LOVELY SPAM, WONDERFUL SPAM [84]

Before you even get to eating it, there is much to be said about Spam. What began with the surprise of my winning a tin of Spam, after correctly answering all the questions in a 1940s-inspired charity quiz at work, has become an odyssey of changing uses, changing meanings, and changing diets.

The most likely meaning of the word “Spam” is “Shoulder of Pork and Ham,” as the tinned meat itself, made by Hormel since 1937, was introduced as a way of using a surplus of pork shoulder, an unpopular cut, built up by the company. Even though the name was coined in a competition, with Ken Daigneau, the brother of a Hormel executive, winning $100, Hormel insist that the true meaning of SPAM, which they always refer with full capitals, is only known by a select group of executives, as if it were Colonel Sanders’ secret blend of herbs and spices.

Monty Python changed the meaning of the word “spam” in two ways, although Hormel only subscribe to one of these. In the United States, Sir Can-a-Lot has graced Spam packaging since 2012, in a reference to “Spamalot,” the musical version of “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” – “Spamalot” was one of a number of titles tested by Eric Idle, coming from the “Holy Grail” lyric, “we eat ham and jam and Spam a lot,” and audiences identified with it the most.

However, Sir Can-a-Lot’s phrase, “Glorious SPAM,” is in reference to the “Monty Python’s Flying Circus” café sketch from the show’s second series, where Mr & Mrs Bun, for that is their names, are given menu options that contain an increasingly psychotic amount of Spam. The reason there are Vikings in the café, as shown in the later part of the sketch normally cut for compilations, is they have invaded the Green Midget café in Bromley specifically for the Spam… before the historian succumbs to repeating “Spam” over and over again, which is continued into the closing credits, with “Spam” inserted into cast and crew names, possibly inspiring the later Halloween episodes of “The Simpsons.”

The overtaking of normal speech by the same word, repeated over and over again, has directly led to “spamming” being the word for targeted junk e-mails and the like. This use came from the user groups and chat rooms, like Usenet and CompuServe, that populated the early internet, where if someone posted something you didn’t like, you had to type something to scroll it off the screen, so typing the same word, like “spam,” became a noted practice – it almost sounds like “spam” was used the way people say “fake news” today, drowning out what they consider to be disagreeable. However, the same practice also led to others realising they could post obstructive chain letters, like 1988’s MAKE.MONEY.FAST, leading to the spam e-mails of today.

Hormel have disparaged “spamming,” as it twists the meaning of their trademark, but “spam” has been used as a synonym for tinned meat, similar to how “hoover” is used for all vacuum cleaners in the UK. Spam is ingrained in the wartime rationing history of the UK: in 1945, when twenty points per person per week were given for meat, a pound tin of Spam was lowered from 16 to 8 points to get more people to try it, after rejecting unrationed meat like whale and snoek, but the more popular pound tin of salmon was increased from 16 to 24 points to force this further, although you were allowed to save up your points.

The UK did come around to Spam, with fritters being a national favourite, but Hawaii have absorbed it into their culture as much as Britain cannot be separated from baked beans - a popular lunch and snack dish is the sushi-derived Spam musubi, and Spam is sold in breakfast platters by both McDonalds and Burger King. I like the idea of the musubi, which is sticky rice, topped with grilled Spam, and wrapped with seaweed, but will I cook it myself? Perhaps.

NO THOUGHT FOR ME REMAINS HERE [83]

Waiting in the queue in TK Maxx to buy a purse, I looked at the various gifts and confectionery stacked before the checkout. On a shelf, at my eye level, was a die-cast model of a car – not one for playing with, as it had been screwed to a plinth. It looked like a Smart car, but with the grille of another company attached to it. I did not know a model was made of a car that appeared to have disappeared as soon as it, well, appeared – perhaps it was part of the marketing. Therefore, my initial thought upon seeing it was not, “oh, that’s interesting,” but, “they really made that?”

There actually was a method to the madness that was the Aston Martin Cygnet. When Aston Martin announced, in October 2010, that a concept car exhibited earlier in the year would enter production, they intended to provide a luxury version of the “city car,” like the Smart Fortwo, or the Ford Ka. Indeed, it was feasible that many owners of their sports cars may want a Cygnet as their weekday vehicle, so they can enjoy the same level of luxury as in their DB9 – the press release stated, “luxury is not constrained by scale,” and, “it is a car without compromise, just like every other Aston Martin.” That said, for a four-seater car slightly shorter (117.5 inches) than the original Mini, the only real boot space was achieved by removing the rear seats. However, for a city car as luxuriously upholstered as a DB9, and painted with the same paint, £30,000 could have been a bargain.

This is where the Cygnet starts to fall down. It’s main reason for existing were European Union guidelines concerning the carbon dioxide produced by a car company’s range of vehicles. Even though the emissions of their diesel models proved less than desired, the Volkswagen Group can balance out the CO₂ produced by their Bentley and Bugatti models with their smaller models from VW, Seat and Skoda. Meanwhile Aston Martin, not owned by a larger group, needed to introduce a car to cancel out the effects of their Vantages and Vanquishes although, producing 110 grams of CO₂ per kilometre, the Cygnet only reduced the company’s average from 304 to 290 g/km.

