The Juju Statue

Joss Stone drops the Bomb

2009-11-21T01:33:00.002Z

The Smoke Fairies have the best low budget video I have come across- Shot in their flat with a prop budget of £60 for tealights, it's hauntingly beautiful.

An example of what not to do comes this week from Joss Stone, whose brother directed a video that has leaked to the internet after a failed attempt to supress it by the EMI label. Amazing for how much it must have cost, all those badly placed lights with professional gels on them, huge cast, HD cameras- but no one thought to switch them to shoot progressive frames, hire a competent cameraman and editor, or even get anybody who has ever been near a film set to give the plan a brief once-over, leaving the whole thing looking like a shitty soap opera. See for yourself-

I doubt many here have watched this to the end, but try to last as far as 3:22, where a special last fuck-you to the viewer is vomited up over the screen.

Postmodern narrative-driven thinking

2009-09-15T13:30:00.005+01:00

Vaccination is a tricky subject. Lots of people don't like needles, don't like doctors and are ignorant enough about the subject that they can make it part of whatever emotionally satisfying narrative suits them best, viz. the Daily mail's Irish Edition supporting the cervical cancer jab while the British edition opposed it.
Incidentally someone (I haven't the time) needs to go back and see if any of these conflicting stories were on front covers at the same time, leaving newsagents around the UK/Eire border with very confusing displays.

This example from a blog called Gender Agenda, also about the gardasil cervical cancer vaccine, isn't typical, but gives an example of the faults in this kind of thinking:

"...women everywhere, including in the west, are used as tools to uphold the current world order, which includes the enrichment of the super-wealthy corporations concentrated in the U.S. and Europe, and other such exploitative entities. Honestly, I can’t even forsee an end to the use of women’s bodies towards this end."

The post links to two articles which make two criticisms of the vaccine. Firstly, that because Merck is an evil corporation that has lobbied for the jab to be introduced in schools, the jab must be innefective, and secondly that not very many women die of cervical cancer, so why spend the money giving it to all of them when it's just a ploy to exploit them anyway?

I left the following comment on the post, but it seems to have been blocked, so I'll shout into the darkness here:

While Merck have obviosly engaged in some fairly shady astroturfing to gain momentum for their approval process, that (ad hominem) argument is irrelevant to the value of the vaccine. The only question here should be: does it work for the money spent? The data seems to suggest
that it is medically effective. But is it cost efective?

Sociologically speaking, this vaccine should be targeted only at sexually active teenagers whose inexperience might lead them to take risks with regard to STDs. Clearly this would be the best use of the vaccine and have a cost benefit ratio that very few would oppose. The problem with doing this is that risky sexual behaviours are highest among socially conservative famillies who would never get the vaccine if it wasn’t part of a national program.

Is it still worth doing on a national scale? Making heavy work of the relatively low number of deaths for cervical cancer ignores that three times as many women are diagnosed with the disease as die from it, and they have to undergo pretty horrid and expensive treatment in order to survive. Their suffering and medical costs should be taken into account in a financial analysis.

There are good political arguments for resisting the vaccine- the success of Mercks rather sticky tactics might inspire more drug companies to follow their example and manufacture demand for their products which would leave us worse off in future crises. Is this political victory worth the cost in lives?

Nearly Naked Soul

2009-08-16T23:55:00.002+01:00

On Friday night, I was sitting in the Gilded Balloon in Edinburgh watching a man embarrass himself in front of a packed house.

The show was called ‘The Nearly Naked Chef’ and its only cast member, Hardeep Singh Kohli, former Newsnight Review presenter and ‘star’ of The One Show, was stalking the stage behind a giant oven, shouting out meandering arrogant anecdotes while cooking a dinner. He was overweight and sweating with nerves and the heat from the range, which must have been fitted with castors, plumbed in and installed at great expense simply to give the struggling presenter something to hide behind when one of his three punchlines failed.

Wearing a Britney style cheek microphone in what he must have felt was a nod towards his status, he tried to come off as relaxed and jovial, a kind of cheery Clive James style renaissance man. Sadly the mic picked up every nervous gulp and pant, making the weak jokes come across more like desperate pleas for attention. Sitting in the front row must have felt like being in the final scene of Sunset Boulevard.

In terms of the content, there wasn’t much. There were only two topics, both were what David Cross calls ‘my ethnic mom talks funny’ bits: his being Scottish and his being Indian. After watching him jump between them every time he crossed the stage, my companion suspected a crib sheet was taped to the oven door, but that degree of forethought seemed very unlikely.

If he were an ordinary bloke trying a new career I’d applaud him. Standing up in front of a crowd and trying to be entertaining is very hard, more so if you’re a known name and can’t experiment in obscurity to find your voice, but when this man gurns at you for an hour whilst proudly sharing his observations about Edinburgh being hilly and how he’s noticed that the Scots can be frugal, he’s hard to like.

He did manage to tell a handful of ‘jokes’ during the course of the evening which he clearly feels justifies adding the word ‘comedian’ to his website, but they were all very old and frequently circulated. The socially isolated audience who make up the Kohli fanbase might not have heard them though, so he might find an audience when the show begins touring the country this Autumn.

I suppose Hardeep views the run as an audition for some kind of daytime tv slot, and while the material was embarrassingly weak and unstructured compared to nearly everything else at the Fringe, it might have stood up alongside the inanity of Loose Women or the Jeremy Kyle Show, so there’s hope for Hardeep yet. Or rather, there would be, as I discovered after a bit of googling, if he hadn’t in July been suspended from the BBC for 6 months following a complaint from a researcher.

In the last two years, Hardeep’s wife has left him, he has been forced of air for the researcher letching, and his highly leveraged property ‘empire’, which lost 30% of its value in the recession, has come under scrutiny from Glasgow Council over the carbon monoxide poisoning of tenants. Given all that it’s hard to put the knife in and I suppose he's due a bit of luck, but sadly I think ‘The Nearly Naked Chef will have about the same rate of success as his business, personal and television ventures.

