Category Archives: Words

A trip to the cut-price past

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Lately, I’ve been dipping into Rewind TV’s reruns of The Cut Price Comedy Show, a short-lived oddity that first aired on Channel 4 in 1982 – right around the time the channel launched. It passed me by back then, but now it’s proving to be a colourful and intriguing time capsule.

The early ’80s was a period when alternative comedy was storming British television, with brash, anarchic shows like The Comic Strip Presents… and The Young Ones leading the charge. Cut Price, by contrast, feels like it missed the revolution: it’s an unlikely mix of vintage variety show, Monty Python surrealism, and low-budget amateurism.

My own encounter with the show began with a fast-forward skim – a personal habit when auditioning old shows. Two familiar faces jumped out at me from very different corners of British entertainment:

  • Roger Ruskin Spear of the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band. Multi-instrumentalist, eccentric sculptor, and the mad genius behind off-kilter Bonzo classics like Shirt and The Trouser Press (“Trouser it to me…”).
  • Stephanie Marrian, former Page 3 model, here gamely cast to “wear saucy outfits and tell jokes… all of which go wrong.” (For some NSFW reasons she was popular at the time, see our bonus gallery: Maid Marrian.)

Rounding out the cast were three less familiar performers:

  • Caroline Ellis, a lady who radiated so much upbeat energy there was probably no need for studio lights. She may be known to you from her later recurring role in Only Fools and Horses.
  • Lenny Irving, co-writer and resident tragic magician, whose act involves endearing attempts to win the audience’s sympathy with ever-sadder tales of personal failure.
  • And Royce Mills, the show’s urbane host. He has the air of a man who’s played many vicars – but went on to voice the Daleks in Doctor Who.

So what exactly makes The Cut Price Comedy Show “cut price”? Well, it’s filmed entirely on a single stage with a shoestring set and a few wobbly props. It feels more like a radio sketch show that’s accidentally wandered into a TV studio. The charm lies somewhere between under-rehearsed chaos and the ‘we’re all in this together’ feel of a school play.

The jokes? Uniformly terrible. Deliberately groan-worthy punchlines were a familiar feature of 70s and 80s comedy shows, but still depended on a sense of timing and delivery to land properly. Those are completely absent here. One episode even has a segment dedicated to “bad jokes” — though it’s hard to tell what made those any worse than the rest.

There are musical interludes, led by Ruskin Spear, a band of eccentrically dressed goofballs and Spear’s mechanical creations. I found the sub-Bonzos wackiness of the songs pretty embarrassing, but one did stand out: the haunting Krautrock pastiche My Friend’s Outside, which you can find in low-resolution here

Below are a few screen grabs from the episodes I’ve managed to catch — to give you a flavour of the mayhem.

The Cut Price Comedy Show was cancelled after just ten episodes. Frankly, it’s a miracle it lasted that long. But despite the dodgy gags and clunky pacing, there’s something disarmingly enjoyable about its gleeful amateurism. The studio audience seem to be genuinely having a good time, and maybe – just maybe – you had to be there to get the joke.

Kudos to Rewind TV for digging up this oddly fascinating relic and giving it another moment in the spotlight. Long may they keep unearthing the overlooked and the outright bizarre from the forgotten corners of TV’s past.

Perfection in a book

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Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico: I’m impressed at how much well-observed detail the author packed into this short study of a modern cosmopolitan couple who discover that, yes, life isn’t what they hoped for.

The couple here is the character. I don’t think we ever learn their names and they’re described as if they’re a unit with mostly shared thought processes. With no dialogue and hardly any events, this book is quite the formal achievement.

The Secret History of Jane

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I recently attended a fascinating talk at London’s Cartoon Museum about the British newspaper comic strip, and wartime cultural phenomenon, Jane.

Created by cartoonist Normat Pett for The Daily Mirror, Jane ran from 1932 to 1959 in its original incarnation, and there were several attempted revivals in subsequent decades. Starting life as a daily gag strip, with jokes revolving around Jane’s life as a Bright Young Thing (a sort of 1920s It Girl, causing a stir on the fringes of aristocratic society), it later developed into a continuing narrative, with stories that sometimes ran for months and Jane juggling a double career as British spy and moral-boosting forces pin-up girl.

