Haphazard Thoughts From A Haphazard Fellow

Faithing the Facts

2008-02-08T08:03:00.000Z

I know one should never, ever begin a post like this unless one has a sudden desire to be Richard Littlejohn but, is it just me? Has anyone else been disturbed by the fact that the papers and columnists screaming most loudly for the head of the ever-otherworldly Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams following his call for the recognition of Sharia law in the UK are the same ones who normally call for hanging, flogging and shooting for littering offences?

Lies, Damned Lies and Letters to the LRB

2008-01-30T19:31:00.000Z

Until last week I had never written a letter to a publication of any kind. What made me break my duck was an article in the London Review of Books by Andrew O'Hagan entitled Living It, ostensibly reviewing Crossfire by Andy McNab and Strike Back by Chris Ryan. In fact, much of the "review" was taken up by a monumentally ill-informed and badly-researched assault on videogaming, of the kind you'd expect to see gracing The Daily Mail or being aired on Fox.

To give you a flavour, here are a couple of excerpts (LRB subscribers can find the full article here)

Five hundred million games of Halo 2 were played online, and $170 million worth of Halo 3 was sold in the first 24 hours after its release. The ‘Covenant’? The ‘Great Journey’? The ‘faithful’? The ‘Flood’? The ‘Prophets’? This sort of thing is de rigueur, adding an evangelical thrill to the marriage of technology and annihilation that the console generation loves.

and

Boys will be boys, and men will be boys too, but it’s arguable that both the skill and the ideology of the modern Western soldier have been, shall we say, sharpened by years of frenetic and dedicated service in the box bedroom. Halo is basically the story of a super-soldier who is fighting a theocratic nightmare called the Covenant, with the person at the video console, if he is skilful enough, framed as the ‘first person shooter’.

These quotes show a level of ignorance of the matter at hand normally only tolerated in the English judiciary. I was so annoyed by the whole "videogames train killers" tone of the piece, especially coming from an organ which has provided me with such genuine entertainment and stimulation over the years, that I was moved to write the following letter ...

It is perhaps appropriate that an article dealing with tales of warfare and violence should be directed against soft targets but Andrew O’Hagan’s decision to use his review of the latest books by Andy McNab and Chris Ryan to launch an assault on video games and those who play them was – like the most recent war – opportunistic and ill-informed.
Mr O’Hagan begins his attack with a series of skirmishes with what the article seems to suggest are some of the most popular video games of recent months: Halo 3, Assassin’s Creed and Eternal Forces. The first two titles will be instantly recognisable to almost anyone who plays video games. The last, summarised (I presume accurately) as “a game set in new York in which the Antichrist attempts to achieve world hegemony” will not. A brief trawl of the most popular gaming websites finds scarcely a mention of Eternal Forces. Those who do mention the game hardly do so with favour, as can be seen from the following extract from www.worthplaying.com,

“Avoid this title like the plague. Not only are you sparing yourself the discomfort of ham-fisted preaching and shoddy game mechanics, you’ll also be doing your part to ensure that this obscene mess of eschatological flotsam and apocryphal jetsam never sees a sequel”

Furthermore a check on www.metacritic.com, which aggregates review scores from across the best-known gaming magazines and websites, reveals that the game has received and average mark of 38 out of 100. This hardly bears out Mr O’Hagan’s claim that this is a game which, “has proved popular with a generation trained – one way or another – in the mental rigours of holy war”. As to Halo 3 and Assassin’s Creed, it would be hard for a fair-minded critic to deny that both have at least some artistic merit: Assassin’s Creed in particular provides genuinely fascinating evocations/recreations of Jerusalem, Acre and Damascus at the time of the Crusades and in its dealings with the questions of Knights Templar and hidden artefacts is at least superior to The Da Vinci Code (though this is, admittedly, not an especially proud boast).
Mr O’Hagan then goes on to cite research at the University of Missouri-Columbia which he suggests shows a clear link between videogaming and a tendency towards aggressive behaviour and a “lowered P300 response”, P300 being, “a way of measuring the emotional impact of what players see”. He does not mention the penultimate paragraph of the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology article in which that research was published, which states,
“One important limitation of the current findings deserves mention. Although our hypotheses (and indeed, our findings) suggest a potential mediational role for P300 amplitude in the link between video game violence exposure and aggressive behavior, specific tests for mediation did not support this idea. Thus, although these three variables are clearly significantly associated, the brain response to violent images did not account for the effect of violence exposure on aggression in this study. It will be important in future research to identify potential mediators of this effect.”

Nor is Mr O’Hagan apparently aware of the paper by Christopher J Ferguson Evidence for Publication Bias in video-game violence effects literature: a meta-analytic review, whose analysis reveals that,

“... publication bias does exist for experimental studies of aggressive behavior, as well as for non-experimental studies of aggressive behavior and aggressive thoughts. Research in other areas, including prosocial behavior and experimental studies of aggressive thoughts were less susceptible to publication bias. Moderator effects results also suggested that studies employing less standardized and reliable measures of aggression tended to produce larger effect sizes..”

Nor does he cite any of the many pieces of research suggesting positive effects for videogame users in terms of education, hand-eye co-ordination and even (in this age of multiplayer gaming) socialisation.

Mr O’Hagan then goes on to cite the now notorious case of 14-year-old Leicester boy, Stefan Pakeerah, who was murdered by his 17-year-old friend Warren Leblanc. Stefan’s MP Keith Vaz, much more so than his parents, has loudly and repeatedly linked Stefan’s tragic death to the game Manhunt. This despite the fact that, as confirmed by the Leicestershire Constabulary, the (18 certificate) game was found in Stefan’s home, not that of his killer and that, in the words of the police’s spokesman “Leicestershire Constabulary stands by its response that police investigations did not uncover any connections to the video game, the motive for the incident was robbery”.

Finally, Mr O’Hagan seems to suggest that it is videogaming that produces the kind of brutish and unthinking uniformed killing machines portrayed in books such as McNab’s and Ryan’s, archetypes whom Mr O’Hagan seems further to suggest we can readily find on the field of battle in Afghanistan and Iraq. I am unaware as to whether Mr O’Hagan has in fact spoken to many soldiers or been out to Iraq or Afghanistan to witness the fighting there. I have not done either and am thus not in a position to comment on this last point. In relation to the suggestion that it is videogaming which has led to the alleged desensitised attitudes of the modern British or American soldier (and dare I say that I suspect Mr O’Hagan would also like a suggestion of enormities such as Abu Ghraib and Fallujah to suffuse his readers’ thoughts?), I can say with some confidence that it seems to have very little support on close examination of the current evidence.

Though it may have served to spice up an article on two books, neither of which is of any particular merit, nor – I suspect – of any particular interest to readers of the LRB beyond the type exhibited by Georgian visitors to Bedlam, Mr O’Hagan’s assault on videogaming was, I regret to say, as tendentious and unreliable as the “dodgy dossier” that helped propel British troops (and McNab and Ryan’s heroes) towards Iraq.

Lastly, I should point out that I am not, nor have I ever been, a representative of the videogame industry. I am, however, a 38-year-old who has played videogames since the advent of Pong in the 1970s. Anecdotal though my evidence may be I am happy to say that I do not find that I am filled with violent urges after playing a game like Halo 3 or Assassin’s Creed, in fact such urges are far more likely to occur when the person in front of me in the concert hall chooses to unwrap their sweets in the middle of the Prokofiev.

This is what the LRB chose to publish

Andrew O’Hagan begins his attack on video games with a series of skirmishes with what he suggests are some of the most popular games of recent months: Halo 3, Assassin’s Creed and Eternal Forces (LRB, 24 January). The first two titles will be instantly recognisable to almost anyone who plays video games. The last, which he describes as ‘a game set in New York in which the Antichrist attempts to achieve world hegemony’, will not. A check on metacritic.com, which aggregates review scores from across the best-known gaming magazines and websites, reveals that Eternal Forces has received an average mark of 38 out of 100. This hardly bears out O’Hagan’s claim that the game ‘has proved popular with a generation trained – one way or another – in the mental rigours of holy war’. As for Halo 3 and Assassin’s Creed, it would be hard for a fair-minded critic to deny that both have at least some artistic merit: Assassin’s Creed in particular provides fascinating evocations of Jerusalem, Acre and Damascus at the time of the Crusades and its treatment of the Knights Templar and hidden artefacts is superior to The Da Vinci Code’s at least – though that might not be saying much.

Of course, I fully appreciate that the LRB would not be able to post my letter in full but to edit it in such a way as to ignore the main thrust of my argument (that this was an ill-researched, anti-gaming scare story) seems like a breach of trust between reader and magazine. This may be rather Pooterish of me but I hope you'll see why I'm sorely tempted to cancel my subscription.

Couldn't Resist This One

2007-01-22T21:40:00.000Z

You Are: 20% Dog, 80% Cat

You are are almost exactly like a cat.
You're intelligent, independent, and set on getting your way.
And there's no way you're going to fetch a paper for anyone!

Are You More Cat or Dog?

Sarah Jane, Ratty and Mole

2007-01-02T08:54:00.000Z

New Year's Day is usually a good time to contemplate the health of the televisual ecosystem, if only because the previous night's overindulgence can be pretty much guaranteed to leave one (a) uninclined to do anything more than slump in front of the telly and (b) in a more than usually critical mood.

This particular New Year's Day had several lowlights, beginning at midnight with the presence of Nick Knowles and Natasha Kaplinsky's makeup (whether there was an actual Natasha Kaplinsky behind all those layers of chemicals and fats was anyone's guess) and carrying on through a cycle of business-as-usual repeats including Bargain Hunt and Diagnosis Murder. Luckily for my over-toxined brain, however, there were two real treats amid all the dross.

When looking for green shoots in television land, one of the first and best places to look is children's TV. Children's TV in the UK spends most of its time being unloved and underfunded. When things are bad in telly land, children's TV is among the first things that suffers: the Beeb's kids' sitcoms become more and more overlit and heavily-laughter tracked, it's dramas get wobblier and wobblier sets. ITV confines itself to one really good show (My Parents Are Aliens) and a lot of cartoons and tries to persuade Ofcom to let it give up children's programming altogether. The best things on kids TV are put out on Channel 5 at some ungodly hour in the morning and turn out to have been made by Oliver Postgate in the 60s and 70s. This has been the picture for the last few years.

Yesterday, two signs of hope appeared. One was a magnificently produced (and largely foreign- funded) Wind in the Willows - a genuine family treat, beautifully cast (there can be no water-rattier Ratty than Mark Gatiss or more badgerly Badger than Bob Hoskins, not to mention a fine turn from Lee Ingleby as Mole and Matt Lucas having a whale of a time as Toad), fabulously directed (I suspect the art director had had a very good look at Arthur Rackham's fabulous illustrations for the book as well as the better known, but rather more twee, EH Sphepherd versions) and elegantly written. The writing deserves particular mention. In a world of dumbing down, this was clever stuff, fully acknowledging Kenneth Grahame's now (rightly) archaic class attitudes while at the same time still allowing us to judge Ratty, Mole, Badger and Toad as characters rather than mere archetypes of certain locations in the Edwardian social order. Much of the dialogue was untouched and, apart from a dodgy "if you catch my drift", the altered/new dialogue fitted in fabulously. The whole thing was genuinely funny, excellently paced and looked fantastic. You can't ask for much more.

