Page 3

While we’re in ranty mood: The Sun’s Page 3 turned up again today in Parliament, as Caroline Lucas went from an awesome, incendiary, subversive protest by wearing a t-shirt calling for it to be banned in the House of Commons, to covering up and asking if the government would please help her ban it. Which seemed a bit like shouting “wanker” at a policeman before asking him to help catch the guy that ran off with your phone but anyway…

Page 3 is a horrid thing, but the reason I dislike it isn’t the reason a lot of people give. But I think it may be the reason a lot of people actually find it more uncomfortable than the likes of Loaded or Zoo. See when Page 3 launched, and for most of the 90s too, it was simple. “Here’s a hot girl, you can see her boobs, isn’t that great?” and I like boobs, and I like hot women, and I like seeing hot women’s boobs. I don’t really need it to be in a newspaper but it’s no big deal. Occasionally there’d be a bit of text about the girl, often with a double-entendre but it was playful and fun.

These days, not so much. The caption has been replaced with a joke. It’s the same joke every day. Here is Kelly from Daventry today:
KELLY is not surprised at the huge backlog of migration cases. She said: “It’s such a complex body. As 20th century author GK Chesterton once said, ‘Large organisation is loose organisation. Nay it would be almost as true to say that organisation is always disorganisation’.”

Haha! Hilarious isn’t it! Because she’s a girl with her boobs out, so she couldn’t possibly have read Chesterton or have an interesting opinion on immigration. So funny.

Now obviously you can make the argument here that I’m the sexist one, that those opinions are legit and written by the model herself. And that by saying it’s a joke I’m the misogynist. You could make that argument, if you wanted to defend The Sun. Thing is, even if the opinions are legit, even if The Sun aren’t purposefully joking about topless models being dumb (note: they are), with the best of intentions it’s still a shockingly patronising “Naked girls can be smart and have opinions too! Who knew?”. I mean The Sun has a Sports section too but they don’t feel the need to ask Wayne Rooney for his opinion on the issues of the day at the end of a match report.

And that is my problem with Page 3: it’s not a woman appearing topless in a national newspaper that demeans her. She’s hot, she has great breasts, people enjoy looking at them. Maybe she’s also an amazing mother, maybe she’s a particle physicist, maybe she’s the best salesperson in her job, maybe she raises tons of money for charity every year. Maybe she’s none of those. Maybe she commits benefit fraud. Maybe she’s a violent alcoholic. Maybe she hits her kids. It doesn’t matter. She’s on Page 3 that day for one reason: because she’s hot. That doesn’t mean that’s all she is. But it’s okay for that to be all she is in that context on that day. Now, if the only presence of women in the entire paper is with their boobs out (Hello, Sunday Sport!) then there’s a problem as that’s presenting a very skewed world view. And it’s been a while since I read The Sun, but I can certainly believe there’s an inherent, uncomfortable tone of sexism throughout the paper in general. But that’s not a problem solved by removing Page 3.

Because Page 3 is at its least offensive when it isn’t trying to be more than it is. When it’s just ‘hot naked girl’. Once you try and add context, comments, made-up quotes, then it becomes a problem. Because then the question becomes “Well why does this woman need to have her boobs out to tell us about immigration?” and there’s no good answer to that.

I think when people claim Page 3 is ‘playful’ or ‘innocent’ that’s what they’re getting at really. Those current captions aside, it used be “What’s this girl here for?” “For men to enjoy looking at.” That’s an honesty people find appealing, because you go to the Daily Mail website and there’s a sidebar full of women in various states of undress with flimsy justifications written for why it’s important we see holiday snaps of Tamara Rutland in a bikini or Britney’s latest nipple slip and you ask “Why?” and it’s “People want to hear about celebrities!”. We turn on the TV and there’s adverts with women in nothing more than underwear and you ask the “Why?” question and it’s “To sell you shampoo”. You open a woman’s magazine and there’s Photoshop’d photos of stick thin models in lingerie and you ask “Why?” and it’s “To make sure you keep buying our magazine for diet tips”.

I’m not really defending Page 3, I don’t give a crap about it really, it’s not like it’s hard to find tits on the internet regardless, but I struggle at understanding how Page 3 is any way worse than those examples in the previous paragraph. Surely if anything, you go after those first? The Mail especially seems to have far more boobs in it than The Sun, but because they belong to celebrities, are often taken without consent, and appear on different pages every day, it gets away with it.

