Booze, Bottle and the Beeb

So much for persistence and application.

I had thought to revisit this blog occasionally, post my thoughts to it maybe a couple of times a week and generally keep track of life's little and not so little events. It is now nearly a month since this idea first crossed my mind and this is my first return visit. This is not because my enthusiasm for blogs evaporated as quickly as it formed. Quite the contrary. Truth to tell, I have become quite addicted to them - especially the BBC blogs which have had a curiously addictive edge to them lately. Sometimes, this is because they are engaging and interesting but, quite often, it can be for exactly the opposite reason.

Take the extraordinarily tedious rubbish that is currently occupying the minds of contributors on Justin Webb's America. Webb is, it has to be said, a quite personable television presence if perhaps a bit cuddly and lacking in edge but his recent holiday on the Isle of Wight seems to have catapulted him into a mindset of obsession with trivia which is characteristic of small insular societies. As someone who lived for some years on the Island, I know how easily this can happen.

It all began with the handshake. You know the one - Obama shaking hands with the old bill outside number ten. Now any reasonable human being, I would have thought, might have reacted with a 'good on him, now let's move on', the odd stuffed shirt might momentarily have raised an eyebrow but, to put is crudely the overwhelming response would be - or ought to be - 'so bloody what?'. But, oh no! We had not one but two threads on the same subject which, needless to say, dragged out all the familiar claptrap about the British class system, the repressed English mentality and so on. It came close to a rerun of the American Revolution. It was very much a 'curate's egg', good in parts, but it originated from a thread about absolutely nothing. Now if Mr.Webb sees his blog as the place where he can express his own views outside of the restrictions normally imposed on BBC journalists, that's fine. We are all free to move on elsewhere. But if he sees it as a tool of his trade, he really needs to do better.

There were pleanty of words about 'the handshake' but they were mostly vacuous and uninteresting. So Webb moved on. He came up with a theory to explain the cultural differences between Britain and America. It seem that the British, all of us, are permanently pissed. We do not start the day with a nice cuppa any more. Oh no, we grope around in the desperate hope that there may be a few drops left in the bottom of last night's bottle, stagger into the bathroom to rinse off the blood from the previous night's brawling, crawl out to the car and somehow make it unscathed to our places of employment where we dose up on AlkaSelza and make a half hearted attempt to look busy until it's time to fall back into the pub again and pick up where we left off. In short, we are a nation of total dypsomaniacs for whom any view of the world which is not seen double is less than perfect. This has, of course, prompted a lively debate about the inadequacies of the Brits in all fields of endeavour, a complete lack of life skills and a total irrelevance to the rest of the world in general and the States in particular.

Why, you might well ask, would a reputable British journalist with a brief to cover the USA want to promote a devisive agenda on such spurious grounds? Well Justin has written a book the basic premise of which, as I understand it, is that there is a goodly junk of 'anti-Americansim' coursing through our British veins (along with all that alcohol) which needs to be explained. Mr. Webb is not shy about his project and he is pushing it for all it is worth. But what if it all turned out to be a false premise? What if, in spite of his best efforts, it turns out that we actually quite like each other? The book would not be worth the paper it was printed on. So you just keep pouring fuel on the fire Justin. It's great promotion and, if everyone has not died of boredom by the time it comes off the presses, you may even sell a few. The BBC, by the way, does not seem to mind their journalists using blogs to promote their books, but it certainly watches carefully to make sure the public do not get too heavy handed in their reaction. Moderation in all things - except of course booze.

So I will say here what I cannot say over there on the off chance that somebody stumbles on it - it is complete and unutterable shit.