Jon Ronson at the School of life

2009-07-17T22:40:00.004+01:00

Last month I was able to merge my two main interests, documentary film and rational skepticism, when I went to see Jon Ronson talk about his new film on the Alpha course. It was hosted at the School of Life by Neil and Padraig, recording for Little Atoms. The venue, a kind of secular church at which sermons are given in subjects close to my heart. It's somewhere I've been interested in but never actually got to before, so that in itself was worth the 4 hour drive up from Cardiff. Jon was fascinating as always, so I got out the camera and recorded a taste of the evening.

Simon Singh

2009-05-19T21:01:00.002+01:00

You can read my last post for the story on Simon Singh. Last night he addressed a meeting of supporters and I went along to document it- It was dark, noisy, I only had a shitty handycam and no clear line of sight to the speakers. None the less, I think the resultant video gives a sense of the night's events.

Simon Singh at the Law Courts

2009-05-08T12:12:00.004+01:00

Busy day yesterday, up to the Royal Courts of Justice to show some support for Simon Singh.

Sadly, things didn't go well. Here's the quote that got him into trouble.

The British Chiropractic Association claims that their members can help treat children with colic, sleeping and feeding problems, frequent ear infections, asthma and prolonged crying, even though there is not a jot of evidence. This organisation is the respectable face of the chiropractic profession and yet it happily promotes bogus treatments.

The surprising outcome hinged on Justice Eady's (famous for the Mosley spanking case) interpretation of one word which appears in the quote above.

First a bit of background- There are two options for the defense, one being that the statement was not defamatory but merely opinion or comment, the other that the statement was defamatory but that it was justifiable.

The judge's first finding, that the statement was defamatory, does not in itself mean that Simon's case is lost, only that he would have to show that his remarks were true. This is what he had expected to happen, and prepared a case based on backing up his written claims that chiropracty lacks evidence.

What was surprising was that the judge interpreted Simon's use of the word bogus to mean that he was saying that not only did chiropracty not work, but that the BCA knew it didn't work and were knowingly relieving people of their money for little in return. This means that in order to use the 'truthfulness' defense he would have to bring evidence to prove that the BCA are complicit in a scheme to defraud people rather than simply ignorant.

This would be impossible to prove and Simon is surprised that his article was interpreted by the judge in this way as he has never alleged that the BCA were crooks, he's written elsewhere that most ALt Med practitioners are deluded, rather than criminal, and is frankly surprised at the way the scentence was read.

He will now be appealing on the grounds that Justice Eady misinterpreted that one crucial word. If this appeal succeeds, then he will be back on scientific grounds, and will go to trial with the burden only of proving that chiropracty cannot treat asthma. Let's hope he gets it.

Bradford bullshit

2009-04-17T13:02:00.004+01:00

A few weeks ago the Local Government Association published a list of words which hinder communication among council staff and deplete the dignity of anyone using them. This quickly became known as the bullshit list, and was the subject of a great deal of web comment, even spawning the brilliant Bullshit detector. Arising from chat on the B3TA boards, it analyses government websites and gives a score based on the frequency of appearance of the misleading words to create a table of the worst offenders. Leading the pack at the moment is the audit commission, with a score of 476. You can view their site with the offending phrases highlighted here.

The reason so many people find these euphemisms unpleasant is that they become a convenient way to create lots of steam for government and others to hide behind. Putting up a poster with “community engagement” and “citizen empowerment” slogans on it is no substitute for actually talking to the public; neither is “Thinking outside the box” a substitute for doing some real work.

I saw an excellent example of this on my recent visit to the national media museum in Bradford, which was hosting an exhibition of baby photography in collaboration with a project called Born in Bradford. Various panels adorned the exhibition justifying the concept, full of the phrases we’ve come to recognise. If you visit the exhibition’s website you will read:

The Born in Bradford research project will follow the lives of 10,000 Bradford babies over the next 20 years. Bradford-born photographer Ian Beesley has been working with parents to help explain the research, encourage participation and establish ownership by the local community.

It’s interesting that there is someone in whose job remit it falls to ‘establish ownership’ by the people of Bradford and make the research clear to them, because nowhere in the exhibition or the museum website will you see any explanation of what the born in Bradford project is for. The general sense is that it's some kind of health survey, but details are thin on a ground strewn with meaningless buzzwords and covered with pictures of proud participating parents and their closely monitored offspring.

If you go to the BiB website however, there is an explanation that many of the city’s residents might not have heard about from their community facilitator.

Bradford's infant mortality rate is amongst the highest in the country. This is why from October 2006, all babies born in Bradford are being recruited into the Born in Bradford research project.

So the idea is to do a cohort study of children likely to die at a young age and try to identify what the risk factors are. That explanation is considerably clearer, but put like that, the council and health authority fear, you might not get so many people signing up.

You can see why they played it safe and hid this very worthwhile project beneath a layer of bollocks, but had they been more honest might they have found that treating people as adults and allowing hem to decide whether or not this projects deserves their support (and it absolutely does) might have resulted in a genuine bit of community-building?

Brum by Road

2009-04-02T00:47:00.003+01:00

After a month’s hiatus from blogging in order to meet some familial duties, I am back on the net and will be resuming weekly service.

There has been a spate of programmes celebrating how wonderful Britain is, beginning in 2005 with Coast and climaxing in 2007 with the Dimbleby series A Picture of Britain. At the time of their broadcast they seemed to be products of nostalgia, looking back to a time when every family would have experienced some of the Britain shown on the telly, when people spent their short holidays getting to know their island better. It now appears that they were in fact ahead of their time, anticipating an era when, after a 25 year embrace with international air travel, we have turned away from foreign countries and their formerly enticing exotic customs. Anxieties about terrorism, creeping xenophobia, falling sterling, globalisation making the world seem too familiar and therefore not worth bothering with are all offered as excuses for our sudden lack of interest in anything beyond Dover, but it’s not necessarily a phenomenon that needs defending.

