Talent shows “The Voice” and “Britain’s Got Talent”

Have reality shows finally replaced religion in the hearts of the British?

This weekend I finally succumbed to the persistent cajoling of my two youngest to share in the questionable pleasure of watching the above shows; two perfect examples of the genre described as the reality talent contest.

I am no stranger to these shows, as my other blogs will confirm, but it is fascinating to track how they are evolving and re-inventing themselves, in pursuit of ratings that are fragmenting as fast as the number of channels available.

It appears that the excesses of The Dear Leader Simon Cowell’s Caligulate lifestyle are finally catching up with him, and that the bright star of his Imperium, whilst not yet collapsing into a Black Hole, may well be in the early stages of becoming a Red Dwarf. I do not understand people’s admiration for this person – surely one look at his smug arrogance is repellent, in the same way that a baby does not need telling to avoid stroking a wasp.

Anyway, new talent show “The Voice” is definitely a part of his legacy and I watched it on successive nights this weekend to give it a fair chance.

“The Voice” is based around the premise that every person auditioning does so without any possible prejudice based on appearance, as the four judges choose blindfolded (not literally) and therefore solely based on “The Voice” and nothing else. This is the first lie of course, as the producers and researchers have obviously selected every contestant beforehand, no doubt with an eye for the greatest disparity between their singing talent and their appearance, to emphasise the show’s purpose.

I missed this process sadly, but apparently it involved the judges with their backs to the stage hitting a large red button when they decided they liked the singer – at which point their chair revolved, presumably like a James Bond villain, and they struggled to contain their shock at the singers’ revealed appearance. I would have liked to have seen that. The fact that they buzz for a good reason, rather than to reject them, is the BBC’s Ying to Cowell’s Yang.

This accounts for the array of rebuilt faces we saw including guest Cerys Matthews, who clearly employed a plastic surgeon about as adept at cosmetic reconstruction as I am at assembling an Ikea flat-pack. Do these people have mirrors?

The Judges themselves are interesting. Artist and producer Will.i.am has the appearance of the boy who forgot his homework and has been made to sit at the front of the class, constantly glancing furtively to his left to see if anyone else knows the answer to a question. Next to him is Jessie J, the singer who comes across as the slightly too enthusiastic clever girl who knows all the answers and constantly bobs up and down hoping to be picked by the teacher.

Add to this the slightly bemused Tom Jones (yes that Tom Jones) who looks like he is trapped in a Bring-Your-Grandad-To School-Day nightmare, plus the lead singer of Irish band The Script (who have only been famous for about three weeks) Danny who spends most of his time bobbing his head forwards and backwards like Quagmire in Family Guy – and there you have them : the judges!

What are they judging exactly?



Well when I watched it was Karaoke Cage Fighting basically and so repetitive and formulaic it became excruciating. Each contest was topped and tailed with that most nauseous of confections the “back story” and the team’s judge bleating on about how hard the decision was…Every time… The same way…They didn’t even change the vocabulary they used.

As the show’s primary and noble premise is that only the voice should be judged, this farce seemed unnecessary but it apparently passes for being entertaining because these “battles” with their suspiciously well orchestrated harmonies and choreography, are currently top of the most popular viewing lists on iPlayer!

That said, the judges were at least genuinely denied any glimpses of their acts beforehand which is probably a creditable change to the format. However it has, perhaps inevitably, meant that septuagenarian Tom Jones has ended up with a team that looks like it belongs somewhere between a Gay Pride march and a Flintstones/Scooby Doo theme party night.

The contestants are so scary in so many different ways I imagined most of them in a HP Lovecraft story. I am not just referring to their appearances or their fashion posturing but to their characters – obsessives, manic depressives, self harmers, fantasists and deluded narcissists apparently. This is our version of the Victorian Freak Show that Cowell invented but more of that later.

So “The Voice” continued with the bone-numbing intellect-sapping vacuity of winnowing these wannabes down to five per team and the whole process goes “Live” next week. I can hardly contain my ambivalence.

