"Can I get a tall skinny latte?"

Yes, you can. Just come round here behind the counter. There's the coffee, there's the machine, there's the milk, off you go.

(Getting back onto semantics and putting science and theology behind me) ... Can we stop saying, "Can I get ... ?" please. It's an odious American habit, and while the Americans have given us many fantastic things (The Wire, The West Wing, Heroes, Curb Your Enthusiasm and The New Yorker), they are not a nation to be deferred to in matters of eating and drinking, nor of related etiquette. I remember a time when the people of this proud nation used the phrase, "Can I have ... ?" in coffee shops. (Indeed, I can remember when we didn't have coffee shops.) To get is to fetch, surely? It's an active verb, and not the verb of a paying customer, unless it's a self-service restaurant, in which case, yes, you can get it. To "get" a coffee when you are the customer doesn't sound right. It also seems to come automatically without a "please", which is another bad habit.

The Americans are, of course, beyond reprogramming, but I don't think it's too late to nip this irksome habit in the bud. If you are not American and you find yourself using the phrase "Can I get ...?", why not experiment with the old way of ordering something in an eating and drinking outlet? It feels nice. I'd like a tall skinny latte please. Can I have a tall skinny latte please. A tall skinny latte please!

That's better.

Except I wasn't in Glastonbury, I was in Dublin for the weekend. It's an irresistible city and we like to go there at least once a year. I need some Irish air and some Irish atmosphere to replenish my soul. Three nights in a fancy hotel on St Stephen's Green, walked everywhere, didn't get round to the Natural History Museum, too many nice places to sit and eat and drink and read the papers and watch the world go by, even when it was raining heavily. Anyway, met two garrulous and entertaining Dubliners in a bar on Saturday night, Neil and Gareth, a forensic scientist and a jeweller. Because they were excellent company, we ended up drinking with them all night and not going out to eat, as planned, so Sunday was designated a take-it-easy day. That said, it was our last full day, so I fully intended to drink my hangover away, in the spirit of the city.

Which is where this handy, two-venue eating and drinking guide comes in: I'll be frank, by lunchtime, I fancied a beer. (There really is no point in going to Dublin and not drinking, as crass as that may sound.) We went into a bistro, just off Grafton Street, called The Bistro, a nice, family-run place. Ordered some lunch, a glass of wine, a bottle of still mineral water and I asked the pleasant waitress what beers they did.

"We don't sell beer," said the pleasant waitress. "Sorry," she added. Having built myself up to this beer, this mythic first beer of the day, drunk at a time when I wouldn't normally drink but this was us on holiday, I was somewhat crestfallen and was unable to hide this from the waitress. Rather than be petulant, I drank still mineral water until the moment passed. The food was nice (chicken Caesar) but the lack of beer couldn't have been timed any worse. I decided to hold off until the evening. Our last evening on holiday in Dublin, one of my favourite cities in the world, right up there with Paris and Madrid and Rome.



Because it is apparently the best wine bar restaurant in the St Stephen's Green area of Dublin, we'd actually booked Peploe's ahead. (I phoned on Thursday and found Friday and Saturday totally booked up, so I went for Sunday.) It's in a cellar and it's French food and the wine list is long, and there are murals on the walls (apparently featuring Pavarotti and Catherine Zeta-Jones and Tony Blair, although these people are unrecognisable), and it's packed, so it looked tremendously promising. (Beware their website, by the way: it plays jazz.) We ordered the food, and some wine, and a bottle of still mineral water, and I asked the humourless French waiter what beers they did.

"We don't sell beer," said the humourless French waiter, adding, "No beers, no liqueurs, no spirits."

