Author: MIL-OSI Publisher

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Alexander Sergeant, Lecturer in Digital Media Production, University of Westminster

Long Story Short is the latest animated series from Raphael Bob-Waksberg, the talented showrunner who is best known for his early Netflix hit BoJack Horseman. As fans of his previous work will know, Bob-Waksberg’s sensibility seems to come through an eclectic mix of absurdist humour and raw, emotional realism.

BoJack started life as a madcap stoner comedy about a talking horse acting like an entitled fratboy. By the end of its six seasons, the show had evolved into a psychological drama about a supremely damaged man struggling in vain to heal himself, albeit a man who happened to have a horse’s head.

In contrast to BoJack’s evolutionary quality, Long Story Short starts exactly where it means to start. This is ironic, perhaps, given that the show’s central conceit is that it tells the story of a multigeneration family in a non-chronological manner.

In episode one, we are introduced the Schwoopers, a dysfunctional middle-class Jewish family consisting of matriarch Naomi (Lisa Edelstein), patriarch Elliot (Paul Reiser), eldest son Avi (Ben Feldman), middle child Shira (Abbi Jacobson) and youngest Yoshi (Max Greenfield). Darting across decades of time and generations of tension, we witness couples meet, marry, divorce and die – sometimes all in the same episode and almost always not in that order.

The show possesses a primarily emotional rather than rational logic to it that fits nicely with it being an animation. It’s often said that animation possesses a quality that makes it particularly good for processing emotional trauma.

The essence of the medium involves purposely selecting moments in the world to bring to life, while leaving others behind. This process of self-conscious selection provides a space to order and sort the world in a manner comparable to something like therapy, processing the information differently through the act of bringing it to life onscreen. BoJack did this particularly well.

Drawing on animation’s long-established history of anthropomorphic characters, BoJack was set in a confusing world of animals and humans. The grotesqueness of the visual design often mirrored the internal disgust the central character felt about himself. Despite his status as an uber-wealthy actor who rarely worked, the writing was so good that BoJack’s trauma became our own.

One of the strongest features of Long Story Short is its look. Using thick black lines and a minimalist approach to scenery, the world of the Schwoopers takes on a painted, almost impressionist quality. It is like watching a Van Gogh painting drawn by Hanna-Barbera, the colours vivid and spotted, punctuating spaces and distorting others, like the process of memory itself.

It’s approach to narrative, however, sits in contrast to its bold look. Its story primarily deals with family dynamics and emotional trauma but these stories are painted with faint marks, opaque colours and tiny details. As such, a weariness emerges in the viewing experience, induced perhaps more by the times in which we are living rather than any failing of the show itself.

Premiering in 2016 and finishing in 2020, during the COVID lockdowns, Bojack seems to provide a strange antidote to Trump’s first term in office. Its madness matched the madness of its times, and its relentless compassion and desire for complexity served as a nice contrast to a world marked by a politics of simplistic cruelty.

Long Story Short tries to replicate this effect, but doesn’t do it as well. Coming out in 2025, the show’s interest in the quiet, everyday traumas caused by living with siblings and partners feel somewhat narcissistic and navel gazing.

Characters represent different sexualities and religions and all embody typical notions of family life. They are each given space and time to be represented onscreen. Yet none of that makes them hugely interesting as people. The character of Yoshi (Max Greenfield) is a good example of this.

Presented as a loveable loser in the mould of BoJack’s haphazard roommate Todd Chavaz, Yoshi is supposed to be somehow sympathetic and wise. However, he spends most of his time doing very little while his relatives struggle with far more arresting problems like surrogacy, divorce and bereavement. Among Yoshi’s biggest struggles are how he will get home after a night out at San Francisco’s trendiest, Instagram-friendly hangouts.

And the fact that a lot of this is set in San Francisco during COVID makes the unremarkability of its characters and premise all the more apparent. San Francisco is an exceedingly wealthy city dominated by a liberal elite. It is also a city that suffers from an undercurrent of real poverty and human suffering. This stark juxtaposition of worlds was made all the more intense during the pandemic. However, none of this finds its way onto our screens in Long Story Short.