As for the winners of each battle, well even duos were allowed it seemed – thus questioning the title of the show somewhat. I am guessing they won’t win. Many of the results were controversial on our sofa, though not with me I would add. That was the moment I got a glimpse of what this show is about and the secret of its success – talent and music are irrelevant, this is designed to capture a nation already inebriated on reality TV shows and give them more of the same, so they sit together arguing and debating and hopefully, and somewhat ironically, forgetting their own personal reality for a while in the process. It is the opiate of the masses, the distraction from rebellion, a palliative dispensed by media.

So will I watch “The Voice” again? Probably not but never say never, as Manchester City fans are fond of saying at the moment. The BBC is meant to educate, inform and entertain and this show clearly appeals to number three.

I got to the end of “The Voice” spectacularly underwhelmed and a little bored and despondent.

My ordeal was not over yet – I now had to sit through the equally execrable “Britain’s Got Talent” with Old Beelzebub himself now occasionally joined by various attractive women judges who seemed to appear, morph and then disappear again (but then this wasn’t a movie and continuity is not really attempted so ho hum). David Walliams plays the stooge good cop and his charisma and talent are not wasted. He was, however, far better in a Roald Dahl documentary the following evening.

Again the myth is peddled that the events in this show are all spontaneous rather than a carefully contrived manipulation. Case in point is the trio of vocalists filmed from their car dashboard getting lost on the way to the audition. Now presumably that was done afterwards unless every single contestant was filmed getting to the show by producers hopeful that at least some of the footage would be useable? This is Cowell all over, and he is very good at getting away with it.

The trio were actually very good, and I hope they get more widely heard as a result, but I suspect you leave your credibility in the wings when you walk onto the stage of these shows as surely as Michael Jackson did when he walked on to that Pepsi advert film set.

Then there is the mob mocking of contestants when they are a little eccentric or just plain terrible. Presumably Cowell instructs his pro-consuls to find these victims and keep from them the fact that they are awful so he can reveal it himself before a grateful nation? Can he be any more despicable?

Almost as bad is the patronising of a clearly terrible act, putting them through to the next round because of novelty value. Tonight it was someone who reminded me of Maria Pracatan from the old Clive James shows. This is pointless bullying, however well-meaning.

Here again is the Victorian Freak Show. The amazing, the scary, the horrific and the amusing all wheeled before a paying crowd and then discarded as quickly – sometimes even after they win.

We all watch because it has become OK to be entertained like this but I always find myself imagining Shane Meadows’ powerful movie “Dead Man’s Shoes” when a boy with learning difficulties, desperately trying to belong, is bullied to the point of suicide and then avenged by his guilt-ridden special forces trained brother. If only the Paddy Considine character could dispense of Cowell as easily as he does the gang members in the film.

Britain’s Got Talent should be called Britain’s Got Talons. It is Jeremy Kyle without the unsettling social realism. We have become decadent.

What have these two shows taught me? Not much. Perhaps that being a morbidly obese, self-obsessed, supine narcissist with no fashion sense does not make you a bad person as long as you can sing well enough to be a commodity.

Religion survives by selling the joy of subjugation, the very essence of abjection. I am not sure we need it replicated – but we perhaps need it replaced.

Amen to that.

The Pinch - Baby Boomers and Bust

David Willetts – “The Pinch: How the baby boomers took their children’s future – and why they should give it back.”

In a 44 year period in the town of Leighton Buzzard 900 properties changed hands, but only a third of these were between people in the same family. The rest were bought by purchasers from further afield – evidence surely of the vibrant home owning society we all live in.

When was this? Oh, between 1464 and 1508! Britain has, apparently, always been a home owning society of smaller nuclear families.

This is just one of the highly satisfying little nuggets of information in this beautifully researched account by Tory MP David Willetts on how those born between 1945 and 1965 have got a pretty generous slice of the financial, cultural and political pie at the expense of those born afterwards, and why.

Willetts is a rare public intellectual who consistently stands apart from his coalition colleagues by virtue of his obvious probity and analytical prowess. In this book he postulates that the baby boomer generation owes a debt of reparation to the young, likening them to a hunter-gatherer tribe with an acute demographic problem.

Imagine Homo-erectus living in an earlier tribal community. There are the elderly and the young who need taking care of and then the fit adults who provide for them. If, by some freak event such as a series of mild winters or an increase in food stocks, the providers have a slightly better time of it and the population of the young spikes upwards, what happens?

