A Bitter Pill - or - Johnny Be Good

I’m not proud to admit it, but I’m a real hypochondriac. I blame the internet; my dad’s sister is notoriously health, or rather, sickness-conscious, as is my dad, so medical dictionaries have long been banned from our mutual family homes. The discovery of NHS Direct, or DeathWeb as it could be more appropriately named, then, meant that my every ache, twinge, grizzle or graze could be immediately and falsely identified as either Cancer or AIDS.

Imagine then the fun that ensued when I discovered sex. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a massive fan of safe sex – sex is, after all a messy, squidgy experience at the best of times (while, of course, being an enormous amount of fun) – but while use of a condom may have kept knob-rot at bay, a flimsy piece of latex was insufficient protection for my hormone-addled, paranoid teenage mind. I was 17, and to this day I am convinced I was too much too young, with too much information and not enough knowledge.

That bout of uninvited sharing out of the way then, I read with some interest this week the growing debate surrounding new plans to allow the advertising of abortion – or pregnancy advisory – services on television and radio, as part of plans aimed at reducing the UK’s high rate of teenage pregnancies and sexual infections. This news came, rather unfortunately, alongside a trial scheme at four Oxfordshire secondary schools allowing girls as young as 11 to ask their school nurse for the morning after pill via text message.

It’s easy to jump on the middle-England, chav-baiting bandwagon and say that most teenage pregnancies are simply the by-product of a generation who see babies as the ultimate meal ticket and should be opposed as such. But, snobbery aside, care must be taken to ensure that in advertising these services, and in making the morning after pill readily available, the safe sex message is still pushed, and pushed more often and with more force. After all, pregnancy is not the only unwanted side-effect of unprotected sex.

Genuine crusties will remember the, frankly terrifying, warning adverts when HIV/AIDS became more widespread in the 1980s. If the sight of that terrifying, tombstone-like black slab wasn’t enough to persuade you to practice safe sex, it was certainly scary enough to dilute your mojo. Nowadays, sexual health ads tend to be a little edgier, a little cooler; more appropriate for the Skins generation.

So one can only assume, if The London Paper’s rather frightening article suggesting that two-thirds of young Londoners practice unsafe sex, believing that they had literally ‘no chance’ of contracting HIV is to be accepted, that young people are simply not scared for their sexual health.

This could be explained by the fact that ‘responsible adults’ are targeting their fears in the wrong direction. It’s impossible to ignore the fact that there can be emotional implications for sexual precociousness; if at 17 I felt I was unprepared for sex, it boggles my mind to imagine that 11-year-olds could be better equipped to deal with it. But rather than impotently wringing our hands at the idea that younger teenagers are finding out that down there’s for more than weeing, perhaps it would be useful reminding them that if they’re going to hop on the bad foot and do the good thang, there can be, and usually are, consequences to this.

Adverts for condoms and contraceptives are, if anything, too few and far between as it is. Currently only Channel 4, that bastion of taboo and general naughtiness, are allowed to broadcast adverts for condoms before the 9pm watershed. Were that not bad enough, those that are shown are entirely too mild. Apparently scaring the bejeebers out of us stopped being vogue, so maybe it's time to get gory. Be graphic! Talk about vaginal discharge, or warty bell-ends! If you can’t put the frighteners on young shaggers, then at least try to put them off their dinner!

Because saying something terrible could happen, and seeing that something terrible in action are two entirely different things: I’d suggest taking a similar approach to the warnings on tobacco packaging; emblazoning bottles of Blue WKD with photographs of seeping, cheesy, gonorrhoea-infected naughty bits and the slogan – ‘Wrap it up, dirty dick’. If that doesn’t encourage you to use a condom (or switch to beer) then I don’t know what will.

And treat adverts for emergency contraception in entirely the same way – a 10-minute clip of a newborn baby screaming its lungs out at full volume, pausing every few moments to show close-up HD-ready images of greenish baby shit and milky sick-up. The problem isn’t that young people aren’t aware of what could happen if they don’t practice safe sex, it’s that the consequences simply aren’t frightening enough.

