The last film at which I laughed myself silly was Sacha Baron Cohen’s Bruno. So I’m more than glad to see that he has another epic character in production: The Dictator. This should be one film that Franco Debono, Jesmond Mugliett and Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando – all three with an epic lack of sense of humour and a serious dictator complex – should see on a boys’ night out.

The character is based on Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi, and if Ali G, Borat and Bruno are anything to go on, it’s going to be hyper-realistic, though how Baron Cohen is going to work up the laughs at comedic behaviour, which is rooted in absolute terror, is beyond me to understand. Or perhaps it shouldn’t be. Adolf Hitler, a despot far more terrible and destructive than those other two, has long been a figure of fun, lending himself magnificently to mockery and spoofs.

Sacha Baron Cohen had planned to debut this latest character on the red carpet at the Oscars night, but the Managing Director of the Academy’s Membership and Awards apparently rang Paramount to say that he would not be made at all welcome if he turned up in character as The Dictator. “Unless they’re assured that nothing entertaining is going to happen on the red carpet, The Academy is not admitting Sacha Baron Cohen,” a spokesman for Paramount said. The Academy responded to the allegations by saying that it had given Baron Cohen a polite reminder that the dress code for Oscars night is black tie.

It’s time for Lawrence Gonzi to ring his Australian counterpart, Julia Gillard, to commiserate and have one of those “I know! Isn’t it awful when they...” conversations.

Eighteen months ago, Gillard mounted a challenge to Kevin Rudd’s leadership (he was her predecessor as prime minister). They wound up in a bitter battle, but she won the party leadership and then went on to win the election, though only just.

The defeated Rudd, instead of returning to the diplomatic service from whence he originally came, kept his parliamentary seat and then accepted the post of foreign minister. So far, so familiar. Now he has announced his resignation at a press conference in Washington, a mere 24 hours after insisting that he would not leave office.

At his press conference, he was vicious and personal, and spoke about attacks on his integrity by “faceless men”, and complaining that Prime Minister Gillard did not support him as he faced these attacks. Again, so far, so familiar.

Julia Gillard has now called a leadership contest to try to get rid, once and for all, of the night-hag on her back. She is prepared to die (politically) trying.

We like to think that these things happen to us because Malta is so small. Well, seemingly not. There is one thing at least of which Prime Minister Gonzi can reassure Prime Minister Gillard: she can stop thinking that she would have been better off had Kevin Rudd resigned his seat and re-entered the foreign service. After all, just look at John Dalli.

Peter Searle, who heads Britain’s largest and most influential recruitment company, Adecco, has said that social networking has created an underclass of job-seekers who don’t have the basic skills needed to enter the workforce.

I quote his comments because, given what I see and read, they are relevant to Malta too, where even older people who grew up without social networking are undergoing a degeneration of their own communication skills as they spend more and more time online talking nonsense in ‘textese’ via a laptop or smartphone.

Searle said that despite high levels of unemployment, British companies are struggling to fill vacancies because school-leavers are unable to work in a team, turn up on time or communicate with colleagues. “We have instances in offices where people would rather sit at their desk and send emails to each other next door rather than walk around and have a conversation,” he said. “They have no respect for their managers. They don’t ask them for advice because it isn’t in their social background to do that. All the things that we think of as normal, they aren’t prepared for.”

He thinks that the heavy use of Twitter and Facebook is much to blame, programming people to have relationships with others primarily via a machine. “They only know how to interact with short ‘text speak’ to save themselves time, so they start using text speak in conversations. Some businesses have had to send new employees on special courses to ‘de-text’ their speech,” he said. “They come out of school and want to get a job, but the people who are interviewing them say that their personal social skills and technical abilities are not suited to the way things work in industry.”

Searle says that the harsh conditions under which businesses have been operating for the last couple of years have made them not just unwilling but literally unable to take on substandard employees and then invest time and money bringing them up to scratch. “Now the market is saying, ‘Actually, I need you to be running tomorrow because I’m going to go bust otherwise.’ There are no large environments, even in engineering, where you can just hang up your brain as you go inside and go through the day and get paid for it,” he said.

We’re going to be seeing a lot of that here in Malta, and then of course we can always blame the government. Are Twitter and Facebook entirely to blame, though? I’m not quite sure. I have a distinct recollection of people’s communication and social skills being a lot worse than they are now – if this is at all possible – way back in the dark ages of the Mintoff and KMB years when we had no computers and certainly no internet because it didn’t exist. I imagine they modelled themselves on what they saw around them, and probably still do.

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