And the most pointless award of the year award goes to…

Inflation up. Omicron rising. Ukraine and Russia poised for war. Drought in Africa. Tornados in America. But, in case you were fearing that it’s all bad news, we do have a winner of the 2021 Tree of the Year competition.

Yes, that deep sigh of relief is certainly warranted.

The winner, announced by the Woodland Trust, is a “lone hawthorn tree located in Kippford, Dalbeattie in Dumfries & Galloway”. To describe this magnificent victor in just a few words: it’s a scrappy couple of branches that achieve a lot by leaning at 45 degrees. Think Annie Leibovitz photographing Kate Moss at a rakish angle and you’ll understand the scrawny appeal. While tree aficionados might take a lot from it, there’s not a great deal for the rest of us to hang our hats on.

Momentous though this news might be, the best bit is saved for the press release. “The winning hawthorn tree will now go on to represent the UK in the European Tree of the Year 2022 contest,” we’re told, raising the conceit to new levels of absurdity as we imagine the tree travelling on the Eurostar to the contest and posing for cameras on the red carpet. Then there’s the look of amazement as it hears its name read out by some star of French arboriculture…

It is a symptom of a great malady affecting us all that the marketing people have our news by the nose, drawing it ever close to their world of promotion and spin, with fake stories that convey messages that have zero meaningful content. “The Woodland Trust’s Tree of The Year competition aims to highlight how vital trees are for our landscapes and our lives,” says their press release, but absent is any reason why they’re telling us this right now. Who doesn’t love a tree? But who also believes this warrants a place on any front page?

It has no more newsworthiness than… well… the very great pleasure I now have in announcing that the winner of 2021’s Pointless Award Competition is… The Woodland Trust’s “Tree of the Year Contest”!

Reaction’s Pointless Award of the Year Competition aims to highlight how vital pointless awards are for all our lives…

The entire industry has now escalated to the point that barely a day passes without ad agencies co-opting social media to announce who has won some pseudo-bauble or to tell us to mark a day on our calendar for some entirely insignificant reason. What began as innocuous-sounding awards like “Pipe Smoker of the Year” (started in 1965) and “Rear of the Year” (first one awarded to Barbara Windsor in 1976) has made anything acceptable… Potato Awareness Day, National Mammal Week, The International Year of the Muffin… (They might be entirely fictional but also might not.)

This week the magazine Time made headlines (and considerable outrage) around the globe by announcing their “Person of the Year”. 2021, they decided, would be remembered for Elon Musk. People immediately complained that it wasn’t the creator of a vaccine or the Capitol Hill Police who stood in the way of an insurrection. What about Greta or Adele or the world’s oldest Captain Kirk to go into space? Yet, overlooked in all the outrage is how entirely specious this award is. An editorial board doesn’t speak for anybody but themselves and only a short-lived tradition (the first was awarded to Charles Lindbergh in 1927) validates them as arbiters of who or what gets to personify a particular year.

Arguably, the only one of these days that makes any sense is the one celebrated by the great Wirral-based punk-folk band, Half Man Half Biscuit. They didn’t speak for anybody when they wrote their seminal, “National Shite Day”, but perhaps now speak for a majority who are surely sick of these meaningless celebrations. The song not only contains one of the finest single lines ever committed to vinyl – “there’s a man with a mullet going mad with a mallet in Millets” – but captures the utter banality of so much media product.

I try to put everything into perspective
Set it against the scale of human suffering
And I thought of the Mugabe government
And the children of the Calcutta railways

This works for a while
But then I encounter Primark FM
Overhead a rainbow appears
In black and white