Last week Brian True-May was suspended as producer of everyone’s favourite rural English take on Nightmare on Elm Street, Midsomer Murders, for some slightly non-pc comments.

“We just don’t have ethnic minorities involved,” True-May said. “Because it wouldn’t be the English village with them… We’re the last bastion of Englishness and I want to keep it that way.”

Unsurprisingly, True-May’s assumption that audiences are as racist as he came across in that Radio Times interview attracted some criticism, not least from a “shocked and appalled” ITV themselves and from Charlie Brooker, who is right about everything except this. Because I think True-May’s detractors are being a little unfair. Midsomer Murders is not the product of a twisted bigot. It’s the vision of a brilliant and stalwart anti-racist hero who refuses to bow to the stereotypes of white and black, rich and poor.

Setting aside that I am from both an ethnic minority background and from a bastion of Englishness about ten times as rural as Midsomer, and bracketing for the moment the programme’s literary vision of an England that never really existed, it’s worth noting the show’s deep commitment to social realism. The programme’s depiction of incest, for example. There’s quite clearly plenty of that in the countryside, even if there are no black or Asian people. And the lack of expletives. People are almost definitely very polite to one another while hacking each other up with garden saws over some homosexual blackmail. Black mail, of course, not black people. But why?

Well, the answer to the show’s lack of ethnic minority characters is not due to the racism of the producer. Quite the opposite. And it can be found in what is probably the programme’s most fundamentally realistic element. It’s alarmingly high per capita murder rate.

Now, there have been 81 episodes thus far, with an average of three murders per episode. Assuming each episode takes place over the course of a week, that gives us 156 murders per year. The fictional county of Midsomer has much in common with Somerset which, in 2008 had an estimated population of 912,900. Assuming that Midsomer’s population is in the same region, that gives us an annual per capita murder rate of 17:100,000. That makes it higher than Mexico, where 13 people per 100,000 are murdered each year, higher than Zimbabwe at 7 people, the US at 4, and way above the UK average of 1.4:100,000. In fact, only Columbia, South Africa, Jamaica, Venezuela and Russia have higher per capita murder rates than Midsomer.

For a sleepy, middle-class community in rural England, this is of course highly accurate and the producers should be praised for creating not only a bastion of Englishness, but a bastion of realism. And True-May, far from being vilified as a racist, should be praised for promoting such a positive image of ethnic minorities.

After all, there are no black gangstas shooting up the hood, no Asian suicide bombers, no katana wielding Samauri. It’s all white on white violence. Quite clearly, True-May made a conscious decision to leave ethnic minorities out of Midsomer because he didn’t want to stereotype them. He wanted to get to the heart of human darkness, not in skin colour, but in the soul, showing that you don’t have to be working class, black or from a broken home to commit acts of depravity. The killer is in all of us, even in this rich white county where grime is what you get when your spouse (who statistically speaking is either a murderer or soon to be murdered) misses a spot under the windowsill, and the closest thing to hip-hop is your mother’s impending hip-op, which will invariably be performed by a budding Harold Shipman wannabe.

It is, of course, a constant source of amazement and amusement as to why anyone would want to live in a place that is only mildly safer than Helmand Province. I certainly wouldn’t. And in that, we can clearly see that True-May, far from excluding ethnic minorities, is portraying them as inherently sensible, rational people who would not, given the choice, opt to live in such high crime areas.

As such, Brian True-May is possibly the last bastion of anti-racism on English television.

Either that or he’s an idiot and it’s a really shit TV programme.

(h/t stroppyblog and luna17)

I am a history buff. As such I find libraries and the smell of old history books seriously exciting. During a recent visit to Northumberland (Reuben would not approve) I spent several wonderful hours exploring the history section of the reasonably famous Barter Books in Alnwick. (See here: http://bit.ly/9D7xvL). I’m a vegetarian, but enormous books on the Reformation, printed like ornate bibles, more than justify the cows killed for their leather to craft the book covers. I found the older history books to be of two kinds: the first, hopelessly specialised volumes on, for instance, the history of land ownership in Kent in the mid-15th Century (these books are unreadable); the second, books that attempt in one go to explain the entire course of the history of Europe, say, or democratic government, starting with the Greeks.