Well, when the abundant young turn into providers they will comfortably be able to support their elderly but what if the number of new tribe members being born falls again? Who will provide for abundant adults in old age when there are suddenly more elderly mouths to feed and fewer replacement adults to feed them?

This is Willetts’ central argument, and it is so well made that you feel inclined not to quarrel with it. He suggests that, on average, every baby boomer will have taken out from society about 118% of what he or she has put in, and that such a boom trails an inevitable bust.

He recreates the “tribe” scenario today – imagining a household where there are husband and wife, two children and an elderly mother all living under one roof. The husband is in well-paid full-time employment; the wife works part time and looks after the children and the elderly mother.

This household is, he argues, akin to the welfare state. The man’s earnings pass to four dependants across three generations and even if he is quite well off he will not feel affluent.



Willetts weaves it all seamlessly into his central narrative that fortune has tracked the boomer generation like a stratified sample fund. When they were of school age, spending on schools went up; when they bought their houses, mortgages had tax relief and property rapidly increased in value; when they hit their peak earnings years tax rates fell, and the coffers bulged so much that many employers bestowed generous final salary pensions on everyone, sweetened further by contribution holidays and index linking. How much of that was true for the generation that followed?

BY 2050 over 50% of the UK will be over 50. The same over 50’s already own 4/5ths of the country’s wealth. There is a flash point here. The boomers will be so abundant they will have real power at the ballot box – tempting politicians to pander to them further. This creates horizontal cultural links, between members of the same generation, rather than vertical ones across generations. That will leave a disaffected youth, over taxed and under rewarded. It is a cocktail for catastrophe.

The conclusions David Willetts reaches are not 100% water tight, but the journey to get there is a hugely enjoyable one. He is, after all, a right of centre minister and I felt justified being a little sceptical of any politician’s motives writing a book proposing large scale social change!

Yet for all that this book is very informative, concise and well written. Economics students will relish the sections on Keynes, Schumpeter and Marx whilst sociologists will salivate at all the well-organised data.

It’s a book I can recommend highly.

Beautiful Mathematics!

For many the very mention of Maths brings them out in a cold sweat and induces either ambivalence or an instant switch off! Why is this? I have always found that Mathematics has a beauty and even a fundamental perfection that can be every bit as thrilling as studying a poem or a painting – and yet so many people never experience this.

Don't misunderstand me - I am no professional Mathematician! I just love the beauty of playing with numbers and shapes.

The first time I remember this happening to me was at primary school. We had a maverick head teacher who just wouldn’t be tolerated today – his name was James Denny and he was a rotund, peppery but jolly Scot who would, on a whim, call the whole school together and teach them something en masse! The other teachers would be expected to just stop what they were doing and join him in the assembly hall.

One of these lessons taught us to count up to 31 on one hand using binary (I had no idea what binary meant at the time, but looking back I see that is what it was) the thumb was one, the index finger two, the thumb and index finger was three, the middle finger alone was four, middle finger plus thumb five etc. We all heard a story about a strange woodland elf that Mr Denny had met and who taught him this secret way of counting! Try it – it’s fun!

From this I discovered the rainy day activity that is Pascal’s triangle – my brother and I used to create these for hours. You know – you start at the top with 1, beneath that you write two more 1s and then continue down where underneath every pair of numbers you write the sum of the number above – so row 3 would be “1, 2, 1” and row 4 would be “1,3,3,1” and so on for whatever size the paper is. Fascinating patterns appear even if your writing has to get very small!

But the best fun of all is Geometry. Say the word “Euclid” and you get blank expressions (or ones of abject horror!) most of the time – but he is like the father of Mathematics in so many ways. His theories mean that even today every schoolgirl and boy has a compass and ruler in their Geometry set – and with them can draw almost any shape, angle or plan. Greek mathematics has endured in a way Greek Philosophy and Literature has of course, but arguably in a more prominent role.

What about Pythagoras? The sheer stultifying brilliance of the formula that expresses the relationship between the sides of a right angled triangle is so rewarding – first when you first try it out but then, if you go that far, when you learn how to prove it! The square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides. Less well known is if you draw semi circles on each side of the triangle, or pentagons, the same is true! In fact any proportional shape will have the same relationship.

