Charlie Gilmour: Status, Crime & Punishment

There's something very, very wrong with the decision today to sentence Charlie Gilmour (that's Dave Gilmour of Pink Floyd's son, for context) to 16 months imprisonment. It's an intriguing story, I think, because of the obvious undertones of all the things that aren't actually related to the crime, which came to the fore as a result of a media backlash and have remained there. For those who aren't aware, Gilmour was snapped numerous times doing idiotic things during the tuition fees protests (which, subtly, areas of the press have taken to calling the 'tuition fee riots' as if that were the true organised nature of the event).

For example, Charlie Gilmour swung on a Union Flag attached to the Cenotaph, then claimed he didn't know (despite being a History student) what the structure represented. This makes him at best ignorant, at worst an absolute moron, but he didn't face trial for that. Despite this, though, the judge still saw fit to pass comment on his actions in that regard. In and of itself, I don't think that's an awful thing to have happen, although I would argue that Charlie Gilmour has probably realised by now that he was a fucking idiot on that day.

What Gilmour was on trial for, though, was the attack of the royal convoy for Charles and Camilla that spawned all those sensational pictures of them both looking veritably terrified as angry rioters threw things at their car. Charlie Gilmour was found to have launched a litter bin at one of the cars in the convoy, sat on a protection officer's car, and smashed a window. Can I just repeat for you the length of the sentence he was handed? 16 months. SIXTEEN MONTHS.

That alone is pretty fucking atrocious. 16 months - of which he'll serve half - for smashing a window and jumping on a car bonnet? But it's worse - far worse - when you realise why it is that the price is so high. Judge Nicholas Page said that "it would be wrong to ignore who the occupants" of the car were.

Hang on a minute.

Judge Nicholas Page thinks that if Charlie Gilmour smashes your window, and jumps on your car's bonnet, and throws a trash can at your car, it is not as bad or important as if he does it to that of a royal.

There are so many things wrong with this that it's difficult to know where to begin. We could start with the fact that, given Charles and Camilla's obviously extensive protection arrangements, it's probably not as dangerous physically or emotionally to them as it would be to somebody else. But I think this is missing the point entirely, actually, and the point is this: somewhere, someone, at some point, has decided that the royal family is more important than you, and more important than me. I'm not about to argue that it's the inverse; that would be foolish and counter-productive.

Because I searched through articles galore to make sure I wasn't mis-reading the quote from Judge Nicholas Page, because for quite some time I thought that, surely, what he actually said must have been that it would "be right to ignore who the occupants" were. Alas, I find myself dumbfounded. In the rooms where people make decisions which affect people's lives in the long-term, we have men who think it's okay to, with very little disguise at all, assert that it is more of an issue if someone attacks the royal family than if they attack what I can only assume they refer to as the plebs.

Charlie Gilmour is an idiot but he's got a hell of a long way to go before he's as much of a muppet as Judge Nicholas Page.

The Sinister Smiles of CCTV Signs

Most of the criticism I post here is about news outlets, primarily because these are the sources which most explicitly change our perception of the world. But in a way, these things are pretty harmless if you're a little bit aware of the hazards involved in consuming them. Sort of. I didn't just call the Daily Mail harmless. But what I'm getting at is that there are more subtle ways people, and particularly organizations, affect our outlook on certain issues:

I don't know about anybody else, but this sign makes me a million times more nervous and scared than I can ever imagine feeling on seeing a sign that said You are being filmed and recorded for the purposes of security and safety. I don't find the smiley face funny; I find it terrifying as hell. I don't find the laid-back and presumably hilarious tone of the text cute; I find it actually pretty sinister.

There are certain things that don't need joking about. If the point of CCTV is to make the world safer, surely trivialising its use to the extent that you're making faintly Orwellian wisecracks at the expense of actual information is a poor communication decision at best. But maybe it's not. No, maybe it's deliberate. Maybe the companies and organizations that use uncomfortably nonchalant signage like this are just paving the way for a tipping point where people stop noticing that they're on camera. Maybe they know that.

Make no mistake: they do. It's a process of desensitisation, of making people unconsciously numb to a blasé and relaxed approach to the idea of a stranger taking thousands of pictures of them every minute. If this sounds like a conspiracy theory, I'm not saying CCTV is Satan incarnate. I'm saying that there are debated to be had about its impact on freedom and privacy, and that signs like that piece of shit up there^ do no justice to the seriousness that even MAKING a sign so apologetically awkward implies. If you accept people need to be made to feel less uptight about CCTV cameras, the best way to do it is not to make light of their fear in the first place.

