Remove Me from Fear: News and the Fictionalisation of Fact

It’s 6am and the abhorred ringing of your alarm pierces the sweet tranquillity of your dreams. You’re suddenly thrown from a quiet, undisturbed island paradise to the stuffy confines of the dishevelled hovel in which you sleep; the last remnant of your Smart Price mattress’ springs digging into the base of your spine. Something of which you’re concerned may have some long lasting, negative consequences; why exactly is it that you can’t feel your toes?

So what does one do after such a traumatic experience? To be taken away from the blissful, surreal kingdom of dreams and thrown into the sub-par pseudo-democracy of reality? Well one turns on the TV of course!

As one Jacques Lacan proposes, you awake to continue dreaming. You plug yourself into the mystical box of alternate realities where absolutely anything is possible; even someone knitting a fully functioning magic carpet out of some children’s felt, or a purple, sexually confused teddy with a television for a stomach eating the congealed pink tears of an infant child trapped within the sun high above, so traumatised that he’s lost the ability to communicate in anything other than short bursts of schizophrenic laughter. You heard me, anything’s possible.

Anyhow, I appear to have digressed. Where were we? Oh yes, that moment when you wake up and your day’s ruined; how does one recover from this? Of course, one retreats into the artificial reality of daytime TV. You see, the world’s a stressful place, bad things such as; wars, child abuse and The Wicker Man remake happen on a day to day basis. It is only natural that human beings need some form of a retreat. Without this we’d all be going the way of Brenda Ann Spencer or Anders Breivik in no time; I mean, nobody likes Mondays as it is, without TV to soften the blow we’d be reaching for the AKs in no time!

Mum: I’m sorry son… Come Dine With Me’s been cancelled.

Little Billy: …

Mum: Is everything okay son?

Little Billy: Yeah it’s fine, I just think the silicon chip inside my head’s been switched to overload…

Mum: Oh my.

So I guess one may argue that I’m a great supporter of television and they’d be right in doing so. It serves an important purpose. But there’s one thing I’ve always failed to understand. It’s why people consistently return to that recurring soap in which every week a new character seems destined to die and no; I’m not talking about Eastenders.

I am in fact referring to the news. Or, as I like to call it; your daily dosage of government sanctioned depression! That’s it folks, the half an hour anti-Prozac in which men and women in suits hold a magnifying glass to all that’s shit in life. When one turns the TV on in the morning to be bombarded by images of Turban wearing threats to their lives and H20’s latest attempts at altitude submerging large quantities of the eastern hemisphere one can’t help but wish they were back in their cheap IKEA bed, drifting freely into REM sleep, or perhaps... a coma. 

This however is not the case. People willingly tune in on a daily basis to hear what’s going to kill them next. They appear to relish the news and its myriad of mournful, daytime matinees of disaster. It appears that as a society, we’re addicted to bad news and this to me seems very strange.

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It seems to me, that the breaking news banner is something that we’re all attracted to. When it’s on screen we’re pulled in to see who’s died or what country is hiding chocolate from America and thus, is about to have a dictator removed.  It’s like when one sees some police on the motorway; we instinctively slow to see what’s happened; to hopefully spot a wreck. But why is this? Why are we – a supposedly civilised society – obsessed with seeing disaster?

Well one may argue that it’s all a means of coming to terms with such things. That in seeing the events played out we gain some form of cathartic relief. The news, the modern day tragedy! King Lear it would seem has been replaced by a Boeing 767… I’m not convinced.

“And my poor fool is hang'd! No, no, no life!

Why should a dog, a horse, a rat, have life,

And thou no breath at all?”

– Boeing 767 (Act 5 Scene 3)

The concept of catharsis would imply that those watching have deep routed feelings towards the events portrayed. With the news however, this is most certainly not the case. In watching the news people become sterile to such tragedies, as another death merely becomes a new statistic. King Lear, well performed can move an audience to tears, it will have them laughing one second and crying the next. To use a cliché, it’s a rollercoaster of emotion in which the audience is taken along for the ride. But frankly Mr Shankly, one morning of the news successfully articulates more sorrow than the whole of Morrissey’s discography, and nobody seems to bat an eyelid.  It is as if we are sat watching the rollercoaster go around, always afraid to take a seat.

What the news in fact does, is removes us from the events it portrays. We see them through a box in a studio, through a separate box in our living room, or wherever your TV may be; I don’t know… your toilet? Guess it could help with constipation; nothing gets the faeces moving better than watching a political broadcast or any show with Piers Morgan. Then again, you could just take the Daily Mail in with you… But that is enough of that.

