BUT I’D RATHER STAY ON THE SOFA [184]

In his video review of the “Huge Screen ver. 2,” a cheap LCD game, Dr. Stuart Ashen wondered if he would have a good time playing it. “Yeah I know it’s not going to happen. Join me after the break.” The screen fades to black. A caption appears: “There are no advertisement breaks. This is the internet.” The previous shot fades back in: “Oh yeah, that was weird. Thought I was on television for a moment. Hmm, I’d probably know I was on television because I’d be being paid.”

This video was posted to YouTube on 25^th October 2010. Nine years and over 400,000 views later, I’m watching it on my television, preceded by an ad for the National Lottery. I only came across the “ashens” channel over a month ago – the first video I came across was the “Chicken in a Can,” a lunch / autopsy hybrid that included the bones and giblets. At that point, the channel had 774 videos available – diving into it is like deciding your next box set to watch will be “Coronation Street”.

I am beginning to think that “ashens” – subtitled “Comedy, Technology, Idiocy” - may well be the archetypal YouTube channel. It is almost as old as YouTube itself, and has evolved both with it and because of it – what must have started as a bit of fun became a career because the platform evolved to accommodate the more professional videos people have posted to it. YouTube is not social media, it is public access television, in the same way that Facebook and Twitter are really publishers.

Ashen’s first video on the channel was “The Truth About Open Source,” a skit made using action figures and computer effects, about why you should pay for licensed software. It is typical of the short, funny videos people first placed on YouTube, when people were testing it to see what worked there – not everyone can put up their day at the zoo. It was posted on 25^th February 2006, only two months after the platform officially launched, and nine months before it was bought by Google. Video resolution was only 320 x 240 pixels, and a ten-minute limit on video length was imposed to deter the pirated upload of TV shows, although you could post longer videos if you respected YouTube’s terms of service.

Widescreen was introduced in November 2008, prompting Ashen to post a video warning YouTube about the sides of the screen they were now exposing: “That’s where the monsters live... that one’s got a hat on.” By this point, the other type of videos he posted became more prominent, as they were elsewhere on the platform: show-and-tell reviews of products, mostly bad ones, framed against the stage of a brown sofa. His second video was the first of the “Pop Station” LCD game consoles, endlessly rehashing poor games with incoherently-translated instructions, but it would take two years for these occasional videos, co-existing with Noseybonk and other sketches, before it would gain the “Hello” opening title card they have used to this day.

I would not normally watch “unboxing” videos, but if you base these types of videos around obscure or poor technology, mundane or badly made “tat” from Poundland, and exotic or expired food and drink, there is much scope to apply dry wit and sarcasm to what you uncover. Because Ashen’s videos are usually unscripted, they usually also serve as their own “reaction” videos, a category of YouTube video that is also prevalent – I am aware that someone did a video reacting to the “chicken in a can” video, in the perfect example of media eating itself.

However, Ashen has continued to make space for comedy, adding an edge to the unscripted reviews. For example, a video that involved clearing a drawer of items to be reviewed contains a sketch about creating the dice that will determine the fate of the objects, loading their eventual destruction with great symbolism. One video was ended by sticking a cartoon frog into a corner while bizarre music played, because it can be done. One review, for a toy violin, was abandoned and re-recorded because Ashen broke down laughing at the poorly translated English on the box, explaining that master violin creators were “nicolas, Marty,” “Antonio Stella bottom tile,” and “ji plug pu – melon nai” – the two videos have a total of nearly two million views between them.

I am aware I haven’t mentioned the feature films yet – the science fiction fantasy comedy “Ashens and the Quest for the Game Child” (2013), and the upcoming “Ashens and the Polybius Heist”. You know you have done well when you can raise the money to make your own film, but when you can get Robert Llewellyn from “Red Dwarf,” and Warwick Davis from “Celebrity Squares,” you name must have some cachet. Oh, and the books: “Terrible Old Games You’ve Probably Never Heard Of,” and “Attack of the Flickering Skeletons: More Terrible Old Games You’ve Probably Never Heard Of.”

