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I feel the fluttering of the wings of history in this decision. Cultural history, anyway.
Top of the Pops is being relegated to BBC2 after 40 years as BBC1’s bastion of chart music, the broadcaster announced yesterday.
Once required viewing for generations of teenagers, a slump in viewing figures has pushed the pop music chart programme on to the second channel. In the 1970s the show had audiences of 14 million but last week it pulled in just 3.1 million viewers.
The first episode, broadcast on Jan 1, 1964, was presented by Jimmy Savile and the first act to perform were the Rolling Stones with I Wanna Be Your Man.
Since then, the theme music and presenters have changed but the formula remained the same, with artists considering an appearance on the show a sign that they had officially “made it” in the British pop world.
Although a relaunched edition was watched by 5.5 million viewers last November, nearly three million had deserted the show by the summer.
Now the BBC hopes that it can win back audiences with a new version which is to go out next spring on Sunday evenings.
Historic? Yes, I do truly think so. For I think what this is a symptom of is the end of the Age of Pop Music. Internet downloads, computer games, and the fact that half the tunes were composed when your granny was in her teens mean that Youth, as it has been for some time now, is wandering off into different directions altogether, of a nature that I, and the kind of people who run Top of the Pops, cannot possibly divine. Taste is fragmenting, and what is now Number One is no longer a matter for the BBC to decide on behalf of the Youth of the Nation. We each decide for ourselves. It no longer matters to each of us what anyone else likes.
Personally, I have just lately been listening to a terrific little country and western tune called “Tell Me About It”, with great c&w guitar and drums backing by who knows what instrumental combination of musicians, and in which the vocals are shared by the glorious Tanya Tucker and one Delbert McClinton, of whom I had not previously heard. It is track number 13 on The Very Best of Tanya Tucker (“Another European compilation – I don’t think there’s anything unusual here” – Amazon.com). This is my current favourite pop tune, but you will not hear it any time soon on Top of the Pops, because none of us any longer need Top of the Pops to find out about our current favourites.
Dave Barry, of all people, links to this delightful news report of a surprising French legal judgement to the effect that a very French film indeed, called A Very Long Engagement, is not actually French.
The film was made with the help of state funds from France’s National Centre for Cinematography. In its decision, the court said that 2003 Productions was a Trojan horse, a company founded by Warner Bros. “to benefit from financial help even though [the fund] is reserved for the European cinematographic industry.”
So, a Trojan film. Sneaky people, those Trojans.
Jeunet is known in North America as the filmmaker behind 1997’s Alien Resurrection and 2001’s Amélie.
A man with previous, perpetrating popular movies.
French actress Audrey Tautou, who played the title role in Amélie, also stars in A Very Long Engagement.
And we all know that Amélie was so good it is not even put in the foreign language racks at Blockbuster. That was not a French film either. It was a film.
“This film, which tells a French story, adapted from a French novel, filmed entirely in France, in French, with the participation of more than 2,000 French people, over thirty French actors and actresses and about 500 French technicians for 18 months, is suddenly no longer considered a French film!” 2003 Productions said in a press release.
The good news is that, assuming I understand this petit contretemps (if contretemps is a girl that should be petite) correctly, this means that this movie will not be getting French government money. Which is nice. This being the case, I feel sure that I speak for us all here at samizdata.net when I say that there ought not to be any French films at all.
Yes, that assumption is correct. Here is confirmation of that, from comingsoon.net, which they got from Variety:
A Paris court has ruled that director Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s A Very Long Engagement is really a Hollywood movie, and therefore not sufficiently French to qualify for public subsidies …
If foreigners, British foreigners especially, continue buying up French real estate maybe it will eventually be decided that France is not French either.
It was a peculiar juxtaposition of programmes. First I watched the latest episode of Spooks, on BBC1 TV, and then I watched the BBC Ten O’Clock News, without pushing any buttons on the TV because that was on BBC1 TV also.
