People I hate: June Sarpong

Today's loathsome creature was once ubiquitous on our TV screens, but seems to have vanished from sight recently. And for that, a good many of us are probably quite glad.

June Sarpong is a television presenter who started off doing the dance music chart on MTV before moving to Channel 4 to present their T4 youth strand. For Channel 4, Sarpong ticked a lot of boxes and they soon started sticking her in front of more and more shows. The highlight of her career was her interview with Tony Blair.

Quite apart from her horrendously grating voice and appalling laugh, she annoys me for a variety of reasons. Firstly, she's been awarded an MBE for ahem, "services to broadcasting and charity" which seems jolly odd. At the time it was awarded (2007), she'd been presenting T4 for several years but pretty much every other TV production she was involved with (Your Face Or Mine?, Dirty Laundry, Playing It Straight, etc) were all dismal pieces of populist shit that vanished without a trace after poor ratings. It certainly seemed like her award was more due to her soft interview of Blair than anything else.

And that's the second thing I loathe about her. After gaining a surprising level of access (she got to shadow Blair for two days), she completely failed to ask anything interesting or even slightly critical. But having described Blair as "a charismatic, rock star-type politician" it perhaps isn't so surprising. And just how did she land this interview? "It sounds so name-droppy and I hate all that sort of stuff. It’s so not that, but I did know them. I just thought it would be really good to do something, because in real life, he has a sense of humour that people never got to see. I thought it would be really good to do a programme where you got to see that side of him."

After leaving T4, Sarpong created a website called Politics & the City because "So many of my girlfriends, who are smart, successful women, don't have a clue about politics - and it's not because they don't want to." So cue a round of private investment followed by media hype and lots of launch parties. And then less than two years later no mention of it dying on its arse.

Although Sarpong had clearly nailed her colours to the Blair mast, she tried to switch horses, saying about David Cameron "I'd love to interview him. I've met him. I think he's got that Blair factor, in terms of making you feel very important. I like what he's doing on family and in making the Conservative Party more fashionable. But you have to wait and see. You don't know what people are really like until they're in power." Uh huh. It didn't work and the Tories haven't invited her to all those parties she loves so much.

And so Sarpong left for America to try her luck on US TV. Here's her bio from Tru TV, who broadcast under the tagline "Not reality. Actuality."

As the female face of Channel 4's successful Sunday morning strand T4 for the last eight years, Sarpong became part of TV history when she scored access to British Prime Minister Tony Blair for her Channel 4 special When Tony Met June. A popular personality within the world of TV, she was voted as the #1 panelist young people wanted to see on the British political discussion show Question Time. She has also interviewed and introduced some of the world's biggest newsmakers, including Nelson Mandela, Prince Charles, Bill Clinton and Al Gore, as well as such personalities as Bono, George Clooney and 50 Cent.
Sarpong is an ambassador for the Prince's Trust and campaigns for the Make Poverty History movement. For services to broadcasting and charity, she was awarded an MBE (Member of the British Empire) on Queen Elizabeth's 2007 New Years honors list, making her - along with Princess Anne's daughter, Zarah Phillips - one of the youngest people to receive an MBE that year.

But just what is she doing over there? Well, she's a minor presenter on a conspiracy theory show hosted by ex-wrestler, ex-governor Jesse Ventura. Nice.






Skip on to the six minute mark to see Sarpong happily go along with the idea that the US government are using an ionosphere research project for mind control and weather alteration whilst Ventura suggests that it caused the Indonesian tsunami. Oh dear. This from a woman who claims "When I was at college I did government politics and I was always interested in the issues." The issues these days being the kind of conspiracy theory crap that appeals to the tinfoil hat brigade.

Her show hit trouble when it alleged that the US government was implementing a police state. They claimed that various planned encampments were to be used for interning people deemed a threat to national security when martial law was declared. Unfortunately they turned out to be for housing people displaced by hurricanes or other natural disasters. The US Representative who signed the legislation covering these sites complained about this misrepresentation. The show also alleged that a site in Georgia was being used to stockpile plastic bins to be used for mass burials when martial law was declared. It turned out to be the storage facility of a company that makes grave liners. When questioned on this, the Tru TV network disclaimed responsibility saying the show was "an entertainment program that appears on an entertainment network." Yeah, that's "not reality" all right. Lest one think that Sarpong's responsibility is limited to that of a presenter, she's actually one of the producers too.

Another project in the States was "The Alpha Woman" - apparently a range of clothing. A quick look through the US trademark website shows the mark being abandoned a couple of years ago. Oh dear.