Stephen Fry once cited the library as something wholly without flaw. Libraries are, he explained, almost ‘sexually exciting’ places, as they are ‘powerhouses of knowledge’. This applies to books in general, but history books in particular. Enclosed in the most pedestrian-looking books you can find the whole sweep of human experience. You can follow Alexander the Great through Persia, watch monarchies fall to revolution, or ponder the disappearance of hats in mens’ fashion in the 1960s. A.J.P Taylor put it very well, as he often did:

History is the one way in which you can experience at second hand all kinds of varieties of human behaviour, and after all the greatest problem in life is to understand how other people behave, and this is what history enables us to do: to see people in all kinds of situations and in all kinds of walks of life…It makes the reader, and to a certain extent the historian too, aware of a fuller, much wider life than somebody could possibly have merely by his own private experience. [though I'm sure he'd agree that leaving the house is often a good idea].

Immersing yourself in history from afar with books is one thing, seeing it happen is another. When we’re old and ugly and not as mobile as we used to be, we’ll likely be asked where we were on 9/11, as we ask people where they were when Kennedy was killed. (I was in year 6 at the time; my friend Nick was staying at my house for after-school games and neon coloured food. I’ll make the story more interesting later). Likewise I’ll always remember being called down in 2003 to watch the chimp President himself announce the invasion of Iraq to the world on TV as my Dad did the ironing. Such moments of ‘we interrupt our regular programming…’ punctuate the 20th Century: people learned of war or crisis from the television, which provided memorable viewing (think of Walter Cronkite choking up like a girlie liberal in Nov. 1963); earlier they sat by the wireless, fretting.

Which brings me to the BBC Archive. Museums must house pots and bits of metal for the benefit of historical memory, and likewise our country needs a class of archive minions to sit in the presumably dark, dank bowels of the BBC and sort through their thousands of hours of broadcasting, and provide it for the public. This civilisational achievement you can enjoy by clicking here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/archive/.

Modern British history is made clickable on this thing. Election coverage, interviews with statesman, public scandals of yore, plus more hours of quality programming than a human being could watch in a lifetime. When Nicolas Sarkozy first took power, one of his first public statements expressed the desire to make French public broadcasting as good as the kind les rostbiffs enjoy for £2.60 a week. Here, you can see why.

The site has a ‘Today’s Choice’ box on the homepage, with a video or radio broadcast of note. Today’s is from 3rd September, 1939. It is highly likely that today you will spend slightly more than 12.38 minutes on your computer either mindlessly youtubing, embarking on a blue-link adventure on Wikipedia, looking up ridiculous sexual activities on Urban Dictionary or masturbating for the third time today (just to prove you can). I would encourage you to forgo such things and listen to this broadcast, preferably in a dark room.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/archive/ww2outbreak/7917.shtml

The BBC’s latest offering to the sitcom gods is Rev, the usual half hour, oh-they’re-in-a-pickle-now kinda thing, with the twist being that it’s not just about a vicar, but about an inner city vicar. It’s been hammered home by the BBC that this is a chance to move away from everyone’s favourite fat theological. Gone is the twee image of the countryside – instead, the writers are forcing themselves to deal with the issues.

The move away from Dibley and the countryside and into the city is taken to the ends of the East London – one of the most deprived areas in the country, lest we forget – and the first episode delved straight into the pressing matters of our time: vandalism, faith schools and small church congregations. (Okay, some of these are more pressing than others).

To sum up: the vicar, Adam, has just moved into his new parish, St Saviours on the Marshes. In the first week, the stained glass window is broken, and vandalism is suspected. In order to raise money to pay for the damages, the vicar is encouraged (by his church superior and his inner self) to accept money from the local MP in exchange for his kid to go to the church school, even though the kid’s family don’t really go to church. Eventually the vicar has a chat with god (overdubbed – no response from God booming through my speakers, I’m glad to say), has a bout of conscience, refuses the money, and settles for the broken window instead. The vandalism also turns out to be by one of the church regulars, an amicable drunk, and entirely by accident.

