Leonard Rossiter, The Sun, weirdness and wanking

 

Here we go again. Someone else has made an allegation of sexual misconduct against a deceased showbusiness personality at the BBC. As I said about the Savile stuff, such claims need to be taken seriously, although the Leonard Rossiter file would appear to be rather slimmer.

But again, I’m more interested in the way the story’s being played, particularly by the BBC’s less placable foes. The Rossiter claims were first published in The Sun, but were quickly picked up (with attribution) by the Daily Mail. Now, normally when one paper runs an article that’s based on an exclusive by another story, they at least have the grace to hone the facts to their own in-house style, rather than simply copying and pasting the original. But there are a couple of stylistic quirks that struck me as interesting in the original version, and were then carried over in the Mail’s version of events. The first is the description of what it was that Rossiter was doing. In The Sun, Stephen Moyes says that he “performed a sex act”. Leon Watson’s story in the Mail uses exactly the same language. 

Now, I don’t know exactly what was going on, but I’m guessing that the allegation is that Rossiter was masturbating. I can’t honestly see another interpretation, although I’d be happy to hear any ideas you might have. Now we know that both The Sun and the Mail have a weirdly conflicted attitude to sexual activity, drooling over young flesh in various levels of undress, but steering clear of anything too anatomical. But both these articles demonstrate how morally bankrupt such guidelines are. It’s a story about an allegation of attempted rape and in both papers, the word “rape” is used several times. Quite right too. But neither Moyes nor Watson can bring themselves to say outright that Rossiter was masturbating. The only feasible explanation is that the journalists (or, to be fair, their respective editorial overlords) think their readers will find an act of masturbation to be more horrible and disturbing than an act of rape. I don’t know about you, but this strikes me as a rather peculiar paradigm of sexual morality, especially in newspapers condemning the “cesspit of depravity” (quoted in both stories) that apparently exists at the BBC.

The other oddity is about the context in which the assault is alleged to have taken place; during the production of Nigel Kneale’s play The Year of the Sex Olympics. Both Moyes and Watson use the same adjective to describe the work: “weird”. Now, I don’t know if either Moyes or Watson has seen The Year of the Sex Olympics. If they haven’t, I wonder on what basis they presume to assess its weirdness. They might like to know that it’s a dystopian fantasy about an elite that controls the moronic masses with a stream of crass media programming, ranging from non-stop pornography to a reality TV show that descends into murder. And I wonder, in the event that they ever get round to watching the show, whether these employees of Associated Newspapers and News International might experience a nervous frisson of recognition. If they don’t, they must be a bit weird.

PS: My friend Nick has given the story a bit of a fisking and, to say the least, the details don’t really stand up. In his words: “(a) There aren’t any rehearsal rooms at Television Centre; (b) What was an extra doing at rehearsals anyway? (c) The scenes being described were, in any case, shot at Ealing Film Studios.” But if they’d mentioned that, it would have rather diluted the BBC connection that was the only reason the story made it into The Sun.

Jimmy Savile: a few thoughts

No, this isn’t really about Jimmy Savile himself, or what he did, or what he’s alleged to have done. That’s all bad; it’s pretty clear that the man was a vicious abuser who used his charitable deeds as both cover and as a cynical, implicit bargaining tool; you don’t need me to tell you any of that. This is more about the responses and reactions to what we know.

First, about the rumours that were apparently circulating for decades about Savile’s behaviour, and the fact that nobody ever acted about them. Well, of course there were rumours, because Savile was a very famous person and there are always rumours about very famous people. Way back when I was completely outside the media loop, I heard rumours about Jimmy Savile; oddly, all of them revolved around his apparent fondness for acts of necrophilia, which he supposedly indulged under the cover of his voluntary work as a hospital porter; I don’t recall anything about child abuse. And I heard other rumours too, about all sorts of people, about the Queen Mother and Michael Portillo and Morrissey and Bobby Moore and Prince Edward and Bill Treacher and Jason Donovan and Patrick Moore and Kevin Keegan and Gerald Kaufman and Una Stubbs and any number of Radio One DJs. Some were accusations of serious criminal behaviour, some were about harmless quirks that, supposedly, the relevant parties preferred not to disclose. Anyone remember Scallywag magazine? The John Major story was pretty bland compared to some of the stuff they came up with.

