DISCLAIMER: I do not intend to belittle serious discussion around sexual behaviour, it's just that I have a puerile sense of humour. I apologise.
A small flutter on Twitter alerted me to Channel 4's sex ed programme this evening, sending me over there in a couple of clicks, needless to say.
As ever, though one could be picky, I thought C4 handled it extremely well, with relatively few slip-ups. This is, after all, where the channel comes into its own, presenting the subject in a popular yet sensible manner. Even Dr Petra was not wholly dismissive, so there's a win right from the start.
I didn't watch the whole programme (sustaining has always been an issue for me) and in fact only dipped in for a couple of minutes, but later tweets pricked my attention, when mentioning an OAP discussing blow jobs.
Much as I despise any nastiness based on prejudice, I realise that I am heading towards old age at a rather alarming speed, but I do not necessarily think I could reach the requisite level of interest by playing this particular movie in my internal (rather small - located in King's Cross before the Eurostar arrived) cinema.
Of course, this attitude cannot stand for long. I am, nobody can deny, the right side of 50, and have a family history of chronic sloth - which I am proud to uphold from my prostrate position. It will not be long before I slide clumsily into old age and stare wordlessly at the wrinkled flesh laid out so alluringly before me. And I speak only of myself. Boom boom.
Wherever I've worked, I always seem to have been haunted by some issue or other. A problem without a satisfactory resolution.
When I was at Channel 4, it was a noisy air-con unit which used to cause the occupants of the floor it serviced to complain daily. We could not - despite throwing inordinate amounts of time and money at it - seem to make it stop. I even resorted to working among the complaining group to see if I could pin-point the cause of the problem. But to no avail. As far as I'm aware, the unit is still screeching away now, and the good folk of Legal Administration (or whatever the fuck department it was) are still phoning in daily to moan about it.
Prior to this, there were a couple of things during my reign at Disney which made my life a living hell. One was a scenic lift. It persistently intermittently and inexplicably broke down, occasionally with some high-flying (no pun intended) executive or other trapped in it. I can look back on this sorry tale now and laugh (unlike the poor claustrophobic executive, sad to say) but at the time I suffered many a sleepless night over it, I have to tell you.
Worse than that - far worse - was a cracked window. It may not seem a huge deal, but this window was gigantic. Approximately 8ft square, located on the 8th floor, above the Hammersmith flyover. JG Ballard could have written my CV if anything had gone wrong with replacing that damned thing, and it took an absolute age to get it done. I remember that there were quite a number of broken windows in the building, and great efforts were expended to find out what had caused this odd fracturing, though there was some hesitation when it came to committing to the huge sums of money necessary in order to (possibly) resolve it.
I can recall an expert who came to look at the problem with me. He and I were looking at one particular office with a broken window. There was a female manager sitting there at that time, but she was not at her desk when we arrived. We deliberated, digested and cogitated for a few moments, with the requisite amount of chin stroking and inside jokes. And then she walked in.
"Hi Carol." I said (for it was she)
"Oh, hello," said my erstwhile companion. "We've just been admiring your cra..."
I have one or two extant situations for the final bizarre couple of weeks remaining at my current place of employment, mostly involving pigeons and leaks, but the biggest bloody sea bird adorning my neck, Flavor Flav style, is a lazer blue bastard, draped around there from an early age, and hanging around like a bad smell ever since.
I have never seen the programme, and don't have the faintest idea how it works, but I am astonished that anyone - even those who are habitual daytime TV watchers - could be stupid enough to pay good money to be involved with it. But then again, as Arnold would no doubt remind us, it takes diff'rent strokes to move the world. Yes it does. My main objection to the show is obviously that it is fronted by Noel Edmonds, who is as loathsome as it is possible to be without wearing a Nazi uniform or fiddling about with little kiddies, or perhaps even both at the same time. I must admit to quite enjoying Swap Shop for a while (and before anyone yells Tiswas, it was possible to watch both if one was a creative viewer) and I even liked Telly Addicts in its original incarnation. Noel's House Party was where it all started to turn sour, and the appearance of Mr Blobby was the straw that broke the camel's back. Crinkley Bottom. Ha ha ha.
It's a terrible tragedy that it took a man's death to get the twat off our TV screens, but at least he was off our TV screens. Around that time, I started work in a place in Kensington, and we shared the site with Edmonds' TV production company, the name of which escapes me. I never saw him while I worked there, but I did speak to some of the staff who confirmed that he was a complete and utter bastard. With a helicopter.
Then, something terrible happened. Interviews with the coiffured little shit started appearing in Media Guardian and elsewhere, and it became clear that he was back. How had this happened? Why hadn't somebody done something to prevent it? My boss at the time was in something of a meltdown and used to sit in her office with the door closed watching DOND on the little TV she had in there, whilst pretending to write spreadsheets. I knew then that the Power of Noel was once more on the rise. Last night, we had a go at the Family Challenge DVD and not only was it almost entirely incomprehensible, it was also unutterably tedious, and pandered to the worst aspects of human nature. We won £3,000 and my kids rather touchingly asked if I was going to ring in and claim the money! Santa isn't real either, I said.
