Wonders of the Solar System (Sunday 9pm BBC2)

Ask me about the theory of relativity and I’ll mutter something about a speeding train and a platform, Albert Einstein and patent office workers being underappreciated, before trailing off in confusion. Tell me to explain string theory and I’ll punch you in the face.

Speed = distance / time. That’s about the extent of my ability in physics. I can tell you the speed of something given the amount of time it took to travel a certain distance . . . and a calculator. But if you already had those details then why would you care how fast something was travelling?
“Hey man you’re here!”
“Damn right! Got a beer for a weary traveller?”
“Hold on a minute. When did you leave?”
“What do you mean?”
“What time did you leave your house?”
“I dunno, about 5.30.”
“Ok, and how far did you travel?”
“You know where I live?”
“Yeah, but what’s the distance? . . . preferably in metres.”
“Who cares, why?”
“I’m going to work out your average speed.”
“Fuck you, I’m going to the pub.”

Aside from this useless equation, I’m also aware of something called ‘lambda.’ It looks like an upside-down ‘Y,’ but I couldn’t tell you what it does. No, as far as I’m aware, physics is of no practical use to me whatsoever. I’m too stupid to use it. My brain doesn’t get it. But this is also the reason that I find it so interesting. When I hear about the solar system I’m like a child hearing a fairytale—fascinated, captivated, enthralled.

The problem with making a program about physics though – and probably the reason that so few of them are made – is that, while it may be a feast for the ears and the brain it is not so for the eyes. Very long complicated equations, graphs, squiggly lines, diagrams of unimaginably small particles, Stephen Hawking; in short, physics is not a very visual medium, and although the night sky is beautiful, there are only so many shots of the Milky Way that the average viewer will tolerate before switching over to watch Come Dine With Me.

To remedy this problem the BBC have attempted to fuse astrophysics with natural history in their new factual programme ‘Wonders of the Solar System.’ Or, to put it in their words, “Professor Brian Cox visits the most extreme locations on Earth to explain how the laws of physics carved natural wonders across the solar system.” What this amounts to is Professor Brian Cox subliminally piping physics into our brains while we are distracted by cascading waterfalls and aurora borealis. Funnily enough, it actually works and doesn’t, as I initially suspected, feel stitched together or forced. Some of the location links to the subject seem slightly tenuous, but there is always a link nonetheless. What’s more, it makes the programme a lot lighter. Having someone talk in lightyears, and ‘to the power ofs’ for an hour is too much for the casual Sunday night viewer to stomach, and so the travel clips and scenery shots form welcome breaks that allow the brain to recover and process the information it has just received.

My only worry is how they will sustain this blend of place and theory throughout the five parts. Perhaps they won’t bother. Maybe the last programme will just be a 45 minute lecture on Kaluza-Klein theory, finished with a 15 minute viewer phone in to discuss, ‘Fundamental forces, ‘Gravitation’ or ‘Electromagnetism,’ which is your favourite?’ . . . Let’s hope not.

Despite the fact that most of us have no real understanding of physics and no practical application for it, that’s not to say that it is of no use. Quite the contrary. To watch the beauty of our world juxtaposed with photos of a far off star in supernova—the light reaching us years after it has died, is amazing; and even more so, to hear in layman’s terms our incredible insignificance in the unimaginable massiveness of space. This is how physics is relevant to me. For an atheist, without the fairytale of a magical man in the sky, it’s about as a good a story as there is. The story of the universe we inhabit is more interesting, more elaborate, more intricate and complex than we could ever hope to create in our own minds – more often than not, it’s even more complex than we can hope to comprehend in our own minds. Take solace in not understanding it all and in the likelihood that we probably never will. It’s the perfect metaphor for human endeavour; groping in the darkness in pursuit of something that isn’t there—the non-existent prize. The unobtainable truth. The pointlessness of it all. Revel in it. Enjoy it. None of this matters. None of it matters.

 

Sue Johnston’s Shangri La (Available on BBC iPlayer . . . but don’t bother)

And the award for most gratuitous factual programme goes to . . . Sue Johnston’s Shangri La.

According to Wikipedia, ‘Shangri La is a fictional place described in the 1933 novel Lost Horizon by British author James Hilton.’ Ok, so to start with it isn’t an actual place. It continues, ‘Shangri-La has become synonymous with any earthly paradise . . .’ Right, so it’s a blanket term for any concept of paradise. And finally, ‘. . . but particularly a mythical Himalayan utopia—a permanently happy land, isolated from the outside world.’ With the Chinese occupation of Tibet I find it extremely unlikely that such a place would exist in this area.

In summary then, this was a quest to find a place that was concocted in a work of fiction nearly 80 years ago, is unique and individual to each and every one of us and – if it ever did exist – has probably been plundered and destroyed by Chinese imperialism. What’s more, this isn’t my Shangri La or your Shangri La, or even a whistle stop tour of achingly beautiful places on earth that could be considered Shangri La. No, it is Sue Johnston’s Shangri La.