Various online sources mention "In March 2011 Lipgloss Productions [Sarpong's production company] registered huffingtonpost.co.uk, sparking speculation that she will helm the UK arm of the popular website." But that sounds like bullshit to me. That domain has been registered by the Huffington Post itself since 2008.

Domain name:
huffingtonpost.co.uk
Registrant:
The Huffingtonpost.com, Inc.
Relevant dates:
Registered on: 06-Apr-2008
Renewal date: 06-Apr-2012
Last updated: 27-May-2011

Sarpong keeps on with the political angle, her teenage-level understanding of issues notwithstanding. She recently launched another website: Row6 "a new kind of social networking which resonates with the humanitarian ideals of the UN and seeks to literally join the hands of all people regardless of color or creed- just as Dr King dreamed of doing half a century ago." Blimey. So that'll vanish without a trace in short order too.

Still suckling at the Blair teat she seems to desperately want the respectability of a political statesman with the unreproachability of a charity campaigner, but y'know without actually having to put the work in.

So farewell then, June Sarpong. May our TV screens never again be troubled by your screechy voice and inane politics.

Mystery Monday: Shangri-la

In an attempt to make life more difficult for myself, I'm going to try for themed days on the blog. Yes, it's not enough to come up with five articles a week, I'm now going to constrain myself to set themes on certain days. Let's see how long it takes me to crack. Today is, ugh... Mystery Monday - I should offer a prize for a better name.

A mystical lost mountain kingdom yesterday

Back in 1933, James Hilton wrote a novel named Lost Horizon. British diplomat Hugh Conway survives a plane crash in the Himalayas. He wanders through a snowstorm and is guided to the monastery of Shangri-la hidden in the peaks. The monastery itself is quite odd, having central heating, modern bathtubs, a grand piano, a large library and all kinds of other luxury items. Conway is shown the surprisingly snow-free valley below from where their food comes. It all gets a bit weird after that when Conway is told that the monks barely age and the High Lama reveals that he is dying and would like Conway to take his place. Obviously, Conway does leave and the whole story is actually told in retrospect whilst Conway is recovering in a Chinese hospital. He then buggers off, presumably to return to Shangri-la.

Oddly, the book didn't become successful until Hilton wrote Goodbye, Mr. Chips the following year, which was an instant hit. Odder still is just how many people took the idea of Shangri-la literally. Not long before the book was written, a number of accounts of travel in Tibet had been published in National Geographic magazine and many of the places featured bore a resemblance to the fictional Shangri-la of the book.

A lot of the other places mentioned in Lost Horizon are real enough. Muli, Kunlun and Chongqing all exist. Since the book became popular, Zhongdian in Yunan Province, China has now been renamed Xianggalila (Shangri-la) to attract tourists. It's funny that, in contrast to other mythical places, Shangri-la actually does exist.

It's all jolly pretty and a lot more accessible than Atlantis

Within Buddhist traditions there are mentions of the kingdom of Shambhala, a Pure Land (pretty much a Buddhist equivalent of Heaven). The concepts of Shambhala and Shangri-la are often thought to be one and the same. It's probably adapted from a Hindu myth (like so much of Buddhism) which  is part of the Kalachakra tradition. It's all a bit complicated, so feel free to look it up some time if you fancy a lot of tortuous reading.

The Shambhala/Shangri-la myth came to the West via Catholic missionaries in the 17th century, but it wasn't until the 19th century that interest really picked up. Hungarian scholar Sándor Kőrösi Csoma (yeah, every name in this article is unpronounceable) who travelled extensively in the region, wrote of Shambhala and even gave a geographical location: "a fabulous country in the north...situated between 45' and 50' north latitude." Following his description leads to the eastern region of Kazakhstan, which is characterized by green hills, low mountains and lakes in stark contrast to the barren mountainous terrain of Tibet and Yunan. Hmm.

Hard to believe that this waterfall could contain the essence of uber-nazis and
super-communists, but a surprisingly high number of people thought so

Theosophist Madam Blavatsky claimed to be in contact with Himalayan ascended masters (enlightened beings) and regularly mentioned Shambhala and Shangri-la, introducing them to a wider audience. Lost Horizon appeared at the time that the Theosophical Society's ideas had most currency with the public and at a time when Nazi Germany was rather interested in using German and Eastern mythology to promote the idea of a master race. In 1938, Heinrich Himmler sent an SS mission to Tibet (under Ernst Schäfer) to investigate Asian mysticism and try to find the truth of Shambhala and Shangri-la.