Our speaker, Adam Twycross, author of British Newspaper Strips: A Contextual History, explained that the evolution of the strip was closely intertwined with the changing editorial policies of the Mirror, which was launched in 1903 as a paper for women by Alfred Harmsworth (later Lord Northcliffe). In 1914 Alfred sold it to his brother Harold, better known to us today as Lord Rothermere, friend of Mussolini and Hitler. And in the early days of Jane, the situations and jokes sometimes reflected the fascist sympathies of the paper’s owner.

The Mirror soon became known for its strong visual identity and photography-dominated covers, particularly under the art direction of Harry Guy Batholemew who, as a fan of comics and an occasional cartoonist himself, upped the number of cartoons in the paper and commissioned Jane as a feature aimed at adults.

The departure of Rothermere in 1933 due to dwindling sales left nobody in overall control of the board of directors. Bartholemew took charge and swiftly transformed the Mirror into a left wing paper for the working classes. This had a profound impact on the direction of Jane too, with its heroine losing her fortune in the Depression and rediscovering her hitherto-unmentioned roots as a more down-to-earth and relatable northerner.

Jane also became increasingly risqué as time went on, reflecting changes in social attitudes to the female body. By the end of the Second World War the public had become more accepting of nudity in the media, and the association of physical fitness with purpose and vitality that had been growing ever since Britain hosted the Olympics in 1908 was reflected in the popularity of nudist magazines such as Health & Efficiency.

Twycross argues, in his essay More than a Mere Ornament, that “the Mirror’s strategy… was to frame the female body as an iconic signifier for the themes of energy, confidence and youthful irreverence that, as a paper, it increasingly sought to embody. These themes, and their visual projection, seem to have resonated with audiences of both sexes, and the paper continued to appeal to strongly to women…”

And it’s for this aspect that Jane is mostly remembered today. Pett contrived one scenario after another in order to show Jane in her underwear – or in later years, wearing nothing at all. The appeal of this strategy to the Mirror’s male audience goes without saying, but as Stillcross pointed out, the Mirror was read by more women than men and Jane was hugely popular with both sexes. If it had just consisted of titilation, it would never have lasted as long as it did – a theory which is borne out by the later, more overtly erotic incarnations of Jane, which all failed to replicate the original’s success.

But Jane’s adventures were funny, engaging and sometimes even gripping. With her days as a society glamour girl long behind her, Jane was now a plucky defender of freedom against the Nazis. I haven’t mentioned the romantic aspect of the strip, as represented not only by her relationship with regular beau Georgie – in which Jane was usually the dominant partner – but also her occasional dalliances with other men she encountered. How modern for the times!

We might chuckle today at the idea of a strong, independent and liberated female role model who just happens to give men what they want too, but as a character Jane had a lot going for her – it’s easy to see why she appealed to women as well as men.

Jane lasted for more than a decade after the war, until in 1959 the Rothermere family regained control of the Mirror and, in an apparent act of retribution aimed at Bartholomew, cancelled the strip along with other features he had introduced. A sad day for British comics – yet with Norman Pett dying a year later, and the swinging sixties just around the corner, Jane had probably run its natural course. It had a good run by any measure.

The art – and sound – of Jane

Back at our Cartoon Museum event, Twycross brought along a splendid original Pett colour drawing of Jane, along with forces magazines featuring the character, some original John M. Burns artwork from one of the Jane revivals (featuring her granddaughter), and other Jane artefacts. I took some photos below – click them to enlarge.

It was a treat to see examples of the daily strip enlarged on screen during the talk, highlighting detail that were often lost in reproduction. Pett paid a lot of attention to the visual characterisation of both Jane and her supporting characters, as well as her canine companion Fritz who was based on the Pett family’s real life pet dachshund.

Fritz’s lovingly drawn reactions to the events taking place above his head provided a visual commentary on the strip. Whenever a charming cad tried to charm Jane, for example, Fritz would often sniff out – and alert the audience to – the rotter’s devious plans before Jane did.

Twycross ended his talk by playing a few minutes from an exceedingly rare episode of the Jane radio show, rescued and restored from a crackly shellac recording. Jane’s role here as a double agent pretending to work for the Nazis afforded us an amusing dig at her German spy master’s Hitlerian efficency – “Jane, we told you to arrive at 10am. You are three minutes early. That is unacceptable. Unlike you, the German spy Hans will arrive at 10am exactly.” (I paraphrase from memory).

