In my most recent Word column, I rued the unappetising prospect of the next General Election, a battle royale between a 57-year old white Scot, a 42-year-old white Englishman and a 41-year-old white Englishman. Well, if the party machine lumbers into action as predicted, Brown is ousted and foreign secretary David Miliband really does become the new Prime Minster, that prospect can be updated to the even less appetitising: 43-year-old white Englishman, 42-year-old white Englishman and 41-year-old white Englishman. (All of a sudden, Miliband, who looks like a head boy, becomes the epitome of "age and experience", the John McCain of British politics.)
How shall we tell them apart in the booth? The fact that they're all white and English is not the issue. It's their politics. All three parties are scuffling around in the same patch of centrist dirt, and aside from ID cards (Labour: dead keen; Tories and Liberals: not so, or so they say now), you'd be hard pushed to get a cigarette paper of policy between them. They're all ambitious youngish men, an Oxford-educated ex-researcher, an Oxford-educated ex-researcher and director of corporate affairs, and a Cambridge-educated ex-journalist and speechwriter. Really zings off the political palate, doesn' it? These three beige men are entirely indicative of the state that British politics is in, where mavericks and oddballs are pushed to the margins or neutered by promotion, and even being over 50 is seen as a disadvantage. (Seeya, Michael Howard! Seeya, Ming! Seeya, Gordon?)
Oh, and Miliband is definitely after the top job. You can tell. After his piece in yesterday's Guardian where he effectively announced his decision to stand against Gordon Brown, he's spent today going around assuring everybody that he's not standing against him. It's only a matter of time.
Batten down the hatches, fans of the Old Politics, it's going to be a smooth ride.
Fuck. The Wire just slips past like a good, cold beer slips down. It does not grab you by the throat, or wag its finger at you (like BBC2's Burn Up last week), or force you to view it in a series of "acts" or "arcs", it just happens, for under an hour, every week, before your very eyes. The writers, and the actors, make no concessions so that it's easier for you to follow; the players just talk, the way people in Baltimore talk, and you must tune in and listen. The episodes, such as tonight's, Season 5 Ep 2, Unconfirmed Reports, just scroll past. They do not end on resolutions, or climaxes, they just end. And the next one will just start. How can you not fall in love with this enormously unpopular show, with its 38,000 viewers? (Less than other shows on FX, I'm told. So Dexter, which is OK but nothing more, is more popular?) [Once again, here only be "spoilers" if discussing the ebb and flow of Baltimore "spoils"] Lester and Sydnor get on with chasing Clay Davis but yearn for Marlo; Gus continues to establish himself as a fully-rounded lead character at the Sun, with his old-fashioned newspaper morals; McNulty, a bottle of whisky in his pocket, decides to rearrange a corpse (not sure why, yet); Marlo visits Barkdale in prison (what a treat to see him again); Carcetti talks test scores (shouldn't be interesting; is); Bubs is encouraged by Steve Earle to open up at NA; and that's about it. There's a shooting. And we have to wait another week.
OK, the results are in. Many critics love The Dark Knight. I notice in the publicity that they have a number of five-star reviews to play with (Heat, Empire, TotalFilm, the Times). I was called upon to reduce 152 minutes of industrial light and magic to a star rating too, for RadioTimes . After a lot of thought, I awarded it three stars, out of five. (I noticed this week that the London listings magazine Time Out have, without me noticing, upped their star rating scale to six stars, which is disconcerting, as the four stars they awarded The Dark Knight looks to the untrained eye to be four out of five, but it's actually four out of six, which is as close to three out of five.)
This is why I gave it three stars: it's not as good as Batman Begins. Simple, really. Sky even showed Batman Begins last week, so I was able to sit down and watch it, and ensure that I wasn't viewing the first of the reinvented series through rose-tinted spectacles. I'm not. It's a terrific film. The Dark Knight, despite sharing cast and crew, is muddled in comparison. And too long. I think Heath Ledger delivers a barnstorming performance as the Joker, but this does not automatically make it a four- or five-star film. It's one performance. Christian Bale doesn't do an awful lot; Michael Caine is sidelined; Maggie Gyllenhaal has almost nothing to work with (even less than Katie Holmes in the same role in Begins). There are some fine stunts and some splendid aerial shots of Gotham and Hong Kong, but these do not glue together the story. It looks great, but the plot about Batman retiring so that Harvey Dent can take his place is weak. With all that said, nobody's saying it's a bad film. It absolutely isn't. But I can't see why so many professional critics have overpraised it to this degree. (I know why Empire and Total Film have trowelled on the love: they have a vested interest in the big blockbusters busting blocks, especially franchises, which they can build campaigns and special issues around in advance without having seen a second of footage. The newspapers do not have this problem. Certainly not the Times, whose James Christopher seems to have lost his mind - "The parameters of the comic book blockbuster have shifted forever".) I'd be interested to know what some non-critics have to say about it.
On a side note, I saw The Dark Knight at the IMAX cinema. This was my first time experiencing the 20 x 26 ft screen. I didn't like it. The bits tailor-made for IMAX - those aerial shots - are spectacular, but you don't want to watch two and a half hours on a wall. What about the scenes in which Aaron Eckhart is just talking to Christian Bale? It hurt my neck. This didn't help my Dark Knight experience, but I'm on my own in this regard. I'm sure other critics who saw this screening might have been, conversely, wooed by it.
