Happily Stupid

"Women, Yet Again You're Not Funny"

2010-08-23T17:28:00.007+01:00

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1305345/EDINBURGH-FESTIVAL-2010-Tim-Vine-wins-best-joke-award.html

There's something rather creepy about this non-story. Firstly, the idea that repetitive digital TV channel Dave has organised a 'best and worst one-liners of the Edinburgh Fringe' contest presupposes that all stand-up comedy should be reduced into eight-second soundbites ideal for its 'Mock the Week Nightly Marathon' trails. After all, some of those on the 'best' list regularly appear on that very show. But am I alone in spotting something a little more sinister here? There are no women at all present in the top ten best list. That's dispiriting enough, although I suppose most comedy critics are male anyway (does Stephanie Merritt still bother?), and still the majority of stand-ups are too. But the worst list features four women out of ten.

Now, I'm not suggesting that the female one-liners are up to much, although in general, I like Sarah Millican in particular a great deal. But let's be frank, leaving Tim Vine and Emo Philips aside, both of whom deserve to be in better company, the male-monopolised best list is comedically threadbare, based on observations that even Michael McIntyre would eschew (wooden spoons in pubs?), and with a surfeit of Making Fun of Physical Appearance. A special vom of 'ugh' to the 'two birds, one stone' line. If one quip can sum up a Dave-sponsored suggestion that girls really should just get off the comedy stage and, it would appear, starve to death, I think that'd be it.

Stewart Lee in his new book argues that reducing everything to soundbites in stand-up does not make the material breathe. And polls like this one only recall lolly stick jokes about stereotypes. The weird, the adventurous spirit of the Edinburgh Fringe doesn't stand a chance when laddish TV and comedy critics get together, and by having their meaningless vote despatched to national newspapers, those not interested in comedy's possibilities will continue to believe that the John Bishops and Jack Whitehalls are all we need.

Fenella Fielding Purring "Snoop Doggy Dogg Cosies Up on the Sofa After the Break": 20 Years of The Word

2010-08-11T11:31:00.002+01:00

Charlie Parsons has been reminiscing in The Guardian about The Word. No, not the disappointing music monthly bathchair which reinforces more than perhaps anywhere else just how male music journalism is (it has its token two women, but otherwise...), but the annoying Channel 4 youth show of the 1990s also known as 'Club X Series 2'. Next Tuesday will be the 20th anniversary of the very first edition. As Parsons, its executive producer, points out, the first two months of it went out at 6pm on Fridays, before being shunted to late-night by C4 controller Michael Grade. What he doesn't say is that it was moved purely in order to accommodate the much-ballyhooed and legendarily unwatched thrice-weekly chat show, Tonight with Jonathan Ross.

Let's get it out of the way. I didn't like The Word, never liked it, though until BBC2 tempted me across with Larry Sanders and Fantasy Football League, I often saw it, usually as a postscript to Clive Anderson's chat show or Absolutely. When Charlie congratulates himself on helping to change television, I think I know what he means, though, and not just the many number of current TV executives who cut their teeth on it. It was the sort of programme that week in week out advertised at least three things you'd theoretically want to see on television (one band, one guest, one idea), and proceed to make events - whether noisy, squalid or 'edgy' - out of all three. In other words, even if much of what surrounded such events was dull and uninvolving, what mattered were the bizarre occasions which the production team willed you to take to work the following Monday or to the pub the next day. "Did you see the bit where... ...L7 showed their bits?/...Mark Lamarr said 'bollocks' to a homophobe?/...that dentistry graduate drank his own sick?" The Big Breakfast, a warmer and much more likeable dawn cousin born in 1992, also relied on water-cooler moments. Its star Chris Evans has, for better or worse, built a career on them.

But at least the worst you could say of the early Words was merely its defiant amateurism: Amanda de Cadenet's stupefying absence of talent, interviews on the sofa that went nowhere very very slowly and awkwardly, the phrase "You're a bit controversial, arencha?" which Terry Christian clung to like a comfort blanket. Even the likeable Katie Puckrik, perhaps the only one of its hosts to wear irony lightly, struggled. But when Paul Ross arrived as the series editor in 1992, licking his wounds after his disastrously-received mix of current affairs and satire A Stab in the Dark (featuring a very young Michael Gove as one of its presenters!), the spirit of the show grew meaner.

The Word originally devised its humiliating Hopefuls slot specifically for budding presenters who crumpled during their screen tests, in order to see how far they would go to get on TV. It did anticipate the desperation of the X-Factor auditionees, and made the viewer delighted with themselves that they're not so deluded. (Just bored.) But I could never quite escape the nagging thought that the humour behind such enterprises was a public version of a private joke between braying public school products.

Yes, I did find aspects of The Word shocking and squalid. But just as it wasn't for the Daily Mail, who consistently used the show to berate Michael Grade and Channel 4 for a perceived lack of morality, so it wasn't for me. Just as I had enjoyed Who Dares Wins... aged 14 (a show that is practically unwatchable in retrospect) because it said 'fuck', because there was nudity, because it said 'yah-boo' to everything (including jokes), so The Word was really for people too young to go out and get pissed. Indeed, its title sequence imagines a teenage boy's fantasy about a 'good night out', as seen through a TV screen.

I already knew how shit a 'good night out' could be. Luckily, I also knew that the best of my 'good nights out' would probably not be orchestrated by members of the Oxford University Union, would not feature a young woman snorkelling around in cowshit (well, not usually anyway), and wouldn't have songs by Intastella cut short by a Swatch logo. Or have them introduced by Cindy out of EastEnders.

Film Fungus

2010-08-07T00:06:00.000+01:00

There's something quite haunting about archive footage, especially the sort shot by amateur filmmakers. Yet little of what appeared in BBC2's The Great British Home Movie Roadshow was given space to breathe. Quite apart from hosts Kirsty Wark and Dan Cruikshank acting like they were presenting GMTV (ie one speaking, the other nodding with plastic empathy), the two experts on film archive burbled on through the kind of fixed grins that synchronised swimmers must wear, and no piece of film was permitted to air without overplayed pop hits of yesteryear trowelled on in the most deadening way. Fancy some fragments of the early 70s miners' strike? Sure, but only if you blast T. Rex and the Stones across them. Charles and Di opening a hospice in 1982: Does it really require Duran Duran and Yazoo? Most insulting of all was Wark expressing surprise to Spike Milligan's daughter Jane - who brought in some of her family's home movies - at how contented he looked. As if all her collection of reels should have been full of him spread-eagled across a bed in a psychiatric hospital.

Perhaps it would be unreasonable to expect the makers of the series to run clips - especially soundless ones - with no music whatsoever, but the soundtrack clashed in such a brutal way that it was like being shown Super 8 films in the foyer of Absolute Radio. Add in the patronising presentation (at one point, I think we were told what a 'wedding' was), and the same "We're going on a journey" cliche that most BBC2 documentaries must include at gunpoint, and I felt breathless, bereft and uninformed. Only when the end credits rolled did I consciously clock the similarity with I Love the 70s/80s, which a few of those responsible for this also worked on. I suppose at least we were spared Peter Kay singing the theme to Houses In Leeds Being Demolished In The Sixties, or Andrew Collins annotating Old Cars In 1978.

