Doctor Who review season finale: Death In Heaven and an ideological battleground

Doctor Who: Death in Heaven season finale — an ideological battleground.

SPOILER ALERT

Cybermen meet zombies in the second half of this A Matter of Life and Death nick in which our intrepid heroes hissy-fit around a lot.

There's so much that could have worked beautifully in this series. How can you have those great production values and Peter Capaldi on board and still make such a hash of it?

The problem, as always, is the script. The writers' caprice runs through the Doctor Who reboot like Nick Clegg's election promises. It's all Patrick Duffy in the Dallas shower, a dream, a mish-mash of half-remembered images and tropes, mis-threaded backstory lurches (a sudden retro-fit and Gallifrey exists, the Doctor's nemesis conveniently telling him where). Characters don't so much arc as teleport to whichever position the writers decide suits the script du jour.

Dream logic seems to have been employed to suit the writers rather than designed to delight the audience the way a modern Maya Deren or Bunuel (from whom the writers appear at times to be borrowing) might do while burrowing into the collective unconscious, taking the audience on a ride rather than taking us for a ride.

Russell T Davies' heavy reliance on undermotivated melodrama and shouty frenetics is still, after all this time, shrilling away like a dentist's drill. Clara is SO deeply in love and yet she wastes an irritating plot-blocking age verifying, like software gone wrong, that it really is Danny who's speaking to her from the afterlife. Everyone's so cross all the time, operating within their own little thunderous clouds of fury. Like late-night coke-fiends running out of Charlie, you half expect them to sniff and wipe their noses before running off in the Tardis to score more.

The producers set Missy (short for misogyny?) lurching around like a menopausal drunk, neurotic and malevolent because, deep down, she lurves the Doctor, really. Michelle Gomez brings her demented Mary Poppins amusingly to life thanks to a histrionic script and neck-breaking nods to Heath Ledger's Joker. Turns out Missy's spotted the dominatrix in Clara and the sub in the Time Lord and has expended a ton of energy keeping them together. Dunno why. It doesn't help the plot but skitters along the surface of better past-masters, nicking all the glittery bits.

The script dusts the cobwebs off old favourites — "Why are you doing this?" "I need you to know we're not so different" from a squillion denouments where, quelle surprise, the protagonist and antagonist are inwardly the same. Aw, and love conquers all, unless you're the season's Big Bad.

This may be Borg territory (poking that hoary old question: what makes us human?) but collective action is trumped by the one single Cyberman — Danny Pink — who loves more than anyone in the entire history of the human race, more than any of the dead who make up the army of Cybermen because some people are more SPESHUL. (If Danny is capable of redemption, then why none of the other Cybermen? If the Brigadier retains a vestige of humanity, then why can't the entire Cyberman race be redeemed and escape genocide?) It aims for the sublime moments in Buffy where the Slayer has to kill Angel gone bad, or finally gets to kiss Spike, but misses, barely achieving bathos. There's no underpinning of the emotions at a deeper level. For a series about a Time Lord, they do get the emotional timing spectacularly wrong.

Once again, the military and authority are fetishised and ideological markers slipped in under the bells and whistles. Danny's a former soldier who meant well but accidentally killed a boy when he was serving in the Middle East. He is the idealised self-sacrificing soldier who never gets to question what it was he killed for. In this narrative, it's not the politics or the premise for the war that's wrong — it's the fault of individual soldiers like Danny, whose conscience pays the price.

Lethbridge-Stewart falls from the Presidential flight and survives because, as it handily turns out at the end, another good Cyberman caught her, her Brigadier father. If favourite characters can be saved from death as easily as this, then nothing is at stake and any anxiety invested in the outcome is thereby diminished. A huge pic of her father dominating the President's plane provides another "hunh?" moment. A humble brigadier? Really? It would take a whole Clifton Suspension Bridge of disbelief to buy that. Not only another sloppy moment of disrespect for the audience, but also an unpleasant reinforcement of the principle of dynastic succession, hardwiring young viewers with ruling-class values of social and political hierarchy.

Hysteria is sloshed on— papering over the narrative canyons instead of generating authentic emotion and catharsis — and the resulting ambience is simply over-mannered and harsh, trite and sentimental.

Superficially inclusive, the narrative brings non-whites and LGBTs under the umbrella of existing power structures – on condition that they don't actually challenge those structures. Even the cheeky black schoolgirl is another version of the perky, privileged white Clara. Prepare to be assimilated!

The BBC has calibrated its culture to the norms of business and the military, with more armed forces personnel featuring as protagonists in its drama and documentaries over the past few years than I can remember, while the space to challenge the mainstream political narrative has shrunk to almost nothing. Imposing a reading of the world at odds with people's experience, BBC output not only leaves capitalism and the status quo unquestioned, it's actually reinforced. All those celebrity chefs, big swinging business dicks and talent judges constantly putting you in your place in the New Order, clipping your wings, accustoming you to taking orders. They're even enlisting Santa, as dreamt up by the Coca-Cola corporation, for the Christmas special. They'd better subvert this one!

Doctor Who was always a bastion of establishment values when it was created just as the Sixties began to swing, but there was something innocent about it, and you could filter out the stories from the residual politics. However, our beloved creation now sneakily puts a new generation back in the box marked pleb. Respect hierarchy, genuflect before authority, fall in with militarism under the delusion that you have value as an individual. Forget the proud heritage of the post-war era where the mass of the population enjoyed an unprecedented confidence born of an increasingly (if far from perfect) egalitarian society. Science fiction fans of the world unite - you have nothing to lose but your gains.

Review of Deep Breath, the season opener.

Doctor Who "Deep Breath" review: all hail Peter Capaldi, shame about the script.

Why is Peter Capaldi flashing his red bits like a lady baboon, and other questions.

SPOILER ALERT

Anna Chen's review of Dr Who "Deep Breath" first broadcast BBC1, Saturday 23rd August 2014

The Dalek was eyeing up some poor bastard on the far side of the room. It hadn't yet seen me, so I backed away. Far scarier in the actual metal than on screen, its presence only three feet away sent my heart pounding to 11, so loud it was sure to hear me. It swung round and I froze, skewered by its cyclops stare. Me and a Dalek. Eyeball to eyeballs. An inhuman rorschach inkblot of a creation, sucking out all the dark matter in my soul and planting it into this single embodiment of EE-vuhl. It waved its sink-plunger at me and I took another couple of steps back. People laughed, my mother among them. Surely a nervous, entirely inappropriate, reaction to the horror before them? I sensed another malign presence. I slowly turned to where the people were looking and tittering ... to find a Cyberman bent right over me, arms outstretched for a bearhug.

I screamed an eight-year-old's scream and ran as fast as I could, missing the Cyberman's grip by a whisker, past the Ice Warriors, the Monoids and the Fish People, and screeched to a halt before the Yeti blocking my way outta here. A moment's relief because the Yeti was surely just a big teddy bear. All that cuddly fur waiting for a kid to snuggle into. But this was no oversized furry playmate: this was a sinister, silent, unbelievably huge furball with fangs and a bad manicure standing between me and the exit. I stared at it, suddenly aware of depths of alien viciousness. Knowing I was beaten, I broke into a fit of weeping and heard the laughter rise. I swear that Yeti was heaving along to the jollity. It shifted a little to one side leaving a space just big enough for me to squeeze through and then made a final swipe. I yelped and leapt several feet in one bound, vowing I would return one day to vanquish the monsters that had landed at the Daily Mail Ideal Home Exhibition.

That was one of the few times Doctor Who ever pressed my terror button. Doctor Who was always about the permanance of the British empire and our values; as much in the outlands of space and time as here among Britainland's acres of melamine and fresh paint. Why else, after 51 years, is there still a white male at the helm of the Tardis aided by a trusty gurl assistant? Terror was the series' way of reminding you how lucky you were to be alive at such a secure, stable time ... if you lived in the British Isles rather than, say, post-second-world-war Korea, Yemen, Kenya, or Malaya. Any disruption of the status quo was certain to be corrected by the Doctor, with equilibrium restored by the end of the series and our place in the universe nailed.

Nuthin' changes except when it does. This year, for its twelfth reincarnation and eighth series of the modern reboot, Doctor Who goes full-tilt steampunk, calling once again on the Victorian era for validation in a world that's a little less secure, a little less reliable. Terror springs from newscasts and comes knocking at the door. Casting Malcolm Tucker (who bears a passing resemblance to actor Peter Capaldi) is inspired. Gravitas, grit, a laser tongue and a weary intelligence far beyond that of the mere mortals surrounding him make him the perfect Timelord in this, our hour of need.

