Martha and Me

Right: DIY Queen and Chia-Bot - Photo by Jill Greenberg for Wired

A few days ago Martha Stewart, American media icon, was denied entrance into the U.K. This – according to a lawyer unaffiliated with Martha who commented on the case – was “bonkers.” As this worthy observed, and as I can personally attest from my last two experiences being allowed to land in England, it’s all down to the individual who looks at your passport. I looked suspicious enough to be detained for six hours in 2007, and unsuspicious enough to be passed through in 30 seconds in 2008. The legal expert commenting on the case confirmed my own suspicions: it’s all down to the luck of the draw.

What Martha needed was the luck to draw the same passport control officer who allowed convicted rapist Mike Tyson to visit the U.K. after he served his sentence. The U.K. is officially opposed to "the entry to the UK of anyone convicted of "serious criminal offences abroad," but apparently that offense didn't qualify to keep the champ out of England.

It would be one thing if lying to a government prosecutor was a crime held to be more heinous than rape on either continent, but as the lawyer chappie remarked in his comments, the crime that was worth a whopping five months in a federal lockup in the States (which Martha did while knitting sweaters for all her fellow inmates) is in any case not a criminal offense here.

So there would appear to be no clear guidelines for deciding who constitutes a threat to the public welfare, which is presumed to be the guiding principle in either allowing an alien to land or putting them on the next plane back to their airport of origin. A conviction for rape can be overlooked, but one for lying – not perjury, I’d like to point out, but lying in the course of an investigation into insider trading – may not, depending on who’s doing the looking.

In my own case, not appearing to have a satisfactory (to someone) reason for coming to London to live for six months may have aroused enough suspicion for detention. But we might want to consider that the answers that marked me a possible threat to public welfare in 2007 were never uttered in 2008 because those questions were not asked. The questions that were asked were the same initial questions as in 2007, roughly: “Where are you going?” “London” “How long will you be here?” “Six months.” and “Do you have family here?” “No.” And while last year those answers resulted in six hours confinement at Her Majesty’s pleasure while getting photographed, fingerprinted, searched, and multiply interviewed, this year they resulted in Stamp, stamp, “Next!” A perverse part of me wanted to ask why I wasn’t a threat this time, but I clapped my hand over its mouth and walked through the “Nothing to Declare” line into Terminal 4 with my jaw still hanging open just a bit. Finally I got my wits about me enough to manage a mental fist-pump and a silent “Yessssss!”

So Martha, though I may be of the opinion that you’re slightly pointless, you’re a highly-successful slightly-pointless multi-millionaire who emerged from a stint behind bars with your public reputation very little affected by what most Americans seemed to think of as a more than slightly-pointless prosecution and conviction. Publicly you maintained your sense of humor and your sense of self, and turned something that could have killed your career deader than Caesar into a sort of triumph, so I doubt you’re going to let a few of Her Majesty’s customs coppers take the shine off your life; heck, most of them can’t even knit a sweater.

The Last TV Post

Television – in any nation – is not exactly the most fascinating subject, but it is a certain reflection of its culture, and in case you’ve conceived from my previous post that British TV is all about painfully-polite, tea-sipping Brits making their Yank cousins look like a bunch of Bud-swilling barbarians, I’d like to put the entire subject to bed – so to speak – with this post.

Lots of Americans (many of whom actually are Bud-swilling barbarians) think of the British as prudes, but after having been exposed to a limited amount of British evening TV as a substitute for having friends, I’ve come to suspect this is a classic case of projection. I’ve seen things at 10 pm on the BBC that I’d never have been exposed to on the roughly analogous U.S. broadcast networks at any hour, and what I have not observed are vociferous bands of picketers protesting it. In the States we have decency groups counting how many times SpongeBob holds hands with his friend Patrick, or whether Tinky-Winky should be seen by three-year-olds.

Even confining my informal survey to the past few weeks I can recall a documentary on men who have sex with their cars – and other people’s when they can get away with it – and one on women who have sex with fences, bridges, the Empire State Building and the Eiffel Tower, to name only a few willing partners. Sheer educational value notwithstanding, in the States this would have been strictly late-night cable, and one reason for that is the FCC.

