Not quite at Boethius dialogue standards

You know how it is. It is 3am and the party is dying down to the embers of conversation. People are lounging on the furniture. The i-pod has shuffled onto the Best Unplugged Album in the world…Ever! Then someone asks about the kid down the street who has the disproportionately large head.

DTD: Do you ever see that guy, Nemo, still around?
GT: Yes, I see him around sometimes.
DTD: Do you know why he was called Nemo at school?
GT: Because that was his name.
DTD: Really? That is so funny! I noticed that someone had written “NEMO” on his picture in the School Yearbook and thought that it was his nickname or something because – well – he had an oversized head and children are not nice with that sort of thing. His name – brilliant.
GT: No, kids are bad for that – his nickname was The Atomic Kid.
DTD: Why?
GT: Because of his massive head!
DTD: Oh! That’s cruel. My mum told me that Nemo was highly intelligent because of the size of his head, so I was not to make fun of him.
GT: That's true. IBM giant head-hunted Nemo. They put him in a filing cabinet and called him DEEP BLUE.


DTD: I don’t get it.
GT: That was a terrifically funny joke for the computer geeks out there.
DTD: Right. Yes. Well I don’t get it.
GT: My point is that I don’t think he really is super intelligent. That is possibly why your mum said it. So it would stop you from making fun of him.
DTD: Maybe. But his Dad worked for NASO so there must be some intelligence in the family.
GT: NASO?
DTD: You know – NASO. The space people?
GT: That’s not the space people. NASA – they are the space people. I have no idea what NASO are. Maybe they are the slightly less funded, chewier, own brand of space exploration. Like Coco-pops and Choco-flakes.
DTD: Right enough! For years I thought his dad worked on the US space programme! OK, maybe it is just a genetic thing – his big head – because I heard that his mum needs a special chair at work.
GT: Wait, this is too much! What does requiring a special chair got to do with a large head? Unless, of course, she needs the special chair because she had to give birth to Nemo’s head. Maybe that’s what the doctor said to her: “Mrs. Nemo, your baby has a gigantic head, we hope that it means it will be super intelligent.”
DTD: Don’t be nasty! It is a shame for him.
GT: Sorry, you are right, I’ll stop now.
DTD: Anyway, you are probably right. I don’t think his head has made him that bright. The reason I asked in the first place was that I saw Nemo working in the local supermarket. He is a grocery bag packer. He packed my shopping. He was very good at it too. He says that he is the best bag packer in the shop.
GT: Does he use telekinesis?
DTD: I am changing the subject.

Critique le critique

TV reviews are more difficult than they may at first seem. In the sense they are substantially straightforward. Also, almost every newspaper and magazine has a TV critic. To be noticed from the plethora of everyone commenting their opinion of the latest BBC documentary you have to be rather good.

Charlie Brooker is possibly the best TV reviewer currently around. He is thematic, insightful and funny at will. His writing has a rhythm which drives the reader through the item. Fundamentally his writing gives the belief that he is genuine in his feelings. In saying this, he has become so ubiquitous with his own television shows and television media appearances that he is the TV Reviewer equivalent of Ouroboros. He is in danger of being one panel show guest spot from eating his own feet.

I remember, too, in the free local community paper I used to read several years ago, in between adverts for local hardware shops and articles about local gardeners and their allotment chat, there was a tremendous TV reviewer. He was called David. He had this super knack for picking up on the little details and taking the review to strange new levels of narrative. The only example, unfortunately, that springs to my mind now was where he reviewed a 2nd round match of a snooker tournament. I remember him starting at the fact the camera close-up of Stephen Hendry revealed a short twitch in his eyes at the very moment of cuing. From this he wove in the idea that Hendry was an excitement eradicating Cy-Borg. The piece was far better than I have just described. Honest.

So, by the same coin, to be noticeably bad, you have to be really rather bad. Or even worse, a man named Sam.

I have been clicking on the Guardian’s TV reviewer’s page with all the dreaded fascination of a group of kids poking a severed girls arm found at the train tracks, with a couple of sticks.

If not for the reality of it being the opening of the Sixth Seal, I would have believed Car. D’gan was moonlighting from his own sector writing.

