Phoney Bones of Contention - it's...Questionable Time

Evening - first up thanks to Richard D Hall for inspiring the title of this.

A few years ago I used to spend the early part of most Thursday evenings having a few looseners with a work colleague of mine. As it got to about 10pm I'd make a statement to the effect of "four pints is plenty on a schoolnight and besides which, I'd best get home for Question Time". It became a running joke between the two of us, his wisecracks on the subject reaching their zenith when he speculated that I had a picture of 'my hero' David Dimbleby on my bedroom wall. For the record I stopped having 'heroes' in the true sense at some point in my late 20s and will speculate that no such poster exists. If I'm wrong then the owners of this poster have my deepest sympathy.

Question Time is packaged to the viewer as a sober, serious and high brow political discussion programme which seeks to explore 'issues of the day' and, through a wide range of opinions on the panel, present the various angles, perspective and points of view from which an answer to that question can be approached,  while hopefully touching upon some of the nuances and 'grey areas' along the way. Audience participation and the presence of journalists, authors, actors, musicians or comedians on the panel give the show an 'everyman' feel, presenting it as a live and dangerous form of real pluralism, a 'democracy in action' sort of thing.

Regular viewers will be familiar with the format but just in case you aren't:- a member of the audience (which is supposed to represent 'the general public') asks a question relating to something that has been in the news that week, be it Brexit, something to do with the health service, a political scandal or whatever. The (usually five) panelists then take it in turns to wax lyrical on the subject, sometimes with them interrupting and arguing with each other. This is interspersed with comments from 'the public', with Dimblebore sometimes asking specifically for contributions 'for' or 'against' the motion if the collective response is becoming somewhat one-sided.

Now I used to watch this show with some regularity, but not because I find it interesting or come away from it with a greater understanding of any issue than I had previously. Seeing strong and independent-minded good panelists are as rare as rocking horse shit, the useful function of Question Time is to tell us what our lords and masters have decreed we should all be talking about, as well as how apparently intelligent, sensible and reasonable 'mainstream people' are tackling these issues. It's worth asking whether Question Time is genuinely the sort of open and informative piece of broadcasting it pertains to be, or something altogether more limiting and dull.

The first thing to consider is that the audience for the show is not a cross-section of the public at all but a highly stratified, deliberately filtered crowd consisting overwhelmingly as it does of political activists and card-carrying party members. Anyone who has ever been a member of a political party will know that as a general rule, 'politically active' people approach most questions from a completely different starting point and use a lexicon that would be unrecognisable to someone like you chewing the fat with someone like me over a beer. The 'informed apolitical' are typically dangerous mavericks, and the BBC's application process for the show deliberately flushes them out.

But leaving that aside, once the question has been chipped up what follows is a sort of intellectual free-for all, with nothing off limits in the couldron of ideas, right? Er...hardly. In reality two rather predictable and bland 'sides' emerge on a 'by numbers' basis, with it typically being 3-2 or occasionally 4-1 on the panel in favour of one 'side' or the other. As a result, panelists regularly repeat or spend copious amounts of time agreeing with each other, with the audience being no better and very frequently even worse. A typical QT 'discussion' that lasts 20 minutes could very easily be nailed in about one tenth of that time with precisely zero value lost.

While this appeals to the 'Punch and Judy' element that many viewers tune in for, this format is by nature highly restrictive on any sort of intellectual level. The show sets a) the questions we are all 'supposed' to be interested in the answers to, b) the sides/arguments in relation to those questions and c) the parameters within which discussion is allowed to take place. Dimblebore might ask for an 'upper' or 'downer' from the audience but have you ever heard him request the thoughts of someone who disagrees with the premise of the question, thinks the whole thing is a phoney bone of contention or that both 'sides' are wrong in their own way? Of course not - that would be dangerous.

Wondering what the hell I'm on about? Let me give you two really good examples, namely LGBT 'issues' and drugs.

The parameters of the LGBT 'debate' have prohibited the expression of any view that might be construed as homophobic for many years now, so the 'anti' view typically takes the form of promoting something else in its place, namely male-female marriage with a view to raising 'stable families' and 'traditional values' as a foundation of society - you know the drill. Equally the 'diversity' side of the argument is not exactly a googly either with its appeals for new laws against homophobic 'hate crimes', some new 'right' that probably isn't a civil right at all, the championing of LGBT in 'competing rights issues' and a desire to 'change social attitudes', by force if necessary.

