MAD WORLD

Yesterday, while out jogging in a vain attempt to fight off the advance of a middle aged beer belly, I was listening to the BBC World Service when I heard an interview of such silliness and banality that it actually became grimly fascinating.

A young woman was speaking in the instantly recognisable glottal tones of what's known in the UK as Estuary English - a sort of mock cockney mixed with your mother's telephone voice plus a dash of Jamaican intonation - found mainly within the region of Greater London known as the Thames Estuary. An example of an Estuary English word is 'innit', that can either be used as a rhetorical question at the end of a sentence, to mean 'isn't it?' or is used as a kind of way marker during speech in place of a full stop or pause.

The young woman was telling an equally excited young man about how she had been recruited into the Sugar Babes, Britain's latest throwaway all-girl singing combo in the tradition of the Spice Girls etc.
She explained how a producer had asked her to come up to London but wouldn't tell her why.

On arrival, she was whisked into a recording studio and asked to sing some vocals for the band, and became so excited by the news she couldn't stop shaking.

She went on to recount how she was then kept in London for FOUR days and barred from 'phoning her mother with the good news, as a publicity blackout of the earth-shattering event was considered of the utmost importance. She wasn't allowed to phone her boyfriend either. The young woman seemed to think this was both amusing and perfectly reasonable.

I know that in the bonkers world we live in today I shouldn't be surprised that being in a pop band is considered more important than 'honouring your father and mother' as the Bible puts it. But if you or I held a young girl incommunicado in a big city for four days I think we'd be hearing from the police rather than the BBC.