In the Daily Mail’s report Dr Peter Saunders, of the Christian Medical Fellowship said: 'Allowing the advertising of abortion services is not dealing with the real problem. This is the approach of having the ambulance at the bottom of the cliff to deal with the casualties.’ That’s as maybe, though his argument seems a little weighted; I, for instance, know that you can get artificial limbs, but that doesn’t mean I’d do the conga through a minefield.

Making the morning after pill readily available, and making young people aware of pregnancy advisory services can, and should be seen as positive steps. It’s too easy to say that the need to promote these things is indicative of ‘Broken Britain’; accidents happen, and people make mistakes. But Mary Kenny’s argument in the Guardian holds weight – contraception should, and must be the norm. Because yes, accidents do happen and yes, people do make mistakes, but in the case of sexual health, and unwanted pregnancy, these are mistakes that are, more often than not, avoidable.

The real concern here is that young people are not left with, much like me, too much information and not enough knowledge. Our high teenage pregnancy and STI figures show that young Brits know what to do with what they have in their pants. The real trick is to make sure they do it responsibly, because if we fail to do that, we’re all going to be screwed…

Gissa Job

And so, approximately a gazillion years too late, the government have realised that there is a distinct shortage of graduate-level job opportunities for the hundreds of thousands of chronically-skint youngsters that will be thrust into the real world at the end of this academic year.

It’s a phenomenon that I am painfully aware of; last Thursday saw the completion of my journalism training, and with it, grim and unwelcome confirmation from my tutor that these were not good times for the recently-qualified hack. With 0% of my qualifying classmates (myself included) leaving the course to walk straight into gainful employment, the fact that previous years had seen at least 60% of her qualifying students had done so with jobs secured was ever-so-slightly more worrying.

0%.

Zero. Per. Cent.

Yikes.

You realise you’re up shit creek without a proverbial when the only bright side to your predicament is that at least everyone’s in the same boat. The problem is, the boat’s still in shit creek, and no matter how shitty our hands get, we’re paddling against the current.

No one ever said that getting into journalism was going to be easy; everyone thinks they want to be a journalist, and a great number of people even go so far as to actually try to become one. It’s a tough, virtually impenetrable industry, characterised by incessant rounds of job application and rejection, manipulation and exploitation.

The ‘state of the economy’ doesn’t help. Newspapers are shedding staff quicker than Mahiki chucking out Big Brother contestants on a particularly busy Tuesday night. It’s not a pretty sight.

And yet, once more, here I find myself, standing before the increasingly impregnable obstacle-course that is job seeking. At its best, it is painful, soul-destroying and utterly crushing to one’s self-esteem. At its worst, it is the sort of sick, sadomasochistic practice that is best saved for particularly nasty internet kink-flicks featuring big-eyed schoolgirls with tentacles.

None of this, I realise, is new information – everyone knows how awful looking for a job can be. But it is the one-sidedness of it all that is most frustrating – the impetus on upwards arse-kissing and downwards casualness. It is estimated that the average graduate-level job seeker must send, on average, 70 job applications to secure a single interview. And from personal experience, one can safely expect that from those 69 rejections, only a very small handful will have the common decency to send you any acknowledgement of your brown-nosing, obsequious scrap-begging.

Is it so hard to say ‘thanks, but no thanks?’ Even a curt ‘fuck you’ is preferable to the weight of being ignored. When did it become ok to treat the achievements and successes of others with such utter, mind-boggling disregard?

I know how I sound. I sound like a self-pitying whinge-monger crying for mummy because no one will see me for the superstar I am. But I’m not! I’m not asking Rupert Murdoch to launch himself around the world to nosh me off, using my own flatulent scribblings as a bib – I’m just asking that when broken, broke young people who have busted their bollocks to get a qualification go looking for work, they are treated with ever-so-slightly more respect than a wet fart in white y-fronts.

Perhaps what is most frustrating is that the most appealing roles exist in some sort of employment half-life, offered as internships where ambitious young writers generate revenue for their publications while receiving nothing in return.

There are literally dozens of jobs up for grabs if you don’t mind trawling through an application process that makes The Running Man look like a nice stroll in the park for the opportunity of working for free for six months.

I’m not such a cock as to call it modern-day slavery – it’s not – but what it is, is an utter pisstake, and amounts to the unchallenged theft of intellectual property.