"One Two Three"

2010-08-06T18:21:00.000+01:00

Stewart Lee's "How I Escaped My Certain Fate: The Life and Deaths of a Stand-Up Comedian" is an unusual and highly addictive composite of transcript, footnote, memoir and polemic. I was already familiar with the three key sets that are faithfully reproduced - 'Stand-Up Comedian', '90s Comedian' and '41st Best Stand-Up'. They represent a comedian's resurgence to triumphant acclaimed performance from a point in the early to mid-noughties when he felt little but disillusionment and disappointment about the art of stand-up comedy.

I interviewed Stewart on live radio in early 2004. At the time, Jerry Springer: The Opera, a playful spoof on musical theatre he had nurtured with the composer Richard Thomas, had just transferred from the National Theatre to the West End and become a controversial hot potato in the ongoing debate about taste and decency in comedy. For the radio show, an interview where I talked far too much, Stewart brought in several records, including a live routine by Ted Chippington from 1984, and an unauthorised dance remix of "This Is My Jerry Springer Moment" which he now cheerfully dismisses as "awful".

The main thing I remember about that interview, aside from how charming, amusing and generous Lee could be even in a low-key conversation, was how he described his plans for the future. Jerry Springer: The Opera would become more notorious and blasphemous, apparently, but he clearly had no interest in devising any other musicals. "I began to wonder recently how it would be to go onstage with nothing," he told me. "And it didn't seem so bad." In other words, he was convinced more than ever that the forced observation, the knackered and hackneyed "comedy about your girlfriend" was not the only way to perform stand-up comedy. Confusing one's audience, taking the slow route, might take longer, but the effect could be far more rewarding. It was so satisfying to see him demonstrate such experiments a few months later at the warm-up shows for what became 'Stand-Up Comedian', at the Soho Theatre after that first triumphant Edinburgh Festival comeback, and finally in 2009, with his television series for BBC2, Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle.

If you care about stand-up comedy and saving it from the likes of Frankie Boyle and Russell Howard, How I Escaped My Certain Fate is a must.

The Best Sitcom of 2009

2010-08-05T09:59:00.000+01:00

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00llg8k

Just a quickie but this finally gets a terrestrial showing from tonight (Thursday 5 August) on BBC2 at 10pm.

And here's what I wrote about episode one when it first went out on BBC Four last July:

http://happilystupid.blogspot.com/2009/07/mrs-and-bristol-stool-chart.html

Bring on the second series. Posthaste.

Welcome to the Working Week

2010-08-04T11:09:00.000+01:00

hi, I’m gavin.
used to write comedy, often quite well
no time to do that now: )
dilemma – write halfhour sitcom or 40,015 ripostes?
great clip of fox anchor stammering http://ba.rz/3rx7c
@offandonagain thanks.
@leytonbellend ha.
@quimbybibble :!&^
comedy writing very difficult
requires concentration and ideas
rather than just pissing days away passively-aggressively attacking people with quite measured criticisms of my work
that was the longest sentence i’ve typed since august 08.
Help.
trapped as a team-capt in an endless cyber pilot of a point-scoring whimsical radio 4 panel game
@trilby342 can i buy that off you?
With a few hundred million partipicants
@trilby342 nought pence
While scenes from What is the Deal with Pencils and cutaways from The Yellow Drawings are prodding my retinas
@trilby342 no worries, will big you up on dvd easter egg
To the point where I slavishly ape both without even realising it
Oh look, footage of funy animation from US. contains bear dubbed with glenn beck speech http://hg.mn/9t5n
SERIOUS TWEET. Something about iraq. will pompously say fuck rather than argue properly
@irmavisits No there is not laugh track, just an audience of humans laughing at nothing! WIN! now piss off
@woman what are you like, honestly?
@woman no honestly, what ARE you like? have to write woman character.
@woman so far, she owns 3000 shoes and shouts loads.
@woman also periods
could you all write haaaa after everything i write?

Some of the 200 Things That Are Wrong With the New Scouting For Girls Single

2010-08-02T10:39:00.000+01:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O0mQ0MvyP-c&feature=avmsc2

1. It's called "Famous", and has an oft-repeated refrain of "Everybody Wants to Be on TV", which doubles as the title of their undeservedly existing second LP. But everybody does not want to be on TV. I, to take a handy example, do not want to be on TV. Nor does my mother, or my girlfriend, or my brother (although he has been), or - I suspect - the immediate and extended families of murder victims. Or many of the immediate and extended families of those accused of murder.

2. The chorus bit of it rips off Daft Punk's "One More Time" quite blatantly.

3. Lyric sample: "But I'm young, and I'm pretty and that's all you need..." Roy, you are nearly thirty.

4. Actually, the chorus bit of it also rips off the tune of Toploader's "Dancing in the Moonlight": the only Toploader song anyone can remember (willingly or no), and a song that Toploader didn't even write.

5. Lyric sample #2: "Everybody wants to be like James Dean". Yeah, dead in a car crash at 24. (The group thinks this line sufficiently clever to be repeated about 30 seconds later, just in case the listener may have misheard. I have a feeling that they may not have seen Giant. I bet they did see a cheap poster of him in the nearly-bust Athena when they were about 12, though.)

6. It manages to confront the concept of fame with even less elegance and insight than Bros managed in 1987 with the already-empty "When Will I Be Famous?". Matt and Luke - who admittedly didn't pen their misguided dream of fame themselves - made unlistenable records, ones that made you bite your lip in a spell of concentrated and pained endurance. But their biggest sin was probably youthful, impulsive naivety. Had anyone explained to them what this thing called fame might chuck at them, how much hatred and mirth they'd unleash, how much money they'd lose, maybe they'd have had a rethink and sent a postcard to Tom Watkins and CBS Records saying, "Think we'll start those apprenticeships in Cobham instead. But thanks for the interest." Bros were of course rubbish. But at least their song which they didn't write was vague enough to not make their audience think too hard about becoming famous. It merely brushed with how great it would be to be recognised, and perhaps with empowerment of some kind. Yeah.

6a. Scouting for Girls are cleverer than that, though. Much cleverer. Drop the boys, they are men. Men of nearly thirty who could well have learnt all their name-dropping values about pop culture from their parents, given the misappropriation of James Dean (famous since 1954 but not breathing since 1955), Audrey Hepburn and Bette Davis (who doesn't even fucking rhyme with 'famous'. Try Kingsley Amis.) This group has previously recorded a hit song about Elvis not being dead (despite the fact that he has been inarguably deceased since 1977), and another previous hit song about wishing they were James Bond. I look forward to their next single: "Masturbating Over Marilyn Monroe".

6b (Top Bell). They really are old men playing at being 18-year-olds, and it is therefore hard to combat the theory that they are lecherous fools. Epic Records seem quite happy to encourage them, though.