I have no idea how many of these tales were wholly or partly true and I probably never will. I’m not suggesting that the accusations about Savile are fabricated, but if journalists followed up every celeb-related rumour that some bloke in the pub insisted was God’s honest truth, there would be a hell of a lot of libel suits knocking around, and even more dead-cert stories that turned out to be dead ends. You need more than urban myth or gut instinct. Yes, Savile was odd, eccentric, weird, creepy. People said dodgy things about him. He had strange hair. The same goes for Chris Jeffries, the entirely innocent Bristol landlord caught up in a murder investigation a couple of years ago. That didn’t end well for the papers concerned, did it?

But a big chunk of the press seems to be using the Savile saga as leverage to redeem itself after the whole phone-hacking/Leveson enquiry saga. Look what happens when celebrities get the upper hand, they bleat, when the fine upstanding spirit of British journalism is cowed by libel and privacy laws. Which is utter bollocks, frankly. If they were using their various scams and skulduggeries to expose real, serious, extensive wrongdoing rather than just dicking around below the surface of Hello-magazine banality, then we’d be impressed. It was in the public interest to know that Savile was abusing girls; it was not in the public interest to know that Charlotte Church might be having boyfriend trouble. Which one made the front pages?

Moreover, certain papers also see the scandal as a stick with which to wallop their eternal nemesis, the BBC. Yes, I don’t doubt that there was a culture at the BBC in the 60s and 70s and even into the 80s that by modern standards would seem pretty toxic and that some men were able to use their power and influence to take sexual advantage of people with less clout. Again, that was bad and wrong, and we need to know about it. But are we to understand that everybody employed by The Sun and The Mail and The Telegraph at the time was entirely without sin? Or that, had any equivalent rumours been knocking around about high-profile journalists and editors at those papers, there wouldn’t have been a temptation to either cover things up, or deliberately look the other way?

Again – bollocks. The BBC was a product of its time, as was (and is) every other institution. It looks wrong now, but it was wrong everywhere, not just in the studios of Top of the Pops or Radio One. Low-level sexual assault could be passed off as horseplay and if anyone complained, it was evidence of a sense-of-humour failure or lesbianism or the time of the month. And once you allow that, the tolerance level for bad behaviour rises incrementally, until you get vulnerable girls being molested in dressing rooms.

But that wouldn’t be tolerated now. And this is the ultimate, sanctimonious hypocrisy of those currently laying into the BBC. A modern-day Savile would be stopped in his tracks because women and children would be empowered to speak up. He wouldn’t get the benefit of the doubt just because he was rich and popular and male. And do you know what caused this turnaround? Not the fearless investigation of plucky newspaper journalists, that’s for sure. No, it was the changes in attitude wrought by feminism and by so-called political correctness, gone mad or otherwise; the very social forces still roundly condemned on a regular basis in The Sun and The Mail and The Telegraph. As it happens.

PS: In the London Review of Books, Andrew O’Hagan goes deeper and further back.

