Nick's Blog
Joannie Loves Blog
21/10/2009 @ 22:01
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I really, REALLY, should not eat cheese before going to bed.
OK, so I have this dream last night: I'm interviewing former "Happy Days", "Joannie Loves Chachie" and "Diagnosis: Murder" star Scott Baio...Mr. Bugsy Malone himself...about his work but all he wants to do is talk about his latest album.
Behind him is a mirror and through it I see an atomic bomb exploding. Scott and I judge, from the distance and the time it takes to form the mushroom cloud, that it won't affect us burns wise or radiation wise but after a few seconds the shockwave does hit us and shakes us around.
I leave the room to see what's happening and realise that I'm on a ship and all around me in the harbour, which incidentally has cliffs over 300 foot high all around us, are tall sailing ships and some are on fire.
I stop to help put out some fires but most of the ships are heavily damaged. The next day I meet the Italian minister for culture and he boasts that the bomb blast was Italy's first atomic test and then he proceeds to show me a small suitcase nuclear bomb and proudly declares it as Italy's finest technological achievement... in particular the arming device which is a simple one touch mechanism.
I complain that the arming mechanism is way too easy to activate by mistake and demonstrate how an accident could occur. He scoffs at me and leaves with the bomb.
Next, I hook up with Bodie and Doyle from The Professionals and together the three of us are tasked to investigate whether Italy is arming terrorists with the new nuclear bombs and as we go to tail the Italian Minister for Culture (our one lead), we are diverted instead to a cheap hotel somewhere in the country to investigate a money laundering racket, which draws protests from me because it's not as important as nuclear terrorism. Bodie and Doyle say that's just the way the system works so I go off and grumble in the hotel's self service lunch counter.
Whilst there, I notice that the lunch menu is heavily dominated by salads and puddings with no hearty main courses being served. I find this odd and try to find the manager to complain to but my friend Bruce McLean says it's best not to and just enjoy one of the salads on offer. As I dither trying to make my choice, my ex-girlfriend from university cuts in front of me in the line and when I object, she acts like she doesn't know me.
I swear that dream just described is all true without any embellishment and it's one of only 3 dreams I've ever had that I've remembered. I cannot begin to fathom why my mind decided to cobble together Scott Baio, an Italian nuclear bomb test, tall sailing ships, The Professionals, my mate Bruce, a salad bar and an ex-girlfriend into some narrative but it did and I still can't decide what Jung would make of being visited by Bodie and Doyle.
The Big Blog
13/10/2009 @ 00:16
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We were off filming last weekend; which went largely well...largely. We had a pared down cast and crew of just 6 people, a lightweight camera which was hand held for a lot of it and a few improvisational ideas. The fact that we were pestered by the police for being an unlicenced film crew on the public streets is neither here nor there. One costume and one video camera is enough to get labelled as some rogue, out of control professional film unit that needs wresting under control. So much for guerilla film making.
Thinking back on this incident, and about what we do here at Rhubba got me thinking about the nature of the media industry. In politics, there's the debate about big vs small government and I got to thinking about the concept of big vs small media.
So what are they? Well, small media includes Rhubba.com: We're financially small, we're a small team and although we have big ambitions, we're small in scale right now. Small media represent independent film makers, local news, internet entertainment, even small digital TV channels. Basically it's where things are kept on a localised level or to a brief that is seldom exceeded.
Big media, natch, includes the big networks, the studios, the national and international press. It also, for me, represents a way of thinking and a way of getting things done. For example, Big Media doesn't just come up with ideas for movies or TV programmes: It creates the very formats and the rules of play for them. It decides how we will consume the product (indeed, it calls its output 'product'), when we will consume it, and what form that product will take in ways that leave very little left to chance.
But Big Media comes with a lot of problems and baggage which I find destructive. Take for example network marketing. At some point, some marketing person put across the idea that branding was the be all and end all of securing an audience. Content wouldn't secure it on its own; it had to be branded content. So a few things started to happen; first, a little channel logo would appear in the top corner of your TV screen. Then a caption announcing what the next show will be gets rolled out right in the middle of a show you're watching. A horrible ugly banner unfurled over the action that you're trying to concentrate on. In the worst cases, that banner would be animated, characters from that next show would dance or clown around next to the caption at the bottom of the screen. I once tried to watch a comedy show only to have a girl in a bikini suddenly show up and start dancing at the bottom of the TV screen before a caption appeared saying that Bikini Beach will start next Saturday evening on that channel. So it wasn't even for the next show, but one in 6 days time! When I would be out! They traded Jennifer Anniston's legs in "Friends" for a moronic looking bikini model with a fake tan just to tell me that.
