John Walker's Electronic House

A couple of people have pointed out to me that my emails to Sid Cordle have been less than ideal.

I believe that satire is a powerful and effective medium for causing debate and anger. And I do not regret using this. However, I do regret being a poor representative of Christianity, which I believe is the case when my position appears rooted in hate. So to address this, I’ve written back to Cordle, apologising, and restating my position in a more direct and less hostile manner. Here it is:

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A while back I emailed a “political” party, the Christian Peoples Alliance (sic), to ask them if they could include an apostrophe in their party’s name. The reply was astonishing. They told me, straight-faced, that they’d focus tested the name and people prefered it with without the apostrophe. Nothing could possibly bring more confidence in local government leaders, eh? Democracy in action!

After some more recent correspondence, I focus tested myself, and it turns out I prefer to spell their name, “Cruel Hatemongers”. Here’s why!

As a result of my request, I found myself on their mailing list. Most of it is mindless local government nonsense, a lot of it is ghastly attempts to prevent Muslims from building mosques, and then this delightful press release arrived:

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Ooh, three of my favourite things combined: bemoaning Derren Brown, tricksy mathematics, and slagging off homeopathy!

I hadn’t even heard that Derren Brown had a new show, until Tim IMd me to let me know it was great. I read the summary – Derren Brown reveals he has a system for winning horse races, and proves it – and sighed. Same old trick from him – do a crappy magic trick and dress it up as paranormal powers, while saying how he doesn’t believe in paranormal powers. I bemoaned to Tim that it would just be a trick, wah wah. Tim clearly smiles to himself, and lets me know that might be the point of the programme.

(You can get hold of it via Channel 4’s abysmal 4oD service. Assume I’m going to ruin any surprises below.)

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#36 No whistling in public. I never thought this would be a contraversial rule, until I proposed it to some apparently idiotic people, who protested. No, absolutely not. It’s the height of rudeness. If I’m standing in line in a shop, the last thing I want to hear is the moronic brainwrong musings of some halfwit, emitting in the form of tuneless, aimless, high-pitched whistling. If you’ve got perfect pitch, and can generate a beautiful, melodic, and most of all, purposeful tune, then please, contain yourself and wait for an appropriate moment. If you’re not capable of this, which you’re not, never leave your house again.

#37 Television and radio continuity announcers are not a part of the programmes they talk between, and thus are not allowed to add their contribution. You aren’t funny, you aren’t in their gang, and it’s not only embarrassing for you, but spoils the moment of the show we were just watching. Shut it. (There’s an exception, of course, which is when the announcer is scripted by the show’s writers, never better evidenced than by the otherwise dreadful Sofa Of Time on Radio 4, where the announcer dead-panned before it began, “Listeners are advised that the following programme contains an angry giant.”)

The Rules So Far

A new occasional column I’m doing for Eurogamer has its first entry posted. It’s a round-up of Japanese DS games that aren’t seeing releases in the West.

It begins like this:

Thanks to Tony who pointed me toward this wonderful news story:

NHS trusts ‘reject homoeopathy’

Here’s an excerpt:

“NHS primary care trusts are slashing funding for homoeopathic treatment amid debate about its efficacy and the drive to cuts costs, a study has suggested. More than a quarter have stopped or cut funding for such services, research by the GP magazine Pulse has found. The Royal London Homoeopathic Hospital, the country’s largest, confirms it has lost eight contracts in a year and referrals are down by 20%.”

Skip, skip, dance, dance.

It’s still utterly terrifying that qualified doctors – people with medical degrees – are falling for this woo-woo bullshit. And that they can come out with statements like,

“The homoeopathic hospitals provide a specialist service that has helped hundreds of thousands of NHS patients over the last 60 years and has extremely high levels of patient satisfaction. They are particularly well equipped to treat patients whose complex chronic health problems have not been effectively treated by conventional medicine.”