(...And how could I forget to mention “Chanticleer Hegemony,” a Pop Station LCD game that featured on a box, but not inside it, and was tracked down after five years, only to find it was literally a cockfighting game, because that was something someone made.)

As Ashen explained on the BBC’s “Newsnight” in 2015, when the word “unboxing” made it into the Oxford English Dictionary, the ultimate reason for doing these videos is because people want to watch them:

“I think when, in the past, when you wanted to buy a new product, you would be very led by advertising, the only things you could see would be in adverts, or perhaps in a very controlled environment, like a shop, whereas people like the raw honesty of just, here is a box, and here inside is what you will get if you buy it, and if we can make that entertaining while we show people it, it’s all good.”

This is the point where YouTube became a professional platform, as in people could begin earning a living from their work. The partner program that began in May 2007 currently pays revenue to channels with more than a thousand subscribers, and more than four thousand hours of time spent watching their videos within 12 months – the latter requirement was added in 2018, a consequence of both the increased number of channels with multiple subscribers, but also the increasing professional standard of the videos posted, as watching online video eats away at traditional television – any video scoring over 100,000 views within a week is already beating most television audiences on satellite and cable television in the UK, and anything over a million views is approaching BBC Two and Channel 4 primetime figures.

I am glad that the YouTube algorithm somehow suggested “ashens” to me, as I haven’t laughed so much in a long time – that can be put down mostly to the toy violin. What it has taught me is that if you think you have a video something that people find funny, put it out there, and make sure they know about it. I should try it myself - if a comic monologue can be wrenched from jelly beans, I could make a video explaining how Quorn could be made in more interesting shapes, then present a blue pyramid of the stuff.

However, to start a career on YouTube, I would need to start by posting at least ten videos, of ten minutes in length, that would get at least 2,400 views each year, with everyone watching to the end, with nearly half of them deciding to subscribe for future content – that is the minimum before I even see a penny from YouTube, unless I get sponsorship. Perhaps, I should make something for fun first.

WE HAVE THE CHANCE TO TURN THE PAGES OVER [100]

This is my one hundredth article for “Leigh Spence is Dancing with the Gatekeepers,” probably the best blog title in the world, and I thank you all for reading what began as a weekly writing exercise in May 2016. I must have written at least sixty thousand words since then but, perhaps more importantly, sales of the “Daily Mail” newspaper fell by over two hundred thousand copies in that time. I know these figures are not related, but I have more to say about this later.

What I love about writing is the process, the build-up, the formation of an idea. This usually culminates in a frenzy of typing at the last possible moment, like this one has, especially if the ideas came later. For months, I assumed trying to equate the outlandish nature of the current political climate with Dadaist performance art did not work out, leaving me with lessons for next time, but that article, using a quote from Alfred Jarry’s absurdist play “Ubu Roi” – “That’s a beautiful speech, but nobody’s listening” – has become the most popular article so far.

Other moments of apparent madness included making blue pyramids of Quorn, making the food more attractive to children’ the assertion that “ain’t” is a proper word that adds punch to song lyrics; that our old family car, an Austin Ambassador with a brown interior, is now one of the rarest production cars in Britain; that people build super-basements so they no longer have to go out; that there are many types of Range Rover to help those that identify as Range Rover drivers, so they can live their life the way they feel; and that Donald Trump is the first world leader to restrict his own ability to speak, rather than restrict his own people. When there is always a next time, ideas come freely.

But what if time is running out? With endless space online, and a curious brain that won’t shut up, my writing has no reason to cease, but what if I was a newspaper, speaking with a one-track mind, in a country where newspaper sell fewer copies than ever?

The world knows “Daily Mail” as the most-read news website in the English, with a very showbiz-led mix on its brightly coloured front page, but UK residents also know it as a very conservative, populist newspaper that makes many people want to spit – you can buy t-shirts and badges saying, “I’m the one the Daily Mail warned you about”. It began in 1896, but its current form evolved in 1971, when the seriously-minded broadsheet “Mail” was merged with a more populist tabloid paper, the “Daily Sketch,” with “Sketch” staff effectively taking over the new compact “Mail,” building a fiercely confident, conservative voice that, within a few years, overturned fifty years of the “Daily Express” beating it at its own game – the “Mail” now sells as much as the “Express,” “Daily Mirror” and “Daily Star” put together.

