Posts Tagged ‘tv’
“Warning: this guide contains highly offensive language and discussion of content which may cause offence”*…
Salty language, systematically sorted…
Ofcom [the UK’s communications regulator— essentially their FCC] commissioned Ipsos MORI to conduct research to help them understand public attitudes towards offensive language on TV and radio. This document serves as a Quick Reference Guide summarising views towards the acceptability of individual words on TV and radio…
For example…
And there’s more: other sections unpack the relative offensiveness of “references to body parts,” “sexual references,” “political references,” “references to race, nationality, and ethnicity,” “references to sexual orientation and gender identity,” “religious references,” and “Non-English words” [mostly South Asian].
Public Attitudes to Offensive Language on TV and Radio: a Quick Reference Guide… a report that doubles as a remarkable lexicon.
See also: “Cursing and the Bloody Class Struggle.”
* from the title page of this report
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As we curse carefully, we might recall that it was on this date in 1888 that The “From Hell” letter was postmarked. Received the next day by George Lusk, head of the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee, it purported to be from the serial killer we know as Jack the Ripper, who enclosed half a preserved human kidney. The police and Lusk’s group received hundreds of letters pertaining to the Ripper case, many dozen supposedly from the killer himself. The “From Hell” letter is one of the few that has been seriously considered to be genuine.
“It isn’t easy, coming up with book titles. A lot of the really good ones are taken. Thin Thighs in 30 Days, for example. Also The Bible.”*…
“What’s in a name?” mused Shakespeare in Romeo and Juliet (first published in print in 1597 as An Excellent Conceited Tragedie of Romeo and Juliet). Would he have said the same, one wonders, if he’d been around to hear that F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby was at one point titled Trimalchio in West Egg; or that for Dracula, Bram Stoker considered The Dead Un-Dead? There is certainly an art to the great title, as demonstrated by the late English humourist Alan Coren, who when choosing a name for a collection of essays in 1975 noticed that the most popular books in Britain at that time were about cats, golf and Nazis. So he called his book Golfing for Cats and slapped a swastika on the front cover.
We also learn that care should be taken to avoid tempting an ironic fate. Bill Hillman, the American author of the 2014 guide Fiesta: How to Survive the Bulls of Pamplona, was gored by the bulls of Pamplona that same year—and again the next year. And in the 2017 British national election, the Conservative politician Gavin Barwell, author of How to Win a Marginal Seat, lost his marginal seat.
The humorous literary award known as the Bookseller/Diagram Prize for Oddest Title of the Year has been running since 1978, with past winners including Oral Sadism and the Vegetarian Personality (1986) by Glenn C. Ellenbogen, The Joy of Waterboiling (2018) by Achse Verlag and The Dirt Hole and its Variations by Charles L. Dobbins (2019). But we can go back centuries earlier to find their ancestors…
For example…
An Essay upon Wind, with Curious Anecdotes of Eminent Peteurs (1787) by Charles James Fox
Sun-beams May Be Extracted From Cucumbers, But the Process is Tedious (1799) by David Daggett
How to Cook Husbands (1898) by Elizabeth Strong Worthington
Fishes I Have Known (1905) by Arthur A. Henry Bevan
Does the Earth Rotate? No! (1919) by William Westfield
Thought Transference (Or What?) in Birds (1931) by Edmund Selous
The Boring Sponges Which Attack South Carolina Oysters (1956) by Bears Bluff Laboratories
A Weasel in My Meatsafe (1957) by Phil Drabble
Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Nude Mice (1977) edited by Tatsuji Nomura et al.
…
Just a taste of the delights at: “77 Strange, Funny, and Magnificent Book Titles You’ve Probably Never Heard Of.” From @foxtosser.
* Dave Barry
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As we nominate, we might send bright birthday greetings to Greg Sherwood Cohelan; he was born 70 years ago today. An accomplished marketing consultant, he is best known for his decades on the radio and television (as Greg Sherwood) in the San Francisco Bay area.
The son of Don Sherwood, “The World’s Greatest Disc Jockey” (who ruled the Bay Area airwaves in the 1950s and 60s), Greg began his on-air career while in high school as a correspondent for his father, doing a call-in show as he drove across country, “Young Man on the Road”; he followed that with a stint as a morning traffic reporter, flying around in a helicopter doing traffic reports for his dad.
After college he joined KQED, the local public television and radio organization, first as a volunteer, then as an employee. Over the years, he’s become the face of KQED-TV and the voice of KQED radio, hosting interviews, anchoring award-winning documentaries, and especially during pledge periods.