Dean Love : 12 Jun 2013 20:28 |  Tags: Politics |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Why ebook piracy sucks

I have a Kindle, but I’ve never felt the need to engage in ebook piracy. I’m not a big reader, I’ll get through one book a month if I’m lucky (and they’re short) and given the average price of a Kindle book is £4-£5, I can spare that monthly stipend for literature.

But since I (sort of) work in publishing, I have a look around from time to time to see what’s going on, and man, does ebook piracy suck. But maybe not for the reason you think.

Let me explain something: services like Steam (for PC games) and iTunes (for music) got where they are today by making one important realisation: the main driver for piracy is that the pirates offered a better product than the official sources. One could get a PC game without leaving the house, not have to faff around with registering for some DRM account system and not need the disc in the drive. One could get music without going to the shops, or having to risk buying online and being locked into a single device, or getting songs in a format that wouldn’t be around in five years.

Steam and iTunes said “fine, we’ll let you do (nearly) all of that”, plus we’re guaranteed virus free, a quicker download than you get on a Bittorrent, and no feelings of guilt”. See, that’s a sales pitch. See the first thing they had to do was be sure they were offering a product at least as good as what the pirates were offering. Because if they didn’t do that, they had no chance.

Here’s the thing: e-book piracy is already not offering as good a service as the legitimate publishers do, but the sucky thing is: you might not realise.

Last night I nosed around a bunch of pirated versions of ebooks I’d bought recently, or owned paperbacks of: some Star Trek novels and some Iain Banks stuff. Some of them were great: they’d clearly taken the files from Amazon or wherever, stripped the DRM and uploaded them again.

Some of them made me throw up in my mouth. Full disclosure: I used to work as editor, so I’m trained to spot this stuff. But this is stuff that will affect your enjoyment of a book, it’s just you won’t even know it.

Here’s the two most common problems I found with the pirated copies:

1) Lack of italics. Yes, no italicisation (and no bold) in the entire book. Not a big deal is it? Italics barely get used do they? Go to your bookshelf, pick up a fiction book, and flick through it and look for italics. Go on. I’ll wait…. There’s loads aren’t there?

Thing is, authors use italics for a lot of things. Not just emphasis like I did there. They use it to, for example, distinguish a character’s internal monologue from speech. To delineate terms in other languages (which in fantasy/sci-fi, may well be made up languages). For the names of ships or brands or other proper nouns. Here’s a thing: in Star Trek novels, when the characters are communicating via communicator (the away team is talking to the ship, for example) italics are used to represent speech over the comms. That’s the Pocket Books house style, and it’s so heavily ingrained and used so consistently in the novels, that after setting it up early on, authors just use it as short hand to avoid the whole “he said / she said” thing.

The net result of that is Star Trek novels without italics in are nigh-on unreadable the minute someone taps a comm badge, as you’ve no clue which dialogue belongs to which side of the conversation.

Of course, the issue here is that I’m telling you this. Had you never seen a legitimate copy of the book, you might think the writer was just a bit crap. Or that the author was trying and failing to do some weird stream of consciousness thing by not separating the character’s thoughts and speech. You’d be confused, but you wouldn’t even realise it was because some idiot pirate stripped the italics out of the file.

Oh and Discworld novels where Death doesn’t talk in bold.

2) No paragraph spacing, no paragraph indents. I’ve seen both of these as individual problems, and also together where they become a complete nightmare. In books, spacing matters. Each novel may do it differently, but early on you quickly learn exactly what spacing means. You don’t realise it, but in the early chapters the author teaches you almost a ‘grammar’ of spacing for that book, and then later uses that. For example, most commonly, books will indent every paragraph, but only space on a scene change. They’ll also indent speech as new paragraphs so you can quickly follow the back and forth between a bunch of characters. Some books will also use double spacing to represent a change in point-of-view character (or they’ll use a horizontal rule or other symbol, also often stripped out).

If you don’t do this stuff, things start to go wrong. No paragraph indentation means knowing when a new paragraph is starting is often difficult, which gives that whole ‘wall of text’ effect that just makes things hard to read. It also makes speech a complete pain to follow.

No spacing means scene changes can just come out of nowhere and confuse the hell out of you. The worst example I found was one where every paragraph had a line space after it (no indentation) except for when there was a scene change, where the paragraph was just run-on directly without so much as a carriage return! The complete opposite of what your brain has been trained to expect. I read a few pages and it was a complete headfuck. If you’re an author and really want to mess with your reader, try doing that.

And then there were the versions that lacked both spacing and indents, and so seemed to eschew the whole concept of paragraphs entirely.