Plato showed how there are only five “solids” that can be generated by regular shapes – the Tetrahedron from a triangle, the Cube from a square, the Octahedron from the triangular pyramid, the Icosahedron from the triangle and the Dodecahedron from the Pentagon. Great for using as die in role playing games!

From here I remember exploring tessellation – basically using a repeating shape to “tile” an area! Some shapes tessellate easily but actually any four sided shape, if inverted exactly, can create a shape which will tessellate! That is pretty amazing in itself. Some of the most beautiful mosaic patterns in the world employ this principle. Interestingly, Islam where graven images were banned still created artistic beauty with mathematics in the tiled floors of mosques from Istanbul to Baghdad – in fact the Islamic nations were well ahead of the west in Mathematics for centuries.

Jack once told me that there are two types of tessellation – essentially with one you can ‘pick up’ a section, move it around and match it exactly somewhere else, and another type where this is impossible. The first is known as periodic tessellation and for years mathematicians tried to discover an example of nonperiodic tessellation. The person who achieved it was known in another field – it was cosmologist Roger Penrose with his “Dart and Kite” pattern shown.

There is no section of this pattern that is ever exactly repeated yet it tiles perfectly! Wonderful… Some even suggest that Islamic mathematicians may have discovered this 1000 years earlier…had religion not poisoned their progress we might have had the Internet in the time of Shakespeare!

Ahh, the beauty of Maths! Hardly even a scratch on the surface…

Favourite Art - L'Umana Fragilita by Salvator Rosa

'Conceptio Culpa, Nasci Pena, Labor Vita, Necesse Mori'

I first saw this piece when I was about 20 years old, and I remember I admired its obvious dark qualities but very little else. I think it was for a creative writing project, and it may have been seen on a glossy page in some text book or catalogue. I barely even bothered to decipher its symbols or translate the Latin inscription – but it obviously touched me in some deep way because when I saw it again years later in the Fitzwilliam Museum Cambridge I was reminded and drawn back in.

At the time of my second viewing I had grown older, had children, had lost my Father and was increasingly identifying with Eliot’s “Love Song Of J. Alfred Prufrock” and Philip Larkin’s “Toads” as contemplations of ageing and the wasting of one’s precious and too brief time alive on working for, or pleasing, others. So on the second occasion I sat in front of the painting for several pensive and ponderous minutes and just…thought.

The painting, which I have returned to on several occasions subsequently, between meetings, after appointments, before seminars, is so obviously a product of personal tragedy for the artist Rosa who lost many of his family to plague the year before it was completed in 1656 - but it reflects most poignantly of all the fact that he lost his son, Rosalvo. It is the imagination of the moment of this loss that is captured in the scene, and yet, at the same time, it is as if all grief and futility is encapsulated within it.

The title means “Human Frailty” and the painting shows the mocking, leering angel of death sealing a contract for the life and soul of young Rosalvo who is portrayed as too young even to form letters on a page with a pen. You can almost trace a demonic Christian cross of light from the angel’s wings through the child’s arms. He sits, oblivious, on the lap of his mother, and on the page is written in Latin “Conception is Sin, Birth is Pain, Life is Toil, Death a Necessity” giving the most lucid understanding of Salvator Rosa’s state of mind. I read that he wrote to a close friend in a letter “This time Heaven has struck me in such a way that all human remedies are useless and the least pain I feel is when I tell you that I weep as I write”.

The moment your children are born you live with the almost constant terror of losing them. In the same way that their birth completes your life's purpose, their premature death must surely destroy it. I am certain that the grieving Salvator shed many tears onto this canvas and I still find it awe-inspiring that he found the courage to create it.

Objectively, the main reason I really love this painting is that it combines that raw, visceral emotion with perfect artistic precision in structure and imagery. There are several symbols of death scattered around the scene – a knife, a death mask, a bursting bubble, the Roman God of death Terminus. The light is used to great effect. The faces of the characters are haunting and memorable. Every detail rewards study and contains profound references and explanations. Most of the allusions I got from subsequent study, but the image is so strong it really does not require much interpretation. It is quite simply what art should be – a means of communicating something tangible, or intangible, about what it means to be human - a glimpse of the numinous that transcends faith or belief.

