Motoring columnists. What on earth is the point of these jerks? Yes, I do know whence they came. The idea of the columnist was to expand on current issues and events in a way that the straight editorial of a printed publication could not. However in recent years the role of the columnist seems to be to spout their own boring and often ill informed opinion over as many column inches as possible therefore saving the newspaper or magazine in question from having to actually fill that space with an article or something which may require research or effort on the part of a journalist to complete. I noticed that Car now has at least four different columnists producing anything up to 2 whole pages of “content” each, even Ol Skool Rodz and Hot Rod feel the need to run multiple pages of opinionated editorial each issue.
Now every newspaper and every car magazine has columnists. Or worse still celebrity columnists. Oh great and deep joy, O frabcious joy calloo, callay! I get to read what Will Self thinks about driving in London or an introspective from Tracy Emmet on her delight at the textured plastic used on a Citroen C3 and how this reminds her of the pain she felt when her grandmother passed on. Or rather I get to grunt and turn the page and moan to anyone who is in the vicinity that any turd could have written that, its not even really about cars or motoring and I’d have done something just as bad and irrelevant for half the price. Or as in the case of this post – for free…
What really bothers me is that the columnist deals in opinion not facts. Everybody has an opinion, and to that person their opinion is very important, vital and relevant. But to the rest of us it’s just a waste of newsprint. And the world is drowning in opinion. Most of it not even informed opinion. I would be pleased to read the opinion of Bob Lutz on the future of car manufacturing in the USA. I would be pleased to read the opinion of Danica Patrick on encouraging women into motor sports. Some miserable hack who appears to know less about cars than I do or a minor celeb with a need to be in the papers SOMEHOW/ANYHOW this week carping on about parking near their local private pre-school? Please, kill me now. Or better yet, kill them.
What ever happened to facts and objective journalism? Well, they just don’t fit any more. Now we are increasingly told that “its not what you know its what you feel”. What tosh. I know that leaping out of my office window will result in my plummeting to my death or significant injury in the car park below. I might ‘feel’ that this will be a liberating experience and a chance to spread my wings in a physical sense, but I’ll still be lying in the car park in a pool of blood either way. IN the same way some grinning buffoon in the papers may “feel” that the Citroen C1 is the most important car to be produced this century but its just plain not. Go on, show me an objective measure which proves it…
I’m waiting.
Still waiting.
Yeah, the rest of us are going to get on with something else while you are thinking that one over.
And why do they always have their ugly mug-shot next to the article. I don’t care what you look like, if you’re a speccy 4 eyes slaphead or some harpie harridan with spiky hair. I don’t care. If we must have a photo, why not one which illustrates the point of the article? And there we trip over the truth of the matter. The photo does that already because the only point of these columns is to massage and reinforce the ego of the person churning it out.
And sod me but aren’t they predictable? And parochial for that matter. If I read one more missive on the subject of SUVs I think I will be reaching for the shot gun. Oh why (opines the columnist) must Land Rover produce these massive four wheel drive vehicles which will never see action outside of the confines of Chelea’s crowded streets, the exclusive tool of the school run mum….” Blah, blah, blah. It seems to me that most of these plebs never actually set foot outside of London and are generally oblivious to the world outside of the capital. Or do they genuinely believe that every single Land Rover is sold to stay-at-home-mums in the affluent areas of the conurbation? Or probably that they just don’t care. After all we may well need 4x4 to drag ourselves around the hostile wasteland which exists beyond the M25 “beltway”. FFS.
And why are they all so fixated about “nipping down to Brighton”? Maybe its true what they say about the sexual proclivities of those in the media. At least there’s space in the back of a range rover for a good old bout on man-on-man by the seaside. Try that in your C3.
