Stuart Maconie: C or D?

Not that I'm too sure about bra sizes.

The best link I can find is here. He's the grinning idiot in the middle.

Or that photo kind of sums him up. He presumably considers having his picture taken with Alex James and some aging members of New Order his life's great pinnacle, and probably now thinks of them as top showbiz chums.

Dud: But I'm sure he's a very nice man in real life. Or maybe not.

"Vanity: that's my favourite," as Al P. says in Devil's Advocate. (And besides, look at Norden; look at his eyes... You think that isn't punishment? You think he doesn't know what we know, see what we see, think what we think? In 30 years time, that's where Maconie will be: not cuz he hasn't the talent to jump sideways and save himself, but because he won't realise he needed to until way too late... )

SM: Hi, I'm Stuart Maconie. Everyone loves my wacky humourous insight.
ITV Exec: Great, we'll give you your own primetime show. Just sign here to transfer your soul.
SM: My soul? Ah but its primetime. I'll take it!
(Later on, SM reads the contract properly)
SM: (In Krusty the Klown regret voice) A clip show??? Aah, schucks.

I think the reason Maconie is annoying is that he is doing a job that we could all do - and getting the fame, the cash and the girls. Well, possibly not the girls as he isn't exactly an oil painting. But talking about mid-eighties TV trivia, that's a buck I could easily garner.

I bet that Gina Yashere eats them all though.

His TV career is a bit irksome, the Denis Norden comparison is spot on, at least he comes across as mildly amusing unlike John Robb who comes across as a knob. His writings great though and his radio show on Radio 2 on Saturdays is pretty good - unless I'm in the pub.

I suppose most of you are aware of the superb www.tvgohome.com website.

There was a brilliant piss-take of this too-close-for-comfort nostalgia in the Feb 23rd edition:

I Love 'All Your Base Are Belong To Us'

Instant nostalgia as Paul Ross, Rock Sky, Kate Thornton, Gail Porter and Stuart Maconie cast a wry glance backward at last week's hit internet phenomenon - the bizarre Megadrove-inspired 'All Your Base Are Belong To Us' online video forwarded around the globe by excitable trendmongers everywhere.

Contains nostalgic anecdotes so contempory they end with the storyteller explaining how he first decided to launch into the anecdote he's still currently telling. If you see what I mean.

surely maconie is already doing clip shows?

No, in his current jobs, he is meant to be the star. There is a massive (though indefinable) difference between this and Stuart Maconie's Late Night Adult Nudey Home Video Show, where he becomes secondary to inscrutably shaky footage of some flabby and/or old woman's nipple popping out of her top.

Mike Reid: Where did it all go wrong?

Damn my touch-typing skills. (I couldn't cut and paste as the text is a rendered bitmap, and I was too lazy to check before I posted.)

Notice how the pinefox's theoretical meta question was largely ignored, while the exact same subject hijacks another thread so we can bitch about minor celebrities.

15 years ago, I'm sure Maconie's musical taste / cultural leanings were far closer to the John Peel show than the Gary Davies show. Certainly his NME readership revered Peel and held Davies in utter contempt.

Which is why (and I still sort-of-like him underneath) I'm baffled that he's ended up on programmes which more-or-less imply that (say) 1986 was *only* Gary Davies and his attendant culture (No Limits, power ballads), that Peel and the sort of music he played barely existed. I don't object to mainstream-nostalgia per se, but it's curious when those who stood up for the non-mainstream *at the time* jump into it. We all have our reasons, but Maconie's flummoxes me. Mark's dissection was perfect.

So -- Dennis Norden = the George Steiner of out-takes?

Here is a thread that mentions Maconie and Dennis Norden !!!

--

"He's going to be a Denis Norden for our generation — and he doesn't see that yet" said my friend LN, when SM's name came up at the Viêt-Hoâ two months back. She was chuckling. Cuz of course in the whirl of his self-esteem, he's not *quite* generous enuff to notice that — c.1965, D.Norden was very much like him, impatient quick-witted amused working-class refugee from something godawful, glozed (not to say mesmerised) by the apparent Change for the Better in routine light entertainment possibility. SM thinks he can play it as others before him could not: and that he was always be young and smart and swift and able — just — to ironise his way out the reach of yr righteous right hammer-hook.