For many, foreign travel meant focusing too much on ticking off certain hotspot destinations, the sort of twatbag travelling that made Max Gogarty famous. Forcing ourselves to look again at what’s in our own country can be of great value, and I had this in mind when I had a bit of a nose round in the north of England last week. I took in Lindisfarne, York Minster, the Bradford media museum, the model village of Saltaire; all fascinating places worthy of a visit, each with a culture worth investigating. The king of these investigations, the painstaking peeling back of layers on places that lack the visual excitement of Sunday night favourites, is Jonathan Meades. Watch his essay on Birmingham and its fixation with the motorcar for a masterclass in revelation.

The Religion Business

2009-02-25T13:17:00.002Z

A few weeks ago in the run up to the Oscars, I was browsing wikipedia’s list of past winners of the documentary statuette. The seventies seems to be the decade with the most consistent quality, with Hearts and Minds (1974) and Harlan County (1976) among the winners. Those two films brought to the attention of mainstream America information and stories about war abroad and poverty and corruption at home. There is a scene in Harlan County (not on the net but a very worthwhile DVD purchase) where a group of coal miners living without running water in shacks travel to New York to protest at Wall Street. The New York City cops, on duty at the protest, chat to the miners and their astonishment at the terrible pay and conditions the miners have endured mirrors what must have been happening in the minds of the audience.
These two films have lasted long enough to be referenced or parodied in the Simpsons and have entered the film school canon, but there is a third film from this era which has not had the same staying power despite fulfilling the same criteria. It exposed a huge part of American society, the creepy evangelicals, whose power and influence has grown alongside their bank balances. Marjoe (1972), promoted under the tagline “You keep the faith, Marjoe keeps the money”, told the story of a young evangelical preacher whose first name was a contraction of the names Mary and Joseph. Groomed to be a preacher from birth by his parents, themselves big players in the travelling medicine show market, the young Marjoe performed to churches filled with people happy to open their wallets for a chance at salvation. The problem was that unlike the other preachers Marjoe worked alongside, he felt guilty about taking money from those who were struggling, or helping to promote the intolerant beliefs for which evangelicals are now famous.
His answer was to go on one last tour, this time with a film crew, and expose the greed and avarice of the evangelism business, severing his links with it forever. The resulting film is extraordinary. The other evangelists, knowing Marjoe as an accomplice since his earliest days, are not in the least suspicious, and the glimpse into a very crooked world is one which might have stopped the growth of the religion business in America in its tracks, were it not that the very people who needed to see this film were denied it. The film was never shown anywhere south of Des Moines. Had it been, could it have done for religion in America what hearts and Minds did for foreign policy, or Harlan County did for Appalachian corruption?
If you don’t have time to watch the whole film, start at minute 41 for a beautifully edited sequence about the sticky fingered behaviour of some very unpleasant people.

Little Atoms bash

2009-02-22T01:09:00.000Z

I normally update my blog on a Wednesday, and although lately I’ve been doing it slightly out of sync for no other reason than disorganisation, this week I had an excellent excuse. I spent Mittwoch evening in the company of the staff and supporters of the most interesting radio show and podcast in the world, Little Atoms. Broadcast on London’s resonance fm, the basic idea is to get a very clever person into a studio and let them talk for an hour or so. Clever people seem to like this setup and the Little Atoms team have managed to score some very big name guests, ranging from Marcus du Sautoy to Colin Blakemore to Jonathan Meades.

This week is their 100^th episode, and to celebrate they organised some drinks, attended by some of their past guests.

There were several exciting moments throughout the evening, such as when a journalist let off some MMR-fueled invective at the admirably cool Ben Goldacre, or when a well known advocate of enlightenment values revealed that only his cock piercing had hurt more than his tonsillectomy, but the evening’s highlight for me was meeting a childhood hero.

When I was at school, my English teacher, Andrew Rattue, strongly encouraged me to watch anything on television made by Adam Curtis, regarding his work as the high-watermark in broadcasting. There are few documentary filmmakers whose names travel outside their own industry, but Curtis, along with Errol Morris and Fred Wiseman, can cause a big critical splash with every project he delivers. His personal filmmaking style is distinct and instantly recognisable, with its use of thematically linked clips culled from stock footage, the occasional purpose shot interview, and tying it all together, the confident tone of painstakingly researched narration. Although the headaches that would result from trying to clear all that archive have meant a DVD release of his work is unlikely, thanks to the wonders of our modern age you can have a look at one of the best things Curtis has made, Pandora’s Box, on youtube. Enjoy.

Porn Porn Porn

2009-02-12T11:42:00.002Z

This week, I tried to watch the new film by Alexandra Pelosi, the Trials of Ted Haggard, but thanks to the slack efforts of American bittorrent uppers I’ll have to wait a while before I can have a look at it. Having seen Haggard’s appearances in Jesus Camp and Richard Dawkins’ The Root of All Evil I am very keen to see whether the formerly arrogant evangelical has softened at all since confessing to gay prostitution and drug problems, but that will have to wait for another time.

Instead of some satisfying schadenfreude at the expense of a troubled man, I have been indulging in what I thought would be the simpler pleasures of pornography. Porn has become a major part of our media intake, while escaping much of the scrutiny applied to all of its competitors for our time. For something so widely consumed, we rarely enter the debate about the ideas that pornography promotes in the same way we would a book, film or television programme. This is chiefly due to being drowned out by the noise from the great battle of the modern age of erotica, ‘extreme’ pornography. The debate is coloured by the death of Jane Longhurst, who was murdered in 2003 by a man whose penchant for asphyxiation was said to be exacerbated to the point of murder by his visits to websites hosting images of strangulation. Since then, Longhurst’s mother has campaigned to clamp down on what she believes may have contributed to the death of her daughter. Clauses dealing with extreme pornography formed part of the Criminal Justice and Immigration Act 2008, criminalising images or video in which someone engages in an act “which results, or is likely to result, in serious injury”, which was met with a furious response from organizations whose members consider such activities a charming weekend diversion.

The problem with all this is that by focusing on the acts shown in the films we forget about the context, which can turn a scene on its head. Two people can whip each other in a loving, safe environment, or could have conventional sexual intercourse in an atmosphere of misogynistic savagery, towards which mainstream porn, the sort of thing regularly viewed by a large part of the population, jokingly alluded to in best men’s speeches and wryly tolerated by headmasters, has been creeping over the last few decades, in the drive towards ‘edginess’.

