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Draft:Trevor Bastard Extended Universe

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  • Comment: Blogs are not reliable sources and many of the sources cited make no mention of TBEU. S0091 (talk) 16:27, 30 October 2024 (UTC)
    :Are you not familiar with the encyclopedia's sourcing framework and the reviewing instructions? There are no blogs cited and your comment here confuses notability and verifiability: "The principle of notability applies to the subject of the article. The principle of verifiability applies to the content of the article." The sources cited inline are done so to support the claims they relate to, and there is not nor has there ever been a requirement for every source in an article to include the name of the article, that would be ridiculous. It would be super to have the draft article reviewed against the actual instructions i.e. "Are you sure this would not survive AfD". Not only does the subject pass notability guidelines, the subject included, Streatham Rovers, inarguably does from the newspaper articles cited, and is more coherently presented with its sister nodes in a single article. 51.37.42.44 (talk) 18:18, 31 October 2024 (UTC)

The Trevor Bastard Extended Universe (TBEU) is a parafictional collective of social media accounts created and primarily authored by the eponymous Trevor Bastard.[1]

Accounts

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The accounts include Streatham Rovers, a South London football team competing in the Xtermin8 Rat Poison League,[2] set up by Bastard after his frustrations as a fan of Dulwich Hamlet after what he saw as that club's hypocrisy in dealing with real estate agents,[3] and as a way for him to deal with homesickness as he was priced out of living in south London.[3] Also included are their rivals Dynamo Catford, CSKA Wallington, and Edenbridge Bridge FC, manager Taff Goose and committee member Roger Parsnip,[1] as well as sponsors the Internet Research Agency (IRA) and Herod Eviction Services,[3] and protest group Enya Fans For Communism who target the club's games.[4]

It extends to divorce lawyer Oliver Laughdughry and his wife Sarah,[5] Blairite politics professor Dr. Robert Zands and centrist columnist Simon Hedges.[1] Hedges was described by its author in a 2017 interview with Vice as "a shallow-minded Aaron Sorkinesque [the West Wing creator] view of the world, where the smart sassy people turn up and make everything OK", pillorying the right wing of the British Labour Party - "people with no ideas, no analyses, no real policies".[6] In a 2024 Financial Times column exploring how George Orwell had become cliché, Naoise Dolan wrote that Hedges (username "@Orwell_Fan") "embodies the Orwell-quoter: a middle-of-the-road disdainer of strong opinions, a stalwart in a polarised society".[7]

Impact

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The TBEU has featured in the Financial Times,[7] The Daily Star,[8] the Daily Mail,[9] The Evening Standard,[3] The Scottish Sun,[10] and The Independent,[5] as well as magazines Vice,[6] Huck,[8] The Athletic,[11] and FourFourTwo.[12] BBC news satire show Have I Got News For You ran a segment taking at face value Streatham Rovers' claim that their opponents' team sheet was an acrostic for "SRFC ARE SHIT".[8] In 2019 Hedges was nominated for a Civility in Politics award set up by Lord Wood to fight a “crisis of trust and crisis of civility”,[7][13] while Conservative leadership candidate Rory Stewart pledged his support to Streatham Rovers' drive to address its "dog muck issue".[4] The Daily Mail featured the TBEU's Andy Churnwell in its coverage of a 2019 scandal surrounding the decision of pub chain Wetherspoons to omit pigs in blankets from its Christmas menu.[9]

In the wake of scandals around misinformation on Twitter after the British Conservative Party had renamed its account "factcheckUK", and Liberal Democrat leader Jo Swinson was alleged to have executed a squirrell, the Streatham Rovers account and several connected ones were banned by the social media platform, only to be reinstated following widespread outcry.[8] Writing of the incident in Huck, Will Magee opined that "if Twitter really doesn’t have room for an institution like Streatham Rovers, it can only become that little bit more obsolete."[8] Football writer Michael Cox attributed the convincingness of Streatham Rovers in part to the fact that there was "no proper football club" in the borough of Lambeth.[11] As of July 2024, Bastard had sold more than 500 Streatham Rovers replica jerseys.[2]

Critical reception

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Tom Gann of the New Socialist described the TBEU as "possibly the 21st Century’s (and definitely Twitter’s) great (sur)realist masterpiece of interconnectivity."[14] Writer Tom Whyman has characterised it as "perhaps best understood as a sort of a Gesamtkunstwerk for the social media age",[1] and situated Bastard among Alison Rumfitt and Dan Douglas in a December 2021 piece as "the people who most obviously seem to have their fingers on the pulse of “what England means”".[15] Critic Yohann Koshy in Vice described the impact of the Hedges account as "to produce a lurid pleasure in the collapse of what was once considered common sense".[6]

References

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  1. ^ a b c d Whyman, Tom (2019-12-26). "The Trevor Bastard Extended Universe is modern art". The Outline.
  2. ^ a b McCambridge, Ed (2024-07-04). "We All Follow The Greyhounds". FourFourTwo.
  3. ^ a b c d Usborne, Simon. "Young, craft beer-loving and politically correct: meet London's new breed of football fan". The Evening Standard.
  4. ^ a b Learmouth, Imogen (2020-01-24). "How a fake football club has taken over Twitter". Thred.
  5. ^ a b Bergman, Sirena (2020-03-22). "This parody of a landlord moaning about their tenants in the middle of coronavirus isolation is all too real". The Independent.
  6. ^ a b c Koshy, Yohann (2017-05-10). "The New Wave of Satire for Our Morbid Political Landscape". Vice.
  7. ^ a b c Dolan, Naoise (2024-10-19). "How George Orwell became a dead metaphor". Financial Times.
  8. ^ a b c d e Magee, Will (2019-11-28). "How a fake football club exposed Twitter's hypocrisy". Huck.
  9. ^ a b Wood, James (2019-12-17). "Wetherspoons serves Christmas lunch including pigs WITHOUT blankets at 'a number of pubs' after 'supplier ran out of staff to wrap sausages with bacon'". The Daily Mail.
  10. ^ Collins, Robert (2016-12-26). "'THIS IS A CRUEL HOAX' Scots comedian Limmy sparks controversy online by joking that the Queen had died". The Scottish Sun.
  11. ^ a b Cox, Michael (2022-03-26). "Arsenal, Wingate & Finchley, Sporting Bengal – the highest-placed club in London's 32 boroughs". The Athletic.
  12. ^ Davies, Gregg (2024-07-04). "Pep's disciples! Slot, Maresca, Kompany, Arteta & Alonso, PLUS Sturridge, Higuita, the New York derby and more!". FourFourTwo.
  13. ^ Whyman, Tom (2020-03-03). "A fake man deserves Britain's "civility in politics" award". The Outline.
  14. ^ Gann, Tom (2020-08-25). "Introducing Bad New Times". New Socialist.
  15. ^ Whyman, Tom (2021-12-02). "England Is a Trans Horror Story". Gawker.
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