It's (Not So) Grim Up North...
Sometimes we are too accepting of a narrative, such of that of Northern Ireland - maybe things aren't so bad after all.
The Week
…. began with a story finally being published almost two weeks after I’d done the interview together with my wonderful producer friend and colleague Ilze.
We interviewed “Tusse”, the Congolese-Swedish singer that will represent Sweden at the upcoming Eurovision song contest. It took a while to get the story out, and his story is so powerful we didn’t want it to get lost, and it was worth the wait.
In Sweden the Eurovision entrant is chosen over a two-month period during which the entire country loses its collective mind. The Eurovision is known in Swedish as “Melodifestivalen”, or quite simply “Mello”, and it is as close to religion as you can get in the cold, dark winter evenings post-Christmas.
There’s a series of heats, and second chances, and vote now and vote early and vote often, and the papers are filled with the intrigues and who is wearing what and dating who and what song is ripped off. It all climaxes in a hugely dramatic final, and this time it was won by a schoolkid who had become separated form his parents while fleeing the violence of his home country and who never saw his mother alive again.
I don’t watch “Mello”, mostly because it clashes with the sport that I work with week in and week out, so I knew nothing of Tusse, his story, his talent or his song, “Voices”.
I stepped into the studio - a tiny little room with a computer, a microphone and not much else - and got to work. His voice is an incredible thing, full of soul, yearning yet complete, as if the Reverend Al Green had decided to open up a new church wherever this young man happened to be standing.
You can see the video report here - at least, I hope you can. We used some footage from public service broadcaster SVT, and they and their European counterparts are notoriously stingy when it comes to rights, so as far as I know restrictions will come into play soon enough.
The Crypto
I have always been deeply sceptical of cryptocurrencies, so when I got an email and a couple of WhatsApp messages mentioning blockchain, they were dismissed as being another grift looking for a platform. This time, there turned out to be more to it than tech bros trying to pull a fast one.
Socios.com allows fans to buy fan tokens in their favourite clubs, and in return they get some influence of fan-related decisions - the story that came looking for me this week was to do with MMA and the Professional Fighters League promotion, who launched their tokens and then allowed fans to decides what the main event in their comeback event will be.
As it happens, the fans voted for Brendan Loughnane, a Manchester-born fighter who, inexplicably, was overlooked by the UFC despite the fact that almost all of his fights are dingers. PFL fans showed much better judgement, sticking him on top of the comeback card, and I spoke to him last night as he sat in quarantine in Atlantic City.
The interesting part is not necessarily the blockchain - it’s how many sporting organisations are coming to the realisation that genuine engagement has a tremendous value when it comes to keeping fans onboard.
PFL has been pretty smart about it, and there’s a reason that Barcelona, Juventus and PSG among others are also exploring the possibilities.
In one way, it’s taking the latest technology to solve the problem of one of our most age-old needs - the desire to belong to something bigger than ourselves.
(Off) the Grid
Last year as the world was losing its shit over Covid, my wife and I bought a tiny cottage about two hours from Stockholm. There was no water, a hole in the roof and an electrical system that I trust about as much as I would a Vegas croupier.
I am a child of the concrete, and I usually break out in a rash when I can’t smell it or hear traffic 24 hours a day, but this has changed me, at least a little bit.
I came down to the cottage on Wednesday, as there is so much that needs to be done just so we can spend some time here during the summer.
Things got off to a bad start when I connected a table-top cooker (one of those two-hob affairs with a small oven underneath) to the same socket as an electric radiator. The demand was obviously too much, and the electricity on that particular circuit gave up - but it didn’t trip the switch on the modern fuse board we had installed over the winter, and I would have preferred if it did.
So instead of doing the stuff I came down here to do - hanging gutters, decorating and so on - I’ve been wandering around the cottage with a phase tester wondering where all the electricity has gone.
Still, it forced me to get creative, and though I will never make it as one of those off-grid backwoodsmen you see on YouTube, I did manage to get the wood-burning stove going. You have to keep feeding it firewood (luckily the previous owners left a couple of tons of the stuff) but it’s some piece of machinery - the cold, damp air has been replaced by a warm, dry indoor climate.
I haven’t been converted from the concrete yet, but little by little I’m getting there…
The Podcast
… has a lot to do with this week’s headline. I spoke to Emma De Souza about what’s really going on in Northern Ireland in the wake of the recent violence, and once again there is a lot more to it than we might think.
The reason I wanted to speak to Emma was that a Swedish newspaper had written a frankly terrible article last weekend, and followed it up with more scattergun reporting made up of snippets from Google and Wikipedia that were clownish in their lack of context.
There’s no two ways about it. The history of our island - my island - is extremely complex, and I have spent decades trying to explain it to people abroad who quickly begin to regret asking me about it.
But it’s not the kind of subject that can be dealt with in a TED talk or a few pithy sentences. It is messy and difficult and contradictory, as many subjects are, and it requires the reader or listener to actively engage.
Complexity is not a bad thing, and I firmly believe that most media consumers are ready for something meatier than just empty headlines or simplistic explanations.
More than anything, it requires journalists and historians to do the work, to ask the questions, to provide the context. I have no problem with anyone who does not understand the issues, but I do expect them to shut up and not foghorn their ignorance dressed as knowledge.
Emma is one of those people who could never be accused of being ignorant about Northern Ireland - listen to her speak and you’ll soon find out why kids are back on the streets there, and how they aren’t as representative as one might think.
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Have a great week, wherever you may be…