The Apprentice: it's nearly all over Deja vu. It's the not-QVC shopping channel task. I'll tell you one thing, I recall last year's contestants being a lot better. All six this year ranged from simpering to slapstick, and lost Ideal World "tens of thousands of pounds" in an hour (which I'm guessing they wrote off against a 60-minute advert on BBC2 to an audience of about 5 million). I am now convinced that this whole series is a spoof, written by the writers who do The Thick Of It, and performed by brilliantly naturalistic actors - except for Lohit, who's played by a terrible actor. How else would one of them have come up with the following instruction for selling the deluxe fold-up wheelchair: "Get behind it, and push it"? Priceless. Unlike the wheelchair, which came in at 199.99.
Siralan was pretty clear: this was not an audition for TV presenters, it was about choosing products and selling them. However, once you're under the studio lights, it must feel a lot like auditioning to be a TV presenter. (Also, isn't Siralan living proof that being "in business" actually involves knowing how to present yourself for the cameras - just look at him in those set-up scenes where he is watching the contestants make tits of themselves, clearly prompted to say what he's saying, but to look natural.) Anyway, Naomi, Tre and Simon chose badly - the wheelchair ("I don't like a wheelchair," explained Simon, who chose it; "I've just seen a wheelchair, Simon!" trilled Naomi), the frottage set, the mini-trampoline (yes, it's called a Supertramp) and the hand-shaver. Actually, I thought the trampette was an astute choice, but Simon put people off buying it by resting it on his groin while he screwed in the "six simple legs" as if each one was his black cock. "Jesus Christ!" said Kristina, live on air, when she couldn't get the thing to fix to the other thing. She was desperate for the solo slot, and she cocked it up royal. Meanwhile, Katie and Lohit did the big pants. It was a dreary performance, hampered somewhat by the fact that Katie had nothing but contempt for her audience. Not only does she feel that most of the human race are beneath her, she doesn't even mind saying it. This is a true superiority complex. A brand manager, let us not forget, she pictured Ideal World's typical viewer as Mavis, with big boobs, no friends, drool coming out of her mouth, a gammy leg, pigeons in the loft, car on bricks, cat shit on the kitchen floor, bailiffs at the door, benefit cheques bulging out of her scrounger's letterbox and a tumour growing in her lungs. I'm exaggerating slightly.
Both teams did bad. Amazingly, one or two items, including the wheelchair and the thing with the other thing on it, sold, which just goes to show how effective those channels are. (I remember a documentary, years ago, about the setting up of Ideal World and going up against QVC. It was a happy shambles. I also remember thinking: I bet a caption comes up at the end and says Ideal World went under two weeks after going on air. It didn't. Look at it now.) Siralan was not impressed. Nor were the channel's producers, who had to sit by while Simon proved unable to actually speak into a microphone and form words for his teammates. For this alone, he seemed to be cruising for a firing. ("What are you bladdy doing?" Siralan exclaimed.)
His team lost, by a couple of hundred quid. Usual pathetic margin. And these are the final six! I don't blame any of them for being bad at TV presenting (as such!), but their vanity once again got in the way of the task at hand. Katie actually stopped smiling in the boardroom, so humiliated was she by the collective roasting Siralan gave them. Even Tre looked on the verge of shame-faced. It looked as if Simon couldn't save himself, but a spirited defence of his wheelchair strategy (and the fact that his hapless teammates sold two of them) took him out of the firing line. There was a dummy: it looked like he was going to fire Tre for not really wanting a job at Amstrad, but no, how predictable, he went for the pretty girl. Naomi left the boardroom with one hairstyle, left the building with another, and ended up with another in the taxi, as if to prove once and for all that they film the exits from the building in one go at the beginning.
From twelve simple legs, to ten. Next week, my favourite, the one where they get interviewed by three of Siralan's macho male friends. I'm afraid I peeked at a couple of previews on the website. Katie-haters, prepare for a treat.
Pre-enlightenment sexist exploitation in boys'-own music publication on its commercial uppers OR major, post-enlightenment blow by alternative style icon against orthodoxy of body fascism? Discuss.
Perhaps because I've been planning the writing of my first novel (which at this stage is just a treatment and a lot of online research), I've allowed myself a detour from the usual steady diet of non-fiction these past couple of weeks and read two works of fiction by two of the biggest names on either side of the Atlantic. As it happened, although I treated myself to both in hardback, which do look lovely on a shelf, neither was very long.
On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan I have only read one Ian McEwan in full before, and that was Saturday, which I was drawn to because it was set on the day of the big anti-war march in London, which like thousands of others, I was on. I had attempted A Child In Time and Atonement and given up with both very early on, so something went right with Saturday. I really enjoyed it. The ridiculous detail about squash and neurosurgery, for instance, which struck some as showing off, really worked for me. On Chesil Beach also had associations for me, as I've been to Chesil Beach on a number of occasions, all connected with Billy Bragg, who lives near there. I read the inevitable extract in the Guardian, fell in love with the beautiful photographic cover, and paid my 12.99 (with three pounds off in Borders). It's a bold concept: just the story of one wedding night in the late 60s, on the Dorset coast, that manages to form a sort of monument to the shifting sands of British society at a pivotal moment in its development from postwar to post-postwar (we're spending the evening with a couple who haven't, cough, done it before, and therein lies the struggle between expectation and reality). Again, you have to admire McEwan's prose. He really gets inside the heads of this couple as they wrestle with, well, everything but each other. Their past. Their future. The bad things that happened in their childhood. It's a swift read, but a full-blooded one. I didn't, but you could read it in one sitting, easy. That's probably the best way. It unfolds in real time, virtually. Wait for the paperback though. There's not a lot in here for a tenner.
Falling Man by Don DeLillo I have only started one DeLillo before - inevitably, Underworld, which hooked me in at the baseball game, but lost me thereafter. I admit, I have to be pretty intoxicated to get into a novel. There was a time, in my twenties, when I went through the likes of Stephen King, Martin Amis and Kurt Vonnegut like a dose of salts. I couldn't stop reading fiction. I did all the obvious cool novels: Salinger, Kerouac, Heller, Reinhart etc. I'm glad I did. But something changed in the 90s, and non-fiction turned my head. I suddenly had no time for the fripperies of made-up stuff and wanted to learn. This, I think, was my way of atoning for the substandard way I was taught history at school. Or something premillennial. Anyway, to Falling Man. Again, the extract in the Guardian, again the beautiful photographic cover, but this time, there was an actual compulsion to read it, as it's about September 11, which, as you know, I am obsessed by.
DeLillo has, I understand, written on these themes before, but this is what you get: a bunch of highbrow characters speaking dialogue that nobody would ever say in real life as they come to terms with either directly surviving the collapse of the Twin Towers, or just living in the shadow of that event. It's a tough book. You feel you could drop it down a lift shaft and it would be OK. DeLillo deliberately keeps back key information, like names, for instance, and forces you to live with his characters, as the narrative skips about between them and work it out as you go along. I got bored two thirds of the way through, which may have been something to do with all the poker, and I felt that Martin Amis had made a better job of getting inside the head of the one of the hijackers. These terrorist flashbacks were entertaining, and a relief from all the Upper West Side navel-gazing, but It was a bit like DeLillo having his 9/11 cake and eating it: doing the aftermath, and then sneakily going back in time to do the preamble with the flight school and the praying to Allah. Make your mind up. Is it a before or after novel?