The News was dominated by David Blunkett‘s difficulties, largely self-inflicted, it would appear. There will be an independent inquiry into whether Blunkett fast-tracked a visa application for his ex-lover’s nanny, and the Prime Minister announced that he was confident of the outcome, which was an odd combination of circumstances. If the Prime Minister is so sure, why the independent inquiry? Why can he simply not say why he is so sure of the impeccability of his Home Secretary? And as another talking head opined, it would now take a brave independent inquirer to fly so completely in the face of Blair’s clear statement of what he wants the answer to be. Which means that if the independent inquiry does endorse the Prime Minister’s view, the suspicion will remain that this was because of the Prime Minister publicly demanding that answer instead of because the answer is true. So whichever way the independent inquiry goes, the stink will either be strong, or strong.
Spooks (a programme I have had cause to mention here before) was a even more lurid soap opera than usual – of junior Ministerial wrongdoing (he murders a girl, then resigns to spend more time with his family (sound familiar?)), of a famed rock and roll couple (she has her baby kidnapped to keep them in the news, but it goes wrong, the baby dies, and he finally murders her in a rage and then shoots himself). Downing Street was presented throughout as relentlessly manipulating a deranged state of public sentimentality (not least in calling in the Spooks to sort the matter in the first place, instead of leaving it to the Police), as in the grip of electoral desperation, as total hypocritical, and generally as a huge cover-up machine. If this show is any clue as to the state of public opinion, out there in Middle England, we have our answer to that question about why the Prime Minister does not want to explain why he believes his Home Secretary to be innocent of all wrongdoing. Middle England would not trust such pronouncements further than it could spit them. The Prime Minister is not trusted. → Continue reading: Public life, private life and public trust – reflections on two consecutive TV programmes
In this posting earlier today, Jonathan mentions how The Incredibles includes some “clever and sly digs at America’s litigation culture”. So here is another clever and sly dig at Britain’s fast expanding litigation culture:
With thanks to b3ta.com.
Did you join an army, and then get hurt in a battle? Sue your commanding officers for forgetting to warn you that war is sometimes violent.
Did you fall over, because of running too fast? Sue the owner of the floor you fell on, the person who employed the person who spilt some water on it and made it slippery, the maker of your shoes for not making them with more grip, the maker of the floor tiles, but: on no account blame yourself, for being careless. Your life is not your fault. It is the fault of somebody else, somebody rich. And if you were engaged in robbing the place at the time, never mind: this makes no difference!
This is fun, in a gruesome way. It is the David Blunkett policy maker, which comes up with things like this:
Detain yobs in the street indefinitely under the Terrorism Act, and then put them under a curfew order.
Or this:
Arrest refugees, and then issue them with compulsory ‘Entitlement Cards’. And charge them for it.
Or this:
Pre-emptively convict asylum seekers, and then try them in secret. And charge them for it.
Although, whenever the BBC is mentioned, I get the feeling that quite a few people around here might agree with Automatic Blunkett’s ideas. I got this, for example:
Deport the BBC to Guantanamo Bay, and then give them a ‘Citizenship Test’.
That is the problem with people like Blunkett. Almost everyone gets something that they want.
Qwghlm.co.uk, whoever he may be (this would be a good place to start finding out – his real name is, I think, Chris Applegate), adds his own cautionary note:
NOTE: The random generator can generate actual policies that Blunkett has launched. I take no responsibility for any distress caused by sudden realisation of the truth, nor any feelings of fear, doom etc. for one’s own civil liberties.
“I take no responsibility …” This man sounds like a lawyer. Maybe a lawyer and definitely a pessimist. Could he be a lefty version of this person.
See also gwghlm.co.uk’s latest blog posting about ID cards. Quote:
I’ve written before at much greater length on just why ID cards are such a bad idea (snappy three word version: costly, useless, invasive) and none of these questions has been satisfactorily answered in the meantime.
Indeed.
(It is off topic, but I could not for the life of me get copying and pasting from this guy’s blog to work. First I could not highlight just the bit I wanted. Then I could not copy even that huge gob that I almost completely did not want. (Although, I was able to copied the embedded short cut.) In the end, I copied that last quote by hand. What gives? Am I using the wrong Internet access whosadaisy programme? Is he one of these guys who made up his own blogging programme? Enlightenment please.)