Sadly, 'Deep Breath', the first episode of the long-awaited new series introducing Capaldi, inhales superb production values, along with some solid acting, but exhales a godawful script from Dr Who veteran Steven Moffat. Dwahlinks, you call that DIALOGUE? Monologues, more like: with declamations to the audience requiring actors to remain rooted unresponsively to the spot instead of reacting the way people, you know, react! The old vagrant and the robot boss have to freeze and endure long narcissistic screeds of character-establishing bollox that should never have made it out of Moffat's notebooks.

The episode opens promisingly with a Godzilla-scale tyrannosaurus rex as the chosen delivery method of the Tardis, the new Doctor and his companion, Clara (Jenna Coleman). After terrorising London, it is swiftly dispatched by a gentleman cyborg who harvests humans for body parts and requires some dinosaur optical nerve; although how first incinerating the creature aids raptor recycling is never made clear. The story then unravels with one damn thing after another rather than pearls finely strung to develop a complete whole: a meandering scene concerning a bad-smelling homeless man, some absurd short-cut ratiocination from Madame Vastra (Neve McIntosh), and lo-o-ong event-free dialogue in Mancini's restaurant. You know it's an idiot-plot when the heroes stumble on their nemesis as he's recharging and don't even unplug him. Clara is saved from the cyborg's cannibalising restaurant by the crimebusting Paternoster gang. They escape by taking the deep breath of the title and holding it, thereby avoiding detection by the murderous bots who only want to find their "promised land". The Doctor, still befuddled by the stresses of his regeneration, may or may not have pushed the cyborg gent out of his human-skin balloon at the clunking denouement, although suicide under the torture of being forced to listen to him rant while barely getting a word in edgewise, isn't ruled out. There's not a lot of outwitting going on.

When Joss Whedon-manque Russell T Davies first rebooted the franchise, his achilles heel was his adoption of the surface characteristics of Buffy and Angel with only the slimmest understanding of how plot and character interact, resulting in relentlessly annoying hysteria and a lack of story dynamic. He gave us sentiment instead of profound emotional involvement, lurches instead of arcs-within-arcs that dipped and soared along with our spirits. Bad habits have stuck.

I was always shown (and told!) that the rule was 'show, don't tell'. The Doctor babbles exposition like a mofo in a stinker of a script in search of a storyline. Note to producers: making characters talk 13 to the dozen like coke-fiends doesn't mean we won't notice little things like plot-holes and entire missing throughlines. Have none of you heard of PACING? Longeurs stretched into longdays as sub-Buffy banter held up the promised action while we were expected to genuflect before the awesomeness of Moffat's one-liners, a vanity process not far removed from pounding rock for diamonds — yes, there were a few but by the time they surfaced I was too exhausted to care.

You can lesbian-lizard-snog all you like in order to establish your LGBT credentials, but class hierarchy is alive and very unwell in the world of Doctor Who. Any subversive value resides in the relationship between Lady Handbag, Madame Vastra, and her maid-wife being normalised, not hollered triumphantly every two minutes. Uncool! Why're we back in very unsubversive days when maids and butlers were the norm (know your place, kids), and where the white "ninja" maid appropriates eastern skills but the only actual East Asian (Clem So) in sight is a robot? Reactionary mindset leaking at the edges? Even Harry Potter had an East Asian girlfriend until she was dumped for a white girl under circumstances never satisfactorily explained. In fact, not much ethnic minority presence at all in this one.

And why does the Doctor keep exposing his frock-coat's red silk lining like a lady baboon flashing her in-oestrus labia? So many questions, so much left dangling.

We wade through a swamp of exposition so thick you could stand a spoon up in it. The origins and rationale of the cyborg aliens aren't revealed through the clever workings of the script: Capaldi has to bark them out while the cyborg stares glassily, politely waiting for him to finish.

The cyborg's not too bright, anyhow. Eons of farming humans in order to make a skin balloon when he could have used whatever material Victorian dirigibles were made from, or simply bought some animal skins from the local abbatoir?

The funniest moments are owned by Strax the over-literal butler (Dan Starkey) whose knocking out of Clara with a rolled up copy of The Times was authentic laugh-out-loud slapstick.

Clara goggles her way through like someone who's been told she has pretty eyes (which she does) and has given up blinking for fear of hiding them. Her shrill tantrums have been praised as the mark of a strong woman. Surely, the critics have mistaken petulant for "feisty"? Having her throw strops and hissy-fits at inappropriate moments is a singularly ham-fisted method of telegraphing that this is not your dad's submissive Dr Who companion but an incredibly dated Grrrl Power trope that the BBC has only just twigged exists. Brattish and bossy when she could be co-operative, sensitive and insightful (but there I go again, talking about myself: it's catching), Clara is the template for the privileged breed of management who climb up the echelons of the BBC and walk off with those million-quid payoffs. FFS, don't try this at home, kids.

"In the name of the British Empire," cries Madame Vastra as her gang perform their rescue. Drip, drip, drip. Doctor Who is the hard-wiring of young minds into the values of the Establishment, not those of our real British society. The post-war period of freedom and relative prosperity for the masses is at an end, the party's over and the Doctor has reincarnated into the child-catcher. Protect your tender budding brains. Retain your critical faculties even as you chow down on your (intermittently tasty) comfort food.

An ideological battleground. Review of Doctor Who season finale: Death in Heaven.

Review of the rebooted Sherlock: The Blind Banker.

BEA FAQ for the BBC, casting directors and general media

Originally posted along with the BBC robo-letter, British East Asian FAQ for the BBC, casting directors, the media and anyone working in areas where diversity is an issue gets its own page here.

FAQ about BEAs for the benefit of the BBC, casting directors and reviewers.

Q: Is it true that East Asians can only play East Asians?

A: East Asian people are said to possess a wide range of human emotions. If you are nice to them, they are often nice back. If you are horrid, they may very well get cross. If, for example, you are in an accident, you may be lucky enough to find East Asians willing to call an ambulance, staunch the bleeding and tie a tourniquet, clear your airways, crack a joke to cheer you up and phone your mum to let her know you may be some time. In real life in the UK we find Chinese bus drivers, Korean traffic wardens, Thai teachers, plus scientists, lawyers and doctors from a whole slew of East Asian origins. Look out for them — we're sure you'll find them.

Q: Is it true that only East Asians can play East Asians?

A: Yes, when white actors play East Asians — such as John Wayne as Genghis Khan, Mickey Rooney as Mr Yunioshi or Jonathan Pryce as the Eurasian pimp — it is called "yellowface". Like "blackface" before it, it is considered bad form by nice people who would not kick a puppy or drown a kitten or otherwise do anything horrid to another sentient being.

Q: Do East Asians have lives outside the takeaway, snakehead gangs and business?

A: Should the takeaway, the restaurant and the casino in your drama already have their full complement of ethnic characters, you may well find other areas where East Asians would fit right in. Having a complicated romance, for example. Discovering a cure for cancer. There's a Chinese doctor whose mitochondrial DNA research proves we all walked out of Africa 70-100 thousand years ago. Think of any human endeavour and we bet you could find an East Asian who has already done it or who is working on it.

Q: Is it true that some East Asians have regional British accents?

A: Human beings tend to absorb and reflect their environment. With over 500,000 Chinese and East Asians in Britain, we think it is likely that some of them will speak Cockney, Scouse, Brummie, Glasgie and so forth.

Q: Do all East Asians do kung fu?

A: Yes. This is something we try and deny to throw you off the scent that we are coming for you.

Q: Is it true that East Asians are all clever?

A: No. Emphatically, no. Did I mention no?

Q: Do East Asians have hobbies or do they unplug themselves when they aren't working in the takeaway or selling dodgy DVDs or hacking?

A: Pertaining to the answer above, you can find them writing poetry, painting and drawing, having tragic romances, raising children, keeping pets and fighting da man.

Q: Are there any East Asians training to be actors? We just don't have a wide enough pool of talent to draw from.

A: Ah, you must be a casting director. Contrary to the myth, there have been Chinese actors in Britain since Burt Kwouk was in short pants and Tsai Chin's dialogue was conducted mostly in short pants for the very varied roles afforded her as Suzy Wong and Juicy Lucy, neither of her characters rocket scientists, sadly. We are confident that a cursory investigation of our drama schools will appraise you as to the number of trained East Asian actors emerging to join those who have been here long time.

Q: European actors have so much character — how can East Asians possibly compete?

A: Acting is a very competitive business but East Asian actors are certainly able to “compete” with their Caucasian counterparts. They no longer have to do this by scrunching up their eyes and doing that buck-tooth smiley thing so beloved of Hollywood back when the world was black and white, and the BBC right up to Sherlock: the reboot. There are more roles in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than the Spooks, Fu Manchu and China dolls dreamt of in your philosophy. A cunning ability to make bad Mandarin sound like good Mandarin to BBC ears will also ensure that one day the said East Asian actor will certainly be able to “compete” with the likes of Benny Cumberbatch and Olly Coleman for all those fantastic quality drama roles once you realise that China is a juicy ol' market, a piece of which you might just want one day.

