I only got up to 10 pages of script for Objective show 2 by the time it needed to be handed in. This isn't long enough obviously and I don't think my new producer Tilusha was too delighted by this, but she hid it quite well. But not so well that I don't know that she was hiding it.
And actually although there is some way to go, I feel confident that this one will be fine. Partly because like Orson Welles (yes I am exactly like him, but more of a genius) I do all my best work at the last minute), but also because the script is really only short because there is so much to say and I have been struggling to work out how to cram it all in. And Jesus, we're not recording until Tuesday night! I had less script that this 6 hours before the last AIOTM recording.
The hoodie turns out to be a really interesting subject to be looking at, because this apparently offensive sweat shirt with a bit to keep your ears warm has become an excuse to objectify young people as thugs and hoodlums and to divert attention away from actual issues. I did some interviews over the phone and had a particularly interesting one with a professor who has been studying moral panics over the last few decades, who made some great points about media (and government) created scares, which often have little to no basis in reality. I asked him what proportion of young people had actually committed crimes and he responded by asking me what proportion of the population has committed crimes and added that it was probably 100%, because of course we've all done stuff that we're not legally allowed to do. He cited taking souvenirs from hotel rooms, but I told him I had done far worse than that. And it's true that absolutely everyone has broken one law another at some point, whether it's illegal downloading from the internet, going over the speed limit, making dishonest declarations to the taxman or, as is true in my case, secretly murdering some tramps (No one will ever catch me. I have been very careful to cover my tracks and never tell anyone about it). He wondered if politicians had been so keen to engage in the hoodie debate in order to help distract people's attention from their expenses, or I would have thought more likely, their illegal war in Iraq. And it's certainly interesting that people seem to think that hoodies are a uniform and that anyone who wears them might be trouble, when over in the city (as the Jam observed, several times in a row if you leave your iPod playing alphabetically) there are a thousand men in uniform, who have certainly mugged the country of a lot more money than a few teenagers in woollen sweat shirts with hoods will manage.
Young people get a bad deal it seems to me. I know who I'd give those bonuses to.
