Seeking Life in the Mediated World: an accidental TV and newspaper review.

ne weekend, I watch Freeview TV and read a broadsheet...

Is TV today actually targetted at connoisseurs of formats, ads and idents? More radically, is it an exercise in contentless form; a way to keep tele-forms alive, in their shimmering, ersatz state, until the arrival of the saviour entities who will reinvest them with purpose?

Even in Britain, where TV "isn't as bad as in America", the conceptual integrity of any TV programme is more and more limited to fitting in with a given format. Viewers are faced with a palette of variations in which producers push and pull, mildly, at the limits of whatever format they've banked on to get some sort of project past gatekeeper executives. I presume.

To the average programme maker, I am a demographically awkward, unrewarding viewer: a fifty-something, financially non-viable middle-class male, living in The North. I'm not interested in buying, selling or altering my home; building a dream-home; elaborate meals; or anything that requires middle-class amounts of money. But because I have a smattering of middle-class education I'm not interested in the top-feeder approach to ideas, either. I'm a snob, with no spending power, and, to make matters worse, an artist.

To me, TV reflects a popular culture that has become even more exclusionary than it already was, even more fiercely limited to orthodoxies, especially around corporatised entertainment, and a self-serving media/celebrity culture: the stock in trade of all the formats in which TV and entertainment people talk among themselves. Released from the sofas, the same actors and personalities fan out in squads across TV-land, emoting for talent shows; scowling, weeping and wailing for overwrought soaps and crime tales, huffing and puffing through nostalgic costume dramas: many of these being formats with interchangeable narratives and roles.

I might be interested in not seeing the invisible reality programme 'I'm a Celebrity: Please Ignore Me from Now On' (copyright © me, 2015). For this, a very large number of celebrities are taken to a rudimentary camp in, say, the Gobi Desert, under false pretences. They're left there without any camera crews, satellite or Internet connections, never to be seen or heard from again (especially if they make it back home: this to be a clause in the contract that the celebs cannot be allowed to see, in order to ensure their participation). 

The Freeview experience is maddening. On the one hand, programme makers seem terrified that the viewer might not be able to follow a train of thought for more than two minutes. On the other, the viewer's interest is constantly frustrated by repetitious advertising and padding. Inside, I'm screaming: I can remember what happened in this oversimplified narrative, and what the consequences were, because, you know, the programme itself explained those very things not ten minutes ago.

The experience is made worse by the tendency of non-commercial programming to imitate the breathless flow of commercial channels. The noisiness of commercial broadcasting makes sense as a sensory fog intended to induce a dream-like state in which viewers might spend more money. In the non-commercial realm the viewer is constantly nudged and prodded for no other reason than the channel declaring its own presence, its qualities, etc., ever more explicitly, even though the viewer, by definition, has already elected to watch the channel.


Of course, it's possible to find thoughtful programmes about politics and economics, arts and sciences (albeit with a strong metropolitan bias), and even one or two films that don't involve Steven Seagal. That is, as long as the BBC manages to maintain its autonomy as a nest of lefty-liberals, or right-wing reactionaries, depending on your analysis of the BBC. [1] And as long as Channel 4 isn't totally consumed by brain-eating controversialitis.

As guest editor-curator of  BBC's Artsnight, Maxine Peake affects to arrive in Salford in a White Van, all bleached-out like a white knight, or the saviour who will reinvest the arts magazine format with new purpose. I enjoy the sections on women in television and on Shelagh Delaney. And I think I know what Peake means when, in another item, she says that the post-punk post-hip-hop duo Sleaford Mods have come to 'save us' (from conventionalised pop music). But I don't like the Mods that much, musically, and I don't know what Peake means by 'the working class'. [2]

The White Van is no doubt returned to Media City, Salford; and Peake to London.

I do appreciate Adam Curtis's film Bitter Lake (BBC iPlayer only). It's about Saudi Arabia and Wahhabism, and the playing out of Saudi and British interests throughout the Middle East, as far as Afghanistan. The film is much too complex to synopsise here, which is a reflection of the fact that it does not oversimplify its subject matter. There is some ambiguity about the "voice" behind the film, and the purpose of certain sequences in it, but I prefer coping with that to fighting the sense that I'm wasting my time, and being patronised for it. [3]

I also like The Great European Disaster Movie, by Annalisa Piras (apart from the acted bits featuring Angus Deayton as a future "archaeologist" of old Europe, on board a repeatedly re-routed airliner). I find a German woman talking about her forbears particularly moving. Whenever I see German people engaging critically with their past I despair of the idiocies of self-satisfied Britishness. The film features few exemplars of that quality, too. [4]

I find a programme about owls. I like to think that this and my enjoyment of it are exemplary of an altogether different kind of Britishness. [5]


After a struggle with TV, I need to reconnect with my roots in free-thinking, radical contemporary art.

