Citizen Kane's truth
Register for free to read more of the latest local news. It's easy and will only take a moment.
SICK of the endless loop about the Euro meltdown and the life or death revolutions that don’t get anywhere? Hello Egypt, where the military is now deliberately shooting protesters in the face to blind them. Maybe one way of counterbalancing the horror and the bad news is to let a few maverick minds loose on it to offer a much-needed twist.
It’s working like a dream for I’M A CELEB, with what is actually a boring bunch of celebs, more OCD than living it large.
So the favourite five minutes of any day in the last week has been the ITV2 aftershow GET ME OUT OF HERE! when comedian Russell Kane is let loose on the latest happenings in the jungle.
Just a little bit more crazy now he’s in his new pompadour and eyeliner phase, his mix of mad impressions of everyone from Essex playboy Mark Wright to Tedward-loving wobbly-voiced Lorraine Chase plus his searingly sharp analysis of what’s going on, is comedy gold.
Still, the sniggers got another rare outing this week during the anti-perspirant pitches from YOUNG APPRENTICE teams. Teens as authorities on branding meant some grandiose claims from the juniors.
And Gbemi had to go for her bullying insistence that a retro gold mirror on the packaging was anything other than pure Vanity.
Teen Henry Johnson had bigger worries though – trying to come to terms with the memory of his dad attacking his mum with an axe in WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT DAD and what to tell – or not tell – his little brother Felix about the reason for the fractured family that has somehow stuck together. Not exactly apart. But not exactly together. And Henry’s own bid to make sense of something so terrifyingly psychotic and out of the blue, made for essential viewing.
As did TRUE STORIES: DONOR UNKNOWN about one girl’s bid to find the "father" who had donated the sperm to make her.
American JoEllen Marsh couldn’t fight the urge to find the man behind the matter-of-fact biology of Donor 150.
And what seemed most bizarre was that the doctors and scientists who made it possible for women to have access to the sperm that might give them a baby, hadn’t thought how primal the urge to find out who your parents are might be for the resulting children.
Best moment of the show came when the frankly rather odd but gentle old hippie Jeffrey Harrison cycled with his new-found kids (all with big foreheads and his same gentle way with him) down the front at Venice Beach, California, where Jeffrey lived in an RV and seemed to care for a pigeon nesting in his caravan as much as for his own.
"Riding with you guys, it’s the best thing that’s ever happened," he marvelled.
But the worst thing that had ever happened to a much-respected American institution hit over 2009 as the multi-media meltdown struck
STORYVILLE: PAGE ONE INSIDE THE NEW YORK TIMES.
Very smart people with lots of big important titles all began to look worried as the reputation of the paper that documented Watergate faced up to the internet’s impact on newspapers.
Finances started to plummet, 100 jobs were lost, and battling the websites that passed on news for free – the aggregators – took its toll.
But through the voice of wildcard reporter David Carr – who had battled drug addiction before getting a New York Times job – the film showed the massive ocean liner of a paper turning slowly to take the lead once again.
Breaking the online sensation of the Wikileaks stories, the NYT used its strengths to get the Wikileaks revelations out to its readers.
And all the time Carr was questioning the doom-laden soothsayers predicting the end of the Times.
He reported the fall of the Tribune news group, where it turned out the businessmen who had taken the organisation over were just interested in looting the assets in "bonuses", not making the future work for the titles.
Carr made a feisty guide. At a conference debating Good riddance to mainstream media, he held up a bit of paper showing all the stories being passed on from traditional papers’ reports by an internet news aggregator.
"This is how this would look without the traditional media," he said, holding up the same bit of paper full of holes where all the original stories no longer existed.
But as the arrival of the iPad seemed to hold out a lifeline for newspapers – readers buying their apps to read online – Carr had his tongue in his cheek.
"Is it a bridge to the future – or is it a gallows?"
Wonder what he'd make of I’m A Celeb ...
