'Fawlty Towers' and 'The Beano' comparison

Within ‘Fawlty Towers’ the audience are presented with a female character, the female character represents a traditional, middle class elegant woman because she is in the kitchen most of the time. The housewife represents many women of the 1970s because she has a passive royal in society and is being delegated by the male to go back into the kitchen. This emphasises on the aspect that ‘Fawlty Towers’ represents the idea of a patriarchal society because the man has all power for, he stands at the front desk of the hotel and accompanies the guests. The idea of a patriarchal society is shown through the comic strip of ‘The Beano’ because within the first few captions there is a male teacher who educates his class whom, majority are boys.

Within ‘The Beano’ there is a battle between how appearance is reflected through the perception of others. Within the ‘The Beano’ there is two female characters one whom can be classified as a ‘ladette’ a girl who behaves like a boy and secondly, you have the pretty feminine girl whom is into her beauty and appearance. ‘Ladettes’ are females whom have the quality of males and rather dress a certain way to gain authority and statue within society- many feminists would suggests ‘ladettes’ are a new form of girl power because they are going for males jobs and becoming stronger and more dominate. The ‘ladette’ girl in ‘The Beano’ is seen as the final girl because she is the one who exposes the pretty girl to be blind- because she is flirtatious to a not so good-looking boy. The battle between females is part of their female intuition because it is like a competition to see who is more pretty and who will actually last between the boys.

‘The Beano’ is situated in a school, the hypodermic needle suggests that whatever an audience sees on any type of media they would emulate therefore, the ideologies being drip fed to the readers of ‘ The Beano’ is the theme of education. Educational factors are also, present within ‘Fawlty Towers’ because the main man is talking about the Great War and how the Germans were defeated – the historical contexts adds parody to the Great War which has an entertaining factor to the audience how they are indoctrinated to listen to the historical knowledge being portrayed to them.

Why Big Brother Is Ideal For Virgin Media

Virgin owned by Sir Richard Branson has staggered with their audiences and have become quite unpopular. Having ventured out to mobiles, internet and now television Virgin was finding it hard to compete with SKY the biggest institution known for digital television.

However, Virgin Media have decided to sponsor Big Brother after Carphone Warehouse dropped them. The decision to sponsor the reality TV show was because of the race row and therefore thought that they could venture into a big project like Big Brother to gain their popularity again.

The big debate is that would ponder many of the peoples minds at Channel 4 and possibly viewers is that:
"The question is whether Channel 4 and Endemol will allow Virgin Media to use Big Brother as a showcase or just pocket Branson's cash while they continue to work on their own digital plans for the show"

My own opinion:
I personally feel Richard Branson is looking to gain popularity and knowing that Big Brother will get his company noticed is a clever way of gaining profit within his business. The man is smart!!!

...Blue Peter phone- in recieved 14,000 calls...

During a fone in competiton a grand total of 14,000 people called in but due to technical faults the show had faked a winner!!! Whomever called in was not part of the competition 'guess whos shoes'. A young girl who was just visiting the show was asked to call with the right answer and was proclaimed the winner.

Figures to show Blue Peters gainings in money...
- 3.5p of the 10p call going to Unicef, it raised £450.52 for the children's charity.
- £727.75 went to Cable & Wireless for the use of the phone-lines
-£207.93 to Telecom Express, which ran the competition and has donated its share to the appeal.

BBC explained that the technical difficulty was due to the fact that calls were flooding in and thereby everything just froze, the tv show carried on saying that the stand in was a mistake and did not think at the time if it was the best thing it was the spare of the moment.

My opinion:
I think that Blue Peter did not want to intentionally hurt anyone that called in - it was a technical difficulty and it was just meant to be the girl in the studio who was visiting. As long as Blue Peter have accepted they made a mistake, there is no problem.

Using the comparison of these two tests as your starting point explore the media issues and debates which they raise.

Rap music is a growing music genre within the contemporary society of today, the genre can not be categorised into one categorary such as only a music genre but has stemmed to globalising many other instituions such as fashion, print and last but not least the taking over other record labels. Nowadays the issues and debates presented within the genre are about a luxurious and lavish lifestyle, having the dream girl and having a lot of money however when the genre started out it promoted black unity and also asked questions on why black people are represented a certain way. Text one 'The Revolution will not be televised' by Gill Scott Heron is about black peoples representation within the media and text two 'Your revolution' by DJ Vadim ft Sarah Jones is about black womens rights and critcising the black media.

Black people in the media and society alone have had alot of grief groups such as the Civil Rights and far out groups such as the Black Panthers have protested and tried to challenge certain stereotypes that the hegemony present to us. In Verse 5 of Text one Heron speaks about a change and the aspect of black people being respected and things will be better 'There will be no pictures of pigs shooting down brothers in the instant replay'. Pigs is referring to the police, in the genre of rap music the police are known as many things such as 5.0 and PoPo, the reason for this is because of the respect the black people recieve from the police- at times it is unjustice and unfair. Heron, is emphasising on the fact that the revolution will change and the police will not pick up the gun and pull the trigger at every black person.

Text 2 is a parody and mocking of black people in the media- within the media there is a lot of competition between individual and groups of black people to be the best. Sarah states ' I'm Sarah Jones/ Not Foxy Brown'. Foxy Brown, is a female rapper who at times is quite a provocative rapper having produced a controversial album called 'Il Na Na' which proved to have explicit messages. Sarah Jones in her song is proving that she does not have to be the trophy on the man's arm but, is going to spread the word of black people and how people are seeing them in the media, by what they produce and broadcast on the television.

The comparison between the two texts is that they are sung and possibly written by Black people.Sarah Jones presents a feminist revolution and feminists but womens rights and Gill Scott Heron is speaking about how black people are pursued and also, at times referring to theorists Staurt Hall's theory of the black person being three things in the media which are: victim, entertainer and savage. Around the time Gill Scott Heron's song was released there was less black media involvement and therefore, they were shown as Hall's theory and in 1998 the media devlovped black people started to shine and the culture of being 'black and proud' was shown in Sarah Jones song however, she is mocking it at times.

Just like Sarah Jones, Gill Scott Heron mentions famous people but who are white 'Not sung by Glen Campbel, Tom Jones, Johnny Cash, Englebert Humperdink, or the RareEarth'. It seems as if Gill Scott is showing how the white society is a dominated area in the media and therefore everything is conducted by them but, there is no black person alongside them to amke a difference instead they are ' trying to slide that colour tv inti a stolen ambulance' - as seen as theifs. There is a real juxtaposition of class and ideologies between black and white people within this song because it seems if white people can be high media mogals but, black people have not reached that level yet until the revolution does not change.

In conclusion Text One shows a more critcal and possibly a stronger message of how black people were represented however, during the years the sterotypes have changed but some may say that they have altered slightly. Text two shows a more materialistic aspect towards the black culture which can be seen as a good and bad thing because they are starting to get jobs and earn respect in society and the other hand as sarah jones jas pointed out they are being materialistic.