In the midst of this we have some casual racism (the only black character is a ‘cassock-chaser’ who orgasms during sermons, a clear dig at Pentecostalism), and the only asian character is a pervy chiropractor who inappropriately feels up the vicar’s wife.

Importantly, the countryside is also held up as a paradise in its absence – the vicar (originally from a small parish church in Suffolk) has a terrible time cycling in the godforsaken city, and is surrounded by ‘church whores’ who only pray in order to get their kids into the local church school. When the amicable drunk is having a crisis of faith, ranting about Richard Dawkins, the vicar takes the example of a snail shell as proof of God’s existence, something in nature (in the unchanging, green and pleasant sense) being beautiful, even though it doesn’t have to be.

But, despite the continuing distinction between countryside and city in that unhelpful, English way (and the casual racism), I think there’s definitely some redemption in the show. It displays religion as a working, functioning thing, albeit something which doesn’t necessarily do good things even when it’s functioning well.

If you’re an atheist like me (and I suspect that most readers of this blog are), then the scene of the vicar relishing the thought of setting prospective parents a Bible quiz in order to allow their kids into the Church school is scary and a bit sickening – but I think it’s also accurate, showing the close ties between money, property, class and religion which dominate the contemporary church. And it’s brave of the writers to broadcast this. (Interestingly, the mere presence of Olivia Colman from The Office and Peep Show, means that it all feels very ironic and sinister).

Religion is still big, and I think it would be a mistake to dismiss all progressive politics within it simply because the expression invokes God rather than ‘the people’ or some other transcendent being. Of course I’d rather that we got rid of transcendence altogether, but in the meanwhile I’m not going to pretend as if I/we have. Anarchists like David Graeber definitely rely on the imagination in the same way that Renaissance theologians use the soul, but this doesn’t mean there isn’t a hell of a lot of good politics and ideas going on in his writing. And the same goes for other radical transcendentalists like Christian anarchists and progressive Muslims.

I think our mistake too much of the time is to pretend as if the political ideology which causes the back-room deals of the MP trying to get his kid into a faith school is structurally different from the theological ideology which makes the vicar talk to God and expect a response.

Once you accept that we’re all living a lie of one kind or another, the point stops being about how good the lie is, but how progressive the results are. Mind you, I didn’t even get onto writing about the generalised sexism in the show…

Last week, two of the most watched television shows were about voting. One provided an in depth, contemporary and perhaps profound analysis of current democracy. The other was a shallow piece of entertainment, easily forgettable and void of conflict. The first was Doctor Who, the other was a game show.

In ‘The Beast Below‘, the Doctor and his companion found themselves on a spaceship UK, a post-apocalyptic vision of the country floating in space, marooned for eternity. The dark past of how this came to be is kept a secret from the citizens on board, until the age of 16. At this point, each teenager is allowed an opportunity to learn of their spaceship’s history, as the Doctor’s companion Amelia finds out, when she is allowed to enter the small room of this initiation ritual. In the room is a screen and three buttons, labeled ‘Protest’, ‘Record’ and ‘Forget’. (If you want to follow this, it’s at 14.30 minutes in).

Amelia Pond sends an electoral message to her future self

The rules are explained by a man on the screen: all of earth’s dark history will be revealed through the television. Then the citizen has a choice: to protest or forget. In almost all cases, the sequence is as it occurs to Amelia: she sees the history, and chooses to forget. (The protest button leads to expulsion: a trap door opens up and the victim is consumed in the ship’s engines.) However, when Amelia ‘wakes up’ in the room after her memory loss, there is a video playing on screen of her past self, telling her current self to leave the spaceship and not return to the room. Evidently, Amelia pressed the ‘Record’ button before the ‘forget’, in order to leave herself this message.

We as the viewer do not see her press ‘Record’, and of course she doesn’t remember doing so. This is the key to the politics of the scene. Not only is forgetting the only way forward – if the citizen were to remember the truth, the whole political system would come crashing down; but the part that we don’t see, the moment between the consideration of symbolic protest and the moment of forgetting, is the ‘record’ button. And of course, the knowledge of the moment of recording is lost: in other words, the processes of ideological construction are hidden from view.

