UK telly in coke blizzard shock A former BBC producer has claimed that the UK's TV industry is snowed under with charlie, and the "off-the-wall" brilliance of many stars is down to prodigious intake of nose ajax. That's according to Sarah Graham, a BBC Radio 5, Children's BBC and Channel 4's The Big Breakfast vet, who has recounted the scale of the abuse to …
Anyone ever observe that when in the company of people who've taken large amounts of drugs, be that alcohol, weed, or whatever, they become utterly fascinated by each others' conversation and increasingly incomprehensible to anyone else?
Enthusiastic use of Colombian Marching Powder explains the fact that most television for at least ten years has been utter gibberish.....
It's only the usual anti-drugs lobby who bleat on like sheep about it. Some people, not many, get a problem with cocaine. Nearly all do not. Most people who take cocaine do so because they enjoy it, not because they are stupid or "throwing away their lives". It's called being an adult, about making a choice for oneself and not listening to the limp and clammy hand brigade who wouldn't fart in public. The ones who are easily led are those who buy the anti-drugs load of nonsense.
I'd like to turn the tables on the bleaters. It's time there was compulsory drugs testing at the end of every sitting of parliament, and every time the plod returns from whatever it is they do these days (attending meetings, perhaps?), and for every Home Office employee when they leave for the day.
For the luvvies who would never do Charlie, before and after every music gig for those performing, actors on stage and film sets, newspaper reporters, etc.
To all those out there who take their drugs and enjoy it, you are my kind of people. Live and let live.
we'll be told that cocaine is a hell of a drug!
"Unfortunately she went to the toilet and took cocaine" – yeah, most unfortunate. You never know who has been to that toilet before. Surely hope she didn't end up socializing some more in there, you never know what that does to your carreer either. I really pity those poor, poor media folks, the need help.
I'll bet if to told some media type straight out of uni, naive to the ways of the world but silly haircut and frankly stupid fashion sense firmly in place and gave them some placebo white powder to snort of the next 10 years before going into "rehab" you'd get a big chunk of people marching to the Bolivian anthem simply because their sheep. I'm not saying some people have problems with coke, and obviously some people have bad experiences. But then some people have bad experiences just breathing, so what does that prove. Fuck all.
All this is is rhetoric pure and simple. I'm glad she's working as a councillor to those who feel they need help, but there is far too much FUD about drug use, especially around cocaine.
/me mumbes something about the US and it's bully tactics against the WHO.....
http://wikileaks.org/wiki/World_Health_Organization_global_Cocaine_Project_Study_suppressed_by_the_United_States_for_13_years,_1995
It's rife, yes. And very public. The problem is, nobody wants to do anything about it, because the people doing it are being successful, and entertainment is all about success; the rest of us are hanging on to the success. Doing something like telling plod doesn't just put the offender out of work, it puts the rest of us out of work.
...d'ya think this could explain 95% of all Monty Python sketches? No, not cocaine, but weed.
I've been watching the six-part documentary on Python on IFC here in the Colonies; last night's episode went into some detail on Graham Chapman's alcoholism, and as I watched some of the old BBC clips, I couldn't help wondering whether or not a joint or two was passed around at some of the script meetings.
Not to denigrate the sheer genius of Python -- they couldn't have been that great if they weren't immensely talented to begin with -- but a lot of that stuff seems as if it were written by people who were really, really, _really_ stoned... especially the Dead Parrot Sketch. I laughed like a lunatic the first time I saw that one, while "straight", but the first time I saw it stoned, I laughed until I damn' near wet myself.
And the Nobody Expects The Spanish Inquisition bits -- that seems like it was written after a few bong hits as well. I mean, c'mon... soft cushions? Comfy chair? "Tie her to the Rack"?
Pint of beer, only because there's no little bong icon.
I want to see some sort of analogue to the Consumer Prices Index being the Retail Prices Index without mortgages: the Media Prices Index could be the Meejuh Prices Index without the coke. On such indices, one suspects that the former rises rather slowly while the latter reaches new highs every year...
True, we know the link between creativity and addiction isn't new; it goes way back beyond Docherty and Winehouse, and even before Warhol and Hendrix. Middle England demands that something is done to stop their children becoming drug craving monsters, but no government can risk a successful campaign against drug supply that would reduce our one remaining export industry to sober mediocrity. Hence a highly visible and expensive "war on drugs" that, according to the UK Drugs Commission report in 2008, intercepts no more than 12% of cocaine imports and 9% of heroin.
The other end of the government campaign attacks demand with token arrests of users and advertising of the "heroin screws you up" variety. This to a youth culture that enjoys piercings and tattoos, and voluntarily listens to Coldplay.
... keep toking away dude ...
It's entirely possible to be as equally funny and nutty without requiring a puff on the old silly sticks.
Indeed, you'd probably find that had they been hitting the herb, they woudn't have got nearly as much work done, because the prime side effect of this rather stupid drug, is extreme laziness.
... hey, perhaps they were doing charlie!
Or - perish the thought - it was booze!
Or maybe, just maybe, they were extremely talented individuals, that despite addictions by some of them (most notably chapman) - they managed to produce what they did and drugs had sweet FA to do with it.
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"Frank" is an adjective in the dictionary, and I haven't tried them but I'm not dead sure that they live up to it, i.e. that as just mentioned, taking funny drugs is FUN, while you're doing it, at first. If you don't admit that then you are not being frank. Anyway, there's a web site, www.talktofrank.com .
However, I've just thought that it may refer to Frank Bough, a genial wise old news broadcaster who was exposed as using much of the happy happy dust, and also paying naughty ladies to do kinky things, after which (especially the second) I think he mostly worked in local radio. He was on the telly breakfast time news magazine show before and it may have been the only way he could find to get himself going at that hour at his age - happy dust not naughty ladies, I mean.