And they’re all just sooooo bored. This is because they are really cool in case you didn’t know. Oh, I drove the new Lamborghini at the weekend, us press types get forced to do this sort of thing you know, so Tarquin and I nipped down to Brighton in it, but really, I have to say the handling is dreadful and there’s no space for baggage for the weekend away, hold on a moment I’m about to insert some random phrase in French because it will make me look every so sophisticated”
If there’s one thing worse than the elitist Notting Hill set pansies and their pseudo intellectualised tripe it’s the “lad” journo who’s out to be the next Jeremy Clarkson. Hold on, nobody’s shot the first one yet… Oh, joy of joys here comes a rash of clichés and horrifying anecdotes which would shame a professional footballer. And they can all out drive Michael Schumacher and to prove this they have to say every car they ever drive “handles badly” which makes me wonder if either every car in the whole world ever handles badly or maybe, just maybe, these chumps can’t actually drive for toffee. There Porsches and Ferraris and AMG Mercs are always “disappointing” – well, these crips probably own a Fabia VRs or a Golf GTi (5 door) and of course these are the absolute pinacler of motoring excellence, so I can see how a mere Ford GT would be “disappointing” after that. All that’s missing is the “if this car were a …. then it would be a ….” and an impassioned plea “please, I want to work on Top Gear, please please please…
By the way, I’m still waiting for a justification the whole C1 business. I’ve not forgotten you know.
Quite the most cringe worthy motoring journalism steps beyond the realm of the columnist, but I feel I would be remiss not to touch on the subject here. That is motoring journalism by and for women. I’m not talking about female motoring journalists, although to be honest they generally manage to embarrass both themselves and their whole gender by their attempts to be “laddettes” both on TV and in print regaling us with how manly and tuff they are and all that. Yeah, lovely. I was particularly taken by some delightful misuse of the term “geezer bird” on some show recently I caught. Where I’m from a “geezer bird” transsexual – or a lass so rough she appears to be one. Nice one darling. Journalism should be gender-neutral. And well researched. Except pornography.
No, what I am objecting to is the motoring sections you get in “Women’s Magazines”. In fact I have to say I am dismayed by “Women’s Magazines” in general. For 100 years or more women have fought the oppressive arm of phalocentric patriarchal society to be viewed, respected and treated as equal to men, with the same rights interests and perogatives. Now women, take your place in an equal and just society! Show the world that now emancipated those stereotypes of women as bimbos only interested in shoes, celebrities and diets were just male chauvinist propaganda to keep you down. Oh. I see. You’re interested in shoes, celebrities and diets. Oh, but so much more that that: celebrities’ shoes and celebrities’ diets. Great. Emily Pankhurst must be really proud.
Well, amazingly these magazines occasionally have motoring articles and the like, and believe me if a guy started on at a lass like this he’d be called a patronising git. But if a woman writes garbage like this then that’s fine. Or maybe a bloke using a pen name of “Chloe Jackbum Davies” or something along those lines. You can’t have Chloe Jackbum-Davies though, that ones mine. I did wonder if the whole Women’s Magazine / Daytime TVB thing was actually a male driven anti-feminist fifth column war to suppress rational female thought. Come to think of it a lot of daytime TV presenters do look like blokes in drag.
Try reading this tripe. Really. I recall one delightful article entitled “ten ways not to get ripped off at the garage” or words to that very rough approximation. You may be interested to see what wonderful advice the brave young professional female is being given when she finally realises that the service interval on her Citroen C3 are not “optional”.
“Give them a big smile! Garage staff are much less likely to rip you off if they like you!” Good lord! What freakin’ planet do you come from? If you go to a garage who does habitually rip people off then they will rip you off on the basis of how much they think they can get away with, not how shiny your pearly-whites are. What’s next, suggesting you gibe the mechanics a flash of your flesh to see if that gets you a bit of a discount? Or even “I’ll service you if you service me?” Also the fact that some things really do cost that amount of money seems to have passed them by. OK, its perfectly reasonable to spend £400 on a pair of shoes but if a 10K service and cam belt change comes to £180 with the VAT then obviously they ripped you off because you’re a woman…
Another top tip was to ask the garage to call you before performing any additional work. I can’t see how this is going to help matters because if you don’t know what’s going on then being asked for your permission to rip you off isn’t really much solace. I can see the conversation now…
“Hello, is that Miss Smith? Its Arthur Daley’s Motors here, need to run a couple of things past you”
“OK, thanks”
“Well, the indicator fluid level is quite low and needs topping up”
“How much will that cost”
“Extra £20 I think, maybe £30. Can be a tricky job”
“OK, go ahead”
“Well we may need to use some elbow grease, to erm, get it lubed up”
“I see, how much is that?”
