At least at this time of year there’s one constant. For years now The Late Late Toy Show has pepped up kids around the country with the sort of hell bent consumer excitement us adults get from peering over that tome of consumer pornography, the Argos catalogue. A doyen amidst the TV schedules the Toy Show has become standard fare to tickle the toes in the pre-Christmas run up. For parents it’s an opportunity to go window shopping without leaving their gaff. For kids its an opportunity to load up on all the ammunition they need to make the X-mas run up complete and harangue their folks with demands. For those of us without a Friday night social life, it provides the sort of comic relief that can only come from a presenter who’s had his personality hoovered out of his nose, leaving him with all the stuffiness of Paddington Bear. The Toy Show revels in that form television that sees adults getting their kicks from the reactions of terrified looking kids.

A childhood memory of Kenny has him gawking from the screen, like Joe Ninety with a degree, presenting ‘Today Tonight’ the forerunner of Prime Time. Starting off as a continuity announcer, Kenny’s plank-ness became obvious early on doing the voice over for Dev’s funeral. After a bout of solemn fiddly dee music, Pat read out the title without checking – it turned out to be ‘The Aul Divil Is Dead.’ Moving on to present the Eurovision, Pat would annoy half of Europe before finally being pacified with his very own ‘Kenny Live’ leading to a state of perpetual guerrilla war in Mountrose between the two production teams. As Gaybo pissed off to retirement, Pat fell into his shoes, leading to a huge fall in ratings. Critics only began to hold their guns on Kenny after viewers opted not to tune into Dunphy’s melted wax model face and retained their generational loyalties to the Late Late.

The latest Toy Show saw Hazel Kaneswaran’s (her of Dove fame and now You’re A Star) kid dragged out on stage to like a performing monkey while she mouthed support from the sidelines. With a face like a rabbit in a headlight, the poor fucker looked like a caged animal in the glare of the studio lights and could only stare blankly at the audience. His ordeal only got worse when a seven foot Barney appeared to mouth off Christmas tunes, while a delirious looking Pat The Plank whooped it up prancing around the child like some demented elf. Dustin still made his annual appearance with all the mannerisms of a drunk taxi driver pontificating on current affairs. Pat struggled to cope with the scripted jokes about turkey hunts, and his attempts to raise the level of humour with a doll that mouthed Bush-ism’s was undercut by the turkey’s Bertie doll, a Telly Tubby. Every year there is the inevitable pile up as kids on bikes hurl themselves across the studio to the glee of Kenny, this year some three year old on a trike nearly came foul of an eight year old road hog in a motorised quad.

Gone are the days of the Billy Barry Kids with their dancing routines and eyes glazed over with Skittle over indulgence. These days thankfully its more a dose of twelve year old rock bands churning out covers of ‘The Darkness.’ The Toy Show features all the stereotypes one could care to mention. The seven year old hairdresser, glamming it up like failed cast members on Ab Fab, all that was missing was a fag hanging from her mouth. The book worms pontificating about Harry Potter, the video game nerds who can barely take their eyes off Fifa to tolerate Kenny for a moment and the construction nerds fiddling around with bits of wood.

Gaybo had his festive jumper, giving him the sort of doteage that smacks of grand-dad and packages of Werthers. With Pat, one can’t help but feel slightly queasy as he awkwardly cohorts with the kids. Behave! The only kiddy fiddling going on here is that of the corporations, who as ever leap on any opportunity provided to pass off their merchandise on the new generation. As a recent episode of Panorama pointed out 60% of household expenditure is on products to satisfy kids. All this means the little gits control the consumer end of an industry worth $1.1 Trillion globally, and that industry is intimately linked to Christmas. As Christmas beckons one really does get the urge to re-enact a stunt performed by the London based situationists, King Mob in the seventies. Who walked into a high street store, dressed as Santa and began to hand out toys to kids with a ‘merry Christmas.’ Full of Christmas cheer, security began to wrestle with hysterical kids in an effort to snatch the toys back.