Despite there not being much more to ask for, the BBC somehow managed to deliver it in the form of "The Sarah Jane Adventures". Now, Sarah Jane Smith is the first Dr Who assistant I can properly remember and, as such, will always have a special place in my heart but what Russell T Davies has done with her is a minor work of genius. Sarah Jane is lonely, conscious of the years passing, conscious that her relationship with one (alien) man has at the same time filled her life with wonder and cut her adrift from simple, human love, friendship and fulfilment. It's an awfully long time since children's drama has seen such a sophisticated character at its centre. The child characters who surround her - one smart, one sassy, one innocent-but-at-the-same-time superhuman - are nicely chosen (although I do quibble a bit with the fact that the sassy child is black ... the sassy child always seems to be black in any modern kids' drama/comedy, just for reasons of variety rather than political correctness it would be great to make the smart kid black and the "yeah, whatever, shattap, in your face" one white) and the decision to use the feature episode to give youth advertising and junk food culture a good kicking is more than fine with me. Again the script fizzed with good lines and was excellently paced, with just the right mix of scares and jokes and the prospect of some intriguing relationships between the characters. I can give no higher praise than to say watching such a genuinely good programme reminded me why I gave up a good job to be a writer and, with any luck, gave me the perfect New Year reminder to start putting fingers to keyboard and words to screen.

James Bond Has Returned

2006-11-26T15:33:00.000Z

Gosh, it's been a while hasn't it? So, what's moved me to take up my blogging keyboard? None other than Bond, James Bond, 007, Licenced to Kill. To be even more precise, everyone's favourite spy's return in Casino Royale.

Adopting slightly out-of-date jargon as is the fashion in film PR, Eon Productions announced some months ago that they saw Casino Royale - the first of Ian Fleming's Bond novels and the only one they had not filmed - as a chance to "reboot" the Bond franchise. Despite the untimeliness of the phraseology, the idea was a good one and the goal has been triumphantly achieved.

In Casino Royale, Bond has been dragged away from the gadget-drenched clothes-horse he always seems to resemble by the end of each Bond actor's lease on the part and taken back to the brutish - but undoubtedly magnetic - killer that Fleming originally created. Gone are the invisible Astons and remote-controlled BMWs, back is the silenced Walther PPK and the easy ruthlessness. As someone who abhors violence, I should - of course - object to this, but the secret of Bond has always been the way his veneer of sophistication, the bow tie and beluga, somehow grants one permission to enjoy the thuggery underneath.

The combination of toughness and suaveness that Bond defines and that defines Bond has, until now, only been truly epitomised by Sean Connery: Moore was too much dandy and too little deadly, Dalton saturnine enough but lacking in savoir-faire, Lazenby too Australian. Pierce Brosnan came extraordinarily close but his Bond was just that bit too ready with a quip and just that bit too slight of frame: a calculating killer-from-a-distance, rather than Fleming's "blunt instrument"; Brosnan's Bond was a Bond for the nineties - smooth and sleek. In Daniel Craig, however, Connery at last has a rival. For the first time in 30-odd years Bond is a government-appointed killer, a man who hits people hard and doesn't expect them to get up afterwards.

In this, the new Bond benefits from a better conversational style. Some critics have suggested an absence of humour but that simply shows how jaded modern critics have become. What there is is an absence of is bad puns (eg "I've always wanted Christmas in Turkey" to the ludicrously named Christmas Jones) and their replacement with some good ones (eg after losing badly to Vesper Lynd during a bout of verbal fencing, Vesper: "How was your lamb?", Bond (ruefully): "Skewered. It has my sympathies"). There is even a scene where Bond teases Vesper that she has been assigned the alias "Stephanie Broadchest" - a wonderful way to send up the Bond naming conventions, especially coming from the same writers who gave us "Xenia Onatop", who killed men by squeezing them between her thighs. There is a sense in which all those behind the new Bond are putting aside the most childish things in their toybox, rejecting teddy whilst still clinging on to Action Man.

If there is one thing that the new Bond for the noughties isn't, it is camp. He might, however, be gay. The Bond books have always had more than an element of repressed, public-school homoeroticism about them, and that certainly seems to have been in the minds of writers and director in the making of Casino Royale. For the first time since the instant before Ursula Andress emerged from the waters in Dr No, the body over which the camera lingers belongs to Bond rather than a female companion. And, it has to be said, it's a hell of a body. I'm sure I can't have been the only person in the cinema to turn round to see their partner's eyes widening as Craig emerges from the sea in his trunks and then vow that this time they really will do more exercise (though I'm not sure Ashtanga yoga will ever give me a bosom like the new model Bond's, to my regret and my other half's delight by far the largest on show in the whole movie). Throughout the movie, it is Bond's form that is fetishised - from the opening credits, as ludicrous as ever but shorn of their female silhouettes in favour of a stylised Bond, through to a naked Bond being strapped to a chair and beaten about the balls with a rope.

It is hugely to Daniel Craig's credit (and that of the writers) that he doesn't allow the musclebound looks to overshadow his character. It was with Brosnan's Bond (in particular in "The World Is Not Enough") that the writers first tried to give the character some depth, some room for doubt, here they go even further. Here there is an attempt, not overplayed, to give some explanation as to why Bond is such a bastard, as well as a hint at a better man underneath. The final minutes, in particular, do a far better job of showing a man capable of love and remorse being transformed into a heartless killer than the many, many, many hours of Star Wars I-III ever did for Darth Vader (perhaps because they were written by people who weren't stuck at an emotional age below 12).

From the chase scene after the credits, in which the man being chased demonstrates all the balletic skills of Le Parkour while Bond literally bulldozes through all in his path, Casino Royale knows exactly what it wants to do and does it. It's the best Bond in ages, better than Goldeneye, perhaps better than any Bond since Goldfinger. In fact, if David Arnold would learn to make proper use of the Dr No theme, I suspect it might well have been the best since "From Russia With Love". Go and see it.

A Wrong That Needs Righting

2006-10-10T07:22:00.000+01:00

I've been having a rather cultural week: 2 trips to see concerts from the Steve Reich "Phases" season at the Barbican and, last night, a trip to the Institute of Education in Bedford Way to see Richard Dawkins and Lalla Ward reading from Professor Dawkins's book "The God Delusion". Given that this blog has largely consisted of rants, you will be unsurprised to learn that while the Steve Reich concerts floated me off to a place of near-hypnotised wonder, the reading left me spitting blood.

I should say that I agree with much, though by no means all, the good Professor says. This is hardly surprising given that his books The Blind Watchmaker, The Selfish Gene and The Extended Phenotype did as much as many of my teachers to get me through my Oxford entrance exams. I also enjoy the relatively-high-pitched, clear, precise-voiced way in which he says it. The years that have passed since a bright, young biologist popped up on TV in the late seventies have left him with the agreeably Professor Yaffle-ish air of a senior Oxford don.

What disturbed me - just as it did when I first read it for myself last week - was the passage of his reading on the teaching of creationism to children at Emanuel College, Gateshead - one of a chain of schools set up under the Government's morally corrupt(1) City Academy scheme - and the Government's reaction to it. Mr Blair sees the teaching of creationism as part of obtaining "as diverse a school system as we properly can" - though I don't see him backing the teaching of the Satanist, Scientological or Spaghetti Monstrist theory of creation, all of which have as sound a base as the Creationist version. The school's former head teacher, Nigel McQuoid believes "to think that we just evolved from a bang, that we used to be monkeys, that seems unbelievable" ... showing the kind of sophisticated comprehension of science that we can expect from a nation whose flagship scientific television programme, Horizon, this week features a minor TV personality talking to chimps(2). His Head of Science meanwhile, I repeat, his Head of Science, believes in the absolute authority of Biblical scripture over all the findings of Newton, Einstein, Darwin, Crick & Watson (and Rosalind Franklin), Galileo and every other scientist ever to have existed :

"... we reject the notion popularised ... by Francis Bacon ... that there are 'Two Books' (ie the Book of nature and the Scriptures) which may be mined independently for truth. Rather we stand firm upon the bare proposition that God has spoken authoritatively and inerrantly in the pages of holy Scripture ... we can be sure that it is as robust a foundation as possible to lay down and build upon"

For the third time, this is the Head of Science. One can only hope that he is so distracted by the business of ensuring that none of his clothing contains both wool and linen mixed(3), killing and offering up his daily bullock(4) and selling any daughters he may have into slavery(5) to teach his distorted version of science.

What concerns me is that Sir Peter Vardy, and others like him, now have a chain of schools across the country where they can churn out child after child, trained to pass exams but also trained not to question authority save where the views of authority conflict with a 2,000-and-more-year-old document whose veracity is on a par with The Lord of the Rings or a government intelligence dossier. In essence we, the taxpayers, are being forced by our government to pay people money to tell lies to children. It is a wrong on an extraordinary scale, as egregious as anything this government has ever done. It renders Mr Blair's claim to believe in "education, education, education" utterly hollow. What he believes in is passing exams, by whatever means necessary, and hang the rest.

Should you happen to be one of the one or two people who ever stumble across this blog, I urge you to do something about this. Write to MPs, write to schools, write to newspapers, make anyone you can aware of what is a true national scandal. If the Creationists and Intelligent Designers are right about their wedge theory - and I fear they are - the time to act is most definitely now.

(1) Rich men (I don't think any women have been involved so far) put up a couple of million pounds of their own money to start up a school at which point the Government pours in far, far greater sums to get the school built and keep it running. In return for their cash these plutocrats are given the power to oversee the appointment of staff members, the implementation of the curriculum and to influence the school's whole ethos. In addition, the fact that these schools are given more funds than their Local Education Authority rivals helps them suck away bright pupils from other local schools, with the concomitant deleterious effects.
(2) I have nothing against Danny Wallace - he's written some very entertaining books and is a bright and genuinely nice person - I just don't think he should be hosting what used to be a hard science programme.
(3) Deuteronomy 22.11
(4) Exodus 29.36
(5) Exodus 21.7-8

A Satire Site

2006-08-26T21:43:00.000+01:00

Just thought I should pass this on. It covers "The obituaries you'd like to see" and, as co-author, I thoroughly approve of it ...

Their World Cup Runneth Over

2006-07-03T08:49:00.000+01:00

With only such minor distractions as the death of yet more British soldiers in Afghanistan, more plans to lock up suspected terrorists for long periods without trial and the continuing tension between Israel and the Palestinians it is hardly surprising that the British news media should spend so much of their time analysing yet another relatively early exit from the Fifa Football World Cup by the England squad. Much of this analysis has come to the same conclusion that the BBC's quartet of pundits (Lineker, Hansen, Shearer and Wright) came to in the aftermath of the match, namely that England's woeful performances throughout the World Cup should be blamed on coach Sven Goran Eriksson, while the squad themselves should be hailed as heroes after their "Churchillian" performance(*) in defending against Portugal for over an hour after the dismissal of the ever calm and reserved Wayne Rooney.

In fact, a brief analysis of the last few weeks of punditry makes it plain that, far from failing in his duties, Eriksson has delivered to English fans exactly what they wanted. Reams of paper have been expended on the need for Eriksson's squad to show "pride", to show "heart", to show "passion", to show all of those things. in fact, that managers in the lower Coca Cola divisions exhort their teams to show just before being thrashed by Premiership opposition in the FA Cup. After years of this sort of coverage it seems the coach, being a reasonably bright man, worked out that what the English require from their footballers is not a bunch of virtuosi capable of mesmerising their opponents by their sheer mastery of the footballing arts, but rather a bunch of lads willing to run up and down the pitch until they fall to the ground exhausted. And in that he delivered absolutely perfectly.

(*) interesting choice of phrase that, especially given that the performances we remember Churchill for were given in the House of Commons, several hundred miles away from the actual field of conflict, and involved nothing more enrgetic than getting up off his arse and speaking for a bit.

25 Things Not To Do Before You're 37

2006-06-25T15:36:00.001+01:00

Now, as the years begin to slip by there is at least one compensation: you do all sorts of incredibly stupid things which are magically transformed from "mistakes" into "experience" by the mere passage of time. Given that, here are 25 things that, in my experience, are to be avoided ...