Now anybody possessed of an independent and functioning brain can surely dismiss this as a phoney bone of contention. The long and short of the issue is that it's no business of the State which consenting adults are going out with, marrying or having sex with each other, nor is it a legitimate function of the State to 'manage' the reaction of person C to the lifestyle choices, marriage, civil partnership or whatever of Person A and Person B (if that reaction crosses the line into violence, incitement to or threats of then this has always been illegal). Both 'sides' on this feed a highly disempowering notion that without the approval of others for our choices, we are basically nothing.

With the drugs question, the two current 'sides' can best be summed up in a word as criminalise and medicalise. The 'criminalise' side are effectively the real life manifestation of Mr Mackey from South Park, constantly reminding us all that "drugs are bad m'kay?". Meanwhile the current mainstream ostensibly pro-drugs stance is to regard all drugtakers as 'poor addicts' and their vice as a 'medical issue', for which potential treatments might include 'shooting galleries' at which the 'addicts' would be given subsidised heroin on demand. I can see it now - the National Smack Service, free at the point of use, based on need and not your ability to pay. Beveridge would be proud.

And the voice of sanity? Look, I couldn't care less which mind-altering drugs you take and am also aware that the overwhelming majority of drug users do not become addicted, dependent or anything resembling either. They aren't 'ill' by any stretch of the imagination and people suggesting otherwise should knock it off. While anyone should be free to get mashed however they want, they are also individually responsible for not committing crime to procure drugs or while on drugs (criminalisers often conflate drugtaking itself with crimes committed to raise funds or while under the influence). By this reasoning "I'm a poor addict" or "because I got high" will not be accepted as an excuse.

And...who on Questionable Time have you ever heard pushing that rational argument?

One of the reasons I started listening to rather than watching the show was because I got tired of screaming at the television upon realising that yet again both 'sides' were full of it. Whether it's just lazy 'television by numbers' or a more sinister form of brainwashing, there's an overt stroking of the ego allied to a subtle numbing of the mind, the invitation to the viewer of this 'high brow' stuff to believe themselves more well-informed than the average punter while passing tired conventional wisdom off as genuine insight. Opinions outside this 'safe range' presented by the mainstream can then be dismissed as mad, bad and dangerous with a smug, warm and all-knowing glow.

There is a place for the exploration of serious issues amongst all of us (certainly beyond the realm of the political establishment), but something as limited and limiting as Question Time has surely outlived its usefulness, assuming it ever had any at all. Funnily enough I was recently watching some old episodes of 'After Dark', a late night discussion programme on Channel 4 in the late 1980s and early 1990s. 'After Dark' comprised mainly of journalists and people from the public eye but was an open house with nothing off limits, no 'set arguments' and no 'upper' and 'downer' sides - hell, it didn't even have a specified time limit and went into some real depth about serious issues.

Unsurprisingly it was canned - but I would welcome something like that back in a heartbeat.

Anyway, feel free to use the above as a rough guide in your navigation of tomorrow's Question Time - just try not to get too excited if you can avoid it.

I'm off to apply to be in the audience (under an assumed name, naturally) so I'll leave you with some music and catch you next time - thanks for reading.

When Society Looks in the Mirror, Josie Cunningham Looks Right Back...

Ok - the recent documentary which prompted this piece is here.

Josie Cunningham's back-story, or at least the major landmarks of it in case you're curious - she leaves school at sixteen and while expecting her first child. Bullied by her peers for a distinct lack of clevage, she is eventually allowed cosmetic surgery on the NHS two years ago, choosing the largest possible enhancements (36DD). This leads to a newspaper interview which prompts the headline 'NEW HOOTERS SERVICE' and immediately turns Josie into a figure of notoriety and the recipient of genuine hatred. One 'gentleman' by the name of Robin Armstrong appears to have devoted his life solely to the purpose of hating her. Having had a second in the intervening years, Cunningham then falls pregnant with her third child, the girl she has during the period covered by this documentary. That's when events take a few quirky twists and turns.

Firstly, she sells 'golden tickets' to a maximum of four lucky 'spectators' who want to watch her heaving, gyrating and screaming for several hours until the kid pops out. Quite who would want to watch this in the flesh, let alone pay for the privilege, asides from family connections or close friends, is beyond me. If you're prepared to pay a sum in the thousands of pounds to 'partake' in something as unfortunate as this, then I'd venture that you should probably speak to a psychiatrist about the sick fascination in your head, then put the money to much better use. Unless I've completely misunderstood, some front row seats for this 'event' were actually sold, raising Josie circa £30,000? The phrase 'more money than sense' has never been more appropriate.

