‘Sex sells,’ said my friend who, for reasons of discretion, I won’t name beyond giving you his initials which are ‘S.M.’ ‘I’ve been giving serious thought to the future direction of your blog which I’ve been overseeing for the past six months.’
‘And doing a lousy job of it,’ I complained. ‘You’ve not updated it once in all the time I’ve been away filming my new series celebrating some of North Africa’s most popular and long-serving leaders.’
‘Nonsense,’ he replied. ‘I’ve merely allowed the field to lie fallow before we put you out to stud.’
‘I don’t like your analogy, Stanley,’ I confessed. ‘You don’t put out a horse to stud until he’s past his best.’
‘All the same, the analogy still holds,’ said my friend who was rapidly losing his claims to that title. ‘The point I’m trying to make is that you need to transform your blog into the next social networking phenomenon and I think I’ve hit upon a fantastic plan. You’ve heard of Facebook, that hugely successful and some might say unbeatable website? However, they have a clear disadvantage.’
‘Which is?’
‘Do you know where the face ranks in the list of the internet’s most popular anatomical features?’
‘No idea,’ I said, for, indeed, I didn’t.
‘Nineteenth. Which means there’s plenty of room for us to beat it...’
I shrugged but he just took that as encouragement.
‘What I propose, therefore, is that we take the name of the Richard Madeley Appreciation Society and change it to…’
I held my breath.
‘Arsebook!’
‘Arsebook?’
‘It’s just like Facebook but without the faces.’
‘But we’d have arses, right?’
‘Exactly so!’ he said. ‘They are the third most popular anatomical feature on the internet but number one if we discount those that are pornographic.’
I quickly grabbed his hand and tested his pulse. Much to my surprise, he wasn’t throwing a temperature and his pulse seemed normal.
‘I don’t think Judy would appreciate it if people started to associate my name with the human posterior,’ I said.
‘They won’t,’ replied my friend. ‘They’ll simply think “arse”.’
Well, I wasn’t sure they didn’t think that already. I looked out from under my brow which had descended to settle on the upper slop of my classically handsome nose. The conjunction of hairy caterpillar on schnoz usually sends out the warning signals.
‘What’s up?’ he asked. ‘You don’t want to become an internet billionaire before you turn forty?’
‘I’d close my blog and delete it from the face of the earth before I’d allow you to associate me with an arse,’ I said. ‘Besides, I have other plans for the blog. Plans that involve certain a British television presenter, freelance journalist, and model…’
‘Not Andrew Neil,’ gasped my friend who, as many of you will know, is somewhat obsessed with the man and his sideburns.
‘I mean Chloe, my celebrated daughter, product of my loins, the apple of mine eye, the second generation Madeley with improved battery life that sits easier in the hand. Since I’m considering retiring to the radio, I think it might be time to change the title of my blog to the Chloe Madeley Appreciation Society so it might appeal to the eager young thrusters out there keen on highly-talented blondes.’
‘But this is barefaced nepotism,’ countered my friend. ‘Has she worked years in regional television? Does she have the requisite qualifications to call herself a journalist? What about her membership of the NUJ? What right have you to call her a “presenter, freelance journalist, and model”?’
‘Those are not my words,’ I replied coolly. ‘Those are the words of Wikipedia.’
My friend seemed to sink into his suit. ‘I refuse to be part of this,’ he said, finally. ‘You wouldn’t be allowed to hand over power like this if we lived in the Middle East. Have you learned nothing from the example of Egypt? If Hosni Mubarak couldn’t get away with this, they why should you?’
I smiled. ‘Hosni Mubarak didn’t have his own book club and a loyal following on Radio 2 ready to defect from Richard Bacon.’
Thursday, 24 February 2011
The Other Facebook
Wednesday, 10 December 2008
My Piece About Blogging, Written Last Week When I Was Moody And Thinking Too Much About Carrots
Change the sheets and polish that porcelain! I’ve decided that old Madeley is coming to stay with you.
But I don’t want you to worry or prepare anything special. I’ll only be with you for two weeks and I expect you to work me until I collapse. You want a pool digging? Just tell me how deep. Want the house repainting? A man hasn’t been born that can beat me around a Dulux colour chart. Work me hard, pay me nothing: that’ s how I like to be treated. It will feel just like being back at Channel 4. Damn their devious, back-stabbing, ‘O’Grady is more popular among the post-menopausal demographic than you’ hides.
But by now, you’re probably wondered if I’ve finally lost it. I too sometimes suspect that I’m walking east when my sanity is going west. Only, in this case, I don’t really think that I'm losing it is in the sense of walking though crowded markets whilst combing the hair of a heavily rouged coconut I like to call Molly. I just mean: how much longer can I go on like this?
Browsing the web, I stumbled across a group of my fellow bloggers talking about their monthly hits. Now, I know that you think you know what I’m about to say before I say it: that I’m about to wail on about how some other blog has forty times the hits that I have and that the most interesting thing they’ve ever written is the word ‘chiaroscuro’. And if you thought that’s what I was going to say, then you just take a merit badge and go stand at the front of the class. Bless the inordinate amount of soft fibrous fluff on your lovely cottony socks, for you are indeed right.