OK, I've seen the much-hyped new Pixar animation WALL-E. It's the school holiday so I had to go and see it in a cinemaful of kids. This was an interesting demographic experiment. I'm sure you know all about it: dystopian sci-fi fable in which the human race has been forced to leave Earth due to pollution, leaving just one rubbish-compacting robot to clear up; he meets a nice lady robot who's been sent back to search for plant life, and they fall in love, ending up on the space station where a now cripplingly obese human race, 700 years after evacuating the old planet, lives in consumer purgatory. It's a hugely melancholy film. I hardly need mention that its animated to within an inch of not looking animated at all, certainly on Earth, and that you will simply forget that it's the cumulation of a lot of noughts and ones, cleverly arranged by men with beards and plimsoles. The big question is: who is this "U" certificate film aimed at?
There were plenty of tinies in the cinema, with their parents. These were the ones who, in some cases, actually got scared, and before it began, couldn't help themselves calling out "WALL-E" in the correct robotic voice. (Presumably they're downloaded clips? Bought the toy? Who knew that advance marketing could be so effective? It's not as if we all knew how ET could talk before seeing the ... oh yeah.) I couldn't help but think that, even though the message is quite an adult one, it's no bad thing for an anti-pollution, anti-obesity message to seep by osmosis into their impressionable minds. Better than films about stabbing people, anyway. Behind me were some older kids, old enough to be in the cinema without adults, maybe early teens? They were much more cynical, calling out "WALL-E" in a jokey way and making wisecracks at their friends sitting, naturally, across the other side of the aisle. At the end of the film, which had clearly not entertained them (the first 40 minutes have no dialogue), one of them shouted out, "Well, that was random." Another said, "Hooray, it's finished." Any film which centres on a love story is not going to appeal to boys of this age. And all the eco-stuff is surely just plain boring. I, on the other hand, really enjoyed WALL-E. And I'm an adult. Perhaps this film is aimed with laser-surgical demographic accuracy at parents and very young kids. All the rest should stay away and go and see something less "random" instead. Like Batman, with its knifeplay and explosions.
Hats off to Chris Campling, who could be male or female, for writing such nice things about the C&H podcast in The Times today (The Knowledge supplement). This was the Steve Brown picture they used.
I feel sure you've all read the abusive emails of Giles Coren by now. If not, here they are. If you don't know him, he's the son of Alan Coren, brother of Victoria, a restaurant reviewer, all-round hack and TV presenter. For those not conversant with journalistic jargon, sub editors are the underpaid footsoldiers of Fleet Street whose thankless task it is to chop copy to length - a length that is constantly changing according to the whim of a desperate ad department - and keep it readable. Sometimes, their job is to turn copy into English. Like a lot of writers, Giles Coren gets all precious and cross if changes are made to his copy by sub editors. However, unlike a lot of writers, Giles Coren actually writes sweary, self-aggrandising, abusive emails - and sends them. Amazingly, a disgruntled sub has passed them round like canapes, and here are three. (Note: these emails have not been "subbed" and are occasionally a little lax on capital letters and punctuation.)
To: the Times subeditors From: Coren, Giles
Chaps, I am mightily pissed off ... I don't really like people tinkering with my copy for the sake of tinkering. I do not enjoy the suggestion that you have a better ear or eye for how I want my words to read than I do ... It was the final sentence. Final sentences are very, very important. A piece builds to them, they are the little jingle that the reader takes with him into the weekend.
I wrote: "I can't think of a nicer place to sit this spring over a glass of rosé and watch the boys and girls in the street outside smiling gaily to each other, and wondering where to go for a nosh." It appeared as: "I can't think of a nicer place to sit this spring over a glass of rosé and watch the boys and girls in the street outside smiling gaily to each other, and wondering where to go for nosh."
There is no length issue. This is someone thinking, "I'll just remove this indefinite article because Coren is an illiterate cunt and i know best."
Well, you fucking don't. This was shit, shit subediting for three reasons.
1) "Nosh", as I'm sure you fluent Yiddish speakers know, is a noun formed from a bastardisation of the German "naschen". It is a verb, and can be construed into two distinct nouns. One, "nosh" means simply "food". You have decided that this is what i meant and removed the "a". I am insulted enough that you think you have a better ear for English than me. But a better ear for Yiddish? I doubt it. Because the other noun, "nosh" means "a session of eating" ...
2) I will now explain why your error is even more shit than it looks. You see, i was making a joke. I do that sometimes. I have set up the street as "sexually charged". I have described the shenanigans across the road at G.A.Y. I have used the word "gaily" as a gentle nudge. And "looking for a nosh" has a secondary meaning of looking for a blowjob. Not specifically gay, for this is soho, and there are plenty of girls there who take money for noshing boys. "looking for nosh" does not have that ambiguity. the joke is gone. I only wrote that sodding paragraph to make that joke. And you've fucking stripped it out like a pissed Irish plasterer restoring a renaissance fresco and thinking jesus looks shit with a bear so plastering over it. You might as well have removed the whole paragraph. I mean, fucking christ, don't you read the copy?