Take Sam’s latest review article [please, someone take it – ho, ho]. It is tantamount to a begging letter for like-ability. A prayer to be seen as knowing. An advert for adopting the N Korea media-model - 23 hours of watching our glorious leader on horseback and 1 hour of X-Factor: worst auditions (renamed: Look at the West! Look how they are Fugly! Do not look at Cheryl! That is an Order!).

This is exactly how it starts:

TV review: The Spice Trail. If you're Kate Humble, look away now. I'm going to be mean and horrid . . .(Sam Wollaston The Guardian, Friday 18 February 2011)
An email arrives, from a television person. He's made a film and wonders if I'll preview it. I don't do previews; this man clearly has no idea who I am, so I ignore him. Another email arrives, apologising – he meant review, not preview. So this time I reply. I'll certainly watch his film, but I can't promise I'll review it; it all depends on how good it is, what else is out that day etc. Unless, of course, he wants to send me money, in which case it not only gets into the paper, it can be guaranteed a favourable review, depending on the sum. If anyone else reading is thinking of doing this, the figure I quote for a positive write-up is "about £4", though to be honest, you may as well put a fiver in because it works out cheaper when you take into account the extra postage for the weight of the coins.

I am all for context, however, should the bribery part be true it casts considerable doubt as to all his "reviews". And it may well be true, by my reckoning, because I can't imagine it was there to be funny.
He goes on:

A couple of days later, a small package arrives: no money, but two small, brown lumps. Drugs! I'm beginning to like this guy. What kind of drugs though, and how does one take them? I'm not taking any chances. I grind up one lump (mmm, the smell rings a faint bell) and smoke it, then grind up the other lump and snort that one. And now my eyeballs are bleeding, and I'm having convulsions, I'm dehydrated and all over the place, but not in a good way. Not drugs then. Nutmeg. Oh, I see, because his film is The Spice Trail (BBC2). With Kate Humble.

Here he is mainly lying, of that we can be on fairly solid ground. Or clinically a moron. Crucially, he has gobbled up 261 words of his limit.

There isn't even any nutmeg in this first episode, it's pepper and cinnamon. Kate goes to India and gets involved, because you have to have a go now, when you're making television. She attempts to climb a bamboo pole, then tries out trampling on bunches of corn to separate them from their stalks. Oooh, can I have a go, let me try, oh I'm rubbish at it, and you're amazing, ha ha ha. You have to laugh a lot, and smile, and agree, and exaggerate all your facial expressions, play the clown a bit, when you're somewhere such as India, to show respect and make the locals like you. And you have to meet them halfway with the language. "Small, small," says Kate, when offered a peck of pickled pepper at dinner, making the internationally recognised sign for "just a bit".

I am sure Sam is trying to tell us something. Maybe it is he would make all attmepts in finding a mature way of getting his point accross and would not make a fool of himself doing something he is less skilled in. And that he is totally blind of the irony therefore of his first paragraph.

She goes to one of those races with big, long boats and lots of dudes with paddles and drumming where she gets very excited. Go guys! And she tells us a bit about the history of pepper, and where the expression "peppercorn rent" comes from.
Then Kate goes to Sri Lanka and does the same with cinnamon. Oooh, can I have a go, let me try, oh I'm rubbish at it, and you're amazing, ha ha ha. To be honest, I had no idea that cinnamon sticks were rolled up like that, by hand. But now I know, 'cos I've cinnamon TV. Geddit?

Nope.

It's quite interesting. I'm going to be mean and horrid about Kate Humble at this point, so if you are Kate Humble, look away now. She's just a teeny bit, how can I say this . . . unspicy. Brilliant on Springwatch, with all those other people. But an hour, on her own – by the end of it, I felt as if I'd been on holiday to south Asia with the head girl.
See, that's the kind of lukewarm review you get if you don't play by the rules. I bet the television guy wishes he'd sent me money now, or real drugs. Christ, my head still hurts.

No it doesn't. Or if it does - it's not because you sucked spice up through your eyes, but because of your displaced guilt about all what that was back there.

Don't forget Sam is paid for what just happened. Admittedly I don't know how much, perhaps not a lot if he really does accept £4-£5 bribes and will happily, crush, smoke and ingest anything he is sent in the post in the hope of a short high or swift death to escape his bread-line existence.

