Ad’s All Folks: Australia’s Tough Call on Cigarettes

Over the last couple of days the new laws have been proposed in Australia and if they come to pass, cigarette companies will have to promote their cigarettes in olive green boxes with some form of reminder of the horrific damage those little things can do.

“We want to make sure that the glamour that might have been attached to smoking in the past is dead and gone,” the Health Minister, Nicola Roxon, said a couple of days ago. “Cigarette packs will now only show the death and disease that can come from smoking. The new packs have been designed to have the lowest appeal to smokers and to make clear the terrible effects that smoking can have on your health.”

In a way, they look like the front cover to a series of Stephen King novels.

So, anyway, I’m bracing myself for the inevitable public media battle that happened round about the time the UK began preparations for the smoking ban in all pubs and restaurants. What I’m talking about is the two factions of anti and pro setting up their camps, waiting patiently for dawn and then beginning their assault of hyperbole and conjecture against each other. And it is so very very boring.

‘We are smokers!’ cry the pro-league, ‘Everyone is entitled to live free and smoke hard. It is our right to smoke. To take away that right blah blah cough weeze figures and facts.’

‘We’re non-smokers!’ shout the anti-league, ‘Everyone is entitled to live free and live hard. We want smoking banned. Blah blah let’s go jogging blah!’

Both parties managing to cancel out each others arguments by saying that the very people they oppose have the right to do whatever they want to do.

And then you have the other party, the third one that no one really listens to…

‘Well, they should save the money and just ban it out right. That would help the problem.’

Well, yeah, like prohibition. That worked well.

Is there fundamentally wrong with shaming people into not doing something? Maybe. It could be argued that people should be allowed to make their own choices, catch their own diseases etc, but then you open the gates for the nanny state protesters and then we have to run for cover. That’s four parties filling up every internet forum and newspaper letter page until mid-2012.

So how we can end all this fighting. Just ban alcohol. Watch how quickly smokers and non smokers join forces then. Oh yes, we can argue till the cows come home about smoking, but to take away our right to drink?! Well, that’s just insane!

The thing is, that nothing is going to change until, and I swear I’m not trolling, smoking is banned outright. People will still smoke, people will still not smoke and the two parties will continue to resent each other. Because, and let’s be honest about this, black tar heroin has been around for a while and that was in plain packaging way before cigarettes. Hell, it even has the disability of being banned! It’s kind of like a narcotic cash cow, like cigarettes.

Fan Culture will Hate Itself: Lady GaGa to star in Doctor Who!!1!!ZOMG!!1

It’s been reported in the Daily Star, The Telegraph and even on a website in India, Lady GaGa is to appear in Doctor Who!

Except…

Except, she’s not is she? This is the least feasible story ever and feels like someone has just taken me up on my Doctor Who Press Release kit. Gareth Roberts has appeared in the July Issue of Doctor Who Magazine discussing his latest script for the show which is due to co-star James Corden. Discussing his previous draft for the upcoming ep, Roberts suggested that the script may one day resurface as Big Finish project (a series of audio plays starring the 5^th, 6^th, 7^th and 8^th Doctors) or Lady GaGa doing it because she’ll need the work.

The brilliant/face palm thing is that the Daily Star et al have taken his exact quote and, despite it reeking of sarcasm even when separated from the rest of the interview, have reported it as absolute FACT! With a capital F and a capital ACT and a lowercase arse.

From the Daily Star:

The star, 24, has already sported costumes which resemble Cybermen, Yeti, Ood and Tree People.

And scriptwriter Gareth Roberts revealed he has already come up with a storyline that would see The Doctor (Matt Smith, 27) go GaGa.

Gareth told Doctor Who magazine: “The script might end up on screen one day with Lady GaGa, who will have fallen on hard times.”

In a way it’s fantastic. Right down to pointing out that Lady GaGa dresses weirdly and, ergo, should be in Doctor Who. As they suggest, she could be a Cyberman, Yeti, Ood or a horrific, highly popular, more-iconic-than-the-Daleks, Tree Person…

Ah yes, the Tree People, a race of trees that resemble people, or are they people that resemble trees? Truly that is the mystery of their race. Either way, they burn up a treat. It’s fair to say that whoever wrote the article thought ‘’Ang on! There were tree people in that episode with Billie Piper. Lady GaGa looks like a twig. Yeah, I’ll whack that down’.

So, if you’re a blogger looking for info on this story or a tabloid hack, please allow me to be one of many to tell you that you are talking arse.

(I am very aware that there is a good chance that I could be misquoted and later this week you will see the headline, Lady GaGa to Play Talking Arse.)

Great Manchester Run 2010

Two years ago, he ran faster than a rock.

Last year, he was a tad sick on another man’s shoe…

This year, it could be a little bit better.

