Okay, enough. The disappearance/abduction and death/murder of Nicola Bulley was unquestionably a tragic affair that saw a 45-year-old ordinary mother of two vanish when walking her dog beside a river in the Lancashire village she knew as home before her mortal remains were discovered in the same body of water just under a month later. Yes, you heard right – Nicola Bulley was ordinary. And I don’t use that word as a putdown or a sneering criticism; most people are ordinary, which is why extraordinary folk stand out; they’ve got plenty to be measured against. When David Bowie passed away in 2016, there was a global outpouring of emotion that reflected the impact this great artist had had upon the lives of millions of people he never met in person for the best part of half-a-century; it’s not unusual for the death of a pop cultural colossus to provoke such a reaction. In the last 100 years, we’ve seen it happen with everyone from Rudolph Valentino to Elvis Presley or from James Dean to John Lennon. The growth of the mass media during these characters’ lifetimes enabled their particular talents to touch individuals from all walks of life, way beyond their own inner circles; as consumers, we develop a uniquely intimate relationship with such figures and naturally mourn their loss as though they were personal friends.
Within hours of Bowie’s death, a mural appeared on a wall in his birthplace of Brixton, one that portrayed him in his iconic Aladdin Sane guise; to me, as a Bowie fan, this didn’t seem like some vicarious exercise on the part of the anonymous artist; I didn’t feel as though they were getting off on someone else’s grief, muscling in on the private mourning of family and friends like some voyeuristic vampire; it seemed to exemplify the fact that Bowie as an artist meant a hell of a lot to a hell of a lot of people and it was understandable that the more creative amongst them might seek to express that meaning through their art. Besides, there was the David Bowie his confidantes knew and there was the David Bowie the general public knew; the former were familiar with a man the rest of us weren’t; we had Ziggy Stardust or Aladdin Sane or Major Tom or the Thin White Duke, and that’s who we were mourning, tied-up as those personas were with different stages of our own lives, as much a part of our collective growing-up as any genuine personal friends who constituted the cast of characters around us at the time. There’s a difference between marking the passing of an extraordinary person like David Bowie by painting a mural in his hometown and doing likewise by painting a mural of Nicola Bulley in hers.
Such a mural appeared last week in Essex, and one that it has to be said wasn’t exactly a flattering or especially accurate portrait of the deceased 45-year-old. To be honest, it was pretty awful going by the photograph at the head of this post. But, even taking poor artistry into consideration, one has to wonder what prompted that kind of misguided ‘tribute’. The artist himself had a tenuous connection to Bulley, having attended the same school as her and apparently being an acquaintance of her sister, though why he felt compelled to make such a public statement is perhaps a sign of our times. This swiftly-assembled makeshift shrine is destined to draw strangers to it like moths to the proverbial flame, armed with candles for a vigil evoking the spirit of other recent victims selected as posthumous media darlings such as Sarah Everard. Considering the vast numbers of people who must vanish without a trace every year – some of whom are not notably photogenic – it’s interesting how the media hones in on a small handful and decides which of them makes the final round of canonization, like a pseudo-Sugar/Cowell panel of judges on some grotesque reality show.
Unlike David Bowie, there was no public face of Nicola Bulley during her lifetime; she touched the lives of nobody beyond those she had met in person until she disappeared and her tellingly attractive features began to be plastered across every media platform, both mainstream and social. If we accept she was already dead by the time her face became public property in the manner of a billboard campaign for a chic perfume, the fact is Nicola Bulley had done nothing to warrant such excessive overexposure; she only became known to those outside of her small world when she was gone, which again emphasises that it is not Nicola Bulley the person who is being mourned by the general public, but the media creation who probably bears little resemblance to the actual human being who allegedly met her fate by the River Wyre. Nicola Bulley herself had no hand in her sudden transformation into the latest media craze, which makes it all the more sad that whoever she happened to be has been permanently buried beneath the bullshit. Those who actually knew the person rather than the hurriedly-manufactured new pin-up girl for the cult of victimhood are currently in mourning in the same way thousands are in mourning every day for the loss of loved ones, yet the family and friends of Nicola Bulley have to contend with the intrusion of not only the MSM and their notorious lack of sensitivity, but online ghouls who have claimed a woman they never met as yet another post-Diana instant saint.