It's International Women's Day, and the editors of the Observer newspaper have put contemporary art curator Hans Ulrich Obrist on the cover of their arts section, under the heading 'Is this Britain's Most Original Thinker?' [6]

Predictably, the bait question on the cover is not addressed in the article. Coincidentally, though, Obrist is shown in a position analogous to that of Deayton's character in the Piras film. We're told in detail of his long-standing obsession with travelling the world, engaging with artists (a back-story that will be familiar to anyone who knows a little bit about Obrist, or looks him up online). As far as the curator's thinking goes, it seems to be that of the classic aggregator; here gleaning ideas piecemeal from the artists he meets, formalising them, post hoc, into something which acquires quasi-philosophical, academic or historical merit.

Neither Obrist nor his interlocutor, Rachel Cooke, choose to discuss how much this perceived merit has to do with the dedication, energy and original thought of the curator, and how much to do with his acquired power in a relatively exclusive art world. Nor do they connect non-artworld issues with what art could or should be doing today. In terms of addressing the vitality of contemporary art, these are significant omissions, made more noticeable when Obrist's global reach is invoked as if it were a professional qualification. Lacking much interrogative drive, the article reinforces the familiar impression that important art and its curators are defined primarily by their ineffable metropolitan-ness: a quality of being, rather than a quality of thought.


...overall, the weekend is educative, informative, slightly entertaining, and a little depressing.

T'wit, t'woo.


[1] "One of the most bizarre myths about the corporation, recycled ceaselessly in the conservative press, is that the BBC has a left wing bias [but] the opposite is the case. From the coverage of wars to economics, it has a pro-government, elite and corporate anchor. The BBC is full of Conservatives and former New Labour apparatchiks with almost identical views about politics, business and the world. Executives have stuffed their pockets with public money. And far from programme outsourcing increasing independent creativity, it has simply turned some former employees into wealthy “entrepreneurs”, while enforcing a safety-first editorial regime."
Seamus Milne: 'Pinkoes and Traitors: The BBC and the Nation 1974-1987 by Jean Seaton review'
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/mar/01/pinkoes-and-traitors-bbc-and-nation-1974-1987-jean-seaton-review

[2] Artsnight., BBC Two: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0551jtq

[3] Adam Curtis: Bitter Lake (2015)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt4393514/

[4] The Great European Disaster Movie (2015, Dir. Annalisa Piras)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt4288614/

[5]  Natural Word: Super Powered Owls.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b054fn09/natural-world-20152016-2-super-powered-owls

[6] Rachel Cooke, 'Hans Ulrich Obrist: "Everything I do is somehow connected to velocity"'
http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2015/mar/08/hans-ulrich-obrist-everything-i-do-connected-velocity-interview

Inspector Montalbano's Mediterranean Midsomer Homeland

y resistance to televison's harmful rays was temporarily weakened recently by Moaning Man flu. I became ensnared in the terrorism/bipolar yarn of Homeland (Series 2), and enthralled by the weird charms of Inspector Montalbano. Here's my report. 

Homeland. 

I expect overheated, clench-jawed realism. My confidence is shaken by early, glaring plot flaws. Why would the well-organised terrorist group waste their most fabulous asset (Brody) just to move the much less important Bassel 'The Tailor' to a new safehouse? (Not that it turns out well, or anything, what with the gouged-abdomen-and-neck-snapping incident in the dark muddy forest.) 

Elsewhere, agent Carrie dresses to kill (herself - in a neat inversion). She glugs the pills, but changes her mind later, regurgitates it all very tidily (CIA training?) and has a nap instead. This is just what her Dad had suggested, earlier, as she packed her overnight bag with clench-jawed determination. 

Having sneaked Brody's suicide video through Lebanese security, Saul brings it to agent Carrie and signals a readiness to die soon in the name of a plot development, by relaxing his jaw. A relaxed jaw in Homeland is like a red tunic in an early Star Trek landing party: a mantle of doom. Remember how loose-jawed The Tailor was; the one Brody buried in the woods?

There are lots of monstrously huge cars with black windows, arriving and leaving. There's quite a bit of dressing up (evening dresses, uniforms) but no sexual congress, in fact 'no intimacy of any kind' according to Brody's wife. 

Escape verdict: spooks on steroids, with family issues. 

Montalbano. 

With Montalbano one must have no expectation whatsoever of logical consistency. My episode starts with M's dream of his own funeral, a scene never referred to again in the whole long tale. The coffin is dropped to dream-thunder which becomes real thunder (perhaps). 

M is now stuck in a queue of traffic, in a downpour. He collects a woman from the lead car (held up by an unconvincing-looking landslide) and gives her a lift. 

