ZORROTORO
Monday, August 25, 2003
Ball scores – but in whose net?
The reaction to this year’s James MacTaggart memorial lecture at the Edinburgh International Television Festival given by BSkyB chief executive Tony Ball has focused, understandably, on his criticism of the BBC licence fee.
Although much of what Ball said about the future funding and remit for the BBC is self-serving – prevent the Beeb from competing in some areas thereby reduce programming costs for BSkyB – there is much that is worthy of serious consideration.
Setting clear remits for BBC television channels is something that makes a lot of sense in a multichannel environment. Clearly there are some areas where it is good for the BBC to be kept out and provision left to the commercial sector.
The suggestion that the BBC auction off its most successful “franchises” may have some merit in it. But it looks suspiciously like a way for Sky to get content like EastEnders on the cheap. Under this proposal, the BBC would develop new programming, taking risks and Sky and other commercial networks would reap the rewards of programmes that were popular. In essence, the BBC becomes the television research-and-development arm of BSkyB.
The ironic feature of the lecture is that Ball makes more sense when he is talking about the BBC than when he is describing his own company.
Ball heads of a network that distributes 400 channels and recently pocketed a cool £9.3 million from “exercising” his share options – a most agreeable form of exercise, it must be said. As befits a man in this position, he talks quantity more than quality. Like all free-market capitalists he chants the mantra of “choice” and the simplistic equation that “more channels equals more choice”.
Up to a point. But if the effect of more channels is to force the BBC, ITV and Channel 4 to cut budgets to compete, to take fewer risks because the price of failure becomes too high, there may be – in certain respects – a lessening of choice. Ball invokes a MacTaggart lecturer who came from the creative, rather than the managerial, side of the television fence: the late Dennis Potter.
Potter (who memorably christened his fatal cancer tumour “Rupert” in homage to Ball’s boss Mr Murdoch) wrote one-off plays and drama series, the like of which we are unlikely to see again. More channels means less choice for BBC producers in terms of risk-taking. Television moves towards the formulaic – 13 half-hour or hour-long series for each television season. Difficult, then, to fit in the 75-minute drama from a leading playwright.
Ball talks of the huge number of Asian channels on Sky Digital. This does indeed illustrate how well certain minority communities – especially those that speak languages other than English – have been served by digital satellite television.
That said, you will look in vain on Sky Digital for a similar array of foreign-language channels from France, Italy, Germany or Spain. The presence of such channels would do wonders to help language learning among UK school children. There is no shortage of capacity on Sky Digital for channels such as ARTE, the excellent Franco-German arts channel. But we are far more likely to see the launch of yet another shopping channel selling dubious devices for creating perfect abdominal muscles.
Ball boasts of the amount of religious programming carried on Sky. But he is speaking of televangelist channels – mainly American – which make some pretty dubious claims about miracles and which are in essence little difference from shopping channels. As “religious programming” all of these channels together are not worth one edition of Everyman or even a half hour of Songs of Praise.
There may be, as Ball says, a huge range of history channels on Sky. But after a while the viewer finds that these are basically along the lines of – any history you want, but mainly WWII and Nazis because that is what the target demographic (men 18-35) want.
Creating channels and schedules to fit the demographics demanded to sell advertising is not, in itself, going to lead to more choice. It is more likely to lead to copy-cat channels all chasing the same audience.
This leads on to the one subject conspicuously absent from Mr Ball’s hymn to the free market: advertising.
The BBC offers, thanks to the licence fee, something that the commercial sector cannot offer – programming free from regular interruptions with injunctions to buy. Most parents, I would suggest, would prefer that the Harry Potter film were shown on BBC1 rather than on a commercial channel which would bombard their kids with advertisements for toys, unhealthy sugary drinks and the like using the well-honed techniques of “pester power”.
It is the absence of advertising that makes the BBC’s digital children’s channels – CBBC and Cbeebies – stand out from their commercial counterparts. And watching them provides considerable relief from the bombardment of Barbie ads elsewhere.
Ball, who is paid in part by the pester-power merchants, would not see it this way. He sees the licence fee as a regressive tax. But he makes no comment on the fact that there is tax levied on viewers of commercial channels – the extra cost of products to pay for the advertising.
But let us give Tony a BBC that is no longer funded by the licence fee. Let us give him an active involvement in the future of public-service broadcasting in the UK.
