First broadcast 29th April 2009.
Charlie Brooker takes a look at how graphics have morphed over the years from modest explaining devices to shouty, scary, video game-style extravaganzas. With the help of Nick Davies and Peter Oborne, he also looks at how print newspapers are changing and the underhand tactics they use to get some of their stories.
Charlie Brooker
Nick Davies
Peter Oborne
Charlie Brooker takes a look at how graphics have morphed over the years from modest explaining devices to shouty, scary, video game-style extravaganzas. With the help of Nick Davies and Peter Oborne, he also looks at how print newspapers are changing and the underhand tactics they use to get some of their stories.
Charlie Brooker
Nick Davies
Peter Oborne
Category
📺
TVTranscript
00:00Hello, I'm Charlie Brooker and you're watching Newswiper, a program all about what's been
00:26going on like this. Nifty blue masks tipped to be the must-have look of the season. Astonishing
00:34scenes as supermarkets new Pamplona Taste the Bull range proves too fresh for comfort.
00:40And Sky News cheers the nation with an account of an eye-watering escape for a hero. A British
00:45soldier serving in Afghanistan has had a miraculous escape when a bullet passed straight through
00:51his helmet. Yep, yep, yep, that's the way the world goes. But first this. You know what's
00:58boring? Facts are boring. There's no emotion with facts, no soul, just cold hard data. If
01:05facts were a person they'd be the most tediously conservative little tag nut in the universe. The
01:10sort of slappable milquetoast who thinks Coldplay are edgy and finds chicken korma a bit hot. That's
01:16hot. The news essentially consists of an unending list of boring facts and that's precisely what it
01:21used to look like. The earliest BBC TV news broadcasts consisted essentially of radio
01:26bulletins being read over still images. The news bosses at the time thought the addition of moving
01:31images would distract viewers from the factual content. Instead a faceless announcer would talk
01:36about the story and then introduce a bit of film at the end of it. Here is an illustrated summary
01:40of the news. It'll be followed by the latest film of events and happenings at home and abroad.
01:44Gradually a bit more artistry seeped in and visuals became more snazzy although making them
01:49was a pain because for years news graphics had to be laboriously crafted by hand until the 80s when
01:54the Quantel paintbox arrived. This allowed the graphics department's imaginations to run right,
01:59even going so far as to put a head on Iran and make it spin around a bit. Now if you think of
02:04the raw factual content of the news as an instruction sheet, which you will because
02:08that's what I'm telling you to do, the news graphics are supposed to function as the helpful
02:12wireframe diagrams that help put the verbal content into context. Now that may well have
02:16been the case back in ye good old days when the visuals literally were graphs and diagrams. But
02:21now watching the news is a bit like trying to follow a set of instructions written in a garish
02:25font on a belly dancer's undulating torso while a psychopath stands in the room playing the
02:30trombone in your ear. Today's CGI visuals punctuate the news like knowing Terry Gilliam sequences in
02:36an old Monty Python episode. Occasionally they go so overboard you could be forgiven for thinking
02:40you've tuned into a whole new surreal animation series. Here she survived by eating dead crabs
02:46and hunting wild goats. Anyway if you want to see news graphics at their most unhinged, just wait
02:50till the next election. We all know what an election looks like. Albert Edward Artstone.
02:56Liberal. 4237. Oh you know we promised when we started doing this series that we'd cut down on
03:05all the loser masturbating alone in this flat stuff we used to do in Screen White, but come on,
03:09look at this. Oh god. I'm gonna have to sit on my hands. 8000. At heart elections consist of the
03:19dullest facts of all, numbers. Consequently news coverage of elections goes absolutely mental in a
03:24desperate bid to distract you from how tedious it actually is. They do this partly by building a
03:29stupid great desk for the host to sit behind showing off like they're in a sci-fi film.