3) And worst of all. Dumbest, deafest, shittest of all, you have removed the unstressed "a" so that the stress that should have fallen on "nosh" is lost, and my piece ends on an unstressed syllable. When you're winding up a piece of prose, metre is crucial. Can't you hear? Can't you hear that it is wrong? It's not fucking rocket science. It's fucking pre-GCSE scansion. I have written 350 restaurant reviews for The Times and i have never ended on an unstressed syllable. Fuck. fuck, fuck, fuck.
I am sorry if this looks petty (last time i mailed a Times sub about the change of a single word i got in all sorts of trouble) but i care deeply about my work and i hate to have it fucked up by shit subbing ... And, just out of interest, I'd like whoever made that change to email me and tell me why. Tell me the exact reasoning which led you to remove that word from my copy.
Right, Sorry to go on. Anger, real steaming fucking anger can make a man verbose.
All the best
Giles
To: the Times subeditors From: Coren, Giles
Sent: August 10 2002 16.41
The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. how fucking difficult is that? it's the sentence that bestrides the fucking book i reviewed for you. it is the sentence i wrote first in my fucking review. it is 35 fucking letters long, which is why i wrote that it was. and so some useless cunt subeditor decides to change it to "jumps over A lazy dog" can you fucking count? can you see that that makes it a 33 letter sentence? so it looks as if i can't count, and the cunting author of the book, poor mr dunn, cannot count. the whole bastard book turns on the sentence being as i fucking wrote it. and that it is exactly 33 letters long. why do you meddle. what do you think you achieve with that kind of dumb-witted smart-arsery? why do you change things you do not understand without consulting. why do you believe you know best when you know fuck all. jack shit.
that is as bad as editing can be. fuck, i hope you're proud. it will be small relief for the author that nobody reads your poxy magazine.
never ever ask me to write something for you. and don't pay me. i'd rather take £400 quid for assassinating a crack whore's only child in a revenge killing for a busted drug deal - my integrity would be less compromised.
jesus fucking wept i don't know what else to say.
To: the London Paper's restaurant critic From: Coren, Giles
Sent: 09 July 2008 23:06
feargus,
I'm emailing to say that your review of osteria emilia, in most ways perfectly fine and good and spot on, pissed me off. i booked, as ever, under a pseudonym, that over made up italian bird did not have a fucking clue who i was (or even who baddiel was, who i ate with because he lives, like me, round the corner). Nor were there any kitchen staff peeking out of any porthole. i appreciate that you have to keep your column as lively as possible - and name dropping david i guess might be exciting for your readers (i'll certainly be doing it in my column) - but in your froth to show how folksy and incognito you are, you did your readers and the restaurant an immense disservice: you suggested that i got some special dispensation in eating a la carte. But if you'd spent a bit more time looking at your lunch menu, and a bit less gawping at me, you'd have noticed that it said, "dishes from the evening a la carte menu are available at lunchtime, with some exceptions".
You said "i didn't have the brass neck to demand anything off the unavailable a la carte". it makes you sound like an utter tit. you are not only a chippy fuck but a lazy journalist. 'brass neck'. learn to write, and take your head out of your arse, you fucking twat.
all the best
giles coren
So then ... righteous defender of the English tongue and noble frontiersman for vandalised prose-writers everywhere, or prick? As someone who writes and has also sub-edited, I can see both sides of the argument, but I'm Upstairs Downstairs enough to think that actual abuse, and especially over-ripe use of fuck and cunt, leaves you without recourse to the moral high ground. Equally, if you're jousting with a fellow critic, as he is in the third email - "learn to write, and take your head out of your arse, you fucking twat" is hardly Wildean. It's possible to deal with BT call centres and not swear, so why not fellow workers at the coalface of journalism? ("Sorry to to go on," doesn't quite defuse it. If a sub doesn't rearrange the initial letters of his next review to read I AM AN OVERPRIVELIGED PRAM-EMPTYING BUFFOON, they won't be worth their salt.) In some perverse way, I almost admire his brass neck. If only he was directing this ire at someone worthwhile, over something worth getting this hot under the collar about. He should go and work as a sub for a week.
In the twenty-third Collings & Herrin podcast, in light of Radovan Karadzic's arrest for being an acupuncturist, we discuss the amazing disguise possibilities of growing a beard, Christian Bale getting bail, the key differences between a Milton Keynes NCP call centre operator and a concentration camp guard, and conduct a calm, reasoned, evidence-based debate about homeopathy. We also reveal details of the first ever live podcast with an audience in Edinburgh. It takes place on Wednesday August 6, at 10.30am, at the Underbelly. A one-off opportunity to be in the background of an actual podcast, and perhaps talk on it, it is free* to attend, but you have to reserve tickets. Don't reserve them and not turn up, that would be cruel. All details here. We're very excited about it. (We recorded two podcasts today; number 24, which has an air of hysteria about it that could go either way, will be up in the usual place next Friday, August 1, by which time Richard and I will be in different cities. See how hard we work for you, and still the Cobra Pubcast and the French Maids are higher than us in the iTunes charts. You are so ungrateful.)
* Sorry, just discovered there is an 80p handling charge and you have to reserve at least two tickets (I assume this is because the Underbelly can't take less than £1 per automated transaction). Thanks to Jason for pointing this out. That's still a bargain. We could have charged more, but we declined in the spirit of the podcast.