The other voting-themed show was an extraordinary ‘Fascist Special’ of Blind Date. If you don’t know what I mean, here’s a Cilla classic from 1991. The comparisons get startling from half a minute in; in this episode we even have a Scot, a Tory boy and some young guy in the middle. Guess who she picks…

It never fails to annoy me when it’s claimed that some group or other is the ‘last’ group that it’s acceptable to be prejudiced about. Sure, there’s no denying we live in relatively enlightened times, but there are any number of marginalised sections of society that you can get away with offending without any fear of backlash. Don’t believe me? Well, off the top of my head, how about people who are mentally ill, or transsexual, or poor and white (yes, the whole chav thing – it’s just sneering at people who are worse off than you; stop trying to justify it)?  Or how about gypsies? If you doubt that they face prejudice, try taking a look at definition 6 (or definitions 1,4 and 7, to a lesser extent) on urbandictionary’s entry for the word. (Yes, I’m well aware that part of the point of urban dictionary is to try to be shocking, but there‘s a difference between pushing the boundaries of what’s acceptable for comedic purposes and simple bigotry. That’s clearly an example of the latter.)

Anyway, while I was vaguely aware that gypsies were marginalised and suffered prejudice, I knew very little about the context and origins of that prejudice, or indeed about gypsy culture at all, so a documentary on iPlayer that claimed to be about precisely that, I was pretty keen to watch it seemed a good chance to learn more. Admittedly it might have been a bit optimistic of me to expect so much from a documentary that had a title like Gypsy Child Thieves, but the blurb for the programme claimed it would show “the racism and discrimination suffered by the Romani people”. In fact there was far less background information than I’d have liked, and unfortunately – while I’m sure this wasn’t what filmmaker Liviu Tipurita intended – a worrying amount of ammunition for the bigots.

The film certainly delivered on the promise of the title; there was plenty of grainy footage of attempted robberies by young Roma children in Spain and Italy, as well as interviews with the same children back at the camps where they lived. And there was some genuinely shocking material as well: the way that the titular child thieves are beaten and coerced into a life of crime by their handlers (or their own parents), and the disturbing revelation that Romani girls are traditionally married off (and the marriages consummated) when they’re just 12 or 13 years old. There was also some footage of a street party held by the Lega Nord (a populist right-wing political party in Italy) to celebrate the destruction of a Romani camp, at which one man openly spoke of his desire to kill Gypsies. But if this film is all you’ve got to go on, antipathy towards Gypsies is almost made to seem understandable, as so much is left unexplained. Why do so many Romani people steal for a living? Why do they live in squalid camps on the outskirts of cities? Why do they so often refuse help from the Social Services? Why is it that they’re so marginalised all over Europe?

Even when Tipurita travelled to Romania (where many Roma who emigrate to Western Europe arrive from) with the supposed aim of finding answers to some of these questions, he didn’t really seem to get anywhere. The best we were given was an extended interview with Breliante, a Romani organised criminal who provided the illuminating insight that “the thieving is no longer a national problem. It’s happening on an international scale.” Liviu Tipurita is clearly a talented documentary-maker, but this felt like a serious missed opportunity.

You can watch Gypsy Child Thieves on iPlayer before 8pm on Wednesday the 9^th September, as long as you’re in the UK.

You are live on Channel 4, please do not swear. Wank! Unless you have tourettes. Shilpa poppadom, Shilpa chappawala! Fuck it, who cares, no one’s watching anyway.

Reports of Big Brother’s demise are not greatly exaggerated, though for a long time, they’ve been greatly anticipated. This week, programme makers, in one last desperate bid for viewers, told housemates to ‘do something exciting’, and then stripped them of their prize money when they apparently did something too exciting. The story barely made a ripple in the real world. One might say the big news from the house this week is that the show is finally, ten years too late, being dropped by Channel 4. But does anyone really care anymore?

You may be beginning to get the impression that I dislike Big Brother. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, I hate it. In the words of Agent Smith from The Matrix: “I hate this place. This zoo. This prison. This reality, whatever you want to call it, I can’t stand it any longer. It’s the smell, if there is such a thing. I feel saturated by it. I can taste your stink and every time I do, I fear that I’ve somehow been infected by it.”