There were other issues: typos, lack of proper chapter marks, all that stuff. But those two big ones make such a huge difference to your reading experience, and they’re things you might not even notice if you don’t know they’re meant to be there. You’ll think the author is just being weird, or worse incompetent.

Now, there’s a reason this happens, and the legitimate publishing industry itself is partly to blame. When ebooks first became a thing, lots of books were not available legitimately, so a bunch of enthusiastic people went out and scanned them and OCR’d them, and some of those were done quite badly. Then after that, plenty of publishers realised they should get their back catalogue out in an electronic format, so paid people to scan and OCR them. And some of those were done pretty badly too, and certainly weren’t proof read.

Things are better now. Not perfect, a book likely still won’t get another proof done at the electronic stage so the occasional spacing issue or typo can turn up, but nothing so egregious as the examples above. The companies that do conversions have gotten better, and the big publishers can now handle it in house. Many are returning to the back catalogue and fixing those errors (and Amazon will notify you if a book you bought has been updated) and this is where the pirates will let you down. They won’t go back, get the new version, and upload a fixed pirate copy. As far as they are concerned, if a pirate ebook exists, it doesn’t need doing again. They’d rather pirate something new or something very old that doesn’t exist in any format. And they can do what they want, but some of their existing stuff is nigh-on unreadable.

As an experiment, I tried to track down the collected works of my favourite author, the now depressingly late Iain (M) Banks. Of 27 fiction books (Raw Spirit isn’t available electronically anywhere, as far as I could tell), 6 of them did not have an accurate pirate version (I was comparing to paperback copies, and legit electronic versions from Amazon). To obtain the other 21, I had to download three separate “complete works” files, each of which had good copies of some books and awful ones of others, and piece a collection together. Even then there wasn’t a single version of Complicity with italics intact. All the Amazon versions are wonderfully formatted and well worth picking up by the way. Especially Complicity for £3.79 if you’ve not read Banks before.

But that’s an author who, while not at a Brown/Rowling level of mass market fame, is one you’d always find near the front of displays in Waterstones, a critical darling. Yet if you sample his work illegally, there’s a one in five chance you’ll get something that’ll put you off him for life.

In a way it’s nice that there’s a good incentive out there for people to actually pay for the work. It’s great that the publishers are beating the pirates in terms of the service they offer to customers. What worries me is that people don’t know this even happens. After all, if you get a ‘bad’ copy of a movie, it’s generally obvious: you can see the cinema audiences’ heads, or it has un-removable Chinese subtitles. If the pirated version just had the actors missing their cues on occasion and few scenes the wrong way around, you wouldn’t know, you’d just think it was bad.

This is what is happening now in literature. So if you must pirate, at least use Amazon’s handy ‘look inside’ feature to compare the legit version to whatever you downloaded, and make sure it at least looks right first. If it doesn’t then for god’s sake just buy thing instead of ruining it for yourself.

Dean Love : 12 Jun 2013 19:32 |  Tags: Books |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

The Ding–Dong Thatcher controversy

I’m not going to talk at length about the whole Thatcher business, suffice to say the reaction and back and forth on social media has been quite interesting.

But then 1000s of people go out and buy “Ding Dong The Witch Is Dead” on iTunes, and the BBC has a very public fit over whether it should play it or not. Some have said the BBC is caught in a tough position: play it and be deemed distasteful or not play it and be deemed censorious.

But had the BBC wanted to keep it’s nose clean, they should have just played it. Because it’s not whether you play it or not, it’s how you play it. People have gone out and bought it just waiting for that moment on the chart show to see how it gets acknowledged.

For the BBC, therefore, all they need do is brief the host to just play the thing without comment, joke, or underhand reference: “And at number two here’s a classic number from The Wizard of Oz”. All those tuning in to see what the BBC say let out a sigh, see nothing interesting has happened, and the thing is done. There’s no clip to go viral or anything like that. It’d be a non-story.

Instead the BBC made a big song and dance over “will we play it or not?” in the end deciding not to play it in the chart show, but play a clip of it in part of a news story. I can’t think of a worse possible choice. Firstly you annoy one bunch of people by not playing it, then you annoy the other bunch even more by explicitly linking it to Thatcher in a news story, making everyone aware of the context and giving voice to the movement that you were trying to avoid engaging in the first place. It’s one of the dumbest things I’ve ever heard and benefits no-one.

When the BBC banned “Smack My Bitch Up” by The Prodigy many years ago, they played a lyric-less version on the chart show. They didn’t then run a news story where the host read out all of the lyrics to the song to explain why they didn’t play it in the first place.

