The other day there was a thing in London. I don't know if you heard about it, but Danny Boyle put on a little, quiet, unassuming thing to celebrate the opening of the Olympics. It was possible you blinked and you missed it. LOL JK (as cool people and Harry Potter fans say). It was the biggest, loudest, most over the top international show since World War Two. Lady Gaga might even have tweeted "Bit OTT isn't it little monsters?" about it, so crazy and big was it. It started, not with a shout, but with a whisper. A nod to all things British. Glatonbury was not on this year, because Danny Boyle had stolen their hill and put it at one end of the stadium, while the Proms (yeah, they're still going on at the moment, been a tad upstaged though) happened at the other end. Sadly there were no great battles between them on the telly. There were sheep and cricket and clouds. Then it kicked off properly. I don't want to go into too much detail of it here, because I checked and my Twitter feed for the three hours of the opening ceremony takes up 31 pages of A4. But quickly: after a little bit of farming, some people dressed as Abraham Lincoln (or Isambard Kingdom Brunel - doing an impression of Abe Lincoln for a fancy dress party) came on and the industrial revolution happened. Chimneys rose out of the ground and the Olympic rings were forged and launched high into the sky, taking with them 7 years of cultivated British cynicism. As we all had to admit, that's a damn good opening titles sequence. Then the Queen turned the whole country into royalists, by proving she has excellent comic timing and is very up for a laugh - God bless ya ma'am.
Then Mike Oldfield's tubular bells started up and some kids in hospital beds appeared in the arena. As the nation moved behind their sofa's fearing that the kid's heads would start turning round in a mass recreation of The Exorcist a tribute to the glory of the NHS started on TV. Volunteering nurses and kids performed a brilliant choreographed dance sequence including JK Rowling reading to kids as a giant Voldermort - if you fear the name, you've already lost really - rose up and creepy dark creatures stalked between the kiddies beds. It turns out that these were Death Eaters and not as I thought, a representation of MRSA. Luckily, Danny Boyle was prepared to fight them off - well, after He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named disrupted the Quidditch World Cup and Triwizard Tournament a few years ago, did you think we wouldn't come up with a contingency plan? In a wonderful move a fleet of Mary Poppinseses were air-dropped into the stadium to fight them off. A wonderful tribute to the NHS, and Britain's Children's charities. Who could fail to be moved by that?
Well, it turns out the Daily Mail. Yes, I'm as surprised as you that they are grumpy. Thing is, I'd been reading lots of Olympics stuff in the Guardian (yes, I read the Guardian, I also turn off lights when I leave the room, wash my clothes on 30 and regret voting Lib Dem - I'm what the Mail refer to as a 'stupid c**t') and trying to write a script, but because I write best when I'm angry and because I always want to get a fair balance, I thought I'd check out the Daily Mail's, for want of a better word, "thoughts" on the Olympics so far. Frankly what I read would have made Jim Davidson blush. "What did they make of this celebration of the NHS?" I hear you ask like you already know the answer but are humouring me. Well naturally it was appalling. Because did you know someone once died in an NHS hospital? How dare the Olympics include a tribute to the NHS? they raged, "what would Kane Gorny's family think?" Kane Gorny was a man who tragically, horrifically and entirely wrongly died in an NHS hospital bed when nurses failed to get him a glass of water for so long that he eventually dialled 999 from his hospital bed to get help, but was still denied it. It's a genuinely horrible case and not something I'm making light of here, but it was one case. The Mail are basing the fact that the NHS should not be celebrated and is immoral, incompetent and should be shut down (they don't say that, but it's implicit in everything the Daily Mail stands for) on one case where some nurses in one hospital massively and horribly fucked up. Nobody, not even Danny Boyle, is saying that the NHS is perfect. I can't have been the only person to have tweeted the MRSA joke when the Death Eaters arrived, but these are a few incidents that don't stop the philosophy behind the NHS - free healthcare to those who need it - or the majority of the work the NHS does being brilliant, worthwhile, worth celebrating (the rest of the world aren't so lucky. Even with the progress of the Obamacare bill the world's biggest nation are still a long way off).
