Honey, we shrunk the brains

South Park takes on Honey Boo Boo and June

One of the cultural highlights of the past few weeks – nay, the past year – has been the arrival of a new digital TV channel from our cousins across The Pond.

And TLC, the channel formerly known as The Learning Channel, has chosen to announce its arrival in the UK with the highly educative Here Comes Honey Boo Boo.

This is a ‘reality’ TV show about a ‘redneck’ family where the mother pushes her seven-year-old daughter – the eponymous Honey Boo Boo – into child beauty pagents that she is never likely to win, and which is how the family was spotted in the first place, during another of TLC’s shows, Toddlers and Tiaras.

The family – parents and four girls – get to go to the Redneck Games, eat ‘sketti’ (spaghetti with a sauce of margarine and ketchup) and comment on life in general.

The audience, presumably, gets to feel superior, in much the same way it does over the ‘guests’ on Jeremy Kyle’s modern-day freak show or on that of Jerry Springer.

Actually, it’s difficult to know on whom the joke is this time. TV stardom has, for the family from rural Georgia, been enough to lift them far away from any impoverishment.

And the programme differs from other examples of reality TV in that they seem to be remarkably functional. The mother, June, has apparently set up trust funds for all her children, noting that such fame won’t last.

TLC – formerly known as The Learning Channel, remember – is also breaking Breaking Amish to UK screens.

This reality show is about a group of young Amish/Mennonite men and women who are taken to see the bright lights of New York, with much being made of whether, if they decide to go home, they’d be accepted back.

Lives lived out in front of cameras, for the entertainment of millions and the profit of a rather smaller number.

Now don’t get me wrong – the idea of giving young people from closed communities the chance to see the outside world isn’t one that I object to in principle.

What concerns me is the question (and let’s assume none of it – or only a small amount – is staged) that really quite dramatic personal experiences, with the potential to be life-changing to the extent that the young people in question might find themselves being ostracised by their families and communities, are being played out for entertainment.

And let's go back to the fact that nobody knows quite how much is 'real' and how much is staged and scripted. It's a blurring of lines that has the capacity to blur the critical senses. This is not the willing suspension of disbelief.

All this reminds me of HL Mencken’s famous quote about the apotheosis of democracy will see a moron elected to the White House – simply substitute culture. And then consider the impact of that on the former.

I’m not opposed to reality TV per se: it can be both educative and entertaining, without being exploitative – as illustrated by the BBC’s recent series, The Tube, about the working lives of some of the vast team that keeps London’s Underground running.

But that’s quite different from, say, Big Brother, when Jade Goody, a very vulnerable woman, according to a former teacher of hers I once met, became famous for being thick.

Later vilified for a racist comment on another version of the programme, she lived out the last days of her life in the public eye, turned almost into a martyr by her battle against cancer.

It all seems so vacuous and vapid and vicarious and vicious: and that is not a comment on Goody herself.

And it’s hard not to believe that such commoditisation of human lives devalues humanity in general.

But further, how much does the public vilification of Kyle’s guests – carefully chosen for their dysfunctionality, since that is what is ‘entertaining’ about them – contribute to the ease with which government and mainstream media demonise vast swathes of the population?

And politicians kowtow to this: from Barack Obama feeling obliged to mention being ‘endorsed’ by an infant would-be beauty queen, to David Cameron and Ed Miliband jumping on the bandwagon to condemn Hilary Mantel’s comments about the Duchess of Cambridge from a position that merely illustrated either their total ignorance of what she had written or their readiness to ignore the facts for the sake of being seen to make the ‘correct’ sound bite that would most please certainly elements of the press.

Honey Boo Boo and her family have been satirised already in South Park – from which no target is, rightly, considered exempt – but goodness, doesn’t it sometimes feel as though there’s a losing battle going on?

Nor is all this a snobbery about what ‘chavs’ watch or read. Consumption of gossip magazines and such programming is spread beyond any one social class, just as the consumption of junk food is.

