My Facebook News Feed has been interesting this evening. A lot of my pals have spent the day in Cardiff, it seems. For the most part, they’ve headed to Comic Con and/or Mardi Gras – either way, there’s a fair chance of bumping into John Barrowman, who seems to be everywhere at once! I would have gone down myself (there was also an anti-war demo taking place this afternoon) but one of the perils of freelancing is the unreliable cashflow situation. When your clients decide to take a late summer break, so does your bank account.
Of my stay-at-home friends, there seems to be a fairly even split. Many of my female friends are wetting their knickers at the prospect of what is little more than televised live suicide. Meanwhile, their better halves have resigned themselves to nearly four months of this crap, and taken solace in football and/or beer. I don’t blame them.
My good friend Neil R. has just marked the coming of Autumn and the inevitable slow decline to Xmas on Facebook. I quote his status update of about half an hour ago (entirely without his permission):
OMG, I’ve just been reminded me that the X-Factor is coming back on TV. Could someone pass me a bucket please? I need to vomit desperately. Yet another slew of talentless plastic clones to be churned out by the Cowell marketing machine.
My friend Lucy G. (who really can sing) failed to get through the X Factor audition stage in Cardiff. By way of contrast, a guy from Aberdare got on the TV a few years ago. He really thought he was in with a chance. Shanara and her sisters actually know the poor deluded soul. They put me onto this clip. Just watch the faces of the judges, and especially Cheryl’s Cole’s reaction when he finally gets cut off. Even if you don’t watch any other video I’ve linked on my blog so far, you really must watch this:
It’s a sad reflection of our society that the Simon Cowell Music Industry has managed to stitch up the coveted Xmas UK No 1 slot every year for the last decade or so – with the noteworthy exception of 2009. That year, a concerted Consumer Fightback put the mighty Rage Against The Machine at the top of the charts instead. Killing in the Name might have sounded incongruous on the Xmas Day Top of the Pops, but it was all done with downloads.
Conceding that we’d won fair and square, the BBC actually invited Rage Against The Machine into the studio to play their song on Radio 5 Live. After all, manipulating the market is easy enough these days. You just need a viral campaign on (say) Facebook and Twitter, and enough disillusioned people to fork out 79p, and the job’s a good ‘un…
Anyway, Neil’s entirely understandable outburst prompted me to rewrite a well-known Yuletide poem.
X-Factor-mas is coming,
Cowell’s wallet’s getting fat.
Some talentless no-hoper
Is going to look a twat.
If you’re not a karaoke singer,
Just sit back and watch the show,
And Simon Cowell’s bank balance
Will grow and grow and grow.
Last night, I watched Sidney Lumet’s Oscar-winning 1976 film Network. I’d been planning to watch it again for a while, but last night it seemed especially relevant.
Network is the story of a washed-up, burnt-out TV news anchorman named Howard Beale (Peter Finch.) He’s been reading the news on the fictional American station UBS for two decades; the news division president Max Schumacher (William Holden) has just told him that his services are no longer required. His ratings have dropped and the programme is losing audience share. He’s become a victim of corporate competition. The following night, at the end of his regular slot, Howard makes this announcement:
A week later, he returns to the studio and, surprisingly, doesn’t go through with his threat. Instead, he decides to use his valedictory broadcast to rail against the network, the television industry, the state of the American economy, the government, and – above all – the audience themselves. In a desperate appeal to his viewers, he issues this anguished rallying call…
Max, watching the news at home with his family, is convinced that his old friend is losing his mind. It only dawns on him that Howard might actually be on to something when his daughter opens the window of their apartment. One by one, their neighbours are taking up Howard’s cry of ‘I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to this take any more.’ They are not alone – the programme is being shown on 67 stations across the country. Howard, it seems, has touched a raw nerve with the American people. Meanwhile, the head of network programming, Diana Christensen (Faye Dunaway) watches from the control room and realizes that she’s stumbled on the makings of a much-needed hit show.
Howard embarks on a new career as ‘the Mad Prophet of the Airwaves’, aided by a fortune-teller and a couple of investigative reporters. But he’s unaware that, behind the scenes, he’s being manipulated for the sake of higher ratings and increased audience share. His own cynicism and world-weariness with the whole business of TV cut across his righteous indignation at one point:
It’s a pivotal moment in the film, and it’s the main reason why I returned to it last night.