All that the prevalence of the internship system actually achieves is a financially-weighted tier industry – providing the haves with entry-level opportunities that are priced out of the reach of the have-nots. And while I am not suggesting for a second that those who can afford to take these internships, and in doing so work without pay for anything up to six months are in any way less talented than those that cannot afford to do so, it is a bitter pill to swallow that so many are excluded from these opportunities on the grounds that they simply cannot afford to take them.

I’ve done my share of working for free – building up the portfolio of published pieces that were required to pass my journalism training cost me a small fortune. Some publications offer to pay travel expenses – most don’t – up to the point where it actually costs the worker money to work. And while the thrill of publication is something I hope will not quickly fade, it is small comfort when faced with the fact I can no longer afford to take the tube to visit museums I have reviewed, or buy a pint in bars I’ve recommended to my readers.

A fantastic, talented and pro-active friend of mine, who has worked at some of the world’s top fashion magazines, has, now as a fully-trained journalist, found herself once more slogging her guts out for free. It’s absurd, and it’s unfair. The reality of the situation is that the industry needs a shake-up. It’s taken a battering of late, but the solution is not slamming shut the doors and preventing the influx of fresh talent, opening them only to let in those wealthy enough to not need the jobs anyway.

Something needs to change, or, sadly, the writing really will be on the wall…

[Sorry, boys and girls, I realise that was not particularly fluffy, or indeed funny, but if I read ‘this is an unpaid position for a period of 6 months’ once more without letting off some steam I was going to throw myself off a bridge… Phew.]

Jump on the Brand-wagon

Oh, hello again!

You just caught me in the middle of writing a strongly-worded letter to Her Majesty the Queen, demanding that Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand be immediately rounded up and locked in the Tower of London for crimes against comedy, England, HRH Andrew Sachs and the Very Rev. Georgina Baillie.

You see, I didn’t hear Russell Brand’s Radio 2 show when it was broadcast on 18th October, but, like the other 27,000 members of British society who have subsequently and retrospectively thought it fit to complain about Brand and Ross’s stupid and childish behaviour, my detachment from events comes as no obstacle to my fiery, wrathful rage. I’ve already sharpened my pitchfork, and once rent-a-mob turn up I’m off for a bit of burning and looting. You see, I am very offended, and I will not stop until I see justice blunderingly and knee-jerkingly done.

What’s most worrying about the ‘furore’ is that it represents head-burying at its absolute worst. I’m not saying what they did was ok, but having a go at them while the world goes to hell in a handcart seems like something of an overreaction.

While the world still (apparently) faces financial meltdown (the BBC must be shitting themselves, having wasted god-knows-how-much money on the new DownTurn logo which accompanies every financial scare story), fighting rages in the Congo and the US prepares to elect their new president, it is nice to see the British public, true to form, focusing on the grotesque pointlessness of celebrity. Even Gordon Brown has taken a timely break from saving the world economy to have his say on this diplomatic crisis shaking the country to its very core.

And the situation keeps getting worse and worse – heads rolling all over the shop. It’s like a particularly bad wedding reception round Henry the Eighth’s place. Brand has subsequently resigned from his Radio 2 job, and Jonathan Ross’s Friday night chat show, which presumably justifies the enormous £18million he costs the public each year, has been canned until further notice. Lesley Douglas, controller of BBC Radio has also handed her resignation, saying: “The events of the last two weeks happened on my watch. I believe it is right that I take responsibility for what has happened."

When celebrities do something wrong, we are very quick to complain that they don’t get treated in the same way that we do. Yet this situation has been allowed to quickly and dangerously spiral out of control, setting an ugly precedent for what can and cannot be broadcast and what can and cannot be done in the name of comedy. Because, hurtful or not, it is very important to remember that Brand and Ross’s behaviour was not malicious – stupid, certainly – but not malicious. The punishment has, in this instance, far outweighed the crime.

There were two, that’s TWO, complaints about the show following its immediate broadcast. The number quickly spiralled once the papers got their greasy hands on it and milked it for all its worth. The public, whether actually offended or not, realised that they perhaps ought to be and subsequently complained in their droves. After all, a national treasure has been humiliated on national radio (a national treasure, mind, and I apologise for being flippant, who is best known for taking the piss out of Spanish people and being knocked about by John Cleese). Complaining to OFCOM, the regulator of communications and broadcasting in the UK seems particularly rich, when the vast, vast majority of those complaining hadn’t heard the show in the first place. It’s the equivalent of deliberately searching for a nudey pic on the internet, only to then complain that the sight of nipples has offended you.