And if junk food is bad for the physical health, what does junk culture do for the mental health?

For Honey Boo Boo, her parents and siblings, they seem to have been able to exploit the system as much as it has exploited them. And good luck to them in many ways for that.

But what will be the end result for those Amish/Mennonite young people – including the ones featured in a second series?

What about the Kyle guests, whose very dysfunctionality provokes enough Twitter traffic to trend, as viewers share their revulsion? It’s documented that they receive no real help to deal with the problems that allow the show to exist.

We’ve got a cult of easy celebrity, whereby fame is awarded not for actually having done anything or having any sort of talent, but simply for being prepared to act as outrageously as possible in front of a camera.

Geordie Shore, The Only Way is Essex, Made in Chelsea and Desperate Scousewives: moronic television made to moronise and desensitise the public, who appear to have enough of an appetite for it all that such dross keeps appearing.

Television that, when voting is concerned, garners more participation (even though it costs money) than some elections.

And if that doesn’t depress you, nothing will.

So where next in this drive to shock and titillate? Who knows?

But you can bet your bottom dollar that someone is mulling over a new approach even as I write and you read. And that, at its root, it will be about making money for a few with little regard for the larger cost.

TV dinners

Bad cop, inheritor of Escoffier, and a teddy bear gourmand.

In the dim and distant past, when TV really was the centre of my childhood home's entertainment, I used to yearn for the lowering evenings that brought with them the autumn season.

But for most of my adulthood, television has played a considerably less important role.

There have been exceptions: Babylon 5, West Wing and a few more. But the advent of ‘reality TV’ was enough to make me glad I wasn’t addicted to the box in the corner.

But this autumn, there has been a glut of food scheduling that’s had me glued to my seat – and thankfully it’s not all been Nigella flirting with the camera and wearing white denim to cook beetroot.

Last year, entirely by accident, I happened on a reality show that I was utterly transfixed by – and this time, I was back right at the start: Masterchef: The Professionals.

Now I dislike the version of Masterchef that involves John Torode and Gregg Wallace. First, it isn’t the Masterchef I remember with a certain fondness from years gone by, where Lloyd Grossman hosted, in calming, mid-Atlantic tones, as three amateur cooks competed in a very gentle manner.

It’s odd that I remember that with such fondness, since it was on during a time before I had any real interest in or love of food myself.

But it’s also exactly the sort of thing that I don’t like about reality TV, with its tone of shouty aggression.

This version sees Wallace transformed into a sort of teddy bear gourmand, with Monica Galetti, the senior sous chef at Michel Roux Jr’s Le Gavroche, playing a bad cop role alongside him in the early stages of the competition.

And then, of course, there is Roux Jr himself, for whom all the contestants want to cook.

It’s grown-up telly that doesn’t feel the need to pander to sensationalism.

Criticism is dished out properly and fairly, while Roux Jr can also be seen coaching young chefs, giving tips and being encouraging.

Okay, there’s a bit of gurning from all three presenters, but this is ultimately about real, serious skills.

Which also means that it’s downright educative – and it’s inspirational too. Indeed, last year’s series was exactly what made me want to learn to lay out a plate of food better than a dollop here, a dollop there.

Only last week, I picked up a method of cooking pheasant, sautéing breast very gently in lots of butter. And as I found out last night, it works.

This is top telly, and something that I look forward to for the four nights a week that it currently occupies a slot on the goggle box.

But Masterchef: The Professionals has not been the only foodie programming in recent weeks.

There was also Escoffier: Britain’s first master chef, which was introduced – appropriately – by Michel Roux Jr.

It proved an interesting look at the great man – perhaps particularly in terms of his creation of the brigade system of service in restaurants.

And it was also a reminder of just how much the style of Roux Jr – and his father and uncle – is influenced by that kind of classic French cuisine.

How do you eat your jelly babies?

