It says much about the disposable society that total nonentities can be even mentioned in the same breath as the greatest pop band of all times.
One Direction are a group of good looking young men thrown together in a world of musical pap. The Beatles were four supremely talented youngsters who changed music forever. The Beatles included two of the greatest songwriters in the history of music and a third (George Harrison) who was half decent as well. The Beatles left us a legacy of great songs and music and musical innovation. And then there's One Direction!!
Which brings me to the question of honours. Can anyone tell me why Van Morrison has been knighted but John Lennon and George Harrison never were? And why was Cilla Black never made a dame or Ringo Starr a knight for their contribution to music and popular culture? Some of these things make no sense to me.
Once the Beatles broke up they never reformed. I wouldn't mind betting that when the members of One Direction have solo careers that sink into obscurity there will be a magical reunion five years down the line. This will be a reunion fueled by the band members' wish to come back from obscurity and make themselves some money rather than any other consideration. Of course they will trot out all the usual answers about art and musical merit and wanting to "give of themselves." We, however, wil know the real reasons.
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Yesterday it was raining again so all I could do was sit in our holiday apartment with the television on. They had Gyles Brandreth running through his favourite television. I suspect that Brandreth is one of those extrovert type people that you either love or find immensely annoying. I happen to like the bloke. He seems to have a natural enthusiasm for everything without using over the top words like amazing and awesome (see yesterday's post).
Not so long ago, I read some of his diaries in a book entitled "Something Sensational to Read in the Train". It was a run through of his life from childhood. The book was a long one but only contained a small proportion of his diaries. I did read that he has box fulls of his writing which one of his daughters is sorting through. He must have written millions of words over the years. Yes he's definitely my kind of person.
That set me thinking. I have been writing my own diary for over 40 years. In fact I have 15,587 entries as of today. Some entries are very long but taking the average entry to be around 400 words, it means my diaries amount to somewhere in the region of 6,234,800 words. Yes that's 6.2 million. The Bible (new and old testament) has approximately 807,000, War and Peace has an estimated 587,000 words. So in effect my diaries are about eight Bibles in length or 10 and a bit copies of War and Peace.
Getting back to Brandreth, his choices included "Watch with Mother", "Steptoe and Son", "Billy Bunter", "What's My Line" and many of the other programmes I grew up with. I have detailed some of my television heaven and hell on a previous web site and will be looking to add it to this site shortly.
I do remember writing an article for the Norwich Mercury newspaper when I was working for that august rag, about my sons' interest in Watch With Mother. It must have been sometime in the 1980s that I sat them down to view a video containing the likes of "The Woodentops," "Bill and Ben," "Rag, Tag and Bobtail" and a few others rather than the children's programmes of the time. They were actually engrossed for a while before deciding that unintelligible language (Bill and Ben), puppets where you could see the strings (Andy Pandy) and dysfunctional families (the Woodentops) was not for them. I loved Brandreth's suggestion that he always found something rather sinister about Daddy Woodentop.
I will talk more about my television heaven/hell in a later blog.