Even worse, the biggest problem for the Cygnet was that it was simply a tarted-up Toyota iQ, which had been introduced in 2009. “Badge engineering” is a common practice in the car industry – a previous family car of ours, the VW Sharan MPV-minivan, was also sold as the Ford Galaxy and the Seat Alhambra, while the latest-model Toyota Aygo, which replaced the iQ in 2014, is also known as the Citroën C1 and the Peugeot 108. What Aston Martin did in customising the iQ into the Cygnet went beyond changing the badges, but the 150 hours they spent on each car – a regular Aston Martin took 200 hours to build from scratch – only extended to how the car looked, and its interior. Just like iQ drivers, every Cygnet was stuck with a 1.3 litre engine, capable of 97 bhp, producing a 0-60 mph time of 11.5 seconds, and a top speed of 106 mph – I can only guess Aston Martin hoped prospective buyers would look past those figures.

The Cygnet lasted only two years in production, from 2011 to 2013, with the media and public simply unable to look past the Aston Martin badge and grille without seeing the Toyota iQ behind it. I have only ever seen one in the window of Aston Martin’s dealership in London’s Park Lane, and have never seen one driven on the road. Aston Martin hoped for four thousand sales per year: in the end, around four hundred were ordered upon its release, with only 150 in the UK, and that was it – you are more likely to see a DB5 or DB6 on the road. For all I know, they probably sold more of those die-cast models. In June 2017, Aston Martin announced an all-electric version of its four-door Rapide S luxury saloon, the RapidE, will enter production in 2019 – that’s a bit more like it.

HIT IT, PAUSE IT, RECORD AND PLAY [82]

Modern-day ingenuity means that popular forms of old technology can have their useful lives extended far longer than ever intended. For example, I have a 1983 BBC Micro computer, sadly no longer working, which could connect to my TV via a SCART lead, and could save BASIC programs to an SD card.

Likewise, improvements in sound recording and playback mean we can play new vinyl records that sound as good as CDs, through heavier records, cutting the groove at a slower speed, and direct-drive turntables. Even CDs sound better through 24-bit mastering not available when they were introduced, meaning my 2015 copy of David Bowie’s album “Never Let Me Down” sounds louder, more dynamic and clearer than my 1987, which I only bought because Bowie hated his song “Too Dizzy” enough to delete it from all future reissues.

However, with retailers now offering more cassette players and blank tapes for sale than seen in the last ten or fifteen years, including various devices to copy cassettes to MP3 format, I must point out the new players and tapes will sound WORSE than what you threw away, or gave away, all those years ago, because the improvements made to cassettes when they were popular are no longer made.

When Philips introduced the Compact Cassette in 1962, the virtue of its compactness – the earlier RCA tape cartridge, as well as Sony’s later Elcaset, were the size of a VHS cassette – was outweighed by its lack of actual sound fidelity. Running at a quarter of a speed of then-conventional reel-to-reel tape, and on tape about half as wide, the iron oxide-coated “ferric” tape rendered only enough to use in dictation, and little else. The introduction, in 1972, of tape using a chromium dioxide coating, known as “chrome” or “Type II,” began the slow replacement of pre-recorded 8-track cartridges with tapes that could would be wound backwards as well as forwards, while 1979’s “Type IV” or “metal” tapes, using iron or chromium instead of their oxides, meant you could start approaching CD quality – “Type III” was a combination of the first two types by Sony, which did not last beyond the mid-1970s.

Meanwhile, the ubiquitous hiss of tapes could be reduced if your recorder incorporated Dolby Noise Reduction, with Dolby B being the first consumer standard introduced in 1968, followed by Dolby C in 1980, and Dolby S in 1989, just as CD sales began impacting cassettes. Unlike the industry standard Dolby A and SR, Dolby B and C were directed at the higher and lower frequencies at which the hiss would be heard, but Dolby S improved the whole dynamic range.

For anyone in the market for a new cassette player, I can now tell you that just about EVERYTHING I have just told you will be unavailable. Unless you can find someone selling unopened old stock, you will only find the base level Type I tapes available, for only these are still made. Even worse, Dolby stopped licensing their noise reduction systems a number of years ago, concentrating their efforts on digital and home cinema systems instead. Even worse, because modern hi-fi systems are not concerned with including cassette players, you can expect the overall quality of the players themselves to be less than before, although making sure the playback heads are clean and aligned always help. Playing back a Dolby-encoded tape will still work, but you just won’t get the benefit.

If you are prepared for the expense of matching the cassette experience you remember having, you may well have to buy your old system back from eBay – you may find me there, trying to buy a replacement BBC Micro.

YOU DON’T KNOW WHAT YOU’VE GOT TIL IT’S GONE [81]

Little bites of information like this appear to be either seldom preserved, or incredibly hard to find, but I finally found what I needed to help prove the argument I am going to make here.