Yep, it’s that time of year when I dust off my running shoes and makes promises to myself that I’m going to do 5k every week and then I don’t because I’m working or eating pizza or sitting down. Then I get to the starting line, fail to do any form of warm up and run off into the crowd pretending I actually know what I’m doing. Next thing you know I’m being overtaken by a man dressed as the Honey Monster, but I’m at least being given the thumbs up by Clint Boon as he bops on his XFM sponsored float.

So, why not make it worth my while and help me raise money for the Alzheimer’s Society.

Now, the science bit. Listen carefully… (See what I did there? I hit those cultural phenomenoms at their peak)

Donating through JustGiving is simple, fast and totally secure. Your details are safe with JustGiving – they’ll never sell them on or send unwanted emails. Once you donate, they’ll send your money directly to the charity and make sure Gift Aid is reclaimed on every eligible donation by a UK taxpayer. So it’s the most efficient way to donate – I raise more, whilst saving time and cutting costs for the charity.

Click here

So please dig deep and donate now. Last year, I managed to raise over £200. Help me get it up to £300 this year.

Fan Culture Will Hate Itself: Election Special which is neither Special nor really about the Election

I’ve voted. Did a postal vote and now I have more time for sitting around and playing Far Cry 2, a game that, whilst good, does feel a little bit racist. Having already done my bit for the country, I have already made my choice for next year. That being the party that sends me the least amount of bumpf in the post.

I have had 100s of different sized multi-coloured bits of paper pushed through my letter box all of them addressed to me personally or to me and my partner that suggests they really do think about me. Often these envelopes/pamphlets/leaflets/tattooed cats have ended up waiting for me as I come down the stairs at half 7 in the morning. This morning I had one from the Liberal Democrats wishing me a good morning. How this has gone down in a household that’s woken up to the news that everyone has woken up next to a dead body is unclear. Who the poor sod is that has to get up at the arse end of the morning to push this soon to be confetti through my letter box is also unclear. Suffice to it’s got to a point where I’m genuinely glad the election finishes tonight. More so when you consider that, as I live in a Victorian house with five flats and one letter box, my bumpf is just the tip of the iceberg of shit that lies on our communal post table. I should add that one of my neighbours has taken to ripping up some of the leaflets they receive and leaving the shards in a tidy pile next to our unspoiled mass of paper. He did this most recently with a leaflet from the UKIP. Whether this was an attempt by the neighbour to perform some form of dirty protest or just their attempt at a stern warning to any UKIP supporters they feel they may be living with, I just don’t know. Maybe they heard me playing Far Cry 2.

As I’ve said before, I’m quite glad the election is soon to be over. I’ve noted a shift in the public conscience which I only ever associate with football league. Pubs, offices and taxi drivers are filled with the support of one party and the shaming of the other. I hear genuine anger spill out of the mouths of businessmen. Poisoned vitriol that could be used as a chemical weapon aimed squarely their 86 year old gran because she said Cameron looks good in a suit. On the other end of the spectrum, I’ve heard political discussions where neither participant has dropped even a hint of where their political proclivities lie. Maybe it’s because of the aforementioned vitriol we think we’re going to receive. Either way, conversations will run no further than:

‘Labour?’

‘Bunch of wankers’

‘Yeah. Tories?’

‘Posh wankers.’

‘Yeah. True. Lib dems?’

‘Posh wankers who eat musili.’

‘Yeah. I hear you. What about the other parties?’

‘Fuck off.’

‘So, are you going to be voting then?’

‘Of course. You?’

‘Definitely.’

‘Labour?’

‘Bunch of wankers’

‘Yeah. Tories?’

‘Posh wankers.’

‘Yeah. True. Lib dems?’

‘Posh wankers who eat musili.’

‘Yeah. I hear you. What about the other parties?’

‘Fuck off.’

‘So, are you going to be voting then?’

‘Of course. You?’

‘Definitely.’

And so on until you die or find a repeat of Glee to watch instead.

Come tomorrow the offices of the country will be filled with people who feel like they themselves have claimed the victory of party most people voted for because it menat not having to put up with the other one. Like football supporters themselves, they will walk in, chest puffed out, chin held high and giving two fingers to the loser who voted for the other side. Conversations will consist of ‘us’ and ‘them’, i.e. ‘The problem with you lot is you were wankers. Now with us, we were wankers but wankers where you know where you were’. Then ‘us’ and ‘them’ will make peace when they realise Ted in accounts voted for the other party and both will skip merrily down the corridor to quote bits of satirical dialogue they heard on the Alternative Election Night on Channel 4.

Still, I can moan and pick apart the elections as much as I won’t, but I’m not David Mitchell and Jimmy Carr and I’m not getting paid so I’ll wind it up. At eth end of the day, truthfully, the election is one of the few experiences we can share as a country and, unlike the football league, it doesn’t involve getting drunk in pubs, shivving someone in an alleyway and throwing up on the streets. So it can’t be all that bad.

