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Which of these were / are culturally the worse?


R.I.C.O.

Who was/is culturally the worst?  

24 members have voted

  1. 1. Who was/is culturally the worst?

    • Actors like Danny Dyer
      5
    • Directors like Guy Ritchie
      3
    • Playwrights like Andrew Lloyd Webber
      6
    • Musical Producers/Managers like Stock/Aitken and Waterman
      11


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When you look at culture, there are individuals who have boosted society's appreciation of the arts -

Great actors like Michael Caine, Oliver Reid, and Peter O'Toole,

Great directors like Michael Powell, Jack Clayton, and Alan Parker

Great playwrights like Harold Pinter, John Osbourne and George Bernard Shaw

...and great musicians like Brian Eno, Robert Wyatt and Gene Vincent assisted by managers and producers like George Martin, Malcolm McLaren and Steve O'Rourke.

However -

There are also individuals who have IMO by and large been detrimental to development of the arts. These characters have looked upon commercial gain rather than artistic merit. Their plays, films, performances and songs are often lazy, wooden, cliched and most of all, irritating.

Forgive me for limiting things here (please feel free to cast your own choices) but which of these four have had the worst impact on the modern performing arts?

Actor: DANNY DYER - Who can forget his wooden, "cockney wide boy" performances he seems to put in every film? It is degrading acting, by popularising the notion of an actor not varying their role for commercial success.

Director: GUY RITCHIE - Ever since "Lock Stock" (which wasn't that great anyway) the public school boy cockney wannabe has used the same tired-old cliches, the same OTT camera effects, the same wooden characters and the same limited actors since LS. It has spawned a new set of durge-tastic films - i.e. Layer Cake - which follow the same storylines and direction.

Playwright: ANDREW LLOYD WEBBER - His plays are entirely superficial, over-the-top and the epitome of naff. Anyone who has suffered through his plays will testify - "wow, the lighting effects and lazers were amazing", "the choreography was very tight" quickly followed by "but the songs were rubbish and cheesy" and "the storyline was utterly lame"...and his negative influence has spread - to Ben Elton of all people, who has changed face at an alarming rate.

Musician/Manager: STOCK, AITKEN AND WATERMAN - Responsible for some of the 1980's and 1990's worst crimes against music, from Jason Donavan to Bananarama, bringing in cheap synths, bubblegum pop and twee melodies into music for real. Their effect his spawned others to go much further - Simon Cowell is a disciple of their black arts.

I 've highlighted mine in bold, but for the record, I hate them all....

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SAW without a doubt, the others are easily ignorable, you choose to go to see a film or the theatre.

Music on the other hand is more ubiquitous, tey play it in shops,you turn on the radio and its there, music sometimes is inescapeable and for that reason SAW and their ilk are the worst offenders in my book

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The music guys. They have irreperably altered popular music into 'make a quick profit' cack. MTV has then extrapalated. The majority of young people now (especially girls) miss out on genuine music altogether. Those that don't have to search and specialise their music tastes. it's appalling.

Andrew Lloyd Webber is also an absolute joke.

Guy Ritchie's films have a time and a place. As long as you don't try and take them as serious pieces of art then they are harmless, and actually, fun. A similar thing can be said about Danny Dyer's acting.

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That Lloyd Webber fellow for me. He has a melody. Just one. Then he repeats it, reverses it, notches it up a fifth, arpeggiates the chord etc ad infinitum. Musically insipid crap. On the other hand though, he's got an awful lot to do with the survival of the Theatre in the West End and up 'n dwon the country - there are an awful lot of lighting people, sound engineers, singers, costume people and dancers who have a livelihood mainly down to him, not to mention the hotels et al. Thing is, he could do all that with great music. Unfortunately he chooses not to.

SAW have a great legacy in that they accelerated the slow distillation of pop music so that rather than 20 years of shite, we only got 10, as people reacted against it. Seems that just recently over the past year or so there are an awful lot of good bands around.

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Guest Lew_Chatterley's_Lover

Nothing wrong with S.A.W. Produced very commercial pop music. Not their fault that the rest of the music scene was piss in the 80s.

Guy Ritchie for me - baby-shopping toffee-nosed gangsta fraud and general rocket polisher

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Andrew Lloyd Webber is such a fraud that there used to be regular letters in Private Eye with musical examples of, for instance, "Rosemary I Love You" or the slow movement of Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto alongside certain tunes Lloyd Webber is purported to have written and was most certainly receiving royalties for accompanied by "I wonder if anyone has noticed the striking similarity between a & b. Could they perhaps be in some way related? I think we should be told." His father was indeed a talented composer and his brother a quite superb cellist but Andrew? A fraud and a crappy one at that. Evita? Buaa.

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Oliver Reid, great actor? :shock:

Interesting that you should mention Mr Waterman, as he was a producer for Stiff Records, Ian Dury's label.

That was before he joined up with Stock and Aikten though. And he did'nt have a great deal of influence either - when he was in SAW he had almost total control.

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