Now, I don’t know Sue Johnston, but even if I did, I wouldn’t want to sit down for an hour while she talks me through her personal idea of paradise and I certainly wouldn’t want to fund her trip to attempt to find it, but unfortunately that is exactly what you and I have unwittingly done.

The target audience for this factual programme was very niche. It would have perhaps been enjoyed by Sue’s close family, or aside from that, any women born between 1941 and 1945 who had a working class upbringing in Merseyside and happened to read Lost Horizons at a young impressionable age. In fact, I hesitate when writing the term ‘factual programme,’ as it contained very little in the way of factual content, unless you consider the facts and information about Sue Johnston to be content. Because if there is one thing Sue did well it was talk about herself. I’m now an expert of Mastermind standard on ‘The life of Sue Johnston.’ I know all about her childhood, her mother dying, her divorce, how many children she has, who they are marrying even! But when it comes to the Tibetan people, or Shangri La I am none the wiser.

When introducing a foreign culture, country or indeed anything alien and intriguing to us, the best presenters in this realm are those who don’t try and force too much of themselves on to the viewer. They recognise that the life of a remote Tibetan tribe is far more interesting to us than the life of a former Brookside actress in her mid sixties. We don’t really want to see or know who the presenter is, we want them to be a faceless medium through which the people and places can be distilled and conveyed back to us as accurately as possible. Needless to say, Sue didn’t master this, but in fairness to her, I don’t think the format of the show even allowed her to try . . .

What is paradise? Paradise is unique for all of us. It exists inside our head and, even if we travelled to every nook and cranny on earth, it probably wouldn’t be realised in any actual location. It is a dream, a myth, an enigma that no presenter no matter how accomplished could deliver, because it wouldn’t be our paradise. So in this respect an actor is the perfect choice, because they can plumb the depths of the soul and emote to us the beauty and the splendour along with tears and gesticulation, which is exactly what Sue Johnston did. And whether or not she honestly felt that the mountain of Kawarkapo and the village of Yipung were her long imagined Shangri La, we will never know.

What we do know though, is that the BBC should be more judicious when commissioning a programme that is obviously destined to be nothing but a worthless, self-absorbed, introspective journey at our expense.

 

Tower Block of Commons (Monday 9pm Ch4)

Pick people that are easy for the public to hate and make them live with people that are impossible to hate. This is a new format for documentaries currently doing the rounds, examples of which include: Blood, Sweat and Takeaways, which followed a group of solipsistic, mollycoddled twenty somethings, leaving their throw away, carefree existence to experience the real cost for those who make their bargain buckets a bargain; Famous, Rich and Homeless, went a step further by throwing various celebrities out on the streets to live with the homeless, shattering their preconceptions that all homeless people are lazy, work shy, freeloaders blocking the door to M&S; and 7 Days on the Breadline, forced the company of several celebrities on a few poor families (in both senses) in Leeds, so that they could learn that some people in this country don’t have enough money. Gasp!

Tower Block of Commons is the latest take on the theme, which sees four (that soon became three) politicians move in with families in dilapidated, poverty stricken council estates across Britain. They are: Austin Mitchell (the fat, old, loud one), Mark Oaten (the one who had the rent-boys), Iain Duncan Smith (the one who quit after a day following his wife’s cancer diagnosis), Tim Loughton (the one who looks like Richard Nixon might have if he wore glasses).

What becomes abundantly obvious early on – as with any of these shows – is the dichotomy between what the politicians hope they will achieve and what the producers know they will achieve. It is a sad irony that the politicians who opted to take part in this show probably did so due to a staunch belief that they were a bit more streetwise than their peers – after all, most middle class people would break out in a cold sweat if a tradesman asked them the time – and by broadcasting themselves side-by-side with the poorest in society they would improve their standing among the electorate, their colleagues in Whitehall and perhaps even change the zeitgeist of negative feeling towards MPs in general. This optimism serves to highlight their naivety in two primary ways.

First and foremost is the delusion that going to live on a council estate with those less fortunate is going to prove that you are fundamentally the same as them and, as such, they will respect you for it. This conviction is rooted in the politicians’ misguided belief that the poorest people in society will be equally interested in politics and as responsive to their policies as the richest. They won’t. The richest tend to get what they want and the poorest tend to get what’s left. The people they are staying with will more than likely have lived a life where politics has had little or no impact on their day to day activities, aside from the constant and belligerent anti-politician propaganda that they read in the tabloids. This engenders a deep seated mistrust in politicians, which is unlikely to be erased over a cup of tea, or a rational debate – such as Tim Loughton attempted with a group of youths outside a shop – because, since when did The Sun give a rational balanced point of view? In Parliament, arguing that MPs should be held accountable for fraudulent expenses claims is a sure to be an argument clincher. On a council estate, “What the fuck are you gunna do about it?” is a winning retort.