The new Smyth’s ad models itself on Power City ads, some kid shouts prices while his female helpers present the various products on sale. It doesn’t take a genius to work out the logic behind some of the more popular products like Pokemon, which bases itself totally on the logic of compulsive consumerism. ‘Got To Catch Them All’ maybe the aim of the shows characters, but ‘got to buy them all’ becomes the reality for parents when it comes to the playing cards and other products. Pokemon once the most insidious end of a industry that seeks to condition children for a life time of buying, has passed its traits on to other products like YU-GI-OH and Bratz. All of which urge more purchases as a means to extract full utility from the line. Buy one Bratz, and it’s a doll, buy two and they interact. Socialisation begins earlier and earlier.

Labels: Muppets, TV

Thursday, November 03, 2005

Mind Numbing Muppets: Mary Camden Has Sinned Again.

Presenting more in this series we call Mind Numbing Muppets - a Soundtracksforthem response from the underbelly of the keyboard to the kaleidoscope of dazzlingly silly cahnts who impose themselves on us via their access to the media.

Number 2: Gillian Evans

That skanky ho Mary Camden has sinned again. For long term viewers of Seventh Heaven, this can't come as much of a shock. Residing in the sort of television universe where the cliff-hanger ending of the first season was a camera close up of Mary's (Jessica Beil) face as she was handed a bottle of beer at a party. Viewers nerves were left painfully taut, fingers bitten to the quick as anticipation mounted as to wheter or not she would take a sip. Of course she did, and a personifcation of evil like no other was born.

The show operates as a thinly disguised public service announcement for the Christian right, it is the Brady Bunch without a hint of the kitsch value. From it's nauseatting opening tune of "where do you go?/when the world don't treat you right/the answer is home" you know you are settling in for an hour of overly wholesome lunacy. The show has been running for the past part of a decade now, for the most part on what seems like auto-pilot. Watching it can be a hugely frustrating affair. Throughout the first season the eldest son Mat provided the tense moments of familial tension with his developing smoking habit that was more Johnny Blue than Afghan Black. The most developed character biography focused around oven chained Annie's flirtation with gange, which of course in a series of flashbacks led to the death of several of her close friends. Her delayed admittance to drug use saw her marriage flounder on the rocks for a good two episodes, as a result the kids for some reason were made live in the garage. Since then moments of crisis have included Ruthie's addiction to bubble-gum, the fact that Simon an apparently health 20 year old is riding young ones left, right and centre. And worse, much worse the fact that Mary Camden who has was cast off to Alaska for developing a non-descript drug problem by her folks has, bless your self in anticipation: filed for divorce against her husband and left her kid to move to England. In a show where the dog Happy is the most rounded character this really is gripping material.

Really, one would really have to hope that the writers of this show are a bunch of college drop out, stoner wasterals lost in this fabric of irony they have pulled over the eyes of the TV networks, the christian right and viewers. But really, I'm left terrified and shaking with the sort of gut pains that only an infestation of maggots can give that - no - this show is for real. It is increasinlgy over stretching itself, with the Camdens house rivalling Home and Away's Pipa's at the height of its use by transitional kids. Two of the "sinners" that currently reside there have developed an odd obsession with the suddenly buxom Ruthie - stalking her on dates, sabataging relationships and eavesdropping on phone calls. But for a show where a 14 year old girl is regularly stalked by two grown men without comment, it really does have an astutely didactic effect. It does exactly what it says on the tin presenting the family as the pivotal social unit in society. Apart from the fact that the Camdens who have blatently closed their eyes to 40 years of birth control have popped a set of twin sprogs who erriely talk in constant unison. If only the writers would transform theses twins into the offspring of Satan spawned in the heart of WASP-ish America, let the local Marilon Manson militia defecate on Rev. Camden's altar then perhaps no more Sunday dinners would be ruined by stumbling across this show on tv and the accompanying desire to slit my throat.

Labels: Muppets, Society, TV

# posted by antrophe @ 5:05 PM

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Monday, January 31, 2005

Mind Numbing Muppets: Could You Fit Bono's Ego In Your Gaff?