I was actually glad when it was over. Not because I was disliking reading it that much - in fact, I'm glad I stuck with it, as there is a rhythm to his prose that pays back over a longer period - but because he finally used his powers to describe what it was like for his main character to be in the Tower when the plane hit. Saving the best bit till the end, eh? (This is not a spoiler - there's nothing to spoil. It starts with September 11 and ends with it, and in between there's a lot of poker, talk about art and talk about talk.)
I expect people to now implore me to read Underworld or Atonement. Maybe I will. The covers of these books remain beautiful, and both will look nice on the shelf next to all the books about military history and eating.
Now then ... there's a shopping centre in Wimbledon in South London called, with understandable opportunism, Centre Court (it's a centre, it's a court, it's in a centre, and what's Wimbledon famous for that also has a centre court? - advantage, town planners!). That's not the problem. It has been rebranded and now has a tagline. This tagline is, "Irresistibly Local" (see: above). Let's just have a think about this, as the overpaid marketing ladies and gentlemen obviously didn't when they thought it up. First of all: it's a shopping centre in Wimbledon. How can it not be local? Everywhere is local. If it was in Harrogate or Chelmsford or Taunton or Oban it would be local. Just not local to Wimbledon. As such, it's true. Centre Court is local. It's not local in any other sense than literal. The shops in it are universal. They are Marks & Spencer and River Island and Gap and Thorntons and H&M and Athena. In what way are they local? Other than they are probably staffed by people from South London?
Now let's look at the prefix "Irresistibly". It suggests, well, irresistibility. It's subjective, but advertising is allowed to be subjective, as long as it isn't a lie. And for someone - someone who fancies a Thornton's chocolate and a pair of Gap trousers who finds themselves in the Wimbledon area, say, and it's raining outside - the prospect of Centre Court might actually be hard to resist. But to call it "Irresistibly Local" is actually insane. How do you resist a building's locality? Its locality is its locality. It's not going to move overnight. There would be little point in resisting Centre Court's locality. You could try going to Centre Court a bit further down the high street, but it would be pointless. (Resistence is, in this case, futile.) Why don't these flipchart fools think twice before having the corporate livery made up? It's like the tossed-off results of an Apprentice task.
Here's the best bit. If you enter Centre Court you will see its opening time displayed on the glass doors. Except these are not just its opening times (9am-7pm), they are, according to the branded notices, its "Irresistible Opening Times"! Resist these times at your peril! Try walking through those doors at five to nine. It's not going to happen.
On a related note, I notice that Regent Street in Central London has been rebranded. There's a big "R", then underneath it says, "Where Time Is Always Well Spent." OK. This is a bold claim. It would certainly be well spent if you wanted to get from Piccadilly Circus to Regent's Park, as walking up it would get you there and there's no straighter route. But to say that it's always well spent? Well, if you like shopping, I suppose it would be mostly well spent. If, say, you wanted to buy a kilt, or an overpriced toy from Hamleys, or a Thornton's chocolate you forgot to get in Wimbledon, you could spend it in worse places than Regent Street. But I've spent time on Regent Street that I'd like back. I once went to the Disney store on a Sunday with my parents and it wasn't open, so we had to stand outside and wait for it to open. That wasn't time well spent.
I looked Regent Street's rebranding up on the Internet, and I'm afraid what I found doesn't quell my ire for those people who are paid to embroider with the English language until a mundane thing seems that little bit more ... I don't know, American.
Under the heading, Branding Strategy - Executive Summary, we find that The Crown Estate, who must own the street, has "a vision" that will "ensure that Regent Street evolves to be a place for people, a place for retail and a place for business." As opposed to what it was before? A place for livestock, a place for bingo and a place for see-saws? "The brand and its identity provide a vehicle that will enable that vision to be realised by reinforcing and communicating Regent Street as a unique destination, attracting shoppers, retailers, businesses and visitors to the area throughout the day and well into the evening." Fair enough, but isn't time always well spent there? Surely when the shops are closed the value of time spent there tails off a bit. It get worse. "The brand highlights and promotes Regent Street as a fusion of contrasts ie. the contrast between the traditional architecture and contemporary retail, the cosmopolitan and community spirit, business and pleasure, buzz and relaxation." Oh do give over.
"These contrasts are best described in the brand essence: Always. Different." The marketeers help us out here by explaing what "Always" and "Different" mean, which I won't trouble you with. Anyhoo, "the brand essence of Regent Street is communicated through the logo, colours, typeface and strapline: the 'R' is composed of Bodoni, one of the oldest typefaces in existence and the re-drawn tail of the 'R' symbolises the famous Regent Street curved sweep; by redrawing the R and adding the flash of colour, the contrasts of Traditional and Contemporary convey the essence: Always. Different."
Oh, it ends with near-priapic talk of "a three-stage evolutionary rollout programme for the brand", including a "stakeholder soft launch", after which I needed a lie down. It's Irresistibly Bollocks.
By which, I mean, who's actually funding this London advertising campaign? The News Of The World? Those not-so-secret capitalist benefactors? I'm sure Clear Channel aren't giving their billboards for free. And if they are - why? (By which I mean, why not one of the other missing or abused children?)
I thought the media heat had died down, but apparently not.
The parents have been invited to the Vatican to meet the Pope tomorrow. Kate and Gerry McCann will have a private meeting with Pope Benedict XVI tomorrow morning at the end of a general audience meeting in the Vatican. According to the Guardian, the couple will fly to Rome this afternoon from Faro on a 12-seater Gulfstream jet owned by the businessman Sir Philip Green. (Ah, he'll be the one pressured into getting involved by the News Of The World on our behalf.) I respect the couple's Catholic faith and the strength it's clearly given them. But meeting the Pope? These grieving people are being turned into pop stars. I know they're courting the media because it's the only way they can keep their daughter in the headlines, but it's a circus now. It's all totally out of proportion.
Clarence Mitchell, a "spokesman for the McCann family", said that that although they were grateful of Green's offer to let them use his private jet, they would only use it on this one occasion.
I do not question the motives of the parents, as I've stated before, but the rest of us have got to calm down. Haven't we?
Let's not be too ungrateful that the BBC has commissioned another documentary series on the history of rock, The Seven Ages Of Rock. It's a "definitive landmark series", in fact, according to the description on its very good BBC website, which is the best kind really. I mean, who wants a partial, schedule-filling history of rock? The BBC have already made a definitive landmark history of rock, of course. It was called Dancing In The Street. A co-production between the BBC and an American broadcaster, it aired in 1996 over ten weeks and really was definitive, calling in all the greats who were still alive to tell the tale, and cutting it up into ten pieces with care, from rock'n'roll to hip hop. I even bought the video of the episode on glam rock, with money, to own. It was that good. Now, although much has happened in rock since 1996, the actual history up to that point hasn't changed - they've certainly been unable to find any more footage of David Bowie or Roxy Music. This story doesn't actually need telling again. In point of fact, it almost seems a shame to have to wheel out many of those interviewed for Dancing In The Street to ask them for the same reminiscences. (Indeed, unable to get Bowie this time around, they actually reused the interview from 1996. A lot less bother than going all the way to New York to interview Lou Reed again, you must admit. Surely, if anything, his memory will have declined rather than improved over ten years. Just like the film stock - it's amazing how grainy Bowie '96 now looks, compared to the crisp HD-ready interview footage of today.)
Anyway, I'm the target audience for this kind of programme, so I've hungrily devoured the first two episodes. (It's getting around 1.8 million viewers, which I'm sure will hold steady throughout. Who's going to tune in for, say, three ages of rock and ignore the other four?) And I haven't learned a single new fact yet. But that's because I always watch these kinds of documentary. I've seen all of Rock's Family Trees and Classic Albums and everything BBC4 have ever put out. I can't help myself. But it's getting to be like humming along to a familiar tune. There surely can't be much left to add? It's just a case of slapping the old record back on the turntable and giving it another spin.
