January 2007
WUNDERKAMMERN

Friday 26th January 2007
E4 Skins

If you've had your head in the sand for the past three months, you may not have heard of the E4 show Skins that premiered last night. Made by the makers of Shameless and featuring About a Boy’s Nicholas Hoult, the programme itself is obviously geared towards youngsters, and perhaps designed to shock us elders that teenagers actually drink, go to parties, take drugs, go about leading a hedonistic lifestyle, and have a tendency to be rude to their parents. Well I never.

Although reasonably fun to watch, the plot was fantastical, the acting at times wooden, and the dialogue was pure Nathan Barley. Keep it chopped out man, yeah. Safe.

What is interesting however, is the way E4 approached the marketing of the series. Alongside the customary cast interviews in teen mags, massive TV campaign consisting of idents and bumpers every time you turn on the tv and heavyweight press and poster advertising, E4 even shifted their youth favourite Big Brother's Big Mouth to a later schedule time to lure the adolescents over to E4 after daily dose of Celebrity Big Brother.

Even more interesting is the fact that E4 had used online communities to build up an eager following before the programme was even broadcast. And because of today's plethora of audience specific communities, their campaign has arguably been able to target more effectively than earlier online tease campaigns such as those carried out for Steven Spielberg's AI and ABC's Lost.

The series has its own E4 web page with video profiles of each character allowing visitors to get to know the characters before the series came on air, as well as unseen footage, an email newsletter and 'free stuff'. E4 has also encouraged interaction by getting site visitors to redesign the Skins logo, style the characters for a shoot in a leading teen Magazine, compose music to accompany the programme, and create a short film about one of the characters. Apparently they're also considering allowing viewers to vote for storylines in upcoming episodes.

The series also has a MySpace page, and E4 has gone a step further by giving the characters their own MySpace pages (Tony, the main character boasts 2218 friends and Sid's character has received messages from girls in the US reassuring him that it's ok to be a virgin...) E4 has even put together a page on flickr hosting the character's 'party photos' - all designed, no doubt, to get teen girls up and down the country cooing over pictures of the cast accompanying their manufactured identities well in advance of transmission.

To maintain interest in the series, fingers crossed for an E4 press campaign stirring up the issue as to whether the series is encouraging UK youth to take even more drugs than they already do. Tune in for some chalk choppin, dollsnatch. It's gonna be total fucking Mexico.

Tuesday 23rd January 2007
THE WEEKS NEWS IN VERSE

Jade Goody, Jade Goody
You best wear a hoodie
To cover your hideous shame
Your apology’s fake
You’re still on the make
You’re everything sick about fame.

Jade, Jade the horror you've made
You common racist bigot
You shame us all
And deserve to fall
No matter how they rig it.

Danielle, Danielle
What is it we smell?
The stench of a racist coot
You’re a brainless tart
Who has no heart
And modeling jobs to boot.

Jo O'Meara, Jo O'Meara
Sniggerer, sycophant, sneerer
You hid behind Jade
With her racist tirade
You're despicable
That couldn't be clearer.

Shilpa Shetty, Shilpa Shetty
Cold ham and spaghetti
You are the new queen of hearts
You've seen off Jade
The racist comments she made
Now it's just the other two tarts.

Jodie Marsh, Jodie Marsh
No words are too harsh
To express a nation’s loathing
The first whiff of cash
And you’re flashing your gash
You can’t wait to whip off your clothing.

Saddam, Saddam
Cold Chicken and ham
Ooo you are a shocker
If I were a kurd
You’d call me a turd
And knobble me with your chopper.

Although the Soviet government claims that only 31 people died as a result, the aftermath of the event saw 485 villages lost and around 2.1 million people living on contaminated land. The accident contaminated as much as three quarters of Europe and thousands of children have been born with catastrophic birth defects since. Countless others suffer ongoing health problems resulting from radiation exposure.

Alexievich's book collects testimony, accounts, and the occasional rant from a broad range of those affected by Chernobyl, from the wives of the first men sent to the burning reactor to those brought in to work there over the following months, from those who lived in the surrounding villages to a variety of scientists and officials. She presents her interviews in the form of a series of monologues, giving a view inside the minds of those affected, untempered by government rhetoric.

The very first monologue in the book sets the tone for much of what follows. The speaker is Lyudmilla, widow of one of the Chernobyl workers:

“The last two days in the hospital - I'd lift his arm and meanwhile the bone is shaking, just sort of dangling, the body has gone away from it.
“Pieces of his lungs, of his liver, were coming out of his mouth.
“He was choking on his internal organs. I'd wrap my hand in a bandage and put it in his mouth, take out all that stuff.
“It's impossible to talk about. It's impossible to write about. And even to live through.
“It was all mine. My love. They couldn't get a single pair of shoes to fit him. They buried him barefoot.”

I think it's a combination of the variety and striking immediacy of the first hand testimonies that sets the book apart from your average historical narrative.

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