Cocktails and Records

I read in today’s Guardian that their exclusive poll (aren’t they all?) reveals that 47% of respondents disagree that the BBC license fee is good value for money.

Are these people the biggest bunch of cheapskates ever?
And what the heck do they think is good value for money?

The license fee presently costs £139.50  a year. For that you get ten ‘interactive’ TV channels, a plethora of radio stations and a pretty damn good internet service - all without ads. Granted, there is some absolute tosh on the BBC which I do resent paying for, but there is also some great stuff as well and, as an entertainment / information / learning resource, I think that the BBC does pretty well.

To put it into perspective, £139.50 (at London prices) gets you approximately one of the following:

1. 50 pints and min. 25 evenings of pub politics
2. 18 mid-priced CDs
3. 5 trips to see a typical band or comedy act at a typical mid-capacity venue
4. 18 trips to the movies
5. 116 chip butties
6. entry to 12 ‘blockbuster’ exhibitions at the British Museum, Natural History Museum or V&A
7. 3 quarters of a typical 12 week language course

OR

a whole year of all of:

1. the Today programme
2. Gideon Coe, Gilles Peterson, Steve Lamacq, Tony Blackburn, Stuart Maconie and Mark Radcliffe
3. Later… and Just a Minute
4. Mark Kermode’s film reviews and repeats of the proper Batman on BBC4
5. Masterchef and the Food Programme
6. Simon Scharma, David Starkey, David Attenborough and Melvyn Bragg
7. excellent online language learning support materials

But then again I live in London so, according to the survey, I would say that.

Ah, the Beijing Olympics are finally upon us. And considering my attitude to the Games (glorified sports day for weirdo sports) I’m taken back by how interested I am in the damn things this year… I think it’s the political side of things, the fact that China is considerably more interesting/contentious than Athens, Sydney or Atlanta could ever be. I am just dying to know how it will go and whether China will emerge from the end of Olympic juggernaut with the kudos it so desperately longs for.

What has really struck me so far is the complete lack of buzz in the UK about the core element of the Olympics - sport. There is little mention of sport, the hype is all around pollution and politics.

This is best exemplified by the fact that major news outlets (BBC news, Newsnight, Channel 4 news etc.) have had teams of reporters in Beijing all week updating us on protests, human rights, Tibet, censorship, pollution etc. but there is only minimal sports coverage planned for prime time. We get one hour of highlights each evening at 7pm on BBC1. They aren’t even showing a complete replay of the opening ceremony, the most expensive and most fretted about opening ceremony of all time.

In Australia, the Games would be clogging up the airwaves all night, every night across two channels. There would be no escape from relentless analysis about the swimming team’s swimsuits and the weightlifting team’s weight. But here, no one seems to particularly care.

God, I love this country.*

 
* Except when its airwaves are clogged with up European football tournaments that England and Scotland haven’t even qualified for.

Lab Rats, BBC2

Thirty minutes of this show about a university science lab confirmed it to be one of the dodgiest sitcoms I have ever seen. Perhaps even worse than My Two Dads. It offers no insight whatsoever into the world of tertiary education or science, other than that ’science types’ make lame jokes about having ‘gay hair’. How can someone like Chris Addison go from one of the best sitcoms (The Thick of It) to one of the worst quite so quickly?

Summer Heights High, BBC3

Thirty minutes of this show confirmed it as one of the best Australian comedies since, well, writer and star Chris Lilley’s last series - We can be Heroes. His satire of school life reminds me exactly why school days were not the best days of my life, but still makes me laugh. Why is this show buried on BBC3? I guess Australian comedy is just too niche.

Thanks to a pretty bad head cold, I’ve found myself snivelling away in front of daytime TV recently. I find daytime television absolutely fascinating - what it says about a country or, probably more to the point, what it says about what TV executives think about a country never ceases to astound me.

Quick lessons from daytime television:

1. Making money is easy (Trash to Cash, Cash in the Attic)

   Need money? Simple. Just flog off your great, great grandma’s teapot that’s cluttering up the sideboard and that holiday in Spain can be yours. Family heirlooms?! Pah!

2. Anyone can be an antiques dealer (Bargain Hunt, Dickinson’s Real Deal, Sun, Sea and Bargains)

   Could this be the only country in the world where making money out of buying and selling antiques (even if it’s only for a £5 profit) can be turned into a competitive game show?