All of which is frankly preamble, the Daily Mail used it as a way into something else. Let's be honest, there are currently more foreign visitors in our country then ever before, and more nations represented, so it would be a real shame if the Daily Mail didn't rise to the occasion and put their long practised racism skills to some good use. But I get distracted back to that legendary opening ceremony.
Next up we have Tim Berners-Lee. The man who invented the fucking internet is there! That's so awesome. Well, I thought it was. A lot of people didn't know who it was, including the American commentators who said: "Don't know who that is," "Google him." If that had been ironic, it would have been funny. I'm not expecting for everybody to know who Tim Berners-Lee is. I don't think I learnt his name at school, I think I should have, but I didn't. But you'd think maybe the people hired to comment professionally on an event he's part of might have read up on him at least. Especially as NBC waited until the ceremony was over to start showing it. It's not like they couldn't have known what was coming up. But they had an attitude of "We don't know who this guy is, so he's not important," a view I think the British should adopt to Mitt Romney from now on.
Next up, a tribute to the music of Britain since the 1960s. As we see a multi-cultural family evolve over time. Remember when I mentioned the Daily Mail being racist? It's now. "This was supposed to be a representation of modern life in England, but it is likely to be a challenge for the organisers to find an educated white middle-aged mother and black father living together with a happy family in such a set-up." Right...everything about this really. It's wrong. I mean this event is happening in East London, I think it would be a greater challenge for the organisers to avoid finding a happy multi-racial family. But certainly an "educated white mother" wouldn't marry a "[note the lack of the word educated, can they read?] black father," no she'd have read up on them and know that black fathers are no good because of er...well that thing er....they all do it.....er..... I hope how massively sarcastic I'm being here is coming across. What utter bollocks. They're just making shit up.
They went onto complain about a celebration of grime music "(a form of awful electronic music popular among black youths)" well, let's look at that:
1) The inclusion of that implies your readers don't know what grime music is and, as good as, tells them they shouldn't check it out for themselves. "Meh...don't listen to it, you wont like it. Here's an opinion about it I can force on you with no evidence. No need to thank me."
2) "awful" is your opinion - and now your uneducated readers' opinions - and that doesn't mean everyone hates it or that it isn't culturally significant to thousands of people.
3) The gist of this sentence is basically "in my day you could hear all the words." It seems the Mail would prefer a tribute to Britain's musical heritage and development that stopped at We'll Meet Again because they just don't understand this modern rubbish and therefore surely nobody else can.
4) "Popular among black youths." Blimey! It's like Eminem and Elvis never happened in your world isn't it? In my experience, white youths love a bit of grime too. I have done no research into this (it always feels to me that doing research to fight the Daily Mail is unsporting. You wouldn't battle a man with a pointy twig using the Trident Nuclear Defence system) but even without research, I would believe that grime music is probably more popular among black youths than white. It's themes and those who make it being from the same ethnic group, it's bound to have more resonance with some than others. But that doesn't make it any less part of Britain's culture. That doesn't make it exclusive to only black people and even if it did, it turns out Daily Mail, that they're just like us and a bit of musical diversity and inventiveness is worth celebrating and embracing. Who would have thunk it?
5) Frank Turner, Mike Oldfield, The Jam, Eric Clapton, The Rolling Stones, Millie, The Kinks, The Beatles, Mud, The Specials, David Bowie, Queen, The Sex Pistols, New Order, Frankie Goes To Hollywood, The Eurythmics, The Prodigy, West Ham Fans, Blue, Dizzee Rascal, Amy Winehouse, Muse, Tinie Tempah, the London Symphony Orchestra ft. Mr Bean, Arctic Monkeys, Sir Paul McCartney, various classical musicians, tell me again what one type of music was it all about? Because I'm struggling to pick out one specific genre and if I did, it would be rock. Don't just pick one song you hate and use that as a basis to say that the ceremony is hateful because it happens to include things popular with groups you hate.