Never ever swap from your usual party drink of beer to wine on the basis you'll "drink less that way and thus avoid getting embarrassingly drunk".
Never think you can hide from a Mormon - you may have turned the lights off and all be hiding among the old paint tins and broken bits of unrecognisable stuff in the cellar, but those guys are like the Terminator - they'll still find you. (In fact, send them tot he Tora Bora mountains and in no time Osama bin Laden will be (a) found and (b) be getting ready to move to Utah with his three new brides)
Never ever vote for a plausible guy with good teeth on the basis that however bad a PM he may turn out to be, at least he won't take the country to war at the first opportunity.
Never mistake a prospective partner's neuroses, insecurity and rampant attention-seeking for charm, wit or "being fun to be with".
Never think "these drugs [illegal or legal] aren't working ... I'll have some more and see if that works"
Never claim to be able to keep a secret - alcohol, lust, incompetence or the simple need to gossip will always win out in the end.
Never expect anyone else to be able to keep a secret - see (6) above.
Never leave the result of a tight election contest to a bunch of judges - especially ones chosen by former Presidents.
Never go for a very long walk in brand new shoes.
Ginger people must never hang their suntan-lotion-free arms out of a car window for the whole journey from Cairo to the Red Sea on the hottest day Egypt has seen in a decade.
Never go out with someone who won't tell their parents you're going out for more than, say, 18 months.
Never go on the fairground waltzer after more than 5 pints.
Never turn down the suggestion by three attractive female journalists you've just bumped into in the street that you accompany them to a nearby nightclub, especially when the alternative is realising what you've done halfway through that pint of water you're downing with a couple of Nurofen at home in front of Programmes For The Open University1.
Never underestimate the bloody-minded fury of an irate goose.
If you smoke, never have fewer than 10 cigarettes on you at any time; stuff pain, suffering, losing your job or - indeed - lung cancer, running out of cigarettes is the worst thing that can happen when you're a smoker.
Never become a smoker (see 15).
Never try to wedge the door of a tube train open with a bag containing a large selection of fireworks intended for a Bonfire Night party.
Never consider going out with somebody who mentions their church within 10 minutes of meeting you.
Never try the full ashtanga primary sequence while hungover.
Never lend someone a book unless (a) you don't plan to read it again or (b) you've got a spare copy.
Never place items which are both (a) fragile and (b) breakable in a precarious precision thinking, "I won't knock it over, I couldn't possibly be that clumsy".
Never give in to the overpowering desire for a late-night kebab with extra chilli-sauce if you are unprepared for the inevitable consequences next day.
Never shave before ensuring beyond all doubt that your partner hasn't borrowed it do her legs / underarms / oh-dear-lord-it-really-doesn't-bear-thinking-about.
Never go into a World Cup thinking, "Finally, this could really be Holland's year".
Never let the bastards get you down - unless they're much bigger bastards than you and they look like they might have violent tendencies, obviously.

1 Clearly this only applies in the pre-finding your life-partner phase of life.

Too Depressed To Commit Blogicide

2006-06-16T07:59:00.000+01:00

Looking back I realise it's been a long time since I last blogged anything on here. As anyone who's read my previous entries will realise, most of my bloggage has been motivated by things that get me so annoyed I have to rant about them. Recently however, I realised that I'm no longer annoyed so much as deeply, deeply depressed by the assorted idiocies that seem to be crowding out the last remnants of "enlightenment" thought in the UK, if not across the globe. So here's a list of some of the items that have reduced me to this state:

John Reid's patronising media performances
Football fanaticism becoming mandatory for every adult and child in England
Newspapers that continue to link the MMR jab to autism despite a total lack of evidence and the return of measles, mumps et al to our schools
The spread of creationism
Melanie Phillips's unquestioning self-righteousness
Russell Brand
The dumbing-down of Horizon
Justin Lee Collins
Patricia Hewitt's patronising media performances
Home Secretaries lurching ever further to the right in their quest for the support of the Sun and Daily Mail
The spittle-flecked rantings of the Daily Mail
The faux cheeky-chappie rantings of The Sun
Piers Morgan's insufferable smugness
Ann Robinson's TV career
Bendy-buses
Ministers treating their ministries as their own personal fiefdoms and/or routes to greater power rather than offices of state deserving of respect
The British Prime Minister's friendship with Silvio Berlusconi
John Humphrys's happy ignorance of all matters scientific
The way the fetishisation of the car has transformed Anglo-Saxon society into a collective of solipsists
The promotion of faith schools
The lick-spittle reportage of the trite and/or idiotic blatherings of HRH The Prince of Wales, Prince Charles
Critics who claim "Footballer's Wives" is well-written drama
JK Rowling: Enid Blyton for the Noughties
Radio 4's "The Moral Maze"
Big Brother
Being unable to get more than 3 metres away from a Tesco store
CCTV on every street corner
The confusion between assertion and justification
Belief in homoeopathic medicine as anything more than psychotherapy+placebo
Smug, middle-class types lecturing "the lower orders" on makeover TV
Parents bringing toddlers to see certificate 12 films
The American tourist whose first words at Bayeux were a dismissive "Is this the WHOLE tapestry?"
The American tourist who, on a trip to the temple of Osiris at Abydos, asked "What dumb-assed pile of rocks are we gonna see today?"
Stephen Poliakoff's vapid televisual meditations
The government's failure to insist on the closure of Guantanamo Bay's Camp X-Ray
The provisions of just about every Criminal Justice Act passed since 1990 you care to mention
Gordon Brown's pretence of socialism
The hegemony of the soap opera over modern cultural life
The "red" states of the USofA
Yorkshiremen - no, all that bluff "speak as I find" stuff isn't charming it's just rude. Also, if Yorkshire's so frickin' great, how come so many of you have moved to the South East?
Chuggers
Education as training to pass exams
Zoo, Nuts, Maxim et al being treated as anything other than soft porn
Archbishop Rowan Williams's general uselessness
Belief in the healing power of crystals
People who claim Jordan is clever
Tony Blair
Still not having a date for my Margaret Thatcher's dead party
People who think Deal or No Deal is anything other than a random numbers game
Spending half an hour blogging out a rant when I should be working

Bang, Bang The Mighty Fall

2006-02-16T17:51:00.000Z

Following the news that US Vice President Dick Cheney's 78-year-old shooting pal Harry Whittington is now on the road to recovery after being peppered by the Veep, I couldn't resist a few gags at Mr Cheney's expense ...

By Wednesday night Mr Whittington was sitting up in bed doing a little legal work … preparing to sue Mr Cheney on Friday.
It now turns out that Mr Cheney didn’t even have a valid hunting licence, although in his defence he does claim that those quail were trying to conceal weapons of mass destruction.
Mr Cheney told Fox News he was appalled to have hit his friend, especially as he was aiming for the Chinese embassy in Belgrade at the time.
Finally owning up to the shooting of a 78-year-old man on Monday morning, a White House spokesman claimed it was merely part of Mr Cheney’s plan to solve the pension deficit “one guy at a time”.
That’s the last time anyone on a hunting trip ever turns to the Vice President and says “So have you seen Brokeback Mountain?”
Pentagon officials have now insisted that Mr Cheney’s next hunting party must include Osama bin Laden.
Senators were quick to react to the news that the Vice President had shot a lawyer … immediately demanding that he be awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor [sic].
The very worst moment came for Mr Whittington came when his old pal insisted on strapping him to the roofrack, taking him home and then mounting his head on a plaque.
The White House kept the shooting secret for 18 hours. They’ve still got some way to go until they break their secret-keeping record - that’s the one that covers the President’s SAT scores.

I thank you ...

Why I Wish the Crocodiles Had Eaten the Friends

2006-01-16T11:58:00.000Z

The BBC calls it "epic" and "extraordinary"(1), the Grauniad thinks it "fabulous", everyone hails Stephen Poliakoff as one of the finest TV writers ever (conveniently forgetting such horrors as The Tribe), so why is it that watching "Friends and Crocodiles" left me fuming at an utterly empty experience wholly devoid of any real meaning? Why is it that the more I watch of Poliakoff the less I see.

All the usual Poliakoff tics and tropes were present in Friends and Crocodiles - the overcareful framing of every shot, the Greenaway-esque painterly references wholly lacking in Greenaway's off-kilter humour, the overlong shots of empty corridors. Still on that last point, I strongly suspect that with these shots, Poliakoff thinks he is using some powerful visual metaphor for the emptiness of modern society/modern relationships/modern souls, in fact he is showing an empty corridor ... at length. And don't get me started on the traditional "solitary figure, bisecting the frame as he/she stands in the rain, head slightly tilted to one side" - an image with all the subtlety of a flag-burning.

And then there's the script. I don't know whether our esteemed writer/director is aware of this but - outside of Alcoholics Anonymous meetings and Freshers Days - very few people think it appropriate to spend their time giving their whole biography to any passing stranger. In Poliakoff land, everybody has their complete "Who's Who" reference ready to trip off their tongue. Within moments of being spotted by Gatsby-esque Paul (nicely acted by Damian Lewis) walking across his land, conventional Lizzie (even better acted by Jodhi May) is announcing "I often walk across this land. I work in an Estate Agent in [names town], so I know all about you and your property. Always buying this and that". I really thought that Austin Powers's Basil Exposition character had done away this kind of thing, but presumably that kind of reference would be far too lowbrow for Mr Poliakoff. Later, at a party a character takes it upon himself to announce to Lizzie "My sister's enjoying herself. Good luck to her. She's been disabled from birth you know". At Lizzie's wedding, characters wander around telling each other things they must already know like "It is a double celebration", "Yes it is, Lizzie has just got a job at AET", "Yes, I arranged that".

In fact, the overemphatic underscore is Poliakoff's most obvious trait. Here are some samples to go with the above:

Paul - a Quixotic figure - shows Lizzie round his disorganised workroom, which is covered in designs for windmills. "Perhaps I'm Don Quixote" he muses.
That Gatsby thing: we see Paul meandering around in front of the pool beside his stately pile, dressed in a white suit as he gazes out on the assorted lotus eaters arranged about the place in suits (men) and skimpy bikinis (a selection of tall, leggy women(2)). I've never read the book and I've never seen the film but even I got the reference to The Great Gatsby, but just in case I didn't there was Poliakoff, forcing one of his characters to tell Lizzie "He really has turned into Gatsby"
The passing of time, assorted examples here: Lizzie answering a call from Paul "It's 18 months since I saw you in the street that day"; the need to flag up huge mobile phones and computers in the late 80's, pagers and AIDS deaths (with the completely gratuitous comment "Graham died ... the poet ... of AIDS") in the early 90's; comments like "they've destroyed the whole company ... in just 2 years". It's clumsy, clumsy, clumsy writing.
One of those Gatsby-style parties was prefigured by a lengthy close up on a wasp chewing at the remains of a half-nibbled sugar mouse - yet another metaphorical howitzer used to obliterate a peanut.
The Greek chorus. He's lost without his Greek chorus is our Steve, or at least he fears that we, the poor, dumb audience may be. We see a GEC-like company suffering a GEC like fall. We see it investing in the internet before the collapse We see it shafting its workforce. We see the outrage at the AGM as the company is forced to 'fess up. We get the message. Yet still Poliakoff has to ram the point home, setting three figures up on a balcony to look down and solemnly intone "It is amazing what they have done", "A great company destroyed in two years", "How can clever people be so stupid?", "A lot of people have lost their jobs".

Next up there's the undergraduate-essay pretension, exemplified in characters like the (Amazonian, natch) women who accompany Paul through the first two-thirds of the film. There's the character with Aspergers Syndrome(3) given, in his simplicity, to a deeper understanding than all about him, thus endowing banal statements such as "He is the minister, he must make the first speech" with some mysterious significance. And I still haven't mentioned the academic working on a book he seems doomed never to finish or the disabled woman who become's Paul's co-lover in a menages-a-trois on an Edenic farm. With regard to the latter of these two, we are constantly reminded of her disability (see above) so it seems in some way significant to Poliakoff, but what exactly that significance is he never chooses to make clear.