03:33Conservatives share the vote in Torbay. Static. God this is the most boring Star Trek episode I've
03:38ever seen. But they mainly do it with visual trickery. Visual trickery began with the
03:43swing-o-meter, which was neat, simple and easy, which is precisely why it couldn't last. In later
03:48years come election night Peter Snow was the mad professor yaffle of the graphics lab. His number
03:53crunching aside started out relatively sober and clear. In 1987 he had a thing that looked a bit
03:58like the departures board in a train station. Look at all that blue right the way across. And in what
04:04was a hugely cutting-edge move for the late 80s some real-time bar graft which excitingly could
04:09revolve a bit as they ventured upwards. And that's exactly the way you'd twist one if you were trying
04:13to work it up your arse. Not that anyone would want to work one of those up their arse. I don't
04:18know why I brought that up it's just weird. Let's move on. Yes anyway zip forward to 2001 and Snow's
04:24graphics card got upgraded ending the tyranny of easy to understand two-dimensional visuals
04:28forever as the swing-o-meter floated off the wall like a haunted clock face. And it won't this time
04:33be a pendulum that moves among the MPs scything him up and down it'll be a laser beam zapping them
04:39from blue to red and red to blue. Reality had entirely sodded off by 2005 as Snow got devoured
04:45completely by the matrix and the election as a whole became the world's most underwhelming
04:49PlayStation 2 game. Michael Howard coming up now. This is our first forecast could change the way it
04:54goes on. Oh imagine that having your very own Michael Howard that would just do anything you
04:59wanted it to. Oh oh I'm gonna have to sit on my hands again. Still the most excruciating moment
05:06ever in election night graphicry didn't belong to Peter Snow no that honor went to Jeremy Vine
05:11who took over holodeck duties for the 2008 local elections. Viewers were treated to a cringe inducing
05:18CGI live-action hybrid starring Vine in a pink shirt tucked into his pants a virtual Nick Clegg
05:24gunslinger thing. Oh and a terrible terrible terrible Texan accent. See here damn all this
05:30here is a shootout saloon. You know this is so bad it wouldn't even pass muster on Italian
05:34television. The 30,000 viewers die of shame on your behalf. 26%. By the time the US election
05:44rolled round Vine seemed somewhat chastened and was largely restricted to dealing with actual
05:48figures albeit ones that floated in the air for no reason whatsoever. Fortunately for fans of
05:54outright idiocy over-the-top American news network CNN went one better by creating the
06:00world's first news hologram. How is this night for you? Feels good being here in Chicago all this
06:06technology I'm being beamed to you like at Star Wars and stuff. Yeah it looks like basically like
06:11exactly like in Star Trek when they would beam people down that's what it looks like right here.
06:15Yeah it looks just like that episode where they found the unconvincing flickery blue sprite. Yeah
06:20What's more graphics aren't just for the hosts to play with these days thanks to brilliant
06:26websites like Sky News Online's Fritzl Interactive. Yes it's Joseph Fritzl's house and you can click
06:32your way around it. Why it's so simple even a child could use it. Anyway with all this visual
06:40fun no wonder TV and the internet have slaughtered the traditional print media. We'll have more on
06:45that later. It's been a busy old week for the world but not all of it's been serious. Here's
06:50the week in bullshit. Hullabaloo as Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad brings gripping
06:58controversy to an otherwise dull afternoon on BBC News by introducing a knockabout air of
07:02antisemitism into a UN conference on race upsetting Zippo and Coco here in the process. The end result
07:07was startlingly like a jonglers open mic spot gone horribly wrong. Guys did you hear the one about the
07:13Jew? Okay you heard that one. Hey anyone here from Israel? Money get him and the nation's anxious eyes
07:24turn to Alistair Darling's face arms and body as he prepared the most important budget ever. Sky
07:29helped build the anticipation with a series of exciting VTs in which celebrities told us what
07:34they'd do if they were Chancellor. I say celebrities I mean people like Nick Leeson. He was pictured
07:39standing up the side of a cliff like a financial cormorant. Their failure to pay attention has
07:44brought Britain to the edge of the financial precipice. The thrills swelled the next day
07:49thanks to Ronnie Wood's estranged wife Jo Wood seen here standing in a wood. In a bid to encourage
07:54people to cultivate veg in their window boxes she said she'd abolish VAT on grow your own seeds.