I understand why Andrew Sachs would be upset – what right-minded person wouldn’t be. But even his reaction to the entire affair has been, at best, sanctimonious and pious beyond all reason. Accepting their apology, tut-tutting and moving on would have been a far more dignified and appropriate way of dealing with the verbal wankery of two silly little men. And in the spirit of fairness, much of what they said was actually true, if Sachs’s fulsome granddaughter, Georgina Baillie’s delightful kiss-and-tell exclusives to The Sun are to be believed.

I, for one, would be able to take Georgina Baillie and her fame-hungry cleavage slightly more seriously were she not quite-so-obviously relishing every single moment. While I am sure that she is royally miffed that these two over-paid gonks have called her granddad and spilt details of her sex life messily onto his answering machine, it’s a bit rich that a self-styled ‘Satanic Slut’ (NSFW) has decided that she can and will take the moral high ground.

It must be amazingly difficult to look both offended and sensual at the exact same time, but Baillie has persevered; her expression like a porn star who’s just noticed her car’s been clamped in the middle of a double-penetration scene.

Calling yourself a slut and then parading around like the Madonna leaves something of a bitter taste in the mouth, and quite how the sight of her tits splashed across the pages of The Sun every day this week is less humiliating for her poor old granddad is an absolute mystery to me.

What we have witnessed is an act of childish stupidity. Prank calls are always annoying, often hurtful and occasionally frightening, but we must be cautious in considering what Ross and Brand have done, to use Miss Baillie’s own words, as ‘beyond contempt’. Her delight at their mutual suspensions in particular smacks more of gleeful hand-rubbing at the fact that they are being punished for airing the dirty laundry that she now takes such glory in. As we increasingly see these days, the media are becoming more and more proficient at not merely reflecting public opinion, but actively influencing it. Brand and Ross are shamed and deplorable, whereas Baillie’s Nazi-esque burlesque routine is branded ‘tongue-in-cheek’. Quite.

This farce has provided nothing more than a scandalous distraction against the constant impotent raging against the bigger issues facing the country today, and, frankly, while Ross, Brand and Douglas’s moral compass may have been somewhat skewed, I’d argue that it was the judgement of the British public that was altogether more Fawlty…

The Name Game

Moses supposes his toeses are roses
But Moses supposes erroneously
for nobody's toeses are posies of roses
As Moses supposes his toeses to be.

When it comes to the naming of things, there seems to be something of a literary pre-occupation with the rose. If it’s not Moses supposing his toeses are roses (supposing, of course, erroneously), it’s Shakespeare’s Juliet pondering ‘What's in a name? That which we call a rose / By any other name would smell as sweet.’ But whether we’re talking about roses, toeses or posies, names continue to be problematic; while they are little more than labels for things that are exactly the same without them, without them we are left in something of an existential identity crisis. Without names, all that distinguishes roses from toeses is the very fact of them being distinct, their physical, tangible difference. Without them, things are just that, things. Perhaps this is why we are thrown into such a quandary when names get changed.

I can still remember the nationwide sense of unease when Marathon bars became Snickers, when Jif became Cif and when Opal Fruits suddenly became Starburst. There was sufficient outcry when Coco Pops were inexplicably re-branded as Choco Crispies that Kellogg’s were forced to make a u-turn (perhaps Coup-Coup Pops may have been an appropriate rename in this instance). If Gertrude Stein is right, and a rose really is just a rose, then why do we get so worked up over what things are called?

I ask this in the light of a recent lobbying campaign taking place in East London that seeks to rename the soon-to-be-reopened Shoreditch High Street station ‘Banglatown’, in honour of the Bangladeshi cultural influence in the area. Despite a similar aborted campaign to have Aldgate East station renamed Brick Lane in 2006, supporters of the proposed change are arguing that such a change will make the area more accessible to tourists and serve to cement the cultural identity of the area. It’s a campaign with noble and understandable intentions, and one that poses the question of how important a name is to the cultural identity, or indeed the social relevance of the location it describes. If the clothes make the man, does the name really make the place?

