Television

I can’t remember the last time I saw something on television that was so breathtakingly beautiful, so sensitively written and scored so poignantly that it often brought tears to my eyes through its sheer power and shocking juxtapositions.

In one scene, the 11-year-old white girl, the subject of the programme, walks in on her mother being banged by her errant, no-good father. Her mother sees her, but drunk, continues. The girl, Leia, betrayed, picks up a toy and goes to the bathroom to make wudu, then prays in her mother’s bedroom. The mother returns, walks across her praying daughter and slumps to the bed in a stupour, crushing the toy.

It’s on BBC2 and worth the whole year’s licence fee alone.

I don’t think I’ve seen anything this powerful in years and not just because it’s about Muslims, because really, it’s not. It’s about child abuse and the way a child seeks refuge in the most unpredictable things. For all of these reasons and more, it’s quite possibly one of the most powerful pieces of British television I’ve ever seen.

I’m not sure if there’s something in the air or not, but after J7’s bold refusal of the Bullshit Broadcasting Corporation’s invitation to appear on the Conspiracy Files, the team behind the excellent Ludicrous Diversion are at it now.

This is all good stuff. I’m hoping that this marks the start of a trend where prominent writers, thinkers, bloggers and YouTubers start telling the Mainstream Media where to stick it.

Standards all round are definitely falling and barring some notable exceptions like Darshna Soni, and the quite amazing John Pilger, most modern journalists are shit.

I recently suffered some trauma to the reasoning centres in my brain after an episode of Channel 4’s execrable Dispatches. Now this is going to blow your mind, but I’m going to do something I never thought I’d do. I’m going to take the side of the supermarkets chains. Why?

You only had to watch how miserable the science was when the equally miserable Jane Moore pitifully tried to skewer some truly gullible families? into believing that they were eating crap and being lied to.

Sure, some of the calore and fat content was out by more than the tolerance level, but much of this was on minute quantities to which the stupid families offered the expected, uninformed soundbites, but Moore repeatedly failed to explain the very important fact that not all fats are equally damaging. You have polyunsaturated fatty acids, monounsaturated fatty acids and saturated fatty acids. These are normally abbreviated to “fats” instead of “fatty acids”

She also failed to explain the difference between fruit sugar (fructose) and table sugar (sucrose) which both act very differently. The former has a lower glycaemic index and is therefore more easily tolerated by the body.

Then she got a bunch of primary school children to pour some cereal in a rather bizarre experiment to determine a realistic portion size. Don’t parents pour cereal for their kids? I mean, if you’re dumbfuck enough to hand over a full box of sugar-coated Frosties to your 8-year old (probably the most lethal cereal on the face of the earth, provoking an insulin response that could kill an elephant) then you’re gonna get cereal on the table, on the floor and in the kid’s bloodstream! What kind of science was this?

Sure there’s acid in fruit juice. It’s called citric acid you dunderhead. And it only rots your teeth if you drink it all day long and never brush or drink anything else! If you’re stupid enough to stick it in a baby’s beaker, well, you’ll be glad that babies have milk teeth to practice on.

She resorted to a Gillian (shrill, sadistic, shrew fraud) McKeith style pile of fat, sugar and salt for varying size families (errrrrr duh!!!)? at the end of the experiment. I mean how stupid are these people? If you saved all your pocket change for a year you’d get a mountain of money. If you saved your newspapers for a year they’d be taller than a block of flats. If you collected your shit for a month it would look like a life-sized-model of George Bush. That’s why you don’t eat it all at once you stupid fuck!

I have rarely watched a programme that masqueraded as an expose and had to shout abuse at its poor science as I did for “The Truth About Your Food”. I actually felt sorry for the supermarkets. It’s not their job to put traffic lights on labels, it’s their job to make money. If the government gives a shit about health, it will enforce regulations that make sense for the consumer, but we all know the government only likes to take part in the game of consumer-buggery. Sometimes I actually yearn for the EU to step in and slap the Sainsbury-nobbing fucks in parliament.

If you’re really bothered about what you eat, bloody well make it yourself! That’s what we used to fucking well do!

In every area of importance, in every sphere of life that matters to ordinary people - and to extraordinary people - on any topic that matters to you, it would be unwise to trust the mainstream media. It doesn’t just stop there though. If you see a blogger start writing for a newspaper, it might be prudent to investigate their motive.