The first porn films to appear slightly edgy were the ones in which the male actors would perform acts many women would not enjoy, such as rough anal sex, under the guise that these particular women were unusual in their keenness to be on the receiving end. The ‘horny porn star myth’ suffered as high profile abuse allegations came out from Linda Lovelace among others, and was soon replaced by the ‘indifference’ model of porn production. This would feature an acknowledgement that the female performer would not be subjecting herself to the attentions of the males without payment, and was characterised by a triumphal inattention to her wellbeing, the theme being male satisfaction at the expense of female comfort.

Since then we have moved into a newer, more unpleasant sphere, where the pretence that the female discomfort is somehow a byproduct of the male’s sexual satisfaction is dispensed with, and acts are performed on the female performer for no possible benefit to the male other than the degradation of the female. Productions like the horrible 'pinkeye sluts', in which men ejaculate directly onto a woman’s eyeball, an unsafe practice risking infection and other unpleasantness, exemplify this trend, and have even begun a trend of their own- shortly after pinkeye sluts' debut the internet welcomed the arrival of 'pinkeye surprise.' Is there a risk that by focusing too much on the more obviously hardcore stuff we are risking the center ground to some pretty unpleasant people?

Liz Jones and the Angels

2009-02-07T01:58:00.000Z

Liz Jones is at it again. The self described “super bright” woman whose chief journalistic output for the last few years has been moaning about her pointless relationship with the obnoxious Nirpal Dhaliwal has found a new subject to entertain her public: the existence of angels.

Readers of the (where else) Daily Mail might have relaxed when Jones announced that her unusual marriage to Dhaliwal, who called her ‘mummy’ and received an allowance and a car from the “fabulous and independent” fashion editor, had ended. Sadly, deprived of even this most trivial of subjects, Liz has turned her pen to promoting a belief in interventionist angels, becoming convinced of their existence after the remarkable recovery of her cat, Snoopy, following an appeal to the celestial beings by one Terry Shubrook of Somerset.

He explains that he often works remotely, using the body of his wife to represent the body of his patient, be it cat or person: he can be many miles away, but somehow treat the patient through using his wife’s body.

He tells me Snoopy is not ready to leave me yet, and does some healing work on him, using Snoopy’s angels to tell him what is wrong (cats have guardians, too, apparently).

These encounters are dressed up in a variety of ways to suit the style of the consumer. If you feel that the west country woo of Terry Shubrook is a bit much for you, there is always the same thing dressed up in a white coat, with comforting words dotted about such as patient, clinic, and treatment, and in some cases the swagger of a Harley street address. Liz Jones is clearly impressed by Sohini Patel at the Tranquil clinic, who “uses angels to help treat her patients’ physical and emotional ailments.”

Like most proponents of nonsense, Ms. Patel has an answer for everything:

“She begins running her hands over me, drawing the bad energy away from my body. My buttocks feel warm.

‘That is your angel, supporting you,’ she says.

Not satisfied by magical buttock insulation, Jones seeks out help from the most powerful movers and shakers in the Angel industry. Divorced from any connection to an established church, the new belief in angels stems mainly from a group centered around the Hay House Publishing Company, home to the odious Sylvia Browne and the “Angel Entrepreneur”, Doreen Virtue. Founded by Louise Hay and built on the premise that diseases are caused by negative thinking and cured by a mixture of positive thinking and enemas, it offers a blame the victim mentality that encourages those suffering serious diseases to find the fault for their illness with their own attitudes- hardly a helpful comfort to those in distress.

Doreen Virtue’s range of angel products stretches from the predictable books and CDs to decks of cards for those intimidated by bound reading material, leaving even the most intellectually vulnerable reader with something they need to purchase.

Over the last 30 years or so there seems to have been a shift in the popular perception of deities, which traces the rise of an increasingly selfish strand in society. Traditional religious belief with an emphasis on self-denial and self-sacrifice, coupled with a sense that divine intervention was miraculous and rare, seems to have morphed, in some corners of London at least, into a concierge service providing grownup brats limitless assistance with their trivial problems, all arranged by a middleman for a handsome fee. The cognitive dissonance involved in this kind of pick’n'mix belief system is bizarre, but with trendsetters such as Liz Jones promoting this sort of rubbish, it’s only set to get worse.

Don't get your hopes up

2009-01-15T00:00:00.007Z

We all know that there is no shortage of charlatans ready to take money from people in dire straits. Whether they have money problems, anxieties about the future or a life threatening illness, there will be someone around to profit from their ignorance. The usual answer is either more regulation or stricter enforcement of existing regulations, coupled with a public education drive to try and close off their revenue streams. It is notoriously difficult to persuade authorities of the need to close down these crooks, but each of these efforts helps protect someone in distress from making an ill informed decision.

The real bread and butter of those who prey on ignorance is not, however, the sick and the desperate. Once in a while they come along and provide a windfall to the snakeoil merchants, but in the main profits are made from the small regular payments of a class of the serially credulous. These are the people who will consult a chiropractor for every strained muscle, who stop by the Chinese herbal ‘medicine’ shop for a monthly check-up, invariably resulting in the purchase of another load of overpriced, and potentially toxic, vegetation, and hire a feng shui consultant and astrologer every time they move house.

So who are these people who keep Patrick Holford handsomely fed and clothed? They probably subscribe to one of the bibles of bollocks which clog up magazine racks nationwide, such as the cheapo “Fate and Fortune” magazine, which seems to have escaped criticism simply by hiding in the ‘women’s interest’ section of the supermarket.

Random quote:

(In answer to a reader’s question about anxiety) “Dear Diane. In a past life, you were buried alive while pregnant. It happened in Spain in the 7th Century. As a pagan sacrifice, you were bludgeoned and thrown into a pit, then earth was piled on top of you. A past life regression would help get rid of your fear.”

Also from the lucrative Bauer publishing stable is the more upmarket “Spirit and Destiny” magazine, circulation 237,949, which this month comes with a free Angel Healing wall chart authored by Doreen Virtue (“PhD”) which provides readers with advice on the best way to “bringing the amazing power of these heavenly beings into your life.”

