Crossofstgeorge Debate

[English Democrat]

Memorable? I don't recall
A BBC guide to improving memory is oddly forgettable - unlike Fat Beauty Contest, says Caitlin Moran

H ow to Improve Your Memory is another of those gigantic slabs of programming that the BBC sporadically lays down, with a great deal of noise and ceremony, in the evening schedules — much like a dinosaur taking a dump in the middle of the road. Previous mastodon-like mounds blocking our televisual highway have been Test the Nation and How to Sleep Better — shows determinedly designed for “all the family” to “join in” with.
Setting aside quite how desirable it is for “all the family” to ever “join in” — in the normal course of things, the only time “all the family” usually “join in” is when trying to salvage furniture from a house fire, or perhaps victimising the weakest member of the household over the course of their lifetime — it does also lead to a particularly vexatious style of presentation. Who knows what is said at the briefings, or the conclusions that are drawn in pre-production meetings? But the end result is that all the presenters constantly look like they’re about to say, “Come on! Get grandma to join in now!”

As How to Improve Your Memory is all about improving your memory through a series of small tests and learned techniques — mostly typified by Professor Robert Winston doing a link, and then leaning into the camera to twinkle: “Did you spot the deliberate mistake? That’s right! Last time we were in this room, there were four Renaissance portraits hung on the wall behind me! Now there are only three!” — this involves a lot of imaginary grandma-rousing.

As well as the Unspoken Grandma Invocation, there is the Red Button Fusspotting Situation. Who knows what year — possibly even which decade — it will be when television trusts us to press the red button on our own? “Whenever you see this sign,” Winston says, gamely pointing at where he has been told the graphics department will, at some later point, put a small logo, “it’s your chance to press the red button and go interactive!” Despite interactive television having been around for three years now, and used on such marginal concerns as the World Cup and the news, the red button is still treated as a potentially explosive situation — one that the nation must be spiritedly coerced into. The expressions on the presenters’ faces recall pioneers urging tribesmen to sample the power of the white man’s thunderstick, rather than simply do something that is one up from using Ceefax.

The most ironic facet of How to Improve Your Memory, however, is that, at an hour and a half long, the average viewer will have long forgotten why they started to watch it by the time it finishes.

The best line of dialogue in Fat Beauty Contest: “She can’t take part! She’s got a flat stomach! She’s got abs” “But she’s got a fat bum!” Having finally decided that, for the purposes of Fat Beauty Contest, fat begins at a size 16, the organisers then have to debate another thorny philosophical sticking point. It turns out that one contestant, Suzanne, is seven months pregnant. Technically, does pregnancy count as being fat? Millions of hormonal women across the world will be interested in the answer; though not, perhaps, so much as their beleaguered husbands (“Do I look fat?” “Darling, you not unsurprisingly look like you have a whole other person stuffed up your nightdress.”) Personally, I always like to see the kind of woman who could stop a pig in an alleyway using only her knees, “shaking what her mamma gave her” and screaming “I am a WOMAN!” It seems unfair that such potent televisual gold is limited only to brief shots of finger-waving audience-members on Ricki Lake.

The final scenes of the documentary, from the contest itself, are predictably magnificent. When the last 12 contestants come dancing down the catwalk in their corsets and heels, it’s like sighting a whole armada of generously breasted flagships, all with gigantic hair. You can imagine them opening fire on the British Navy, and having every manjack on his knees after the first salvo. Sail on, beautiful hefty chicks! Let only hot pirates board your joyous broad bulwarks! Here’s Garry Bushell — a man one might generously describe as “ape-like”, on the understanding that the ape in question was one of those that had gone mad in captivity, and had to be kept in solitary confinement after throwing his faeces at the penguins, and upsetting them — on a programme called The Great British Black Invasion. I do not think it is unreasonable for a body to surmise that Bushell would be broadly against the concept of such an invasion. He did, after all, stand in the last election for the English Democrats Party.

However, over the course of this pleasingly non-clichéd, 90-minute compilation of clips and talking heads, at no point does Bushell say anything once might describe as “Bushelly”. He is here firstly, and understandably, in his capacity as an expert on ska, and secondly and less expectedly, to explain the realities of life as a black Briton in the 20th and 21st century. At one point, he even mentions that he had, on his wall in his youth, a poster of Angela Davis — “one of my heroes”.

It’s all quite discombobulating — like seeing Prince Andrew bigging up Wat Tyler. Maybe it was all a deliberate mistake that we need to Press the Red Button to register: choose option 1 if you recall Gary Bushell historically being down with the strong black brothers. Press option 2 if your memory of Garry Bushell was, widely, that of a jingoistic goon.


How to Improve Your Memory, Wed, BBC One, 8pm; Fat Beauty Contest, Thur, Channel 4, 9pm; The Great British Black Invasion, tonight, Channel 4, 7.25pm.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,22871-2294486.html
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[Lance Dragon]

Caitlin Moran. Sounds like a typical Scottish sneerer to me.

It's their only remaining national sport at which they excel.
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RBS - Robbed by Scots
The deadliest enemies of the English are the British
Better a "Sour Little Englander" than a Poisonous Wee J ock.

[isca]

Least said about this person's snide remarks, the better.

Why do her dirty work for her.

Mindful of that, it's a pity that this thread didn't have a different title.

[calmac_man]

[isca]

[calmac_man]

[quote="Harold"
You are clear proof that 'care in the community' simply is not working!
[/quote]

Are insults all you've got?

[isca]

[calmac_man]

Woman with funny name writes something I don't like.

Must be Scottish then.

Bloke comes on here pointing it out.

Attack! Circle the wagons!



Sophisticated stuff.

[Lance Dragon]

[AEngliscman]

[calmac_man]

[isca]

[AEngliscman]

[Lance Dragon]

[Rob]

I read this article and tried to e-mail Ms Moran about it but I couldn't even find a general contact e-mail address for The Times, never mind the woman herself.

Her articles are mostly rubbish, she very rarely writes anything with any real intellectual substance. This offended me though - she got the English Democrats Party's name wrong and intimated that both it and Gary Bushell are anti-black racists. If she knew the first thing about the man she'd know that, for all his faults, he is a long-standing left-winger who has never been involved with any racist organisation, and if she knew the first thing about the English Democrats Party (i.e. its correct name) she'd be able to look at its policies on its website and hold her tongue.

As for her name - obviously Irish (not Scottish - it's slightly pitiful the way some people can't tell names from the two countries apart). She appears to have been born and raised in England though.

Doesn't matter though - what matters is the drivel she wrote.
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"extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue"