John Walker's Electronic House

Sorry about the lack of Rum Doings this week. This was due to Nick’s wife Victoria squeezing out a tiny baby human, which apparently was more important than recording a podcast. Please accept my sincere apologies for Nick’s complete lack of priorities.

Hopefully we’ll be recording a new episode at the end of this coming week.

In the meantime you can catch up on old episodes from here. Or you can subscribe to it on iTunes here.

And if you’re desperate to hear my voice, I’m on the latest PC Gamer podcast, saying rude things about idiots. I’d link to it but their website appears to be down just now.

Question Time this evening will be receiving a slight boost in ratings. With the appearance of the leader of the openly racist British National Party, Nick Griffin, it’s clearly going to be the largest audience the political debate programme will have seen in a long time. What’s not known at this point is what the consequences will be.

Many are arguing that giving the BNP a voice on a respected BBC programme legitimises them, and will increase their popularity. Others counter this by saying his views will be exposed and people will become more aware of the party’s racist and fascist nature. Each likes to accuse the other of patronising the population. But the point where everyone gets caught up is in the figure of 900,000 people who democratically voted for them.

One side likes to argue that these 900,000 people are confused about who the BNP really are, and would not vote for them if they really knew their bigoted values and opinions. Another side likes to argue these 900,000 people want a party who’s willing to stand up for Britain against Europe, or bring in real change, and they’re resorting to the BNP in desperation. What almost no one seems to suggest is the possibility that there are 900,000 hateful racist bigots who voted for a hateful racist party.

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In episode 7 of Rum Doings the topic not under discussion is how we can fix Broken Britain.

More readily discussed are John’s inability to sing and Nick’s desperate need to hear it, the scandalous gossip regarding John’s sexual impropriety with Nick’s wife, and the terrifying contents of some Super-8 film. And that’s in the first five minutes.

Loyal listeners will be relieved to learn that the episode contains the results of our experiments performed on all 3.5bn women in the world, and the resulting contention for the Noble Prize 100p prize. Then things descend into the usual arguing about hat doffing, the awfulness of the word “used”, and moist ladygardens. And the controversy controversy. And very much more, including a frenzied debate over the title “artist”.

To subscribe to the podcast click here, or you can find it in iTunes here. To download it directly, right-click and save as here.

Thank you to everyone who’s been plugging this for us. Please keep going. Retweeting is a tiny favour, but makes a huge difference for us. Tell your friends, colleagues, and so on. And please actually do this – you won’t believe how much help it is just to tell two or three people. If you want to email us at Rum Doings, send emails to podcast@rumdoings.com. We’ll respond to your questions in the next episode.

At the centre of so many of the current super-injunctions and and brain-meltingly bizarre libel decisions in UK courts is one judge, Mr Justice Eady. In my previous post I asked whether anyone knew whether he was the judge behind the Trafigura rulings. As it turns out, he was not. A fact that surprised the Guardian’s George Monbiot as much as it did me, as he explains in a fantastic piece about this man whose decisions have been described by appeal court judges as, “plainly wrong”, “legally erroneous” and have earned comparisons with the Communist party censors in the Soviet Union.

Eady, Monbiot explains, is a force behind the existence of libel tourism in this country, and a huge part of the reason why courts in other countries are creating new laws to protect their citizens from his potential rulings.

So often you hear stupid, loud people screeching about “free speech” and how theirs is being taken from them. Inevitably they’re being given absolute freedom to scream this with no one trying to stop them, and indeed are only spurting their self-important idiocy because they saw someone else disagreeing with them. But in this case the actions of the UK libel courts are a genuine example of free speech being at risk, and indeed completely denied.

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Today’s explosive reaction to the Daily Mail’s crude and ignorant article about the death of Stephen Gately has once again demonstrated the extraordinary effect of Twitter and Facebook. An effect that will increasingly merit consideration.