"Vanity: that's my favourite," as Al P. says in Devil's Advocate. (And besides, look at Norden; look at his eyes... You think that isn't punishment? You think he doesn't know what we know, see what we see, think what we think? In 30 years time, that's where Maconie will be: not cuz he hasn't the talent to jump sideways and save himself, but because he won't realise he needed to until way too late... )

― mark s, Thursday, July 5, 2001

lmao

Maconie update.

He was just doing MUSIC NEWS and the newsreader said: 'Arctic Monkeys are returning for their first gigs since 2014'.

Maconie cried 'Yeeeee-ay!' and clapped his hands once.

The moment seemed to sum up something of the worst in Maconie - his lickspittle tendencies. There is something so sycophantic about him. And this about Arctic Monkeys.

I think I agree with Matt DC that this is a bad article.

https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk/2017/03/labour-finds-it-easier-ignore-working-class-persuade-them

"One gets the distinct impression that Jeremy Corbyn and his acolytes would prefer the purity and posturing of permanent opposition rather than the messy, compromised business of government. They offer ineffectuality and disdainful superiority dressed up as a kind of saintly decency. Maybe Jeremy feels that by not doing anything, he cannot do anything wrong. He should be disabused of this notion, and quickly."

This is very patronizing toward someone who had been elected multiple times by many thousands of people.

Maconie does not have the right to call him 'Jeremy'.

It's just regurgitated recieved wisdom really, it's aping the worst of unreflective pre-election Westminster lobby bubblethink even as he pretends to be doing the exact opposite.

it looks especially silly after the last general election results

Still here's Gentle Giant with the closing track of their 1972 album, "In a Glass House".

the problem is these metropolitan music journalists are afraid to connect with white working class prog rock bands

and their legitimate concertos

:)

Caitlin Moran's pre-election piece on Corbyn was also embarrassing, she identified JC's lack of "media training" as why he's no good and said May's excellent array of media skills was working "gangbusters" with the electorate/polls.

Did Private Eye ever have a Mayballs section?

"prog is middle class haha" is tbf exactly as spavined a sociological cliche as landed SM that NS gig

shulman bros were born in the gorbals iirc

Did Jon Anderson deliver all those milk bottles in the cold Accrington dawn in vain?

i do suspect he was quite a bad milkman

he was no pat mustard

The cheery whistling of selections from "Tales of Topographic Oceans" didn't go down too well with the housewive of Accrington.

I was absolutely not suggesting prog was middle class btw altho maybe Gryphon or somebody idk

there is an amusing disparity between Stuart's "horny-handed son of toil" shtick in the NS tho and his other interests

Jon Anderson, Who Are They?

Horny-handed son of a Stockhausen biographer

"Stuart Maconie's TV Towns for ITV3, six one-hour shows about TV and film locations in Newcastle, Birmingham, Manchester, Edinburgh, Liverpool and London."

Not one fucking Town even mentioned there.

What was Roger Whitaker on about then?

lol ward

"Stuart Maconie's TV Towns for ITV3, six one-hour shows about TV and film locations in Newcastle, Birmingham, Manchester, Edinburgh, Liverpool and London."

really hoping there's the traditional mixing up of TV/films shot in Glasgow and Edinburgh

Cardiacs fan. Completely free pass

never mind, that was Durham not London

xp
I'm like that with fans of Wagner's operas.