Where’s Jane today

I encounted Jane via the WW2 stories collected in the 1976 telephone directory-sized collection Jane at War. As befits the strip’s cultural significance, a copy of the book is lodged in the Imperial War Museum but it still shows up from time to time in second-hand book shops if you want to bag yourself a copy.

Jane also appeared on the big screen, although some years after her glory days. The Adventures of Jane (1958) is a charming enough, cheap as chips, British B-movie starring Chrystabel Leighton-Porter, Pett’s most famous model for the series (shown below with Pett and Fritz). Not essential viewing by any stretch of the imagination, but curious fans should look out for one of its occasional appearances on the vintage movie telly channels.

Finally, Don Freeman’s book The Misadventures of Jane features over 500 daily episodes, full colour pin-up art, and an interview with Pett. It’s out of print but still available on Amazon.

Visit The Cartoon Museum at 63 Wells St, London, W1A 3AE. Follow Adam Twycross on Bluesky.

Some 21st century pop classics

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This list was compiled while I was preparing to speak at the Battle of Ideas discussion, Is Modern Music Rubbish? Although I was critical about the modern pop industry in my talk, I also wanted to acknowledge some songs which prove, to my ears at least, that commercial pop can still come up with the goods now and then.

Click on the links to listen to the songs or immerse yourself in the whole set on this YouTube playlist.

Is modern music rubbish?

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“The Taylor Swifts and Beyonce’s of this world may be able to top the streaming playlists, fill stadiums, generate headlines, hold court to politicians and even awaken dormant economies when their circus comes to town. But outside of their admittedly considerable number of fans, how many of us could name or hum more than one or two of their songs? Or maybe, any of their songs?”

In October I took part in a panel discussion about modern music at the Battle of Ideas festival in London, along with Aaqil Ahmed, Rushabh Haria, Lysia Leal, Leo Villa and chair Andrew Calcutt. You can watch a video of the discussion below.

You can also watch other debates from the Battle of Ideas festival on the Academy of Ideas YouTube channel.

And, for anyone interested in the list I mentioned of great 21st century pop songs, I’ve posted it here.

The Fallen

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Over the past six months bassist Steve Hanley and drummer Simon Wolstoncroft have both released books on life in my favourite band, The Fall, and there’s another one due next year from Brix Smith-Start.  Brix, Hanley and others have also started playing gigs as The Extricated, delivering convincing renditions of old Fall and Adult Net songs.  I wish nothing but good fortune to these folks, who have all played significant roles in creating a body of music which has enriched my life. But I do have mixed feelings about where this is heading.  My 2009 review of the book that kicked it all off might help explain why…

The Fallen
Dave Simpson, CANON GATE ISBN 978 1 84767 144 8 PAPERBACK UK (2008)

Mark E Smith has been keeping the music press supplied with choice anecdotes for many a year, but interest in his behaviour (as opposed to his music) seems to have ramped up quite considerably of late, fuelled in part by his mid-90s excesses and, more recently, his notorious TV appearances on Newsnight and Football Focus, which garnered amused respect from folks who care not a jot about his band The Fall.

And in theory there’s nothing to halt the ongoing rise in MES-mania, as the stories that make it into the media are just the tip of the iceberg. (You’ll be aware of this if you’ve ever encountered the man or know anyone who’s had the pleasure of his acquaintance). So how long before we have newspaper columns, monthly magazines and entire TV channels devoted to his exploits?

For now, we have The Fallen. This is the story of music journalist Dave Simpson’s two year quest to track down and interview as many ex-members of The Fall as possible, originally for a four page Guardian article. For who better to spill the beans about MES than the men and women who worked for him? Indeed, for many music journos the rapid turnover of Fall musicians is the most visible and fascinating manifestation of Smith’s eccentric behaviour. The fact that the quality of The Fall’s music is seemingly immune to lineup changes seems to be particularly confounding for them. The Fall look like a rock band and yet they aren’t.

This sense of bafflement is captured in the paperback edition’s sensationalist tagline: ‘Life In and Out of Britain’s Most Insane Group’. Simpson puts it more grandly in his introduction: it’s ‘a piece of social history: 30 years of music seen through the eyes of the foot soldiers’. Which description is the most accurate? I’m still not sure.

