Via the handily lotterial (I don't care what you may think, it's a word. Put your hand down and pay attention at the back there) method of rant generation, BBC2's prime-time, nail-in-the-coffin-of-judicial-process controversy farm The Verdict gives ample opportunity to hate all kinds of things and still come out at the end of it all looking all intellecutal and clever-like.
To summarize, for the benefit of those who had the foresight to pull out their own brains and then cauterize the vestigal stump that remained for fear of infecting themselves with this guff: a convicted perjurer, three individuals of varying talent who all linger under the moniker of 'actors', two musicians, one of whom sees fit to name himself after a Japanese manga craze and still thinks he ought to be taken seriously, the CEO of a well-known high-street purveyor of knickers and hilarious inflatable animals (erm, so I've heard, anyway), a footballing-type fellow, a woman who wasn't very happy when her daughter got murdered, some stripling of a lad of twenty-one who's too successful for his own (or is it my own?) good and a former Shadow Chancellor all get together to decided on the guilt or lack thereof of a made-up group of defendants accused of raping a made-up woman. So, just your average jury, then.
Oh, but wait, it's not. It's actually not a legitimate jury at all, containing as it does at least one man with criminal convictions who's served jail time within the last ten years, and at least a good few grounds for objection by even the most half-witted of barrister smattered around the place. It's also, let's be fair, so astonishingly unlikely that all twelve of these vaguely-known individuals would all a) be called for jury service at the same time, b) all be within the catchment area of the same Crown Court and c) all serve on the same jury that we may as well give up now and call in Darth Vader as the foreman.
Ah, but, say the programme's advocates (the puns! Oh, the terrible terrible puns!), that's the point! We get all these people together to crack open the nature of the jury and show everyone what the law's all about! Then it's not a big mystery any more and we all go home happy, discussing last night's episode of the case over the water cooler and on the BBC message boards, presumably with gusto. Well, here's news to you all, chumps: you can't have both, and, to be frank, you shouldn't have either. If you want to treat this like a real case, and if you want to watch what a jury go through as they take the agonizing decision between possibly locking up an innocent man and allowing a guilty one to walk free, while learning how the law that frames all this works, then fine. Go ahead and do it, you ghouls. But don't be surprised if I come round and bash your smug little heads together when at the end of the week you congratulate yourselves on guessing correctly whether or not she was lying. If you want Archer and his cohorts to treat this deal as though it was the real McCoy, you need to be doing that yourself, too. Of course, you've probably stopped reading by this point, because it's a long paragraph and mostly it flies over your head a bit with all the legal talk. Well, it gets thicker from here, so we'll have a Tourette's-style outburst so the stragglers can catch up.
Boobies!
But, much as I'd love to blame Jeffrey 'Perjurer Mcperjury Perjury Perjuryface' Archer and the whole damn programme for the whole mess, it really isn't their fault. If we've got to the point where a programme like this actually becomes plausible, then somewhere down the line someone's put a foot wrong, and I think I can guess who. Hint: it's quite a lot of people. Quick pop quiz: which piece of legislation defines the offence of murder? If you answered anything other than 'none, it's covered in the common law and always has been, you charlatan', possibly substituting 'charalatan' for your own highbrow insult of choice, then I'm not at all surprised and don't think any the worse of you. Unless you're a legal professional of some kind, in which case you'll understand if I don't hire you to defend me against my forthcoming lawsuit from made-up PhD lady 'Doctor' Gillian McKeith, with 'Doctor' here rhyming with 'not a doctor'. But I digress.
The only reason I have any particularly decent knowledge of the English legal system is because I chose to study it at A-level. Had I not done so, I'd probably be in the same boat as everyone else, which is mad: I actually had to elect to learn the law as a purely academic and university-attention-grabbing qualification to know anything much about it at all. Compare with the United States, and their schools' undying devotion to their beloved Constitution. Sure, it creates obsessively silly patriotic zeal of the kind that should've died out with all the rest of the Nationalist movement about seventy years ago, but at least it gives the little 'uns, and by extension, the big little 'uns, at least the vaguest grounding in their laws and how they come about. And then they go and spoil it all by doing something stupid like televising trials.