And then there are the themes: the conventional figure lost amid the sybarites, the old vs the new, the mindlessness of a certain form of capitalism (in Poliakoff land capitalism is a marvellous thing, but only in the hands of mercurial booklovers given to sending exquisitely tasteful swan boats gliding across wine-dark lakes). All these are illustrated by the author gazing back over the past 30 years and using the spurious genius of hindsight to suggest that he was somehow aware of what would happen all along by ramming home again the lessons we have all been forced to learn since the 1970's. Thus Poliakoff panders to the natural small-c conservatism of the broadsheet film and TV reviewers, using attacks on allegedly culture-destroying and faceless big business to distract them while he produces yet another pretty, but ultimately empty 110 minutes.

(1) it has an excuse, it paid for the thing to be made.
(2) Poliakoff productions don't do any other sort of woman. Women under five foot eight don't exist in Poliakoff land. Also on this point, given that the film followed a 20 year journey, I was amazed that in all those years Jodhi May's character wore only one costume that didn't show off her (admittedly fabulous) legs and that sole exception was presumably on the sole ground that it was a wedding dress.
(3) you can tell he has Asperger's syndrome because he wears the traditional costume department uniform for Asperger's: thick-rimmed glasses, stripy jumper, ill-fitting polyester blouson.

And While We're Being Political

2005-12-30T15:50:00.000Z

Just time to break off from the serious business of wading through the last remnants of the Christmas feast to point out that Craig Murray, our former ambassador to the happy and carefree democracy that is (if you believe Messrs Bush, Blair et al) Uzbekistan, has brought his ongoing dispute with his former employers to the blogosphere by publishing evidence that the UK government has indeed relied on evidence extracted by torture in its prosecution of the laughably mistitled war on terror. Mmm-mm we love the smell of waterboarding in the morning, it smells like being embroiled in an unending conflict with an undefeatable foe, fought for unclear reasons by reprehensible means.

The Iron Foot In The Velvet Boot

2005-11-08T10:30:00.000Z

If there were any doubts that this is one of the most scoundrelly governments we have seen they have been thoroughly assuaged by the current attempts to force a power to detain alleged terrorist suspects - without charge and without evidence - for up to 90 days, the same time served as for a 6 month prison sentence.

Initially, Home Secretary Charles Clarke - a man whose majestic girth doubtless contributes to the fact that his political turning circle is rivalled for elegance only by a supertanker - was keen to demonstrate his bona fides, seeking "cross-party consensus" on a matter of national security with which it would be inappropriate to play partisan politics. Of course, it now appears that he, not to mention Prime Minister Blair, only wanted consensus inasmuch as it meant total agreement to all his demands. When such "consensus" failed to materialise, when even the man previously considered the nation's most right-wing Home Secretary yet, Michael Howard, refused to agree, things got nasty.

With resentment simmering on the government backbenches, culminating in the threat of a first commons defeat for Mr Blair over the issue and a humiliating climbdown by Mr Clarke, things got nasty, the government decided to play dirty. Over at The Sun, editor took Rebekah Wade has taken time out from slapping her husband(1) to adorn her front pages with images of the victims of the 7th July attacks(2) and her comment pages with wailing calls to ignore the '“Human rights” champions, woolly MPs and leftie judges' bent on pissing on the memories of the dead(3). Tony Blair himself let those ever-so-sincere tears form in the corner of his eyes as he told reporters at his monthly press conference about his meetings with the July 7th victims last week. Both Blair and Clarke repeated that the police had called for a 90 day period of imprisonment, and that the majority of the public supported them. With these twin "arguments" behind them, they plan to put matters to the vote again, hoping to make the Conservative leadership look "weak on terror".

So, what of these two arguments - (a) the emotive, June 7th, "this must never happen again" argument and (b) the "this is what the police and public want" argument. To deal with (a) is straightforward: where is the evidence that 90-day detention would have prevented the attacks on the bus and tube on the 7th July? Given that the police and security services told us following the events on 7th and 21st July that the bombers and would-be bombers were unknown to them, how could they have been detained in the first place? Argument (a) is a pure appeal to the instinct for knee-jerk action and with even Michael Howard and David Davis ... Michael Howard and David Davis for goodness' sake! ... warning that 90 day detention will serve merely to stir up resentment, shouldn't the government be wary of repeating the disaster that was internment in Northern Ireland?

And then there's argument (b), that the police and public support the 90-day period. Well, the police may have some grounds for their view(4) but since when have the public been experts on the best means of identifying and preventing terrorism? And even the police view shouldn't be conclusive: as Tony Blair himself argued back in 1996 when he opposed the renewal of the Prevention of Terrorism (Temporary Provisions) Act in 1996, something Michael Howard noted as can be seen from Hansard

Mr. Howard: Since the first Prevention of Terrorism (Temporary Provisions) Act in 1974, successive Home Secretaries have come before the House to argue the case for renewal. Not one has undertaken that task without feeling both sorrow and anger that such measures are, and continue to be, necessary to protect and defend the citizens of this country from those who are prepared to engage in acts of terror--to kill and to maim by bomb and by bullet. The sadness I feel today must be at least the equal of that felt on any such occasion over the past 20 years. This is the third year in which I have asked the House to renew the Act. On each occasion, the backdrop to the debate has been different. On the first occasion, in 1994, the IRA's campaign was in full flood. Indeed, as the House may recall, I was just winding up the debate when news reached me of the mortars that had fallen on Heathrow airport less than an hour before. I appealed then to the whole House to unite with the Government so as to send a signal to those responsible for that campaign that the House was united, that it was

"determined to face them down and to make available to the police the powers that they need to fight terrorism."--[Official Report,9 March 1994; Vol. 239, c. 335.]

To my regret, the right hon. Member for Sedgefield(Mr. Blair), who now leads the Opposition and was then his party's spokesman on home affairs, rejected that call. The Labour party voted against the Government and against the continuation of the powers in the Act.

And besides Mr Blair's volte face over the value of the police view, it's worth remembering most of the police and most of the public want hanging to be brought back (and remember they can justify their position on the ground that no-one that has ever been hanged has gone on to commit further offences, terrorist or otherwise). If we accept the (b) argument then we should also accept the return of hanging, notwithstanding the likely fates of the Birmingham Six, Guildford Four et al and the actual fates of Timothy Evans, Derek Bentley, Mahmood Hussein Mattan &c.

This "reasoning", this blind urge to do what "The Sun Says", what the police want, what the people "demand", is the same reasoning that has seen right after right abolished. Who would have thought even 15 years ago that a Labour government would see Britons photographed up to 300 times a day by CCTV cameras, facing imprisonment without charge for up to 90 days, unable to assemble for the purposes of lawful protest without the fear of police using anti-terrorist legislation to arrest them, fearful of criticising religion, afraid to state view on the Easter Uprising or the acitivities of Nelson Mandela and Umkhonto we Sizwe for fear of "glorifying terrorism". It turns out we have not sat idly by as this government has removed our basic liberties, instead we have lapped up Mr Blair's honeyed words and applauded his every step. When, in his novel "1984", George Orwell gave O'Brien a speech about the future being "a boot stamping on a human face forever", what he omitted was that the boot would be velvet, but the foot within it would be made of iron.

(1) sadly not because "Ultimate Force" is such an appalling TV show.
(2) not 7/7. The attacks on the tube were appalling but simply do not equate to the sheer horror that was 9/11 (or even, for those of you trying to resist Americanisation of your calendars 11/9)
(3) I paraphrase, but only slightly. Examples of The Sun's measured journalism can be seen here and here.
(4) though given the findings in a recent report that many of the constabulary need supervision merely to tie their own shoelaces we perhaps shouldn't put too much weight on such a view.

Fed Up

2005-10-25T11:38:00.000+01:00

The USA's President Bush(1) has decided to distract attention from the disaster that is Iraq/Katrina/Tom Delay/&c by announcing the successor to US federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan. Given that he chose a former commissioner of the International Arabian Horse Association to head up the Agency charged with responding to major emergencies and someone who'd never sat as a judge to the Supreme Court, all were relieved to find that this time he'd picked Ben Bernanke, his chief economic adviser, to succeed Mr Greenspan. Mind you, just wait until they discover is that the job of chief financial adviser to George Bush merely involves reminding the President that Dow Jones wasn't "that British guy in The Monkees".

(1) Some might say I'm a little obsessed with George Walker Bush but given that he is (dear Lord can it really be true?!) the leader of the world's sole superpower (pace the Chinese), I say my obsession is absolutely fair enough and absolutely no cause for the issuing of any kind of court order.

What in God's Name?

2005-10-07T10:42:00.000+01:00

In England, on 30th January 1649, the ultimate rejection was delivered to the notion that the nation's leaders were appointed by God and gave effect to his will, with the execution of Charles I. Across Europe, similar results had been, were being and would be achieved as much of the continent moved from the dictatorship of kings to the democratic representation of the will of the people. Perhaps the greatest flowering of this movement was seen more than 100 years after Charles's death with the Declaration of Independence followed over the next decade or so by the Articles of Confederation and the United States Constitution.

All this makes the (not altogether surprising) revelation that President Bush believes that God is speaking to him all the sadder, particularly when God is apparently not merely sanctioning but instigating war. And, given all the denials currently leaping from the White House, it's worth pointing out that this isn't the first claim of its kind: in July last yea r the President apparently told some Amish "folks" that 'I trust God speaks through me. Without that I couldn;t do my job'. That kind of thinking would have been more than familiar to Charles I. And, like many of Charles I's subjects, it appears large numbers of Americans are more than willing to support their leader in his belief. Two hundred and more years after its foundation in one of the finest displays of enlightenment thought, much of America has returned to a belief in the divine right of its rulers. And once enough people start to believe that someone is an instrument of God's will rather than merely a man, how can anyone hope to argue rationally against him?

Don't Say They Didn't Warn You

2005-09-29T10:55:00.000+01:00

In a tradition going back so far that its origins are lost along with those of well-dressing and Terry Wogan's weave, every Home Secretary introducing legislation designed to restrict the liberty of Her Majesty's subjects will spend at least 20 minutes of his(*) time appearing on the Today programme denying that the powers granted by that legislation would ever be used save in the most serious circumstances. Those attacking the new powers on the grounds that they represent yet another abrogation of our civil liberties are pooh-poohed as "loonie lefties", "civil rights nutters", "rabid libertarians", "friends of the terrorists" and the like. So, for instance, we were informed that powers under s44 of the Terrorism Act 2000, permitting police officers to stop and search persons on the grounds that those officers believed that to do so was necessary to prevent an act of terrorism, would never be used to stifle legitimate dissent. Taking it for granted that our past and previous Home Secretaries have all been men of probity (notwithstanding any involvement they may or may not have had in, say, their lover's nanny's visa applications), I can only assume that Walter Wolfgang, who was arrested under s44 after committing the outrageous offence of shouting "nonsense" at Foreign Secretary and quondam Mr Magoo impersonator Jack Straw, was a dangerous terrorist posing a threat to the very life of the nation's democracy and not, as reported in the Times, Telegraph, Guardian et al merely an 82-year-old Labour Party member. Indeed, I can only dismiss as ludicrous the idea that ill-thought-through and heavy-handed legislation, empowering even more unthinking and heavy-handed police should have been used against a man who, as a Jew, was forced to flee the paradigmatic police state that was Nazi Germany.

(*) still no female Home Sec's yet.

There's Glory For You

2005-09-16T14:30:00.000+01:00

'There's glory for you!', [said Humpty Dumpty]
`I don't know what you mean by "glory",' Alice said.
Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. `Of course you don't -- till I tell you. I meant "there's a nice knock-down argument for you!"'
`But "glory" doesn't mean "a nice knock-down argument",' Alice objected.
`When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, `it means just what I choose it to mean -- neither more nor less.'
`The question is,' said Alice, `whether you can make words mean so many different things.'
`The question is,' said Humpty Dumpty, `which is to be master -- that's all.'