Fall fans have pieced together a lengthy list of said foot soldiers on the band’s unofficial website, but even that’s doesn’t give the whole picture. Without even trying I’ve met two people in different walks of life who claim to have played keyboard for The Fall, neither of whom are mentioned on the website or in the book. Are you among The Fallen too?

Given the scale of the challenge he sets himself, Simpson does as well as anyone could reasonably hope for, interviewing almost all of the significant figures, plus many others who passed through the band briefly but whose stories are revealing or at least entertaining. I’m pleased to report that my personal favourite Fall anecdote (or a variation on it) is present: the story of how Smith, frustrated with slow progress being made at a mixing session, threw his producers off the desk, arranged the faders in a smiley face and said ‘that’s how we’re mixing the track’.

There’s lots here that is laugh-out-loud funny: the chapter on keyboard player / producer Simon Rogers’ time in the band is especially chucklesome. But whilst The Fallen plays the ‘isn’t MES a crazy feller?’ card for all it’s worth, it is at least honest about the impact of Smith’s more destructive and perverse actions, and it does make some interesting if not particularly original observations about Smith’s approach to getting the best out of his band.

But whilst I can usually hoover up as much information about The Fall as the day will allow, I came close to being defeated by the book. About half way through it started to feel rather empty and unedifying, like a very, very long version of those Mojo one-pagers where musicians talk about how they joined a band and how they left, but all the most interesting and productive stuff in the middle is skipped over. For me, initial admiration for Simpson’s persistance and devotion to his task turned to wonder that he managed to get so little out of most of the people he encountered. It’s no surprise that the famously reticent Craig Scanlon would have little to say, but he’s by no means alone. And when long-serving members of the band like drummer Simon Wolstencroft come away with a few unrevealing pages, it starts to look like Simpson isn’t a very capable or sympathetic interviewer.

I wonder if some of The Fallen took Simpson for a chancer, out to ride the wave of interest in MES, and clammed up accordingly. The book may amount to a big group ‘kiss and tell’ session, but its subjects are not, for the most part, bitter and have no axes to grind. In fact they’re almost universally loyal to their former boss, irrespective of any personal gripes they may have him, which is possibly the most heart-warming revelation in the book. As it makes clear, they value the framework and creative encouragement he gave them as well as the opportunity to be part of something special.

Whatever Simpson’s real motivations, a problem manifested in the book is that he only seems to be interested in his interviewees in so far as they can tell him about their boss. There’s a token amount of biographical chat, but the subject soon turns to and stays with Smith, and the book ends up being the worst of both worlds: unsuccessful as a portrait of Smith and unsuccessful as a portrait of his band members. You get little sense of what they did between tours or albums, how they came up with their contributions to Fall songs, or how they went about their collaborations with each other. Sure, Simpson has a lot of ground to cover, and the book is aimed at a casual audience who may not want to know intimate details of every recording session or fist fight, but there must be a more interesting and informative middle ground than he achieves here.

As for Smith, perhaps trying to work out what makes him tick is the real fool’s errand here. Simpson himself concludes that he hasn’t got much closer to knowing the man: ”Like Macavity, The Mystery Cat, the more you try to pin Smith down, the more he slips away”. And given the limitations of Simpson’s approach, we can be thankful he set some limits to his task. If he had kept going and interviewed Smith’s best mates, accountant and postman (who, after all, says Smith’s house is like the bleeding bank of England) it’s not likely that he, or we, would be any the wiser.

Undeniably The Fallen does add plenty of detail to the picture of the band sketched in recent biographies by Simon Ford and Mick Middles. And, given as Smith is to fantasy, exaggeration and self-congratulation, The Fallen should, in theory, be a useful as an objective counterpiece to Smith’s autobiography, Renegade.

But the difference between the two books is instructive. For all the half-informed taxi-driver-rant style of Smith’s book, I found it unexpectedly moving. Smith may be a habitual liar and he is unsentimental to a fault, but he’s also full of ideas and optimism and I came away from Renegade inspired and excited about life, music and creativity. The Fallen just left me depressed.