Q: How come East Asians do submissive nookie so well?

A: We learned this at our grandmothers' tiny lotus feet, grasshopper, and imbibed it with our mothers' milk. Or our wet-nurses' milk if you happen to be a Chinese oligarch. Ha! Only choking. Some might say you were just too darn lazy or lacking in imagination to create, say, a working-class Chinese woman, bright, sparky and political with no business sense whatsoever, who dreams of a better world where we are all equal. Oh ... that would be me.

Q: Doesn't the actor have to reflect the character they portray and include things like ethnicity as well as wider considerations of age, gender, physical appearance and so on?

A: Sometimes we suspect you are just too stupid to do this job and perhaps you shouldn't be clogging up the works with your seething prejudice. At other times, we just think maybe you should get out more. To answer your question, yes, which is why Laurence Olivier made such a good Othello.

The Fairy Princess Diaries: When the BBC told the BEAs to take a Slow Boat to China….

Open letter from the British East Asian Artists in response to the BBC letter.

BBC axes The Review Show

This Sunday sees the last edition of The Review Show, ending a longstanding BBCTV arts strand. Already shunted from its weekly Friday spot on BBC2 to a monthly graveyard shift on BBC4, even that has proven too much for the philistines at the top who have decided to axe it. All those ginormous management salaries in return from destroying our common cultural experience. Well done.

The Review Show was a must-watch for sharp informed cultural debate anchored by Kirsty Walk and her regulars: Germaine Greer, Tom Paulin, Tony Parsons, Paul Morley and Mark Kermode. Alison Pearson may be an unpleasant right-wing idiot but her flaws could be absorbed by her panel peers.

Before that, its forerunner, The Late Review, was a nightly event on BBC2 from 1994, presented by Tracy McCloud.

We used to have Arena, The Old Grey Whistle Test, Top of the Pops (pre-scandal), Melvyn Bragg, and Newsnight Review down from its weekly slot.

Now BBC2's The Culture Show and Later With Jools are the last men standing. Jools Holland is increasingly looking like a fish caught in a tiny pool as the tide goes out.

What happened to regular doses of animation, dance, silent movies, international cinema, movie greats, Play for Today and all the other cultural coverage that was woven into the fabric of the media reflecting our rich and illustrious arts mix? You used to be able to get a solid education in the arts just from watching the BBC. Now it's wall-to-wall Simon Cowellesque copies and business shills.

The BBC promises better arts coverage just as they drop their arts show. I guess there's not enough room for reality shows, soaps and ghastly "talent" contests harking back to They Shoot Horses, Don't They? Make us stupid, why dontcha? Capitalism demands it and the men and women running the media are serving it up with a spoon.

The Borgias - 0 Tudors - 6: review of the Showtime series starring Jeremy Irons

Suffering from withdrawal symptoms at the end of my DVD box set binge of The Tudors — superb pacy story-telling, complex characters you cared about, stunning costumes and jewellery — I looked for a replacement. One friend assured me that The Borgias with Jeremy Irons was as good as. How could it not be? The most infamous family in Christendom, politics, power, treachery and sex.

I'm afraid my friend was wrong. Very wrong.

It's like wading through wet cement and I'm having a problem staying with it in the 2nd season. I can see why it was dropped after three seasons. Jeremy Irons is more a peeved country squire than the satanic but charming Roderigo Borgia transforming himself into Pope Alexander. No matter how much he seethes and flashes his eyes, he does not have the gravity of Daddy Borgia.

Same with Cesare Borgia played by Francois Arnaud. These are not bad actors, just a sadly miscast reflection of the programme's middle-class audience.

The real problem is the script. Ye gods: pompous, ponderous, on the nose, overlong. Scenes that outstay their welcome, the writing puts the bore in Borgias. I mean, how can you make Nicolo Machiavelli a smirking clerk? None of the lethal intelligence of the age is even approximated at, only shallow posturing. Neil Jordan needed someone on the team to give him a counter-balancing wit and verve, the sort that made The Tudors sparkle.

Not just in the style, but the content. The Tudors is excellent in showing how complicated politics worked in Henry VIII's time and swings you with masterful ease around all the perspectives, so you always understand the motivation behind dodgy choices even if you don't agree with them. The Borgias just have one dreary linear one-damn-thing-after-another plot but with long gaps. It's mostly telling with little showing, and all on one note.

We are told the fact that certain things happened and that choices were made, such as the French King Charles's change of mind when he captures Lucrezia — but there's never a convincing demonstration of why he suddenly held back. And then Charles simply agrees with Roderigo that the French army should go on to Naples rather than stopping to sack Rome. We are told the surface facts but are never shown the emotional and subtle reasons why this should be. This was never a problem with The Tudors.

Some of the characterisation is rivalled only by cardboard. Performances veer off grand guignol and into amdram. I mean, the affected nasal whine of the Naples prince and King Charles of France's uglification may have neen historically true but here it's apparent that it's being acted.

The only character who seemed to have any complexity is Giovanni Sforza (Ronan Vibert), Lucrezia's first husband who comes a cropper after serially raping her and trying to extract himself from the political commitments that went with the marriage.

The film set is the star. The bonus feature showing you how the vast beautiful hall of St Peters was made is fascinating. If only the series was half as interesting.

Showtime obviously felt the same as me and hunted for a replacement series to fill the Tudors gap and settled on what should have been a no-brainer. Unfortunately, this is no I, Claudius, Game of Thrones or ... dare I say it one mo' time, The Tudors.

Military industrial complex Skynet rewiring our brains

Not another radio drama about soldiers. Our 21st Century militarised culture seems to be shaping up with the help of an increasing number of army plays on BBC Radio 4 to go with the tedious humanisation of business drummed into us in programmes such as The Apprentice, Dragons Den, anything with Evan Davies, Secret Millionaire (boo-hoo!), and anything with Mary Portas.

Not to mention the bloody awful swathe of Confucian wet-dreams telling us where we are in the pecking order with a ready-made stratum of management big-heads enjoying putting the scum in their place. Very offending examples include: X-Factor, Pop Idol, Britain's Got Talent and anything involving Gordon Ramsey. Across the pond, there's a plethora of instances but let's go with America's Top Model where an imperious Tyra Banks and her thousand-yard stare regularly mash up young beauty, and Kate Perry's ghastly Part of Me video where she gets over a breakup by shearing off her lovely locks, donning khaki and learning how to shoot foreigners in their own lands.

Today we had Behind Enemy Lines in Radio 4's Red and Blue series, a tale about British Special Forces and war games. Last week it was Hearts and Minds. Even the National Theatre has got in on the act with its militarised Hamlet, although you'll have to take my word for it as all pix of the heavily tooled-up soldiery behind Fortinbras and manning Elsinore have disappeared off the net despite this being a crucial element of the production's mise en scene. Elsewhere we have images from Wootton Bassett stoking emotion so we daren't ask the important questions about why these young people were sent to fight, for what purpose and in whose interest.

Soldiers and commerce are stewing up a treat in a mercenary agenda where the state backs the interests of money, not unlike the East India Company of old. Even Islington Green isn't immune from that military magic now that the powers-that-be are changing its name to Islington Memorial Green.

Former residents of the one-time People's Republic of Islington are especially resentful of this. Shapely Charles Shaar Murray (42, 42, 42, 12.5) said: "I am especially resentful of this." He then flounced off, muttering, "I am a free man, not a cylinder."

UPDATE: Watching Britain's Got Talent, I realise that this breaks the mould in that it's not a freak show set up to entertain the mob. There's some awesome talent in there and the judges genuinely seem to care and want to develop the newcomers. So apologies to everyone at BGT — you're doing a great job.

The Triumph and Turmoil of Niall Ferguson's obsession with China, Channel 4: review

I knew the nutty Professor wouldn't let me down.

"Could China’s rise repeat the same disastrous trajectory of Germany a hundred years ago? It’s something to ponder the next time you order a Chinese takeaway." So says Niall Ferguson in the Radio Times even as the US moves forces out of the Middle East where they've done such a fine job and into the Pacific.

There are some who think that America is closer to Weimar hyper-inflation than the Land of the Rising Renminbi, and China tends to purchase its raw materials rather than send in the troops, but it doesn't make for as good a scare story as the humble takeaway as outrider for the new Chinese empire.

In Channel 4's China: Triumph and Turmoil (Mondays 8pm) Ferguson takes us from 250 BC to the present day and the Chinese "huge potential for venality" with no mention of Jardine Matheson, Western banks and drug money liquidity in 2007, hackgate, Empire, an accelerating number of wars on foreign soil or even the Opium Wars.

Niall shows us little old ladies playing mah jong because, he says, this is how we Chinese launder our ill-gotten gains. Children draw beautiful calligraphy as visual filler for yet more fear-laden drivel. We are sinister, we are robots, we are less than human: thank goodness we have been found out by the Yellow Peril Finder General. "They think differently," he growls. No, Niall. We think.

