Mocha in the Family Latte: Race on American screens

Posted on January 15, 2013 by Samira Ahmed

“He should not be here, ” said the fish in the pot. ” he should not be here when your mother is not.” – The Cat In the Hat Dr Seuss (1957)

It is a conundrum worthy of the massive geek brain of The Big Bang Theory’s theoretical physicist Sheldon Cooper: Why, apart from the occasional background character or extra, are there no black people in one of America’s biggest and best sitcoms? The question comes up very quickly if you start typing “Why” and “The Big Bang Theory” into Google.

True there’s the Indian guy, Raj, who might be gay. Occasionally he makes jokes about his brownness and having sex with white women  — “ Why not put a little mocha in the family latte?”  But the omission of a main African American man from the bonhomie is increasingly eerie. Historian Timothy Stanley in his recent BBC2 documentary Family Guys – What Sitcoms Say About America Now found a racially polarized American TV culture – very different to the more integrated viewing of the 70s and 80s.One in which it has, instead, become normal to commission a new all white or all black version of a popular show such as Sex and The City.

So watching Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained –about an ex-slave, played by the handsome Jamie Foxx, seeking revenge on plantation owners – is in its own way quite liberating:  It has Samuel L Jackson as the evil “house” slave after all. The screen play is as full of N-words as his previous films, but with a pointed relevance quite different to a bunch of white gangsters throwing it around in the Reservoir Dogs diner.  The KKK are ridiculed as a bunch of dumb fools.  It’s a buddy film with Christoph Waltz playing the kindly German bounty hunter who helps Django in his Wagnerian quest to liberate his beloved “Broomhilda”.

A significant amount of the screenplay’s torture and sexual violence has been eliminated from the final edit, making it much easier to enjoy the humour and the witty wordplay between the film’s charismatic actors. But Django and his wife still spend a lot of the film being abused, or sitting in silence. Fans are loving the transgressiveness of the whole proposition, conveniently protected behind the genre of a retro-style Spaghetti Western. Django caged naked upside down with white people threatening to castrate him might be playing with deep seated white American racial fears of African American male sexuality right before our eyes. But does the long awaited bloody revenge – beautifully shot as it is – quite make up for the extended racial humiliation that precedes it? I’m not sure.

Assistant Professor of English and Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania,  Salamishah Tillet, is the author of Sites of Slavery: Citizenship and Racial Democracy in the Post-Civil Rights Imagination.  In an interview with me on the World Service arts programme The Strand, she pointed out that the finished film actually sanitises the treatment of slave women and Django, who hardly interacts with the other slaves, could be seen, to represent the “exceptional” African American, like Beyonce´ or President Obama, who is above and separate from the masses.

CatInTheHat

In his 2008 paper “The Black Cat in the Hat: Seuss and Race in the 1950s” Philip Nel, Professor of English at Kansas State University presented a fun theory: that the cat with his white gloves and jazz-style improvising ways, who first appeared in print in 1957, at the height  of rock ‘n roll, could be seen as a metaphor for the perceived threat of disruptive black music and culture coming into white middle class homes via the young. Nel thinks the cat visually references the type of a “northern Dandy Negro”. As he puts it: “A black character in a white family’s home, he is both fun and terrifying.  He liberates Sally and her brother from stifling social rules, but brings many dangers — the very real possibility of the household’s destruction, the fish’s death, and mother’s censure.”

Dr Seuss might be onto something there. The alternative is a carefully infantilised black presence: the offensive so-called “magical Negro” trope of black characters who offer spiritual insight to the white lead, in films such as The Legend of Bagger Vance or The Green Mile. Is the alternative only an absence of black characters to avoid the discomfort? Sitcom writer Alyson Fouse in Tim Stanley’s documentary mused on the sad fact that, in her view, black people were regarded in mainstream tv as “scary and dangerous and you don’t want them dating your daughter”.

Tarantino, a Sheldon Cooper geek of the film kind, has written some brilliant roles for black actors such as Samuel L Jackson and Pam Grier. His hero Django ends the films in triumph. And The Big Bang Theory doesn’t deliberately offend. In a recent episode Star Trek The Next Generation actor LeVar Burton, who happens to be African American, made a sweet cameo appearance.  (Incidentally he recently pointed out that he was never allowed a sexual romance on TNG). 36 years ago he became a star in the mini series, Roots, which got a mainstream US TV audience to confront the horror of slavery. Now I find myself wishing for some middle ground – between the N-word extravaganza of a Tarantino revenge fantasy and the unspoken racial segregation at the heart of American TV culture.

A version of this was first published in The Big Issue magazine

Further reading

The Strand Jan 10th 2013  – discussion with Professor of English and Africana studies, Salamishah Tillet of Pennsylvania University on what Django Unchained and Lincoln say about race in America today

Phil Nel Website — on children’s books and popular culture

The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel – India as one giant Magical Negro

Django Unchained – screenplay

The Cat In the Hat – on Good Reads

The Problem With The Big Bang Theory – Critical post that inspired this:

A Nerd’s Defence of The Big Bang Theory – (Jan 2013)

 

Posted in Children, Cowboys!, Culture, Film, Media, TV, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

The secret elite club of ex-Virgin Marys

Posted on December 23, 2012 by Samira Ahmed

“I was always the sort of child who got picked on to DO things, you know?” recalls Julie Christie’s Darling, in the 1965 film, as we see her as a 6 year old Mary in the school nativity play. (watch from 3’20”) It’s the start of a journey to superstardom as a manipulative, petulant but beautiful blonde. The scene captures in film a first lesson that many women get from the school nativity play — that it’s looks and playing up to the boss, not talent, that gets you on life.

Communications officer Alison Charlton says: “As a non-Mary it taught me – at age 5 – that the power of patronage is arbitrary and tough to challenge.” Many adults in their 30s and 40s recall a pre-multicultural casting rule: “At my school and Brownies (in rural Essex in the 80s),” remembers homemaker and gardener Alison Gibbs, “you had to be blonde to be Mary or an angel. I was always a shepherd.” As for two future freelance writers: “Jewish girls weren’t allowed to be Mary. Ahem,” says Lucy Marcovitch. “I always got to read the bloody prayer.” Lucy Sweetman says she was cast as “the ‘foreign girl’, dressed in a belly dancing outfit, who didn’t “get“ Christmas. I was tutored in Christian ways by Angel Gabriel and Santa.”

Time to consult Philip Hodson, former children’s TV agony uncle and a fellow of the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy: “At such a young age it must play to some extent with your brain. What would it be like to produce God? Does it give you a promotion? Have I got a special role in the world?”

And as for rejection? Hodson compares it to being a failed beauty queen or  overlooked in a school play, which therapists know does affect people for the rest of their life. “There’s a sense of…being dis-preferred and anonymous.”

A confession here. I was a pre-school Mary. So was my daughter. It’s not that I think I’m special. Certainly later at Catholic school I was relegated to a minor role  in the rather daring Pina Bausch Tanz Theatre-style Nativity. (Mary had to pull a yogic “bow” pose for the finale).

But even at 3 it was a unique experience to have all those children lining up to lay tributes at my feet. My daughter, now 11 recalls: “When you put that blue veil on, you feel like a goddess.” The Hindus know this of course. Naming children after goddesses and embodying them for festivals has long been an honest and open ritual.

