Twilight? Pisslight, more like.
On the death of Raoul Moat
16/07/2010
Must be difficult for news teams, struggling to shed light on this immense planet peppered with stories. Where do you start? You determine which current event is most likely to affect your audience, and place that at the top of your agenda. Then you methodically explain said event, so your viewers or readers retire for the night with a clearer sense of the world, and their place in it.
Unless there’s a gunman on the loose. Then you just shout like a wanker.
That masturbatory term is a fitting one. When it develops an obsession with a particular kind of story, the news turns into an idiot with an erection. Its IQ plunges fifty points and it can’t stop till it’s satiated.
The hunt for Raoul Moat got the news so flustered, it shrieked its reports at a pitch several hundred octaves above satire. Beneath a photograph of Britain’s Most Wanted Man as an infant, The Sun ran the caption ‘Cute baby … but two-month-old Moat clenches his fists’. On the front page, his estranged mother apparently wished him dead.
Moat was so enraged by this kind of coverage, he threatened to kill a member of the public for each inaccurate report he came across, like an extremist wing of the Press Complaints Commission. The police requested a news blackout on stories relating to Moat’s private life. Soon the rolling news networks were reduced to filling hours of airtime with speculation about what kind of campsite he might have built. To make this seem exciting, they’d yabber that ‘the net’ was ‘closing’, or read out exhaustive lists of how many guns the police had.
When the police cornered Moat on the outskirts of Rothbury, the immediate advice to everyone in the vicinity was this: for your own safety, go inside and lock your doors. The BBC’s Jon Sopel recounted this information as he strode down Rothbury high street, moving as close to the standoff as possible. At the cordon, a distressed and tearful woman explained that her mother’s home was in the sealed-off area. She rang her mum. Sopel asked her to put it on speakerphone. ‘That’s a bit impersonal,’ said the daughter. But she obeyed.
Then Sopel borrowed the phone himself, presumably so everyone at home could enjoy hearing how scared the old lady was. After several minutes he handed the handset to the woman’s husband, who was standing patiently on the sidelines, waiting to speak to his wife. The phone was still on speaker when Sopel passed it back, so the man’s conversation with his shaken wife was also broadcast live on air, with a camera trained on his reaction.
In the background, lads attracted by the cameras grinned and gave the odd thumbs-up, lending events the air of a live Children In Need link-up. Why stay indoors for your own safety when you can walk outside and be on TV? If I was fifteen, I know what I’d do.
Meanwhile, other reporters were competing to get as close as possible to an armed confrontation with a mentally unstable gunman with an acknowledged hatred of the media. On air, they whispered down phones so the police couldn’t hear them. Sky’s James Matthews crept to ‘within metres’ of the standoff until an armed officer caught him. ‘Crept up silently, first I knew was when I felt his breath on my cheek,’ he tweeted. There were other tweets from TV reporters, written in a breathless hurry. Channel 4’s Alex Thomson apologised for the rush: ‘Sorry lots of Bberry tweets in dark running thru peoples gardens evading cops – some spelling may have gone astray’.
Eventually a shot rang out. Matthews held his microphone in the air and captured it for posterity. The muffled blast was replayed over and over on Sky, while Kay Burley asked an expert to assess what the ‘significance’ of this single shot might be. The expert thought it sounded like a suicide. He was right. Raoul Moat had done as the front page suggested. The story had come to its end.
And we all retired for the night with a clearer sense of the world, and our place in it.
Get a deadline
15/08/2010
One of the side-effects of having your work appear in a public forum such as this is that people often email asking for advice on how to break into writing, presumably figuring that if a drooling claybrain like me can scrape a living pawing at a keyboard, there’s hope for anyone.
I rarely respond; partly because there isn’t much advice I can give them (apart from ‘keep writing and someone might notice’), and partly because I suspect they’re actually seeking encouragement rather than practical guidance. And I’m a terrible cheerleader. I can’t egg you on. I just can’t. My heart’s not in it. To be brutally honest, I’d prefer you to never achieve anything, ever.