This is me, sitting in a self-op studio in the bowels of Television Centre, talking about me. Well, talking about my book, which is about me. I decided to take a self-op picture of myself talking about me for posterity because it is a lonely existence, even though you are talking constantly to presenters at BBC local radio stations. I have done identical sessions to this to promote my other books. It's what you do. It's ritualistic solipsism in the name of commerce. So, yesterday morning, between 0950 and 1310, I did 18 interviews, each of them ten minutes long. BBC Radio Northampton pulled out at the last minute, and BBC Radio Gloucestershire sort of got lost in the ether, but British Forces Radio pulled in at the last minute (cue: "My brother was in the army," I always say that to get on their good side), as did BBC Radio York.
For the record, then:
0950 Newcastle 1000 Hereford & Worcester 1010 BFBS 1020 Stoke 1030 Wiltshire 1040 Three Counties 1050 Derby 1100 break 1110 Manchester 1120 Lincolnshire 1130 break (due to disappearance of Gloucestershire) 1140 Berkshire 1150 Humberside 1200 WestMidlands 1210 Coventry & Warwickshire 1220 Kent 1230 Shropshire 1240 Norfolk 1250 Solent 1300 York 1310 Stop talking about myself.
It's exhausting. It's illuminating. It's like a lightning trip round England. A seemingly endless list of producers' names and presenters' names (Alfie, Mike, Nick, Olly, Lorna, Andy, Heather, James, Sarah, Lara, Trish, Bob, Dom, Clare, Karen and Graham, Charlie, Adam), and just ten minutes with each one, whether it's going well or not. Some take flight, others are a little stolid. You do you best to remain animated and if you're me, you call up the station's website first and find a photo of the presenter you're speaking to, which makes it that bit more personal. Inevitably you say the same things, and tell the same stories, but that's because they've all got the same press release and almost none have had time to read the book, so it's your job to fill in the blanks. (Some of them didn't even have a copy of the book! Well done, my publishers!) On the whole, you'd be hard pushed to find a more sparky and upbeat bunch than the footsoldiers of local radio. Since I stopped broadcasting live, regularly, last year, I find I miss the thrill of it. I'm quite jealous of Alfie, Mike, Nick etc., whereas the last time I did this, I had no need to be.
I've also discovered that summing up my book in ten minutes is pretty difficult. Maybe that's why it's been so difficult to sell.
Funnily enough I had a text from Phill Jupitus afterwards, who'd been listening to me talking about me on Radio Norfolk, on his way home from Latitude. We should be on the radio.
The Wire is back for its fifth season. It is on a small cable channel. It is very good. No, really, it's very, very good. If you haven't seen it, and don't have access to FX, the box sets await. If you haven't seen it and are sick to the back teeth of being told by the media that it is either the best or second best TV drama ever made, don't let the loud voices of the converted turn you off. Get the first season on DVD, give it a whirl. Be patient. Keep your ears open. Don't expect neat conclusions. Don't worry if you don't understand what they're saying on first listen. If me telling you this is also bringing you out in a rash ("When will they stop going on and on and on about The Wire?"), step away from the blog. For UK Wire fans, this season - the final one - is the dictionary definition of long-awaited. Unfortunately, for those latecomers among us who devoured the first three or four seasons in box-set form, bingeing on them in twos and threes and more, this season will be long-awaited while it's airing, as we're not used to having to wait seven days between episodes, and in fact, the gaps really slow down the flow. (I loved season four, but watched it in situ, week by week, and frustration really does set in.) So be it. I'm not waiting until it's over before I start watching it.
Can you sense a backlash? (I mean in the media, not in the real world.) It was inevitable. Resist it. What's great about The Wire is its confidence. A new season begins, it's a continuation of the last season. Life, in Baltimore, goes on. Police work, especially in the Major Crimes Unit, is laborious and boring and slow and frustrating. That's the point of the show. God, as one of the new characters at the Baltimore Sun (season five: the Media) notes, is in the details. This show is not about crime, it's about politics at every level: City Hall, the higher echelons of the police, the law courts, the unions, even drug dealing, which is the city's key industry. It's about how these disparate worlds bump along together. There's no central character. McNulty is the closest it comes, but entire episodes go by with no "story" for him. He's still boozing. Still coming home late. Still neglecting the kids. Still bitching and moaning. It's not about McNulty. Nor is it about Carver (who's been promoted to Sergeant), or Omar (who has yet to appear), or Marlo, or Prop Joe, or Bunk, or Greggs, or any of the other living, breathing participants in this living, breathing ecosystem.
So, the first episode has aired. We've met the staff of the Sun. There's politics there, too. They have their fingers in everything. I loved the way they were alerted to the breaking news story about a fire when they saw it out of the window. Bubbles, after finding himself in rehab in season four, is attempting to straighten himself out. Presumably you were as tense every time you saw him as I was? (Perhaps The Wire is, in fact, about Bubbles.) There's no money for the police. It's all going into education. (Season four: Education.) And Homicide are still doing everything they can to amuse themselves while the bodies pile up - including conning one corner boy with a Xerox machine. The scene is set for trouble ahead. The cops are angry. The mayor is in a cleft stick. The reporters are sniffing around a property deal that links just about everybody to everybody else. Nobody can stop swearing. And Bubbles is selling the Sun.