In the end, for me, just a bit forced humour, a risky stratagem to imply that money or drugs would have improved what Sam himself described as a lacklustre effort, inter-cut with (it seems two can play at drug wit) an anemic's lunge at describing what was on the telly, is not even close to passing mustard (and there is a spice one for free). He is a professional critic for a major newspaper and I am horrifyingly convinced he considers that this was acceptable output as such.

Ultimately, it could be that Sam and I have something in common after all this: we both could be doing with a little more Charlie.

Oh! I just got that "cinnamon TV" thing. Sweet Jesus.

Open Letter to the Office Green Champion

Dear Office Green Champion,
The Office’s new intranet site has allowed you to create an eco-group “Friendly Energy” page. Very successful it is too. The page has a handy tip for turning socks into draft excluder “snakes” [take sock/fill it with more socks/staple sock of socks to bottom of door – I imagine are the instructions, not that I have read them]. It also has a monthly question where the answer is always in the currency of heated microwave meals. This month's number of microwave meals one can heat with the power saved from turning off 15 office PC monitors when not in use is truly harrowing.

However, from this informative and passive step you have quickly become militant – a regular Swampy – office bins labeled for various recycling materials only have just been the start. Reducing default font sizes, lecturing about the evils of polystyrene and hemp craft barter days have followed.

Tonight I see your precious Sun is going to be bombarding us with what I am calling “kill rays”.

I bet you are regretting all that recycling to help it now.

Yours,
G. Tombs

The Day Greville Chased The Dragon

The memory only resides as the crude, blocky images that old memories tend to end up becoming. As such, it is almost a certainty that it will become a vivid hallucinogen reality, should dementia ever set in.

That I was reminded of it all was during a conversation which led me to ask:
GT: Did you ever do that dragon slaying thing at primary school?
Name changed to protect the innocent: Do you mean where you had to work out how to defeat the dragon?
GT: Yes! You had to find the dragon and defeat it.
Name changed to protect the innocent: Yeah – that was good fun. You had to answer some questions in class from the workbook and then in groups of 3 you got to go to the computer in the corridor and play the game. It was - I think - called, "Through the dragon's eye". It was on one of those big floppy discs! We used to think the graphics were so -.
GT: - ...never heard of that. I was put on a public bus, taken to a house and had to hunt an actual, proper dragon.

From what I recall, it was a day trip out of school. We were taken to one of those large detached houses in the New Town. A witch met us at the door and, in a room where black-out blinds were half-drawn over tall windows, she told a tale of a fierce, fire breathing, Dragon somewhere in the house’s upper floor. But it was worse than just that. The dragon, you see, was far more dangerous than what we could have possibly imagined: it had learnt simple mathematics.

The witch hoped we could help her defeat it by reminding her about potions and solving the dragon’s elementary arithmetic puzzles it had set as mental traps along the way.

With witchcraft, dragons and sums, it was the anti-Bible world way before Disneyland’s Harry Potter Waltzer ride.

[Now Bible World: there was a school trip. Before you start thinking I am even older than math dragons, Bible World was a modern attempt at making the history of the written Bible cool for kids. Kids who were all too aware of Nintendo GameBoys.

Bible World, despite its cheque writing name, turned out to be a largish vestry room in a converted church where you could talk to a man in sackcloth who said he was a monastical scribe from circa 1300AD and busied himself by copying out bits of Biblical verse on parchment with a feather that had a Biro in. The claim (and main selling point) of a virtual simulator of a shuttle craft that would transport us through the Galaxy, and therefore through time itself, to the Biblical era was no more than a boxed off part of the room where there was seats and a 19” computer monitor showing the Windows “Starfield” screen saver. We had to get our hands stamped off that monk for that! We had to, otherwise the Space Border Control Officer waiting at the false room wouldn’t less us go past him and sit on one of the office chairs to watch the screen and hear the recorded booming voice of St. Jerome telling us about his life, while the pilot jiggled about in front]

In the morning we had to train. As anyone knows, you can’t simply get off a number 44 bus, listen to a witch’s plight about a dragon savant and march upstairs. That is suicide in a basket. Nope – you need skills. It turned out that those skills were using poster paints and sticky crêpe paper to create a picture of a dragon and then change from school shoes to gym plimsolls and act out being a dragon until lunchtime. That part made a bit more sense: A “to know your enemy you have to become your enemy” sort of Sun Tzu.