So why did I mention the “Mail’s” sales had fallen? Looking at figures quoted by the “Press Gazette” website, its circulation peaked at 2.59 million copies in September 2001. By February 2018, that figure halved to 1.34 million, down eleven percent on the previous year. The global shift to online put printed newspapers into decline, and when Mail Online effectively gives you the same content for free, why bother with the “Daily Mail” at all?

After reading it for the last month, I wish I knew. I consider myself to be politically in the centre, but I am definitely to the left of the “Mail.” It reads like a magazine, using many double-page spreads of stories and opinion pieces in high-contrast black on white type, bellowing its points down to the reader in length and in depth. Using these pages to brand Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn an informant to a Communist spy, and ex-Formula One boss Max Mosley as much of a racist as his father, everyone with connections to them are also scrutinised and judged for their reactions, and the BBC is criticised for not covering either of the stories at the same length – when Mosley didn’t reply  how the “Mail” wanted, the next day’s headline was “STILL HE WON’T APOLOGISE.” Based on what was printed, both Corbyn and Mosley have some questions to answer, but the “Mail” has already found them guilty as hell, let alone guilty as charged, and any raising of their voices is a threat to a free press.

There has also been the A-Z of Millennial speak, the A-Z of Baby Boomer speak, the “witch hunt” against men by “Hollywood feminists,” how political correctness causes sense of humour failure, stories about the pro-EU bias by inbred left-wing taxpayer-funded BBC, and the usual stuff about politicians, tax avoiders, judges and investment bankers trying to thwart Brexit, preventing the will of the British people. The last of these included a page-length editorial comment with the headline, “They just don’t get it, do they? This elitist class imposing THEIR views on ordinary people…”

I think the “Mail” gets off on hearing itself rage. If the “Mail” were a person, I would run away.

The last months of screaming words has been overwhelming, the spectacle of the Metropolitan liberal elite being lambasted by the Metropolitan conservative elite seemed like an ironic and pointless bonfire, as the “Mail’s” sales continue to fall – Mail Online hides many of the double-page spreads under a link to “Columnists,” leaving the bigger stories to generate views and revenue. For all the outrage over the content of the “Daily Mail” as a newspaper, for how it currently uses acres of paper to tell us to stop using plastic, and for all the advertising boycotts by Lego, Paperchase and Center Parcs, there remains one thing: the figures show the newspaper is dying anyway. Unless the website can support it when printing on paper is too unprofitable to continue, we will live to see the end of the “Daily Mail” – it will happen, it will absolutely happen.

One day, just as in the dream that gave me the name for this blog, I may turn “Leigh Spence is Dancing with the Gatekeepers” into an album, where I will yell at those that tell you what to think, singing “all they have are words” until fadeout. I don’t know if that will be in the next hundred articles, but I will see where my mind takes me.

OH WHAT WILL I BE BELIEVING [58]

Logo #1

Firstly, a big thank you to you all for reading what has been quite a bewildering year’s worth of subjects. When I began “Dancing with the Gatekeepers,” on 30^th May 2016, my intention has always been to understand each subject that came to mind each week, and to learn something from it, confirming why the most popular articles so far range wildly from David Bowie to Donald Trump, from Quorn to the Futurist Cookbook, from big data to “legal names,” from George Orwell to word puzzles, and from the art of telling a joke to the history of the word “ain’t.”

If anyone has sought to find out more, or ask a question about something, or someone, having read my work here, then that is the best possible outcome – I only write because I am happy to admit I don’t have all the answers.