Amy Winehouse's dad told parliament yesterday(?) that as he understands it, most substance abusers begin by using alcohol quite heavily before they get hooked on other things, but I think it isn't always the case.
There are some fine things on BBC children's TV although they aren't to my taste. SORRY I'VE GOT NO HEAD is as juvenile as the first series of KEVIN BISHOP but if you're twelve must be marvellous, unlike Bishop who is adults-only -and-, in that first series, puerile. The second was mostly better. OOGLIES I didn't know what the heck was going on and whether it was good or bad. You have to see it, or... Animated, it appears that mischievous poltergeist spirits inhabit more-or-less inanimate small objects such as vegetables, eggs, sausages, toothbrushes and just about anything else, and then act out dozens of little plays in a quarter hour. At least that's my interpretation, I don't want to believe that eggs or tomatoes actually died in the course of the story, but many children are rather cruel about such things and probably don't mind.
Given past revelations, I suppose it is likely that some or all of the lively minds that delight me on such as MOCK THE WEEK are synthetically accelerated in a socially unfortunate manner (as another explanation I think Frankie Boyle claims to have scored 98% on an are-you-a-psychopath test - really), and the sheer number of quite different things that Marcus Brigstocke is in, SORRY I'VE GOT NO HEAD included, makes you wonder where he gets the energy, could it be the same place as Frank Bough. I prefer to believe that Brigstocke and the others like him are just naturally funny and intelligent and humane and energetic, the lucky few best of us who earn the privilege of an audience's attention, several distinct audiences in that case, justly much in demand because they're good at it.
Even if someone in that line of work is exposed as chemically self-modulated I may still admire their work and would not reject it for that reason - but yes, on reflection I would, not because it is poor work but because I don't want to support anyone's drug abuse in that sense or in most other senses.
those damages are bourne out of prohibition arising from the Nixon (anti-semitic) war on drugs. Obviously, coke used to be a sensibly used (i.e. strength wise) product used in pile cream, cola and many other products etc etc and deeply ingrained in Latin american cultures (as it still is).
I read a fascinating article recently on the 'rise' of cocaine in western culture since the 60s and the glamourisation through films like Easy Rider (many many more after obviously). It really enlightened me as to where we are today in this whole drug mess.
It needs legalising and unglamourising desperately. I used to take a bit of coke from time to time and it really is vastly overrated. Indeed, I've seen many people who drink and drink and drink and drink (not getting drunk) on coke - not realising the huge dangers of this.
An E a couple of times a year and that's all I would want to let my hair down.
Obvious really, impose the same sort of random drug testing you have for sport.
You could have a little announcement - tonights edition of Newsnight will not be broadcast after X tested positive for a performance enhancing substance.
You could extend it to movie sets and recording studios.
Finally TV would be reduced to Last of the Summer Wine and Alan Bennet (assuming Horlicks isn't a banned substance)
Guys, those of you who believe you become superstars and fascinating raconteurs after snorting cocaine, I've got news for you - you simply become self-obsessed boring wankers. Really, really fucking boring. Delusional and tedious. It makes people think you're a tosser.
Just thought someone should break it to you, y'know...
There you go again, you bleating sheep! I will make up my own mind, thank you.
I don't need an Anonymous Coward to tell me that "It is a poison". (Actually, cocaine is not). But alcohol is, and that is legal. And judging by any Friday or Saturday night, loads of people are happy to get themselves paralytically drunk.
Stop treating people who take drugs like ill-informed children, instead treat them like adults who have made a conscious decision. Their freedom to decide to take drugs is no different from your decision not to take drugs.
When will the anti-drugs lunatics get it into their supposedly un-addled brains that prohibition does not work. They must be on something.
Uhh, like, what I said there, above. Python were off-the-scale geniuses, sober or otherwise. Some people are blessed with a natural gift of funniness -- Python, Firesign Theatre, George Carlin, et.al -- but then, you throw a bit of psychedelics into the mix, and look out. Needless to say, of course, if you haven't the gift, all the weed in town won't help you...and, as one commenter notes above, the links between drugs -- especially weed and psychedelics -- and artists go back far before Charlie Parker, or the Grateful Dead, or Pink Floyd, or Peter Max, or Jack Kerouac.
I guess my point was that back in college, a lot of Python's absurdist, situationist-type stuff -- Dead Parrot, Spanish Inquisition, Blackmail Game Show, Ministry Of Silly Walks -- seemed to be especially funny while high... although the first time I saw any of that stuff, it was at age 16, before I'd ever touched weed (started in college; I'm in my early 50s now), and it still had me laughing until I hurt.
I do graphic design and illustration as a profession, and political cartoons as an avocation in my off-hours; I'll readily confess that a lot of my "research" involves nabbing a couple of tokes while paging through the wire services or checking out the talking heads on the TV. I've come up with great stuff while "straight", but there's something about weed that sort of kicks the door down, as it were. Ask the Firesign Theatre, or George Carlin (were he still here).
The secret is, of course, to jot it all down, and then next morning with my first coffee, go over them again and see which ones are still funny.
If you don't believe drugs have done good things for us, then go home and burn all your records, all your tapes, and all your CDs because every one of those artists who have made brilliant music and enhanced your lives? RrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrEAL fucking high on drugs.
- Bill Hicks
Funny how the government seeks counsel from someone on an anti-drugs crusade having landed in rehab after a decade on the old bugle. Of course, information from independent scientific advisers went out the window, but a biased point of view, even one with valid points to it, is heeded.
I'm hoping I never move back to the UK.
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