I can make you hate (29 page)

Poor Jamie Oliver. A few years ago he single-handedly saved every child in the country from imminent cholesterol death with his school dinners campaign. And there was nationwide rejoicing. The Queen called a national holiday; councils held street parties in his honour and the City erected a 600-foot glass-and-metal
statue shaped like one of his Flavour Shakers (known today as ‘the Gherkin’, after one of his favourite sandwich fillings).

Now, instead of reducing the kiddywink generation’s waistlines he’s attempting to expand their minds by establishing his own ‘Dream School’. A tape recording of this selfless act of altruism somehow ended up in Channel 4’s hands, and they’ve been broadcasting extracts from it for the past few weeks. And what do we do? We watch
MasterChef
on the other side. The professional chef is being shunned in favour of a bunch of unknown amateurs. Because they’re actually bloody cooking.

The audacity of
Jamie’s Dream School
is truly inspiring, assuming you’re impressed by mountains of bullshit. The first episode opened with Jamie recounting how he left school with no qualifications. The British educational system failed him, just as it fails millions of others like him every year. Now he wants to make a difference. Not by campaigning against education cuts – which might be boring – but by setting up his own school. Not one staffed by actual teachers – which might be boring – but by celebrities. And it won’t be open all-year round – which might be expensive – but for a few weeks. Thus our education system will be saved.

Simon Callow taught them English by shouting at them. David Starkey taught them history by insulting them. And Alastair Campbell taught them politics by arranging a debate, which soon degenerated into a full-blown playground ruck. This was their first true lesson: they learned first-hand that Campbell is shit-hot at instigating conflict from thin air.

Thank God Jamie merely opened a school, and didn’t decide to explore the NHS’s failings by opening his own Dream Hospital, in which famous actors who’ve portrayed doctors in popular dramas perform operations on members of the public. Watch Hugh Laurie sew up a gaping abdominal wound! See James Nesbitt conduct intricate neurosurgery! They’d make mistakes now and then – slicing the wrong bit off here, letting all the
innards spill out there – but that’s where Jamie could come in. He could take that human offal, whip up a delicious
intestine-and
-kidney casserole, and then spoon it into the dying patients’ grateful, gurgling mouth as they drew their final breaths.

Anyway, back to
Dream School
. When the series was announced, the initial promotional material was couched in the trad Bash Street Kids visual language of British school-based capers: chalk, blackboards, board rubbers, pencil cases and so on. It looked like Jamie versus
Grange Hill
. But, presumably because the authorities wouldn’t allow the production team to meddle with the education of actual children, they’re reduced to teaching teenage volunteers who’ve already left school. So: no real kids, no real teachers, and no real exams. Nothing is real. No wonder they called it
Dream School
. It’s effectively a youth club with Starkey instead of a pool table.

And what’s the worst thing about youth clubs? The youths. And they’ve got a prime selection here. Watching
Jamie’s Dream
School
is enough to transform the wettest liberal do-gooder into a furious Nick Ferrari type by the third ad break. They gawp at iPhones, they burble witlessly amongst themselves, they slouch in their seats looking bored and surly and demanding respect for absolutely no reason whatsoever … Maybe our educational system has tragically failed them. Or maybe they’re fuckwits. Even the most helpless fuckwits can change, of course, but they tend to do so quietly, and of their own volition. Which doesn’t make great television.

Follies of youth aside, their biggest problem seems to be a chronically stunted attention span: they’re constantly texting or yapping on their mobiles instead of applying even 1 per cent focus on whatever’s directly in front of them. The entire programme should have been billed not as a crusading mission documentary, but as a chilling warning about how technology will inevitably destroy human civilisation by distracting it into stupidity and madness.

Dumb though half the kids may be, they’re just plodding meat fodder for a shockingly arrogant TV experiment, which exists for no apparent reason other than to demoralise any genuine teachers watching, potentially to the point of suicide, which really would cause a crisis in our educational system.