Whenever I take life a bit too seriously, I often think of that cold bony hand gripping the young child’s wrist. Death too early was an ironic fact of life in 1656 of course, the artist himself died at just 57, and most life was nasty, brutish and short - but I manage to believe that the message of gloom contained within this work can be turned into a hopeful optimism, even if just by my vowing to make a little bit more of every extra day I am granted and finding precious moments of human interactivity that prove the inscription, albeit occasionally and too briefly, to be over stated.

A short story I tell my youngest daughter.

Amazing!

Once there was a little girl called Charlotte who was very clever, very curious and very brave.

Her teacher, Miss Burgess was a colourful, smiley young girl who wore striped tights and loved telling stories. She had a big shelf behind her desk with all her clever teaching books on it with titles like “How to think in shapes and numbers” and “Count the stars”.

One afternoon Miss Burgess handed the children their Maths books to take home for the weekend.

“Now remember children, you mustn’t work any further than the page I told you” she said “Or your brains will be full!”

After the class had gone Charlotte went over to the shelf of books and looked at the ones on the top which were covered in dust and very thick. They had gold lines down their spines and old fashioned embossed letters. Checking that nobody was looking, she climbed onto Miss Burgess’ desk and took down the first book.

It was titled “Very Clever Maths” and was full of pictures of revolving spheres and levers and graphs and shapes and other things that made Charlotte’s eyes widen.

She slipped the book into her bag and ran to catch up with the other children.

That night, with a torch under her bed clothes, Charlotte read the whole book and then did all the test questions at the end so that the next morning she could show her answers to Miss Burgess.

At first her teacher was very cross that Charlotte had taken the book but when she read the test she said:

“Amazing!” and ran off to show the Head Teacher.

“Amazing!” said the Head Teacher and ran off to show the Governors.

“Amazing!” said the Chairman of the Governors and took it to show the Mayor…

When the Mayor saw Charlotte’s hard work in the Maths test he decided he had to show the Prime Minister.

“Amazing!” said the Prime Minister and set off at once for the United Nations where he read out the results of Charlotte’s Maths test to all the nations of the world, and they all nodded to each other smiling and clapping gently. All agreed that it really was amazing.

That night as Charlotte was doing her homework there came a knock at the door. When she opened it there were five scientists dressed in white lab coats, each with spectacles and a clipboard and all scribbling away attentively.





“We are from NASA the space people!” said the tallest one with the bright yellow tie “come with us!”

So Charlotte followed them to their shiny rocket ship, which was parked in her back garden and they flew her off to NASA’s base in the United States of America.

The scientists took Charlotte into a big room where there was one desk in the middle and lots of others in a big circle around it where even more scientists sat, all with glasses and clipboards and bright coloured ties.

“Please” said the man with the yellow tie “Can you try and help us? We want to land a space ship on Mars but the Maths equations are just so difficult!”

Charlotte looked at the piece of paper he handed her and scratched her chin “hmmm…” she said and then sat down at the desk in the middle.

“It’s quite easy...look” she said and explained the equations to the scientists whose eyes were getting wider and wider. Then suddenly they all began shouting “Of course!” and “Eureka!” and “That’s it!” and ran back to their own desks in feverish excitement.

This continued for some time. Then, at last, the scientist with the bright yellow tie stood on a chair and shouted “We’ve done it!” and all the other scientists stood up and applauded Charlotte who did her best curtsey, in recognition of their kindness.

“How can we ever thank you?” said the scientist with the yellow tie.

“Well, you could give me a ride home” said Charlotte.

And they did.

It was several months later when Charlotte and her classmates were all gathered around the screen in her classroom watching the first ever humans landing on Mars. The astronauts bounced and wobbled about in their big space suits and planted a flag, and lots of famous people on Earth gave speeches and clapped.

The day came for the ship to come home. The last astronaut was just about to board the shuttle when he stopped and began scratching something in the dry, red dust on the planet’s surface. Nobody knew what he was doing.

He climbed in and slowly the great space shuttle lifted off to rejoin the Mother ship and return the astronauts safely home. As they began to lift off, the astronauts switched on a camera on the bottom of the shuttle. It was looking back down at the surface of Mars, so everyone could see.

And there, written in the dust, were the words

“Thank you Charlotte!”

“Amazing!” thought Charlotte (…and continued working on her idea for a ship to fly to the stars!)