My beef with BB is not that I have to watch it. Nor, as a point of anti-snobbery, do I object to the mindless teeming zombies of the lower orders who choose to watch a parade of freaks who think East Angular is a foreign country and can barely spell their own name because it makes them feel vaguely clever and sane by comparison. People enjoy what they enjoy. It’s not for me to judge or condemn what a person chooses to watch, anymore than I should criticise what they consider to be art, what plays they like seeing or what music they choose to listen to, unless they like Leonard Cohen, in which case they should probably be shot. No, my problem with Big Brother is what it has done to the medium of television. It’s the smell, if there is such a thing.

Jade Goody's public battle with cancer

What is laughably called ‘reality’ television is relatively cheap to produce. It doesn’t require scripts or scriptwriters, acting or actors, directors or direction, special effects or complex editing. Just stick a few ‘normal’ people in a room with cameras, compile the vaguely interesting things they do, add some bird sounds and you’ve got an hour of television. Most entertainment, from the mysterious jungles of Lost’s $14m pilot episode to sixty minutes in the jungle with Ant & Dec, is a commercial enterprise adhering to the principles of the market. Even the most ardent anti-capitalists have come to accept that. But reality TV is the lazy way to make money. It’s storytelling without a storyteller. The one real story to come out of Big Brother was Jade. And even the tragic soap-opera of her life and death was tedious and over-reported, the coverage of her illness, whilst suitably sympathetic, far outweighing her importance in relation to everything else going on in the world. If a well-scripted, well-acted, well-directed drama series can be compared to a band’s first album, their magnum opus, the culmination of a life’s work; then shows like Big Brother are the greatest hits, the cash-in, thrown together with little need for thought or effort to make the maximum money with the minimum creativity.

The worst part of it is that it does all this under the flimsy pretence that, like some kind of modern day Stanford Prison Experiment, it has something important to say about society or human nature. What this amounts to is a freakshow. And whilst there have been some genuinely important issues that Big Brother has, in its own mind-numbing fashion, brought to the nation’s attention – Pete’s tourettes, Nadia’s transexuality, Jade Goody’s casual racism and the ephemeral nature of celebrity – most of it amounts to little more than finding the campest, most flamboyant person out there so people can point at him and go, ‘look at him, he’s gay.’

Reality TV was, arguably, the defining genre of the soulless noughties. At one point, before the wild success of resurgent big-budget, thickly-plotted, highly-serialised drama series like Lost, Prison Break and 24, some critics were even proclaiming the death of scripted television at the hands of the new kid on the block. A decade ago, Big Brother might have seemed original, even creative, meeting Channel 4’s remit to ‘demonstrate innovation, experiment and creativity in the form and content of programmes.’ But yesterday’s news is today’s chip paper. And now, as viewers desert the show like Labour party supporters, it’s clear that it has had its time in the sun.

Big Brother’s model, and the plethora of ugly cousins it has spawned, is a blight on good television. With its axing, Channel 4 has a prime time vacancy for the edgy and the innovative and an extra £50m to fill it. Let us hope that this marks the end of reality television as we know it. The days of watching freaks for fun should have ended long ago.

According to a little page-filler in the back of today’s Guardian, sales of tickets to comedy gigs have risen dramatically recently   “luring in customers with affordable tickets and topical stand-up routines on the economic downturn.”  It’s a cheap night out, the paper suggests, and the pickings are ripe for a new generation of angry young men to come forth and vent the collective fury of the ineloquent and the inactive alike.  But something is missing.

There is – and I say this with a fair degree of self-assured self-importance – a wealth of very funny comedians around at the moment.  In fact, I would even go as far as to say that, in terms of mainstream entertainment, the standard of British comedy is as good today is has ever been.  Mark Watson and Michael McIntryre, to name but two, are exceptionally funny observational comedians who deliver consistently likeable and new material on an almost weekly basis.  On the small screen, The Inbetweeners is an hilarious ode to youth – closing a decade that has already bore witness to The Office, Peep Show and 15 Storey’s High, with snobbery being the only reason not to utter these in the same sentence as Black Adder and Monty Python.