I would claim unexpected insights. Mine came during an A-level English Lit class on the Jesuit priest and poet Gerard Manley Hopkins. The Blessed Virgin Compared To The Air We Breathe was the text. As we read his passionate lines about holding up his hand against the blue sky of her mantle “Rich, rich it laps./Round the four fingergaps” I remember thinking I had one up on Gerard. This is not to exclude the potentially interesting experiences of boys who played Mary, but they tend to keep it quiet. And there is in Marian blue – an early lesson in trademark style from the first woman with a signature colour.

I find myself discussing Marian style and the linked veiled elegance of nuns with  actor Murray Melvin (star of The Devils), who is like me, fascinated by them. He however has played a nun for Peter Maxwell Davies, while  I was restricted to playing at nuns by putting my navy & white C&A polyester poncho on upside down over my head in best Fraulein Maria style. Crucially both Nuns and Mary are set up as better than or not quite one of us. “Of course when you put that wimple on, you’re not a woman. You’re a nun,” Murray points out. He was educated by the Sisters of Mercy who had special beautifully made enamel pins to hold up their winged head gear. “I used to find dropped pins on the floor with this pale blue head and keep them,” he said. “The French match it with brown.” It emerges that Melvin , immaculately turned out is wearing a Sisters of Mercy blue shirt with a brown cashmere scarf.

As well as being styled divinely, some ex-Marys form a secret club of future high achievers. Journalist Claire Truscott says,“It was funny to discover living in Islamabad that 3 of us correspondents in town had also been Mary in our school nativities.” However  plenty of never-Marys can be motivated by rejection into super achievement.

And what future feminist ex-Marys will tell you is this “star” part is not all it’s cracked up to be. Writer and actor Abigail Burdess: “It looks like the main part but it’s not. Ultimate be quiet and look pretty role. The Shepherd is better. Funny beard.“

Voluntary worker Sarah Kathryn Perry still remembers her one wretched line (made more topical with the monumental media fuss over Kate Middleton): “Oh Joseph, I’m SO tired.” Charity campaign manager Pinky Badhan recalls “crying because I didn’t want to be pregnant.” I can’t have been the only Mary who instinctively wanted to be the Angel Gabriel and do some annunciating. I actually remember my kindly nursery teacher patiently explaining to me, “But you’re the most important part.”

Philip Hodson says that celebration of beautiful, silent women rightly disturbs us. He remembers being in a 1966 Oxford University production of Dr Faustus with Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. “He had a billion lines, but all she had to do as Helen of Troy – a mute part- was go from stage left to stage right – where there was a maid waiting with a G&T in the wings. It was weird to see the biggest draw in Hollywood at the time in a non-speaking part.”

But Mary doesn’t have to be mute and meek. My favourite Mary ever remains the ethereal Sinead O’Connor in Neil Jordan’s masterpiece, The Butcher Boy. Sample quote: “For fuck’s sake.”

Merry Christmas.

A version of this piece first appeared in The Guardian on December 18th

Further reading

The Blessed Virgin… by Gerard Manley Hopkins

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How The Middle East Became Another Planet

Posted on December 17, 2012 by Samira Ahmed

From Flash Gordon’s Ming the Merciless with his harem and his war rocket Ajax, to Frank Herbert’s prophecy-obsessed desert tribes in Dune battling over a valuable resource, the Middle East has always been another planet to western science fiction creators. In his box office hit Argo, Ben Affleck played the CIA agent who in real life rescued 6 Americans from revolutionary Iran via the cover of a science fiction film location trip.

But the film’s real power, lay in how it was itself (apparently without any irony) filmed as a 70s science fiction apocalypse drama. Relentless hordes of zombie Muslims break down gates, smash windows, emerge from side streets to thump their zombie hands against the hero’s minivan, use zombie cunning to reconstruct shredded photos and even chase the departing plane down the tarmac in their relentless hunt for human/American meat.

While it is now fashionable to sneer at the supposed racism of it all, those of us old enough to remember those dark times will never have forgotten the images that appeared on our television news bulletins: the women swathed in black, the chants of hatred, the torment of the US embassy hostages. A nation before our eyes transformed, as if by a virus, into an alien state. Over time secular leaders of the revolution were to find themselves victims of the terrifying purges that followed as the clerics turned a popular uprising into a new theocracy. The Iranian revolution, though dependent on a unique set of Persian and Shia circumstances, was to create and inspire a new generation of Sunni militants; its imagery overlapping with the visual clichés of science fiction not least in the obsessive pursuit of nuclear or “dirty” weapons.

Could Western science fiction have shaped some of those forces too? Writers  have explored the theory that Al Qaeda took its name from an Arab translation of the title of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation novel series. Did Osama Bin Laden read it in the early 70s like the young Newt Gingrich (another fan with ambitions of great power) in his wild teenage years in the West? Even Ayatollah Khomeini, no fan of cinemas and their whoreish fantasies, wrote spiritual advice about marriage with extra-terrestrials.

Egypt’s new Islamist President Mohammed Morsi revealed recently that the 1968 film Planet of the Apes had influenced his vision of nation-building. As I write crowds of ordinary Egyptians are back on the streets protesting his granting of sweeping powers to himself. But President Morsi found a rather bizarre lesson in the film of a repressive religious state that grew out of a world destroyed by war. He implied he knew better than the citizens and court judges contesting his actions: “That’s the conclusion,” he told Time magazine of the film. “Can we do something better for ourselves.”

Mohamed Morsi saw the film when he lived in Los Angeles for several years from the late 1970s. I wonder if he ever watched Conquest of the Planet of the Apes (1972)? Shot in the new Century City Shopping Mall of West Los Angeles, its visuals deliberately re-imagined police brutality against 60s civil rights and student anti-war protestors. When I lived in LA, I wandered round the mall, remembering how the film juxtaposed happy shoppers with the police pouncing on dissidents.

Like President Morsi, the film remained with me and the imagery came alive again as I watched internet footage from last year’s anti-government protests in the Gulf states. Fired on and beaten by riot police, in some states armed by British firms, young people took refuge where they could – in a Costa Coffee in Bahrain – in one case. They were dismissed within their nations, and by some outside, as naïve “Rolex revolutionaries.” (Egyptian economist Tarek Osman talks about the label in our recent Radio 3 Free Thinking discussion with BBC Middle East Editor Jeremy Bowen about the Arab Uprisings) But their abuse was real. In Bahrain, doctors who treated injured protestors were tortured and jailed. In Qatar, a poet who wrote verses inspired by Tunisian uprising, has just been jailed for life. Has the appearance of Western affluence and shared consumer totems made it easier to turn a blind eye? How bad, really, can it be if they are hosting a Grand Prix, the football World Cup or have Top Shop and Starbucks like us?

One of the most mined SF clichés of the 60s and 70s is the affluent society masking a repressive police state.  It used to look heavy handed when it was filmed in the shopping malls of LA. But we find ourselves looking to the Middle East this time to see the political prophecies of science fiction come to life.

