Actually, it's not. I wrote it yesterday as I was dying to relieve myself of this knot of ideological disgruntlement. I'd submitted it to the Guardian as a pitch on Wednesday, but because it's outside my usual Guardian-blog comfort zones of TV, Media, Music and Film, I didn't know who to send it to, and it had to go round the houses. Anyway, I've just heard back from them, and they don't want to publish it*, so I'm going to publish it here. Sorry it's not about TV, media, music and film.
SOLD OUT BY THE SOIL ASSOCIATION
Watching the latest animal welfare programme by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall on TV this week, I felt a familiar swell of pride when he compared government and EU standards for chickens intensively raised as meat to those of organic watchdog the Soil Association. (The charity recommends a flock size of 500, while even organic chickens reared to EU specifications can come in flocks of almost 10,000.) Ah yes, I thought, three cheers for the Soil Association: out there fighting for truth and justice, pushing back the barriers of what constitutes sustainability and keeping all other organic certifiers on their toes. That's why I have been an evangelistic supporter of the Association's tireless work for over a decade.
As a member, I recall being consulted when the charity actually considered changing its name for fear that its association with soil might muddy the waters of its consumer-aimed message. I voted to keep the old name, and thankfully they did. The Soil Association's place in modern life - as a real stamp of quality and assurance whether spied on the side of a jar of organic coffee or a tube of face moisturiser - is now totally ingrained. Like so many aims of the organic movement previously viewed as crank extremism, the Soil Association has gone overground.
Unfortunately, it's gone a little too far overground. Into the air, in fact, and I for one feel betrayed. After two lengthy consultations, it seems for all the world to have caved in to pressure from big business to allow air-freighted produce to display the organic label. Although they deny that this is the reason, it remains a far more contentious issue than changing the name, and, for me, a deal-breaker.
The debate began in earnest last year, having been bubbling since 2007, when the Guardian asked the question: should we stop flying in organic food? The Soil Association proposed - rightly, in my opinion - to reclassify organic fruit and veg that arrived here by plane. Although less than 1% of imported food is air freighted, it contributes 11% of the carbon emissions from UK food distribution. I understand the counter argument - that many organic farmers in the developing world rely on export to faraway places like the UK for their livelihoods - but my view, which I believed I shared with the Soil Association, is that the future of the planet is local.
As I write, the Soil Association website makes little fanfare of its egregious and lily-livered decision to allow air-freighted food to continue to carry the organic label. You have to dig to find the information, but there it is, in the Standards section**, rehearsing the line about improving rural communities in Africa and offering this flimsy get-out: "Soil Association organic standards are constantly under development, reacting to new research, technical innovation and public expectation."
For "public expectation" read "expectation on behalf of the public." I am a member of the public; I expect organic standards to become more not less stringent. Most produce on our shelves is non-organic, it's not as if people don’t have a choice, especially in these belt-tightening times. But those who do choose to shop ethically surely do not wish their principles to be sold down the river for fear of upsetting Sainsbury's and Tesco. The supermarkets pay lip service to farmers in Africa, but all they really care about is the bottom line. (They don't even care about British farmers.) Why should we expect otherwise from shareholder-led multinational corporations?
What we do expect is the leading organic certification body to stick to its principles. Perhaps it should change its name now, to the Spoiled Association. Ha ha. *Actually, it was passed to the Observer too, but they already have a piece about it, so it's been rejected twice! ** Ironically, I can't find it today, but it was there yesterday. Why isn't it on the front page? And why has it only been reported in the Times and Mail?
Actually, Collings & Herrin Podcast Number 48 was recorded earl-eye in the afternoon, but you'll have to listen to it to find out what I'm on about. In it, we mainly come up with a new book idea for Dave Gorman which is a surefire winner, but also find time to ponder what happens in the seconds before your death, marvel at Prince Harry's appetite and compare the original lyrics of the 1891 sea shanty What Shall We Do With A Drunken Sailor and the new politically-correct version that has probably been made up by the tabloids. Also, Richard's gearbox has broken and he's pretty circumspect about the amount it's going to cost him to get it fixed, even though he has yet to be made redundant. Still, look at the cute photos of kittens from the Daily Mail.
Next week, get the bunting ready, as it will be our One Year Anniversary Podcast. It should be the best ever.
The third series of Not Going Out begins tonight at 9.30 on BBC1. For the record, again, my involvement with this series was reduced from series one (for which I co-wrote all six episodes, in a room with Lee) and series two (for which I co-wrote five episodes, partly in a shed with Lee, but mostly on my own, in a room), due to other work commitments and boring stuff. As a result, I only worked on one of the seven episodes, although I have to say, I'm as proud of this one - which goes out next week, entitled Winner - as any of the others I've co-written with Lee. We have a couple of new writers this time around, but the premise and cast are the same as series two, and Lee's hand is always on the tiller in terms of quality control. There's a really good interview with Lee on the British Sitcom Guide site. I've seen scripts and read-throughs but didn't get to the recordings, so I'll be sitting down to watch tonight's opening episode - which has a very rude premise - just like anybody else. I hope you like it. I'm still incredibly proud to have a hand in it and in many ways can't believe we're at series three. (Series two is out on DVD on February 2, on which I was invited to take part in one of the audio commentaries with Lee and Tim.)
