Today is my birthday. I hate birthdays. I hate Christmas too, but birthdays are probably number two on my list of annual events which I hate, closely followed by New Year’s Eve. I hate birthdays on Facebook because there’s a little reminder telling so-called friends that it’s your birthday, it’s put there so that they can then write “Happy Birthday!!!!!!!!!!” on your pissing wall and then you have to work out if you should thank everyone individually, or do a big post thanking everyone, thus drawing attention to the fact that it’s your birthday, guilt-tripping those people too stupid to have seen the reminder on their homepage into “liking” your post about thanking people for their birthday wishes. Well not for me. I’ve disabled the fucker. No one on Facebook will see that little reminder today. My wall shall remain barren, bereft of witty comments and birthday wishes from people I haven’t seen for ten years.
I fucking hate Facebook. In fact, I may treat myself today and delete a few more friends.
I considered not mentioning my birthday on here, it’s almost akin to people tweeting: “it’s my birthday!” and then waiting for @ replies congratulating them; those people are cocks. I like Twitter, and I like the people that read my blog, so I’ve decided it’s ok to reveal my birthday secret on here, just don’t tell anyone, yeah?
Here’s a funny video which is very silly and has been posted by way of thanks for someone who has helped me immensely with work this week.
Annoyingly this is the second post on here that starts with something along the lines of ”when I started this blog I promised I would keep it updated”; my last post was in 2009. I don’t even remember what happened in 2009, except what I wrote on here, which is of fuck all use.
The other day a very good friend of mine came down to visit me by the seaside with her kids, one’s about a year old and cries, the other is three. When asked by her father where she’d been for the day, the three-year-old announced that she’d been to visit “grumpy”. Now I know I moan a lot and tend to be miserable the majority of the time, but for someone who’s only three to pick up on how I hate most things did worry me a little. Most of my friends understand, sympathise and laugh at my unhappy ways, but people that don’t know me or have just met do often just think I’m a cunt. It takes them a while to work out who I am, and this puts me at somewhat of a disadvantage when meeting new people or spending time with friends of my partner (who is always very happy and smiley, the complete opposite of me in that respect). So I thought I might write a book, looking into why I’m so grumpy all the time and whether or not anything can be done to change or even alleviate it. It will probably involve me having to do all sorts of “happy” things, like watching Disney films and visiting a life coach. Just the thought of doing things like that fills me with absolute horror and dread. Perhaps I am just grumpy and destined to a life of pessimism, or maybe, just maybe, something out there can make make me see that there is something worth smiling about. At the end of my journey, will you find me walking down the High Street with my usual scowl, or will I be skipping along, grinning like a retard?
When talking about writing a book, @judewinstanley tweeted “whatevs. You couldnt maintain the blog for more than 2 monhs..” [sic]. She’s got a point, but then she also has pink hair. Anyway, I’ve done a blog, how difficult can a book actually be?
Here’s a choir singing, worth watching through to the end or for as long as you can manage it:
My blog’s becoming a occasional blog despite the fact I promised that I would update it regularly when I started it. It’s becoming like all those other blogs I did, although admittedly most of those just had one post before I ended up deleting the entire account. After a good five months of doing nothing, in recent weeks I have been stupidly busy, finding myself a boyfriend, working with a very exciting new TV company and filming porn (all these three are entirely different projects with no crossover whatsoever). As a result of this, I haven’t been watching much TV, so much so that I’m even beginning to miss Live From Studio Five and its insights into modern life. Last night, with nothing to do, I sat down to watch The Restaurant.
What a fucking mistake that was.
I missed the first series, but watched a lot of the second series with my former flat-mate, and it was relatively enjoyable, but the start of this series gave me rage (rage, by the way, is French for rabies; if you’re reading this Raymond, I mean the anger rage, not the rabies one). Previous series were filmed at Raymond’s Manoir restaurant, but this one started with what was essentially a three-minute advert for one of his brasseries, a chain with such glamorous locations as Milton Keynes, Cheltenham and Portsmouth. I don’t know if previous series featured them, but what with the ‘current economic climate’ I couldn’t help feeling that the whole product placement thing had been taken a little too far and that it was all for Raymond’s benefit. There was a shot of him calling in the orders (there’s a technical restaurant term for this what I’ve forgotten) that almost made me want to sick up my supper in my mouth and then swallow it back down again, it was so false and set-up, we all know Raymond doesn’t spend any time cooking there.
