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59 pages

English

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The Little Book of Anger has been written as an antidote to the genre of inspirational books which aim to make the reader a better and happier person. It is a diatribe about many of the aggravating and irrational aspects of modern life, but done with much humour, a certain amount of research and a great deal of observation and some ill-suppressed exasperation. There are thirty chapters in all, each focussing on an aspect of modern life that can cause irritation - from chewing gum to the assault on the English language. The book explores some of the major irritants of life in way that will chime with readers, even if they don't agree. As one reviewer put it, the pleasure of the book is in agreeing with most of it - and getting cross with the rest.This book is not intended as a literary version of Grumpy Old Men and Grumpy Old Women, but if you liked those, you'll love this!

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Publié par	Troubador Publishing Ltd
Date de parution	08 mars 2017
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781780888293
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0250€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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THE LITTLE BOOK OF
ANGER
MARTIN WILSON
THE LITTLE BOOK OF
ANGER
Copyright © 2012 Martin Wilson
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.
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ISBN 978 1780888 293
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Matador is an imprint of Troubador Publishing Ltd
For Julia
‘Anger makes dull men witty, but it keeps them poor.’
– Francis Bacon
CONTENTS
The Little Book of Anger
Television Journalists
Production and Post-Production
The Present Historic
Print Journalists and the Attempted Murder of English
The Assault on English
Wine Snobbery
Baseball Caps
And T-Shirts
The Asphyxiation of English
Gastro-Bollocks
Cod Science
English a Victim of Grievous Bodily Harm
Drama Clichés
Drama Solecisms
Chewing Gum
English - A Victim of Forced Feeding
American Pronunciation of French
Safety (And Health)
The Infection of English
First Names
Nodding Politicians
The Culture of Celebrity
Uncontrolled Children
Charities
Cuddly Toys
Slogans and Taglines
Heroes
Social Networking
Road Signs (And Other Signs)
Book Jacket Reviews
THE LITTLE BOOK OF ANGER
As you get older, that is, beyond the age of about eight, the irritation gene begins to develop. Perpetual sunshine and green grass and smiley rabbits no longer complete your world and, almost imperceptibly, you realise that some things are not perfect. What starts as a nebulous questioning of what goes on around you develops, with increasing maturity, into a critical faculty which has, at its extremes, a spirit of enquiry on the one hand, and intemperate cynicism on the other. That being so, it is difficult to understand why there are so many, generally small, books available (notably at airport bookshops) of the “Little Book of Happiness” genre.
This is intended to be an antidote. I suppose that a major cause of irritation to some people are those who cannot restrain themselves from offering their opinions on every subject and upon which they are unassailed by any doubt that they might, possibly, be wrong about anything. Conscious of that, I nevertheless tender my contribution: this is my Little Book of Things That Annoy Me.
TELEVISION JOURNALISTS
What is it about them that make them so irritating? Well, I suppose the most obvious thing is their hand-waving. They do not seem capable of saying anything without exaggerated gesticulation. Just watch the next time you turn on the news and see a reporter explaining some perfectly simple concept with the aid of sweeping gestures and bouncing hands. And why do they say “absolutely” as soon as they have been introduced and have taken over the item? Absolutely what? If the implication is supposed to be that the journalist’s enthusiasm is boundless, does that mean that a lesser colleague should start by saying “Partially”? It is a particularly meaningless word to use when it normally follows an anodyne question from the anchor, such as “Jim, you are outside Scotland Yard now?” “Yes, absolutely.”
But, given that the reporter is standing outside Scotland Yard, near that faintly ridiculous but much photographed revolving sign, the next question is: why are you standing there? The topic under discussion may concern a wide range of police-related topics but it is difficult (no, let’s be frank, it’s impossible) to see how the reporter’s being outside the building is going to enlighten the viewer or facilitate comprehension. The poor journalist (and here a touch of sympathy creeps in, reluctantly) has driven from a comfortable studio or even his or her home, taking with him a cameraman and a sound recordist, possibly in dreadful weather, possibly through London’s slow traffic so that he can stand outside the building and tell his tale. Assuming that there are archive photographs of most public buildings and assuming further (and this is not an immediately obvious assumption to make) that there is some dramatic