Dean Love : 14 Apr 2013 14:15 |  Tags: Politics |  Comments (1) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

The Offensiveness Manifesto

Or A guide to being offended for comedy audience and performers

COMICS: You have the right to tell offensive jokes

AUDIENCES: You have the right to laugh or not laugh at a joke you find offensive. You also have the right to walk out of a show, and most honest promoters will, within reason, give you your money back.

AUDIENCES: You do not have the right to not be offended (in comedy shows, or life generally).

AUDIENCES: You do not have the right to interrupt a performance to loudly to point out how offended you are by it but…

COMICS: That protection only goes so far. If you decide to take issue with someone not laughing or looking offended at a joke (or frame you offensive routine around a piece of audience interaction), you’ve then chosen to enter into a dialogue with the audience. And yes, some people will happily laugh at jokes about kiddie-fiddling, rape and abortion, then not like a joke about lung cancer. That’s not hypocrisy or double-standards, it’s just human.

COMICS: You don’t have the right to attack, belittle or mock an audience member for being offended by something. They can’t help it. And if your ‘edgy’ and offensive routine involves bullying an audience member, you don’t then get to be annoyed when someone else in the audience ‘heckles’ you in the middle of it.

BONUS HINT: there’s basically just one reason someone will be offended by a rape joke. You probably don’t want to try and turn that into a bit of jolly banter.

AUDIENCES: If you’re offended by something and feel there’s a reason it shouldn’t be a subject for comedy, you have the right to approach a comic after the show and calmly explain why. Under those circumstances, you’re far more likely to be listened to and have sensible consideration given to your viewpoint than in the middle of the performance.

COMICS: You have the right to ignore someone that wants to tell you why they were offended after the show. But if they’re being polite about it, maybe you should listen. You may just have different opinions on the matter and that’s okay. Or maybe you’ll see something from an angle you didn’t notice before and reconsider that joke.

COMICS: It’s not a betrayal of the art form to drop a gag because it’s too offensive. Similarly, managing to offend someone isn’t a comedy badge of honour. It’s one less potential fan. If you’re Frankie Boyle then no, you probably don’t need that one person. If you’re a new open spot, you probably do. So if you’re going to offend people, you best be sure it’s worthwhile.

COMICS: You don’t have the right to tell someone they can’t be offended by something. Offence is a reaction, it’s taken, it’s not a considered, though-through viewpoint. You can explain why you, personally, don’t find the joke offensive, but you can’t tell someone that their being offended is wrong. The corollary to that….

AUDIENCES: Offence is a reaction. If it’s three hours after the gig and you suddenly realise that a joke you laughed at the time is ‘offensive’, it’s not. Or at least, it’s not to you. You don’t get to ‘be offended’ on behalf of other people not at the show. The easily offended don’t go to see Jerry Sadowitz or Frankie Boyle for a reason. If you then repeat the joke you think your friend might find offensive to them in conversation, on your blog, or in an e-mail to the Daily Mail, congratulations, you’re now the one offending them.

AUDIENCES: You do not, ever, have the right to request that comics be censored, banned or arrested because you were offended. You do have the right to not go and see them again.

EVERYONE: What offends differs from person to person. I’ll laugh at rape jokes but find the audition stages of X-Factor where kids are set up to fail and then relentlessly mocked hugely offensive and quite upsetting. So I just don’t watch X-Factor. We’re all adults. Just because no subject is taboo for comedy, doesn’t mean it’s necessary to test every aspect of that theory all the time. Nor is it necessary to let everyone know every time something happens that offends you.

Offence is a part of life. It’s not a great part, it’s not something we should aspire to create in others but nor is it something we should run scared of ever experiencing or inflicting. It’s just there. Maybe we shouldn’t make quite such a big deal of it?

Dean Love : 06 Aug 2012 21:39 |  Tags: Comedy |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Getting out of the comedy game

“Dean runs stand-up comedy gigs”. I hear that a lot. It’s not entirely true. I run one stand-up comedy gig, but it’s weekly so that’s quite enough. But over the last two and a half years it’s become the “one interesting thing” about me that everyone has to have. It’s my thing. I like being that person, but then, I also kinda want to be “Dean writes about TV and videogames”, “Dean plays piano in a band” or “Dean makes indie iPhone/PC games”. But finding the time to be any of those people while still being “Dean runs comedy gigs” is hard.