Next up is meet the teams time, this is a couples competition, which adds an interesting dynamic to the programme. As always, it’s pretty obvious from the outset who’s going to be thrown out as the narrative focusses on them the most. The task is to create their signature dish, which they must then present to Raymond and his team along with a brief description of what their restaurant concept is. I can’t remember all of the names of the competitors, basically I forgot to write them down, so I’ll do my best to explain what happened next without them.
All of these teams are carefully selected from hundreds if not thousands of applicants, so the nine that make it to the first programme have been chosen for a reason – some of them will be shit, some of them will be great – it’s like manufactured pop. You could almost describe this first episode as the X Factor of food, only that would be false, X Factor is entertaining, this programme just plods along with few surprises. One of the shit teams, a mother/daughter combo, I think, failed to crack open a coconut with an incredibly sharp kitchen knife, and then attempted to open a can using the same knife. Ok, this scene was quite funny, it was like watching clowns in the kitchen and the fact that they ‘couldn’t even open a tin’ made it all the better, but these two were clearly going to be culled – quicker, in fact, than anyone else – Raymond just had one taste of their dish, raised his concerns about its taste and their safety in the kitchen, and then fired them or whatever the word is for exiting this show. Don’t be fooled, two teams were always going to go, it was just fortuitous that this team were so shit they could let them go early. While the rest of the teams cooked, Raymond’s helpers wandered around. Raymond’s helpers are nothing like those folk fromTthe Apprentice – these two are devoid of all character and seemingly talent. David Moore made some snide comment about the mushroom tower looking more like a maisonnette (hilarious, David, why don’t you fuck off and crawl back under that rock?) while Sarah just looked like a mega-bitch for the entire episode and contributed nothing at all to the programme. Nothing. Not a thing. Not one thing. Nothing. She was terrible. Her wikipedia page reveals that she has been included in the Sunday Times list of 35 most successful women under 35 when she was 33 years of age; I can reveal that her success was certainly not measured by her TV appearances. It also boasts of her business success, which includes being on the board for the chain Tootsies (you know, the chain that closed down a couple of weeks ago) – whatever, I don’t like her, I don’t like her attitude and I don’t want her to darken my screen ever again. Unless she can manage smile through that (probably) botoxed face.
Okay, back to the teams. There was one guy who’d retired from the army, decided he’d quite like to do a restaurant thing, grabbed a military cook and off they trotted, onto our screens with having known each other for under two months – they will prove to be entertaining. There were two fat chavs who done chocolate fondant badly (do they not watch MasterChef? FONDANTS NEVER WORK), two girls who cooked peas for 25 minutes, some friends who wanted to bring African food to Britain, a couple of South London lads, two weird blond guys, a couple who sell flowers and look like they don’t wash and own lots of animals and then a mother and son team who transcended strange; if I wanted to set up a restaurant it wouldn’t be with my mum – and if she wanted open a restaurant she wouldn’t want to open one with me – neither would we appear on TV together – but this mother/son relationship definitely had something of the ancient Greeks about it (if you’re in any doubt, what I mean by this is that wouldn’t surprise me if the two of them had sex occasionally). Anyway, they failed to convince Raymond that their concept worked by not providing him with a concept – they were the second team to go.
Here’s a rundown of the teams (with names), concept (in most cases) and my own views.
JJ and James – blond nobs, haven’t got a fucking clue – their concept is some kind of picnic thing, no one really knows. I hope they stay in because they’re fun to laugh at (not with).
Shaun and Janet – the dirty animal lovers (my words) – they are Weird with a capital W. She wanted gravadlax and pronnounced it with an accent. They’ll be out soon and back to their animal loving.
Chris and Nathan – the London boys – they’re really sweet, want to bring high-end food to the masses and will go far.
Barney and Badger – the army boys - not sure how this will ‘pan’ out – army people are a little scary and these two look like they might fist people down dark alleys (should that be up dark alleys?)
Daisy and Nadine – want to open a Nigerian restaurant, despite not being Nigerian. They’ll go far.
Rebecca and Stephen – fat, eyes like pigs. Might do well but look like they might eat their way through the stock, that’s if they haven’t stopped munching through the camera cables.
Frances and Lucy – can’t cook peas; what more do you need to know? Want to do entirely locally sourced food, Raymond says it’s impossible, he can only manage 30% – try harder, Raymond, that’s what I say.
Will I be watching The Restaurant again? Maybe later in the series when the funny people are out-of-the-way and the real cooking starts, otherwise I’ll be giving it a miss; it’s the same-old-manufactured-try-hard-reality-show, pedestrian, nothing exciting and nothing special. If you could make TV through painting by numbers, this would be how to do it. Oh, and I went to a Brasserie Blanc the other day and thought it was over-priced and underwhelming. So stick that up your French pipe and smoke it in a specially constructed shelter outside.