"Through the Looking Glass", by Lewis Carroll. From Chapter 6, "Humpty Dumpty"

Britain's Home Secretary Charles Clarke, has been taking a leaf out of Humpty's book. His latest wheeze is to seek to imprison for up to 5 years anyone who "glorifies, exalts or celebrates" any terrorist act committed in the past 20 years. Anybody with any experience of looking at government legislation will know that the presence of three alternative words descriptive of an offence, especially when at least two of them (in this case "glorifies" and "exalts") have a rather nineteenth century air about them, is never a good sign. Indeed, it almost inevitably points to hurried legislation aimed at something which the Home Secretary and the tabloids deem to be an obvious evil but which they are unable to define with any real precision. In this case what is meant by "glorifying", "exalting", "celebrating" is anybody's guess (will party hats be required? Is an iced Victoria sponge a pre-requisite for the commission of the offence?). The real bugbear, however, is "terrorist offence". It seems that the definition of this term will be at the Home Secretary's discretion, with certain offences being "listed" as a result of which any "glorification" of them will still be an offence even after the 20 year cut off period has elapsed. Already pencilled-in on the list is the 11 September attack on New York's twin towers (potentially bad news for Harold Pinter) and already excluded from it is the Irish Easter Rising of 1916 (which will doubtless have "Dr" Ian Paisley ranting about caving in to the papists). But what happens when we get to something like the violent political resistance of the African National Congress in
the early 1960's? And will Martin McGuinness/Gerry Adams have to face arrest every time they speak of the "armed struggle" in Northern Ireland? Might a future devoutly protestant Home Secretary ban anyone from seeking to justify Guy Fawkes's actions, or a Muslim Home Secretary try to have Tony Blair jailed every time he tries to justify the war on Iraq?

Cricket, Lovely Cricket

2005-09-15T11:17:00.000+01:00

Having spent much of the week glorying in England(1)'s achievement in finally recovering the Ashes, now seems as good a time as any to deliver some fulsome praise to the game I love(2). Thanks to the revolution in the game started by the Aussies back in the 90's, cricket has become the definitive sport, compared with which anything else is mere tiddlywinks. A grand claim, you say? Well, perhaps it is but it's one I think I can justify: let's take the ingredients of sport and see how many boxes cricket can tick ...

Athleticism. For a long time this was cricket's bete noire. These days, thankfully, the pudgy slow-left-arm bowler trudging wearily up to the crease to deliver a ball at 20 mph with just a hint of turn has virtually disappeared. Today top-flight cricketers have to have more than a passing acquaintance with the gym and to favour something more than just raising pints and downing pies as a form of exercise. Watch someone like Brett Lee or Steve Harmison steaming in to bowl, or a Collingwood or Bell diving round in the field and you are witnessing a genuine display of athletic prowess.
Skill. Watch Shane Warne bowl. Nuff said. (although a quick shout here for David Gower's 215 against Australia in 1985)
Entertainment. Oh yes. No longer do tests dribble to a draw after endless days of Chris Tavare blocking, blocking and blocking. These days top sides try to knock off 400 runs in a day and bowl the opposition out in a morning. No other sport can keep an audience rapt not merely for 90 minutes or a couple of hours but for up to 5 days. No other sport has so many twists and turns, so many chances to redeem a failure or throw away a triumph: batting collapses, bowling disasters, brilliant catches, dropped dollies, brilliant run-outs, sloppy leg-byes. It's all there. And I defy anybody watching the closing moments at Edgbaston, Old Trafford or Trent Bridge to disagree.
A team game. Possibly England's strongest point over the last couple of years - all 11 players are happy to act as a unit, revelling in each other's success and supporting each other in failure. As Leicestershire CCC proved in the 90's, a good team is damn hard to beat.
An individual game. Can anything be greater than the loneliness of the long distance batsman? At its heart cricket boils down to one man standing alone against 11 others, all ready to leap on his slightest mistake as a very hard ball is hurled at him at speeds sometimes exceeding 100 mph (ta Shoaib Akhtar), talking of which ...
Danger. You might not think it but cricket is a genuinely dangerous sport: that ball is very hard and comes in very, very fast, something I can confirm having gone to a school where we had 2 pads, no box and a county Under-21 fast bowler(3).
Mind games. Oh yes, cricket has got more mind games than chess. On winning the toss should you bat or bowl first, should the batsman attack the new bowler or block for a bit, should the field be aggressive, defensive or in-out, how does the fielding side cut off a batsman's favourite shots, should the follow-on be enforced? &c &c &c ad infinitum.
The fickle finger of fate. And then of course there are the elements - rain, bad light, cloud cover offering help to the swing bowlers, a pitch with extra bounce for the seamers or offering extra help to the spinners on day 4. There are a million ways in which fate can intervene in a game of cricket, and more often than not it does.
Human frailty. Dodgy umpiring decisions, anxiety leading to fumbled catches, fear of a particular batsman/bowler, off the pitch familial worries (Thorpe, Warne et al). Yep, cricket's got frailty covered.
International conflict. England vs Oz, India vs Pakistan - if you want to see national passions come to the fore, the cricket pitch is as good a place to look as any. And I haven't even mentioned the bodyline series yet.

And besides all the above, cricket doesn't have David Beckham. I rest my case.

(1) and Wales (Simon Jones) ... not to mention Australia and South Africa courtesy of Messrs (Geraint) Jones, Andrew Strauss and Kevin "More Hair Changes Than My Sister's Girl's World circa 1977" Pietersen.
(2) that is, the game I love to watch. I should record here and now that I am utterly, appallingly awful at almost any sport you care to mention. (3) the first man to be killed playing cricket was Jasper Vinall, hit by a bat while trying to catch the ball in 1624 (thanks cricinfo)

A Tune With A View

2005-04-13T07:38:00.000+01:00

A brief one this (for once). I was fascinated to see that among the good ole boy country tunes lurking on President George Dubya Bush's iPod (apparently he listens to it during cycle workouts to pump up his heartbeat(1)) is material by fey Canadian songstress Joni Mitchell. Does he ever listen to the lyrics? And if he does, do they inspire him? Is he even now reaching for the Presidential cellphone and dialling his Deputy? "Hey, Dicky-boy, got a great new idea for the environment policy: we should pave paradise, put up a parking lot. Yeah, yeah, it's a doozie, isn'it?"

(1) well, it's so much cheaper than coke.

Better What Is Don

2005-04-10T20:42:00.000+01:00

The Sopranos is a fabulously good TV programme. Like all the best Mafia-based dramas it skilfully weaves the threads of family life - relations with mothers, children, husbands, wives - with "family" life - relations with mobsters, bruisers, victims, cops - to produce scene after scene of Wagnerian intensity(1). So it was interesting to find myself leaning forward on the edge of my seat, fearful of what might happen at any second, not while watching The Sopranos but rather a different sort of Don altogether, Friedrich Schiller's "Don Carlos". Like The Sopranos, Don Carlos is an elegant dissection of the true limits of violent power and the effect it has on those who wield it. Again, like the Sopranos, the lens through which this dissection is viewed is the family.

Though set during the reign of Phillip II of Spain (a few years prior to the time of the Armada, though that gets an anachronistic mention) like so much good drama the play begins with the stuff of soap opera(2) - a cold and unloving patriarch, a milksop son with a near-incestuous love for the father's young bride - but then does what soap opera so conspicuously fails to do by moving on to offer a critique of power and of lovelessness, whilst also offering up a call for the freedom to think and speak. In this production by Michael Grandage, the play proves to be beautifully constructed, guiding us safely over a web of deception and counter-deception, of love offered and refused, of power unused and abused, at whose centre we find, not the all-powerful and tyrannical King we had expected, but instead a lonely and uncertain monarch (brilliantly portrayed by Derek Jacobi, who deploys the good-old-fashioned Shakespearean roar with astonishing discrimination and effect) over whom looms instead the true temporal power of Phillip's time, the Church, in the form of the genuinely chilling Grand Inquisitor who believes "men - souls - are numbers - no more than that" and will see them dragged to paradise only through the Inquisition's flames. Appearing only during the play's final act (and yes, you could say that no one was expecting the Spanish Inquisition), the Cardinal not only chills the blood but also arrives at the peak of an astonishing sequence of peripeteia which leaves the audience desperately believing that the young Don (again, excellently played by Richard Coyle(3)) and his love, the Queen (the equally excellent Claire Price) will escape, even when it is sure that they are doomed. With a uniformly good cast, a lithe translation and a set of elegant simplicity this was fabulous and intelligent drama.

(1) thankfully without any Wagnerian music, anti-semitism or Idiot's Guide to Schopenhauer intellectual posturing.
(2) and for a rant about soap opera see In A Lather.
(3) previously in my good books for his delivery of the lines "It would be like a breast octopus" and "I've got the key to paradise but I've got too many legs" as Jeff in episodes of Coupling.

In A Lather

2005-04-06T09:25:00.000+01:00

Can anybody tell me when it became mandatory to like soap operas? When I was a kid it was quite acceptable for educated adults to be snotty about a programme like Coronation Street or Crossroads (especially Crossroads) and be sure of receiving either a nod of approbation or a polite enquiry as to what exactly this Crossroads programme was. These days, if you dare to suggest that something like Footballers' Wives is unmitigated trash, in which a series of ludicrous scripts wholly lacking the redeeming merit of - say - an overarching theme, well-constructed dialogue or good characterisation, is badly acted by a series of day-glo men and women apparently refugees from a nuclear incident in a tanning salon, you are dismissed as some kind of media luddite.

Today soaps are everywhere. We have graduated from a time when the only soaps were Corrie, Emmerdale and Crossroads (with Waggoner's Walk and The Archers on the radio) to a time when Corrie lords it over most weekday evenings, Emmerdale is promoted from lunch time to prime-time and both are joined by Eastenders, Family Affairs, Doctors, Neighbours, Home & Away, The Bill (long given up being a police procedural), Casualty (long given up being a medical drama), Holby City (never tried to be anything but a soap), Footballer's Wives, Hollyoaks ... the list is apparently endless (and I haven't even mentioned Pobol Y Cwm).

Everywhere you look in the TV schedules there's another set of 2-dimensional characters (nb no, having a lot happen to you does not make you 3-dimensional: look at what a character like Pauline Fowler's been through since the start of Eastenders, but she's still the same miserable harridan she always was) going through the same eternal sequence of storylines - engagement, marriage, divorce, betrayal, crime, death. Occassionally things are "spiced up" by a special storyline, but these usually relate to the kind of sexual kink which on the internet leads to "alt.sex" newsgroups but on TV leads to overexcited reviews from Mark "So, 'Wife Swap', I presume the producers were hoping they'd have sex with their new partners" Lawson. Give a stern look to any mother on a UK soap and they'll instantly go into the whole Evelyn Mulwray "My sister, my daughter" bit from Chinatown (only to be acting as if the whole thing had never happened 3 weeks later).

Today, there are plenty of apparently sensible people who claim that soap operas are the repository of some of the finest writing and acting talent that this country has ever seen. Frankly, I find it rather hard to believe. Admittedly, many very good British TV writers have gone through the soap opera mill and I have no doubt whatsoever that it is a superb apprenticeship. Surely, however, that's the point - it is only an apprenticeship. As to the actors, if they're all so marvellous how come they only seem to work successfully on soaps? In Eastenders Letitia Dean and Ross Kemp were stars, need I say more?

Soap operas are big and dumb. They lumber across our screens like dinosaurs, dominating the TV ecosystem and crushing all in their path. I have no problem with that. The thing about TV is that you can switch over or switch off, and besides there are plenty of plucky little programmes out there in the undergrowth, eking out an existence by asking viewers to put their brains into gear. What I have a problem with is not the dumbing down of television but the dumbing-down of TV criticism: dear Lord, if we're willing to hail something like Emmerdale as a dramatic pinnacle what's next up for cultural reassessment? Chucklevision?

The Dangers Of Certainty

2005-03-31T16:18:00.000+01:00

Recently I've been reading rather a lot about one of the 20th Century's most astonishing, yet apparently least well-remembered, writers: Karel Capek. I am currently adapting one of his novels for radio and felt it right to delve a little deeper into the character of someone who was, at all times, an intensely personal writer. What has struck me most intensely is his espousal of Pragmatist philosophy and the degree to which this chimes with my own beliefs.

