TRAILER: The Boy In The Dress

Via the BBC:

The Boy in the Dress is the story of Dennis, a 12 year-old boy who lives in an ordinary house, in an ordinary street, in an ordinary town, but he feels different,. His mum has gone off with a roofer and he lives with his dad and brother - everything is boring and grey. Dennis feels like he wants to escape to some sort of magical world, and discovers it in the most unexpected place - Raj's newsagent. A chance view of Kate Moss on the cover of a fashion magazine introduces Dennis to a whole new world of colour and creativity. Thankfully he has an ally in Lisa (Temi Orelaja), the coolest girl in school who decides to teach him everything she knows about the world of fashion and clothes. Dennis is enthralled, and after a little persuasion from Lisa tries on a dress she has created, soon they decide to try and pass Dennis off as 'Denise', Lisa's French pen pal. But can a boy wear a dress, and what will the headmaster Mr Hawthorn, his Dad, best friend Darvesh (Aaron Chawla) and his school football team-mates think if they find out?

Pew Ranks "Trusted" News Outlets

From the Pew Research report:

Those with consistently conservative political values are oriented around a single outlet—Fox News—to a much greater degree than those in any other ideological group: Nearly half (47%) of those who are consistently conservative name Fox News as their main source for government and political news. Far fewer choose any other single source: Local radio ranks second, named by 11%, with no other individual source named by more than 5% of consistent conservatives. Those with mostly conservative views also gravitate strongly toward Fox News – 31% name it as their main source, several times the share who name the next most popular sources, including CNN (9%), local television (6%) and radio (6%) and Yahoo News (6%).

On the left of the political spectrum, no single outlet predominates. Among consistent liberals, CNN (15%), NPR (13%), MSNBC (12%) and the New York Times (10%) all rank near the top of the list. CNN is named by just 20% of those with mostly liberal views, but still tops their list, followed by local television (11%) and NPR (9%). Both MSNBC and Fox News are mentioned by 5% of those who are mostly liberal. Those in other ideological groups name the New York Times, NPR and MSNBC less frequently as top news sources.

Respondents with a roughly equal mix of liberal and conservative values also have a diffuse mix of news providers. CNN (20%) and local television (16%) are the most frequently-named top sources, with a long list of other news sources named by fewer than one-in-ten. Fox News (8%) is among the most-named sources in this “long tail,” along with Yahoo News (7%) and Google News (6%), both of which primarily aggregate and highlight news produced by other outlets.

For the record, I highly trust last place Buzzfeed's Chris Geidner.

BRITAIN: Pop Music Stars Perform Beach Boys Classic God Only Knows

With a cast of new performers, the BBC has restaged its 1997 star-studded take on the Beach Boys classic, God Only Knows. Via the Guardian:

As in 1997, the BBC has succeeded in gathering together a fairly staggering array of stars. Joining Brian Wilson, the song’s writer, are Sir Elton John, One Direction, Stevie Wonder, Pharrell Williams. Jake Bugg, Lorde, Emeli Sandé, Chris Martin, Kylie Minogue, Paloma Faith, Sam Smith, Florence Welch, Chrissie Hynde, Brian May, Dave Grohl, Alison Balsom, Martin James Bartlett, Danielle de Niese, Nicola Benedetti, Eliza Carthy, Baaba Maal, Jamie Cullum, Jaz Dhami, as well as the BBC’s Zane Lowe, Lauren Laverne, Katie Derham, Gareth Malone and Jools Holland. They are joined by the Tees Valley Youth Choir and the BBC Concert Orchestra. Sir Elton John is the only survivor from Perfect Day. The song is accompanied by a lavish video filmed at the disused Alexandra Palace Theatre in London, which hosted the first BBC broadcast more than 90 years ago.

(Tipped by JMG reader Chris)

Yes Scotland Protests The BBC

"Pro-independence Scots rallied outside the BBC’s Glasgow headquarters on Sunday to protest the public broadcaster’s pro-union 'bias' and demand the resignation of political editor Nick Robinson."