I am sure that when many regulars here, readers and writers, read this, they will decide that finally and irrevocably, the country that grabbed itself an empire over which the sun never set, invented the steam engine, saw off Hitler, and used once upon a time to eat ball bearings for its breakfast, has finally gone so soft that nothing will save it:
The Princess Royal has unveiled a memorial sculpture to the animals who have served and died alongside British and allied troops.
The monument, in Park Lane, central London, depicts two mules, a horse and a dog, together with lists of the numbers of animals lost in conflicts.
But I do not think this is straightforward evidence of softness. I think that we just live in rather soft times. If the times harden, we would harden up with them pretty quick.
The irony is that this apparently soft-as-slush BBC story actually harks back to a much harder time, when men were men and pigeons were pigeons. (Do you think Blackadder when you follow that previous link? I do.)
Anyway, on with the BBC story:
The monument pays special tribute to the 60 animals awarded the PDSA Dickin Medal – the animals’ equivalent of the Victoria Cross – since 1943.
They include 54 animals – 32 pigeons, 18 dogs, three horses and a cat – commended for their service in World War II. Among these heroes were:
Rob, a para-dog who made more than 20 parachute drops while serving with the SAS on top-secret missions in Africa and Italy.
Ricky, a canine mine-detector who continued with his dangerous task of clearing a canal bank in Holland despite suffering head injuries.
Winkie, a pigeon that flew 129 miles with her wings clogged with oil to save a downed bomber crew.
… and many more gutsy beasts, protected, one suspects, by having only the dimmest idea of what they were actually engaged in, and of the risks they were taking.
Nevertheless, these are arguably statues in a similar vein to this one, or even this one.
If you want further evidence of the hardness that lurks just beneath the soft surface of human nature in soft old Britain just now, take a look at another piece of sculpture I spied this evening, on my travels along Oxford Street.
On the face of it, this is good news, of a householder standing up for his rights, and using reasonable force:
Rock star Ozzy Osbourne has been praised by police for “very courageously” tackling a burglar who stole jewellery from his house.
The singer grabbed an intruder who then jumped 30ft (10m) from a first floor window as the star gave chase at his Buckinghamshire home on Monday.
But of course, this event leaves the definition of ‘reasonable’ in the same old totally unreasonable state that it has long been in. If you are Ozzy Osbourne, and you take it into your head to interrupt a criminal in the course of his criminality using only your bare hands, and not actually hurting the criminal, and you merely chase him away, with his swag, then fine, the Police will shower you in praise.
But if Ozzy had actually smacked the criminal with a chair leg or something, and had done it hard enough to ensure that the criminal would not be in any state to fight back, as would have been entirely reasonable and as would have been very much in the interests of everyone other than criminals, his legal position would now be far more awkward. Never mind that if Ozzy had done this, the criminal might have been caught, and might even – who knows? – have ended up being punished in some way. And Sharon Osbourne would have got to keep all her jewels. But no. Ozzy only managed to chase the criminal away, and the criminal gets to go on being a criminal. Well done Ozzy!
Well, Ozzy did do quite well. At least he had a go, as the saying goes. But he could have done far better, and if he had, the Police would have squealed like outraged, upstaged pigs.
Further to this posting and previous postings involving Zimbabwe, the England cricket tour of Zimbabwe, etc., this story is the kind of reason why I am not that bothered about this apparently very stupid cricket tour that is now going ahead. No tour, and there would be that much less reportage of Zimbabwe and its disgusting ruler. What has happened is that about half the media have been banned from entering Zimbabwe, to write about the cricket! I suppose the fear is that they might wonder what all that shouting and screaming and people bashing is that goes on outside cricket grounds (and everywhere else – except in Safari parks apparently, see the comment on that previous posting) in Zimbabwe these days.
All the same, the ICC, cricket’s global governing body, is making itself look ever more ridiculous:
For most countries, intervention from the government in this manner would be grounds enough for withdrawing from the tour but the ICC gave Zimbabwe special dispensation because of the situation in the country under the regime of president Robert Mugabe.