And even that isn't enough for TV marketing men: The end credits of a show must be squeezed into a little corner box whilst a scene from the next show plays on the right of my screen and the next shows on the two sister channels scroll across the bottom. But what's the use of that when you can also have a continuity announcer vocalising what is up on screen to see and read for yourself.
So your modern TV show will tell you, in 4 ways, what station you're watching at any given moment. Time was when TV listing magazines told you what was on, and the end credits of shows told you who was what and who did what job on that programme: Now it's the other way around.
There is absolutely no reason, no logical and sensible reason, why this system is in place. None. And anyone who tells you there is either a damned liar or seriously deluded. Oh, and probably in marketing. Have you ever met anyone in the world who likes credit squashing? Or captions being unfurled right in the middle of an action or intense dialogue scenes? No. No-one outside of tellyland likes them and yet we still have them. Petitions have been sent to the BBC and other networks complaining about credit squashing and the Beeb said it would "review the policy" which in practice meant laugh at the stupid plebs who dared to protest and piss into their baying mouths for good measure. No, the networks are going to maintain this and more because they're stuck on the idea and will pursue it until the public is numbed into submission. Soon, it will become the despised norm and people will give up complaining about it.
You see, that's an example of a Big Media idea. Marketing says that network branding is king, therefore fuck what the public thinks and push through the measure. Big Media likes big audiences, but it doesn't care about a relationship with them. There is no duty of customer care when it comes to the media. You can't make a complaint about a programme and get your money back or exchange one sucky idea for a better one. If you listen to any of those viewer and listener feedback shows on TV or radio, they essentially boil down to someone complaining about a facutal error, or smut, or offence and a producer's spokesman (never the top person themselves, they never stoop to answer Joe Public) basically says a statement to the effect "we've heard what you've had to say but we're right and you're wrong. Clear off."
Big Media is seldom about concepts, but it is obsessed with the medium. It loves the word format, and shies from the word content. Big Media people talk about post modernism, they talk about zeitgeists and "fingers on the pulse". It's about buzzwords. It seldom creates anything new that doesn't already fit an existing mould. It loves adapting comic books and old TV series into movies because of the potential for a pre-built audience. It uses phrases like "pre-built audiences". It likes to employ columnists and commentators who couch their opinions in pat phrases and safe pronouncements such as "downgrading from a policy to an aspiration" and "living in a post-Y2K environment" as if people out there either comprehend or care what they mean by that.
Another example is the way those in the news and media who are asked to comment on the news always rush for the safe and vague ground when making a statement: Put it to them that the BNP might have to get some TV coverage and they retreat to "of course it's appauling that the BNP is being given a platform and I hope someone will prevent them from doing so" or the ever reliable "well the vast majority of Muslims are law abiding and non-violent", a statement that is banal in the extreme: The vast majority of most groups of people are non-violent and law abiding. These are platitudes designed to make people seem more intelligent and understanding than they actually are.
Big Media exists in its own self-congratulatory bubble where it only needs itself for company. It thinks that most people are interested in awards ceremonies to the extent that whole evenings are devoted to them. It assumes that if it devotes time to any subject, then that subject becomes relevant or important and never entertains the notion that something could be relevant or interesting without it being filmed or reported on.
It's not about single, brilliant flashes of inspiration...it's about the carefully applied theories and practices doing the rounds. Take "Strictly Come Dancing" for example. A show designed and produced in kit form by committee. It took the bare bones of an old TV show, "Come Dancing" and added "Strictly" to the front because that was used in a popular movie called "Strictly Ballroom" in an attempt that two recognisable and successful products can somehow combine into making a third, super product. It's format is the mix of the old show, ballroom dancing, and it's added the celebrity factor used in "Help I'm A Celebrity Get Me Out of Here", put in a snarky panel of judges a la X Factor and a public voting system used on Big Brother. So it's just a bunch of ingredients from other successful shows cobbled together with a misleading title: If the show really was "strictly", it would go back to featuring professionals and dedicated dancers instead of hapless celebrities.
The controversy that SCD has garnered, and the controversy that has arisen from Big Brother's race and exploitation rows, the phone in scandals and the cynical re-editing of of programmes to create nastiness has illustrated just how far a gulf has grown between the viewer and the networks. The days of an outraged Mrs Whitehouse and the tut tutting of her National Viewers and Listeners Association are long gone: Viewers aren't put off by smut and violence any longer. Rather it's a gulf of mentality where one party thinks it knows better and lords it over the other that has caused the rift.
Which is where small media comes in. As we all know, the mood is shifting. Do people want to sit in overpriced multiplexes to watch a mediocre SFX movie anymore? Are newspapers so partisan and celebrity obsessed that people can't trust a single word in them? And as TV continues to crap all over the audiences that are deserting them in droves is anyone got any sympathy for it?