I have two problems with Seven Ages Of Rock. Well, three if you count the fact that there aren't seven ages of rock, since all of them, by the programme makers' admission, overlap. Which is why "age" comes in inverted commas on the website. Thus, part one, the snappily subtitled Blues-based Rock covers 1963-1970, and Art Rock, programme two, covers 1966-1980, as if perhaps art rock stopped happening in 1980. Meanwhile, the forthcoming Stadium Rock covers 1965-1993. Again - and I haven't seen it - I must have missed the news story in 1993 when stadiums stopped booking rock bands. I know, I know, I'm nitpicking, but when the BBC are so clearly re-slicing a cake they've already eaten, if that's possible, it's hard not to. Dividing the story up into loosely themed chapters is fine, but putting dates is asking for trouble.
Problem one: the narration. It's voiced by Julian Rhind-Tutt, an actor for whom I have a great deal of time, especially in Green Wing, but ... WHY? You can imagine the meeting when they decided to go a bit wacky and get somebody out of a trendy comedy to do it, rather than, say, someone with any connection to music whatsoever, but that doesn't explain why they didn't do a u-turn when they heard the tapes. He sounds like he's reading a story to nursery schoolchildren.
Problem two: the narration. By which I mean the words Julian Rhind-Tutt is forced to say. This programme is filled with people, including wise programme consultant Charles Shaar Murray, who speak with constant eloquence on the subject at hand. It's a pity the programme requires grouting with narration at all, but hey, it does, so let's deal with it. The actual words, which we must assume were penned by the series producer as no scriptwriter is credited, range from vague (and I'm not quoting directly here, but words to the effect of, "Dark Side Of The Moon shifted millions of units worldwide" - did it? How many millions? Why not look it up and pass that information on? And was the use of "units" supposed to be sarcastic?) to meaninglessly hyperbolic (every record "changed the world" or was "the most innovative debut album every recorded", and every artist "did something that nobody else had ever done, ever"). This is very wearing over the course of an hour, especially, as I say, when the talking heads are so illuminating and clever. Imagine if, say, the informed words of John Harris had been transcribed and used as the script.
These three things annoyed me so much during programme two (which, as those posting comments on the dedicated message boards have been quick to point out, didn't actually mention Marc Bolan even in passing), that I vowed to watch every single episode to the end. That'll show them.
A quick plug for Anthony Gormley's latest project, Event Horizon, which is the best public art I've ever seen - 31 life-size human figures positioned on the tops of buildings around the South Bank in London (the Shell Centre, the National Theatre, Waterloo Bridge, King's College, Imperial College, Freemasons' Hall etc.) I think it's to promote his actual show at the Hayward, which I've not seen, but the figures are astonishing, and they're up until August. As you approach the South Bank on foot, you'll spy your first one, and then the others become apparent as you make your way along the embankment. First of all, it appeals to the collector in us all, as we try and spot more and more of them (I think we made it up to about 15, 20 at the most, so there are plenty more to go), but you can't help but be haunted by the distant sight of so many men on the edges of so many high buildings. One has his head bowed, which makes the uniformity of his compatriots even more arresting.
I've never seen the Angel of the North, except on film, but I suspect I would love that too. And his figures on Crosby beach in Merseyside, which recently won a reprieve and seem to have found a permanent home in the sand. They're all based on a cast of Gormley himself, but they never strike you as narcissistic. What a tremendous chap he clearly is.
There's a lot of crap knocking about under the generous umbrella of modern art, and I defend all of it in principle, but Gormley's stuff actually does the job.
Contains Idiotic Censorship Decisions From The Start This Is England, the award-winning latest from Shane Meadows, passed through my local multiplex, which is pleasing to me, as his films are never as widely seen as they deserve to be. Advance hype seems to have garnered this one a wider release, albeit the cinema was virtually empty when we saw it. Anyway, that's not the point I'm here to make. Set in 1983, as you've probably read, it's a skinhead rite of passage based on Meadows' own experience as a junior provincial boot boy, and centres on the redemptive transformation of Sean, played by the astonishing 12-year-old Thomas Thurgoose, from flare-wearing dork to booted-up skinhead, and the havoc played on his new-found gang acceptance when the 32-year-old Compo (played with shark-like menace by Stephen Graham, aka the Scummy Man from the Arctic Monkeys video) comes out of prison to reclaim his crown, with some uncompromising new views on immigration to impart. Like all of Meadows' terrific little films it's naturalistically played suburban ennui laced with sudden violence. He captures housing estates on summer evenings as well as Bill Forsyth did in Gregory's Girl. It isn't actually his best film - that surely remains a tie between TwentyFourSeven and A Room For Romeo Brass - but it's very good indeed. No less than we've come to expect.
Now, this film has been granted an 18 certificate. It's about teenagers grappling with the timeless issues of peer pressure, surrogate parents, sexual awakening, role models and race politics, and has important things to say. You'd think the BBFC might allow the fact that it features occasional scenes of violence to pass, so that people of, say, 15 could legally view it. It's a film about kids, as have been all of Meadows' best films. (It's probably why Once Upon A Time In The Midlands remains the black sheep of the family: not without charm, but too full of adults!) It should be available to kids.
The insidious thing is that the nature of the violence seems to be the sticking point. It is, in context of the story, racial violence. The film's about the National Front, and about the friction within the skinhead movement between its Jamaican musical roots and the vile racism that infected certain factions in the late 70s and early 80s. You can see the flare-up coming a mile off. And it is shocking. But not graphic. And certainly no more shocking than the violence in all these slasher horror movies that get away with a commercially-vital 15 certificate. Is the message being sent out by the censor that violence is OK for 15 year-olds, but not racially motivated violence? I could understand this if it glorified racism, but quite the opposite. It's like saying The Deer Hunter is pro-war because it shows war.
Interestingly, Westminster Council in London have opted out and placed a 15 certificate on the film, as have Bristol City Council, I think. This is encouraging. But why must you be 18 to see This Is England everywhere else in England, and Scotland, and Wales? Own goal. If racism and racist violence is a hot-potato issue, and it is, then let's get it out into the open. Shane Meadows must be gutted. (And it reduces his available audience - something a filmmaker on the edge of mainstream success can ill afford.) There are probably loads of examples of violent films that get away with a 15 these days, which I always took as a result of market forces. I'm all for a system of certification for films, but consistency is paramount, surely?
The Apprentice: it's royal! Siralan took great pleasure in informing Tre, who has become convinced that if he says he's great enough times the others will become convinced that he's great, that this week he had "cocked this up royal." Tre, unsurprisingly, thought differently. "I've cocked this up, but I don't think I've cocked this up royal, as such." It's the final "as such" that makes this programme great. Although, to be honest, this was a pretty flat and uneventful episode, as our teams - almost back to girls versus boys, with Katie, Naomi and Kristina up against Tre, Simon and Lohit, plus the emotional and therefore WEAK Jadine - were tasked with buying three items from one of five foreign countries and selling them back to "the trade" in this country. Some laughs were promised by the auditions, with comedy recliners and galloping horses and instant lamb shank, but both teams plumped for sensible items. From Canada: the insole, the do-it-yourself rug and the "sunshine in a box"; from Sweden (who certainly would have been my design choice): the nozzle, the air purifier and the microwaveable rabbit, which may or may not have had "packaging". None of these was a total disaster, although the purifier gave off static electricity and made "the trade" jump, and the microwave toys contained wheat that was unsuitable for the under-threes (and the wheat-intolerant), and the only snag in selling them was, in both teams' cases, failing to set up any appointments the night before. The boys' team because Lohit was left on this own while Jadine went off for a homesick sniffle (cue: grudging empathy from parent Tre, but, "You know what women are like"), and the girls' team because they were just a bit shit. However, they had Kristina, who set up her own appointments in the people-carrier. (Incidentally, I could never scour the Yellow Pages in transit - I would get car-sick.)
