Fat Pigeons

Well.

If you live in the UK, you may have noticed that MPs in the House of Commons have just voted to extend pre-charge detention to 42 days.

42 days. That’s six weeks.

Six weeks, in which you could be locked up in a cell with no idea what you were being accused of.

Six weeks away from your friends and family.

Six weeks away from your job.

And they don’t even have to charge you with a crime.

But hold on, Piers. These are terrorists, right? They’re bad people who want to kill us. What if they can hold out longer than the current 28 day limit?

Well, in one of the most complex counter-terrorism investigations in British history, the evidence obtained to charge the two suspects charged with terrorism was obtained at four and twelve days respectively.

42 days? Hell, that’s nowhere near the edge of even the 28 days that we currently have. (Which, by the way, is roughly four times longer than that any comparable democracy in the world.)

But it’s not just all political posturing, right? The police and MI5 are asking for this change? Well, actually MI5 don’t, the police are split on the issue, and even the supporters of a longer detention period think that the bill in its current form is unworkable.

The bill will now move to the House of Lords, where we expect it to be defeated.

Good.

This is bad law, drafted by a desperate government.

Those behind it deserve nothing but our derision and contempt.

Genius.

The first time I’ve ever been interviewed, and it’s out now.

You can read my witterings about how the state of modern SF is affected by the times in which we live in this month’s issue of SciFiNow, available from all good newsagents.

Every time I think about it, I still get slightly surprised.

Jason Arnopp recently had a showing of his new short film Look At Me. (trailer)

Great fun was had by all. A precursor, no doubt, of greater things to come.

His next task? A feature with a working title of ASK. Director Dan Turner offers a prize to those hardy souls who can guess what it stands for.

And if you don’t look forward to it then Jason and I will hunt you down with our giant floating hands and destroy you while you sleep.

Let’s not make any bones about it.
This is a bona fide threat.

Finally got round to watching Being Human last night.

Well that was rather fucking fine.

You can watch Being Human online here for the next couple of days. After that, you may have to resort to the usual channels.

Like Buffy the Vampire Slayer (“She’s a cheerleader! She slays vampires!”), the setup itself gives no clue as to the goodness within.

You hear: “A Vampire, a Werewolf, and a Ghost share a house,” and you think: “Sitcom.”

This is not a sitcom. This is an accomplished drama, and the story engines are revving mightily.

The clue is in the title: These are people who desperately want (like so many of us) to be normal. And (like so many of us) aren’t.

Solid reviews from The London Paper and The Times.

Now, I don’t know how BBC3 commissioning works. It may be that they have already blown their new drama budget for the year on Phoo Action.

But if you saw Being Human and liked it, there is a petition to get a series commission here.

It would not kill you to visit.

You may already have seen the first (and, now, last) part of Max’s travel blog for the Guardian.

Basically, a 19-year-old boy doing a gap year is about to travel to India and Thailand. He’s going to write a blog about it.

Good for him. Thousands of kids his age do just that.

Here’s where it all goes pear-shaped:

Somehow, someway, the Guardian commissions him to put his blog on their website. And a comment-storm arises criticising Max, the media in general, and the Guardian specifically for writing and publishing this.

The writing is, to put it kindly, not the best travel writing ever. But pretty much none of the thousands of other “Here I am in Thailand, wow,” blogs are either.

So, why exactly was Max picked from the crowd to a featured spot on a national newspaper?

It doesn’t take much research on the Internet to find that Max’s dad is, funnily enough, a travel writer. And it’s not a big leap to suspect that nepotism may have played a part.

Whether it did or didn’t is actually irrelevant. The problem here is that no-one at the Guardian thought it might be a problem.

The Guardian’s travel editor, Andy Pietrasik, responded (but, notably, didn’t apologise), saying basically “Yes, he’s not a very good writer, but I thought it was interesting that a 19-year-old was writing for Skins. And I didn’t edit his writing.”

Max’s writing is trite. That’s not an offense in and of itself. My writing here is often trite. I keep a blog, don’t I? Who the fuck wants to read my bizarre witterings?

The fact is that it doesn’t matter in my case, because readership of this blog is self-selecting.

Now, if a respected newspaper such as the Guardian had promoted me as an exciting new talent, who happened to live in London, and I happened to come from a nice middle-class family, and my father happened to be a respected travel journalist, and my first piece happened to be badly written, dull, and about a small well-off subset of London society, and no-one at the Guardian thought that people might wonder why the hell I’d been commissioned then that’s a different story entirely.

So. Max’s blog becomes a minor Internet sensation, and he’s wisely decided to not write any more. Good.

But then we have this story from the Observer, in which we find that Max’s dad was surprised by the outpouring of vitriol. But I believe that his quote from which the title of this article is taken proves that he, too, really hasn’t thought this through.

It’s not a crime to write badly, to be white, to be male, to be middle-class, to live in London, or to have contacts at the Royal Court, Channel 4, and the Guardian.

This is not about Max. It’s not his fault, and I wish him well on his trip.

This is about the editors at the Guardian who damn well should have known better.