Throughout his work, Capek repeatedly insists that whoever believes that he has found the 'one truth' that will save humanity will necessarily find himself in conflict with those who refuse to accept this 'truth', and that personal conviction - however sincerely felt - gives no one the right to feel better or more righteous than others. For the pragmatists "the practical value of true ideas is primarily derived from the practical importance of their objects to us ... 'The true' to put it very briefly, is only the expedient in the way of our thinking, just as 'the right' is only the expedient in the way of our behaving"(1). Moreover, the individual should not try to force his truth on others, save that we should all recognise as true only that which is not in conflict with sound reasoning and which is able to stand up to close scrutiny.

Whatever its epistemological merits, there is something deeply satisfying, to me at least(2), in this approach, perhaps especially because the recognition of the relativity of truth acts as a useful reminder that one cannot simply dismiss those with whom one disagrees as in some way idiotic and/or insincere and/or morally defective, which would at the very least put paid to most of the arguments voiced in Radio 4's 'The Moral Maze'(3). It has another effect as well: when we cast our opponents as idiots or monsters, any evidence of their intelligence or humanity is seen as somehow weakening our arguments against them. If, however, we recognise that they are intelligent beings holding sincere and rationally held beliefs, then it is possible to argue against them. Furthermore, in refusing to assume that our opponents are in some way our inferiors, we are reminded not to assume that we are incapable of the same mistakes. Perhaps a little pragmatic thought might prevent tabloids from publishing headlines such as "Stop The Gipsy Invasion" and "Stamp On The Camps" in the same pages so often used to attack the German people for Nazism.

(By the way, I do recognise how badly the above fits with the various rants hereinbefore but just because I'm a complete hypocrite doesn't mean I'm wrong. Come to think, it also doesn't mean I plan to stop ranting.)

(1) William James "Pragmatism: A New Name For Some Old Ways Of Thinking".
(2) See how addictive this pragmatic relativism can be?
(3) especially, it seems, arguments made by Melanie Phillips. On this subject, I caught a rather neat exchange on the programme last night - Professor Steven Rose expressed his surprise at Melanie Phillips's claim that Christianity was the foundation of Western democratic equality, she replied that equality was a fundamental of Judaeo-Christian thought. The conversation continued:
"Prof Rose: Judaism isn't about equality.
Phillips: Of course it is.
Prof Rose: For goodness sake! It has a chosen people"
Well I thought it was funny.

And While We're Being Positive

2005-02-07T08:44:00.000Z

Continuing in this new, more positive vein: last week saw the addition of a perfect comedy line to the canon, this time from Robert Popper and Peter Serafinowicz's 70's science TV spoof "Look Around You". The scene - the head of The Royal Pop and Rock Association (ROPRA) is seated behind his desk, being interviewed. In the background someone is seen knocking on the door. The head of ROPRA says "Go out" in exactly the tone of voice normally used for "come in" - viewers fall about laughing. On paper it's almost impossible to say how those two words produce their effect (in fact, if you didn't see the programme and have just read the preceding sentences you're probably wondering if I've been sprinkling those special mushrooms on my omelette again) but on screen they're hilarious. The same is probably true of 3 other lines which still make me fall around laughing just at the mere thought:

"I brought you some hard boiled eggs and nuts" - Laurel & Hardy, County Hospital.
"Good news! It's a suppository!" - Professor Farnsworth, Futurama.
"Pardon me ... my ear is full of milk" - Laurel & Hardy, Going Bye-Bye.

They may not look like it when written down, but I promise they're all works of genius.

Accentuate the Positive

2005-02-06T10:56:00.000Z

Hard though it may be to believe, some have suggested that this blog might be a little negative in tone. In fact, having read through my last few entries, I realise that statement is false: it's not hard to beleive at all. In the circumstances (not to mention the fact that, as a writer, I need to improve my karma before any critics decide to look at something I've written) I thought I should take time out from my usual carping, moaning, sneering and such like and offer up some praise. Luckily for me, I went to see Theatre de Complicite's "A Minute Too Late" at the National Theatre last weekend. It was intriguing, compelling, smartly acted, fluidly mimed(1) and elegantly directed. The cast (Jozef Houben, Simon McBurney and Marcello Magni(3)) beautifully illustrate the absurdities and embarrassments, as well as the simple humanity, of our struggles to come to terms with death. Throughout McBurney takes on the role of that great archetype the embarrassed Englishman, while Houben and Magni play everything from a chief registrar thwarted in his duties by an absent seat to his chair to the flickering flame of a gas hob, expiring in a sudden "pop" as the bereaved McBurney makes himself a lonely cup of tea. Throughout the audience's emotions are played with great skill: people almost falling off their seats one minute, as McBurney tries in vain to follow the complex rituals of a church service and ends up tying himself in knots; the next were nodding in recognition as McBurney physically shrivels at every word of his wife's prognosis. A Minute Too Late is very, very funny (eliciting genuine laughter from the audience, not the ghastly guffaws used to indicate that one has been clever enough to get the playwright's oh-so-witty joke) but that shouldn't make anyone forget that it is also very serious, really rather grown-up theatre.

(1) Ah yes, "mimed". Now I feel I should own up here and point out that mime is something that I loathe. Show me a man in a black lycra all-in-one, beret and white-painted face, pretending to be trapped in a glass box and I will show you a man who deserves to die by being forced to eat his own internal organs. Force me to sit in front of a Jacques Tati film for more than five minutes and I will try to eat my own internal organs. Complicite's work, however, falls firmly within the infinitely more respectable category of "physical theatre", with mime a means to illustrate human thought and emotion rather than an end in itself(2).
(2) In fact the least satisfying section, for me at least, of "A Minute Too Late" was a car chase in a hearse, which was almost pure mime and which, though good for several big laughs, added little or nothing by way of characterisation.
(3) who is, rather wonderfully, the voice of Pingu.

Petering Out

2004-12-31T09:07:00.000Z

The world seems to be full of Peter Cook at the moment: his biography stares out from the shelves, his face stares out from the screen in retrospectives of his life and reminiscences about Secret Policemen's Balls and, last night, his black and white doppelganger, in the form of Rhys Ifans, stared out from beneath a cloth cap in Ray Bennett's "Not Only ... But Always". This last was supposedly a teleplay about the Peter Cook-Dudley Moore partnership but turned out to be simply another piece focusing on the life of Cook.

Cook, for many, is the great genius of British comedy, the man who - with a single wave of an elegant hand - shook up the establishment (and set up The Establishment) with his excoriating satire and opened the way for the 60's to occur. All around him, we are constantly reminded, were mere pygmies: Alan Bennett a campily wistful Northerner; David Frost an irritating little git on the make; Jonathan Miller a pompously overintellectual ass; Dudley Moore a Dagenham oik who could play the piano a bit and liked shagging, and so forth.

Yet there is surely a worm in the bud of this rosy view of Cook; not his treatment of Moore, nor his treatment of women, nor even the booze and porn. The clue to the problem lies in the constant asseverations by those who bend the knee before the Cook altar that "he certainly didn't waste his talent". They protest too much. For those of us who didn't grow up in the sixties, Cook was a pale and puffy figure who stalked such heights as "Supergirl: The Movie", "Joan Rivers: Can We Talk?" and reruns of dross such as "Bedazzled". By all accounts he would regularly drop in on the offices of Private Eye to sprinkle a little magic dust over the contents, but the difficulty with using this to defend his genius is that the Eye has never been half as brilliant as those behind it think it is. Let's face it, apart from a moment of brilliance at the Secret Policeman's Ball with his parody of the Jeremy Thorpe summing up, an amusing turn on a Clive Anderson talkshow(1) and a few rambling calls as "Sven from Swiss Cottage" to a late-night phone-in, Peter Cook spent his last few years in an alcoholic haze, shuffling from his house to the Europa late-night store on Hampstead's Heath Street to grab more booze.

None of this is to deny Cook's early brilliance: he's still the man who created some of the finest sketches and monologues of all the early 60's Oxbridge set. It is to ask why we in Britain are so keen to tell and retell his story. Particularly when the British seem so keen to praise Cook while ignoring the story of Moore. Surely in any other country it's the diminutive Dud's story that would be being told and retold. Where else would they ignore the tale of a short, working class boy with a club foot who manages to overcome all these difficulties, going on to become an organ scholar at Oxbridge, an accomplished jazz pianist, half of one of the greatest British double acts and then manages, while his partner trudges the weary path into alcoholism, to turn himself into a Hollywood sex symbol? Where else would they prefer the story of a well-heeled public schoolboy who began his life on the public stage in triumph and ended it in something less interesting than failure?

(1) generally hailed by his supporters as the second coming of the comic Messiah.

The Incredulous

2004-12-30T16:07:00.000Z

So, while the Christmas season has put me in the mood to rant, let me turn my baleful gaze on"The Incredibles", the latest product of the usually excellent (not counting "Finding Nemo") Pixar Studios. I went to see the film yesterday and, as you might expect given the tone of recent entries, hated it. Amazingly, given the competition, "The Simpsons" alumnus Brad Bird has succeeded in creating one of the dullest films of the year; so much so, in fact, that I felt I could have spent my time more profitably by scanning my popcorn for kernels resembling Mother Theresa.

So how did Mr Bird manage his astonishing feat? It's certainly not the premise of the film, which is cheerfully stolen from Alan Moore's excellent "Watchmen" comic (the premise being that the government has banned superheroes from plying their trade, forcing them to live out their lives in their everyday Joe/Joanne personae). Nor can the blame be put on Pixar's animation which, while perhaps a little plainer than in some of its films, is otherwise pretty much up to the studio's usual high standards. The music (a loving 'tribute' to Connery-era Bondage) is also up to snuff, and the voice-acting is fine, if lacking in the pizzazz found in something like "Monsters Inc", "Toy Story 1 & 2" or Dreamworks' "Shrek" movies.

So what are the problems? (By the way, I should probably point out that there are a whole load of plot spoilers ahead but, as the plot's ropey, I can't be bothered) Well, number one is the decision to worship the gods of genre more unswervingly than a Texan worships his semi-automatic, particularly when the genre god being worshipped is the wrong one: Bird starts the film by setting up all these superheroes, but then uses all the genre conventions of the spy movie (baddie intent on using technology to take over the world, volcano lair, the torturing of the hero, the villain's female sidekick who suddenly balks at their mentor's utter lack of morality &c &c). Not a single convention is ever subverted in the slightest - when you see our hero dismiss the ugly kid who wants to be his sidekick, you know that kid is going to come back as the evil mastermind and - waddaya know - you're yawn right, when evil mastermind turns out to have a yawn sexy female sidekick you know she's going to come round to the goodies' side and - waddaya know - you're right again. Next there's the decision to shove in the family-relationship issues (hmm, spies with kids, now where have I seen that before ... hmmm .... perhaps ... "Spy Kids"?), with the inevitable blossoming of self-confidence in the shy yawn goth yawn teenage yawn girl ("You're more powerful than you realise ... You'll know what to do when the time comes" ... but strangely not, "By the way, have I mentioned anything to you about periods?") while the brash yawn and annoying younger yawn yawn brother learns to ... oops fell asleep there for a moment ... learns to be less annoying and brash. Then there's the lack of peril - at no point does anyone seem genuinely threatened: James Bond may be threatened by a missile lurching towards his plane, but that's because he's (just about) human, there's no way an elastic woman, a superfast boy and an invisible goth who can throw forcefields around are going to be imperilled, not even when yawn yawn yawn gothgirl is too lacking in self-yawn-confidence to use her yawn powers. And talking about a lack of peril, how can anybody think it's frightening to use as your final baddie basically the same one Mr Incredible defeated unaided somewhere in the interminable first half of the movie??!!! Please, if anyone out there can explain this to me I'd be really, really grateful. And then, of course, there's the completely idiotic stuff, like having the baddie defeated not by the Incredibles but (a) by his own robot (which seems to have taken against him for some reason best known to itself and certainly never explained in the plot), (b) by the Incredibles' baby, who yawn yawn yawn yawn yawn yawn yawn snore fart twitter turns out to have superpowers after all! and (c) his own cape (in the lamest excuse for keeping down the very expensive business of animating capes yet seen).