“Maybe need half a litre, say £30 on top.”
“That’s fine”
“Oh, and we were looking at bleeding the brakes, but we can’t do that without some other parts”
“What do you need?”
“Well it looks to us like you’ve got seized nipples”
“Oh now you’re just taking the pee!”
Of course the absolute lowest form of motoring journalism is the “10 Best…” “10 Worst…” lists which often flow out of the columnists pen anyway. These can be roughly translated into “curse word we spent far too long down the pub and theres no chance we can research a proper article to fit in that big empty space on the page so lets do a list, we can leave lots of blank space then and it looks like it was doneon purpose and if we give it a jokey title then any complete balls ups we make with the ‘facts’ we can just say it was part of a joke and it doesn’t matter”
10 worst cars, 10 fastest supercars (according to some bloke down the pub who once spent a summer job delivering cars for Mann Edgerton) , 10 most hackneyed motoring stereotypes, ah, no we’ll save that for the basis of an editorial… And of course the “hot or not” lists. I remember as a young child seeing the Sunday Times colour supplement had their “Hot or not” list, and “not” now included Volvo 260s and my dad had just recently bought one of these new (in 1975 LOL), so I said “Daddy, look your Volvo’s not hot!” to which without looking up from the cricket coverage he replied, “good, shall we go burn it in the garden then, or would the neighbours complain?”
When people meet my father they say a lot of their unresolved issues about me become clear.
For those of you have reached this far, you're as bad as I am and there is no hope for you. Come let us trip into the sunset together hand in hand on the sand to the tune of "A Forest" by The Cure.
And I never did get that answer about the C1 did I?
(C) Chloe Jackbum Davies 2007. Sindicated by AP Press, all rights reserved.
Now every newspaper and every car magazine has columnists. Or worse still celebrity columnists. Oh great and deep joy, O frabcious joy calloo, callay! I get to read what Will Self thinks about driving in London or an introspective from Tracy Emmet on her delight at the textured plastic used on a Citroen C3 and how this reminds her of the pain she felt when her grandmother passed on. Or rather I get to grunt and turn the page and moan to anyone who is in the vicinity that any turd could have written that, its not even really about cars or motoring and I’d have done something just as bad and irrelevant for half the price. Or as in the case of this post – for free…
What really bothers me is that the columnist deals in opinion not facts. Everybody has an opinion, and to that person their opinion is very important, vital and relevant. But to the rest of us it’s just a waste of newsprint. And the world is drowning in opinion. Most of it not even informed opinion. I would be pleased to read the opinion of Bob Lutz on the future of car manufacturing in the USA. I would be pleased to read the opinion of Danica Patrick on encouraging women into motor sports. Some miserable hack who appears to know less about cars than I do or a minor celeb with a need to be in the papers SOMEHOW/ANYHOW this week carping on about parking near their local private pre-school? Please, kill me now. Or better yet, kill them.
What ever happened to facts and objective journalism? Well, they just don’t fit any more. Now we are increasingly told that “its not what you know its what you feel”. What tosh. I know that leaping out of my office window will result in my plummeting to my death or significant injury in the car park below. I might ‘feel’ that this will be a liberating experience and a chance to spread my wings in a physical sense, but I’ll still be lying in the car park in a pool of blood either way. IN the same way some grinning buffoon in the papers may “feel” that the Citroen C1 is the most important car to be produced this century but its just plain not. Go on, show me an objective measure which proves it…
I’m waiting.