I don't mean to namedrop but Mark Thomas* recommended this book to me, backstage at the Bloomsbury before Christmas. He said it was the definitive book on the current global financial crisis, in that it's the definitive book about the previous one, in 1929. The Great Crash 1929 by JK Galbraith proved a very quick first book of 2009. I couldn't stop reading it. It's not that long anyway, and Galbraith's style is such a breeze, especially for an economist. The parallels between the original crash and our current one are astounding. Both booms were built on unregulated banking and speculation, and both busts came about because nobody in the financial services sector wanted it to stop and nobody wanted to be the spoilsport who stopped it, so they kept on going, treating the stock market like a roulette wheel and sitting back and counting their money while investment firms spread their investments among another layer of investment firms until nobody actually had any real money in their hands any more, it was all hypothetical and the whole edifice came crumbling down.
Either today's brokers and money-jugglers have never read this book (if they have time to read a book when there's all that shouting and looking at screens to be done), or, like the speculators and get-rich-quick schemers of 1929, they have their fingers in their ears and are going la-la-la-la. Galbraith's book was written in 1954, and he was amazed then that so little had changed, when the Crash was only 25 years in the past. I wonder what he'd have made of today's little difficulties?
* Mark's new series of interviews on matters fiscal, It's The Economy, Stupid, are available as podcasts here and from iTunes.
The Egyptian went straight over and crashed to the cobbles, 40 feet below, where he gurgled twice and died.
Next week, I'm off to Cardiff to record an audiobook of Where Did It All Go Right? This is a long-held dream, and it's coming true thanks to Go Faster Stripe, who, as you may know, put out comedy DVDs of quality and distinction, including those of Mr Richard Herring, something he is too shy to point out every week on our podcast. So, for research and to improve my mind, I decided to download an audiobook and listen to it, on my iPod, which is quite the new thing, I understand. I guess these two things were made for each other: a book you listen to, and a handy device you can listen to stuff on. Because I would never think to pick up and buy the papery version of a Frederick Forsyth novel - not out of snobbery, just because I don't read many novels and have way too many pending non-fiction books piled by my bedside - I opted for The Afghan(Abridged), read by Robert Powell. It's four hours and 31 minutes long. (The Unabridged is 10 hours and 43 minutes.) I have started listening to it.
I suspect Forsyth's clear, clipped prose suits the medium particularly well, and Powell is a skilled enough actor to drop into accents without them sounding too comedic, such as Irish, Pakistani and American (it's a tale of international terrorism and intrigue that moves seamlessly from Hampshire to Peshawar within the first ten minutes).
Anyway, I know I'm not Frederick Forsyth, or Robert Powell, and nor is my book The Afghan, or an exciting spy novel, but it will be an interesting experiment to have a go at one of my own slim volumes of provincial solipsism. I'm certainly looking forward to trying. Anybody else into audiobooks? (I note from the iTunes audiobook charts that I think all of the Top 10 are something to do with Ricky Gervais - is there any corner of the market he does not dominate?)
A fantastic bird-spot yesterday afternoon: the fierce and majestic Sparrowhawk. I glanced out of the kitchen window and saw it, skulking, head down, on a fence post, eyeing up next door's garden. I wasn't 100% sure what it was at first - not being a hardened birder-from-birth like my friend and birding mentor Dave Keech - but I noted its slate-grey body, lighter underparts and hawkish beak. When it took off, its wingspan was impressive. I leapt on my bird books for identification and there it was. (I emailed Dave and he confirmed it. We are like Caine and the all-wise Master Po off of Kung Fu in the 70s.)
More details on this gorgeous killer of smaller birds (hey - it's his gig) at the RSPB website. I've seen one once before, but not in the town.
By the way, I prefer to illustrate with exquisite RSPB drawings, as if I borrowed a photo from Google Images of a Sparrowhawk your immediate assumption would be that I had photographed it, when in fact, I couldn't even get to my binoculars quick enough to give my Sparrowhawk a proper look, let alone a camera. And tripod.
Bought this on spec, not having heard White Lies before, but suspecting it might be my cup of tea. It plays in my CD player and it plays in the car and it plays in my nephew's laptop, but it does not play in my laptop. Is it copy-protected? Does anybody know? Is it a Mac thing? (I bought it from the competitively-priced HMV website, which is becoming my default online music-purchasing destination, but the fault does not seem to lie with the object itself, rather with the vagaries of music-delivery systems.)
Anybody else get involved with the annual RSPB Garden Birdwatch? It's a whole lot of inexpensive fun, and they publicised it well this year. It involves making a note of all the bird species you see in a chosen hour over this designated weekend - if you see more than one of any species at any one time, you note that down too, creating a running total. (Clearly, you can't count each blue tit you see in an hour, as it could be the same one, but if you see two at a time, you put down two. It's tremendously exciting.) Then, when the hour's up - no cheating! - you fill in the boxes, submit your findings and the RSPB have an instant survey from all across the country and can draw up a new hit parade of birds, down which the sparrow will continue to mysteriously plummet. I was really hoping a recent but regular visitor to my bird feeders would make an appearance, and he did: the charming blackcap, who comes under "scarcer birds" in the RSPB form. That made me very proud.
I was telling Michael Ball all about Birdwatch when I went in to appear on his Radio 2 programme at brunchtime. He couldn't have been less interested. I still think they should give him a damehood.
