TV review: Jonathan Meades on France

Jonathan Meades is one of those people I have a lot of time for, even though I routinely disagree with him.  Like Adam Curtis (whose blog appears in my blogroll, although I rarely actually visit it: the posts are so densely audiovisual it can take, literally, hours to work through each one), he’s a polemicist.  Like Curtis, he’s not so much a polemicist for a particular viewpoint as he is a polemicist for the necessity of thinking for oneself.  Like Curtis, he’s interested in unorthodox juxtapositions (especially of apparently serious and trivial things), and in approaching weighty topics from unusual angles.  Like Curtis, he’s interested in drawing connections between things that aren’t usually seen as connected (although he’s not called a conspiracy theorist as often as Curtis is).  Like Curtis, he’s routinely mislabelled as a documentary-maker, when he’s actually an essayist – less interested in documenting the world than in exploring ideas.

Like Curtis, his programmes are meticulously well-researched (if Curtis gives the impression of having watched every second of TV ever broadcast, Meades gives the impression of having devoured every book, meal and public building to be found in Europe).  Like Curtis, his programmes carry an air of formidable intellectualism (even though the ideas he discusses are usually pretty accessible, even simple).  Because of this, like Curtis, he is sometimes misunderstood as trying to produce an authoritative account of the things he discusses, when he’s actually just trying to provoke a reaction.  Not, usually, in the way that some newspaper columnists and bloggers try to provoke a visceral reaction, but in the way that a really great teacher tries to provoke an intellectual reaction: to cause people to think about a topic for themselves, and to disrupt the automatic acceptance of received wisdom.  Like Curtis, in other words, he’s an anti-hegemonist, and therefore a very necessary thing.

Unlike Adam Curtis, though, Jonathan Meades is frequently laugh-out-loud funny.  As a case in point, the first programme in his new series* Jonathan Meades on France (available on the iPlayer for the next week-and-a-bit; the second episode, which I haven’t seen yet, is available here) opens with the theme music from the Croft/Perry sitcom ‘Allo, ‘Allo – about as far-removed from the serious attitude of a typical BBC4 series as one could expect.  There’s also a lot of what has become Meades’ trademark visual style (though I suspect it was developed by his directors rather then him personally): the dark-glasses worn even on cloudy days; the pieces to camera delivered standing stock still in the middle distance rather than close up or walking; the flat, deadpan style of delivery.  All of this is designed, as always, to try and create an interesting visual counterpart to what is, essentially, a fairly un-televisual experience; for someone who works in TV, Meades’ style has always been determinedly verbal, even literary.

This wordiness perhaps explains why, in the process of preparing this sort-of review (not a real review; it’s too scattershot for that), I found myself transcribing whole sections of what Meade said, rather than relying, as I usually would, on paraphrases from memory.  I have the impression that his words are chosen so carefully that to paraphrase them would be to miss the point.  This is Meades, for example, on the subject of a once significant but now somewhat ignored monument in the Alsace region of France:

Why the benefits cap is unfair

On the face of it, the idea of limiting the maximum amount any family can receive from benefits to £26,000 per year seems eminently fair; this is, after all, the median household income after tax.  Iain Duncan Smith, the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions (who, with an estimated private wealth of ‘only’ £1million, is one of the poorest members of the cabinet) has seemingly been everywhere, making the clear and simple argument that it’s unfair that people who are in work should be paying tax to subsidise a higher standard of living for unemployed people than they can afford for themselves.  Unfortunately – as with so many clear and simple arguments presented by politicians – the reality turns out to be rather more complicated.  So complicated, in fact, that what seems like an eminently fair policy turns up, on further examination, not to be fair at all.  Here are some of the reasons why.

Can the Westminster government set the terms of a referendum on Scottish independence?

There has been much talk, of late, about whether the Scottish parliament can go it alone in organising a referendum on the constitutional future of Scotland, or if this is a matter for the UK government at Westminster.  The UK government have today announced their ‘clear legal view’ that it must be handled by them, but are proposing a temporary and specific transfer of power to the Scottish parliament that would enable that institution to organise it instead.  They have announced a ‘consultation’ on the details of the transfer of power, but it’s clear they assume a right to impose conditions that would have the effect of dictating the terms of the referendum.  So, can the Westminster government dictate the terms of a referendum on the constitutional future of Scotland?

Diane Abbott: Let’s look at what she actually wrote

There are all sorts of things to be said about Diane Abbot’s comments, and the political blogosphere – back from the Christmas break and looking for things to be loudly and unilluminatingly opinionated about – has said most of them.  But this whole storm-in-a-twitter-feed is proceeding on the assumption that Ms Abbott made a racist generalisation about white people, and no-one seems to have stopped and analysed what she actually said – not the implications, not the nuances, not the endlessly-debated ‘context’, but the actual words she used.  So, here’s the actual tweet:

‘Overcoming Low Self-Esteem’? You’re unlikely to do it reading a self-help book.

I recently acquired a Kindle (gotta love Christmas, the time of the year when wealthy relatives feel unnecessarily guilty about not emailing all year and try to make up for it with consumer electronics).  As a result of this I was browsing through the Kindle store, and I came across a promotion for a series of books called the ‘Overcoming Series’.  Now, you might assume that, with a promising title like that, the series was aimed at people who worry they masturbate too much (over-cumming, geddit?), and would include volumes with titles like Wankers in the Kitchen: How Adding These Simple Foods to your Diet can Boost your Zinc and B-vitamin Levels, or Good Vibrations: We Road Test the 50 Best Intimate Pleasure Devices on the Market.*  Sadly for people like me who enjoy bad puns, it turns out that this is instead a series of self-help books aimed at people with common psychological maladies, and encouraging them to make use of self-administered CBT techniques to overcome them.