Presenting the first in a coming series of Mind Numbing Muppets - a Soundtracksforthem response from the underbelly of the keyboard to the kaleidoscope of dazzlingly silly cahnts who impose themselves on us via their access to the media.

Number 1: Bono

Fresh from prancing around on the set of their new video Bono and co are back to unleash another album. Bound to hurtle straight up the charts and receive the sort of rabid air play that ensures their new single 'Vertigo' will drill itself into the heads of anyone in the vicinity of a radio with all the infectious quality of Variant CJD.

Lucid as ever, Larry Mullen strives to convince anyone unfortunate enough to hear that U2 are the 'only real band left.' Meanwhile the rest of us are checking ourselves into mental wards worried we'll be prompted into the sort of self questioning frenzy which results in frantic dashes about HMV to locate their new album. Wondering how we were deceived by all those other bands, which Bono et al have now confirmed don't actually exist. A clever fucking marketing approach to monopolisation or what?

But then again, U2 and Bono are one clever as fuck marketing gimmick aren't they? The politicians realise that too. Only too happy to use his mountain sized ego to add credence to their public relations stunts when it comes to debt relief and funds for aids. The fuckers string him along like some mascot to the yoof vote (as if we're that thick). Delusional with the idea he exerts a single ounce of power over them Bono traces a path around the globe like a Bishop with no flock bestowing virtue on one and all. In Genoa so gripped with ego mania was Bono et al that he maintained the social movements which were being battoned and shot off the Genoa streets were 'distracting' from his chats with Blair and other leaders on the luxury cruise liner the "European Vision" and his four year campaign to save the world.

Bono is known for traipsing around Africa with former Secretary of the US Treasury, Paul O'Neill like some 19th Century philanthropist on a 'civilising' mission to the colonies. While Bono got on with whispering sweet nothings in the global elites ears, the Bush administration moved against O’Neill for making the sort of vaguely liberal ‘non-republican’ criticisms of policy Bono himself is renowned for. Showing slightly more insight in the workings of Empire than Bono, O’Neill described the Enron scandal in which corporate fraud cost employees and shareholders billions of dollars and broadly undercut confidence in corporate accounting, "the genius of capitalism."

He’s far from alone in his delusions. "Someone once called Bono a Mother Teresa figure, but in fact he is more like John Wayne," says Bobby Shriver, record producer and member of the political Kennedy clan, who helped to get Bono his introductions to Capitol Hill. "He is the lone good guy who rides into town motivated by nothing more than an ideal. It is a potent American myth." Visionary as ever, after Genoa Bono described how he was 'getting messages even from corporate America saying, 'What can we do? Can we help?' Perhaps the corporate world are returning favours, because a band that certainly know a thing or two about advancing the corporate agenda are U2. Amidst fears that their new album would be circulating on the internet Bono and friends have joined the ranks of other notable gits like Metallica and rap stars Eminem and 50 Cent who have all rushed new albums into stores to undercut piracy. "If it is on the Internet this week, we will release it immediately as a legal download on iTunes, and get hard copies into the shops by the end of the month." Those of you who are desperate enough or stupid enough to be suckered in by 25 unreleased tracks can now buy a special U2 Ipod, complete with a gleaming silver cover featuring the bands signatures.

Meanwhile Bono continues in his sycophantic relationship with power. "You know, they're not bad guys. They're just busy guys. It's just bureaucracy. It's just, it's heart breaking really. I'd like to tell you these people are the devil. Well they're not. They're people who want to put this right." Perhaps handicapped by a Christ complex, Bono has been known in recent years to court the evangelical American right in an effort to persuade them of the importance of debt relief and the like. Many commentators note Bono’s remarkable silence on the Iraq occupation, seeing it as an indicator of his unwillingness to upset his American fan base.

So will people on this site be rushing out to buy their new album, fresh from nights of dreaming about getting close enough to lick Bono's bag? Or will you be joining me in hopes that some time somewhere Bono will lose more than his lyrics and laptops, and hopefully end up lost in an attic somewhere for over twenty year?

Labels: Bono, Muppets, Music, Rant

# posted by antrophe @ 9:27 PM

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