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Patrick Crozier is happy to see the old lags of British terrestrial television being given a run for their money
UK Channel 5 has been dismissed by the elite as being a non-stop orgy of sex and violence. Such statements in themselves lay bare the warped priorities of our ‘leaders’ but there is one other problem: it isn’t true. Channel 5 is simply the most dynamic and innovative British terrestrial channel around.
It has the best reality TV programme: The Mole
It has the best two animations: The Powerpuff Girls and Tintin
And it has some of the best history documentaries around. My favourite has to be Hitler’s Henchmen. Not least because an inspired piece of scheduling led to biographies of Hermann Goering and Heinrich Himmler being interspersed with shows covering the life and works of John Prescott and Pete Waterman.
In fact, Channel 5’s documentaries seem to be giving BBC2 and Channel 4 something of a headache. For many years these stuck up elito-vision channels have been pumping out nothing but revisionist pap. You know, ‘Churchill was a drunken child molestor’, that sort of thing. But then Channel 5 started broadcasting things like “British Heroes of World War 2” (the title says it all). And then “Secrets of World War 2”. In the hands of the elite this would have been all about how Churchill contributed to the slaughter of Russians on the Eastern Front but from Channel 5 it a set of stories about the daring exploits of our ancestors.
I do not know if Channel 5’s documentaries are particularly popular. But the reaction (especially from Channel 4) has been revealing. To “Secrets of WW2” Channel 4 countered with “Battle Stations”. To “Heroes” they countered with “Commando”. And to a fine 3-parter on the Falklands they dusted off a 10-year old documentary of their own and put it out as a spoiler.
But the really interesting thing about this is the way the content has changed. Quite simply, Channel 4 has sobered up, smelt the coffee and dumped the revisionism. Commando was an hour long show but contained little more than half an hour’s actual information. Could it be that the missing half an hour was the revisionism they had to axe to get the ratings?
Patrick Crozier
Two men have been killed and a third seriously injured after being shot by armed men in a pub in South London
It is a few minutes past noon and I can hear the sound of artillery from my home here in Chelsea… no, it is not the start of an anti-European Union revolt but rather a 41 gun salute being fired off in Hyde Park that heralds the start of the Queen’s Jubilee.
Two people were shot, one of them fatally, in a West London restaurant today
The BBC, in its on-line news, reported on Monday: “Roman Catholic lawyers should refuse to handle divorce cases, Pope John Paul has said.”
In fact, the Pope said nothing of the sort and the Telegraph points this out in an editorial after some ‘fact-checking of arses’*. As I have mentioned before, I would be a whole lot less bothered by what the BBC spews out but for the fact that I am forced by law to pay for this mouthpiece of the statist British establishment.
* = Pace Ken Layne: asses are a type of strange donkey and are less likely than posteriors to be repositories of facts and falsehoods.
As I noted in a previous blog article, the British media have finally turned seriously nasty with the Labour government. Why? Search me. Could it be that they (a) now believe that “New Labour” is running seriously out of steam and that, (b) knowing new Conservative Opposition Leader Ian Duncan Smith better than the rest of us yet do, they believe he’s got something going for him? (a) and (b) feeding off each other, of course. After all, if Labour’s now mountainous majority is seriously reduced at the next general election, then the Labour government that follows will be a lame duck, in the manner of the John Major regime. And if the next Labour government is going to be a lame duck, their threats and promises of advancement already, now, count for less than they used to, and Ian Duncan Smith’s threats and promises now count for somewhat more. In politics, perceptions of the future are facts in their own right. Therefore, the media are now switching their loyalties.
I think this may make sense of this bizarre “America snubs Britain“ stuff that Our Great Leader (the Owl Man I mean, not Tony Blair) has been complaining about. He’s right. I don’t feel snubbed either, and I don’t know anyone who does.
