Exactly different in the same way

About 15 years ago I went on holiday to Tenerife and whilst there I observed that most people  had tattoos. Now this was the late 90's and tattoos weren't as prevalent as they are now and certainly weren't considered that fashionable. It was amazing, myself and my two friends seemed to be the only people there that didn't have tattoos. It felt odd seeing all these people all with tattoos (mostly football team crests).

Fast forward to today and I could be forgiven for thinking I was in Tenerife when walking down the high street, going to the pub or even being at work.

I can't remember when this first happened but there has been an explosion of people getting tattoos and sometimes I struggle to understand quite why this is. Now, before I go on don't misunderstand me, I have nothing against tattoos, I think if they are done right they can look good, I just wouldn't have one myself.

A lot of people who have tattoos have them as it is something unique, it shows their personality and their individuality but just how unique are tattoos nowadays? I mean if you have a Chinese symbol somewhere on your body then you are not in a unique group of people, quite the contrary, you are part of a very large group of people who share this taste. Likewise if you have a phrase written on your body, a Celtic design round your arm or a band your leg you are not unique, you are not individual you have merely copied a trend in the same way as say, people copy fashions in Top Shop.
There is a massive difference here though and that is that tattoos are for life. There is no doubt that they can now be called a trend. So what happens if they go out of fashion, what happens if having a Chinese symbol on your body becomes naff and outdated in the same way as say wearing flares or paisley shirts did in fashion? This for me would be the underlying worry with a tattoo. If you get a tattoo to remember a loved one then that is not going to out of fashion as it was never really in fashion but for other designs I can't help feeling that in 20 or 30 years time these may go out and maybe back in, to fashion.

The point of this post though was not to really discuss tattoos but individualism.

You see, with the advent of the Internet I believe that individualism is on the rise in all aspects of our society. Let me try and put this into context. If you walked round a city in the 90's and stopped people and asked them what their favourite TV programme was you would have got a lot of people saying the same name, likewise if you asked them the last album they bought it would have been similar and they would probably have been wearing similar clothes. Nowadays though, all that has changed and we don't watch the same things, we don't listen to the same music and we don't wear the same clothes.

This is of course mostly through choice, you can see with music especially that the range of artists we listen to now is much more diverse than it once was and the days of millions of singles being sold or millions of albums are on the slide. I have already discussed TV habits in a previous post and as for fashion well that is something that I believe is really changing especially with young people where there seems to be an anything goes sort of attitude. In my childhood, everyone wore the same thing or you were almost bullied! Now though, it is a symbol of how cool you are as to how different you dress. I have to say modern fashions are just something that I don't understand but one thing I do know is that there is a massive drive to be individual.

But if we are all getting tattoos, if we are all listening to different things, if we are all getting private number plates if we are all dressing differently how can we be individual? And that is my point, in trying to become individual all that happens is that people copy that "trend" so that they can also be individual and thus popularising it. By not having a tattoo I actually feel more unique and more of an individual as I ever have. In fact, I am almost self-conscious that I dont have one.

So next time I am on the beach and I find myself surrounded by people with tattoos on the beach, all wearing their cool clothes, listening to dub, trip-hop whilst I sit there with my tattoo-less body, my high street chain clothes and listening to my Beatles albums maybe those people will look at me and think "Wow, look at that guy, he's so unique and cool". Maybe not. In fact, definitely not.

Jeremy Kyle Style

We've all seen them, they pop up on The Jeremy Kyle Show every week and they all come dressed for the occasion. Its what I call Scrubber-chic

On the rare occasions that I haven't been at work and have been up in the morning I have stumbled across the Jeremy Kyle Show and I have been instantly addicted. By the show? No. By the host. No? Its the people. Where do these people come from?

So what defines a Jeremy Kyle guest, well there is the clothes. It seems that the Jeremy Kyle guests have their own uniform, it consists of cheap top, jeans and trainers for the normally toothless males and cheap top, leggings and fake Ugg boots for the ladies (if you can call them that). Then there are the personality traits shown, most claim benefits, they take drugs, they have sex, a lot and with indiscriminant amounts of partners and they shout. Boy, do they shout. It can be one person shouting, sometimes two and occasionally a whole stage of people are shouting all at the same time. On the periphery stands Jeremy Kyle, a slim 40 something who tries to control the characters on stage and the baying crowd (who he jokes "should be at work). It seems the only people working are Jeremy and some big bouncer guy who occasionally has to split up two guests who are, you guessed it, shouting.

