More Ranting About Liars

You know television? That magic stream of colourful shiny joy that burbles away happily in the corner of your living room? It's good isn't it? With all its stories, and cool images, and places and people we would never otherwise see?

Well, no, shut your mouth, actually, because you're wrong. It's not wonderful, apparently. It's a horribly, naughty invention and what's worse it's a big fat liar. Don't believe me? Well it must be so, because it says so in newspapers, actually. Reliable, trustworthy, definitely-never-told-a-lie newpapers. They don't like television's propensity for making things up, and by God they're going to say so.


That's right. In the middle of the biggest series of revelations about press journalism ever, where every day unearths fresh evils committed in the name of the printed word, the papers themselves are going nuts; casting around like trapped, naughty school kids, shouting, as loudly as they can "Look at what he's doing miss!" Their problem this week is the BBC series Frozen Earth. Apparently this programme , which explores the wonders of the natural world with passion, techical brilliance and a keen intelligence, contains sequences which are not 100% raw, unedited chunks of blistering reality.

The sequence in question contains some polar bears nursing their newborn cubs. The programme integrated footage of the bears' natural habitat - the snowy wastes of the Arctic - with specially shot scenes of the bears themselves in what was essentially a studio set made up to look like a cave. Various papers, The Mirror, The Telegraph and - sigh - The Mail included, were incensed by this terrible, shameful lie. How could the BBC deceive us like this? The bastards! Don't we deserve integrity from this organisation? Isn't this just another example of the LIES told us by nasty, stupid television? Do bears even exist? How can we possibly be sure about anything ever again?

For. Fuck's. Sake.

Where to start unpicking this self satisfied, hysterical bullshit. Ok, here's my favourite bit.

Do you know how the papers discovered this horrible lie? How they saw through the lies and deception and valiantly unearthed the truth?

It was on the BBC's website.

As part of the behind the scenes information on the programme.

The BBC told you it was fabricated, you dicks. What you are doing isn't journalism. It's a sort of extra thick plagiarism, where you use information you have stolen to attack the person you stole it from. It's like when that dick Richard - an ex-tenant of mine -  stole a chequebook from one of my friends and used the cheques to pay me his rent. Incomprehensibly stupid!

Also. Documentaries aren't pure, unvarnished actuality. Ever. How could they possibly be? They are shaped, selective, edited fragments of life, presented in narrative form for our pleasure and education. Attacking them for being 'constructed' is like attacking a shelf for not being a tree. More than that, it is to utterly misunderstand the nature of 'truth'.

Telling the truth isn't just representing literally what happens. That's a kind of truth, I suppose, but a fairly weak one. That's the kind of truth that lies in the gutter, sticks its camera up a woman's skirt and shouts 'Wow! I can see knickers!' Yes, that's what happened. But it isn't telling us anything about women, or pants, or the propensity of women to show us their pants. It might be saying something about how you're a pathetic paparazzi with no sense of how to behave as a human being, but that's probably not what you meant, is it?

Truth can - indeed should - be something better, and deeper. The truth of a Polar bear mothering its young is a thing in itself. It happens. It's not like Attenborough mocked up a scene where the mother bear engaged in violent, explosive battle with Pinhead from Hellraiser, firing lasers from her eyes and shouting "I invented the kettle!" He simply found a way of showing us something real, and true, but which we have little chance of actually seeing in its natural environment.

And that's all we can ever do - partially represent truth through imperfect means. I'm pretty sure Attenborough's mock up of the mother bear/cubs scene is close to the truth, and surely better than watching the results of an attempt to film the real thing, which would probably look like:

a) a blurry white thing near some smaller white blobs in a blizzard of white stuff.

b) nothing happening at all, for hours

c) a sound recordist being eaten by an enraged bear.

Finally, 'the press'. Where the hell do you get off wittering about truth and lies? A vast proportion of your entire business is founded upon making shit up and hoping no-one notices. Literally, completely inventing things that never happened, and saying they did. And not so you could tell us something about the wider world we live in, but rather so you could make the world smaller, playing on people's instincts to bully, villify and sneer util our minds are so shrunk that we don't know how else to think. And then when you get caught out, you print the tiniest retraction, hidden away in the depths of the paper, saying 'Sorry - we just thought it would be funny to tell complete lies about someone.' You horrible, shallow, hypocritical dickheads.

Dear BBC. Please do not apologise for this. In fact just stop apologising. Next time some bleaty, whiny tabloid starts jumping up and down, pointing and you and squealing like a demented pig, just do this. Pause what you're doing, glance unhurriedly in its direction and say, with the utmost contempt, "Your opinion... is worthless." And get back to what you were doing. Which was probably something worthwhile, beautiful and good.

Also, I'd quite like another series of the Fades please. That was good. Make more of that.