You’d be rightly quick to point out that Chinatown in Soho does just that – labels a place unequivocally with the cultural background that it serves to represent – but that doesn’t necessarily mean that it is a trend that ought to be unquestionably followed. Sure, renaming Shoreditch High Street station Banglatown would make it easier for tourists to locate Brick Lane and everything that comes hand in hand with this particular area in East London, but aside from setting an uncomfortable precedent for labelling locations with such definitive racial and cultural boundaries, doesn’t it also smack slightly of dumbing down? Are we in danger of turning London into one big theme park – a huge reproduction of the ‘it’s a small world’ ride at Disneyland? And if we are, why stop with Banglatown? Oxford Street is confusing enough, so why don’t we just call it Shopland? Soho might literally be dripping with connotative implication, but it could be clearer – Gaytopia, perhaps, or Shagsville?

The labelling of places might be problematic, but the labelling of people is, unsurprisingly, even more so. Somewhat further away, the Greek gay rights organisation The Homosexual and Lesbian Community of Greece has come under fire from campaigners on the Greek island of Lesbos for their use of the term ‘lesbian’. The campaign, spearheaded by Lesbos publisher Dimitris Lambrou argues that the ‘international dominance of the word in its sexual context violates the human rights of the islanders, and disgraces them around the world.’ Lambrou insists that the worldwide sexualising of the term causes daily problems to the social lives of Lesbos’s inhabitants. Now, far be it for me to trivialise the embarrassment of 100,000 people, but with all the problems currently facing the world today, is that really the biggest thing they have to worry about?

The term lesbian entered the English vocabulary at the start of the 20th Century, and originates from the poet Sappho, who expressed her love for other women in her 7th Century BC poetry. This in mind – and all fatuousness aside – doesn’t it seem that the Lesbians have taken rather a long time to be offended about the lesbians? I mean, a really, really long time. I’d try to defer my offence next time someone calls me a dickhead for a hundred years, except I’d probably be dead, and that would be really, really quite petty.

Perhaps the most ludicrous part of the entire campaign is the reported intention to combat the use of the term worldwide if their campaign is successful. Talk about keeping your eyes on the bigger picture - Mary Whitehouse must be positively spinning in her grave that she never held such ambition.

It takes some stretch of the imagination to believe that insurmountable confusion arises from the duality of the term, even more so to believe that this duality brings the people of Lesbos disgrace. Are the Lesbian people really so soft-shelled? And if a capital letter isn’t enough to distinguish the terms (Lesbian referring to someone from Lesbos, lesbian referring to someone from Channel 4), shouldn’t some degree of maturity, acceptance and the common sense to rise above what is, frankly, puerile schoolboy humour provide sufficient defence against this perceived embarrassment? Frankly, if the Lesbians think they’ve got it bad, they should probably give some thought to the people of Fucking, Austria. They may find that the grass is actually greener on their side of the fence.

There is a fine line between using names as a means of identification and using them as a means of implication; I’ll concede that Shakespeare and Stein had something of a point, but I’ll venture that were roses in fact called shitblossom, we wouldn’t be in so much of a hurry to shove our schnozzes into them. But the responsibility must be placed firmly at our own doors – words only have as much power as we let them; the continued taboo surrounding the word c*nt is evidence enough of this, so perhaps if we just remember that a word is a word is a word, just as a name is a name is a name, we’ll be better defended against the damage the labels we create can do.

After all, sticks and stones may break our bones, but names will never hurt us.

The S Word

Okay boys and girls, I’m about to tell you a scary story, so you might want to read this with your eyes closed. In fact, if you’re under eighteen, might I suggest you don’t read this at all, or at least get your parent/slash/guardian to sign a release or something; if you go bonkers and start clubbing baby seals to death, I don’t want the blame. All sorted? Are we sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin:

Once upon a time, people smoked. And they lived, and died, happily ever after.

