Changing Faces

Hello there, boys and girls! Like what I’ve done with the place? I should bloody hope so, it took long enough.

So, ahem, without further ado, I welcome you to the new, not necessarily improved, charlie farlie’s boozy thursdays. If you really want to stalk me, you can become a follower on the bar to the left, so do that, ok?

Make yourself comfortable, kids, it’s going to be a grumpy ride…

C x

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.]

There’s no business like Snow Business

“The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them.”
(Isiah 11:6)

At the ripe old age of 23 I like to think of myself, despite all evidence to the contrary, as a real, bona-fide grown-up. I can tie my own shoelaces, I always pay my phone bill on time and I generally make sure that I’ve got enough cash left in my pocket for a kebab after a particularly heavy night on the Cosmo’s.

I’m also a bit of a bastard. I’m not pre-occupied with rediscovering my inner child, since my outer child resembled a shaved baby chimpanzee and was usually dressed as some sort of epileptic scarecrow. It wasn't a good look for me.

Yet upon opening the curtains on Monday morning and finding that eight inches of all-my-Christmases-at-once had bountifully settled on bonny England, I was all-at-once struck by a peculiar sensation:

I wanted to be a kid again.

It had snowed. And not just snowed, but really, really snowed. So, despite being in possession of the least appropriate footwear the world has ever seen, I determined to go and make the most of it.

There’s something intrinsically magical about snow. Sure, it’s cold, slippy and uncomfortable, but it’s also fun, pretty and, dare I say it without sounding like a right girl, really quite romantic (the new squeeze and I enjoying what will go down in history as the smuggest walk in the snow ever). And despite essentially being the slightly harder sibling of rain, the snow gave London a much needed facelift. Even wheelie bins look utterly gorgeous with a generous dusting of the white stuff.

As a now-trained journalist, it ceaselessly causes me alarm that the industry I am trying so fervently to become a part of is undergoing a worrying transmogrification. What was once an industry driven by the unbiased report of world events is now an endlessly-negative misery-marathon, geared to suck the fun out of every aspect of our lives.

Many publications were quick to report that, according to estimates by the Federation of Small Businesses, almost 6.5million – that’s around a fifth of Britain’s workforce, fact fans - failed to turn up to work on Monday due to the snow. They also say that the three days of disruption caused by the snow will cost the UK economy around £3.5billion. Accusatory nods were, of course, made to those who had said they were snowed in, when in fact they were snowed out.

‘The worst snowfall in 18 years’ was the catch adopted by most reports of the snow. The worst? The bloody best more like! In all my life I have never seen such universal jollity, good feeling and sense of community.

I’ll exemplify: A posh woman nearly clocked me in the head with a snowball, while aiming for her husband. She was, naturally, mortified to have broken that last barrier of class division, physical attack. Did I happy slap her? Or sue her on the grounds of reckless endangerment? Of course I didn’t. I stooped, scooped and threw one back. Turns out all it takes is a well-placed ball of weaponised rain to ease social tension.

News bulletins were peppered with voxpops, broadcasting the malcontent grumbles of those who, unlike all normal people who had seen eight inches of snow as the perfect excuse to escape wage slavery and go outside and play, had struggled on across the tundra to complete meaningless jobs that benefit no one.

And of course, these grumbling whingesocks were utterly indignant at the lack of action from that ever blameable, faceless ‘they’. One grim-faced lady murmered sourly to ITV News that ‘they knew it was coming, but of course they didn’t do anything about it.’

Do what, exactly? Erect an enormous umbrella over London? Switch on every sunbed and kettle in unison in hope that the combined UV and steam power would be enough to thaw the city from its icy prison?

Because the stark reality of the situation is – this sort of thing doesn’t happen very often, which goes some way to explaining why London doesn’t have a crack fleet of snowploughs, skidoos and husky-rescue teams on constant 24-hour standby.

And don’t even get me started on the outcry over closure of schools. For one, keeping children inside when there is something as rare and novel as actual, tangible snowfall in the South-east – proper, snowman-building, sledging, ride-down-a-hill-on-a-bin-lid snowfall – is nothing short of cruel, and more, it provided parents with the even rarer opportunity to bond with their rugrats.

There's nothing quite so unifying, it would seem, as seeing how much freezing, wet snow you can stuff down the back of your dad’s jumper.

Despite being a bit of a bastard, it gave me a warm fuzzy to see people so unabashedly enjoying themselves. There’s not a great deal to be jolly about in these grim, ambling times, so an unplanned icing-sugar-coated bank holiday was just the boost people needed to solider on through the humdrum dreariness of it all.

We’re all-too-often too quick to look on the gloomy side of things; our glasses are more and more frequently half empty, and clouds are less and less frequently in possession of that ubiquitous silver lining. So it’s a little disappointing to see the press, and the however-small proportion of the public throwing grit into Frosty the Snowman’s face.

Yes, the country coming to a standstill is irritating. But a snow day is also very rare, and, by and large, very, very fun. And, wanting to continue a trend for arse-achingly bad puns at the end of these rants, all that remains to say is… shouldn’t we all just chill out..?

[P.S - I realise I have been rather lax (read: shitty) in my updating of this blog. I promise to try harder this year... not including January, obviously... bugger...]

Photographs © Charlie Breslin 2009

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…