What Kind Of Week Has It Been? 27 April 2013

Biting The Chelsea Defender Of News

It seemed for a while there that Mondays had struck up some kind of deal with the rolling news stations. A few weeks ago Margaret Thatcher died, forcing 24 hour news to get out their Latin incantation book and summon forth the Tory's eminences grises for interview after bloody interview. Hell, even David Mellor was asked.

But just when they started to wonder what news event they could pore over obsessively next, seven days later along came the Boston Marathon. 24 Hour Grand Guignol was all of a sudden back at it's wildly speculative , foaming-at-the-mouth best. Social media wasn't much better, with gruesome pictures and quite right (but often much too self-righteous) compare and contrasts of the loss of life in Boston as compared to those in Iraq, Syria or anywhere else that doesn't speak English basically from the minute the bombs detonated. After that, it became a veritable jamboree for the news stations: Late night raids!Manhunts! Chechnya!

Of course the whole Chechnya thing, with its high prominence in the 1990's followed by relative quiet since making it the Gabrielle of geopolitics, has been quite a confusing factor. Distressingly so.

To happier news half way round the world now and New Zealand has again marked itself as being world pioneers (first country to give women the vote, first country to have three women in the top three jobs in the land all at once, first country to make hilarious ads involving pick up trucks and animals cursing) by being the first to legalise same sex marriage in the Asia-Pacific region, with song breaking out and MP Maurice Williamson winning the internet with his funny, touching speech. Back in the UK another internet darling MP has tripped up quite dramatically, which wouldn't suggest a career in the service industry. But, Chris Bryant, being British, apparently wouldn't get a job in that field anyway.

Making casually daft comments about them immagints is much more the purview of UKIP, although this week Nigel Farage has confessed to supporting continental business. Namely, going to a strip bar with a French Presidential candidate, that he stressed "wasn't Sarko". He also admitted he may have gone the odd time back in his City Boy days.Which is almost hard to believe.

But if you need to vigorously scrub the image of Farage in a nightclub, that other lapdance aficionado Pharrell Williams has just the ticket. He's collaborated with Daft Punk, the best French machinery since those lovely Citroen Xsaras and dreadlocked music boss Nile Rodgers, who has made basically every song worth listening to in the last 35 years. The result, Get Lucky, is surely destined to be the most played song of the year everywhere. Including, come to think of it, Franch lapdancing clubs. Oops.

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