BBC Breakfast Watch! World Of Warcraft Will Kill You Stone Dead

I've not watched BBC Breakfast for a while, replacing the misery of watching Bill Turnbull and Sian Williams (aka Mail-tuttery-personified) with the endurance test that is Atlas Shrugged. Well, I say that, but I will admit to taking a break from that as well, so that I could binge on Ed Brubaker's genius run on Captain America (surely the classic Cap run) and Ultimate Spider-Man by Bendis (on top form, thankfully) and Stuart Immonen. I know! I should end that frigging book, but I needed to see the new Captain America kick some right-wingers around, especially now that they're feeling so down. Obama's got a mandate, bitches! A mandate! Suck it up!

Anyway, this morning I paid more attention to BBC Breakfast than is healthy, primarily because today some evil corporate bastards have unleashed a new weapon against humanity, striking against our precious children by chaining them to an artificial reality in order to drain them of their resources, their souls, their potential. Such an apocalyptic event deserved full expression of their dismay, as they tried valiantly to prevent the theft of an entire generation. Yes, though it sickens me to say it, Blizzard released another WoW expansion pack. Those evil mind-controlling motherfuckers! Save the children from that thing we don't quite understand but will distrust anyway just to be on the safe side!


As soon as I saw the two disapproving parent-archetypes sitting on their sofa with all of the moral authority of two angry bags of compost, announcing the imminent discussion with all of the severity their little brains could muster, my heart sank. As I have said before when railing against this most insultingly alarmist show, I understand that early morning TV is meant to be light, but surely the release of an MMORPG expansion pack for one of the most successful, popular, and beloved games in the world is not going to bring about the death of childhood, and so acting like it is is surely the antithesis of "light chatter". I missed the start of the show, but Canyon informed me that even before their little snippy piece about the game began, they predictably brought up the death of a South Korean gamer from exhaustion which, in traditional BBC Breakfast style, was linked to World of Warcraft when, in fact, the guy died playing Starcraft. A small point, but indicative of the rigour with which the disapproving Luddites had researched the piece.

I almost didn't watch. It's been a while since I spent time watching Bill and Sian, simply because they make me so mad I can barely stand it. For all I know they have been railing against gaming with miserable regularity. "The release of a game called The Force Unleashed has raised concerns that children may turn to the Dark Side after playing it." "This game, Spore, encourages children to cultivate and eat diseases!" "Your children are at threat from LittleBigPlanet, which might make your children sew themselves into sacks!" Of course, this morning they were particularly terrible, using their stern faces to register disgust over the thought of anyone daring to play computer games which corrupt minds and destroy lives and many other imaginary things.

Though they've done this before, and even though they were talking (down) to three WoW fans instead of having some typically ineffectual and token balanced debate (which is usually conducted with the inclusion of some non-gaming crazy person with a head full of suspicion and fear), their behaviour this morning was even more snotty and dismissive as usual, probably because they resented wasting their time discussing something as "silly" as a game when OMG! They had the thrill of introducing a previously filmed clip of a BBC journo on a press junket interviewing Angelina Jolie about Changeling! The glamour of presenting BBC Breakfast should never be sullied with something as decadent and corrupting as a mere game. Get off our sofa, worthless fools, I could imagine Sian saying, as Bill sits and devours numerous custard creams while humming the theme to Dixon of Dock Green.