And that's not all folks, oh no. Then there's the politics of the thing, now this may just be me but I couldn't help but think that Mr Bird had been on Maggie Thatcher's "How To Be Me" course, the film's messages being (a) that there's no such thing as society there is only the family, (b) when everyone is super no-one is (c) you should only ever lose to people you know you could beat with your hands tied behind your back if you wanted to and (d) goth girls should learn to wear Alice bands and smile more. I half-expected a lengthy discussion on why the British were right to torpedo the General Belgrano when it was sailing away from the Falklands.

And finally there's the matter of tone. The Incredibles is not a family movie. For one thing it spends too much time making overlong jokes for the adults (see Mr Incredible working at his insurance job ... see him sharpen pencils ... see how dull his life is .. see how the, initially packed, audience is rapidly thinning out) to grip the children, for another it spends too much time pandering to the children (no blood, no sex) to grip the adults. And where was the stuff that's supposed to appeal to both groups: the funny jokes, the clever sight gags (even Mrs Incredible getting stretched in a whole series of sliding doors was too drawn out (no pun intended) to work as a joke but too jokey to let us think she might be in danger), the bits that make you - even for a second - care about and feel for the characters? If it was there I missed it, as did all those members of the audience who got bored and left halfway through, led out by their screaming kids.

No S#!t Sherlock

2004-12-27T08:47:00.000Z

I watched the BBC's latest leaden Sherlock Holmes last night, a "new and original" tale: "Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Silk Stocking". To call it woeful would be to flatter it.

The problem isn't to be found in the petty details, though there are plenty of problems there: Holmes enjoying a pipe of opium (a vice he specifically rejects in "The Man with the Twisted Lip"), his taking of heroin/cocaine during a case (a vice we are repeatedly told he only indugles in when bored), his saying "Elementary, my dear Watson" (when, as every good pub quiz member knows, he never once uses the line in the original stories), having Watson rather than Holmes make the vital imaginative leap (something clunkily set up to show Watson's understanding of human nature and Holmes's lack of it) &c.

The problem isn't the characterisation (though the characters are uni-dimensional even for a Holmes adventure, and the relationship between Holmes and Watson is reduced to that of a squabbling married couple).

The problem isn't the casting (though Rupert Everett is truly awful as Holmes: all lassitude and no energy, his voice a constant public schoolboy's monotone, which - though it is sprinkled lightly with mid-Atlantic vowel sounds - repeatedly gave me the impression he was actually investigating the theft of Tompkins Major's postal order from the prep room).

The problem isn't the decision to set the stories in the early 1900's, after Holmes and Watson have gone their separate ways (though it seems to be there not to give freedom to the writer but to allow him to show telephones! and use fingerprints! and involve King Edward VIIth! coo-er gosh!).

The problem isn't the liberal scattering of cliches: the evil identical twins, the trail of blood (unaccountably ignored by all and sundry for 15 minutes), having our detective arrange matters so that victim and criminal will confront each other in the police station ( a favourite of "CSI: Miami" which at least has the excuse of having to produce twenty-plus shows a year and not just a one-off special), or the detective seeking to distract the criminal by revealing their dark side ("I understand too, it's an addiction" - oh piss off while I yawn myself to death) et al.

The problem isn't even the fact that, due presumably to total failure of dramatic faculties, the writer can't even be bothered to be consistent: at the beginning of the "drama" Holmes can spot Watson despite the fact that he's walking 50 yards behind him through a smog-ridden and filthy alleyway near the Limehouse docks filled with as many extras as the budget will allow, at the end he's unable to tell when a murderous slightly-less-evil twin is galumphing around a foot to his rear.

No, this alleged drama has one overriding problem: the plot is a substandard police procedural of the type normally knocked out for minor TV channels as pale imitations of "Prime Suspect" with a dash of "Cracker"-style cod psychology and sexual dysfunction (clumsily introduced via Watson's "feisty" American fiancee (all American fiancees are feisty, it's the law). The programme has nothing to do with Holmes - like James Bond a cartoon superhero without the cartoons - at all, and everything to do with a writer needing to use a name to get his flimsy idea commissioned or, perhaps, the usual crew of anencephalic BBC commissioners leaping at the 'imagine Sherlock Holmes meets Jane Tennyson" pitch.

The whole team behind this have robbed me of a couple of hours of my life. If they'd wanted to show an averagely-entertaining detective drama they could have put on an old episode of Bergerac. If they'd wanted to annoy Holmes fanatics they could just have dropped their trousers outside 221B Baker Street and crapped on the pavement. If they wanted to annoy anyone who could give a toss about decent telly... well, if that's what they had in mind they've found a pretty good method.

The programme was expensively shot, expensively made and cheaply thought out. British TV doesn't get much more depressing.

A State of Decay?

2004-11-29T15:32:00.000Z

I have a terrible confession to make: I have a problem with Half-Life 2. It's the same problem I have with Citizen Kane, or rather it's the same as one of the problems I have with Citizen Kane. You see, back when Orson Welles came to make Kane back in 1941 he was reckoned to be at the very height of his powers: fresh from having terrified the whole of America with his radio-adaptation of War of the Worlds, he'd been offered a 3 picture deal by RKO and, essentially, told he could do pretty much what he wanted. So he did.

They say power tends to corrupt, and that seems to have been equally true for Orson Welles as for his creation, Charles Foster Kane. Supplied with "the biggest train set a boy ever had" to play with, Welles decided to play with every last bit of it: he decided to shoot every scene he possibly could in his newly-discovered "deep-focus" when, in reality, the focus of the human eye flits from object to object; he built sets with ceilings because real rooms have ceilings, but then had to shoot from an unnaturally low angle to show his precious ceilings off. His problem was that having coming up with his new ideas he had to show them off at every possible opportunity. And that's what's happened in Half Life 2, with one crucial difference: at least Welles was wise enough not to let his new tricks mess up his plot(1).

Look at Half-Life 2 and you soon find that sandwiched between the fabulous opening levels and stunningly cinematic (if too brief) end levels are a series of nicely-realised tech demos, placed end-to-end in lieu of plot. Act II of Half-Life 2 is a series of answers to the developer's "wouldn't it be cool if?" questions: wouldn't it be cool if we had a boat?; a car?; a gravity gun?; pheromone-controlled giant bugs?; improved AI for your street-fighting buddies. Each new gimmick (apart from the omnipresent and over-powered gravity gun) appears for one level, only to be completely discarded thereafter - one boat, one car, one looooonnnng bug-assisted level, one eternal series of street-based firefights. Why can't I get the bugs to help me in the city? Why can't I drive a car through the rubble-strewn streets? Because they've been done, the cool idea has been demonstrated, now look at this cool idea instead.

It's this lack of careful plotting (in stark contrast to the original Half Life) that has left me feeling dissatisfied. Valve seem to have confused work on a script with work on dialogue (which is almost universally excellent, a couple of clunky "don't go down that corridor"s aside), with the result that the game qua game lacks any real twists. Here's a ***spoiler***-laden example: the only plot-based (if heavily signalled) "twist" in HL2 is the discovery that a character working for the resistance has actually been working for the sinister Dr Breen. Does this affect you? No. Does it have any impact on the way you play the game? No. Compare this to HL1. Midway through the journey of that first game you find yourself full up on health and armour and in ownership of just about every kind of armament known to man or monster. What is more you have just successfully seen off the scariest bunch of ninjas ever found outside Quentin Tarantino's nightmares. What happens then? You get bopped on the back of the head and thrown into a trash-compactor. Were you expecting it? No. Do you care? Oh yes. Does it affect the way the game plays? Bearing in mind you've got to earn back all those goodies you've just been enjoying toying with, most definitely. Now that's a proper plot twist for a game. And twists like that require thought and care just as much as the physics engines and the voice-casting.

So there you have it. Rant off. HL2 plays well, looks lovely, is well acted and has nice dialogue. Just a pity they forgot the plot.

(1) which was messed-up enough already.

A Proper Charlie

2004-11-18T15:07:00.000Z

Oh dear, Chazza has been at it again (see Prince 'out of touch' with education, says Clarke on Guardian Unlimited)(1). It seems that the Prince has been issuing memos railing (yet again) against the present education system. He blames "social utopianism which believes humanity can be genetically engineered to contradict the lessons of history" for producing a society in which people believe "they can become pop stars, high court judges or brilliant TV presenters or infinitely more competent heads of state without ... the necessary work or the natural ability". As if he hadn't already provided enough hostages to fortune, the Prince also asks "What is wrong with people nowadays? Why do they all seem to think they are qualified to do things far above their capabilities?". Now, I don't know about you, but I think those statements taken together are sufficient to entitle me to have a bit of a rant. So here goes ...

It's very easy for this vacillating, buffoonish adulterer to attack others for believing they can take on jobs without "the necesary work" when his own "job" requires only that someone successfully impregnated his mother. I suspect however that the Prince would classify himself as one of those who are entitled to their lofty position as a result of their "natural ability", if so I do wish he would try and provide some evidence that he possesses any ability whatsoever, whether natural or otherwise. For the avoidance of doubt, being rich, owning land, being able to fall off polo ponies and having people bow to you are not skills.

As to "thinking they are qualified to do things far above their capabilities", can there be a better example than Charles himself? The Prince is happy to lecture architects on architecture, educationists on education, scientists on science, all without any qualifications in these areas whatsoever. He has eagerly cried "O tempora, O mores!" to all and sundry whilst engaging in an adulterous affair. He lectures us all on the need to care for the planet from the comfort of his gus-gazzling Bentley. He claims to understand the needs of his nation's people while requiring servants to squeeze his toothpaste and hold his specimen jar for him. If Charles can believe there is nothing of which he is not capable however great the weight of evidence to the contrary, why can't the rest of us?

Sadly for the Prince there is one ambition, and his most fondly expressed ambition at that, which surely even he would concede is beyond him: yes, with ears like that he will never, ever, qualify as a tampon(2).

(1) Strangely enough, something similar has been going on with the Prince of Albia, if you'd like to know more why not head to Mad, Bad And Dangerous To Know?
(2) To those who say there is no place for common abuse I say that there is and that place is right here and right now.

Come Back

2004-11-13T17:46:00.000Z

Well, judging by the stories and sites springing up across the internet (such as this - rather forcefully expressed - one and this one) it's pretty clear that a large number of those in the blue bits of the US of A are still feeling somewhat traumatised after the gun-totin', sister-marryin' types in "America's heartland" voted for good-ole boy(1) George "Dubya" Bush. Overall it seems that half a nation (and the profitable half at that) has been left feeling disenfranchised and oppressed.

Now Britain has a long a noble tradition of taking in the disenfranchised and oppressed (at least it did have until the successive interventions of Tory and Labour Home Secretaries eager to curry favour with Daily Mail, Express and Sun readers). What better way to express this tradition than to invite those blue states to come back into the fold and rejoin the country of Thomas Paine, the country in whose army George Washington sought a commission, the country which helped instill so much of the spirit of the Enlightenment in the breasts of the founding fathers?

Now I am fully ready to concede that there would be many adjustments necessary for blue-staters, but I am sure that with a little willing on their parts they would soon adjust to such revolutionary ideas healthcare being free for all irrespective of wealth, football having something to do with putting foot to ball, elections being fought out by persons other than the super-rich, savoury food existing without added sugar and in portions less than sufficient to feed a regiment, and democracy involving counting the votes of everyone irrespective of race, creed or colour.