07:59Tomatoes, peppers, aubergines and salads would soon sprout from our flats and houses. Hang on did
08:07she say tomatoes, peppers, aubergines and salads? Tomatoes, peppers, aubergines and salads. I thought
08:14so yeah it's my favorite vegetable that the salad the salad vegetable. The day after Jo's
08:19economic revelations Roger Daltrey rocked up standing in a hospital. The lead singer of the
08:25Who standing in a hospital corridor it's like he's Doctor Who. Doctor Who I don't know why I bother
08:33with you. He used his slot to plug the Teenage Cancer Trust which he's a patron of and that's
08:38fair enough so we're not going to take the piss. Fortunately the next day's entry required us to be
08:42less earnest as former jewelry magnate Gerald Ratner outlined his plans while underwhelmingly
08:47superimposed on a cheap fold-out projector screen in a variety of locations for no apparent reason
08:52whatsoever while people wandered by ignoring him. If I was Chancellor. Never mind if you were
08:58Chancellor you're a magic talking rectangle and no one's paying you any f***ing attention. Class
09:02dismissed. Ladies and gentlemen the Chancellor of the Exchequer. The final Alastair Darling wannabe
09:11was Neville Staple. Yes Neville Staple you know from the specials. He sang on Ghosttown and that's
09:16why he'd make such a good Chancellor of the Exchequer. If I was Chancellor I'd be bloody
09:21worried about what's happening today. Come the day itself Sky reflected the austere belt-tightening
09:27mood of the nation by cracking out the exciting Skycopter to follow Darling the few hundred
09:31meters from Downing Street to Westminster. They also wheeled out lots of grubby urban
09:36Banksy style graphics and held scintillating interviews with the stars. What did you make
09:41the budget? Do you feel as a pensioner better off at the end of it all? Erm. Hang on a minute is that
09:49Victor Meldrew's wife? I don't believe it. Just leave me alone. Away from Sky the BBC covered the
10:02money-geddon budget by highlighting the toxic state of the economy while Five News which is
10:06in no way a dumbed-down source of current affairs highlighted the seriousness of Darling's debt
10:11crisis by illustrating it in the most bizarre manner possible. This year Alastair Darling appears
10:16a lonely figure at the mercy of events controlled by forces which give him hardly any freedom of
10:23action. God you know TV fakery really has gone too far. Yes they made a lovely little puppet show
10:28featuring an unbelievably cheap Alastair Darling marionette apparently made by a psychopath and
10:33they got their money's worth we saw him enjoying the riverside and having a shit in a field and
10:37caressing his bright red box and walking gaily down the road and camping it up at a building
10:41site and standing on a wall and sitting at the wheel of a car and jatting up some birds and
10:46waving his money around and impishly wagging his eyebrow and going mental at a garage and being
10:51shunned in a pub and telling off a silly man in the foreground and walking past Whitehall and
10:55all confusing a bystander and then catching a little migraine before giving up and cutting
11:00back to the studio. Andy let's talk more about national debt. No Andy let's talk more about what
11:05the f*** you were doing with that puppet. These days if some major news event happens chances are
11:10you'll find out about it on the internet or via a text message. But once upon a time the news used
11:21to be printed on sheets of paper using something called ink and these news papers were apparently a
11:27primary source of current affairs. It used to be the case that papers would report things that may
11:32have happened a week ago but that was okay because the world ran a slightly more sedate pace back
11:37then. Since the beginning of the 20th century the press has been forced to adapt in the face of
11:41emerging whippersnapper technologies. Radio had some impact but when TV appeared summarizing the
11:46news in a visually appealing way and drawing millions of viewers in the process the press
11:50was forced to switch focus away from breaking traditional stories and towards snazzy photographs
11:54and human interest pieces. The advent of the internet and a collapse in advertising revenue
11:59has massively accelerated the newspapers transformation from news vessels to lifestyle
12:04comics. The mid-market press for example is obsessed with scare stories, house prices and