Do not view the three animated films starring Simon's Cat unless you are a cat person. They will mean nothing to you. I saw the most recent, TV Dinner, on The Culture Show. You have to see them all. (Unless you're not a cat person.) It's not just animator Simon Tofield's keen observations of the human-cat dynamic, it's the noise the cat makes. Genius of the week.
Watch out! Posh sandwich shop Le Pain Quotidien is expanding (it began in Brussels and then went Paris, New York, Los Angeles and now London and beyond), laughing in the face of the credit crunch with its expensive organic coffee, bread and cakes. It's not exactly somewhere you'd pop into regularly, unless money was literally no object, and I wouldn't ordinarily give the nod to a chain that's selling "a lifestyle" or that has a "philosophy", but the atmosphere is nice, the furniture wooden and the cakes quality. The reason I mention it at all is that the logo's starting to bug me. What is it? I'm feeling that there is bread in there, but is the bread the almond-shaped bit bottom left, or the "grainy" looking rectangle that forms the background? And if so, what the hell is the shape in the middle? Let's have a guessing game. It's a lot cheaper than eating in a Pain Quotidien.
Q. What is the Pain Quotidien logo supposed to be?
Points scored for good suggestions, good objections and for actually cracking it.
SORRY FOR SHOUTING, BUT IT'S CELEBRITY MASTERCHEF! AND GREGG AND JOHN ARE NOTHING IF NOT PASSIONATE ABOUT SHOUTING! I LOVE CELEBRITY MASTERCHEF! I KNOW IT'S ONE OF THOSE PROGRAMMES WHERE - HA HA - YOU'VE NEVER HEARD OF THE CELEBRITIES! BUT I LIKE NON-CELEBRITY MASTERCHEF JUST AS MUCH. WHO CARES IF THEY'RE "FAMOUS" OR NOT - IT'S THE COOKING THAT MATTERS, AND I LOVE WATCHING PEOPLE MAKE FOOD! ESPECIALLY IF THEY'RE PASSIONATE ABOUT FOOD!
I can't keep this up. Let's calm down. This is an apt piece of advice, actually, since this year's Celeb Masterchef is a Liverpudlian love-in. Or was, until Louis Emerick (ie. Mick out of Brookside) was let go after a week of semi-finals, leaving just two Scousers: Mark Moraghan (ie. Greg out of Brookside) and Liz McClarnon (formerly out of Atomic Kitten). The token non-Scouser is Andi Peters, billed as the "much-loved TV presenter" rather than the "much-despised executioner of Top Of The Pops." I'd have been happier if he'd been voted out on Friday, as he's a bit soulless and technical for my liking, and way too serious and self-critical. Meanwhile, the three Liverpudlians have been fantastic telly. They really bond. I started to forget that Louis and Mark were actually competing against each other. And, as has already been pointed out, it's the most emotional Masterchef ever, with Mark actually bawling before the decision about the three finalists had been made. Liz was so happy at getting through she was inconsolable, having not actually used the downstairs bit of an oven before coming on the show, but her natural ability has got her through. A lesser commentator than I would call this a "journey." Let's not go there.
Masterchef is such a sound format (originally invented by Franc Roddam, who directed Quadrophenia, trivia fans): it's always been amateur cooks cooking - never mind the change of set, or the introduction of stunt cookery rounds. If anything, they've improved it by adding SHOUTY JUDGES. You can't not love John Torrode and Gregg Wallace and their catchphrases: "It just need a bit of HEAT." "Mate, THAT is what I call a dessert." "It's well-SEASONED, it's well-FLAVOURED." "This is a guy who LOVES to cook!" "It's GOOD, HONEST, home-cooked food." "It's like two different dishes on one PLATE." "I could fall in LOVE with that dessert." "STOP OPENING THE OVEN!" (That's a new one.)
I hope - and predict - that Liz will win. And in the montage accompanying her victory they'll show her cracking the glass with the dessert in it. And Mark will cry all over his GOOD, HONEST, home-cooked food until it is runny and over-seasoned.
On a side note: did anyone read Michael Buerk's account of his failure in the early rounds in the Radio Times? What a miserable, moaning, ungrateful twat. He agreed to do it even though he'd never seen the programme. What a waste of a place. I could have had that place.
Whilst doing some errands in the car today I alighted briefly upon the indie rock radio station xfm. I don't know who the DJ was, but it was the afternoon and he may have been filling in for someone else, but he is obviously the type of DJ who does "prank phonecalls." I bring this to your attention only because it was the worst prank phonecall I have ever heard. I don't know if it was live or not. If it was, then everybody involved must have been shamefaced at its failure. If it was pre-recorded, I have no idea why they put it out. The DJ called the Government Passports and Immigration office and asked this question:
"If somebody is born on a plane that is flying between two countries, what nationality would they be?"
First up, this is not a promising start to a prank phonecall. The DJ wasn't pretending to be somebody else, he was just asking a question. It's not even a stupid question. It's a fair question. And guess what? The nice woman on the other end of the phone answered the DJ's question patiently and informatively. She covered all variables (if the baby was born to two parents and they weren't married, the child would take the nationality of the mother, and so on) and presented the information eloquently and clearly. When she had finished, the DJ, with seemingly nothing more to add to the merriment, said thanks and put the phone down. What a wag! What satire! That'll show the Government Passports and Immigration department! Ask them a reasonable question and they'll ... answer it.
