I'm the Duke of Earl? (BSDA #3)

I was listening today to my latest iTunes download, La Carotte Bleue by The Ghost Of A Sabre Tooth Tiger, which is the project of John and Yoko sprog Sean Lennon and his girlfriend (don't worry, it's actually brilliant), and fulminating on what it was I liked about the band. Was it their slightly ridiculous hipster name, their sometimes French language lyrics (always a necessity for the higher echelons of pretension society), or the fact that at least 98% of the people I know won't have heard of them. In fact, it is option D - I love their sound, which is, it seems, simultaneously marijuana-fuelled aristocratic garden party and disturbing noirish horror flick, while at the same time is drenched in a foam of echoing vocals and soft organ (you'll never read this sentence again, you can be sure of that!), which, at the simplest level, I like.

The above paragraph oscillates tremendously, because I'm really a terrible writer, but I suppose the conclusion I'm trying to steer the semantic ship towards is that while I'm generally a fan of obscure music, it isn't that quality of such bands I like, rather their music - which is, it would seem, not always the case with some people. You must be aware of the guys who always drop the most unknown names into a conversation merely to seem better than you; against whom a brilliant tactic is to simply put together two random words and try to pass off the result as the latest undiscovered Belgian sensation.

What the hell am I talking about? This is what happens when you sit down to write a blog without a plan and just spew. Which is all the time.

Anyway, part two - in which I talk about the opposite to obscure hipster chic, the humble twelve-bar standard. So Hank Green recently made a video showing the waiting world how many different songs have been written around the so-called Ice Cream Changes, I-vi-IV-V, including Reel Big Fish's ska classic She Has A Girlfriend Now, the Police's stalker anthem Every Breath You Take and even Justin Bieber's Baby.

Delightfully, however, he started at the dawn of musical time with the Penguins and Dion & the Belmonts, and, a magnificent singer of whom I had never heard called Gene Chandler, whose lovely Duke of Earl is a beguiling satire on the interbreeding of the British aristocracy. (Late April fools... or something. It isn't, anyway; that was a poor joke, which is what you get when you write blogs after 11 in the evening. Soz.) So afterwards I had that song's refrain in my head ALL FREAKING DAY, after which it slightly started to lose its sparkle, I'll be honest.

There was a point to this blog, but it has temporarily escaped the author's mind. Something to do with the difference between obscure and well-known music and how it ultimately comes down not to the label you give a song, but to the musical quality it has of itself.

Yeah. Kinda got away from me.

Follow me please, or a thousand thousand slimy things will crawl upon the slimy sea. (Coleridge, now. Anyway now I'm off to read Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Who the hell do I think I am?) 

The visual and narrative conventions of documentary television. (BSDA #1)

[So I'm attempting BSDA, my own acronym for Blog Some Days in April, a kinda cop-out version of the internet tradition. Two reasons why I can't do every day - I'm away from the 18th to the 22nd, and, well, I have a life. Not to mention revision. My challenge is therefore to do 20 blogs this month. I hope you'll join me in my quest. If you want to, please follow. Now - on with the rant.]

I really hate watching Andrew Marr walk around shopping centres. By this, I don't mean that I occasionally see him perusing the shelves at Topman or whatever, because I don't go to those kind of places. And I'm sure he doesn't either. What I'm talking about is documentaries. It seems that today it is absolutely essential for every director on the BBC to fill at least 40 minutes of their hour-long shows with fatuous nonsense, moody music and presenters walking around NOT SAYING ANYTHING.

Yesterday I watched a programme about the census with Marr and one about employment practices through the last half-century with Kirsty Young. They were an hour long each. I managed to watch them both in 37 minutes. Why was this? Simply, I fast-forwarded through any pointless scene-setting or conclusive narration (the BBC seems to take the philosophy of "tell them what you're going to say, tell them, then tell them what you've said" to ridiculous levels by giving each the same amount of time), transitional shots of the presenters a) walking through busy streets b) waiting for trains or c) driving massive cars through the countryside (green credentials writ large), and any attempts by the presenter to talk to a non-expert in the middle of the street, or, worse, their cosy suburban households. I simply hate listening to people tell me about their own life as if that somehow illuminates a wider social change (because very often this leaves gaping holes in the argument as the presenter searches desperately for some way to qualify a personal anecdote as though it were an established social trend). All these things are, it seems, held to be necessary for people to remain interested in a programme for a whole hour, a timespan so immense in the days of 24/7 television that it's necessary for newsreaders to tell us the time four times in every broadcast, as though we were fruitflies and might die, unfulfilled, before the next announcement.

Another tremendously irritating convention is to send your superstar presenter all around the world to film tiny little segments of to-camera work in front of as many different examples of "nature" as possible. The rockstar-turned-physicist Brian Cox has fallen victim to this, with his latest series Wonders Of The Universe featuring him making sandcastles and smiling inanely into camera in the Namibian desert. Not Brighton, not Blackpool, not even a freaking studio but a country thousands of miles away whose only connection to a spiel about entropy seems to be its larger collection of sand. Despite that, he still used a regular bucket.

I like TV documentaries. I like their capacity to inspire, educate and entertain, in the great Reithian tradition on which public service television was founded. So it really hurts me to see directors waste their presenters' talents by filming them silently reading train timetables or standing in front of Patagonian glaciers as though that in itself were somehow information. This madness has got to stop.