On Thursday, David Cameron’s rush to war with Syria was halted in its tracks when some of his own MPs joined the Labour Party, the Nationalists, and a fair number of Liberal Democrats in voting against military intervention in Syria. The BBC and all the print media in the UK had been delivering consumers of news (for that is what we are, ultimately) the unequivocal message that President Bashar al-Assad had used chemical weapons against his own people. Last week, the mainstream media had presented us with harrowing images of mass casualties after a ‘chemical weapons attack’ that is thought to have claimed some 1,400 lives and injured countless civilians.
On Tuesday, Mr Cameron announced that Parliament would be recalled to debate the possibility of joining the United States in military action against the Syrian regime. Meanwhile, United Nations weapons inspectors were on the ground in Syria, searching for President Assad’s caches of chemicals. Those of us with long memories no doubt thought back to the invasion of Iraq, where Weapons of Mass Destruction were ‘definitely’ available to Saddam Hussein. History, it seemed, was about to repeat itself.
However, the British people are cleverer than Mr Cameron gives us credit for. We remember the ‘dodgy dossier’ and the imaginary Weapons of Mass Destruction that took us to war in Iraq a decade ago. Fortunately, so did a fair number of MPs, including (most notably) the former Tory leadership candidate David Davies. The motion was defeated by a mere thirteen votes.
Almost nobody in the mainstream press carried a story from Associated Press correspondent Dale Gavlak, which first appeared on Thursday, on an Internet news site named Mint Press:
This story was picked up by the radical American news presenter Alex Jones and carried on his InfoWars website, where it quickly went viral. Shortly afterwards, the Mint Press website crashed under the sheer weight of traffic. By that time, Paul Joseph Watson had put this report on InfoWars.
I shared the story on Facebook and Twitter, and even sent the link to the BBC in the vain hope that it would get reported in the national media. I’ve been told that The Daily Telegraph alluded to Ms Gavlak’s story, but I’ve just looked at the print editions for Thursday and Friday and haven’t found any mention of it. Maybe it was on their website. Who knows for sure?
Indeed, ‘who knows for sure?’ could well be the motto for the past fortnight, ever since the news of the tragedy in Ghouta first broke. We’re never going to hear the definitive account of events from the mass media, whether in the UK or the United States. President Obama (a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, remember) is determined to go to war with Syria, with or without Britain’s help. For his sake, it’s vital that the managed news networks present the approved version of events, otherwise the whole agenda falls apart.
All of which brings us back to Howard Beale, the beleaguered ‘Mad Prophet of the airwaves.’ In this powerful scene, he is summoned to a private audience with the station’s new head, Arthur Jensen (Ned Beatty), who gives him an outline of the situation in the real world:
Having reluctantly accepted his new ‘mission to explain’, Howard finds himself at the mercy of events, and is carried headlong to the film’s inevitable conclusion.
Network is both a moving story of one man’s battle with The System, and an uncompromising satire on the commodification of the news, made two decades before dumbing down was invented. Paddy Chayevsky won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay; Peter Finch and Faye Dunaway won Best Actor and Best Actress; and Beatrice Straight won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress. (Playing Max’s wife, she’s on screen for just over five minutes. It’s still a record for the shortest performance ever to win an Academy Award.) Have a look at the film when you’ve got a couple of hours free. It’s probably on Netflix somewhere.
Sympathize with Howard during his slow descent into madness. Empathize with Max (‘a craggy middle-aged man’) as he embarks on a doomed love affair with Diana. Laugh at the 70s fashions and hairstyles, and chuckle at the hopeless radical group, torn apart by their own internecine squabbles.
Then read Dale Gavlak’s story for yourself, and watch the film again…
Being a Non-Linear Account of the Life and Opinions of The Author, Cross-referenced and Illustrated, with Occasional Hesitations, Repetitions and Deviations.
You can hide behind your mask....but not for long! Masked women in movies, tv-series, cosplay, fan art and comics (superheroines, villainesses, burglars and so on)
An Autobiography in Random Chapters 
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