But let’s return to stand up for the moment – truly the finest and foremost marker of what can undoubtedly be one of the noblest of art forms.  What are Watson’s and McIntyre’s jokes about?  A pigeon flying into the back of a man’s head at Liverpool Street train station in Waton’s case, and a man’s draw full of outdated foreign currency in the latter’s.  So, where’s the beef?  Where is the Ben Elton of our generation?  Critics of the Iraq War are forced to simply rewatch Bill Hicks ever ponient lines from two decades before.

It is a sad indictment of our time that the closest we have to hard-hitting comedy in the semi-mainstream today is Mock the Week’s Frankie Boyle.  Undoubtedly a gifted and cutting comedian – “Have you heard that the Spice Girls are reforming?  The only way I ever want to see Geri Halliwell draped in a Union Jack again is if she dies in battle” – he is, all the same, just a tad trivial and often purile.  And even he is on a leash.

But not that of the BBC, I would venture.  Rather, it is the choking leash of public indifference.  Could it be that, with the mediocrity of our current age and our tired adherence to this unenfranchising system of ‘consensus based politics’, so too has such woe come to betide stand up comedy?  Oh, how I long for a George Carlin, Lenny Bruce or young Chris Rock for today… someone to help us question that which we are too tired to have thought about ourselves.  Comedians who do not just satirise and mock the world as they find it, but offered an alternative vision as well.  Our current breed, by stark contrast, sneer without care or consistency.  The result: a banal hybrid of gaffs about Peter Andre and Jordan, and a reliance on swearing and foul imagery as end in itself, so as to maintain a veneer of being ‘edgy’.

I know what some will say: “for good comedy, you need to go to the clubs mate, not sit in front of the television”.  And that may be so.  But today I fear that even our greatest comedy venues have become bastions of mediocrity.  And I have been to a few.  Even The Comedy Store, on Oxendon Street, lest we forget was the place that first brought us Eddie Izzard and the alternative comedy boom that accompanied Thatcherism and the economic downturn of the 1980s.  Today, it is frowned upon to even make a witty heckle.

Play it safe.  Make your money.  Bums on seats.  Don’t offend anyone.

Humour is, rightly, the end point of all good stand-up comedians.  Hicks and his ilk would always maintain that they were humourist first and satirist second.  But as we approach a dank, dark winter of channel flicking and inevitable social unrest, somebody – please – step forward and grab this momentous opportunity by the horns.  You will only be saying what we are all thinking: some of us just haven’t realised we wanted to hear it until now. And it could go a long way towards changing things, as have many of the greatest artists before you.

It’s extremely easy to criticise the politics of cultural products if you don’t agree with absolutely everything they say. If you consider your understanding to be more nuanced, it is very easy to say that a book, a film, or an article doesn’t go far enough. The point is that not every great film is like a glass slipper to each Cinderella viewer, but regardless of this fact these sorts of cultural products can be hugely valuable in changing consciousness and changing the world. It feels a bit silly to preface my review of The Age of Stupid with this, but I am all too wary that whilst I am writing a relatively critical review, I see this film as extremely important, and something that really should be disseminated as widely as possible. Or as Ken Livingstone has put it “Every single person in the country should be forcibly sat down on a chair and made to watch this film.”

The film is set in 2055, in a world in which almost all life has ended on earth. Pete Postlethwaite stars as an archivist, who looks back to the early 2000s, seeing how we got to a state in which the environment caused the collapse of civilisation. He follows a number of stories from different continents around the world ranging from a mountain guide in Chamonix watching glaciers melt, to an entrepreneur setting up a budget airline in India. The main political focus is on inaction and how we (the Western viewers) can do more to cut carbon emissions, and ultimately on how we must lobby in advance of the meeting on climate change in Copenhagen at the end of the year, which will decide on an international strategy on carbon emissions for the coming 15 years.

There are some powerful arguments here, and the film attempts as best as possible to be scientifically accurate, or at least as scientifically accurate as one can be with these sorts of projections. Real changes are shown, along with some of the realities of abject poverty and misery caused by both the use of oil and the industry that maintains its production. The message is loud and clear: if we do not act now, it will be too late.