I'm more sure now that we're out of the dream, but things remain quite dream-like. It's as if all the outdoor scenes were shot on the day of a televised World Cup Final. M seems perpetually puzzled, although I don't know why: no one is present in the town who isn't in the plot; there are no boats in the harbour not involved in the plot (except at the end, when the coastguard suddenly have two massive boats to block the harbour). He's an Inspector. It shouldn't be that hard to work out, whatever it is.

Day after day, M's underlings burst into his office wearing exactly the same clothes as the day before, gabbling. Several, similar-looking women pass in and out of the plot, often via M's office. In case the viewer gets lost, characters regularly describe what's happening, as in: 'there's a landslide across the road' or 'I'm going to wash my hands'. In one scene, though, the English subtitle contains the amazing phrase: 'It's a case of homophony'. 

A romantic sequence between M and a female coastguard in an evening dress is punctuated by the image of tinfoil peeled back from a baking tin. A row of pre-cooked, dry-looking red snappers is revealed. Meanwhile, an underling sent to infiltrate a boat crew engages some energetic in-berth bonking (an ironic counterpoint to M's platonic entanglements?). 

A lissom female agent appears three-quarters of the way through to explain to M that it's all to do with 'blood diamonds'. It's a great relief, plot-wise. Now the coastguard from the red snapper scene is shot and killed. On the stone steps of a convent hospital M scrunches up his face in existential agony. 

I'm still worried about how the queue of cars got around the empty car left behind by M and the woman he rescued at the beginning. I'm unsure what she had to do with the story, or if I ever saw her again. Maybe she was the homophony.

Escape verdict: post-modernist cop procedural; Cocteau on holiday; Lynch hits the marina; Fellini does Midsomer.

The Pub Scientist and the Landlords of Knowledge

hysicist and educator Richard Feynman once said that whilst mathematics was vital for an understanding of the world according to modern physics, there were many delightful things for which mathematics was unnecessary.[1]

Advocates of science today, in their media-pomp, can lose sight of the subtleties hinted at in Feynman's remark. Most issues in human affairs have multiple aspects: personal and emotional, intellectual and philosophical, social and economic. We may concentrate on any of these aspects to the exclusion of others, and various kinds of specialism - or selectivism - encourage this.

In a 2012 episode of the BBC Radio 4 programme The Infinite Monkey Cage entitled 'Art v Science' scientist-presenter Brian Cox scoffs a little too eagerly at the contributions of those brought in to represent "the arts".[2] Comedian Al Murray's suggestion that anyone can engage instructively with the natural world by 'taking a walk' is hooted at as though Murray is proposing an equivalence between 'a walk' and the intellectual edifice of the sciences. He isn't. He's only suggesting that an engagement with the natural world can yield insights, without them having to be authenticated as science. In another aside, Cox implies that art is definitively less useful than science because it is not 'based on reality'. It escapes him, apparently, that art must spring from the same reality as science, even if its outcomes are codified differently, or have different powers of affect.

Further implications of this kind of selectivism came to light for me recently in a discussion about what the definition of "art research" might be. I wonder if the very idea of seeking a definition for art research is a response to there seeming to be a clear definition of research in the sciences, where the qualitative nature of disciplinary advances can easily be taken for granted. Relatively few discussions are staged about how many outcomes of scientific research really are qualitative advances, as opposed, for instance, to increases in the data existing around a given phenomenon or problem (that is, quantitative advances which "bulk up" a particular discipline).

Artists and scientists subsist within what sociologist Pierre Bourdieu called the social fields of art and science. Many such fields overlap in the wider social world. A scientist may be comfortable - and perhaps become a little smug - arguing for the kind of knowledge practice authenticated within his or her own social field: for example, a practice aimed at rendering the natural world as facts and information. But such an argument does not meet all the challenges of a social world constituted around emotional, economic and political relations, in which science must be legitimated. Perhaps advocates of science are impatient with this particular reality. It would partly explain the over-vigorous (and slightly mindless) way in which they can put down non-scientific engagements with wider reality.

On the other hand, whilst it can almost always be shown in an academic context that an artistic practitioner has employed the processes said to define research, demonstrating that insights have been gained, and made consensible is harder. The mythos of art incorporates the idea that subjective facts can be transformed into something of special value via the agency of an artist. But the question of whether or not this transformed thing constitutes an insight, or an element of a knowledge, is not settled. In artistic fields the gains related to core practices often remain ambiguous, to be contested, critiqued, authenticated, etc. by agents other than artists (and by other artists). The intricacies of these processes can seem mysterious or ridiculous in the wider social world.