 |
| Germany arrive thinking it's fancy dress |
But fear not foreigners, the Daily Mail wouldn't forget you. Because when it came to your turn to walk into the stadium the Mail complained that we were made to sit through hours of teams walking into a stadium from "banana republics" (just when you think they could get no more vile) that we'd neither heard of nor care about. I'm not saying that section didn't drag, my God it dragged. I'd been and made 10 cups of tea during countries starting with A alone and I don't even like tea. By the time Team GB entered the stadium the teams from Afghanistan (good ol' Welwyn boys it turns out) had all ready finished the sports and were starting the closing ceremony! But it did matter, people did care. This is a global televisual event. People from those countries were watching and cheering on their athletes. Their athletes who'd spent at least the last four years, probably their whole lives, training to be there to represent their nation, the least we could do is watch them - or listen to it from the kitchen while we grab another snack. Why not do what me and majority the lefty scum I follow on Twitter did, and listen to the commentary and try and learn some trivia about these places so we know who they are in Brazil next time. Like NBC and their Tim Berners-Lee gaff, the Mail assumes that if we don't know them, and we don't own them any more, then what's the point of them. They don't care and they don't want to and they're the rag that millions of Britons trust every day to keep them informed. I have no punchline, that in itself is a punchline, a joke so horrid if it was on the BBC they'd call for it to be shut down.
I read that article the other day, and it worked, I was angry enough to write 8 minutes worth of a pretty decent script. I didn't feel the need to channel my anger into a blog that would be very angry and political, but then today my friend Luke tweeted at me to tell me the article had been taken off the Mail's website. Maybe, just maybe, this is because they got so many complaints about it and had a change of heart, but in my opinion it was a "lets hide it and pretend it didn't happen and it's not what we really think, coz some of those Guardianistas are kicking up a right fuss," and frankly, I'm just not sure I want to let them get away with it. This blog may not have the most views, but at least somewhere there is a record of what they Daily Mail thought, and definitely continue to think.
I say definitely continue to think, because you don't have to look far for other hints. Jan "He died of gayness" Moir chipped in yesterday with her comments on the pressure put on Team GB, and it started relatively sane and interesting. She suggested that the pressure on Team GB is probably made worse by every news reporter and interviewer banging on about the pressure we put on Team GB. Of course she was unaware of the irony of theorising that in an article about how we probably all talk too much about the pressure put on Team GB, but I can forgive her that. She talks about the pressure on Zara Phillips in particular who "nevertheless still contrives to sound like a bored Essex under-manicurist despite being a) royal and b) taking part in the poshest Olympic sport." It's almost like she only brought up Zara to have a go at her dead-common sounding voice. How dare she sound normal! Not that the rest of us were even in danger of hearing her voice and mistaking it for that of Amy Childs. Especially as sounding bored, implies that frankly she's not feeling the pressure as much as your article about everyone feeling the pressure too much world like us to believe. After a brief section bitching about the face of one of the commentators (careful, Jan, you're no Sam Brick yourself), she goes on to report on Lizzie Armitstead's effort in her cycling event, where maybe the pressure put on Team GB did play a hand in it because she came second to that Dutch rider, what was her name? It's completely slipped my mind. I'll just look at Jan Moir's article to find out. Oh yes "some bitch from Holland." Yeah, stupid bitch, "snatching" a medal from Team GB, we paid for this event....well us and lots of cooperate sponsors, the least you could do is let us win. Fucking Dutch bitch, how unsporting.
The Daily Mail website is good for one thing, and one thing alone. If you want to watch porn but have content restrictions imposed on your computer, you can always find pictures of celebrities in Bikinis disguised as news KATY PERRY SHOWS OFF HER CURVES IN GREEN BIKINI THIS TIME or HER OFF TOWIE WENT ON HOLIDAY, LOOK YOU CAN ALMOST SEE SOME FANNY or of course they always have pictures of Samantha Brick.
Ah go on then, just for you:
By the way, Marianne Vos, because I do have the respect to find out her name. Well done Holland.
No comments:
Post a Comment