What if you create a timeless work of art that benefits all humankind? I’m never going to do that – why should you have all the glory? It’s selfish of you to even try. Don’t you dare so much as start a blog. Seriously. Don’t.
Sometimes people go further, asking for advice on the writing process itself. Here I’m equally unhelpful. I’ve been writing for a living for around fifteen years now and whatever method I practise remains a mystery. It’s random. Some days I’ll rapidly thump out an article in a steady daze, scarcely aware of my own breath. Other times it’s like slowly dragging individual letters of the alphabet from a mire of cold glue.
The difference, I think, is the degree of self-awareness. When you’re consciously trying to write, the words just don’t come out. Every sentence is a creaking struggle, and staring out the window with a vague sense of desperation rapidly becomes a coping strategy.
To function efficiently as a writer, 95 per cent of your brain has to teleport off into nowhere, taking its neuroses with it, leaving the confident, playful 5 per cent alone to operate the controls. To put it another way: words are like cockroaches; only once the lights are off do they feel free to scuttle around on the kitchen floor. I’m sure I could think of a more terrible analogy than that given another 100,000 years.
Anyway the trick (which I routinely fail to pull off) is to teleport yourself into that productive trance-state as quickly as possible, thereby minimising procrastination and maximising output. I’m insanely jealous of prolific writers, who must either murder their inner critic and float into a productive reverie with ease, or have been fortunate enough to be born with absolutely zero self-critical reflex to begin with.
As for me, I’m stuck in a loveless relationship with myself, the backseat driver who can’t stop tutting and nagging. There’s no escape from Me’s relentless criticism. Me even knows what I’m thinking, and routinely has a pop at Me for that. ‘You’re worrying about your obsessive degree of self-criticism again,’ whines Me. ‘How pathetically solipsistic.’ And then it complains about its own bleating tone of voice and starts petulantly kicking the back of the seat, asking if we’re there yet.
Some days, when a deadline’s looming and my brain’s refusing to co-operate, I’m tempted to perform some kind of psychological cleansing ceremony. More than once I’ve wondered whether I should prepare for the writing process by wishing my inner critic inside a nearby object – a tennis ball, say – which I could then symbolically hurl out of the window before taking a seat at my desk. It sounds like the kind of thing Paul McKenna would do. He’s massively successful and can probably levitate.
But before I can even get round to it, I’m plagued with doubts.
How far should I throw it? How hard? If I toss 95 per cent of my personality into the garden, do I have to go and retrieve it later? What if it actually works? What if I wind up utterly dependent, and need to perform this ritual every time I’m called upon to do anything – even something as simple as asking for change in a newsagent’s – and before long I’m zealously carting a trolley full of tennis balls everywhere I go, violently hurling one into the distance at the start of every sentence, breath, facial expression or bowel movement, and before I know it I’ve woken up screaming in my own filth in a hospital bed until the man comes in with the needle to make it all go away again?
What if that happens?
Yes, what if? So the tennis ball remains untossed, and those ty
ping fingers move unsurely and slowly until the deadline draws sufficiently near enough to become a palpable threat; a looming iceberg whose ominous proximity transforms whines of self-doubt into cries of abject panic. And eventually the page is filled.
So then. To everyone who has ever emailed to ask me for advice on writing, my answer is: get a deadline. That’s all you really need. Forget about luck. Don’t fret about talent. Just pay someone larger than you to kick your knees until they fold the wrong way if you don’t hand in 800 words by five o’clock. You’ll be amazed at what comes out.
Katie Price versus the afterlife
20/08/2010
Wow. I never thought I’d live to see Jordan come face to face with a screaming, wailing, bona fide, three-dimensional ghost. Britain’s top former glamour model and flat-voiced celebrity Aunt Sally confronted by indisputable proof of the afterlife – and on camera?
Surely this simply wouldn’t happen, I reasoned. And then I saw Ghosthunting With Katie, Alex & Friends, and had all my preconceptions confirmed to their very foundations.