Well, exactly. A normal government cannot be allowed to behave like this. The Mugabe regime, on the other hand, must obviously be spared the interfering attentions of inquisitive journalists. How else can this disgusting regime grapple unhindered with all of the many, many problems caused by its own disgustingness?
There was debate here about just how bad the situation is in Africa in general, just how corrupt African governments now are, and just how pointless and/or harmful it may now be to send them charitable aid, etc. But I take it that no one will claim that matters have improved very much, in particular, Zimbabwe during the last decade.
Up to 70 per cent of Zimbabwe’s workforce, some 3.4 million people, has fled the country to escape the political oppression and collapsing economy under President Robert Mugabe’s rule, according to research by an independent church study group.
The South African-based Solidarity Peace Trust said that most of them had crossed the borders into neighbouring countries, with an estimated 1.5 million skilled and able-bodied workers arriving in South Africa to seek work to support families left behind in Zimbabwe.
“An estimated 25 to 30 per cent of the entire Zimbabwean population has left the nation,” the Peace Trust reported.
“Out of five million potentially productive adults, 3.4 million are outside Zimbabwe. This is a staggering 60 to 70 per cent of productive adults.”
Zimbabwe’s economy is in its most dire crisis since independence in 1980.
But do not worry. Some skilled workers are about to go to Zimbabwe, in the form of a visiting England cricket team.
Which might explain why someone thinks it worthwhile to place adverts featuring this website, next to the Telegraph piece quoted from above. I cannot think of any other reason to want to visit this dreadful place.
Looking for ZIMBABWE flights? Book your cheap holiday or business trip dates? Check availability for all airplane tickets and flights to ZIMBABWE airports, then compare discount airfare rates to find the cheapest airline tickets and ZIMBABWE air travel from Kelkoo UK.
Book your cheap holiday or business trip dates? That would be a real fun holiday. And business? What on earth business might that be? Nothing very civilised I should imagine. Selling cheap bus journeys out of the damn place, perhaps.
What a horror story. Death to Mugabe. Seriously, the sooner that stubborn old bastard drops dead the better, from whatever causes God (in the insurance sense of that much overused word) chooses, the better. This will probably be the next good thing that happens to this wretched country, and if he is as stubborn about clinging on to life as he is in clinging on to his idiotically destructive policies and damn the consequences, then the people of Zimbabwe could be in for a long wait.
I know that many who read this blog might feel that I ought to be angry about those cricketers, but honestly, I cannot see their visit making much difference one way or another. After all, nobody in a position actually to improve matters in Zimbabwe seems at all inclined actually to do that. In South Africa, for example, the big debate now seems to concern whether or not to be nasty to the millions of refugees from Zimbabwe, not about whether anything can or should be done to improve things in Zimbabwe itself.
This afternoon, the BBC showed the highlights of the international rugby match played yesterday between England and South Africa, at Twickenham. I already knew that it would have a happy ending. (I find important rugby internationals very hard to watch properly, and always try to tape them, so that, if England win, I can then settle down and enjoy them properly. I am not, in other words, a Real Fan.)
Anyway, yes, England won 32-16, scoring two tries in the first half, with South Africa only managing one try, at the end when it was too late.
This was not a result that many people expected. Why? Because no one really knew what to expect.
South Africa won the recent triangular tournament of the Southern Hemisphere giants (i.e. against Australia and New Zealand), but what does that mean nowadays? Hard to say. After all, last weekend, Ireland beat them in Dublin. Narrowly, but they beat them.