Citizenship lessons, that's the key! To most Johnny Commoners on the street, courts and laws and parliaments are all just a load of blokes in silly wigs talking in code while occasionally one of them sees fit to appear on the news and talk down to them, thus making the football late. Thanks to Law & Order and its brood, I'd hazard most English citizens have more idea how US criminal law works than does their own. Probably best not to dwell on what goes on on the civil side of things. Teach little Jimmy Commoner about Magna Carta, the blowing up of shit all over the world for the Campaign For This Sort Of Thing (as it was never known) and about a thousand years' worth of blokes with swords shouting at each other and getting quite huffy over the whole affair and you've suddenly got a whole new ball game. Probably best to leave out all the boring stuff, and quite right, too, but all little Jimmy needs to know is the beautiful balance of nature which has somehow fallen out of a constitutional Monarchy being ruled by a democratic assembly and a convention of aristocrats under a joyously simple set of legal frameworks and he'll leap for joy. Well, probably not, but possibly the little bastard will stop kicking peoples' bins over and laughing.
This rant was brought to you in conjunction with the letter 'K' and the number 7.
Tuesday 13 February 2007
Monday 5 February 2007
Bill Lawrence Ought To Be Ashamed
I'm not normally given to making two blog posts within the space of four hours, but there you are, my blood's up. Seeing as though all I've done with it lately is rant about TV programmes I've watched, I may as well continue the theme and pretend like I'm Charlie Brooker and get paid for this stuff. Also, there's little point in my discussing details of my actual life, since anything of interest I'd probably tell people in a slightly less nerdy way.
So, I've just this minute watched episode seven of Scrubs's sixth season, which aired on NBC last Thursday and then on a lot of computers via various quasi-moral file-sharing facilities about three hours later. 'Nuff said, a nod's as good as a wink to a blind horse, need I say more et cetera et cetera. Anyways, bearing in mind that up this point, the show has been one of the smartest, best written and obscenely well-soundtracked TV sitcoms to date, I'm willing to forgive even quite a big duffer of an episode now and then. So what is it that makes me want to rant about it to an audience who mostly won't see the show until this autumn at the earliest, and therefore won't have a clue what the fuck I'm on about?
It's probably the obscenely childish portrayal of the touchy subject known as politics and also the linked notion that bringing it up would throw all notions of professionalism out of the window. Without going too in-depth into the plot (mostly because I don't need to, not because I actually think it's worth protecting anyone from accidental exposure to the plot of a half-hour sitcom they'll have forgotten by the time they get around to seeing anyway), the presence of a wounded soldier fresh from a tour in Iraq causes instant and suspiciously equal division between the staff at Sacred Heart hospital in the pro- and anti-war camps. What follows was no doubt billed by NBC as a fair and balanced portrayal not of the views involved, but rather the ancilliary effects of the conflict and what happens when friendship and politics mix. I'd describe it either as the sort of thing that could only be concieved in the most childish and simple-minded of intellects or a demonstration that life in America really is as bad as TV news-based panel shows and comedians would seem to suggest.
You see, as the two camps of staff continue to argue and dispute with one another, they end up neglecting their work, and, who'd've thought it, the injured soldier fellow nearly dies because of it. Eventually, tiring of all the bickering, Dr Kelso saves the day by setting himself up as a figure they can all love to hate and start getting along again. Oh, and JD demonstrates a complete ingorance of the whole situation, lovable scamp that he is, and goes off to read Iraq For Dummies while it all goes on.
So we're supposed to imagine that the assembled medical types (so, doctors, mind. Educated people who've done some learnin' in their time) are actually some form of robot or Jack Russel terrier, grabbing onto the touchy subject of the war with their sharp little teeth and refusing to let go until their jaws are forcibly unclamped and they can go back to running around yelping. There's nobody, in a hospital full of people, who has the wit to go "hold on, guys, we're not going to agree. What say we all abandon this endless bickering and, God, I don't know, stop that guy from dying and do our jobs?" Apparently, you see, in America, professionalism is just something to do while you're waiting for the next argument to come about. Or, to put it another way, there's a clause in the Hippocratic oath which excuses the doctor from performing his duty if the guy he's got to do it beside is a Republican jerk.
But oh! As long as we remember that we both hate our boss, then it's all cool and I don't know what we were fighting about in the first place, I really don't. Come on, let's sew this guy's chest back together, and I bet you fifty bucks that we never mention this incident again in the entire series. Meanwhile, poor ol' JD can't even point to Iraq on a globe, and has no idea what the fuck's happening until it's too late.
One might be forgiven for dismissing all of this as just really bad writing, but my meagre research performed on the subject indicate that the regulars on the show's message board count among their number several people who thought this an interesting, relevant and (sweet baby Jesus, don't let it be true) accurate portrayal. Which means, of course, that this kind of thing is more widespread than I'd dared believe, here in my liberal cocoon of intellect, education, relying on more than just the breakfast radio for my source of news and not letting people die because I was busy arguing with my colleagues. Silly old me for thinking that doctors in a TV sitcom might do the same.