After two episodes I wound up hating almost everyone in it, aside from a couple of the kids and, curiously, Jamie himself – because he just looks so crushingly, dizzyingly confused by the whole thing. Why is he there? Why is this happening? What’s the ultimate aim? If he’s got any sanity left at all, come episode three he’ll tear down all the
Dream School
signs and turn it into a sandwich-making academy. Because that, at least, would fulfill some kind of function.

Red faces at
Midsomer Murders
. Which at least provides a bit of diversity among all the white ones. Producer Brian True-May’s ill-judged comments about the programme representing ‘the last bastion of Englishness’ have caused a predictable storm and counter-storm, with one side crying racism and the other side crying about the cries of racism.

But is the overwhelming whiteness representative of the English countryside? Well, I grew up in south Oxfordshire, very close to some of the locations used in
Midsomer Murders
, specifically near a town called Wallingford, which used to double as ‘Causton’ in the series. It’s also – fittingly – where Agatha Christie died. Oh, and it used to regularly show up in the Ronnie Corbett sitcom
Sorry
, if you’re interested. Which I sense you aren’t.

To the best of my knowledge, when I was growing up, there was one black kid in my village, several black and brown kids at my school, and a Chinese family running the local takeaway. This was back in the late seventies and eighties. Not exactly the United Nations, but still: to actively pursue a policy of
white-only
casting would be unrealistic.

It’s interesting that
Midsomer Murders
managed to chug along for sixteen years without anyone really bothering to question its Caucasian hue. That’s partly because although it notionally takes place in the present day, everyone watching it implicitly understands that it’s actually set in an anachronistic bubble – a strange unofficial cross between 1991 and 1946. I’m surprised the characters don’t drive steam trains to get to the shops. In this environment, anything even vaguely contemporary looks out of place: if someone turned up wearing a digital watch, the villagers would probably mistake them for a warlock and beat them to death with cudgels.

Midsomer’s lack of ethnic diversity stems from the fact that it’s essentially a camp tribute to ‘Murder at the Vicarage’ potboilers from a pre-multicultural era: a knowing assembly of Middle England clichés. The show is hardly a slave to realism. One of its murder victims was pinned with hoops to a croquet lawn and killed with a vintage bottle of claret fired from a Roman catapult. Complaining about a lack of authenticity in those circumstances seems daft. On the other hand, since it’s about as realistic as a butterscotch harpoon anyway, why do the makers seem to assume that the addition of a few brown faces might jolt the audience out of their suspension of disbelief? The viewers aren’t that stupid, or anywhere near that prejudiced. And the ones that are will be too busy designing racist pamphlets or ranting on the internet to tune in anyway.

Putting aside the legality of a major commercial venture apparently enacting an employment policy that excludes people on the basis of skin colour for no good reason, many have
complained
that to suddenly introduce ‘ethnic’ characters would be ‘PC gone mad’. Yes it would, if they introduced them solely to do a storyline about grime MCs or arranged marriages, or showed them walking around the village shaking hands with all the white
folk. But no one’s asking for that. You don’t even have to change the writing. Just widen the audition process. It won’t hurt. It can only help.

When I was a kiddywink, back in that almost entirely white Midsomer-style village, many of my views about people from different ethnic backgrounds were defined by what I saw on
television
. There were a few black and brown characters in shows such as
Grange Hill
. There was Trevor McDonald, Lenny Henry, Huggy Bear from
Starsky and Hutch,
and assorted musicians on
Top of the Pops
.

Black people were often used as a sort of lazy shorthand for ‘cool’. Consequently, I formed a spectacularly patronising general view that all black people were inherently ‘cool’. It wasn’t until I moved to London and suddenly met lots of them in real life that I realised many were massive dorks. And that wasn’t the only way they failed to live up to the televised stereotype: I can still recall my feeble shock at meeting a black girl who preferred indie rock to hip-hop.

But still: gauche though I may have been, at least I wasn’t fearful or mistrusting. I had an inherent (albeit incredibly condescending) sense that I liked black people, and wanted them to like me. And I genuinely believe a lot of that was thanks to Derek Griffiths. Griffiths was the first black person I can remember encountering anywhere in my life, and he existed only on my television. He presented
Play School
, appeared in
Play Away,
and created the music for
Bod
. And as far as I’m concerned he’s one of the most brilliant TV presenters this country has ever produced: instantly warm and likeable, clearly very talented, and possessing the rare knack of appearing to speak directly to young viewers without patronising them. His colour absolutely didn’t matter, yet at the same time it did – precisely because it didn’t matter. Even this four-year-old could see that.