What? What do you mean that’s not that scary? It’s bloody terrifying! You’re telling me that the fact there’s smoking going on out there doesn’t make you fill your pants in the most pooey of ways? See, there’s a new swear word in town; it begins with S, and appropriately enough, it rhymes with joke. I refer, of course, to the new initiative set out by anti-smoking group SmokeFree Liverpool, who are pushing, with support from the city council for all movies with smoking scenes to be given an automatic 18 certificate. Call me alarmist, but doesn’t that seem a bit strong? It called to mind a story I read all the way back in 2003, when some unnamed US poster companies airbrushed a cigarette from the hand of Paul McCartney (yes, him again) on the iconic cover to the Beatles’ Abbey Road album cover. It’s one thing trying to promote a healthy smoke-free future – but denying a hoarse, phlegmy smoke-fuelled past is another kettle of fish altogether. People smoked. It’s a fact that’s not going to change with a fancy photoshopping job, and until cigarettes are banned outright, forcing them underground and turning nicotine immediately into the most-used illegal drug in the UK, people will continue to do so. It’s already illegal to advertise tobacco in the UK, which is directly promoting it, but in censoring the very act of smoking, are we not setting a rather dangerous precedent of not only what it is legal to do, but also of what it is legal to see?

SmokeFree Liverpool’s argument is that viewing smoking scenes at the cinema encourages the young to smoke. Dr Stacey Anderson, who carried out the new pilot study for SmokeFree Liverpool claims that ‘[i]n 2006, around 1650 11 to 17 year olds in Liverpool started smoking because of exposure to smoking in films’. Are young people in this country really so muffin headed that the sight of some Hollywood bimbo chugging away on the big screen is enough to whip them into a tobacco-hungry frenzy? Cigarette packets now come adorned with health warnings that take up around 50% of the packaging; why isn’t that enough? Does our every waking experience really need to be protected from the great smoky threat? Are we really that weak-willed, knuckle-dragging and downright thick? The smoking ban in England came into force in July 2007, forcing those who choose to smoke out of bars, clubs, cafes and bus shelters out onto the streets, and that’s just fine. Were it not for the smoking ban we wouldn’t have smokalising, or smirting, and nightclubs wouldn’t smell of wee and farts. I suppose the idea behind SmokeFree is that it paves the way for a genuinely smoke-free society, as opposed to a society where smokers are just the smelly grey elephants stuck out in the corner. In the rain. But unfortunately for those who seek to slap an 18 certificate onto films with smoking scenes, it’s a lot harder to censor real life. Take a walk through any given street in London today, and you will see swathes of smokers, huddled for warmth and acceptance, the new social pariahs, making their vice visible.

Disney have apparently declared that smoking scenes in their future family films would be ‘non-existent’. And why not? – no one wants to see Mickey and Donald sparking up after a heavy night on the tiles any more than they want to see Minnie’s drink getting spiked or Daisy Duck being slapped with an ASBO. That’s just common sense. It’s one thing declaring to cut smoking out of our future, but to censor it from the past is an entirely more scary prospect. Ignoring famous Disney chugger Cruella De Vil for a moment, let’s think back to a little puppet boy who made some stupid choices. The 1940 Disney feature Pinocchio features a scene where the little wooden boy turns sickly green after a puff on a huge comedy cigar. Why not replace all smoking scenes with that? It’s hardly glamorising smoking, and, if I remember rightly, within the next five minutes, poor old Pinocchio sprouts a pair of ass’ ears, while his more nicotine-hungry chums go to full hog (so to speak) and transform into braying little donkeys. Daniel Craig commented on the fact that smoking scenes had been cut from the latest Bond movie Casino Royale that ‘I can blow someone's head off but I can't light a good cigar.’ But you can, Danny Boy, just as long as after that first puff you turn green and grow donkey’s ears, highlighting your foolishness and appeasing the hand-wringing anti-smoking apologists.

But why stop there? Mr. Craig has a point; why should we be able see him blow someone’s head off, but not see him enjoy a snout? Cut the bloody lot of it out. The violence. The swearing. The sex. The god-awful, unforgivable smoking! Sure the SAW films would be a lot shorter, and more than a bit pointless, but Bambi would have a far happier ending.

It’s a tough fact for the anti-smoking lot to deal with, that some people smoke, and some people look cool doing it. Some people look cool riding motorbikes, and some people die doing that. And, much like smokers, they have to do that outside in the rain, too. Here’s a suggestion, stop selling cigarettes to under eighteens, ask for ID if necessary, because the last time I checked, James Bond wasn’t working behind the counter in my local Sainsbury’s…