Honestly. The quality of satire in this country. I turned over to Smooth.
In the 22nd Collings & Herrin Podcast, we bring perhaps the most important news story of the year to wider notice, unfathomably buried at the bottom of Page 6 in this week's Sun, and ignored by all the other papers. We also start a campaign to make necrophilia illegal and review the 1983 TV drama Reilly Ace Of Spies. You don't get reviews of 1983 TV dramas on the Cobra Pubcast with Danny Wallace and Dom Joly.
And here is a nice picture that a person called Jonah very kindly made of me and a much less insulting and disrespectful comedy partner:
I shall be deputising for Mr Mark Kermode for three weeks in August, on both Five Live and News 24 (which I think might now be called BBC News - whatever). This means I am now seeing a lot of film screenings. It's always fun to be back in the film critic's saddle, but mainly because I don't have to see all the films every week. That would be a living hell, obviously. Anyway, I'm working my way through the 18 or so I have to see and this week, by chance, I have only seen films with Ben Kingsley in them.
Alright, the film I saw on Monday night had Ben Kingsley in it, and the film I saw last night had Ben Kingsley in it, but that's a 100% record so far. The two films could not have been more different, and stand as testament to the sheer breadth of work "Sir Ben" now does. Monday night's was The Love Guru, already heavily advertised on London buses (and, presumably, other buses in other places) and out on August 1. This is a Mike Myers vehicle, which I daresay I must not review yet due to embargoes, but I will say is not a classic Mike Myers (to the point where I'm finding it hard to remember what was a classic Mike Myers?). Anyway, Ben Kingsley cameos as a cross-eyed Indian guru. It is, to say the least, broad.
The film I saw last night with Ben Kingsley in it was The Wackness, which is released on August 29. This has already been praised at festivals and is one of those much-talked-about indie sleeper hits. (Which has nothing to do with the band Sleeper having a hit.) Again, I won't review it, but it's as good as they are already saying it is: low-key, low-budget, no explosions, no cross-eyed gurus. When I arrived at the screening - which was at the relatively new, and very nice, screening room in the Soho Hotel, tucked away down a cul-de-sac you'd never ordinarily walk down - someone from the film company ushered me into the bar and asked if I'd like to "chat with Ben?" Because it's a small film, my first thought was: oh no, the director, called Ben, is here, and I have to chat to him at a screening of his own film! However, Ben turned out to be ... you're way ahead of me, here ... Ben Kingsley, who was just stood there, near the bar, having a glass of wine with his wife, and son, and son's friend/girlfriend. I didn't even notice him at first. Then the person from the film company took me out of the conversation I was having and introduced me to Ben. (The director's name is Jonathan. He wasn't there.)
Hey, I'm an old hand at meeting film stars. They're actually not film stars, despite all the hoo-ha. They're actors. And actors are insecure, and need a lot of loving. The "star" part is no help when it comes to alleviating an actor's insecurity. I learned this during my two and a half years' service on Radio 4's Back Row, when I must have interviewed at least one, if not two actors a week, some hugely famous (Hanks, Costner, Thurman, Depp, Hopkins, Allen), some less famous and more approachable and off-guard (Morton, Hawke, McGregor, Walters, Seymour Hoffman). However, you at least get the chance to acclimatise when you're interviewing someone. To prepare. Here I was, well, just meeting Ben Kingsley. Chatting to him. In the event, I chatted to him for about five minutes, standing near the bar, me with my shoulder bag on my shoulder and a Marks & Spencer reusable plastic carrier bag in my hand. It was quite surreal. I weighed straight in with the fact that I'd seen him the night before in The Love Guru, and I remarked that mainstream American comedies these days seem to be aimed specifically at an imagined 14-year-old boy. (This was my way of getting out of the fact that I didn't like it - and a very slick way, I think.) He agreed, and said that he'd loved working with Myers, something I don't doubt. It didn't change my opinion of the film, but chatting to him made me remember that actors have no idea what they're getting into - whether the film will work or not work, whether it will be a success or not, whether it will be released at the cinema or not - so their choices are made in the dark. Ben felt like doing a broad comedy, and working with Mike Myers: he succeeded in both. He actually compared Myers to Chaplin, which, in terms of the power he seemingly wields, is not as daft as it first seems. I chatted to Ben about Sexy Beast, which I loved him in, like the rest of the world, and told him that his turn as Don Logan had opened to door for other "serious" actors to be cast as Cockney gangsters in thrillers, such as Ralph Fiennes in In Bruges. He's very proud of Don Logan. And I chatted to him about the film we were about to see, which I'd heard good things about. It was time to go into the screening room before I had chance to compliment him on his performance in The Sopranaos.
He came on to introduce the film, humbly and briefly. He hoped we'd like it. He's clearly very proud of it, in that I don't see him introducing a screening of The Love Guru. (Mind you, if I was Mike Myers I'd not be super-keen to introduce it either. You'll note that Ben does not appear on the poster.) It must surely be agony to watch a film you're in with a roomful of London critics. But he did. He sat it out to the end. And then went back to the bar, with his wife and family and friends, and where I was too humble to follow him and renew our new friendship. (I am, by the way, fully aware of what happened in the bar. But I still enjoyed chatting to Ben Kingsley, for fun. It's possible that he's on a charm offensive, to fend off these rumours that he's a diva and demands to be called "Sir Ben". He certainly succeeded there. Maybe they're out of date rumours and he's cheered up.)