Whilst the German mission to Tibet is relatively well-known, few have heard of the similar Soviet mission. Senior intelligence officer and chief cryptographer Gleb Bokii (no, really) was fascinated by the teachings of the Theosophists and met with several Mongolian lamas. He gained a fascination with Shambhala and Shangri-la and organised an expedition to Inner Asia with his writer friend, Alexander Barchenko. They wanted to prove a link between Kalachakra-tantra and the tenets of Soviet Communism. Although their mission didn't go ahead, Bokii and Barchenko founded a laboratory (under the auspices of the secret police) to experiment with Buddhist techniques in order to try to create perfect communists. Crikey. They weren't the only Soviets interested in Shambhala and the the Soviet Foreign Commissariat did later send an expedition to Tibet. I don't know if they managed to make a super-Soviet-Buddhist-ubermensch, but I presume I'd have heard if they had.

Nicholas Roerich, Song of Shambhala: Thang-La (1943)

Today, you can visit Shangri-la for yourself on any number of package holidays. It's maybe not at its best right now though. Whilst making his 2005 film Wu Ji (The Promise), Chen Kaige and his crew built massive sets in Shangri-la and they got into trouble a bit afterwards for messing the place up. The Chinese government got a bit shirty after Chen and his boys cut down quite a few trees, destroying an entire local eco-system and then left behind massive sets, many of them made with concrete.

It was like that when we got here

A big boy did it and ran away

So there you go: Shangri-la is real and Shambhala might be. But if you want to find a mystical mountain kingdom, don't bother going to see Hitler or Stalin, just hire a Chinese film crew, but remember to tidy up after yourselves. What's especially annoyingly is that The Promise is a bit of a shit film. Ah well...

So what's the deal with Kim Jong-un then?

Kim Jong-Un

Since the death of Kim Jong-Il, a surprising amount of people have asked me what I think of the situation in North Korea. This is a bit odd as I'm not from North Korea and I'm not terribly familiar with the political situation in the country. I do take a keen interest in the DPRK and I have been there - I even went to Kim Jong-Il's birthday party (although he wasn't there and it's not like we were mates or anything). But given the standard of punditry and expertise on display on the various news programmes, it appears that nobody really knows a damn thing about what goes on over there. Mind you, that doesn't stop various guests collecting appearance fees and burbling away endlessly like they actually have a clue.

North Korea is a bit of an odd country and a lot of what's said about it is nonsense or difficult to understand without knowledge of their cultural context. There's little doubt that life there isn't exactly great for a lot of people and that their respect for human rights isn't high, but why do our news organisations spend so much time fretting about the country when we barely hear a word about similar states like Myanmar (Burma) or Indonesia?

Kim Il-Sung and Kim Jong-Il

If there's one thing that defines the North Koreans, it's their own particular brand of communism: Juche.It was Kim Il-Sung (Kim Jong-Il's dead dad) who came up with the Juche Idea (well, officially at least) and defined it as independence from other states, a strong military and relying on national resources. Basically, it preaches self-reliance above all else. At the end of the Korean War, this was quite an appealing concept as it was the actions of other countries (most notably the US and the Soviet Union) that had brought about the circumstances that started the war. When China got involved, America threatened to use nuclear weapons and carried out a series of tests of low-yield nuclear device tests during the conflict. So the idea of North Korea cutting themselves off from the influence of foreign powers was welcomed there in the aftermath of that superpower faceoff.

For a while it worked pretty well and North Korea advanced quickly, to the point where they sent food aid to help the struggling South. Kim Il-Sung was seen as a hero and was increasingly portrayed as a great leader who had defeated the superpowers and reconstructed a country ravaged in a proxy war. Initially the hero worship was at least partially justified, but soon grew into a personality cult with increasingly outlandish achievements and abilities attributed to Kim Il-Sung who started to be referred to as the "Great Leader".

Things started to plateau in the mid 1960s and Kim tightened his political control of the country in the face of increasing opposition. Although China had been a fairly enthusiastic friend to North Korea, it was around this time that China began to feel that Kim and his country had little to offer and so scaled back their trade and political links.

In 1980, Kim announced that his son, Kim Jong-Il, would become his successor. It was a further 14 years before he died, so Kim junior was thoroughly groomed to take over and became well-established after being given a series of high ranking posts in the military, communist party and government. As he began to take over more and more leadership responsibility from his father, things really started to go wrong in North Korea. Mismanagement of land resources worsened the effects of a series of natural disasters in the 1990s and the collapse of the Soviet Union meant that there was no support from former Eastern Bloc countries leading to famine and mass starvation. Oops. Although the disasters ended, the country never really recovered and a subsequent series of floods in 2007 brought back food shortages so bad that North Korea had to formally request help from the Red Cross.

