Reviews - Owen Jones: The Establishment and Chavs

Owen Jones 
The Establishment And how they get away with it (4*)
Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class (4*)

The Establishment explains how the powerful are able to ignore the electorate and manipulate things for their own benefit. You'll never watch the news in the same way again. Essential for anyone pissed off with how the wealth is being fracked out of society leaving only the shafted bedrock behind. It leaves little hope so long as things continue as they are. (February 2016)

Chavs is Jones's earlier book. If you only suspect that successive governments have gravely failed to look after the ordinary population as they should, this will confirm it. As someone from an ordinary background who prospered despite a false career start, I doubt I would be able to do the same again now that things are so stacked against those without the advantages of wealth and class. Even truer for Alan Johnson, as reviewed previously. (September 2016)

Key to star ratings: 5*** wonderful and hope to read again, 5* wonderful, 4* enjoyed it a lot and would recommend, 3* enjoyable/interesting, 2* didn't enjoy, 1* gave up.

Previous book reviews 

Keith Richards' Lost Weekend

What a treat on BBC Four television this weekend when Keith Richards’ “pirate broadcast” took over the channel from dusk to dawn for three nights, replacing the usual schedule with his own selection from the past, such as Tony Hancock’s Twelve Angry Men, Captain Pugwash, and Hitchcock’s 1935 version of The Thirty Nine Steps, all billed as Keith Richards’ Lost Weekend. I didn’t stay up all night with Keef but the bits I did see were great. 

One particular clip had me in hysterics: Spike Milligan’s Raspberry Song from 1977. I’d never seen it before.* I squirmed in agony until my family decided it had to be switched off – “before he wets himself” was the phrase used.

They turned over to the other channel for Would I Lie To You in which two teams of metropolitan smart alecs compete to make viewers feel witty and sophisticated. Next to Milligan they are no different from any of those pompous, pedestrian panellists of the past, like Frank Muir, Robert Robertson and Robin Ray. Raspberries to them all.

* For the lyrics see http://lyricsplayground.com/alpha/songs/e/everythingisfreshtoday.shtml

Help ... my courgette looks like a duck!

It’s like something out of That’s Life – a 1973-1994 BBC Television magazine-style consumer affairs and entertainment programme presented by Esther Rantzen and a panel of male co-presenters. During its Sunday evening run in the mid nineteen-seventies it made for a relaxing and usually mindless end to the weekend. Among the serious and often worthwhile consumer rights campaigns, the show contained numerous items that were just plain silly: there were “Odd Odes”; stooges would burst into song in supermarkets; there was a dog that could growl the word “sausages”; and viewers would send in unusually shaped vegetables such as intertwined carrots, teddy-bear shaped potatoes and parsnips that looked like legs with male genitalia.

Well here Esther, around forty years too late, is my contribution – a courgette that looks like a duck. Pareidolia.

It was hiding in the vegetable patch. It must have twisted round to grow against its stalk. Concealed beneath the leaves at the back of the plant, it surreptitiously became this three and three-quarter pound (1700g) monster.