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

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!