On the plus side:

1. They've written a song that isn't in C major. Congratulations, 'lads'.

Winslet and Boshoff

2010-03-21T12:38:00.000Z

As well as founding the charity Release, and much more besides, Caroline Coon was an exemplary pop writer in the 1970s, especially at Melody Maker, where she often contributed an excellent and eclectic singles review column. Even before the arrival of punk rock, during what is now generally (sometimes unfairly) regarded as a fallow period for British music, she possessed plenty of infectious enthusiasm and didn't care whether it was hard rock or disco, reggae or pure pop.

And then, in 1977 or perhaps 1978, she decided to leave the paper. In 2001, she told Paul Gorman one of her reasons for departing:

"They wanted me - having done the job, real journalism - to write the gossip column, which they wanted to call 'Bitch'. In other words, as a woman, if you were going to be a writer, there was incredible pressure on you to be 'the bitch'."

[From "In Their Own Write: Adventures in the Music Press" by Paul Gorman]

It'd be nice to think the popular press is a bit more enlightened than that now, but I'm not so sure. From the 3am Girls and Sue Carroll, to Carole Malone and Amanda Platell, there are plenty of women prepared to wade in with their opinions on the physical appearance of women in the public eye. They might not write columns that are called 'Bitch'. But bitching is mostly all they do, and rarely do they switch from that default mode. Is it a role they chose? One they felt they had to adopt in order to get work? Or both? Whichever way, it's ugly.

And that's just the columnists. Check out the bylines of showbiz stories in the same publications, and you really do find some vindictive little sniping beneath the surface of supposedly important exclusives. Often from writers who have the schooling and background to know that they're peddling crap. Trouble is, some of us out there have spotted the patterns, and have come to recognise vendettas, scabs that require fresh picking every so often.

Alison Boshoff, showbiz correspondent at the Mail is by no means the only one of her ilk who needs serious help with her obsessional need to target certain celebrities, nor is she alone in wasting her knowledge. (Cambridge graduate Victoria Newton's another one that springs to mind.) But this particular week, it's Boshoff who just won't give it a rest, specifically about the end of the marriage between Kate Winslet and Sam Mendes.

Alison Boshoff has been working as a hack for 20 years or so. As a student of English Literature at Oxford University in the early 1990s, her occasional forays into campus title The Cherwell brushed alongside much more regular contributors like Rachel Cooke (now The Observer, New Statesman), Julia Hartley-Brewer (Express, talking head on everything), John Harris (NME, The Guardian) and cartoonist and future comedy writer Andy Riley (sometime Armando Iannucci collaborator and author of those Suicide Bunny stocking filler books). Alison's contributions are about as frequent and remarkable as my collected student journalism: a theatre preview here, 400 words about a Poll Tax demonstration there.

After graduation, though, Alison's career moves fast, and by 1993, she's won a Young Journalist of the Year Award. Now, I know neither what she wrote to win that accolade, or where she worked, but it'd be nice to think it was material that claimed to be in the public interest, and really was. Investigating corruption, or perhaps campaigning to free a wrongly-convicted prisoner.

Come the middle of the 1990s, and Alison Boshoff is at The Sun, beginning a long-running jig of delight at the sight of celebrity marriages crumbling. This is now her patch, apart from sporadically bothering the grieving relatives of murder victims. In the 15 years since, she's stopped doing that, but the marriage obsession remains. I invite you to search http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/index.html, if you dare, for further proof.

She REALLY has it in for Kate Winslet, though, and quite why requires a bit of research. In terms of the need for the Mail to keep having a go, there's one obvious current reason: Winslet sued the Mail last autumn after an article by Liz Jones early in 2009 accused her of lying about her exercise regime. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/8339830.stm tells you all you need to know, although obviously the original feature's not on the Mail website anymore.

Since 1996, Boshoff has done everything from patronise Winslet's thespian sisters for not being world-famous to bothering her first husband. Presumably, the gagging order that forbade the press from talking to him after their divorce has now elapsed. They're actually friends now. Still won't talk to you though, Alison. Diddums.

But this weekend Alison's written this glutinous squitting nonsense:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-1259327/Why-Kate-Winslet-called-cut-Mr-Ego-He-shunned-talk-text-messages-dead-lover.html

Several things. Firstly, never EVER write a novel, Alison. It's embarrassing. Secondly, don't you feel that to dredge up material about a former boyfriend who died very young remains as disgusting, intrusive and irrelevant as it was when you first used it in 2002? Back then, you used it as an aside to chuckle at the fact that he was her only boyfriend before her first husband. Tasteful. In this newly-written rehash of old clippings, what appears to be a slating of Sam Mendes is a thinly-veiled celebration of him as an "effortlessly intellectual" Cambridge graduate. Something that, as Oxford graduate Alison never stops reminding us, is not what Kate is.

This article, written on Tuesday, but simmering since about the turn of the century, is perhaps even more contemptible and pernicious:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-1258223/Why-Kate-Winslet-make-marriages-work.html

They're always the worst, aren't they? The ones who pretend to be your friend. The ones who play at amateur psychology. The ones who ring up your schoolfriends. The ones who feign the only-trying-to-help stance.

The ones who make out they're objective.

------

Alison Boshoff - who wrote this utter cuntery when Natasha Richardson died a year ago - is also forever complaining about the wall that Kate and her entourage of family and friends constructs around her. One Mail story of yesteryear (not online now) expressed self-righteous outrage that Kate had replaced her publicist with another one. Perhaps one who didn't give rabid showbiz hacks the time of day. I do hope so. Whatever, if you ever read 'a friend said' in articles like those, I think you can safely assume it isn't one. Certainly not a real one.

I write as no particular fan of Winslet. I thought she was tremendous in Heavenly Creatures, although her co-star Melanie Lynskey was even more impressive (and the fact her career didn't take off similarly is a real shame). I groaned with horror when Winslet - then starring in Iris - gushed that she was "a tremendous fan of Iris Murdoch" despite in the next breath admitting she'd never read any of her books. But glorifying in her marriage break-ups? I think it's all a bit adolescent and, well, putrid.

It's not to say that men don't also write spite: sweating, wallet-faced Littejohn does much the same when he scrawls about Britain going to the dogs from the convenient distance of his gated Miami mansion. It's just that high-profile female journalists on tabloids seem to have only two options even in 2010. Be flowery and shrill, or be catty. Caroline Coon was right, and not much has changed on this score in thirty plus years.

Mail Again: Misleading Article About Something It Doesn't Really Understand

2010-03-11T23:59:00.001Z

One of the things that still really shocks me as an adult is just how selfish some people are. In other words, if something doesn't enrich their life directly and immediately, they dismiss it as worthless and, in a classic phrase only uttered by twats with shit for brains, 'a waste of taxpayers' money'.

So it is with this report about the supposedly failing S4C, the Welsh-language version of Channel 4, where about 20% of last month's programmes scored what the Mail calls a ZERO rating. Just to clarify, ZERO does not actually mean that no-one watched, just that under 1,000 people did.