I felt especially bad for one player, Marijke Jensen, who was still clad in the Night Elf costume she had been wearing to the special release event at HMV Oxford Circus last night. It was a cool costume, and after Bill had expressed a somewhat unhealthy interest in it, she seemed to not expect his sneering "Whyyyyyyyyyyy?" because, you know, you don't think a TV presenter would be openly rude and dismissive like that, though she was friendly enough to defuse the moment with a genial acknowledgement that wearing something like that might seem extreme to, say, a trad-dad square from the McCarthy era magically transported to W1, 2008. The other guests, a hardcore player (Ben West) who had also attended the launch, and Tim Edwards from PC Gamer Magazine, then had to put up with Bill and Sian stumbling to understand what the game involves, not to mention returning to the same goddamn question, over and over again, about how long people play it. The poor guy who attended the launch, who had waited 36 hours in line, was mocked by Bill for waiting so long, but at least he tried to explain that he did it for the feeling of being a part of something, a community of like-minded people, that playing the game is a social thing and leads to real friendships (as regular Shades of Caruso visitor Jaredan can attest to). It's something Bill can't understand, as the only community he belongs to is Daily Mail Island, and they despise the BBC. It must be horribly depressing for him.

The piece continued for only a few minutes, but it felt like a million years, with both presenters tut-tutting at the amount of time devoted players spent on the game, and then reading out one viewer email from a Concerned Mother who complained at her 18-year old son's daily WoW marathons (12 hours a day, which seems excessive and probably exaggerated for effect), stating that he has no friends. Of course, anyone who plays the game will know that it's very easy to make friends online, and the game depends on social interaction and cooperation, but parents (and Bill and Sian, obviously) won't accept that because internet friends can't possibly exist or mean anything to their children, oblivious to the fact that they are probably grateful to meet people with the same hobby as them, who don't judge them for doing something they enjoy. After that single negative email Sian deigned to read a positive one, prefaced with the dismissive and frustrated bleat, "I have to say, the majority have been positive because they do play the game," which is the perfect example of how her mind remains closed against new information. Closed, because otherwise all of the Hypothetical Idiots she has invented will come spilling out, babbling hysterically, running into traffic, or eating quicklime, or maybe even playing a computer game for eight days without a break and then dying from dehydration.


As I said earlier, this anti-gaming suspicion is something I've gone on about before, and it's a really silly thing to get annoyed about, but the Today Programme is also getting in on the technophobia with a depressingly one-sided report, and the BBC News homepage features this special report, which makes me suspect the corporation is secretly really pissed at the failure of Fightbox. (Night Elf Marijke is on the far left on the homepage picture.)

Still, despite the depressing blanket suspicion across the BBC's coverage, I'm most incensed by Bill and Sian's obnoxious behaviour, telling their guests off for playing WoW for any amount of time (Bill kept tutting, "That's still a lot" no matter what the response), frowning constantly and belittling them for having an interest in something they don't understand. With the only "professional" interviewed being a young journalist, they felt free to treat their guests like ill-behaved delinquents, sniping at them and their hobby with distasteful arrogance. Even Bill's "jokes" about the Night Elf's ears were framed as a nasty side-effect of playing too long.

Obviously there is an issue about compulsive playing there; I'd be crazy to deny it (probably driven crazy by obsessive gaming!). However, any pursuit can potentially create obsessive behaviour in those who follow it, and many of the complaints about WoW are coming from parents whose children, who have retreated into what they see as a pointless fantasy world, would probably retreat into some other world away from their parents if they weren't gaming. It's called adolescence, and is a fact of life. Nevertheless, that coverage is not what annoys me. It's the distrustful attitude of much of the mainstream media, possibly resentful that young eyeballs are being stolen by gaming (or whatever the dehumanising term for viewing figure decline is this week), that gaming is always framed in terms of the harm it must do to children, that it is never seen as a positive thing or a potential source of much artistic value, that the fact that it brings people together is treated with much amusement by commentators stuck in their 20th Century world and unable to believe that social networking via any new form of technology can be enormously empowering and, at its most base level, a lot of fun. Families are being formed or brought together because of these developments. It's not threatening our way of life, it's enhancing it. Embrace our machine friends!

