Omnishambles at the BBC

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March 11th 2023 was Omnishambles Friday at the BBC, a day of multiple trouble. The redoubtable David Attenborough has a new series on British wildlife and there was consternation that the final episode, apparently dealing with its dramatic decline and what has caused it, is not being transmitted but will be seen only on iPlayer. Another of their top stars, Gary Lineker, was suspended from presenting Match of the Day for a tweet criticising the government’s new asylum policy, and his co-hosts promptly withdraw from the programme in solidarity. As a side show, following complaints from listeners, the BBC issues an apology for allowing former culture secretary Nadine Dorries to make false claims about Sue Gray and Keir Starmer on a radio show, and Question Time presenter Fiona Bruce was accused of trivialising domestic abuse in an exchange with Stanley Johnson. All these incidents revolve around household names, as so much of the news does. A few days earlier, the broadcaster was under attack from another direction, after announcing a review of its classical music provision, including 20% job cuts in its three English orchestras, and disbanding the BBC Singers, whose origins go back even further than the orchestras, to 1924, a twenty-strong choir of top flight voices capable of singing anything, and a jewel in the BBC’s musical crown. Read more

Artificial Writing: a first evaluation

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LIKE every other domain of everyday life, education at all levels has been battered by digital technology even in places where it isn’t called for. Now the alarm has been raised about a new AI program, ChatGPT, which can be used, it is said, to write academic essays. A free trial version of the program was launched at the end of 2022, and gained a million subscribers in the first month. You give it a prompt in natural language and it returns a coherent and apparently cogent text. Before coming to a judgement about it, one should of course try it out, and my first impression is that its essay writing skills are stilted but it looks like it might make a useful research tool. Its great advantage, after trying it out with a few queries (called prompts), would appear to be its speed, which is much faster than using Google, and where Google delivers you a list of results which you then have to trawl through, here you get an immediate answer in formal, polite, and completely impersonal prose.  Read more

‘From Printing to Streaming, Cultural Production Under Capitalism’

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Cuba’s one time Minister of Culture Armando Hart once said ‘To confuse art and politics is a mistake; to separate art and politics is another mistake.’ You can also say, to confuse art and economics is a mistake; to separate art and economics is another mistake – a paradox that I explore in my new book, ‘From Printing to Streaming, Cultural Production Under Capitalism’.

www.plutobooks.com/9780745340968/from-printing-to-streaming

Culture, in the sense of aesthetic creation, has always been central to the good life under capitalism, which has engendered a magnificent apparatus for its production and consumption across the globe, but this apparatus is so riddled with contradictions basically economic in origin that it negates its own potential. Marx thought capitalism was hostile to the arts, because it cannot fully control aesthetic labour and the process of creativity the way it controls the alienated labour of the factory worker, but he never gave the question any prominence because in his own time and by his own estimation, it was marginal to the accumulation of capital. But that was before the birth of the mass media. With the invention of new technologies of mechanical reproduction came the emergence of the culture industry as a distinct sector of capital, infiltrated by the techniques of advertising and heavily interlinked with other sectors like electronics, which provided both the means of production and the means of consumption.

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Kiss Channel 4 Goodbye?

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The prospective privatisation of Channel Four induces in me a state of cognitive dissonance. Part of me is appalled at this wanton repetition of what the patrician Harold Macmillan way back called ‘selling off the family silver’, and another part of me answers back, but what is there worth saving? I remember, you see, what Channel Four was really like when it started, before it adopted a populist agenda in the 1990s, and I’m speaking not just as a viewer but as one of the numerous independent filmmakers who was commissioned by them. Over its first decade, C4 was truly novel, adopting unconventional and groundbreaking programme formats and bringing a whole new generation into production, in fulfilment of its public service remit, to be innovative, to inspire change, to nurture talent and to offer a platform for alternative views.  Read more

Archival Values: A report on losing a documentary archive

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Almost thirty years ago, I attended an international seminar at the Babelsberg film school in Berlin, the first time that teachers of documentary from west and east Europe met together to compare notes on pedagogical methods and values. On the second day, Klaus Stanjek, the seminar’s convenor, disappeared and returned later in the day with a van full of film cans. ‘Someone called from the other side of the city,’ he explained, ‘they said people at the old East German film school were about to junk their archive, so I just had to go and rescue what I could before it was too late’, and then he rushed off to get some more. I am put in mind of the episode because I now find myself forced to oversee the loss of an archive that I have myself built up over several decades and which then expanded considerably after I moved to the University of Roehampton in 2007. 

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Going Viral: A Coronavirus Diary

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Coronavirus brings globalisation into focus by forcing attention onto the different layers of interconnectedness in our twenty-first century world. As the virus spreads around the planet in waves, the pandemic impinges on different social and economic sectors each according to its own rhythm, throwing them out of joint one by one. The synchronisation which normally keeps the whole system running harmoniously breaks down. It is precisely at the moment the system breaks down that we realise how interconnected it is. What is normally hidden because, as we used to say, it functions like clockwork, is exposed. We discover that while our clocks are nowadays calibrated atomically, public time is not at all uniform but constituted by the superposition of many different tempos.

Free Associations 78, 2020

Read it here:

Chanan 334-1265-1-PB

 

The Music of Politics

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It was an unexpectedly amusing moment when Cameron was caught ‘humming’ to himself as he went back into No.10 after announcing his handover to Theresa May, unaware that his microphone was still open.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ap1qKhCSeKc[/youtube]

Even more entertaining was the rapid reaction of a bunch of savvy composers, some of them in response to a challenge by ClassicFM.  Read more

Brexit, Labour & the Media

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What the anti-Corbynistas are doing is unconscionable. In pursuing their cackhanded coup, they are abdicating from intervention in the process of negotiating Brexit. They wouldn’t admit it, likely not even to themselves, but this might even be one reason why they’re doing it, because of course they too have no plan for how to proceed, any more than the Tories (while Owen Smith even seems to think he can successfully challenge Corbyn by proposing a second referendum). They’re like animals caught in headlights, not knowing which way to turn, while now installed behind the wheel is Theresa May and her equally clueless crew, driving in the dark with no road map and their GPS out of range, sniffing their way to the unshackled neoliberal dreamland of neo-Thatcherism.

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Referendum Blues

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Like many other socialists, I have had strong doubts about whether the EU is capable of the reforms that would be needed to shake off the shackles of its disastrous neoliberal policies, especially after two visits to Greece last year to film episodes for our new documentary about money and debt, Money Puzzles. I could not imagine myself voting to leave, despite a number calls from the left to do so which I found pretty persuasive, partly because I refused to align my vote with the utterly disreputable politicians calling for exit, and partly because all my instincts, my sense of cultural identity, belong with a European imaginary. I have to say ‘imaginary’ because actually existing Europe is as far from its democratic ideals as actually existing socialism in Eastern Europe was from real communism. Read more

What the big media don’t show

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Paris 29 November 2015.

[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/147310542[/vimeo]

By chance I was in Paris for the weekend. No demos are allowed in Paris because of the State of Emergency following the November 13 terrorist attacks, so at midday protestors organised a human chain along Boulevard Voltaire. One of the organisers, a friend of mine, told me that the police agreed to this as long as roads were not blocked, and the memorial site at the Bataclan theatre was excluded. None of this was reported in the big media, which focussed instead on the shoes at the Place de la Republique and a violent clash which took place there later in the afternoon. The shoes made a powerful symbolic statement, but so did the human chain which the media ignored. Read more