Some thoughts on the Common Toad

Views of Animal Farm/nineteen-eighty-four

"Orwell in Pictures" was very good. My wife said she thought the inserts with an actor playing Orwell inserted into various real situations were unnecessary but I felt it gave a real link between a man who was after all a man with great feeling for real people and the people he spoke up for. It is all too easy to see his privileged background as a barrier to real understanding of what he thought. The show was funny as well as clever. As Orwell addressed the home guard via a wartime public information film, he casually tossed a grenade from one hand to the other, saying that the one thing that deters German soldiers is being shot at. I have too many books to read so I resisted starting on the Orwell Biography. There are two supposedly definitive new biographies of Orwell just out so there are those to wait for. I only read nineteen-eighty-four last year but I have an inkling to read it again though I suppose I should dig out Animal Farm first. For years I could see the point of nineteen-eighty-four - it was set in this country and provided a possible future with a horrendously believable situation but Animal Farm was purely a satire on the Soviet Union and despite any black and white pronouncements by the Right during the 70s and 80s, a Soviet society was never likely in this country. Maybe it was just a good yarn with a moral against a distant possibility but now with the events of nineteen-eighty-four likely to occur by stealth rather than war, it is a good time to resurrect the moral and warning tone of what is after all a very good story. I see Newspeak everywhere and no-one seems to care; never use "difficult" always "not easy". ("Good" "Double-plus Ungood"). It is not the Government who have taken over the role of language-mangler but the newspapers and advertisers. The Health Secretary resigned last week, it appears simply so that he could spend more time with his family and not in any traditionally euphemistic sense either. A brave move in a time when families are losing their importance and structure. How did the Daily Star report this? "It's not about sex says the minister for nurses." You can of course try and find a link to this travesty of a newspaper/comic/toilet requisite but I am not going to provide it for you and by the way apologies to James Whittaker regarding the use of the word "Toilet" - and I would look on the use of the word - "sic" after anything in a letter of mine as a badge of honour. I would deliberately misspell something to get that. Who said you don't have to do it deliberately. By the way James Whittaker writes for the Mirror and not the Star but hey - same difference these days ... almost.

Big Brother (non-Orwellian) Mania is with us again. No links as that just encourages them but just a thought how can the man who created one of the engineering marvels of the Millenium - the London Sewer system, have a descendent who produces such a shallow, cheap, demeaning show? The only link between the two is that the creations of both men are full of the same substance (verbally anyway). Does anybody actually log in and watch the stuff live? We are all so sad in every sense of the word. I don't feel that much in the media represents me anymore. Sometimes there is a gem like the Orwell things but so much is now irritainment. The mids shows my Daughter watches are often more in depth than a lot of mainstream TV. There used to be some great drama but now it seems that the saddest moments which before relied on good writing have to use some music to drag every last ounce of emotion out of the viewer. A few months there was an updated version of Wuthering heights called Sparkhouse. We have stopped watching any soaps now - even Coronation street - but if they made a soap with the .. er spark .. or Sparkhouse then I might be tempted back. Maybe not the full on tragedy but just some more meaningful events which rely on writing rather than attitude. Coronation Street used to be a well-written comedy-drama which never took you outside of the believable. I know a soap has to maintain interest and like a lot of people I was caught up in the whole tricky Dicky muder and mayhem but it left me feeling that it was time to stop watching. Like I only finished American Psycho to make sure Bateman got caught, I only watched Coronation street to make sure Richard Hillman got caught and when he died it was time to stop watching. Sometime I catch my wife watching it and she looks at me guiltily as if she has been discovered with a banned cake while dieting. Makes me sound like an Ogre. It is suprising how free not being tied to a five times weekly soap makes you. Not that I read any more or make music of write - I just vegetate in front of the myriad digital channels we now have. If I can give up a soap then I should be able to make a resolution to read more or do something equally as improving.

Talking about improving. Time to start work.