Haven’t done any blogging stuff for a while now. The last month or so has been rather strange, but this week seems to be seeing the start of various new exciting things, so I thought I’d put pen to paper (fingers to keyboard?) and write about Channel Five. Why the hell not?
For those of you that don’t know it, Five is this the fifth terrestrial channel in the UK. In recent times its big hits have been American imports, along with a few homegrown commissions. Earlier on in the year, Five got a new controller, Richard Woolfe – a well-known figure in the industry. Richard is credited with turning round Living (“pink and paranormal” were the then mots du jours). More recently Richard was heading up Sky1, 2 & 3 – it was he that poached Lost from Channel 4, he that brought back Gladiators and he that was responsible for an overall change in direction for Sky, resulting in Stuart Murphy inheriting a reasonably healthy few channels.
Richards big plan for Five is Entertainment, hopefully putting Five back on the map and making it a destination channel. One of his biggest commissions so far has been Live from Studio Five, a topical daily live show broadcast between 18.30 and 19.30. Five have said it’s nothing to do with The One Show and that the inspiration came from elsewhere. I don’t believe them.
The show has already suffered poor ratings and I can’t say that I’m surprised: it really is terrible. The basic idea behind it is quite good – it’s news, but not as we know it. There’s a bit of Loose Women in there, a dash of This Morning, two spoonfuls of Newsround and a little Big Breakfast thrown in for good measure. But it’s rubbish.
The first problem are the presenters. Melinda Messenger, Ian Wright and some old bint from the Apprentice. This was just never going to work. Ian Wright is clearly out of his depth discussing even the most basic of news stories, and makes up for this by grinning inanely at the camera, laughing to cover gaps and generally making a fool of himself. When he does talk, my instant reaction is to shout ‘SHUT UP IAN, I DON’T CARE WHAT YOU THINK’.
Melinda Messenger looks very happy, but then so would you be if you hadn’t had a job in five years. Out of all of them though, she’s the one that they should keep on. She has spark in her eyes, she acts professionally and more importantly comes across as being genuinely inerested/aware in what’s going on, rather than just reading an auto-prompt badly like the other two.
The girl of the Apprentice is pretty. Sadly for her, she’s also pretty stupid. Today she managed to stumble over her words and call the show ‘Five from Studio Five. Obviously she’s not a trained presenter, it’s only the beginning (of the end) of her TV career, so allowances should be made for mistakes. Her main problem is blandness, it’s something that she’ll never overcome. Fixed with a perma-smile, her and Ian spend most of their time grinning at each other, whilst Melinda valiantly tries to save the show.
You can’t manufacture a relationship on screen, it’s either there from the beginning or it’s not. Fern and Phil, Johnny and Denise, Chis and Gabby – these were genuinely good on-screen relationships. Will we be talking about these three in years to come? No.
My solution: ditch Wright and the Apprentice girl, keep Melinda, get her a new male side-kick and bring in a guest presenter each week.
Content wise, the show’s pretty poor – but when the credits roll at the end and a BSkyB endboard flashes up it all becomes clear. Sky provide Five with all their news and this must fall under that contract.
The studio is small and brightly coloured. It makes me want to be sick a little bit in my mouth if I stare at it for too long. The crew get involved in the action, reacting to the triumvirate and their incessant babbling (cf. Big Breakfast) but even this is a relationship that comes across as fake and manufactured.
I want to write more about the show but as it’s not on Demand Five (they really ought to sort the rights issue out ASAP) I can’t remember what else happened, mainly because I’ve tried to block most of it out of my mind. Live from Studio Five: good idea, poorly executed.
Here’s a lovely little sketch from Cowards, a sketch show on BBC Four which passed by with few people realising it was on. Watch out for the comedians in it, they’re all incredibly talented.
I haven’t done a blog post update thing for over a month. It’s been so long since I logged into my account that I had forgotten my password.
After all that, I haven’t really got anything much to say. Might pop back later or tomorrow if I think of something mildly interesting or amusing, otherwise I’ll see you next month. .
… just a quick note about some words that have been annoying me recently.
I know that language changes over time, and I’m happy about that, really I am, but there are a few words floating around at the moment that I see a lot on twitter (and sometimes in texts) and those words REALLY piss me off.
1. Meh – anyone that uses that needs to stop being so apathetic, go outside and have some fun. Or failing that, just stop saying meh; it’s not big and it’s certainly not clever.