The second big mistake – and it’s more stupid than the first – lies in trusting that the programme’s producers have set the show up with the politicians in mind, as a vehicle for their political resurrection. This is an obvious blunder. Television portrays things as it feels fit, and in most cases, this is in the simplest and most shocking way. Tower Block of Commons could have been used as a vehicle to show politicians in a better light, connect them with the electorate and hopefully reinvigorate a lost generation of voters – which, judging by the enthusiastic opening monologues, was what the MPs had hoped for. But why put the effort in to do that when you can just make a 75 year old back bencher dress in a gaudy tracksuit and mock his gaucherie when confronted by the horrors of heroin addiction?

TV in this form is reductive. It doesn’t try to find meaning or solutions, it aims to belittle and humiliate. It follows the current capricious wave of public feeling and in this instance that means creating a show with the express intention of making politicians fail and look foolish.

Sadly though the programme is a double bluff. The politicians are the easy butt of the joke, but ultimately it is the poor families they stay with that suffer the most humiliation; the humiliation of having to live a life limited by poverty, poor health care, lack of education and job prospects. At a time when the focus is on filling the void between rich and poor we aren’t half bad at digging.

As David Cameron says, staring intensely from his poster, “We can’t go on like this.” . . . But what the fuck is he gunna do about it?

Glee (Monday 9pm E4)

Glee. I don’t like the word. It contorts the mouth into a smile. Not a nice smile like you may experience when watching John Cleese playing Basil Fawlty, but a disingenuous smile, like you might get from watching someone do an impression of John Cleese playing Basil Fawlty.

So, to use it as the sole title word for a new series about a bunch of pulchritudinous American high school students overcoming their personal adversities through the insufferable medium of song and dance seemed wholly appropriate in relation to my personal association with the word.

The show had set itself up for a fall. I tuned in to watch with the sole intention of extracting a few trite clichés from the script with which to flavour the blog flog I was set to give it.

Imagine then my consternation when it turned out not to be a shit, strung out, multiple episode break down of High School Musical (I actually watched it twice to check I hadn’t gone mad). In fact, I can’t directly compare it to anything else in the genre. It isn’t like Skins, because it isn’t a poorly acted depiction of what teenagers wish their lives were like; neither is it of the same ilk as 90210 or The Hills, because I don’t get the urge to kill myself and all of the cast after watching it; and most surprisingly of all, it isn’t like the diabetes inducing, High School Musical. The storyline is multifaceted and the actors aren’t all smiling morons waiting to deliver the next nauseating platitude. The characters they play are well rounded individuals with personalities that are quickly identifiable without being stereotypical, and what’s more, it’s funny; yes that’s right, it’s genuinely funny sometimes.

Ok, it’s not perfect. The script is padded out with Sierpinski love triangles and riddled with the obligatory life affirming messages that are a staple in any programme whose primary objective is to woo the maudlin masses, but aside from that, I can’t slate it too heavily.

So I’ll be watching it every single week then? No, of course not.

It may be well put together, but I still hate it and everything it stands for; the conglomeration of insipid, mindless, mass produced music, the relentless allusion to a non-existent aesthetic perfection, the vain and vulgar worldview it extols. It is as base as any of its rivals – a brazen whore pandering to the capricious desires of the lucrative youth audience – but at least it is something new, engaging and original, rather than the usual re-packaged, re-branded crap – the same ass, but in a new skirt. As a result it beats most television hands down, and for that it deserves credit, even if its ultimate objective is to take the money and fuck us.

 

‘The Big Freeze.’ A big help?

An old housemate of mine used to joke that weather chat was the lowest form of conversation. Just to clarify, he wasn’t an old person, rather I lived with him in the past. If he was old he would have vehemently disagreed, as we all know that old people love to talk about the weather.
“Nice day today eh Ron?”
“Lovely. It’s nice to get a bit of sunshine once in a while.”
“I know, it’s been so gloomy recently.”
“Oh, hasn’t it just. Still a nip in the air though.”
“Especially in the morning—Gladis went out this morning, said it was very cold.”
“That’s right. I still have the heating on in the morning. I can’t get out of bed otherwise.”
“They say though that it should be warming up over the next week or so.”
“Is that so?”
“Oh yes. I saw on the weather . . .”

Boring. Old people talk about it, because they have very few other talking points. “Did you watch Countdown yesterday?” “No, I fell asleep during Dickinson’s Real Deal.” It’s conversation polyfilla. When you have nothing else to talk about, you talk about the weather. But really, what is there to talk about? There is no point of view or opinion to debate. It’s cold, it’s hot, it’s windy, it’s raining. It is what it is.