He's actually paid for this.

Niall shows us how awful it must have been to live under the First Emperor Qin Shi Huang (259-210BC). What did the Emperor ever do for us? Apart from standardising the language. And the currency. And the Terracotta Army. He burned books and he killed scholars. Two thousand years ago. Of course, what I'm really jonesing for is to live in mediaeval Europe 'cause I'd look good with buboes and the robber barons were sort of hippies if you overlook the weapons and the rape and the pillage. (Niall keeps referring to "Qin" as if this is his surname whereas his personal name was Ying Zheng. Keep up, Ferguson.)

Who could forget Niall's terror of Chinese male sexuality in Newsweek?

That has scary implications. ... It may be that the coming generation of Asian men without women will find harmless outlets for their inevitable frustrations, like team sports or videogames. But I doubt it. Either this bachelor generation will be a source of domestic instability, whether Brazilian-style crime or Arab-style revolution—or, as happened in Europe, they and their testosterone will be exported. There’s already enough shrill nationalism in Asia as it is. Don’t be surprised if, in the next generation, it takes the form of macho militarism and even imperialism. Lock up your daughters.

The trouble with this Top Gear school of history is that valid criticism, such as the very real corruption scandal of the billions stolen and taken abroad (helped by Western banks), gets lost in the fog of some old geezer's paranoid ramblings (there's an entire series of this to come). Instead of thoughtful analysis which would allow a deeper understanding and dialogue, we find ourselves being hard-wired for a military conflict further down the line once we've done over Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Iran, Venezuela and Russia. Hello, George Bush senior's New World Order.

The British media, once the best in the world (by my limited reckoning), now indulges such ill-informed racist nonsense. However, if you can get past the collective raspberry being blown on Twitter during last night's first episode, a quick scan of tweets shows that viewers are generally better informed than this throwback to Empire. Edward Luce in yesterday's FT — headline: Welcome to the new China-bashing — observes that the US trade deficit with China stands at £300bn, and we always tail the Americans. Damn those cunning orientals and their enormous tax breaks for investors!

Meanwhile, back here in the country with the highest number of CCTV cameras per head of population, where our government scrambles to withdraw us from European Human Rights laws, I look forward to the Olympics in the Land of the Free.

Niall Ferguson on the BBC.

Yet more depravity at the top: Jeremy Clarkson's joke

How depraved is our ruling elite: No 2

Ah, yes. A big Number two.

Then there's the BBC okaying Jeremy Clarkson's Pinochetesque outburst calling for strikers to be taken out and shot in front of their families. Under pressure from 21,000 complaints, the public corporation then told him to apologise, exercising more punitive authority over two middle-aged lads making a mischievous phone call in Sachsgate than they have over the popular entertainer so admired by Norwegian killer Anders Breivik and the EDL who are calling for attacks on trade unionists.

I am told by John Mendelsohn that, in the US, Ann Coulter is calling for a Kent State-like response (that is, fatal shootings) to the Occupy movement.

String him up with dental floss and then make him drive a Trabant. Only joking.

Or throttle him with his own oversized gizzards in front of his idiot sidekick. Only choking.

Not that the "only joking" plea worked for the Facebook Two, jailed for four years each after the summer riots, or Paul Chambers convicted and fined over a joke Tweet in the Twitter joke trial.

Before Clarkson fans start bleating about freedom of speech, remember that this is someone who supports the use of super-injunctions for the rich and, indeed, reached for his lawyer to shut up his ex-wife when he didn't like what she was saying about him. He only had the order lifted when he saw that it didn't work.

Comics (I know, Clarkson's not very comical) bust down taboos, paving the way for others to follow: usually good when you are mocking authority and control. But how about when you are facilitating the return of a mindset that divides us, that reinforces the powers of those repressive authorities? The beeb surely wouldn't want their man planting a seed in the collective unconscious for use of the same atrocities occurring in places like Colombia. Surely not just as working people are starting to challenge the pillaging of their their livelihoods by bankers and business, and when the right is on the rise in Europe?

Big business turns TV toxic

My latest NEW INTERNATIONALIST magazine column December 2011

Big business turns TV toxic

The ghost of Milton Friedman must be breaking out the bubbly in whatever Circle of Hell he now inhabits.

Across the globe, his Satanic little helpers have been sucking the wealth out of the system like a parasitic alien virus to feed the plutocrats at the top as public services are 'liberalised'. And now, in the Mother of all Parliaments, the Houses of both Commons and Lords have handed over Britain's glorious National Health Service to the forces of capital.

You know it's a bad thing when Cherie Blair sets up a company to profit from pillaging the NHS. Private clinics in supermarkets, no less. Croesus wept!

The October vote on NHS "reform" represents a massive seismic shift in our society ... but where have the media been in all of this?

It wasn't until the day after that some of the media happened to mention the colossal conflict of interest among those dismantling our national treasure. The TV outlets came to bury the news, not ring out a warning or a danger, or analyse what this would mean for their viewers. So while we were all watching Strictly Come Dancing, the Sopranos were making their major play. It's like the last reel in The Godfather where Michael Corleone attends his son's baptism while his enemies are bumped off.

Business is now more powerful than our democratic institutions, and to prove it, they're all over the media like a poisonous rash.

The Apprentice, Dragons' Den, Secret Millionaire ... All those toxic shows where hatchet-faced middle-managers with thousand-yard stares tell desperate losers which part of their souls they have to hack away in order to be a winner. Noticed how our entertainment is wall-to-wall with Wall Street wannabees naturalising this nightmare? If there was any fairness in the world, we'd be screening They Shoot Horses, Don't They? (1969) on a 24-hour loop as a warning to dem yoot.

It's not like we can wait for them to die out. Their well-fed spoilt children, like little emperors, are forming a queue, assuming privilege and telling-off rights over the rest of us. Ye gods, when did we last see the child of a sleb actually studying and doing something even two stages away from commerce, where success isn't measured in share-prices?

We're entering the Heart of Darkness as the delicate cultural superstructure is sucked back into Mordor and all the little Orcs start running things, while we're dragged into the 10th century.

Kids, you won't remember this, but there was actually a time when we had the beancounters on the run. When company directors earned only 50 times what their lowest-paid workers received.

Good luck to the protesters in Greece, Spain, America, Britain ... everywhere. We need you.

Working for the Clampdown: Niall Ferguson's testosterone theory of history

'Dominate, dominate, dominate.' No, not an S&M dalek, but Niall Ferguson on the telly. I lost count of how many times this word, or variations thereof, came up in the first five minutes of Episode One of Ferguson's Channel 4 series, Civilisation: Is the West History?

Coming on like an Oxbridge Jeremy Clarkson, Ferguson promises an explanation as to why the West is in decline and about to be overtaken by Asia, as represented by China in the first programme. However, instead of presenting a cool economic and political analysis of history since 1420 when China was the most advanced nation in the world and England was a 'septic isle', this heavyweight intellectual rammed home a barrage of triumphalist tub-thumping which quite startled me. His nostalgia for Empire, as once observed by an astute Eric Hobsbawm, was cranked up to eleven as he attempted to nail his viewers to the headboard.

Fear of the Yellow Peril evidently stalks academia, and Ferguson stoked himself up to confront the threat of the Other.

Much of his thesis seems predicated on the supremacy of the penis because, on Planet Ferguson, the human cock is central to his might-is-right narrative. It's all eunuchs (them) and size (us) and grrr ... He may think that the overblown use of macho terms is punching (see what I did it there, 'pushing' being far too effete?) buttons in his audience which will identify him with the power he craves, but there's a danger of thus drawing attention to what he lacks.

Achieving patronising machismo in one tiny phrase, 'Killer Apps', the first of his six apps, 'Competition', is the theme of this opening programme, so I laid back and thought of England while Fergy strutted his stuff.

I recognised some of his reading material. Ferguson is able to draw on 1421 and 1434 by Gavin Menzies for his enthralling account of China's massive 15th-century Ming Dynasty fleet: a veritable ocean-going city, while much of his list of China's achievements in science, agriculture and warfare can be found in Robert Temple's masterful The Genius of China (Joseph Needham). This, plus the superficial nature of his enquiry, gives the unfortunate impression that little information has been gleaned from original research but has instead been sourced from best-sellers and airport potboilers.

Following an amazing period of voyage and discovery, when vast 400-foot ships sailed as far as Africa, and possibly further to the Americas and Greenland, the new Emperor issued an order in 1424 that China clam up.

I eagerly awaited an explanation as to why China closed down in the 15th century. Was it fiscal troubles? Squabbling in court? Wars in Annam (Vietnam) proving to be too expensive? And the master's answer? 'We may never know.' But Niall, honey, you're paid to at least come up with a likely answer.

