9/19/2023 0 Comments Cartoon graveyard![]() ![]() The only periods of sustained increase in manufacturing employment occurred under Conservative Prime Ministers: rather weakly, rising around 200,000 in the nine years from 2010 to 2019 and then more dramatically under John Major, rising 190,000 in just four years from 1993 to 1997. But then between 1997, when Labour’s Tony Blair became Prime Minister and Gordon Brown’s exit from No.10 in May 2010, manufacturing employment fell by 1.7m. ![]() It’s not something Labour like to talk about, but if deindustiralisation under Thatcher is notorious today – informing, still, how much of the North of England is perceived – its second round, under New Labour, was also far-reaching.īetween 1979, when Thatcher entered office, and 1990, when she left, employment in manufacturing fell by 1.8m. And although reported as an attack on Thatcher, Danker picked his words more carefully: “Since the 1980s, we let old industries die… We have spent the past decades living with these consequences.” Greeted with pearl-clutching in the Daily Mail, rentagob Tory backbenchers providing the copy, Danker has taken careful aim at forty years’ worth of neoliberal economic policy in Britain, specifically calling out the loss of manufacturing jobs under successive governments. But far more interesting than the party leaders’ paeans to profit or to Peppa Pig were the comments made the same day by the CBI’s new Director General, Tony Danker. But since I am a bright-eyed naif, I will assume that Nick’s executives were simply wowed by the artistic daring and intricate storylines of a show whose idea of a television event is a guest spot by an annoying vlogger.Both Boris Johnson and Keir Starmer chose to address the Confederation of British Industry conference this week. Now, a cynical man might think the reason is simply a boldfaced attempt to capture the preteen girl audience with hypermaterialism and relationship drama. One such has become rather famous recently, with a recent movie release and tons of merchandise related to her stage name, Indiana Jones.Īnd that’s the model Nickelodeon decided to follow, ditching nearly all their prime-time cartoons for a host of virtually identical live-action sitcoms. The protagonists are usually girls with odd names that are the same as animals or states. It is well-known by now that Disney is where innovation goes to die, and the new channel quickly settled down to formula: sitcoms about attractive “teenagers” who have low-key, brightly colored adventures and inexplicable side jobs in show business. Hey, remember things from your childhood? I do too!Īlas, somewhere along the way a serpent was introduced to this animated Eden, and its name was The Disney Channel. So what do we make of it when a network suffers a mood swing? Usually, it means a change in ownership, such as when AMC got sold and went from being the poor man’s Turner Classic Movies to being the stupid man’s Turner Classic Movies, then suddenly picking up two critically-acclaimed series and exposing my framing device for the tenuous fiction that it is. FOX, as ever, is the crass class clown, hollering from the back of the room about boogers and boobs and desperately hoping someone is shocked. CBS is the prudish old man of the group, churning out Nielsen-friendly detective shows and lame sitcoms like a well-oiled, incredibly boring machine. TV critics seem to think so, and they have a habit of characterizing networks’ “personalities” based on their programming. But can companies really be thought of as individuals? Does the much-derided groupthink of corporate boards really translate into a unifying personality? Here’s a linguistic quirk to chew on: in America, we refer to corporations in the singular: “Coca-Cola did this, General Electric is building a new that.” In Britain they’re referred to in the plural: “McDonald’s are suing so-and-so, Starbucks are closing stores in wherever.” It’s been suggested that referring to corporations as individuals in speech might have been a factor in the legal rules treating them as such, rules which are not looked upon kindly by those not in charge of corporations. First off, a Happy Birthday to my good friend and colleague Sarah. ![]()
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