But, there could be a subtext, as they say in the theatre. Isn’t one of the implied messages of this America-snubs-Britain spiel that all Tony Blair’s recent World Statesman performances count for very little if he and his mates can’t get so much as a pair of handcuffs and a blindfold removed from one Al Qaedist in US custody, and that the Bush White House doesn’t give a damn what Tony and his Cronies think about this, that or anything else. Ergo Blair’s a twat. I’m not saying Blair’s a twat myself. I’m saying that the Daily Mail and the rest of them are saying it, in a slightly roundabout way.
Could that be part of what’s going on?
The Daily Mail, a newspaper that if I ever do link to it will be filed under the “Havens of fluorescent idiocy” section, had as its front page headline on monday:
TERROR SNUB FOR BRITAIN
America poured scorn last night on British concerns over the treatment of Al Qaeda suspects in Cuba
So in spite of the fact no less than five polls in Britain show support of about 90% for US actions in Cuba, somehow “Britain” is being snubbed. Not “the British Government” or “elements of the British media” but “Britain” is being snubbed.
So presumably the 90% of people in Britain who appear to support the US are, well, not Britain. The 10% that supports the anti-American media elite and establishment and who were presumably ‘snubbed’…that must therefore be “Britain” according to the Daily Mail. Interesting.
And so then just who the hell are the 90% of people in Britain that don’t feel in the slightest bit snubbed by USA?
Three men have been admitted to hospital, one of them in critical condition, after a shooting on a Glasgow Housing Estate
Interesting story in the January 25th 2002 Times, front page and rightly so in my opinion. It begins:
“The Office for National Statistics announced yesterday that it would stop collating data on the number of days lost to industrial action, as further strikes loomed in the already hard-hit rail industry.”
Something big may now be happening in British politics. The New Labour dictat against big increases in government spending may now be expiring. Perhaps they think their reputation for financial rectitude is now fireproof. In reality, if they abandon financial rectitude, their political supremacy – their public support is “wide but shallow”, as many a commentator has noted – could vanish like the morning dew.
Strikes are caused by, among other things, financial uncertainty, and the biggest creator of such uncertainty is the State. By hinting that blank cheques may be available for keeping “public services” going (on account of them being essential, too important to be left to the private sector, etc. etc.) but by explicitly claiming (e.g. to railway managements) that, actually, State funding is strictly limited, each side is primed for a fight. Management insists it can pay only so much. The workers now think they smell a different atmosphere. The feeling in the country is now: time for something to be “done” about “public services”, and to many “done” sounds like “spent”.
It doesn’t have to mean this, which is what privatisation is all about. The government should now “re-privatise” the railways, probably on the basis of the old regional companies, with track and trains being combined again.
Will they be smart enough to do this? If they do, will the new Conservative leadership finally have the sense to split Labour by agreeing with the policy? Only if the answers are Yes and No can New Labour sail on unmolested.
Maybe the government will get a grip on things. But then I thought they’d get a grip on the Dome and they never did. The Conservative opposition under its new leader is showing distinct glimmerings of adequacy and the media are finally getting nasty with New Labour, hence the above story, among many others. (There’s also a huge ruckus now going on in our newspapers about just how bad the National Health Service is and whose fault it is.)
There’s lots more one could say about this. I will content myself with noting that the phrase “the honeymoon is finally over” is being much used in Britain nowadays.
I have spent the last 13 years of my life in the West Belfast, Andytown orbit. I suspect I know a little bit more about it than some. I certainly don’t class as an outsider or a disinterested outside observer on these matters. I am also not going to be drawn into a long discussion that will just rehash verbal territory I have been over many times before.
Comparing any of the paramilitaries in Northern Ireland of either side to the Al Qaeda is ludicrous. Ours are a local problem, not a global one. In any other period of history what happened in Northern Ireland would have been called a civil war. In the early days of ‘The Troubles’ in the 70’s there was actual open small unit warfare between elements of the British Army and highly trained IRA units. This was not reported in the newspapers but I have talked to people who were there.