Foiled again! But what I objected to was the lack of apology. It was a badge of honour that they didn't sell beer! This restaurant had decided that it was in some way more sophisticated not to sell beer or spirits or liqueurs (never encountered that particular alcoholic apartheid before) because these drinks are for riff raff. If this was an attempt to seem more French, it failed, as French people drink bottles of beer, in cafes and restaurants, lunchtime and evening. Anyway, I drank some wine, which was nice, although I wasn't in the mood for wine, and the food was nice, if rich, and the waiter even cheered up after he'd been tipped. But the damage had been done. Also, there were one too many Americans in there eating with one fork, which rather took away from the sophisticated aspect encouraged by the no-beer policy (perhaps a no-American policy would have been better, or at least no Americans who can't use a knife.) So, I didn't get my beer yesterday. I looked forward to a beer twice and was thwarted twice. Should have stayed in the pub again.

I hope this story doesn't make me sound like a beer hound. I don't always drink, and I am more likely to drink wine if I drink, but I was in Dublin, I was hungover from beer, and I wanted a beer, but was disallowed from having one by two establishments with ideas above their station.

Dublin emerged from this double faux pas intact as one of the nicest cities in the world.

My First Ballet
I believe in experiencing everything once, apart from potholing, canoeing, murder and seeing Bruce Springsteen. So I went to my first ballet last night at the Royal Albert Hall: Swan Lake performed by the English National Ballet in the Round. Clearly I have nothing to compare it to, as I've only seen ballet in films that have a scene at the ballet, but it was pretty amazing. I feel the same way I felt after visiting Wimbledon for the first time last year and seeing my first live tennis match. Now, some of you will know all about ballet, so bear with me and my initial thoughts:

The men have incredibly shapely bottoms, which are in unforgiving tights and thus on proud display at all times. You could crack walnuts with these bottoms, which is presumably why there is a famous ballet just about that. The women are almost anorexically thin, except I suspect they haven't got any disorders at all, as they are strong as lady oxen, and walk about most of the time on their tiptoes, which must take superhuman strength. Just as I love going to see stage musicals to admire the dancing, with a ballet there is hardly anything else to admire - just the dancing. And it is a sight to behold. In the round, which is now 100 per cent of my ballet experiences, you get a lot more dancers for your money. There were 69 on stage at one point, and in the Lakeside scenes, there were 60 swan-maidens. Captivating. I would imagine you only get about 20 on a normal theatre stage. When you've seen Swan Lake in the round, it's difficult to imagine seeing it any other way, so fully do the dancers (mostly Russian, Estonian, Lithuanian and Latvian, with a few token Brits) use the space.

I loved the sound of it. And not just the beautiful music of the Orchestra Of The English National Ballet (amazing how many of the hits I knew, but didn't know I knew, if you see what I mean) - I loved the sound of the feet on the floor. You never hear this in films. It's so percussive when the swan-maidens tiptoe around en masse. The audience clapped at the end of each individual dance, but by the time of Act III, which takes place at the Great Hall of the Castle, a formal celebration that involves "impressive displays of national dances" (mainly East European, I surmised), the applause got more spirited. I even heard a man shout, "Bravo!" and another man shout, "More!" (which was nice, but pointless, as I imagine the dancers have to stop when the bit is finished, and can't just keep dancing). Come the climax, back at the Lake, the Albert Hall was tumultuous with appreciation, which was great in the sweaty circumstances. (No air con in there.) My favourite part was when they first created the Lake, by filling the round with dry ice and then lighting it in such a way that it looked like a mystical body of water, which was disturbed by Rothbart, the evil "half-man, half-bird", running around. Fantastic. You'd think this stuff was invented by Stadium Rock (1965-1993). It wasn't.

So, all in all, a tremendous experience. (We even got found a parking meter, and didn't have to use the car park.) The ballet lasted almost three hours, with two intervals. To be frank, there's not enough story to merit that running time, and a lot of the dancing is repetitive (mainly tiptoeing and leaping in the air and holding people up in the air), but the overall spectacle puts such quibbles in the shade.

If you are silly enough to think that ballet audiences are a cut above, I saw at least two audience members with their phones on, and one woman was actually texting while Odette returned to her companions and Siegfried came to beg her forgiveness. Idiot.