Blogging is an activity that most of us take up for purely narcissistic reasons. Those of us that don’t work professionally as journalists, will probably be writing in the vague hope that we can find work as journalists or writers or cartoonists or porn magnates. (I originally wrote ‘porn magnets’ but Judy won’t allow me to keep them on the fridge door. [Originally, I typed ‘porn midgets’ but that’s a story I’ve promised to keep under my hat. (I originally wrote ‘under my cat’ but that’s where I’m hiding the gloriously ribald account of my affair with a one-eyed Bulgarian vegetable seller called Molly who also happened to sell coconuts)]).
Anyway, to get back to my point: there can’t be many people who don’t open up their first Blogger account without thinking that they’re going to make a difference. The truth is that very few of us make a difference. There are ways to blog successfully and I consistently refuse to take those routes. I won’t post any videos of tap dancing dogs. I shirk porn (I originally typed ‘shake porn’ but... Oh, never mind...) I also won’t repost gags ripped from 'The Onion'. This blog is all me and is undoubtedly weaker for that. And, in a sense, every blog is about ‘me’. And ‘me’ isn’t very interesting. Have you read Iain Dale this week? Me, me, me, me, me. And Tories. Shudder, as Fry would say. Shudder.
The unhappy truth is that blogging is the poor relative to other social networking schemes that require far less effort and bring far more in terms of reward. Blogging also requires effort when a service like Twitter asks that you only write 120 characters a post. Facebook doesn’t even require that you write at all. You just send your friends vampiric bites to acknowledge their existence. ‘Dick Madeley has poked you with a carrot. Do you want to poke him back? Choose you vegetable of choice...’ Hardly the best advertisement for 'user created content'. After all: who likes being poked with a carrot? Not me. Not even Bill Oddie and I should know. I've poked him with plenty of carrots in my time.
Which brings all the way back to my offer. I’ve worked out the figures and I’ve calculated that the effort it takes me to do all my blogging is as profitable as if I came to work for each of you, my regular readers, for a fortnight every year. So long as you’ll pay my travel expenses, I won’t be out of pocket. For that, you’ll get at least forty hours of work out of me. Laying paths, decorating, fixing computer problems, teaching, or general administration: I can do the lot, possibly concurrently. And yes, if you want to, I’ll even let you poke me with a carrot.
Which reminds me of this story I keep under my cat...
Friday, 30 November 2007
With a Poke and a Grunt
Watching the votes build up in the latest poll, I’ve been somewhat surprised to see so many of you pick subjects I wouldn’t, myself, have chose. ‘More stories involving Stephen Fry’ currently lies in second place, with ‘More drunken moralising’ holding the top spot. Personally, I can’t get enough of ‘the Judith Chalmers prophesies’ and would have happily gone out and produced more ‘interviews with Richard’s famous friends’. However, today I thought I’d give you what you so clearly want. Since lately I’ve barely gone ten minutes without writing about Stephen Fry, I thought I’d devote this post to a spot of drunken moralising.Unfortunately, I wasn’t actually drunk when I sat down and began to write this piece. Nor was I entirely sure what I should drunkenly moralise about. Nothing immediately came to mind. These topics, I find, are best when they descend on you, like a fury or a dizzy spell. So, in the end, I decided to sit down with a piece of paper and write down a list of things that annoy me. If began like this:
Cheap jam. Practical jokes. Rudeness. Card shops. Rugby. The internal combustion engine. Rural types. Lentils. Natural fibres. Artificial fibres. Norway. The Guinness Book of Records. Tinned meats. Acorns. Alan Titchmarsh. The M11. Carrot cake. Extra virgin olive oil. Tight underwear. Trekkies. Burnt onion rings.
Just as I was beginning to think that I’d never come up with a decent subject for a rant, Judy came in talking about her evening with Denise Robertson. She was chatting away and I was on auto-pilot, yes-ing and ah-ha-ing as she went, when she suddenly came out with a sentence that turned my blood’s boiler up to high.
‘Anyway,’ she said, ‘Denise has joined Facebook. She told me to tell you that you should be on it too. You’ll be able to exchange messages.’
‘What’s wrong with ringing me up?’ I asked, feeling my cheeks flush.
‘Oh, Richard. It’s not the same.’
‘Too right it’s not the same,’ I cried as I picked up a bottle of wine from the rack and ran to my office, inspired for my rant.
One bottle of plonk later, I’m beginning to feel my rage loosening me up. So let me begin by telling you that I consider Facebook to be a feral world where only the dimmest creatures of the human swamp find pleasure. Somewhere deep within us, the strands of DNA are unwinding in a desperate attempt to end this madness. Civilization is in meltdown as humanity spends its most profitably hours of the day engaged in the single most pointless activity since the invention of the yoyo.
For some godforsaken reason, I joined Facebook just last week. I took a good look at this brave new world and quickly got the hell out of there. It seemed to me that there are people you call friends and then there are Facebook friends. The only difference between the two are an electric fence and a few restraining orders from the local crown court.