Social Me, a name I call myself

Undeterred by my fleeting flirtation with Klout and passively encouraged by that digital pimp Everett the-sometime-Legend! True, I have joined some grisly entity going under the name of Social Me, which essentially casts a baleful eye over one’s Facebook posts and treats them to a bells-and-whistles version of what we used to call the Gunning Fog Index. So:

• I like to talk about Literature, Social Media, and Philosophy. I am Artsy and Confident. (Really not sure about the last one.) I post statuses to Facebook most often in the morning.
• My posts are most often Humorous, Loving, Excited and Happy. (Yeah, right. And some of them seem to come under the heading “Your Day” which implies a certain diary-like banality. Gee, thanks.)
• I post about 9 statuses per month. The average person posts 12.8 statuses per month. (So I’m officially below average. Yay!) I posted the most statuses in one day on Jan 18, 2009 (which was the day after I joined Facebook) with a total of 6 statuses.
• I am Extroverted, Confident, Strong-Willed, Organised, Artsy. (In most of these, only on Facebook, I’d suggest. And the only one that sounds at all valid is “artsy” and I’m not sure what it means, especially as its antithesis is given as “Traditional”.)
• I have posted as many words as a book. (32,049 at about this time yesterday; and not including the Facebook post that will be automatically generated when I publish this blog post. How meta is that?) In fact, I have posted more words than Charlotte’s Web, which has a total of 31,938 words. (Yes, but it’s a very short book. I’ve actually written three books that are longer than that. To be fair, none of them was as successful or as good as Charlotte’s Web, although they did make me cry almost as much.)
• My most popular updates were smartarse one-liners about Kindles, Mo Farah and Rebekah Brooks. Here’s where it gets interesting, though:
• I use more words per sentence than 88% of people.
• I use more emoticons than 90% of people. :)
• I use more commas than 87% of people.
• I use fewer exclamation marks than 94% of people.
• I use more apostrophes in his writing than 86% of people.
• I use longer words than 96% of people.
• I use words with more syllables than 96% of people.
• I use fewer concrete words than 97% of people.
• I use fewer imaginative words than 99% of people.

I’m guessing/hoping that “imaginative words” is a euphemism for words that don’t really exist. And to be honest, all the stats about punctuation and so on are pretty irrelevant unless we know whether I’m using the many apostrophes and few exclamation marks properly. And it’s only particularly relevant if you’re labouring under the misapprehension that the real “you” exists within the ones and zeroes of your Facebook profile; whereas mine is on Twitter, of course. The real “real me” went out to buy some milk some time in 2008 and hasn’t been seen since. So I don’t know what any of this means. And I’m still baffled about the whole “confident” thing. Oh go on, you do it for yourselves and come back and tell me what it says and give me your best guess as to how accurate it is. Especially the stuff about commas.

Of course, no sooner had I disgorged my Zuckerbergoid self into the Social Me bucket, I remembered that there’s another method of self-analysis via one’s own writings that doesn’t focus on the banal, superficial blatherings of my pokey/likey persona. So I pasted a few recent posts from Cultural Snow into I Write Like and discovered that I write like HP Lovecraft, which is intriguing because I’ve never knowingly read more than two or three sentences of Lovecraft’s prose. And then I did the same thing with some text from my new David Foster Wallace blog – which you’re all reading, I know – and was informed that, no, actually I write like the late David Foster Wallace. Which is at one and the same time entirely to be expected and also a bit weird, as if I’ve been typing on someone’s grave. To coin a tortured simile that DFW would probably spurn; although he does at one point come up with the sentence “He went to the bathroom to use the bathroom” which is pretty bad. Hey, I can say that! I write like him! Which means I’m pretty much him.

Doesn’t it?

Absolutely the last word on Kate Middleton’s frontbumps

Oh dear. All sorts of issues bump together; the privacy of the individual; the status of the celebrity; the power of the media; the implied misogyny of the male gaze; hooray, boobies. And yet what is there to say? Essentially, it was wrong of the photographer to take the photos and wrong of the various magazines to publish them; but it was probably also a bit dumb of the Palace to get quite so openly annoyed about it or to take it to court; a deep sigh of disappointment might have done the trick better. (And the same goes for Muslim reaction to that idiotic film that probably doesn’t even exist in its full state.) Essentially, this is the sort of crappy thing that happens to celebrities these days. Do the royals really want to be celebrities in the modern sense? Because they do have a choice, to some extent at least.

