The True Meaning of Diplomacy

Diplomat – look it up.  In the dictionary the meaning is pretty clear.  A Diplomat is an ambassador, an envoy for his or her country in a foreign land.  As a Diplomat one is required to be diplomatic ie tactful, respectful of the customs of the land you are being a Diplomat in while representing the best about your country and dealing with any situations that arise with Diplomacy – I think  you can see where this is going.

Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock for the last few days you can’t fail to have read about the new WikiLeaks info dump either from the site itself or in the various press reports.  Depending on your point of view it either matters or doesn’t matter who said what to whom, who called who a light weight, who ordered US diplomats to spy on their UN counterparts, who the US government considered unstable ( newsflash – he was)

The fact is that those comments are a matter of record and as such should be subject to the Freedom of Information Act but as they are covered by a cloak of diplomatic secrecy some parties would have you believe that the world will end if they see the light of day.

So here’s what I want to know.  Why did the diplomats and government officials in question write or say those things? There are other ways of expressing your opinion of the French PM or Chancellor Merkel or Blair or the current situations in certain countries that don’t cause sharp intakes of breath or strained relations with the countries involved.  More diplomatic ways, shall we say.

Of course one answer is that they never expected their comments to see the light of day.  Another is that they hold the rest of the world in such contempt that they don’t care.  If lessons are learned from this then WikiLeaks will still publish the same kind of information but it won’t be controversial or interesting.

Did this article raise your hackles do you want to discuss it further?  You know where you can reach me. 

The Remake - why???

When I lived in England we were just entering the satellite channel boom and you could count the terrestrial channels on the fingers of one hand.  Our TV diet consisted of a couple of reality shows – the very first Big Brother was appointment TV – it’s been flogged to death since and was recently taken out and shot after 10 years.  Sitcoms, some serious science programming by men in radiation shield glasses and comb-overs on BBC 2, period dramas and sprinkled into the mix those glossy shows from the US. 

We didn’t mess with perfection, the channels bought shows from abroad and we watched them. The few times we did try and remake shows they were misfires. The woeful Days Like These, the UK version of That Seventies Show sank without a trace, despite being copied word for word – the humour didn’t travel well.  Among others that didn’t work Green Wing the UK version of Scrubs.  We bought plenty of concepts, This is Your Life, Family Fortunes, The Apprentice, Blockbusters (my favourite quiz show) and most recently Deal or No Deal.  Concepts are fair game, you can’t import the host and the slick production values, so you have enough latitude to tailor the program to the audience who are going to watch it.  I prefer the family atmosphere of the UK DOND to the slick sanitized, bimboed up US version.

But going the other way it seems the US TV industry continues to not get British TV shows.  While there are occasional bright spots, the US version of the The Office is actually funny (I hated the UK version).  I think the point I’m trying to make is that we Brits like to watch foreign TV shows because it shows us a world we’d have to hop on a plane to see - from our living rooms.  Brit shows are usually gritty, their humour is blacker their characters darker.  To remake shows like Life on Mars or Being Human or Red Dwarf, Viva Blackpool (Viva Loughlin – one episode CBS), Coupling, Men Behaving Badly and whatever the next remake is that’s coming down the pipe is an insult to the showrunners, actors and most of all to the viewers who ‘won’t get it.’

The reason for this post is that SyFy are remaking Being Human, it’s a huge hit in the UK and did well when it was shown over here on BBC America.  The teaser trailer they had for it went something like this, ‘a vampire, a ghost and a werewolf share a flat in Bristol’ of course Bristol will be swopped for New York or LA and the actors will all be so pretty (in the UK version the werewolf wore glasses, the ghost was obsessive about making tea and the vamp was on the wagon but they blended the horror with the sad/funny bits) and of course just to spice things up a bit the vampire will have a human girlfriend.

US TV has some great shows, but it would be ground-breaking if they could show imported programming in its original form.