Author: Jon Bounds

Jon was voted the ‘14th Most Influential Person in the West Midlands’ in 2008. Subsequently he has not been placed. He’s been a football referee, venetian blind maker, cellar man, and a losing Labour council candidate: “No, no chance. A complete no-hoper” said a spoilt ballot. Jon wrote and directed the first ever piece of drama performed on Twitter when he persuaded a cast including MPs and journalists to give over their timelines to perform Twitpanto. But all that is behind him.

Satirical Cartoon: Zombie Walk & Tory Party Conference

A group of people in suits, scabs on their faces, dishevelled, walk stiffly across Centenary Square with the new library in the background. They all look blank faced and stumble in the same direction towards the ICC.

Sitting on the walls around the hall of memory are some young people, in tracksuits and with skateboards. On the floor near them are two newspapers (as the council have stopped clearing rubbish recently or something) – one paper has the headline ‘Tory Conference in Brum’, the other ‘Zombie Walk Today’.

One of the young skateboarders in saying, “Which one’s Boris?”.

101 Things Birmingham Gave The World. No. 58: The Last Night of the Proms

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As the orchestra parps, the squiffy toffs bray, and the BBC commentators struggle with pitching their insight towards an audience that pretty much only wants to watch for the 1812 Overture, please remember to direct some of your swelling pooterish patriotism towards Birmingham. For without the global city there would be no local musical pride.

The Proms were launched in 1895 by some people in London, but they were not the first regular musical festival season, not by a long way. That may well have been the Birmingham Triennial Musical Festival which pre-dated the proms by over one hundred years.

That first music festival in Birmingham, held over three days in September 1768, was to help raise funds to complete the new General Hospital on Summer Lane. It took another event ten years later in 1778 to achieve the funds to open the hospital in September 1779. A further five years on, in 1784 the performances became the Birmingham Triennial Musical Festival, and after calling it that they decided to run it every three years.

It was so bloody popular they built the Town Hall (in 1834) to house it, and it took the War to End All Wars to end it. But that spirit lives on, every September: with added plastic Union Jack bowler hats.

And the Last Night of those proms wouldn’t be the same without the Pomp and Circumstance of one Edward Elgar who was Professor of Music at the University of – wait for it… – Birmingham. He wouldn’t be where he is today without the city or its musical ambitions, four of his major choral works were commissioned by the Birmingham Triennial Music Festival.

Birmingham, land of hope and glory.

Image CC By: Steve Bowbrick

Satirical Video: Howard’s Ice Bucket Challenge

You know how we describe these cartoons as we can’t draw? Well, we haven’t got a video camera either.

Howard Wilkinson, the Paradise Circus Director of Satire, is standing in the fountain in Victoria Square near the ‘Aphrodite at the water hole’ statue. He’s wearing some clothes that he doesn’t mind getting wet. Cat Deely has said he’s got to do this.

Someone chucks a bucket of cold water on him. But he still gives money to charity.

He nominates Shefali, David Harewood, and Chipper the dog.

Satirical Cartoon: West Midlands Police and Crime Commissioner By-election

A cartoon infographic, like those that are popular on the Internet these days. The lines are simple and the writing a little shaky, like David Shrigley or those birthday cards or XKCD.

It’s a bar chart, in black and white and cross-hatching. It’s labeled ‘West Midlands Police and Crime Commissioner By-election Exit Poll’. The bars are:

Labour 200
UKIP 130
Tory 50
Green 45
Lib Dem 10
Residents against the wheelie bin 12
White Dee for Celebrity Big Brother 243,235

There’s still a copy of the Birmingham Mail on the floor with an explanatory ‘Low Turnout’ headline.

Disappearing Brum

Marti De Bergi first saw the legendarily punctual Spinal Tap in a little club called the Electric Banana but advised us “don’t look for it—it’s not there anymore”. And the director of Kramer Vs Kramer Vs Godzilla is right, nostalgia is a fool’s game.

The gateway drug is TKTVP, street name ‘Talking about old Kids’ Television Programmes’. No matter how it makes those lonely first-year undergraduate conversations in the Union bar seem easier it’s just building up an empty existence propped up only by Shine compilations in your work cubicle. By my age, you’re drawn and haggard and fit only to frequent the back rooms of the seedier pubs in Moseley talking about bloody Tolkien.

But like a pusher, I’m going to attempt to give you false nostalgia for a past you needn’t have bothered to remember. Let’s see if you can develop a simulacra of a misty eye over these gone, or soon to be gone, Birmingham fixtures:

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Lolitics: The power of civic satire

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Local councillors often communicate in a torturous combination of management speak and political spin. They share the oratory and obfuscatory ambition of government ministers but lack the support of hundreds of SPADs or the rhetorical benefits of a classical education. But for a time the ruling officials of Birmingham — the largest local authority in Europe — spoke to the city in the simple, grammatically incorrect, language of the internet cat.

A site called Lolitics from 2008 to 2012 took the publicity images — hard hats, awkward grins, pop-up banners and all — of the politicians and added lolcat-style captions, poking a very new type of satirical fun at a group of people who hadn’t quite grasped how communications were working in the world of social media. Council Leader Mike Whitby, a blustering older David Brent in a multicoloured tie, was lampooned as a man who spoke in one noun sentences, while Councillor Deirdre Alden, the most thrusting of a husband/wife/son team on the Conservative benches, became a paranoid princess obsessed with building her ‘shiney (sic) army’ (a group of supporters, most often in hi-vis jackets performing some community good).

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B’ham Student Guide: how to avoid students

Students are annoying: they sit around in groups wearing clothes that blogs tell them are cool, quoting Noel Fielding (probably, I haven’t listened since 2006), and have endless conversations that are inextricably pulled towards them all listing their fucking A-Level results. You don’t want that sort of thing putting you off your beer, so here’s where to go for a pint in Brum without seeing the skinny-jeans of anyone doing a degree in Meeja Studies:
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Satirical Cartoon: CityTV

Some vaguely recognisable faces, Debra Davis, Kid Jenson, that fella off Heart FM (although they are all wearing City TV badges so we know who they are) are queuing outside a Job Centre.

There’s a TV crew filming them, they have ‘Benefits St’ on their hi-vis tabards.

Heart FM chappie is saying: “At least we finally get to make a programme.”

101 Things Birmingham Gave The World. No. 53: The Ironing

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Back in the days before anything was open on a Sunday, the gentleman of the house would repair to the local hostelry and return home pie-eyed at about half past two. He’d then sleep off the roast dinner in an armchair, before it was time for That’s Life and then bed.

For his adoring wife there was but one thing to do: iron his clothes for the week ahead in front of a black and white film. As Bette Davis wept to a finale, the shirts would pile up neatly folded on the sofa. And this picture of everyday sexist bliss was brought to you by the city of Birmingham.

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