I was walking down the street yesterday morning, first thing, and I passed a perfect heap of vomit on the pavement. I mention this only because it had clearly been deposited that morning, and that it had at its centre a good fistful of undigested jelly bears. Whoever had had the misfortune to bring up their breakfast on Tuesday morning had clearly done so after ramming about a dozen jelly bears down their gullet, which looked as if they hadn't touched the sides going down. Nor coming back up. Perhaps it was a greedy child. If so, isn't breakfast supposed to be more along the lines of cereal or toast? Perhaps it was a crazy adult with arrested development, eating jelly bears for breakfast just to prove that he was no longer a kid. Either way, the plan backfired.

It's all dried up this morning, but the remnants of those brightly-coloured bears are still there. I suspect one or two will have been pecked up by pidgeons. This has not been a profound blog entry, but at least it is now logged for all time that someone vommed up some sweets which they hadn't even chewed in South London yesterday morning. I think I'll write about the ballet now.

Seven Ages Of Rock: Stadium Rock, cough, 1965-1993
Well. For those who think I have a "problem" with this series, which I do, but not with the content, the fifth episode, about Stadium Rock, was alright. Bit dull, watching a sea of people change into a different sea of people for an hour, but this was truly a re-slicing of the cake that I had not seen before. Of course, Stadium Rock didn't end in 1993, but you can almost see their logic of saying that when U2 reinvented it, it was never the same again. (Even though it was.) As for starting in 1965 - which is what it says on the website - this would presumably mean the Beatles at Che Stadium (as I always used to think it was called), which wasn't shown, and was only mentioned in passing later on. But hey, I'm grateful to have seen this one. It spoke of changing times in an astute and fairly comprehensive manner. I'll let one of you say, What about Simple Minds?

I have a feeling that I will never like Bruce Springsteen. Nothing I ever see about him changes my mind.

The Apprentice: it's Simon Time
Boring, wasn't it? My money was on Kristina to the end, even though I don't much like her and her mercenary Kristina Time, and prefer the hapless Simon, if forced to choose, which Siralan ("blahdy old fool") was. Good for him, obviously, to have beaten the stigma of having been to a good school and good univerity and still won The Apprentice, but the last hour was not vintage, by design. Bringing back some of the fired candidates (no Andy, no Ifti, no Dr Sophie, no Katie) must have seemed like a crowd-pleaser again, but there's no dynamic, nothing at stake. So what if Tre and Rory still don't get on? ("You're still nothing to me." "I'm still a horse-faced twat.") Adam summed it up when he admitted that he didn't give "a fuck" who won. Why should he? (Did you see them all sniggering behind his back like children when he sketched out his hot air balloon building idea?) Boring task: design a building. Simon's was like a vibrator. Kristina's was like a building that had sagged in the heat. Both looked remarkably good once computer-animated, sweeping down the Thames, which just goes to show why so many horrible buildings get signed off and built. Siralan quite liked both buildings and both presentations and both candidates. Where's the fun in that?

A great series, the best for sheer masochistic entertainment. But perhaps even more acutely than in the previous two series, we've all the seen the cracks in the "reality" of the process: the continuity errors, the opportunistic and manipulative editing, the reaction-shot cutaways, the to-camera pieces that actually came across as pre-scripted, certainly pre-prepared, like the "funny" answers on Blind Date. These deceptions are not a crime. Treat it as a continuing 12-week primetime drama about ambitious but clueless idiots, and it's unbeatable.

Episode One
Episode Two
Episode Three
Episode Four
Episode Five
Episode Six
Episode Seven
Episode Eight
Episode Nine
Episode Ten
Episode Eleven

Fantastic Four On Promo Treadmill
I'm presenting Radio 4's Film Programme this week, so, in a flashback to my two and a half years' service on Back Row, I get to be a film journalist, and interview movie stars in a controlled environment for an alloted amount of time. Saw Fantastic Four: Rise Of The Silver Surfer last night, and I suspect my views on it are embargoed until Friday - suffice to say, I found the first film thoroughly enjoyable: family entertainment, colourful, jolly and doesn't outstay its welcome. It made $330 million. You may assume that 20th Century Fox might not have meddled with the formula a great deal for outing number two. Anyway, we're all media-literate now, and we all know that the press for such blockbusters is done with military precision by way of a "junket". If this was ever disparaging slang it's industry parlance now. No shame in a junket, where journalists - print, radio, TV - are wheeled in and out of whichever suite at the Dorchester or Claridge's the "talent" is installed in. Today, Ioan Gruffud, Jessica Alba, Chris Evans (no, not that one) and Michael Chiklis - the Fantastic Four - were doing their second day of promo. But they were not holed up in hotel rooms.