The British Army purportedly arrived to protect the Catholics from the Protestants, but the people who lived through that time say that the results were otherwise. It was as if the National Guard who went to Selma shot the blacks they had come to protect.
It would not surprise me to find that the USSR was feeding money and agents provacateurs to both sides in the late 60’s and early 70’s in the run up to the hostilities. Whatever the causes, the problems between the two communities escalated into open warfare. There were real problems here for outsiders to exploit, not imagined ones. In those days the Protestant community ran Northern Ireland the way the Klu Klux Klan ran Mississippi. Catholics were niggers here, and that made a fertile and inflammatory ground for what was to come.
This was not a pleasant place in those days. One friend was held in his bedroom with an Armalite stuck into his mouth – he was perhaps 15 – while his mother was held downstairs and the British soldiers searched for the hundredth time. 30 years ago, but I think if he ran into that officer today only one would survive the meeting. I could give you a hundred stories like that, all from the people it happened to, all from people I know very well.
Almost all of it happened right here in one small province, about the size of West Virginia. True, the IRA did things in England; but it seems to me that is supposed to be part of the same country. Some of the Protestant paramilitaries acted in Ireland, but I would also have to call that part of the same ‘country’ because there was a rather serious intersection of interests in Northern Ireland.
Did the IRA and UFF commit terrorist acts? Yes. Are they just like the Al Qaeda? Not even close. Al Qaeda killed over 3000 people and injured many more (remember my flame about us never being given an old fashioned casualty figure, dead plus injured?) in one hour. The attack on the World Trade Center was not a military objective; it was planned to maximize deaths of civilians of a nation nearly a half a planet away from where the attackers lived. The same organization killed perhaps another thousand people in the last decade, many of whom were Americans. This is no little local civil war. They aren’t killing their neighbors over which flag should be flown over City Hall.
In the global leagues, the IRA and UFF and the rest of the Northern Ireland alphabet soup are pikers. And pretty much out of business pikers at that. I’m sure Natalija can tell us about living somewhere where the terrorists really knew how to go about their job. I think we should all be thankful for the fact that as bad as these people may have behaved, they were not in those leagues. They called and politely told people to evacuate before blowing up places, rather than timing for maximum carnage. They never tried to acquire ‘the bomb’. They didn’t blow up civilian airliners.
And yes, I do agree that the ‘Real IRA’ people responsible for killing so many people of both sides in Omagh should be just quietly shot dead if found. I doubt anyone here would shed a tear over their despicable carcasses.
The Peace Process here is working. I have lived through it. I do not want to go back to the way it was. I want the Republican and Unionist leaders jawing and jockeying instead of shooting. I want them to keep it up for another decade. By then they will be out of touch with the reality of day to day life. Belfast is a lovely place with these lads talking instead of fighting. I’d like to keep it that way.
Some day there may be a vote here on which country we are to be a part of. I suspect by the time it happens the vote will be based on pure economics rather than which flag was printed on your nappies.
When I was a teacher I would sometimes, not often but sometimes, convince a yob* to do some work. When this happened I would do my best to welcome him back to favour but also tried to avoid giving said yob an easier ride than those who had always been working. I felt that giving him an easier ride would send the wrong messages to both yob and good kids. Correction, stuff the “wrong messages” bit, it would be radically unfair to both yob and good kids.
If I could work this out within weeks of first facing a class, why can’t Tony Blair? I say all this to illustrate why I heartily support David Carr’s recent post “A warning to George W. Bush” while opposing, in gnomic fashion, his post a little further down where he appears to lament the partial reform of terrorists.
* Editor’s translation for our American cousins: yob = English slang for a disorderly young man
A woman is seriously ill in hospital after been hit by a stray bullet fired as a result of a gunfight in South London
A man is also fighting for his life after being shot on the doorstep of his home in Berkshire
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