But let's have a slightly closer look at some of those programmes that NO-ONE WATCHED:

Sgorio. Football highlights show usually broadcast at 10pm on Mondays, which as the Mail grudgingly acknowledges, achieved better figures on other nights, but scored a ZERO one week in February. There's a reason for that. The week it got ZERO, it went out at 11.40pm. Much later than usual. Rack your brains, Daily Mail Reporter. Why did it get very low ratings that week? Hmmm.

Sali Mali. Children's cartoon broadcast on weekdays at 8.50 in the morning - so when the vast, vast majority of children would be in or on their way to school - on S4C's digital channel. What are the equivalent viewing figures for animation like on Fiver or Nickelodeon's many offshoot channels? I'll bet they're not making The X-Factor quake in its boots.

Tocyn, 'where presenters visit Celtic countries and regions'. Broadcast at 2pm on S4C's digital channel. Once again, hardly a primetime slot for a repeated programme. Think of it like a daytime showing of Goodnight Sweetheart on ITV3.

Context, then. I know, I like context as well.

This is my favourite sentence in the article, at least until I find my next favourite sentence: 'Not even the voice of Hollywood star Ioan Gruffudd could lift the figures for children's cartoon Igam Ogam on the Welsh-language channel.' No, well, there'd be a reason for that. Young children honestly don't give a fuck whether or not a Hollywood star does the voices on a cartoon. It's showbiz-obsessed sphincters at the Mail who worry their bilious fat heads about such nonsense.

Another misleading aspect of the article is that it does not take into account that most of the 196 programmes are likely to have been children's animations (much repeated, many of them, and a fair number of them dubbed from other languages, for instance Little Princess, Pingu and Noddy). Very economical, that. So short, five-minute programmes. There'll be a lot of those on a digital channel during the day. They mount up. I'd suggest the total can't be far off, ooh... let's say 196.

But what about the most-watched programmes on S4C, which are not mentioned in this article? Pobol y Cwm (a popular serial that's been running even before S4C's launch) gets 100,000 viewers most evenings. Which is one in six of all Welsh speakers, the equivalent of 10 million viewers on a mainstream English service. Sporting events and entertainment shows also do well, while dramas and documentaries have found appreciative audiences all over Europe, and won many awards. Just because they're not shown elsewhere in Britain - not even subtitled, and that has an awful lot to do with the impatience British viewers have towards anything that deigns to be in a different language to the one they speak - does not mean that they have no value.

"Just 139 out of all the station's entire programmes for the period were watched by more than 10,000 viewers."

Which is still the equivalent of 1 million viewers or more.

I could go on listing some of the errors in that hastily compiled drivel - which among other things, gives the impression that the channel was founded only because some nutter went on a hunger strike (dear God, please read some history books), and that only the BBC broadcast Welsh-language programmes before 1982 (nope, HTV did as well, lots of them too) - but I won't. Instead, I'll turn to some of the comments that the bloody stupid have left underneath the article. If they're not doing sheep-shagging jokes, they're expressing astonishment that a nation might want to maintain a language because of its beauty, its heritage and its cultural value. Some appear to be saying, "All well and good to do so, just don't spend money on it". The thing is, though, how else do you keep a language alive, if you don't establish an accessible, regular, reliable framework for that language to be spoken? Like television. Or if you don't found schools where all lessons are taught in that language? Things like that require money. And the vast majority of the 600,000 Welsh speakers use S4C regularly, as well as the BBC's Radio Cymru.

I'm not a Welsh speaker, but I am from Wales. I remember that when I was growing up, the only way Welsh language TV could be accommodated was to put shows on here and there on BBC1 Wales and HTV, often demoting favoured English shows (unless you lived on a hill and could pick up English transmissions). It was a situation that satisfied no-one, Welsh nor English speakers, and the creation of a whole channel for Welsh speakers has had quite an effect. From a language that was ailing in the sixties and seventies, now many young people speak it, thus virtually guaranteeing its survival. I even know a few people who went to live in Wales, and learnt to speak Welsh. You can only achieve that sort of commitment by funding committedly. And you'd have to be a particularly petty-minded Mail reader to want to deny people something like that. Oh.

Stephen Wright at the Daily Mail

2010-03-10T10:39:00.001Z

Just maybe Stephen Wright, crime guru at the Daily Mail, now knows what it's like to be on the receiving end.

Yesterday afternoon, after reading with dismay this little shit-stirring piece he had written (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1256533/Jon-Venables-Terror-young-father-accused-Bulger-killer-Facebook.html), I sent the following to his email work account (firstname.surname@dailymail.co.uk):
-----
Dear Mr Wright

Do you really think reports like yours are helping matters in the current climate? Don't you think that by drawing attention to troublemakers on Facebook, you're helping to reopening old wounds? By naming an innocent man who has already been wrongly vilified time and again, you're not going to calm down a sizeable portion of your rabid readership, many of whom (judging from their recent outpourings) appear to harbour their own disturbing fantasies about murdering children.

The really cynical part of me (mistaken, I do hope) thinks that you are thoroughly enjoying this bunfight, and that nothing will satisfy you, your editor, and many of your readers until Jon Venables is found dead. You may think that would make the world a better place. It wouldn't. It would just convey the message: 'Angry about something or someone? Get rid of the perpetrator'. The whole reason that Venables and Thompson were given new identities was precisely because some unhinged members of the public could attack them or even people who looked like them or shared the same name. I think what depresses me most about your coverage is that, deep down in the depths of your soul, you already know this, and are doing nothing more than exploiting your readers' spare bile. If you really cared about crime prevention, you'd be doing a little more understanding and less condemning.
-----
Obviously, I received no reply. But what's most interesting is what happened next.

The article is still there, but if you've clicked on the above link, you'll have noticed it now has a different author. Exactly the same article, different 'author'.

So I just sent the pair of clowns this, once again using their work email addresses:
-----
It's nice to know that Mr Wright is so prepared to stand by what he has written that the author of exactly the same article has mysteriously changed in the past 24 hours. Either this demonstrates that the whole of the Mail crime desk sit there typing the same material parrot-fashion day after day (an image I'm afraid I find all too convincing) or that people aren't prepared to take responsibility for what they have written.
-----
Isn't it strange how journalists - usually the first people to cream themselves at finding out where someone lives - suddenly get utterly paranoid when they get a direct message to their work account pulling them up for their cowardice and idiocy?

I've said it before: if you disagree with a hack, write to them directly.

6Music, Asian Network, GLR and Mark Thompson

2010-02-28T15:49:00.001Z

In 1997, when I first moved to London, I was finally able to listen to the near-mythical Greater London Radio, or GLR for short. The BBC's local radio station for the capital, it had been devised in 1988 by Matthew Bannister and Trevor Dann to fill the 'yawning gap' between the youthful Radio 1 and the then very-middle-aged Radio 2. In trying to overhaul the ailing BBC Radio London, Bannister and Dann reasoned that there was a market for listeners who had long outgrown the top 20 but weren't ready for Mendelssohn and Mantovani. In other words, a mix of intelligent rock music and speech for 25-45 year olds. Its audience was never large, even in the days when its weekend roster included Chris Morris, Chris Evans and Danny Baker, but it was loyal, ferociously loyal.