Their tales are the sort of dirty laundry that any normal person would want keeping from every person they know but these guys trot it out as if it was Parkinson and they were discussing their new film. Subjects like "Is my boyfriend cheating on me?", "Are you my real father", "Has my sister stolen our Mum's money?", "Is my girlfriends baby mine?" It is shocking to any normal person and of course that is what makes the show.

It hit home to me though the other night when I was watching a Channel 4 documentary called "skint" which focuses on a Jeremy Kyle style group of people, that the one thing all these people have in common is that no matter how bad their lives and what immoral things they may be doing they have no fear or embarrassment of showing the general public. The characters on Skint are very similar to Kyle's guests, they are on benefits, they take drugs, they sleep around and they shout, a lot. They talk of how bad things are and how they have no money but do this all whilst smoking, playing the x-box on a 50 inch TV with their Apple iPhones resting on their ashtrays. No shame, no embarrassment of the juxtaposition of the situation and of course they do it all whilst wearing the uniform of the scrubber-chic. I noticed that some of the girls had substituted fake Ugg boots for ballet pumps which had seen better days but on the whole the get-up was almost identical.

They openly discuss how they are playing the system, they get more money from not working, they got more money the more children they have, they go to prison because its a holiday camp. The honesty is quite frightening to those watching. In fact the only people not frightened are those on the programme. Of course, the truth is that their lives are wretched and we all know it, we thank God we don't live like this but it is all these people know and for them its just fine.

Does all this mean that I am a snob? Am I looking down on a group of people who need a break? People who are vulnerable? Well, I don't think so, I have no time for people who are just rinsing the state dry and are having children for financial benefit. Its kids having kids.
For the first 4 or 5 years of my life I was in a single parent family and my Mother had little money but she made sure I was turned out properly and she made the best for our lives but that is what sets some people apart from others, my mum doesn't shout, she listens. There is the difference. We need these people to start listening. To start contributing to a society that they have become isolated from.

Every so often these shows throw up a person or people who are searching for something more, something better, these people are normally not shouting but you know it will be difficult for them to break the ties of their old lives.

 I don't pretend to have the answer but what I can tell you is that I find Jeremy Kyle and Skint for that matter, an hour of the most frustrating television ever.
If I did have some advice it would be to start to listen more, shout less and maybe go and buy a pair of  those mustard coloured cords that those guys from One Direction wear. Actually don't, I almost hate those as much.

Kill your televison

Recently I have noticed there has been a revival in old Television programmes being translated to the Theatre. Shows like Birds of a Feather and Rising Damp are being re-hashed and are touring the country with either the original cast members or a new set of actors where previous lead actors may not be available or have passed away. It was after seeing Lesley Joseph on some talk show promoting this and talking about Birds of a Feather and how, at its peak, it was drawing in up to 18m viewers, it dawned on me just how much television has changed.

18m people! Only major sports and news events (or royal events)could hope of getting those sort of viewing figures now and the reason for that is simply – choice. In the 60’s, 70’s, 80’s and even for some of the 90’s on the whole you had 4 channels to choose from when settling down to watch the TV and two of those channels (BBC2 and Channel 4) were considered alternative. So really when most people sat down to watch TV they had 1 choice to make, was it BBC1 or was it ITV? Thus, for say, comedy programmes you would see enormous TV ratings for shows like Hi-De-Hi, Last of the Summer Wine and Birds of a Feather. The reality is that none of these shows are actually that funny, in fact some of them weren’t funny at all but if it was a choice between Last of the Summer Wine or Highway or Hi-Di-Hi or World in Action then there was only going to be one winner. To put it bluntly, we were forced to watch something because there was really scant or no other choices.

So you may think that my point to all this is that we are now better off and the advent of extra channels is the best thing that ever happened. Well not quite…

You see, I think that what has happened is quite sad, Television as a social event has died.  When I was growing up in the mid to late eighties, every Friday night without fail my Mum and Dad and I would sit down and watch “The Golden Girls”. I don’t remember it particularly funny, I was too young to understand some of the racier episodes and half of the time I probably wasn’t even watching, pre-occupied with my Panini sticker books, but I have some very fond memories of it. I have the same memories of Cagney and Lacey and Howards Way. I also remember sitting down with my parents and my Grandma to watch The A-Team, CHIPS and the Price is Right on a Saturday night. It was just what we did.