Facebook and Twitter exchanges between those who wasted little time in elevating the ghost of Nicola Bulley to her saintly status and those who find the whole circus nauseating and somewhat sick have been perversely entertaining, if a sorry barometer of where we are now. The rush to promote the Bulley franchise – the swift manufacturing of T-shirts and placards and the speedy setting-up of a GoFundMe platform encouraging complete strangers to pay for the funeral – has been achieved with undignified haste, a well-oiled machine primed to respond to such OTT coverage. It gives the unsettling impression that everything Nicola Bulley might have done in the privacy of her 45 years has been posthumously reduced to the level of a packet of fish fingers or a tin of baked beans, her face sold in the public arena in the same cold, cynical way as an inanimate object gathering dust on a supermarket shelf. But, again, this is not unique. It happens with every chosen victim both the MSM and social media take a shine to; barely a month ago, the murder of transgender teenager Brianna Grey in Warrington was seized upon by Trans activists, her sad ending stolen from her family and friends and claimed by those who only saw her horrible death as a new cause to attach their rainbow ribbons to.
In a way, it seems almost fitting when one takes the nature of the reporting on, and the fallout from, the Nicola Bulley case that somebody was arrested and then named and shamed for shooting footage on their phone of police retrieving Bulley’s body from the river before inevitably uploading it online. Is anyone truly surprised that whoever shot such footage either did so or saw fit to upload it when Nicola Bulley had already been stripped of her humanity and her basic ordinariness and rebranded as a hip dead icon ala Bruce Lee? That’s all this reprehensible individual saw, a way to grab a piece of the media action after non-stop 24/7 coverage for the best part of a month; how were their awful actions any different from the endless, distasteful Fleet Street speculation or the lyrical waxing on social media of St Nicola by bandwagon-jumping disciples who were only made aware of a normal, anonymous middle-aged mother once her death mask became the face of ’23?
I’ve no doubt the mainstream media’s mutation into a beast that never sleeps as a means of competing with the even more unscrupulous medium of social media is as responsible for this current situation as newspapers desperate to reverse dwindling circulation figures; Fleet Street has always had a hard-faced survival instinct that will see it chase whatever story it thinks will spare it from death row, and when an unfortunate ordinary woman is nominated as this year’s model, there’s nothing anyone who actually knew her can do about it anymore.
© The Editor
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For a generation, Dickie Davies was the face of sport on television, whilst for more than one generation John Motson was the voice of one specific sport on the same medium; that both should pass away within a week of each other is one of those timely coincidences that often occur and make my job easier. A rather heartless admission, true, but the number of times a paucity for inspiration re a Winegum post is salvaged at the eleventh hour by the death of a famous face is remarkable; even the recent post covering the resignation of Nicola Sturgeon was eased by the passing of Raquel Welch being announced as I was writing it. On the eve of taking a week’s break and busy cursing Wee Nicola for intruding upon my preparations, hearing a celluloid sex symbol of old had shuffled off this mortal coil meant a post I hadn’t intended to write could be completed with a tad more haste than if I’d had to delve even further into the Krankie career to pad it out. So, yet again the Grim Reaper came to my rescue. And, as the march of time proceeds on its relentless pace, the collective childhood furniture is reshuffled once more and continues to become more threadbare as another pair bites the dust.
