I’ll sit back and not take a view over whether or not having three minutes of silence for those who died in the Asian Tsunami was a good thing or not. I’ve no problem with remembering the dead, but putting it into the context of the many other disasters and tragedies that have struck – man-made or natural – it’s necessity is not absolutely cut and dried.
Anyway, as we would for Armistice day, we got a polite email at work, sent to all staff explaining that everyone would be welcome to observe the three minutes’ silence. And I had every intention of doing just that.
But I didn’t.
What actually happened was that I was helping out fixing a laptop that had become clogged up, had lost thousands of songs from its Itunes, and then duplicated them all to boot. This was taking a lot longer than I’d planned, and I’d started around 9.30am. You need to know that this isn’t my actual job. I was just helping out a friend. As it happens, I sit right outside my boss’s office, and he eventually came out of his office, tapped the clock in the bottom corner of my screen, and wandered off.
Why did he do that? Actually, I was acutely aware of why he’d done it. I was spending far too much time doing trivial things and not getting on with proper work. Another colleague threw a look at me, as if to say “you really shouldn’t have wasted so much time.” I said as much to Pete who I was helping. He apologised on my behalf, but my boss said nothing. We decided that we’d done as much as we could, and called it a day, shutting down the laptop and chatting away all the while.
Then the silence of the rest of the office became apparent, our newsreader came out of the silence, read a brief summary of the rest of the news and we started playing REM’s Everybody Hurts.
It clicked. It’s just gone midday!
I said to Pete, “We’ve just chatted through the whole of the three minutes of silence!”
Guilt descended on us, and my colleague who’d thrown the look asked me how much indication I needed. My boss had tapped the clock on my screen – the clock reading 12.00 – and she’d tried to let me know by casting that look.
Because it was silent across the floor, everyone else had been aware that a couple of people at the other end of the office – us – had not been observing the silence.
The shame.
But returning to things that I’m not sure about, I have very mixed opinions about the New Years Day episode of The Vicar of Dibley. I’m not especially a fan of this sitcom, although I was surprised to learn that prior to the two specials shown over the Christmas period, there’d been as few as 16 previous episodes in total – the majority of which were specials themselves. I’d thought that there must have been dozens of episodes made – but since the man carrying the weight of the entire British film industry, Richard Curtis, pens them all himself – they’re less frequent than I’d realised. Hence the big noise over these two new episodes.
I didn’t see the Christmas Day programme – instead I was enduring my first ever full episode of Midsomer Murders with John “Bergerac” Nettles. But with little to do on New Year’s Day evening, I sat down to watch it. The jokes were poor with a plot based around the fact that we’re 20 years on from Live Aid, and an entirely predictable sequence where the Vicar goes speed dating. But then at the end, the show took a turn for the unpredictable. The main characters all sat down to have a meeting about writing letters to Tony Blair about world debt. Then the Vicar handed out white armbands (as passed around by the artists at the Band Aid 20 recording) and when they were reluctant to wear them, she showed a video (from this website). It was a very moving piece about African children whose parents had both died of Aids. We saw this video in full. When it was over, all the cast members were wearing their white bands. We then had a brief sequence with each member looking at the camera face on, before the programme ended without credits and the BBC put an action line number for further information.
So what’s my problem? The BBC subverted a comedy programme to highlight a very worthy initiative – one that surely I can’t have a problem with?
No I don’t have a problem with the cause. But it still felt jarring to me seeing it presented as such. Why should this cause get the benefit of a top-rated sitcom over, say, cancer or heart disease charities. Is one cause more worthy than another? It’s pointless asking such questions since they are unanswerable. We all have our personal causes that we might support or believe in.
Obviously the BBC do run regular charity appeals – including those for Children in Need, and, later this year, Comic Relief. Then there are the varying gameshows with celebrity specials – The Weakest Link for example – where the winnings go to charities that also get a mention. But in those instance, we know clearly in advance that this is a charity programme.
I know, since he was interviewed on Five Live the other week, that Richard Curtis is heavily involved in the Make Poverty History campaign, and that it is in fact a coalition of many other charities who are all trying to get something done in 2005. But be that as it may, Richard Curtis is undoubtedly using his access to a large BBC audience to push this particular cause. He has the power and influence to get it up there.
If large numbers of my family happened to die of cancer, that cause would be likely to be very important to me. And if I happened to be John Sullivan, and the BBC asked me to write one more episode of Only Fools and Horses, and I got David Jason et al to appear, my question is this: Would I be abusing my position as the writer if it became totally concerned with cancer charities and the worthiness of their work, and I used it as a springboard for launching the Del-boy Cancer Ribbon?
You can see where I’m going with this.
I’ll say again that I’m not at all opposed to the sentiment that was being expressed. Just unsure about the manner in which it was introduced unannounced.
If I was really cynical I’d go along with another comment I read on an internet forum somewhere – why doesn’t Richard Curtis get together a handful of his biggest stars and make Blackadder the Movie, or Four Weddings Two – something that’d be a guaranteed smash. The cast would do it for free or for cost. The many millions it’d be almost certain to make could all go to the charity, including TV rights, DVD rights and so on. Of course no film is certain to make back its money, although I am of the opinion that in general Hollywood isn’t a loss-making enterprise. And putting films together’s no easy task – certainly harder than getting forty or so musicians along to a central London recording studio one Sunday in November. But it is a thought…
But returning finally to Dibley, I’d also say that whether or not it was a good idea to include it, it was poorly executed and probably didn’t quite do what it intended. It was too heavy handed. And I’m sure that if there’d been the opportunity, they’d have preferred it to not go out at the same time as the British public is embarked on one of its biggest ever charity drives for the Asian Tsunami, particularly as this served as a kind of launch event.