There are some things that you cannot escape unless you are fortunate enough to live in a cave. A cave that is isolated. Away from any poorly secured wifi connections, radio transmitters or vociferously bothersome newsmongering town criers. A blissful cave of ignorance. Free from insurance comparison website advertisements, people who walk 3-abreast on pavements and those who are only slightly better - racists on TV. Unless your cavemates are a trio of rather inconsiderate pathway-hogging bigots. If you happen to be taking part in an underground version of Strictly Come Troglodyte then the chances of you being able to avoid inevitable showers of ignorant mouth muck are about as slim as a silver Rizla with a Tapeworm. For the higher-end professional recluse these things aren't going to be an issue but for those of us left to fend in the world above they come thick and fast.

Reality television did seem to have a monopoly on widely broadcast racial slurs until last week, when the news media broke into a chorus of dysphoria as it announced that there was to be a new king of controversy - the BBC's 'flagship' show, Question Time, was to don the dubious crown, which is believed to be made of three parts genocide and one part child abuse. It's kept clean with a few sprays of Cillit Ethnic Cleanser. BANG! And the tribe is gone.

For those who are unaware the British National Party is not, as you would like to think, like the halcyon days of Noel's House Party. Mr Blobby was clearly mixed-race.

There are two reasons this story broke into my otherwise ignorant sphere of unconsciousness. The first was because I never knew Question Time was the flagship show of the BBC; I had always assumed that honour went to Match of the Day or Groundforce. I'm not even sure Groundforce was on the BBC. That's how little I knew about the flagship and how little I know in general. I could easily research these things but that would take time away from watching the high definition episode of 'Life' I'd recorded. I may be woefully uninformed about anything other than unusual frogs but I am so at 1080p. David Attenborough is the rightful BBC bellwether. Get fucked Dimbleby.

The second reason the story aroused my torpor is because it spoke at exhaustive, repetitive, length about the BBC giving the leader of the far-right British National Party a hugely visible platform on state media. For those who are unaware the British National Party is not, as you would like to think, a super-happy-sunshine-shindig for everyone in Britain. It's not like the halcyon days of Noel's House Party. The British National Party are friends of the common man - but only if those common men happen to be holocaust-denying, white-supremacist, homophobic xenophobes. It's unlikely that any of Noel's charges would be welcome even if the British National Party were the non-stop sovereign fiesta it's name promotes. Mr Blobby was clearly mixed-race. There are, however, sickening BNP adaptations of Noel's House Party stalwarts 'Beat your Neighbour (if they don't look like you)' and the self-explanatory 'Wait Till I Get You, Homo'.

Unite Against Fasicsm counter demonstration against the Welsh Defence League, Swansea

My life has never been intruded upon by the BNP quite so much before. I was aware of them in the same way I am reluctantly conscious of horse racing. It exists, certainly. It is to be ignored, for its core demographic is 'The Idiot' - not the Dostoevsky story, the other kind. The dimwitted stupid-head kind. The only brush I’d previously had with this party, who clawed their way from the ashes of the National Front as they learnt to fasten a necktie or at least work a clip-on, was when their membership list had been leaked last year. Inevitably I had to check it to make sure my relatives weren't on there. The grandparents can be trusted not to donate to anything other than the National Trust but their eyes aren't what they used to be and 'Trust' does have a marked similarity to 'Front' when viewed through the opacity of their cataracts.

Not since that bit in The Matrix where Keanu Reeves goes to see that women in her flat and breaks that cup has a self-fulfilling prophecy been so evident.

There were arguments for and against why the leader of the BNP, Nick Griffin, should be allowed on the BBC show. It was the arguments about the argument that the televised argument might give the BNP a wider audience that gave it a wider audience. My lack of research has shown that regular audience figures for Question Time were consistently around the 14 mark - which is actually the number of people the controversial party figurehead believes died in The Holocaust - whereas the edition of Question Time featuring Griffin drew in 8 million. That is around about 8 million more people than usual. An increase of over 700 million per cent - even athletes can't boast that kind of percentage boost when they talk of effort they expelled. Not since that bit in The Matrix where Keanu Reeves goes to see that women in her flat and breaks that cup has a self-fulfilling prophecy been so evident.

If nobody had mentioned who the guest was to be, there would have been no more interest in the show than usual - I, for one, regularly have no clue who is on Question Time and I'm sure most people only tuned in because they had heard the hype. If you remove the incestuous media coverage of media events, it is likely to burn itself out without attracting unwarranted attention. Fight ignorance with ignorance!