This column first appeared in The Big Issue

Further reading/listening

Al-Qaeda and Isaac Asimov’s Foundation (Fantastic Guardian article by Giles Foden 2002)

President Morsi and The Planet of the Apes (NY Times Lede Blog Nov 2012)

The Arab Uprisings and democracy BBC Radio 3 Discussion with Egyptian political economist Tarek Osman and BBC Middle East editor Jeremy Bowen (Nov 2012)

UK arms sales to Bahrain (Guardian Feb 2012)

Cameron defends “legitimate” arms sales to autocratic Gulf states (Telegraph Nov 2012)

Bahraini doctors jailed for treating injured protestors (Guardian Sept 2011)

Poet jailed for life for criticising Qatari Emir (Guardian Nov 2012)

Posted in Books, Culture, History, Politics, Religion, Science, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

That Was Then, This Is Now – Satire from JFK to Savile

Posted on November 28, 2012 by Samira Ahmed

Last night I went to the British Film Institute’s celebration of 50 years of the breakthrough TV satire programme, That Was The Week That Was. (TW3). It featured many of the original cast, writers and modern satirists, and clips including this controversial one above.

It wasn’t seeing the song using the N word and dancing black and white minstrels about the KKK murders and lynchings in Mississippi that did it (though it’s very, very hard to stomach even if you appreciate the savage irony intended). It wasn’t even the idea of the TW3 cast fighting back the tears as they sang a sentimental song about JFK, 24 hours after his assassination. It was the closing script, addressed to camera, when the performers in that JFK special, talked about understanding people’s fear that the “liberalism” he represented might be threatened. The content crossed the line into politically biased comment. To a BBC journalist working today, such a transgression is truly shocking. And if there was a revelation for me, it was the realization of how self consciously alert BBC news staff are to the danger of being accused of liberal bias. And how much effort goes into avoiding accusations of partiality.

Before an audience that included one former DG forced to resign under political pressure (Greg Dyke) the mood quickly shifted from pleasant reminiscence to an honest, and often quite raw debate about what had happened to the atmosphere within which programme producers operate. Rory Bremner, who had to go to Channel 4 to find an outlet for the more overtly political satire he wished to pursue in the 90s, reflected on the fact that “What we call satire is now light entertainment” with panel shows filling the place of more daring work.

TW3 originally went out with an open ended transmission – it could run on for who knows how long? The concept is inconceivable now. David Frost remembered how there was a much shorter command chain. “[The senior  executive] Alasdair Milne protected  TW3 from the pressure of MPs and the establishment,” he recalled. Milne was to be a future DG whose resignation followed what’s widely regarded as  pressure from Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government. As TW3 and Private Eye writers reflected on what they regarded as the cooked up outrage of anti-BBC Fleet St bias, TW3 presenter David Frost said he didn’t fully appreciate just how much they were shielded from that at the time. “He [Milne] wouldn’t let the Director General and others read the script. He read it himself and said he would take responsibility if anything went wrong.”

15 years later, producer John Lloyd (Not The Nine O’ Clock News, Spitting Image) said he benefited too from that culture of trust. “The producer was responsible. There was no referral upwards. It was your responsibility and if you made a mistake you were carpeted [by your boss] and then your boss defended you to the hilt.” Lloyd was reflecting on the Corporation’s current woeful morale, since the failings of the Jimmy Savile Newsnight investigation. An obsession with “compliance” by tier after tier of managers, he and Bremner remarked, had suffocated satire. “Now,” said Lloyd, “everyone’s jibbering in fright if you do anything at all.” He contrasted it to his experience on Not The Nine O’ Clock News when, he said, he was “being encouraged to provoke and challenge.” And remarked on the current BBC climate:   “Now no one will take responsibility either when something goes wrong.” Lloyd pointed out that trusted to make their own decisions, and backed by executives who believed in them, all with the security of real jobs and not shortterm contracts, producers like him didn’t feel they were in danger. “I don’t think I’ve ever taken any risks. I’ve never been sued,” he said. Though he did have to pay the former newsreader Reginald Bosanquet, “for saying he drank too much.”

It wasn’t just about religious sensitivity, either. The final clips of the evening were from that post-JFK assassination programme. Ian Hislop stirred up some real tension in the audience when he criticized script and tone. “There’s no way that level of uncritical sentimentality would happen now,” he pointed out. In the audience the lyric writer of the ballad sung by Millicent Martin that night, said that with hindsight the final verse was mawkish and should have never been aired. TW3 writer and Private Eye co-founder Christopher Booker, who had mostly been stirring up boyish mischief during the evening, as Gerald Kaufman claimed credit for an idea lifted from Booker’s Private Eye, made a confession about that JFK show too. He admitted, that looking back now, the JFK material was too “mawkish.” But some people in the audience felt comparisons with the death of Diana and even 9/11 were unfair. Hislop was pressed to give an example of a jokey cover about an Obama assassination. He did and reminded the audience of the 9/11 Private Eye cover that referred to George Bush’s famous inaction for minutes after being informed by an official of the attacks while reading to pre-schoolers in a classroom.  “It’s Armageddon, sir,” and responding, “Armageddon outta here.” While Hislop didn’t spell it out, the fact is that like the Diana cover about the crowds, the satire was directed NOT at the victims, but at aspects of questionable behaviour. Was there nothing, about gun control, for example,  said Hislop that might have been relevant to comment on? But an increasingly vocal number of people in the audience were getting angry and shouting out. It was strange to have some vocal older members of the public “who remember how it felt”, “we were there” jam the metaphorical switchboard in the BFI auditorium. Here was a clash over satire and “taste” taking place in our midst.

Overall though, Booker felt “We are still living in the [freer] mental universe created in the early 60s” by the satire boom. Hislop felt the 60s satirists had helped focus attention on the right targets — the powerful. But then and now a government presided over by an old Etonian prime minister, is sent up in the media. Then and now politicians turned up to watch themselves being parodied – then at Peter Cook’s The Establishment club, now they think they’re hilarious when they publically declare some incident in their life as being “just like something out of The Thick of It”.  Bremner though distinguished between cynicism and healthy skepticism in emphasizing the positive role satire can and should still play in our democracy. He’s right that modern politicians aren’t parodied by actors in the way that all PMs were till Tony Blair. But David Cameron goes to extraordinary lengths to avoid comparisons to his Private Eye Dave Snooty parody, including turning up at a friend’s wedding in a lounge suit rather than a morning suit. And how do you do a puppet version of a politician as popular and recognised as London mayor Boris “man on a wire” Johnson?

What shone through overall was the calibre not just of the writing, but especially of performers. The TW3 players were backed by 20+ writers. Lance Percival told me before the event that it was the writers who made it, but watching the clips I would disagree. The singing cardinals included the much missed Willie Rushton and Roy Kinnear, but also the joyously understated Kenneth Cope. Percival, who managed to steal the evening on stage, also revealed the level of preparation. Still a boyish presence, he revealed he read every newspaper, watched and listened to every news report over the week, ready for that moment at the end of each show where he would improvise a calypso (that 60s calypso boom that was not to last) to ideas from the audience. Stirring up audience complaints was proof you’d done your job. Percival recalled with pride a small boy pointing him out to his father in a shop: “Look, dad, it’s one of those bastards off the television”

Who in television would dare to commission, not a exploitative reality tv show, but such a genuinely daring programme now?