By the time I arrived in London, Morris and Evans had long since left the station, and Baker had just rejoined after an ill-fated stint at Radio 1. Nevertheless, it became my music station of choice almost immediately. It had a music policy that seemed to pinball between indie, funk, psychedelia, folk and pleasing well-chosen oldies. Its daytime schedule then was a breakfast magazine (music and news) presented by Jeremy Nicholas and a woman whose name currently escapes me, then Robert Elms, then Fi Glover and lastly Peter Curran (who was soon replaced by Gideon Coe). At this point, there was no XFM regularly on air, and the creation of 6Music was still five years away. Radio 1 had swung smartly back to straight pop in the wake of the Spice Girls' success. If you wanted alternative music in daytime, GLR was the only real option.

But still people weren't listening much. And according to Private Eye, one incident in 1999 would epitomise the BBC's unhappy relationship with GLR, which would lead it to overhaul the station yet again. On 5 October 1999, 31 people died in the Ladbroke Grove rail crash. Mark Thompson, now BBC Director-General, then head of Regional Broadcasting, claimed that he switched on GLR the following morning, only to hear not incisive coverage of the disaster, but "Mambo No. 5" by Lou Bega. Within a few weeks, it had been announced that GLR's daytime schedule would be radically overhauled by spring 2000, most of the specialist music shows would disappear, and there'd be a news dominated agenda and a glut of phone-in shows. BBC London wouldn't be all bad - Baker and Elms are still there - but it would employ the oafish Jon Gaunt and other presenters who preferred to holler rather than speak.

Thompson had not been listening to GLR the morning after the Ladbroke Grove crash, claimed Private Eye. He had been listening to Capital FM. GLR had in fact devoted the vast majority of its breakfast programme to the crash. Thompson is the man who is now expected to make decisions about the BBC and music radio. It is he who is likely to decide that 6Music and the BBC Asian Network are not distinctive enough, do not meet the quality threshold achieved by, say, BBC Three, or Scott Mills, or EastEnders, or even the atrocious BBC Breakfast. 6Music is not perfect, but it's the closest we have to a great music radio network in Britain, and at its best it is as much a product of public service excellence as Radios 3 and 4, and as BBC Four.

Metroland

2010-02-08T22:11:00.001Z

Catching the tube home tonight, I noticed in one half of a copy of this morning's Metro that had been torn in twain an ad at the foot of the page. It said something like, "Leaving your copy of Metro on the seat on the tube is litter", next to a photograph of a copy of Metro left on a seat on the tube. Being an advert, though, where everything is glossier than in the real world, the copy of Metro in the photograph was in comparatively pristine condition, maybe embossed on watermark paper, when set against the fragments of rag I was having to hold with tongs at arm's length. I imagined a full day of these remains being ravaged by irritable armies of rats, squirrels and trainee accounts clerks.

Placing the ad was probably the nearest to an act of public service that Associated Newspapers has performed in a sod of a long time, although doubtless, they've been obliged to do so. But there's a flaw in Associated's campaign. Which is: It's a free newspaper containing a shitload of showbiz PR, surveys, something about Alastair Campbell having an onion in his jacket pocket, and, above all, nothing whatsoever that demands to be re-read. It's not The New Yorker, with short stories and finely-crafted critical vignettes to treasure forever. It's simply a way of trying to make you forget, for about 18 minutes or eight Victoria Line stops, that you have to go to work. It's something you haven't paid for. It's something that, in fact, you haven't even asked for. Nobody would miss Metro if it disappeared like whatever News International's rival freebie was called. (Deliberate ignorance there. I do know really.) No-one would bemoan the lack of an outlet for Keith Watson's TV reviews or the cultural hole where 'Down the Dumper' used to live. Or 'The Green Room', a gossip column that isn't even salaciously interesting.

So, it's hardly commuters' fault that there's so much discarded newspaper on tube trains. The key to understanding the waste is this: How often do you see unwanted copies of The Times, or The Guardian, or the Telegraph, or even The Sun on the tube? It happens, but not nearly as often. Because people have paid for them, they've invested in something, and therefore it has at least a small meaningful amount of value. And so they're more likely to take the paper with them when their journey ends. Even The Sun.

My God, I've just bigged up The Sun. Kill me.

Bisy Backson

2010-02-07T23:49:00.000Z

It's been something of a hectic start to the year. Once the first week was out of the way, there's not been sufficient time to post anything here that wasn't just the daily mantra of 'Sleep/Eat/I have read something interesting/I somehow did not shout obscenities at work'. Some hopefully rich ideas are bubbling away in the background, though, and they may emerge here very shortly. If you're kind enough to carry HS on your blogroll, and any of your readers are taking note of it, please do bear with me. Thanks.

He May Have Been the King of Rock'n'Roll...

2010-01-08T20:59:00.002Z

But he did the lamest version of The Laughing Policeman.

Worlds Colliding and Information Withheld

2010-01-07T21:17:00.009Z

One of these nights, I'll get through the Victoria Wood Christmas special without falling asleep. My second attempt may have got me to the 20-minute mark, though it's hard to know the exact moment at which shut-eye occurs. Probably during the unending Last Cranford to Trancentral parody.

So, to something I have watched all the way through. Great to see Stewart Lee not only do well on Celebrity Mastermind (Monday 4 January, BBC1), but to do well by choosing a specialist subject that, by the standards of many contestants - never mind celebrity competitors - was well out there. Derek Bailey (no, not the host of Mr & Mrs) was a Yorkshire-born avant-garde jazz guitarist (1930-2005) with a long and varied career. For some who have followed Lee down the years, and know all about the Evan Parker menu music for the 90s Comedian DVD, not to mention the use of Harrison Birtwistle in This Morning with Richard Not Judy, perhaps Derek Bailey needs little introduction. Though it might have helped if Lee had been asked his reasons for selecting Bailey by John Humphrys, the man with the most unsettling laugh in Britain. (He yelps like a puppy facing a firing squad.)

I got a big fat zero on Derek Bailey. Stewart Lee did stupendously well. It's not often references to "ECM Records", "John Zorn" and the "Spontaneous Music Ensemble" abound on early-evening BBC1. And it certainly beats when Myleene Klass chose whatever series it was of Sex and the City. Had she only ever seen the one she'd chosen?

If Lee's choice of questions puzzled those tuning in by mistake for The One Show, I was the perplexed one watching We Need Answers (BBC4, Tuesday 5 January). From reading a Radio Times write-up, I had been expecting the "humiliation" of Kelvin MacKenzie, one of this week's two guests. MacKenzie, for the uninitiated, was editor of The Sun for 13 years, during which time he ran a series of libellous and damaging stories about Elton John (who later sued to the tune of £1m), suggested in a front-page article that Liverpool fans urinated on the dead at Hillsborough in 1989, included extremely unnecessary detail about the victim of a rape that bordered on titilation, and revelled in publishing highly unpleasant and misleading copy about Peter Tatchell. Amongst many other misdemeanours.

