It’s well worth clicking the author’s name and going through his previous work;
On Gordon Ramsay’s new and incomprehensible quiz show:
Most quizshows originate as inexplicable stress dreams. Recently, a television executive dreamed he had to balance bars of gold on a confusing roundabout/seesaw thing while the celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay watched. He was terrified.
If the television executive had had his soothsayer to hand, they would have explained that this was a prophetic dream warning about precarity of labour under late capitalism. Sadly, the soothsayer was exhausted because of a zero-hours contract and wasn’t around. So the television executive made a quizshow.
What a show. Gordon Ramsay’s Bank Balance (Wednesday to Friday, BBC One) has the perfect name, in that it explains both the concept of the programme and the motivation for the host’s involvement. Ramsay, as you know, now hosts 50 per cent of all programmes on television, and by 2030 he hopes to host them all. Peak Ramsay will coincide with peak oil.
On the new Netflix show Tribes of Europa:
Mulleted older sibling Kiano is taken in a trudging convoy to Berlin. If he’s thinking “Einfach klasse! I’m going to live in a rent-controlled apartment while DJing three nights a week for an experimental hardcore krunk club!” then he’s in for a shock. Because before he can say “I’m moving to Kreuzberg to work on my video art and taxidermy!” the head Crow castrates, then murders, his uncle. Awkward!
The backdrop of Tribes of Europa is that technology has failed, the EU has been dissolved and the whole continent has collapsed into anarchy, factionalism and violence. Or possibly, dropping the liberal Irish Times act for a moment, it has collapsed into a paradise of free-trading autonomous nations. Take the Crows: by deregulating their labour laws their workers have become far more productive, their entrepreneurs have flourished and their debauched decadent techno clubs are booming (if a bit sticky).
And if you counter that their factories produce terrifying narcotics, that the workers are sick and dying slaves, and that their techno music is crap, let me suggest to you that this is Project Fear talking and that you just hate freedom.
Speaking of which, Kiano’s crossbow-wielding sister, Liv, joins up with the Crimson Republic, a militarised remnant of the European Union who are trying to bring order back to Europa at the barrel of a gun. Classic EU. Liv helps them capture a Crow and then tries to convince that Crow to take her to Berlin, where, with luck, they’ll end up working on a feminist zine together before doing some stencil graffiti then hitting the techno clubs. (Sadly, the techno clubs of the future feature slaves fighting to the death and S&M goths writhing so sexily I fear they have worms.)