I will still review both films honestly on Five Live and News 24, but it was cool to meet Ben Kingsley. I always used to say on Back Row that the day I wasn't excited about meeting a famous actor was the day I should throw in the towel. I have yet to stop being excited about meeting famous actors. Spare me from ever becoming jaded.
Can you feel the furore? My favourite magazine in the world, the New Yorker, has raised some hackles with its latest cover image: a cartoon of the Obamas in the White House, depicted as, from left to right, a tooled-up Black Power activist and a practising Muslim, with a burning Stars and Stripes in the fireplace and Osama above the mantel. It is a satire upon the various smear campaigns directed at the Democrats' golden couple - directed at them from the right. Thus, the right have been the first to kick up a stink.
For the record, the illustration is by regular cover artist Barry Blitt. It's very good. Well drawn and, to me, funny - in that it makes flesh the right's worst nightmares. And it's called The Politics Of Fear (the title appears on the contents page, as with all cover illustrations). Like all good cartoons, its meaning is clear, without the need to have a newspaper strewn casually on the floor with a headline that helps explain it. David Remnick, editor of the New Yorker, has already put in an early rebuttal, explaining to an outraged world that the readers of his magazine are smart enough to understand what's going on. Imagine running a magazine where you could realistically use that as a defence!
Newsday quotes some Long Island residents. Eileen Hafner, 55, a Republican from Bay Shore, said, "I'm really offended by it. I plan on voting for McCain, but even still, I can't believe they would go there." Another resident, Valeire Melhado, 47, said, "There is nothing funny about it. And the Osama bin Laden painting on the wall in the corner - that just gave me chills."
Gosh, how easily offended Republicans are! "I think the picture depicted them the way they really are," said Denise Demichele, also of Bay Shore, who also plans to vote for McCain. "They're way too militant." Advantage, Remnick! Then, just when you think it's safe to go back in the political water, the Democrats also sling mud. "Oh, lordy," said Jon Cooper, Obama's campaign chairman in Long Island. "I think I have a pretty good sense of humour and I think I'm pretty fair-minded, but this is just beyond the pale ... It's not funny." Bill Burton, an Obama spokesman said, "The New Yorker may think, as one of their staff explained to us, that their cover is a satirical lampoon of the caricature Senator Obama's right-wing critics have tried to create, but most readers will see it as tasteless and offensive. And we agree."
Yes, the smear campaign against Barack and Michelle Obama is certainly tasteless and offensive. (They're black, ergo: they must be dangerous.) For an artist to satirise that does not make his picture tasteless and offensive. The New Yorkeris a liberal magazine. Its illustrations and cover images are famous. They are often esoteric and even psychedelic. There is something touchingly old-fashioned and soft-sell about them - after all, this is a weekly magazine that doesn't even bother to advertise what's inside it on its own cover. (Overseas editions have a menu on the flap.) But the content is avowedly Democrat, albeit never slow to criticise the left. They certainly won't let Obama get away with his current shift to the right before polling day.
Once again, we see the power of the image.
One Islamic civil rights and advocacy organisation has called the cartoon "inflammatory". The Washington-based Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) said: "Unfortunately, the New Yorker's front cover cartoon failed to achieve its stated goal of exposing and lampooning right-wing caricatures of the Obamas. These inflammatory images and spurious associations will only serve to reinforce the racism and anti-Muslim stereotypes that the magazine says it is out to challenge." Bollocks.
Oh, lordy. Here's Remnick on the defensive. Apparently some people who posted comments on the Huffington Post have already threatened to cancel their New Yorker subscription. Don't they realise how stupid that makes them look? (I hope Remnick is saying, good riddance.)
Meanwhile, here's MSNBC's Mika Brzezinski (whoever she is) being offended, but not very eloquently:
This is this week's London listings magazine Time Out. It made me laugh to see it there, a little red circle of positivity in among all the Andrew Ridegley digs. Sorry for all these short, picture-heavy posts but I really am terribly busy and don't have time for long, discursive entries about telly programmes at the moment. I'll be back.
A belated thanks to everybody at Methvens bookshop in Worthing, who hosted the That's Me In The Corner event on Friday, as part of the Artists & Makers Festival, which is ongoing. (That's Dan on the left, who runs the festival.) It's belated because I've only just had the grinning, slightly blurry group shot forwarded to me, in which I look a bit weird and everybody else looks fine. Thanks also to the surprisingly large number of people who turned up to have a glass of wine and listen to me bang on for 90 minutes about Everett True and Alan Lamb - that's at least two anecdotes that didn't make the book. That's why you have to come and see me in bookshops. Not that I plan to be in any other bookshops for a while. I love bookshops and the people who work in them, especially independent ones, but it's a risky business turning up in one and expecting people to come and see you. I once saw the famous TV chef Rick Stein sitting at a table in Border's on London's busy Oxford Street, alone except for a Border's rep and two big piles of books. It was a heartbreaking sight. Anyway, use independent bookshops, they're ace.
My friend Robin Ince would like to draw your attention to this star-studded charity comedy gig that's on this weekend in London. More information here. I have no involvement, but Mark Steel's on, so I'll be there in spirit.
