No. 7: The best of local racism on the local internet

It’s your weakly, Birmingham-related, freemium email with everything you need to know. It’s like the video tapes of 10 mins of Eastenders and Pop Idol that Alistair Campbell used to make for Blair so he could seem ‘with it’. Everything in the zeitgeist is here…

Birmingham in internet history

The Brumternet has had it’s own Boaty McLackofimagination internet moment this week, with the people who are destroying Central Library thinking a competition to name some of the wrecking equipment would be a good idea. As the clickbait-ers in training at the Birmingham Eastside blog are collecting the ‘best repossess’ from Twitter we don’t have to. Our favourites are ‘Cliff’ and ‘Richard’ or ‘Child Protection Services’ and ‘The Missing Capita Contract’.

This left us thinking what would be the best clickbait internet headlines in Birmingham history. We got this far and gave up:

  • Enoch Powell Hired A Function Room On Stephenson St And You’ll Never Guess What Happened Next
  • These Actors From London and Liverpool Were Hired To Play Brummies In A Gritty Period Drama. What Happens Next Will Surprise You
  • What is your Birmingham Quarter name? Connect your Facebook account to our content farm to find out
  • 101 Things Birmingham Gave The World

We’re closing our whimsical local nostalgia archive to free up commercial space for the local press to exploit with their copies of our work, so expect to see this on a site with adverts near you soon. You can sign our petition against us, here.


Up the bum no bouillabaisse

For the past six months or so professional telly cookery twat Marco Pierre White has been terrifying people who walk from town to Millennium Point with huge photos of himself looking like an axe murderer.
All this to advertise his new joint at Hotel La Tour. It doesn’t have the views of the Cube and, presumably, it has a better food hygiene rating.
Apparently that hasn’t done enough to entice folks into his restaurant because now they’ve replaced his haggard visage with much bigger and more literal arses*.

If you’re going to take a leap back into the 70s with your advertising, then probably best not to do it on the main pedestrian walk to a school of media and cultural studies. Led by BCU’s Dr Gemma Commane there’s been a bit of a Twitter storm in a tea cup (filled, one assumes with foam and jus) about these posters, but given that at least one budget holder from the uni has announced they won’t use the Hotel La Tour to host visitors, this one could have legs (we just won’t show you a photo of them).

Of course, crass advertising and general visual pollution aren’t the worst of Hotel La Tour’s crimes against Brum-anity—that would be them being complicit in the tearing down of Island House to make a fucking car park.
*they’re much nicer though. Is it ok to say that? I think we’re being postfeminist about it if that helps.

Once you see the Capita contract in this photo you can’t unsee it


Make your own jokes: Snapchat for councils

Council comms blog Comms2point0 have written something about snapchat for councils. So our joke contains pictures of Albert Bore basically. And mixed use developments. With weird meme slogans like squad goals. Use double sided sticky tape for speed.


10 of the best casually racist Tweets following Chinese businessman Dr Tony Xia’s Aston Villa ‘takeaway’.

Or a few, anyway.

Barely even the right continent, onwards…

Of course in China, they just call it ‘food’…


Want to mine that seam, do you? Mind we seem to be having our No. 39 and eating it…

Maybe, of course, having a Chinese owner might lead to the Villa fans expanding their cultural horizons and knowledge. Although the smaller-scale pilot of this in Small Heath didn’t work out like that.

Has this one got a deeper football supporting meta-reference in it?

We didn’t think of any of these ourselves, our first thought on hearing the name of the new Villa owner was something different…


Stop the planet of the japes I want to get off


Dr Xia, Dr Xia / Dr Xia, Dr Xia / Dr Xia, Dr Xia / Oh oh ohhh, Dr Xia…

Have the Holte got the voices for that one?

In case you missed it

And finally…

If, like us and Andy Burnham, you’re still listening to the new Stone Roses single you might find it useful to know that “Roy Hattersley, Les Battersby, Anne Hathaway, Arsenal’s Bertie Mee”, fits perfectly over the lyrics in the verse. Sorry.

“The Birmingham accent is sexy,” says Peaky Blinder Cillian Murphy according to the BBC. We’re just surprised he’s heard one, la.

Author: Howard Wilkinson

Director of Satire, Paradise Circus. Howard adds stability at the top, taking a strategic overview of operations whilst also stepping in from time to time in a caretaker author role.