Malcolm Tucker

from "The Thick Of It".

Writing for the BBC

Three weeks ago my Comedy Sketch-Writing Partner submitted several of our collaborative efforts to a well-known BBC sketch show -- and the producer liked some of them enough to ask us to rewrite them. So we have a deadline, suddenly, and it's tomorrow.

I think what happens next is that if the producer likes the rewrites, our sketches get performed by the cast in front of an audience; then I guess they're either discarded completely (if nobody laughs), or we rewrite them again to make the less funny bits funnier, or they just go forward as they are to be included in the shooting script.

It's all very exciting, and at some point in the far distant future some money might even change hands.

I picked up a pencil

and drew Dexter's sister.

Plus: fairly good feedback from a producer I can't name regarding some writing for a show I don't want to mention in case nothing comes of it.

Inspiring reminder from John August

"You wouldn’t splash gasoline on the walls of your home, then toss a few matches while strolling out the door. In real life, this kind of willful destruction is criminal.

In fiction, it’s crucial."

The whole piece is on his blog.

White men are like angels or something?

This video I did about the BNP continues to attract comments from angry racists. In the latest, a young lady calling herself onewhitefemale copy-pasted this:

"In the United States in 2005, 37,460 white females were sexually assaulted or raped by a black man, while between zero and ten black females were sexually assaulted or raped by a white man. What this means is that every day in the United States, over one hundred white women are raped or sexually assaulted by a black man."

Something about the figures made me think that, just maybe, this analysis of the state of interracial rape in the US in 2005 was flawed. Maybe it was the disparity between the numbers. Was it really possible that white men raped fewer than ten black women in a whole year - the same year in which black men were on some kind of rape rampage?

Onewhitefemale, this blog post is for you, and its message is this: Google.

The quote you pasted comes from a 2007 article from FrontPage magazine written by a guy called Lawrence Auster; and the article was really just a repeat of something Auster had written on his blog a week or so earlier. To arrive at the figures mentioned, Auster analyses (in the broadest sense of the word*) a table from a Department Of Justice document called Criminal Victimization in the US 2005.

Trouble is, the figures don't mean what Auster thinks they mean. And four days after FrontPage published his article, he admitted as much on his own blog.

He doesn't come out and say he was wrong, exactly. He titles the second piece "New Perspectives On The DOJ Figures", and includes several emails he received from people who actually read the Department Of Justice reports in detail. You ought to go and read the whole thing -- but in case for some reason you can't be bothered, here are some highlights (in bold text because that's how you like them):

The DOJ figures are not reported rapes. The page you link to is a random survey, not a record of police reports. That's why it is called the "National Crime Victimization Survey.

and

The footnote "Estimate is based on about 10 or fewer sample cases" does NOT mean that there were 10 or fewer victims nationwide. It means there were 10 or fewer in the survey sample.

and

According to the glossary on page 143 "Sexual assaults may or may not involve force and include such things as grabbing or fondling. Sexual assault also includes verbal threats." Therefore the number of actual rapes is less then the numbers in Table 42.

As far as I can tell, FrontPage magazine never published a retraction of the original article, and the quote at the top of this page can now be found all over the web on various white supremacist and far right blogs and message boards. Just sitting there, all bold, waiting to be copied and pasted by people like you, onewhitefemale.

Perhaps you could tell your racist mates it's time to stop using that quote now.

Hey, did you read this far?

Hello?


*If we agree that "analyse" can sometimes mean "glance at with a total lack of comprehension".

How the BNP is dealing with their new membership policy

The British National Party has agreed to accept non-white members rather than be deemed illegal under a revised Race Relations Act.

This is part of a speech made to the party faithful by Arthur Kemp, BNP Foreign Affairs spokesman (and author of March of the Titans: a history of the White Race):

“There are those who will say that the party will now be ‘flooded with ethnics’ and taken over. This will not happen for two reasons. Firstly, if the enemy was going to do something like that, they would have done it ages ago with white members. That never happened and there is no reason to think it will happen with ethnics. Secondly, even if this unlikely scenario ever happens, we will just all leave and start a new party. People vote for the principles of the party, and not the name. We will do that again and again and even if we end up with something called the Ying Tong Tiddle I Po party, we will still be here."

Not that they're a bunch of paranoid racist dickheads or anything.

Actually, I shouldn't call them "racist" - they don't like that term because they think it was invented by the Jews. Perhaps "racially obsessed" would be an acceptable alternative.

But damn, I would really like to see them become the "Ying Tong Tiddle I Po Party".

Jeffrey Archer's prison nightmare

While on holiday, I picked up a second-hand copy of Jeffrey Archer's prison diary. The first volume, in which he describes the twenty two days he spent in Belmarsh.

He called the book "Hell", so I was expecting it to be a bit like the horrific American TV prison drama "Oz" -- but hell for Lord Archer turns out to be bad food and having to shave in lukewarm water. There's one moment when he implies that some young men swear at him in the exercise yard, but that's it for the violence and aggression you'd imagine would be a staple of prison life. Most of the other inmates go out of their way to politely provide him with interesting anecdotes, which he duly types up for profit.

But I was interested in his writing regime. When writing a novel, he says, Archer gets up at five thirty AM and writes for six hours a day, in two hour chunks with two hour breaks in between. He does this for fifty days, at the end of which he has a first draft. He then works for another year until he's written sixteen drafts, at which point he turns it over to his publisher.

Blogger Stan Cattimore at Bete du Jour actually read a whole Archer novel - one that had, presumably, gone through the sixteen draft process and then been edited before finally hitting the shelves - and very helpfully uploaded a few paragraphs to his blog.

This is the kind of prose the best-selling perjurer produces:

There are more excerpts in Stan's post at the link above, which is well worth your time (as is his whole blog). And the interesting thing is that AT NO POINT during his long writing process did Archer read any of those paragraphs back and think "God, that's diabolical. Maybe I should reword it..."

Literary ability aside, I have to admire Archer's self discipline in putting in the hours. And I bet he doesn't waste time writing blog posts sneering at people more successful than he is.