Most immediately, though, I'm furious about the rude attitude of Bill and Sian, who acted like stern parents to these total strangers, all of whom are over the age of 18 and surely deserving of some respect. It was bordering on bullying behaviour, to be honest, and I'm sick of seeing gamers treated like potentially unstable children. Even worse, I feel especially bad for gamers who have been up all night, filled with excitement about the release of a long-awaited expansion pack and happy to have been part of a joyful event populated by people who share the same interests as them, turning up to a BBC studio to enthuse about their hobby only to be treated like delusional freaks or criminals by the sub-moronic presenters of this appalling, amateurish, poorly researched piece of shit show.


Compare Bill and Sian's awful treatment of the three gamers with their fawning interview of singer and sentient oil slick Jonathan Ansell, whose oleaginous insincerity was only matched by their boundless delight at his dreary anecdotes about how wonderful he is. A truly nauseating display. If I could I'd organise a boycott of the show by bombarding gamer and legendary literary leviathan Charlie Brooker with incensed all-caps emails, but that's just the fatigue-induced temporary insanity talking, and has nothing to do with my recent Civilisation Revolution binges, which have lasted for up to five hours. Nothing to do with that at all.

Still, it was not all misery. They also had Dragon's Den judge Duncan Bannatyne on. I've yet to express my immense frustration at these pompous, self-aggrandising sinkholes who have convinced the BBC, a publicly funded corporation, to air a show that allows them to interview inventors and cherry-pick the best ideas for investment, from which they then make a fat wad of cash. Truly imaginative entrepreneurial thinking, there. Of course, I take great pleasure every time I hear that one of their rejects, usually dismissed with derision and laughter, has become a huge success without their minimal investment (usually offered in exchange for almost punitive shares in the new businesses). If I came up with a solid idea, the last thing I would do is give these crooks a chance to absorb my profits with their rapacious plundering.


Anyway, Bannatyne was on, and looking grumpier than usual. I wonder why? (There was a copy of the Sun sitting around the studio earlier in the show, during the sports news, and I can imagine it was whisked away and hidden with a quickness once they were done with it. Poor Duncan.)

ETA: Good to see I'm not the only one annoyed by Sian and Bill's arrogant embrace of technological ignorance, and worded with far more elegance than I can muster to boot.

Breakfast Of Champions It Ain't

Consider it flagellation, but we tend to watch BBC's Breakfast while preparing to head out in the morning. It's an infuriating show, but there isn't much else on at that time in the morning. This morning, after nearly bursting into angerflames while watching it, I ended up turning over and catching a customarily piss-poor episode of Smallville (guest-starring Ian Somerhalder), having missed the start of The Naked City on Sky Movies Classic and not feeling up to watching multiple installments of Takeshi's Castle or Ironside. Even though there is nothing else on, I still debate having it on at all, giving up only because it features London travel news, or as it should be called, "What Percentage Of Your Tube Journey Will Be Cancelled At The Last Minute, Stranding You Underground And Unable to Contact Your Boss To Beg Him Or Her Not To Fire Your Ass For Being Late Every Day?"


Why the hatred? It is just breakfast news, which is never going to be Newsnight, and I'd be a fool to expect anything more than fluffy nonsense and light chatter. What I would expect is at least a baseline level of competence, which we do not get. We only watch about twenty minutes of it on average, and in that small section of the show we always, always, get at least one mis-cued link, one sound error, or one wrong film clip. Oftentimes it's far worse than that.

I once mentioned this to a colleague of mine, and he immediately leapt to the defence of the show, saying it was no easy thing to make a live TV show, and yes, I'll grant that, but many live shows either come off without a hitch or with only the occasional error. In a small subsection of the show (which runs for 195 minutes) we get at least one screw up every day. Extrapolate that out to the full length of the show and we're talking about ten head-in-hands-level mistakes a day at the least. It's sad and hilarious viewing at the same time.