2. Fail – where the fuck did this one come from? All of a sudden it’s fail this, fail that,fail fucking everything. WHY DO PEOPLE KEEP SAYING FAIL? If you’ve just written something and you’re about to put fail at the end, or even if you’re discussing the recent ‘Facebook/Twitter fail’, please, do me a favour and don’t write fail otherwise I shall find out where you live, go straight over there and spit in your face.
3. Nom or Om Nom – this one really gets my goat . It generally appears on twitter and I every time I see I literally go mad. Literally. For two or so minutes I am in a state of delirium which years ago would have seen me committed to an asylum. As much as I hate the use of Nom or Om Nom, it’s made even worse on twitter as it’s usually alongside whatever the person has been eating or will be eating or wants to eat. If it’s got to the point where all you’re doing is signing into twitter to tell us all what you’re having for lunch or dinner or breakfast, do me a favour and fuck off. Or just eat less food and make less noise while doing so.
So there it is, rant over. Feel free to keep using those three words on Twitter, I don’t mind really and I hope we can still all be friends. If you do choose to carry on using them, please bear this in mind: each time you use one of those words and I see it, I will think slightly less of you.
Here’s a funny old sketch about word play – the picture and sound quality aren’t great but I chose this one because it’s got laughter and the video and audio are in synch – its quite long but worth it.
The news that Rupert Murdoch and his various companies are going to introduce charges for their various news sites has prompted me to write a slightly serious posty update thing.
In the UK the big three newspapers that will be affected by Murdoch’s latest scheme The Times, News of the World and the Sun, presumably Sky News online will also carry a charge but let’s be honest, who in their right mind goes to that site anyway? Sweeping aside the inevitable ‘Murdoch should be paying me to read that shite’ comments, will this business model work and what implications does it have for us, the consumers?
Murdoch’s News Corporation has already lost at least £2bn this year, so he is clearly looking at new ways to make a few quid, presumably unhappy with the advertising revenue generated by his news sites. Online readers devoted to individual titles probably will pay to continue reading; whether that percentage of subscribers is enough match or even beat advertising revenue remains to be seen, but it is the loyal readers that will be the make or break of the new business model. Scoops and exclusive pictures might attract some subscribers but how long can those stories and pictures remain behind behind closed doors? With the stories, the answer is not very long. Whilst the Telegraph recently enjoyed day after day of exclusives with the expenses scandal, all the other papers were soon reporting the same thing – so if the Times has an exclusive story, will I pay to read it or wait until it’s reported elsewhere? The answer is pretty obvious: I won’t be paying. Exclusive pictures and our thirst for celebrity could prove to be a winner for cheeky old Rupert, but they will leak elsewhere online. I suspect that Murdoch’s legal teams will be hunting down all sorts of illegal activity but even they, with the full force of the Murdoch wallet behind them, will be unable to control the spread of an exclusive picture.
Another problem facing Murdoch is well illustrated by this article in the Guardian. You don’t even need to click the link to see what the problem is. So many people now share links to stories that drive up the web traffic for online newspapers – this will become a thing of the past for those sites that carry a charge.
Of course if this model is a success, other papers will follow – which would be a complete disaster. One of the great things about news on the internet is the ability to compare stories, to got from site to site finding great stories, articles and features, one could almost say ‘surfing the internet’. Will we be doing this if all online papers introduce charges? No, and that result will undo so much good that has been brought about by the internet.
So what next? Encrypted radio stations? Where does one stop when it comes to this? Thankfully in the UK we’ll always have the BBC and whilst I’d hate to get all my news from there, at least I and others will be able to do so free of any charge. The spread of news should not be restricted to those who can afford it.
On the other side of things, I can sympathise with Rupert (although do slightly hate myself for it). I work (or don’t work as the case actually is at present) in the TV industry and understand the damage that the internet has/can do. Illegal downloads, peer-to-peer sharing of content that should be paid for – most of us have done it at some point – an odd episode of our favourite American sit-com, a dodgy copy of MS Office – this sort of thing means that ‘the companies’ have less money, which in turn means they’re not employing me. Is it possible to have totally free content? No, advertising alone cannot support it, we know that and I’m happy to pay for some content – but I don’t and shouldn’t have to pay for all of it.
Now that’s out of the way, here’s a funny video from a BBC Two series which shows us that the news is shit anyway, so why even bother. Fuck ‘em, introduce the charges, I don’t want to read the horrible papers anyway.
“Start up a blog”, I said to myself. “You’ve got fuck all else to do”, I agreed. Turns out I was wrong and I’ve actually been too busy to post anything on here. To make up for it, here are ten things that have interested me or that I’ve discovered in the past week or so.