At this point he must have been experiencing performance anxiety, but nonetheless on he ploughed. His next trick: a brief dismissal of the opium wars as a reaction to something done by China to the British, as if the Brits were mere passive unwilling participants, thereby absolving them of any responsibility ... "We got the coffee houses," he says, "while China got the opium dens." Admire the cunning linguistic gymnastics, distancing Britain from its role as drug pusher-in-chief.

The opium wars were airily dismissed as 'retaliation' for an 'over-zealous official' who had the temerity to 'burn' the Britishers' opium. The 'over-zealous official' happens to be Governor-General Lin Zexu, something of a hero to many Chinese for his bid to stem the tide of opium, about 1,400 tons of it per year, but Niall couldn't bring himself to even give him a name. (And the opium wasn't burnt for obvious reasons: it was dissolved in water, salt and lime and dumped into the sea.) But what's a little drug addiction when there's cash to be made?

'Size isn't everything,' Fergy growls manfully. Hence his admiration for tiny Portugal's Vasco da Gama, who wrested the spice trade from the Arabs and other Easterners in what he tortuously calls the 'first spice race'. Ba-doom! Never mind that da Gama set up trading posts in the East with 'ruthlessness and downright nastiness', you can smell the envy. 'G'wan my son. Who's the daddy?' as Fergy might have thought but thankfully never said. At least not in this programme.

Portugal was followed by Spain, Holland, France and then England which, in 1635, sent its first ship to Chinese waters. 'With each new trading post, Western capitalism uploaded its killer app of competition.' Western lust for money made the interlopers 'hungry enough to kill for it.' Good grief, where's the competition in the bloody brutality this entailed? Is this his definition of competition?

Venice, Frankfurt, Lubek and London wanted their own 'autonomy'. Small was beautiful, according to Fergy, because it meant competition between states. But it was still within a great schtonking Western capitalist system. So not exactly competing systems, then.

Chaos can produce energy, and Karl Marx approved of the productive energies released by the early competitive stages of capitalism. However, Marx saw that the system contained the seeds of its own destruction, and predicted that capitalism would be its own gravedigger. For many of us being chewed up by this great juggernaut, this is true: even if it does mutate and survive, it will be for the benefit of a shrinking number at the top, not humankind as a whole. Capitalism took us out of feudalism and makes a better springboard to a more humane system than it does a place to stop and ossify.

Fergy fetishises capitalist competition out of context, out of time. 'By being divided, the West was able to rule the world', he says, as if this is a good thing on its own. He wants this 'killer app' applied as a principle where we are all atomised and competing against each other for dwindling resources. Haven't we moved on from this barbarism?

Casual racism aside, and noting that slavery was at no point even mentioned, Fergy's crowing about the success of capitalism — despite 2008's catastrophic and ongoing recession — may be considered by some to be short-sighted, out-of-touch and perhaps even a tad corrupt. As others have pointed out, we are only now beginning to feel the effects of a recession with its roots in the untrammelled 'competition' of the banks since they were deregulated by Reagan and his fellow Milton Friedman acolytes.

Seaumas Milne writes:

... there is a determined attempt in Britain to restore the economic model so comprehensively discredited in the crash of 2008. ... the banks' survival might depend on the greatest public handouts and guarantees in history.

In Wisconsin, collective bargaining rights have just been removed, while we face devastating cuts to our services in the UK. Right now, it is the working class and proletarianised middle classes who are paying for the bankers' crisis, capitalising the ruling business class. Where is the competition here?

Ferguson glorifies the nasty, brutish and short values of Hobbes in a world of every man for himself, dog-eat-dog, devil take the hindmost. You know what happened to civilisation? Masters of the Universe like Ferguson ate it.

Perhaps the key to Niall and his strange obsessions is to be found in the latest issue of Newsweek. In a piece about the gender imbalance in China, titled 'Men Without Women: The ominous rise of Asia’s bachelor generation', he writes:

That has scary implications. Remember, most of Hemingway’s stories in Men Without Women are about violence. They feature gangsters, bullfighters, and wounded soldiers. The most famous story is called simply “The Killers". It may be that the coming generation of Asian men without women will find harmless outlets for their inevitable frustrations, like team sports or videogames. But I doubt it. Either this bachelor generation will be a source of domestic instability, whether Brazilian-style crime or Arab-style revolution—or, as happened in Europe, they and their testosterone will be exported. There’s already enough shrill nationalism in Asia as it is. Don’t be surprised if, in the next generation, it takes the form of macho militarism and even imperialism. Lock up your daughters.

Once upon a time, such paranoia would have earnt you a spell of therapy or a nice basket-weaving holiday. Nowadays it gets you a TV series. Funny old world. No wonder civilisation's going down the pan.

Looks like de Niall is a river in Egypt.

In the Evening Standard, Civilisation: The West and the Rest is imperial history without the nasty bits by Alex Von Tunzelmann

Glorious British Imperialism in action or bullying by gunboat diplomacy? 'China's Age of Fragility' by Robert Bickers in History Today.

Ken Livingstone challenges Niall Ferguson on the Tory cuts.

Guardian review 25th March 2011

Review of Nial Ferguson's Channel 4 series, China: Triumph and Turmoil, 12 March 2012

Niall Ferguson threatens to sue London Review of Books writer over unfavourable review in the LA Times.

Julia Lovell on The Opium War

BBC jumps the orientalist shark: Fu Manchu in Edinburgh

Even Radio 4 is at it. Hard on the heels of last week's Sherlock oriental hate-fest, my beloved BBC Radio 4 has just broadcast someone called Miles Jupp presenting a thinly disguised bit of sinophobia celebrating one of the most notorious exercises in colonialist literature: Fu Manchu In Edinburgh.

While it's valid to explore the imaginary world which an iconic literary creation inhabits, the unquestioning depiction of Chinese as dehumanised hate-figures in the almost utter absence of humanised Chinese in the culture is fairly loathsome, not to mention irresponsible. The (il)liberal peppering throughout of orientalised buzz-words such as "fiendish" and "diabolical" only reinforces the suspicion that they've dug up Leni Riefenstahl and hired her as executive producer.

So what were these stories of which Jupp is so fond?

Anglo-Irish author Sax Rohmer finally hit paydirt in 1913 with a nasty series of novels embodying paranoia and hatred for an entire race embodied in the character of evil Dr Fu Manchu. Rohmer (born Arthur Ward) rode the vicious Yellow Peril wave, presenting Chinese as subhuman, cruel and degenerate, although he was actually projecting the cruelty, degeneracy and inhumanity of a nation that could go to war in order to impose at gunpoint the consumption of opium on the Chinese in the nineteenth century.

Clive Bloom writes in his 1996 investigation of pulp literature, Cult Fiction:

It is commonplace nowadays to note the inherent racism of English fiction at the beginning of the twentieth century. Sapper, Dornford, Yates, John Buchan, Edgar Wallace are targeted as the promulgators of a fearsome and totally irrational hatred of all things foreign. For them, the Black, the Chinese, the Argentinian, the Levantine and the Jew become sinister 'niggers', 'chinks', 'dagos', 'greasy Levantines' and 'oily Jews'. The race hatred of these authors employs a feverish conjunctivity, with oily Jews as both capitalists and 'bolsheviks', or Chinese who are both mandarin warlords and opium den keepers in Limehouse. Moreover, when not acting themselves these essentially cowardly employ peculiarly simian dacoits or things of a polyglot and nauseous origin.

This invention by a lower-middle-class writer for his similarly conservative-minded brethren diverted class anxieties and fears about an emerging working-class empowered by the unions onto an exotic Other. The desire for status quo and hierarchy was fought in the battles between hero Nayland Smith and the wily doctor.

The BBC blurb reads:

Miles Jupp investigates the hidden connections between Edinburgh and Sax Rohmer's criminal mastermind Fu Manchu. Did the 'Devil Doctor' get his doctorate at Edinburgh University?

Er, could the answer be 'no', because this was the invention of a propagandist hack? Jupp's dialogue with the scientist concerning the use of toxins derived from low forms of life — fungus and flies — by subhuman lowlife Fu Manchu sounds like a documentary about a real criminal mastermind and his baroque methods of assassination. He ends by urging Edinburgh University to mark the attendance of Dr Fu Manchu. Yes, nice to know where he learnt his homicidal trade, then.

I missed this programme when it was first broadcast in April, otherwise I would not have been backward in coming forward and vomiting all over this insidious crap at the time. I presume that it is the success of Sherlock which has prompted this repeat transmission.

Why are they trying to rehabilitate this lurid pulp as some sort of accurate representation of the Chinese? "It's only a bit of fun," cries the halfwit as he perpetrates some atrocity on a dehumanised minority. I'm not the first to note that there's no way they would get away with this sort of depiction of a racial or cultural group of people had it been Jewish, gay, black or south Asian, and quite rightly so. (I've excluded Muslims as they get shafted even worse.) So why is there a drive to do this to the Chinese? It's not the Chinese who have devastated the Middle East with wars for oil and dominance. What is the BBC's (and certain other media's) agenda in reviving these fantasies?