Nigel Slater’s Life is Sweets was a bittersweet trip down a sticky memory lane for England’s answer to Proust. There is simply nobody else on these shores who so wonderfully writes about food and memory.

Seeing old packets and wrappers brought an instant shot of nostalgia, even though I don’t personally have the same sense of sweets as having been at the heart of my own childhood as Slater clearly does.

But I do have childhood memories around visits to the sweet shop (or primarily the newsagent), and as usual with Slater, it had an emotional power that rang completely true even if you cannot identify 100% with his own experiences.

Calf's Head & Coffee: The Golden Age of English Food, gave Stefan Gates the chance to actually cook a calf’s head – which was interesting, although I won’t be trying it myself any time soon.

But this followed his rather astonishing claim that we are in the midst of a British food renaissance – a claim made, without any hint of his tongue being in his cheek, while standing in a supermarket.

‘Ah,” I thought. ‘Here we go again, with the sort of wild delusions that Joanna Blythman lambasts in Bad Food Britain.’

While it is most certainly true that the restaurant scene – particularly in cities – has improved massively in recent years, it’s difficult to believe in any sort of wholesale improvement when the UK consumes more ready meals than the whole of the rest of Europe put together.

Breakfast, Lunch and Dinner gave Clarissa Dickson Wright the chance to explore the history of our three main meals across three episodes.

Presumably filmed before she decided that Leicester was frightening and not ‘her’ England, there’s a certain irony then in her discussion of the origins of the cooked breakfast going back to religious rules, given that her beloved Catholic church has, in many parts of the UK, been saved by the arrival of migrants.

A couple of particularly fascinating aspects of this trio of programmes was learning that eggs were, a long time ago, roasted in the shell in the ashes of a fire – and also that the first reference to a soft-boiled egg anywhere in literature is in Jane Austen’s Emma, while Northanger Abbery actually references brioche.

It’s also well worth noting that our habit of drinking beer with breakfast had changed iby the 1620s – replaced by the arrival of coffee. In other words, contrary to what some may imagine, Starbucks did not introduce coffee to these shores.

So, for once, it’s been a delight to sit in front of the television and lap up a mixed menu of foodie treats.

And with iPlayer around, there's still time to watch some of these gems.

Everything must go

You may well have heard or read somewhere the appalling news that sex has been commoditised – the only wonder is that anyone imagines that sex is somehow unique in this way.

Just a few days ago, on Facebook, a post appeared from someone saying that they’d applied to be on Jeremy Kyle.

It’s difficult to know why anyone would do that. Their 15 minutes? A night in decent hotel? To be yelled at by Kyle himself?

There can’t be anyone out there who really believes that the people who appear on it get serious help. Because they don’t. It’s about nothing more than presenting people’s problems as entertainment, for others to point, stare and generally feel superior. And for someone to make a financial profit from.

Now it’s hardly as if Kyle is on his in this oeuvre – its apotheosis is probably Jerry Springer, although at least that programme doesn’t seem to pretend to take itself as seriously as Kyle’s modern freak show – both see the commoditisation of dysfunction.

But this type of telly isn’t alone in the commoditisation stakes either.

Only this week, the world discovered that Nadine Dorries is going on ITV’s I’m a Celebrity – Get Me Out of Here.

The MP for Bedfordshire has decided that this is the very best way to make use of a Parliamentary recess – although one might have expected her to spend some time being available for her constituents.

Dorries thinks that girls should have special school lessons in just saying ‘no sex, we’re British’ (but recommends nothing comparable for boys), and is also a campaigner against abortion, desperately trying to get the time limit lowered, for instance, and coming up with spurious claims about the independence of advice available to women on pregnancy issues.

She says that she is going to sit around the campfire in the jungle and discuss these issues with her fellow contestants – to ‘spread the word’.