I bloody love running Reckless Comedy, but the sheer amount of time it takes managing the acts, venue, publicity… all before you even take into account the entirety of every Monday night that it’s on. It’s not an easy task. Plus it’s a weird gig. On the one hand, it’s the best sort of gig. The crowd don’t pay much but they love comedy. The acts don’t get paid much but they love trying out new stuff at the gig. I don’t make a profit but I put the work it because I want it to exist. Everyone’s expectations are set at a reasonable level and it all just works. It’s a genuine new act / new material night, rather than those that are sold to the public for £6 as a pro-night and to the acts as a “new material” night so they can get better people. And we always have at least one paid, pro-comic on the bill, so that we’re not just an open mic night. In reality, we often have a lot of pro-comics trying out stuff because we put on a good gig.

But I’m boxed in. I’ve ridden the gig up to the point I no longer have to worry about it breaking even in terms of money. It all just about works out. But we still have quiet nights with only 12-15 people in, and then the next week we’ll have 40. I can’t get it to the point where it’s a consistent sell-out every week. So every week is a nervous panic of “will we get many people in”. Then there’s the fact that we’re in half of the pub, which is fine literally 95% of the time. The other 5% you get loud nutters in the other half of the pub ruining it. And yet because that’s only a very rare occurrence, there’s no impetus to do anything about it: because we can’t consistently get 30 people in every week, it’s hard to sell the pub on paying for the extra staff member to run it permanently in the basement because of the 1 in 20 shows that have issues. Small audiences are uncommon. Disruptive noise is uncommon. But that doesn’t mean I don’t worry every week about this being the week it all goes to pot.

So then there’s the question of what I get out of it, beyond seeing awesome comedy and a sense of tremendous elation at putting on a good show. I’m learning to be a better MC, which would be great but I have no interest in being an MC. I don’t even want to be a comedian! I MC my gig as I’m fairly funny on occasion, and having a regular MC really helps with a weekly show (punter expectations are low – they know they won’t get fifteen minutes of new gold every week, but the crowd feel comfortable with me, I can reset the room between acts, I can pick them back up if someone bombs – I’ve learned a skill that’s only really any good for MCing Reckless, basically). I have a bunch of contacts now that are of little use because again, I don’t want to be a comic. And my forays into trying to spin Reckless off into a side business with a few pro-nights where I can make some money for my efforts have all failed too. Leamington seemingly can’t support another one (and there’s no decent venue I can find) and Coventry seems over-saturated as it is.

“None of this is going anywhere”, in other words. So my current plan is to get out of the comedy promotion game at the end of the year, though hopefully with finding some sort of continuity plan for Reckless as, if nothing else, it’s somewhere I like to hang out, and always has been. With the time that will free up, I can hopefully pursue things that do have the potential to go places. But it’s sad because, frankly, it won’t be as much fun.

Dean Love : 12 Jun 2012 17:22 |  Tags: Comedy |  Comments (2) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Leamington Comedy Festival

Hi folks, I (along with the marvellous Miss Katherine Howells) will be running Leamington Comedy Festival on Sunday-Monday June 3-4. Not to be confused with Leamington Spa Comedy Festival which is something different that was announced the day after. We have a marvellous line-up featuring:

June 3rd

2:00pm – 3:00pm – Paul McCaffrey: Pills ‘n’ Thrills And Bellylaughs
3:30pm – 4:30pm – Anthony King: Songs of Love and Death
5:00pm – 6:00pm – Jonathan Elston
7:00pm – 8:00pm – Owen Niblock: Codemaker
8:30pm – 9:30pm – Diane Spencer: Exquisite Bad Taste
10:00pm-11:00pm – Aaron Twitchen: Quarter Life Crisis

June 4th

2:00pm – 3:00pm – Gareth Morinan: Truth Doodler
3:30pm – 4:30pm – Harriet Dyer: What a Palaver
5:00pm – 6:00pm – Jay Foreman’s Mixtape
7:30pm – 8:30pm – Jack Heal’s Murderhton
9:00pm -11:00pm – Reckless Comedy

Prices are crazy reasonable, and you can get tickets now from http://www.wegottickets.com/f/4665

Day ticket: £6 door, £5 advance
Two-day ticket: £10 door, £8 advance
Individual shows: £2 (door only)

Dean Love : 01 Jun 2012 00:42 |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

A Comical Tale

I’ve dusted off and updated a piece I wrote for the Warwick SU’s in-house magazine as it turns out I never put it up here – It was originally written for the 2006 heat of the Chortle Student Comedy Awards, and back then it was history. Now it’s ancient history.