Failing that you could always do the most important point. A point that was, shamefully, not highlighted by anyone on the QT panel - vote for anyone other than the BNP. Get a few people together get a garden gnome, put it in a Barbie dress, nominate and vote for that. A cardboard cut out of a week-old dog poo in a fez. Anything. Anyone watching the show would not have been enamored with the politicians involved. This will probably only serve to alienate more people from the main political parties, causing more people to 'protest' by running away from the polls to live as hermits in their blissful cave. Leaving the fiercely active BNP members free to roll stones over the cave entrances and waddle down to cast their vote - struggling as they remember how to write an X.

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Images:

Unite Against Fascism march, Swansea: an original photograph by Mike Mantin.

All images appear under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license.

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Anti-BNP Demonstration: an original photograph by James M Thorne. Modified image appears here under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license.

Eyes bleeding, legs bowed and skin two shades off ‘Oyster Taupe’, Daniel Smith offers a sofa-side perspective of rolling news

As you sit, hunched, unwashed, blearily counting the syllables of the words in the rolling news ticker at the bottom of the BBC News 24 screen, the voices start to sink in. Stories start to take shape. It's not a big news day. It's a slow news day. The news ticker hasn’t slowed to a crawl, reflecting that nothing warrants it's continual attention. No. The scrolling ticker scuttles by at the same rate as usual (approx. 114 syllables per minute) but with nothing good for it to really grasp with its many hands and bite with its many teeth. There are no child kidnappings/discoveries. No natural disasters. No opportune celebrity homicides to condense to haiku. It just trudges along, blissfully unaware of the gravity of its cargo of letters. Like a sluggish, yet reliable postman carrying a birthday card and a letter bomb in the same unquestioning sack.

One of the papers is even writing about itself on the front page. 'EXTRA! EXTRA! Read all about us' they seem to cry.

The presenters know different. They continue the vacant badinage as they review tomorrow's newspapers, like the most impotent, condescending and vainglorious episode of Early Edition ever to be poorly penned and inadequately acted. Grinning toothily, they casually dismiss each of the main headlines in turn. One of the papers is even writing about itself on the front page. 'EXTRA! EXTRA! Read all about us' they seem to cry as they inform the Labour Party that it has lost their vote. Like Icarus, flying too close to The Sun, so too the Labour Party has got its wings burnt and is falling to its soggy demise. Satire. The presenters seem to avoid picking up on the fact that one of the country's biggest selling newspapers is admitting its lack of impartiality and therefore further undermining what little credibility it should have as a news source. Instead they choose to concentrate on the fact that the BBC and The Sun's owners, NewsCorp, have had a bit of a spat recently, with James Murdoch calling the BBC's ambitions 'chilling', and the BBC responding by saying something like “chilling? No, he probably meant just chillin', without the 'g', our ambitions are just, k'now, chillin”. Probably.

Next up for dismissal by the flippant, fickle wags (not the appalling acronym for those betrothed to football players, the other type) on the future news conveyor belt is The Sun's sister paper, The News of The World. In a family where the brains and beauty were long ago left, ironically, to drown like an ugly cat in a bag at the bottom of a canal. The sister, herself a kitten sporting a gammy eye, fat whiskers and a butch meow, would seem to have escaped the undertow it deserves and instead landed a cushy place by the fire, mewling the family ethos in a desperate effort to please her father. In recent times however, with little natural gifts of its own, the paper has been reduced to selling itself for 20p or just giving itself away free whenever someone picks up her older sister or a Twix, the sluttiest of chocolate bars. Caramel covered fingers. All the while The Times, an altogether more supercilious relative, just sits back and does its own crossword like an incestuous hermit masturbating into its dinner while smoking a pipe and wearing a monocle. You would think the addition of pipe and monocle would make it better than its simpler siblings but that is not the case. A pipe and a monocle make you far more odious, as is proved by the fact that Hitler, Huntley and Shipman all wore monocles, smoked pipes and knew exactly what they were doing.

You would think the addition of pipe and monocle would make it better but that is not the case. Hitler, Huntley and Shipman all wore monocles, smoked pipes and knew exactly what they were doing.