[makes the obvious comment]

Maconie can do his godawful radio shows and wander about looking like fucking Alan Titchmarsh w/ hair dye. But when he delves in on UK politics it becomes quite personal when he's just parroting the MSM/BBC line. People like him seem to have no awareness that politics isn't a game for some people, in some cases it's the difference between having a house/homeless, or shopping in supermarket/queuing at a foodbank. It isn't a good time for armchair dilettantes like this cunt, he'd probably do better to stay the fuck out of it in future.

now now, we're all comfortably well-off here

Why does Maconie almost always wear highly patterned shirts?

he’s taking his talking head role seriously and going for some sort of dazzle camouflage effect in the wardrobe dept thereby liberating his noggin to be more like a free-floating sentient blancmange

like a squid eating dough in a Morrison’s carrier bag

Thought this was the descriptions of Steve Bannon thread for a second there

Man the barricades:

Watched the Carillon mess on the news, then Ken Loach’s Spirit Of 45. Pretty much ready to set off for Downing Street now tbh if anyone’s up for it

— Stuart Maconie (@StuartMaconie) January 16, 2018

i'm staying at somebody else's house and i've just skimmed a bit of Pies and Prejudice. might make the trip to London myself so i can shove it up his arse tbh

That nostalgia for the Attlee government is ok, as long as you are willing to take the rough with the smooth, as in his strong pro-imperial tendencies and some very fucking rough foreign policies. I'm not sure he would be fondly remembered in Greece for starters. But Maconie is a fucking joke. I've never seen the Loach doc on Attlee, but could imagine it being the type of complete hagiography that would please someone like him.

Is Maconie offering to become Prime Minister?

he's all jacked up on Ken Loach, maybe someone should phone Prevent.

lots about ken loach's influence on his politics in his new book, the wind that shakes the bhajis

Lard and Freedom etc

I, Total Arsehole

*gets out scribbled notes on the very real problematics of loach's attlee film, from a left political perspective*
*checks thread*
*puts notes away*

HOOKED ON 45 press submit

Would be interested to read your take on it, is there a link?

lol no, sorry claz, it isn't even on paper, that was just busywork for the joke: but basically this

i: british troops in both the world wars were NOT ALL WHITE (by any means: some 140,000 chinese were in the trenches alongside the british and the french). so several colleagues who did see it were quite unhappy at how whitewashed the "masses returning from the war to meet the masses working at home" seemed. obviously the popular image of the troops and the make-up of the country back home has been whitewashed in films and picture history, this began in the 50s, when the re-establishment of empire norms was at least briefly in play (oops india). but loach ought to know better
ii: it also coincided w/loach's LEFT UNITY project, a party announced as needed on the left bcz nu-lab blairfail etc (a perfectly good point) which (you'll never believe what happened next) rubbed the rest of the left the wrong way. it never really took off: pictures of early meetings seemed to be dozens of well-meaning white men aged 95 and upwards, plus owen jones

(in 2017, it instructed voters to mark a cross for corbz)

my essay would start with what you can glean from the above, adding details discovered when i maybe actually go watch documentary, which i haven't yet

some tool I know on twitter once retweeted this Attlee meme in which he is wite Bob Marley and "granted Independence to India" is amongst his list of achievements!

If It's Spirit Of '45 we're talking about I don't think you can say it's a documentary "about" Attlee as such, I learned very little about the man or his govt from it. The film's much more interested in portraying the creation of the NHS as a bottom-up initiative, pols reacting to immense pressure from The People.

bpb is much abused in this world of trouble

xp

it feels wholly symptomatic of Maconie's shtick that his radical vision is to go back 80 years to an era he no doubt imagines as being free of all this identitarian nonsense

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Re0zGO_sxx8/TqAGQEXnnKI/AAAAAAAAA0M/0EC-DRw87OE/s1600/image.img.jpg

"It is telling that the last alternative bands that emerged with lyrics that observed the world around them wittily and pungently were Kaiser Chiefs and Arctic Monkeys, both from working class backgrounds in Yorkshire."

omfg!

https://i2-prod.cambridge-news.co.uk/incoming/article14165682.ece/ALTERNATES/s615b/UC-bow-1.jpg

"I also want him, and the zealous metropolitan left in general, to start reaching out to those they have forgotten.