Although a phrase that has become more commonplace in recent years where desperate Z-list celebrities and even the living rooms of plebs on the telly are concerned, ‘makeover’ has nonetheless been a routine PR tool in showbiz circles ever since the dawn of mass media. Hollywood effectively wrote the manual, formulating a familiar device to extend careers as Tinsel Town’s leading ladies received makeovers via the magic of the lighting men on set, keeping the ageing process at bay before excessive cosmetic surgery found a way to do it for them. In the 21st century, most post-Madonna female pop stars seem to ‘get sexy’ when seeking to re-launch their fading stock, and squeaky-clean members of clean-cut boy-bands usually embark on solo careers by forgetting to shave whilst suddenly acquiring a Maori-like range of tattoos, supposedly to signify ‘street cred’ – all examples of the makeover in action. Turd-polishers have never had it so good these days, though I would imagine even the most experienced would have faced an unusually tough challenge when entrusted with transforming a Jihadi bride into a sexy R&B siren.
Where Scots are concerned, it seems that for every Bannockburn, there’s a Darien Venture; or a Culloden; or Scotland Vs Peru 1978; or Scotland Vs Iran 1978; or Scotland Vs Costa Rica 1990; or the Gender Recognition Bill 2023. Continuous electoral success that was only momentarily derailed by the brief Tory resurgence spearheaded by Ruth Davidson in 2017 suggested Nicola Sturgeon’s lengthy tenure as SNP leader and First Minister of Scotland was destined to climax with her being crowned queen of an independent Scotland come the next ‘once in a generation’ referendum. And now it’s all over. Wee Nicola has announced she will be bringing the curtain down on her stellar political career without having seen through the fanatical obsession of every committed Scottish Nationalist to its ultimate conclusion, one that appears to take precedence over every other issue that elected leaders of countries are supposed to devote their time and energy to.
Back in the days when a man could get away with observations of a lady’s physical assets by uttering such statements as ‘You don’t get many of them to the pound’, the name of Raquel Welch routinely cropped-up as an example of a female public figure renowned for being…erm…well-endowed. Yes, Dolly Parton may have eventually superseded Ms Welch as the most prominent example, but for the latter half of the 1960s and the first half of the 1970s, Raquel Welch was celebrated as the prime copyright-holder of the attributes many men value in the opposite sex. I suppose her memorable appearance in Hammer’s ‘One Million Years B.C.’, the historically-inaccurate yet undeniably enjoyable 1966 outing for Ray Harryhausen’s stop-motion dinosaurs, sealed her reputation. The fur ‘bikini’ she wore for the duration of the movie as a prehistoric pin-up girl became one of the decade’s most iconic sartorial statements and a pop cultural snapshot that opened doors for the actress whilst simultaneously leading her down some fairly limiting and narrow alleyways.
I’ve often noticed a list of around 20 incidents that may or may not form part of the life experience routinely appears on Twitter, whereby the user is encouraged to count the number of said incidents they themselves have encountered. They usually consist of things like ‘Have you ever been arrested/ridden in a stolen car/had a tattoo/had a one-night stand/taken illegal substances’ and so on. One item absent from this list is ‘Have you ever travelled in a hot-air balloon’, to which I would sadly answer in the negative, for I’ve always fancied it. I guess my fondness for this uniquely serene form of air travel was piqued by childhood exposure to a memorable episode of ‘Mr Benn’, whereby the gentlemanly hero’s latest adventure via the costume shop is to take part in a Victorian balloon race; naturally, one of his opponents is a moustache-twirling villain who cheats, though the bad guy obviously gets his comeuppance in order to prevent him from stealing the race – and Mr Benn ends up winning it. As was characteristic of this perennially charming series, the depictions of the balloon race itself are exquisitely sketched, and seductive enough to provoke a craving in the viewer to follow suit. Despite their somewhat archaic qualities – and lack of speed when compared to the flying machines that came after them – balloons retain an appeal that reflects the need for life to occasionally slow down a little, something that was brilliantly captured in the Jimmy Webb song that gives this post its title; this has not always been the case, however.