I have no idea if geriatric dinosaurs were dancing round their beds, singing "I've got a golden ticket" or not. Only Josie herself could tell you whether or not that happened. Maybe banging four tickets in bars of Dairy Milk and doing a deal with Cadbury would have generated a more favourable public response and a roughly equal amount of money, I dunno?

Perhaps the worst thing she does is, while pregnant, Cunningham declares that she will have the child aborted if it means she can appear in the next series of Celebrity Big Brother. Quite where (and how) you start dissecting that particular brainwave, which of the many angles you come at it from in the first instance...well, off the top of my head, the first thing worth noting is that this poor child will not have to look too far going forward to find out that her Mum gave very serious consideration to having her terminated - not on the grounds that she was unable to provide for the child, or some health reason, but because she wanted to appear on Celebrity Big Brother. As far as motivations for wanting to abort your own child go, doing so in order to appear on a low-rent trash TV programme for the cheap 'fame' that results is amongst the very worst of what would be a pretty worrying list to start with.

Josie eventually has the child, and appears genuinely happy having eventually decided not to go ahead with the abortion plan. The man originally believed to be the father was Hull City and former England under-21 defender Curtis Davies. At least that's who Josie understood him to be - until it turned out he was just a bloke who looked (and to be fair, he did) quite a bit like the Tigers star. Anyone who is the victim of a deception on that scale from someone who they have trusted and allowed into their private space is fully deserving of sympathy, but there's a nagging doubt as to whether Cunningham's outrage is fuelled simply by a sense of having been lied to, or the realisation that the the life of a WAG will remain elusive, at least for a while longer. On a personal level, I'll admit that had you asked me if there was any mileage in being a Curtis Davies tribute act before this strange story blew up, I'd have answered no, definitely not.

Turns out I was wrong. Emphatically wrong. No point pretending otherwise...

You have to wonder if they watched a Hull City match on TV together though, perhaps while the 'real' Davies was injured or something like that. Sorry, I couldn't help it...

When that story broke, I remember engaging in a bit of schadenfreude about it on social media, stating that "it couldn't have happened to a nicer woman" and other comments of that ilk. A lot of people hate Cunningham and you have to wonder if the Geordie and self-appointed arch-enemy Robin Armstrong, could perhaps devote the time to being better at telesales, following the Toon Army, memorising lines from old episodes of 'Our Friends in the North' or listening to Jimmy Nail. Perhaps he is wasting his life by essentially dedicating himself to the intense hatred of a woman he will almost certainly never meet? On the 'golden tickets' saga, Armstrong suggests "I'd pay ten grand to watch her fired into a fucking volcano", which is funny in a limited and somewhat twisted way. Honestly, hands up if there's nobody in your life you would ever have wanted to see shot out of a cannon in the general direction of Mount Etna...

However, it adds to a lingering sense that just about nobody comes out of anything surrounding this woman with any credit. Cunningham herself, her friends and relatives who seem capable only of seeing everything through the lens of what she suffered as a child (and I'm the last person to trivialise the scars that can be left by the cruelty of others, having had a rough adolescence myself). Her haters whose unhealthy obsession with her poses just as many questions as it makes any attempt to answer, while inadvertently feeding the public profile of this person they'd clearly like to see fade into obscurity. Then there's her shallow and vacuous agent, Rob, turning every minute into an opportunity to get something on Twitter, preferably something deliberately spelt wrong. The girl gives birth and his immediate, in fact his only concern is 'the celebrity angle'. This is some fucked up and seriously sick shit.

And what of the rest of us?

It's worth remembering that nobody 'becomes' famous or achieves a public profile. The rest of us, mere plebs as Andrew Mitchell might (or might not, just for legal reasons) call us, buy tickets to the matches, shows, concerts, pay our own hard-earned money for the albums, the DVDs, the replica shirts and souvenir mugs. We own the T-shirts with their photograph on the front, buy magazines and newspapers simply because he or she is being interviewed or is the subject of a feature in them. We talk about them with our friends and relatives, actively seek out others who hold them in the same regard we do, post on internet forums devoted to their talent or genius and engage in a collective form of dopamine-inspired euphoria as we fawn over his or her brililance with the like-minded. Others with equally impeccable taste, right?