Neither team really fucked up, although Jadine and Lohit (who were really angling for something called "congratulations" from their project manager - wrong project manager, I'm afraid) missed the 6.30 deadline, which stopped Siralan from being a "happy bunny." I hate that phrase. Further infantilisation of adults by the consumer society. Anyway, yet again it seemed to boil down to our heroes wandering the streets of inappropriate area of London knocking on doors. Will any task amount to anything more than this unedifying sight? It's as if "business" is just that. And maybe it is. Pure desperation. Pleeeease buy my stuff, I'll give you a hand job. (Michelle Dewberry was interviewed in today's G2 and moaned that after all the shit she went through to get the gig with Siralan, her job was a dead end, and involved trying to sell a service that should have been free. She left. And still loves Syed, as a friend.) Simon didn't do any humorous ethnic impressions. Tre didn't even swear that much. (Although Jadine illustrated the sheer elasticity of our language by exclaiming, "For fuck's sake!" as she high-fived Lohit after a sale, and then grumbling, "For fuck's sake," when caught in traffic, thus preventing her from making that sale. Same phrase, different intonation, different meaning.) Even Katie was relatively unbitchy. The only decent comedy was indirectly provided by Simon, as Lohit went through the list of 50 contact numbers he'd got for them off the Internet, and discovered that half of them were for garden shops. They should have cold-called Premium Sheds to see if they'd take take the air purifier - they'd have had as much chance as the computer shop on Tottenham Court Road taking one.
The boardroom saved the day, or what was left of the day, by the time Jadine and Lohit turned up, still angling for that congratulation but not getting it. Both teams made a profit, despite the tears, traffic and bad information, but the girls made more. End of. Katie did her usual flushed gaze upwards, learned from Lady Di, and forced Siralan to call her a winner, which he did. Charlie's Angels went off to spent five hundred quid each in Selfridge's, which, for telegenic reasons, seemed to have to be clothes, so that the programme could do a changing room montage. I would have taken my five hundred quid to the basement and bought a nice mirror, or some crockery. At least he refrained from describing it as "the most famous department store in the world". The boys held up well enough, with Tre taking the heat for his team leadership failures. It was obvious he would use Jadine's gender against her, and he did, although I didn't expect the cuddly Lohit (no "killer instinct", apparently) to turn on her. He said her tears had "interfered on the task", which has to be better than interfering with the task. She was hung up to dry, which was appropriate, in the moist-cheeked circumstances. Siralan came that close to being sympathetic: "In business, you get homesick. In business, you miss your children. In business, life sucks. It should never, ever affect what you're doing. Go home and see your daughter." Then he added, "There's nothing bad one wants to say about you. Good luck!"
Business sounds rubbish. Why would anybody want to work there?
By the way, there's no way that lot could be out of bed, showered and spruced, and ready to be picked up in 30 minutes, which is how much time we are led to believe they get every week. Do me a favour.
Oh, I've been forgetting to do this, for the record:
Well, I finally got sent the Maddie chain letter. Now, all of a sudden, I feel a part of the collective outpouring of grief, albeit unwilling. I actually don't even recognise the name of the person who sent it to me, but there I am, in among 20 other names in a group email. This is the one that originated from Madeleine's uncle, Phil McCann. In it, accompanied by a picture of Maddie, he says, "As you are aware my niece, Madeleine, is still missing and I am asking everyone I know to send this as a chain letter i.e. you send it to everyone you know and ask them to do the same, as the story is only being covered in Britain, Eire and Portugal. We don't believe that she is in Portugal anymore and need to get her picture and the story across Europe as quickly as possible. Suggestions are welcome." I feel for the bloke, and the family, as previously stated for the record, but I ask once again, is this helping? Really? (By which I mean helping to find Maddie, not helping people unconnected with the crime fill a hole in their lives.)
I am so against chain letters, or chain emails, which are worse, as they literally take zero effort to forward and strike me as a form of casual harassment. In a way, putting a bulletin out on MySpace is less intrusive. That's what those networking sites are for. But why send me this email? What am I to do? (Apart from send it to "everybody I know", as instructed, which I am certainly not going to do. The only time to send an email to everybody in your address book is when you change email address.)
Meanwhile, away from the chain letters, the media seem to have now lost interest almost completely in Maddie. That must be galling for her parents. It's not as if she is any less lost all of a sudden is it? How abandoned they must now feel, having been wooed and made to feel so important for so many days on the trot. It all rather proves the point about the profligate, uncaring, venal nature of the media I was originally trying to make. It's as if we've been given the all-clear to care less and move on. If that bloke called Roger, who found my "anti-media cliches" so yawnsome would like to comment, I'd love to hear what he has to say. (Actually, I wouldn't.)
If anyone wants the email, let me know, and I'll forward it.
Men in shirtsleeves, in offices, on the phone, typing and talking: now that's what I call cinema I knew I was going to enjoy Zodiac, which I saw at the cinema over the weekend. It's about a real life serial killer - the Zodiac, whose case remains officially unsolved, almost 40 years after his first murder, and has filled two books by Robert Graysmith - and it's set predominantly in the late 60s and 70s, when the murders took place. Now, although I find serial killers fascinating, and have read all the lurid books, firstly, I am not one, and secondly, this doesn't mean I find the dismembering of young people, which they often are, in any way titilating. In fact, I'm rather repulsed by slasher horror films, if I'm honest (reserving a soft spot for the daddies, Psycho and Halloween, obviously). The point I'm making is that what interests me about those who murder in a methodical way is their motive, their psychology, the context in which this breakdown in the moral compass occurs. I saw a terrible film about the serial killer Ted Bundy once. It was called Ted Bundy, and not only did it sidestep any tricky questions about his motivation for terrorising and killing young women, it took way too much delight in showing us Ted Bundy terrorising and killing young women. A film from the same writer, Stephen Johnston, about Ed Gein (the inspiration for Leatherface and Norman Bates), called Ed Gein, was a far more lyrical and interested attempt at the same gig, but it's a tough one. Since Silence Of The Lambs turned the serial killer into an intelligent, suave, thinking person's screen antihero, the vertical hold has gone a bit wonky in this area.
In real life, for instance, serial killers don't "copy" other serial killers (as the killer did in Copycat) or indeed stage elaborate tableaus (as the killer did in Se7en), as entertaining as those devices proved to be. Which is why a factual film about the Zodiac (albeit made by David Fincher, who helped glamourise the subject in Se7en) sounded so refreshing. I admired Spike Lee's Summer Of Sam as it used the climate of fear in New York at the time of the Son Of Sam spree as a backdrop for various other stories. But Zodiac is different again. It's almost not a serial killer movie at all, despite its armrest-manhandling opening sequence depicting Zodiac's second double-murder of a canoodling couple down some lovers' lane. What Fincher and screenwriter James Vanderbilt have done is take the murders as a mere starting point. This is a two and half hour film in which most of the screen time is taken up with men in shirts and sometimes even ties, going about their business in offices, be it the San Francisco Chronicle, where Jake Gyllenhaal's Graysmith and Robert Downey Jr's crime reporter trade downbeat quips as the killer's coded messages keep turning up in the editor's in-tray, or the offices of Mark Ruffalo and Anthony Edwards' police station. Because the murders took place over five counties in California, the action, such that it is, moves about a lot, and involves a lot of phonecalls. Are you getting the picture? Not a huge amount happens beyond investigation. Perhaps four series of The Wire, with its wire taps and subpoenas and paperwork, are good training for a full enjoyment of what is a strict police (and journalistic) procedural.
