Friday, February 13, 2009

What a load of pap

Not the best night for press relations last night with BBC3’s somewhat repetitive mini-doc Paparazzi: Next Generation. Camera crews followed a group of young bucks with telephoto lenses, driving with one hand, jumping red lights and sticking their cameras in the faces of everyone from Amy Winehouse to Goldie Hawn.

Narrator Lee Williams did his best to big them up by referring to them variously as Top Gun, Lone Gun and Sharpshooter and pondered what it must be like “looking down the barrel”. There were shoulder-cam shots of chirpy chappies running around in pursuit of prey and one or two of them came over well; waiting for hours in one spot, giving it large when the moment came, and downloading £££-a time shots from their laptops.

But it was worth it to see the hapless Ryan Essex standing outside a Thames-side hotel waiting for the prime Minister emerge from credit crunch crisis talks. Somehow he hadn’t sussed that while shouting “Paris” outside Stringfellows may elicit a pout in his direction, shouting repeatedly “Gordon” would not.

Having failed to snap anything of value he complained: “It would have hurt him to turn round. Why is he so moody?”

He may have got a few pix in the papers, but it wouldn’t hurt to read them….

Friday, February 06, 2009

Oh Carol, you and your big mouth

It didn't surprise me at all that Carol Thatcher compounded her golliwog gaffe by taking ages to apologise.

From the little time I've spent in her company, it's obvious she has a somewhat bombastic sense of fun and I’ve no doubt, genuinely imagined it to be innocuous at the time and in the context she said it.

Admittedly, it would have been better if she'd fessed up and backed down on the spot. It’s daft, belongs to a best-forgotten age when black and asian people were described as coloured and it’s galling to find it’s still in circulation. But did it really warrant Adrian Chiles and Jo Brand "storming out" in disgust? Stick her firmly in her place by all means. It’d sink in later. But don’t blab…

Carol's a big character, great fun and it’s the public’s loss to see joining the queue through the BBC’s PC exit door.

And don‘t tell me there is any contrition in this punishment. No sooner had Jonathan Ross served his time in obscurity, he was back on his Friday night show taking the p*** and milking it for all it was worth.