Topical !

So I am trying to right this blog weekly. And therefore if it is weekly it should be topical. And if it is topical then there is really only one story. Raoul Moat. To those of you reading in the future Raoul Moat is an ex nightclub bouncer who became a bit unhinged after coming out of prison, shot and wounded his ex partner and killed her current partner and the following day shot a policeman who was sat by the side of the road.

He then went missing for about a week. Rather helpfully he left a couple of notes to help the media ramp up their hysteria levels from ‘Crikey’ to ‘Armageddon’. It eventually all finished last night when Moat killed himself, infuriatingly just off camera for the news outlets.

I didn’t need to watch a great deal of the coverage but enough to gather the tone of it. Lots of interviews from handwriting experts and forensic psychologists and ex-firearms officers. All of them doing the same thing. Speculating and therefore filling valuable airtime.

In the good old days before 24 hours news coverage when there were sieges we had to dutifully wait for the allotted hours that our news was delivered. This freed us up to actually get on with the business of living our lives. The news bulletins because they were only half an hour stuck to reporting what was actually happening.

Media experts will tell you that this was highbound and moribund and an affront to democratic right of us to consume our news when we like. Well I don’t need to point out to you what snake oil selling cocks Media experts are. They spend their lives studying trends in media, as if that isn’t what we all do. Get a real fucking job.

If anything serious really happened we used to have the news interrupting the main programmes. And what a thrill it was when that happened, wondering in the feverish few seconds between ‘we interrupt this programme to go over to the BBC Newsdesk’ and being told what actually had happened.

Compare that with ridiculous BREAKING NEWS tickertape that runs across both Sky and BBC News channels. This can be used from everything from ‘David Cameron to meet the Queen to Become Prime Minister’ to ‘BA and Unite talks break down’



I realise how hopelessly luddite all this sounds. 24 hours news cannot be put back in the box. And I would also point out that the true joy of 24 hours news is that it gives them more time to screw things up, get caught out by members of the public as beautifully demonstrated in the above clip. Also with out 24 hours news we probably wouldn’t have Charlie Brooker’s Newswipe. I am just lamenting that the crowning achievement of 24 hours news is not an increase in democracy in the way people receive their news, but an increase of the amount of bullshit in the world.

Since I started to write this the media is doing its best to elevate Raoul Moat to the status of folk hero. Which reminded me of the below clip. No lessons ever learned.



Raoul Moat happened about a month after Derek Bird's rampage.

Thugs

I seem to be the only football fan in the world who thinks The Netherlands were ok in the way they played the world cup final last night. They were playing a team everybody agreed were the best passing team in the world. So rather than ry to play the same game and inevitably get thrashed they decided to rough Spain up. And it worked. They were punished when they went to far and were very lucky not to have one player sent off in the first half but that's the price you pay for playing that style.

In the end it all worked out when Spain scored and the best player on the park Iniesta scored it. But good God to hear the BBC commentators go on you would have thought Holland played no football at all.You would also have thought that Spain never ran up to the ref branding imaginary cards every time that a dutch player did a foul. That didn't fit with the narrative they wated to tell. Even in football we need a good guy and a bad guy.

The pundits seem to em to be completely out of touch. they don't understand that football is not a popularity contest or a beauty pageant. its a game in which both teams try to win and stop the other team winning the best they can. And if they win ugly big deal. its down to the better footballing team to show why they are the best. Oh and Alan Hansen's a wanker and seriously they could pick any bloke from a pub and he'd give more insight than Alan Shearer. The guy, well he just defies words. I just hope the Beeb can see sense and sweep away these complacent smug tossers and relaunch Match of the Day. It makes Question of Sport look current and cutting edge.

The Beautiful Game

Well we're out, spectacularly out. I mean amazingly out. Mainly as the result of some defending that at the most charitable could be described as amateurish. The main talking point through the game was about the blatant goal that England were denied. Now this should not totally distract from England's woefulness. However it was clearly a turning point. Had we come back from 2-0 to 2-2 in two minutes then we truly would have been sailing with the wind full behind us and I think we could certainly have gone on to win the game.

The inevitable talking point after the game surrounds the further introduction of technology. I am certainly in favour of goal-line technology. However the difficulty this brings is that ionce introduced for goalline technology pandora's box is openned. As I type Argentina are leading in a game where their first goal came from a laughably offside position. Lineker et al are discussing how they could use technology for that. And therein lies the problem. So I'm inclined to think stuff it. Don't bother with any of it and just let the officials do their job. As a white midle class male I have little to kvetch about. It may as well be about that instead of immigrants nicking my job or women being confident in themselves getting me into a lather.