I guess one overlooked consequence of 13 years of Tory misrule is that being exposed to such a rich barrel of rotten apples means all corruption in public office is inevitably painted blue. How easy it is to forget the Labour MPs that have fallen foul of the law, not least those who were named and shamed (and, in one or two cases, imprisoned) following the expenses’ scandal. So, considering the supposedly ‘nobler’ alternative to the Tories could well end up in government a year or two from now, it’s rather timely to be reminded that some of their own are just as capable of crookedness as those on the other side of the House. Take Jared O’Mara – you remember him, of course; he’s the one-time ginger geezer who caused one of the biggest upsets of the 2017 General Election by ousting Nick Clegg. Well, yesterday he was found guilty of fraud and sentenced to four years in the clink. Convicted on six counts that the judge described as ‘cynical, deliberate and dishonest’, the former MP for Sheffield Hallam had stooped to play the mental health card as a defence for his actions, but it didn’t wash. Said Judge Tom Bayliss in his summing-up: ‘I have concluded that, although Jared O’Mara was without doubt suffering from autism at the time of the offences, that does not reduce culpability.’
The emergence of the self-contained pop music artist in the early 60s undeniably dealt a body blow to the dominance of Tin Pan Alley; but the best of the professional songwriters were a resilient bunch and found there were still outlets for their talents. Not all of the bands at the forefront of the Beat boom and British Invasion contained in-house hit machines, and there were also what used to be called ‘girl singers’ in abundance – young, spunky sirens for whom the elegant standards of the 50s were old hat; the likes of Dusty Springfield, Lulu, Cilla Black, Sandie Shaw, Petula Clark and others were in need of their own standards, ones that reflected the changing mood of the 60s; and few songwriters delivered what was required better than Burt Bacharach, whose death at the grand old age of 94 was announced yesterday.
A very early post on here – albeit one which had been ‘remixed’ following a previous appearance elsewhere – discussed the appeal of old monochrome movies during their BBC2 heyday as a Saturday afternoon alternative to sport; the title of said post escapes me, but I recall it was illustrated with an iconic shot of the young Lauren Bacall, and it’s one that continues to attract visitors to this day. I seem to recall it contained a recommendation in the comments section to check out what was then a fledgling digital channel called Talking Pictures TV. Once this obscure channel (abbreviated to TPTV) eventually became available on the Free View service and began to be featured in the bewildering labyrinth of Radio Times listings, I decided I’d check it out. Familiar with archive channels stretching all the way back to the cable era of the 90s, I expected the usual narrow range of obvious vintage shows that are routinely wheeled-out on an endlessly repeated loop. What a pleasant surprise, therefore, to discover some of TPTV’s prime-time programmes include the likes of ‘Public Eye’ with Alfred Burke, ‘Justice’ with Margaret Lockwood, and ‘Maigret’ with Rupert Davies.
A TV interview Paul McCartney gave to Russell Harty in the early 80s contains an anecdote from Macca that underlines how the parent/teacher relationship has often been a strained one. In it, he recalled how the young George Harrison had been caned at school in a manner that appeared extreme to his father once he saw the wound, even in an era wherein most dads regarded corporal punishment as not only a necessity but a good thing. Apparently, Mr Harrison turned up at school the following day, entered the classroom, asked the teacher if he was the man who’d scarred his son, requested the teacher step outside for a quiet word, and then laid him out with a single punch. As McCartney remembered, little George’s old man was unsurprisingly an instant hero to the kids who were witness to this incident, and I’ve a feeling no police or lawyers were dragged onto the scene thereafter; this was simply how men resolved disagreements back then. Mr Harrison had made his point and that was the end of the matter. In theory, parents and teachers work in consort to ensure a child receives the best education and is eased back onto the right path should they stray; in practice, the two parties can sometimes vary in their beliefs as to how much influence the other should exert over the child, and as Paul McCartney’s colourful recollection proves, this is no new development.
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