Further reading/listening

What The Hell’s The Presidency for? LBJ and JFK – My R3 interview with LBJ biographer Robert Caro about the assassination

Posted in Comedy, Media, Politics, TV | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 72 Comments

The Curse of the Typewriter

Posted on November 20, 2012 by Samira Ahmed

The last typewriter was made in Britain yesterday at a factory in Wales. But has the stigma of typing for women really been lost? This was originally written earlier this year to look at how far the QWERTY keyboard might be replaced by new technology.

As new technology promises voice recognition typing software, and icon based texting, could the traditional QWERTY keyboard finally losing its dominance? Taken for granted, the keyboard has played a central role in the empancipation of women, but also in their entrapment in the “typing pool” of secretarial handmaidens. From the Victorian Lady typist, like Laura Lyons in The Hound of the Baskervilles, to Tess McGill in the 80s film Working Girl, I explored the intimate and ambivalent relationship between women and the typewriter for The Guardian (link here) and in a discussion on BBC Radio 4 Woman’s Hour.(listen here)



“Did you learn to touch type? Where and why?” A simple question. But when I ask it I am struck by how many people say they learned in secret. Some former grammar school girls over 35, said they were expressly told not to learn. They were supposed to become executives with secretaries. Teaching in schools remains haphazard. Apart from the men who said they learned in the army, many claimed they could “touch type” with 2 fingers, or had taught themselves under a tea towel. One said he was permanently scarred after being forced to type to Billy Joel’s Uptown Girl in ICT. How did we end up with such an odd relationship with the instrument at the heart of most modern jobs and communication? Especially one that was a tool of female emancipation?

In Sherlock Holmes’ most famous adventure, The Hound of the Baskervilles, a mysterious and exciting new independent woman was captured in print: The Lady Typist. The character Laura Lyons, had been helped to set up a typing business after escaping an unhappy marriage.

The modern typewriter Christopher Sholes invented in his  Milwaukee workshop in 1866 was transformed by his associate, James Densmore, who designed the letter arrangement of the QWERTY keyboard. Laid out to prevent keys jamming and improve flow rate, it remains the standard today, seeing off its only serious rival the 1930s Dvorak. Women’s expected accomplishment at piano playing was linked from the start to the typewriter’s ten finger flow.

Historian Anna Davin has pointed out that when the British civil service took over operating telegraph and postal offices in the 1870s, the official in charge, Frank Scudamore, sought out women clerks for their typing speed and dexterity. But crucially Scudamore said the wages:“which will draw male operators from but an inferior class of the community, will draw female operators from a superior class.” Women would spell and type better, raise the tone of the office, then marry and leave without requiring pensions.

So the trap of the over-educated, but low-status secretary was born; the typing pool. The BBC’s typing pool may have been the entry point for some breakthrough female broadcasters and executives, (Esther Rantzen trained as a clerk, as well as a studio manager) but in Rona Jaffe’s Mad Men era novel, The Best of Everything, sexual predators prowl its perimeter.  In the BBC 50s-set newsroom drama The Hour, a veteran producer pointed out to me that the female producer, young and glamorous, would really have been about 50. No matter how educated, young women were condescendingly regarded as typing pool fodder only and spent years trying to escape it, while young men from the right school were fast tracked.  In the seminal 80s film, Working Girl, the secretaries play with the jargon: “I prefer personal assistant”, but the only way to be taken seriously is to pretend to be an executive.

Future-technology entrepreneur, Elizabeth Varley, the CEO and co-founder of TechHub, didn’t see the keyboard as a trap. Her mother, a single parent, used to work from home in Melbourne, Australia as a legal secretary, typing up often complex Dictaphone audio tapes: “I saw it as a tool of empowerment. And it was a fun thing to play with.”

A badly designed keyboard could help kill a computer – most notably IBM’s PCJr in 1983 — IBM’s first foray into the home computer market.  But at the same time IBM office PC researchers found male executives hostile to the “secretarial” word processor image of PCs. (The advent of spread sheet software is what made office PCs acceptable to them.)

Like generations of women before me I learned on a black, spider-like manual machine in a typing school. (Like a manual car, compared to the lazy “automatic” ease of an electric or PC). With headphones to listen to the audio exercises, the letters embedded themselves into my finger muscle memory, ready for a life time of typing scripts and news copy. But for many women, it was a skill not to express one’s own thoughts, but to take down and shape those of one’s boss – usually a man. The “take a letter, Miss Jones” culture that dominated office life till the 1990s also shaped a literary culture in which men thought, and women took down and gave discipline and structure to their ideas.  How many anti-Establishment writers relied on women who could touch type to make their groovy ideas publishable?

Varley temped when she first moved to England in 1999. By then, she says, executives were doing most of their own emails, but were challenged in expressing themselves in the new visual formats, like the dreaded Power Point. “This BBC executive would say, I need to communicate my idea, but I don’t know how to make it look nice.” She felt there was accorded a certain status to secretaries who were  tech savvy.

British tech entrepreneur, Ed Maklouf, arrived at Stanford University in the heart of Silicon Valley in the mid 1990s to study communication and linguistics. “If I had any lingering idea about the supposed secretarial nature of touch typing,” he says, “it disappeared the moment I walked into a room full of coders all attacking the keys like they were in battle.”

With the personal sec a thing of the past for many executives, is the new roll out of voice recognition typing technology, an attempt to recapture the compliant female for the smart phone generation? Apple’s Siri has a female voice in the US, but a male voice here in the UK. It’s recognition is still pretty crude. And Google’s Majel, due out this year, is affectionately named after Majel Barrett, the actress who provided the voice of the computer in the original Star Trek TV series.

Maklouf, who is marketing the SIINE – a symbol based keyboard app for Android phones — says they’re more about helping people with a lack of time, working mothers as much as young singles. “We’re now expected to respond immediately to emails, wherever we are,” he points out. “People want to be able to reply back from a phone without worrying about being rude or impersonal.” SIINE enables people to programme personal phrases onto keys: “Best wishes” as much as “Whasssssupp”.

Other new technology to try and improve the experience of using keyboards includes  laser-projected keyboards that can be generated onto a hard surface anywhere for instant typing. And Microsoft was 2 years ago experimenting with a touchscreen extension along the top of the QWERTY keyboard, to enable users to scroll through different documents as they worked, without having to open many windows on the master screen.

RSI, notably carpel tunnel syndrome, continues to be reported in much larger numbers by women (Is that because it affects women more, or because they’re better at reporting it than men?)

But until anyone comes up with a genuine alternative to the QWERTY it remains at the heart of our ambivalent relationship with words and work.

Further reading/links

The Early Office Museum — Great online resource on the history of typewriters and other office equipment

Thoroughly Modern Millie — 1967 film parodying the 1920 Stenographer. The Baby Face number features Julie Andrews sitting a shorthand and typing test using a variety of heavy black Edwardian office gadgets.

