Thinking About It Only Makes It Worse (32 page)

The media are pretty tough on the Met Office. It isn’t helped by its association with the BBC. The thought of being able, even tangentially, to blame bad weather on the BBC is enough to make some tabloid editors have an erotic accident. When it rains
in August, but the Met Office has said there was a 70% chance it would be a dry month, or we have an icy February when it’s said a mild winter is more likely than not, the press denounces it as incompetent with the vehemence of a boy who has rolled a one in Snakes & Ladders and is screaming at his mother: “YOU told me it probably WOULDN’T be a one!”

Newspapers seem to imply that they don’t think the Met Office is trying its best to work out what the weather’s going to be like; that this organisation, established and funded with the sole aim of working out what the weather’s going to be like, might have let working out what the weather’s going to be like slip down its “Things to Do” list, below such items as “Have huge boozy lunch at taxpayers’ expense”; “Book summer holiday a long way from Britain (where it’s going to piss down despite our assurances to the contrary)”; and “Meet BBC execs in champagne bar for lots of cocaine and a giggle at some child porn.”

Contrastingly, I’m convinced that weather forecasters are genuinely trying their hardest to forecast the weather but quite often get it wrong for the simple reason that it’s impossible to know for sure. Letting that fact slip from the public’s consciousness is where they’re at fault. I think they should start every bulletin with it: “Good evening. Please remember that it is impossible to know for sure what the weather’s going to be like. Nevertheless …”

Maybe they thought that, like the rules of
Countdown
, it went without saying these days. They decided they could save time by dispensing with all the coulds and mays. It was a mistake and their George Lucas-like enthusiasm for snazzy computer graphics has made the situation worse.

When I was a child, TV forecasters stood in front of solid, non-virtual maps on to which they stuck little symbols denoting the type of weather they considered most likely to occur in that region. But at one point in the bulletin, they’d cut away
from the man and his maps to “the satellite picture”. This was a grainy photograph of the UK and its environs, taken from space, showing the cloud cover at a particular time. This was fact. The stickers were speculation but the satellite picture showed weather that had definitely happened.

The snazzy graphics have destroyed this demarcation. Satellite-style footage of what the weather has definitively been like slides seamlessly into projections of what the forecasters reckon it’s going to be like. Well, a seam is needed – or a lighting change or a klaxon – something to herald the point at which we enter the realm of educated guessing.

Instead, they present what they think will probably happen as fact and do little to differentiate forecasts where they estimate the likelihood of the predicted events coming true at 90% from those where it’s much lower.

Forecast and reality look the same; and this comes straight after the news, in which viewers rightly expect the distinction between truth and speculation to be rigorously drawn. It’s no wonder that we sometimes feel, when weather forecasts turn out to be inaccurate, that we’ve been lied to.

Forecasters would do well to adopt Peter Snow’s phrase about election night swingometer extrapolations: “Remember, this is just a bit of fun.” No one ever watched that and thought it was the result. Not in Britain anyway; after the US election of 2000, Fox News’s bit of prediction fun got horribly out of hand. That organisation had the influence to make its forecast come true. Sadly, the same cannot be said for Michael Fish.

On Valentine’s Day, as usual, I received several heartfelt anonymous messages. “You’re not funny, you cock,” “Why are
you such a smug shit?”, “Just seen you on a repeat of
Mock the Week
, I wish you would die.” That sort of thing.

But then I get that every day – all comedians do (apart from the funny non-smug ones who are already dead). In fact, everybody does; that’s one of the joys of the internet age. On 14 February everyone used to look forward to the possibility that someone would share their passionate feelings incognito, and now it happens all the time. As soon as you have a Facebook wall, a Twitter feed or simply a name that someone can type, Anonymous Missives Inc is open for business. And it’s not only people who are the targets of strangers’ ardour – restaurants, bars, hotels, books, movies and DVDs are all the objects of feelings so strong that those holding them are embarrassed to reveal their identity.

