Binge Britain (again)
So yet another journalist has been given a blank cheque, a ticket to Lime Street station and the job of showing the world the dark horrors of binge Britain. Here's the formula:
1: Go to Liverpool because a) it contains scousers - and they're always drunk, right?, b) it's where the Centre for Public Health is based, and they are bound to have just released another set of 'Britain is drinking itself to death!!' statistics, and c) it's ony three hours from London.
2: Do the stats bit: quote Ian Gilmore and the latest figures from the CPH.
2: Get in a taxi and ask the driver to take you to wherever people get drunk
3: Find drunk woman (standing in the queue for a nightclub, for shame!), mention that she is a bit wobbly. Let the reader draw their own conclusions.
4: Find an alcoholic and report how many pints he has drunk. Let the reader assume this person represents something other than the fact that cities usually have some alcoholics in them.
5: Find a fight - or, in this case, have your bottle of diet coke spilled slightly as some post-match drinkers return to a pub (I can't believe the sub editor actually left this in)
6: Find someone being badly beaten up - or, if not find a pub where someone was badly beaten up two years previously.
7: End up in a club where all sorts of terrible things happen
8: Go back to London thinking 'Ah, Liverpool. Great city, but also strangely tragic too. Hmmmm....'
What can go wrong? Well..
1: Send a journalist with a painfully raging sense of cultural superiority (i.e. who seriously bothers to make the point that a he couldn't possibly eat a salad with a pinot grigio blush - they have a word for people like that in Liverpool, and it rhymes with "bobhead")
2: Send a journalist who thinks we actually want the biblical reference for an engraving on the wall of a converted church (...rhymes with "posser")
3: Send a journalist who drinks nothing stronger than a couple of glasses of wine, then insists on referring to his 'tempranillo goggles'. No, really: he wrote 'tempranillo goggles'. Islington has arrived on Hardman Street!!
4: Find out that actually the worst thing that happens is that in the Blue Angel at 3am you can find people playing air guitar to Bryan Adams. Now, I agree that our country has reached a terrible state when anyone even listens to Bryan Adams, never mind plays air guitar to him in public: but it's not really news, now, is it?
That's the problem with most of the journalism surrounding 'Binge Britain'. Yes, lot's of people drink too much and behave appallingly when they do; but most people just behave like they are, well, drunk. And that usually involves nothing more earth-shattering than slurring your words, over-emoting and singing along to stomach-churning fuckwits like Bryan Adams (or, er, Shania Twain ... ahem). But newspapers need copy, and as long as that is the case we can expect a steady stream of journos to don their 'tempranillo goggles', hide their wallets, and head up to Liverpool where they can witness the terrors of young people being a bit silly at first hand.
1: Go to Liverpool because a) it contains scousers - and they're always drunk, right?, b) it's where the Centre for Public Health is based, and they are bound to have just released another set of 'Britain is drinking itself to death!!' statistics, and c) it's ony three hours from London.
2: Do the stats bit: quote Ian Gilmore and the latest figures from the CPH.
2: Get in a taxi and ask the driver to take you to wherever people get drunk
3: Find drunk woman (standing in the queue for a nightclub, for shame!), mention that she is a bit wobbly. Let the reader draw their own conclusions.
4: Find an alcoholic and report how many pints he has drunk. Let the reader assume this person represents something other than the fact that cities usually have some alcoholics in them.
5: Find a fight - or, in this case, have your bottle of diet coke spilled slightly as some post-match drinkers return to a pub (I can't believe the sub editor actually left this in)
6: Find someone being badly beaten up - or, if not find a pub where someone was badly beaten up two years previously.
7: End up in a club where all sorts of terrible things happen
8: Go back to London thinking 'Ah, Liverpool. Great city, but also strangely tragic too. Hmmmm....'
What can go wrong? Well..
1: Send a journalist with a painfully raging sense of cultural superiority (i.e. who seriously bothers to make the point that a he couldn't possibly eat a salad with a pinot grigio blush - they have a word for people like that in Liverpool, and it rhymes with "bobhead")
2: Send a journalist who thinks we actually want the biblical reference for an engraving on the wall of a converted church (...rhymes with "posser")
3: Send a journalist who drinks nothing stronger than a couple of glasses of wine, then insists on referring to his 'tempranillo goggles'. No, really: he wrote 'tempranillo goggles'. Islington has arrived on Hardman Street!!
4: Find out that actually the worst thing that happens is that in the Blue Angel at 3am you can find people playing air guitar to Bryan Adams. Now, I agree that our country has reached a terrible state when anyone even listens to Bryan Adams, never mind plays air guitar to him in public: but it's not really news, now, is it?
That's the problem with most of the journalism surrounding 'Binge Britain'. Yes, lot's of people drink too much and behave appallingly when they do; but most people just behave like they are, well, drunk. And that usually involves nothing more earth-shattering than slurring your words, over-emoting and singing along to stomach-churning fuckwits like Bryan Adams (or, er, Shania Twain ... ahem). But newspapers need copy, and as long as that is the case we can expect a steady stream of journos to don their 'tempranillo goggles', hide their wallets, and head up to Liverpool where they can witness the terrors of young people being a bit silly at first hand.
posted by James Nicholls at 8:23 am
4 Comments:
UH FEEL LIKE UR WOMAN! wahey... I'll get back to you when I've sobbered uppabit, aright guys
The Shania Twain incident was NOT my fault!
Damn that wedding singer......
Shania Twain aside, I'm guessing the journalist in question was very glad Newcastle didn't come out on top (or bottom depending how you look at things) as he'd have had to travel even further into the North, heaven forbid. He may not have made it out alive. Hope they send Boris Johnson next time. He’s brilliant at fair and balanced reportage.
I'm looking forward to a Guardian study on shopping in a northern ASDA in a similarly colonial style. Imagine the insights:
"Hard to believe but it is nigh on impossible to locate a bunch of organic rocket in this Warrington branch of ASDA. As I gaze a across the aisles of sugared drinks watching the heaving mass of humanity gorge themselves on fatty foods I breathe a heavy sigh, contemplating the ticking time bomb that is obesity. Are they poorly educated or merely willfully stupid? I approach a rotund child clutching a bag of donuts and ask him if he realizes that he is slowly committing suicide as he snacks incessantly. For some reason the mother takes offense at my line of questioning. I pull the photographer away from the thrust off her loaded trolley and we retreat to the next aisle."
It practically writes itself. You’d never even have to go if you sent the hapless photographer off to brave it by themselves.
Does anyone remember the Guardian article written by an academic who bravely lived amongst the poor of Southwark which seemed to include her husband? That was a classic. It’s like the Daily Telegraph for people with slightly more contemporary references.
I think you've got yourself a commission there. And I wouldn't worry about the photographer, there are probably as many stock photos of ugly-looking fat people (probably women) as there are of ungainly-looking binge drinkers (usually women - except for the 'blokes fighting' shots). The Guardian, in fairness, doesn't insist on reprinting the standard 'pissed woman looking sexually vulnerable' shot that crops up in most reports, but it is obsessed with the 'Look! Two women in fancy dress! Aaaaaaaarrrgghh!!!' photos instead.
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