The appetite for this stuff is huge, a fact borne out by the recent findings of the Office of Fair Trading, who trumpeted their success in closing down a Dutch organisation selling lucky lottery numbers to what the OFT described as 'vulnerable people'. Over 6,700 orders were placed, at £20 or £40 a time, and though it doesn’t say whether that represents 6,700 customers or a smaller number who brought repeat business- if you’re naive enough to pay at least £20 for a random string of digits, then you might well do it twice.

The office of fair trading estimates that basic scams such as these earn the perpetrators around £3.5 billion per year, the bulk of it from a small number of suckers, whose names and addresses can change hands for large sums thanks to the potential revenue that can be raised from their pockets. To snare such a person represents a regular source of income for unscrupulous persons, much as getting the custom of an incorrigible addict is for a drug dealer, and, for the same reason, it isn’t possible to reduce the number of quacks in operation below a certain number. The resultant high profits for those few that remain represent too great a temptation, and recruit more people into the ‘business’.

As long as there are people willing to give up their money without thinking about it first, and they are legion, it seems that this sort of bollocks will be with us for a long time to come.

Bill Maher’s Religulous

2009-01-07T23:18:00.003Z

Whenever a film is said to be “still in the edit” shortly before release, it can generally mean one of two things. Most often it means the film is terrible and producers have demanded drastic changes before letting anyone near it, more rarely that the film is terrible but has a tie-in to a franchise and is protecting curiosity-driven ticket sales by hiding it from critics, used to great effect on the release of Sex and the City and Mama Mia, now Britain’s highest ever grossing film.

When, at the last Britdoc festival, it was revealed that the long awaited premiere of anti-fundamentalist docu-comedy Religulous (out now in the US, UK release 3^rd April) would not be a full showing, but simply some clips with commentary from director Larry Charles, (formerly of Borat and Seinfeld) I wondered which it would be. Bill Maher, the film’s star, has a big following in the States but is almost unknown in the UK, so a delay to profit from his reputation was probably out, leaving a drastic repositioning of the film as the most likely cause of the postponement, coupled with a general slowing of production as a result of the screenwriter’s strike.

The version out now in American cinemas is very different from than the clips I saw last summer, and my unease that the film was squandering an opportunity to ask some useful questions about religious belief at a very important time has grown. Maher spends the majority of his time and vitriol travelling through the poorest parts of the world’s richest country, using his superior knowledge of the Bible to belittle the sincere, if confused, beliefs of those he comes across. In the summer showing, though a little unkind in its humour (the scene at the daily (daily?) passion play at Orlando’s The Holy Land Experience theme park which was shot from behind a row of enormous Floridian bottoms sticks in my memory), it still seemed more funny than nasty, but in the most recent version the whole tone has been punched up another level.

A scene in which Maher ribs a well-dressed minister for spending church money on his lizard skin shoes is preceded by a sequence featuring demands from the worst of the crooked televangelists, and one in which Maher meets an obviously troubled but basically friendly “ex-gay” advocate follows shots of “God Hates Fags” demonstrations by the ludicrous fringe group the Westboro Baptist Church, hardly representative of mainstream Christian opinion regarding homosexuality.

The film feels as though the filmmakers couldn’t decide on whether to go for a laugh from the audience or needle their ideological opponents, and in the time intervening it seems they have settled on the latter. Interviews are punctuated with cutaways which seem to be chosen more to make political points than be amusing, although I did give a proper belly laugh when “Dr” Jeremiah Cummings, the aforementioned lizard-skin shod minister, stumbles gobsmacked for an answer, and there is a quick cut to an early passion film showing Jesus being slapped by a centurion. The later cutaways during this interview seemed more cruel, cutting in a shot of a gruesome suicide bombing to a remark about turning the full force of one’s passion towards God and one comparing the blinged up black preacher to a pimp flashing his gold in a way that should make liberal viewers more than slightly uncomfortable.

One of the key arguments of the film is Maher’s idea that good things occur without the need for religious intervention, that without the ten commandments people would still be aware that murder is wrong, and points to secular countries that enjoy all the benefits that his interviewees claim are the exclusive preserve of a Godly society. The trouble is, he seems to forget that paedophilia is not unique to the Catholic church, and that stupid ideas about gays and Jews are more commonly linked to class than religious belief.

The most uncomfortable scene in the film is one of the very first, where Maher travels to a truckstop chapel and mocks the truckers whose modest place of worship it is. Their beliefs might not be as clear as an unmuddied lake, but they are clearly deeply held, and it isn’t pleasant to see them struggle to defend themselves against a much better armed opponent.

In a country like the United States class is signified more by intellect and education than birthright, where a black Chicago lawyer fears the elitist label more than the son of a president. Charles and Maher, pair of rich, highly educated secular Jews, seem to hide behind their criticism of religion to poke snobby fun at a succession of members of America’s great class of poor or uneducated or both, and it ends up feeling as though you're watching a precocious child winding up his teachers than (however comic) an adult documentary.

Another one posted to both counterknowledge and here.

2008-12-23T23:02:00.002Z

One of the most vivid examples of a lack of intellectual accountability in broadcasting is the now-notorious “Alternative Medicine: The Evidence.” Broadcast on BBC2 in 2006, it suggested that patients could undergo heart surgery with no anaesthetic other than acupuncture. Thanks to the efforts of Simon Singh some public criticism of the broadcast took place, but the series and the press coverage which accompanied it reached a far larger audience that the complaints and subsequent retraction.This episode provides a useful insight into the ways that media executives might have approached a situation such as this.

The first problem is that even a public service broadcaster is chiefly concerned with reaching the largest number of viewers possible, and so will favour a concept that can be widely understood. The central theme of this series - that the proud medical establishment, whose hubris led them to believe that they had all the answers, is being humbled by Mother Nature - is a dramatic narrative. It allows the viewer to feel superior, and relieves the anxiety many have about their relative ignorance.