Clive Bloom quoting Cay Van Ash and Elizabeth Sax Rohmer in Master of Villainy: A Biography of Sax Rohmer:

And why is it that 'So vehement and repetitive were Sax Rohmer's references to Asiatic plotting against "white" civilisation that they cannot be explained simply as the frills of melodramatic narration. The man clearly was possessed by some sort of private dread'?

I can think of some others to whom that would apply.

Guess what? Africa was never full of cannibals. Transylvania was never full of vampires and werewolves. And Limehouse was never full of dacoits and opium dens. Get the hell over it.

I'm beginning to think that with the inexorable drip-drip-drip of poison (Hey! A cruel Western Media Torture!), there are those who won't be happy until there are anti-Chinese pogroms and race riots in Britain.

What was the point of me making Chopsticks At Dawn or Anna May Wong: A Celestial Star In Piccadilly for BBC Radio 4? Here's what I think of their orientalist clichés (the last two poems).

Sherlock and wily orientals: Blind Banker, Episode 2 review

SPOILER ALERT

Having missed the curtain-raiser of the Sherlock series last week, boo-hooing over the rave reviews, and tonight's show — The Blind Banker — promising to be more Second Coming than second episode, Loved One and I settled in to watch, even forsaking our TV pals over at Channel 4 in the Big Brother house just as Josie's nemesis Sam Pepper enters the fray.

Episode Two began intriguingly enough. The robotic woman from the Bing ad emoted in similar fashion as she mysteriously and inscrutably demonstrated the tea ceremony. I did wonder why a modern young Chinese Miss would be wearing a chipao frock in present-day London, but Loved One sniffed that she needed it for her job entrancing the tourists and demanded to know why didn't I do tranquility and ancient wisdom like writer Stephen Thompson's creation? After yelling that I am frikkin' peaceful when not being wound up, I admiringly noted her noble struggle with the accent, as actress Gemma Chan evidently speaks Chinese as orfentically as I speak it — that is: not at all. But I put this down to the obvious imminent revelation that she was really a Terminator-style android sent by Moriarty to wreak devastation on our imploding civilisation and the accent therefore was deliberately gauged to be unlike any known human language. A sort of error of the tongues.

Ah, so sinisterly clever.

In this reboot of the Sherlock Holmes franchise for BBC1, Arthur Conan Doyle's characters stay in the same Baker Street location but move forward in time to the present. Thus Martin Freeman's John Watson, like the original, is a former military doctor, wounded in Afghanistan. Ooh, topical as well as clever. And Sherlock (Benedict Cumberbatch) is a snotty skint smart-arse, verging on Withnail (only sober), perpetually dragging his friend into mischief. (Spot the borrow: Sherlock and Watson as Withnail & I — did Cumberbatch lose out on the Dr Who auditions and this is his consolation prize? — Blade Runner origami, Hammer Horror Fu Manchu, A Beautiful Mind graphics ...)

Suddenly, my heart sinks and I realise it's all Black Lotus, Tongs (you should see my Terror of the Curling Tongs), drugs and torture. For are we not a cruel race, as the clever programme-makers have noticed? A series of killings and a trail of yellow-themed clues lead our intrepid heroes into the dangers of Soho Chinatown where even the shop assistants are ... sinister. Very clever creators Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat, and their resident Sax Rohmer Stephen Thompson, plus assorted producers, editors, BBC bods and friends, uncleverly fail to pull the mindset out of the 19th century along with the update and sadly jam their heads up their collective fundament.

"With a brow like Shakespeare and eyes like Satan", lordy, here's a heart-of-darkness Chinese circus with their uncanny abilities and deathly tricks. Sherlock morphs into Nayland Smith (hero of Sax Rohmer's Fu Manchu books) and has to fight assorted Yellow Peril villainy that is so dastardly evil and fiendish that a brother can kill his own sister (she wasn't a Terminator-bot after all) without breaking into a sweat.

Gillian Facebooks me that she's looking forward to them doing one of those pentatonic scale thingies, such are our expectations by now. They don't do that but they do kill off the Chinese female lead character as they must according to the rules of Anna May Wong Must Die!: she's sexotic so she has to go. And life in these heah parts is cheap.

I too am rapidly losing the will to live. Still, I am at least relieved that Sherlock is not as frenetic and hysterical as its Joss Whedon-wannabe stablemates Dr Who and Torchwood. Eventually, clever Sherlock identifies the McGuffin as being a jade hairpin worth nine million dollars or pounds or yen (I was having trouble concentrating at this point as I had to go feed my vampire bats and torture someone) and defeats the cruel circus-mistress by doing something-or-other that's very clever.

For much of the programme I was hoping clever Mark Gatiss et al would do something remarkable and witty with the wily oriental clichés that would leave me gasping with delight and applauding their clever audacity. This is, after all, the 21st Century and we all do irony now. Evidently this was beyond their capabilities. Unaccountably, they omitted the obligatory Limehouse opium den scene. WHY?

The idea of updating Sherlock Holmes is a spiffing wheeze. Nevertheless, there are some Victorian values which should be locked in a hansom cab back with the swirling pea-soup fogs.

Sherlock: The Blind Banker. Episode 2.
BBC1 9pm, Sunday 1st August 2010

Have you seen the script for The Blind Banker? Soo Lin Yao "a fragile little doll".

Here's my poetic answer to the lazy prejudice of these stereotypes in a poem I wrote a while back: Anna May Wong Must Die!. It's at the end of this set I performed at the Farrago Summer Poetry Slam the other day.

More orientalism on BBC: Fu Manchu in Edinburgh

View from America — Mark Watches

Monique blog

Sherlock BBC

Lyndsay Faye at CriminalElement.com

Jonathan McCalmont on Sinomania in Boomtron.com

LUCY LIU TO PLAY DR JOAN WATSON IN CBS SHERLOCK HOLMES SERIES "ELEMENTARY".

Undercover Boss and Gok Wan's Fashion Fix TV reviews

Great. Yet another paean to capitalism and the glorification of the boss class. Not content with blitzing us with Dragon's Den, The Apprentice and a whole genre of TV programmes shoving you in your place (how very Confucian), C4 gives us another series naturalising the New Order, in Undercover Boss (C4 9pm, Thursdays).

Watching Alan Sugar and Donald Trump treating their employees like bad pets as they compete for the right to serve their masters like the most loyal hounds ever is pretty sickening, but at least it's honest. The beady eyes of the Dragons' Den panel laser-beaming the contestants, sizing them up for the kill and discarding the runts of the litter, is a fairly useful illustration of how the system works. Providing, of course, that you don't identify with the predators, and that you maintain a healthy residual memory that social relationships can and should be better than this.

But, like that kindly-millionaires-play-at-philanthropy programme (pay more bleedin' tax!), Undercover Boss takes that process a step further. Now the Masters Of The Universe are slipping in beneath our defences as they try to win over the hearts and minds of any remaining doubters. Described tellingly on the C4 website as "High-flying executives take extraordinary steps to ensure their companies are fighting fit by going undercover in their own businesses", the programme presents the Boss as someone on our side, whatever their real priorities as revealed in the blurb. He or she is like one of us. Tell that to the Dyson factory workers who made the machine such a hit and then joined the Great Unemployed when their boss moved the operation to Malaysia, where labour is cheaper and conditions nowhere near as good.

The latest Undercover Boss in the photo above is perfect for the purpose. Young, good-looking in that bland English pudding kind of way, like Ben out of Big Brother or a minor royal. Could be in the armed forces, another institution which has undergone a rebranding in the last decade coinciding with the ratcheting-up of US and British military adventures abroad. This is television as social engineering: HG Wells's Morlocks using devious methods to herd the Eloi.

"So this was the destiny of the Eloi. They were being bred by the Morlocks... ... who had degenerated into the lowest form of human life: Cannibalism!" The Time Machine.

Competition trumps co-operation in the New Order. Gladiatorial combat is everywhere. Whether it's modelling, fashion or entertainment, everything has been reduced to an elite of opinionated declassé morons judging desperate participants trying to scrabble out of the chasm opening up underneath us.

We've been changed from a society where the individual is of the highest value, to the hive where everything is subordinated to the accumulation of wealth in the top tier. Respect and pride have shifted on their axis and now mean something very different to when it meant taking your place in the world as an equal human being. Now it carries shades of being better than the next person through the crumbs of shiny acquisitions or superior strength for your own advantage and the business class you serve, not about co-operation and brotherly/sisterly/neighbourly love.

You can't run a civilised society along these lines without something cracking.