Still waiting.
Yeah, the rest of us are going to get on with something else while you are thinking that one over.
And why do they always have their ugly mug-shot next to the article. I don’t care what you look like, if you’re a speccy 4 eyes slaphead or some harpie harridan with spiky hair. I don’t care. If we must have a photo, why not one which illustrates the point of the article? And there we trip over the truth of the matter. The photo does that already because the only point of these columns is to massage and reinforce the ego of the person churning it out.
And sod me but aren’t they predictable? And parochial for that matter. If I read one more missive on the subject of SUVs I think I will be reaching for the shot gun. Oh why (opines the columnist) must Land Rover produce these massive four wheel drive vehicles which will never see action outside of the confines of Chelea’s crowded streets, the exclusive tool of the school run mum….” Blah, blah, blah. It seems to me that most of these plebs never actually set foot outside of London and are generally oblivious to the world outside of the capital. Or do they genuinely believe that every single Land Rover is sold to stay-at-home-mums in the affluent areas of the conurbation? Or probably that they just don’t care. After all we may well need 4x4 to drag ourselves around the hostile wasteland which exists beyond the M25 “beltway”. FFS.
And why are they all so fixated about “nipping down to Brighton”? Maybe its true what they say about the sexual proclivities of those in the media. At least there’s space in the back of a range rover for a good old bout on man-on-man by the seaside. Try that in your C3.
And they’re all just sooooo bored. This is because they are really cool in case you didn’t know. Oh, I drove the new Lamborghini at the weekend, us press types get forced to do this sort of thing you know, so Tarquin and I nipped down to Brighton in it, but really, I have to say the handling is dreadful and there’s no space for baggage for the weekend away, hold on a moment I’m about to insert some random phrase in French because it will make me look every so sophisticated”
If there’s one thing worse than the elitist Notting Hill set pansies and their pseudo intellectualised tripe it’s the “lad” journo who’s out to be the next Jeremy Clarkson. Hold on, nobody’s shot the first one yet… Oh, joy of joys here comes a rash of clichés and horrifying anecdotes which would shame a professional footballer. And they can all out drive Michael Schumacher and to prove this they have to say every car they ever drive “handles badly” which makes me wonder if either every car in the whole world ever handles badly or maybe, just maybe, these chumps can’t actually drive for toffee. There Porsches and Ferraris and AMG Mercs are always “disappointing” – well, these crips probably own a Fabia VRs or a Golf GTi (5 door) and of course these are the absolute pinacler of motoring excellence, so I can see how a mere Ford GT would be “disappointing” after that. All that’s missing is the “if this car were a …. then it would be a ….” and an impassioned plea “please, I want to work on Top Gear, please please please…
By the way, I’m still waiting for a justification the whole C1 business. I’ve not forgotten you know.
Quite the most cringe worthy motoring journalism steps beyond the realm of the columnist, but I feel I would be remiss not to touch on the subject here. That is motoring journalism by and for women. I’m not talking about female motoring journalists, although to be honest they generally manage to embarrass both themselves and their whole gender by their attempts to be “laddettes” both on TV and in print regaling us with how manly and tuff they are and all that. Yeah, lovely. I was particularly taken by some delightful misuse of the term “geezer bird” on some show recently I caught. Where I’m from a “geezer bird” transsexual – or a lass so rough she appears to be one. Nice one darling. Journalism should be gender-neutral. And well researched. Except pornography.
No, what I am objecting to is the motoring sections you get in “Women’s Magazines”. In fact I have to say I am dismayed by “Women’s Magazines” in general. For 100 years or more women have fought the oppressive arm of phalocentric patriarchal society to be viewed, respected and treated as equal to men, with the same rights interests and perogatives. Now women, take your place in an equal and just society! Show the world that now emancipated those stereotypes of women as bimbos only interested in shoes, celebrities and diets were just male chauvinist propaganda to keep you down. Oh. I see. You’re interested in shoes, celebrities and diets. Oh, but so much more that that: celebrities’ shoes and celebrities’ diets. Great. Emily Pankhurst must be really proud.