As you watch these comfortable people be rather uncomfortable, you feel like grabbing the frame and turning it left or right in the hope that we might have a break from all this hand wringing. For those who know the city, we’re looking for reality to break in, to see an example of the suffering and pain probably happening on the streets that surround them.

This story about the liberal coastal elite fails to get beyond their narrow concerns to find more mutual and human territory in which we can all relate. It’s safe, comfortable, a little stifling, a bit boring, and seems to be completely fractured from the suddenly dangerous and precarious world that surrounds it.

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Alexander Sergeant does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Long Story Short: an appealing but unsuccessful animated fantasy of memory and liberalism – https://theconversation.com/long-story-short-an-appealing-but-unsuccessful-animated-fantasy-of-memory-and-liberalism-264466

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Christopher Burden, PhD Candidate in Comparative European Populisms, Aston University

Having spent the summer holding weekly press conferences, Reform UK is seeking to drive the political agenda into conference season by holding its annual gathering before Labour and the Conservatives have theirs.

The party will meet at the Birmingham National Exhibition Centre, with a bigger agenda and line-up than previous years. What’s also notable is just how different this conference will be compared to the traditional events held by the other parties.

Labour will be in Liverpool voting on policy, debating motions and deciding committee positions while the Conservatives will be in Manchester, unveiling their policies for the year following difficult local elections. Fundamentally, these conferences are expositions to the membership, followed mainly by journalists, politicos and the motivated base.

Reform is using its conference to draw public attention. So far, that mission has manifested in staging that feels more American than British.

The conference website features images of Farage surrounded by indoor fireworks, with a rolling ticker listing key speakers. Tickets are “SOLD OUT” – although “platinum” packages are still available for £2,500, which buys you fast-track entry and champagne breakfasts with party grandees.

Meanwhile, cinematic trailers on YouTube feature yet more flashing lights, sweeping spotlights, rousing music, and slo-mo montages of Reform UK politicians delivering impassioned speeches.

Unlike traditional conference formats – speeches, debates, motions and amendments – Reform is highlighting personality-driven performances. While the Conservative conference is promoting a “thought-provoking fringe programme”, Reform is promising entertainment.

Their proposed line-up features controversial TV presenter Jeremy Kyle, former host of an eponymous 2000s TV show which was once described by a judge as “human bear-baiting”. In the video announcing his involvement, Kyle says: “It won’t be boring, trust me.”

“It’s quite interesting – when you say party conference,” he adds. “This is gonna be a party.” Having a celebrity speaker trailed in this way – and to have him redefine what the “party” in “party conference” means ahead of time marks a significant cultural shift.

Kyle – and indeed everyone involved – seems to be actively crossing traditional conference boundaries between the politicians on stage and their audiences, drawing upon the transgressive aesthetics of populism.

These tactics are unusual for Britain but normal in the US. Journalist Tucker Carlson has long performed a Kyle-type role for the Republicans. Reform appears to be replicating this approach in the UK, integrating household names into the political fold, normalising the concept of politics as something for everyone.

These spectacles are for those who may not necessarily know what they want but know that they want something different. We might wonder if Reform minds that people question how much substance there is to its policies, so long as they’ve got people discussing their agenda.

Reform is threading forms of populism normally found in the digital realm into its conference agenda. This form of reciprocal populism seeks to reconcile the needs of the politician with the wants of the audience. It doesn’t necessarily matter what is promised, so long as the audience feels as if they have stock in that conversation.

At this conference, expect audience participation and soundbite straplines. We’ll see attendees sporting “Farage Number 10” football shirts. Just as Trump fans wear red Maga baseball caps at his rallies, Farage is seeking to brand his voters with his products. Maga has successfully transitioned from party slogan to household brand and Reform is clearly trying to follow suit.

Will it work?

On inspection, these American branding tactics, rousing patriotic music and bombastic speeches prove a relatively thin populist fabric. They are imported from successful campaigns abroad and mapped over a Britain the party wishes to conjure rather than necessarily reflecting the one that exists.

Policy-light infotainment and “mega-rallies” remain distinctly foreign to the UK audience and may later prove to be an unwelcome change in a country seeking stability in complicated geopolitical times.