12:09moral campaigns. Campaigning in particular being a goldmine for papers as it creates a simple
12:14narrative of its own that could often yield palpable results. The BBC's terrified of the
12:19Daily Mail for instance which has been campaigning against it for years. In fact if you imagine this
12:24harrowing footage represents the relationship between the BBC and the press then the mail is
12:28basically Trevor and the beeb is little Moe but with less balls. Meanwhile the red tops have
12:34become violently dispiriting celebrity gossip rags filled with pictures of starlets clambering
12:38out of cars outside a nightclub taken by a paparazzi scumbag literally lying on the ground
12:43amongst the fag butts and the dog shit in the hope of spotting a glimpse of lady pants. The
12:47quality press for its part has a demented emphasis on opinion pieces headed by photographs of people
12:52grinning like idiots or looking constipated or pulling embarrassing warthog scowls and when
12:57they're not full of that they're running wanky lifestyle features about which expensive designer
13:00shoe is going to go best with your organic food delivery or they're bombarding you with free
13:04bloody wall charts like that's going to improve your stinking life. Yeah a bloody wall chart that's
13:09going to be good isn't it? Why don't you stick that on your stupid bloody wall you prick. Go on, do that, look at that, see how much better that makes your life you c**t, you c**t.
13:18Of course that's just the print editions I'm caricaturing there. It's a different kettle of chips online which is where the papers are hoping their future lies.
13:24All the major newspaper brands are now also thrusting multi-platform thingamajigs replete
13:29with moving pictures, message boards and interactive widgets. All of that costs money,
13:32not enough of which is being generated by the websites at the moment. As the money runs out
13:37titles are cutting back and many local papers are closing entirely. In short being a newspaper
13:42journalist right now must be about as much fun as gargling cold cow piss for a living.
13:47Beleaguered though it may be the press still exerts a huge influence over many aspects of
13:52British behaviour, especially in the corridors of power. The media and the powers that be,
13:56the powers that be and the media, just how much in cahoots are they? Here's veteran political
14:02journalist Peter Oborn with his view. It's his view. The collusion between media and government
14:08stretches down to a very very detailed and precise level. Let me give you one example.
14:16Several years ago the Sun newspaper launched a campaign against asylum seekers. Didn't like
14:23them very much, felt that they were abusing the system. That apparently was very critical of the
14:28government and they launched their campaign and at the end of that campaign they had an interview
14:34with the then Home Secretary David Blunkett who made certain concessions, said the Sun was right
14:38about asylum seekers and so the Sun could claim some form of victory. I got hold of the Dining
14:43Street grid in which they laid out in advance future events. What was fascinating was that the
14:50Dining Street grid prepared in advance of the Sun campaign, had the Sun campaign on it, down to the
14:57day when David Blunkett would give his interview. So what the Sun did, which appeared to Sun readers
15:02to be a spontaneous attack on government policy and asylum seekers, was actually an orchestrated
15:08performance with Dining Street which excluded Sun readers and it's all a performance, it's all
15:14choreographed and it's quite disturbing I think for British democracy. Whatever happens with papers
15:22the influence of the blogosphere is on the rise as clearly illustrated by the recent dismal case
15:27of Damien McBride or Damien McPoison or Dirty McMuck or whatever they're calling him today. Damien
15:35McBride was Gordon Brown's special advisor or attack dog as the news christened him in a series
15:39of rather nauseating headlines. Although he doesn't really look like an attack dog, more like a
15:44nodding dog. You know like the one from those cheerful and chummy insurance ads, he looks a bit
15:48like you Damien. Oh yes. For somebody apparently so important it was strange the news had such a
15:53little footage of him, almost as though they'd been ignoring his existence for years. They had
15:57to slow down and highlight the meagre clips they had just so you could pick him out in the crowd.
