Channel 4's new weekly current affairs/satire show, "10 o'clock live", made its debut last night. It's supposedly inspired mainly by Jon Stewart's nightly news show on CNN, with a nod to the old BBC satirical stalwart, "That was the week that was". The nicest thing that I can say is that it needs a bit of work if it wants to be mentioned in the same breath as either of those programmes. The camera work was bizarre -- why did we need to see shots of Jimmy Carr from the rear, standing on a little podium as he did his introductory monologue? Why were the pre-recorded bits so feeble? And who invited Lauren Laverne?
No doubt those things are fixable; well, maybe apart from Lauren Laverne. But there is one flaw that may be harder to gloss over. The political stance of the show is clearly left of centre, which is fine. However, when David Mitchell hosted a small panel to discuss bankers' bonuses, I felt the token banker on the panel -- an ex-Goldman Sachs guy -- missed a real opportunity. How nice it would have been if, on live television, he'd said something like "Before we go any further, I wonder if our hosts (Carr, Laverne and Mitchell, plus Charlie Brooker) might care to disclose their own incomes". I don't know about Brooker and Laverne, but I'd be very confident that Mitchell and Carr are in the 7-figure bracket. And good for them, but it does mean they ought to feel just a bit queasy about calling other people fat cats.
Elsewhere, Thursday's Daily Mail showed the paper's truly hateful side at its very worst. The front page headline screamed "Charities pay price of greed at Goldman Sachs: Bank gives staff £9.6bn... but slashes donations to good causes by a third". Just how this compares to the Mail's charitable giving was not, of course, disclosed. Nor was the fact that Goldman uses its own charitable donations (which have indeed been cut this year, though to a still-hefty £200 million) to encourage its employees to increase their own charitable involvement, by matching donations to their favourite causes.
I know from my personal involvement in my former bank's charitable activities a few years ago that Goldman employees are extremely generous donors, of time as well as money, to good causes. This tends to be true of American banks as a group, and for that matter of Americans in general. To give massive amounts to charity and then find youself smeared by a bunch of envious, loathsome, xenophobic reptiles like the Daily Mail must make the powers that be at Goldman wonder why they bother even trying to do the right thing.
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