Well, alright, the first album of 2009 to really tickle me. It's Walking On A Dream by Empire Of The Sun, who are Luke Steele from The Sleepy Jackson (whose first album, the Australian Recording Industry Association award-winning Lovers, I enjoyed very much in 2003 - Good Dancers a 6 Music staple ie. we playlisted the arse out of it) and someone called Nick Littlemore, a fellow Australian of whom I've never heard but is apparently in a dance duo called Pnau. Anyway, it's a gorgeous mix of soaring vocals, every sound you can make on a guitar and a brilliantly relentless, crunching electronic beat, a bit like Stars On 45. I'm getting Beach Boys ... Fleetwood Mac ... Supertramp ... Air ... I'm getting on with writing my review of it for Word. It's released on 23 February. The single is on YouTube - but I warn you, they're not pretty!
Incidentally, Steele - a lovely, gentle, thoughtful, genuine guy, if decidely odd - came onto my 6 Music show and he had the hardest handshake I have ever experience in all my 21 years of shaking rock stars' hands. I will never forget it. It still hurts.
Ha-ha, another unflattering screengrab! It can now be revealed that I have been working on three exclusive films for Bafta to help flag up the forthcoming Orange British Academy Film Awards. Entitled the Essential Guides, these little featurettes assess the nominees and look behind the scenes of the extravaganza itself; running at 15 minutes each, the first of three is available to view at the Bafta website now and makes strategic use of my blue shirt. (Part two goes live this coming Friday, and part three - including an interview with host Jonathan Ross, which I'm doing tomorrow at the Film 2009 studio - the Friday before the ceremony. TV coverage runs on BBC3, BBC2 and BBC1, across the evening of Sunday February 8, just in case anybody tries not to watch it.) This means that I actually get to go the Baftas, for the first time ever in my glittering showbiz career; the caveat being that I'll be working, doing interviews with all the stars as they step off the red carpet and enter the foyer of the Royal Opera House, and annoying the winners the second they walk offstage. (The footage will go up on the website as quickly as we can turn it around, before the TV coverage starts.) This will be pretty nervewracking, but it's good for an old man to try something new. I may become the new Fearne Cotton.
In the 47th Collings & Herrin Podcast, subtitled Hubris, we continue to ponder the fate of the Hitler moustache [Richard having actually grown one for research into the moral implications of the once-popular facial addition - see: pic], give away the entire plot of Slumdog Millionaire, continue to humiliate ourselves over Adam and Joe, and mark both inaugurations of Barack Obama. Richard also returns to the burning issue of anarchist Christmas tree disposal and the etiquette of how to deal with a scary man with two black eyes - and he accidentally calls Andrew "Stew", which was bound to happen sooner or later. Meanwhile, Andrew tries to keep quiet and ponders his own intellectual insecurity. Oh, and Richard's got something called an iPhone.
Ah, the official photos are in. (The full range is here.) Look at these two high-fliers at last night's Radio Times Covers Party at Claridges. Despite the man on the right, the event was pretty star-spangled. I've been to a number of these on official duty over the years - it's a private bash where everyone who's been on the cover in a given year is invited to go up and collect a framed copy, thus creating a small-screen/publishing love-in and providing starry editorial for the magazine. I've even been required to go up and collect a cover twice: once for a cover story I wrote called 50 Films To Change Your Life (no, we didn't have a cover story that week), and two years ago, embarrassingly, I had to collect Daniel Craig's on his behalf, because it was to do with films, and I am the Film Editor. Graham Norton, that year's host, seemed bemused to have to announce my name and invite me to the podium to shake my hand and have his photograph taken with me, and it was awkward and horrible. Never again. No such civilian substitutes required this year, as whoever did the celebrity booking played a blinder.
In a very bald and vulgar way, I'm simply going to list all the stars who were there to collect a cover from genial host Rob Brydon: Keifer Sutherland (I know! even the professionally jaded among us were knocked about by this!), Stephen Fry, David Walliams, Ian Hislop, David Tennant, Philip Glenister, John Simm, Dawn French, Kevin Whateley, Gary Lineker, Barry Norman, Patsy Kensit, Keeley Hawes, Marshall Lancaster, Dean Andrews, Monserrat Lombard (fans of Life On Mars and Ashes To Ashes will have spotted that these are the cast of those shows), Eddie Marsan, Judy Parfitt, Emma Pierson, Georgia King (Little Dorrit), Natalie Dormer (The Tudors), Freema Agyeman, Gabby Logan, James May, Ben Daniels, Joseph Mawle (The Passion), Gregg Wallace, Jemima Roper (Lost In Austen), Olivia Hallinan (Lark Rise To Candleford), Anthony Head, the lead actor from Merlin ... I feel sure I'll remember some more, and I'll add them to my vulgar list as soon as I do.
As Rob said in his opening routine: "On this momentous day in history with the first black president of the United States being sworn in and millions watching his inauguration around the world, you're here because you had your photograph on the front of a magazine. If you didn't know what kind of person you were before, you do now."
After the prizegiving - during which, uniquely and brilliantly, Rob kept shushing the audience, who had rudely descended into low muttering very early on - I met Philip Glenister and talked to him for ages about the state of TV drama. (And don't worry, I know very well when a celebrity is looking over my shoulder, wishing they were talking to someone else, so I wasn't bothering him, I promise. He was as decent and outspoken as I knew he would be.) It was also good to chat to Barry Norman and find out what he's voted for in the Baftas - not that I would betray that confidence here. I actually didn't hang around for too long but it was a good night.
I notice, via a failed Google search for pics, that Stephen Fry was providing a running commentary on Twitter. Am I alone in thinking Twitter is surely the end of the world?