Not snow though. Snow is a different type of weather altogether. Old people don’t discuss snow as much as other weather because they are mostly too busy sitting next to a fire trying not to die. Snow is weather for the rest of the population to discuss. No, it’s not just crystallized water! How dare you speak of snow so perfunctorily! Snow is the king of all weather. Everything and everyone stops during the snow. We call each other up. “Is it snowing where you are?” “It snowed quite heavily this morning, but it didn’t really lay.” “I hear more is on the way this evening.” Etcetera, etcetera.

Snow brings with it a mixture of excitement and misery, which the news relentlessly peddles to us in equal measure. Cheery pictures of children on sleds and 8ft snowmen are interspersed with cars stuck in snow drifts and pensioners with pneumonia.

I’m watching BBC News at the moment, which reverts to the weather situation once every 20 or 30 seconds. Last night, they even devoted the whole of BBC1’s schedule to reporting on the weather, or ‘THE BIG FREEZE’, as they helpfully dub it, along with the other unnecessary hyperbole, ‘FROZEN BRITAIN’. There is some talk about stocks of salt, the problems with transport and mostly the temperature, which they keep lying about. It was “temperatures as low as minus 16” earlier, which then jumped to minus 18, then a moment ago a bloke from the Met Office assured us that it would be minus 20 in some places. Yeah, if you live in the Outer Hebrides maybe, but for the majority of the country the temperature is hovering around nought during the day and no less than minus 10 overnight. That’s not even very cold on the scale of temperatures on earth. I just checked the weather in Scandinavia. The maximum daytime temperature in Oslo is minus 21! I bet their news isn’t emblazoned with ‘FROZEN NORWAY’.

At least though the snow provides a temporary distraction from this typically bleak time of year. And this New Year is perhaps as bleak as ever. Not just a new year, but a new decade, with its new hopes already mired in the old recession; many people returning to their old jobs, or old job hunt. The snow is an evanescent diversion from normality and the shroud of whiteness is a metaphor for the bright new beginnings that lie on top of our old well trodden paths.  

In fact, weather doesn’t seem such a bad conversation after all. Let’s just hope the snow doesn’t thaw for a long time.

“Everything popular is wrong” Oscar Wilde

The X-Factor masquerades as a singing competition, but really it’s just a popularity contest. Strictly Come Dancing purports to be a dancing competition, but really it’s just a popularity contest. The X-Factor vs. Strictly, which gets more viewers? It’s a popularity contest. Our whole lives are just popularity contests.

Birth: Who’s baby is prettier? Infancy: Can your baby talk/walk/not poo itself? School. Who’s cool, who isn’t? Work. Who will network and brown nose and get promoted? Marriage. Who can I marry that has these pointless attributes? Unbeknown to me, there’s probably even a judging criteria for the residents of old people’s homes. Who has the best biscuit selection perhaps? Or who smells least of wee?

Everything in our fleeting lives involves us trying to steer the big popularity ship in our direction. We’re all narcissistic ego maniacs to some degree; it’s encoded in our DNA. Survival of the fittest—biting, clawing and fucking each other over behind a veneer of civility.

It’s horrible and base, but we love it. Unfortunately, however, due to the massive competition, not all of us 6 billion humans can rise to the upper tiers of popularity where we can use our high regard to influence others. So when we do get a chance to exert some control we grab hold of it. In this sense, it’s voting. Not in a general election or anything boring like that. After all, politicians aren’t popular. They’re just trying to force their way to the top to make up for a life of languishing at the bottom of the pile. But we’re smarter than that. You can’t make us vote for you, David Cameron! No, we vote for things that entertain us, like those that once filled the seats in the colossal amphitheatres, we take our seats and cheer and boo along with the plasma screen people in front of us; we listen to the ‘wise words’ of the judging emperors and then give the performers an electronic thumbs up with our phones (well, some of us do, apparently).

In fact, the only differences between watching modern day reality TV shows and ancient Greek gladiatorial contests are that: (1) Nobody dies (if you consider death in the traditional life ending sense of the word) and (2) the contests are there out of their own free will (if you consider free will to be non-deterministic and if indeed any of us proletariat wage slaves can ever truly be considered free, that is). So really it’s exactly the same. Apart from one other major difference that is.

From my in depth historical research of gladiatorial contests (watching Gladiator twice about 5 years ago), it would seem that performance is directly related to popularity. Maximus Decimus Meridius fought well, gained the public’s respect and was, therefore, allowed to live. However, as with everything, the media have destroyed the relationship between talent and reward to the extent that, when we now watch a show, we don’t pick the best person for their singing or dancing, we pick the person that seems nice and has a good back story (the more deaths in the family the better); we disobey all the rules and concepts of the show and follow our popularity meter based on the skewed ideals touted by the red top tabloids.