I usually enjoy We Need Answers. Inessential viewing, but a pleasing way to pass thirty minutes, a low-key, "Radio 4" version of Shooting Stars if you like, and unlike SS in recent times, with guests I'm more likely to have heard of. In this series we've had Jenni Murray off Woman's Hour, Inbetweener Simon Bird, Miranda Hart, Sophie Grigson, Ian McMillan and Neil Innes. What troubled me about Kelvin MacKenzie being invited to take part, though, is that unlike a lot of people who turn up on television all the time, he and his work made decisions that have caused severe harm to people, including people who did not seek nor wish celebrity. In his world, where as long as something sold papers (even when that thing was "stuff that's not true"), it's just a game. And so, as We Need Answers is just a game, he has nothing to lose by appearing on it. Apart from when co-host Mark Watson made the point about lying in an aside, MacKenzie was treated with kid gloves. MacKenzie was, slightly annoyingly, a good sport. Maybe, I have to concede, I find it difficult to forgive someone like him. But I just remember the gleeful spite that dripped from his work for many years, and which under his successors has continued to do so. But then what was I expecting from a genial if eccentric quiz? Mindless violence?

Next week, Terry Christian will be on the show. I'm likely to tune in and chuckle at one or two things he says. Despite myself. Am I a hypocrite for not giving Kelvin MacKenzie the benefit of the doubt?

Books for January

2010-01-04T23:12:00.001Z

An amazing offer for the New Year at WHAuden.

Buy one puffed-up self-improvement guide by a former early morning Radio 1 DJ, and spend roughly the same amount of money on another fictional one by a different one who doesn't even write books.

Yes! There's...
Paul McKenna Can Wear Thin (And Play Londonbeat).

And Half a Dozen Others That Aren't Even Real:
Me Mark Page's Ultimate Feng-Shui.
Gary King - You Remember, the Announcer off Wheel of Fortune - Thinks Positively.
Bruno & Liz: In Two Minds - Tackling Your Bipolarity.
Adrian John's Hip and Thigh Diet.
Lighting Up Your World: David Rider from Playground's Guide to Seasonally Affected Disorder.
and
Loft Inspiration: Jenny Costello Clears Out the Attic.

[Micro] Fame at Last

2010-01-03T14:32:00.004Z

On the afternoon of Christmas Eve, I was sitting in a railway station coffee shop counting down the many minutes before I could board my train back to my family. And out of the corner of my eye, I saw a bloke read a book I worked on about four years ago. In fact, it was a book I spent four months or so, all but reconstructing from dust. It was a music biography of a well-known band. Let's call it, for legality's sake, ["Halo James: Angels of 90s Rock" by Hambum Parfitt].

I'd worked as a sub-editor and writer for many years. One of the first major jobs I had undertaken was to reshape article copy by many first-time writers for a music encyclopedia. It was clear that, although some of the material they had submitted required extensive reworking in order for a house style to be established for the book, there was still plenty of value in what they'd sent. They just needed direction and shortening.

[Hambum]'s first draft, though, which I encountered some years later, was a real eye-opener. The man had managed to assemble all the members of [Halo James] for their memories of those crazy times [in the 90s], to talk about their many hits [from "I've Cleaned the Kitchen" to all the others]. The results of the process made me weak with horror. [Hambum Parfitt] COULD NOT WRITE. The oaf could only dream of 'cliche-ridden and workmanlike prose'. His grasp of syntax was so appalling that I was simultaneously angry in two directions: at the writer, certainly, but also at the publishing house that had allowed such sloppy old stink to be presented as final work. Had they required three chapters and a synopsis? Had they read anything he'd written before? Maybe all his previous books had been saved by subs as well.

So, it was a terrible book, and while I improved it measurably with research, background knowledge and sentences rather than just hurling random jumbles of letters at a Word document, it was still no great shakes. The tepid reviews it received on fansite [www.couldhavetoldyouso.net] were fair ("They've just trawled the music press!"). The ones it got on amazon were over-generous. But to see a human being reading this Frankenstein's monster of a tome was startling all the same. I watched as he sat engrossedly turning the pages, pausing only to sip at his latte, consult his iPhone, stare into space, shut the book, glance at the departure boards, and consult his iPhone again. I reckon he probably reached about page 30, about the time [Halo James] first shook up rock's complacent and lazy scene with their heady mix of [raw power, confrontational energy, and powerplays on Gary's Bit in the Middle]. Clearly, all that had given this reader so much food for thought that he couldn't handle any more ideas and theories, was stuffed to the gills with breathtaking anecdotes. Enough! Else there'd be a Cresoteric explosion.

Disappointed by his lack of commitment, though? To be honest, I wanted to shake him by the hand, as vigorously as I'd wanted to shake [Hambum] by the windpipe. "I could have told you so", I'd have quipped. "You really should have spent your hard-earned on something else. Like that [And Why Not? track by track guide]." And then I thought of all the far superior books that authors really have toiled over, spent years of their lives researching and writing, and which I've stopped reading either due to mild disinterest, or sometimes due to forgetfulness. I can be as feckless as committed when it comes to reading.

Still, the experience was a sort of microscopic fame, seeing as I got a small print co-author credit, though not on the cover, and it made me wonder what it must be like for the best-selling authors who must see people on planes and tubes reading their work all the time. Did they get excited the first time that happened? Do they still do, from time to time?

If you see a copy of ["Angels of 90s Rock"], please don't buy. I'm sure there'll be an authorised [Halo James] biog one of these days. Also, I'm not on a royalty rate.

He May Have Released a Video of 'The Sickest Jokes Ever' But...

2010-01-01T17:55:00.004Z

Hope you all enjoyed your New Year festivities, and for that matter, Christmas too.

I've done a lot of Craig Charles slagging over the years. On Saturday Live in the mid-80s, his performance poetry tended to be reason one for going to boil the kettle. The Red Dwarves is a sitcom I've never really cared about. And I've seen Captain Butler AND his late-night ITV post-pub offerings Funky Bunker and Weapons of Mass Distraction. Yes, that's a real title. Guess what year they commissioned that.

Two things redeem him. The first is his 6Music soul and funk show on Saturday nights, and whether it's him or his producers who choose the records, no matter. It's a warm arena for the staples and classics, as well as some pleasing obscurities, and a special edition last night was the ideal aural backdrop for getting ready to go out. (Also, he shuts his face while the records are on.) But I also very much enjoyed a children's programme he fronted in the late 80s and early 90s, which was entitled What's that Noise? This was a magazine show with studio performances, which took as its starting point the notion that there are no musical barriers. Pop groups appeared, but so did jazz musicians, so did orchestras, so did rappers. Did I see Extreme Noise Terror and Courtney Pine on the same edition once? And probably Nigel Kennedy slept in the studio. It was like Later with Jools Holland, only it was even more eclectic in what it would cover. I'd love to see an episode again.

As someone who really despises musical snobbery - and that's as much towards rock fans who hate classical as the other way round - I loved its attitude in encouraging younger viewers to use their ears and not relying on their prejudices. You really could like all kinds of music, and in truth, before kids are told what is credible, they already have open minds. I remember a couple of years after What's That Noise? had completed its run, a friend of mine from college who was training as a music teacher (and at the very comprehensive school I'd attended too) said that she was taking a class where, as homework, the pupils had to compose their own raps. I'd only been at school five years earlier when the curriculum in music teaching was still strictly classical. I wonder to what extent ideas like What's That Noise? had influenced this shift. Indeed, what are music lessons like at school now? Any teachers out there who could shed any light on this?