Secondly, whether something is actually true or not doesn’t seem to figure in the commissioning process. I have seen this happen. At the Sheffield Documentary Festival earlier this year, the Wellcome Trust was giving development grants for films which promoted the understanding of science. One filmmaker wanted to do a project about fMRI, and the potential that it might be used as a lie detector. A representative from Channel 4 suggested using it to test Michael Barrymore to “prove” whether or not he was responsible for the death at his home of Stuart Lubbock in 2001, despite protests from the panel that no such thing as a lie detector exists.

Thirdly, there is a significant amount of nepotism in television. A great number of lower-ranking production staff, particularly in independent production companies, are the nieces and nephews of the higher-ups, and are simply not capable of making some of these difficult decisions. One of the worst examples of network stupidity was a recent episode of Five’s sideshow “Extraordinary people” strand, featuring the horrendous baby mind reader, Derek Ogilvie. The film follows the shrieking Scottish psychic as he tries to win James Randi’s million dollar paranormal prize. The whole thing is on YouTube, and is as predictable as you might expect (spoiler: no, he didn’t win the money), but what’s really shocking about this programme is that it was almost never broadcast.

The original pitch for the programme was that Derek really was a psychic, an “extraordinary person”, and the film was structured around him winning the money at the end. When he didn’t, they almost pulled the plug, and it was only broadcast when they shot some extra material with a dodgy scientist who hooked Derek up to a computer and said he wasn’t normal. By now, the producers had switched from credulity to cynicism, and tacked on something that ended the narrative on a suitable high - without worrying about whether or not it was true.

Finally, a strain of what we might call postmodernism runs through much of media thinking, with an emphasis on different “readings” of facts. It’s quite widely believed that western science is just another opinion among many. The fact that the heart-surgery-with-acupuncture sequence was made in China is significant: the less understood another culture is, the more likely it will be regarded as having spiritual, esoteric knowledge. This is why people will happily visit a Chinese Herbal medicine practitioner, but not someone whose ancient “arts” are closer to home.

An executive would have looked at the proposal for “Alternative Medicine: The Evidence”, and seen a chance (under the auspices of the Open University, no less) to sneak in a satisfying narrative which might get a large audience, and add it to their annual statistics as a successful science programme. The damage being done to the public’s understanding of the issues involved wouldn’t really have figured highly in their thinking.

Since 2006, when this embarrassing project was broadcast, there have been some attempts to improve things. Thanks to the complaints about this and similar programmes, subsequent broadcasts in this area by the BBC have been more muted. Channel Four have this year introduced new guidelines on the use of experts (PDF), which demands that anyone identifying themselves as an expert must be vetted “by a series producer or higher”. Published in April 2008, it might have saved them some embarrassment with regard to their employment of “Dr” Gillian Mckeith had staff been asked, as per guideline number 2 to: ”Check what is in the public domain about the expert through internet searches and press cuttings.” Number 7 asks: “Do specific qualifications apply in this expert’s field? If so, ensure that the expert holds these qualifications.” [Note to producers- Ben Goldacre's dead cat would make an excellent contributor to any debate]

If it’s taken a public service broadcaster this long to get around to asking their researchers to do some minimum diligence before interviewing anybody, then you can bet there’s little or nothing being done on commercial networks - particularly in the U.S. How long will it be before we see another programme as ridiculous as “Alternative Medicine: The Evidence”?

Cross-posted from Counterknowledge

2008-12-21T11:43:00.003Z

This week, I wrote a piece for counterknowledge.com about the dodgy author, Robert Kiyosaki. This is a website which covers news about crooks and fraudsters, whether they be academic, medical, or now, financial. The site's critical tone is pretty strong, and even though I tried to ramp up my usual style to match, the editor added a few tweaks to get it to the suitable condemnatory level.

If you don't know who Robert Kiyosaki is, read the article, but in the meantime, this might give you something to go on.

On Tragedy and the Power of Google News.

2008-12-11T01:14:00.003Z

There’s a new game I’ve been playing, which is to find stories on Google news, rank them by date, and go back to the beginning and try to anticipate how the story will unfold. One of the most interesting stories I have come across recently was the Urban Music Awards ceremony and the fate of its presenter.

The earliest recent entry on the topic is from the Sun on the 3rd November. Titled “Naomi will blow your top off”, an article which has become decoupled from the sexy publicity pics it was written to deliver touts the presenting skills of one Naomi Millbank-Smith, formerly of reality tv show shipwrecked, who will be hosting the awards. In a rare candid moment, Naomi reveals “There's a lot of pressure to do it alone with no co-host, but I can't wait."
The next reference, on the 14th November, is Naomi popping up for another bite at the cherry, again accompanied by now absent sexy pictures, to tell us in an article titled “Naomi’s a sweetie” that she “aims to make the most of her big break.”

The night of the big event she must have been as anxious as any thesp to see the first editions. She had done all the right things- get her tits out in a lad's mag, do some sexy lollipop sucking for the Sun's photographers, even getting and remaining on a reality tv show in the first place had been hard enough, and now the night had finally arrived. Could she do what so many have tried, but only Craig from Big Brother 1 and to a lesser extent Chantelle have achieved, and turn a brief cock-teasing tv exposure into a serious telly career?

The first report on the evening didn't mention her- a wire release from teletext, it had “event abandoned after brawl” as its headline. It was followed by “Three knifed at Urban Music Awards” on Sky News, and the following morning the Times neatly tied all the strings together with “Urban Music Awards at O2 abandoned after stabbings in huge brawl”

It follows the familiar dramatic pattern of a disaster movie- reading these articles in order we can imagine Naomi’s excitement as she prepares herself, the chicane of emotion as what was to be her big break is forgotten in the melee of broken bottles and blood. In the final tally, only three out of the 407 news articles mention her at all; most of the coverage centers on the fact that the fight broke out as an award was about to be presented by an anti-crime organisation.

Still, she managed to recover from the trauma and is getting her name back in the papers; a current search reveals that she is dating someone called Dale Howard, although Now magazine, who had the scoop, have declined to picture her. The tenacity some of these people have to demonstrate just to get a little bit of fame makes you wonder if the rewards- in Naomi's case having builders masturbate over your image in a grubby newspaper and compering an attempted murder- really can be worth the effort.