So last night Warwick Uni once again played host to the midlands heat of the Chortle.co.uk Student Comic competition. At first glance this might seem like your average comedy competition but it is in fact an event intrinsically linked to Warwick Uni and their Students Union. To explain this, we have to go back in time nearly ten years.

The exec of the Comedy Society in 2003 was comprised of six entirely new people, the prior exec having all graduated in the same year. None of us had much of a clue what we were doing, but nevertheless we had grand ideas, the majority of which proved to be far too grand for our little society but nevertheless one idea stuck out. It developed from some discussion that had been going on with student comics at other universities, about the idea of having some sort of ‘act exchange’ program, where upcoming student comics could go and play at other university’s gigs. It was a nice idea but somewhere along the way it metamorphosed, and we thought: ‘why not make it a competition?’ And so the country’s first student comedy competition was conceived.

The Guardian had recently spoken to us about our society and the benefits it bought to student performers and we took the opportunity to mention the idea of the competition. We were rather bemused upon reading the resultant article that they’d also spoken to Paramount Comedy, who were rather disparaging towards the whole idea and were “not convinced it would go ahead”. “They said it couldn’t be done” is phrase that often gets used to add gravitas to a given success. Very rarely does anyone ever tell you who ‘they’ are. For us it was Dave Hancox of Paramount Comedy; now we had no choice but to prove him wrong!

There were still, inevitably, a fair few problems to solve. First was the issue of money – turns out that the previous exec hadn’t actually filled in a budget request form, and so the money available to us in our account was this: none existent. Un-deterred we quickly spotted that Barclays were running a capital investment competition, encouraging societies to submit ideas for worthy events that they would provide some funding for. A proposal was quickly written up and submitted, and we soon heard we’d been picked as a finalist. We put aside the irony of entering a competition to run a competition, and worked on a presentation we were to deliver in front of our competitors and a number of Barclays executives the following week. Despite strong competition from the likes of RAG and StreetVibe, as we emerged from the presentation evening we did so £300 better off. Was it the brilliance of our concept, the strength of our proposal, or the charisma of our presenters that won us that prize? It could have been any of them, but I like to put it down to a certain exec member (that shall remain Stacy) doing the presentation dressed up as a fairy. Never let it be said Barclays have no sense of humour.

So we had a concept and funding, all we really needed now were some competitors. We placed a notice on the forums of comedy website Chortle.co.uk, which are frequented by comedians of all statures, from the local guy who just started last week to Dave Gorman. Oddly, the most interesting response was not from any of the entrants, but from Chortle editor Steve Bennett, who was interested in getting involved in running the competition: “[It] struck me as a good
idea because there was nothing like it that existed, even though lots of
students perform comedy. So this was a good case of highlighting that
talent.” Steve kindly agreed to not only publicise the competition on the front page of his website, but also provided us with an MC for the evening and a panel of judges. After shifting through all the entries, we chose thirteen finalists who performed to a packed student crowd in the Cooler. After a closely fought competition (and some chilled out Jazz from The Pretty Small Band in the intervals), Warwick’s own Lloyd Langford emerged victorious. One could argue that the home-advantage helped him with the audience vote, but convincing our three-strong panel of comedy industry judges (Steve Bennet, Alexis Dubus and Rich Batsford) was undoubtedly down purely to his talent.

The event was a resounding success, and so it was no surprise that the next year it was agreed cast the net far wider, with a number regional heats culminating in a final in London. This year there are seven regional heats and it is now a major national comedy event. It continues to grow under the aegis of Chortle’s Steve Bennett Corey Shaw.

Last night saw a fantastic show, just one of thirteen heats nationwide in a competition that now includes two semi-finals and a £2,500 grand prize.. The whereabouts of Dave Hancox are unknown.

Dean Love : 28 Feb 2012 00:58 |  Tags: Union |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Things learned in 2011

1. Online co-op gaming is a brilliant way to keep in touch people. Because while calling someone up to chat about random stuff feels like a poor use of time, doing that on Skype while shooting things feels constructive.

2. Sometimes, it may seem like a friendship is so completely fucked up that there’s no way of fixing it. But if you genuinely care about each other and think that it’s worthwhile to try, then it can work out.

3. Conversely, if you keep trying with some over and over, and they keep letting you down in the same way, time and time again, then eventually you have to throw in the towel. Not out of bitterness, not to punish them, not to get even, but simply because it hurts. Because as much as you enjoy their company, it’s not worth being made to feel worthless every few months.