Alternative to this view is the proposal that the writers actually know that what's on the show is a load of tripe-flavoured bollocks, but actually what they're doing is using their lovely medium to highlight an undeniably present issue by overblowing it so massively. All well and good, then, but they don't actually highlight anything. If they were to do so, there'd be a whiff of controversy about the thing, with possibly some sort of resolution. All I see is the use of a potentially hugely volatile (and, thanks to what's known informally as the Brass Eye Equation, potentially pant-pissingly hilarious) piece of current affairs as a throwaway bit of tat so disastrously wasted it's nearly as bad as that time I used the V & A's collection of Fabergé eggs to learn juggling with. God, that was a costly trip to the museum.
So, in conclusion, either this is a portrayal of a country so arse-backwards that it's not even funny anymore (which would make it dead serious and volatile, which would, via the Brass Eye Equation, make it funny again) or a disastrous waste of writer's resources the like of which they won't find again.
Right. I'm off to watch the whole of M*A*S*H. I'll no doubt be seeing you all around the point Alan Alda gets too preachy and BJ Hunnicut grows a 'tache. There's bile material in there for months.
So, I've just this minute watched episode seven of Scrubs's sixth season, which aired on NBC last Thursday and then on a lot of computers via various quasi-moral file-sharing facilities about three hours later. 'Nuff said, a nod's as good as a wink to a blind horse, need I say more et cetera et cetera. Anyways, bearing in mind that up this point, the show has been one of the smartest, best written and obscenely well-soundtracked TV sitcoms to date, I'm willing to forgive even quite a big duffer of an episode now and then. So what is it that makes me want to rant about it to an audience who mostly won't see the show until this autumn at the earliest, and therefore won't have a clue what the fuck I'm on about?
It's probably the obscenely childish portrayal of the touchy subject known as politics and also the linked notion that bringing it up would throw all notions of professionalism out of the window. Without going too in-depth into the plot (mostly because I don't need to, not because I actually think it's worth protecting anyone from accidental exposure to the plot of a half-hour sitcom they'll have forgotten by the time they get around to seeing anyway), the presence of a wounded soldier fresh from a tour in Iraq causes instant and suspiciously equal division between the staff at Sacred Heart hospital in the pro- and anti-war camps. What follows was no doubt billed by NBC as a fair and balanced portrayal not of the views involved, but rather the ancilliary effects of the conflict and what happens when friendship and politics mix. I'd describe it either as the sort of thing that could only be concieved in the most childish and simple-minded of intellects or a demonstration that life in America really is as bad as TV news-based panel shows and comedians would seem to suggest.
You see, as the two camps of staff continue to argue and dispute with one another, they end up neglecting their work, and, who'd've thought it, the injured soldier fellow nearly dies because of it. Eventually, tiring of all the bickering, Dr Kelso saves the day by setting himself up as a figure they can all love to hate and start getting along again. Oh, and JD demonstrates a complete ingorance of the whole situation, lovable scamp that he is, and goes off to read Iraq For Dummies while it all goes on.
So we're supposed to imagine that the assembled medical types (so, doctors, mind. Educated people who've done some learnin' in their time) are actually some form of robot or Jack Russel terrier, grabbing onto the touchy subject of the war with their sharp little teeth and refusing to let go until their jaws are forcibly unclamped and they can go back to running around yelping. There's nobody, in a hospital full of people, who has the wit to go "hold on, guys, we're not going to agree. What say we all abandon this endless bickering and, God, I don't know, stop that guy from dying and do our jobs?" Apparently, you see, in America, professionalism is just something to do while you're waiting for the next argument to come about. Or, to put it another way, there's a clause in the Hippocratic oath which excuses the doctor from performing his duty if the guy he's got to do it beside is a Republican jerk.
But oh! As long as we remember that we both hate our boss, then it's all cool and I don't know what we were fighting about in the first place, I really don't. Come on, let's sew this guy's chest back together, and I bet you fifty bucks that we never mention this incident again in the entire series. Meanwhile, poor ol' JD can't even point to Iraq on a globe, and has no idea what the fuck's happening until it's too late.
One might be forgiven for dismissing all of this as just really bad writing, but my meagre research performed on the subject indicate that the regulars on the show's message board count among their number several people who thought this an interesting, relevant and (sweet baby Jesus, don't let it be true) accurate portrayal. Which means, of course, that this kind of thing is more widespread than I'd dared believe, here in my liberal cocoon of intellect, education, relying on more than just the breakfast radio for my source of news and not letting people die because I was busy arguing with my colleagues. Silly old me for thinking that doctors in a TV sitcom might do the same.