Widening Access to Bollocks

2008-12-02T17:07:00.003Z

If the ordinary man in the street cannot understand something, and gets no benefit from it, then why should the licence fee and the lottery (a regressive tax by another name) be used to fund it? It is hard to justify the spending of money raised by taxing the hopes and dreams of the lower classes on an opera house in which they will never set foot. The financial aspect of this has dominated the debate in the papers since the Thatcher era, and has all but obscured the fact that, a few high profile examples aside, high culture has never been so cheap. Almost every arts or ideas led organisation has fully embraced the accessibility agenda, to the point that they are questioning what more they can possibly do. Most museums are free or have a free day to visit, the RSA has film screenings and lectures at no charge, The BFI archive is free to anyone at any time, free concerts abound in London and many of the most important musical events are recorded and broadcast on Radio 3.

The problem that everyone seems to be skirting around is that there is an intellectual hierarchy in the arts, not a class hierarchy. People will come to the arts from all kinds of backgrounds, but will necessarily be more able and will have had put in the time that cultivating an interest requires. To widen access any further means going beyond financial barriers to participation and trying to break down cultural barriers. Some places are doing that already- I met someone recently whose sole job it was to encourage ‘hard to reach groups,’ a term usually used by social workers when they want to avoid saying problem families, to come to the Tate (admission free).

Those who want family entertainment will be well served by commercial television and radio, as broadcasters know that an audience that wants mass consumer entertainment probably also wants mass consumer products and makes a very good bet for advertising sales. Ad men don’t generally want an audience with a high income, but one which is willing to go out on Saturday morning and spend its disposable on whatever bauble was dangled in front of them on Friday night- hence the sponsorship (ended by the Shettygate the racism row) of Big Brother by Carphone Warehouse. This is why older, more educated people rarely find anything worth watching on the commercial channels and favour radios 3 and 4. They tend to know how they want to spend their cash, and as such are a useless bet to advertisers.

The reality is that after years of very welcome spending, we have reached a barrier which it will be very hard to overcome- there are opportunities for anyone, regardless of income, to feast on the ideas and cultural capital which surround them, but there will always be a rump (from all social backgrounds) who are very happy with Kylie, Eastenders and consumerism. If they are not being barred from ideas and culture by snobbery or lack of funds, but simply chose not to participate, could we describe that as a disaster?

Presentation Points

2008-11-26T21:29:00.006Z

One of the gripes often vented by documentary filmmakers is that broadcasters want to dumb down their ideas. I saw it happen at Docfest, as a filmmaker with a project about collaboration between hospitals in Brighton and Lusaka was asked whether she could get someone from Holy City to present it. This would be more appealing rather than the boring old bond of friendship between HIV nurses that had crossed cultural, national and religious boundaries, which she had foolishly thought might provide a structure to the piece.
This "bums on seats" way of thinking is the accepted orthodoxy among popular broadcasters, whose simple calculation is that a well known face and an absence of complicated ideas or language will mean more people tuning in and better viewing figures, which can only be a good thing. Even if they were only occasionally glancing at the goggle box whilst dipping a chip in the ketchup, the telly was on and they looked at it; this is regarded as an achievement even among public service broadcasters.
At the other end of the telescope is the Franco-German network Arte. I asked one of their commissioners how much he worried about the number of viewers tuning in to his broadcasts, and he explained to me that Arte is not concerned with sheer numbers. As a crucial part of the European unity idea, Arte's place at the funding table is sacrosanct, safeguarding peace by uniting Teutons and Gauls with incomprehensible Lebanese cinema. Their survival is not at stake if the numbers fall off, so their chief measurement of success is the value placed on their programmes by the audience.

I was thinking about ways that this might be done in this country- perhaps we could have a memorableness survey?

Ocean Finance- the Hitler connection?

2008-11-18T15:27:00.007Z

Since the advent of bittorrent, the catchup service on channel 4 and the iPlayer, I have been seeing fewer adverts. The only ones I have caught in the last year or so are those which are award-winning and celebrated on the net, or so cheap, nasty or misleading that they make the news. As a result, it was only recently that I saw an advert for ocean finance which has been around for a while. Uploaded to youtube by the company itself, perhaps hoping for the viral success of the Cadbury’s Gorilla, it has attracted a respectable 3000 views.

Now this part might reflect more badly on me than it has on them, but the final sequence of the advert reminded me of the (Hitler commissioned) Leni Riefenstahl film Olympia. The ramping down of the speed as the diver leaps, hangs in the air and then falls is exactly the same as the famed scene in the Nazi Olympics. The two scenes are shown side by side here for comparison. The only change I have made is to speed up the footage from Olympia slightly to match the faster pace of the modern commercial.

I don’t want to speculate on what the ad director may have been trying to convey about the merits of this subprime lender, but seeing as their previous adverts have been widely criticised for their zoological approach to the working classes, it may be that the new director had an attack of conscience.

REVIEW: Beyond Our Ken, Very Young Girls.

2008-11-12T20:04:00.017Z

Two of the strongest films I saw at Sheffield both involved demonstrations of psychological control over others. In the case of Beyond our Ken, it was disguised as "energy conversion" techniques as part of an Australian human potential movement called Kenja Communication. The name is a contraction of the first names of it's principal promoters, Ken Dyers and Jan Hamilton, who constructed a new religious movement rooted in Scientology, with all the guff about spirits attaching themselves to otherwise healthy people and causing all the problems that we experience, but with an old fashioned, muscular Christian style focus on fulfilling activities such as ballroom dancing and fencing.

It's easy to see how people could become attracted to something like Kenja, with its emphasis on good clean fun and wholesome living, particularly those who haven't had a lot of either in their lives before they get the invite to attend a "spiritual development seminar." The sense of direction that the participants described stemming from their involvement must have been liberating, even as the movement eroded their personal freedom as they ceded even more control over their working lives, friends and eventually sexual behaviour to the leaders of their movement.