Those technical difficulties aren't the worst things about it, though. Not by a longshot. As I said before, I don't expect Newsnight or Channel Four News, and so it's churlish to complain about the presenters not being Paxman and Kearney or Snow and Hilsum, but my god, even by the usual standards of early morning TV presenters (in the UK and the US), regular hosts Bill Turnbull and Sian Williams are just appalling. Watching them struggle to comprehend even the most simple of subjects is hard on my teeth, as they tend to grind together every time Bill says something inane, or Sian misunderstands what their guests are trying to say. They're so bad they make me nostalgic for Dermot Murnagurnah and the fragrant yet icy Kate Silverton. Yes, that bad.


I've considered writing something about this godawful show for some time now, momentarily inspired by various car-crash interview gaffes, such as the morning Bill asked Simon Pegg about drinking eggs a grand total of four times, obviously because that was the only bit from the Run, Fatboy, Run trailer that penetrated his braincasing, or yesterday's debacle when Joanna Lumley tried to get up from her seat in the middle of a link to local news which panicked Bill so much he practically rugby tackled her back down. There are many more examples, but those are the ones that spring to mind.


However, my ire was finally raised to blogging point by a segment about the release of Grand Theft Auto IV which, as expected, was used to say nothing more than, "Video games are destroying civilisation by turning your children into murderers." I could tell because Bill and Sian's faces were set not to Puff Piece Perky, but to Serious Story Stern. After a quick nod to the success of the franchise, this little factoid was used as proof of the game's insidious hold over the nation's children, as various non-statistics about the violent nature of the game led us into an interview between Team BS and two gamers, one casual, one working for the BBC. Surprisingly the "debate" wasn't held between the gamers (which is the usual course when news items are discussed in the studio), but between them and Bill and Sian, who pointed out time and time again that games are for kids and are violent and therefore are bad for kids and hence everyone is doomed.


It was already heading downhill by the time the first question was asked, which followed on from an email sent in from someone who thinks GTA IV was "symptomatic of the degenerating society", and that it allows people to live out a "fantasy of evil," leading Bill to ask the gamer if he has a fantasy of evil of his own. Sadly the guy didn't tell him to shut up, instead arguing for the game by saying it allows people to get rid of their pent-up aggression, which led Sian to ask the BBC gamer if that was the same for him, and to add, "I'm not suggesting you're violent in any way or give in to violent urges." By then it was obvious the game has been framed as only appealing to people who are drawn to violent things exclusively. Later Bill asked if the game has any redeeming qualities, if the characters give to charity or help people. Seriously, if Bill and Sian were a TV show, they'd be Monarch of the Glen. If they were a book, they'd be The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency. Where their brain should be, there is merely a tombola, used to raffle off a set of china teapots commemorating the coronation of King George VI.


When it was pointed out by the BBC gamer that GTA IV isn't on sale to children, Sian batted that away with the argument that kids would want to play it anyway. Of course they do. They're curious. When I was young I wanted to watch anything that was forbidden, and not even the exciting stuff. I remember staying up to watch some of the Red Triangle films shown on C4 late at night, though sadly the one or two rather earnest European art movies I caught have faded from memory compared to the proper innocence-destroying stuff (early viewings of The Thing, Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Videodrome). So what does she suggest? Infantilising ourselves and censoring all art and culture just in case some children stumble across something that might do some harm? (And I emphasise might as there are conflicting reports about the corrupting influence gaming has on young minds.) I say this all the time in real life, and I'm introducing it to the blog now; it's the 21st Century, you fuckers. KEEP UP!!!


Even for BBC Breakfast, the whole thing was offensively facile. The Beeb gamer tried to draw attention to the huge success of the franchise and how great it was that it was developed by Rockstar Edinburgh, but that was ignored by the presenters who were utterly incapable of seeing the release as anything other than another nail in the coffin of humanity. Another emailer, your archetypal concerned mother, accepted that the game wasn't for kids, but stated even eighteen year-olds don't have the emotional maturity to deal with the themes presented by the games (and then said why not celebrate the nice things in life, for crying out loud). Why stop there? Maybe eighteen year-olds don't have the emotional maturity to deal with anything. Let's take the vote away from them, stop them joining the army, stop them driving. And what age are you ready to handle any of this? Twenty? Thirty? Life begins at forty, so let's make that the default age.