Moving up the Noels, there was another in the news lately - the monobrowed Gallagher of course. He is the second Noel - neither wholly good nor wholly bad, but a little bit of both. He is a (sort of) City fan after all, and has penned some foot-tapping, if derivative, ditties. He annoys me sometimes with his overt slebbyness, but most of the time he's fine. He also speaks very highly of me.
Before moving on to the First Noël - the only one on the list to actually use the umlaut above the 'e') there is a more minor Noel, at least in terms of the modern celebrity profile, which the denizens of the DOND online community (Noel Barber doesn't count, 'mK?) seem unable to identify. He played alongside Mr. Mitch Mitchell and Mr. Jimi Hendrix in the Jimi Hendrix Experience. He is (or was, may he rest in whatever is the rock god equivalent of peace) Mr. Noel Redding.
The First Noël then (at long last! you cry) has to be Mr. Coward.
Virginia Woolf (no less) described Coward as: 'clever as a bag of ferrets and trivial as a perch of canaries', which is a splendid epitaph, I think. Winston Churchill vetoed a knighthood for him, despite the fact that he had been a spy for the British government during the war. His plays are sublimely funny, almost Wildean, and his epigrams delicious:
"I'm not a heavy drinker. Sometimes I can go for hours without touching a drop."
So Tuesday was the unveiling. I've spent most of the time since then attempting (futilely. Again) to upload an AVI file to the blog. Neither Windows nor Macintosh have worked. Even viewing the damned thing has proved almost impossible. In the Windows environment, I hear sound, but get no video; in the Mac environment, the opposite is true (but only when I drop the file into VLC) I swear I will swing for it!
A sizeable crowd stood in the rain for half an hour waiting for proceedings to start.
A man in a Tavern Snacks van drove along and scraped the entire length of one car, also dragging along the back of an expensive looking pickup just in front of it. The people around me ooh-ed and aah-ed as the driver of the van ploughed on, at last emerging form the rear of the van with his own cameraphone to take pictures of the damage and apply a note to the cars.
Once, a couple of years ago, I was skiving in Soho - just wandering around, drinking coffee, playing pinball, looking in shop windows. I was not far from Seven Dials. A van roared past me then, narrowly missing hitting some people across from me. I gasped, tutted and walked on, when, around a corner, I suddenly heard loud raised voices. The van was stopped, at an angle to the pavement with its driver's door wide open. Next to it the driver was approaching a pedestrian angrily.
"You're a maniac," the pedestrian said, "You could have killed me!" Without warning, the driver lunged forward and made to stab the other guy in the eye with a pen he was holding. He landed a glancing blow, and the pedestrian backed off hurriedly. One of his companions half-heartedly said something to the van driver, who was like a raging bull, and tried to stab the other man again. I remember that the van driver was wearing glasses, because they flew off during his first frenzied attack, and they lay on the ground unheeded after that. I was still walking towards the fight, and I could see the crazed look in the van driver's eyes. It looked as if things were going to turn very nasty. Then another passer-by leapt into action. He barged into the van driver and grabbed him around both arms, pushing him to one side.
"If you're going to stop a fight," he said, "Fucking stop it! No point fannying around!" That seemed to do the trick. The driver picked up his glasses and stalked back to his van. The guy who had been attacked, bleeding from one of the pen wounds, was consoled by his ineffectual mate and I carried on walking.
As the crowd began to grow, a police van rolled up and a male and a female PC got out and told everyone to move back off the road. And then, finally, Andy Duncan and Margaret Hodge appeared. Almost soundlessly and very slowly the shroud was removed. There was a very slight ripping sound and the shroud billowed as if floated slowly down, momentarily snagging on an upper section and then lingering for quite some time nearer the bottom.
The crowd cheered and clapped as the artwork beneath was slowly revealed - the pieces of the sculpture covered with photographs from Nick Knight. I later discovered that the installation also features a heartbeat sound, clearly audible from the bridge over the Channel 4 Drum.
Today's the day that the Big 4 is unveiled here at Channel 4.
It's caused me a few headaches, but on the whole, it's been good to have been involved (albeit in a relatively small way) in the construction process. The work will be unveiled at 11.15 this morning, and I'm going along with my camera. Shots will be sure to follow, on here as well as my Flickr stream.
In the meantime, here are a couple I made earlier:
A lot of people seem to think that the inquest into the death of Princess Diana, Dodi Fayed and Henri Paul in Paris over 10 years ago is a waste of time and money.
There appears to be a very strong prevailing view amongst Grauniadists and Istas that even discussing the incident is a low-brow Daily Express style indulgence and that, clearly, the crash was nothing more than a tragic accident. They say that Henri Paul was 'high on a cocktail of alcohol (twice the legal limit, which is 2 pints, isn't it?) and prescription drugs' - which is an excellent tabloidese cliche. Diana was not wearing a seat belt and the Merc, pursued by the baying hounds of pap rats (the stenographer's interpretations are being beamed on to a big screen, and occasionally, he or she must mis-hear the words) slammed into a concrete pillar in a Parisian underpass. End of. Anyone who suggests any form of conspiracy theory should don their tin foil hats and join the ranks of the feeble-minded, the UFOlogists and the like.