So, come on home blue staters. And if the prospect of freeing yourself from the red states isn't enough, just think how much fun you can have laughing at our bad teeth and medieval plumbing. Come on home.

(1) that being "good ole boy" in the sense of being a scion of one of the oldest and most upper-class families the USA has got.

The Horror, The Horror

2004-11-12T07:42:00.000Z

I went to a "classical" concert at the Queen Elizabeth Hall on Monday. The music itself (Britten, James McMillan, Part & Bartok) was great (although the Part & Bartok half rather paled in comparison to the Britten & McMillan), with yet another fabulous performance by Joanna McGregor, this time playing McMillan's Second Piano Concerto.

What struck me most though was the appearance of my fellow concertgoers. It is one of the great mysteries of life, but why are the vast majority of those attending classical concerts so odd-looking? Look about you at any classical venue and you could be forgiven for thinking you've stumbled onto the sound stage of Todd Browning's "Freaks". Pale skins, buck-teeth, braces, high-necked blouses, tortoiseshell glasses (always on a chain), great expanses of bushy grey hair, trousers covered in multi-coloured diagonal stripes disinterred from a 1980's kids' chat shows (along with many of the pullovers present), people who think that Laura Ashley cum Goth is a good look. Believe me, when a comparison with the surrounding mass of humanity sees me classed as a veritable Adonis, there is something terribly, terribly wrong with the world.

So, is there anyone out there who can explain why people who enjoy classical music tend to look like the bastard progeny of the school computer club and the Dungeons and Dragons society? And do they really disintegrate when their pallid skins are exposed to sunlight?

It's A Mythtery

2004-10-18T07:31:00.000+01:00

I've been playing the chart-conquering Xbox game Fable (the excellent official site is here). It looks good, the controls are well thought out, the voice acting is of a surprisingly good quality, the score is excellent and the whole thing seems to flow along quite nicely, thank you very much. So why do I get an urge to spit blood almost every time I switch it on? The answer, of course, is the woeful quality of the script. Why is it that so many game developers are willing to spend thousands on getting that lens-flare (yawn) effect just right but seem to think that chucking a few peanuts at the office monkey is more than adequate to obtain a decent script?

Fable promised much (a lot of which it admittedly failed to deliver - see Molyneux Apologises For Missing Features In Fable) but there is absolutely no hope of a player "creating their own story" when they're faced with a series of cut-scenes built on fantasy cliches so old they went out with Amadis of Gaul and such glorious verbal infelicities as someone's hopes and dreams being "crushed to ashes" (I ask you, I mean "burnt to ashes" yes, "crushed to dust" yes, but "crushed to ashes"??).

Gamers constantly bemoan the fact that their "nascent art form" is not taken seriously, unlike film or television. Surely one of the major factors behind this is that in film and TV, the scriptwriter's art is taken seriously. As long as those behind games are content to create a sandbox and then bung on a script afterwards (you know who you are Peter Molyneux) or to try and work out their fantasies of cinematic genius while boring us to death with long and convoluted cut-scenes (yes, I mean you Hideo Kojima) or are content to serve up a tossed salad of cliche dressed with kindergarten prose (just about everybody), serious critics will be right to sneer and walk away.

[NB the most obvious honourable exclusion from all this would have to be Ico - the perfect distillation of love-story, coming-of-age tale and Gormenghast - pity no-one bought it, really]

Blair Blah Blah

2004-09-28T16:12:00.000+01:00

Just managed to catch some of Tony Blair's speech to the Labour Party conference (The Guardian has the full text at Blair's conference speech). The most interesting bit was probably the point where he addressed the Iraq war. As far as I could tell he was very sorry that no WMD's had been found, presumably on the basis that this has left him looking either a fool or a liar. He went on to seek to justify the invasion of Iraq on the basis that - though the country may now be a haven for terrorists - an evil dictator has been deposed. Of course, this line of reasoning always come up against the difficulty that there are rather a lot of pretty evil dictators around the world, most of whom we in "the West" have never tried to depose (many of whom, in fact, we have tried to cosy up to). Having looked carefully at the PM's speech, and presuming always that I have understood its logic, I think I have finally found the solution for all those around the world currently being oppressed, whether in Korea, Sudan, Burma or anywhere else: all these oppressees have to do is launch terrorist attacks against the USA and we'll be in there quick as a flash (unless of course you happen to be from Saudi Arabia, in which case we'll have a go at some other country, completely unconnected with terrorism). So there you have it, don't try and get our attention by letting your rulers lock you up, attach, electrodes to your genitals or send squads round to ethnically cleanse you - simply pop on a plane to New York armed with whatever you can smuggle past your country's lax airport security checks. And just remember, you won't even have to bother with that lengthy wait to get through US immigration.

A Bit Of A Blow

2004-09-27T16:35:00.000+01:00

As I read of the fourth hurricane to hit Florida in a few short weeks (Guardian Unlimited The Guardian 1m without power as Jeanne hits Florida), I can't help but remember that Florida's governor, Jeb Bush, is the man who gifted his state to, and swung the last presidential election (with considerable assistance from the majority of the United States Supreme Court) decisively in favour of, his brother. Bearing in mind the frankly Biblical nature of the forces which have been wreaking havoc in Jeb's state, a god-fearing man (unlike myself) might be tempted to ask whether the Lord was trying to indicate his view of the election 2000 shenanigans. Of course, as I don't believe in God at all, let alone fear him, I could never think such a thing ... though if the Supreme Court gets struck by lightning, I might have to think again.

A Rum Do

2004-09-24T07:01:00.000+01:00

Talking about Iraq this week, Donald "Stuff Happens" Rumsfeld has said, "You have an election that's not quite perfect - is it better than not having an election? You bet" (See Violence 'may limit Iraqi poll'). In this respect we should, of course listen to him. After all, if you're looking for an expert on imperfect elections, a member of the Bush administration is definitely the go-to guy.

The Unspeakable In Pursuit of the Unspeakable

2004-09-17T13:53:00.000+01:00

Now, I know I shouldn't say this, but I'm afraid I was more than a little amused by the sight of the police laying into the pro-blood-sports protestors outside Parliament on Wednesday (for some of the BBC's coverage see Hunt demo complaints investigated). I think what caught me first was the look on the faces of many of the protestors as the police started whacking them: they were clearly utterly surprised that their boys in blue should decide to set upon them in this way. My interest piqued, I found myself looking on as the "tally-ho"-ing types reeled about as blows were rained down on them. I watched on as, bewildered, they staggered this way and that, with no idea of which way to turn as the coppers got to put all those hours of side-handled baton training into effect. There might even have been a quickening of my pulse at the sight of blood. It was then that it struck me, maybe these people are right - there is some pleasure to be found in seeing a baying pack set about a dumb animal ... they just picked the wrong animal: we should ditch hunting foxes and start hunting foxhunters immediately. In fact, now I think about it, it's only a pity that the police failed to send in any of their mounted divisions: then our protestors could have got a real idea of how the fox feels.

From Here To Paternity

2004-09-14T03:47:00.000+01:00

This "Father's 4 Justice" thing ( Palace balcony protester removed - ta to BBC News) is beginning to worry me. The group's aim is to highlight the plight of fathers denied access to their children, and they've tried to do so by a series of protests involving men dressed as superheroes climbing up structures including cranes, the London Eye and now Buckingham Palace. I may be missing something here, but it seems to me that it's a strange way to demonstrate your fitness to share the childcaring duties. Just imagine the access hearing:

"Judge: So Mr X, you're applying for increased access to your child are you?

Mr X: That's right, your honour.

Judge: And you believe you're a careful and responsible parent who will always put your child's interests first, do you?

Mr X: Got it in one, your Honour.

Judge: And you demonstrate this by?

Mr X: Dressing up as cartoon heroes and scaling famous buildings.

Judge: Say no more! I can't imagine how any court in the land could possibly conclude you aren't the ideal person to have a role in child-caring duties. I'd have thought climbing tall buildings dressed as a superhero is just the sort of skill that any young person should expect their parent to be able to pass on to them. I hereby award you access to your child, beginning from this Thursday.

Mr X: Sorry, your Honour, does it have to be Thursday? Only I'm supposed to be abseiling down The Angel of the North dressed as Wonder Woman."

1986 And All That

2004-09-12T07:55:00.000+01:00

Went to see Alan Bennett's The History Boys last night. I'll preface the rant by saying that I am a fan of most of his work, all the way back to Beyond the Fringe and "Is there a little bit in your life?" - a sketch my parents used to quote at every opportunity. The Madness of King George III? Great. A Question of Attribution? Excellent, subtle, gripping. Talking Heads? Triumphant uses of the monologue form. The History Boys? Bobbins.

I mean it, absolute and utter bobbins. Superbly acted bobbins - I can't think of a duff performance by a single cast member, whereas I can think of plenty of excellent ones - but bobbins nonetheless. From the moment you meet the two teachers vying for their pupils' souls - one a cynical historian who wants his charges to abandon the truth in their quest for Oxbridge (and who will become first a wheelchair-bound TV historian and then (oh surely not this cliche again) a New Labour MP), the other a genial, motorcycling pederast who uses General Studies classes to fill the boys' heads with Gracie Fields, the films of the 1950's and re-enactments in French of visits to Parisian brothels - you have the thesis of the piece and its ultimate resolution laid out before you. I am still trying to work out whether the thesis is trite or simply banal, but I know that the resolution (*spoiler alert* the offstage motorbike crash which kills our hero and leaves our villain crippled) was about as satisfying as having a Greek God winched onto the stage to resolve the conflict.

Then there are the specifics. Having gone through the state education system in the 1980's and wound up at Oxford, I was saddened by Bennett's attempted evocation of an Eighties' grammar school. The idea that there would be one teacher, let alone two or three, hungering to fill the pupils' heads with great, or at the least brilliant-sounding, thoughts in a school bearing any resemblance to the reality of those I and my peers went to is balls. And as for the pupils, in Bennettland they may swear occasionally but they also spend their time flitting between English and French, playing 40's favourites on the piano, singing hymns and quoting at length from poets like Houseman and Elliott (we're back to 40's and 50's favourites again). What I suspect Bennett has evoked is his own Grammar School. Bennett also makes one of the lead pupils almost openly gay. Nothing wrong with that, but then he makes the other boys treat him with the sort of easygoing understanding that you'd hope to find in a Hampstead Dinner Party but you'd never find among a group of schoolboys in Thatcher's Britain. Show a schoolchild someone with red hair or buck teeth and they'll soon form a pack baying for the kill, give them someone who's gay and it's The Lord of the Flies all over again.

Moving on. Frances De La Tour's character is nothing more than a Greek chorus in female form. This is something Bennett recognises, giving her a brief "I have not yet been granted an inner voice" address direct to the audience. He then seeks to make amends by giving her a lengthy (and amusing, this is Alan Bennett after all) speech about history as the teaching of centuries of masculine ineptitude, a speech which flows from the surrounding action as smooth and swift as a brick superglued to the floor.

A similar trick is attempted with the character of Rudge (the thick son of a former Cambridge scout (ie cleaner)). He is patronised freely by all the characters. and the author, throughout. Bennett seeks to get round this by giving him a single line at the plays end saying how he "refuses to be patronised", he's "had that all [his] life".

Then there are all the other questions. Why does Bennett fail to explore one boy's deep interest in religion beyond using it to give him the role of (another) Greek chorus? Why does the boy who, we are told, absorbed our hero's lessons most deeply, become (*further spoilers ahead*) a sad and lonely figure, living alone in a cottage and pretending to be a woman in internet chat rooms? Not to mention a thousand pettyfogging questions like what are league tables doing in the 1980's?

So that's the rant. The acting really is superb. The set is good. There are some very good lines, even some very good speeches. It's still bobbins though.

Well, that was easy.

2004-09-11T00:50:00.000+01:00

So, that's how you start a blog is it? Seems easy enough. Now then, let's think of something to say ... Hmm ... tell you what, I'll be back soon