I've seen mention of Alan J Pakula's All The President's Men in more than one review, and it's a perfect comparison. I can't do any better. In that, we didn't see much of the crime itself at the Watergate building, but we saw an awful lot of Woodward and Bernstein knocking on doors and typing things up and sitting around in meetings. That was a very male film. So is Zodiac. Chloe Sevigny does well with the role of Graysmith's long-suffering wife, but beyond that, it's not about women. I rather imagine this is a true picture of journalism and police work in the late 60s and 70s. Ruffalo seems a limited actor, but he's perfectly cast as the cop who became the unlikely model for Dirty Harry. It's a masterstroke to show him walking out of a screening of Dirty Harry - its own killer, Scorpio, a barely-veiled extrapolation of Zodiac, then still at large - failing to recognise himself on screen and disgusted by the fact that the case he can't crack has already been fictionalised by Hollywood. The San Francisco setting is evocatively captured, recalling Vertigo in its foggy beauty, and further allusions are made to the city in the early 70s by the soundtrack, which is by David Shire, who scored The Conversation. The same piano-led dissonance is achieved. It's a very smart back-reference. You half-expect Harry or Stan to walk into shot at Union Square.
All in all, Zodiac restores my faith that talky films can still be made in America with studio dollars. If you want gore and suspense and Hannibal Lecter, look elsewhere. The killings in this are all the more horrific and "ordinary" for their lack of sensational staging. And when all that police work and library time and phone manning finally winkle out a prime suspect (ghoulishly played by John Carroll Lynch, who I mainly know as the sacrificial rescue worker on the subway train in Volcano), and the net tightens, none of this provides a neat denouement. This is not a neat story. The final captions make that clear.
On a related note, I saw Half Nelson by Ryan Fleck the weekend before last, and there's another intelligent American film (albeit one on a budget and without marquee names), which also recalled The Wire (it's set in a high school, and even shared a couple of junior cast members). A central performance that merited its surprise Oscar nomination from Ryan Gosling, and although it was set in the here and now, it too had a grainy 70s quality. There's some kind of theme here.
Punk rock! Did anybody else see Patti Smith spit on the floor before launching into her cover of Gimme Shelter on Later over the weekend? She and her band were on great form, and she proved an amiable and patient interviewee when the hapless, muttering Jools posed his typically trite and unaswerable questions ("Why did you choose to make an album of covers?", "Which of the bands playing tonight have you particularly enjoyed?") - but did she have to gob beforehand? Some minimum-wage BBC cleaner is going to have to mop that up later. This is no example to set our kids. Patti Smith is 61. (Actually, does that make spitting alright again? I'll have to check. You do see old blokes coughing up phlegm occasionally.)
Sorry if this has been an unsavoury post. But she started it.
Wire: we waiting So, belatedly, I caught up with the final two episodes of Season Four of The Wire. I half-recall mentioning that I quite like this programme, so I won't do it again. (Everyone's at it now. Pundits saying it's better than The Sopranos are ten a penny. But it's still only showing on FX, so no amount of chatter can actually elevate it to the mainstream. Let's hope they get this one out of DVD soon. It doesn't appear to be listed, yet.) Needless to say, this season has been elegaic, moving, funny, at times more violent than any previous season (especially the death of Bug's father), and deftly balanced between police, the corners, the Mayor's office and (new thrill!) Edward Tilghman Middle School, where co-creator Ed Burns' experience as an ex-cop schoolteacher could finally come into play. You wonder if he's Prez, or Colvin, as both went from the police to the public school system. He's probably both.
I must say it's been weird, and not necessarily in a good way, watching this season with a gap of seven days beween each episode. Having watched all the other three in binges, sometimes three or four at a time, and certainly one a day until the end of the box was reached, it made Four a langorous experience, somewhat disconnected. I'll be honest, I was glad of FX's "previously on" catch-ups, so labyrinthine and subtle is the plotting of The Wire. You don't get standard cliffhangers or denouements on this show.
The final episode, directed by Ernest Dickerson, story by the guv'nors, David Simon and Ed Burns, teleplay by David Simon, was called Final Grades (the 50th episode, and a fitting half-century). So much happened (and do I need to point out that I'll be running through a few SPOILERS?), it would be foolhardy to relate it all, but among the more poignant beats were: Jay Landsman blowing his top as Lester's tenaciousness at the boarded up vacants, as he uncovers a potential homecoming parade of lime-sprinkled John Does (we later see a sheet of paper added to the bottom of the whiteboard, so many are there), then finding redemption with his sensitive handling of the Bubbles case. The man has a heart under all that blubber. You could see it when he patiently dabbed off Bubbles' vomit in the men's room.
The school gymnasium where the body bags were eventually laid out after Lester's excavations (the nail gun was the key - and didn't we see it in Episode One?) became a haunting mausoleum, and not a coincidence that this was a school building, with echoes of the Middle School. Daniels even nail-gunned this point home by saying he used to attend this school. It's so circular. The Major Crimes Unit is back up and running, and guess who's come back to the fold? McNulty, done with "drinking and whoring" and ready to attack the Marlo investigation with a clear head. We later see Bubbs in a "soft walls" hospital, being visited by NA buddy Steve Earle, but his cold turkey from what he accidentally did to Sherrod will take some time to sweat out.
Prop Joe finds his back against the wall (which still means his stomach is far out in the street), and has to give up his drug connection to Marlo after Omar steals the package. Here, we get a Season Two flashback as the Greek is seen, down by the docks, too, judging by the background noise. The Wire does have a sentimental streak. Omar, meanwile, becomes a default drug dealer, selling back the shipment he jacked at "20 cents on the dollar". Joe's affronted nephew Cheese (aka Method Man) says he's going to "kill him twice." Carver seeks redemption by attempting to foster Randy, to prevent the "snitch bitch" going into a group home, but he fails, and is last seen punching his steering wheel, as Randy meets more rough justice. "You tried."
The sense of tragedy that grew out of the sense of hope and a new semester at the Middle School was palpable. Randy, so cocksure with his chocolate and hall passes at the beginning of the Season, ends up in a home, a punchbag. Michael proves to be the corner version of Michael Corleone, the white sheep who goes black (as it were), seen, under the instructional wing of Chris Paltrow (the most innocuously named vicious assassin in West Baltimore) and the boy/girl Snoop, who are finally arrested by Bunk and Greggs for their twilight nail-gun activities. Education comes in many forms. Duquan graduates to High School, where the brand of his backpack might just ensure his alientation. The corner is his only option. Namond fares better, being taken under the wing of Bunny Colvin. (The final shot is of the pleasant, upscale suburb he now calls home.)
