BeeB Give Northern Moor The Tools To Reply...

Rumour has it that in response to the outcry surrounding ITVs recent foray into social documentary, the BBC have offered the residents of Northern Moor the chance to film their own account of life in their community. Kind of a serious 'Big Brother for the Beeb'. It was then allegedly edited by the BBC themselves and yesterday screened for the residents of the area at a local college, to seek their judgement of how the editors have butchered / tailored the footage. If true, how very noble of the BBC.

ITV to be investigated?
What's arguably worse for ITV is that reports suggest that not only have they incensed a lynch mob but they have incurred the wrath of Greater Manchester police and possibly social services. Allegedly numerous sequences in the documentary The Duchess On The Estate, aired last Tuesday and concluded in the second part last night, showed young people from the age of fourteen working to uproot trees, breaking up wooden fixtures and using tools. Reportedly none of the adults working with them had been screened with necessary checks, like those carried out by the Criminal Records Bureau. I can sympathise that in order to get something done, it was a corner that almost had to be cut. Nobody wants to rely on the CRB when there's urgent work to be undertaken. And what if they lose your form, which tends to be a regular occurrence rather than a freak incident? The Duchess is a very busy lady you know? Only two days ago she was a judge at the National Guffawing Championship. No, she wasn't...but she could have been. For ITV, much of the backlash will lacerate their backs. They seemed so sure that their cocktail of get up and go enthusiasm and faux social awareness would unite everyone in jovial appreciation, that they forgot simple things like health and safety procedures and the law.

Flailing Presumptions
Much was made of the fact that Sarah Ferguson only spent ten days in the area that she said displayed a lack of community spirit, and ITV themselves were accused of presenting the area as an effigy of 'broken Britain'. She tries chatting to a few local lads in the first programme and ends up sounding like Withnail from that sequence where he suggests a jukebox at the tea shop ("Let's get a community centre in here and liven you stiffs up a bit!"). She asks them if it's boring. "No," they say, "it's just shit". An outlook which is much, much worse and more difficult to reverse. I think the unfavourable, grim tone of the documentary - where everything from the soundtrack to the editing make it feel like one of Frank Gallacher's drunken nightmares - was a huge factor in how people that know the area perceived the show. Why is the Duchess there, because she's demonstrative? It looked like she only pulled a limited number of strings and I didn't see her involved in any grubby haggling, unless you count Sir Richard Leese, chief of Manchester City Council, who couldn't have seemed more apprehensive to commit to her mania if he tried. Why didn't ITV find someone successful that was born within a five to ten mile radius and ask them to get involved? Show the young people of the area that aspiration and ambition should exist and that such confidence starts at home, at school, on the streets. Here are some famous people born and/or raised in Wythenshawe: Caroline Aherne, Paul Young, Johnny Marr, Jason Orange, Steve McDonald from Corrie and Little and Large. As far as I know they're all still alive. I bet a couple of them could have done with the gig. I mean if the Duchess had come to our street when I was fifteen talking about rebuilding my community she would hardly have been welcomed with Eccles cakes and Smiths songs. I'm from Salford, I wanted to meet Ryan Giggs, Ben Kingsley or John Virgo.

And as much as old Fergie tries, she's still very much her Spitting Image self, snorting and slurring her way through the whole debacle like an asparagus in a ginger wig. At one point she bonds with reformed criminal Simon, who tells her that he sold drugs, fought for fun, made a living out of crime and was renowned and revered for it. He poignantly and sincerely states that he regrets his illicit past and that he has been urged to go back to his wayward vocation, but being attached to the Woodville Community Centre was going to prevent him from doing so. Fergie 'yahs' her way through his touching revelation and goes, "and that's why I like you. I've made mistakes too, you know, not - I haven't sold the drugs or done any of those things. But I've made mistakes, publicly...blah blah" Oh, how she connected. Quite what she was insinuating in terms of common ground, I don't know.