The news turns these real life events into a story. It morphs these disasters into something we can follow; it fictionalises them and makes them its own. The shooting we see on the news, is not the shooting the Korean kids at college saw. It is all a part of the story created for us by the news, removing us from the reality of the events.  Allow me to explain further with an example. September 11^th 2001, we all know what happened. Everyone would have had different circumstances, but we all saw the same thing. At first it was truly shocking. It was something entirely new! It was like Voldemort, it was he who can’t be named. The events we saw were truly horrifying. I believe I’m right in saying, many people did in fact cry. This however, was a first of its kind. This was not a news story; it was something unique and unseen. It was within the first week however that the portrayal of this event had changed. Names began appearing such as, “9 11” and, “al-Qaeda”. The news was slowly turning the tragedy into a story. The events were being fictionalised before our eyes and before we knew it, we had become sterile to what had happened. Multiple documentaries were shown displaying the crash from numerous perspectives and films were in the early stages of production. The September 11^th we were now seeing, was something very different to what we saw on the day. Thanks to the news’ handling of the events, it had become a story and thus, we had become emotionally indifferent.

It is from this that each new tragedy was related back to this new story of “terror”. September 11^th had sequels on the news, “al-Qaeda” a recurring villain. There was then the spin off story with the second Gulf War, factually unrelated it was shown to us in relation to the on-going stories of “terror” as a means of removing us from the reality of the situation. People were dying but to society, it was merely another chapter in one of our favourite series. This is how the news fictionalised September 11^th and how we as a nation, are able to digest the numerous disasters it offers up to us. They are just new twists in a plot we are all used to following.

Personally I can’t wait for the next instalment of “Natural Disasters”, the Japan episode was good but you know there’s more coming up!

This is why I find the news hard to digest. It’s how artificial it is able to turn truly horrible events. It is due to the news we are able to joke about things of this nature, they’re distant to us. We never see past the statistics, but instead buy into the news’ fictionalised account.

And that to me… is the saddest thing of all.

Shaun Beale

The Pessimist's Guide to Modern Living - Part 4: Bang! And My Migraine Is Brewing

It's something we've all experienced. Sitting comfortably, watching your favourite episode of Scrubs, The Jezza Kyle Scumbag Farm, Star Trek: The Good One with Picard In It, or what have you, when, all of a sudden, your viewing experience is rudely interrupted. It wouldn't happen at the cinema, of course - they have the common decency to get all their advertising out of the way before the film starts, so the smart among us can judge when we can safely enter the theatre at a strategically-discerned time and thus avoid the barrage of products vieing for your attention (ignoring, of course, subliminal messaging and the odd case of product placement). This is not, unfortunately, the case for today's television. Unless you're watching the Godlike BBC, you will be forced, every quarter of an hour (or thereabouts), to submit to ritualistic brainwashing, through a horrendous mixture of bright colours, irritating actors and, naturally, cataclysmically grating jingles.

Yes, The Pessimist's Guide to Modern Living has finally reached the topic of annoying adverts. You could go outside and enjoy the sun, but at least if you're reading this you in no way run any risk of advert confrontation. Outside there be billboards. Here, there be no adverts: there are but my honeyed words.

A prudent place to begin this search into the dark depths of this most irritating of subjects would be to provide a short summary of the kind of adverts I intend to discuss herein. As a student of English, one of the many things we are taught to treat with a pessimistic eye is capitalism, and the consumerism which inevitably walks hand-in-hand with it. Of course, I am not completely against advertising per se: as a capitalism culture we require the exchange of goods to keep our world afloat and, more immediately, to keep ourselves prospering. The majority of us do this through work - by exchanging the application of our skills for capital; it is true, of course, that in order to get jobs we must advertise ourselves, and earn interest from potential clients. Furthermore, if you're skill is making a product, then the only way to make a living is by advertising this product in a way that will interest the consumer and make them want to purchase it. As such, advertising itself is not a bad or even an annoying thing - it is a necessity for us to keep afloat in a country dominated by the pursuit of capital.

What I do have a problem with, however, is those adverts that choose to make themselves stick in our minds or invade our personal lives through the most irritating means necessary: it is at this point that the pursuit of monetary wealth ceases to be a necessity and instead becomes an aggressive offensive, trying ferociously to make us buy what they are selling if only in a desperate attempt to make it go away and leave us alone.