Pet Shop Boys Perform World Premier Of Alan Turing Opera With BBC Orchestra

Accompanied by the BBC Concert Orchestra and the BBC Singers, last night Pet Shop Boys performed the world premier of their Alan Turing opera, A Man From The Future, at Britain's Proms event at Royal Albert Hall. The Independent has posted a review:

Tennant stands by the choir for A Man From the Future, with fellow Boy Chris Lowe behind him in familiar baseball cap and shades, tweaking a laptop. Juliet Stevenson’s disembodied narration, drawn from Andrew Hodges’ Turing biographies, is almost overpoweringly dominant. But getting the tale of Turing’s singular genius and representative tragedy across seems to outweigh the balance between words and music. “Conform, rebel or withdraw” are the choices the public schoolboy Turing is presented with, as ominous strings close in to cage him.  The remorseless glide of laptop-generated synth washes signal the machine-dreams which led him towards the computer’s invention. The BBC Singers then give the sensation of a dying fall, as the backroom heroism which turned the U-boat tide at Bletchley Park is passed over in a sentence. Tennant and Lowe aren’t interested in what Turing is belatedly honoured for now, but his shadow-life then. Bursts of hot, frantic swing follow him mentioning his homosexuality, and the furious swell of the choir’s baritones greet his downward spiral towards chemical castration by the state. His hot blood and mechanistic visions’ merging is expressed in the orchestral-laptop score. It is always, though, subservient to the verbal tracing of Turing’s fate.

Listen to the full performance below.

BBC: Do We Still Need Gay Bars?

Same-sex marriage has been legal in England and Wales for only four days and already the BBC has published a trend piece on whether gay bars are destined to fade into history. (Spoiler alert: They aren't.) The article opens by asking a couple of familiar questions.

It's a Saturday night in March, unusually mild for London, and Soho is thronging with bar-hoppers, theatregoers and couples strolling along Old Compton Street. The venues are a mixture of straight, gay and anything in between. From the non-too subtle GAY at number 30, to She Bar at 23a, its basement entrance so discreet you could walk past a dozen times and still miss it. Yet tonight there's an imperceptible difference from the Saturday before. In England and Wales the law has now changed. If you happen to meet the same-sex partner of your dreams tonight you could marry them. So with huge steps being made towards legal equality, will the notion of a separate social culture die out? Have gay bars become irrelevant?

Bar owners and patrons interviewed for the piece conclude that while young gays and their straight friends will increasingly socialize together, there will always be gay-specific nightspots, if just fewer of them. There's also an interesting bit about the history of gay nightlife in London.

In the 17th and 18th Century, "Molly houses" started appearing. Sometimes they were coffee or ale houses or private rooms in otherwise straight pubs. Even in this environment people couldn't be entirely at ease, Cook explains, "A lot of the knowledge we have about early gay culture is from criminal records. Molly houses were often raided and people being prosecuted is the main source of information about what happened at that time." A gay counterculture continued to emerge in the mid-20th Century. "In the 1940s and 1950s there was the A&B club, otherwise known as the Arts and Battledress and there was also the Rockingham, both in Soho. They were for a more middle-class clientele. There were also pubs such as the Salisbury in Covent Garden which weren't as exclusive."

The article continues its club history until the present day.

Gung Hay Fat Choy!

The Secret World Of The Living Dolls

The Daily Beast reports on a documentary that Britain's Channel 4 aired last night.

When 70-year-old Robert looks in the mirror, which he does often when dolled up, he sees a beautiful blond woman, voluptuous in her yellow halter dress and chunky heels. Her name is Sherry and she passes the time taking selfies in the courtyard of her Orange County mansion and floating topless in the macaroni-shaped pool. Sans costume, Robert (not his real name) is a property developer, recently divorced, and living with his 19-year-old daughter. But when he powders his latex and silicone suit and climbs in, pulling a frozen, doll-faced mask over his head, and throwing on a wig and a dress, he’s Sherry. “That’s me in there,” he says, gazing entranced at his reflection. “That’s one of the things I have to keep telling myself: That’s me inside that female.” Robert is a masker, leading two very different lives: one in the so-called vanilla world of his family and coworkers; another dolled up as a life-size figurine in the privacy of his own home, or, occasionally, out with other cross-dressers and fellow mask-wearers.