This simply wouldn’t happen nowadays (save for maybe X-Factor or The Voice), in the modern family, the parents would watch the TV downstairs and the kids would be either watching something different on another TV or downloading whatever they wanted to watch on their laptops or mobile devices. They probably wouldn’t even be watching something that was on “now”, rather watching on a catch up service or using something like Netflix. Whichever it is the likelihood of the whole family sitting down and watching the same programme is low and what is more the likelihood of going to work and everyone talking about the same programme they watched last night is low. The social aspect of it is almost disappeared. You hear people time and time again saying “Did you see xxxx last night” to which invariably the answer is no or I have sky plussed it. In the 1986 if you had asked someone if they had seen Den give Angie her divorce papers you had a 50% chance of the other person saying “yes”.

The argument is that more choice equals better quality. Well there is no doubt that we don’t see the likes of Birds of a Feather anymore, a show like that would nowadays last a series and then be binned like most comedies are nowadays. What has happened though is that we have seen an influx of programmes from abroad. Whereas before this might have been Neighbours or Home and Away it is now The Soprano’s, Breaking Bad, Boardwalk Empire. Shows of such size, style and overall brilliance were certainly not a feature of the 80’s but if they had been shown in the 80’s I don’t believe they would have got 20m viewers because they are aimed at a certain viewer, they are controversial and not made for everyone. That is where we have seen the big win with Satellite/Cable TV. You can now find a programme that you actually want to watch. You want crime, there is a channel for it, you want music there is a channel for it, you want Birds of a Feather there is a channel for it, you want Red Hot mums, there is a channel for it, in fact there is a channel for everything. Literally. There is so much on offer now that if you have 30 minutes spare you can spend the entire time looking through the options. You have the full range of television from the ridiculously low budget independent channels which look like they are being filmed on a mobile phone through to channels like Sky Atlantic where you can see TV programmes with budgets of over a £1m an episode and I believe you can find pleasure in both. I am as happy watching a cheap cooking show on Good Food as I am stumbling across an old episode of Porridge on Gold.

The thing is TV is like everything else in that we all have different tastes, comedy for example is a very subjective thing and I use The Office as an example of this. For me, it is the funniest thing ever written but to many it is not funny and a lot of people don’t get what the joke is. So to think that in the 80’s and 90’s we had 20m people tuning in to watch an old man sliding down a hill in a bath seems absurd, surely all those people couldn’t have found that funny! Likewise, watching those A-Team and CHIPS episodes now leaves me asking the question “Did my 70 year old Grandmother really find Mr T entertaining?????”.

Christmas is probably the most obvious example of how TV has changed. Christmas TV used to be the jewel in the networks crowns. As a child of the 80’s and a teen of the 90’s the one thing you could be sure of was at Christmas there would be good TV, whether it was a blockbuster film or a TV special (usually Only Fools and Horses). For people of my generation every year you hear them say “Christmas TV this year is rubbish” but think about why? We don’t have comedies that everyone watches like we used to so it is unlikely we will get specials and most of the blockbuster films already sit in peoples DVD collections or have been watched on Lovefilm or Netflix. The reality though is that there is loads of good stuff on over Christmas but not on the conventional terrestrial channels, you have to trawl through over 100 channels to find it. A classic Christmas comedy on GOLD, a James Bond on ITV3 a Morcombe and Wise on BBC2, a cheesy Christmas Film on Channel 5 or a Delia Smith Christmas Cookery programme on UK Food. Its all there and more you just have to find it and then most probably, sit on your own and watch it whilst your partner listens to “Last Christmas” on MTV Classic in the other room.

So, I find myself saddened that we won’t see the days of programmes being watched by everyone and that families won’t sit down to watch the same programmes but feel joyous of the fact that if I turned my TV on to see Tracey and Sharon moping about talking in irritating cockney accents and Lesley Joseph in one of her short skirts I can turn over to channel 187 and watch The Wire