As I understand it, the Federal Communications Commission was established 80 years ago or so to determine who would be licensed to broadcast along a limited spectrum of AM radio waves. Over the years, the commission became the Decency Police of American broadcasting, holding its powers over the heads of announcers who might utter words which shouldn’t be heard by decent Americans. Except, perhaps, at home or in the schoolyard. Broadcast is a slowly-cooling dinosaur in American entertainment, and the FCC is starting to draw flies, though they’re also drawing federally-funded salaries. But they’re not the disease; they’re more like the symptom. The Brits got rid of their Puritans, who survived the crossing to become…us.

So you’ve really read this far to find out about men who shag their cars, haven’t you? I knew it. The BBC documentary focused on two American men, a young man from the Midwest whom you wouldn’t be able to tell from your cousin Fred, and a middle-aged man from – ready for this, folks in Seattle? – Yelm, Washington. The younger man has friends and a life and other interests, but the bloke from Yelm seems pretty much content to stay home and pork his classic VW. He’d be only a little out of place at a science fiction convention, or perhaps less. Despite his rather hazy notion of what other people are like (can doctors transplant mirror neurons yet?) I’m pretty certain he’d never have allowed an American documentary crew to tape him rhapsodizing about the exhaust pipes of cars on the highway, or drooling (and worse) all over a Trans-Am in a motel parking lot. Yelm is a small town.

The following week’s doco explored women who can only respond sexually to objects. No, not those objects, but things the rest of us might consider rather impersonal, asexual, and even public, like the Eiffel Tower. One of the women the show followed had married La Tour Eiffel in a private ceremony, but they’d been unable to consummate their love due to all the bloody tourists. Fortunately she has a liberal attitude towards these things, and has been busily shagging bridges and fences in the meantime. She had a mad affair with her bow, but it cooled, and so did her archery career.

It occurred to me that what might be operating in all cases – NEWS FLASH! – was an inability to relate to other human beings. Most of the people profiled were technically virgins and had no interest in sex as we (well, as I…) know it. One of them had been diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome, and the rest had not, but almost all seemed to me to be out on that end of the neurological spectrum. None knew there were others like them until they went looking on the Internet. Now they’re starting to link up, and even to share lovers.

“Ten P.M. is the watershed hour,” a gentleman told us when a visiting American friend commented on the adult content on the BBC, which is, for any Yank barbarians who don’t know, a government-controlled-and-funded entity. “It’s assumed children will be in bed after that.” Well, if they’re not, they’re getting an education I was denied in my FCC-controlled childhood in the Puritan States of America. And if they happen to like boinking cars and bridges, they now know how to google up some friends.

COPS in Essex

Right: Fridays, 8 p.m. GMT

So there's this show on BBC 5 called Police Interceptors. Among the terrestrial channels BBC 5 is the one that runs American crime dramas like CSI, NCIS, and Law & Order, but this is a homegrown show about a homegrown high-speed police interception units. To be fair, I've only seen part of one episode, but I've gotta say it seemed rather typically British to me that it concluded with the Essex interceptor unit pulling over a young woman who was driving without insurance. In addition to an automatic six points on her license, they impounded her car. The excitement was very nearly unbearable.

Now I know the Essex interceptor unit regularly bag drug dealers and other major criminal types, but the fact that they chose to focus on the plight of an ‘Essex girl’ – over here Essex girl jokes occupy same evolutionary niche as ‘blonde’ jokes in the States – illustrates a major difference between U.S. and British shows that deal with crime. In Yank crime drama a suspect who protests his innocence nearly always turns out to be guilty after the cops leave the interview and talk about what a liar they think he is, and then go out and prove it. British TV cops are far more likely to argue that the suspect seems genuine, so they’d better go out and find the real perp, and far more often that turns out to be the case. In general – and admittedly based on an incomplete knowledge of the shows involved – American TV cops seem to me to focus more on the dark side of human nature than their British counterparts.

Robert Anton Wilson once asked: “If all T.V. shows about the police went off the air, and instead we had an equal number of T.V. shows about landlords, how would this change the average American reality-tunnel?”

Of course British TV’s already done landlords, from Basil Fawlty to Peggy Mitchell of EastEnders. They’re okay with that. And the majority of the crime drama on offer seems to be imported from the States: those same endless series with either strings of initials or Ice T, where the majority of civilians turn out to be perpetrators of one kind or another. It's difficult for me to imagine shows like this coming out of the U.K.

One would hope not too much of that attitude will rub off on our British friends, but then the Brits have already embraced Starbucks and Kentucky Fried Chicken, so there may be no hope for them at this point.