Poor Man About Town

I had to attend an out-patient appointment today. There were quite a few magazines lying around. The choice was varied - Sunday supplements, lifestyle mags, true stories and celebrity mags. What struck me was the class divide between the mags. The lifestyle and supplement mags were clearly geared towards the middle-class nest builders - all of which insisted on force feeding crap and more crap to the already bloated middle stratum of society. The photos looked very cosy, nice clean photographs of nice clean and healthy people (the ethnicity of which is invariably white) - the couples look happy and look as if they are about to go on holiday to Barbados. Then you have the products, face creams made from the mud of the Borneo jungle, the bollocks of rare goats steeped in olive oil and balsamic vinegar, furniture made from one of the last surviving rain forests in South America...

Then we come to the magazines aimed at the working class - the true stories - grainy and out of focus home produced photos - the highly graphic stories were invariably tragic - wife beaters nearly beating women to death with pokers and pick axe handles; wives poisoning their husband; children being physically and sexually abused - these mags were selling stories of the front line of working class tragedy. None of the middle class angst that one finds in middle-class childless couples. These true-life stories made rather painful reading. Has the working class really become this pit of depravity!

Then we have the Celebrity Mags, obviously directed towards the working class - celebs in expensive homes - it is as if they are not making any suggestion of aspiration, more like to say "look at what we have got, you pathetic plebs"

Whoever says that we live in a classless society needs to have his / her head testing.

Labels: Class, Lifestyle, media

What is it about the BBC - not content with making BBC1 its own trash channel (and that includes the News)as well as a large part of BBC2 also showing crappy programmes, it has done some navel gazing and believes that it is far too high brow. A review has been ordered by the Director-General, Mark Thompson. What this means is that a large sum of money is going to be spent on researching something of which we will already know the outcome anyway - more trash on BBC!

Labels: BBC, dumbing down, media, review, Television, trash

I see that following the news that Blair has allegedly supported David Miliband, Peter Mandelson chipped in and lent his support to the kiddie as well.

The press and media were out in force to find him yesterday. It was like Princess Diana all over again. He was sporting an umbrella, relishing in the adulation, refused to answer questions and denying that he would make a challenge to Gordon Brown.

I am seriously puzzled about this, why the press interest in someone so painfully boring? He's no Michael Portillo nor even a Geoffrey Howe - just a politician who makes politics really really boring!

Labels: boring, David Miliband, Gordon Brown, hype, media, Peter Mandelson, politics, press, Princess Diana