He somehow forgot to add, “We’ve never produced a scrap of evidence that anything we’ve done in those 60 years has had any effect beyond placebo and basic counselling,” but I’m sure the BBC just cut him off or something.

Don’t forget that homeopathy is deadly. Yes, it’s laughable, but it’s also vile and cruel, preying on those whose symptoms are imaginary, the frightened and dying, and those too stupid to know better. And it’s murderous, deliberately preventing people from taking effective medicines, such that they die because they drank a bottle of water. Nevermind how many conclusive studies come out proving it utter crap, we just go around and around the same pointless pole of stupidity.

It seems that anyone I worked with in the radio days is doomed.

I only met Jeremy Beadle very briefly, but it seems enough for the apparent curse I have. He was producing the dreadful (but very popular) OK! To Talk on Talk Radio – an OK! magazine-sponsored celebrity somethingorother, that was part of Dear Kelvin’s plans for the station. It meant that Beadle would be in the Talk office a couple of days a week at the point I was working day shifts.

I guess Ok! To Talk captured the Beadle Confusion. Every radio or television project he was involved with was two things: utterly hateful, and a massive ratings success. And because of this, I think he’s fairly villified. However, speak to anyone who worked with him on anything, and they’ll tell you what an extraordinary nice guy he was. I don’t know about nice – I never felt entirely comfortable around him – but he was ferociously clever. The sort of clever that you have to respect. He knew how to create television that would work, and saw no reason to let notions of quality get in the way. Which I think was a great shame. Were he less canny and more creative, he might have produced some fantastic stuff.

The show segment I was working on was a consumer complaints sort of thing – Watchdog on the radio – that when it first started wasn’t quite working. It didn’t gel, and it wasn’t good radio. Beadle one day in the office walked over to the team and said, “Call it Scambusters”. And they did. And it immediately took off. Not just because it was a catchy, silly name, but because it gave the hour an identity. Quickly they realised their three producers (oh, remember when radio shows had three producers?) were called Tom, Richard and Harry, and it became “Scambusters, With Tom, Dick, and Harry”. The behaviour on the show changed – they started adding increasing amounts of nonsense, including sound effects, on-air arguments between the team, and some excellent irritating treatment of companies who were screwing people over. (For instance, we’d phone the CEO of Time/Tiny computers on air every single day, finding new ways to lie our way past his secretary, and then ask him the same question – ooh, he hated us). It was a nice thing to work on – we got people their money back, or their goods replaced. And we got to piss off the bastards at Time/Tiny. And it all sprang out of one simple name change. And that seemed to be Beadle’s schtick – an uncanny knowledge of what works.

So I only blabber on to say, don’t only remember him as the cock who presented Beadle’s About. He was a really brainy guy, who just didn’t seem to have much care how he used it. Dunno if that’s a good thing of course.

Could people I met in radio stations stop dying now please? It feels like a really grotesque form of name-dropping.

I think it’s only inappropriate to finish: A big hand for Jeremy Beadle.

My good friend Kim is once more risking life, limb and mostly blisters, as she takes on a walk to raise money for Susan G Komen For The Cure. Kim explains,

“So here I am in a new city. I’m back in Philadelphia, and mom and I are participating in the Susan G. Komen 3-Day. While the Avon Walk was 39.3 miles over two days, the 3-day is just that—60 miles over three days! Much as I did for the Avon Walk, I plan on making every mile of this one.”

So, give her money. Well, not her, but people who spend money making the lives of those with breast cancer easier, and fund projects to hopefully prevent women from dying stupidly early, via her.

We’ve got to do this for the boobies, people. So give what you can.

If everyone who reads this blog on a daily basis gave $10 (a measly £5), Kim would make her target immediately.

Change, does not roll in, on the wheels of inevitability.
But comes through continuous struggle.
Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor.
It must be demanded by the oppressed.

Exciting times are afoot. Hacker group Anonymous have announced a full on war with The Church of Scientology cult.

It all began over this:

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1) Car Poolers.

2) This video