Due to the appearance in the film, during a spectacular CGI action sequence, of disappointing fairground ride the London Eye (a deal that must have been easy to strike between Fox and the Mayor's office, since the big wheel was created entirely out of pixels, with individual pod sets shot against green-screen, and now they get a free advert in every corner of the UK media in exchange for four pods and a bit of extra security), the interviews took place on ... the London Eye. There was even a big Silver Surfer figure lashed to the side of the wheel. Myself and Stephen the producer turned up at the alloted time of 9.30am and joined the carousel of media queueing up to spend their revolving half an hour with each of the Four. This was hop-on, hop-off interviewing. (The Eye takes precisely 30 minutes to revolve, and within each half-hour revolution, journalists were given ten minutes or so to play with. We were sandwiched between Paul Anderson from XFM - that rare thing, an XFM DJ! - and Miquita Oliver from T4, made up to within an inch of her life.) Almost inevitably, as the American film company were involved, there was an unecessary edge of panic about the whole thing, and a brusqueness you don't get from the London-based film company folk. Certainly at one stage, Stephen and I were urged to run from the hotel where pastries and coffee were served to the base of the Eye, even though it was 45 minutes until our slot. So we ran. Unecessarily. But hey, it adds to the important impression that you are just an ant, and you are there to gaze in wonder upon the talent, who are giants. Because the Eye moves constantly, as we hopped on and the previous media-gatherers hopped off, an American PR grew vocally distressed as the carrot juice she'd ordered for the "talent" was not there to be handed aboard. She behaved as if perhaps her job depended on getting that carrot juice, and maybe it did. It was amusing to witness. Hollywood Star In Carrot Juice No Show On Revolving London Landmark! Heads Roll!

We were interviewing Ioan, who, guess what, turned out to be as warm and friendly as his cuttings suggests. (This wasn't a man about to throw a hissy fit at the lack of carrot juice - film company people must, though, act as if he might, at any moment.) With only ten minutes, which turned out to be about six (when I was on Back Row we'd turn movie stars down for anything less than 20 minutes, but in the last five years, things have apparently changed for the worse), I did my best to engage him in some light-hearted banter about how surely he'd rather the LA skyline was on view and not dreary old London. (It was touch and go that we were there at all. We lost our slot and pretty much had to beg to get it back on Monday. But if you're making a film programme, even for Radio 4, you need the voices of those who make the films.) We'll edit a few decent minutes out of our six and drop Ioan into the programme, falling back on a long interview I've already done with screenwriter Frank Cottrell Boyce and a studio chat with Simon Pegg, both of whom are decent enough to come into the BBC to do it. Ioan Gruffud was lost to us five years ago, when he moved to LA to seek his fortune, which you must admit, has paid off. He belongs to them now.

So, a very strange way to spend an hour on a Tuesday morning. The London Eye, of course, provides a simple but effective metaphor for the promotional treadmill, constantly revolving, same old view out of the window, the stars trapped inside it, the media hustled in and out. Big Ben even strikes every 15 minutes to help the PRs gauge the time. I actually think all junkets should be held this way. At least if you're late, you miss your slot, which would be good discipline for film journalists. And it means the biggest stars in the world have to hold a piss in for hours at a time. I forgot to give back my laminate, which was the size of a Buick, at the end. There it is.

Of course, if Fox had been really clever, they'd have clothed four of Anthony Gormley's rooftop figures in Fantastic Four uniforms for extra branding.

