Sam's World Of No

My television habits are distinctly modern; I very rarely sit down at the tv praying that it will entertain me. Homer Simpson’s “Come on television, give me some of that sweet sweet pap” I am not. Like a lot of people, I now download the shows I like, either in the “illegal but who cares because it still makes us money” Bittorrent sense, or via dedicated sites such as Mr Twig for South Park. A lot of BBC programmes are available on the iPlayer, another great idea crippled by executives who fall in love with acronyms like DRM and the other usual suspects, and I know that Channel 4 have some stuff available online too.

So for me, my PC is my TV. One of my secret pleasures however, and I don’t think I’m alone in this either, used to be the stupid quiz programmes they had on late night channels. Hilarious questions, desperate presenters trying and failing to “make it” in TV, terrible effects and shoddy production - it was a winning combination. But its legality was always a bit suspect, but at that time in the morning after a couple of pints, who cares.

Strangely, they were not the biggest culprit in the recent “television self-destructing” fiasco. Nor were they the most amusing - the story of Blue Peter, the ever lovable children’s programme, faking a poll to name a cat was just awesome. It’s the story of the whole thing; frankly, it’s the story of the year.

But it’s over, we’ve had our fun and Jeremy Paxman had the chance to give one of the most memorable MacTaggart lectures of all time. Heads have rolled where necessary and television had the wake-up call it needed. Unfortunately, it’s still news, because a lot of media outlets have missed a crucial point of Paxman’s speech - that television is, by its very nature, not real. The people you see aren’t living in a box in your living room. Most of it isn’t live. Supposedly ad-hoc dialogue is scripted, stuff is filmed in a different order from which it is shown, and generally the editing process is necessarily subjective in order to meet the aesthetic necessity, time concerns and narrative effectiveness.

Top Gear is a fine example. It’s of the very few programmes I make an effort to watch at the time of original broadcast, and at the start of the new series last Sunday, after a summer off the air whilst all this “fake” commotion had started up, they opened with a joke about how the whole thing was real. By way of a punchline, Richard Hammond, noted for being short, stood on a box that was out of shot, making him look taller than the gargantuan Clarkson.

I cringed. Top Gear is one of the most heavily faked and edited programs in current production.

Now of course it is all real; the races are real, the timing is real, the interviews are real. But the bits where they are in a car talking to you, and then they come over voice over doing part of a conversation, or an introduction to a comment that they will then make “live”, are all deceit to make an effective narrative. This is good; it works well at creating a cohesive story for the viewer.

Top Gear’s news section is filmed like it’s at the pub and the banter is flowing randomly, but of course it’s all scripted. Or at least, the topics are discussed in a pre-determined order. This helps with crucial issues like the right background pictures, or graphics of the news item they are discussing, appearing on the screen in the background.

The filming of the large events is not real at all - the shots of the cars driving are done after the time, especially in the races. There are chase cars and planes that you never see; these are a normal part of filming. In the Bugatti Veyron vs Cessna race, May even had an instructor in the plane with him as he hadn’t passed his flying tests; this is never mentioned.

I know all of this because Top Gear make their production notes available. Imagine if all of these small deceits were removed - the program would be just awful. It wouldn’t fit together; it wouldn’t entertain. So we have to accept some lies, because it is what makes television believable.

So maybe we shouldn’t have too much heavy editing on news programmes, but we really shouldn’t care if the judge’s “houses” on X-Factor aren’t their own. Frankly, the people that need this much explaining to them should stick to children’s television, and the fact that this story got onto the BBC News front page for most of today is just depressing. Television has had its wakeup call. It heard the alarm, it didn’t hit snooze, it didn’t fall back asleep. It had a shower, it went to work. Now can’t we just let it enjoy a hard-earned beer at the end of a long day?

That is all. I’m going to now enjoy my own hard-earned beer.

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Radiohead’s announcement that people downloading their new album would name their price was unusual, but it wasn’t revolutionary. Many commentators have suggested that this meant that their album was free - in fact, this would have been a much more run-of-the-mill announcement. Free music is nothing new - putting aside piracy and the associated and ridiculous lawsuits, every popular musical outfit in the world has a MySpace page where the vast majority of them allow visitors to listen to full versions of songs. Some bands even take it further and, prior to the album release, put their entire album on MySpace for streaming, for free, for anyone. No pre-registration, no nothing. These aren’t small bands - granted they are not the size of Radiohead, but Bloc Party are a pretty serious commercial venture in the UK. People who know what they are doing have worked out, finally, that the whole idea that people wanted to listen to albums before they bought them wasn’t just an excuse for piracy - it was the truth. Bloc Party reached #2 in the UK with the album in question, Weekend in the City.

Smaller artists and unsigned artists, myself included, are even greater advocates of free music - Harvey Danger, for example, were not that unusual in their release last year, although it was one of the first times I personally had come across such a well-produced album for free - for them, their music is the medium by which they get known - it’s the way they get gigs.

Record companies have added a middleman to this process, and added value to the recorded music itself where, for each artist’s own individual chronology, previously there was none. It’s been a fun and profitable ride for them, but as I’m sure the formers printers of sheet music can attest, things move on.