More from the Daily Mail:

Unlike transgender people, ‘maskers’, or ‘rubber dollers’ as they’re also known, do not feel born in the wrong body. For them, dressing up as a member of the opposite sex is a simply a way to have fun. ‘They’re not freaky people, they’re not weird, they’re just like you and me,’ explains Barbie Ramos, the owner of Femskin, a company that makes the $850 (approximately £518) custom-made silicone outfits worn by maskers. ‘They’re just like what they call “vanilla people” - that’s you and me - except for at night or on special occasions, they like to put on a mask. Why not?’

Most of the men report having supportive wives or girlfriends, although some say their "masking" habit has cost them their marriages.


RELATED: Minneapolis hosts an annual convention called the Rubber Doll Rendezvous  and the Daily Beast has also posted a rubber dolls gallery. A Florida-based company called FemSkin (not office-safe) sells some of the full body suits.

Deficit Comparison

The debt ceiling kerfuffle has prompted the BBC to post several economic comparison charts.

Taken out of context, the numbers are staggering. The US has a total debt pile of almost $17 trillion (£10.6 trillion), which is expected to rise to almost $23tn in the next five years. Japan is not far behind, with current debts totalling $11.5tn. By any standards, these are big, big numbers. But context is needed - after all, debt is not necessarily a problem if you have the income to cover it. That is why the two most common measures used to gauge a nation's indebtedness are: total debt, as expressed as a percentage of total economic output (GDP), and budget deficit, the amount by which a government's expenses exceed its income, expressed as a percentage of GDP.

Inside Gay Pakistan

The BBC reports on gay life in Pakistan:

Pakistan is not the kind of place that most people would associate with gay liberation. But some say the country is a great place to be gay - even describing the port city of Karachi as "a gay man's paradise". Underground parties, group sex at shrines and "marriages of convenience" to members of the opposite sex are just some of the surprises that gay Pakistan has to offer. Under its veneer of strict social conformity, the country is bustling with same-sex activity. Danyaal, as he's asked to be known, is a 50-something businessman who lives in an affluent part of Karachi, and uses his smartphone to organise Karachi's gay party scene. "One of the first things I did online, maybe 12 years ago, was type in G - A - Y and hit search. Back then I found a group and made contact with 12 people in this city," he says. "These days there are smartphone apps that use GPS to tell you how close you are to another gay person with an online profile. There are thousands of gay men online in Pakistan at any one time."

The report goes on to note that almost all gay men in Pakistan marry women in order to please their families. Doesn't really sound like "paradise."  (Tipped by JMG readers Eric and Eugene)

Alex Jones Vs BBC Hosts

The BBC made the mistake of inviting crackpot conspiracy weirdo Alex Jones onto a Sunday chat show where Jones stayed true to form and went nuts. The host ended the interview by calling Jones "the worst person I ever interviewed." Watch the last minute or so.

Queen Photobombs Live BBC Broadcast

In what the BBC is calling "one of the most bizarre bits of television" they've produced in a long time, today Queen Elizabeth walked into the live shot of the announcers describing her tour of the their newly remodeled studio. The Guardian reports:

The Queen "photobombed" the news on Friday in one of the more surreal moments in live broadcasting history as she officially opened the BBC's revamped Broadcasting House in central London. As BBC News presenters Julian Worricker and Sophie Long addressed viewers from their glass-windowed studio, the Queen, who was being given a studio tour, loomed into view behind them, peering intently from the newsroom. The two turned to see the diminutive Queen, resplendent in turquoise coat and hat, linger for several long seconds as BBC journalists crowded behind her raised a resounding cheer.

BBC Recaps Marriage Battle

Including coverage of the "prayer warriors."