Because at the end of the day, format means precious little to a viewer or reader. Content means a whole lot. Do you watch a show for its format, or do you want it to entertain you, to inspire you, to make you laugh, cry, or feel anything? Do you wish to be surprised? Well, Big Media turned its back on those things to a large extent but small media has based its well being on it. It has little else. It's the old tale of a low budget movie doing well because shorn of its trappings, it has to rely on its story. The internet has been a way of letting people be creative without getting bogged down in branding excercises. There are bloggers out there with infinitely more interesting things to say than columnists because they're out of the media bubble and not trotting out the cliches.
For me, Small Media is my happy hunting ground. May I never have to squeeze any credits.
Zorba The Blog
02/10/2009 @ 16:31
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I just got back from Crete...didn't tell you lot I was going because I still get paranoid you'll burgle my house.
Anyway, I could tell you about the sunshine, the beach, the history, the culture, the sights and sounds but I'm not. If you want to know what Crete is like...go there. Or get a good guide book.
I'm not even going to go into anything remarkable or unusual that happened or bore you with a blow by blow account of mundane things that we did or how Junior did some really cute things. The only odd thing I noticed on this trip was a family of 4 staying at the same hotel as us; a middle aged couple and their two 20 something daughters... who all looked like Ringo Starr right down to the early Beatles hairstyles. Here's a top tip: If you already look a little like Ringo Starr, DON'T get a Beatle hair cut.
Instead, I'm going to talk about some of the things I love about going on holiday...the little things that never fail to put a smile on my face.
First, I love airline food. I don't care about the taste so much but I love it for all its compartmentalised dudiness. A little plastic tray with foil covering that, hey presto! Reveals a meat, potato and vegetable meal. And even though I don't need it and even though it's probably not healthy for me...I'll sprinkle salt and pepper from the two little sachets provided over my meal BECAUSE I CAN AND THEY'RE THERE! I love orange juice in a plastic foil covered bowl, not a glass because that would be all wrong. You see, I just love the fact I can have a 3 course meal in a space smaller than a sheet of A4 paper.
And that love of little dudiness extends to hotels as well. For me, the mark of a top hotel is not its restaurant, its beds, its location and whatnot. It's the quality of its little bottles of shampoo and shower gel. You see, just a couple of little bottles of gloop in my room means that I don't have to lug large amounts of the stuff across the world and taking up precious space in my cases because the airline security won't let me carry them in my hand luggage for fear that I'll pull a MacGuyver and fashion them into napalm. And of course, the king of all holiday items is the hotel mini bar. Lots of little doody miniature drinks! And it gets restocked every day!
But I now have another holiday fave to add to dudiness: Foreign TV. Sure, I can tune into CNN and it's fine. I like it. But I love finding some foreign drama show and trying to work out what the hell it's about.
It started when we were in Austria a couple of years ago and I stumbled onto a locally made soap opera I dubbed "Orangenders", because it looked like the show was filmed using no artificial studio lighting which made it look like something shot on a family camcorder which hadn't been white balanced.
Then, on this trip, I discoverd the Dutch version of Byker Grove or Degrassi Junior High called "Spangas". In it, a bunch of attractive teenagers with the worst dress sense since 1980s era "Neighbours" got themselves worked up over a number of really minor social issues. Really Lana, nobody really cares if your pen friend in Portugal stops writing.
But I became addicted to two Greek soap operas which I dubbed "Greekenders" and "Coronation Greek" (I found out that their real titles are even cooler: "The Secrets of Eden" and "The Other Life"). I couldn't understand a word but I had great fun trying to work out what was going on. Something about a salad not tasting crisp and fresh was one of my guesses. But I loved the whole looks of the shows as everything was so glamourous, but shot on a low budget. In the UK, they'll spend millions on Eastenders and Coronation Street trying to make everything look drab and nasty. In Greece, everyone's hormones are ramped up to factor 11 and shirts are just ready to pop open with the puff of a chest. The characters all live in great ultramodern homes that wouldn't look out of place on an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation and are always just a nanosecond away from bitch slapping each other. But they film these shows with all kinds of crazy, and needless, crash zooms and jump cuts which jarr the eyes but I like that: No British soap would dare to use a jump cut or rapidly zoom into someone's face, realise they've zoomed too far in, zoom out a bit to compensate and then adjust the focus. That, my friends, is TV making on the edge!
But I want this stuff available for all the world to see! Given the choice between a bleary eyed Roxy Mitchell staggering hung over into the Queen Vic kitchen and some over made up Greek version of Kate O'Mara throwing salad, I'd plump for the latter every time.