Some late news just in, from the University of Northampton website:



Andrew Collins (centre) chats to Vice Chancellor, Ann Tate, and Dean of the School of The Arts, Dave Keskeys

University welcomes Andrew Collins back to Avenue Campus
08 June 2007. The University of Northampton welcomed alumnus and Honorand, Andrew Collins, back to Avenue Campus last night when he officially opened the School of The Arts Summer Show 2007. A renowned journalist, author and broadcaster, Northampton born and bred Andrew also opened the new Heyford Building in the School of The Arts which houses Foundation Art and Design and Fine Art Painting and Drawing. The Summer Show is a great chance to see the talented, bright artists of the future and to buy, rent or commission original artwork! There is a wide range of art and design on display including work by students of Architectural Technology, Fashion, Fine Art, Graphic Design, Product Design, Surface Design and Printed Textiles and Foundation Art and Design.

Full opening times are as follows:
Monday, 11 June: 11am - 6pm
Tuesday, 12 June: 11am - 5pm
Wednesday, 13 June: 11am - 5pm
Thursday, 14 June: 11am - 5pm
Friday, 15 June: 12pm - 7pm

[Honarand's Note: It was hugely flattering to be asked back to my old college to open the show and the Heyford Building, and I had a great evening on Thursday. It should be noted, although I have yet to get my hands on photographic evidence, that I was actually called upon to cut a ribbon with a giant pair of scissors. I can now retire happy. I was tempted to transcribe the accompanying article in the Chronicle & Echo, which described me as the host of "a number of radio quiz shows", but we'll leave it there. I am, if nothing else, irresistibly local.]

1. Seven Ages Of Rock, Saturday, BBC2
Ah, the episode about the birth and development of Heavy Metal. Which didn't mention - and I mean didn't actually mention at any stage in an hour-long programme about the birth and development of Heavy Metal, not even in passing - Led Zeppelin. Well done.

2. Talk To Me, Sunday, ITV1
New four-part drama starring Max Beezley as a late-night DJ. Turned it off about three minutes in when a woman who was late for work ran out of the house still eating a slice of toast.

The Apprentice: they think it's all over
Wow. Just when you think you've second-guessed the outcome, they throw a curveball like this one. There was no task, just that "gruelling" three-way interview with Siralan's henchmen, two of whom I remember from last time. It's testament to the narrative carefully built up over the previous weeks that The Apprentice can devote a whole hour of television to five people being interviewed by three men, one man comparing notes with the three men, and then one man assessing the five people. Rarely does the action stray from desks and chairs. That should not be gripping telly, but of course, it was, and they've earned it. What we expected was all five, especially Tre and Katie, being brought down a peg in an environment where bullshit walks. This was a surgical dissection of five CVs, of which, quite clearly, Tre's was the most likely to win the Orange Prize for Fiction: does he work out of his bedroom, or does he have offices all over the world? Does he work for himself, or his dad? Does he in fact have bedrooms all over the world? Or dads? Could he use the phrase "as such" more inappropriately? As such? This was the dismantling of Tre, who had shown "flashes of genius" but let's face it, mainly pissed and moaned and preened. He was not the first to go, as Siralan had to deal with Lohit first, as if removing a piece of toilet paper stuck to his shoe after a visit to the lav. He should have just looked at Lohit across the boardroom and exclaimed, "Are you still here?" It's what the rest of us were thinking. He truly rose without a trace. Nice chap, and all, but a waste of a chair. Siralan called him a "tailor's dummy" but with "the greatest of respect."

With just Katie, Simon and Kristina left, the nation was surely using Uri Geller-style brainwaves to will Katie out of there. She talks about herself in the third person in the interview on the website. For that crime alone, she cannot be given another puff of the oxygen of publicity. As it happened, Siralan (skillfully advised we may assume) blindsided us and told her she was through to the final, having grilled all three about the mundane issue of where they lived, and if they'd be prepared to move to Brentwood in Essex (a question that will sort out the men from the boys). Katie's smile left her lips. She had little else to play for. The "game-player" had sort of won the game. We found out, for the first time unless you've been following her talboid exposes, that she's a mother. But she'd never call herself a mother, as mothers apparently puree everything in sight and wear floral print. But, fuck me, if the mother in her didn't show herself in the final act, as she admitted she hadn't quite got the babysitting sorted out beyond a vague offer from her sister in Bournemouth, and she handed back her place in the final. I can't work out whether this was a moving moment, or just another gear-change in her constant stage show (now I'll play my "humility" face), in which case she remains despicable.