We all know what these Ghosthunting shows consist of: underwhelming footage of people standing around in spooky old buildings after dark, listening out for the odd indistinct bump in the night and doing their best to look scared. Approximately 50 per cent of each episode is shot using night vision cameras, which gives the whole thing the look of a Paris Hilton sex tape, but with notably less visible ectoplasm. This is the same as ever, but featuring Katie Price and Alex Reid and two of their friends, a gay couple called Phil and Gary. Gary, amusingly, looks just like Marc Wootton playing Shirley Ghostman.
It’s a slightly flawed concept, because – and I hate to break this to you like this, bluntly, in the middle of a TV review column – ghosts don’t exist.
Nonetheless, many people insist on believing in them anyway. These citizens are beyond help. Ask if they believe in Scooby-Doo too, and they’ll accuse you of sarcasm, even though he was at least based on something with some grounding in honest reality – i.e. the animal known as a ‘dog’ – unlike the spooks and ghoulies that chased him and Shaggy around, which inevitably turned out to be local gas station attendants wearing costumes to scare people away from the gold they’d discovered.
Anyhow. Since ghosts don’t exist, you’re guaranteed to never ever see a ghost in an episode of Ghosthunting, no matter how hard they hunt for one. They might as well film themselves searching for Smurf eggs or trying to jump over the moon. But they don’t. They just stand around breathing. For two hours.
Yes, I hate to be the bringer of bad news for the second time in one column, but this programme is two hours long. One hundred and twenty minutes of non-ghost action. One episode of Mad Men has a running time of approximately forty-two minutes; fast-forward through the credits and you could squeeze in three of those before this was over.
And I bring up Mad Men for a reason, because often nothing much happens in that either – but at least it’s an interesting nothing. Two hours of Katie Price and Alex Reid exploring an empty house may be an apt metaphor for our times, but it’s hardly compelling TV. If it wasn’t for the ads you could mistake it for a screensaver.
Still, the night is not without its controversies. At one point Gary baulks at participating in a Ouija board reading in a chapel, because of ‘the respect thing’. ‘I’m not religious in any way,’ he claims, ‘although I am Church of England.’
Katie Price herself comes across surprisingly well, incidentally, because she spends much of her time tutting, moaning, saying things like ‘this is bullshit’, and giggling whenever Alex Reid tries to communicate with the netherworld. In fact, her lack of respect for the entire spook-chasing conceit causes nigh-on constant bickering among the group, lending events the air of a dysfunctional family on a claustrophobic camping holiday.
Imagine the conversations that might break out if the Mystery Machine got stuck in a ditch for nine hours. It’s like that.
Occasionally Katie stops sniggering and professes to be slightly scared – although it’s hard to ascertain whether she’s telling the truth, since her face never registers any emotion whatsoever, as though it’s never even been hooked up to that part of her brain. This isn’t a Botox thing: seriously, have you ever seen her pull a single identifiable facial expression at all?
She’s like a face on a banknote. Cold and unknowable. And omnipresent. And reeking of money.
** It’s okay. You have not really gone mad. I was kidding up there. Just my little joke. Apologies if it upset you. Although if it upset you to the point where you physically wept onto the book, maybe you have gone mad after all, you poor mad fuck.
PART FIVE
In which a mosque is not built at Ground Zero, everyone in the world is strangled, and Screen Burn comes to an end.
On the ‘Ground Zero’ mosque
22/08/2010
Things seem awfully heated in America right now; so heated you could probably toast a marshmallow by jabbing it on a stick and holding it towards the Atlantic. Millions are hopping mad over the news that a bunch of triumphalist Muslim extremists are about to build a ‘victory mosque’ slap bang in the middle of Ground Zero.
The planned ‘ultra-mosque’ will be a staggering 5,600 feet tall – more than five times higher than the tallest building on Earth – and will be capped with an immense dome of highly polished solid gold, carefully positioned to bounce sunlight directly towards the pavement, where it will blind pedestrians and fry small dogs. The main structure will be delimited by 600 minarets, each shaped like an upraised middle finger, and housing a powerful amplifier: when synchronised, their combined sonic might will be capable of relaying the muezzin’s call to prayer at such deafening volume, it will be clearly audible in the Afghan mountains, where thousands of terrorists are poised to celebrate by running around with scarves over their faces, firing AK-47s into the sky and yelling whatever the foreign word for ‘victory’ is.
