The Chronicles Of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe
Stage school kids. Jesus allegory. Impressive CGI battle with big swords. Nice beaver. Fun spotting the animals' voices (Ray Winstone, Dawn French, Liam Neeson, Rupert Everett, an uncreditied Michael Madsen - I got four out of five, not correctly naming Everett, and I became convinced that I'd misidentified Ray Winstone at one point and in fact it was Bob Hoskins as the beaver; good job it wasn't an actual test). I remember the book from school, and liking it; as with any other kid, I was captivated by the idea of a magical land round the back of some coats, but I'm not sure this film was really my cup of tea. It's all a bit bloodless, and I mean that literally, and any story where the good guys get turned to stone has a built-in denouement, doesn't it? Tilda Swinton definitely makes a good white witch, although all the costume and hairstyle changes struck me as a bit camp for this earnest type of thing. I also found the recruitment of mythical creatures (Minotaurs, Centaurs, Cyclops, Gryphons etc.) a bit of a steal. Think up some of your own!

Anyway, it didn't convert me to Christianity but it did pass an easy two and a quarter hours as a nice, bright day turned into a cold, dark evening. I had the day off work, and it felt good to be able to watch a big-budget fantasy on DVD at 5.45, because I could.

One-day return to Bath Spa
A very enjoyable diversion today, in the historic City of Bath. I had been called up by BBC Bristol (with whom I have worked twice before, on a Time Shift documentary about the Centrial Office of Information that is due to be shown on BBC4 in two weeks, and a failed pilot for a series called The Times Of Our Lives, which involved a lot of me "walking and talking" as they say in the trade, and being shipped around assorted locations between Oxford and Bristol in search of "real people" and their memories and archives, which will never be shown unless you ask to view my showreel) - this time to present a short film about the BBC1 drama series Life On Mars, around the re-showing of which on BBC4, they are theming an evening of programmes. I jumped at the chance, a) because I like doing TV, b) I like the people at BBC Bristol, c) I love Life On Mars, and d) I would get to drive an original 1973 Ford Cortina.

Catching the 8.13 from Reigate and changing at Reading, I arrived in Bath Spa just before 10.30 and was collected from the station by Caroline and Kristin, production assistant and researcher. Francis Welch was in charge, as producer/director, a disarmingly youthful chap, but then that is often the way in television. First cameraman was Pete, soundman was Nic and shamefully, I've forgotten the name of the second cameraman, which is very bad form. Please never let me be the kind of presenter who forgets the name of the second cameraman. Anyway. I was whisked to a piece of picturesque wasteground with a gasworks in the background (very Sweeney, which was the masterplan), where a red Cortina was being driven, screeching, round in circles, by its owner Dwayne, and filmed in the rear view mirror. It was bitterly cold. This is why film crews all wear puffa jackets and woolly caps as industry standard.

Fully insured for the occasion by the BBC, I was called upon to drive the Cortina into shot (it will, of course, look as if I was doing the stunt driving when it's edited together) and deliver a "piece to camera" (the technical term for delivering a piece to camera) out of the car window. Then I had to drive off. In terms of TV presenting, this is fairly basic stuff, hitting a mark etc. But for me, it was a first, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. I love to learn how to do new things, even if they are ultimately useless things unless you happen to be presenting a TV programme on wasteground. Filming, even on this scale, takes a long time, as the producer, director and cameraman always want "coverage". They film everything more than once, and from every angle, so that back in the edit suite, they'll have footage to service every eventuality.

Bored? Here's a picture of a car. (Not the but the same model and colour)



Next, I had to do a variation on the same speech (which I memorised: "So what's behind the success of Life On Mars? Is just a nostalgic romp for lovers of bad shirts and glam rock? Or does the show prove that British audiences are hungry from drama that pushes back the boundaries?"), which involved turning off the engine, getting out of the car, shutting the door and walking round to perch on the bonnet in a 70s cop-show kind of way, talking all the while and looking in to the camera. Pretty tricky, I think you'll agree, but we nailed it in four. Then it was off to an Irish pub called the Rummer in central Bath, where the bulk of the film was to take place. First though, I had to drive the Cortina into a parking space, get out and walk into the pub (at which point, you must be slack-jawed at the multi-skilling TV professional I clearly am). This took quite a few goes, as we had to wait until there were no buses pulled in at the other side of the road, as they ruined the shot, and there were a lot of buses. Also, Kristin had to stop the traffic, with no greater authority to do so than the fluorescent tabard she was wearing. (People do respect day-glo yellow. Someone should write a thesis on that.) I also had to get back in the car and pull out into traffic, for an end shot.