The celebrity endorsements aren’t themselves odd, nor are the gimmicks entirely unheard of in British politics. After all, Liberal Democrat leader Ed Davey spent much of the 2024 election campaign plummeting down waterslides and falling off paddle boards.

However, Reform UK is attempting something quite different when it emulates the brash, loud populism more often seen in the US. It’s just a style at odds with British sensitivities.

For instance, while dismissing net zero as nonsense, Reform has called for Britain to open up sites across northern England and Wales for fracking. Richard Tice directly quotes the American president, with a call to “drill baby drill”.

The rejection of net zero in this way, and the calling for greater use of fossil fuels, comes straight from Trumpian playbook but stands starkly out of kilter with British public opinion.

Similarly, calling for the mass deportation of 600,000 migrants mimics what is currently happening in the US. But while immigration has captured the national narrative, and has been a long feature of Reform campaigning, the opinions of the British public are far more nuanced than supporting wholesale repatriation of hundreds of thousands of people .

It’s clear that on these topics, which are to be discussed at the conference, Reform is not necessarily seeking to represent mainstream views as they exist. Instead it is trying to shift what’s known as the Overton window, the range of what is seen as acceptable views, in order to present these issues to mainstream voters who feel disaffected by the traditional parties.

The mainstream must not underestimate this threat. Reform has undertaken a significant effort to professionalise the party, constructing an inner circle of financiers, communications experts and advisors. While the character remains definitively populist, they possess the architectures and platforms needed to effectively campaign and operate.

The party is well aware that within the first-past-the-post system, where tiny leads deliver thumping majorities, they need to achieve only a broad support, rather than total conviction. Not everyone needs to be dazzled by this theatrical party conference – just enough to tip the balance.

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Christopher Burden is affiliated with the Labour Party.

– ref. How Reform is pitching its party conference as an American-style rally – https://theconversation.com/how-reform-is-pitching-its-party-conference-as-an-american-style-rally-264458

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Millie Horton-Insch, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, History of Art Department, Trinity College Dublin

Britain appears to be a nation on the verge of Norman-conquest mania. In July, the prime minister and the French president announced that the Bayeux tapestry – the epic 11th-century embroidery that depicts the 1066 conquest of England – would be loaned to the British Museum in 2026-27.

This makes new BBC drama series, King & Conqueror, which depicts the events leading up to the Norman conquest, extremely well timed. The credits of each episode feature the drama’s title overlaid on imagery from the Bayeux tapestry. But how does the drama compare to that most evocative textile account of the conquest?

I could write at length about how the BBC drama variously depicts and diverges from the tapestry’s version of events. And the extent to which King & Conqueror is consistent with 11th-century written and embroidered sources has been explored by historians elsewhere.

As an art historian who has researched the Bayeux tapestry, it is difficult not to regret the relative darkness and lack of colour in King & Conqueror’s depiction of the 11th century, an age which would in reality have been richly furnished, as the tapestry itself attests.

But it is satisfying to see that the narrative devices that are most effective in this new drama are those also included in tapestry. To varying degrees, both the tapestry and the drama are dramatised retellings of history, a reality most obviously signalled by fact that neither tell a perfectly linear account of the events.

In the tapestry sequencing for instance, Edward the Confessor’s funeral is stitched before his death, shocking the viewer with the pomp of a stately funeral before then depicting his deathbed. Similarly, in episode five of King & Conqueror, we see Harold and his wife Edith kidnapped, bound and held in a wagon under attack from archers. Then the chronology leaps backwards to explain that Harold and Edith have travelled on a diplomatic mission to Normandy, landed in Brittany by mistake, and then been taken hostage by bandits.

An unflinching portrayal of the brutality of battle is similarly used in both the BBC drama and the tapestry to maintain suspense, even when the outcome of the Battle of Hastings is well known.

Violence and fear

Blood and gore are dramatically present in King & Conqueror. But arguably, replacing benign patterns of birds and beasts on the margins of the tapestry with mutilated bodies is an even more arresting way to signal the violent disruption to life caused by medieval battle.

The scale of William’s violence off the battlefield is also more fully captured in the tapestry. In the final episode of the drama, William is shown ordering the plundering and burning of every village they pass through: “We move forward like the wrath of God.”