Historian Anna Davin’s paper City Girls: Young Women, New Employment, and the City 1880-1910 is an excellent resource on Victorian women typists. (You can find it on Google)

IBM Archives History of the Personal Computer

The 10 Worst PC Keyboards of all time (PC Magazine)

Lovely Al Jazeera report on Delhi’s manual law court typists 

Posted in Business/Economics, Design, History, Media, Uncategorized | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Brunel, Bristol and re-forging history

Posted on November 18, 2012 by Samira Ahmed

Branagh-Brunel: Steampunk hero

Confession. I have this big crush on Isambard Kingdom Brunel. Or rather, on Kenneth Branagh as IKB, with those sideburns and a stovepipe hat, quoting  Shakespeare at the Olympic opening ceremony; an engineering Renaissance man.

Perhaps it played a subconscious part in why I took the kids on a half term minibreak to Bristol. We stayed in a magnificent Georgian B&B, convenient for marching onto Brunel’s Clifton Suspension Bridge and admiring the big manly chains holding it up.

In the docks we wandered around his beautifully restored iron ship the SS Great Britain, marveling as we stood under a water level glass ceiling, at its huge rudder and I watched the pumping of its pistons in the throbbing heart of the engine room.

But enough steamy metaphor. Because as my Branagh/Brunel conflation proves, when it comes to history, nowadays we want to “like” people and places. It’s not easy though, when the present beauty and grandeur of places like Bristol  depend on a deeply ugly legacy.

In the M Shed museum of Bristol history, I learned Brunel, rather less sexily, complained that the army didn’t use MORE force to beat protestors demanding the vote in the 1831 Queen Square Riots, which historian Tristram Hunt has described as “the bloodiest battle on mainland Britain since Culloden”. At the time Bristol had just 6,000 voters out of an adult population of 104,000. Colonel Thomas Brereton initially refused to follow a command to order his men to open fire and charge on rioters. When he  later did, hundreds were killed and seriously injured. Brereton was court martialled for his initial delay and committed suicide before the verdict was delivered. I found myself looking at a human arm bone, recovered from the ruins of the Customs House, burned down in the riots. A human face had been carved into the ball at one end. A macabre relic.

Most notoriously, many of Bristol’s mansions were built on the profits of slave sugar plantations. The M shed has a city map marking the enduring elegant landmarks built by plantation owning Lords and merchants. Lists of slave “stock” written in beautiful copperplate lettering on ledgers make for sober reading: A man of forty with “bad feet” worth only ten pounds. There are a few sets of heavy manacles to stare at. It took the British anti slavery movement 20 years to secure an end to the trade in human beings. And a further 25 to ban slavery itself.

The displays on slavery featured blown up quotes from modern visitors praising and moaning about the idea of commemorating the city’s role in the slave trade, in a rather bizarre attempt, one assumes, to be inclusive and balanced. I wonder if any Holocaust museum would think it necessary to display complaints suggesting it’s time to stop going on about it.

In a city affected by riots and difficult race relations in the recent past too, the desire to let all sides be heard may have an honest motive. But past the slavery display, and next to the Gothic doorway where children are invited to dress up as medieval merchants and try out their bartering skills, I found this breathtaking  text about the history of prostitution in the port city: “Today a sex worker could be making porn films in a Bristol suburb, lap dancing in a club or walking the streets.; they could be a middle class student or a drug addict, male or female. Are sex workers exploited or do they have a choice?” I guess I should be grateful that my children weren’t offered the chance to dress up and try their “sex worker” bartering skills. But nor were there quotes from visitors pointing out that most female “sex workers” start out under 18, and most experience violence.

Every great Victorian metropolis was built on the exploitation of workers; including child prostitutes. But a parallel history of emerging human rights and protest is visible too. Seek out the display on Quaker sugar boycotts, and visit Bristol’s most atmospheric building — John Wesley’s first chapel in Horsefair – which helped birth a radically modern ideology of equality.

The true joy of Steampunk literature and art, which I adore, is that it’s a benign re-imagining of the Victorian age. Without slavery, or sexual exploitation. Perhaps this alternate fantasy history – like Branagh’s re-imagined Brunel – is a positive celebration of our age, and an acknowledgment that it is built on a past we are glad to have left behind.

This post was originally published in The Big Issue.

Further reading

SS Great Britain 

The Bristol riots

Tristram Hunt on the Riots and British Identity (Guardian 2006)

John Wesley’s New Room

M Shed museum

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Broken clocks & zombie apocalypse

Posted on October 28, 2012 by Samira Ahmed


I have a thing about broken public clocks. I wrote a piece for The Big Issue about why I think they’re the first step on the way to social breakdown and chaos. Think Day of the Triffids when there’s no one to wind them anymore. The artist Alfie Dennen, who I interviewed, then invited me to help him wind the Caledonian Clock Tower in Islington. I’ve embedded video and photos in this post of the remarkable experience. Alfie and I both took part in a fascinating discussion on BBC Radio 4’s You & Yours programme which found, as a result of a Freedom of Information request, that a quarter of public clocks managed by the local councils who replied, are broken. Here’s the original column on why they matter. And special thanks to Alfie for letting me share the Victorian engineering marvel of the Cally Clock tower.

My once regular walk to work across London’s Waterloo Bridge took in a view of 2 great clocks: The Clock Tower, housing Big Ben – its faces often glowing through the fog of early mornings – and what was once known as Big Benzene – the art deco Shell Mex House clock that faces the River Thames. Built in 1931, its giant hands spread across the bare Portland stone, amplifying your anxiety if you’re going to be late. As I neared the office, the frozen hands on all too many historical pub clocks near Fleet Street, such as the Cittie of York, on High Holborn, felt like a personal insult to a district built on print deadlines.

In Paris guerrilla hacker-artists (UX for Urban eXperiment) tackled the national insult of the broken clock on the neo-classical Pantheon. Breaking in and working in secret for more than 2 years, the temple of the Enlightenment, where Parisians once flocked to see Foucault’s pendulum displayed, heard the chimes of the quarter hours rung out again in 2007. But to public shock, the humiliated authorities chose to stop the clock again, rather than admit their failure, even trying to sue the restorers.

Artist Alfie Dennen, (@alfie) started drawing attention to the number of stopped public clocks in London a few years ago, via the website http://www.stoppedclocks.com, with a view to encouraging their repair. Change of owners, budget cuts and the loss of expertise all play a part. (Smiths of Derby are the best people to call in, it seems).

Dennen got cooperation from Islington Council to restart a much loved tower clock by Caledonian Park, and has now trained up a team of 8 volunteers to wind the mechanism, much to the delight of local residents.  Dennen’s initial mission was sociological. He wanted to protect them as part of our analogue history, but also for their symbolic bond between citizen and state. “My mother would say, “When I look at a public clock and it’s not working, I feel actively not cared for.””

But a public clock is more. It can seem a living machine – somehow tuned into the frequency of the universe, even if we know atomic clocks are now more accurate. Scaled up on public buildings, their power is formidable. And horology is at its heart, compatible with faith. The Augustan poet, Joseph Addison’s hymn “The spacious firmament on high” celebrates the “divine” clockwork of the universe.