Gok Wan's Fashion Fix (C4) is one of the exceptions in the popular culture. Gok treats his make-over stars with warmth, respect and affection, even if his purpose is to make you more competitive in a society where surface is all. His high viewing figures demonstrate a need for human connection and development of potential rather than writing off the contestants as mere prolefeed fodder.

Another difference is that, unlike the majority of TV competitions where the proles are made to jump through hoops for the entertainment of the privileged few who sit enthroned like little emperors waiting to give the thumbs up or down, the competition in Gok Wan's series is confined to the show's drivers for the edification of the rest of us. With Gok representing our interests and Brix Smith representing the moneyed class, this is more like it should be.

Over The Rainbow: The Search For Dorothy (BBC1) was another case in point. Populist and superficially similar to Simon Cowell's X-Factor talent dogfights, you did get to see how the young women developed throughout the competition under top tutoring that I'd give a helluva lot for. And there was genuine sadness as each one was knocked out. You were watching friendships being made for life.

Despite the competitive structure of the X-Factor programme and its kin, what's being rewarded are obedience and malleability. But the drive to conformity is cloaked in the rhetoric of individualism, though individualism is the last thing an X-Factor contestant needs. It's all part of the cult of managerialism that's crept in. We even had 12 years of a Labour govermnent who saw its role as managing us rather than radically improving our lives.

On top of the rampant militarization of our fiction in movies and TV glorifying guys and gals in uniform with shooty things, the programmes mark a further departure from what I regard as one of the high points in our civilisation, when the broad mass had access to culture that empowered and illuminated. Now we're all being trained up to fight and consume and we don't even have the economic means to buy stuff.

When are we going to see a spate of output from the workers or trade union point of view instead of this barrage of petit-bourgeois vanity pieces?

What we need is something like Stewart Lee's fabulous deconstruction of the hymn All Things Bright And Beautiful: an insidious bit of brainwashing claiming that God made the rich man in his castle, the poor man at the gate so all is right in the world and, hey, ain't it wunnerful.

Undercover Boss and Gok Wan's Fashion Fix TV reviews

Great. Yet another paean to capitalism and the glorification of the boss class. Not content with blitzing us with Dragon's Den, The Apprentice and a whole genre of TV programmes shoving you in your place (how very Confucian), C4 gives us another series naturalising the New Order, in Undercover Boss (C4 9pm, Thursdays).

Watching Alan Sugar and Donald Trump treating their employees like bad pets as they compete for the right to serve their masters like the most loyal hounds ever is pretty sickening, but at least it's honest. The beady eyes of the Dragons' Den panel laser-beaming the contestants, sizing them up for the kill and discarding the runts of the litter, is a fairly useful illustration of how the system works. Providing, of course, that you don't identify with the predators, and that you maintain a healthy residual memory that social relationships can and should be better than this.

But, like that kindly-millionaires-play-at-philanthropy programme (pay more bleedin' tax!), Undercover Boss takes that process a step further. Now the Masters Of The Universe are slipping in beneath our defences as they try to win over the hearts and minds of any remaining doubters. Described tellingly on the C4 website as "High-flying executives take extraordinary steps to ensure their companies are fighting fit by going undercover in their own businesses", the programme presents the Boss as someone on our side, whatever their real priorities as revealed in the blurb. He or she is like one of us. Tell that to the Dyson factory workers who made the machine such a hit and then joined the Great Unemployed when their boss moved the operation to Malaysia, where labour is cheaper and conditions nowhere near as good.

The latest Undercover Boss in the photo above is perfect for the purpose. Young, good-looking in that bland English pudding kind of way, like Ben out of Big Brother or a minor royal. Could be in the armed forces, another institution which has undergone a rebranding in the last decade coinciding with the ratcheting-up of US and British military adventures abroad. This is television as social engineering: HG Wells's Morlocks using devious methods to herd the Eloi.

"So this was the destiny of the Eloi. They were being bred by the Morlocks... ... who had degenerated into the lowest form of human life: Cannibalism!" The Time Machine.

Competition trumps co-operation in the New Order. Gladiatorial combat is everywhere. Whether it's modelling, fashion or entertainment, everything has been reduced to an elite of opinionated declassé morons judging desperate participants trying to scrabble out of the chasm opening up underneath us.

We've been changed from a society where the individual is of the highest value, to the hive where everything is subordinated to the accumulation of wealth in the top tier. Respect and pride have shifted on their axis and now mean something very different to when it meant taking your place in the world as an equal human being. Now it carries shades of being better than the next person through the crumbs of shiny acquisitions or superior strength for your own advantage and the business class you serve, not about co-operation and brotherly/sisterly/neighbourly love.

You can't run a civilised society along these lines without something cracking.

Gok Wan's Fashion Fix (C4) is one of the exceptions in the popular culture. Gok treats his make-over stars with warmth, respect and affection, even if his purpose is to make you more competitive in a society where surface is all. His high viewing figures demonstrate a need for human connection and development of potential rather than writing off the contestants as mere prolefeed fodder.

Another difference is that, unlike the majority of TV competitions where the proles are made to jump through hoops for the entertainment of the privileged few who sit enthroned like little emperors waiting to give the thumbs up or down, the competition in Gok Wan's series is confined to the show's drivers for the edification of the rest of us. With Gok representing our interests and Brix Smith representing the moneyed class, this is more like it should be.

Over The Rainbow: The Search For Dorothy (BBC1) was another case in point. Populist and superficially similar to Simon Cowell's X-Factor talent dogfights, you did get to see how the young women developed throughout the competition under top tutoring that I'd give a helluva lot for. And there was genuine sadness as each one was knocked out. You were watching friendships being made for life.

Despite the competitive structure of the X-Factor programme and its kin, what's being rewarded are obedience and malleability. But the drive to conformity is cloaked in the rhetoric of individualism, though individualism is the last thing an X-Factor contestant needs. It's all part of the cult of managerialism that's crept in. We even had 12 years of a Labour govermnent who saw its role as managing us rather than radically improving our lives.

On top of the rampant militarization of our fiction in movies and TV glorifying guys and gals in uniform with shooty things, the programmes mark a further departure from what I regard as one of the high points in our civilisation, when the broad mass had access to culture that empowered and illuminated. Now we're all being trained up to fight and consume and we don't even have the economic means to buy stuff.

When are we going to see a spate of output from the workers or trade union point of view instead of this barrage of petit-bourgeois vanity pieces?

What we need is something like Stewart Lee's fabulous deconstruction of the hymn All Things Bright And Beautiful: an insidious bit of brainwashing claiming that God made the rich man in his castle, the poor man at the gate so all is right in the world and, hey, ain't it wunnerful.

1000 Ways To Die review: lurid, shocking, gruesome TV

Has anyone else stumbled across the Bravo cable TV show, 1,000 Ways To Die? It's a sweet little offering from the US, re-enacting the weirdest ways people have met their end — usually prime contenders for the Darwin Awards.

I'm sitting here squirming having just watched the fate of the scumbag robber who stole groceries from a pregnant blind woman (aw, presumably with one leg and five grandparents to look after). Now, robbery isn't a capital crime to anyone except the Joe Sixpack couch potatoes who enjoy this lowly entertainment, whose ranks I now admit to joining in a rare confessional moment I'll probably live to regret, especially if the Orwell Prize judges are reading this (please look away now). But the gleeful voice-over assures us that the evil perp got his just deserts.

Escaping from the pursuing cop, the villain runs into a doorway, unaware that he is now in a car wash. At that moment, an attendant, oblivious to the presence of the unwanted visitor, starts up the machinery for its daily test run. Said crimo, disorientated by flailing brushes, oceans of soap and jets of water, slips and falls back onto a high-pressure nozzle in the wall that spears his head. So far, so banal.

Did I mention this was a high-pressure nozzle?

We are treated to a very surprised criminal whose head suddenly explodes, leaving a stump of neck above his rather fetching blue jumper.

To an animated illustration of the inside of the human anatomy, a Scientist then tells us in a serious tone befitting the sad occasion, exactly what happens when water is rapidly pumped into your cranial cavity at kazillions of pounds per square inch. "It raises the brain to the top of the skull and, having nowhere to go, is ejected upwards and out at force," because, of course, we needed that explained.

Cue illustration showing said brain squeezed up until the skull shatters.

It's all done with no pretence of good taste whatsover, tells the stories with lipsmacking delight, makes us contemplate our own mortality and thank the lord there but by the grace of god/luck/smarts go I.

What's not to like?

1000 Ways To Die review: lurid, shocking, gruesome TV

Has anyone else stumbled across the Bravo cable TV show, 1,000 Ways To Die? It's a sweet little offering from the US, re-enacting the weirdest ways people have met their end — usually prime contenders for the Darwin Awards.