But the fear such an order would have struck in people of all classes is not so explicitly captured as it is in the tapestry, where the battle is preceded by the depiction of an anonymous woman and child fleeing their home as the Normans set it on fire.

In this sense, the tapestry also gives a greater sense of the effect of a conquering army had on ordinary women, than a drama more concerned with the main characters. So much so, that it makes the BBC’s sexed-up trailer shared on social media bewildering.

Suggestive clips of Harold and William are shown with the text: “Want to be served by a king? Or let him conquer you?” Anyone who had viewed the Bayeux tapestry and seen the fate of women portrayed there, would certainly not wish to conquered by William’s forces.

The porousness of the English Channel as a well-trodden diplomatic avenue is a similarly effective leitmotif in both the tapestry and the drama. Boats crossing the Channel are a frequent tableau in King & Conqueror, reaching a crescendo in the final episode, in which the scale of the Norman fleet with its sails raised resembles the white cliffs of Dover.

In the tapestry, boat crossings are shown with equal frequency, though the scale of the Norman fleet is even more evocatively captured by the depiction of its construction: men felling trees to make boats for the invading flotilla. A unprecedented number of boats in the tapestry are then seen crossing the Channel, their overlapping prows powerfully conveying the scale of the invading naval force.

History meets contemporary politics

It is here that the Bayeux tapestry, the BBC’s dramatisation, and contemporary politics intersect. On the day that followed the announcement of the Bayeux tapestry’s loan, Keir Starmer and Emmanuel Macron held a joint press conference in which they announced a bilateral policy engineered to respond to the increase in the number of migrants crossing the English Channel from France in small boats.

In King & Conqueror, the series ends with William’s coronation. However, the tapestry itself appears incomplete and terminates abruptly after the Battle of Hastings.

The current leaders of France and Britain have explicitly sought to frame their new policy as a continuation of the tapestry’s narrative, with Macron commenting:

The story is unfinished and nobody knows the end … But this is our work, our duty and our chance … to finish the tapestry and … take the same road as these warriors but with another state of mind … that together we will build a new … common history and create a new era based on culture, knowledge, respect, science and centuries of enlightenment, creations, and … friendship.

There is, of course, an irony to promoting Anglo-French bilateralism through an object that depicts the invasion and conquering of England by the Normans in 1066.

But there is also a poignant, unacknowledged paradox in referencing an object that so evocatively depicts boats crossing the Channel as a means of bolstering policies specifically designed to deter them, and the people they carry. Certainly, it is clear that some visual motifs remain as politically affecting today as they did in the 11th century.

Millie Horton-Insch receives funding from the Leverhulme Trust.

– ref. Why the Norman conquest still has a powerful hold over British culture and politics – https://theconversation.com/why-the-norman-conquest-still-has-a-powerful-hold-over-british-culture-and-politics-264464

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Steve Westlake, Lecturer, Environmental Psychology, University of Bath

Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch has described her plan to “maximise extraction” of the UK’s oil and gas from the North Sea as a “common sense” energy policy.

Politicians are using language like this increasingly often – calling themselves “pragmatic” on climate change and invoking “common sense”. It sounds reasonable, reassuring, and grownup – the opposite of “hysterical” campaigners or “unrealistic” targets.

But new research my colleagues and I conducted, calling on a decade of interviews with UK MPs, shows that political “pragmatism” is fast becoming a dangerous form of climate delay. By framing urgent action as “extreme” and steady-as-she-goes policies as “pragmatic”, leaders across the political spectrum are protecting the fossil-fuel status quo at the very moment scientists warn we need rapid, transformative change.

Badenoch’s latest intervention is a perfect example. She said “common sense” dictates that every drop of oil must be extracted from the North Sea, and that net zero by 2050 was a policy pushed by “bullies”. This came just a day after the UK Met Office declared summer 2025 as the hottest on record.

We found that members of parliament deploy the same language of pragmatism to defend fossil fuel companies and to insist to their constituents that nothing needs to change too fast. The paradox, of course, is that more urgent social and economic change is precisely what the world’s climate scientists say is necessary to avert climate breakdown.

