By John Ward: Although many threaders here obviously think I’m a miserable bugger, the truth is that during any given day I laugh on average about 20 times more than most people. This has probably got something to do with reading 20 times more news: but whether the equality-forcers like it or not, it’s also because older, more intelligent and worldly folks know it’s laughable, and the overwhelmingly majority don’t even know (or care about) what the issues are. Why should they? They pay their taxes to have soi-disant ‘professionals’ sort this stuff out for them. They think those people know better. And anyway, the semi-final of The Voice is on tomorrow. Between 65 and 80% of the population in the West consume media on most of the issues of the day, and only rarely spot when they’re being manipulated. I was talking to a friend yesterday whose theory is that advertising (or perhaps more accurately, ‘publicity’) has simply invaded the editorial completely, so the thing that drives hacks these days is “Will it get the sales/hits/thread numbers up?” She’s right, of course.
George Orwell famously said that journalism is the craft of printing stuff nasty people don’t want printed, and the rest is just pr. Today, it’s all pr and spin in one form or another.
The journalists worth reading in 2014 know that they’re being handed bollocks, and so chuck that in the bin and start afresh: most of the rest change a few words here and there, have a quick look what everyone else is saying online, and then file the story – sorry, post the blog. And a few of the remainder (Con Coughlin, Cristina Adone etc) simply write what they’ve been told to by spin doctors, proprietors, or the security services.
I spent 35 years in advertising and marketing, covering almost every product field there is from mint chocolates to COI Government campaigns. We were the folks referred to by Vance Packard in the 1950s as The Hidden Persuaders, a truly daft title given that, of all the persuaders there are working in media, we were the only ones who had to make it crystal clear we were advertising, and the only ones to have the validity of all claims regulated. I always tried to avoid products I didn’t believe in, because when the product doesn’t deliver on the promise, the agency gets fired. This is bad for business. Nothing kills a crap product quicker than great advertising…as the 1970s Fiat Strada advertising proved to perfection.
But what the experience taught me is that the people in ‘top’ positions (especially politicians and Sir Humphreys) are nearly always disappointing when one meets them. I’ll go further: they’re not very bright either – but they are cunning…that’s how they got to the top, and that’s how they stay there. Their main weapon along the cunning dimension is the lie that can’t be proved, won’t be remembered, or sounds entirely plausible. I have watched, over the years, Alistair Campbell, Gordon Brown, Tony Blair, Peter Mandelson, David Cameron, Nick Clegg, Jeremy Hunt, Boris Johnson, Harriet Harman, in fact just about every pol going back to Margaret Thatcher lying to an interviewer. What they said, however, was almost always impossible to contradict, not big enough to set hounds on its trail, or pretty much what the viewer or listener expected.
It’s when the plausibility factor starts getting thin that the lies become anything from smile-inducingly to bladder-control defyingly funny. Few people can watch the Paxman interview with Michael Howard in 1997 without falling about laughing as each “Yes, but have you read it, Minister?” butts in to suffocate the media-trained drivel, as Howard trots out one evasion after another to hide his ignorance of a document about which he’d been sound-biting for England earlier. And as the trial unfolds, the evidence of Andy Coulson at the Old Bailey is going rapidly from implausible to hysterically funny.
The bloke’s insistence that his affair with Rebekah Brooks was “wrong, but not unprofessional” had me giggling for several different reasons earlier in the week. But yesterday Mr Coulson went straight through Credibility Junction without stopping, heading with a full head of steam towards Hilarity Gulch.
Admitting he’d heard voicemails of home secretary David Blunkett declaring his love for a married woman, the former Newscorper told the Court that when the reporter Neville Thurlbeck rang to say the source of his story was voicemail audio, “I was shocked that he was telling me this….I know that I used some colourful language to the effect of ‘what on earth do you think you are doing?’”.
Picture the scene. In the busy news office atop the bustling streets of Gotham City, ace reporter Scoop Thurlbeck – a man of dubious methods whom his boss Captain ‘Clean’ Coulson has been thinking about firing because he only wants to run a straight ship – smiles as he plays a tape of Bluebeard Blunkett saying “bottom” and such like.
“Holy privacy invasions Nev,” says the fearless, campaigning editor as he recoils in horror, “I mean, how did you get this? What on earth do you think you’re doing risking the reputation of the Gotham Star’s philanthropist owner Ripper Murder? Don’t you know this sort of thing is illegal? Be off with you scoundrel, and do not ever again darken my door!”
Well I’m sorry, but it made me laugh.
Like most skills, as spin has diffused down the innovation triangle and fallen into the hands of barrow-boy clods like Grant Shapps and Ed Balls, it has been poorly understood and thus incompetently used. Bring it on is what I say, but while we’re at it, let’s have a laugh too. And the ridiculous ‘evidence’ being offered up at the Bailey is far from rare in any given day’s ‘news’ output.
Methodist minister and former Coop Swinging Dick Paul Flowers is looking bang to rights on at least the moral charge of being something of a fat old hypocrite, so I confess to having laughed out loud when he arrived at the Court on various drugs charges yesterday, and addressed the media pack thus: “There is a phrase for some people, they call them vultures, and I really do hope that somebody quotes me on that, especially the BBC. The BBC have been really nice to me but the rest of you are vultures.”
I wish more people spoke to the media like that – I’m just not capable of keeping a straight face when those living in tissue paper conservatories start lobbing boulders into the Street of Shame. No doubt within 24 hours, Grant Shapps will pop up to demand an enquiry into why Paul Flowers got nice treatment from the Beeb, and soon afterwards Mark Williams-Thomas will arrive on the scene to allege that Mr Flowers used drugs to have his evil way with small parishioners. Later, when he gets round to it, Andy Coulson will be repulsed and offended by the word ‘vultures’.
Here’s another cracker: ‘British Christians should be unashamedly ‘evangelical’, says David Cameron, as he speaks of the ‘healing power’ of faith in his own life’. In an Anglican Times article, he also attacked those who demand a strict “neutrality” in public life on religious matters, arguing that it would deprive Britain of a vital source of morality.
I’m pleased to hear of this dimension in the Prime Minister’s life, and sincerely hope that his religious leanings won’t cause him to need the sort of recreational drugs on which Paul Flowers came to depend. Indeed, his evangelism probably explains why he felt it important to lunch with James Murdoch and Rebekah Brooks during the most important event in the Christian calendar. For both his companions at lunch that day are hard at it doing God too, so it was the obvious thing to do; and as the pious repast took place the day after the commemoration of the Nazarene’s birth, then we can rest assured that no discussions of a Mammonesque nature occurred, for that would’ve been blasphemous at such a time. But we know this anyway, because Mr Cameron told the House of Commons – seventeen times, to be precise – that no such discussion took place.
What can one say in the light of that overwhelming evidence in support of King David the Confessor? Probably something like, “I wouldn’t want to be a member of any Church that would accept David Cameron as a member”. Mr Cameron himself feels the same way about tax dodgers, and simply will not tolerate them in his circle. Quite how Messrs Hunt, Fallon, Osborne and Dave’s Dad got in there is hard to explain, and I wouldn’t want to speculate about it. Mainly, it just makes me smirk.
Almost everything’s funny in the end. People engage in an orgy of shopping to celebrate the birth of a Saviour who recommended a life devoid of retail therapy. Those same people eat chocolate rabbits in remembrance of their Christ’s execution at the hands of a vicious empire. I like Easter, but it has no religious significance for me at all. Whichever way you lean, enjoy the long weekend. And if, during the long waits in Bank Holiday traffic, you find yourself in a car with others looking fed up, say something naively implausible. As a comedic form, it rarely fails.
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