I'm sitting here squirming having just watched the fate of the scumbag robber who stole groceries from a pregnant blind woman (aw, presumably with one leg and five grandparents to look after). Now, robbery isn't a capital crime to anyone except the Joe Sixpack couch potatoes who enjoy this lowly entertainment, whose ranks I now admit to joining in a rare confessional moment I'll probably live to regret, especially if the Orwell Prize judges are reading this (please look away now). But the gleeful voice-over assures us that the evil perp got his just deserts.

Escaping from the pursuing cop, the villain runs into a doorway, unaware that he is now in a car wash. At that moment, an attendant, oblivious to the presence of the unwanted visitor, starts up the machinery for its daily test run. Said crimo, disorientated by flailing brushes, oceans of soap and jets of water, slips and falls back onto a high-pressure nozzle in the wall that spears his head. So far, so banal.

Did I mention this was a high-pressure nozzle?

We are treated to a very surprised criminal whose head suddenly explodes, leaving a stump of neck above his rather fetching blue jumper.

To an animated illustration of the inside of the human anatomy, a Scientist then tells us in a serious tone befitting the sad occasion, exactly what happens when water is rapidly pumped into your cranial cavity at kazillions of pounds per square inch. "It raises the brain to the top of the skull and, having nowhere to go, is ejected upwards and out at force," because, of course, we needed that explained.

Cue illustration showing said brain squeezed up until the skull shatters.

It's all done with no pretence of good taste whatsover, tells the stories with lipsmacking delight, makes us contemplate our own mortality and thank the lord there but by the grace of god/luck/smarts go I.

What's not to like?

Spirit Warriors review: Chinese talent alert

Oh, I am so suggestible. I have just finished my first bacon roll in years (actually, a bagel — howzat for a fusion-cuisine atrocity?) as a direct result of watching the seventh and latest episode of CBBC's children's show, Spirit Warriors. The one that begins with our young heroes happening upon a dream setting of their favourite meals.

Crrrrrispy frrrrragrant bacon, fried tomato and ketchup on a hot toasted buttered bagel aside (getting you too, huh?), those familiar with Hansel and Gretel will recognise the universal trope in this story: kindly mother-figure, in this instance the impossibly beautiful Elizabeth Tan, who turns out to be an evil witch vamping off the youthful vigour of her child victims in the absence of botox and monkey-gland injections in this fantasy realm.

"Since the creation of Yin and Yang there has been the Spirit World filled with magic and myth, protected by five warriors," so quoth the dragon laying out the show's franchise in its opening moments. Their quest is to collect twelve jade McGuffins and save the universe along with the girls' mother, who has sent them into the other world in Episode 1. (Hmm, is the writer working out some mother stuff here?)

Production values are fantastic: lighting, costumes and design are outstanding considering the moderate budget. And it's great to see familiar faces from the decidedly-underemployed Chinese actor circuit getting some meaty roles for a change from mere noodling. From the voice of the dragon (Burt Kwouk, now being mooted as a long-overdue MBE recipient) to perpetually furious Tom Wu as Hwang, their kung-fu military antagonist, and the wonderful Benedict Wong (last seen in Danny Boyle's Sunshine) as his leader, evil Master Li — they all deliver some energised performances.

A whopping two out of the five child protagonists — count ’em, FORTY PERCENT OF THE STARRING CAST!!! — are Chinese, growing up in multicultural Britain. They include a budding Buffy-alike, Bo (Jessica Henwick), and her younger sister, Jen (Alicia Lai). Their schoolmates trapped with them in the Spirit World dimension are Vicky (Lil' Simz), Trix (Gilles Geary) and Martin (Karl Rogers).

But, best of all, the series is the creation of British Chinese writer Jo Ho, who has endeavoured to kick out the stereotypes and present her Chinese characters as part of the normal range of humanity ... and the supernatural.

There have been some criticisms that Chinese are again doing martial arts as their party trick — and there is some truth in this — but only because the almost total dearth of east Asian Pacific performers in the media and entertainment means that we are forever being associated with China as the Orient and Other. When will British casting directors apply their (round-) eyes to the reality that the Chinese are the third largest ethnic minority within these shores, and go in for some cross-racial colourblind casting, as the Americans have been doing for years?

Some of the plot points have dodgy reversals and the breathless directing allows some idiot-plotting to get through. F'rinstance, one golden rule is that you never make things easy for your protagonists. So when in episode seven our heroes fall under the spell of a rain of green flakes that makes them hate each other, it needed more than one of the boys to say, oh, by the way, I think this green stuff is responsible, and then simply shaking themselves down. Or when the witch's minion signals to Jen that she shouldn't eat the biscuit by shaking his hand over the lo-o-ongest time and she still doesn't geddit ... And perhaps post-Heroes cheerleader and after Buffy, the notion of a girl saving the world could have a tad more irony when somebody articulates it. But it's early days and they definitely deserve a second series.

I'm not bovvered by the kung-fu fantasy schlock. After all, no-one sneers at Arthurian legends as "English stereotyping". And I remember enjoying the Chinese 1970s series of "Monkey" with its mediaeval tales of everyday Buddhist folks.

This is a good start, and it enables the BBC to tick a few boxes. But it is only a beginning. Ai-yah!

Watch Spirit Warriors on iPlayer here

Elizabeth Tan

Spirit Warriors review: Chinese talent alert

Oh, I am so suggestible. I have just finished my first bacon roll in years (actually, a bagel — howzat for a fusion-cuisine atrocity?) as a direct result of watching the seventh and latest episode of CBBC's children's show, Spirit Warriors. The one that begins with our young heroes happening upon a dream setting of their favourite meals.

Crrrrrispy frrrrragrant bacon, fried tomato and ketchup on a hot toasted buttered bagel aside (getting you too, huh?), those familiar with Hansel and Gretel will recognise the universal trope in this story: kindly mother-figure, in this instance the impossibly beautiful Elizabeth Tan, who turns out to be an evil witch vamping off the youthful vigour of her child victims in the absence of botox and monkey-gland injections in this fantasy realm.

"Since the creation of Yin and Yang there has been the Spirit World filled with magic and myth, protected by five warriors," so quoth the dragon laying out the show's franchise in its opening moments. Their quest is to collect twelve jade McGuffins and save the universe along with the girls' mother, who has sent them into the other world in Episode 1. (Hmm, is the writer working out some mother stuff here?)

Production values are fantastic: lighting, costumes and design are outstanding considering the moderate budget. And it's great to see familiar faces from the decidedly-underemployed Chinese actor circuit getting some meaty roles for a change from mere noodling. From the voice of the dragon (Burt Kwouk, now being mooted as a long-overdue MBE recipient) to perpetually furious Tom Wu as Hwang, their kung-fu military antagonist, and the wonderful Benedict Wong (last seen in Danny Boyle's Sunshine) as his leader, evil Master Li — they all deliver some energised performances.

A whopping two out of the five child protagonists — count ’em, FORTY PERCENT OF THE STARRING CAST!!! — are Chinese, growing up in multicultural Britain. They include a budding Buffy-alike, Bo (Jessica Henwick), and her younger sister, Jen (Alicia Lai). Their schoolmates trapped with them in the Spirit World dimension are Vicky (Lil' Simz), Trix (Gilles Geary) and Martin (Karl Rogers).

But, best of all, the series is the creation of British Chinese writer Jo Ho, who has endeavoured to kick out the stereotypes and present her Chinese characters as part of the normal range of humanity ... and the supernatural.

There have been some criticisms that Chinese are again doing martial arts as their party trick — and there is some truth in this — but only because the almost total dearth of east Asian Pacific performers in the media and entertainment means that we are forever being associated with China as the Orient and Other. When will British casting directors apply their (round-) eyes to the reality that the Chinese are the third largest ethnic minority within these shores, and go in for some cross-racial colourblind casting, as the Americans have been doing for years?

Some of the plot points have dodgy reversals and the breathless directing allows some idiot-plotting to get through. F'rinstance, one golden rule is that you never make things easy for your protagonists. So when in episode seven our heroes fall under the spell of a rain of green flakes that makes them hate each other, it needed more than one of the boys to say, oh, by the way, I think this green stuff is responsible, and then simply shaking themselves down. Or when the witch's minion signals to Jen that she shouldn't eat the biscuit by shaking his hand over the lo-o-ongest time and she still doesn't geddit ... And perhaps post-Heroes cheerleader and after Buffy, the notion of a girl saving the world could have a tad more irony when somebody articulates it. But it's early days and they definitely deserve a second series.

I'm not bovvered by the kung-fu fantasy schlock. After all, no-one sneers at Arthurian legends as "English stereotyping". And I remember enjoying the Chinese 1970s series of "Monkey" with its mediaeval tales of everyday Buddhist folks.

This is a good start, and it enables the BBC to tick a few boxes. But it is only a beginning. Ai-yah!

Watch Spirit Warriors on iPlayer here

Elizabeth Tan