In the meantime, of course, it’s pretty clever ‘casting’ by the makers, since it pretty much guarantees that plenty of people will tune in and (more to the profitable point) spend money phoning in just to make sure Dorries gets as many nasty ‘bushtucker trial’ tasks as is possible.

Indeed, perhaps the almost orgasmic pleasure some people are getting just thinking about her being made to eat insects could constitute a new form of phone sex.

The commoditisation of ego and ideologically-induced discomfort for the sake of an almost sexual pleasure.

In a delightful example of a lack of self awareness, the Parliamentary Conservative Party has suspended Dorries, since none of them have any interests outside politics that rake them in oodles of cash and consume time that could be spent helping constituents or on other matters political.

Dorries is not the first sitting MP to agree to appear on a celebrity ‘reality’ TV show: that honour goes to George Galloway, whose vomit-inducing performance on Celebrity Big Brother was not only the first of this sub genre of MPs making tits of themselves on reality telly, but possibly also its apotheosis.

The news that Dorries was flying to Oz emerged just days after Labour MP Denis MacShane was found to have submitted 19 false invoices for expenses – shouldn’t they be banged out of office (and up) simply for being so incredibly stupid as to keep doing things like this, given the scandal of 2009?

But it throws Dorries’s celebrity ambitions into a certain perspective and reminds us of how some politicians have commoditised their representing of us into financial gain beyond their legitimate remuneration.

In a delightful sleight, the Guardian – clever for once – produced comedy gold when it persuaded Louise Mensch to opine on the matter, condemning Dorries for ‘demeaning’ the office of MP.

Murdoch worshipper and chick lit author Mensch, who has herself just recently resigned as an MP in order to ‘spend more time with her family’ – possibly the first time this has happened without being preceeded by a sexual ‘scandal’ – enjoyed a high-profile political career (while it lasted), including appearing on topical comedy quiz Have I Got News for You, where she was pretty much eaten alive by Ian Hislop.

But increasingly we can see that politics has been commoditised, with public office a career move and a step into celebrity and/or nice business opportunities in other areas.

I can hardly be alone, for instance, in imagining that, after setting in motion the privatisation of the health service, former health secretary Andrew Lansley will not be forgotten by the private healthcare companies that had sponsored him for years before.

And Tony Blair has been busy making himself a tidy fortune ‘advising’ the despotic regime in Kazakhstan – which just happens to have oil – a move only made possible by his having held high political office.

Now of course politicians, once they leave office – or have its departure foisted on them by a disenchanted electorate – have to do something with their time. We wouldn’t them all to become benefit scroungers, would we?

But herein lies a larger issue: how many MPs, for instance, genuinely had careers before politics and have skills outside of it, that would not simply see them trading on their political experience afterwards?

Should we insist that all those who stand for election have done something other than study for a degree in PPE – that holy trinity of politics, philosophy and economics?

Because while it somehow doesn’t seem as though it should be the main point of standing for office, what is clear is that politics sells: and it sells individuals some very juicy career opportunities.

But some of those same politicians commoditise things themselves. They’re presently engaged in carrying on Lansley’s work of commoditising health care, as they parcel up the NHS and sell it off to private companies to make profit.

Yes indeed – granny’s cancer is being commoditised so that it becomes profitable for someone.

The same is true of the police and justice system, which may have faults, but isn’t going to be improved by being privatised, so that the prime issue becomes the making of profit.

Unemployment has been commoditised – trying to get people into work is a profitable business for the likes of A4e. It’s financially beneficial for large companies too, when they can get free labour via the ironically named ‘Workfare’ scheme and even lay off paid staff.

The disabled can be commoditised, as yet another company (Atos, in this case) profits from it’s update of the old Jesus and Lazarus comedy double act, by claiming that people who are chronically disabled can get up and work, and therefore require no state help whatsoever.

And yet when you hear people worry about commoditisation, it’s almost invariably about sex, as though they’d never heard about ‘the oldest profession’!