Such as kids in dying towns who will never get to a university to debate Momentum in the Union bar; embittered ex-miners in Leigh and Doncaster; unemployed steelworkers in Consett and Port Talbot; all those decent but disillusioned working class people of the Labour heartlands; the people (like me) to whom Hillsborough and Orgreave are as important as the Chilcot Report."

I didn't realise everyone born below Watford couldn't gaf about Hillsborough victims, only authentic w/c northerners like our Stuart and Gyles Brandreth felt any outrage.

pretty sure there are plenty of outraged Home Counties Reds for a start

altho they're probably not real nor pie-consuming

".... Kaiser Chiefs and Arctic Monkeys, both from working class backgrounds in Yorkshire."

Isn't there a thread on here somewhere about snobbishness of "I Predict a Riot"? Sung by the privately educated son of a TV producer, no less.

but Tom, he has a regional accent.

who could forget the Arctic Monkey's class conscious "eeeh there's some right scum live round 'ere not that mum lets me go onto the estate after dark or owt"?

he writes all about that in 'a pasty too indie, yeah' fwiw

delet

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DT0-l3NWkAAlI7e.jpg:large

this made me think of this chump.

zep on the south coast feels really wrong to me, always think of them as some midlands business

also having the la's on a list of anything ever is the true mark of a complete gobshite

Mmm, who else would fit into that tiny space?

hitler

seriously though, the la's only had like five singles and two of those were sodding 'there she goes'

was kind of fascinated how they came up with that list, market research or some random at the company brainstorming, but then I thought "who cares, these people are vermin" and left it

"my life's a vain pursuit of obvious plodding conformity"

ooh, tetchy this morning, kill all normies

The Fratellis is the really egregious inclusion there. Dire Straits in Newcastle is controversial as well but it's not as if they have any other bands and putting Three Colours Red in there really would be stretching it.

Oh wait I just saw Feeder there and now I have an overwhelming desire to waste my Friday reworking that to include Terris and Gay Dad and Gaz Coombes.

Glasvegas are on there, so this must be pretty old? Who remembers them now ?

hope arlene foster is going to be raising an urgent question about the exclusion of northern ireland though having a big blob of teeeenaaage kiiiicks out in the atlantic might look a bit odd

glasvegas are solid btw, maconie puts forward a good case for them in ‘mein kebabf’

It might look like Van Morrison is in quarantine.(xp)

The Fratellis is the really egregious inclusion there. Dire Straits in Newcastle is controversial as well but it's not as if they have any other bands and putting Three Colours Red in there really would be stretching it.

― Matt DC, Friday, January 19, 2018 9:13 AM (ten minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Lindisfarne or Venom before Dire Straits.

Or Pet shop boys

Toy Dolls, even

I believe there was a band called Prefab Sprout once.

do you fucks even knows who gazza is

he had more hits than the la’s for starters

Exactly, did Moaty die in vain?

dunno if you've ever checked the album 'gazza and friends' but it's got some pretty weird shit on it:

https://www.discogs.com/Various-Gazza-And-Friends/master/544196

gilbert o'sullivan, kenny lynch?

The map is not good but to be fair to Maconie, he has not given it his approval.

I was thinking: people will dislike this map for being Rock focused; then that it was Rock only; then I saw trip-hop type things in the SW, so that's not quite the case. Then I thought: the SW should include Sarah, Another Sunny Day, etc.

It features OCS as Great British Band so the map is definitely bad.

ahem

"It is telling that the last alternative bands that emerged with lyrics that observed the world around them wittily and pungently were Kaiser Chiefs and Arctic Monkeys, both from working class backgrounds in Yorkshire."

"oohhh.. I'm Telling! "

If we don't keep reporting these people to the schoolteacher Cheka, we'll never get the bastards gulagged.

Politics

Maconie self-identifies as a Marxist. "In these days of identity politics and what you might call “the selfie-fication” of political thought, Marxism remains refreshingly bracing in its view of the world."[18]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuart_Maconie#Politics

I'd presume that quote comes from the NS piece where he takes a centrist/legitimate concernist line in the pre-election Corbyn bashing piece. Someone needs to tell him that copying what the other grown-ups are saying doesn't become elevated to "political thought" just because your ego needs to think it is.