Anyway: stars. It's fun to spot them at close range. The day I stop being dazzled by famous people is the day I hand in the PRESS card in my trilby hat. I think the reason so many turn out for Radio Times is - apart from the circulation and national treasure status of the magazine - that the Covers Party requires nobody to make a speech, and they keep the paps out.
This seven-minute compilation of clips from Vision On is not only a joy for those of "a certain age", but a fitting tribute to Tony Hart, who has died, aged 83. He was as important as Rolf Harris in demystifying art for a whole generation, including me. What I loved was the way he framed a drawing or collage using a frame that had clearly been pre-glued, so that it stuck as if by magic, et voila, actual art. Made all the difference.
In the 46th Collings & Herrin Podcast, we fight off the cold of Richard's house by shouting at the tops of our voices about: how good Adam and Joe are (no, really, they are very, very good, much better than us on literally every level, you should subscribe to their podcast now, if you haven't already), how the pilot of the United Airlines flight that landed in the Hudson River should be rewarded for saving the lives of 155 people, whether or not Prince Harry is an idiot, whether it's socially acceptable to grow a Hitler moustache in this day and age [see: pictorial experiment - I think we know the answer], and how the third runway at Heathrow will actually be good for the environment. Did we mention how good Adam and Joe are?
No, nothing to do with the inauguration of Barack Obama, or the thrilling new epoch of noise and pollution signified by the popular third runway at Heathrow - I have my MacBook back from Apple. I picked it up this morning, first one through the doors of the Apple Church, sorry Store, at 9am. Not only is the problem fixed, but due to the "known issue" with the chipped casing*, I have a brand new keyboard, top case and touchpad. It's even got a transparent sticky protective layer over it, which I'm leaving on, like those people who used to leave the polythene wrapping on their sofas to keep them clean. (Nobody does that any more, do they? Just buy a new sofa.) I was hoping to take a photograph of my new keyboard using the inbuilt camera in my laptop, but simple physics has defeated me. The paranoid among you can rest easy: they didn't wipe my hard drive, or draw a moustache on the photo of my cat that I use as my desktop wallpaper, or give me someone else's laptop with child porn on it. Nor did they charge me a small fortune. In fact, they charged me nothing. Because the chipped casing is a "known issue", I have basically had my laptop pimped, for free. It's amazing how greasy the keys on my keyboard had become. They look pristine again. I'm actually typing really gingerly, which can't be a bad thing. What I'm saying is: I've been on a "journey" this week. I've learned lessons about myself. I will no longer rely on my computer to work, every day, I will asume it's about to crash at any moment, and make sure I back up every word I write, as I write it, and write out a hand-written version on a piece of paper just to be sure. I will not treat the casing as an indestructible object from the future as I cart it around from home to Library to cafeteria to coffee shop, but as a delicate, eggshell-like sculpture that requires love and care and, if needs be, protective gloves and bubble-wrap. I will exist in a state of permanent Code Orange.
By the way, even though many of you scared me half to death with your doom-mongering, I really do appreciate the response to my original cry for computer help.
I'm old enough to remember a time when, if your telly broke, a Man came round to take it away to be mended. This could take days, but the days felt like weeks. And then the Man would come back with the telly and it would work again and normal service would be resumed. (These days, of course, you'd throw the telly away and buy a new one, which would cost less than getting it repaired.) Anyway, I took my lovely MacBook into the Apple Shop in Central London today, to the Genius Bar (how the employees must love working behind that particular bar), because my "touchpad" had packed up. The cursor could be negotiated around the screen but clicking did nothing, so it was less than useless. I bought a separate mouse this morning, just so's I could work (I have a lot of work to do), and that worked for a whole morning. Then it went too. This was serious.
Anyway, it turns out it might be a problem with the casing, so the nice Lady at the Genius Bar had to check my computer in and send it to hospital to be mended - possibly by a Man, possibly by a Lady. I may be without it for 48 hours - and that's if it is indeed a casing problem. (I had been experiencing that thing MacBook users will know all about where the casing starts to fray where the laptop shuts. This is a "known fault" and thus costs nothing to have put right by the entirely fallible Apple Corporation. I am praying that's all it is.)
Anyway, I'm writing this from someone else's computer and I have to get off it now. I just thought I'd share that sense of desolation from NOT HAVING YOUR COMPUTER.
Addendum (15/01/09): As I failed to make clear in the original blog entry, I regularly back everything up to a separate portable hard drive. However, due to the nature of the problem, the work I did on a script yesterday morning and the day before became essentially locked inside my laptop as there was no way of copying it or moving it due to the death of the touchpad. This was frustrating as I can't deliver it either. I may have made this sound worse than it is in my original phrasing. The worst thing that can happen is that Apple wipe my hard drive and I lose this week's work. (Everything else I've written this week has been delivered to people by email, and will thus not be lost, it's just the script draft that's outstanding.) What I should do is back everything up, as I write it, on a portable memory stick or similar. I realise that now. There's a lot of computer users out here in the world of non-IT who don't realise how reliant we are on the simple fact of our computer working every day. I really appreciate the concern expressed in the initial flurry of comments, which had the sum effect of making me feel about as insecure as I've felt in my computing life!
Steve Jobs has now stepped down. I hope he's alright, too.
