Here’s a list of names: Jody Cundy, Ellie Leach, Nikita Kanda, Adam Thomas, Zara McDermott, Eddie Kadi, Angela Scanlon, Amanda Abbington, Layton Williams and Bobby Brazier. What do they all have in common? The answer, for me, is that I don’t know who any of them are, yet they are all contestants on the forthcoming series of Strictly Come Dancing. There are two other contestants, Krishnan Guru-Murthy and Angela Rippon who are both newsreaders, who I have heard of, but what does this say about me?
The answer is that it illustrates just how out of touch I am with popular TV culture. Several will be soap TV stars, others will be stars on so-called ‘reality’ shows and at least one will be a sportsman or woman. Without the aid of Mr Google, I have no idea which is which and, given that it’s still, notionally, summer, no real interest
Meanwhile, the Daily Mail helpfully shares with us ‘Holly’s summer holiday summer secrets’. The Holly concerned is Holly Willoughby who hosts This Morning on ITV for hundreds of thousands of people with either too much time on their hands or a physical inability to turn the telly off. Anyway, it turns out that Holly’s secrets involve what appear to be library pictures of her wearing different kinds of clothes, including several revealing photos designed, once must presume, to attract the husbands of the Mail’s middle aged female readership.
I know little about Holly other than she appears to be a modestly talented TV presenter with the kind of sharp elbows one would need to jump the queue in order to pay tribute to the dead Queen.
Holly’s secrets are no longer secrets, but who in their right mind would pay to read this crap? Oh yeah, Mail readers.
Speaking of newspapers, the Daily Telegraph is as angry as ever, reporting that government ministers have been able to exploit a loophole in civil service pay which enables them to double the pay of ‘mandarins’. The Torygraph alleges that the ministers simply promote them and are able to pay them more money that way. The paper points out that this affects those currently trousering in excess of £100,000.
Who knows if it’s true, although when I was a very junior mandarin I earned barely a quarter of that sum and wasn’t promoted because I wasn’t suitable or good enough.
The Telegraph is one of those media outlets that tends to parrot the line that somehow mandarins, or civil servants to give them their proper name, couldn’t cope in the real world, to which I would reply “bollocks”. Certainly when it comes to the front line, in terms of DWP fraud investigators, border patrol staff, HMRC investigators and the like, I doubt if your average hack could do what we do and did, or indeed would get out of bed for the kind of money we were being paid. But say something often enough and somehow some people believe it’s true.
It looks like I was totally wrong about the women’s world cup. After expressing my general apathy about the whole tournament, some 5.2 million people watched the last 16 England game against Nigeria on the BBC, with an additional two million plus following the game on the website and via BBC sounds. These are significant numbers, particularly when compared to the recent Ashes cricket series between England and Australia, which attracted record viewing figures on Sky, but never once exceeding one million.
When I pooh-poohed the early stages, people were saying, “Well, you just wait until the knock out stages and see what happens then!” and they were right.
Now, the Lionesses are favourites with the bookies to win the World Cup outright. Will the country go mad or will most people be fretting more about Sheffield United, Luton Town and AFC Bournemouth?
That 41 migrants have died in a shipwreck off the Italian island of Lampedusa attracts little attention across the media. It appears on the BBC website alongside a story about how a cat interrupted a reporter during a a live broadcast because obviously the stories are equally important.
We now live in times where the actual deputy chair of the Conservative party, Lee Anderson, says publicly that migrants should, and I quote, “fuck off back to France”.
I am sure that you are well aware that we are being caught up in a culture war initiated from within the very heart of government to distract us from the cost of living crisis, rising interest rates and the collapse of the NHS.
Refugees, asylum seekers and good old fashioned economic migrants (like the parents of Priti Patel, Suella Braverman and Rishi Sunak) are all presented as wrong ‘uns and being much the same people. The government has allowed the asylum system to get out of hand by presiding over a catastrophic rise in numbers needing to be assessed and by withdrawing from all the agreements we had with the EU when we were still members.
Migrants included my mum who came here in a big boat from the Netherlands, my paternal grandfather who came on a big boat from Scandinavia and my father who took a plane from England to Canada to begin a new life.
Migration is a hugely complex subject and it will become an even bigger issue when the movement of people becomes even greater because of cuts in overseas aid and the effects of climate change.
But here in Merrie England, we simply tell migrants to fuck off back to France. What a time to be alive.