It's from a different NS piece, where he praises John McDonnell. It's still a really dumb piece tho.

Today’s version is media savvy, in touch with its feelings and soundtracked by indie alt-pop and cutting-edge electronica.

wow, so this is what a modern Marxist is like, very enlightening.

marx had a giant hipster beard long before it was cool tbf

They've seized control of the means of procrastination.

The Marxism Party has a good soundtrack, I'm voting for them.

the dictatorship of the prOATLYtariat

lolz

The trad English bigotry behind "these days of identity politics" is clear, but I'm confused by the "the selfie-fication of political thought".

i think he means - and this is beautifully ironic - the public display of ostensibly political beliefs done merely for the applause and attention of others

his idea of rigorous "political thought" = going on a real ale trail looking for bigots and then making a fatuous Jarrow March book about it.
Too much NME is fatal for some ppl!

have you read the Jarrow March book?

no, I'm making presumptions here purely based on his usual shtick and the amazon summary. I couldn't even force myself to read it tbh.

i've read chunks of one of his books and he is fucking awful

I wonder if he is thinking of people having their picture taken with Jeremy Corbyn MP, whom he has previously attacked ?

I imagine that's because Corbyn isn't left wing enough for an indie alt pop Marxist?

Some excerpts from the review in the Northern Echo:

Maconie had travelled a mere 12 of the 291 miles when a café waitress in Chester-le-Street, to whom he had confided “I’ve walked from Jarrow; I’m retracing the Jarrow March,” replied: “Oh have you. Very good. That’ll be £2.65. I’m locking up in ten minutes.”

...

At his previous stop, in Harrogate, he’d sampled his first Wetherspoons. Cue for sniffy disdain? Not so. “I liked it. It was full, and not of slavering beer monsters as I’d been led to expect, but of cheery, civilised working people having a pint and a meal after work.”

...

He himself fared rather better, especially when he found himself in The Little Tanner - “one of those strangely likeable new pubs or bars that have sprung up all over Britain in what feels like front rooms or old sweet shops or printers.” Its patrons, he reports, were “luxuriantly bearded graphic designers wearing vintage US seed-merchant baseball caps and drinking botanical gins and Sri Lankan pale ales.”

So, all sort of made-up stuff then.

The trad English bigotry behind "these days of identity politics" is clear

I heard Terry "You'll never guess where I'm from" Christian make similar noises - maybe a new gammon front is opening on 'the left'?

His grasp of marxism seems to extend only to "class privilege means that if you're in the proletariat it doesn't matter how much money you make, you're still locked out of real power", which makes his dissing of identity politics even more insane.

he's the kind of guy who would talk approvingly of "common sense" - the first refuge of a scoundrel

don't want to be Cap'n Save-a-Maconie but the Jarrow March would seem to me to be a good topic to revisit. Those extracts make it sound atrocious though.

Terry Christian doesn't like "student union politics" and thinks the current PLP haven't got any "balls". He has that disease where he can't stop speaking in high-octane Talk Radio speak and becomes very exhausting, in even in small doses.

i don't know, think the original Jarrow march could only have been improved by faux bemused reviews of pubs along the route

original Jarrow march was led by a woman, something blokes like Maconie would do well to remember

The interwar period and backdrop to the Jarrow March is very interesting as well. 10-15 years after the big general strikes and all that.

not being flippant: a retracing of the march that visited nail-bars (rather than saloon bars) en route could i think be a lot more interesting and informative

(not by SM obviously)

>>> original Jarrow march was led by a woman, something blokes like Maconie would do well to remember
― imago, Wednesday, February 14, 2018

Maybe he does remember and talks about Ellen Wilkinson in his book?

Reminded today of something I don't like about Maconie: he will say something vague or uncertain, then spend a minute or so persistently saying 'is that right? ... I THINK so ... is that right?'