Eventually, with all this in the can, and Dwayne profusely thanked for the lend of his Cortina, we moved inside the pub - a really excellent, welcoming, old-fashioned wooden city pub, purpose built I understand - to warm back up. While the rest of them them set up in a private room upstairs, I ate Irish stew and parsnip soup, as it was St Patrick's Day - surely the finest pub food I have ever eaten, all homemade. At this point, far away from home, my day took on a surreal aspect. The bar staff were wearing those hilarious novelty top hats made to look like giant pints of Guinness, which is what all Irish people wear in Ireland, day in day out. Irish folk music was played over the PA.

To cut to the chase, the bulk of the programme was a discussion, which I chaired, between the three creators of Life On Mars, writers Tony Jordan, Ashley Pharaoh and Matthew Graham, and John Yorke, head of drama at the BBC. (Bit of history: John produced the first ever radio Stuart and I ever did, on Radio 5 back in 1991. I also worked under him at EastEnders between 2000 and 2002. Tony was series consulant on the soap then too, and he was something of a guru to new writers. I'd never met Matt or Ashley before, but they also have an EastEnders background, so some bonding occurred before the cameras rolled. It also turns out that Matt bought Where Did It All Go Right? as research for Life On Mars, a fact that thrills me.) This discussion took place in a room that was "dressed" to look like a room in a 70s boozer, with artefacts like a picture of George Best in a frame and half-supped pint pots strategically placed. A noisy dry ice machine filled the room with smoke. This aggravated my asthma, which is unhelpful when you have a microphone pinned to your collar. (I fear I will never be able to go on Stars In Their Eyes.) Matt had on a noisy new shirt, which also caused microphone problems and demanded retakes. As the filming progressed, I gradually poured my beer away so it would look like I had actually drunk some of it. The three writers had no need for this illusion and actually drank theirs in the spirit of three men who should actually be working on the second series of Life On Mars but instead found themselves in a pub in Bath on St Patrick's Day.

So, we finally finished shooting at 19.25, just in time for John and I to catch the 19.42 back to London (or, in my case, Reading), and put the world of television to rights. What an exhausting day it was, but hugely rewarding and good fun, and I think it will make a nice little programme. Should be on in the next month. Because most of my TV presenting experience has involved sitting next to Stuart in a cinema in Hammersmith, it's bracing to get out and do some walking-and-talking and PTCs. I will never claim it to be rocket science.

The lady in the blue sweater . . .

Having just submitted my piece for Word magazine defending Question Time against facile charges of dumbing-down, it was heartening to see another lively and intelligent debate last night. I also got the chance to shake my fist at the screen, which is a useful defence against developing cancer. In decending order of party-affiliated vacuity, we had Margaret Hodge MP, the condescending, eye-narrowing, head-shaking work and pensions minister; David Willetts MP, shadow education secretary and a great favourite of the programme, on account of his unusual number of brains; Jenny Tonge, sacked Liberal front-bencher (something to do with suicide bombers) now outspoken Liberal peer with newly-dyed hair, which looks much better; Simon Jenkins, floor-crossing Guardian columnist whose words I find regularly compelling and fair (not bad for a former editor of the Standard and the Times); and Kwame Kwei-Armah, who I would describe as "most famous for appearing on Casualty" if I was trying to make a snooty point, but since I'm not, the playwright and actor.

From Gateshead, the audience were as tuned in, passionate and vocal as we've come to expect, not least a teacher from Sunderland who attempted to cut through the party bullshit about Blair's education bill (which squeezed through its second reading thanks to life-saving support from the Tories - how proud he will be of his legacy). I was particularly interested in the panel's reaction to this Parexel story: six human guinea pigs fighting for their lives after a drugs trial that went wrong. My first reaction, and you might not like it, is, hey, they volunteered to take part in this trial. It's a risk you sign on the dotted line for. Drugs-testing is a well-known method for topping up grants or paying for a skiing holiday (you can get up to two thousand pounds a trial - two thousand, three hundred and thirty in this case - and you only have to leave three months before you can do another one); those that sign up do so with plenty of small print to protect the drugs company and, I daresay, in a spirit of "what could possibly go wrong? There are people with white coats here". I respect the volunteers' right to do this, and I wish no harm upon any of them. But when it goes wrong, as it has done with this trial for TGN1412, an anti-inflammatory, it's difficult to get worked up. The QT panel indulged in a display of kneejerk sympathy which, for me, skirted the issue, which is twofold.

1) Why are we testing drugs on animals (in this case rats and monkeys), if the drug can still have catastrophic effects on humans? Doesn't this blow the pro-animal-testing argument out of the water? It's a waste of time. I don't recall a media feeding frenzy the last time six monkeys swelled up and had to fight for their life. Is the life of a mouse so cheap? How many mice must die to make the papers? (It's ironic, because if a pet dies, we go nuts, and if a pet dies in a horrible way, it will make the papers, but these creatures are being bred as convenient drug-dustbins just so that we can relieve joint pain. And worse ailments, I know, but there's still something wrong, to me, about the set-up.)