That’s partly because Simpson’s book ends on a major personal down beat, his obsession with The Fallen eventually causing his long term girlfriend to walk out. In itself this isn’t particularly noteworthy – it’s not the first time a workaholic has alienated his partner – but it somehow becomes pathetic when Simpson tries to weave it into the myth of The Fall. He relates the tale of how Smith berated a particularly annoying journalist with the words, ‘I fucking curse you. You’ve got the Curse of The Fall’. Two days later said journalist had a near-fatal car accident, in just one possible manifestation of Smith’s purported psychic powers. As Simpson proceeds through his journey, he half-jokingly wonders whether Smith has cursed him too. Following the split with his girlfriend, his own car accident, and various other disasters which befall him, he concludes that he too has fallen victim to The Curse of The Fall.

By this point the book has goes seriously awry. Having failed to carve his way into Mark E Smith’s head, Simpson turns his blunt scalpel on Fall fans and himself, asking ‘why are there no Fall ‘fans’, only Fall obsessives?’, and suggesting that obsession with The Fall is a product of a deep psychological flaw: ‘It’s as if we all have a crack in our psyches or a scar in our experiences that makes us susceptible to The Fall’. But he’s wrong about Fall fans: yes, of course I would say that, and many are obsessed, but there’s also plenty of people who like and respect the Fall but whose obsession goes no further than attending a gig or buying a record every few years.

And he’s also wrong to try to treat obsession with The Fall as if it’s a medical condition. With 30 years of intensive and radical music-making behind them, The Fall represent an important contribution to our culture. And with Smith defying all predictions of demise (physical or creative), they’re the band that keeps on giving. They’re worth devoting time to, even obsessing over.

But obsession can take many forms. You can dwell on Smith’s behaviour and try to work out what makes him tick, as Simpson does, or you can get to grips with the messages which are encoded in Smith’s interviews, his approach to making music, and the music itself. Simpson seems fully aware of this side of The Fall, but in an entirely passive way; as a gobsmacked onlooker rather than engaged participant. None of what Smith has to say about imagination, change or self-determination seems to have rubbed off on him.

Two decades ago, in the song ‘Dice Man’, Smith outlined his personal attitude to risk (‘balls on the line, man’) and challenged to his audience to follow suit: “Do you take a chance, fan?” I’d argue that The Fall’s music is one big challenge to engage with Smith’s ideas: to learn from them, integrate them into your life or improve upon them, or to reject them and go your own way. And to obsess about Smith the man – or his band – is to miss the point.

In this light, Simpson’s imagined Curse starts to look like a self-fulfilling prophecy. And from where I stand, there was no need for Mark E Smith to lay that curse on Simpson, he laid it on himself.

Originally published, in slightly different form, in The Sound Projector issue 18.

Consumer Kids: How Big Business is Grooming our Children for Profit

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Ed Mayo & Agnes Nairn, Constable (2009)

It’s another day, and here’s another book warning us about the evils of modern capitalist society. This one focuses on the influence of consumerism and advertising on the lives of children. As the father of a five year old, I have an interest in the subject, but I’m also sceptical of the grand claims often made about the power of advertising by both its advocates and its opponents. Not so this book’s authors, who boldly state that ‘marketing today is… the very air that [children] breathe’.

The authors are campaigner Ed Mayo and academic Dr Agnes Nairn, who evidently believe that their approach to the subject is more considered and sensible than most; a middle ground between traditionally polarised positions. And, at one level, the book is a useful objective survey of modern marketing practices, which pays particular attention to the new approaches made possible by widespread access to the Internet and considers how these are these different to previous forms of marketing. Any book that can help us understand changes in society is to be welcomed, but the prominent use in the book’s subtitle of the word ‘grooming’ – with its associations of sexual predators and paedophiles – should tip us off that this isn’t going to be a sober assessment.

Sure enough, the emotive language continues inside. If you thought that ‘behavioural tracking’ was a way of companies keeping tabs on what you buy in order to predict what you might want to buy next, think again: ‘Be under no illusions, someone is stalking your child’. And when a conference pamphlet describes children as ‘secret weapons’ in the war of marketing, Mayo and Nairn choose to take the meaning literally rather than dismissing it as an ill-advised example of marketing industry posture.

‘Catching Children’

That’s the title of the first section of the book, which continues in this overheated and alarmist vein, and follows a template set by popular books such as Fast Food Nation – light blue touch paper, stand back and wait for eruptions of middle class outrage. It also shares the latter book’s simplistic worldview: big corporations run everything, we are subject to powerful commercial forces beyond our control, and we all need protection. And none more so than children. Accordingly, almost every liberal bugbear of the last couple of decades is here, magnified through the lens of child protection – advertising, gambling, teen magazines, pornography, anorexia, body image, objectification of women, materialism, supermarkets, computer games, media violence, mobile phones, junk food, salt, plastic surgery, alcohol, Disney, etc etc.

