brexit negging when yr mandate is is trash: or further chronicles of a garbage-fire

Of course, the camera panning backing to Baddiel and Skinner's faces after Southgate had trundled that penalty towards the German gooalkeeper was the highlight of 1996 for the rest of the UK.

wait, what?

Non-english UK-ards don't tend to cheer for the England team, stevie.

*squints*

is this about... football?

Of course it is, it's Blair, what do you expect?

Theresa May probably deserves a microscopic amount of credit for being the first PM in my adult life not to even pretend to like football (excluding perhaps Gordon Brown who genuinely does I think).

I'm all for giving microscopic amounts of credit to Tories who don't bother focus grouping everything they are supposed to like. But still - to the gulags with them, but credit for not pretending you like the Arctic fucking Monkies or something.

You have to separate art and the artist.

Major 'liked' football?

I thought he was more of a warm beer + cricket ultra.

Let's blame Harold Wilson for piggybacking on the England World Cup win.

... and the Beatles.

Wilson always kept a photo of the Huddersfield Town triple title winning team of the 20's in his wallet.

Next to his pipe and baccy. Good if it's true, you never know with Wilson though.

Well, at least the public is aware the true PM loves Arsenal.

Major 'liked' football?

visual evidence:

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/db/83/f9/db83f96fc5f7061d3ff0181f05b0fedb--john-major-bolton-wanderers.jpg

http://l7.alamy.com/zooms/67018b3999594153bb002894c8846ae7/john-major-playing-with-two-footballs-at-ednburgh-b4m4h5.jpg

Once Wilson said something hackneyed and cringeworthy alluding to northern toughness and how people aren't born t'up north, they are forged like steel. And some wag retorted "I always thought there was something fake about you".*

*probably a half decent anecdote poorly recounted here.

Cool Britannia worked because kids in the US - and around the world, because US culture is international default culture - needed to distance themselves from the mainstream and have a rarified "sophisticated" secret language. I think that's been totally taken over by Japan at this point though.

Yep, and it's worth noting that the Japanese government is milking that for all it's worth in the same way as the UK did. The university recruitment / cultural export sector has essentially gone Full Pokemon.

I know which I prefer. I guess the cool sophistication of Ocean Colour Scene has its fans tho

https://s3.postimg.org/qvyuztynn/20160916_114356.jpg

Pika-choose Kanazawa University for a Pharmacology course ranked in the world's top 200...

The UK seems to be falling back on Big Ben and umbrellas again but the cultural capital of the BBC (Sherlock and Dr Who, in particular) is still strong.

kami as cartoon top trumps vs the ghosts of colonialism's mechanism

read some fucking Orwell for the great taste of liberal hegemony

If I spin back the dials, it was all about 1995 and finding copies of mixmag in a big bookstore in town and realizing there was a whole island full of attractive people listening to the coolest music in awesome nightclubs all the time.

I never thought britpop was cool and couldn't give any shits about England football but I was definitely convinced the UK scene for dance music was the best in the world. And IIRC art and fashion weren't doing shabby either. It seemed like the most exciting place to live as long as you didn't care for food.

The funny thing is all the important creative groundwork started under Major, or seems to have. In one possibly notable example, Tories spun off Channel Four, which wound up bankrolling Trainspotting.

oh boy Kasabian on the pub's unwanted sound system right now

Channel 4 started under Thatcher - and was infinitely more establishments shaking in its infant decade than by the time we got to the cosy public health warning of Trainspotting

those red triangle films c4 played in the 80's were like - ugh! subtitles, but yowza - full frontal nudity!

"Themroc" has never been off on our screens since.

pretty sure they showed Pasolini's Porcile in that segment. Good work

Yeah but us over here never bought tickets to those

I've just noticed they showed "Throw Away Your Books, Rally in the Streets", which I never saw but am familiar with the soundtrack album.

it was as much about what they funded themselves anyway, a lot of silly crap but a lot of genuine Daily Express apoplexy things too.

i was too young for the red triangle series but can remember Alex Cox's moviedrome playing some good movies, well at least it introduced me to Burnett's To Sleep With Anger. They could do with having something similar these days (as long as Kermode isn't involved), but I won't hold my breath.

a welcoming home for people like Alan Clarke after the Been had bottled out

Moviedrome was BBC2 tho iirc

Beeb. Fucking spell check

moviedrome was a big formative influence for me, cox was a great host

mark cousins, then as now, drove me up the wall when he took over

oh yeah, that was bbc2. There doesn't seem to be any home for someone like Alan Clarke these days, alas.

Channel 4, early on, also had a season of about 20 Fassbinder films - maybe more - God knows how long it would have been before I got the chance to see them. Also "Berlin Alexanderplatz" shown episodically.

The outcry over the red triangle series had entirely the opposite effect than the objectors had intended; the opening film, the grisly surreal comedy Themroc, garnered over two million viewers (Whitehouse apparently among them, later saying of its broadcast "It's not good enough to slap on a warning symbol and then indulge in sadistic madness of this kind."). Later films (mostly those whose TV Times synopses sounded racy) gained viewerships of over three million, figures which dwarfed those of the other channels still broadcasting that late (which carried fare of very limited appeal and educational programming from the Open University). Some critics contended that the whole series was a cynical attempt to wilfully stir controversy, and in practice many viewers discovered that "softcore porn" against which campaigners had railed was in fact genuine art cinema (and not the titillation for which they'd stayed up late). With viewing figures latterly declining, and press opposition remaining strong, Channel 4 quietly discontinued the red triangle the year after it had been introduced.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_triangle_(Channel_4)

It's really not a bad list tbh

I discovered earlier this year that Berlin Alexanderplatz is what the real Golden Age of Television would be like if the bastards weren't in charge.

they showed Stephen Frears' Walter opening night; I haven't watched it in 30 years but as I recall that movie covered stuff that still gets ignored today. and the usual suspects went full mouth-froth

jesus, the Rotten Tomatoes synopsis describes McKellen's character in Walter as "moderately retarded", but I get the picture. The BBC only deals with cute middle class boys with autism, and the hand-wringing of their parents. Not the struggle and abuse faced by adults, because it isn't a trope that hasn't had a hit book and movie yet, I don't think.

Frears was great in the 80's, still love Prick Up Your Ears.

the absolute themroc

Walter controversially suggested that learning disabled adults might have autonomy and sexual desire, also that cuddly state care might not always function in their best interests

frears is wildly variable but "dirty pretty things" is one of my favourite post-2000 movies abt the UK (and london)

(a friend of mine worked on DPT it in production and said SF was non-stop annoyed abt how hard it had become to film in a london street: now you had to get permissions in triplicate, in the old days i guess you just plonked down yr crew and held up the traffic till you were done lol)

My Beautiful Launderette is still a great stew of sexual, racial and economic politics too

Come here from the inscrutable politics, get inscrutable movies on the teevee nostalgia

surely Dangerous Liaisons and The Grifters were quite mainstream US hit movies, weren't they? But admittedly MBL might be a bit less known over the pond.

I know which I prefer. I guess the cool sophistication of Ocean Colour Scene has its fans tho

I dunno, if I was Japanese I'd probably be pretty annoyed with the legions of man-children across the world idolizing my country because of its productivity in churning out cartoons where dudes have harems of teenage girls. Like, not that that's what all international engagement with anime amounts to, but more often than not...

Counterpoint: that's what all international engagement with anime amounts to