I’m sure embarrassment is what it is. Like love, hate is something that makes us go red in the face. It’s safer expressed covertly lest it be rejected. If the local cafe knew it was
you
who found the service unfriendly or the muffins overpriced, it would make you feel vulnerable. This way, you get to call the manageress a wart-faced crone without it getting personal. Anonymity, like a secret ballot, is a guarantee of sincerity.

There was certainly nothing insincere about the 30 negative reviews of The Good Life restaurant in Shrewsbury that were posted online in autumn 2011. They came from the heart. In fact, they came from the same heart: all 30 were written, under different names, by Ms Helen Griffiths, a marketing manager from Salford. But she wasn’t managing the marketing for The Good Life – this wasn’t an elaborate exercise in reverse psychology. Ostensible offence at “cold and unattentive” staff and “hairs in my quiche” hid Ms Griffiths’s real dislike: the vegetarian restaurant’s owner, Joanna Langfield. Griffiths was angrier than even tofu can make you, because Langfield is the ex-partner of Griffiths’s husband and, last August, became involved in some legal dispute with him.

The online review dispute, in contrast, was deemed illegal. Ms Griffiths, after being given a police caution for harassment, had to publish an apology for the aspersions she’d cast, carefully picking them out of the house hummus and admitting that she’d “never actually visited or eaten at the restaurant”. This was the end of a long battle for Joanna Langfield to restore The Good Life’s good name in the face of a hate barrage that had caused a 25% slump in the restaurant’s profits.

One can readily see Langfield’s problem. When a restaurant owner approaches a website to ask for some negative reviews to be removed, saying they’re biased, the claim is going to be viewed with scepticism – in the unlikely event that the website has any staff to view it at all. Online reviews, either anonymous or with no verifiable name, customarily go up unchallenged. We assume that the wisdom of crowds will ensure that a fair impression is given overall – that the uncensored self-expression of hundreds of millions will tend towards the truth. Half the time it just regresses to the mean.

And the rest of the time it goes the other way: overeffusive, hysterical praise. So often you’ll read a review that couldn’t be bettered if the hotelier, restaurateur, musician, bar owner or author had written it themselves. In the notorious case of the description on Amazon of Orlando Figes’s
The Whisperers – Private Life in Stalin’s Russia
as “Beautifully written … leaves the reader awed, humbled yet uplifted … a gift to us all,” it’s because he had. But he was even-handed enough to cast his eye over rival works of Russian history, anonymously describing
Molotov’s Magic Lantern
by Rachel Polonsky as “the sort of book that makes you wonder why it was ever published” and Robert Service’s history of communism as “an awful book”; and, while sucking on the sourest grapes of all, to write of Kate Summerscale’s
The Suspicions of Mr Whicher
, which beat
The Whisperers
to the Samuel Johnson Prize: “Oh dear, what on
earth were the judges thinking when they gave this book the Samuel Johnson Prize?”

Figes was unmasked in 2010 and apologised unreservedly for having been caught. But let’s imagine for a moment that Figes isn’t just a foolish man whose sense of proportion and decency got lost in a research trip to the interminable steppe and give him the benefit of that imagined doubt: perhaps he was trying to teach the internet a valuable historiographical lesson about the limited value of unattributed sources. If you don’t know who’s written something, you can’t know why it was written and so you can’t trust it. It might genuinely be a fan of Russian history rightly panning some sloppy research, or a quiche expert correctly informing potential customers that, if there’s human hair in it, it isn’t vegetarian any more. But, if so, why won’t they give their names? If they remain anonymous, there’s a decent chance it’s an envious historian or the wife of the owner’s ex.

When you read a bit of graffiti that says something like “Blair is a liar”, you don’t take it as fact. You may, independently, have concluded that it is fact. But you don’t think that the graffiti has provided that information. It is merely evidence that someone, when in possession of a spray can, wished to assert their belief in the millionaire former premier’s mendacity. It is unsubstantiated, anonymous opinion. We understand that instinctively. We need to start routinely applying those instincts to the web.

