The Crusade Against Big Business Begins...

I have just received a text. From my gym. It reads:

“Hi, only 6 days left to get a FREE MONTHS [sic] membership if you refer a friend to cannons. Call now…”

Lovefilm.com regularly sends me correspondence along the lines of:

“Recommend a friend and get 3 months rental free”

My mobile phone company can’t stop itself from exhorting me to:

“Persuade your mates and family to join us and you'll get £10 worth of airtime for every friend you connect”

While I get several text messages a month from Nike:

“Thanks for buying those pink lycra leggings. Snag another pair by exporting your brother to work in one of our sweatshops for six months. Reply Now!”

It appears that it is increasingly difficult these days to buy a product or service without being prompted to dob your family or mates in for financial gain. While I’m all for exploiting friends and family for monetary reward, I do take exception to Big Business removing the personal initiative from the whole enterprise. Where’s the fun in getting something for nothing when you’ve got some corporate sponsor telling you to do it? When did all this ‘refer a friend’ tyranny begin?

I object to these Faustian corporate urgings on a number of levels. Firstly, the ‘refer a friend’ tactic carries with it the assumption that its target actually has friends. This could well be an erroneous hypothesis and one which runs the risk of inducing additional trauma in the subject who may already be rueing his or her lonely existence and now finds this compounded by the fact that he or she finds themselves unable to pass on this wonderful retail opportunity (to their non-existent friends).

The second assumption made by these preachers of corporate conversion is that the subject’s friends will be of the unlikely disposition that they take any notice of the promptings or suggestions of said friend. These ‘trick your mate, get a quid’ messages also make the category mistake of believing that the subject’s friends are likely to listen favourably to the proposal when its proposer stands to benefit financially. If you doubt this, try asking your mates to go for a particular phone network, i.e. your one, when they next upgrade their phone. When you outline the benefits of the free off-peak minutes and the good coverage, their eyes will light up…when you finish your pitch with the words, “This is really good. You should go for it…and mention my number when you buy it and I get £10” you will get a less sympathetic response and you'll find they’d rather place their trust in the wisdom of the spotty seventeen year old in the Carphone Warehouse.

This being the case, surely these corporate urgings are doomed to failure? Surely very few people manage to exercise the nefarious means to bend the will of their mates to achieve their own financial reward? I’d be intrigued to know how many people managed to get their friends to sign up for any of these deals.

But I’m not only intrigued…I’m outraged. I mean, what are they trying to do? Turn us all into automatrons, feeding instructions into our ears & eyes so as to propagate their dirty commercial message? I might be getting this out of proportion but I’m declaring the foundation of a campaign against corporate snitching. Text your mates and get them to join.

Auden Remembered

Being the culture-vulture that I am (it impresses the chicks, see), I went along to the 'Celebration of Auden' poetry reading at Westminster Abbey last night.

Today sees the centenary of Auden's birth and last night the actor Sam Dastor read 21 of Auden's poems, including Night Mail and Funeral Blues. Funnily enough, the spiel on the event leaflet mentioned Sam's roles in I, Claudius and Julius Caesar (and his one man show Shakespeare's Sonnnets) but callously omitted mention of his appearances in Blake's 7 and Space 1999. Such modesty in an actor is quite refreshing...

As in other areas of life, I was generally ignorant of much of Auden's work but I did appreciate the timing of the centenary, and the setting of the poetry reading, given the poet's homosexuality and the current discussions of Anglican leaders in Tanzania. I also spotted Lord Hurd at the poetry reading. Given his political career, I'd thought this part-time poet would have been more up Lord Hurd's alley.

Back to the poetry, I liked Roman Wall Blues (1937), which I hadn't heard before:

Over the heather the wet wind blows,
I've lice in my tunic and a cold in my nose.

The rain comes pattering out of the sky,
I'm a Wall soldier, I don't know why.

The mist creeps over the hard grey stone,
My girl's in Tungria; I sleep alone.

Aulus goes hanging around her place,
I don't like his manners, I don't like his face.

Piso's a Christian, he worships a fish;
There'd be no kissing if he had his wish.

She gave me a ring but I diced it away;
I want my girl and I want my pay.

When I'm a veteran with only one eye
I shall do nothing but look at the sky.

Iran, Omaar and troublesome stonings

In G2 today, Hannah Pool talks to Rageh Omaar about his new film 'Inside Iran'. Hannah notes that in the film Rageh is moved to describe Iran as Wonderland.

Hannah Pool: "What about the more troublesome parts of Iranian society?"

Rageh: "Yes, there is oppression, people being stoned and hanged and all
that"

Ah yes, how 'troublesome' it is to be stoned. Like that itch that you can't quite reach, like that stain that just won't come out of the carpet, it can be a little irritating to have a baying crowd chuck rocks at you for, erm, getting your rocks off.

Mercifully, the stones in Iran aren't too large. Or at least they shouldn't be. Article 104 of the Iranian penal code states, with reference to the penalty for adultery: "...the stones should not be too large so that the person dies on being hit by one or two of them; they should not be so small either that they could not be defined as stones." Amnesty argues that this is clear evidence that "the punishment of stoning is designed to cause the victim grievous pain before death" (source: Wikipedia).

So far, so troublesome. But if stoning is one of life's little irritations, then hanging, by this benign interpretation, must be the community justice equivalent of finding chewing gum on your shoe. Annoying, yes, but not likely to prevent you from getting to work.

Of course, it is Hannah Pool who uses the remarkably benign word 'troublesome' to allude to the existences of such cruelty and barbarism in Iran. Omaar's lack of interest, in this film at least, in 'oppression, people being stoned and hanged all that' is he says because:

"there surely is an argument and a need to present the other side of Iranian society where changes are being made."

I'm not sure why this means the existence of cruelty in Iran have to be ignored but let's hope that the film shows there are enough reasons to be found in the developments of Iranian society to believe that such cruelty might become a thing of the past.

Party Animals

Forget House of Cards, this is Maison de Merde. The first episode of Party Animals, broadcast on Wednesday but caught fashionably late by myself due to cocaine-snorting-off-the-backs-of-female-lobbyist commitments, is truly dreadful.

Tibor Fischer famously wrote of Amis' Yellow Dog: "It's like your favourite uncle being caught in a school playground, masturbating." Party Animals, on the other hand, is like your errant brother being caught defecating on the London Underground. You didn't have high expectations in the first place but the idea that people might associate such embarrassing behaviour with your own way of life is strangely unsettling...

The highlight of the first episode must surely have been when Posh Blonde Journo (PBJ) engages in shengagians with Gormless Lobbyist. As they get down to business, PBJ, in a manner which should be breathless but instead oozes all the sexuality of a train platform announcement, utters a line claiming how great it is to shag someone "below's one's social class!"

Such searing indictment of the Westminster Village aside, Party Animals really doesn't have anything to recommend it. Will I be watching the second episode? Of course I will! Then I can sit there wallowing in Parliamentary anorakism, shouting at the screen "That's ridiculous! Don't they know OPQs have to be tabled two days advance.."