In our recent interviews with politicians, MPs from across the political spectrum tended towards gradual change in order to maintain political and public support. One said:

First and foremost be pragmatic. Accept incremental change, because incremental change often accelerates, but you take people with you. If you didn’t take people with you, you’ll start getting resistance.

Another MP contrasted a pragmatic approach with the calls from some campaign groups for more rapid action:

There are campaigns that say we’ve got to be net zero by 2025, or 2030. [laughing incredulously] … do you realise what the consequences of that will be … you’d have a revolution in Britain if you tried to do that, in terms of destroying people’s quality of life.

Interestingly, despite rejecting more ambitious targets, later in the interview the same MP acknowledged that faster change was needed:

We need to do more, we could do more, we are, you know, I’m sure the government will do more. I’m certainly pushing it to do more. But fundamentally we’ve halved our emissions since 1990.

Here we see the nuance, and the danger, of the language of pragmatism. It allows politicians to hold two positions at once. They can acknowledge the need for rapid change, while promoting a “pragmatic” position against it.

The calls for pragmatism appeared to stem from MPs’ desire to present a reasoned and rational case for climate action that does not impinge on constituents’ lives. They also used pragmatism to distance themselves from arguments they portrayed as “extreme” or “shrill”.

The flawed assumption underlying these calls to pragmatism is that the public will not support ambitious, transformative climate policies. We concluded that whereas a few years ago MPs promoted climate policies “by stealth”, meaning they did it on the quiet, now they turn to ideas of pragmatism in an attempt to maintain a fragile political consensus in favour of net zero – a consensus that is already fracturing.

Top-down pragmatism

This turn to pragmatism can now be seen at the very top of British politics, threatening the UK’s steady ratcheting up of climate ambition to date.

Former Labour prime minister Tony Blair recently wrote in the Blair Institute’s report on climate change: “People know that the current state of debate over climate change is riven with irrationality.”

Blair then asserted: “Any strategy based on either ‘phasing out’ fossil fuels in the short term or limiting consumption is a strategy doomed to fail.” This is despite the widespread consensus among scientists that both phasing out fossil fuels and reducing consumption of at least some products are essential.

The report goes on to say: “A realistic voice in the climate debate is required, neither ideological nor alarmist but pragmatic.” This language is intended to sound rational, reasonable and even scientific. The problem is that it can be used to justify actions that appear to ignore what the science is telling us.

Former Conservative prime minister Rishi Sunak warned against treating climate change as an “ideology” . Notably, Sunak referred to “pragmatic, proportionate, and realistic” climate action shortly after his government announced hundreds of new licences for oil and gas fields in the North Sea.

His message coincided with ongoing road-building programmes, plans for airport expansion, and insufficient action to insulate the UK’s housing stock, all of which could jeopardise the UK’s climate targets. Again we see the language of pragmatism working against the rapid societal changes that are necessary.

The pragmatic road ahead

In general, the MPs we spoke to were not using pragmatism in bad faith. Rather it was a way of navigating the complexities of climate politics where the huge changes demanded by climate mitigation are deemed too challenging to sell to constituents. But this political strategy is a very risky one and underestimates the public’s appetite for “strong and clear” climate leadership from government.

The current government is already struggling to reconcile net zero commitments with its economic growth agenda, which includes a new runway at Heathrow airport. Not only is prime minister Keir Starmer facing divisions within the ruling Labour party over net zero ambitions, he is also dealing with increasingly prominent net zero scepticism from the leaders of the Conservative and Reform parties.

The political language of “pragmatism” therefore risks spreading from Badenoch to Starmer, becoming a discourse of delay that promotes non-transformative solutions.

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Sign up for our weekly politics newsletter, delivered every Friday.

Steve Westlake and co-researcher Rebecca Willis received funding from the Centre of Climate Change and Social Transformations (CAST) to conduct this research. CAST is funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC). Westlake also received a post-doctoral fellowship from ESRC from 2023-2025.