Some argue that anonymous online commenting should be restricted, that websites shouldn’t allow it – they should make you put your name to your words. But that would lead to annoying cries of “Censorship!” and would inhibit the web traffic by which news agencies hope to increase their imperceptible online advertising revenues to a noticeable pittance.

Instead, we should merely heed Figes’s warning. If you read a review, an opinion, a description or a fact and you don’t know who wrote it, then it’s no more reliable than if it were sprayed on
a railway bridge. We should always assume the worst so that all those who wish to convince – whether vegetarian gastronomes or lovelorn suitors – have an incentive to identify themselves.

In October 2012, it became horrifyingly clear that even superheroes can’t resist the advance of technology …

Those of us who worry about the old media have had a fraught week – and we’re used to stress. The last few days have been up there with those anxious months in the 1480s when the bottom fell out of illuminated manuscripts. They’ve seen the demise of Ceefax, probably the most recent of all the old media, a brand spanking new old medium, hardly conceived before it was careering towards obsolescence. Useful, if clunky – like a seatbelt, but it didn’t save lives – this valiant example of British innovation will be sadly missed and reminds us that not everything that came out of the BBC in the 1970s is tinged with rape.

Worse than that, the most powerful journalist in the world has quit. It has emerged that Clark Kent, aka Superman, is to leave his reporting job in the forthcoming issue of the comic. Initially I assumed he was protesting against all the nasty commenters on the
Daily Planet
website: the thousands calling him an arsehole without having paid for the paper, or complaining that he only got to save the world because of his posh upbringing on Krypton. But apparently not: as well as his other powers, Superman is super-thick-skinned and embraces the internet age. He’s off to work in new media and, according to Scott Lobdell, the writer of the series, is “likely to start the next Huffington Post”.

Presumably Kent originally chose to work in the print media in order to be at the beating heart of news, so he’d find out about impending world crises and sport before his fellow citizens and
would consequently be best placed to save their lives. But, as the under-resourced
Daily Planet
came increasingly to rely on stories cobbled together from Twitter, the giving out of free DVDs and endless pages of comment, Kent’s disillusionment must have grown. The last straw was a disagreement with proprietor Morgan Edge over his preference for celebrity gossip over hard news. Apparently they’d also just given some comedian a column.

Superman will be all right, of course. If his internet start-up founders, he could reboot his career on
Dancing with the Stars
. But, in an era of crumbling institutions, where will the fictional heroes they once sheltered end up? What hovels will they fashion for themselves in the entrepreneurial rubble?

The
Daily Planet
’s keen young photojournalist has long since noticed which way the technological wind is blowing and gone freelance. With his digital camera and close working relationship with Superman, he can sell pictures of world disasters to the highest bidder. “No sooner has Superman heard that there’s a bus about to fall off a suspension bridge than we’re there: Superman rescues the bus while I see if I can get up-the-skirt shots of the flustered passengers. People really lose their sense of modesty when they think they’re about to die. I can have the shots online before Mr S has repaired the bridge with his laser eyes.”

Disillusioned with the NHS, Watson has been searching out a better way to spend his time during Holmes’s frequent cocaine binges. “Medicine is a mug’s game,” is his diagnosis. “People resent what you earn and sue if you accidentally kill them. Worse than that, you’re constantly having to meet diseased people and deal with the insoluble problem of their mortality. Far better to earn my crust sympathising with affluent malingerers. After all,
alternative medicine does a hell of a lot of good for those who don’t happen to be ill. Also, in my Harley Street clinic, I get to meet the kind of rich person who’s likely to be involved in an interesting murder.”

In the latest reimagining of the tale of Mr Chipping, the noble and dogged public schoolmaster who inspired generations of schoolboys with his principles and erudition, Chips leaves Brookfield in disgust when the prime minister, an old Brookfieldian, slashes spending on libraries and the arts. “You can’t spend your life worrying about whether or not children know Latin,” he concludes. “You’ve got to follow your dream!” In this case, a gay dance reimagining of the
Satyricon
which he’s staging above a pub in Wandsworth.