I propose a new system of funding for the BBC. An annual budget to be set and linked to the retail price index. Channels to have clearly defined remits. And funded by a tax levied on ITV, Channel 4, Channel 5, BSkyB and all other commercial broadcasters. The tax would be levied proportionally according to the turnover of the companies concerned.
This may mean that Mr Ball has a smaller bonus, but surely this system – in which BSkyB can be seen to be funding quality public-service broadcasting – is much better than a regressive old licence fee.
A candle in the wind or a beacon of hope?
It seems like a small gesture - Arabs and Israelis playing Beethoven together. When suicide bombers and Israeli tanks and helicopter-gunships kill and kill and kill, does anyone have the ears to hear music? But Barenboim and Said are trying. And, as has been said, far better to light a candle than complain about the dark.
BBC NEWS | Entertainment | 'Peace' orchestra makes Arab debut
Friday, August 22, 2003
PowerPoint - what's the point, where's the power?
* good article
* shows what is wrong
* with way people use Power
* Point presentations
* dumb-downed data all dressed up
* with no where to go
Wired 11.09: PowerPoint Is Evil
Monday, August 18, 2003
heretics and apostates
The saying "Once a Catholic, always a Catholic" now seems rather dated, as Catholics - both lay and clergy - leave the church in which they were brought up. The worst that can happen is excommunication - a punishment that is more about the next life (not getting a seat amid the saints and angels) than the present. No such freedom is allowed the Muslim who, by accident of birth, is required to remain a Muslim for life. Renouncing the faith - apostasy - is, in many Muslim countries, punishable by death in this life.
As this excellent article in the Boston Globe shows, the post-September 11 Western apologists for Islam are misunderstanding the nature of the religion that, often in the name of countering Islamophobia, they seek to defend. How horrific that in the 21st century someone who renounces and denounces the desert religion into which he was born, has to hide behind a false name to protect himself from the fury of fanatics.
We live in a world where the various "peoples of the Book" - Muslims, Christians and Jews - justify the unjustifiable by appealing to (often ambiguous) words written down in the deserts of the Middle East between 1,500 and 3,000 years ago. Bearded American Orthodox Jews claim their Book gives them the right to take land from Palestinians. Christian Fundamentalists claim that the same Book says that gays are doomed to an afterlife in hell and that Christians should resist moves to give homosexuals equal social rights. And Islamic extremists....well read on.
But in Islam, as in the other religions, there have always been those at the margins who have offered a more tolerant, a more compassionate, a deeper understanding of matters. As quoted in this article, the 11th-century Syrian-born poet Abu al-Ala al-Maarri, wrote:
The earth has people of two kinds:
The ones who think have no religion,
the others do and have no minds.
Boston.com / News / Boston Globe / Ideas / Losing his religion
Thursday, August 14, 2003
K9 questions
amusing review of the latest literature on "what dogs want"
Boston.com / News / Boston Globe / Ideas / canine_fodder_081003
Wednesday, August 13, 2003
Why is contemporary art so cool yet contemporary "classical" music not?
Vaguely interesting piece in Newsweek:
Mostly Not Mozart
But art and music went their separate ways in the first 20 years of the 20th century. The Cubist and modernist revolutions in art may have been matched by similar movements in music. But people will queue for Picasso, Kandinsky, Pollock et al, who would not do so for Schoenberg, Webern or Elliot Carter.
Schoenberg's 12-note system, breaking the post-renaissance model of harmony, can be compared with Braque and Picasso's breaking with perpective through Cubism. They are parallel movements. But whereas one can excite the general public, the other cannot. We have grown so used to Picasso's forms that we can lose sight of how radical they originally were. Schoenberg said that one day every butcher's boy would be whistling his tunes! Such a day, if ever it comes, is a long way off.
But is there something inherently different between the breaking of visual "rules" and breaking those of music?
Friday, August 08, 2003
MORE THOUGHTS ON GAY BISHOPS
BBC NEWS ONLINE TODAY: "The Archbishop of Canterbury summons all primates to a meeting in London after the decision to appoint a gay bishop in the US. "
"Primates" - a noun that describes a bunch of chimps, baboons, gorillas and Anglican Archbishops. Though the latter can often seem to be a little further down the evolutionary chain.
As for Bishop Gene Robinson, I offer him not only my support and congratulations, but also a song. Time for Simon & Garfunkel to get back together to sing:
Well hello, Bishop Robinson -
Jesus loves more than you can know....
Thursday, August 07, 2003
A tale of two churches
Or: Gay bishops? What will they think of next?