16:01Watching it was a bit like playing Where's Wally but starring a small pink moon. Even before the
16:06smear scandal broke it was fair to say politicians have never been quite as unpopular as they are
16:11now. In fact recent scientific studies show conclusively that even glancing at a politician
16:17causes the average citizen to vomit uncontrollably. There are a few notable exceptions but on the whole
16:23they're less popular than shingles. Anyway over the past few years the Labour Party has watched
16:33in dismay as right-wing political blogs have thrived online with perhaps the biggest turn
16:37in their punch bowl being Guido Fawkes's Westminster gossip and sleaze site which is
16:41run by a mysterious silhouetted figure seen here having his cover blown on Newsnight sometime back.
16:45Why do you insist on this preposterous disguise? Well so I can go undercover. No I saw you at a
16:52lunch once where everybody else was in a tie you were wearing a rugby shirt and somebody said that's
16:58Paul Staines he's Guido Fawkes and I said I said get away is it? He looked a bit of a prat. Yes
17:03Guido is actually a guy called Paul Staines played here by a sort of made-over Oliver Hardy. He claims
17:08not to be a Tory incidentally but a broadly anti-politics libertarian although whatever
17:12he is he certainly seems to be a bit of a tit. Sometimes he does hilariously arrogant things
17:17like posting this charming snap of him enjoying a cigar on a city balcony overlooking the G20
17:22protests. Still tit or not the papers are certainly scared of him and he gets results. For instance
17:27Peter Hain resigned after Guido's revelations about campaign donations. The Guido Fawkes site
17:31and others like it routinely brittle with common innuendo criticism and boneheaded abuse just like
17:37any other message board on the internet or any newsroom or this show. Anyway Labour were keen to
17:43launch a snarky countersign of their own called Red Rag. Derek Draper was going to oversee it
17:47and Damien McBride sent him an email suggesting a bunch of pungently repellent smear stories to
17:51run on the thing. Somehow they ended up in the hands of Guido Fawkes. He handed them to the
17:55papers and boom it exploded all over the news like a balloon full of hot sewage. McBride resigned soon
18:02after blaming Guido Fawkes for not playing fair. Oh and Derek Draper had a little moan about it too.
18:07What a world we live in where private personal emails can be can be used in this way. Oh woohoo
18:12actually with Guido Fawkes on one side and the likes of Damien McBride on the other it's been
18:17like watching two immense monsters made of shit fighting each other in some sort of Godzilla movie.
18:23Except of course no matter how big an arse Guido Fawkes may or may not be he's not a civil servant
18:28with wages paid by the taxpayer which is what McSpunk was. Once the story broke the focus
18:34quickly shifted to whether Gordon Brown would apologize or not. First he expressed regret in
18:39a series of letters but that wasn't good enough for the Tories. The pressure mounted on Brown to
18:43say sorry properly which he seemed comically incapable of doing. Prime Minister will you
18:47apologize for the Damien McBride emails? As the days dragged on the Tories got to set the news
18:54agenda. David Cameron sees the opportunity to liven up an already lively day for Sky News by
18:59mentioning the word change about a billion times. What this whole episode demonstrates is the need
19:05for change not change in the special advisers code but change in the culture at number 10 Downing
19:11Street change change change change of government we need change in order to change the culture
19:15change change change change and change and we need some change. But change the record. Then
19:20Francis Moore depressed those same Sky viewers with his doubt that Gordon Brown would ever say
19:24sorry. He's not going to apologize we know that Gordon Brown's constitution incapable of saying
19:28sorry. Although a few days later that's precisely what he did. Well I'm sorry about what happened.
19:33Yes it was such a humiliating climb down for the Brown minister even a stranger in a hardhat in the
19:38background who wandered into shot at a piss-off out of sheer embarrassment. So why did this whole
19:42thing happen? Well as I see it partly because blogs are becoming more influential but mainly
19:47because politicians themselves seem so indistinguishable and remote from the voters
19:52that most political arguments now come across as exercises in opportunist point-scoring conducted
19:58in management wonk speak. In fact watching politicians debate the issues today feels a
20:03bit like sitting through the grinding egomaniacal boardroom bickering sequences from The Apprentice.