1. Deciding to clear out my old PC and transfer stuff over to my mac was a big mistake. Apparently it’s very easy to hook a mac up to a PC. Well I can exclusively reveal that it’s not – it took me 6 hours to get them to talk to each other, and a further 10 hours of sorting out files and folders. “Ooooh”, thought, “it will speed up my PC if I have a good clear out”. It hasn’t. Waste. Of. Time.
2. I struggle at the best of times to direct @replies to the correct people on twitter, so coming back home at 2am on Friday night/Saturday morning I should have realised that it was not a good idea to start tweeting.
3. Saturday Kitchen would be better if James Martin were to go on a presenter course. Or just not present Saturday Kitchen at all.
4. I never want to cycle up Highgate West Hill again, only down it.
5. TNT Show on Channel 4 is *actually* the worst thing I’ve ever seen on TV and should be banned, despite it being presented by the very capable and talented Jack Whitehall.
6. If I have one more spam follower on Twitter I am going to personally hunt them down and spit on their spam faces.
7.Pausing halfway through writing this to check my e-mails and find a£286.88 bill from Vodafone was a silly thing to do as I am now on the phone to them having an argument and won’t be paying much attention to 8, 9 an 10.
8. At least Peter Andre is keeping quiet and not making a scene like that awful Price character.
9. I will give up smoking this week and update my blog more regularly.
10. Vodafone are cunts.
This video’s been around for sometime but I’ve somehow only just seen it – the best cut of something like this that you’ll ever see!
Had another meeting at the BBC today. I quite like meetings, they break the day up when you’re not working. Next week I’m going to plan all sorts of different meetings and appointments just to keep me going.
I want to talk about those journalist cants at the News of the World and the little pickle they’ve got themselves into over this phone hacking business. It’s about time these fuckers were made accountable for the things they get up to – especially after years of bashing us telly folk for being dishonest and faking a few competitions or rigging a few little votes on shit televisions shows which are forgotten about after a month anyway – journalists are WORSE than TV producers, they lie every day and rarely make front page apologies. TV people lie only a little (although I’ve witnessed some extremely dodgy lies in my time). Also, this is PHONE HACKING we’re talking about, not a researcher pretending to win a competition.
WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON WITH THE WEATHER? I got soaked today, twice. I hate it when the forecasters say ‘there’s going to be a lot of weather about today’… this doesn’t mean anything, there’s exactly the same amount of weather EVERY day, I just want to know if it’s going to be rainy weather or sunny weather. The other thing that those fucks say is ‘unseasonal weather’. It’s raining and it’s summer time – that, in my mind isn’t unseasonal, it’s like this every year. Each summer we have three of four weeks of nice weather, in our minds those hazy days go on and on, the reality is it’s wet and cold most of the time.
Apologies if you read this thinking it would be funny; I’m still wet from my cycling. Un-review of Loose Women tomorrow. In the meantime, here’s a sketch from a brilliant animation that the BBC axed.
Only a short post as I’ve had a shit day and can’t be bothered to write much.
I have watched a lot of news on various BBC channels today and I am SICK of hearing about swine flu. Why can’t they bring back Bird Flu? Not only did it sound better but it only lasted a few days because there were other more important news stories to talk about. This morning on BBC Breakfast (well it was midday but that’s breakfast time for me) they had LIVE interviews with correspondents in places like India and Spain with the newsreaders asking the most stupid questions and being met with even more idiotic answers “So, John, what’s it like on the streets of Spain?” – “Well Mildred, there’s no widespread panic or anything, people are just getting on with their lives as usual, although there’s been an increase in the sale of hand gels” – WELL THAT’S GREAT JOHN – I’m so pleased that you’re over there in Spain to report that fascinating bit of news back to us. “Alex, tell us what’s happening in India” – “Well Mildred, not much actually, we’ve only had 308 infections over here”. – THANKS ALEX, YOU DICK – thanks for taking the time to tell us that 0.000026742255693623104% (genuine figure worked out by me) of the Indian population have got the sniffles. WHAT’S THE FUCKING POINT? It’s a bit of flu. Okay, so some people are dying, but no more than would normally die of flu. Do we really need moron correspondents stating the fucking obvious and whipping up the general public into a state of mass hysteria? The Government have re-issued some of their advice but have said the rest stands and that it is not confusing – and they’re right – it’s not confusing – it’s only been made confusing by cants at the BBC/Sky News/Daily Mail turning this into such a drama. More people will die on the roads this year, or falling in the home or masturbating than will die of Pig Flu. So just shut up and stop annoying me you news fucks.
Here’s a funny flu/cold sketch from Man Stroke Woman. I’m going off to take my Tamiflu.