Many of these sentiments are couched in anti-royalist terms, along the lines of: "I didn't care then, and I don't care now. Why should this woman take up so much of our time and so much of the public purse when she is dead? She took up more than her fair share when she was alive."
I disagree. I am not (as many of my friends will attest) by any stretch of the imagination a royalist. My feelings towards the blue bloods are similar to my feelings towards the Church (I make the distinction between Catholics and Protestants in my views mainly on the grounds of attitudes towards birth control. Protestants are simply slightly less evil in my opinion) and its bloated oligarchy. Namely, that there should be no place for either institution in an enlightened society (not that we live in anything approaching an enlightened society) and, though I would probably stop short of advocating public physical violence against those in the upper echelons of either, I do occasionally daydream about it.
My feelings specifically on the British Royal Family are as follows. They are anachronisticleeches. They are responsible for maintaining the status quo; for helping to widen the gap between rich and poor in this country; for the disproportionate representation of a minority pursuit within the political system; and for fostering the hateful concept that some babies are born better than others (from Wikipedia: "The king or queen of the United Kingdom is one of the last monarchs still to be crowned in the traditional Christian ceremonial, which in most other countries has been replaced by an inauguration or other declaration.") They are shown extraordinary deference by seemingly intelligent people, and they are just so personally objectionable. Who could imagine sharing a pint with Prince Charles, or trying to have a conversation with the Queen? The whole thing is little short of ludicrous.
When I heard about the death of Diana, I was in bed, woken by a phone call from a friend to tell me it had happened. Though initially disbelieving, and then mildly shocked, I became quickly bored by the wall-to-wall coverage and very soon resentful that TV programmes I wanted to watch were being cancelled to make way for more live shots and 'analysis' of the event. The day of the funeral was the nadir for me (not that it was probably a high point for Diana, though many people in this country seemed to wallow in it) in terms of what it did to TV programming. I felt as if I was going insane. Around this time (by accident) I also found myself at Kensington Gardens, and was stunned to see the sheer quantity of flowers, and the outpouring of emotion, on display there. I had seen the kind of mawkish patriotism so prevalent in this country before, with the Queen's Silver Jubilee and the Royal Wedding - you know, people from the Wirral who wave Union Jacks and camp out overnight in the rain just to get a glimpse of the Queen Mum ("Ooh, she's a marvel!") but this was something else. It had been taken to another level.
Since then, events have become more interesting. Watching Liz and the others squirm around in their efforts to come across as normal people in their grief for Di was great fun, but was as nothing compared to the fantastic circus of Paul Burrell. The fencing of baubles, the 'dark forces at work in this country' quote and the allegations of Prince Charles raping a manservant contain elements of farce and high drama of which Joe Orton himself would have been proud.
Mohammed al Fayed has been a supreme irritant to the Royals, his rant to Keith Allen on Channel 4 rating amongst the best TV you could ever hope to see.
And that is the reason why I think the inquest should go ahead. With every question, noses are pried a little further into the rat's nest that is Balmoral, Buck House, KP, Sandringham, Windsor and all the others. Another chink in the armour is slowly inched open.
Even better, if there really was a conspiracy, what an excellent story it would be. I have been mildly castigated for finding allegations that Prince Philip ordered the murder of his daughter-in-law amusing, but I'm afraid that I do. The idea of brake fluid traces being found on the livery of one of the royal footmen, of equerries slipping out of sight in the Parisian night, is simply too delicious. I am watching the inquest with interest.
Update: 28/09/07: Set your TiVo, DVD-R or (hurr-hurr) VCR for 10pm Sunday - More4.
I must declare an interest, but Channel 4 is going to be 25 years old on November 2nd. The uniquely British flavour of the channel warms the heart, I feel. There can be few, if any, countries in the world which can boast such an institution (I hesitate only when thinking of the National Film Board of Canada, though I don't think it really compares) and it is an institution of which I think we should be justly proud.
The remit of the Channel says it all, although the rapidly changing media world is presenting some serious challenges to that way of thinking. My interest means that I am able to distill the remit in a way which is (by and large) taken seriously by the much maligned staff. This is how it is told to those who start work there:
Do it first. Make trouble. Always innovate.
Like a lot of people these days I watch less and less TV, preferring to generate my own content, but I still feel that C4 has the most interesting (looking) programmes, and when I catch them I feel I was right. Over 25 years, there have been some crackers. I know that this has been done before, but I have been thinking about some highlights. I would like to share them with you and ask for any opinions you may have.
A Very British Coup.(I confess - I have never seen it all the way through, though I have read the book. There is a reason, but I will save it for a later post)
channel 4
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