20:07Oh that's interesting I thought I caused eight arguments. Yeah you did. Politicians even seem to
20:12want to dominate the agenda when they haven't got anything to say. If you just let me get a
20:17word in I would be very happy to answer your question. I mean would you like me to do that?
20:22Yes please. Yes please. Thank you. The paucity of ideological debate is partly the fault of the
20:33news which favours character and drama over dusty old politics. It means our MPs often end up
20:38essentially debating nothing more than who's the smelliest and the public don't like it. No wonder
20:43MPs recently overtook paedophiles on the National Bogeyman Index which tracks unpopular hate figures.
20:48So in summary the press is defunct, people are awful and Westminster is doomed. But never mind
20:53here's a funny photo of a duck to cheer you up and a silly noise. Here's a short piece from Nick
21:01Davis the author of Flat Earth News with his view on how some elements of the press gather their
21:06news stories. For years most Fleet Street newspapers have been using illegal techniques to get access to
21:14information which they call in their internal office jargon the dark arts. The more you look
21:21at the Fleet Street's use of the dark arts the dirtier it gets. There are examples of them phone
21:28tapping which is serious illegal stuff. Fleet Street got obsessed with Angus Dayton's sex life
21:33which is a sad story in itself and they had a British telecom engineer place a listening device
21:40in the junction box near his home in order to listen to his phone calls and that's a straightforward
21:45breach of the law by the engineer. They've also started using things called you know Trojan
21:50horse emails where the journalist sends the target an email which has an attachment which
21:55opens and then copies everything in the hard disk and relays it on to another email address
21:59which can't be traced to the newspaper but gives them everything that's on the hard disk. Part of
22:03the dark arts tradition in Fleet Street has been hacking into mobile phones and this is a major
22:11industry although Fleet Street continues to deny it. Journalist Clive Goodman got caught hacking
22:17into the mobile phone messages of three people on the staff of Prince Charles and because it was the
22:23royal family the police reacted so Goodman got busted along with the private investigator who'd
22:29been doing the stuff for him and they both ended up in prison. So the private investigators who
22:34work for Fleet Street basically have two techniques bribing and blagging. So bribing simply means you
22:39hand over a brown envelope full of cash to whoever it is the civil servant who can get you into the
22:44social security database or the police officer who can get you into the police national computer.
22:48It's a criminal offence but hey who's asking questions or blagging. Blagging means that the
22:52private investigator cons the people who look after the database into releasing the information
22:57and they're very skilled at it. There was one newspaper who had a former actor who was like
23:02their own personal blagger who learnt how to speak with the kind of internal language of a
23:09British telecom engineer. So a lot of what we know about the dark arts comes from a raid by the
23:15Information Commission on the home of a private investigator in Hampshire called Steve Whittemore.
23:20He set up a network of people who could get him access to these secret record bases. So he had
23:27somebody in the DVLA so he could convert a car number into a name and an address. He had somebody
23:34who had access to the police national computer. He had other people in social security. Newspapers
23:39were ringing him up for illegal stuff and within half an hour he's delivering it for a fee. The
23:44Information Commission basically didn't have enough money to put the newspapers who had paid
23:50him in the dock. People are very frightened of the bullying of Fleet Street newspapers. Government
23:56in particular don't like getting into fights with newspapers so they back off. I think that if you
24:01ask where do the dark arts come from ultimately it is about commercial pressure. It's about trying
24:07to get stories that nobody else has without putting in the money and resources that you
24:12should. And like so much of what's gone wrong with our news organizations ultimately it is to
24:17do with being corrupted by commercialism and the dark arts is an example of that for sure.