Let's Look At The Positives
There were good things to come out of it. Another community centre and a massive sense of achievement for those involved in it's opening. I stress another, because despite ITV's producers and editors tugging your heart strings in the wrong direction, Northern Moor already had it's fair share of community centres and sporting complexes, including the array of facilities nearby at Wythenshawe Park. People like Dawn however, who ironically reminded me of a kind of Mike Leigh version of Dawn French, deserve credit for trying to make a difference. And although I don't think it was a good idea to be filmed all the time to prove how grubby one is getting one's hands, the Duchess obviously has a little leverage here and there (she did raise £35,000 at a posh dinner, and give Simon a platform to show his tattoos and prove to a bunch of otter eating pencil backs that even men with scars can be sensitive), so credit to her for taking the plunge in the first place. Christ, Dawn could haggle though couldn't she? Not that we really got to see it, because we just saw compliant employees at B&Q or wherever presenting cheques and/or vouchers under particularly inconspicuous signs wearing inconspicuous orange uniforms.

Real Reality TV, For Real! Maybe.
So I'm preparing myself for some televisual delights, and I pray that the BBC get the go ahead to air it on television, rather than just online or perhaps not at all. It all hinges on the residents of Northern Moor, who at least will be more widely represented once given the chance to film friends and family at will. It is, to my decreasing and disloyal knowledge, pretty ground breaking that a media frenzy in the wake of a poorly received documentary can light the stage for some actual reality TV and it is an incredibly clever to way to generate good publicity for pretty much everyone involved...except of course for ITV.

To see Fergie interviewed on GMTV, go here.

Another One Bites The Dust

Oh, deary, deary me.
Kerry Katona's 'career' is in tatters. Her private life has once again spilled out into the public domain like a horror movie victim's guts, and this time it's to her utter detriment.

I shouldn't care. I should nonchalantly shrug my shoulders and act as though I don't even recognise her name. It's people like me that have often blown on the embers of her farcical 'career' too much and then shown repulsion when faced with the bush fire. Yet when colleagues in my office start talking about something, anything, to do with our celebrity obsessed culture I can't wait to get things off my chest.

Recently though, I've been doing some soul searching. I've reminded myself that I have a degree in performing arts and that such self reflection comes naturally; I mean for fuck's sake I've pretended to be a tree for two hours just to get my hands on a scroll of paper. In looking deep within and trying to work out why she is such a game scapegoat for my disgust I have discovered this: I need Kerry Katona. I'm not intelligent enough to hate someone highbrow that resides in the public eye. Katona and others of her ilk give me a giant fat arse to kick, and I can rant and rave all I like because no one expects a clever dissection of her actions. My political aspersions are limited to tuts about the expenses scandal and low humming groans about North Korea teasing the West over nuclear weapons. I know nothing of the inner workings of fashion or the arts. I'm hardly going to start sneering at Angela Merkel's biography while perusing exclusive pictures of her interior hall in the Times Magazine or dissing Stephen Frears for popping up in the Guardian.

Role Model Behaviour
And while I mention Angela Merkel, how disappointing to see that as a nation our only prominent (not to mention British national) entrant in the Forbes Glass Hammer 100 Most Powerful Women was her Majesty the Queen. I mean big up Lizzie The Quizzi, but could it have anything to do with the fact that over in this country you only really get press - and thus, attention - for growing fake children in your cat's litter tray, or stumbling out of a club in Ibiza with an ultimate fighting champion ingesting your neck and a kebab between your legs? While Jordan and the aforementioned Katona struggle to handle the concept of dignity and pummel the word privacy into extinction with their loutish, insufferable behaviour; young German and American women are looking on at people like Merkel and Michelle Obama and considering not just how they can be successful amongst their own gender, but how they can topple us arse scratching neanderthals in the process.

