ChristopherWhite.info

Yeah, yeah; Jerry Springer: The Opera is ‘offensive’. Boo hoo.

I can (just about) see why the Christians are so upset - the ones that went to the trouble of printing out the lyrics from the internet, that is; none of the ones we spoke to had actually seen it, of course. A nappy-wearing Jesus claiming that he is “a bit gay” (after all, the homos will burn; David told us); the suggestion that Mary was raped by an angel/God; and Jerry’s Final Thought that there is no absolute right or wrong are bound to upset religious types.

(For what it’s worth, I don’t agree with the latter either; it’s only a matter of time before I open an article with “I was a relativist once. I’m not proud”.)

The vast amounts of swearing’s just plain funny - in that setting. The fact that theatres are normally people by fairly conservative folks who avoid deploying bad language is all part of the satire - a satire that includes the personal tyranny of familial relationships, as oppressive as anything any government has to offer; the tendency to avoid taking personal responsibility, instead blaming either God or ‘low culture’ TV programmes like The Jerry Spinger Show.

But the religious can’t see past that. Oh, no; it’s offensive. It’s blasphemous. It’s also bloody funny, which is more than can be said for the Bible.

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The scab’s nearly off now, and I have a copy on the back of my left shoulder of the tattoo I’ve had on my right shoulder for five years.

They look the same, but the fact that they were etched onto me half a decade apart - time in which I’ve in many respects become a very different person - means that they feel rather different.

They’re the same, but not. (Aargh! Po-mo!)

That’s the thing about symbols - their meaning can change over time. The Swastika was originally a Hindu/Buddhist symbol for good luck before misappropriation by the Nazis made it virtually synonymous with evil.

It’s a shame nobody told Faisal Bodi that.

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This was nearly a post about the wrongs of banning the Welsh contestants from speaking in their own language on the show, after seeing a headline in one local newspaper (can’t remember which) yesterday that read: “Fury as Big Brother Bans Welsh”.

Then I thought I’d better check my facts, and revealed this:

“Housemates are free to talk in any established language of their choosing,” clarified the masterly voice.

“However, any discussion, in any language, that is deemed against the rules will result in Housemates being punished. Glyn, Big Brother is multi-lingual and is always listening.”

Tut tut, newspapers.

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I’ve only seen the first episode so far - not out of deliberate avoidance, just that I haven’t been in - but I refuse to believe that at least some of these people aren’t actors.

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I was wrong. Quite, quite wrong.

I claimed that Aids-awareness adverts were completely barking up the wrong tree, that we didn’t need to hammer home how disease spreads, and that people are not ignorant but rather simply irresponsible.

But…

Colin Richardson writes:

There is still a great deal of ignorance about HIV in this country, after all these years. A recent survey conducted for the National AIDS Trust found that 21% thought that HIV could not be passed from one person to another during unprotected sexual intercourse.

Ignorance is not just the preserve of the British. Jacob Zuma, the former deputy president of South Africa and one-time head of that country’s National Aids Council, has said that he didn’t use a condom when having sex with a woman he knew to be HIV-positive because men were at little risk of becoming infected that way. In any case, he added, he took a shower immediately afterwards, which, he claimed, further reduced the risk.

Dear me.

Not only that, but one of Cardiff’s broadcast students had to do some voxpops about STIs. One interviewee, In response to being questioned on whether he would treat HIV-postive people any differently, came out with: “No, but I wouldn’t use the same cup as them and I’d bleach the toilet after they’d used it.”

Ignorance, it appears, is rife. Including, as I was so desperately mistaken, my own.

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Jonathan Freedland has a novel out. Freedland claimed in a post on Comment is Free that there are a lot of parallels between writing a novel and reporting the news. It’ll be interesting to see how his own worldview comes through in the story, particularly given that a novel could probably easily contain about a year’s worth of column material. When Richard Littlejohn tried his hand at fiction, it was quite simplistic: the baddies were asylum seekers.

More often than not, the protaganist simply stands in for the author. Bearing in mind the previous post, how does this work in comedy? Chris Morris claims to be an antipolemicist, only making a point if it’s funny, when talking about Brass Eye, but Nathan Barley exists purely as a damning indictment of “media twats”, with the weary Dan Ashcroft representing Morris’s point of view.

Freud reckoned that jokes stood alongside dreams and slips of the tongue in revealing the subconcious. Freud talked a lot of rubbish.

But look at this, from series four of Auf Wiedersehen Pet:

Government official type: “This is a sensitive post so we will be carrying out extensive background checks.”
Several members of the team look at Oz, expecting him to reveal his spell at Her Majesty’s pleasure.
Oz: “I’ll tell you this now, as it would’ve come out anyway. I’ve got a son what’s a poof.”

That isn’t a joke - not from the perspective of the character. But it is funny - to the audience.

So…

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It’s probably too small to see on the picture, but the really wee text at the bottom says: “Over 4 hours of deleted scenes, outtakes, interviews and extras”.

Kerr-ist.

Given how thoroughly awful the material that actually aired was I can’t imagine how dreadful the deleted scenes must be.

It went wrong long before then, with the downward spiral - the shark-jumping, if you like- beginning in series 7. It’s not hard, if you take the time to think about it, to see why.

There is a simple formula: comedy = truth + pain. For so long, through six series, that truth and pain were displayed by Lister and Rimmer’s mutual loathing. Even when an episode ostensibly centred around Kryten or the Cat, the majority of the jokes were based on Lister and Rimmer’s disagreements on how to handle the particular issue. When, during the second episode of series 7, Rimmer left to save the Universe as his alter ego Ace Rimmer - a man who would make the lovechild of James Bond and Joan of Arc look like a weenie - there is no conflict, and thus no source of gags. Attempts to replace Lister’s friction with Rimmer with his unrequited love for Kochanski were futile: any ‘conflict’ was almost entirely one-way.

The most popular episode from all eight series was, according to a fan poll, Back to Reality from series 5. It found the characters experiencing an hallucination which caused them to believe that their lives aboard Red Dwarf were an elaborate virtual reality computer simulation, and, more importantly, that their personalities were very different to what they believed. It was character comedy at its best, hence its popularity; it’s a shame that the writers failed to learn that lesson for later.

And that characterisation is key is a lesson that all comedy writers would benefit from, too. Look at any comedy series, and whatever other comedy techniques are employed, the ones with strongest characters are funniest.

Discuss.

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Perhaps this shouldn’t be called ‘Spanish’, but rather ‘Live a permanent beach holiday and remain completely ignorant of the culture of the country you’ve moved to’ magazine.

Along with most of the other 150,000 Brits in Spain.

Ironically, those Brits that have been living in Spain for two decades and think it’s clever that they couldn’t so much as order a coffee in Spanish even if they wanted to would often be the first to complain about ‘them immigrants’ while still living in the UK.

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