Revolutionary Rants

I tried to watch BBC4’s ‘Britpop Night’ on Tuesday, partly because I love abit of ‘pop culture’ and partly because I find it both exciting and worrying that I lived through and remember things that are now being regarded with pop culture nostalgia (OK, yes, I watched ‘Live Aid’ but it does not have that hazy rose-tinted remembrance of the summer of 1995).

Warhol-esque it was not. As usual the first programme - ‘The Britpop Story’ no less - was presented by some sudo-intellectual (not like me at all then…) wazock NME ‘journalist and author of a definitive study of the Britpop era’ (according to BBC4). He waxed lyrical on the great surge of British re-birth music (apparently this included Sleeper, Elastica and Manswear…) and the brilliance of Blur, Suede, Oasis, Suede, Pulp and, er, Suede, whilst not actually talking to anyone involved more than Justine Frishman and Graham Coxon - who spent most of the time being aggressive about Damon Albarn. Nice. And what was the legacy of Britpop, prey tell? Oasis are still here, you know!

Much the same can be said for ‘Live Forever’ which I had seen before and was very disappointed by. It said nothign new or, indeed, interesting. At all.

Maybe it is all too close to be nostalgic yet? Maybe what all the bands involved did next puts us off? Maybe it just wasn’t as good as I remember?

On a scarier note, in the tradition of watching crap when you are half awake and drinking your coffee (well, actually it stems from lying in bed being lazy before going to work on a Sunday in my student days) Chicken and I have been watching a truly awful American programme: Average Joe Hawaii. It is evil, but just like when you have to look at the car crash on the other side of the motorway, it drags you back each new day… The pretext is a ‘beauty queen’ type woman (skinny, bikini and heavy make-up clad artist) has to be ‘romanced’ by a herd of ‘average’ men (fat, very skinny, mad hair, mad eyes, lots of tattoos, buck teeth). Then, half way through - as most of the average men are ‘falling in love’ with the beauty queen and she is starting to suggest they ‘take control’ and lose weight/get a haircut/change - enter eight ‘ripped’ ‘not average guys’ who look, as one average contestant put it, ‘like the Terminator’.

This is such a horrible idea… The woman is a not-very-nice-person with a ‘hot’ body, the muscle men seem in love with themselves, the ‘average’ people learn to hate themselves. Perhaps this is why we watch it - it is like a contrived American ‘Big Brother’!!!!!!!!!