I have a problem with this.  Obviously, I have a problem with CBT at the best of times (I once described my own experience of CBT for depression as feeling like I was being sent out to compete in a jousting tournament armed only with a cocktail stick), but in this particular instance my problem is with the continued existence of self-help books.

My improbably grandiose plans for 2012

Is it just me, or is this the first new year in ages that doesn’t sound impossibly futuristic?  It just feels kind of ordinary and par for the course, perhaps because we’ve been talking about London 2012 for so long it became familiar long before it actually arrived.  It’s also the first year where it feels completely natural to pronounce it “twenty-twelve”; I did tend to call 2011 “twenty-eleven” but part of me wanted to stick with the “two thousand and xxx” pattern that worked during the 2000s.  I don’t have that feeling at all with 2012 – again, perhaps because ever since we were talking about London 2012 we were talking about “London twenty-twelve”.

Anyway, I hope you had a good New Year’s celebration, whatever you did.  I spent it in front of the telly, and I can tell my critical faculties must have been switched off for the evening because I happily sat and watched 2½ hours of Alan Carr.  I’ve never really been able to get along with Alan Carr.  When I’ve seen him being interviewed by other people he’s always seemed a nice enough chap, but the heightened persona he creates for his own shows I’ve always found extremely grating.  I have no problem with camp people (some of my best friends, etc – although in my case that’s actually true), and I’m actively drawn to effeminate guys (and geeks; if you’re an effeminate geek, congratulations, you’ve achieved perfection), but that’s when those things are genuine.  Alan Carr is clearly naturally camp and effeminate – and more power to him – but he exaggerates those things for his TV persona, and that fakeness irritates me, in the same way that Nicky Campbell’s faked-up ‘man of the people’ act makes me want to punch my radio on those rare occasions he crops up on it.

But, anyway, I set that aside for the purposes of last night, and actually found I was enjoying myself.  I think it helped that there was a lot going on, and he had reasonably interesting guests, which meant he wasn’t forced to fall back on the insincere posing quite so much.  Mind you, it probably also helped – given how mind-meltingly shallow I am – that the show included a lot of shots of Olly Murs sitting around looking pretty.  (If you’re unfamiliar with him, Mr Murs is a former X-Factor runner up.  I’ve become mildly obsessed with him ever since coming across discovering this (NSFW-ish) photo.)

Still, the purpose of this wasn’t to talk about the tail end of 2011, but rather to talk about what I hope to achieve in 2012.  I’m always wary of having anything so concrete as a resolution, but I also think it’s a bad idea just to allow myself to drift.  I didn’t achieve a great deal last year, but I did manage to hold to my weight-loss programme.  Even if I do still look as globular as I always did to a random stranger, at least I know I’m a smaller globe – Neptune rather than Jupiter kind of thing – and having that as a thing to look back on is positive, I think.  With that in mind, this is a list of not-resolutions, things I hope to try and vaguely get round to maybe doing something about in 2012.

Christmas post

Yes, this is a blogpost.  Yes, it’s Christmas day.  No, it isn’t a scheduled blogpost – I’m actually writing and posting it today.  Yes, today as in Christmas day.  No, posting to my blog on Christmas day doesn’t mean I’m eaten up with misery and self-loathing.  It just means, for the second year in a row, I’m getting to have the kind of Christmas I want – quiet, solitary, and tranquil.

Sock-puppetry: a classic gotcha

Nelson Jones wrote a blog entry at the New Statesman yesterday evening, in which he discussed an essay in the print edition of the magazine by the philosopher (and noted atheist) Daniel Dennett.  At about lunchtime today, the following pair of comments appeared in the comments thread underneath the article:

Gay marriage ‘improves health’?

I’m a strong supporter of marriage equality.  I believe that same-sex couples have an equal right to get married if they want to, even though I think it’s unlikely I’ll ever want to exercise that right myself (though that’s what I would say, of course, given my current and enduring relationship status: Profoundly Single…).  Here in the UK, I back the campaign to open up civil partnerships to opposite-sex couples and open up marriage to same-sex couples.  In the US, I back the campaign to overturn DOMA, and the various state-by-state campaigns to extend marriage and block homophobic amendments to the US Constitution.  None of this means I’m prepared to blindly endorse every piece of evidence that seems to support the campaign for marriage equality.

As a good case in point, take this story, which reports on a study into the public health benefits of legalising same-sex marriage:

Mad World

I didn’t actually watch Mark Zuckerberg: Inside Facebook, but I caught a couple of minutes when I was channel hopping.  The programme’s mainly of interest, I’d guess, to people who use facebook (i.e., not me), and people who are fascinated by the mega-rich (i.e., not me), and people who don’t understand how this whole internet thing works, and how can they make money offering something for free anyway (i.e., not me – my lack of interest doesn’t preclude a basic understanding of facebook’s business model, which is essentially the same as google’s: eyeballs on their website = money from advertisers).  The contributor who caught my eye wasn’t Mr Zuckerberg himself, but one of the hundreds of millions of people who use his site.