“Call right now, 1 (800) 937-8850.”
“Commercials are about products… in the same sense that the story of Jonah is about the anatomy of whales”*…
In a civilization organized primarily around the funneling of capital to corporations, commercials offer a space of transcendent communion with the objects of our dependence and desire. They take place in a realm understood to be ideational without quite being imaginary—existing not in any one person’s mind, but ambiently, on a level of reality we rarely think to question, encoded in the daily order of things as neatly as the peanut butter aisle of a suburban grocery store. (This bare proximity to capitalism’s exposed nerves, combined with a habitual callousness to human dignity, is I believe why, in the recent words of A.S. Hamrah, “TV commercials are the worst thing to see on hallucinogenic drugs.”) These commercials embody and transmit all kinds of cultural norms, declaiming on the career-destroying horror of “even one flake” of dandruff, the correct way to manage a labor force, how women should interpret cough syrup viscosity, and so on.
Commercials also encode and preserve basic aesthetic and narrative conventions. Musically, they’re a trove of low-rent original product psalms, in styles ranging from quietly sophisticated poultry rock to funky rugged simplicity jams that sound like a person in a boardroom frantically describing the inner life of a coalminer. They introduce stock characters from discomfiting gym teacher to comic book nerd. They offer an education in America’s throbbing corporate epiculture, whose dark world they echo in a thousand ways—through who gets represented and who not, portrayals of nations and cultures, depictions of idealized daily life, enshrinement of a particular commercial landscape, style parodies, intimations of eternity, messages of warning, messages of beneficence, and more—all calligraphed into air and sent streaming through the walls of our homes by giant corporate antennas…
From Ian Dreiblatt, “Toward a Theory of the American TV Commercial of, Oh, Say, About 1990.”
[image above: source]
* Neil Postman
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As we take it all in, we might celebrate National Tooth Fairy Day.
In the mid-1920s fairies were used for all sorts of health education from bath fairies to fresh air fairies as a way to get kids to remember to eat their vegetables, wash behind their ears and get a good night’s rest. Unlike toothpaste today, that advertises fruity flavors and sparkles to get kids excited to brush their teeth, in 1925 it was probably quite a bit more difficult considering the pastes were mostly peroxide and baking soda. One advertisement was for a Fairy Wand Tooth Whitener. This product promised to brush away cigarette and coffee stains. The ad was aimed at both children and adults, we hope!
Then in 1927, Esther Watkins Arnold printed an eight-page playlet for children called The Tooth Fairy. It was the same year Sir Arthur Conan Doyle “proved” his claim that fairies and gnomes are real and “verified” with pictures of two little girls surrounded by fairies. The world was ripe with imagination and primed to have a tooth fairy about to come collect the lost teeth of little boys and girls and leave a coin or two behind.
Arnold’s play began to be performed in schools the following year, and the tooth fairy has been slipping into homes ever since. She (or he) started leaving nickels and dimes under the pillows of sleeping children. Over the years there have been variations on the theme. In 1942, in an article written by columnist Bob Balfe in the Palm Beach Post, his children received War Stamps to put in their books when they lost a tooth…
“Life doesn’t imitate art, it imitates bad television”*…
And sometime, good television: full episodes of the frighteningly-prophetic Max Headroom at Dailymotion.com— watch ’em while you can!
* Woody Allen
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As we cope with blipverts, we might recall that it was on this date in 1959 that the legendary Edward R. Murrow aired his 500th and final Person to Person interview (with actress Lee Remick). The series continued for another two years with Charles Collingwood as host.
“Communism is like one big phone company”*…
The Beatles were big enough that even the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics had to deal with it, somehow. In 1976 Soviet-controlled TV—the only available televised media in the entire country—played a peculiar Russian version of Paul McCartney’s deathless song “Let It Be” as an oddly baroque and defiantly un-glitzy bit of variety TV. Odd to say about television in the worker’s paradise, but the trappings of the proceedings seem to me somewhat … bourgeois?…
The totalitarian tale in toto: “Bizarre video of the Beatles’ ‘Let It Be’ from Soviet TV of the 1970s.”
* Lenny Bruce
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As we wonder if imitation is, in fact, the sincerest form of flattery, we might recall that it was on this date in 1961 that the Beatles, fresh back from Hamburg, played their first date at the Cavern Club in Liverpool. The band swiftly became a regular fixture at the Cavern, attracting a loyal audience to over 290 performances until their final appearance on August 3, 1963. For this first show, lasting from 1-2pm, they earned a £5 fee to share among them.
The Beatles (with Pete Best on drums) at the Cavern Club
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