“What’s this, a dancing competition? . . . Bollocks! I’m voting for that fat ungainly clubfooted old bloke dragging his partner across the floor like a dead animal, because he is well spoken, jolly and, from what I’ve read, a fine political correspondent.”

“What’s this, a singing competition?” . . . Fuck that, I’m voting for those weird twins that dance like they are suffering from multiple dislocations and sing like a cat being opened with a rusty can opener, because they have been touted as the plucky underdogs and their winning might destroy Simon Cowell’s career.”

The results of this phenomenon are both humorous and dispiriting in equal measure. It is, of course, endlessly funny to watch the perpetually in control Simon Cowell, splutter and choke on his own rage at the irony of yet another brilliant singer being voted off because they didn’t register highly on the public’s popularometer, as a direct result of the media hype that he engendered in order to promote the ‘singing competition’ in the first place. But on the other hand, it is not so fun to watch talented people systematically crushed week in week out solely for the purposes of entertainment.

Unpleasant as it may seem at the time though, ultimately it’s a good lesson for the contestants. Talent contests such as the X-Factor give ordinary people a taste of what it’s like to be climb to the upper echelons and bask in the warm glow of popularity, and for the vast majority of contestants, it also offers the perspective from the gloomy depths of obscurity after the fast fall back down again. What’s more, the judges, with their increasingly pernicious back biting and derision of one another show the acerbic attitude you need to reach the top and stay there. To watch a contestant stood alone on stage post performance waiting for an honest appraisal, only to be greeted by a series of unconnected sideways snipes between judges is to watch the true narcissism of celebrity unfold. It is the type of behaviour we read about in celebrity magazines, that we remember from popular people at school and from bosses in jobs we left. It is the type of behaviour that makes this level of popularity, despite the vast riches it offers, still seem unappealing.

 

Alone in the Wild (Thursday 9pm Ch4)

The traffic, the noise, the smog, the twat in the office who says ‘anyone fuck-coffee’ every morning. Who wouldn’t want to flee this suppurating mass of flesh and filth and live in peaceful isolation, alone with nature? I often fantasise about throwing off the oppressive shackles of Western civilisation and escaping into the faceless wild. I sometimes even subject friends, family members and random acquaintances to long and baffling tirades about how I will actually accomplish such a task.

In actual fact I’ve come close to total solitude on a few occasions. This may seem like a strange claim – we all know solitude don’t we? Well no, not really. As small overpopulated island dwellers we make do with a notion of solitude, but it is only a notion; there is always a street light glinting in the distance, a plane passing overhead, a dog barking; everything retains a sense of tangibility and closeness and, in that sense, the isolation is spoilt. But when you experience true solitude, you realise that your preconceived ideas of what it might be like, just don’t do it justice. Real solitude has a strange and indefinable quality – most notably, the absence of sound. It’s silence, but more complete – like the air has been sucked out from your ears. Because there is no background – no distant traffic drone, no humming refrigerator, no ticking clock – to process and lump into the category of ‘white noise’, the brain instantly recognises it, and the feeling it engenders, as something new, rare and unfamiliar. It is this stillness, combined with distance from civilisation that, in my mind, defines pure solitude.

I can remember well two instances when I attained this pure solitude. The first was driving towards the very bottom of New Zealand’s South Island; sheltered between two mountain peaks with long lonely fields to each side of us, I pulled over and cut the engine. I walked off into the fields and I became immediately aware of my breathing and the sound of my feet, because there was nothing else, absolutely nothing – no birds, no insects, no breeze, absolutely no sound whatsoever. The second time was in Bolivia, near the border with Chile, where the Atacama desert spreads to the West and the Uyuni salt flats to the East. Again I wandered off alone over rocky crags into the vast, desolate, tufted scrub of the Andean Plateau, and again, it was complete unadulterated silence.

In both these situations, however, I wasn’t actually ‘alone in the wild’, as I’m sure you can discern. Yeah I wandered off to appreciate the isolation, but in both instances I was within touching distance of civilisation – via a camper van with a tank full of diesel in New Zealand and a questionable 4X4 with a driver and guide in Bolivia. To have been in those situations with nothing and nobody anywhere near me would have been an unimaginable nightmare – stripped of all the peace and serenity following the blood freezing realisation that the silence implied thirst, hunger, cold, crying and shrieking at the abyss in manic despair before, ultimately, death. Nature is a cruel holiday rep.