So I was all prepared for a full day's writing. I got the call at around 11am: it was BBC News (formerly News 24), asking if I could come on and talk about the Golden Globes results, on air at around 2.50pm, arrival time 2.30. Even though it meant blowing a hole in my writing day, I said yes, as it's flattering to be asked onto The News, and it's pretty easy to say about three pertinent things in two minutes to a practised BBC newsreader. Unfortunately I was in my writing-day civvies and would actually have to buy a shirt on the way to Television Centre. Not a big problem. I need a new "TV shirt" anyway, and there's a great big new shopping centre right opposite the BBC now. Ugly and sad Westfield may be, but it's bloody convenient.
Then, as if by divine providence, I got a call from Front Row, asking if I could go on and talk about ... the Golden Globes. It was to be a pre-recorded interview with Kirsty Lang and I could squeeze it in after BBC News and before I went off to a film screening (The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button), at 6pm. My writing day was in tatters but I had two unexpected paid broadcasting engagements on the same subject, in two different BBC buildings and on two different media. To be honest, I was quite happy that my day was going in a different direction; life would be intolerable if everything went to plan.
So, I put in a couple of hours' writing - tragically, not actually finishing either of the jobs I had planned to finish, largely due to spending most of the time busily researching my two Golden Globes jobs (the latter, for Front Row, involved comparing the results of the Globes with the Oscars, to see how accurate a predictor they really are - not especially being the answer). I left for West London at 1.30. I arrived at Westfield at 2.00. I found a nice blue shirt in Next and bought it. I arrived at TV Centre at 2.30. I watched the clips they had lined up. I changed into my shirt in the toilet (no, they don't have dressing rooms at BBC News), and sat in the Green Room, powdered and de-shined, to acclimatise and go through my notes. My 2.50 slot went sailing by, while George Bush did his live farewell news conference. They told me, via a chain of people younger than me in headsets, that I'd now be on at 3.28. This was fine. I didn't need to be at Radio 4 (in another part of London) until 4.30. Then David Milliband delivered a statement about Gaza in the Commons, which, again, BBC News took live.
At 3.45, they led me into the studio, miked me up and sat me on the guest chair to the right of the big news desk, next to Emily Maitlis and John Sopel, the man with the blackest hair in newscasting. The three of us sat and watched Milliband, bored, for ten minutes. I fiddled with my cufflinks and shuffled my scrap of paper with the Golden Globe winners' names on it. Then, just after 4pm, Maitlis passed on the now-inevitable news (my own personal bulletin): the Golden Globes item had been bumped. I had been bumped. I was David Duchovny on Larry Sanders. I was Bruno Kirby.
Yes, I will still get my modest appearance fee (and I have a nice new blue shirt), but the whole not-being-on took a total of two and a half hours out of my working day. It's most aggravating, never mind that it's all part of the cut and thrust of live, rolling news. Anyway, I arrived at Broadcasting House for Front Row, recorded my interview with Kirsty, and made my screening on time, having done a total of about one and a half hours' of planned writing all day and failed to eat my packed lunch (there just wasn't the time or opportunity). But hey, I'd had a crazy, rollercoaster "journey" and learnt some important lessons, and at least the second interview took place, and went out, on Radio 4, last night. It's on iPlayer, if you're interested, and it's the last item.
Benjamin Button was almost three hours long. Why would anyone make a film that long? When I got home, late, I watched The Golden Globes from the night before.
A warning: Slumdog Millionaire, the new film from Simon Beaufoy and Danny Boyle about the Mumbai kid who reaches the final stages of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire, is being heavily marketed as "the feel-good film of the decade", after a quote from the News Of The World. It swept the Golden Globes, which is great news for the British film industry - or the Indian film industry, anyway - and it's a terrific film: cleverly structured, well-acted especially by the younger actors, fast and furious. However, it is not a feel-good film.
This poster literally mis-sells it, with its bright Bollywood pinks and oranges, celebratory, romantic image and colourful tickertape shower. It looks like Bend It Like Beckham, which really was a feel-good film. This is a film about abject poverty, torture, corruption, religious violence, mutilation, child prostitution, crime, guns and the dehumanising aspects of capital growth and urban development. It is brave for being about all those things, but I wonder how many people are going to pay their money to see one film and end up seeing another. (Yes, yes, I know it's good when a "difficult" subject reaches a wider audience, but surely the filmmakers wouldn't want that to happen under false pretences?) I recommend Slumdog Millionaire, but ignore that stupid poster.
"Like all revolutionary new ideas, the subject has had to pass through three stages, which may be summed up by these reactions:
(1) 'It's crazy - don't waste my time.'
(2) 'It's possible, but it's not worth doing.'
(3) 'I always said it was a good idea.'"
Arthur C. Clarke, 1972 *
* He was talking about space exploration, but it can be applied to any revolutionary new idea. Oh, and his quote is adapted from an original thought by Shopenhauer, which itself was adapted by philosopher William James, but I think Clarke said it the best.
We're back. Collings & Herrin Podcast 45, our first in the new year, is ready for take-off - or soon will be - unlike Monarch Airlines, as you will hear in our all-new consumer advice section. Just off the banana flambe boat, Richard tries out his new, "chillaxed", non-hectoring, post-Caribbean persona and Andrew, in a New Year's Resolution, becomes a man of rational scientific thought and debunker of non-evidence-based myths. It takes us quite a while to get to the newspapers, but when we do, it's mainly the story about the UFO hitting the wind turbine that we cover in detail, and the Radio Solent scandal. Don't worry, in the end, we both return to our usual selves. Except Andrew. Pictured: the lovely Grenada chocolate Richard bought for me, and possibly made, using his own feet. It's great to be back, shouting at each other again at the tops of our lungs and not sponsored by Monarch Airlines.