And, like Fast Food Nation, Consumer Kids is largely content to preach to the converted and doesn’t make any serious attempt to persuade dissenters round to its point of view. Take for example the statement that ‘Around half of children aged 8 to 15 eat from a fast-food outlet at least once a week’. This is clearly intended to be self-evidently shocking but what if, instead, it seems a) unsurprising and b) nothing to worry about? In so far as Mayo and Nairn acknowledge other outlooks, their approach seems to be ‘if that hasn’t shocked you, then perhaps this will’.

One particularly unpleasant example given – a company who marketed pole dancing kits to children – seemed so unlikely, even in today’s highly sexualised times, that it prompted me to check its provenance. The reference given in the book turned out to be erroneous, but Googling the accompanying quotes took me to a hysterical newspaper piece about a mother who happened across the offending items in the Toys section of the Tesco website. If you resist the temptation to scream ‘outrage!’ and instead read the actual details of the story, it looks more like an administrative mistake, arising from confusion about how to categorise ‘adult toys’, than a deliberate attempt to sexualise our children.

Such dubious evidence suggests that, before flying into a blind panic and calling for restrictions and censorship, we should ask ourselves what actual impact this all has on the lives of our children? Despite the book’s claim to detail the ‘real effects of the runaway commercial world we live in’, the evidence it presents runs counter to its message. Every allegation of marketing malpractice is undercut by the supporting testimonies provided, which demonstrate children being far more intelligent and media-savvy that the authors give them credit for, inadvertently suggesting at the same time that a lot of the effort put into marketing is wasted and ineffectual.

Yet Mayo and Nairn appear to be blind to this, and their interpretations of their evidence compulsively negative. For example, when they discover that many young girls gleefully torture their Barbie dolls, they may be right, at a stretch, to speculate that their subjects are ‘reacting viscerally against a product that tried to package a very particular fantasy of how they should be’. We might see this though as a healthy example of children growing out of the toys they liked when they were younger.  However for Mayo and Nairn ‘There is no magic, only betrayal.’ (This begs the question, would they prefer young girls to stay enamoured of their Barbie dolls forever?) Likewise, when the inevitable happens and children learn that many adverts promise much but deliver little, Mayo and Nairn can only grant that they have ‘grown to expect disappointment’.

From this glass-half-empty outlook, advertising is seen as a minefield of thwarted expectations and disappointment. But children’s engagement with advertising isn’t that straightforward or one-sided. I remember spending hours poring through a Hornby trains catalogue when I was a child, fantasising about the games I could play if I got this train or that engine shed. It made a more lasting impact on my imagination than the actual, pretty limited, train set I finally persuaded my parents to buy (although I enjoyed that too). Nowadays I’m pleased to see that toy catalogues still grip my son’s generation with similar fascination, and ‘telly selly’ time (as advert breaks are known in our house, thanks to Tiswas) can be a cause of great excitement. The fact that children won’t get to own everything they see doesn’t automatically lead to lasting heartache and pain, and learning that you can’t have everything is an important part of growing up. I’d argue that children’s capacity to engage imaginatively with advertising and their ability to reflect upon its relationship to reality suggests that the situation is a lot less alarming than Mayo and Nairn would have us believe.

Stealth marketing

However the authors have a trump card: ‘stealth marketing’. In other words the secretion of products and brands within TV shows, films and other media. By Mayo and Nairn’s way of thinking, it doesn’t matter how clued up today’s kids are, they aren’t equipped to deal with adverts which they don’t realise are there. This is because ‘the stimuli which kids don’t really notice and which create emotional associations are the ones which influence them in the most powerful ways’

To back this up, Mayo and Nairn cite experiments in which watching films containing product placements apparently influenced children to choose Pepsi over Coke and unhealthy Fruit Loops over a healthy fruit salad. Interesting perhaps, but how much do these cases really tell us? As any parent will know, children will generally choose sugary junk food over the more virtuous equivalent, with or without the guiding hand of the marketing industry. And is persuading people to make a choice between two all-but-identical products such as Pepsi or Coke that big an achievement? (And what if Coke and Pepsi both place products in films, do they cancel each other out?) Such real world considerations do not figure in Consumer Kids, as Mayo and Nairn take the findings of this and other experiments conducted in controlled circumstances and brazenly extrapolate them to society as a whole. Ironically we learn that, in his capacity as a consultant, Mayo tells companies not to believe everything that marketing industry lobbyists tell them, yet he and his co-author seem happy to uncritically trot out any study that fits their prejudices.