After a spot of packed lunch in the garden, we were to begin searching the upper floor for the room with the dragon in. But while we had been out, plotting our strategy over a packet of Space Raiders, the dragon, we were told by the witch, had come down stairs (obviously smelling our meaty bones) and had managed to stand in some of the paint we had left out when it heard us returning, in quick retreat.

This was the break we needed. The math dragon’s one mistake. We followed its painted foot prints. Occasionally the witch would stop to ask us to solve a times-table question, scrawled by the dragon with chalk on the floor. We were obviously getting close, the questions were getting trickier: 8x7 – Clever girl.

Eventually we got to a door and solved the long multiplication question to open it. Inside, in the corner, was the dragon! The witch asked us what to do? “Throw the potion!” and she did and closed the door. “That’s it! You have defeated the Dragon! The land is safe! Oh thank you, brave children!”

Are you sure? Do you want to maybe open that door again and check? Because on reflection it seemed to be just a kind of semi-mechanised papery contraption merely in the shape of a dragon. It had smoke coming out of the nostril holes but that could have been from a smoke machine which, unless it has a touch of asthma, would account for the wheeze noise. And it had red bulbs for eyes. Maybe this was a well executed rouse and the dragon is still at large? Was it not all too convenient, you know, when you consider the situation?
-------------------------------------
In fact, now I am thinking back on it, I am pretty sure that she was a teacher acting or something and not a real witch.

What the hell was actually going on?

You dumped me because you said I was ugly – but look at me now after 2 years of intensive beauty surgery, you fool!

There is a fundamental truth about shows such as the one brought to my attention recently called, “Re-vamped”. Re-vamped, I believe, is a Canadian exported show that has taken a segment piece from the likes of, notably, The Ricki Lake Show and stretched it into a series.

Women, who have been divorced by their husbands because he said they were too fat and ran off with the girl next door or lost interest in the relationship after their young twin girls died [apparently and despairingly genuine for one of the women involved], are taken on a crash course in fitness, diet and burlesque dancing. The women then each perform a strip-tease routine out of some sexy garb in front of their ex-husbands in a club. The forthright message is so loud and clear it might as well be lasered onto the moon out the tips of their tassels by the final over-chair-leg-swing-step-and-lunge flourish: See! You made such a mistake divorcing me!

The only conclusion reasonably invited to be made by the man is: “Yes, well, possibly if you had done a bit more of this while we were married I wouldn’t have become as pre-occupied with the young lady who moved in next door, studying her regular trips to the swimming baths for a discernible pattern. But back then, you ate a lot of cheap pies and thought that dancing for male attention was demeaning of your aspirations of being a successful business woman. There was no hint in the many years of marriage, frankly, of this effort.”

Yeah that’s right! [Snap of fingers top left, snap of fingers middle right, snap of fingers lower left] Look at the mistake you’ve made! You said I was overweight! Well who feels bad now? Go Ricki! Go Ricki! No, wait, I mean – you just been re-vamped! Woo Hoo!

Is this really what empowering means to women? Is this really an acceptable method used to restore self-esteem issues? Isn’t it, well, desperate?

I would have suggested her coming out from behind the blue velvet curtain in the sultry decorated club looking exactly as she did when married (probably, and nothing wrong with it, a little dreary) and simply approaching her ex-husband to say: “Since you divorced me I have got on with my life, improved it in many areas I felt our relationship held me back from and have become happier now than when I was with you. I can only sincerely hope you are even half as content as me.”

But then, women are an odd bunch. An odd, sexy revenge strip dancing bunch.

Hello, Dermott O’Leery here

"For the month of January this year Greville Tombs posted a voting form about the type of content people might like to see more of in his blog. The period of voting has now... closed.

The results are in. The votes cast have been authenticated by an official independent adjudicator."

Ok, it is not really the little bloke from such TV as X-Factor and Little Brother and... that quiz where one guy has to beat 100 others - the name escapes me. It is just me, Greville.

But the vote was close. Real close. Just the single vote in it, in fact. Or, to put it another way, it was emphatic, absolute and unanimous. 100% clear. This is statistics in action, people.

But just to be sure I counted that solitary vote not just once, but again. One. And… One. Then again…. One.

The result is more reviews, less everything else.

Thank you, brave soul, for jumping into the breach and taking part and I will see what I can do.