I was going to tap it out on here, but if I am to occasionally buy myself a homemade flapjack at the British Library cafe, I need a bit of pocket money, so I pitched it to the Guardian and they took it. I'm sending you from one blog to another. It's my "coming out" about Smooth Radio. Read it here. So far, the comments have been anything but vitriolic, which is a change.
Help. My internet browser had a nervous breakdown this afternoon. Apropos of, seemingly, nothing, it stopped loading webpages properly. Images wouldn't load, typefaces came out in weird sizes, layout was all drunk. I use Firefox, so I consulted their Help pages and was advised to remove cookies pertaining to the culprit websites (which, by the way, was pretty much all of the ones I was bouncing between - BBC, Guardian, Blogger, Flickr ... Wikipedia was particularly odd, as the pics wouldn't load and the search bar disappeared, until I scrolled down and down and found it at the bottom, skulking - it was like being Alice in an online version of Wonderland, but without smoking opium first). I did as I was told. Hey! Some of the images reappeared. But not all. So I removed all cookies*, which scared me but I was willing to take any advice. Et voila! My browser sobered up. And all was well with the world ...
... For a few minutes. Then they started to go wonky again. Does anyone out there understand cookies? I've never really had cause to fiddle with them before, and now all of a sudden they are using up all of my valuable time with their demands. As I type this, things have calmed down again, but I'm expecting the worst.
I'm rather hoping there's something I can do. Is there? (I have recently updated Firefox, as prompted by a big box telling me to, but I don't think this is what's causing the drunkenness, as I did so after the problem started - stupidly thinking this might fix it.) * In removing all cookies, I have now had to go back and re-input all my passwords and logins, but this is a small price to pay.
Thomas's Fund, the Northampton-based charity of which I am a patron, now has its own web presence. Thanks to James Atkins of this parish, the website (which includes information, cuttings, contacts and a handy donation link) is now live. For those that don't know: the Fund, set up in 2007, raises money for music therapy in Northamptonshire, specifically for children and young people with life-limiting illnesses or disabilities that largely confine them to the home, like Thomas Smith, in whose name the charity was founded. Thomas died, aged 10, from a neurodegenerative condition in 2004.
We owe a debt of gratitude to James, whose design company website is here.
While researching Norman Cook at the Library today - ie. trawling through the internet - I happened upon this article I wrote for The Observer, Sunday 4 July 1999, about the media's fascination with asking famous people mundane questions. I reprint it here partly because it is quite prescient in places, partly because it contains a number of references which seem antique (such as Adam and Joe having their own C4 show - if only!), and partly because I can barely believe that the Observer was giving me so many words to play with at their expense in 1999. It's also very unlikely that I'd have been able to research the piece by trawling the internet at that time. I didn't even have a modem connection in 1998 and was still keeping an alphabetised cuttings library at this time. I'm not even sure if the Observer had a website? My guess is that I researched it old school! Them were the days.
Ask A Silly Question ... What's in your pockets right now? I'll tell you what's in mine. Some small change, a clean hankie, door keys, a Cartman keyring, some Fisherman's Friends and an asthma inhaler. How revealing. From the contents of my pockets, you, the pop psychologist, have ascertained that I suffer from asthma, follow South Park and have a front door. It really is astounding what you can find out about somebody from their belongings. Now, if I were famous, you'd have a scoop, a telling insight into my character, for we live in forensic times, when the scrutiny of celebrity has reached the invasive intensity of keyhole surgery. While unscrupulous tabloid journalists go through your dustbins round the back, the more resourceful detective will be at the front door, asking you straight out: what's in your fridge, what's on your mantelpiece, or - perhaps most revealing of all - what's on your record player?
Channel 4 has just launched All Back To Mine, a pally, televisual take on Desert Island Discs, in which pop celebs talk us through their record collection, selecting key tunes that theoretically shine a light into their soul, but in reality will have been hand-picked by the programme's producer to provide an 'eclectic' menu of musical clips (in the first programme, Fatboy Slim aka Norman Cook picked out one punk record, one soul record, one acid house record and so on). Though the title has been underhandedly 'adapted' from Mojo magazine's All Back To My Place (a revealing steal, since popular television is turning into one long magazine), Desert Island Discs is the template to which All Back To Mine owes its commission.
But with respect to Roy Plomley, the idea of the questionnaire as key to the soul was not new when he invented the programme. Marcel Proust famously filled in a questionnaire at a friend's birthday party in 1884. Proving himself a horribly precocious 13-year-old, to the question 'Where would you like to live?' he wrote: 'In the country of the Ideal, or rather, of my ideal.' In response to 'Who would you have liked to be?', he parried: 'Since the question does not arise, I prefer not to answer it.' Seven years later, Proust submitted to another questionnaire, sealing its respectability forever. Favourite painters: Leonardo da Vinci, Rembrandt. Favourite poets: Baudelaire, Alfred de Vigny. Favourite colour: 'Beauty lies not in colours but in their harmony.'