The obvious place to begin, then, is with those adverts we are forced to watch about 3 minutes of about every twelve or so minutes on television. Not all of them are bad - some are in fact very impressive. But occasionally - very occasionally - we will be presented with something that really jars with our personality or which feels worse to watch than Chinese water torture is to endure. It is because of these few most heinous examples of the media that I so often thank God we are free from adverts here, I often think - otherwise, we could be driven insane by the constant influx of promoters vieing for our attention and love. For pity's sake, when will we be left alone?

Sorry about that. Please ignore the slight interruption, and continue with your truly ad-free enjoyment.

As I was saying, it often feels like we would be better off just suffering a mild stroke every time a show we are watching chooses to take a break, so that we can avoid such horrors as that opera singer trying to make us Go Compare before we buy our car insurance (the English student inside me feels the urge to write him a letter to inform him that the correct expression would be to 'go AND compare', but I worry this may be bordering on the realms of obsessive-compulsive behaviour, so I will resist even mentioning the fact). This man not only has the most annoying jingle in the world, but is always surrounded by terrible scenery, props and, of course, cheesy one-liners: 'How much do you think they're paying him?' 'He's only a tenor.' Ha. Ha. Ha. Actually, he's a baritone, but worst of all is the fact that this is supposed to entice us to use this service! The advert has certainly achieved the feat of making sure nobody forgets their product, but nobody has fond memories of the process, and I have a strong suspicion that more people are driven away from the company than are dragged into support for it, and all because of a bad decision: the choice of trying to be funny, and instead becoming an unbearably grim spectacle of consumerism at its worst.

This isn't, however, the only advertisement that I have a deep-seated hatred for. I can list a hundred if I felt you had the time to read it or that my fingers would be able to bear the strain as I furiously hit the keys in an attempt to expel all my pent-up rage a frustration with these terrible spectacles, expressing my disgust at the ear-burningly bad Confused.com adverts, consisting only of several cartoon people singing along to 'cleverly' reworked versions of such great hits as Queen's 'Somebody to Love' and The Village People's 'YMCA', interspersed with imagery exhibiting a strange obsession with women's breasts: take a close look - all of the female characters in these adverts have heavily-emphasised and exaggerated boobs which in many cases defy the laws of physics and, whenever these characters move, they bounce, accompanied by a strangely Carry On-esque 'boing!' sound. I'm not sure what this has to do with the service of price-comparison, but it seems very strange to my mind. Other things I am sure I am not alone in hating are the new Churchill adverts, where suddenly the titular dog is incredibly Northern and in a civil partnership with Martin Clunes, the worst part being that aside from all their unfunny banter really meaning nothing with regard to selling insurance of any kind, I generally come away with more of an urge to buy pickled eggs. Cartoon rappers also seem to now be selling cars of some variety (although I can't for the life of me remember what model - something about a car than makes pasta?), and O2 is now advertised by a young woman walking very slowly singing about little boxes on the hillside, little boxes full of ticky-tacky little boxes, on the hillside, little boxes all the same or something - I may have misheard the lyrics, and they may in fact be very insightful about the benefits of joining this particular network, but that's what I heard and it's not doing a lot for me...

Speaking of adverts which don't really help you get a grasp of what it is you're supposedly buying, the biggest culprit seems to be perfume adverts. What is wrong with these adverts, I hear you ask? Well, I'll tell you.

I think the biggest issue surrounding them is the fact that they seem to be attempting to pose as some strange for of high art, but showing Natalie Portman lie in a bubble bath with large sunglasses on and then show off her naked back isn't really that classy. Furthermore, the more 'intellectual' the advert tries to be, the less we are actually told of the product: two moody-looking young individuals hoarsly whispering words like 'obsession' and 'lust' may be sexually exciting to the more horny individual, but it really doesn't help these sprays sell. What the cinematography has to do with the perfume on sale, furthermore, is a whole different kettle of fish. In fact, for everything we are told about the fragrance, it could smell just like that! Assuming you are supposed to believe, however, that the perfume will make you smell like the celebrity endorsing it, then are we really any the wiser? How does any Average Joe actually know what Natalie Portman smells like? Actually, let me rephrase that: How does any law-abiding Average Joe actually know what Natalie Portman smells like? From my limited knowledge of her (from V for Vendetta) I can only assume she smells like gunpowder. Is this really an accurate idea, however? And what about other celebrity-supported smellies? Most people buying Robert Pattison's cologne would probably expect it to smell a bit like blood; Lady Gaga's, like meat left out under a hot spotlight for hours. In fact, for all the good perfume adverts do with regards informing us of the nature of the product, they might as well have Martin Freeman talking to camera, telling us that it smells okay. It would sell more bottles than what we've got at the moment, I assure you.

