The BBC

New season of David Olusoga's A House Through Time started this week, it's Bristol this time. Great stuff as always, he's one of the main reasons to still tune in to the BBC these days.

Yeah, I saw that last night, great episode to kick things off. Looking forward to part two. I loved that they explained the 18th century political 'cartoon', explaining all the tiny details. 'The Sixth Letter' book in one's pocket, dragging a dead man to the polls to get his vote etc.

It's about Englands's slavery past - well, those who profited from it immensely - and I've been seeing more of that incidentally (even fucking Paul from FlogIt had a 'slavery was bad! It's going under hammer right now!' epiphany recently). I don't know if this is a new thing for England, but it's been noticeable.

Xps

Marianne's pain is more present in the text, even if the causes of it are more absent - in the figure of the monstrous father. One way of reading Marianne and the brother is that they both compulsively repeat the cycle of abuse. Which is a way of saying I 'believed' her more readily in the text. I think that's a function of the space of literature but that needs unpacking.

I keep coming back to the title. I think it's supposed to be provocative and the adjective is doing a hell of a lot of that provocation but it's there and my response is to think, well, how *about* some normal people then? The series, especially, is full of normal people and they're made out to be almost grotesque - there's not even a deferred glow, they're just shadow figures. What about his story - him with his worries about his small dick or her with her worries about body hair (just to focus on bodies)? That would be normal. Instead we get a fetishised, voyeuristic close-up of beautiful people being tortured by their genius and beauty, however little they understand these things. (Not that I don't enjoy looking at beautiful people being beautiful, but still.)

Anyway, that's all a rambling and confused.

(even fucking Paul from FlogIt had a 'slavery was bad! It's going under hammer right now!' epiphany recently).

lol

Slavery was also very much present in the previous seasons but it's more to the front in this one I agree. I like how upfront the presentation is: these are the people who lived in this house, this is how they made their money. Very hard to spin as activist historians or revisionism, though I'm sure if the show becomes more popular the usual suspects will have a go.

And it, like the novel, manages to be too on-the-nose about any of it I think.

?

Wonder if this should be: 'manages not to be' ?

One of the many problems with the programme is something it shares with tons of visual narrative, which is that it tends to be terrible at rendering literature, writing, reading - or sometimes even ideas and thinking.

Thus: by the end, we're told that Conor is an amazing writer. But the programme has shown us absolutely nothing that he has written that looked in any way amazing. At best, we have simply to imagine this quality. But given that it's presumably supposed to be so important to him, that's not very adequate.

At one point she says his emails to her were amazing. He jokes that they're better than his stories. Well, what we do see / hear even of their emails to each other are embarrassingly mundane. 'Normal' if you like. It's fine to write and send such emails. But it's not good for them to appear in a programme where it's implied that they're works of genius.

There was really so much bad about this programme that I should just give up thinking about it at all.

I still recognize that the book could possibly be much better.

Here's a better thing about the BBC: iPlayer currently hosts a load of terrific RKO films. I'm going to watch MY FAVOURITE WIFE later.

xp yes thanks PF, should have been not "not too on the nose".

Slavery was also very much present in the previous seasons but it's more to the front in this one I agree. I like how upfront the presentation is: these are the people who lived in this house, this is how they made their money. Very hard to spin as activist historians or revisionism, though I'm sure if the show becomes more popular the usual suspects will have a go.

― Daniel_Rf, Friday, May 29, 2020 2:04 PM (two hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

Thanks, I didn't know that as I haven't seen all previous seasons. Agreed on how up-front it is, it really works. David Olusoga's delivery is very good for this approach.

This from the former deputy leader of North Somerset Council: https://t.co/qLBlvm6Djb

— Martin Booth (@beardedjourno) May 28, 2020

Can't believe there are thick ignorant racists in Somerset

Hold on, I've been led to believe that only working class people from the Midlands and the North can be thick ignorant racists.

"Some cruelty yes but"

XPs

At one point she says his emails to her were amazing. He jokes that they're better than his stories. Well, what we do see / hear even of their emails to each other are embarrassingly mundane. 'Normal' if you like. It's fine to write and send such emails. But it's not good for them to appear in a programme where it's implied that they're works of genius.