Unperturbed by the stark reality of these 6 stages of desperation, however, is ‘adventurer’ Ed Wardle, who has decided to confront a potentially rapid and undignified death by living alone in the remote Yukon territory of Canada. Ed has some provisions, including a tarpaulin, some pots and pans, basic rations, a gun and, judging by his well constructed shelter and snares, a rudimentary knowledge of how to live like Grizzly Adams. Oh, and a handheld camera with which he films his exploits. Unfortunately though, in spite of this thoroughly civilised array of equipment with which to catch, kill and cook his dinner, he has had almost zero success. As of last week, he’d been out in the vast swath of nothingness for about a month and the only sentient beings he’d managed to murder and devour were three fish, each one approximately the size of my little finger (I’m actually not exaggerating). The remainder of the time he has had to make do eating his measly rations, which he supplements with great handfuls of vegetation that he boils down to impalpable green mulch. 

Ed’s failure to catch any high quality protein has left him a guant Gore-Tex clad Gollum – perpetually miserable and emotionally unstable. As far as I can tell, he goes from 1-5 of the 6 stages of desperation on a daily basis. He wakes up thirsty, so he goes to the river to drink. On the way back he checks his snares, which, predictably, are empty, so now he’s hungry. Hungry and listless he sits around and gets cold. The cold makes Ed sad, so he has a bit of a cry about it all. Finally he pulls himself together enough to bound off into the forest as a blizzard of screaming, heckling madman, being whipped in the face by branches and twigs. Once he’s thoroughly worn out he heads back to his shelter, exhausted and in need of some sleep to recharge before beginning another day in the relentless pursuit of living.

It’s not enjoyable watching. I tuned in to witness the dream of the intrepid adventurer being lived out in front of my very eyes – Real life Castaway, Dr. Livingstone 2009, Ray Mears live! – which is what I’m sure Ed Wardle wanted to depict. But instead, all he managed to convey was a lunatic shouting at an indifferent forest while slowly starving to death. No, there isn’t much to like about the programme – the occasional bit of scenery, the odd pithy aphorism perhaps. Generally though, it is dull, pointless and boring, which is, in actuality, the reality of nature. Nature without the well worn trails, the information boards, the packed lunch, thermos of tea, and a hearty meal and comfy bed at the end of it all, is incredibly harsh and unforgiving, and we humans are simply unable to cope with it anymore. For instance, try to imagine being marooned on a desert island with just the clothes on your back and the shoes on your feet. What would you drink? A coconut? How would you open it? What would you eat? A fish? How would you catch it? Literally everything would be impossible! If society imploded today then we’d all be scrounging through bins and drinking our own urine by Monday.

Attesting the virtue of Western civilisation was probably the antithesis of what Ed Wardle set out to achieve, but that’s what he’s unwittingly done and, to be perfectly honest, despite it being incredibly boring TV, it’s one of the most truthful programmes I have ever seen. Unlike Blue Planet, Nature’s Great Events, Yellowstone, South Pacific and the plethora of other nature shows that drift on and off our screens, Alone in the Wild doesn’t eulogise nature and place it on a pedestal, while denouncing our vacuous ideals and crumbling society. Ed’s shaky hand held camera work not only captures, in brazen candour, his grim battle with nature – the treacherous impassable terrain, the biting insects, the poisonous berries, the rain, the cold – it also shows his anger and frustration, his fear and loneliness, his hope and disappointment; even when he occasionally gets a small win among the relentless losses – a beautiful sunset over the lake perhaps – we can see through his veneer of elation. “This has got to be what it’s all about isn’t it?” he postulates towards the unmanned camera. The question, addressed to the unwavering lens rooted in the grass, seems rhetorical and we know that at that moment he’d trade all the sunsets in the world for an evening with his wife and children, or a few drinks with a group of close friends. Because despite our longing to get away from it all, we are essentially social creatures and Ed has been reminded of this in the most brutal way possible. As he gazes out at the setting sun, the rays colour his face pink and, all of a sudden, his smile seems abashed and disingenuous – jaded by the realisation that he hasn’t found it and that he is alone, and his dream is not as he imagined, and the civilisation he hoped to better is, sadly, as good as it gets.

 

How then must I live to be happy, and why was I not happy before?’ And he began to recall his former life and he felt disgusted with himself. He appeared to himself to have been terribly exacting and selfish, though he now saw that all the while he really needed nothing for himself. And he looked round at the foliage with the light shining through it, at the setting sun and the clear sky, and he felt just as happy as before. ‘Why am I happy, and what used I to live for?’ thought he. ‘How much I exacted for myself; how I schemed and did not manage to gain anything but shame and sorrow! and, there now, I require nothing to be happy;’ and suddenly a new light seemed to reveal itself to him. ‘Happiness is this!’ he said to himself. ‘Happiness lies in living for others’.

Leo Tolstoy, ‘The Cossacks’

Magic? Psychic ability? Or something else? . . . Yeah, something else.

“All of us believing we can do it [predict the lottery], is what made it happen.” The unconvincing words from one of the 24 participants Derren Brown used to help him predict the lottery last week.