UK: Ding Dong Hits #2

Ding Dong! The Witch Is Dead finished the week at #2 on the British pop singles chart after an internet campaign to download the song as a final protest of Margaret Thatcher's support for Section 28.  As expected, the BBC only played a five-second snippet of the track during this weekend's countdown show.

BBC: No "Ding Dong" Song

Saying that they are "between a rock and a hard place," the BBC announced today that they will only play a five-second snippet of Ding Dong! The Witch Is Dead during this weekend's countdown of the Top 40.

Sales of Ding Dong! The Witch is Dead have soared since the former Prime Minister's death on Monday, aged 87. Mr Cooper called the decision "a difficult compromise". The song is set to take the number three spot in Sunday's countdown, according to the Official Charts Company. Speaking to Radio 1 Newsbeat, Mr Cooper said: "The decision I have made is I am not going to play it in full but that I will play a clip of it in a news environment. "When I say a news environment, that is a newsreader telling you about the fact that this record has reached a certain place in the chart and here is a clip of that track."

In a separate blog post, the head of Radio 1 added this: "To ban the record from our airwaves completely would risk giving the campaign the oxygen of further publicity and might inflame an already delicate situation."

BBC Reports On British Marriage Battle

The below clip was posted today by the C4M, which is Britain's version of NOM.

TEASER: Doctor Who - The Snowmen

Airs at 9pm tonight on BBC America.

(Tipped by JMG reader Kevin)

Pet Shop Boys - He Dreamed Of Machines

Pet Shop Boys have created a tribute piece to gay British computer genius Alan Turing. Yesterday they wrote on their blog:

Last night's concert with the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra was a wonderful experience for us. The orchestra played with such luxurious power and conviction, conducted by Dominic Wheeler, and the Manchester Chamber Choir brought ethereal beauty to, for instance, "Miracles" and "He dreamed of machines" (from our new piece about Alan Turing). To hear Johnny Marr playing the guitar riff from "This must be the place I waited years to leave" was a real thrill so many years after he played on the original record; his acoustic guitar playing on "Breathing space" was gorgeous. Other highlights for me were performing live for the first time "It couldn't happen here", "The survivors" and "For all of us". Sven Helbig's orchestral arrangements were both magnificent and subtle: "New York City boy" was returned to Broadway; "He dreamed of machines" had a pale beauty.

The first clip below is a fan-created video for He Dreamed Of Machines.  Below that is the full audio of Wednesday's collaboration with the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra, which has been reviewed here.

UPDATE: During the concert, Neil Tennant reveals that the Turing song is from a coming bigger piece titled A Man From The Future. Start at the 56:00 mark for Tennant's introduction to He Dreamed Of Machines.


(Tipped by JMG reader Paul)

The World Wants Obama

According to a BBC poll conducted in 21 countries, respondents who expressed a preference in the American election chose President Obama over Mitt Romney by a more than 5-1 margin.

The countries with the largest pro-Obama majorities were France (72 percent for Obama, 2 percent for Romney), Nigeria (66 percent for Obama, 11 percent for Romney), Canada (66 percent for Obama, 9 percent for Romney), the UK (65 percent for Obama, 7 percent for Romney) and Australia (67 percent for Obama, 6 percent for Romney). Romney received the most support in Kenya, where he registered an 18 percent approval rating, compared with Obama’s 66 percent. In Poland, Romney was also able to garner a bit more favor, with 16 percent supporting the Republican, compared to Obama’s 34 percent. Both candidates received relatively low scores in Pakistan, China, Malaysia and Japan. Pakistan was the only country where more respondents wanted to see Romney elected.

The Washington Post has a bar graph by country.

The Rise Of Britishisms

Last month the BBC published an article noting that many Britishisms have recently come into (relatively) common usage in the United States.  A follow-up article this week lists some of the words BBC readers are hearing more frequently from Yanks.  Here's just a few of them: bloody, bum, chav, cheeky, flat, frock, gobsmacked, kit, loo, queue, row, shag, skint, sussed.  I'll admit to using just a couple of them, most of all "proper." As in, "We should have a proper breakfast before heading to the airport."  Hit the list and tell us your own favorites or the ones you find most annoying.