The News of The World was recently accused of tapping voicemail messages to try and gather information about celebrities and sport, only to find out that most people's answerphones contain an average of three messages – one from your mother asking, yet again, what size pants you wear, despite it being nowhere near either your birthday or any form of religious festivity, one that you have left yourself, leaving carefully-timed gaps for yourself to reply back to yourself so you can converse with yourself and feel like you've actually got someone to talk to, proving your life is not just a cyclical vortex of Lovejoy repeats, LucasArts point and click adventure games and decisions over whether to wipe your arse with the tear-soaked, flaking, tissue in your pocket, the semen-encrusted sock in the linen bin or the hand towel... and another phone message from a vet. You own no pets. You drowned your only cat because it was not pretty enough. You weren't attracted to it sexually, or otherwise. The messages are meaningless. That information should not be on any legitimate news provider’s agenda. Having it present reeks of a crisis of priorities, like sewing buttons in place of a zip on your cardigan when you should be thinking of similes.

The news has now moved on to jockeys and motorcycles. You have seen these stories four times already tonight. You deride the newsreader for using the same script each time. You mockingly shout the next predictable turn of phrase at the helplessly bland night watchman of sports news. You have not considered chastising yourself for failing to change channel or leave the flat in three days. It is not you who is the problem. It is the news. It's never new. Oh hang on. The ticker's just mentioned something about Sumatra. This might be good. No.

Enough of the BBC News 24 ticker. Time for Sky News. Their ticker is 46 syllables a minute quicker. A victory for speed. This should keep me you busy for a while.

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TV Chair: an original photograph by Mike Seyfang. Modified image appears here under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license.

An industry of lies or window to a more perfect world? Josh Russell asks whether life could do with a rebrand.

In the world of adverts we are all either young and beautiful or old and oozing with proverbial wisdom. There a very few problems that cannot be overcome with a cup of tea or a watery microwave korma. No one is ever lonely or sick; there’s no stain on the soul that can’t be shifted with a squirt of Vanish or a spoonful of Cillit Bang. Pets comfort us in our darkest hours, distracting with their boundless mischief and never once taking it upon themselves to lick all the upholstery or piss all over your new shag carpeting. People bend the dimensions of space with their flexible phone contracts. Technicolour TV screens chase each other down the street. Car headlights dance in the desert to the soundtrack of a rising sun.

It is undeniably a seductive world and one that any sensible human mind rails against like Rupert Murdoch against state-owned broadcasting. There is very little truth to the promises we are made and yet somehow, infuriatingly, it is incredibly difficult to break the hold advertising has over us. The question we have to ask ourselves is that given the fact we all know there is little actual substance lurking behind the sleek veneer, why do we fall for it time and time again? Is it that we are so desperate to part with our hard earned cash that we’ll buy any old tat endorsed by a familiar face or is there something deeper going on?

I am here to propose a new theory to you. The thrall advertising holds over us is nothing to do with gross commercialism or greed. It’s not even that we have grown used to its ubiquitous presence like an unpleasant odour in a stairwell or the hum of a laptop fan. Our love affair with advertising is based on one fundamental truth: the glossy world of adverts has it right. It’s our world that has got things wrong.

Billboards in Union Square, San Francisco

A bold claim you may think but give it some thought. Consider what we have to deal with in our daily lives. Global debt is rising. Britain is still acquiring enemies like an art student acquires STIs. In the face of mounting pressure from all quarters, Gordon Brown is starting to tremble and make deeply unsettling clunking noises. And yet at the flick of a switch we can immerse ourselves in a fantasy world where sofas are cheap all year round and drinking mineral water for 14 days will make you anything apart from considerably less well off. We can plug ourselves up with cats offering advice on which pet food contains the most nutrients and toddlers that are CEOs of major corporations, despite having a woefully limited knowledge of European commercial regulations.

The more you look, the more savage injustices you find hiding behind every line of copy, yet more reminders of how our world lets us down. Freedom is not only a drive away. A man can’t win his beautiful neighbour’s affections by merely finding the right shade on the Dulux paint chart. Chemicals don’t make you look younger; they just help you die quicker. The world of adverts has cute little fuzzy-felt cows that get up to amusing antics in velveteen fields. What do we get as an alternative? Lumping, great monsters that stand around looking lugubrious and occasionally squeezing out shit. No matter how you look at it, reality seems to be as resistant to the concept of a narrative conceit as a Yorkshire bus driver is to make change.

