Reactions

Yesterday was a busy day for this blog. I was up early (unusual for me) and spotted something in another blog. I was moderately outraged by what I saw, and wrote this post about the 10:10 'No Pressure' film. I saw that one of my favourite bloggers, Subrosa, had covered it too, and I wrote a comment there, linking back to mine.

After that, the blog became quite busy. I was chasing the story all over the net - firstly to see what others had said about it, and then later, when 10:10 pulled the video from YouTube, trying to find a safe copy. All the while, comments were coming in. I was responding to them, and emailing a protest to 10:10, and writing a letter to my MP (scandalous waste of taxpayers' money, ect ect). It's a good job it rained most of the day, or I would have felt very guilty for not being outside and active.

In all, this blog received 167 visitors yesterday - previous bests were 61 and, before that, 55. Although that is pathetically small compared to some of the big hitters, it's a source of some satisfaction to me. The post received 23 comments (so far), which is almost as many as the 25 on the Cancer Research UK Ride post, which were mainly about the benefits or otherwise of feet-forward motorcycle designs. (And the same commenters too - we're a verstaile bunch.)

Reaction to the film in the press has been interesting.

The BBC are studiously neutral, as are the Daily Telegraph. The latter has two interesting articles, from Vicki Woods and, more aggressively, James Delingpole:

But with this new monstrosity, truly the great Richard Curtis has excelled himself. It’s so bad, it makes his previous shimmering masterpieces of emetica – Love Actually, The Girl In The Cafe, The Boat That Rocked – look like Battleship Potemkin. It makes the Vicar of Dibley look like a collaboration between Oscar Wilde and Shakespeare. It’s so deliciously, unspeakably, magnificently bleeding awful it makes you wish that the man could be given a ticker tape parade in every major capital city, in gratitude for the devastating damage he has (unwittingly) wrought on the eco-fascist cause.

(There's also a link in this article to the thoroughly nasty and misanthropic Greenpeace video of the snarling adolescent in the grey hoodie - if 'No Pressure' made you mad, this one will make your skin crawl.)

The Guardian gave the film a predictably enthusiastic pre-launch fluffing (the reference to "our friends at the 10:10 campaign" is revealing), and later updated the piece with the news that it had been withdrawn, but I couldn't find anything else in the paper about the reaction. That's surprising.

Right - back to the real world.