The pace of the film builds towards an exciting climactic confrontation (and a shocking epilogue), but seems to get diverted on a tangent about whether or not people with mental health problems were harmed by their association with Kenja. The strongest argument that any of the whistle-blowers came up with was that people with serious problems were ignored or mishandled, but it is inevitable that those searching for difficult answers will drift between legitimate religions and fringe movements for a time before their problems become acute- perhaps Kenja didn't help, but it probably did no more harm than many other "faith-based" alternatives to proper mental health treatment which go unremarked and uninvestigated.

The twists of the plot come as genuine surprises thanks to the relative obscurity of Kenja's founders outside Australia, and paired with a sharp score the insightful questioning by the filmmakers delivers revealing answers which certainly hold the audience's attention.

The abuse of power by Dyers which makes the meat of the film is certainly startling, but not enough to mark out Kenja for special investigative attention- With such a large number of clergy in a variety of denominations coming under suspicion, the failings of one man should not be used to condemn a group of people who come across as quite charming- the faithful do seem genuinely happy with their newly active lives and it's hard to watch the Kenja communicators dance about with more commitment than coordination and not feel that there might be something in it.

The second film covers a system of control that lacks the glamour and humourous undertones that the whiff of cult can bring- the sexual and psychological enslavement of young girls on an industrial scale in modern American cities. In Very Young Girls director David Schisgall presents the stories of the girls, who at an average age of thirteen are kidnapped, coerced or emotionally manipulated onto the streets to sell themselves for sex. Most never see a penny of the cash they bring in from the hundreds of punters, who would no doubt plead ignorance of the age of their malnourished and grubby conquests. The police certainly prefer to treat the girls as willing participants in criminality rather than the tragic rape victims they really are- and they are tragic in the classical sense. So often their stories begin with the troubled home lives they have endured prior to running away and the inevitable offer of help and a place to stay from a sleazy pimp, who by promising love an attention if they only bring in cash, and the threat of violence if they don't, shock the girls into extreme dependency, to the point that in one heartbreaking scene we see a girl leave sheltered accommodation to return to the streets and her pimp.

Hearing the girls in the shelter talk about how much they love the men who have variously beat, drugged and raped them one feels that their chances of living a normal life are slim.
What truly makes this film stand out from the countless other exposés of street life is the access to the other key actors in the girls lives- At the top end of the moral spectrum is Rachel Lloyd, of GEMS (Girls Educational and Mentoring Services), based in New York, whose tireless work to gradually wean the girls away from their horrific lives deserves more than the medal we see her receive in the film. At the other end are the pimps, whose moral degeneracy is so total that Schisgall, working alongside co-directors Nina Alvarez and Priya Swaminathan, was able to source video which shows them beating and coercing girls off the street and onto the game, shot by the pimps themselves as part of a 'trailer' for a reality TV show in which they would star.
Strong stuff.

Sheffield Docfest embraces the net

2008-11-10T12:17:00.000Z

Docfest is finished. It's only the second time I've attended, so my basis for comparison is weak, but the filmmaking community seemed to particularly engaged this time around. Perhaps the looming economic threats and the torment that it will certainly bring has galvanised the filmmakers into action, fearing that the juiciest misery will be snapped up by a competitor if they don't act fast. This year there was a big multimedia strand, and while I was pleased at the effort, I still think a lot of the TV establishment is thinking about the web the wrong way.

The session I was most interested to go to was "my tube, your face," which dealt with using the internet to find audiences. Included on the panel was Dan'l Hewitt from Bebo.com, which was I think the first social networking site to also flirt with being a content provider. The only problem is that the main users of the bebo site seem to be adolescent girls; traditionally not a huge audience for heavyweight documentary, so some of what he was saying didn't seem all that relevant. What I had really hoped would be up for discussion was the huge power of social networking to deliver an audience to a screening or an online or television broadcast by using the networks of potential audience members that already exist, but they seemed more about trying to replicate TV-style mass entertainment on the web, which seems to be the opposite of what the web is for- allowing small disparate audiences to find their niche en masse.

The best example I have seen of this power in action is the upcoming event at the Bloomsbury theatre, "9 lessons and carols for Godless people", which sold out in less than a week and resulted in three extra dates being added at the Hammersmith Apollo, all through word of mouth- There wasn't even a flyer or dedicated website for the event apart from a brief listing on the Bloomsbury theatre website, and purely through facebook groups and bogs, the massive audience who are fed up with being served shit from their gogglebox every night bought tickets in their thousands.

In "Here come the Philistines", the arts documentary session, I tried to raise this as a question, but I'm not sure the panel got what I was trying to talk about and they gave back a few comments about 360degree commissioning (building a web community to coincide with a broadcast or cinema release), which seems to be a buzzword that will soon lose it's lustre when people realise that filmmakers make films, not websites. Unless there is a campaign or a community already associated with their subject matter, in which case they will probably already have a web network, these sites which are commissioned alongside broadcasts seem to get abandoned pretty quickly, or neglected by the broadcasters and left in the hands of trainee journalists- see the Channel Four Disarming Britain blog, which very quickly became a collection of barely literate reactionary comments about locking people up FOR LIFE.

The meat of the arts session was very interesting, although the panel (chaired by Mark Lawson) got a bit stuck on what constituted arts programming, with a debate raging about whether or not the X factor should be counted. What was rather refreshing was that the members of the panel didn't begin their remarks, like many filmmakers did at the festival, by apologising for dumbing down their output or pointing out that it was someone else's idea to use intrusive narration. Jan Younghusband seemed genuinely proud of her work in bringing the arts to a wide audience, which made a very welcome contrast to what I heard later on from Louisa Bolch. She has a fantastic record in arts and sciences, but her remarks to some of the filmmakers pitching science-themed ideas to the Wellcome Trust panel seemed too pessimistic. She seemed concerned that films without a celebrity presenter or celebrity angle would fail, however interesting their content or storyline (she told someone pitching an idea about using fMRI in lie detection to test it on Michael Barrymore). I wish I could have shown her the massive online networks filled to bursting with people interested in science and ideas who have largely abandoned television because of this crap, and who would flock back if only they could be reassured that they wouldn't end up with Griff Rhys Jones gurning out into their living room. My experience is that television has lost the trust of a lot of these people, and it will take time to win them back.