I have (had, actually, as they've mostly been forgotten) Thoughts about Normal People but this was one of them (also Aldo otm). Including how they're meant to be excellent writers - we see a flash of this in Marianne (as I've moaned about before - after the first two eps where she's mainly talking about how she's not like other girls) but not really anywhere in their communication for the most part. Is that meant to be some kind of irony? I watched the weird 'breaking glass in sink' 'flashback for most of ep' 'back to broken glass in sink' bit and didn't understand what had happened, then the next ep opened with another kind of flashback about this iirc? Like everything takes so long to spell out except the actually important stuff. That Jamie or whatever he was called was such a bloody pantomime villain too, was any of his character supposed to be anything other than bog standard sneery entitled Grange Hill bully? Did he and Marianne share anything on any intellectual level? Where did Peggy go?
I did like that the characters that seemed to help Marianne through everything were the 'normal' (ha) women, just by being there without anything to prove - Lorraine and the English flatmate with no mummy issues who was gently checking in on her the whole time.
I feel like lots of people got a lot from this series/book and I possibly just missed it all.
Also this https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/may/05/sally-rooney-normal-people-hulu-bbc-soap-opera

Well I got to the end. I guess the only time I really engaged with it was in Conner's reaction to the suicide, but when it was just turned into a narrative excuse for his behaviour which wasn't apparently different from before then I was just annoyed.

My big takeaway is that we make all our life decisions before we have the experience or emotional ability to make them.

ok all day the bbc news main headline has been about a rocket going into space. considering whats happening in th euk and around the world w/ covid an considering what else is happening in the us this is fn perverse. also how inefficient is the private sector, literally 50+ years behind the ussr

nick robinson currently doing an in-depth interview with someone from “the national diversity coalition for trump”

crucial stuff there...

i heard him the other day doing a jokey "you would say that wouldn't you, hoho" with a tory saying we should move on from dominic cummings. cunts all of them.

creditable job on the 10 of covering the protests. called them a continuation of historical injustice and grievance rather than an aberration. two live OBs.

now a fairly brutal piece on contract tracers “sitting on their arse”.

how come Today can’t do this?

Sarah Sands, next question?

yeah :(

New DG has been announced: Tim Davie.

Big news, I assume.

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2020/jun/05/bbc-appoints-insider-tim-davie-as-director-general

It's another white man but at least this time it's one with Big Croydon Energy.

I think the BBC will need a bit of a bruiser in the coming years, and he can be that. He's not genteel. He's capable of thinking in quite ruthless commercial terms. But I don't think he'll sell the corporation out - he's BBC to the bone.

He doesn't have a news background - so it'll be interesting to see what he does there.

hmm i see he is a tory

feck

The optics are...not great. Rona Fairhead was widely distrusted for being married to a Tory councillor. Davie was deputy chair of the local party.

and responsible for BBC Store

the less said of that the better

Presumably the optics are good for Tories, who will be calling the shots in the mid-charter review?

Absolutely losing my mind at a BBC panel show discussing the possibilities for radical global change after coronavirus ft George Osborne, Tony Blair and A MINISTER IN ORBAN'S GOVERNMENT https://t.co/WpaR5GI5ir

— Dan Hancox (@danhancox) June 22, 2020

lol this shite was on R4 and WS at the same time when I tried to switch over, beyond a fucking joke!

I knew Amol Rajan was a horrible right wing bullshit merchant from his despicable media program on R4, but it's much worse than that Jim!

LMAAOOOO WHO IS THIS HILARIOUS DUDE??????? 😂😂😂😂😂 THIS RICE COOKING IS A HATE CRIMEpic.twitter.com/V4N4gS4W77

— Jenny Yang (@jennyyangtv) July 23, 2020

:D :D :D

that is the greatest video i've seen in a long time

lol

Never thought i'd live to see the day someone cooks rice worse than gyac but here we are. That's astonishing.

you don't need to boil the water first, just put the pasta in the water from the get go and then heat it up cmon guys

― gbx, Sunday, 18 June 2017 03:57 Bookmark

reminds me of this guy (also an idiot) i once met who cooked rice by pouring it into a pot of boiling water and draining it after x minutes

― r|t|c, Sunday, 18 June 2017 08:55 (three years ago)

shots fried

western ppl in their expensive millionaire kitchens with every bleeding mod con going apart from a rice cooker!

tbf i don't own a rice cooker - one day, sigh - but i know how to measure water to rice

uncle roger otm, wtf is this

Ffs

I use a colander to wash the starch off the rice before I cook it, like you would with potatoes for chips or a bake. If I'm prepping it for a fried rice dish I use the steel rice ball, otherwise the rice cooker is the easiest way and they are cheap af.

https://www.google.com/search?q=pasta+method+for+cooking+rice&oq=pasta+method+for+cooking+rice

this was how every uk person of non-asian descent cooked rice in the eighties iirc.

It's how French people still do it!!

The 1 part rice/2 parts water thing is so simple and makes such decent rice I don't know why I need a rice cooker!

because they keep the rice warm when i'm cooking a few things at once like a curry and frying some onion bhajis, it takes one more job off the load, too much multi-tasking and whats left of my brain starts to melt!

that ratio sounds wrong btw!

well for basmati it would be! ignore me I only get the cheap rice in big sacks

I'm used to the rice cooker ratio of 1 - 1 and a bit