Christmas TV: Not Now, Nationwide

2009-12-29T08:34:00.004Z

There was an inevitability about an anniversary documentary about Not the Nine O'Clock News this Christmas. There had been one in 1999, another in 2004 (to mark its 25th anniversary) and now a third: Not Again (BBC2, 28/12/2009). No-one does 'Happy 35th anniversary' documentaries, not even ones on Monty Python, so that'll probably be it now on Not until the eve of 2020. Over 90 minutes, four of the five principal cast, its two producers, its musical director and a smattering of writers and (mostly uninformed) fans guided us through a sometimes enlightening but very selective story about why and how it was so damn popular. It's strange to witness a parade of people who were already successful 30 years ago, and who are somehow many times more successful now, thanks to a collective mix of TalkBack Productions, Blackadder, Mr Bean, QI, Spitting Image, Big Bangs, Four Weddings and a Funeral, bad psychotherapy, and Griff Rhys Jones Prods Some Silt in Cumbria.

The anal bits of my head sighed as some contentious guesses were dressed up as statistics. Fan and occasional scriptwriter Stephen Fry burbled that the first series 'only got a million viewers, probably', and while the LPs did indeed often reach the top ten, no-one sells half-a-million albums in a week. Never mind, let's put that down to seasonal excitement. What concerned me more was the complete absence of information surrounding the planned first series, due to begin on Monday 2 April 1979 (in a slot that had housed the second and last series of Fawlty Towers), but removed and cancelled due to the announcement of the General Election. It's probably just as well, because the original cast of that series was a very unlikely mix of people: Willoughby Goddard, John Gorman (The Scaffold, Tiswas), Australian-born actor Jonathan Hyde, Christopher Godwin, Chris Langham (already acclaimed for his work with Spike Milligan) and 23-year-old Rowan Atkinson.

I've seen a scrappy pilot of Not, and it's fascinating but not at all good. It's a soup of revue, current affairs and corny gags, with a cast which interacts awkwardly, and produced by two men - John Lloyd and Sean Hardie - who by their own subsequent admission were learning on the job how to set up and manage a high-pressure weekly comedy show. Lloyd had spent five years as a radio comedy producer and whose only TV experience was slipping a few newslines under the radar of The Two Ronnies. Hardie had considerable experience in BBC Current Affairs, but had no comedy to speak of on his cv.

The first transmitted series - screened, unlike the others, on Tuesday nights (from 16 October 1979) - retained Atkinson and Langham, but ditched the others in favour of Pamela Stephenson and Mel Smith. For some reason, until Not Again!, I had never considered the connection between the Life of Python sketch (penned by Colin Bostock-Smith) and the fact that Langham had been in Life of Brian. Lloyd and Hardie now claim - and I was previously unaware of this - that Langham had got annoyed at the item, and that this drove a wedge between the cast. It's hard to say to what extent Langham did not gel with the other cast members as so little of series one is even allowed to draw breath on the compilations. But sacked he was, and replaced by Griff Rhys Jones. It's a pity that because of more recent troubles in his life, his own view of what happened could not be included here. At least Radio 4's The Reunion (2005) found Langham and Lloyd discussing the issue. I must dig out my copy.

If the chronology of Not Again was all over the place, at least there were fresh anecdotes abounding: the tensions between Rowan and Pam, the reminder that those two really were the stars of the show, and Lloyd's discomfort at having to watch a whole original episode, which is probably why complete series DVDs are extremely unlikely to appear. Whether it's just unease about material like The Ayatollah Song (lyrics by Richard Curtis and released as a SINGLE in November 1980), or acknowledgement that some of the jokes really weren't that good, it's hard to tell. What the compilations miss, though, is an inspired messiness and spotaneity that tends to occur when you're steering a topical comedy show and you start every single week with no script. It was strangely touching when the originally transmitted episode of 15/12/80 (the last of series three) had run its closing credits over a black screen while 'In My Life' by The Beatles played. Jokes about Lennon's death may have occurred in my school playground, but there was little doubting the sincerity of Not's team.

Following the documentary was the screening of 'a classic episode', which was, as usual, a compilation of very very good sketches (assembled by Lloyd for broadcast and video release in 1995). What came across most clearly was: the writing was sometimes sloppy, the acting was frequently brilliant (Smith in particular), and the producers did well to keep the show on track. The fact that a compilation of 30-year-old sketches is watchable at all is quite something, as anyone who's seen any of the BAFTA-winning Three of a Kind during that time can testify.

And one last thing. Is HBO's Not Necessarily the News (1983-90) really the American version of Not the Nine? That's worth a documentary in itself if so, what with Rich Hall in the cast, and a team of writers including Simpsons scribes Al Jean and Mike Reiss, King of the Hill co-creator Greg Daniels, Seinfeld writer Elaine Pope, and future chat show king Conan O'Brien.

Alan Yentob's Massive Imagination Say: BINGO!

2009-12-23T10:35:00.007Z

The arts on television tends to unbutton itself at Christmas and relaxes. The soon-to-disappear South Bank Show habitually saving its crowd-pleaser editions until this period (Tom Jones, Cliff Richard, Monster Munch). Over on BBC1, Alan Yentob's Imagine is likely to gain its biggest audience of the year for choosing a subject that entrances people of all ages, and which thanks to the net and social networking, has enjoyed something of a resurgence lately.

Shown last night (22/12/2009), "A Night on the Tiles" was a celebration of Scrabble. The adjective 'playful' has been used a lot in the promotional bumf for the documentary, going far enough to claim it was presented by 'Lana Botney' (a surname Private Eye has called Yentob for years). There's another anagram you can get out of 'Alan'/'Lana' but let's leave the Imagine office to snigger at that one.

Come to think of it, if you're going to have an arts programme covering Scrabble, IMAGINE is an appropriate one. Seven letters. Ten points only (1, 3, 1, 2, 1, 1, 1), but you'd have used your whole rack of tiles in one go, and so 50 bonus points are yours. With even more points possible, depending on where you've placed it on the board. Perfect.

(Although: SIGNALS (C4, 90s; 1, 1, 2, 1, 1, 1, 1 + 50) would have been apt too. Not AQUARIUS however (LWT, 60s/70s), as that's a proper noun, and therefore disallowed. Shame. That 'Q' is worth ten points in itself.)