However, the first subject I featured, on how John Lennon’s flippant remark to a journalist’s question became, at the insistence of Yoko Ono, the inspired dream of a man on a flaming pie, telling Lennon to name his band, “The Beatles, with an ‘a.’” Once you know something is untrue, the persistent insistence that “ceci n’est pas une pipe” becomes a deranged fantasy. When it comes to cold facts, those that mean the world works on a base level, you should not the use joke in René Magritte’s painting “The Treachery of Images” as a way to live your life or, even worse, assert your point of view over those of others.

The two words of the last year have been “Brexit” and “Trump.” Even if I look back on this article in twenty, thirty, fifty years, I will not need any further explanation than that, and I don’t expect you may not either. I have tried not to advance a particular view about either of these – politically, I am in the centre, so if the world is substantively better for everyone after Brexit and Trump, then that is fine by me – but the one thing I should not have to be, if I did say anything about either subject, is afraid to say anything at all.

Freedom of speech is paramount in this world – all opinions should be able to be heard, then we can decide on their merit. I am not the type of person who tells people that the truth is being kept from them, or that they are blind to it, because I would need to have concrete evidence to prove that, unless I wanted to engage in conspiracy theory. When certain voices think they have been silenced, because one outlet decides they don’t want them there anymore, they should think whether that place has its own voices to protect, or whether they might have been in the wrong place to begin with. Every voice has its own place and, if requires, what it says can be tested, in a court of law.

I wrote a great number of notes for what I wanted to write about here, and quite a few of them could become their own discussion here in future weeks. It is a febrile time for thought about our own places in the world, having felt that everything has been turned upside down. However, I feel safe that things will work out better for everyone in the end, even if I don’t know why - that might just be me.

The dream that gave me the name “Dancing with the Gatekeepers” was my having recorded an album, rock and/or electronic in nature, in which one song led to my shouting “all you have are words” over and over again. Despite what others may choose to do with their words, they are all I have too.

Good luck, everyone.

I'VE GOT HUNGRY EYES [7]

I am going to mention Quorn quite a bit here but, as will become clear, this is not an endorsement – for a start, I like Linda McCartney sausages as well.

I don’t really eat red meat. I’m not a vegetarian either – I just prefer chicken or fish most of the time. Instead, I am more likely to eat Quorn, now preferring its meat-ish taste to what it is imitating. In fact, when I do eat actual red meat, I do get a bit surprised – “oh, so that’s what they’re copying.”

Choosing not to eat meat is an ethical and lifestyle choice, and so is choosing to eat something that looks like meat, but Quorn was developed not to satisfy this sort of demand – in the 1960s, there was a fear the world would run short on protein-rich food within twenty years.

The British chemical giant ICI had already developed a process named “Pruteen,” where bacterial single cell protein was turned into animal feed, so the head of Rank Hovis MacDougall, J. Arthur Rank, instructed his company’s research laboratory to look into converting starch, left over from bread production, to make a protein for human consumption. (As Rank was also the UK’s biggest film producer at the time, he could also have produced an effective biochemical weapon from the jokes in “Carry On Camping.”)

Quorn went on sale in 1985, in a joint effort between Rank and ICI, becoming very successful. The carbon footprint produced in Quorn production is eighty per cent less than beef, and free-range eggs are used as a binding agent. For what is a type of fungi, the ingenuity in producing products that taste like meat, in addition to its appearance, cannot be denied. However, I still cannot get over how you can only buy Quorn that is made to look like meat, almost confirming that is the only way people will buy it.

The furthest it has strayed from this is the Quorn “Roast,” or “Family Roast,” a concoction resembling a giant sausage that tastes like it is trying to tap into the collective experience, in its customers, of what a “roast” is, regardless of whether it is turkey, or chicken, or anything else – for that reason, it may be the best product they sell!

I just feel Quorn have missed a trick by using their protein to develop food that, while still tasting like meat, could look however they wish, bringing in even more people based on curiosity. I have had the idea of “Quorn Blue Pyramids” stuck in my head for ages, but while I cannot make that myself, Quorn can have this idea for free. Much like Birds Eye have contorted potatoes into faces, dinosaurs and so on for children, perhaps Quorn could try the same.

Having said all that, I am having fish for dinner today, so I will have to think more about this later.