– ref. Politicians now talk of climate ‘pragmatism’ to delay action – new study – https://theconversation.com/politicians-now-talk-of-climate-pragmatism-to-delay-action-new-study-264317

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Alison Smith, Lecturer in European Film Studies, University of Liverpool

The Courageous opens with dense greenery, as sunlit and idyllic as it is discouragingly impenetrable. Then, with barely the rising sound of an engine to warn us, we cut back to urban humanity: a hand slams a glove compartment shut, with the tense “merde” of a woman on edge. And so we meet the protagonists of the film: Julia, or Jule, at the wheel of the car, and her three children giggling on the back seat because mum just said a naughty word.

Another cut, this time behind Jule’s head, reveals the breathtaking mountain scenery of the Swiss Valais. In just over a minute we meet the people and places, the tensions and contrasts, that drive the film, even if full understanding will only come to us gradually. Jule, a rebellious young woman bringing up her children alone, is fundamentally at odds with the ordered society of rural Switzerland, and in consequence her life is a constant struggle.

The Courageous is director Jasmin Gordon’s first feature film. It lies within the strong tradition of engaged social realism that, in Britain, we associate with Ken Loach, but the genre has its own life across the channel too, with eminent exponents like Laurent Cantet in France or the brothers Jean Pierre and Luc Dardenne in Belgium.

These are films that depend on their close attention to the particular circumstances of particular individuals in a particular place, and so they are always unique – as well as being extremely varied in their directors’ chosen styles and narrative choices. Still they follow a recognisable pattern, drawing us into the struggles of marginalised protagonists trapped by a hostile world.

Gordon involves us in Jule’s world largely through her canny management of the children’s viewpoint. From the start they are always observing their mother, and so are we: Gordon quickly encourages us to feel that we are reading her along with the children. But this is an illusion. We know less than they do, we judge according to our own stereotypes and we misunderstand.

The film knows that we will misunderstand, and takes pleasure in baiting our anxieties, gradually revealing our mistakes, and so involving us ever more closely in the family’s difficult life. Jule is not perfect, but she has an iron determination, and we feel her love for her children and her humiliation as every attempt to better her life through the “proper” channels is systematically beaten down.

Outside the close family group, people exist entirely as cogs in the system that doesn’t care for a woman like Jule. This is to some extent a characteristic of the genre, but Gordon takes it to an extreme: these cogs are always individuals, and sometimes you can see that Jule is putting them in an impossible situation too, but they act according to their place in the social machine, excluding and humiliating Jule because they must, some reluctantly, some with bitter pleasure.

While Loach’s characters usually maintain some alliances and tentative solidarity with groups outside the family, Gordon denies Jule any complicities at all, which in turn denies her any space to articulate her situation. She will not even confide in her daughter, despite the latter’s assurances that she’s old enough to understand. So it’s up to us to make sense of Jule’s experiences, and, in our programmed role of audience, we can only watch helplessly.

Gordon’s only tentative route to hope, and one of the film’s great structuring contrasts, is in fact the setting – and so we return to that puzzling opening shot. The place is of paramount importance.

On the one hand there’s the urban network, and the cheap modern buildings, all cubes and corridors, in which the family’s life is mostly spent. It is, paradoxically, easy to move around, and the obstacles it presents are quite negotiable: even the motorway can be crossed with no more than a brief intake of breath. Jule is good at circulating in it, finding its cracks and corners, knowing where it hides its treasures – but it forms a continuous closed system in which the guardians will catch up with you eventually.

But, opening out from within this urban space, there is nature: not so much the picture-postcard mountains, which are more enclosing than liberating (no question here of that immortal trope of British social realism, the “view of our town from that hill”), but a more intimate nature that offers the family its happiest moments – a swim in a lake, a fortuitous fruit tree. The green woods do offer an exit, but they are worryingly fragile and utopian.

This is a powerful film but it offers little hope of an outlet for Jule’s undoubted courage. I was gripped by the family’s story, even if, thinking it over at more leisure later on, some doubts crept in as to how far this social despair may get us. At least, perhaps, it will take us to understanding, which is precious.

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Alison Smith does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. The Courageous: a powerful work of social realism about a rebellious mother searching for her place in the world – https://theconversation.com/the-courageous-a-powerful-work-of-social-realism-about-a-rebellious-mother-searching-for-her-place-in-the-world-264535