Travel also seems to suffer a bit of a deficit between perception and actuality. A tour operator shows you cream coloured sands. You and your partner are on the getaway of a lifetime. They show you eating in wonderful restaurants, drinking good wine, swimming in the azure expanse of a gentle sea. You hang a shell a wonderful shell souvenir around your partner’s neck, bought from a local market store. A bronze skinned 20-year-old guides you around the island, showing you sights that the average tourist will never get to see. A holiday you will never forget.

Khezr Beach, Hormoz Island, Iran

Unfortunately, the reality is slightly different. The gritty grey sand is littered with condoms and sun-bleached turds and you become so paranoid of the weird wriggly things on the seabed that you don’t put even your little toe in the murky water. The local plonk gives you a fucker of a hangover; on the third day a substandard restaurant introduces a gut-blending parasite into your lower intestine. Your partner spends more time eyeing up the young local than sighing over beautiful sights. When you reach the border, a disgruntled guard fingers the memento around your partners neck and disapprovingly tells you that removing shells from the country comes with a five-hundred-pound fine. A holiday you will never forget. No matter how hard you try.

Something has clearly gone wrong somewhere. For years we have been promised a future of golden health and technological wonder and yet, year on year, all the world has given us is an encroaching obesity epidemic and instant-access porn. Growing up, I truly thought we were reaching an age where we’d be able to taste colour and beautiful music would issue forth with every movement of our limbs. Now I know my future only contains disappointment, bedsores and wanker’s wrist, I feel decidedly let down by our version of events.

I’m not claiming for a second that the rampant commercialism of the world of advertising doesn’t rankle slightly but you do have to admit that they’ve kind of got us up against a wall. Reality just can’t compete with what they’re hawking. When asked to choose between a world of terrorist attacks, testicular cancer and David Cameron for one of Sony Bravias, Honda Accords and Mylene Klass, very few people with any common sense would drop Mylene and her bikini for David and his intolerable smugness. The soft lies beat the hard edges of truth hands down.

Burger King logo amongst pile of scrap

The fact is that humans find it far easier to deal in abstracts and lies than in actualities. We treat life like a film, with peaks and troughs, working towards an epiphany that we secretly know won’t come. The way we view our world is permanently tinted by our expectation that things should obey certain narrative conventions, despite the massive amount of evidence to the contrary. Adverts, with their fabrications and aspirations, seem to make more sense to us than a cold, hard reality because the world of advertising cossets us, makes us feel like we can obtain a charmed life that so far we have been denied. The mistruths of adverts offer a far more aesthetically pleasing view of the world and, as the late, great Douglas Adams once propounded, given that “beauty [is] truth, truth beauty”, surely in this case the “guilty party [is] life itself for failing to be beautiful or true”?

The aspirations of advertising, the aesthetic we are all sold is undeniably more palatable than the reality. Rubicon is sunshine in a can. Elderly men can break into a major football stadium without being rewarded with a night in a cell and a couple of cracked ribs. We are happy to believe any lie thrown at us, that cooking is “as easy as 1, 2, 3, 4” and that a spritz of after-shave will secure a quick clinch on a rain-drenched street, no matter how many burnt woks and eyefuls of pepper spray proclaim otherwise. Cherry-lipped kisses are somehow far more appealing solution to sore throats than a musty lozenge that tastes of perfume and death.

Like or loathe advertising, you have to admit that it offers a breadth of experience and emotion that few ever get to realise in their daily lives. During my commercial break I can watch a man trace colours around city streets with his fingertips. A harem of women pout and preen at me, stirring what little life my shrivelled genitals can muster. I live a thousand different lives an hour, from successful businessman in New York to an animated germ under someone’s toilet rim. Every road practically pulses with life changing events; sentient cars play hide and seek and crazed electronics companies flood whole districts with bubbles.

It’s a vibrant existence, living through advertising, one that trumps reality hands down.

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The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy – Fit the Tenth, [radio programme] BBC, BBC Radio 4, 23 January 1980.

Slogan from recent Marks and Spencers promotion.

Images:

Union Square Advertising: an original photograph by Shearer Family.

Khezr Beach, Hormoz Island, Persian Gulf, Iran: an original photograph by Hamed Saber.

Dec07 261: an original photograph by Lord Jim.

All images appear under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license.

Title Image:

Advertising imitating art: an original photograph by Dan Taylor. Modified image appears here under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license.