Attacking the marketing industry

For a high-profile consumer activist and a Professor of Marketing, Mayo and Nairn seem staggeringly naive and ill-informed about the marketing industry. The picture they paint is, it seems to me, based on superficial observations rather than insider knowledge or insight. Whatever you think of the commercial world, it is not monolithic, and companies are not acting as one to ‘catch our children’. They are competing for our attention, some more successfully than others, and some playing dirtier than others.

Despite claiming that their book ‘uncovers the latest marketing tactics and discovers what big corporations are really up to’, it is not really the tactics that the authors object to but the ends to which they are put. They bemoan pester power when it’s exploited by corporations, but are conspicuously quiet about its government-approved use in schools to get children to guilt-trip their parents into recycling, for instance.

And while they rightly reject the marketing industry’s attempts to give its actions a socially responsible sheen, they take pretty much everything else it says as read. You don’t have to be a genius to see that marketing professionals have a vested interest in persuading people that what they do is incredibly effective (hence the almost mystical significance attached to ‘the brand’) but this beginner-level knowledge seems to have escaped Mayo and Nairn.

Attacking parents

Companies and corporations are not the only ones who come in for criticism. Mayo and Nairn also appear to have a rather dim view of parents, despite claiming to look out for their interests. This particularly comes out in the section about diet and obesity. As many critics have pointed out, the measure of obesity has been expanded in recent years to cover more and more people until it has become effectively meaningless. So we might sympathise with the parent (quoted in the book) who says of their child, ‘I don’t really think about whether [my children] are physically healthy because I can see that they are. If they were ill, I would know’. But according to Mayo and Nairn, if we dispute official advice that our children are overweight or obese, we are simply fooling ourselves.

I could go on…

…because there’s something to object to on almost every page. In that at least the book is good value. Nevertheless, the authors and I agree on something fundamental. There are much better ways of organising society than around commerce and there are better things we could be doing with our collective time than creating Barbie dolls or pole dancing kits. But if we are unhappy with the consumerist society, we need rigorous political debate about what could replace it, and honest discussion about which aspects of it work and which don’t. The jaundiced and one-sided picture presented by this book muddies rather than clarifies our understanding of the world we live in, and the authors’ willingness to cast parents and children as victims, helpless in the face of all-encompassing consumerism, is arguably more disempowering and destructive than the things they criticise.

Having said all that, the second part of the book is a different matter altogether. Entitled ‘Children Set Free’, it looks at ways in which children have turned the commercial world to their advantage, and finally takes the open-minded and inquisitive approach promised at the beginning of the book. This I found genuinely thoughtful and interesting, but it takes up a paltry fifth of the page count and is so bizarrely at odds with the previous chapters it feels like it was written by different people.

Mayo and Nairn suggest these closing chapters ‘could offer a vision of a society that … neither relegates children to the position of someone else’s customer nor assumes that they will be passive victims that need to be protected by older generations.’ A noble sentiment, but the authors should reflect upon their own role in relegating children to that position, before they criticise others.

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  1. I joined Ed Pinsent in the Resonance FM studio for a tribute to Ennio Morricone: http://www.thesoundprojector.com/2009/12/12/ennio-morricone/
  2. A scathing (but fair) piece I wrote on The Fallen, Dave Simpson’s book about ex-members of The Fall, appears in the latest issue of the Sound Projector: http://www.thesoundprojector.com/current-issue/
  3. …as does a lengthy consideration of Peter Doggett’s excellent There’s A Riot Going On: revolutionaries, rock stars and the rise and fall of ’60s counter-culture

George W. Mackey?

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Recently I wondered whether or not some of the acclaim which has been showered on TV-show-of-the-moment The Wire would rub off on The Shield, the cop drama which shares some themes with The Wire and which has, in its own way, been pretty great through most of its seven series run.  We’re now half way through the final series, and the answer to my question appears to be ‘no, not really’.