If only so many of us hadn't rendered ourselves dopey and complicit with the mainstream media in terms of being told who and what to like, we'd realise it's one of the few bits of power we have left - the ability to decide who does and does not become famous. This 'sheep phenomenon' is something I have noted and observed getting slowly worse over the last fifteen years or so. A television programme in the mould of the X Factor, Britain's Got Talent or the Voice has absolutely no artistic merit and, by rights, should not exist. If only enough of us followed our noses and changed the channel, then the highwaymen trying to pass off C-list holiday camp cabaret as the new Elvis would be out of business within about ten minutes. Instead, I've worked in more than one office where I've been in the distinct minority not remotely interested in this shit. A minority refusing to buy what it's told to buy - and they thought I was weird, fancy that...

In the case of Josie Cunningham, it's even easier as there are no CDs to 'not buy', no live shows or tours to avoid. It is, quite simply, a case of not paying your own money for the trash-rags that run stories featuring her (read them for free online and ignore the ads if you must!!). Don't engage with her Twitter account, or any other form of social media where she's the topic of discussion. If she's on the television then change the channel. Stop watching programmes like 'this Morning' that take her seriously. Then Josie, the social media creation with its own agent and marketing strategy, courting controversy and making money on the notoriety generated by it, will die. Josie the single Mum from Leeds will then have a choice to make, between getting some sort of 'normal' job or a life on benefits. As it stands, like many of those who choose not to work, she's made the most rational choice available, which begs the question, who are the real mugs?

Even in the dysfunctional society that is 21st century Britain, the phenomenon of Josie Cunningham remains something of a rare one, possible only because of a fusion of numerous quirks and circumstances. The fact that breast enhancements were available to her at the expense of the taxpayer, the decision to get 'massive bangers' and cash in on the controversy as a form of 'therapy' for the 'flat chested' bullying she got as a teenager. That she lives in a society where the connection between fame and being half-decent at something, anything, has been broken. The ability of the talentless to collude with the media and, it would seem, tell people "look at me, I'm famous now" and the lemming-like tendency of the masses to swallow whatever the mainstream media and Twitter tells them is trending. I swear in fifty years time Kang and Kodos will watch us from space running around in our hamster wheels and wonder what the fuck went wrong.

Without all of this coming together, she would be nobody's nothing. Perhaps another subject of her fifteen minutes of fame for dancing topless in a bar in Rhodes and sent home by the authorities - no idea where I got that idea from. Ah yes, this is where...

Strange that Sarah was from Sheffield and Josie's from Leeds - what is it they put in the water over the Pennines?

And then there's Josie herself - I'm always unsettled by the sight of anyone crying (must be my inner bleeding heart, but please don't tell anyone) and it's quite apparent from the emotion she displays that Josie does love her kids, regardless of the rather fucked-up ways in which that love would appear to sometimes manifest itself. The real problem would appear to be one of reconciling that regard for her offspring with an unhealthy desire to 'get famous' in the ultimate equal opportunities society, where stupidity and a lack of ability to be good at basically anything is no barrier to having a public profile. She doesn't want to be 'a scrounger' but clearly has less than zero interest in taking some sort of 'normal' job, as hundreds of thousands of other single parents do, even if her 'fame' puts the kids she clearly loves in danger of by proxy abuse and attacks. However much those kids might mean to her, Josie's fame is clearly 'the non-negotiable bit', despite her pleas to the contrary.

Maybe all of us are to blame in one way or another - the legions of Twitter followers and haters, those sheep who watch 'famous for being famous' shows like Celebrity Big Brother, which create the space in which the talentless create a public profile for themselves. Observers like myself for watching documentaries like this against my better judgement, pausing to take notes and then writing thousands of words about why she's not worth the oxygen - yes, I'm totally aware of the irony but thankyou for pointing it out. Those in the alleged profession of journalism, which has become little more than the indulgence of existing pop culture and the regurgitation of the fake 'news' fed to them by Reuters and other agencies. Proper, investigative journalism where the truth is paramount appears no longer to be with us on a scale capable of making a difference, Then there's Josie Cunningham herself, obsessed with fame above all other considerations.

Anyway, what was that about life imitating art and not the other way around? Here's the quite hilarious Fran Chappell from the brilliant 2000s TV series, Monkey Dust.

Dunno why it seemed appropriate but...take care and I'll catch you soon.