A sad end for Bodie, too, who's been there since the start. I had to look this up, but the idyllic place were Bodie and McNulty ate shit food was Northwest Baltimore's Cylburn Arboretum. Another reference back to Season One when "them little bitches on the chessboard" are explained to be pawns. Remember D'Angelo's lecture on the rules of chess? So long ago now. And what a poetic moment, when Omar collects his clock, repaired by Prop Joe, and we all hear it tick. Someone's heart is still beating. Even Wee-Bey, incarcerated at Jessup, comes good, giving his blessing to Colvin's effective adoption of his son, who will never be a soldier. Prez, such a failure as a police, finds that his class have slightly improved their "math" and reading scores in those demoralising, dehumanising tests. He's found his spiritual home. "Got a pretty good education, now that I think on it," is Cedric's remark that resonates. Look at him now.
The finale was, I'm almost embarrassed to say, a musical montage, but it worked, because this is The Wire, and I guess they didn't even know for sure if there'd be a Season Five when they shot it, so some wrapping up was required. (With, of course, Marlo still at large and the unit back in business, just in case.) Again, I've looked it up, and the tune was Paul Weller's version of Dr. John's Walk On Gilded Splinters, a huge honour for our boy, I'd say. Cutty's back at the gym, Herc attends his Internal Investigation hearing in uniform, Pearlman and Daniels break bread with Carcetti as State Sen. "Clay" Davis and the ostrachised Burrell watch from another booth (symbolic of the turning political wheels). It's a classic, almost soppy ending.
On points, while I was watching it, I'd called Season Four the most satisfying, and the most diverse, but I'll always harbour a soft spot for Season Two, because it was so daringly different to Season One. Anyone still not up to speed has plenty of time in which to complete this task. Season Five's a long way off. FX are showing it from the beginning, every episode, if you have access to the channel - which, as far as I can work out, is otherwise filled with Nash Bridges.
The Apprentice: it's wicked, man! More woeful ineptitude and cloying lack of self-awareness from what are now the final eight. (One of them - Ghazal? Simon? can't remember, somebody idiotic - noted in the people-carrier that they were now "contenders" - which just goes to show how perverted this format has quietly become, with not one truly outstanding candidate among them, leaving Siralan, rendered soft by his own TV stardom, with the equivalent of a walking tumour on his payroll in a few weeks' time, someone who will make him long for Saira or Paul or Syed or Ruth from the old days. Can you seriously imagine any of the surviving candidates working for Alanstrad Holdings and taking home 100 grand a year for it? Wasn't that once what this programme was about? How quaint that seems now.) They were, to be fair, being set up for a fall. Designing and marketing a new, unbranded trainer in a "billion pahnd market", in two days, was only ever going to bring out the worst in our hapless heroes. A quick flipchart brainstorm about what The Kids want was never going to dig very deep - they want to "reclaim the streets", according to Jadine's team (but, seriously, do they?); their defining ethos is "image is everything", or "music is everything", according to Ghazal's (don't worry if, like Siralan, you don't understand this Big Idea - neither did Ghazal, Katie, Kristina or Naomi, and it was their idea).
I know very little about kids or trainers, but my guess is: they just want what everybody else has got. The bloodless men from the "top" advertising agency, called something like CCCP (clients include: Carphone Warehouse - did they think of Mobily?), were, if nothing else, honest. They actually said, "Nobody needs another trainer," and that the only way to sell one was to dress it up in a big cloak of bullshit. To this end, both teams weren't so far off the mark. Bullshit, they can do. However, Siralan made it clear, from the dome above Piccadilly Circus (the prime advertising spot in the world, he boasted, as if working for the Mayor's office, although I think Times Square may have something to say about that), he did not want an ad that won the "Montrose Award for Advertising Tossers", a statuette given out every year in the Scottish coastal tourist resort. I know it's his persona and it sells the programme, but did the Apprentice producers use the word "tossers" when they were booking the ad agency for the programme? Such contempt.
Jadine's team called their shoe STREET, to subtly suggest STREET. Isn't this like calling it COOL or WICKED or BUY THIS TRAINER? (Actually, I could work with that last one.) Having had it designed so that it looked like a designer had attempted to replicate graffiti writing down the side, they moved swiftly to knocking out an ad. Had Ghazal's all-female team not called their trainer JAM (having rejected the Asbo-friendly likes of STAMP, PUNCH and, er, CHEEK), and designed its logo to look like something doodled on a pencil case, Jadine's team's efforts would have seemed laughable, but in comparison, they looked world class.
Amelia, one of six who came to audition for Jadine and co's "street dance" advert, was classic. Her incompatability with the task was not her fault: she was just sent to an audition she shouldn't have been sent to. "I dance on Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays and Fridays," she said, sweetly and promisingly. What kind of dance? "Disco, rock'n'roll, Latin, ballet and tap." What about "street"? "Er, I don't do street." Encouraged to give it a go, she agreed, as Tre started human beatboxing (another of his talents, besides saying "fuck" and explaining how talented he is). Amelia giggled and said, "It would be easier without ...", referring to the man with the long face's funny mouth noises. Tre's long face fell, as it so often falls. Because Simon comes from Hampstead Garden Suburbs and was the only Caucasian member of the team, it naturally befell him to do the rap for the advert (another amusing ethnic impression from the man who did a comedy Indian last week, a regular little Jim Davidson) and throw some outdated breakdancing shapes for the TV spot. Mind you, next to Amelia, he was Jay-Z. His rap actually wasn't that bad, and nor were his shapes - for a white guy - but all Tre could do was piss and moan and make faces. He, you see, was the most "street" and this allowed him to throw his weight around in that special way that means he doesn't really do anything. If his team had lost, there would have been a postmortem, and this question would have been asked: who called the casting agency? Who actually called them and booked the auditionees? They were the weakest link.
The moment Jadine jettisoned Naomi (because she "doesn't like working with women", according to Naomi - nothing to do with the fact that she doesn't like working with Naomi - if in doubt, shift the blame from yourself to your gender), Ghazal's team were doomed. She already had counterproductive, hot-flushing drama queen Katie and the scheming, lined wench Kristina. Now she had sweet, jawless Naomi. The dream team. All four of them hated each other! You could have cut the air in that brainstorming session with a knife, once Katie had taken it out of Kristina's back. I don't mean this to be sexist, but they needed a man, just to break the all-girl configuration. To stop the in-fighting. As it was, they were as weak as piss, failing to agree on anything, and with a 23-year-old leader seemingly incapable of exerting her authority except by insisting they stick with a shit idea, then changing her mind at breakfast. This U-turn was reached totally independently of course, and had nothing to do with Katie's Iago-like whispering in her ear. "Reclaim the street" is a Big Idea. (They even planned to give ten per cent of the sale price to youth charities in order to stop anyone buying the trainers, which, incidentally, would not be available to buy in Asda, nor on a website. Take that, common sense!) "Image is everything" is a vague, meaningless catchphrase, and only really works if your trainer has an image, rather than JAM written on the side in biro. (Not "crayon", Katie. Too busy rehearsing her bons mots for the camera to actually think through what she's actually saying.) Anyway, the new Big Idea, which was Katie's, was "Music is everything", which would have been fine if they were selling musical plimsoles.
Predictable fun with Margaret and Nick using young person's phrases like "bump", "grind", "R" and "B" - didn't really need that - but the real toe-curler came with, guess what, the pitch. Various among the candidates are people who claim to work in advertising or brand management (this programme is really about creative CV-writing), and yet none of them know how to pitch. Jadine read hers from a sheet of paper, as if reading a psalm in church. Katie managed through her tone of voice to patronise an imaginary "consumer" called Jay and the assembled ad execs. She carried this through to the boardroom and patronised Siralan too. Gah! Why is she still on my television? Why? Ghazal's team lost by a mile, not based on money spent or money made, but on whether the results were any good or not. Hers were not, with a TV ad that didn't appear to be about trainers (not a crime in the real world of advertising but we're not in Montrose now), and a print one based on the clever play on words, "soul" and "sole", which Katie helpfully explained. Jadine's team went off to make cockatils at the Savoy, luckily when the American Bar was closed to the public, by the look of it. I wonder how long they have to film these "rewards" in order to get enough footage for a quick montage?
