#FridayFive
1 The Love We Stole - Bear’s Den
2 Mess - Ben Folds Five
3 Delicate - Damien Rice
4 Dog is Dead - Longpigs
5 Poison Oak - Bright Eyes

#FridayFive
1 There’s a Storm a Comin’ - Richard Hawley
2 Raining Revolution - Arrested Development
3 Crying Lightning - Arctic Monkeys
4 Red Earth and Pouring Rain - Bear’s Den
5 Cloud of Stink - Biffy Clyro

It is utter bullshit that the mistaken splicing of two bits of his January 6th 2021 speech on Panorama in October 2024 had any significant impact whatsoever on the reputation of Donald Trump in Britain, or globally, and the claim for $1 billion damages is bullshit and bullying by the US president

#FridayFive
1 Since I Left You - The Avalanches
2 Red Right Hand - Nick Cave
3 All The Lovers - Kylie Minogue
4 Are You Gonna Be My Girl - Jet
5 Left of the Middle - Natalie Imbruglia

Ba-boom sssssh.

#FridayFive
1 Street Spirit - Radiohead
2 Pumpkin - Tricky
3 The Dark is Rising - Mercury Rev
4 Black - Pearl Jam
5 Blue Eyed Devil - Soul Coughing

It is a massive shame that I’ve yet to see any news outlet challenge the way people are abusing this data to excuse the racist views being expressed by some people who should have actually looked at the data properly.

Two of the adverts were performed entirely by animated animals and two adverts (one repeated in the second ad break) only featured Michelle Keagan. I wonder what the racists will think about that representation.

Last night, in an unscientific study, I reviewed all of the adverts in two ad breaks on the “massively woke” E4.

There is no way that fifty one percent of people in adverts are black, or even that eight percent of people in adverts are south Asian.

Many people will draw from this that 17% of people in adverts are south Asian and 11% are east Asian. This is not what the report is saying. It is a racist twisting of the statistics.

The Daily Mail went on to claim, “People from a south Asian background make up eight per cent of the population but featured in 17 per cent of adverts. East Asians account for one per cent of the population and featured in 11 per cent of adverts.”

It appears that the Daily Mail and many of those who have gone onto comment on this report have taken this to mean that 51% of people in adverts are black. Unsurprisingly, this is not the case.

When you read the actual report and explore the graphs, you discover that, though the group the researchers have identified as black appear in 51% of the sample of adverts they watched, their average length of appearance was only 6 seconds. They took a lead role in only 23% of adverts.

In the Daily Mail’s article about the report, they claimed that “more than half of the commercials featured black people.”

The Daily Mail’s headline for this article was “TV adverts over-represent black people and ignore over-70s, study finds.”

The annual “Mirror on the Nation” report can be pretty helpful to advertisers interested and invested in the ethical and/or commercial benefits of representation. It turns out that, like many things in the wrong hands or read incorrectly, it can lead to discriminatory conclusions.

Thank you. Hope you’re doing ok now.