2) The bit that nobody seems to be picking up on: when are we going to stop treating genetic modification as A Good Thing? This drug is a "humanised monoclonal antibody", a genetically engineered protein that is part mouse but mostly human. These drugs usually aim to suppress an immune system reaction - but this does the opposite. Either way, it's part-mouse! Who wants the genetic makeup of a mouse sticking in them? This is unholy.

I don't wish to get into a crowing debate about the pharmaceutical companies, but, like all other companies, especially ones that make billions of dollars a year, they need to make more money. And to make more money, they must invent new drugs in the hope that one will be a "blockbuster". and to get these on the market, they must test them. Fair enough. But let's not be surprised when one puts six fit young men in hospital, or when one, like the painkiler Vioxx, turns out after about four years on the market to cause heart attacks and strokes.

We are all guinea pigs, not just those poor blokes on organ support machines.

Check out Parexel's website (I'm not doing a link, you'll find it) - they're an American company who are very keen to promote drugs trials in Latin America, where there's a large untapped market described in the blurb as "naive subjects". I'm sure this is a medically-recognised term, but the big buzz-phrase at Paraxel of "shortening time-to-market". Good idea. Let's speed things up.

Be careful out there.

The Apprentice Week 4



[SPOILER ALERT! Read no further if you're watching the repeat or you've taped it. I got back from a restaurant at 11.25, but had to watch it before bedtime. It's too important not to.]

Oh how we laughed every time the voiceover mentioned Mani's "crepe idea"! It was the inevitable catering task: with Velocity headed by a boy (the oleaginous Mani, whose flipchart-Tourette's went into overdrive with talk of "a divergent phase" moving into "a convergent phase") and Invicta headed by a girl (dead candidate walking Alexa, whose rosy cheeks only got rosier as the task engulfed her miniscule talents), the hapless fools were dispatched to the edge of the Thames to create a food stall in a marquee. Most nosh shifted: the winner. Both teams seemed unhappy with their gender-swapped project manager, the boys for ingrained sexist reasons, the girls because Mani was a goon from the off, with his brainstorming (otherwise known as shouting stuff out and writing it in a spiral-bound jotter). Invicta went for pizza as their "theme", with Syed responsible for fucking the whole thing up, despite having managed restaurants, or so his CV says. Having failed to note when the wholesalers opened and closed, he was reduced to leaving a message with his order and thus landed the team with 100 large chickens - this meant one chicken per traditional Italian "chicken pizza". They seemed to have over-ordered the mince too, as the "mince pizza" looked heavy and overloaded too. (Anyone who has eaten pizza in Italy will know that it comes with tomato, oil and, if they're feeling really crazy, mushrooms.)

Apart from the appalling waste of food (we inevitably saw the boys scraping whole cooked chickens into a bin in the middle of London where, it's rumoured, one or two people are homeless), this was also an appalling waste of manpower, with the girls chopping peppers and manhandling chicken for their Oriental noodle stall for the best part of a day, all the while refraining from stabbing Jo in the heart with a kitchen knife, and the boys putting in a 17-hour shift making about 90 pizza bases out of a planned 500. My heart sank as the farce played out. There was no leadership on the boys' side (Alexa's time was running out) and no respect on the girls'. The sight of them desperately trying to flog off their unsold noodles and pizza to passers by at the Thames Festival (something I've never heard of - perhaps Sir Alan set it up as a hoax) was unedifying and pathetic. I noted Paul using his not-considerable charm on a lady customer and I'm pretty sure she told him to fuck off. These business buffoons are meant to thrive on pressure. They just became panicky and unable to make a decision when the hob was on. (If you can't stand the heat of business, get out of the kicthen, or at least enter a second "divergent phase" and diverge off.)

I know the editing is selective and the "story" the programme-makers opted to tell was one of Mani sneaking off and not doing any work, but he was the team leader and I didn't begrudge him not getting his hands dirty. I wanted to know a little bit more about the sequence at the wine wholesalers where he seemed to patronise an employee at the warehouse. Could this bloke speak English? We never heard him open his mouth. Was Mani being a tit? Or was he clearly explaining himself to a non-English speaker? Let us not have our emotions manipulated.

Sir Alan, like the little girl who whined that her pizza slice was too big, was not happy. The girls-and-a-boy won, and deserved to, for not ordering 100 chickens and plucking the figure of 500 pizzas out of thin air. They were sent to a restaurant ("the Oxo Towers" as poor Tuan erroneously called it, as if perhaps it might be a future Al-Queda target), whose attendant fireworks display seemed in danger of giving the overexcitable Jo a coronary.