I'm glad Simon got through with his yellow socks and his carpet-inspector's skills ("I"m big fry"), as his poshness should have put him at a disadvantage in Siralan's class war. I'm also glad Kristina got through, as she's a single mother who battled her way through university and is now totally dedicated to Kristina Time ... hang on, no, that's the press release. I'm just glad she got through as she isn't Katie. I have learned that if you tell her she can't do something, she'll do it. We always think of Siralan as a woman-hater, and I think deep down he is - albeit no more than, say, Katie is - but last year's final two were both women, and this year's final two almost were. Perhaps this is a comment on the state of the male candidates. Or a comment on the fact that he's being well advised by his advisers, who, by the way, are Talkback Thames who make the programme. This is, lest we forget, not the job interview from hell. It's a television programme.

I'm sort of not bothered who wins now. At least Tre and Katie are out of the gene pool. The henchman who was a mate of Siralan's, and shared his disdain for "good schools", and had the same ugly half-beard, put it best when he informed Lohit that in the "big, bad world of business", they will "cut your fucking legs off." And these thousands of candidates want to join this macho, self-aggrandising, vicious, rugby-club world why?

Lohit gets to keep his legs. Tre goes back to his bedroom. Katie gets her own programme on Sky Two.


Episode One
Episode Two
Episode Three
Episode Four
Episode Five
Episode Six
Episode Seven
Episode Eight
Episode Nine
Episode Ten

Damn. Going through some boxes of stuff in storage this morning, and I found this Polaroid, taken at the Q Awards in 1994. If only I'd found it while putting the book together. It screams, "That's me in the corner"! Two enormously famous people having a meaningful conversation, and who's loitering, Zelig-like, in the background, wearing a jazz tie to offset grunge hairstyle? The story of my life.

Xfm Launch Xu: Radio To The Power Of U, Apparently

So, that's it for commerical radio, then. Xu is the "groundbreaking radio first" (except for all the digital stations that do it already) that sees Xfm, the one-time "Alternative" radio station, handing over control of its airwaves to the listeners between 10am and 4pm, in other words, sacking the daytime DJs to save money. Every weekday, Xfm now asks you, the dwindling band of listeners to "interact via SMS, phone and online". They're dressing it up as an interactive revolution - why wouldn't they? - but it's an act of commercial surrender. I am no radio insider, but I do know that many Xfm presenters were pissed off at the hours they were being forced to work. Lauren Laverne, who's just hopped it, was doing the breakfast show and a weekend show, although her defection may have as much to do with a desire to go full-time telly. GCap, who own Xfm and Capital (aren't we lucky in London to have two radio stations that play Keane and Snow Patrol?), seem to have been squeezing their DJs dry, hence the recent exodus. Unless, of course, they saw the writing on the wall and got out before they were pushed. The powers that be must have seen the healthy figures for "jukebox" stations on the digital dial, flipped their flipcharts, drawn a line with a squeaky marker pen and come to the conclusion: WHO NEEDS DJs?

As a sometime DJ, I think it's a crying shame that a high profile radio station would ditch the personalities altogether for six hours in the middle of the day. Surely, if you want to "compile your own playlists" between 10am and 4pm, you could, hey, listen to your iPod? For which you wouldn't require the services of (and I quote the press release again) "the crack Xfm studio production team", who are "on hand to send your choices straight to air." No pesky DJs getting in the way, though. Telling you what time it is, talking to you, making you feel involved, giving the station a voice, that kind of quaint stuff.

The big joke is, many of the jukebox stations are moving towards more "content" ie. people actually speaking between tracks. GCap seem to be swimming in the wrong direction. I hope it saves them lots of money and that their shareholders, who don't listen to Xfm anyway, are very happy for the thousands of pounds saved over a fiscal year.

