wastage

The ship was as big as a block of flats,

sailing through the Mediterranean while the passengers laughed and ate and drank and made merry.  At night the air was soft and the moon lit the sea, beating down on the wake she ploughed through the waves.  Never innocent that track, not with the waste of 1800 paying guests and the considerable crew to dispose of.  You can’t help but think of waste when we live in a consumer society which is always urging upon us something new, something we must have, something we just can’t live without.  And if you discard the old thing for the newer thing, the old thing has to go somewhere.

In the recent past, most people took a newspaper and when we threw things away, we wrapped it up tightly for rubbish collection

Friends of the Earth / uses for old newspapers

by what we called dustbin men. That’s a whole other discussion, right there.   Plastic was not everywhere as it is now.   

But interestingly when you look up wastage, it was a concept first applied to people.  And at the hands of some, it still is.  So there is a new television series on Peter Sutcliffe, a serial killer whose horror casts a long shadow because many of his early victims were what we now call sex workers but he subsequently killed other women too.

The new series claims to speak up for the children and families of those impacted

rather than the horrible man himself (thankfully dead) but also to examine what the police failed to pick up on, and why, largely because of their prejudice in favour of “decent” women.    So this is wastage, those who were shoved aside, forgotten in the media hue and cry over a man who evaded capture for a long time because he was himself so unremarkable.

Not for me.  It’s done, done well, done badly, done.    Let those people alone.

Also to look forward to is an acted series about Jimmy Savile which will undoubtedly involve what is thought as well as known, the failure to understand that it is rarely nice people who make a success of life in those terms (media attention, mass approbation, frequently foul mouthed and sexually unusual as perks of the trade, but acknowledged by the great and the good).  Savile made a lot of people uncomfortable

I wanted to wash my hands

and too many of them pushed away that feeling, suborned their misgivings to other people’s praise of him and the few that tried to bear a different kind of witness weren’t thanked. 

It was a gross management failure by the BBC who employed him, in the name of money.  And there are many people who blinded by the making of money – blinded, deafened and made stupid.

And the news on Saturday 16 September 2023 was dominated by the revelations to follow in Sunday’s press that Russell Brand, a sometime comedian whose voice I always thought raised by the tightness of his pants,

has been abusive to several women who now wish to make a case against him.   And the television company and the production company involved didn’t speak up, speak for or protect their younger staff.  Well, there’s a surprise.  Timed just as the Big Brother House comes back round for another bite of the profit apple.

Old journalistic hands would say there is always a story in sex, death, religion and the Royal Family.  To that, you can currently add wastage.  Let’s talk about the victims.  Who was left out, who was failed, which police acted narrow mindedly and short sightedly  – the police don’t have a moratorium on those qualities.  They are everywhere.   And so is personal taste.

Television’s commissioning editors have less money and less opportunity  than they have ever had so they commission on the basis of what they hope people will want to watch.    A crystal ball helps.  And bearing in mind terrestrial television is dying.   So maybe this is what sufficient numbers of the public like.  Never mind the critics, we are talking about viewing figures that hold up.   Maybe it takes their minds off their own troubles, the terrorism of the energy companies, not being able to make the money go round, not being able to allay the fears of their children whether from iffy school roofs to another pandemic, the strain of it all.   I hope so. Not for me.