A visit to the clock gallery at the British Museum in London is a transcendental experience. The mechanical peace of dozens of ticking devices from across the centuries immediately calms the spirit. Long pendulums swing against one wall, the renowned  16th century Augsburg golden galleon automaton, sits frustratingly still in its glass case. But the ebony Mostyn clock, made by the renowned 17th century clock maker Thomas Tompion shows not just hours and minutes but counts weeks for a year’s duration, using six wheel gear trains. A sector aperture at the top displays the days of the week, each with a figure personifying its ruling planet.

To be in their company is to realise the liberating power of time ticking on. At the time of my last visit to the gallery the abyss of the economic crisis was still opening up every day.  But time was indifferent to the collapse of banks or personal misery. Everything would pass.

Now I seek out pendulum clocks, like some people might seek out religious sites. Often hidden away in the back corners of public institutions, when found, their steady movement is a comfort. They are in tune with the rhythms of the universe whether you are there to see them or not. And they embody human endeavour and achievement in the intricacy of their gears and wheels.

Where the embarrassed custodians of the Pantheon chose to see only trespass and “vandalism” (though the judges threw out the case), the guerrilla repairers   saw a greater mission Their spokesman Lazar Klausmann told the Guardian in 2007: “The Latin quarter is where the concept of human rights came from. It’s the centre of everything. The Pantheon clock is in the middle of it. So it’s a bit like the clock at the centre of the world.”

The engineers sent in by the Pantheon bureaucrats to “restore” the clock to its broken state, refused to do more than disengage a wheel. UX went in not long after to “liberate” the part. They’re keeping it safe till a more enlightened regime wishes to bring the clock at the centre of the world back to life.

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 All photos and video copyright Samira Ahmed taken at the Caledonian Clock Tower, July 2012 

 

 

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Martin Landau and the Art of Darkness

Posted on October 21, 2012 by Samira Ahmed

“The embodiment of danger”: (centre) with Cary Grant & James Mason in North By Northwest (1959)

I was lucky enough to interview Martin Landau when he was in London for the Film Festival premiere of Frankenweenie. Like a lot of 70s kids I first discovered him as Space:1999′s haunted looking Commander Koenig. When discussing his career at a recent BFI event he described with remarkably sincere detail the living conditions on Moonbase Alpha and why they couldn’t procreate.  It is that level of  earnestness that characterises his approach to all his roles — TV or Oscar nominated/winning film parts for renowned directors such as Ford Coppola,  Woody Allen and Tim Burton. For The Strand –the BBC World Service arts programme — I focussed on his  roles of darkness.  He proved delightful company and a witty mimic. Sadly he never had time to finish telling me his theory (complete with Olivier and Richard Harris impersonations) of why he thinks British actors drank so much. But he spoke movingly and protectively about his best friend, James Dean, from his student days. You can listen to it here.

James Dean and Martin Landau as drama students

And this is my Big Issue column about what Landau taught me about measuring success and the obsession with a youth-based career.

When I was a teenager I thought I’d have to write my brilliant first novel by 21 to be like Francoise Sagan. In my late 20s, friends unhappy in their work, started thinking about changing careers before 30 – somehow doing so after would be “too late” to avoid being regarded as a failure. I even made a pact with a fellow hack that we would marry each other if we didn’t find anyone else by the start of our 4th decade. (Luckily for both of us that proved unnecessary).

The urge to succeed young has been a curse to us all. But last week at the British Film Institute I met the man who had secretly been preparing me to throw away my ticking career achievement clock.

As a 70s child I’d watched the avuncular Captain Koenig on Space 1999 struggling to keep his band of lunar survivors alive in the face of malign alien encounters. I didn’t know then that Martin Landau had been James Dean’s best friend, Marilyn Monroe’s boyfriend, and a contemporary of Montgomery Clift. They had all died young and turned into icons.

Landau, who was one of only 2 students in his year to pass an audition for the Lee Strasberg Actors’ Studio (the other was Steve McQueen) didn’t. You can see his early promise as the strikingly handsome and cruelly malevolent henchman, Leonard, in Hitchcock’s North By Northwest (1959). In one of cinema’s most famous scenes the hero Cary Grant is holding a dangling Eva Marie Saint by one hand, hanging by his fingertips off a ledge of Mount Rushmore with the other; an abyss of rocks below. A steely eyed Martin Landau is standing on his hand, and pressing down hard with his sharp leather shoe.

At a time when homosexuality was a serious taboo, Landau, decided to play the part of Leonard, with just enough of a hint of homosexual jealousy of Saint, his  rival for James Mason’s affection, that, as he put it, “I knew  in big cities they’d get it.”

But despite some other film roles, his CV through his 20s, 30s and 40s showed a jobbing actor playing parts in almost every TV series going: Westerns, Sci Fi, cop shows. Despite enjoying success in Mission Impossible, he turned down the role  of Mr Spock in Star Trek – uninterested he said, in playing a part without emotion. In the leanest years, he took on such humiliating fare as The Harlem Globetrotters On Gilligan’s Island.

One day watching the Oscars at home in his underwear, in 1984, he fumed that it should be him up there. He recently told The Times that he was aware that he was at the height of his powers. A great part finally came. I can still remember sitting in the cinema in 1988 watching Francis Ford Coppola’s Tucker: A Man and His Dream and suddenly realizing Martin Landau was up there dominating the film, as a broken man, whose shameful secret has been uncovered.

He got an Oscar nomination and then another, the following year, for Crimes and Misdemeanors — Woody Allen’s greatest and darkest film. Five years later he won for Tim Burton’s Ed Wood.

For the tragic-comic part of the dying horror star Bela Lugosi, Landau said he went round to visit all the houses Lugosi had ever lived in, noting their gradual shrinking in size and grandeur. He saw every Lugosi film he could, from the greats like Dracula, to the schlock of the final years. Most significant of all, Landau noticed how Lugosi’s billing on his films had shrunk from top, to shared with Boris Karloff, to smaller and lower, until he disappeared.

It must have been a strange experience for Landau, whose greatest roles and critical recognition have only come after 60. But it was an inspiring story for fans watching him speak at the BFI last week.  For the sci fi geeks, he could describe the details of living conditions on Space 1999’s Moonbase Alpha as if it were a real place. For the cineastes he recalled in detail storyboarding with Hitchcock and how he used his teenage training from his first job as a cartoonist on the New York Daily News to visualise his film characters.

Then Martin Landau opened his jacket to show us the row of drawing pens he still carries everywhere. At 84, he is the embodiment of the satisfaction of work well done and a life well lived, without a care for how long it takes to make it.

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Hacks on Film: Essential viewing and reading

Posted on October 3, 2012 by Samira Ahmed

This is an updated version of an article I first wrote for The Spectator blog, that formed the basis of a lecture to journalism students at Kingston University in October. It has links to scripts, films and articles about all the movies I reference in the lecture. Plus there are some more for anyone interested in how journalists have been portrayed on film over the years and what such movies reveal about the profession, the politics and social attitudes of their time, and how much hasn’t really changed.

When I got my first job in journalism —as a BBC graduate News Trainee fresh out of university – my father bought me the video of Citizen Kane (1941) and my brother got me Broadcast News (1987). Both turned out to be important to my career in different ways and explain why I feel so passionately about how journalism is portrayed in the movies.

The best film ever about TV journalism?

