Posts Tagged ‘balloon boy’

It seems that there is a total sense of humour failure endemic throughout the world when it comes to stunts like the ‘Balloon Boy’ incident, as the ongoing trial of the parents proves – they apparently pleaded guilty only after the wife, who is Japanese, was threatened with deportation.

Certainly, the need to think about wider concerns makes outlandish and outrageous stunts a more difficult prospect in this health and safety and desperately money-conscious world. Some years ago, a band wanted me to help them arrange to completely stop traffic in Piccadilly Circus so they could play a gig from a flat bed truck – I had to hold a hand up and say “what are we going to do if an ambulance comes through with a heart attack victim on board?” The need to stand back and question all possible outcomes is even more imperative nowadays.

As much as the Rupert Pupkinish hedonistic approach is appealing, for its ability to grab headlines and for the sheer thrill of pulling something extraordinary and outrageous off, the parents of ‘Balloon Boy’ are proof positive that care has to be taken and that serious thought has to be applied if you don’t want an initially amused and fascinated public to turn on you if even the smallest thing goes wrong. Fame for the sake of it can be a costly business.

The more implausible elements of the ‘Balloon Boy’ story are deflating fast, but still people are hanging on in there, waiting to see what happens when the balloon crashes finally to earth.

Deprived of the possibility of an injured or dead child to fulminate over, the press are waiting to see what happens to the child’s father and making scathing noises about his “appalling” hoax. Legal action looms on the horizon and the life of a man desperate for attention looks likely to deflate even more drastically than the balloon he claimed had carried off his son.

But why is there all this fuss? The media are furious at being scammed and at appearing gullible, but they have scammed many times before and shrugged it off, admitting they’ve been kippered – such stories make for good entertainment.

Hoaxes have been a part of the American psyche for decades – just think of Orson Welles’ radio version of War of the Worlds in the 1930s. The flying saucer is one of the most recognisable tropes of the modern era of hoaxing; ‘balloon boy’s’ father was just – amateurishly – continuing a theme. On reflection, ‘Balloon Boy’ is one hoax that the media could and should have been able to see through, given that there was no realistic way that the balloon could have held a cat, let alone a six year old boy.

Why are the media so furious about a man who is so patently desperate for fame that he was prepared to try anything? Is it really because he pulled the wool over their eyes? It is the media’s fault that people are doing anything and everything they can to get noticed – all one need do is look at the reports of fabulous nobodies like Kerry Katona, Jordan and Pete and so on, who litter the newspapers daily at the expense of actual news, and at the thousands of wannabes who clutter up the tarmac at X Factor auditions. It’s seen as the last measure of job security, being famous, even if it often pays little.

The media needs to take a long hard look at what it is asking the public to buy into in future, if it is serious about turning on the people it has helped create.

When King of Comedy came out 26 years ago, the character of Rupert Pupkin was a grotesque, an inflated satire. Now that mindset is everywhere – the world is full of Rupert Pupkins, created by the press and public’s endless desire for the next sacrificial lamb in the servant’s quarters of fame. The press are largely culpable for this, using stories such as ‘Balloon Boy’ to bury bad news or carry people away on a soapy ride. To censure someone for trying to play the game by slightly different rules is simply hypocrisy.

If you want proof that stunts are an art form, your best bet is to head down to the Tate Modern’s Pop exhibition and take a long, hard look at the Andy Warhol and Jeff Koons exhibits. Here are two prime examples of early stops at one of the stations of the cross of Consumerism, part of its steady progress to becoming the prime 21st Century religion.

And proof is needed that stunts are an art form – they are making something of a comeback at the moment, but the latest examples – the Starsuckers film and Balloon Boy – are in need of a bit of spit and polish if they are to really shine. Despite all this, there has been not one mention of the master of the hoax, Joey Skaggs, the master Culture Jammer whose hoaxes have always had a pertinent point to make. This is a pity because the Starsuckers team could learn a trick or two from him.

Take, for example, Skaggs’s Celebrity Sperm Bank hoax from 1976. Skaggs organised a sperm bank auction in New York, then arranged for the sperm bank to be robbed with the semen supposedly being taken hostage. Or the Dog Meat Soup hoax from 1994, in which Skaggs portrayed Kim Yung Soo, a butcher who wanted to purchase dogs for food, to expose cultural intolerance and the media’s tendency to overreact. These are the stunts of a master and they are works of art.

There has been considerable attention for the hoaxes at the heart of the new film Starsuckers – the film’s makers created a series of hoax stories about celebrities that they then pushed on the tabloids. The aim was to point out how easily one could dupe journalists at the tabloids into taking patently ridiculous stories about celebrities and in this they succeeded. Reports of Amy Winehouse’s beehive catching fire, Avril Lavigne falling asleep in a nightclub and Russell Brand’s secret childhood desire to be a banker all made the tabloids – and some made it round the world.

But filmmakers’ aim, which was to expose how the whole of the news industry is running stories without checking their facts, has not been achieved. This was not a sublime act of Culture Jamming – celebrity journalism and hard news are quite different animals (most of the time at least) and the hoax story they tried to push on the media that came closest to qualifying as real news, in which G20 protestors were apparently planning to dump tonnes of sugar on Alan Sugar’s drive, was not picked up.

Telling everybody that it’s easy to pass off nonsense about celebrities to the papers is hardly news in itself – most reporting of the lives of celebrities verges on the nonsensical as it is and most people know this and don’t care, so far gone is their addiction to celebrity soap. The team behind Starsuckers are going to have to work harder if they are to achieve what they want.

Balloon Boy is another matter again. A family in Colorado claimed that they thought their son had been carried off by a weather balloon – he was found “hiding” in the attic after an expensive two hour cross country chase in full view of the world’s media. I suspect that this was a stunt by a publicity-hungry family of stormchasers keen to further promote themselves after appearing on American Wife Swap. I also suspect that the only reason that the police aren’t treating this as a hoax is to save face.

None of this has stopped a full-scale media hoo-ha and #balloon boy trending on Twitter. There’s been reams of analysis in the medi and newscasters claiming they’d burst into tears as a result, followed by a backlash after the six year old boy was found in the attic at home. As my pal Mark Solomons says: “He’s a falcon liar, that’s what he is. The father put the con in Falcon. It’s like the Bart-Simpson-down-the-well episode. If the balloon had been up any longer, they could have had Sting do a charity record.”

We know that the media are willing consumers of all kinds of storytelling, but it would be good to see more artfulness and careful thought going into any future hoaxes. More Skaggs less blags, perhaps?