Cut to ITV2 and you've got all manner of horrors giving your young daughter (and son) ideas on how to belittle their henpecked partners and expose orange flesh for the benefit of a TV crew while bulging out of a leotard that was made for one of those sleek blue aliens from Avatar. Katona herself is now an easy target for such derision, and I should make it clear that I only developed a suspicion about her once her membership with the 'Kittens' expired. Until then I really didn't feel very offended by her. I had no real concept of her. I wasn't particularly enamoured by the 'Kittens' music but I rarely listen to the charts and I have no problem with teenage girls splurging their pocket money on disposable pop-junk. At that point she hadn't had children, there was no ill feted marriage to (and subsequent catty divorce from) the fat one from Westlife, she hadn't been crowned 'Queen of the Jungle', she hadn't smoked and drank while pregnant, having been deemed the best celebrity mother of the year - twice! To put it bluntly, she was still masquerading as someone with an (albeit limited) amount of ability. A few contemptible comments later (i.e. proudly claiming "I never sang in Atomic Kitten") and she's starting to affect me a bit. She has now had a 'career' feeding off the media's need for scandal for nearly ten years. In short, the word 'celebrity' has become ubiquitous in our lives in part due to Katona and others like her, rather than in spite of them.
It's common knowledge that the baying public now take more delight in negative press than we do in positive press. See almost every competitive talent show recently currently broadcast to our living holes; X-Factor, Strictly Come Dancing, Britain's Got Talent, Ramsey's Kitchen Nightmares: all revel in failure almost as much - if not more - than celebrating success. People systematically queue the length of the Great Wall and tunnel through Eastern Bloc nations to expose themselves to the acidic tongues of 'experts' and the more judgemental, tired eyes of an audience that generates more fun from watching small rodents being plucked from open fields by birds of prey than they do seeing someone enjoying themselves by exhibiting their talent. I'm so wary of this savagery that last night I actually had an epiphany in which it was revealed to me that these 'celebrities' aren't real; they're built somewhere and powered by a giant hard drive of desperation, fitted with a component of TK Maxx and up to date self delusion software. If a deluxe model, their processor is wired up to a small microchip of talent. There is a sordid conveyor belt in the centre of this factory that produces unit after unit of individual looking drones all wired to speak a little bit differently (though with similar vocabularies), all programmed to the same end; public meltdown. In my head the scenario resembled something like the introductory montage of iRobot doused in Primark to the tribal theme tune of I'm A Celebrity: Get Me Out Of Here.

What genuinely angers me is that every time Katona appears in the paper hoovering ivory dust up her snout, or Jordan lurches out of a nightclub looking like she's just done a drunken forward roll through an Avon counter, their kids are at home with grandma and grandad oblivious to the whole debacle, and that these plastic people demean and make light of such serious issues. I'm no social worker, but the aforementioned perpetrators alone have managed in recent memory to make an airbrushed mockery of the following: alcoholism, child protection, weight gain / loss, drug abuse and divorce. These are things that society is struggling to remedy, not itching to champion. Yet when they talk about such problems with Phil and Fern, or share their endeavour-less thoughts in 'Huh? Magazine', the issues immediately take on an air of insignificance, as though they only affect celebrities. "Oooh no, Katona's nose is falling out, remember when Daniella Westbrook suffered the same public embarrassment?" People don't watch these morons crumble on shows like This Morning and wonder how to help alcoholics or drug addicts, they watch it repeatedly on youtube as they scoff down a triple deep fill at work in between repulsed exhalations of contempt. Their public repentance / remorse / recovery means nothing to society, because the celebrities mean nothing in the first place. Watching them lurch from shame to indignant to denial is basically like watching Jeremy Kyle with added glitter and Alexandra Burke doing the soundtrack. And while such public figures exist, we will always have a big red and orange target for our cynicism...the question to ask yourself is: does the notion of celebrity make you jump with cynical, sneering joy or curl into an embarrassed little ball of cringe? If it's the latter, you really shouldn't be reading this...