Jan Moir’s spiteful piece (originally titled, “Why there was nothing ‘natural’ about Stephen Gately’s death”) combined that niggling thought that I would contend all must have had on hearing the news of the pop singer’s early death, “But surely something dodgy must have gone on for a 33 year old to just die?” with a second, insidiously unpleasant personal prejudice of hers, “I’ve never trusted those gays. And what they get up to.” An opinion that, of course, is speaking directly to the audience of the newspaper. The Daily Mail has, for the 114 years it’s existed, never been exactly offering a liberal slant on the news. It’s famously the paper that supported Hitler long after it began to seem perhaps a little inappropriate, and hasn’t really improved its attitudes since. The central thought to Moir’s piece, “I always knew those gays were up to no good, and look, it’s got another one of them killed,” addresses the potential homophobia in the paper’s readership. (Astonishingly his death manages to confirm to her that gay marriage is a sham, unlike the near 100% success rate enjoyed by heterosexual marriage.) She then takes this to a new depth by going on to heavily imply (well, even state) that there’s been a cover-up of the real reasons behind his death, and that those real reasons are bound to be something to do with penises and bottoms. (I’m not going to go through the piece picking it apart – that’s already been done splendidly by Charlie Brooker.)

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In episode 6 of Rum Doings the topic not under discussion is what we can do about the dumbing down of British culture. Instead we primarily discuss sitcoms – so much so it becomes dangerously close to being a theme. There’s thoughts on what the UK and US sitcoms have in common, and indeed what they do not. Along the way we consider the anti-Semitism of Shakespeare, why Stephanie Cole grew into the wrong old lady (and is brilliant), and why you should never shh a pregnant lady. This, as you’d expect, brings us to our plans for scientific experiments on all 3.5 billion of Earth’s women.

Defining a sitcom proves to be far trickier than you’d imagine. Can it be an hour long, does it require an audience, how important is the situation? And is either nation better at irony? We also ponder on the private life of Jonathan Swift, the peculiarities of Bill Hicks, and the excellent tests on OK Cupid. Oh, and one of us turns out to be a murderer, and the other seeks the wrath of religious fundamentalists.

To subscribe to the podcast click here, or you can find it in iTunes here. To download it directly, right-click and save as here.

Thank you to everyone who’s been plugging this for us. Please keep going. Retweeting it helps it spread for miles, like a ghost-to-ghost call in Alfred Hitchcock’s Three Investigators books. Tell your friends, colleagues, and so on. Make us famous. Make people love us. Or hate us so much they have to listen to the next one. If you want to email us at Rum Doings, send emails to podcast@rumdoings.com.

Derren Brown’s The Events comes to an end, and without the much-predicted redaction of his stupid and ignorance-promoting claims in previous episodes. There’s thoughts on the series over all below.

But first Friday’s idiocyfest. Derren Brown was going to beat a roulette wheel. Well, let’s just point out a few things before we get started:

– Any casino in the world would be delighted to be identified and filmed because the publicity and advertising would be superb.

– You can’t make a man give you money and then make him forget he did.

– You can’t guess the speed for a roulette ball and predict where it will fall more accurately than a computer.

– You can’t predict where a ball will land after bouncing off many walls in the first seconds of its being thrown.

– You can’t use triangulation of three fixed objects to calculate the speed of a car.

– You can’t guarantee that a man will not notice that he’s £5,000 short in the bank, and therefore you couldn’t set the trick up the way he claimed to.

So Derren claims that he stole £5,000 from an unwitting stranger, on a programme that begins saying there’s no actors or stooges used. (Which rather raises the question: what is a stooge? As Brown said when he met dear Ben last week on film, he volunteered to be on the show. Are volunteers stooges?) He did this by somehow hypnotising him in about three seconds and then instructing him to visit his bank, withdraw the money, then hand it over. Then erases this from the man’s brain. Because apparently Derren Brown is an evil wizard from space, and we’re supposed to just accept this – surely the most extraordinary feat in the whole episode – as something that just happens every day. He’ll now gamble that money “live” (for some reason he can’t talk directly to Ben when he’s in the casino – which seems strange since it would go some way to proving it wasn’t pre-recorded footage and somewhat undermining the purpose of a live event), and potentially win Ben £180,000.