Although it was always going to be the borrowed-time Ghazal who got fired (she's all talk and no do, apparently - her "talk" mainly repeating the word, "correct"), it was impossible not to will Katie to push Siralan too far and find herself on the end of his disagreeable working class boot. Her tactic is so dangerous: she smiles at him as if she thinks he is, like the rest of the human race, scum. She talks over him. She throws his analogies back in his face ("You're a loser" he barked, having compared her boardroom record to a football team that loses six out of eight games; "I understand the math," she oozed, even though I don't think she is an American). But he will not fire her. Ghazal was "no good" in the final analysis. Her wild card was torn up.
Seven left, then. Correct. The invisible Lohit, the grinning Katie, the featherlight Naomi, the blustery Tre, the childlike Simon, the perfunctory Jadine and the vicious Kristina. Correct. I hate them. Correct. I hate them all. Correct. Correct. Correct.
"Good for you!" I quote, of course, Ms Jade Goody. Since Celebrity Big Brother and for all eternity, she has imbued the phrase, "Good for you!" with evil, top-of-the-lungs menace. And now, Mr John Sweeney, venerable BBC reporter, has done the same for the innocuous phrase, "You were not there." This is how he said it, in last night's Panorama on the Church of Scientology: "YOU - WERE - NOT - THERE! YOU - WERE - NOT - THERE - FOR - THE - FIRST - HALF - OF - THE - INTERVIEW!" There's no point in watching the YouTube clip out of context, but at the same time, it is a great media moment. Alternatively, you can watch the whole programme on Panorama's website, thanks to the unique way the BBC is funded.
The context: Sweeney had been attempting to make a balanced film about Scientology, which has yet to be granted the status of a religion in this country, and should, thus, be on a charm offensive. In order to make his film, he had sought official access through the Church, whose reptilian representative on earth, Tommy Davis, responded to any loss of editorial control with what turns out to be a common Scientology tactic - borne, we must assume, out of deep paranoia, and perhaps even a little embarrassment - that is, stalking, shouting and intimidating. (This went on long after filming had wound up. They are nothing if not tenacious, these Scientologists.) When Sweeney finally snapped (see: YouTube, footage filmed by Davis's ever-present cameraman and gleefully posted as a counter-attack that failed miserably - it was the only reason I bothered to tune in!), you were utterly on his side. Never mind that he lost his rag. I would have lasted two minutes. He lasted days.
He had been invited to interview such Scientology celebs as Juliette Lewis, Anne Archer and Kirstie Alley (religion that attracts Hollywood stars: approach with caution), but all of whom refused permission for Panorama to use the footage because Sweeney used the word "cult" in questioning them. He was shown round an exhibition called Psychiatry: Industry Of Death, attacking psychiatry and claiming in lurid, illustrated detail, that it was a Nazi death camp invention, and linking it explicitly to the Holocast, which Sweeney found distasteful. It was at the exhibition, which looked a bit like the London Dungeon, that he started shouting back at the shouting Tommy.
I don't object to Scientologists believing in what they believe in, if it makes them happy, and if people wish to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars, then good for them. Jehovah's Witnesses come round my house and try to convert me. I politely tell them I don't want converting thank you very much, but they're not hurting anyone, merely politely asking for a moment of my time. That's all fine. But to see the media wing of Scientology trying to shut down a BBC investigation, threatening legal action, reporting it to Ofcom over what they see as 150 guidline breaches, and then to use intimidating tactics such as we saw in the film, does them no credit whatsoever. It'll take a personal appearance by Tom and Katie to paper over this one.
Let's get this clear: I feel awfully sorry for Gerry and Kate McCann, although I have never met them, as their four-year-old daughter Madeleine is still missing in the Algarve. It must indeed be "every parent's worst nightmare" to lose a child. Worse still, to not know where she is, and to have the eyes and ears of the world on your every grief-stricken appearance. However, my thoughts on this matter are not straightforward. I see far more here than a missing child.
The British media is currently and unhealthily fixated on this story. It's the lead news story on most bulletins, and has been since Maddie was snatched from the apartment where her parents had left her while eating tapas. (They were popping back to check on her, and the twins, every half an hour, which reminds me of what my parents used to do when we were very young and they attended a house party in our street - although this was the early 70s, when we used to leave the back door unlocked and the garage open, and it wasn't in a foreign country.) Even though leads seem thin on the ground (one suspicious local has been arrested, the parents attend a vigil, some millionaires have been shamed by the News Of The World into stumping up a ludicrous reward, as if we are in a cowboy film), the papers are pedalling madly to find fresh material from Portugal to fill their pages. Am I the only person who finds this uncomfortable? I bet I'm not.
We are invited, indeed encouraged, to "feel" for little Maddie and her distraught parents, to "identify" with their plight, to "pray" for her safe return (whether we believe in a deity or not), to question the efficacy of the Portugeuse police forces (useless foreigners!), and to "remember" the last missing child who so dominated our news media for days and days on end. This story may end badly, as the Soham kidnapping did, or as Sarah Payne's abduction did, but you get the feeling that deep down, the newspapers would rather it dragged on a bit longer. Hope sells papers. Followed by tragedy. Followed by postmortem. But let's pray for a bit more hope before the possible tragedy, shall we?
It's not exactly controversial of me to detect a certain unscrupulous ambulance-chasing venality on the part of the papers, especially the tabloids, but what does it say about us as a nation that we allow ourselves to get caught up in it? To be emotionally blackmailed in this way? Are we actually incapable of feeling empathy or sadness or alarm about less "photogenic" tragedies, the sort that unfold all around us every day, and in countries much further away and less familiar than the Algarve? People are killed, abducted, abused and made miserable all the time. So please don't let's lose sight of the bigger picture as we wring our hands over a family we have never met.
I actually saw a handmade poster on the gate of a house down our street this morning urging me to call Crimestoppers if I had any information about Maddie's whereabouts. What's that about? Whose conscience is that assuaging? I think we are collectively losing our marbles. Look what Princess Diana did to us.
Remember: at the end of the day, all that newspapers want to do is sell more newspapers. News Of The World didn't rustle up that bounty, by contacting the offices of Phillip Green, Richard Branson and Bill Kenwright, because they care. It's because they knew it would sell them a few extra copies on Sunday. And I bet they did. It's a great spin on a story lacking in new detail. This is the newspaper that thinks naming and shaming anyone on the paedophile register will help "our children", when "our children" are more at risk from abuse within the family than from shady looking strangers in dirty raincoats by the roadside. They don't care about your children. But it's not just the tabloids, is it? They dress it up more soberly but all the papers are chasing the same prize. Radio 1's Newsbeat has been leading with Maddie all weekend, with, again, nothing new to add. How are we ever to put this complicated world into perspective when the media weight individual stories of tragedy so heavily against less "sexy" ones. (I hate to use that word, "sexy", but are you telling me that the newspaper editors didn't use it, or think it, when the story first broke? Missing girl, distraught, good-looking young parents, holiday nightmare, possible dirty foreign moustachioed paedophile on the loose?)
