A court in the US has found Robin Thicke and Pharrell Williams guilty of copyright infringement, and ordered them to pay $7m in damages to the family of Marvin Gaye, because their song Blurred Lines sounds like Gaye’s Got To Give It Up.
Now, I hate Robin Thicke as much as the next man, and want to see bad things happen to him, but this idea of having copyright on your art and anything which is a bit like it is bullshit.
I love the BBC. It’s a vital institution: not just a beloved entertainer, but one of our stalwart defences against the hegemony of the media barons. Being publicly funded, it holds a unique moral high ground, from where it should be able to resist the corrupting influence of money and hold to account those who haven’t – such as the once august Telegraph, which is apparently rotten to the core. So it was heart-breaking to read Nick Cohen’s report on how the organisation has forced out the whistleblowers who broke the Jimmy Saville story, and promoted the managers who tried to cover it up.
The BBC’s enemies – that is, every private media company – will no doubt use this as ammunition in their ongoing campaign to destroy the world’s greatest public broadcaster. Yet the problem here is not one of public funding or structure, but of private sector ethos. The BBC has become infected with the same malaise as the rest of the economy: a parasitic class of executives with soaring, apparently uncapped remuneration, but no evidence of any real leadership worth paying for.
The BBC needs less private sector thinking, not more. The actions of its whitewashing managers give the lie to the idea that you have to pay the “market rate” of hundreds of thousands of pounds to get “great leadership”. All you get is a clique of overpaid climbers whose main effort is to protect their own positions and obscene salaries.
You could pull any random Army officers out of Staff College and put them in charge of the BBC – or the Telegraph, HSBC, or any other organisation – and you’d get better, more principled leadership than from any of these self-serving shits, for little more than £50,000 per annum.
So, last night was the final day of Crufts, and I was surprised to discover that people still watch this shit.
The sight of manicured poodles being trotted up and down by a group of vicariously aspirational oddballs is one of those regrettable tastes of former decades, like orange and brown upholstery, prawn cocktails and IRA pub bombings. You’d like to think that these things are all long past. But apparently, Crufts is still shown and enjoyed on prime time television. Perhaps, like the prawn cocktails and decor, it’s experiencing a retro comeback. Or, perhaps, the incomprehensible alien hive mind that is middle England still genuinely enjoys it.
But hey, aren’t I being a cultural snob? Isn’t it all just a bit of fun? Well, no, it isn’t. For a start, there’s the dog who dropped dead, allegedly poisoned, shortly after the competition. Even if it was natural causes, the fact that the owner jumped immediately to the hysterical conclusion of poisoning by a competitor, gives a sense of the type of bitter, deranged competitiveness that Crufts inspires. And if it was poisoning, the conclusion is the same, just more tragic.
Do you find, like I do, that however rigorous you try to be in checking every “do not email me…” option, you still end up receiving corporate spam, marketing emails from every company you’ve done business with? I think they just ignore those boxes, add you to the marketing list anyway, and hope a few of you won’t bother unsubscribing.
What’s even worse is when you find yourself unable to unsubscribe. This often happens, ironically, because you took the most data-cautious route of all, and refused to sign up for an account. They added your address to the mailing list anyway, and now you’ve got no account to log in to, to change your subscription settings.
The solution to this is either to create an account (and they’ve got you after all, the conniving bastards) or contact customer services. But the latter option is often made deliberately difficult. There’s no email address on the website, or if there is it doesn’t work. The final resort is haemorrhaging cash on a telephone call to Bangalore in which you have to navigate a problem resolution flow chart, which you’re not allowed to see, and which is only described to you indirectly via an intermediary, who speaks the same language as you, but not a mutually intelligible dialect of it.
At the end of the phone call, in which you’ve been told to “click the unsubscribe link” and then explained that you’ve already done this 14 times and you’re still receiving emails, you just know that when the operator has told you they’ve unsubscribed you from the list themselves and the problem is now resolved, all they’ve done is click the same link, and you’ll be receiving more spam from them in less than 24 hours.
I’ve developed a new strategy to fight unsubscribable corporate marketing emails, although it could be applied more widely to get resolution on any customer service issue. I call it the CXO Clusterbomb.
Here’s some of my favourite stuff from 2014.
The Daily Mash has really grown a beard in recent years. Once, it was merely an embarrassingly sub-standard attempt to do a British version of The Onion. Now, The Onion has disappeared behind a paywall and no-one’s reading it any more, and it’s The Daily Mash which gets shared virally around social media. Not only that, but the quality of its articles has vastly improved: its choice of satirical targets is spot on, its insights into the absurdity of contemporary politics and society are razor sharp.
For example, there’s this little gem: “Friends enthralled by gig filmed on phone”. Gig-filming is one of those phenomena which are especially bewildering, because everyone agrees it’s shit and people should stop doing it, and yet lots of people still do it.
Here are my resolutions for 2015:
1. Read and see six Shakespeare plays.
I’m going to repeat my successful 2014 resolution and see six more. Again, the focus will be on comedies. Shakespeare’s Globe, which I love, is doing Measure for Measure and As You Like It. The Lion and Unicorn is doing The Taming of the Shrew. I’d still like to see an RSC production in Stratford, but their summer 2015 programme is no good to me. Others I’m interested in include: All’s Well That Ends Well, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Love’s Labour’s Lost, The Two Gentlemen of Verona and The Two Noble Kinsmen.
2. Repair my ZX Spectrum and complete The Lords of Midnight.
Having failed to do this in 2014, I’m having another go.
3. Crawl through the ventilation shafts of a large building.
This has been one of my life’s ambitions for many years. In 2015 I’m going to make a definite effort to achieve it.
Let’s review how I did on my 2014 New Year’s resolutions.
So, Shreddies have dropped their cutesy “Knitted by Nanas” marketing campaign (which was actually a sneaky attempt to pretend they were all lovely people, not a giant baby-killing, child-slaving, famine-exacerbating industrial food-processing corporation). Instead, they’re now promoting their small squares of processed wheat with the following ziggurat of bollocks:
Has anyone else noticed a sudden increase in Jehovah’s Witnesses on the streets of Britain in recent months? I keep seeing them handing out their Watchtower magazines and “What does the Bible really say?” booklets everywhere lately.
Last month, I was mildly curious and accepted one of the offered magazines. (This, along with my cheerful, “ooh, yes please!” seemed to produce a response in the offerer similar to a mild electric shock.) The reason for my interest was the cover story and its headline, “Is Satan real?” According to Betteridge’s Law of Newspaper Headlines, if an article’s headline is framed as a question, the answer is invariably “no”. However, Watchtower violated that rule, because it turned out, much to my surprise, that the answer is “yes”.