The Anglican and Roman Catholic Churches have always erred and strayed in different directions.
No surprise, then, that within the space of a few days, the American branch of the Anglican communion should elect an openly gay bishop, while the Vatican thundered against the grave threat to society posed by homosexuality.
Quite what all the fuss about gay priests is about, I have never understood. For most people – at least in Europe and north America – the idea that a priest could be gay is about as shocking as finding that a hairdresser or British Airways flight attendant might just possibly not be a ladies’ man.
The rather unchristian character assassination launched against Gene Robinson, the new bishop of New Hampshire, is only to be expected within a body where hypocrisy vies with irrelevance for its main defining characteristic.
The main vice of the Anglican church has long been humbuggery rather than buggery. So the hairy Chief Druid of Canterbury first says yes to a gay bishop for Reading and then, bullied by bigots, forces the poor man to “withdraw”.
Quite why the “non-practising” gay Dr Jeffrey John should have to pull out before consummating his new position is one question. The challenge posed by his American counterpart is that he dares to practise – if not perfect – a love that is at last able to sing, dance and otherwise speak its name.
That the Anglicans should bend both ways on the questions of homosexuality is hardly a surprise. It has always been a church of contradictions, set up by a king in dispute with Rome over matters concerning sex and marriage, and then modified under Good Queen Bess to be all things to more or less all people.
In her famous comment on the Anglican settlement, Elizabeth I said she did not want to open windows into men’s souls. But now windows are being opened not only into souls, but also into bishop’s bedrooms and closets.
How differently they order matters in Rome. Grand Inquisitor Ratzinger – a man who really should have been a James Bond villain (“Rat-zing-er, the man with the poison touch”, you can just hear Shirley Bassey sing it) – grandly attacks the legal recognition of gay relationships. The latter-day Torquemada declares that homosexuality is “immoral, unnatural and harmful” and homosexual acts “go against natural moral law.”
Few Catholics in Europe or the USA buy this nonsense any more than they accept Vatican rules on birth control (Catholic Italy and Spain having the lowest birth rates in Europe). But the RC approach has always been to genuflect publicly to the Pope and his dogmas while practising the complete opposite in private.
It should be noted that it is the Catholic church, with its strict celibacy and repression of anything that smacks of sexual gratification, that has the bigger problem with paedophile priests. Most European and North American Christians would rather have an openly gay, emotionally stable priest living with his partner than a repressed, bitter “celibate” child molester.
The issue is not going to go away and schisms and splits over homosexuality are likely. At least the Anglican Church is trying – in its traditionally clumsy way – to come to grips with the issue. Rome meanwhile continues to rail against sex, while its cross-dressing priests chase altar boys round the presbytery.
It would be hard to put it better than the Anglican missionary Barbie Batchelor in The Jewel in the Crown when she said – in a line memorably delivered by Dame Peggy Ashcroft in the television adaptation – “Bugger the Pope.”
Now there’s a thought. Any volunteers?
Paul Davies August 6 2003
Wednesday, August 06, 2003
BALANCE OF TERROR
Why flying naked is the only way to beat the terrorists
The anti-terrorist authorities are fond of warning every now and then that an increase in “noise” on the internet indicates that a terrorist attack against Western (usually US) interests may be imminent.
Often such warnings from the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI or the Foreign Office have come at times when uncomfortable questions about the “war on terror” are being asked.
Nothing like a bit of a scare to bring the populace back into line. And if the terrorists have temporarily suspended their activities, then it is up to the state to do a bit of terrifying itself.
Not having access to the security forces computers and their logging of dodgy internet traffic, there is no way of our knowing how much truth there may be in these warnings.
But sometimes common sense coupled with scepticism is enough. This week’s big warning was of 9/11-style hijackings where terrorists might use everyday items carried by many passengers as weapons. These would include, it was said, cameras.
Er, how exactly? I suppose that cameras are blunt objects with straps, so they could be whirled around like a latter-day mace to knock out a victim. But so could most items of hand-luggage. Maybe some brainless official saw a camera called Canon and thought it was some kind of gun.
Soon after September 11, I had my first in-flight meal where metal knives had been replaced by plastic ones. But the forks – those helpful little objects with four sharp points – were still metal. And the wine came –and continues to come on every flight I have taken since – not in plastic bottles but in glass ones. Anyone who has ever witnessed a post-pub brawl in a UK town centre knows the potential damage that can be caused by a broken glass bottle.