But it could be worse for them. Imagine that someone took the photos, and nobody wanted to publish them; not out of any sense of propriety, or even because of fear of legal sanctions, but because they didn’t think that anyone would care one way or the other. What would that say about the status of the monarchy today? Or – worse for the Duchess herself, maybe – what if the pictures were spurned because the dugs in question didn’t match some industry standard for bounce and perkiness? Or imagine that they were published and ignored because it turned out that all that wishful blather about the Olympics finally shaking us out of our celebrity semi-coma had come true and for now on we would only get excited about people with real talent and real personalities. And their tits, of course.

The infinite knot of aboutness and my ebong hair

I spent the weekend in Hong Kong, mainlining dim sum and Picasso, just about dodging Typhoon Vicente and barely even looking at the  wondrous interwwwebblynets, so it was something of a surprise when I got back home and found that I was suddenly part of a Facebook group called Bloggers. Maybe this is what the future looks like, one bit of social media talking about another, Tweeting about a LinkedIn group for MySpace diehards, taking to Weibo to ask to what extent your Klout score is affected by your activities on Pinterest, Instagramming your LibraryThing profile page and posting the picture on Google+. And real life falls down somewhere between the cracks, where the WiFi connection isn’t so great. By the way, the picture isn’t really anything to do with all this, except that I vaguely remember I found it on Facebook and it’s now on a blog, so feel free to decide how relevant that is and scrawl your findings in magic marker on the nearest wall. And the following email that I just retrieved from my spam folder has even less to do with anything, but it may serve to fill the gap while I think of something actually worth blogging about:

 I AM INTERESTED IN MARRIAGE
Am Engr william philip.I hail from lancaster UK,I attended oxford university,where i studied marine engineering,Am 47 years old single and work as a marine engineer in the submarine section. Am elegant,vibrant,vigorous and full of life I was opporturned to glance through your page and personnality profle.You seem to be the woman of my choice.You scarlet lips,ebong hair,well biult physique charming face,sedycing eyes are of great intersest to me.In fact,your entirety commands my variety of interest

PS: And a neat line by Daphne Wayne-Bough from the aforementioned group: “Facebook is like meeting in the pub. Blogging was more like inviting people round to your house.”

Georgia Ford and the unforced error of Twitter fame

As gawky Spider Man doppelganger Andy Murray wielded his claymore in the vague direction of the Swiss Tarantinobot, a young woman in Sunderland by the name of Georgia Ford asked a question:

Is wimbledon always held in London?

Unfortunately, she asked it on Twitter and within minutes it was being RT’d around the planet; last time I looked, about 5,000 times. Ms Ford was clearly embarrassed; she mustered some admirable Mackem defiance, but her unwanted fleeting celebrity was evidently too much and she deleted her account.

That was when the sanctimonious finger-wagging kicked in:

Anyone who abused @Georgia_Ford for a simple mistake need to have a long hard look at themselves. Sort yourselves out for goodness sake... Why would anyone be mean to her?? It was cute!... theres a line between banter and abuse... Can people stop being horrid to @georgia_ford please. The tweets may have been more than a tad amusing but no excuse to be mean to her!?... To the pitiful excuses for human beings that hounded Georgia Ford from twitter. Every moment of your life will be under scrutiny….from me... I wish that @Georgia_Ford had not been shamed into deleting her Twitter account. Time for those who mocked her to eat some crow...  @georgia_ford if you're reading this then ignore the haters and hold your head high. x... I miss Georgia Ford.

...and so on. Now, I don’t know whether it was the sheer volume of responses that persuaded Georgia to shut down, or one particularly vitriolic message in particular. As far as I can see, the vast majority of the RTs were unadorned with anything apart from the occasional raised eyebrow (or emoticon equivalent thereof). And I know online bullying is a serious problem, especially when one person is singled out by a pack. But this wasn’t some sort of Twitter Borg acting in unison; it was just something that lots of people independently thought was funny, and was thus passed on to some more people, and so on and so on. The Huffington Post sprang to her defence, but in doing so they had to mention the original tweet, surely compounding the original problem. 