I used the Citizen Kane video to make a report about its 50th anniversary on our
trainee Newsnight programme. Egged on by my fellow trainees who said it was
really good, I channelled young Mr Orson Welles himself, walked up to the 7th
floor corridor of TV Centre and took it to the editor of Newsnight the same day,
boldly suggested they might like to run it. They didn’t, but I was soon a trainee
there and within 2 years, a Newsnight reporter. Thank you Mr Kane.

But it was Broadcast News – made only 5 years before I joined the profession myself, that set the benchmark for journalism on film. James L Brooks, who cut his teeth in 60s TV said he wasn’t interested in the world of TV news, but the relationships. And yet it remains, for me, the most accurate portrayal of my profession ever made. The film celebrates with humour and charm the intellectual ambition of talented journos and the excitement of the work (Holly Hunter’s Norman Rockwell edit that barely makes it to air); the egos (Jack Nicholson’s cameo network Anchor) the office politics and TV attitudes to talent (Albert Brooks is talented but not anchor material; William Hurt looks the part
but is struggling to “get” the stuff he’s reporting on) and the way long running
stories are viewed from HQ: Hunter and Brooks head off to Nicaragua to prove
they are heavy weights; Hunter sends her love rival, Lois Chiles, off to cover an
Alaskan serial killer’s’ trial. The film is framed by the characters contemplating,
sometimes helplessly and regretfully, the decline of journalistic standards. You can read the script here.

Broadcast News was a combination of intelligent soap and a throwback to the Hollywood of “grownup” sparring reporters – Spencer Tracey and Katherine Hepburn in Woman of the Year (1942) and Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday (1940)

But more than, that it turned out to be accurate. Most of the things that have
happened in that film, right down to the periodic mass sackings, have become a
reality across my profession. The film managed to humanise the hacks and their wretched love lives, but did not sentimentalise us or our world. It even threw in an ethical dilemma – (SPOILER ALERT) and after all the fakery scandals I’ve seen over the past 2 decades, I find it interesting how my attitude has changed significantly to the crucial scene in which it’s revealed that William Hurt faked a tear for his cutaway, interviewing a rape survivor.

But I blame another blond Hollywood leading man for the trash that has come to dominate the Big Screen’s portrayal of my profession. Yes, I know Robert Redford was in All The President’s Men (1976) and Three Days of the Condor (1975) –a conspiracy thriller fantasy which climaxes in a Wikileaks style victory as his envelopes of secret documents land safely in the offices of the New York Times.

But this man is responsible for the truly execrable Up Close and Personal (1996) with Michelle Pfeiffer. Remarkably, this film started out as an intelligent biopic script about one of America’s first female news anchors, Jessica Savitch, scripted by Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne. You will have to dig out the TV movie Almost Golden to find out about the sex discrimination and personal tragedy of her life and her notoriously volatile temperament.

For all its faults, there’s a chilling scene in which hostile producers refuse to brief her over her earpiece as she’s live commentating on a breaking event. You can also read the scathing account of the metamorphosis of Up Close and Personal in Didion and Gregory Dunne’s book, Monster. Here’s a clip of the real Jessica, filmed in rehearsal, in full flow.

Up Close and Personal is the Showgirls of TV journalism. It’s tawdry, exploitative and hideously sentimental in a way that real hacks could only dream of. I’ve lost count of the number of times it’s come up in conversation with fellow journos, ending with howls of derision.

Pfeiffer, a poor Southern weather girl, on the make, complete with fake TV
name Tally Atwater, finds her pre-shoot in a jail turned into a live nationwide
broadcast when a riots breaks out, despite a lack of any cables out of the camera.
Some black and Latino men die hideously, and it’s all for us to feel how special
Ms Atwater is. It makes her career and she never has to do a piece of original
journalism again. Just read autocue with different coloured hair. Any time a
sense of irony might be creeping in, Robert Redford looms up for the romance,
his ageing face barely visible in the blur of the soft focus as the once great
producer, who’s on the way down. . I think it was supposed to be a remake of A
Star is Born. But no one laughed when James Mason died at the end of that.
Although James Mason wasn’t blown up at the end by generic evil non-blond
militants. With the live camera running…

What Up Close and Personal did mark out was a sub genre of Cinderella films ,
in which childlike girls found their princes while negotiating a Barbie-glamorous
grown up career in, like, journalism. The Devil Wears Prada, Superman Returns,
and, judging by the trailer, Morning Glory.

I must confess to having a soft spot for one such film though. And there is a sort of relevance, in the light of the undercover police/environmentalist campaigners story, to Straight Talk (1992).  This guilty pleasure of mine features the flawless James Woods as the hardnosed Chicago newspaper hack romancing talk radio agony aunt Doctor Shirlee (Dolly Parton) to find out if she’s a fake doctor.

She is. A graduate only of the southern University of Life. There is a scene
involving her bra and the phrase “holy moly” that Katie Price would be proud of.
The film also features Spalding Gray, and the then unknown Michael Madsen and
Teri Hatcher. But beyond the fairytale an ethical dilemma presents itself, too,
as Woods pulls his story rather than destroy the woman he loves and she comes
clean about who she really is. Sniff. The original poster even shows her sitting on a pumpkin.

I finish with a list of films about journalists– worth checking out for what they
say about the times they were made, as much as whether they are accurate or
not:

The first 4 are classic Conspiracy Thrillers:

The Parallax View (1974) – Made 6 years after the Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King assassinations, Warren Beatty plays the reporter uncovering a sinister plot behind political killings.

Capricorn One (1977) Elliot Gould is the hack who discovers NASA’s first manned mission to Mars is being faked from a TV studio in the Western desert. An outstanding ending. Stars OJ Simpson as one of the 3 astronauts.

Defence of the Realm (1985) – the last film to capture old Fleet Street at work.
Gabriel Byrne negotiates a rather imitative London conspiracy thriller, complete
with envelope handovers on Hungerford Bridge and a doomed Denholm Elliott
as ageing alcoholic hack, but is strong on the atmosphere of smoky copy rooms,
rattling hot metal presses, and the ritual “banging out” of retiring print workers.
Greta Scaachi looks great in a trenchcoat.

The Ghost (2010) The plot unravels into a lame rather than believable 70s conspiracy thriller, but Ewan MacGregor and Pierce Brosnan turn in fascinating performances in this
atmospheric exploration of the instincts of a good reporter who sold out,
uncovering the secrets of an ex-prime minister.

Mr Smith Goes To Washington (1939) – Frank Capra’s film features a sinister sequence near the end where corrupt politicians, powerful business moguls and the police collude to intimidate an honest politician (James Stewart) and threaten the citizens of his home town. Fascinating watching since Hackgate.

Anchorman(2004)  Under the cover of being set in the 70s, this combines fantasy streetfighting between rival network gangs with anti-diversity arguments that stretch only a little beyond reality:

Brick Tamland: [opposing women in the newsroom] I read somewhere their
periods attract bears. Bears can smell the menstruation.
Brian Fantana: Well, that’s just great. You hear that, Ed? Bears. Now
you’re putting the whole station in jeopardy.