Desert Island Discs is, however, by far the best-established clinic specialising in 'favourite things' psychoanalysis. Pillars of society have, for 57 years, been selecting eight pieces of music, providing eight biographical jumping-off points for Plomley, Michael Parkinson and latterly Sue Lawley. While most guests are candid enough to select truthful, representative cues, some politicians shamelessly exploit a golden opportunity to paint themselves as the fully-rounded human beings they so obviously are not. In 1996, Tony Blair's list was, typically, all things to all voters: The Beatles, Debussy, Robert Johnson, Bruce Springsteen, Classic FM fave Samuel Barber and - here's the curve ball - 'Cancel Today' by obscure Latin guitar duo Ezio. (Perhaps Tony had heard them on the radio in Tuscany. Or perhaps Alastair Campbell had.)
Such calculating dishonesty exposes the 'favourite things' approach as flawed - although who can blame Tony for trying it on? When you or I are asked, in real life, to name our favourite music, we reply: 'Oh, all sorts really, a bit of anything.' It's a conversation-stopper, so the advanced social animal will instead reel off a prepared list of artists who make them sound effortlessly cool and knowledgeable ('The Beta Band, early Roy Budd, Basement Jaxx, Giant Sand, The Delfonics, Mercury Rev before they got on the cover of the NME'). When, in 1086, King William conducted the first survey of England, you can bet one bright spark tried to outwit the Domesday Book auditors by claiming to have a much cooler breed of pig than he actually had.
On Channel 4's The Adam And Joe Show, the DIY duo subverted the endlessly corruptible Desert Island Discs format by arriving at a celebrity's house by the back door and ruthlessly ransacking their actual record collection for the specific purposes of ridicule. The slot is called Vinyl Justice.
But such investigative rigour is usually deemed out of bounds in this cosy shopping-list world where every radio station worth its salt has its own pipe-and-slippers variation on Plomley's brainchild: Radio 1's My Top Ten, Radio 2's Personal Choice, Radio 3's Private Passions, Radio 4's The Tingle Factor (tunes that make the hair on the back of the neck stick up). In the Eighties, the BBC ran the TV series My Favourite Things, expanding the brief from music to, well, everything. Margaret Thatcher eulogised a hideous ceramic figurine commemorating the Falklands based on the flag-raising at Iwo Jima - and how much more human it made her seem! In these days of fragmented scheduling, celebrity's choices makes an ideal 10-minute filler, be it My Monet, Music for the Millennium, or The Nation's Favourite Comic Poem. If anyone from a TV production company is reading, My Ugliest Ceramic Ornament remains up for grabs.
What makes us so fascinated with the mundane tastes of the rich and famous? Does it bring John Redwood closer to us if we learn, as we did in one newspaper's weekly Fridge File, that his Zanussi contains Heinz Weight-Watcher's Dressing, red pesto and Waitrose jam? (His press advisers clearly think that it does.) Is it a worrying side-effect of Hello!-mania, where a star's new baby or toy boy is now only marginally more interesting to us than what make of toaster they have? A more practical answer is that there are simply too many celebrities now, and without the available quality time in which to truly get to know them, we must rely on the diagnostic shorthand of what's-your-favourite-colour?
This vapid questionnaire-culture cuts society up into small, bite-sized pieces and spoon-feeds it to us. It elevates the mundane to an unwarranted level of import (the Eighties pop singer Howard Jones keeps three Toblerones in his fridge) while reducing valuable insight to trivia (in Woman's Own's Loves And Hates, we learn that Chris Tarrant hates Americans). What's worse is that the format knows no bounds; fridge-inspection can be found in every publication from highbrow to no-brow. One broadsheet supplement invites celebrities to Show Us Your Pants.
In an effort to restore some intellectual ballast to this brain-bypassing approach to journalism, Vanity Fair has been publishing its Proust Questionnaire since 1993, a 25-question census which - in name chiefly - reminds us that the clipboard model is not a new one. Proustians on the staff of Vanity Fair, including London editor Henry Porter, thought that naming their questionnaire after him was a splendid wheeze. But forget the fancy literary back story - questionnaires are a great fallback for magazines because they can be done by fax. And publicists love them because they're quick, and if push comes to shove, they can fill them in themselves.
Whether discovering that Anne Widdecombe enjoys listening to the recorded sounds of hippos for relaxation (as we did on Desert Island Discs last week), that Joanna Trollope's greatest extravagance is 'posh soap' (the Guardian Questionnaire), or that TV's Gail Porter's number one smell is Gaultier Le Male (Passions in Now magazine), this is psychological profiling by way of the playground, and no more reliable a judge of character than the unthumbed copy of that Isaiah Berlin biography 'left out' on someone's coffee table, or the casually draped John Coltrane album atop their hi-fi. And yet, it seems, everybody's at it, pushing us, like pressurised players in a docusoap, to make ourselves sound far more exotic and interesting than we really are.
Now, in my other pocket, I have a loaded pistol and tickets to an Ezio gig
Ah, Celebrity Big Brother 2009: I've watched three episodes.
Boring, boring, boring.
I understand the celebs have been thoroughly "briefed" in order to prevent a re-run of the 2007 Shetty/Goody/Lloyd/O'Meara racism row. This time they've put in a black rapper who nobody's going to use ignorant racist epithets against, a black Jackson who pretends never to have seen Big Brother in order to protect herself, a hardened socialist to keep the peace, a disabled actor to keep them all on their guard and a gaggle of shy pop singers, TV personalities and one model who, if a goose were let into the house, would be unlikely to say "Boo!" to it. It makes you wonder: have the housemates this year actually been chosen not to be interesting?