What? A podcast? On Wednesday? Yes. Richard and I convened at his house yesterday because a) he's selfishly gigging on Friday, and b) we were there to have our photographs taken by a nice woman called Elsa for the Independent On Sunday's iconic How We Met feature, for which we had to be interviewed about each other. Who knows how it will turn out, or whether it will run - we're both too hardened and cynical to believe it will ever run - but it was fun to be photographed again by a professional, especially as it meant Richard and I went into his garden for the first time. (I don't think he's ever been into it before.) Thus, Collings & Herrin Podcast Number 21 is out there. We hope you like it.
This is a picture taken with my laptop while we were having our photograph taken by Elsa with an actual camera:
Look, my book is at number 7 in Amazon's charts, thanks to my colleague's despicable plan to embarrass me and shame me within the publishing world. Unfortunately it's number 7 in Amazon's very specific Film, Television and Music Biography chart, but hey, I'm above Alex James, and nipping at Richard Hammond's planet-destroying heels.
I received a card from my publishers yesterday saying, "Happy publication day!" because the book (pictured) is out today. I've been too busy to look for it in any shops, but if you see one, do let me know. I understand it's in some offers, which is good. I'm only really posting this to provide a link to TV Cream's exclusive supplementary minisite, which they kindly created last May to coincide with the first edition. In case you didn't catch it at the time - and are that way inclined - it's the book's "deleted scenes" ie. all the offcuts which didn't make the final draft. (Although it doesn't include Richard Herring's name, as it had yet to be deleted at that stage.)
It's just like the BBC to force us to stay in for five consecutive nights just to watch a drama. (I understand there is such thing as a futuristic device that allows you to watch television programmes at a time quite indistinct from that at which they are broadcast, but where's the fun in that?) Criminal Justice is a "major new drama". You can tell this, because it's been trailed for weeks and because ... it's on for five consecutive nights. Actually, it's a big new-fangled risk for BBC1 to sign the keystone 9pm-10pm slot over to the same thing, Monday to Friday. What if people get bored? The pressure is on for Peter Moffat, the writer, to keep putting up new hurdles for the main protagonist to deal with. (Ratings holding steady from 5.5 million to 4.8 and back up to 5 over Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, so all is looking well.)
Since it's ongoing, and I know some of you won't be watching it when it goes out across five consecutive nights, here's what I am allowed to tell you without ruining it: Ben Whishaw (one of the Bob Dylans in I'm Not There) plays a snivelly and slightly daft young asthmatic who gets arrested and put on remand before being tried for a murder he doesn't remember committing, and is pretty sure he didn't commit, despite being out of it when it happened. The drama takes us through the criminal justice system to see what it's like. It's not very nice. Prison is full of mostly scary men and one nice old man who barter with mobile phone usage and fags and get drugs delivered in dead pigeons being thrown over the wall. Barristers are corrupt. The posher they are, the more corrupt and venal. The more crumpled the lawyer, the more chance he'll be one of the good guys. The police are a bit useless and a bit corrupt. Deals are done. Pleas are bargained. The CPS don't prosecute anyone. Targets run the police. Everyone grandstands in court, as if they are on the television. One old-school detective grumbles. And Ben Wishaw has a rubbish time. Really, really rubbish. If it were a book it would be impossible to put down. I'm three episodes in and desperate to find out what happens in the end, even though if the person I think did it actually did it, I'll be a bit disappointed.
Peter Moffat, ex-barrister, wrote the fabulous North Square, a zippy, fast-talking, cynical drama about barristers that was on Channel 4 in 2000 (God, was it that long ago?), a sort of This Life for grown-ups and without the E, and centred around Phil Davis, which can never be a bad thing. It was larger than life, and the dialogue was perfect. Because Criminal Justice is a bit more realistic, or pretends to be, some of the dialogue sounds a tad theatrical. This is OK in court, but less so in the other bits. It's not a deal-breaker, but it does run counter to some of the realism. I'm into it anyway. The performances are all solid, from old dependables like Bill Paterson, Lindsay Duncan and Pete Postlethwaite, to newer faces like David Harewood and Juliet Aubrey. I'm taken with Con O'Neil as the crumpled lawyer with eczema feet. If there's a dramatic flaw, it's that our snivelly and slightly daft ashmatic hero, who might or might not have dunnit, seems to be fighting a one-man war against the criminal justice system, and we've not really seen any evidence (geddit?) that he's the kind of person who'd take that upon himself. It's convenient for the story that he does, but he looks to me like the very person who'd give in and do what he's told.
Nothing more to add, really. Quality drama. Unnecessary scheduling gimmick. Especially when BBC1 are running a new series of Celebrity Masterchef over three consecutive nights. (We're supposed to get on with our lives when exactly?)
In my most recent Word column, I rued the unappetising prospect of the next General Election, a battle royale between a 57-year old white Scot, a 42-year-old white Englishman and a 41-year-old white Englishman. Well, if the party machine lumbers into action as predicted, Brown is ousted and foreign secretary David Miliband really does become the new Prime Minster, that prospect can be updated to the even less appetitising: 43-year-old white Englishman, 42-year-old white Englishman and 41-year-old white Englishman. (All of a sudden, Miliband, who looks like a head boy, becomes the epitome of "age and experience", the John McCain of British politics.)