4. It’s nice to be there for friends when they need you. It’s nice to have friends in your life that will be there for you. But that’s not the ultimate expression of friendship, it’s not the be-all and end-all, in fact it’s a relatively minor part of the whole thing. A truly valuable friendship is one where you just like each other. Where you want to spend time with that person for it’s own sake. Because they’re entertaining and interesting, and they find you entertaining and interesting too. It’s great to have friends who are there for you when you really need someone, but they’re barely friends if they can’t find time for you when you don’t. They’re just nice people who tolerate you.

5. Having a full-time job, writing regularly about TV for one website, writing semi-regularly about games for another, running a weekly comedy night and trying to maintain a semblance of a social-life with all that is about the limit of what one person can fit in the average life. Note that updating this blog is missing from that list. I think I understand serial-monogamists better now, because after you’ve been single for over a year, you end up taking so much on that you’re left with no clue how you’d fit a relationship in with that. Despite all this, I am running a two-day comedy festival in June.

6. My ability to cook has now surpassed my mother’s. This in no way means I can actually cook, but it does likely mean I’m doing Christmas dinner this year.

Dean Love : 14 Jan 2012 23:34 |  Comments (1) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

A bit more digging in to this Daily Mail / Amanda Knox story

I’m not normally one to defend the Mail, but this story going around that they pre-wrote two versions of the Amanda Knox verdict story, and then published the wrong one, set off some alarm bells.

If you haven’t seen it, the background is here

Writing two stories isn’t so bad, running the wrong one is a horrible mistake to make, especially when it has details and quotes that are obviously made up as they could not possibly have happened.

But.

I can see a reporter writing the two outlines, then leaving it with some work experience kid or junior reporter to stay on the desk all night and just “fix the details” when the actual verdict is reached. We can’t know for sure that the intention was ever to publish the story as it was. Take this bit:

“As Knox realized the enormity of what judge Hellman was saying she sank into her chair sobbing uncontrollably while her family and friends hugged each other in tears.”

This didn’t happen, but maybe it was just a way of writing an instruction to whoever was going to run the final piece to make a note Knox’s and her family’s reaction. Or maybe I’m being generous. We can’t possibly know as none of this ever happened, and they didn’t mean to publish the story anyway. So we can’t prove any sort of intent.

Or can we?

It stands to reason that if a ‘guilty’ story was pre-written with false quotes and observations, then the ‘not guilty’ story as run should also have false quotes and observations, which would be actually verifiable.

And this is where it gets a little wonky.

Here’s the current story in the Mail, that is found here:

It covers the reaction to the verdict as follows:

“Last night, there had been screams in court as the verdict was delivered.
Knox burst into tears and hugged her parents Curt and Edda Mellas – as just feet away the family of Meredith could only look on in amazement.”

But let’s have a look at Google shall we, which still has a search result extract from the original version of the ‘correct’ story that they posted which you might be able to see here:

Apparently:

“Knox, 24, punched the air in delight and screamed yes while her parents Curt and Edda Mellas collapsed in a flood of tears”

So apparently upon hearing the verdict, Amanda Knox must have punched the air, screamed in delight before bursting into tears and jumping on her parents to hug them while they were collapsed on the floor.

The detail of her punching the air doesn’t appear in the current version of the story on the Mail site at all, and it’s a rather odd thing to leave out. If it actually happened. Alas Google doesn’t have last night’s version of the page cached, so we can’t check any other details or quotes, but while it’s less obvious and certainly less funny than them reporting her as being found guilty, I can’t help but feel it’s a much bigger smoking gun in terms of demonstrating the fact that they’d already written and made-up these stories well before they went live last night, and then just fixed them with actual facts earlier this morning.

Dean Love : 04 Oct 2011 13:10 |  Tags: Politics |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Why Torchwood: Miracle Day Sucked

So we’re a week on from the finale, we can finally get some distance and reflect on if this season of Torchwood was really that bad. Turns out it was. It’s sad because at the halfway point I was ready to defend it. I watched the first eight episodes over one weekend and so the pacing problems were obviously there but didn’t really hit affect me half as much as people watching it with a week between each episode. But then it went so badly wrong and gave us an ending that betrayed the whole show. Here’s my analysis of exactly why this was bad television.

Character development: there was none. Seriously. Look at every character’s first and last appearances in the show. They’re exactly the same. No-one changed. Maybe, just maybe, Oswald Danes changed a bit, but the show never let us in his head. We never knew what was real and what was fake. His character veered from one place to another every week. Less a character journey, more a character spider-diagram.