The problems come, then, in the political messages of the film, or rather what is lacking in the political messages. We are told over and over again that the problem is consumption. Consumption on a scale we’ve never seen before. Consumption so large that it somehow alone makes people poor. Only once is capitalism ever mentioned, and the film-makers are far happier to rely on the rhetoric of consumerism. The problem is, though, that what makes people poor is categorically not in the field of consumption. Yes, over many decades this may be the case, when we exhaust the world’s resources, but there is a fork in the argument: why is it that when we are producing more than ever, when we are pumping trillions of pounds into the market that people are still poor. The point is that poverty is completely inadequately explained by consumerism, and that we need to look at production. A little is said of the so-called curse of resources, but this is never explained in any depth.

I can understand why the makers of the film stay away from this – add a bit of Marxist economics to your environmentalism and your world leaders are less likely to accept it. The trouble is that in ignoring this important debate the arguments for how we can transform the world, and avert crisis, disappear. If we found a clean way to run capitalism (that’s environmentally clean, of course, capitalism is never morally clean), then it is perfectly possible that global poverty would be worse rather than better. Well I mean people would be poor rather than dead, but we can’t be accepting this as a solution.

The film concludes with an argument for people to live in a way that is as close to carbon-neutral as possible. This suggestion seems aimed solely at the Western middle-classes. No advice is offered to, say, the Chinese about how despite rampant growth improving living conditions they should probably curb it a little. In fact there is no challenge to the consciousness of people in the developing world, which ultimately is about them demanding better quality of life, and often this isn’t a very green process (although it has been sometimes – I think back to Chico Mendes and the struggles of the rubber-tappers in Acre in the 1980s.) We can all do our own little bit, but in reality the redistribution of carbon emissions can only happen alongside the redistribution of wealth. Quality of life is not simply relative, and cutting standards of living in the West will ultimately not help people in the most oppressed regions of the world feel better about how they are forced to live.

Despite these difficulties, and the rather fluffy economics of the film, it remains important. We must act now, and the Age of Stupid is proposing a way forward. It’s a shame that the dissemination of the film is not as wide as it could be – I can only assume that there are rights issues that stop it being put up on Google Video or similar. Needless to say, there’s information about the campaign and screenings on www.ageofstupid.net and I encourage you all to watch the film, and show it to others too.

Puts todays puritans to shame.

A recent report in the Guardian confirmed my suspicion that alot of people who complain to Ofcom are, to put it kindly, morons. Of the 290 people who complained about this year’s Big Brother, it would appear that the majority of them have completely missed the point of broadcast regulation. 200 of the 290 complaints concerned ‘an argument between housemates Marcus Akin and Sree Dasari, which occurred on Thursday’, in which one had mocked the others accent, and the other party had made a verbal threat. Now obviously these kinds of things are done by fictional characters in TV programmes all the time. Which in turn suggests that the people complaining have missed the point of Ofcom. They are not complaining because they object to the impact of certain material being broadcast but because they feel aggrieved on the part of one or other of the contestants over the way another house member has treated them. In other words they are participating in the reality TV game show – but using Ofcom to do so.

So why am I so down on people who complain to Ofcom. Well partly its because, I am an instinctive cultural libertarian. But its also because complaining to Ofcom is a form of activism for which I have no respect. Compared with the current generation of censorious citizens, I do in fact have a grudging respect for Mary Whitehouse – though I disagree entirely with her aims. When she wanted to challenge the media she wrote letters to papers, spoke on platforms and all the rest of it. In contrast to todays Ofcom speed diallers she engaged in a public discourse about what should be on TV.  As indeed she should have – for when one seeks to control what is and isn’t available to viewers, listeners and readers they are engaging with a crucial public issue. The point is she put herself, her ideas and her arguments out there so that they could be challenged and debated by other people with an interest in the matter (ie everybody). She provoked a national debate about something we absolutely should have a national debate about. By contrast, the Ofcom complainer, quietly and anonymously seeking to bend the public sphere to his or her standards makes a depressing figure out of the 21st century citizen.