So free music is nothing new. But what people seem to be forgetting is that Radiohead are not giving the album away for free - they are asking you to set your own price, they are making you perform a value judgement on their work. This is a massive difference, and I hope that soon they will release some figures about how much people chose to pay. Initial indications are that most people created a price that was around what they would normally pay for a CD or iTunes DRM-free download. Because you are valuing the work, the people who paid nothing - or worse, the people who paid 1 penny but got hit with the 45p transaction fee - are essentially saying that the new album from one of the world’s top artists is worthless.

Certainly, that is what one BBC philistine has implied with his rambling set of words put together onto a page that resembles an article. Frankly, anybody that considers Pablo Honey to be their best work is totally missing the point of the musical development that Radiohead have experienced over their career. I certainly consider it to be the work of the least artistic merit - a mediocre album that showed promise, at a time where promise in UK music was scarce. I don’t think I’m alone - in fact, I know it.

For the record, the album is really good. It isn’t a massive departure from the stage that they reached with Amnesiac, in particular, but I have the feeling that they’ve finally found what they wanted to make all along. The continuity is no better illustrated than in the fact that track 3, Nude, is perhaps one of their oldest-but-never-recorded songs. If they have reached a point where they can finally make a version of something they’ve had knocking around for years that they are happy about, it sounds a lot to me like the style they have created is what they craved all along.

In my view, it’s worth the full cost of a normal retail album, and I would have happily paid £12-£14 in a music shop. As it turns out, I’m a Radiohead nut so I bought the £40 discbox. And I won’t be alone, but I won’t be in the majority of customers. That said, almost certainly, we will find that when people are asked to value a piece of work, only an insignificant minority will price it as worthless.

Of course, to get stuff for free is the logical follow through of the ’set your own price’ idea, but it’s a novelty. Perhaps this will be an important stage in the history of music, the current chapter of which almost seems to be the demise of record companies, or perhaps the unique situation that Radiohead are in (bags of money, no record company) will not be repeated. I think that both are true - I think that it is the latest in a series of high profile media events that show that DRM was a stupid idea that won’t work, that people aren’t petty thieves but music lovers, and that the internet is going to change music. And everything else. Of course, that is cliché in the extreme, but I don’t care if it means that Ash won’t be making any more albums. For those guys at least, the next logical step should be to just stop writing and releasing music entirely.

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Today, I have been fighting Firefox and Wordpress, partners in crime. Let’s be clear: I’m a lover, not a fighter. I just want things to get along.

I don’t think that my realisation, some years ago, that trying to only ask software to do things that it was designed to do was a reasonable way to conduct life, was a particularly important epiphany. After a youth spent tinkering I was done, and I stopped building computers, I stopped re-inventing programming wheels and I started sympathising with Mac users like Zeldman when they have problems just from trying to use software in the way it was designed to work.

Therein lies my frustration with Firefox. I’m a recent convert and yes, overall it is better than IE, but dear lord does it use memory. I don’t tend to shut down my pc, I hibernate it, so after three or four days I start noticing that stuff is lagging. Why? Because Facebook uses some ridiculous number of AJAX requests to load each page, a number that is multiplied if you or your friends have installed any of the applications that are now taking over the site (and the world). So I leave Facebook open in a tab, Gmail in another, and check in on them every now and then. A mere 3 or 4 hours later, Firefox will be using a manly 250mb of memory. The worst thing is that Firefox only runs one version of itself by default (I say this because I haven’t gone through the settings to see if a similar option to IE’s “run each version independently” exists), so I have to shut down every Firefox browser, every tab, to get my memory back. Hopefully, when the cookie scope bug is fixed, this will become less of a problem. That bug will also help with trying to develop over multiple sessions with Firefox, which at the moment is, frankly, a nightmare.

Wordpress is a different kettle of fish, it’s hard to break it but when you do, run for the hills. I’m a very competent user of this development platform, but I’m not kidding you when I tell you I had to re-install it twice over the course of trying to get this site working. If you get some bad data into that wp_posts table, you really do seem to be screwed. JavaScript errors (which Firefox/Firebug for some reason seem to ignore) appear. You can’t edit pages, you can’t save them. Clearing out the table doesn’t help. I ended up dropping the database and starting again.

The problem of course is that while I’m doing this, at the back of my mind is the thought that Firefox will soon need restarting again. This is because Wordpress does almost as many AJAX requests as Facebook, and it does seem to be these requests, constantly checking in for updates (Gmail is a major culprit as well) clog up the system. It’s not a big problem, but it is unnerving. Just as soon as I think that I’m getting somewhere, I immediately feel like I’m going to have to restart Firefox again. With IE, you can run it forever. Well, until it crashes. My version of IE on my home pc is so angry that I switched away that it now crashes on boot.

So this was my re-introduction to blogging. I’m back because I am jealous of all the people who never used to blog, and now do. I remember blogger being launched - I must have been amongst the very first batch of users. I remember when people used to call blogs ‘b-logs’ cos they didn’t know what the word meant. I’m back because, again, I feel like I have something to write about, and today I summoned the impetus to get this site and its 10-minute design online.

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