Children’s TV has long been ahead of adult TV in terms of diversity – witness Cerrie Burnell, the one-armed CBBC
presenter, whose very presence on our screens is right now teaching millions of kids not to be wary of disabled people. They know a disabled person now, and they like her, and that unusual arm is unimportant in the way they see her, but profound in the way they see the world. Again: widening that audition process won’t hurt. It can only help.

Not so long ago, if you wanted to issue a thirteen-year-old girl with a blood-curdling death threat, you had to scrawl it on a sheet of paper, wrap it round a brick, hurl it through her bedroom window, and scarper before her dad ran out of the front door to beat you insensible with a dustbuster. Now, thanks to Twitter, hundreds of thousands of people can simultaneously surround her online screaming abuse until she bursts into tears. Hooray for civilisation.

That’s in effect what happened the other week in the Rebecca Black ‘Friday’ affair. In case you’re not aware of it, the trail of events runs as follows: 1) Parents of thirteen-year-old Rebecca pay $2,000 for her to record a song (and video) called ‘Friday’ with a company called ARK Music Factory, a kind of vanity-publishing record label specialising in creepy tweenie pop songs. 2) The song turns out to be excruciatingly vapid, albeit weirdly catchy. 3) It quickly racks up 40m views on YouTube, mainly from people marvelling at its compelling awfulness. 4) Rebecca is targeted on Twitter by thousands of abusive idiots calling her a ‘bitch’ and a ‘whore’ and urging her to commit suicide. 5) She gets very, very upset. 6) Thanks to all the attention, the single becomes a hit. 7) Rebecca becomes an overnight celebrity, goes on
The Tonight Show,
and donates the proceeds from ‘Friday’ to the Japan relief effort.

So the story has a happy ending, at least for now. But it marks a watershed moment in the history of online discourse: the point
where the wave of bile and snark finally broke and rolled back.

God knows I enjoy a helping of bile. But only when it’s crafted with flair. One of the most disappointing things about the slew of online Rebecca Black abuse is the sheer poverty of language involved. If you are complaining about a banal pop song but can’t muster a more inventive way to express yourself than typing ‘
OMFG BITCH YOU SUCK
’, then you really ought to consider folding your laptop shut and sitting quietly in the corner until that fallow lifespan of yours eventually reaches its conclusion.

The other crucial component of an artful slagging is not a ‘sense’ of perspective but an ‘awareness’ of it. It can be amusing to knowingly punch out 10,000 words feverishly declaring Justin Bieber to be some kind of squawking terrorist weapon – but it only works when the author’s comic desperation is at least 50 per cent of the joke. The (brilliant) comedian Jerry Sadowitz’s entire act consists of him shouting indefensibly hideous things about everybody on Earth, and yet he never feels like a bully, more a frenzied marionette jerked around by uncontrollable despair: a sort of self-hating dirty bomb.

Just as Sadowitz’s palpable vulnerability makes him funny, so it’s a soulless lack of self-reproach that makes the predominant Perez Hilton/3am Girl/Holy Moly/TMZ gloaty online
sneer-culture
so unbearably dull and depressing. You people lick the inner base of dustbins for a living. Stop looking so fucking pleased with yourselves.

And this culture dominates Twitter. Twitter is great for
disseminating
news, trivia and practical instructions on when and where to meet up in order to overthrow the government, but it also doubles as a hothouse in which viral outbreaks of witless bullying can be incubated and unleashed before anyone knows what’s happening. Partly because it forces users to communicate in terse sentences, but mainly because it’s public. Many tweeters end up performing their opinions, theatrically overstating their viewpoint to impress their friends. Just like newspaper columnists
– but somehow even worse because there’s no editor to keep their excesses in check or demand a basic level of wit or ability.