Whether or not you watched it, you will have probably heard or read something about Derren Brown’s new four part Channel 4 series ‘The Events’. The first of which, ‘How to win the lottery’, aired last Friday.

In many ways the show could be considered a huge success. Following the Wednesday night draw in which he correctly ‘predicted’ the lottery, his Friday night show, in which he promised to reveal how he did it, attracted a whopping 4.6 million viewers (beating both ITV and BBCin the 9-10pm ratings battle) and has garnered huge media speculation and conjecture, which will obviously heighten awareness and raise viewer numbers for the forthcoming shows.

On the other hand, the show could be seen as a dismal failure, because he broke from what is, in my opinion, his most successful modus operandi. In past shows, such as Séance and Messiah, Brown exposed the fragility and susceptibility of our minds to persuasion; manipulating people’s thoughts through surreptitious psychological techniques, until they believed something unquestionably – like ghosts, for example – only to show that it was all a trick and there are no ghosts, which provides us, the audience, with a group of bewildered participants to laugh at and also a fascinating insight into how easily our feeble little brains are confused. DB: “You believe in ghosts now don’t you?” Person: “Yes, definitely! 100%. I’ve never been so certain of anything in my life.” DB: “Well you shouldn’t, because I tricked you and there definitely weren’t any ghosts.” Person: “Oh no, I’m an idiot”. Us: “Ha ha ha, you are an idiot! I wouldn’t have fallen for that . . . probably.”

In ‘How to win the lottery’, he tricked us, but he didn’t reveal the truth behind the trick, thus breaking the promise held in his aphorism, “I am often dishonest in my techniques but I am always honest about my dishonesty.” Probably because, in this case, the honest truth wasn’t an interesting experiment that delved into our psyche, but a cheap camera trick glossed over with meaningless mathematical and psychological hyperbole.

If you still believe that Derren Brown did predict the lottery by getting a random group of 24 people to look a wall of meaningless numbers and then subconsciously doodle on a piece of paper while feigning a trance, then firstly, re-read that sentence and then secondly, look at the evidence:

1. According to Derren Brown, he used ‘Deep Maths’ to predict the numbers. Roger Heath-Brown, Professor of Pure Mathematics at the University of Oxford, had this to say about the claim: “Mathematically it is complete rubbish.”

2. Also, if Brown did use ‘Deep Maths’ then why did he feel the need to get 24 people to sit in a room, close their eyes, then scribble some barely intelligible numbers in a spiritual process known as Automatic Writing.

3. Apparently Camelot wouldn’t let him buy a lottery ticket for the draw. If that was the case then: (A) Why did he tell them he was doing it, when he could have just bought a ticket like any normal person and become £2 million pounds richer? (B) If they had such a problem with him buying a ticket then why would they be perfectly happy for him to explain the technique to the entire country a few days later?

4. Nobody, apart from Derren Brown, saw any of the numbers predicted until after the lottery was drawn. Brown tallied the averages that the group of 24 selected. Brown put the balls into a sealed tube which he promptly carted off out of sight. And Brown claimed that the BBC had the legal right to announce the lottery numbers first, thus preventing him from showing his numbers before the draw.

As far as I’m concerned, the most reasonable explanation is the split screen hypothesis, whereby, the side of the studio with the stand full of balls is switched from a live feed to a video and back again, enabling an assistant to switch the balls moments after the numbers are announced. This theory is backed by the unnecessarily jerky handheld camera work, which would cover any jumps when the video was switched to the live feed and, most importantly, the unmistakable rise of the ball on the far left hand side moments after the numbers were revealed.

It is still a clever trick, but it is devoid of any of the psychological prowess that Derren Brown has demonstrated in the past. I hope that the remaining shows: ‘How to control the nation’, ‘How to be a psychic spy’ and ‘How to take down a casino’ showcase more of the old DB that made him so highly regarded.

Perhaps though, Derren Brown is a victim of his own brilliance – I’ve never heard the word genius bandied around so often, as when he crops up in conversation. Maybe, to paraphrase the first quote, all of us believing he can do it, is what made it happen.

Chewing gum for the eyes

Here it is . . . the blank page; just a rectangle of white, soon to be covered with words that may or may not strike a chord within you.

God, I can really write some shit when I put my mind to it, or take may mind off it; whatever it is. In this case there is no real it, which is why I’ve started with this meandering and vague stream of consciousness style opening. Stream of consciousness indeed, but you’d never catch Joyce or Woolf writing such feckless gibberish. In fact, you should read them rather than this, because the work of very good writers has the power to make you think more deeply, ponder things you’ve never considered, to move you in ways you couldn’t imagine or, as Hemingway eloquently put it, “make people feel something more than they understood”.