The other big joke is, just like a constrained commericial radio DJ, your choices on Xfm will be limited to tracks from "the full Xfm music library as used by the Xfm producers to compile their playlists." Such freedom! Still, Xfm Managing Director Nick Davidson says, "Xfm has always been an innovative radio station ... [it certainly was before Capital bought it] ... and we really felt that we were ready to push the boundaries again. We are all excited about handing over the airwaves of Xfm to our listeners - it's a new era and we can't wait to see what kind of playlists they come up with." Nothing too risky, let's hope, eh? Plenty of Snow Patrol would be ideal. With some Linkin Park for variety. (I will never forget Lucio, now also departed, once playing a listener request, When Doves Cry by Prince, and saying, "See? We'll play anything on Xfm!")

[There are kind-of-spoilers here, but none I hadn't read about in other reviews. Anyway, don't go and see it.]

Oh dear. I've been a huge admirer of the Spider-Man franchise thus far. Secure - or so it seemed - in the hands of Sam Raimi, it had a good cast and balanced the biff-bang-pow effects set-pieces with just enough existential misery, simultaneously in the spirit of the Marvel comics, the animated TV series and the woe-is-me, post-Dark Knight modern-day comic-book-adaptation orthodoxy. But what a disappointment Spider-Man 3 (which I've only just caught up with) turned out to be. Let us first take note:

Spider-Man: 121 minutes
Spider-Man 2: 127 minutes
Spider-Man 3: 139 minutes

We should have known there was trouble up ahead. First film: Green Goblin. Second film: Doc Ock. Third film: Son of Green Goblin, Sandman and Venom. This tripling up of villains conveys a straightforward lack of confidence. There's a lot of money riding on this series now, so they've obviously reasoned: let's fill the screen with baddies! One of them is bound to stick. In fact, Sandman is a good enough villain on his own, and provides 3's biggest dose of pathos and its finest special effects, as Thomas Haden Church, out of Sideways, is turned to sand by pesky nuclear particle testing rods, from whence to fly around Manhattan like a melancholy sandstorm, eventually rising up to the height of King Kong. This was villainy enough.

Poor, hapless James Franco, cast in the reasonably small role of Peter Parker's mate and eventual nemesis, now has to carry large chunks of the third film, convincing us all that he's a) cross, b) not so cross any more after a bump on the head (beware the film with amnesia as a key plot driver), and c) really cross again. It's beyond his capabilities. Tobey Maguire is still right as Parker, but even he is called upon to camp it up in this one, as a blob of black goo that pops out of a meteor (beware the film in which the coincidence of a meteor landing near a lead character is a key plot driver) turns him into Black Spider-Man. At one stage Parker pimp-rolls down the street, clicking his fingers, like Tony Manero. Only Stayin' Alive is missing. Yes, it's fun, but it jars against the supposed "dark side" subplot. (He's so evil, he gets funky?) Ultimately, it's yet another of this film's multitudinous strands flailing around.

There are too many stories going on. When the seemingly talentless Topher Grace turns up as a boy photographer, humiliated by Parker and then attacked by the same black goo in a church, the sheer reckless number of ongoing storylines becomes unmanageable, and reduces the potential for caring any more. (Oh, and beware the film in which the coincidence of a photographer praying in the same church where Spider-Man happens to be wrestling with his inner demons at the top of a belltower is a key third-act plot driver.) The climactic battle just goes on and on and on and on. Where's the economy of that blink-and-you-miss-it two-hour first film, which had the onerous job of setting up the whole premise, as well as keeping us on the edge of our seats? There are flashes of Raimi genius: another cameo by Evil Dead's Bruce Campbell, this time playing a Maitre D' as if he were actually John Cleese; a top-flight set-piece involving a crane on a skyscraper, a lot of office equipment and Bryce Dallas Howard (who did well as the floozy); and the aforementioned Sandman, especially his early scenes. But these cannot disguise a directionless multimilliondollar bore.

Spider-Man 4? It's already in production.