As for England. There is something rotten in the state of our football and I think it is all about money. We have few brilliant up and coming players and those that are up and coming cannot play in the premier league because our teams are 75% made of foreign players. We are told that we have the best league in the world. But what this means, and lets be clear it is Sky and The Premier league who say this, is it is the richest league in the world.

Except that it is bankrupt. Half the clubs are heavily indebted. Meanwhile we have lost to a young German side. I can't help but think it is significant that German teams have a rule about so many young German players being in every matchday squad. This can never fly in this country because it may harm their chances in the Champions' league which would adversely effect their ability to service their debts. How I pray for the day when English club football's bubble eventually bursts. Its coming I know. One of the bigger teams will collapse and there will be nothing the premier league can do about it. The only losers will be the money men. The fans will survive.

In praise of Luther...sort of

Just got around to finishing Luther on BBC. It was a fantastic series. Its only slight problem was that it had Idris Elba in. This is not a problem in itself as he is a very good actor. The problem was that anything with him in is inevitably going to remind me of The Wire.

The Wire is unique amongst television dramas in the way that it did not bother conforming to the regular way of TV shows where everything had to be packaged and wound up in a neat one hour package. By doing that The Wire was able to let stories build naturally and not make the kind of shortcuts that shows like Luther, however brilliant they are, have to make.

Still I loved the show and I'm hopeful there will be a second series. As long as his gruesome female sidekick is with him. She delivered the two best lines of dialogue in the series. In one of her occasionally wearisome philosiphical discussions about the nature of love, she says 'The universe is not cruel John, it's just indiffferent.' To a fan of natural selection and the apparent cruelty of nature that is beautiful to me.

Secondly she said that there are three common delusions people suffer from. Which are:

1. We overstate our good parts (I am English and Catholic so come with self loathing already installed so this one does not count).
2. We overestimate the ammount of control we have over our lives
3. We persist in the veiw that our lives will change radically for the better in spite of all available evidence to the contrary.

Which I personally found pretty fucking sobering.

World Cup Woe

England truly have set a new benchmark for averageness at this tournament thus far. It really is mystifying. Anybody who sees Rooney, Lampard and Gerrard play for their club sides knows that these are class players so why is it they cannot do it for England.

This is ordinarily the bit when I offer some kind of bon mot or pithy reason why. But the truth is I don't know the reason why. And judging by the varying bewildered looks on the faces of messrs Capello, Errikson and Maclaren to name but the most recent three it seems the England managers are in the dark as well.

Nuclear Elephants and World Cup Fever

In the hopes of trying to restore this blog to some kind of regularly used blog I am going to try and write this in a regular weekly fashion.

Nuclear Elephant

There has been a great deal of talk over the last few months regarding the deficit. We all know it is big and that we need to tackle it. I work in the public sector and we are the public enemy number one it seems. It is our inflationary wages that our causing us all to be in hock. Now the right way to handle this I might suggest would be to say to everybody ‘look we’re in a bit of a hole here. We’re all going to have to sacrifice a bit for this. Which means public sector worker’s money will be frozen. But so will benefits. And taxes on the really well off will go up to so nobody feels picked on.’

Unfortunately this kind of plain speaking seems beyond British politicians at least. So what we have is a sustained attack on public sector workers. Who, if little else, do actually get up, go to work, pay taxes and spend money and do all the other things that make an economy work. The cause of this one track attack I think lies with our press who do like their easy hate figures. If you want proof look at the last two years as they have moved from Ross and brand to bankers to Social Workers to MPs to Gordon Brown…repeat.

And while this goes on we have the other story of Iran. Who may or may not be developing nuclear weapons. I have always thought that it is more than a little hypocritical of the rest of the world to lecture Iran while holding nuclear weapons themselves. I have heard various politicians and commentators try to justify this. But at heart it is simple hypocrisy. I have these arguments with my daughter who regularly points out what a hypocrite I am (although she is 6 and does not know the word hypocrite). I am left floundering and end up just feeling I have a right to be a hypocrite because I am an adult and that’s what 99% of us are. However I do realise how facile this argument. It is no less facile when it is elevated from an argument with a six year old to an argument between sovereign states.

Then we come to the elephant of the title. With all this talk of the deficit wouldn’t it make sense to scrap Trident. Even some of the generals, hardly wet lefties, have questioned their usefulness. So why keep it ? The money would ease the deficit, even if half of it was spent on the equipment our soldiers are lacking and would actually give us some moral authority when negotiating with Iran. Trident is the elephant in the room which could help solve so many problems.

World Cup Fever

Well we’re all going a bit silly over here again about England. With half the country declaring we will win and the other half saying we can’t win. The truth is both of those points of view are wrong. England are at best a quarter final team. However once we are there…who knows.