I’m exaggerating. But I’m only exaggerating a tad more than some of the professional exaggerators who initially raised objections to the ‘Ground Zero mosque’. They keep calling it the ‘Ground Zero mosque’, incidentally, because it’s a catchy title that paints a powerful image – specifically, the image of a mosque at Ground Zero.
When I heard about it – in passing, in a soundbite – I figured it was a US example of the sort of inanely confrontational fantasy scheme Anjem Choudary might issue a press release about if he fancied winding up the tabloids for the 900th time this year. I was wrong. The ‘Ground Zero mosque’ is a genuine proposal, but it’s slightly less provocative than its critics’ nickname makes it sound. For one thing, it’s not at Ground Zero. Also, it isn’t a mosque.
Wait, it gets duller. It’s not being built by extremists either. Cordoba House, as it’s known, is a proposed Islamic cultural centre, which, in addition to a prayer room, will include a basketball court, restaurant and swimming pool. Its aim is to improve inter-faith relations. It’ll probably also have comfy chairs and people who smile at you when you walk in, the monsters.
To get to the Cordoba Centre from Ground Zero, you’d have to walk in the opposite direction for two blocks, before turning a corner and walking a bit more. The journey should take roughly two minutes, or possibly slightly longer if you’re heading an angry mob who can’t hear your directions over the sound of their own enraged bellowing.
Perhaps spatial reality functions differently on the other side of the Atlantic, but here in London, something that is ‘two minutes’ walk and round a corner’ from something else isn’t actually ‘in’ the same place at all. I once had a poo in a pub about two minutes’ walk from Buckingham Palace. I was not subsequently arrested and charged with crapping directly onto the Queen’s pillow. That’s how ‘distance’ works in Britain. It’s also how distance works in America, of course, but some people are currently pretending it doesn’t, for daft political ends.
New York being a densely populated city, there are lots of other buildings
and businesses within two blocks of Ground Zero, including a McDonald’s and a Burger King, neither of which has yet been accused of serving milkshakes and fries on hallowed ground. Regardless, for the opponents of Cordoba House, two blocks is too close, period. Frustratingly, they haven’t produced a map pinpointing precisely how close is OK.
That’s literally all I’d ask them in an interview. I’d stand there pointing at a map of the city. Would it be offensive here? What about here? Or how about way over there? And when they finally picked a suitable spot, I’d ask them to draw it on the map, sketching out roughly how big it should be, and how many windows it’s allowed to have. Then I’d hand them a colour swatch and ask them to decide on a colour for the lobby carpet. And the conversation would continue in this vein until everyone in the room was in tears. Myself included.
That hasn’t happened. Instead, 70 per cent of Americans are opposed to the ‘Ground Zero mosque’, doubtless in many cases because they’ve been led to believe it literally is a mosque at Ground Zero. And if not … well, it must be something significant. Otherwise why would all these pundits be so angry about it? And why would anyone in the media listen to them with a straight face?
According to a recent poll, one in five Americans believes Barack Obama is a Muslim, even though he isn’t. A quarter of those who believe he’s a Muslim also claimed he talks about his faith too much. Americans aren’t dumb. Clearly these particular Americans have either gone insane or been seriously misled. Where are they getting their information?
Sixty per cent said they learned it from the media. Which means it’s time for the media to give up.
Seriously, broadcasters, journalists: just give up now. Because either you’re making things worse, or no one’s paying attention anyway. May as well knock back a few Jagermeisters, unplug the autocue, and just sit there dumbly repeating whichever reality-warping meme the far right wants to go viral this week. What’s that? Obama is Gargamel and he’s killing all the Smurfs? Sod it. Whatever. Roll titles.
I can make you hate Page 16