The One Show vs Kick-Ass

A Toby Jug full of piss apparently....

The one show arrived on our screens in 2007 and its agenda was simple: to be a light and airy magazine show with vaguely interesting guests and numerous segments filmed in the Trafford Centre, Manchester’s testament to Liverpudlian shopping.

Since then, it’s evolved from this initial idea to: knowingly be a light and airy magazine show with vaguely interesting guests and numerous segments filmed in the Trafford Centre, Manchester’s testament to Liverpudlian shopping.

Each week, Christine Blakely and, the ginger equivalent of an all knowing git, Adrian Chiles run us through numerous inane stories that serve no other purpose than to fill in the time before Eastenders. Actual stories I’ve seen over the last few months include:

• Pot holes and the repairing of
• Colour and the standisation of
• A warehouse filled with 70’s clothing and the finding of
• Old people and the euthanasia of
• Alan Shearer and the pointless of – Actually this may have been an actual interview with Alan Shearer

Each VT is bookended with Chiles looking off camera and pretending that this is all beneath him.

‘So, that was pot holes then… Interesting, eh?’ He smirks as the studio crew laugh along.

Oh, how they understand their position in life. This is just a bit of fluff. It’s for the old dears that have nothing to do but wait patiently for death, innit? In fact, one could argue it’s like The Word for OAPS. A few more tits and you’d never notice the difference.

As I say though, it isn’t always like this. When the going gets fluff, the fluff get fluffier. After Carole Thatcher’s rather ill-judged comment about a black tennis player, the show piled on the fluff even more. Oh look, here comes Gyles Brandreth with an amusing story about combing squirrels. Where was Chiles’s smirking after this report? Nowhere to be seen. Having been the person who grassed Thatcher’s backstage comment to the heads of the BBC, Chiles proved he knew which side his bread was buttered on. This meant everything went back to being supersweet and inoffensive.

But now we’re back to normal and Chiles, a man once described by Stewart Lee as like ‘being stuck in the buffet car of a slow-moving train with a Toby jug that has miraculously discovered the power of speech… A Toby jug filled to the brim with hot piss’, is back to rolling his eyes and looking off camera and making sure his cheque has been signed properly.

So, imagine my surprise last night, when The One Show took five minutes out from troubles of shaving pebbles to discuss the weightier matter of censorship. In particular, the movie Kick-Ass and the now infamous line uttered by 11 year old Hit Girl, ‘Which one of you c*nts wants to die first’. If you want the full story, do a bit of searching on the net, if you want a knee jerk reactionary version of the current story, here’s a link to the Daily Mail’s article.

Intermission – I don’t want to get into the whole should an 11 year old even be saying that, but just quickly, films like City of God and the Boy in the Striped Pyjamas show children as young as 8 or 9 in severe distress and the biopic Before Night Falls, has a 12 year old child having a 30 odd year old woman simulate a blowjob on him… So, as far as I see it, it’s okay if it’s ‘artistic’ but if it’s mainstream movie then we have to follow a whole new set of badly written rules. When, oh, when, oh, when will the liberals and the lefties and the commies get it.

Back to the show…

So, there sits a very bored looking Matthew Vaughn, the director of Kick-Ass, bracing himself for the barrage of questions.

‘Do you think it’s right for this child to be saying this?’ Christine Blakely asked in a serious tone she’d learnt looking at herself in the mirror

Vaughn responded that if you read the comic book or watch the film and take what is said and done in the right context then there’s really no issue. After this, the journalistic dynamic duo of Chiles and Blakely floundered. Frost vs Nixon this was not.

Chiles managed to lose all respect by telling Matthew Vaughn that he hadn’t seen the film yet, but he’d seen a picture and it outraged him. Chiles even offered the counter-argument that you can take anything out of context which seemed more reasonable to be coming from the defence as opposed to the prosecution. Vaughn suggested Chiles watch the film and Chiles attempted to bruise Vaughn’s ego by doing his usual eyerolling. Blakeley then later admitted that she had seen the film and that she enjoyed it despite its violence. 30 seconds later, Vaughn was thanked for his time and they moved onto the topic of hot curries.

Magazine shows don’t have to be hard hitting, but neither should they be smug or self-serving. However, if you deliberately aim to be like this than you will eventually be exposed. Chiles, a man used to interviewing monosyllabic footballers and Blakely, a woman I’ve yet to find an interesting fact about, were out of their depth. There was only so much hmmmming and furrowed browing one can do before you come out as being ill-educated on the subject you’re talking about. Chiles admission that he hadn’t seen the film showed disrespect to his guest and that’s why the interview began to drown.

One can only hope that next time they want to do a hard hitting interview, they get Carol Thatcher back in and get Chiles to explain why he grassed her up to the boss. Should be a little bit more entertaining than Harry Hill talking male nappies.