Esther Drummond: the exception to the above rule. She changed. She grew up. It was kind of hokey and obvious: nervous researcher slowly becomes confident field-agent, it’s not setting the world alight as a concept. But at least it was there. So of course, she gets shot and killed. Because god-forbid we have more than one strong female character on a Russell T Davies show. She doesn’t even get to die any sort of heroic death. She’s just cast aside. Imagine how much more interesting the next series of Torchwood would be if she was the one that ended up immortal.

The acting: the main characters were all fairly wooden – we know Barrowman and Myles are a little wooden but Mekhi Phifer is generally decent but was the most shocking of the lot in his portrayal of Rex. It didn’t help that the show kept introducing decent actors before killing off their characters a few episodes or even minutes later. The wonderful Nana Visitor gets about three minutes of screen time before getting blown up, and John de Lancie’s character lights up the screen and makes the show actually feel alive for an episode an a half before he’s… blown up.

The ‘Britishness’: producing a British show with US locations and money. Sounds okay in theory, in practice we get US-style seriousness peppered with hammy British ridiculousness from the two leads. On its own one can just about deal with how silly Torchwood can be. That sense of fun seems to be an all-pervading part of British drama, for better or for worse. But dropped into the middle of a US cable show it just feels embarrassing.

The science: no-one dies, but why is no-one dying? It’s the crux of the show, and early on we get a glimpse at what sounds like proper science-fiction. Morphic fields are real and an area of science that we currently don’t fully comprehend, something ripe for exploration. Then they discover the device under Angelo’s bed and it all starts to seem very interesting. Then it turns out no-one is dying because of a giant magic creature that lives in the earth and ate Jack’s blood. Sorry what?

The politics: if you read any reviews of Children of Earth, the scenes in the cabinet office dealing with how the government react to the whole thing, making tough but selfish choices, are highlighted as one of the best parts. On the surface, Miracle Day is perfect for doing something similar. It’s a crisis, how are they going to deal with it? And this time there’s a chance to feature that sort of thing on an international scale with the UK-US connection. And they don’t bother. The classification system gets introduced but we never see the horrendous discussions that must have taken place to bring in that and the camps.

The medicine: some of the best parts of the early episodes are when Dr Juarez is attending the medical conferences, and they discuss the consequences of what’s happening, how medicine has to change and so on. None of this ever reflects on the plot, but it’s moments of interest and speculation that show how good the show could have been. And then one episode she turns up at the conference centre, only to be told they’re over. She looks disappointed, and so were we. Apparently they used them to work out the classification system, but somehow we missed all that.

The irrelevant episodes: there’s an entire flashback episode featuring Jack in 1927, and introducing who we assume will be an important character. Not the best episode, but I could live with it. But then that character is killed off in the next episode, the device he was protecting is talked about for a bit, Jack nicks part of it and it’s never mentioned again. It has no bearing on the plot whatsoever. Which means that the flashback episode was there solely to establish that in 1927 Jack died infront of three people and they watched him come back to life.

The failure of the arc: taking the previous point even further, nothing comes together at all. The camps are introduced, fought against and then accepted later on after a time-jump. The Oswald and Kitzinger stories both go absolutely nowhere at all. The Angelo thing has no point. The morphic field angle is dropped. There’s no effort made to tie it all together. Why not let the fact that Oswald was the first ‘survivor’ matter? Why not have the camps and ovens be a part of the story, perhaps the still living souls of the people burned affect the morphic field or something. Anything. Just have a story arc that actually ties itself together. We don’t even learn the motivations of the people behind it – they want to create a new world but it’s never really explained how they’re going to do that.

The missed opportunity: Russell T Davies got given ten hours and a huge budget with basically free-reign to do what he wanted. There isn’t a writer in television that wouldn’t jump at a chance to do that. And we get this. Something that can’t even hang together consistently over ten hours. And it’s such a good concept too – people stop dying. And the show even tells us what that would mean and the problems it would create, but doesn’t bother to show us. It should have been brilliant but it wasn’t. Worse than that, it was actively bad. It tore up the TV rule-book on mini-series and character development but instead of being a radical re-invention it just looked like Davies had no clue what he was doing.

I have a fairly high tolerance for bad TV, but Miracle Day was just so irredeemably, objectively awful that it should be university syllabuses as an example of what not to do. Wake me up if Moffat ever takes over this show as well.

Dean Love : 23 Sep 2011 00:36 |  Tags: TV |  Comments (1) |  Close comments |  Report a problem