Kim Jong-Nam possibly

In the late 1990s, Kim Jong-Il started actively promoting his son, Kim Jong-Nam, as his successor, but this started to go wrong when he turned out to be a bit thick. In 2001, he was caught attempting to enter Japan with a false passport, claiming he was going to visit Tokyo Disneyland. This was massively embarrassing and Kim Jong-Il had to cancel a visit to China. Kim Jong-Nam fell further out of favour in the next few years and it soon became apparent that his father was looking to his other sons to succeed him.

Kim Jong-Chul allegedly

At one point, Kim Jong-Chul (yes, they're all called King Jong-something) looked to be likely after it was rumoured that the military supported him. This is the main problem with news coverage of Korea: very little is known about what goes on and most information comes from rumours repeated by defectors or from watching North Korean TV over the border in the South or selected rebroadcasts in Japan.

Kim Jong-Un aged 16 at school in Switzerland, supposedly

In 2009, Kim senior started shopping around the idea that Kim Jong-Un was to be his successor. There were a few problems with this, not least his age (mid-twenties). The young Kim appeared on the ballot for the Supreme People's Assembly (their parliament) and was appointed to the National Defence Commission. The latter was interesting as his father's actual job was chairman of the defence commission (for some daft reason, Kim Il-Sung didn't stop being president just because he was dead). Embassy staff were asked to swear allegiance to Kim junior and he secretly travelled to China, probably to obtain the endorsement of their government. Kim Jong-Un was later given a military rank in a probable effort to gain the support of the army. He also started to appear on television in what was clearly an attempt to familiarise the citizenry with him.

It all went massively wrong when Kim Jong-Il died just a few days ago. Well, his death was announced, but it's more likely that he kicked the bucket a bit before that. The official story was that Kim died when travelling the country on his personal train, but satellite pictures reveal that the train hasn't moved in weeks. Chances are that it was felt necessary to have a death scenario that tied in with Kim's public image of tireless micro-management and that support for his successor be affirmed.

Jang Sung-Taek

The succession is far from settled even though Kim Jong-Un has been formally named "supreme leader" and China has publicly recognised that position. Kim Jong-Il just didn't have enough time to confirm his son's status and show him the ropes. So who's really running North Korea? It's thought by some that Jang Sung-Taek is in charge at the moment having been the second in command (Vice-Chairman of the National Defence Commission) and he just happens to be Kim Jong-Il's brother in law. A couple of days ago, he was seen dressed in a general's uniform, suggesting that he's been given an army rank to give him some pull with the military. Nothing is really known about him and any suggestion that he's in charge is just speculation. Just as many North Korea "experts" are queueing up to say that his wife, Kim Kyong-Hui, is the one in charge after spending years as Kim Jong-Il's aide and being promoted to the same military rank (and on the same day) as Kim Jong-Un.

So what's going to happen in North Korea? Is Kim Jong-Un really going to be the leader or will it be his uncle actually running things with a possible view to letting the youngster assume command in the long term? Will North Korea soften its hardline stance and start to gradually reform in the way that China did thirty years ago? Will re-unification with South Korea ever be possible? Could the United States provoke North Korea into a military stand-off? I dunno.

And it's not just me. No one has the slightest clue what is happening in North Korea and they have no idea what's coming next. Although the news confidently reports that Kim Jong-Un is 28 years old, in reality we just don't know. It's thought that he was born sometime in 1983 or 1984, but no one knows for sure. No one had even seen a photograph of him until two years ago. Bear that in mind next time you see some pundit on a news programme confidently predicting what will happen over there.

About the only country with any kind of influence over North Korea is China. America has tried sanctions and threats, but has failed. Masses of US troops are still stationed on the border with South Korea (the ironically named Demilitarised Zone or DMZ). It's often mentioned that North Korea has nuclear missiles and that's true, but it only has a few and their missile systems haven't been terribly successful. One can't help but wonder if American wouldn't already have found a reason to have intervened militarily in North Korea if they didn't have nukes. On the day that Kim Jong-Il's death was announced, a missile test was conducted. It's not clear what the purpose of this was. It may have been to signal to the US that, just because the country's leadership was in flux, it didn't mean there weren't fingers on triggers just in case the Americans got any clever ideas. Or it may even have been to suggest that the military were capable of acting autonomously without explicit authorisation from Kim Jong-Un. Goodness only knows.

And that's why it's going to be very interesting to watch what's happening in North Korea over the coming months and years. No one knows anything about what's happening there right now and any suggestions about what's going to happen in the future are just guesses. One thing's certain though - it won't be boring.