I sincerely hope that Maddie is alright. I really do. Who with a heart beating inside their ribcage wouldn't? I hope she is reunited with her parents, and they never let her out of their sight ever again. Actually, I don't wish that - we should not cosset our children, or they will grow up unworldly and inexperienced and dependent, which does not make for a better world, especially the precarious one they will inherit, where the sanctioned plight of one little girl is officially more important than all the others. Her parents are blameless in the media circus. That's not of their making. All they can do is take advice and try to use the media to get their daughter back, but they are not in control.
This would be in my new newsblog when the 2007 website spring clean is complete
I'm happy to say that the promotional juggernaut is now roaring down the highway. (No wonder my book is 1,213 in the Amazon charts!) I was in My Media in Media Guardian today, and very well transcribed by Paul Mardles it was too. It feels oddly subversive to announce in the Guardian that I stopped buying the Guardian on February 21. Apologies to Sean Phillips for their misspelling of your name, and to the other bloggers whom I mentioned in the phone interview but didn't make the final edit.
Also, in case you missed it, I was in the 5-Minute Interview in the Independent on Thursday. Thanks to Elisa Bray for sorting that out, and for getting it in so quickly. They used my old 6 Music picture, which was taken at the end of 2002 (soon to be replaced in the Radio Times, I'm relieved to say), and they called me a 6 Music DJ, which I'm not, but apart from that - and the rather po-faced way my light-hearted stuff about blood groups came out on the page, I'm happy with it.
(Don't tell anyone, but this is the third time I have been featured in the Guardian's My Media section. Is this a record? Here are the other two, from 2003 and 2005.)
Thanks to Sarah Richardson, who took this photo in Waterstone's in Nottingham. I think I must now surrender myself to market forces. The book's out there. You've provided written, and photographic, evidence. I've had a couple of nice reviews now, too. One in Q (thanks to Paul for spotting that: "As good an insight into magazine life as you'll get"), one in Hot Stars (which is inside OK!: "Entertaining from start to finish") and, today, a really thoughtful and questioning one from football-and-music author Mark Hodkinson in The Times, which you can read in full here. (Yes, he's the one who wrote the excellent 1990 Omnibus Wedding Present biography that Dave Gedge disowned. I still have my copy.) Yes, it's a paranoid time when your book is first out in the public domain, as reviewers sharpen their pencils and bookshops seek maliciously to hide it from view. Thanks to Iain and Stuart for posting positive reviews on Amazon, too - it won't be long before a disatisfied customer barges in and brings the batting average down! But that's democracy.
The Apprentice: it's bitchy! "Anything?" was Adam's plaintive cry to the man behind the counter in the auto spares shop. This, we were led to believe, was his skill as a salesman, coming out. He was in a car-related shop, and his skills required him to knock the man in the green overall down on the price of a 1997 car battery - one of the humorously random ten items Siralan had sent the team off to buy on the cheap before six o'clock. The man in the overall wasn't budging. "Do you think you could do one as a one-off for about twenty pounds?" asked Adam, his chin in his hand (stop rubbing your face, man - you'll get spots!). The man's answer: "Nah." Adam's response: "Can you do anything at all for us? Anything?' "Nah." "Anything?" "Nah, sorry." It was that final, decisive "anything?" that sealed Adam's fate. Finally. His fourth time in the boardroom was booked in that pathetic instance. I will never agree with the now monumentally appalling Katie, but Adam did have to go. As a team leader, he looked lost. He and Ghazal went in one people-mover, his nemeses Kristina and Katie in the other: the two blonde witches, scheming to bring the dumb northerner down. (This geographical snobbery, incidentally, was all Katie's. She appeares never to have driven her Range Rover further north than North Kensington, and in this, comes straight out of the 80s. How I wish she would go back there. Kristina, who has the ambition and drive of Katie, but none of that armoury of withering, rehearsed putdowns, is of course from the north too. "She's a hard, evil little wench," concluded Katie, after discovering that Kristina had hung her dirty knickers out to dry in last week's boardroom. Perhaps the 80s doesn't quite cover it. Maybe she's from the 1780s.)
We've seen this task before, and it combines the plot of one of those British comedies from the 1970s in which a group of character actors have to perform ridiculous tasks in order to qualify for the will of an eccentric uncle, with the lowest of Siralan's trade: squeezing every last penny from everything. You can tell the task itself is dull (basically: our nine suited fools haggling at ten different types of wholesaler - and even, for the microwaveable leg wax, in a shop, where such haggling would get you precisely nowhere if you weren't accompanied by a BBC film crew), this episode was packed with Other Stuff, ie. the bitching and the scheming and the assassination and the intrigue. Which is fine by me. Not all tasks can be as televisually entertaining as the food or the art.
As is often the case on this programme, none of them read the instructions properly before hitting the road with their Yellow Pages. These are people who never read the instructions in life, they just weigh in, with their "dynamism" and "drive", and hope for the best. If they had read the rules, they would have been better able to weigh up which risks were worth taking in terms of potential penalties. Instead, they became obsessed with finishing by six, and in the case of Adam's divided team, working for each other and not the corporate good, this meant failing to get the problematic Nigella Seeds. Adam wondered if these might be the rubber granules that you get on modern athletics tracks. Sadly, those are called rubber granules, rather than seeds. They turned out to be for cooking. We established this when, improbably, Tre used an Indian accent to negotiate with someone at an Asian food market. Whether or not Tre is entitled to do this (I don't know his background), or whether it actually fucking helped, it was certainly inadvisable for Simon, from Cambridge, to copy him, with a Mind Your Language head-wobble thrown in. All this in front of the TV cameras.
Ghazal, to her credit, never used any ethnic assimilation in her phone negotiations, instead doggedly sticking to her incomprehensible Glaswegian. it's an interesting ethnic mix this time around, but communication breakdowns do occur in the heat of accented negotiation. The lady who sold elegant kitchenware from a lock-up in East London wrongly advised Adam to try the "pahnd shops" in Bethnal Green (where, let me tell you, they don't do the Brabantia bin on the list - try John Lewis). He thought she said "pan shops", which was an easy mistake to make. I loved it when Simon defended his strategy of trying to buy all ten items in a tiny radius around Brick Lane, and Naomi said that it would be a good strategy, if they could get all ten items in that tiny radius. Logic!
It was an unedifying performance from both teams, once again. Simon's had a bit of luck (the seed supplier was just round the corner from the corner shop which stocked them), and came back with all ten items, but having bought some marble at the first price offered, they incurred a penalty (and some wrath from the wheeling-dealing Siralan). They beat Adam's team by 97 pence and missed out on the opportunity of going in some racing cars. This took the wind out of car-loving Adam more, I think, than losing The Apprentice, which he was scripted now to do. It all came out that Kristina had shopped her new confidante Katie, with Katie's already-ruddy cheeks flushing to a new crimson. Unfortunately, the red button on my television did not allow me to wipe the smile off her face, or else I would have done. She really is a ball-achingly unpleasant toff. When things got personal, she hit back at Adam, suggesting, libellously, that he had a rather too intimate relationship with "Mr Pinot and Mr Grigio." This was low. Although with Adam already on the carpet, perhaps there's no point in aiming high. This bitchiness was unbecoming and riled Siralan, who'd rather not hear about people "carrying on". Adam had no defence for not asking the Nigella Seed supplier who they supplied to, and simply lied that Ghazal had asked and they'd refused to tell. If there was a corner of his coffin lid that still needed a nail, this crap deception provided it.
"I've proved that I can sell. I've proved that I can lead a team and motivate people," said Adam in his own, face-rubbing defence, perhaps still hoping that Ghazal would get the boot for being 23. In actual fact, he had - while being filmed with some cameras - proved that he can't sell, that