3. Everyone else’s house is nicer than yours and look how much it cost them! (Homes under the Hammer, To Buy or Not to Buy, A Place in the Sun, Escape to the Country)

   These shows are probably aimed at our innate voyeurism, but I suspect that they also play their own small part in pushing up property prices and buyer/seller expectations. Afterall, absolutely everyone wants to (and can afford to providing they sell enough of their attic clutter in Trash to Cash) live in a 5 bedroom house with 4 bathrooms, 3 car garage, aga, huge cottage garden and heated swimming pool with superb sea/countryside views, which is all just down the road from the worlds best pub.  

For reasons still only known to them, my parents hardly ever let me watch TV when I was a small child. However, despite their aversion to nasty American cartoons I was still allowed to watch Sesame Street. Thank God - how I loved Sesame Street!

It didn’t bother me that Cookie Monster encouraged gluttony and binge eating of sugary snacks, that Super Grover’s stunts defied health and safety regulations or that some people thought that Ernie and Bert living together was a tad suspect. No, I loved the diverse mix of people and muppets who populated the show and attempted to teach me about ‘co-operation’ and ’sharing’.

But for me, the best thing about Sesame Street was the music. Disguising education in the form of a funky tune worked a treat on me, and some have stayed with me forever. Here are two of my favourites.

‘Days of the Week’ from My Name is Roosevelt Franklin, 1971/1974

I’ve had this LP in my collection for as long as I can remember and it is still one of the funkiest records I own. Roosevelt Franklin was one of the few Black American muppets on Sesame Street between 1970 and 1975, but was apparently dumped for being too feisty/naughty and setting a bad example to children. Here though, he sets a good example by singing about, um, the days of the week: ‘I go to school five days a week, ‘cos I get five times smarter that way’.

‘Days of the Week’ from My Name is Roosevelt Franklin (2.56 MB)

‘Pinball Number Count’, around 1976/77

This supremely funky tune was recorded especially by the Pointer Sisters to accompany a scarily pychedelic animation. For more (lots more) info check the muppet wiki.

The Guardian online is asking all the tough questions today. Namely, ‘Why didn’t American sit-com Seinfeld ever take off in the UK?’

Good question. I’ve been wondering this since I first came to the UK nearly 9 years ago, and discovered that the series that I was addicted to in Australia was virtually unknown in this country. 

Britain has produced some fabulous sit-coms over the years - Blackadder, Fawlty Towers, The Office, Father Ted  (ok, Graham Lineham is Irish, but still), Porridge, Dad’s Army, The Thick of It, Man about the House (soley for having one of the best sit-com theme tunes ever), I’m Alan Partridge, Peepshow etc. etc. - but yet the sheer brilliance of Seinfeld, not to mention Arrested Development, Curb your Enthusiasm, The Larry Sanders Show and Family Ties (ha!) seems to have passed too many people by. 

OK, as the article points out many of these shows have been buried in the TV schedules (Arrested Development certainly has been) and constantly shifted around time slots, but surely they would have managed to find an audience somehow?

And do UK audiences really prefer to have continuous story arcs where characters ‘learn something’ as the Guardian suggests? I suspect not. Just imagine what Fawlty Towers or Black Books would be like if the characters ‘learnt something’ and ‘developed as people’?

It seems that The Guardian doesn’t know the answer and neither do I. All I can say is: don’t watch boring old tripe like Sex in the City and Friends, watch Seinfeld, it’s one of the best TV shows of all time.

‘Festivus’ highlights from ‘The Strike’, Seinfeld, season 9, 1997

I am currently reading the Chinese literary classic from the 16th century, Journey to the West, by Wu Ch’eng-en. The book is probably better known to people of a certain age in the form of 70s Japanese TV show Monkey which, along with The Goodies, seemed to be on constant rotation on the ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) throughout the late 70s/ 80s.

A side effect of reading the book is that my head is constantly plagued by the deliriously catchy, funky theme tune. So I thought I’d share the joy (and the requisite Monkey wisdom - “But the phoenix can fly only when its feathers are grown”) with you.

There was an interesting documentary on BBC4 this evening about the bespoke tailors based on Savile Row, London. The programme was called, in a suitably restrained way, Savile Row and it depicted what is truly another world.

This was best exemplified when one of the tailors described marketing as ‘vile‘, saying something akin to:

‘We’re proud of the fact that we don’t do any marketing at all and never will. The kind of people who respond to marketing are the kind of people we don’t want coming here. We don’t want that many customers. I’d prefer to employ someone to tell people to go away’.

I am torn between whether this is just good old class snobbishness or the most radical anti-capitalist thing I’ve ever heard a business owner say. It has particular resonance too when the tailors are not paid that well themselves, and are under threat from chain stores, high rents and unsympathetic developers who want to flog their traditional workshops to tasteless overpaid City boys…

This clip is great so lets see if the youtube embed works…