Before Christmas, I attended the press junket for The Spirit, Frank Miller's adaptation of Will Eisner's classic 1940s comic book stories. I don't do as many junkets as I used to, so it was a pleasant enough novelty to turn up at a posh Central London hotel, find the block-booked suite of rooms with the film poster displayed on an easel outside, sign in and wait for my allotted interview slot with stars Samuel L Jackson and Scarlett Johanssen (or at least for an allotted slot, traditionally an hour or two after your allotted slot). Usual drill: help yourself to coffee and soft drinks and pastries, chat to other film journalists - in this case, a nice chap called Nick from Empire - with whom you compare waiting times with rolled eyes. ("How long have you been waiting?" "Who are you doing?" "Sam and Scarlett." "Not Eva?" "No." "I'm just doing Eva." "Ever done Sam before?" "Yeah, he's always good value" etc.) Here's the big difference: none of us had seen The Spirit. And by none of us, I mean the journalists, the PRs and the actors. The Spirit, we were informed, despite being mere weeks away from release, wasn't ready.
This lent an odd hue to the whole experience of being led into another suite for your allotted slot with Sam and Scarlett. The etiquette of junkets is this: meet star, tell star how much you love their new movie, talk to them about their new movie, all the while looking for your chance to seamlessly move off their new movie and onto their old movies. On this occasion, the conversation about The Spirit was limited to speculation. They showed us a few minutes of footage in the green room, which gave us an idea of what it would be like, but no more. Samuel L Jackson, whom I've interviewed before (for Jackie Brown ten years ago), seemed particularly agitated by the process of talking about a film nobody had seen. The upside: it was easy to get off the new movie and onto the old movies. Because at least we'd seen the old movies.
I've never experienced this before. It was rather surreal. As I was reviewing The Spirit for Radio Times and in Mark Kermode's stead on 5 Live, I assumed I'd see the film before it was released. I didn't. The film company, Lionsgate, were unable to provide a screening. Instead, just before Christmas, we received an email telling us that, "due to late delivery", a screening was not practical. So I paid my money and went to see it on Friday morning at an otherwise empty mulitplex except for three teenage boys, who sat in the back row.
I wonder what they made of it. I really liked Sin City, Frank Miller's previous outing in this graphic-novel-for-the-screen format, so would ordinarily have been looking forward to The Spirit. However, not screening a major film for the press always carries with it an eggy smell. I'm sure "late delivery" was the very reason we weren't shown the film in advance, but it puts a real pole in the spokes of all the pre-release press for The Spirit, which will have been written without the writer having seen the film they were writing about. I certainly filed my copy to Radio Times without any meaningful qualitative description of the film, and instead ran it as a more general Q&A. Guess what? The film's a dud.
I admire Miller's pioneering technical prowess - shooting actors against green screen and dropping them into digital environments in post-production, in the spirit of the 2D original - but this cannot carry a film alone. He provides some truly beautiful frames, but the action itself is hampered by two things:
1) The lack of courage and conviction in "updating" the 40s style to include mobile phones and video and computers, while putting all the women in wartime hats and using the classic 40s pulp-noir delivery (one or the other, surely?). 2) The uneven direction of the actors. Having actually spoken to Scarlett Johanssen about the process, it's clear that Miller storyboarded the action to within an inch of its life - as you'd expect from a comics master - but allowed the actors a lot of freedom, at least within the ludicrous confines of acting against a green screen and hoping for the best. This is why - perhaps understandably - Samuel L Jackson is totally off the leash, making the Octopus a composite of every other part Jackson has played, except cranked up to 11. He looks tremendous (everybody looks tremendous), but the acting is so over the top, it threatens at every stage to topple the film over into a ditch. Johanssen clearly has no idea how to play her vampish-nerd-sidekick Silken Floss and comes across as embarrassed. The brief given to Eva Mendes was obviously "Be sexy" and she pulls this off, but all around her, actors seem unsure how realistic or cartoonish to play their parts.
The result is a relentless cat and mouse plot that gathers no momentum and no empathy. Who cares what happens to any of them? This is not a given with comic book adaptations: I cared what happened to everybody in Spider-Man and Iron Man and Batman Begins. There's something about Miller's flat, drawn-in methodology that puts caring out of reach.
Oh, and it all ends in an escalating shoot-'em-up, with big guns blazing. Hardly in the "spirit" of the original, and such a lazy way of attempting to keep the teenage boys onside. Surely the acres of cleavage will have done that job.
What becomes clear in retrospect is that Sin City was as much a triumph of Robert Rodriguez - a director of actors by trade - as of Frank Miller. It was so much better than The Spirit - leaner, more impactful, content-driven, more drawn and yet more fleshy. Miller will ride again, but in adapting something sacred from 60 years ago, he's killed it with modern tricks. The likes of Persepolis and Waltz With Bashir are clear indicators that not only does flat animation work, emotionally and narratively, people will actually go and see it. Maybe his next film should dispense with actors altogether and go old-school. Living, breathing human beings are clearly outside Miller's comfort zone.
So, 26-year-old actor Matt Smith has been named as the new Doctor Who*. And he's from Northampton. Great. It used to have a certain cachet coming from Northampton. Not any more. Now there's Alan Carr. And Marc Warren. And the eleventh Doctor Who. I might start saying I'm from Duston. Bloody bandwagon jumpers.
* Actually, I think it's a bold choice. He's little known, unless you watched Party Animals, which I certainly didn't. I liked him in the episode of The Street I saw him in. And he has to be better than David Tennant!
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