Oh, sex sells – and when people are complaining about that, what it seems to be selling most effectively is a lovely diversion from the commoditisation of just about everything else in life.

A long twilight struggle

I've often wonder if J Michael Straczynski would forgive me. Tonight I decided that he would.

There are great moments in many TV series – and there are certainly great moments in a great TV show like Babylon 5. One of these moments – actually, more than one, but bear with me – comes in episode 20 of season two, The Long Twilight Struggle.

In it, after being humiliated by the defeat of his people by the Centauri, Narn ambassador to Babylon 5 G'Kar is forced to ask for sanctuary on the station. That granted, Centauri ambassador Londo Mollari attempts to have him turned away from the council, But G'Kar has a speech to make before he leaves:

"No dictator, no invader can hold an imprisoned population by force of arms forever. There is no greater power in the universe than the need for freedom. Against that power, governments and tyrants and armies cannot stand. The Centauri learned this lesson once ... we will teach it to them again. Though it take a thousand years ... we will be free!"

I cannot remember how many times I've heard it. But watching the episode again tonight, I was close to tears. It is magnificent drama. Not just during this speech of G'Kar's, but also as Londo watches from a Centauri ship as the Narn homeworld is bombarded with weapons of mass destruction. His face tells us a thousand things.

It is a gut-wrenching, heart-rending episode.

But it means something extra for me.

Twelve years ago this year – this coming February, to be precise – my editor of the time was suspended and then sacked. The grounds were invented: a dossier that was a complete joke. But as it happened, in a Buggins's turn sort of way, I happened to be the mother of chapel at the time. That's the term we use in journalism (and other parts of the print) for a shop steward, in remembrance of the days when trade unions were still illegal in the UK, and non-conformist churches provided sanctuary for us to meet.

There I was, suddenly faced with a member – my boss, as it happened – who was being sacked for no reason other than an unholy combination of politics and nepotism.

Well, we as a chapel (the shop) decided that the Rubicon had been crossed. And we acted.

I'm not going to occupy you with the ins and outs of what happened. Suffice it to say that we won and that John got his job back.

But in the process of what happened, I found myself giving speeches to various gatherings. And inspired by G'Kar's speech, I took his words and changed them enough to make them work for us. I spent the entire strike in a B5 baseball cap too. There's even YouTube footage from a major national news provider of our picket line, and me interviewed, with that cap screwed down hard on my head.

There is an extent to which I look back with a modicum of disbelief as to how much B5 meant to me at the time. But however naff it sounds, at a time when I had to make massive decisions about what side of a row I stood on, it gave me an inspiration I'll never forget.

And tonight, as I watched The Long Twilight Struggle again, perhaps my tears were not just for G'Kar and the Narn, but also for what I ... no: for what we achieved, almost 12 years ago. And I really don't think JMS would be offended.

A little bit rock 'n' roll

I was late up this morning, putting off rising for a while to sit up in bed with a book and some very good fresh coffee.

So breakfast was equally late. It was around midday when I took a couple of soft-boiled eggs and sat down in front of the telly.

On UKTV Food, which I switch to often for inspiration and education, was a programme called The Ace of Cakes. 'Ah', I thought. 'Baking. Since I'm going to do some baking in a little while, I'll watch this while I eat my eggs.'

It was about a company called Charm City Cakes in Baltimore, which is run by one Duff Goldman, who looks more like a member of Motorhead than a chef (hence the show title). He and his staff have taken cake decoration to new heights, and thus the programme is a cookery show meets American Chopper, although Goldman, for all his metal look, couldn't hope to compete with the real deal, Paul Teutul Sr.

And of course, the soundtrack to the fast and mobile camerawork was a bit metally too.

So, thus inspired and motivated, I descended on the kitchen, donned my apron and popped Alice Cooper's Billion Dollar Babies on the deck.

I can be a bit rock 'n' roll too.

I don't know whether Cooper really goes with a classic French apple tart, but who cares?