Superman (1978) Superman II (1980) Unlike the wretched “reboot” of Superman Returns with teenage mum Lois Lane – the originals feature growups. The scenes in the newsroom of the Daily Planet are highly atmospheric. Terence Stamp’s terrorising of America via live TV is genuinely chilling. The humiliation of the President in the Oval office takes place months apart from Jimmy Carter’s real life humiliation over the Iranian hostage drama, that was regularly played out on American TV news. Chain smoking hardnosed Margot Kidder’s greatest moment is when she climbs the Eiffel Tower to get her scoop, spelling out “P-U-L-I-T-Z-E-R “ to calm her nerves.

Network (1976) In our world of “infotainment”, how much of this Oscar winning film about pushing TV news ratings with aggression and violence is really fantasy anymore?
Faye Dunaway is a role model for today’s TV execs.

True Crime (1999) Reporter Clint Eastwood and his editor James Woods battle it out in the newsroom as the clock ticks to save an innocent man from the electric chair. Eastwood plays a kind of ageing Dirty Hack rather than Harry who could redeem himself with this one story. It is very, very silly.

Ace In the Hole (1951) Kirk Douglas and Billy Wilder concocted this nasty little tale about the heartless reporter trying to make his fortune when a miner is trapped underground. Sound familiar? Spike Lee paid homage to the famous end shot near the start of Malcolm X.

Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs (2009) This intelligent Fast Food Nation-style allegory about modern Western consumption features a fascinating subplot about the exploited female intern turned investigative weather reporter who is mocked by the sexist news anchor for not looking glamorous enough; and pressured to play down her intelligence on camera. Delicious.

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Troublesome slags: What Rochdale reveals about our attitudes to teenage girls

Posted on September 27, 2012 by Samira Ahmed
Heywood, Rochdale (Photo by Peter Byrne/PA)
A provisional multi agency report into the scale of sexual abuse of young girls in Rochdale published today admitted there were issues about the legitimate sexual “consent” of 13 year old girls that the authorities failed to tackle.  When did it become politically incorrect to question why 13 year olds were having sex with a range of much older men? Or was it evidence of deepseated attitudes to poor and challenging girls? 

15 years ago the renowned filmmaker Peter Kosminsky made No Child of Mine, a controversial drama about a teenage girl in care who’d ended up being passed around by men for sex. The phenomenon was called “conveyor belt grooming”. The script was based on the experience of a real young woman.She was played in the film by Brooke Kinsella. It won a BAFTA in 1998 for best single drama, but the TV company which had commissioned it, threatened not to show it and there was a huge row about its content, with tabloid newspapers expressing outrage. The same papers which, after the conviction of the Rochdale gang, were outraged by the scale of such abuse.  I asked Kosminsky how he felt about the revelations from Rochdale.

You made No Child of Mine in 1997. How do you feel seeing the Rochdale case about large scale conveyor belt grooming?

 I think it has always gone on.  Occasionally, events occur which demand public attention but generally it continues in its sordid, vicious, destructive way, ignored by almost all of society.  Some men feel protective towards the vulnerable.  A minority respond with cruelty, greed and violence.  Guy Hibbert drew attention to this with his script No Child of Mine in the 1990s and the film caused controversy in part because its message was deemed so surprising.  But it ought not to have been.  Before that, there had been the Kincora Children’s Home scandal in NI.  And who knows what Squeers and his friends got up to at Dotheboys Hall?

What sense did you get at the time of how victims were perceived?

PK: When we were researching No Child of Mine, the victims – those that had the guts to speak up – were viewed with skepticism, ignored or accused of making false allegations to discredit individuals against whom they had a grudge.  The woman behind No Child of Mine was publicly branded a liar.  One national newspaper attempted to name her, in contravention of the strict anonymity guaranteed to rape victims.  And yet the research suggests that children very rarely invent such dreadful things.  It takes enormous courage to report an abuser despite the threats made against their family and themselves.  When they manage to do so, they should be protected, supported and, as a first response at least, believed.

What was the reaction from the authorities — media executives and social services?

PK: An incoming executive told me “We don’t want this muck here” and promptly fired me.  But No Child of Mine quickly found a home with Meridian and ITV.  The execs there were incredible, (Vernon Lawrence, John Willis, Simon Lewis, Sue Hogg), brilliantly supportive both to their film-makers and also to the woman on whom our programme was based throughout the weeks of controversy.  Social services were defensive, imagining we were making a Jasmine Beckford-type exposé of social services failing.  But No Child of Mine was really more about the tragedy of conveyor-belt abuse than the shortcomings of any specific social services department.  And we had enormous support and encouragement from Childline, The Children’s Society, NCH-Action, Barnados and the NSPCC.

In May the conviction of a Rochdale child abuse ring of Asian men who’d groomed and raped mostly white teenage girls focussed attention on the race of the abusers. While an MP, Ann Cryer campaigned relentlessly against the misogynistic abuse of young women — Asian and white — either in forced marriages or sexual grooming cases, it suited her political party, as much as council officials to play it down, for fear of being labelled racist or anti-Muslim. It seems the girls were worthless not just in the eyes of their abusers. Or at least, not as important and worthy of protection as good “community relations”. The Ramadan Foundation, to its credit, has been prominent in criticising the complacency and denial of “Muslim elders”.  As in Ireland — where it recently emerged Cardinal Sean Brady chose to cover up testimony from a number of children who had been abused by the Catholic church’s most prolific paedophile priest Brendan Smyth — abused children were the least valued people in the scandal.

Julie Bindel in The Guardian, came closest to pinning down British society’s problem with the abused girls in Rochdale: a sweeping, unofficial assessment of such children as “troublemaking slags”. In that sense, the Chief Constable of Greater Manchester Police has a partial point when he claimed the rapists did not target the girls because they were white. It was because they were worthless. In a hypersexualised culture in which footballer Ched Evans raped a comatose drunk 19 year old while a friend filmed it,  it was the victim who has been publically demonised on social media. We have see St Trinian’s films about sexy school girls being remade within the past few years.  

While acknowledging that young people’s consensual sexual relations have changed in the past 20 years, is it time to question the role of the state in normalising very young sexual activity? The NHS made the decision just weeks before the Rochdale convictions, as the result of successful pilots, to roll out contraceptive pill programmes for 13 year olds. One wonders how many of the Rochdale abuse victims got given contraception to stop them getting pregnant, and maybe STD tests, but no one thought to challenge the idea that they were having sex at that age. This is a social environment of our own making. Perhaps it’s time to put morality back into our thinking about “safe sex”.

The key difference in the successful prosecution  of the 9 British Pakistani men in Rochdale  appears to have been the determined attitude of the new chief crown prosecutor for the North West, Nazir Afzal, who reopened the case. His own experience as a teenager of police indifference to racism, and his track record on tackling “honour” based crime proved highly relevant.

If the latest convictions prompt a genuine social enquiry into why so many young girls are so vulnerable to exploitation and why so many ordinary men seem so unbothered about abusing them it will be a start.  But it will be at least 15 years over due.

Further reading

The Rochdale Observer newspaper website –includes interviews with relatives of the convicted men

Interview with Peter Kosminsky about his career, including about No Child of Mine (Doc House Festival 2007)

You can follow Peter  Kosminsky on Twitter @KosmoSFL

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