Alternative to this view is the proposal that the writers actually know that what's on the show is a load of tripe-flavoured bollocks, but actually what they're doing is using their lovely medium to highlight an undeniably present issue by overblowing it so massively. All well and good, then, but they don't actually highlight anything. If they were to do so, there'd be a whiff of controversy about the thing, with possibly some sort of resolution. All I see is the use of a potentially hugely volatile (and, thanks to what's known informally as the Brass Eye Equation, potentially pant-pissingly hilarious) piece of current affairs as a throwaway bit of tat so disastrously wasted it's nearly as bad as that time I used the V & A's collection of Fabergé eggs to learn juggling with. God, that was a costly trip to the museum.
So, in conclusion, either this is a portrayal of a country so arse-backwards that it's not even funny anymore (which would make it dead serious and volatile, which would, via the Brass Eye Equation, make it funny again) or a disastrous waste of writer's resources the like of which they won't find again.
Right. I'm off to watch the whole of M*A*S*H. I'll no doubt be seeing you all around the point Alan Alda gets too preachy and BJ Hunnicut grows a 'tache. There's bile material in there for months.
The Pathos of a Chicken's Funeral
Ah, the journalistic pride I feel in reporting the fact that the Shipwrecked crew harboured a raving racist a whole two or three days ahead of most of the country's news agencies, who all had to wait around for Ofcom to tell them. Oh, the bitter sting in knowing that it doesn't matter anyway and most people have learnt the news in question and then forgotten it again since then. Such is life; a fleeting mass of information travelling at such a speed that the world as an entity suffers from collective ADHD and can't pay attention to anything more than - oh look, goats.
This week on the show, token-gay-man's week-old pet chicken died, and a funeral was held in which the fool looked down upon the body of his former pet and recited the lyrics to Goodbye by the Spice Girls while his two companions looked on and sniggered their slightly-more-sane hearts out. The whole affair was drenched in rain, as any TV funeral should be, and couldn't have come out more beautifully if the producers had hired Harold Pinter to write the whole thing.
Meanwhile, a snippet of conversation illustrates exactly what we're all in for over the coming months. It went like this:
TANNED, SHIRTLESS BLOKE: So, what did you come on the show for?
BIKINI CLAD HOT GIRL: Well, I suppose to find out who I am.
Which is all indicative of the sort of thing that goes on on tropical islands, I suppose. If I wanted to find out who I was, God forbid, I'd go and look at my birth certificate. That seems to have all the salient information. Why are you lying, Bikini Clad Hot Girl? The answer to that kind of question goes like this: I like islands, especially of the tropical variety; I like money and the chance to win it; and finally I like scantily clad members of the opposite sex who have a similar level of absolute lunacy to my own. I also may like the chance of being out of the reach of the Long Arm of Her Majesty's Law for a few months due to some misdeeds which I may or may not have accidentally committed after my husband came home one night reeking of perfume which was not my own and then tried to lie about it, the bastard.
God, that's be great, wouldn't it? I don't know under whose law the Shark and Tiger islands are governed, but if they didn't have an extraditon treaty with Britain, there's all kinds of room for runaway felons there. And I bet the damn Guardian wouldn't even know about it till Ofcom told them next Wednesday.
This week on the show, token-gay-man's week-old pet chicken died, and a funeral was held in which the fool looked down upon the body of his former pet and recited the lyrics to Goodbye by the Spice Girls while his two companions looked on and sniggered their slightly-more-sane hearts out. The whole affair was drenched in rain, as any TV funeral should be, and couldn't have come out more beautifully if the producers had hired Harold Pinter to write the whole thing.
Meanwhile, a snippet of conversation illustrates exactly what we're all in for over the coming months. It went like this:
TANNED, SHIRTLESS BLOKE: So, what did you come on the show for?
BIKINI CLAD HOT GIRL: Well, I suppose to find out who I am.
Which is all indicative of the sort of thing that goes on on tropical islands, I suppose. If I wanted to find out who I was, God forbid, I'd go and look at my birth certificate. That seems to have all the salient information. Why are you lying, Bikini Clad Hot Girl? The answer to that kind of question goes like this: I like islands, especially of the tropical variety; I like money and the chance to win it; and finally I like scantily clad members of the opposite sex who have a similar level of absolute lunacy to my own. I also may like the chance of being out of the reach of the Long Arm of Her Majesty's Law for a few months due to some misdeeds which I may or may not have accidentally committed after my husband came home one night reeking of perfume which was not my own and then tried to lie about it, the bastard.
God, that's be great, wouldn't it? I don't know under whose law the Shark and Tiger islands are governed, but if they didn't have an extraditon treaty with Britain, there's all kinds of room for runaway felons there. And I bet the damn Guardian wouldn't even know about it till Ofcom told them next Wednesday.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)