Legitimating arguments made in public for selectivist practices (for instance, by citing their deeper connection with reaity or their efficacy as research) do not necessarily show us why certain territories are desired, competed for, and guarded. For artists and scientists, the continuance of their disciplines can be as important as the utility of anything they produce. Artists and scientists are seeking to live a certain kind of life, and this affects what they will or won't argue for, and the tactics they will deploy in advocating it.

[1] Richard P Feynman, Jeffrey Robbins, The Pleasure of Finding Things Out: The Best Short Works of Richard P. Feynman (Cambridge, Mass: Perseus Books, 1999), p. 15.
[2] http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/timc/all
http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/radio4/timc/timc_20120723-1700b.mp3

Business Rulezzz...

hen I was a little boy Jesus wanted me for a sunbeam. Now a shiny man in a Lexus wants me for a trickling stream in the great, backflowing delta of trickle-up capitalism. But I'm laughing inside. They can never get inside you, can they...?

The eagerness with which Britain's last Labour government embraced capitalistic aspirationalism is critiqued with great humour by Stefan Collini, in his 2010 article 'Blahspeak'.[1] (I apologise, obviously, for my own terminological sin: "capitalistic aspirationalism". I won't use it again.)

Years pass. Governments depart and arrive. I'm still underwhelmed by the tedious public culture of "business reality", especially as peddled on TV and radio. It's both a promotional buffer zone, and a means of pre-emptive defence, making it possible for the attitudes of self-interested entrepreneurs to be presented as if they were naturally progressive.

Every now and again there's a fuss about the under-taxing of business, usually to do with tax avoidance on a global scale; as with the Transfer Pricing tactic used by Google and others, to minimise their tax liabilities (i.e. their contributions to the societies from which they earn their huge profits).[2] In my fantasy society I can only propose interventions on a smaller stage, and so I wonder if business could be taxed in proportion to the airtime enjoyed by business people on national TV and radio? Big earners for the British state would include Alan Sugar, the little Napoleons of Dragon's Den, Mary Portas, and others.

For this to be fair we'd need to develop an index for evaluating self interest against public good. There could be tax rebates, of course, negotiated on the basis of how hard a ride a business person has on a TV or radio programme. For instance, significant rebates could be claimed in relation to BBC Radio 4's The Bottom Line (20 October 2011).[3] In this episode, presenter Evan Davis insistently harries his business guests with the question of whether the financial services sector actually creates wealth, or merely redistributes it around its own inner circle; and whether or not it simply predates on society whilst bearing no responsibility for the consequences.

It's such a great episode, I sometimes think I dreamed it.

Market imperatives are neither natural nor objective. They're an aggregation of the actions of commercial agents exercising their own interests. Unchallenged, they form a pseudo-logical background to rhetoric about entrepreneurialism, wealth- and job-creation, which is delivered as though everyone could be rich, and resources were infinite. It's doze-inducing.

...hypnotised in out hutches, our bank accounts are opened up via mysterious agreements we never knew we'd made, authorising thousands of micro-payments per year to the myriad service nodes of a few multinational corporations. Society used to want our labour; now the private capitalists whose systems have replaced society just want our cash. Every bit of it. Before we die.

Business rules? Is there still time to reconnect with other kinds of cultural imperative?

[1] Stefan Collini, 'Blahspeak', London Review of Books 8 April 2012, pp. 29-34. http://www.lrb.co.uk/v32/n07/stefan-collini/blahspeak
[2] John Christensen, 'Time for Europe to take tax justice seriously', New Europe, November 2010. Reblogged: http://www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/category/86/
Orig: http://www.neurope.eu/articles/Time-for-Europe-to-take-tax-justice-seriously/103504.php
[3] The Bottom Line. Evan Davies (presenter). BBC Radio 4. Broadcast on 20 October 2011. http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/radio4/bottomline/bottomline_20111020-2100a.mp3

Careless about Culture

istorian David Starkey has told BBC's Newsnight ''the whites have become black'' in a discussion on the England riots with author and broadcaster Dreda Say Mitchell and the author of Chavs, Owen Jones. He also hit out at what he called the ''destructive, nihilistic gangster culture'' which he said ''has become the fashion.'' [1] Here's my two-penneth:

Corporatised culture of all kinds (whether 'Hollywood' or 'Street') restricts participation to the sanctioned route of possessing (buying) its marketised iconic objects. Rappers, movie stars, footballers (for eg) may perform messages of inclusion, but they also constantly show how they differ from their followers, especially economically. The 'culture' they promulgate is exclusionary, especially to the poor, because it is economistic.

If 'culture' is the concern, let's question the habit which equates the possession of proxy objects (either by purchase or theft) with a kind of cultural inclusion. Starkey does not differentiate between affnities, attitudes and objects, and thus reinforces a reactionary idea of a person's agency inside and outside "their" culture.

All cultures of identification can become false consciousness, can't they, especially when monetised?

[1] http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-14513517