Well, amazingly these magazines occasionally have motoring articles and the like, and believe me if a guy started on at a lass like this he’d be called a patronising git. But if a woman writes garbage like this then that’s fine. Or maybe a bloke using a pen name of “Chloe Jackbum Davies” or something along those lines. You can’t have Chloe Jackbum-Davies though, that ones mine. I did wonder if the whole Women’s Magazine / Daytime TVB thing was actually a male driven anti-feminist fifth column war to suppress rational female thought. Come to think of it a lot of daytime TV presenters do look like blokes in drag.
Try reading this tripe. Really. I recall one delightful article entitled “ten ways not to get ripped off at the garage” or words to that very rough approximation. You may be interested to see what wonderful advice the brave young professional female is being given when she finally realises that the service interval on her Citroen C3 are not “optional”.
“Give them a big smile! Garage staff are much less likely to rip you off if they like you!” Good lord! What freakin’ planet do you come from? If you go to a garage who does habitually rip people off then they will rip you off on the basis of how much they think they can get away with, not how shiny your pearly-whites are. What’s next, suggesting you gibe the mechanics a flash of your flesh to see if that gets you a bit of a discount? Or even “I’ll service you if you service me?” Also the fact that some things really do cost that amount of money seems to have passed them by. OK, its perfectly reasonable to spend £400 on a pair of shoes but if a 10K service and cam belt change comes to £180 with the VAT then obviously they ripped you off because you’re a woman…
Another top tip was to ask the garage to call you before performing any additional work. I can’t see how this is going to help matters because if you don’t know what’s going on then being asked for your permission to rip you off isn’t really much solace. I can see the conversation now…
“Hello, is that Miss Smith? Its Arthur Daley’s Motors here, need to run a couple of things past you”
“OK, thanks”
“Well, the indicator fluid level is quite low and needs topping up”
“How much will that cost”
“Extra £20 I think, maybe £30. Can be a tricky job”
“OK, go ahead”
“Well we may need to use some elbow grease, to erm, get it lubed up”
“I see, how much is that?”
“Maybe need half a litre, say £30 on top.”
“That’s fine”
“Oh, and we were looking at bleeding the brakes, but we can’t do that without some other parts”
“What do you need?”
“Well it looks to us like you’ve got seized nipples”
“Oh now you’re just taking the pee!”
Of course the absolute lowest form of motoring journalism is the “10 Best…” “10 Worst…” lists which often flow out of the columnists pen anyway. These can be roughly translated into “curse word we spent far too long down the pub and theres no chance we can research a proper article to fit in that big empty space on the page so lets do a list, we can leave lots of blank space then and it looks like it was doneon purpose and if we give it a jokey title then any complete balls ups we make with the ‘facts’ we can just say it was part of a joke and it doesn’t matter”
10 worst cars, 10 fastest supercars (according to some bloke down the pub who once spent a summer job delivering cars for Mann Edgerton) , 10 most hackneyed motoring stereotypes, ah, no we’ll save that for the basis of an editorial… And of course the “hot or not” lists. I remember as a young child seeing the Sunday Times colour supplement had their “Hot or not” list, and “not” now included Volvo 260s and my dad had just recently bought one of these new (in 1975 LOL), so I said “Daddy, look your Volvo’s not hot!” to which without looking up from the cricket coverage he replied, “good, shall we go burn it in the garden then, or would the neighbours complain?”
When people meet my father they say a lot of their unresolved issues about me become clear.
For those of you have reached this far, you're as bad as I am and there is no hope for you. Come let us trip into the sunset together hand in hand on the sand to the tune of "A Forest" by The Cure.
And I never did get that answer about the C1 did I?
(C) Chloe Jackbum Davies 2007. Sindicated by AP Press, all rights reserved.