As for England, who knew? Since that World Cup triumph (actually since just before it – England peaked before the World Cup rather than at it and only just clung on to their form enough during the World Cup to win it) England have been in decline, and then in – disintegration. Big Name after Big Name announced their various retirements. Leonard, Johnson, Dallaglio, Back. Manager Clive Woodward had always said in public that the World Cup, once won, was only the start and that he and his happy band would then proceed to win the next one. But in truth, winning this thing once (and for the very first time remember) was always the important thing, and once Everest was climbed, climbing it again held insufficient magic for the older players, especially since their only contribution would be supplying a bit of continuity before retiring in a year or two’s time. Other players got injured, or revealed that they already were injured, and in no state to play in any games other than such games as World Cup Finals. Others just needed to put their feet up. So the World Cup team fell to bits with extraordinary suddenness. England came third in the Six Nations at the beginning of this year, their lowest position for many years, and only escaped a total thrashing from France in the final game (which had earlier been billed as some kind of huge decider type confrontation) because the French got bored and let England back into the game. And then when England journeyed yet again to Australasia to try to repeat their pre-World Cup triumphs of a year earlier (that was when they peaked), they were just murdered.
Eventually Woodward himself realised that putting together another team to win the World Cup again would not be the same either, so he said bye bye also, muttering about being some sort of soccer manager, and amid autobiographical claims that he only played rugby instead of soccer because his snobbish dad made him. Now he tells us. → Continue reading: England 32 South Africa 16 – England back(s?) in business
I yield to no-one in my enthusiasm for space flight and in my admiration for men like this guy who are now so magnificently pioneering it, but I yield to anyone who challenges me on the technicalities of it. However, I do wish myself to challenge this man (thanks to Instapundit for linkage to this argument). Alexander Tabarrok, in a recent TCS article questioning the immediately future of space tourism, put, among other things, this question:
The space shuttle has a slightly better record of safety – it was destroyed in two of 113 flights. There are lots of millionaires willing to spend one or two million dollars for a flight into space but how many will risk a two to five percent chance of death?
I would not have noticed this very rhetorical question had Rand Simberg not also singled it out, so particular thanks to him also.
As I say, I know next to nothing of how quickly the costs of space travel are going to plummet (other than that they will plummet, just as Simberg says) as more people want to get in on it, but one thing I do know is that if those are now the death odds you face, the queue is going, contrary to what Alexander Tabarrok says with his question, to be a very long one.
Tabarrok has a very limited idea, it seems to me, of what a millionaire is these days. Presumably when he typed in his question, he had in mind a rigidly rational calculator of odds, sitting at his dull desk, wearing a dull suit, fully 42 and more than usually plain for his age, who spends his entire life looking at boring safety graphs (Tabarrok features a boring safety graph at the bottom of his piece) and who never so much as sets a foot on a water ski, let alone anything at all seriously risky. But what of the millionaires of a more fun loving and risk friendly disposition? Has he never met any of those?
Above all, what of the millionaire sons of the world’s now really quite numerous billionaires? This is a notoriously risk embracing group. These people are famous for taking hair-raising risks, if only to impress all the girls they so like to chase after. They cannot out-earn dad, but they can at list out-stunt him. The now highly established (and now insufferably safe) sport of motor racing owes its entire existence to a couple of generations of nineteen thirties and nineteen fifties (they spent the nineteen forties killing each other) young tearaways with more money than sense, or to put it another way, with a bit of imagination when it came to spending money. What on earth makes Tabarrok think that death odds of a mere five per cent a pop would put off young men of that sort, and what makes him think that the world is not now massively fuller of such wacky racer types than in was in the nineteen thirties? One in twenty are the kind of odds that will actually make the queue longer. They certainly will not shorten it much.
Hell, a one in twenty chance of a quick and glorious death (already, I would surmise, far more dignified and far cheaper than a long spell of Alzheimer’s), but a nineteen out of twenty chance of one of the great Bragging Rights of the early twenty first century, would be enough to entice me into space, if only I could afford the ticket.
Tabarrok’s headline is a similarly timid pseudo-question: “Is space tourism ready for take-off?” Damn right it is.
I am about to rush off to a dinner date, but there is still time for me to say that, if Instapundit and all his linkages, and all their linkages are anything to go by (look at the links in the first comment at roger l. simon), some really interesting things seem to be happening in North Korea.
If things are going as well as they just might be, then, good. Very good.
If this is all premature, not to say nonsense, then my apologies. It at least looks as if the North Koreans may soon get to eat a little better.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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