My first experience of Facebook happened only minutes after joining. Somebody asked to be my friend. I didn’t know who the hell they were but I thought ‘why not’. It seemed like a win-win situation for Madeley so I agreed to the deal. The next day, I got an email to tell me that my new Facebook friend had changed the status of our relationship and I should log in to confirm the change. When I logged in, I quickly saw how they’d changed the status. They’d deleted me as their friend! I hadn’t even spoken to this person and they’d already erased me from their life. I’ve had enemies that have treated me better.
And that’s the problem with Facebook. It’s that little motto that welcomes you with when you log in: ‘everybody can join’. Wonderful! ‘Everybody’. My favourite group of people. It’s what makes Facebook the periodic table of the mentally unstable, the spiritually adrift, the chemically unbalanced, and the charisma free. I wouldn’t want to share a line at the supermarket with some of these people, let alone spend my day with them, living a virtual existence, playing at being friends. Give me loneliness and isolation if this is what friendship has become.
I don’t want to find my friends through the ‘Friends Finder’. If people are my friends, I already know where they hang out. If they’re not friends, they’re just another stranger who wants to come along and demand that I spend my time in inane conversations while they’re stuck in some office and waiting to go home. And, I’m so sorry to tell you this: I don’t want to write something ‘fun’ on your Fun Wall. The one thing you can be sure about is that no wall that calls itself a ‘fun wall’ will contain anything that’s remotely like fun. It’s like people who declare themselves ‘crazy’ and ‘fun loving’ or having a ‘great sense of humour’. That’s how accountants always describe themselves.
Facebook devalues the very notion of friendship to such a degree that we forget what we mean when we use the term ‘friend’. Is a Facebook friend going to get out of bed at three o’clock in the morning to rescue from the bathtub? Are they going to write you a 2000 word blog post about their meeting with Chuck Norris? I don’t bloody think so. Just because I’ve clicked on a box that confirms that ‘I’m friends with Sue’, it doesn’t mean I’m actually Sue’s friend. And when I’ve got a list of a few thousand such people called Sue, it doesn’t even mean that I really know that Sue even exists. What it does mean is that Sue has linked to me so she can boast to her other ‘friends’ that she’s got over two thousand Facebook friends and must therefore be such an interesting, warm, and wonderful person. Actually, Sue, it means quite the opposite. Simple fact: the more friends you have, the less valuable the word ‘friend’ becomes.
Then there are the applications within Facebook that ‘enhance’ the Facebook experience. The only thing I’ve discovered that enhances the Facebook experience is the ‘Logout’ button. However, for many, there’s nothing that brightens up their day more than informing a ‘friend’ that they’ve just been bitten and that they are now a vampire. Cue the music. ‘I’ve bitten you. Oooh… You’re now a vampire.’ Music ends. High drama it is not. More like an utter waste of time and energy. The place is a meme hell, where you can spend your whole day comparing yourself to others in a seemingly endless list of tests and quizzes that inform you of nothing that’s remotely significant to your life.
‘Bah!’ I hear you cry. ‘But Richard, with Facebook you’ll network!’
‘Network’. The single most nauseating word in the English language, probably invented by an American to replace that old fashioned word ‘contact’. Why would I want to contact other people? For what purpose? Don’t I seen enough of the damn things when I look out my window? People who network are usually people with personalities so utterly toxic that you wouldn’t naturally want to be their friend. They usually breath through their mouths and talk through their noses. They wear aftershave imported from Bulgaria and have every album produced by Five Star, who they still claim are the British Jacksons. And let us be quite clear on this: they don’t actually want to know me. They want to collect me like they collect stamps in their lonely bedsits late at night. My whole existence is reduced to a pretty little avatar on their homepage. And then they have the cheek to ask me to join their ‘communities’. Protest this. Outlaw that. Change the face of democracy. Help X get nominated for Y. Support Z in their campaign against W. Then there are the ‘big issue’ communities that hope to change the world. The notion that any government is going to look at Facebook and realise ‘hell, there are x thousand people opposed to our policy, we better do something about it’ is faintly ridiculous. Gesture politics have never been so futile or require such small gestures.
Take the community called: ‘I bet I can find 1,000,000 people who dislike George Bush!’. To my astonishment, there are over 800,000 people so cretinous that they joined in with this nonsense. The only thing more inane than creating this group is actually joining it. What are these people going to do? Confirm what they already know? Discuss their febrile hatred of Bush? Or is it, like so much of Facebook, just another trivial activity to fill the vast emptiness of a daily life in which grown adults can’t find something more meaningful to do with their time?
My last and saddest experience of Facebook was when I was ‘poked’ by a friend. I poked them back, whatever that means. And that was the end of our communication. They poked me. I poked them. Oddly, three days earlier, I had written this person a thoughtful email full of words and clever observations about life, hoping to ask their opinion about something. I never sent it. I thought I was being too presumptuous to expect them to reply. I didn’t want to bother them with it. Yet somehow, there I was poking them. If felt like we’d regressed back to the cave, prodding each other as a means of communication. Isn’t technology wonderful when we can replace words with pokes? It inspires me to end this with some modern form of communication that will be appreciated by the Facebook generation. You know: like a grunt?