This is the main reason I favour reading a book to watching the television; it’s a much better and more worthwhile use of time. I will concede that in its best form television has a lot to offer. For instance, I would prefer to watch anything from David Attenborough’s oeuvre than to read a book on the same subject. However, these sorts of shows make up a minute percentage of the total programming. Much of the remainder, particularly on Sky, is just hundreds of channels of noise and colours, engineered to distract your mind and prevent your thoughts from bothering you while your life ebbs away quickly and painlessly. As a mind numbing device this ‘filler TV’ is very successful, in the same way that alcohol is, or any drug for that matter. Except that if you drink a pint of gin with your Weetabix, smoke weed all day, or intermittently shoot Heroin, people wont like it. They will call you an ‘addict’; they will shout at you and maybe cry as well, and if they really love you, they will do everything in their power to prevent you from continuing that behaviour. People don’t react the same way if you watch 6 or 7 hours lot of TV a day (that sounds a lot, but it’s not beyond the realms of possibility for any 9 to 5er) and how much of that is ‘worthy TV’? Less and less I feel, as production companies now seem to be actively embracing the mind numbing.

For instance, I put on the TV at lunchtime last week and there was a programme on called ‘For the Rest of Your Life’ (ITV1 12.30pm). It could loosely be defined as a gameshow, in the same way that ‘Deal or No Deal’ could be described as a gameshow, or that other one with Chris Tarrant that also involves coloured boxes and predetermined amounts of money. In this one though, rather than open boxes, the contestant must select rods imbedded in the floor that, when removed, either emit white light or red light. If the contestant picks lots of white ones they win increasing amounts of monthly income, if they get red ones they don’t. Apart from that it’s the same as Deal or No Deal or the Tarrant one. They all involve some irritatingly garrulous presenter prattling on in unintelligible nomenclature (For the Rest of your Life deals in: ‘Climbing the time ladder’, ‘Stick Downs’ and ‘5 more white sticks for 3 years’) to a moron from the general public, who nods knowingly as he carefully appraises his options of box or rod choice, before applying some baffling fabricated reasoning to the art of random selection in a vain attempt to make sense of complete chance. It’s unendurably pointless and leaves you with absolutely nothing. You gain no knowledge, you don’t laugh, you don’t cry, you don’t think, you don’t feel, you just watch and expend another hour of your life.

I admit that I’ve probably overstated the harm of TV by comparing the likes of Quiz Call to alcoholism or drug addiction, but I was trying to make a dramatic point and I do, nevertheless, stand by my belief that, like an addict, the average person squanders a large portion of their life, that they could have spent constructively, watching futile television shows.

John Lennon said that ‘life is what happens to you while you’re making other plans’. Maybe a more apt motto for our generation is ‘life is what happens to you while you’re watching television’.

 

Am I bovvered?

Write something. Anything! It’s come to the point where it would be less detrimental to write 500 words of completely inane stream of consciousness crap than nothing at all. It’s been over a month since I last wrote this blog, which has led people to speculate that I may have died, or worse than that, entered the Big Brother house. It was this final and horrific assumption that stirred me from my ennui and resulted in me writing what you are now reading. I can cope with being assumed dead I thought, but I’ll be damned if people assume that I’ve taken to spending my time with that horde of bastards.

The real reason for my lack of activity is because of bother, or specifically a lack of it. And not just on my part, no. Of late, I’ve realised that no one and nothing can be bothered.

They can’t be bothered to make good television shows. The last thing I watched was a program called ‘Young, Dumb and Living off Mum’, which in short, involves a group of spoilt insufferable brats whining about the difficulties of existing. It’s almost exactly what I and the other two million nine hundred and ninety nine thousand nine hundred and ninety nine unemployed people don’t want to watch; a show where those with everything moan about how difficult it is to do nothing. What next? . . . A man dousing couture gowns with 1945 Chateau Mouton-Rothschild, whilst eating fistfulls of £50 notes?

The news can’t be bothered either. Rather than giving you information about events from around the world, it chooses to provide updates on MP scandals and a death count of troops in Afghanistan. Unnecessary deaths in a futile and unwinnable war is nothing to sneer about in a blog, and MP scandal is so boring and tired that I wouldn’t even feel incensed if it transpired that Gordon Brown had claimed a million pounds a month for renting out headspace to his ears.

My personal life can’t be bothered. The most interesting thing that has happened to me of late was an argument with a bus driver that resulted in me leaving the bus a pound poorer and him being called a fucking prick. I won’t go into the details of the incident as it is long winded, boring and, most of all, I can’t be bothered. But rest assured that I was right and he was a fucking prick.

I even found out this morning that the weather can’t be bothered. August, at first predicted to be swelteringly hot and lovely, is now being described as ‘unsettled’.

So, there you have it, I’m not dead and I’m not in the Big Brother house and what’s more, I bothered to write something that, provided no one from Transport for London reads, will have proved less detrimental than writing nothing at all. I only hope that you lot can be bothered to read it.