As I have already asserted, adverts are a necessary part of a society driven by consumer culture - we could try and do without capital, but it would be impossible to adjust to a new way of living now. A little restraint, however, would be nice. As aforementioned herein, the benefit of the comfort of the cinema is that our viewing experience, unlike that of our television-viewing, is uninterrupted by the constant barrage of advertisements. However, if we wish to watch a film on the small screen, the same problem presents itself. Would it not be better to allow us to enjoy what we have settld down to watch and have all adverts postponed until the end, so as to provide us with a fuller, more satisfactory viewing experience? The worst thing, of course, is almost too terrible to write about: what happens when we are enjoying Rush Hour 2 and then, suddenly, we are presented with a completely different break - namely, the half an hour wait following the adverts for a news update? I know it isn't strictly in line with the theme of annoying adverts, but when you think that all news really is is an advertisement for fear, then it suddenly finds a place within this text. I'm watching this film - I don't want to have to wait a whole frickin' half hour to see how it ends! Damn you all! And then they have the audacity to go and disrespect the hard-working people who helped to make the film (or, indeed, television program) we have just watched by squashing the credits up to the corner of the screen and talking over the newly-recorded song by Bryan Adams created purely for the text in question solely for the purpose of telling us what's on next. If I wanted to know, I could always wait a few minutes or, better still, click the 'guide' button on the remote! Grrr!

And still I am unfinished in my rant about this subject. I cannot go any further without mentioning public service announcements and government-funded notifications. As if we weren't scared enough of the world already, we are now constantly told that we need to do this and that or all our income will stop coming in! And don't forget, that if you have a boyfriend you WILL be sexually assaulted or verbally abused, because this is what the modern man does: there are, after all, no cases in history where women have been the cause of their partner's misery, are there? Therefore, a perfectly one-sided television campaign showing how dangerous men are is the only way forward.

And what about when we're happily watching something and then, suddenly, we see Graham Norton running across the bottom of the screen, thus ruining the intense moment while we watch Matt Smith defeat yet another alien threat. I don't care about the new series of Help Sir Andrew Lloyd-Webber Find a New Way of Making a Fortune - leave my entertainment alone!

But it would be remiss of me to blame the annoyance of advertising purely upon television - have any of you ever noticed how rarely pop-up blockers actually work? Here I am, happily working my way through an article online to help with my course, when suddenly I am hit by some weird sort of subliminal messaging from the sick overlords who rule the interweb with their iron fists and armies of internerd sidekicks.

VOTE GREEN FOR ADONIS OF THE YEAR

It doesn't seem to matter what you do or where you go these days, you will never be able to avoid the in-your-face attacks of the advertising companies.

It isn't like you can just turn on safe-search: how about the massive image in the middle of the Charlie Bear fan website telling you that you have won their hourly prize? I'd be more inclined to believe you if I hadn't just been told exactly the same thing by the last ten or so websites I visited. Even more irritating are those 'interactive' adverts - swat the fly to win a free* iPad 6 even though it hasn't been invented yet! Vote which of these you prefer and we'll give you a prize even though you'd have to pretty stupid not to realise that it doesn't matter where abouts on the image you click: it will still register you as having made some kind of vote even if you just click the rightmost corner of the box.

Sometimes, I accept people need to advertise to survive. But surely they could do it in a less irritating way?

William D. Green

Adverts created with the kind help of Shaun Beale and Alex White.

Special thanks goes to Harriet Baker, Shaun Beale, Simon Birkmyre, Nicholas Cage, Juliet Dowrick, Andy Harbottle, The Most Interesting Man in the World, Alex White and, of course, myself for appearing in the adverts contained herein, whether they expected to be featured or not.

These images may not be situated in the same location in the post if this page is viewed from a mobile application, but this should not adversely affect your reading experience. If the text on these images proves hard to read, simply click on them for a larger version.

The Most Interesting Man in the World

Coming Soon to a Cinema Near You!

The unique tale of a self obsessed and educated hero saving the world! Unlike anything Cage has performed in before; a truly ground-breaking performance. This highly anticipated film has Cage overtaking Keanu Reeves' position as the single most talented actor of his generation!

Five Stars! A must-watch!

Shaun Beale