A journalistic myth has appeared in the last few years, about “Twitter lynch mobs” and “concerted Twitter campaigns”. I’m sure these things exist, but more often than not, they’re the result of a large number of people independently coming to a similar opinion about something. It’s not much different from lots of people liking a catchy song and humming it, or lots of people laughing at joke on a TV show and retelling it to their friends. It’s very sad that Georgia Ford felt the need to leave Twitter, but what do her erstwhile defenders want? The next time someone asks a silly question, we should just grit our collective teeth and act as if nothing happened? That wouldn’t just harm Twitter, it would bite a huge chunk out of modern culture and discourse.

And now, back to the tennis.

The BBC, the Jubilee, the Daily Mail and the hard cash value of abject stupidity

I won’t, if you don’t mind, spend too much time pontificating on the BBC’s coverage of last weekend’s Jubilee fandango, chiefly because I didn’t watch it, apart from a brief YouTube clip of a hula-hooping Grace Jones, who was utterly superb, and a rather briefer moment of Cheryl Cole sounding as if all the toilet attendants in that world had chosen that moment to punch her in the vocal cords; or maybe she’d caught Prince Philip’s bladder infection. Apparently the rest of it wasn’t very good. 

But the subsequent commotion over the inadequacy of the Corporation’s work is about far more than mediocre pop stars and posh people looking at boats. As I understand it, the problem is that the BBC’s programming over the weekend was geared too much to celebrities who didn’t know what they were talking about. My instinct is that this is indeed a bad thing: the shift in all news media over the past 30 or so years from an emphasis on empirical facts and informed debate to vapid, glossy, concocted quasi-realities where fame (however transient) trumps ability is something to be deplored. 

What sticks in my craw, however, is that the media outlets leading the charge against the BBC are the worst offenders when it comes to replacing hard news with vacuous, airbrushed twattery. Look at the homepage of the Daily Mail. Look at the stripe of shrill banality down the right-hand side, the gibbering sub-Kardashians falling out of limos and bikinis, the gittish prattle about shoes and hair and cellulite, the cheerful dishonesty that this cynical collusion with media PR machines might in some way be described as journalism.

Ah, says the Mail, but that’s just celeb fluff. The Jubilee was a royal occasion, and worthy of more respect. Well pardon me, but which were the media organisations that hitched themselves to Diana three decades ago and turned a stuffy, self-effacing entity into just another manifestion of Celebrity Inc? Who was it who started prattling about the Queen’s grandson’s wife’s sister’s arse? Was it the BBC? Was it? The Mail and the Telegraph and the Sun are not annoyed that the BBC’s coverage of the jubilee was superficial, banal and ill-informed. They’re furious because superficial banality is what they do and they don’t like anyone else encroaching on their turf.

Now, I believe in a free press. If the Daily Mail wants to make a few quid from morons looking at pictures of other morons, it should be allowed to do so. But isn’t there a certain level of hypocrisy, cognitive dissonance even, in burrowing so deeply into the steaming shitpit of vapid, pointless celebrity, then shrieking like Cheryl Cole’s singing coach when the BBC skims a little off the top?

The problem, of course, is nothing to do with the Jubilee. The problem is the licence fee. The privilege of public funding brings with it the responsibility to maintain a certain level of quality, below which the Daily Mail happily ducks every day. But if everyone pays the licence fee, that includes a certain proportion of fudge-brained Kardashian fans who switch off if anything more demanding stumbles into view; and the BBC has a duty to cater to them as well. There’s a serious debate to be had here, and a difficult one because it touches not only on money but also on notions of cultural hierarchy and social class, and the British find it very embarrassing to talk about such things; although since the mainstream media seems entirely capable of celebrating the embodiment of inherited status and privilege without once mentioning social class, maybe it’s entirely possible to sidestep that particular elephant. But until the Mail admits that it wants to fart raw, wet stupidity into the dull eyes of its readers and what it objects to is subsidised competition for said eyes, its own contribution to that debate should not be taken seriously.

