British pork, three beans and the end of empire
Thoughts on what fallen empires leave behind, pork getting a mention amid a conversation about pyramids and a book that might change the way I listen to music.
The pyramid and pork connection
Three Bean Salad is a comedy podcast made by the three beans and comedians Ben Partridge, Mike Wozniak and Henry Paker. Having started in the heady days of the on/off Covid lockdowns of 2021 and now amounting to over 130 episodes, each week the trio of hosts tackle a different theme, suggested by their listeners. In recent weeks, themes have included vampires, jazz and pasta. In and around talking about these very important themes, there’s a host of tangential conversation.
This week, the theme was pyramids. But turning their attention back to last week’s theme, adverts, they brought up British advertising for the pork industry from the 1980s and, in particular, the TV ad below.
“It’s so sinister,” one of the beans points out. The well-pleased pork eating man of the house in the ad, with his constant utterances of “my wife”, appears to be from the same charm school as circus ringmaster Papa Lazarou from The League of Gentlemen. And, as another of the beans says of the seen but not heard housewife, “She's got what it takes, but she does not have a line in this ad.”
According to the Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board, in the year-to-date (w/e 4 August 2024) retail demand for pork fell 2.2% year-on-year while the food service market has recovered better than expected with volumes up 5.2% (AHDB estimates). More excitingly, perhaps, although probably not for a huge section of non-pork eaters, AHDB have a range of marketing activities planned for the year, including a new pork campaign! Let’s take it back to the 1980s.
The Three Bean Salad podcast is available via all the usual podcast platforms, including Apple.
Empire in freefall
Empires fall for a variety of reasons, often involving a combination of internal weaknesses and external pressures. Key factors, of course, include economic instability, political corruption and inefficiency, military defeats, social unrest and inequality, cultural or religious divisions, environmental factors and succession crises.
These factors often interact with one another, creating a "perfect storm" that leads to an empire’s decline and eventual fall.
Of course, nobody expects an empire to collapse in a great big heap. But it does appear to be the natural order of things. At least we’ve been left with some decent stuff in the aftermath, such as the architectural wonders of the Roman Empire (The Colosseum, aqueducts, and roads), Ancient Egypt (The Great Pyramids of Giza and the Sphinx) and the Mughal Empire’s Taj Mahal. Then there are the cultural and artistic achievements of empire, such as the mosaics of the Byzantines and the contributions to drama, sculpture, and philosophy, including the works of Plato and Aristotle, from Ancient Greece. Then there’s the Persian Empire’s systems of governance and some top notch cuisine, the influence of China’s Tang and Song Dynasties on global technological progress (including paper!), the spiritual and ethical foundations spread across the globe by India’s Gupta and Maurya empires, the Abbasid Empire's contributions to mathematics, the development of trade routes by the Mongol and Inca empires.
When watching the National Football League’s Detroit Lions slaughtering the Dallas Cowboys (known as ‘America’s Team’) via a US sports network, I considered the above when served up with an advert for Season 12 of The Masked Singer, broadcast on Fox.
Should, come the day, as will inevitably be the case, that the United States of America’s days of empire are no more, one wonders whether this South Korean import made its own, will be the lasting legacy of the land of the free.
From what I can glean from the advert, celebrities sing songs while wearing somewhat ridiculous head-to-toe costumes and face masks concealing their identities, thus negating their celebrity, while panelists have to guess who they are. It appears to be a game based around a collective shame that life, or at least television, has come to this.
Apparently, there is a British version. Although we are merely an outpost of this empire in freefall. The British version is commissioned by ITV, who coincidentally had the rights to broadcast NFL highlights this season but axed that show when they realised that, because of their own decision to broadcast it at 11pm on a Friday evening, nobody watched.
Is this my brain on music?
It is good to have a book on the bedside cabinet to dip in and out of. One such is Daniel Levitin’s This Is Your Brain On Music.
“From Mozart to the Beatles, neuroscientist, psychologist and internationally-bestselling author Daniel Levitin reveals the role of music in human evolution, shows how our musical preferences begin to form even before we are born and explains why music can offer such an emotional experience.
”In This Is Your Brain On Music Levitin offers nothing less than a new way to understand music, and what it can teach us about ourselves.”
I’m just opening it at random pages and reading in a non-linear manner. Which feels quite a musical approach. Only time will tell whether this will, as Classic FM suggested in their review, mean that I will “never hear music in the same way again”.