If you don't know something, don't say it on national radio in the first place.

He spends far too much of his time broadcasting his ignorance at length.

The specific thing he wasn't sure of was: what is the last track on the first Supergrass LP.

if only there was some easily accessible means of checking facts like this

invite gaz coombes in for an acoustic set?

the answer that applies to every question

Last night BBC repeated an edited version of I LOVE 1981.

It occurs to me that when this first screened, in 2001, I was already commenting on it on ILX.

The pundits were like ur-versions of the pundit style that we came to know - 'Danger Mouse ... a Mouse with a car? What was *that* all about?'. I think that this programme was the first to do it.

Worst was Eko Eshun who kept sounding like he was attacking things but was just repeating facts about them.

Mary Ann Hobbs, of all people, looked good and seemed more reasonable than others.

... and Maconie was on it - looking youthful (even though it was already 25 years since his journo heyday?) and chubby, and talking in a way even more glib than he does now.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EQ8E4HyWAAUVo00?format=jpg&name=medium

turgidly conservative, crap old NME hack gives critical support to the bigots.

I am genuinely struggling to work out what all this anti-trans stuff is about, beyond straight-up bigotry, and I'm not the sort to tag along on a Gay Pride march and put a rainbow filter on my profile picture on Facebook.

There definitely seems to now be a concerted effort in the UK, from various quarters, to make an issue out of this though.

it seems to getting louder for sure. Glinner is now a mail columnist so they see there is life after getting cancelled for the professional bigot.

Had Brendan O'Neill going on about it on Sky News last night, how Labour going all 'woke' will turn off their horny handed natural supporters when, in fact, it seems to be middle class London media wankers who are most exercised by it

for all Brendan O'Neill's fulminating about the "liberal media" telling working class people what to think, he really likes using the media to... tell people what to think. It's almost as if he's a massive hypocrite, determined on injecting bad faith arguments into "the discourse".

There definitely seems to now be a concerted effort in the UK, from various quarters, to make an issue out of this though.

Not just in the UK (see: Joe Rogan). The emphasis on trans athletes appears to be a typically 'Murican obsession, though (muh fair competition).

Glinner is now a mail columnist

really? fucking hell. Looking at his twitter feed he's now retweeting Julia Hartley-Brewer too.

(xp) I expect in the US though. That was the subtext to my post.

transphobia is the last vaguely acceptable form of lgbtq discrimination, these fucks aren't gonna give up their bigotry without a fight

it's def. going to replace anti-semitism as the stick to beat Labour with.

I don't think it will tbh. It's much more widespread and mainstream than anti-semitism and too popular to be a useful stick to beat the opposition with.

the reactionaries are definitely positioning themselves for a fight which they'll gratifyingly lose, but only after a long and bitter period of bad-faith bullying

it's def. going to replace anti-semitism as the stick to beat Labour with.

It's started already.

when a cowardly little shit like Maconie is peeping above the parapet it's probably indicative of how mainstream trans bigotry has become. All previous dunking on here is on him being laughably bad on class, music, and the obligatory Corbyn bashing in the NS which all his ilk of shit 80's nme hacks engage in. But he usually treads a careful line .

It's being spun as being indicative of Labour's problem with women. Hard to believe that anyone is seriously going to claim the Labour Party is more misogynistic than the Tories but...

I don't get it. The same people who are disseminating transphobic bigotry are going to use it as a stick to beat Labour with? I don't see how that works!

At best the right can attack Labour over perceived 'hypocrisy', but do Tories outright claim not to be transphobic in the same way they believe themselves not to be antisemitic? If anything, transphobia appears to be a feature rather than a bug of their ethos, so I don't see this being a very lucrative angle.

xps

xp Transphobes will use their bigoted attack lines to argue that Labour figures are not being transphobic enough, by framing that as failing to defend "women's rights" as narrowly conceived. It's a new front in the culture wars, hooray!

ah yes!

Regardless, that's far likelier to backfire than the antisemitism row.