New nods and updated winks

In a piece of research that will startle very few, mathematicians at Dartmouth College have shown that modern writers are far less influenced by “the classics” than their predecessors were. Well, yes, um, maybe. Of course, nobody reads Walter Scott any more; or, more to the point, nobody feels the need to pretend to have read Walter Scott any more. The canon is still there, but like a football team or the cast of The Archers, the list of names has changed; so we get that slew of novels about Henry James a few years ago, or maybe Martin Amis rehashing his fanboy schtick about Saul Bellow.

So writers are still influenced by writers, but they’re different writers. What’s really changed is that the references aren’t just to writing. A Victorian author might have expected readers to pick up on references to Shakespeare or Virgil or the King James Bible; her 21st-century successor will pack in nods to the Zapruder film or Ricky Villa’s goal in 1981 or the structure of DNA or Donna Summer’s sighs in ‘Love To Love You Baby’. And writers already have the ability to offer their product in formats that can include not just references to those memes, but actual pieces of footage and audio embedded in the words – and the academics at Dartmouth will have to work out a completely new method of textual analysis to pick that up.

In fact, pretty soon there will come a time when Literature – as the name for a discrete academic discipline – will fail to do its job. What’s going to replace it? Media Studies has been pretty much discredited. Any thoughts?

Klout: I get a pain in the back of my neck

Oh dear, Klout’s everywhere all of a sudden. It’s a service that aims to quantify your social media influence, deploying algorithms that translate to a score out of 100; the bigger cheese you are on the interwebnets, the higher your score. This might have some validity if Klout were to operate with the ethos of an old-fashioned gentleman’s club; those who push their claims for membership too loudly and brashly are doomed to failure. But increasingly, those with high Klout scores are not truly influential, but simply people who have the time and energy and inclination to rack up high Klout scores. Like people whose self-worth is determined by number of Twitter followers or blog eyeballs or Panini stickers, they modify their online behaviour to game their own statistics.  

And even when applied to someone who is properly (if not rightfully) famous, the statistics really don’t add up. Singer of popular ditties Justin Bieber has a Klout score of 100, apparently, but it’s not clear what portion of that score derives from people who use Twitter to express their heartfelt desire that Mr Bieber might be elbowed to death by Joey Barton (who scores 85).

 

Of course, purely in the interests of research and solipsism I just had to find out where I fit in the grand scheme of things; and Klout tells me not only that I have a Klout score of 45*, but that I am an influencer when it comes to the subject of “pak”. Unfortunately, it neglects to explain what “pak” might be and I spend several hours in a state of heightened agitation, worried that businesses and governments and criminal networks throughout the world will seize on the notion that Klout scores actually determine whether or not one is good at something, and ask me for my opinion on pak, my advice on pak, on whether we should privatise it or subsidise it or abolish it or put it in the water supply. I suddenly feel like Chance, the innocent gardener in Being There, whose ill-informed platitudes are interpreted as great wisdom. And then I remember that one of the main uses I have for Twitter is making facetious comments on cricket matches, and “#pak” is just a hashtag that indicates that Pakistan is playing.

And that, my friends, is why Klout is silly. Far better, if you must jump on any sort of virtual bandwagon, is social media for existentialists: “All passwords on the Being and Nothingness Network are vaguely menacing anagrams formed using the maiden name of Martin Heidegger’s paternal grandmother.” You know, if anyone at Klout reads this, I’ll immediately become one of the world’s leading experts on Heidegger. It’s between me and Joey Barton.

* 45’s not brilliant, but it could get me free noodles at San Francisco airport.