This may in part be because the first few episodes shown this year were, truth be told, terrible.  I suggested previously that at some point all of The Shield’s strengths become weaknesses, and so it has come to pass, en masse, this season. The already fast-paced show went into plot twist overdrive, in the process becoming detatched from whatever was anchoring it to reality.  As a friend put it, it’s as if the show’s writers suddenly forgot how to tell stories: characters have been behaving bizarrely, in situations which have been set up  unconvincingly, and the contrivances have been piling up left, right and centre.  With the show looking like a lazy parody of its former self, the usually reliable cast of actors have had little choice but to mug their way through as best they could or, in some cases, go into chicken-in-headlights mode.  Only Walton Goggins (normally the closest-to-the-edge member of the cast) has maintained his actorly dignity in the midst of this dramatic car crash.

But, returning to my question, why did The Shield not get more attention when it was actually good?  It’s easy to see why The Wire has caught the imagination of critics at this particular time.  Amongst other reasons its bleak message – that people’s attempts to change their circumstances are doomed to failure – chimes with the modern penchant for celebrating victimhood.  In contrast The Shield is an undeniably intense, macho and testosterone-driven show, in which human willpower is central, and I suspect this sits uneasily with many of the liberal-minded folks who have taken The Wire to their hearts and for whom masculinity is a bad word.  Then there’s politics.  Given The Wire’s subject matter and sprawling scope, left-learning critics and columnists haven’t had to try too hard to reduce it to a salutory tale about the evils of Bush’s America.  It is much more difficult to do the same to The Shield, with its tighter focus and tough questions about morality and human nature.

Or so I thought.  In one of the few features to herald the return of the show, Ben Marshall (writing in the Guardian Guide on 14th February) argued that The Shield works as “a hyper-real depiction of a wounded, deeply conflicted country and even as a metaphor for the Bush administration”, whilst pointing out that the show’s run coincided more-or-less with George W Bush’s term in office.  He provided evidence for his claim drawn from an interview with Shield creator Shawn Ryan who claimed that the character of corrupt cop Vic Mackey was “very much inspired by the Bush ‘my country, right or wrong’ doctrine”.  Michael Chiklis, the actor who played Mackey, also got in on the act: “Bad times often produce great art. If you believe that art is human outcry then there has been a lot to cry about over the last eight years.”.

This has the whiff of hindsight and revisionism about it to me, but of course we can’t know for sure what was in the heads of Ryan and co when they were making the show or how directly they were influenced by political events.  Whatever the case, if The Shield is genuinely intended to be a giant metaphor for the hubris of the Bush administration, it’s not a very good one.

Power is their common factor but The Shield tells us little about George W Bush and vice versa.  For a start, the highly intelligent and calculating character of Mackey just doesn’t make a good proxy for Bush, for obvious reasons.  And it’s not just a matter of personality or strength of character.  The source of their power, their motivations for using it, and the manner in which they do so are all very different.  Mackey is the head of a small but effective team of police officers which bends the rules in order to keep drug dealers under control in a rundown part of LA.  Bush was the head of the most powerful nation on the planet at a time when, post-collapse of communism, it lacked any meaningful purpose or direction.  Mackey routinely takes incredible risks and makes them work.  Bush and other American politicians view the very idea of risk as something to be avoided wherever possible, and haven’t any idea how to see whatever risks they do take through to a successful conclusion.  Mackey and Bush could hardly be more different in what they represent.

Viewing a show like The Shield or The Wire through the narrow prism of anti-capitalism means you’re likely to miss a lot of what makes them interesting.   Take the way The Shield handles the question of money – normally treated as ‘the root of all evil’ (hand-in-hand with consumerism and a love of material things).  True, the pursuit of large amounts of cash does lead the corrupt cops in Mackey’s Strike Team into all kinds of trouble and eventually causes them to turn on each other.  And they do jokily fantasise about using it to bring them a carefree life of leisure.  But their actual concern, as seen again and again throughout the series, is to support and protect their families (as reflected in their description of their ill-gotten gains as a ‘pension fund’).  And material possessions hardly figure in their lives, which mostly consists of incredibly stressful and dangerous work.  If anything, the show raises questions about why Mackey and co feel they need to be go to such extremes to secure a decent lifestyle for their loved ones.  And Bush-shaped blinkers won’t help us answer questions like that.