It ended with Sian commenting that kids should be playing "that tennis on the computer that just went 'bip!' and 'bip!". Fine, Sian, if it makes you happy, we'll throw out years of programming progress just for you. Thanks for contributing nothing to the debate other than to continually turn it around so that game designers and gamers have to prove a negative instead of pundits and panicky parents having to prove games are corrupting on something a little stronger than conjecture and fear of the unknown. Now that you've done that, can the adults do what they want now? Please? The despicable Mail bitches that the BBC has a left-wing bias and rails against it every day, but this kind of insulting, alarmist, blinkered, ill-informed, paranoid, Luddite idiocy is just the sort of thing it loves. The Mail and Breakfast should get married and have stunted babies who can't feed themselves, are terrified of the modern world, and can only talk in racist, homophobic code phrases.

Wow. I feel like Will Graham up in this bitch. In the scheme of things, yes, the shoddiness of Breakfast is nothing to write home about, but this is a subject I get very annoyed about. I guess I should be grateful that they didn't trot out the "proof" so often used by lazy churnalists that another Rockstar game, Manhunt, warped one kid's mind so much he murdered his friend, even though he didn't own it, may have never played it, and any link between the murderer and the game was disputed by the police who investigated and the judge presiding over the case. Instead we got a lot of emotive nonsense about protecting kids from amoral culture intended solely for adult usage, none of which can be considered journalism or news. It's comment, and poorly thought through as well.

And what came up after that? Talking to Robert Webb and Ella Smith about the current West End run of Neil LaBute's Fat Pig, which could have been the starting point for an interesting debate about size fascism and peer pressure, or even a discussion about what the fuck LaBute's problem with women is, but instead turned into Sian asking if the play was like Shallow Hal, Bill asking if they keep laughing at all of LaBute's high-larious jokes while performing, and whether Robert Webb was filming another series of That Mitchell and Webb Thing. I guess it's good to see their momentary contact with the depravity of gaming hasn't changed them, if you enjoy cringing, that is.

ETA: Just after I finished this post, I read this article in the Times, telling of a horrible knife attack in Croydon while waiting for the midnight opening of Gamestation. It's terrible that someone was assaulted in that manner, but the article continues to draw parallels between the game and violence that don't hold up. The perp obviously has rage issues, but is that because of playing the GTA games? Or was he already like that? There's no causal link established there, merely a confluence of events, unless the guy suddenly screams, "It was the games wot made me do it!".

Even more annoying is that some poor guy got mugged yesterday, and his copy of GTA IV was stolen, which is reported in that article as if it is further proof of the corrupting influence of the game. That's not the fault of the game. It's a desirable object. Tragically, people get mugged for their desirable objects all the time. Should we ban iPods and mobile phones? No matter how often bad journalists try to link gaming with crime, it just won't wash. I expect to read more of this nonsense over the next few months.

ETA again: According to Florida attorney Jack Thompson, "Grand Theft Auto IV is the gravest assault upon children in this country since polio." He also says, "indictments should be handed down against Wal-Mart, Best Buy, GameStop, and all other retailers distributing this game to minors at their retail stores, openly, to kids who are only seventeen." Of course. They would be breaking the law, after all. However, he also says, "indictment should also be against Sony and Microsoft which are making this pornographic game available to minors, and openly so, on their PS3 and Xbox systems." What, just for making the game and making machines to play the game on? This argument only works if you assume games consoles are exclusively used by kids who are not legally being sold the game. Gamers are not just kids, you cretin. Now go find something important to rail against instead of playing to the worst instincts of the voter. Oh God, I'm getting this annoyed about it all and I don't even like the GTA games. I realise that they're great, but I've never spent enough time with them to get as obsessed as millions of other people have. I need to move on before I really do burst into flame.