In the early 1960s, television programmes were recorded on giant reels of industry standard videotape, measuring two inches wide, and costing £200 per half hour. Meanwhile, the biggest star on British TV at the time, Tony Hancock, was to be paid £4000 per episode for his new ITV series, although he would be paying for the scripts out of this – the highest paid writer was given no more than £500. Put another way, that £200 video tape is the equivalent of nearly FOUR THOUSAND POUNDS today.

This massive expense is the root cause of the problem that “Doctor Who” fans know all too much about. From the original series that began in 1963, ninety-seven episodes were destroyed after their broadcast – the video tapes were transferred to cheaper film stock, to be repeated sold to stations in other countries, and the expensive tapes were reused for other shows. Quite often, the BBC did not keep hold of their film copy, or they would also destroy that later.

This has led to bizarre situations where copies of episodes have resurfaced, like nine Patrick Troughton-starring episodes being discovered at a station in Nigeria in 2016 - other episodes have also been animated, using soundtracks of episodes that someone watching at home had recorded on a reel-to-reel tape recorder. Only a few seconds of the first transformation from one Doctor to another still exist, because it was shown in an episode of “Blue Peter” the BBC still have.

Evidently, there has been a point where the makers of a TV programme still had to decide whether to swallow the cost of a video tape, bizarre as that may seem today, or whether the ephemeral nature of TV at the time, with no home video market in existence, meant that erasing the product of hard work became a possibility, especially when more expensive colour broadcasting began.

The results of these decisions can seem baffling today – three episodes of “Dad’s Army” are still missing, and BBC Four could only start showing “Top of the Pops” every week from 1977 because only from then was every episode kept. On the other hand, over fifty episodes of the notorious “Black and White Minstrel Show,” deemed racist even at the time, still exist, but the first male-to-male kiss on TV, in a 1960 production of Jean Anouilh’s play “Colombe,” was lost until 2011 – the context here even more ironic because no-one had known that the kisser, Sean Connery, would become a star later.

Home video, home streaming, and the insatiable desire for content, has made the decision on what to keep more democratic than it could otherwise be – you have to keep everything, because you don’t know what people may want to re-discover later. The legal loophole that allows members of the public to keep copyrighted material for their own personal use, without profiting or gaining from it, was closed in 1979, as a result of bringing the comedian Bob Monkhouse to court, after lending a copy of a film he had to one of Terry Wogan’s sons. When Monkhouse died in 2003, his archive of 36,000 video tapes and countless other films and radio recordings, including multiple missing episodes of “Hancock’s Half Hour,” and even Sir Lenny Henry’s first appearance on TV from 1975, in an episode of “New Faces,” something Henry had been trying to find for forty years. Obviously, Monkhouse saw something there that was worth keeping.

BUT WHAT A FOOL BELIEVES, HE SEES [80]

I had already decided it was time to talk about “fake news” when dictionary publishers Collins yesterday proclaimed the term as their word of the year, just as Oxford Dictionaries had done with “post-truth” last year. The use of “fake news” had, according to Collins, increased by 365 per cent in comparison to last year, confirming not only an increased awareness among the general public awareness of what it I, and how to identify it, but of an increasing boldness in using the term – we all know who is responsible for that, but I will return to that later.

I am pretty sure anyone encounters a website named “Leigh Spence Is Dancing with the Gatekeepers” knows what they are to expect. Each article be presented from the point of view of a particular person, i.e. me, and that person may have a particular axe to grind. At the same time, I expect that you know that without me telling you because, from Wikipedia to Facebook to Twitter to Snapchat, anyone can say whatever they want online, and the more respectable you appear, the more seriously you will be taken. Your CV may be watertight, but the interview is what gets you the job – plus, using your own .com address, and pink and white text on an International Klein Blue background also helps. I know I am writing in a more anecdotal style than an academic one, and sources are not listed like an essay, but if I know that someone wants to look something up, either because they are interested, or want to check it is correct, my work is done.

However, the Collins dictionary definition of the noun “fake news” will be: “false, often sensational, information disseminated under the guise of news reporting.” Interestingly, when you go to collinsdictionary.com, and enter the word “false,” the first example of the adjective “false” is: “It was quite clear the President was being given false information by those around him.” Oh well – there is no mention about separate objective and subjective uses of the word “false,” or of “fake news,” because to do so would be to fall down the proverbial rabbit hole.

It is no surprise that Donald Trump could take credit for popularising the term “fake news” – in an interview with Mike Huckabee, he said, “the media is really, the word, one of the greatest of all [the] terms I’ve come up with, is ‘fake’ … I guess other people have used it perhaps over the years, but I’ve never noticed it.” For someone who is also quoted as saying, “I am more humble than you could ever understand,” claiming to have invented words that have existed for decades is about as hubristic as you can get.

The accumulated use of “fake news,” already used to describe “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart” and “The Onion,” has grown because of Trump, but his use of it – “the Fake News is at it again” – is different from the Collins definition, because it is the same as his abbreviation “MSM” (mainstream media), in that it is anything he personally doesn’t like. Donald Trump uses “fake news” like the main character of J.D. Salinger’s “The Catcher in the Rye,” Holden Caulfield, calls everyone “goddam phoneys.” That we can now argue the meanings of words is par for the course these days, and that we can do it with “fake news” is even worse.