It terrifies me that someone somewhere, by way of either stupidity or treachery, thought this a good idea.

A New Dimension of Banal Celebrity Bullshit

On the scale of mindless and unimportant celebrity bullshit there are four key benchmarks for ridiculousness:

1) Something happened. This is the type of article which purports to be about X's new music video or Y's new movie or Z's show in _____land, but usually actually just spends 5 paragraphs recounting in a tedious and dry fashion the last two weeks of X/Y/Z's life. Still, at least it's about the work that they do, i.e. the supposed reason people know who they are in the first place.

2) Really? Wow. This type of story - though about someone you've never met and wouldn't ever think about were they not plastered all over magazines and tabloids - is nevertheless intriguing. It usually concerns fairly major developments in a celeb's life like a divorce or an injury - personal stuff that affects nobody but is still, for whatever reason, interesting.

3) Nothing happened. Kim Kardashian crossed a road. Avril Lavigne was wearing a bikini. James Corden had a takeaway. These stories are the filler, the real gossip, the real dross; they're the completely empty and vacuous tales of absolutely nothing important or with wider consequences or even with small consequences to the celebrity in question. They're like those crisps that don't taste of anything and don't have any calories either; people just eat them because they want to feel like they're eating something at that moment in time.

But wait, because there's something worse than that:

4) Nothing happened. Literally.

Today the Daily Mail is carrying an article whose headline boldly asserts:

Reigniting the flame: Ashley and Cheryl Cole get intimate on a romantic day out

Got that? Ashley Cole and Cheryl Cole are getting intimate. On a romantic day out.

But the Mail don't just tell you so: they include 3 brilliantly clear photographs of the loved-up couple because the cornerstone of celebrity bullshit is photographs. One is the pair in a restaurant, another is of Ashley lifting his ex-wife into the air, the last is of a romantic embrace in the street.

In the second paragraph of the article the Mail's anonymous byline Daily Mail Reporter asserts with the utmost confidence that:

now it appears there is confirmation that the relationship is back on track

Got it?

Cheryl Cole and Ashley are back together?

Understood? All clear, now?

Are you ready for the twist?

It's not them.

It's a pair of lookalikes.

Making Excuses For Homophobia?

Today, the BBC is carrying an article as the lead of its Entertainment section about an opera which was cancelled after a school decided that - to quote them -

it was still deemed as unacceptable for four to 11-year-olds to be exposed to.

Let's get one simple thing out of the way straight off the bat: the opera company can't be blamed for the collapse of this show. It was due to open in 10 days' time, and it was not their disagreement with the script that led the school to pull its 300 pupils from the production. The company, Opera North, has clearly been driven to make the decision by the school's ultimatum regarding a specific line in the script which the writer refused to alter. Therefore, implying in the article's headline that the opera company has any case to answer whatsoever is greatly misleading. But what of the line to which the school took such offence?

"Of course I'm queer/That's why I left here/So if you infer/That I prefer/A lad to a lass/And I'm working class/I'd have to concur."

Wow.

The writer, Lee Hall (who also wrote Billy Elliot) insists that this is the only part of the script on which he and Bay Primary School couldn't reach an agreement. The school asserts that it is not the simple presence of homosexuality that irks them, but instead the tone and language of the work. Quite how they got involved to start with is beyond me, but the BBC article and interview make it abundantly clear that Hall agreed to change everything but that line.

So, basically, the school has pulled out of a production happening in 10 days' time because of the word queer.

Queer.

Queer can mean strange, but it usually doesn't any more, and certainly not in the playground. It's actually quite true that the word is often used by bullies and in homophobic name-calling, and in that context, yes, it's a bad word. But here, the word is not being used in that context. It's being used by a character to describe himself and because it needs to rhyme with here.

It's quite evident from the writer's protests as to the cancellation of the show that he's not the homophobe in this situation, and so you'd have to assume that the use of the word queer here is not derogatory in any sense. And yet this is the school's excuse. And because of all these things, that's what it smacks of: an excuse. They have pulled their 300 pupils from the production of Beached on the grounds that a - frankly - painfully banal line from the script includes a word which sometimes has negative connotations but in this case definitely doesn't.

At the least, it's cowardice; at its worst, it reeks of actual homophobia, of the literal kind: fear of homosexuality.