Once again the episode was a mixture of various nice-enough tricks that had nothing whatsoever to do with the final effect, and Brown bullshitting his face off. Oh, apart from one trick – the ball in the squash court. Where he achieved something equally as impressive as the roulette trick – somehow predicting the path of a spherical object being thrown by someone else by making impossible calculations in split seconds and knowing where on the floor it will come to rest – and threw this away midway through the show as a minor step on the way to his final plan. Which was an odd choice.

But of course he doesn’t manage the final trick! What a way to end the series, eh? The man doesn’t win £180,000, and Brown ends his series on a fail. Except of course nothing of the sort happens.

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Okay, it’s time. Enough new shows for a rundown. First up, sitcoms:

Community – NBC

I didn’t know what to expect from this. I love Joel McHale on The Soup, but he does seem to struggle with the autocue. It didn’t bode well for proper acting. The pilot was the funniest sitcom I’ve seen in years.

The premise: McHale is a lawyer who has been caught practising without a license. (“I thought you had a degree from Columbia?” “I do, and now I need one from America. And not as an email attachment.”) He’s forced to go to community college. Er, just go with it. Once there he employs his skills at lying and bullshitting people to attempt to breeze through the course, along the way accidentally creating a study group of mismatched students.

It works by a combination of a superb mix of people (including Chevy Chase, oddly), a potential romance, lots of fast-talking cleverness, and an awesome relationship with one of the members of staff played by John Oliver. This last part provides the very best jokes in the pilot episode, which makes it something of a shame he’s then gone from the show by episode two, and absent from the titles. The following episodes have still been funnier than anything else on TV at the moment – it’s testament to quite how stunning the pilot was that it can drop in quality and still be so damned strong. But the pilot – the moment it finished I started it again and laughed as hard the second time. Oh, and it gets even more kudos for having scored its first two episodes with Matt & Kim songs.

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I realise I’m wasting energy dissecting the third episode of Derren Brown’s The Events to any great depth.

They show a close up of this woman’s eyes and ask people to draw a shape, and then the letter “O” draw itself on the screen as a slowly appearing circle, etc etc. And then, astonishingly, Brown even instructs people who drew concentric circles to text in, as if after doing this people texting this is some sort of useful evidence.

Once again Brown muddles half truths and glimmers of things we’ve experienced with ludicrous over-played nonsense. So we’re expected to believe he can make a man fall asleep and then steal a TV by drinking his tea at the same time, while insultingly claiming the remarkable, verified ability of some blind people to use echolocation to be in any way related. Of course, most of it, were it not in a programme in which the presenter psychotically flipflopped back and forth between declaring his disbelief in psychic powers and announcing things are happening because of psychic powers, would have been fantastic magic tricks. Here it all feels like part of the propaganda that contributes to his crazed misinformation campaign.

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In Episode 5 of Rum Doings not under discussion is whether we should bring back conscription for unruly teens. More discussed are matters of repetition, the changing face of the cinemas, and we respond to a complaint regarding our being rude to Phil Collins. There’s chat about how a splendid friend of ours changed his mind about the ownership of music, and thoughts on the potential for democratising paying for media. We bring up another rule to join those from Episode Four, the No False Modesty Rule. Which leads naturally to the moral implications of teleporting clones. And the likelihood of coincidence. And of course cream teas. It’s probably safe to say that this is the first of the Rum Doings where the doings of rum played their part by the end.

The name of the film I couldn’t remember the name of is RIP, and you can get it here (so long as you’re in the right region!).

To subscribe to the podcast click here, or you can find it in iTunes here. To download it directly, right-click and save as here.

For a podcast put out there without any promotion we’re delighted by how many people are listening. However, we’d be more delighted if it were more. We’ve levelled off in numbers in the last couple, and we want to see it climbing each time – or at least, we reject false modesty and believe that’s what it merits. To help that happen, please let people know it exists. Please blog, tweet, IM, telephone, write and paint on cave walls about it. Spread the word and make us happy. Oh, and to aid that, by next week we should have a website for the podcast outside of my blog.