And if the tart might itself seem too conventional to be really 'rock 'n' roll', then baking is not yet a convention for me. So there. Put that into your blender and purée it.

The pastry is a sweet shortcrust with vanilla, as previously. Then, while that's resting, I make crème pâtissière for the first time. Take caster sugar and egg yolks and beat until they're wonderfully smooth and a pale yellow. Then add a little plain flour and some cornflour and beat that in. Then heat milk and more sugar with vanilla (seeds scraped out, but the pod in the milk too). When that's just about to boil, strain gradually onto the egg, sugar and flour mix, stirring in. Return to a clean pan and keep stirring until it stiffens, and then for a minute or so more. Take a small amount of butter and stir in. Leave to cool.

I blind bake the pastry case and then fill it with the crème pâtissière, before topping, in a fan pattern, with thin sliced of cored dessert apples. And then into the oven for 30 minutes. Later, when it's cooled completely, I'll melt some top-quality (French) apricot jam and glaze the apples.

A glance at the clock says that the afternoon is shooting past. Manchester City are on telly at 4pm, so dinner has to be started before then. I'm doing chicken – a recipe from the River Café Two Easy book. I take the bird and remove the bagged giblets (not forgetting that I actually don't want to throw them away just yet, because they can go in the stock pot later), then stuff the cavity with handfuls of sage and rosemary and thyme, plus half a dozen cloves of garlic and half a lemon (the thyme and the half lemon are my additions to the recipe, but I had them in and they'll go perfectly). Then the bird goes in a dish – the tightest fir possible – with 200ml of water. And then into the oven at a very low 80˚. It'll get an hour before being turned over, then another hour before being turned again and then another hour after another turn. After that, the heat goes right up, butter will be rubbed into the skin and vermouth added to the roasting dish. I tell you, it's melt-in-the-mouth gorgeous.

And there'll be the apple tart to follow.

Now just how much more rock 'n' roll can you get?

Blurring reality with this cruel circus

In the US, people have been bombarded in recent weeks with stories about the mother of octuplets – the so-called ‘Octomom’ – a single (and by the sound of it, rather troubled) young woman who conceived after IVF treatment, while already mother to six more children by the same method.

In the UK, if we want a reality TV soap opera, we’ve had the strange case of Jade Goody for the last couple of months. And it shows no signs of going away just yet.

For those of you who don’t know, Goody rose to national attention in 2002, when she was a contestant on Big Brother. She became infamous for her apparent stupidity and was vilified by the tabloid press, which described her, amongst other things, as: “A slapper with a face like a pig” and “the most hated woman in Britain”.

But it was the start of a career as a celebrity that saw her launch a beauty salon (not very successfully), a perfume, an exercise DVD and goodness knows what else. She was barely out of the tabloids and gossip rags before an appearance on Celebrity Big Brother in 2007 brought her downfall, when she was accused of bullying and using racist abuse to fellow contestant, Bollywood star Shilpa Shetty.

Following eviction from that show and countless apologies, she eventually cropped up on Big Boss, the Indian version of the reality show, in summer 2008. And it was during that that she was told that she had cervical cancer.

Treatment was too late though. And earlier this year, it was announced that the cancer had spread and she was dying.

Cue a new media circus, with her wedding to boyfriend Jack Tweed (a convicted criminal who is due to be sentenced for yet another assault) attracting wide media coverage – and money.

She stayed in the public eye as long as possible and sold the rights to everything she could, with the stated aim of raising money for her two young sons. But at 27 years of age, on 22 March (Mother’s Day), she died. The timing was quite good, since it stopped Ok! magazine’s ‘memorial issue’ appearing quite as presumptive as it had.

Her funeral followed just last Saturday, with the intervening period providing time for the tabloids – those same publications that had once vilified her – now holding her up as some form of secular saint; a Princess Di for the plebs.