To go a little further: in the hands of a skilled soldier trained in martial arts, an umbrella (often carried in hand luggage, especially on flights to the UK) could be a lethal weapon. So too a rolled-up newspaper - but these continue to be handed out by cabin crew. Even an ordinary necktie could be used to threaten and strangle a hostage.
The only was to be truly safe is to ban passengers from carrying any luggage, provide them with no food or drink, and insist that they fly naked after having been subjected to an intimate body search. This really would be no frills air travel.
I admit that I am getting a bit silly here. But does it matter when in the “real” world there are serious proposals from within the Pentagon for a “futures market” in political assassinations and terrorist attacks. Never mind that the idea has been abandoned in the face of outrage, the worrying thing is that the proposal got so far.
You can imagine the scene. A fevered New York trading floor with gesticulating and shouting traders: “Sell $10 million of Abdullah getting killed in 2004 and buy me $20 million of dirty bomb in London next March!”
It may be sick, but it is the logical extension of the neo-conservative market religion: The market knows best. Better than any government agency.
Before the back-tracking began, the US Defence Department defended the idea: “Research indicates that markets are extremely efficient, effective and timely aggregators of dispersed and even hidden information."
Maybe, but also extremely efficient at rewarding those with insider knowledge. How strange that the Pentagon should come up with such as good way of providing funds to Al-Qaida.
Well, not that strange – the guy in charge of it was none other than Admiral Poindexter, whose previous contribution to the war on terror was to sell arms to Iran and use the money to fund the Contra terrorists in Nicaragua.
With a history like that, what the hell was he doing with a senior post in the Pentagon in the first place? I don’t know about the terrorists, but the anti-terrorists sure scare the hell out of me.
HAPPY ANNIVERSARY, PRESIDENT CASTRO
or How the left was won over by the son of Stalin
Fifty years on and time to commemorate the Cuban Revolution. In Madrid last Friday, the Fidel fanclub took to the streets to sing their birthday greetings. Viva la revolución! Viva Fidel!
As demonstrations go, it was small. A few dozen unkempt middle-aged communists and a smattering of younger fellow travellers in Che T-shirts. For the latter, brandishing the hammer-and-sickle is a risk-free way to give the finger to globalised capitalism, the centre-right Spanish government and, no doubt, middle-class parents.
Viva Fidel! Down with USA! I may be a leftist, but could not make common cause here. Well it’s because I’m both a journalist and gay – you can get locked up for these in Cuba, you know. Freedom of speech, freedom of sexual orientation may now be part of the bread-and-butter agenda for European socialists and reformed communists. But of little concern to this band of Stalinst brothers (yes, there weren’t many women here either).
One hears so much nonsense about Cuba. And not just from its leftist apologists. I recently introduced an English acquaintance to a friend of mine who is a Cuban exile. With the breathtaking foot-in-mouth clumsiness all too typical of my fellow countrymen, he said: “I never made it to East Germany or the Soviet bloc. I’d love to go to Cuba and see it now before it all changes.”
To which my Cuban friend replied “You mean visit the concentration camp to stare at the prisoners, the people who can’t leave?” Well he was lucky, he was able to get out. But not before spending some years locked up as a political prisoner.
Not for conspiring with the CIA, for being a counter-revolutionary or a crony of capitalism. But because he is gay.
The most curious thing about the Cuban regime is that in its dour Stalinism it looks so fundamentally un-Cuban. Where is the sexual beat of salsa or merengue, where the irrepressible (not to say rapacious) sexuality exhibited by almost every Cuban I have ever met?
There were, of course, no gay banners on this mini-demonstration. Unlike the anti-war demonstrations earlier in the year, which were enlivened by such slogans as “No a las bombas, sí a los bomberos” (No to bombs, yes to firemen” – which, I admit, loses something in translation). No rainbow flags, just the red end of the spectrum and the dour faces of those whose libidos have been sucked off by Stalinism.
But 50 years is certainly an anniversary worth commemorating, if not exactly celebrating. And it all goes back to the days of young Fidel sparring with young Jack Kennedy. With that in mind, I wish the Marilyn Monore were still around – as an ageing canteuse to sit on Castro’s lap, play with his cigar and sing Happy Birthday, Mr President.
But that is a typical, superficial gay comment that has no place in the socialist revolution. Laughter will be permitted only once the revolution has been fully completed. Now, where were those tractor-production figures?