24:21Music and Dennis Healy takes to the stage of the world's most exhilarating heartwarming yet
24:28paradoxically shit variety show in the most uplifting event ever captured on videographic
24:34tape. Now the two astonishing things about Susan Boyle are apparently one that she looks a bit like
24:43a cross between a Soviet premier from the 70s crossed with a haunted tree yet two she manages
24:49to have above-average vocal chords. Except she's not that remarkable if you stop to think about it
25:00for I don't know 0.68 of a second. She's not got the greatest voice in the world nor has she got
25:05the ugliest face. Just walk into the street and you can see a woman who looks like her standing
25:10at pretty much any bus stop. But thanks to a combination of our backward appearance led
25:13culture and a nakedly manipulative setup VT which made her out to be a comedy loser.
25:19I've never been married, never been kissed. Oh Jim. Susan Boyle's performance soon became the number
25:26one talking point for every tiresome prick in the land. Before long this cheerful highlight of
25:32one hit ITV show became the cheerful highlight of another hit ITV show called The News. And finally
25:38we've been humming her song around the office once again today and it seems we are not alone. The
25:43voice and the life story of Susan Boyle have managed to lift the spirits of millions in these
25:48tough economic times. Of course the festival of patronization didn't end there. Yes Susan Boyle
25:55really did practice with a hairbrush at home in West Lothian. Yes they showed us all around her
26:00little house in her little corner of Scotland which wasn't prepared for this kind of attention.
26:04Honestly you'd have thought they'd discovered John Merrick could juggle. Inevitably we're also
26:09forced to listen to some choice words from Formica face. I honestly think it spoils people if you give
26:15them a big old makeover. Well like when you pump 10 gallons of Botox into their face. But I think
26:20we'll keep her as she is for now so she doesn't have the added pressure of worrying about what
26:23she looks like. We also heard from shits logo ball bags here. I mean look we're in the middle of a
26:28terrible recession. A lot of people in Britain have been suffering very badly from that. I can
26:32think of some I'd like to suffer more. And I think what Susan Boyle has single-handedly done is bring
26:38a smile to all our faces. And she's achieved all this in just the show's first episode.
26:43As well as dominating ITN's news bulletins this feel-good story was also all over the
26:51papers like an outbreak of some kind of Les Dawson visual spam mail. In fact sometimes it
26:56felt like you couldn't go anywhere without seeing her face. You might as well have cut it out and
26:59stuck it on a pole and then stuck that to your forehead. Still if her dominance of the UK was bad
27:04enough it got worse when the Americans got wind of her. They managed to crank the condescension
27:08to a whole new level patting her on the head like she was a magic baby that had learned to play the
27:12flute. So Susan what a sensation this is. Do you wake up every morning now with a smile? Or what
27:19passes for a smile on your unconventional face? You also said to everybody that you had never
27:26been kissed. No comment. Don't want to talk about that. Yeah well fair enough. Tell me Susan can you
27:36wipe your own asshole? Were they surprised what you could do in front of that crowd? I'm very
27:41surprised. I think they were gobsmacked. Gobsmacked one of my favorite British words. I've got another
27:48British word for you. Shitehawk. Let's try to keep it ladylike. Yeah let's do it. Okay now just turn
27:55around for me if you will. And do a little jig for us like a monkey. Anyway this whole saga
28:00simultaneously stinks and sucks in equal measure. For one thing it's a PR story about a not that
28:05remarkable event on a televised end of the pier show starring three twats which only became a
28:09news story because apparently it's a f***ing miracle that women who aren't conventionally
28:13attractive are also capable of exhibiting any kind of skill whatsoever. But instead of being
28:17allowed to find this depressing we're told that actually it provides hope for us all. Susan Boyle
28:22has shown us that there is hope for humanity. Basically instead of being feel-good this whole
28:26thing strived to make me feel unbelievably and unbearably alone on this stinking fetid kidney
28:30stone we call a planet. Still maybe a little song will help me get through it yeah. I dreamed a
28:36dream in time gone by. Well that's all we've got time for this evening and indeed this series. Go
28:44away. There are a few frights in store for the MP for Halton Price and Howden next tonight on BBC
29:004. David Davis sits down with Marcus Brigstocke in I've Never Seen Star Wars. Next.