Just yesterday, veteran TV presenter Sir Michael Parkinson dared to lambast the entire circus. But today, self-appointed bishop of his own church, Jonathan Blake, got all upset because Parky had spoken out.

The point is not that it’s not tragic that a young woman has died and that two young boys are now without their mother. Of course it is. The point is not that the cause of her death has sent many women to get smear tests – yes, some good has come out of it.

The question is, what does the entire thing say about modern Britain? It seems to raise a number of issues:

• that the tabloids (the overwhelming majority of which are right wing) could so vilify someone in their pages, without any comeback – and so many people continue to read these rags;


• that the same people could later raise up Goody as some sort of saint ‘people’s saint’ – and sell even more papers;


• that we have a culture of mass hysteria (really seen after the death of Diana) whereby people who had never known her went to the funeral, laid flowers outside her home etc etc – and spent money buying souvenir editions of the rags mentioned above);


• that we have a culture where people can become – and aspire to become – a celebrity, even though they have absolutely no talent;

that on the one hand we have a whole sub-culture where stupidity and a lack of education is considered something to be proud of, and on the other, people who are not particularly intelligent or educated are turned into freak shows for the public to vent their spleens on and feel superior over (shows such as Jerry Springer and Jeremy Kyle are similar);

that we seem to have developed (or perhaps redeveloped) a culture of cruelty – not just visible in situations like this, and the daytime shows mention in the last point, but also in a great deal of comedy today;

that the exploitation of Goody was simply one of those extreme examples of how many people are exploited by elements in the media in order to sell more of their rags (the case of Max Mosely last year was the same).

that we seem to have a reached a point whereby, if you criticise the whole mawkish, tasteless affair, it is taken by some people to be offensive and even insulting to Goody herself or disrespectful of her. Offence is increasingly becoming a way to deflect or even stop criticism of any number of things.

I don’t know whether it’s better or worse in the UK than elsewhere, but it’s the sort of situation that leaves me close to despair sometimes.

And what does make it worse here is that we have no real intelligentsia to help inform public discourse on this or any other subject – primarily because we, as a nation, distrust intellectualism and intellectuals so much.

As I said, the circus hasn’t stopped. On Monday, the Sun – one of the gutter-scraping rags in the forefront of this voyeuristic farce – had as its front page headline something along the lines of: ‘Let her rest in peace’. Below was a strap advertising 12 pages of coverage of the funeral. Some peace.

It’s probably only a matter of time until the Daily Mail offers readers the chance to collect tokens for a Jade Goody memorial rose bush or a Jade Goody commemorative porcelain plate (or is that only for Diana or the Queen Mum?).

A decade or so ago, you could avoid it. But now, with 24/7 TV and news coverage, with free rags handed out to commuters every night in London and other cities, filled with nothing but gossip and other crap, with whole newsagents’ shelves filled by gossip and scandal sheets, it’s more difficult. It creeps into more and more peoples lives, whether they want it or not.

But it’s easy to slag off the media (and as a media worker myself, I’m more than capable of highlighting the worst excesses of my trade). But is it really just the media to blame – or the people who buy into all this? If people stopped buying such stuff, they’d stop publishing it. Yet that commemorative edition of Ok! apparently sold many, many more copies than it usually does. Classic chicken and egg.

I don’t know how one cannot but feel for Goody (and others like her – and there are many). They’re the victims of a new kind of freak show or the visit to Bedlam to gawp at the mentally ill. Nothing, but nothing is achieved by raising up – or knocking down – people like her. It is, in part at least, a chance for some in the media to savage the working class – particularly the lumpen proletariat (or 'chavs' as they're colloquially known in the UK these days) and then to indulge in mawkish, sentimental twaddle about them.

Is it the new “opiate of the people”? Does it matter? Well, I think it does. I have no great solutions to offer right now, but it does need to be raised from this perspective and discussed.

And Parky managed, for once, to make a touch of Yorkshire ‘plain speaking’ most welcome.