enhancement in having the building as the background, I fail to see why he has to traipse over to SW1. It cannot, surely, be that they expect something momentous or even moderately newsworthy to happen: a deputy assistant commissioner throwing himself from the top of the building, for instance, or a cabinet minister being bundled into the back of a police car with an officer’s hand on the top of his head in the manner of a crime drama. No, it is, plainly, because some dunderhead long ago decided that to be outside the building would, in some undefined way, add verisimilitude to the story and, with a complete lack of independent thought, it caught on and now this is how it is always done. That there is no other explanation is illustrated by the following. There are often noteworthy criminal trials that catch the public’s attention and take place outside London. The jury returns its verdict at, say, 3.00 pm and, if there has been a conviction, the judge adjourns the case for sentence until, say, the following day or until pre-sentence or psychiatric reports are available. So the defendant is driven off to prison and the jury, the judge, the barristers and solicitors, the police officers, the families of the victim and of the prisoner, in fact, everyone, goes home. The cleaners come in and start work. It is now 7.00 pm and, live on the early evening news, a television journalist is outside the Crown Court, in the pouring rain, in the dark, with a piece on the trial and the verdict. Is it believed that the item will be given more impact if it comes from outside the court? Presumably so, and most probably that is because the journalist thinks (no, that is too strong an assumption because it is hard to divine what process of logic would arrive at this conclusion; it is more likely that he feels) that there is more credibility in a report that comes from outside the arena than from inside a studio.
That is not, of course, limited to court reporting; we have all seen zoom-in pictures of the exterior of hospitals, for instance, where an outbreak of MRSA or an unfortunate mix-up of blood samples has occurred. That is the subject of the report and we are supposed to be able to absorb it better if we are shown the sign for the outpatients’ department in close-up.
Misuse of English is another serious fault of many television journalists, but it is not limited to them and is so widespread that it merits a section of its own. Nevertheless, I am conscious that some of the crassness of their reports may not be wholly, or at all, their fault. It may well be down to production and post-production.
PRODUCTION AND POST-PRODUCTION
Presumably the same pseudo-thought process is employed when we are shown wholly uninformative photographs or video footage as the background to a report. Some slightly post-adolescent studio director must once have decided that, when a news item relating to finance was reported, we should be shown pictures of bank notes and pound coins and that, if it concerned mortgage interest rates, it should be of a row of houses, some with ‘For Sale’ boards up. When there was controversy over the sale of Cadbury to an American conglomerate, we were helped to understand the social and fiscal complexities by being shown pictures of bars of chocolate. If the topic is children, we see feet in a school playground. We, of course, never see the children’s faces because of some strained misunderstanding of the law: for Heaven’s sake, we can see children if we look out of the window, that doesn’t make us paedophiles or invaders of their privacy; but we do see their feet, lots of them, just as we are shown footage of lots of people (for some reason, usually crossing what looks like Waterloo Bridge) when the item concerns, in some way, the population in general or sections of the population. I once saw the same shot used when the topic was obesity. These pictures add nothing to the story other than to make me shout at my wife, poor darling, “So, that’s what money looks like!” or “Haven’t those children got a lot of feet!” 1
There must be a pecking order in broadcasting. You start as a radio producer with the BBC and think it a good idea to have supposedly apt music to accompany serious news commentary. Thus, to go with an, admittedly, rather dull piece on secondary school class sizes, you insert as an introduction, a few bars from ‘I Don’t Need No Education’ and, rather than getting demoted for that inanity, you either do it again or find the idea taken up (for, yes, I have heard it done three times) and find yourself promoted to a television production manager where you believe that you are the first person to conceive of the idea of having someone interviewed at the wheel of his car – and not just at the wheel, but actually driving. This is for no discernible purpose – the interviewee is not talking about driving or anything even marginally connected with road transport – but he turns towards the cameraman who is, presumably, squeezed uncomfortably with his equipment in the front passenger seat and puts everyone’s life at risk as he gives his views on welfare reform or the burgeoning of Starbucks. Then, having established himself as a someone who can reuse hackneyed situations, the y