The Labour Party should pledge to make it illegal to go into a public toilet and sexually assault women.

I would dispute that transphobia is more ingrained and mainstream in the UK than antisemitism which has been rife in our society for centuries and is barely acknowledged most of the time.

The Tories in legislative terms have seemed largely unbothered by trans rights but it's a wedge issue and there's political capital in allowing Labour MPs and supporters to tear themselves apart over the issue. It can be weaponised against Labour in swing seats as well.

Sorry, I wasn't clear: the stick that will be used to beat Labour is not that they are anti-trans; it's that they're anti-women.

The idea is that the plebs who have voted Labour in the past are a bunch of knuckle dragging bigots stuck in the 1970s and that Labour getting all woke and SJW can be used to drive a further wedge between said plebs and former party of the plebs, Labour.

(xp) Yes, because being pro-trans is anti-women in this little scenario.

didn't mean to sound reductive about anti-semitism and was going to say it is more of a pervasive undercurrent than the mainstream bigotry of transphobia. But then I remembered that our current unelected de facto emperor Cummings used the blaring antisemitic foghorn "the likes of Goldman Sachs" on his blog only to minor ripples of outrage.

Pauk Morley: That's his name. My only knowledge of him is from I Love Vaguely Amusing Celebrity Soundbites, but I have to ask, why is he such a miserable basstard? He's like a crap Maconie alter-ego. Maconie's usual trick is to say appallingly rubbish stuff is great, but Morley slags off absolutely everything, and he's not even funny. It's like he's immune to irony, humour, wit, frivolity, kitsch, silliness and fun. So much more punchable than Maconie.
― Graham, Saturday, September 1, 2001 bookmarkflaglink

Er, blimey: not the P.Morley *I* know. Who = not quite immune ENUFF to that stuff. He doesn't put the TV emoticons in much, tho, it's true. V.v.v.dry sense of humour, plus not entirely operative tv delivery of same?
― mark s, Saturday, September 1, 2001 bookmarkflaglink

Probably a TV thing again then. He probably does say nice things sometimes, it's just the only times I've noticed him recently (3 times I think = ILE rule), everyone's laughing and joking about how rubbish-but-grate something was, then cut to Paul Morley saying "This was an all time nadir" "This was the worst thing ever" "I don't see how anyone could possibly have liked that" completely seriously. Maybe he is joking, but how is the lowly viewer meant to detect subtlety amongst the vivid shirts and psychedelic backdrops?
― Graham, Saturday, September 1, 2001 bookmarkflaglink

He doesn't work in bitesize slices, I agree, and I don't really understand why he agrees to do things like that.
― mark s, Saturday, September 1, 2001

The days before 9/11.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FstW9SlXsAAhfZp?format=jpg&name=medium

these people have nearly always been on "journeys of discovery" when hawking their latest books, but then just coming out with the same old shit (I haven't read it nor ever will - but feel quite strongly like he might not really have discovered anything about England going by previous insights from him, lol)

If you are an English person, in England, who already spends much time with English people, then going 'in search of England and its people' doesn't make much sense.

It's not like they're hiding. Though hiding from Maconie might be understandable.

(xp) I hear one more advert for a (Channel 4 in particular) TV programme where some no-talent celebrity (usually a comedian) is on a journey to discover something or other I think I'll fucking scream.

lol, yes

I saw this through a local writer's twitter, who I think only has one book published and isn't as famous as Maconie. But these are the polite people he's going to find on his book tour, other writers and assorted old people who read the NME in the 80's, not really a broad church!

Am I correct in thinking that Maconie typed flatter themselves that they are not "English" so much as cosmopolitan Europeans, thus making their "search of England" something akin to, like, a guy from the US travelling to Ireland or whoever in search of their roots?

Maconie *types

Oh no, that's not Maconie at all.

Maconie is completely puddled on class and UK politics, but that kind of self-delusion sounds more like Billy Bragg.

Professional Northerner.

... Maconie that is, not calzino.

lol!