Alexa correctly pulled in Syed and Tuan for the final showdown (Paul threatened to laugh if he was selected - I'd like to have seen that, the big role-player - sorry, liar). Sir Alan viewed the whimpering "brain surgeons" will unconcealed disdain and looked for all the world like he was going to fire Syed, the architect of the team's downfall, despire being "a fighter", in his own frightened words, and a "winner". "But you bloody lost!" Nevertheless, his endless claim of having given "150%" (unless he meant that's how much he over-ordered by) either earned Syed a last-minute reprieve, or Sir Alan was going to get rid of the silly girl anyway, and it was all amateur dramatics. Alexa watched her second chance go up in smoke and, like the pizza oven, was fired. (Sir Alan is a brilliant performer. He might not know how to flog anti-ageing cream, but he has an instinctive grasp of TV drama.)

You had to love it when he told them, "Clear off."

Not enough emotion this week, save for when Sharon walked out of a meeting to sob on a bunk bed because Mani hinted that he couldn't understand her Scottish accent. Unable to use the English language properly, in common with all our business hopefuls, she said he was being "derogative", which I'm fairly sure isn't a word*. Earlier, Mani had said, "Let's go whole hog." I'm not sure my heart can take much more of this.

*It is a word.

Capote
Saw this at Reigate Screen this afternoon. What a bleak film. I have been furiously reading In Cold Blood, trying to finish it before seeing the film of its conception, and I didn't quite manage it, but the way it's written - so evocative, so thorough, so vivid - I feel I've been inside the Clutter house where the mutliple homicide took place in November 1959, smelt the wheat of Holcomb in Kansas, met Perry Smith and Dick Hickock, the killers, lived in the family household of sheriff Alvin Dewey while they were tracked down. So actually seeing the story dramatised, none of it was any great surprise. The bit that's not in the book, of course, is the author himself. He never mentions himself, playing the silent, omniscient observer. With 94% recall.

It goes without saying that Philip Seymour Hoffman is impeccable in what might have been a cartoon role. I've seen Truman Capote on film and he really did speak like that! Effete and false and almost wilfully irritating, that's just the way it was. And Hoffman brings such a subtle depth to him. This is not a heroic portrayal - he's selfish, opportunistic, manipulative - but it beats most standard literary biopics. Yes, we see him typing, but not once does he take a sheet of paper out of the typewriter and screw it up into a ball, which I thought was law in this genre.

Let's hear it for the supporting cast: Clifton Collins Jr, who should have been Oscar-nominated for his Perry Smith (you may have seen him in Traffic or Tigerland, but this should improve his stock); Catherine Keener, who's now been in so many unrewarded supporting roles it was a moral victory to see her Oscar-nominated; and Chris Cooper, who, as my wife observed, is the new JT Walsh, and there's no shame in that. He's a walking mark of quality. Let's hope he finds a lead part for himself at some stage. (And I don't mean in a John Sayles movie. Nobody watches those. Mind you, look at David Strathairn, another Sayles repertory player who came good this year. It can happen.)

Beautifully shot and composed by director Bennett Miller, Capote is a quiet masterpiece, I think. As long as you can get over the voice. Now, I must finish the book. You can see why it is purported to have changed American literature. It's the kind of writing I read the New Yorker for (do all their writers have 94% recall?), and the kind you don't really get in British magazines. (I know, not much of an anti-American am I?)



A note about Reigate Screen. I feel privileged to have it as my local. It's small but it has a big heart. Screen 2 seats 139. The massive Screen 1 seats . . . 142. Quite a difference. And the manager, Toby, comes in before the film starts and tells you about other films they've got coming up (including an ongoing season of foreign films on a Tuesday night). What a tremendous individual. I have actually learned to despise going to the cinema in recent years with its texting, crisp-rustling, talking idiots, but Reigate Screen has changed my opinion.

I include these shots from the 6 Music webcam because today was the last time I will broadcast from Studio 5G, Broadcasting House. As of next week, 6 Music is moving to new studios in an adjacent building called Western House. These new studios are mint, never been used before except for training. They also use a new playout system, which is a bit like the old one, but better. I fear change like everyone else, and I have sentimental feelings for 5G, as we've been broadcasting from it, as a network, since day one, four years ago. It is the first studio where I ever "drove the desk" (ie. press the buttons and move the faders and insert CDs into the drawers and cue them up, like proper DJs do). I was trained, somewhat improbably, by Chris Hawkins. (I only say improbably because he is a fellow presenter.) Anyway, these grabs show me and Richard Herring having a right old laugh at Daniella Westbrook or Margaret Beckett or Judas, based on stories about them in the Sunday newspapers. Notice my admiring face, looking over at Richard. This is obviously put on, to make him feel important, even though he doesn't get paid very much money. You can see Mark, who is the programme's BA (broadcast assistant) but he was being the producer today because Leona is taking some well-earned leave.