The section about its history was fascinating stuff, especially when Yentob went to visit the nephew of the game's inventor, Alfred Mosher Butts (1899-1993). There, unlocking the archive, we could see just how, in the days of 1930s America, out-of-work architect Butts had devised embryonic versions of the game, first called 'Lexiko" and 'Criss Cross Words'. We were shown rejection letters from Milton Bradley Games (MB Games, probably busy then developing Postal Ker-Plunk), and fantastically, the careful five-bar-gate survey Butts conducted in order to calculate the scoring system of his new invention. Inspired by the Edgar Allen Poe short story "The Gold Bug", which considered the frequency of letters of the alphabet, Butts sat down with a copy of the New York Times and literally counted Number of Es, Number of As, Number of Os, and so on. From this painstaking research, he deduced the ten very common letters only worth a single point, then those worth two points (only two letters, perhaps surprisingly) and so on, up to ten points each for Q and Z. Probably not a very scientific study, but it's served the game incredibly well for over 70 subsequent years. Countdown - and its French parent Des Chiffres et des Lettres - owes it a great deal too.

I thought the programme had some interesting things to say about how Scrabble competitors have different passions. For some, it's about the mathematical delight of scoring, of placing an obscure word with no knowledge or even enthusiasm for its meaning. For others, it is a celebration and exploration of language. I fall somewhere in between the two polar opposites. I can't deny that I want to score as highly as possible (NB By the standards of Scrabble, let alone Championship level, I do not particularly). Yet I adore it when I ask my opponent (or when they ask me), "What does THAT word mean?" It's a great way of uncovering people's passions too. You can always tell a person with wide knowledge of food, or someone with a medical background, or in my case, someone who's music mad, by seeing some of the unusual words that are slapped down or, in the case of online Scrabble, clicked up.

Well worth catching on iPlayer, anyway, while you can. Now, if you'll excuse me, I've got four online games to continue...

The Clanging Chimes of Doom: Unseasonal Christmas Number Ones

2009-12-22T13:56:00.003Z

Rage Against the Machine, then, have succeeded in becoming the Christmas number one hit in the UK, the first reissue to have done so since Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody" in 1991. The group has apparently vowed to play a free concert in Britain next year as a thank-you gesture. I'd urge them to book an arts centre rather than the O2, though: the vast majority of those who downloaded "Killing in the Name" won't be interested in standing through the rest of their set. Or: turning up at all.

Much has been made of upsetting the applecart in this instance, of confounding expectations. And yes, the stunt will be remembered. But perhaps only because the British charts even now are always prepared to house the novel and the unexpected in a way that the American ones rarely do. I can always remember Black Francis of Pixies - during a press interview to promote the Bossanova LP in 1990 - marveling that the British singles charts could have Pavarotti's "Nessun Dorma" at number two in the charts and it could feel perfectly explicable. And not just because it was all over World Cup Grandstand.

Is the UK the only place where a Christmas number one is discussed with any kind of fervour and anticipation? The US hasn't had a seasonal chart-topper since the Fifties. Not even anything off A Christmas Gift for You, or Mariah Carey's one passable song. But what a casual international trawl through all things Number One has revealed is some wonderfully bizarre anomalies. Sure, sometimes the world has bought in near-unison at Christmas, as in 1964-65 (The Beatles) or, more tragically, in 1992 (Whitney). At other times, the shocking taste of the British public has not been mirrored in other countries. Hold your head up high, The Netherlands, for opting at Xmas 72 for "Crazy Horses" rather than the horrific "Long Haired Lover from Liverpool". Respect, Canadians of 1971, for ignoring Benny Hill's "Ernie" in favour of Sly Stone's sublime "Family Affair". And good on you, the USA, in 1978. "Le Freak", not "Mary's Boy Child - Oh My Lord". Which by the way is the first ever British number one to have its own sarcastic review in the title.

I love discovering that Ireland's Christmas number ones - while often duplicates of those in the UK - have included Zig & Zag (pre-Big Breakfast, 1990), Dermot Morgan (pre-Father Ted, 1985) and Kate Winslet (post-Get Back, 2001), or that New Zealand's roll-call can boast The Hollies (1966), Lieutenant Pigeon (1972), Bachman-Turner Overdrive (1974), and Run DMC featuring Aerosmith (1986). Oh, and I "forgot" Joe Dolce (1980).

If some believe that Rage Against the Machine represents a high water mark for the starkly unseasonal hit, they are kidding themselves: as long ago as 1970, the Germans ensured that Black Sabbath's far preferable "Paranoid" emerged triumphant for Christmas week, while Brit anarchists Chumbawamba found their "Tubthumping" charging for first place in both Canada and Australia (1997). A year earlier, Prodigy's "Breathe" had been unbeatable in Sweden, and it's hard to find a country in 2002 where Eminem's "Lose Yourself" wasn't invincible. Except for the UK, where we had Girls Aloud.

I'm with Simon Cowell on one thing: Christmas number ones in Britain have rarely been up to much. Of course, we've had Those Beatles, Slade, Pink Floyd (yes to the single, a whole fist down to the double LP), The Human League and Pet Shop Boys, but nothing that I've much liked for well over a decade. All too often, it's either been stinky cosiness, or glutinous cover versions. Sod cred, fun will more than suffice at number one for Crimbo. The simple trouble is that neither contender in Britain this year has been much fun to listen to.

On Not Keeping Up

2009-12-20T10:01:00.006Z

Ten years ago, when I marked the millennium by yelling out in agony on a sofa unable to move my neck or head to switch over/off from Graham Norton's Y2K special, I had just got my first home PC, and for the first time was surfing the net obsessively. I quickly became a forum addict, and probably one of those forum addicts in thrall to their own exciting opinions. I even had a few fans, I suppose, people who'd hang on my every word, and who would want to meet me in real life, as it were. And day after day, I'd venture my thoughts about the awfulness of Alan Davies comedy-dramas and pointing out which bits of I Love the 70s were factually incorrect.

I must have been an insufferable prick.

Not only do I not do forums anymore, blogging is losing its sting for me. I am doing plenty of writing, but most of it is resolutely offline now, and out of the public gaze. I am amazed at those who can write 500 words on just about any subject, and have the knowledge and insight to reach their own conclusions concisely, stridently and clearly. Clarity and certainty, in a marked contrast to where I was sitting a decade ago, are definitely missing. As I get older, I am more and more acutely aware of how I know less and less. No longer do I have the drive or curiosity, nor even the rigorous conviction that was keen to demonstrate to people why I was right about three subjects. While it slightly disturbs me that that sort of confidence has deserted me, that's been dwarfed by the realisation that it was shrill and superficial confidence. As I met people who not only knew far more than I did, but had the wisdom to know how to manage that information, I grew tired of it all.

Is this a whinge? Probably. But at least the past couple of years, and especially the last nine months, have seen a gradual change in me. If 2009 has been a wobbly year, abandoning a serious interest in a writing career and deciding to bin the anti-depressants which had never really worked for me, it's still been far superior to the ones that preceded it. I've met some terrific new friends. I've caught up with some equally terrific established ones that I hadn't seen enough of. I've enjoyed (occasionally) getting exhilaratingly drunk again. I've been on holiday. I've started a course at college. I've become an uncle.

But perhaps the highlight of my year took place on 11 August. I was with my partner lazing on a remote beach on the Gower Peninsula. I had no books, my iPod was back in the house... There were no distractions whatsoever, aside from assimilating the sights of the idyllic coastline which, because it was two miles from any car park or road, was sparsely populated. It was then that I knew that I had found true happiness, and even though I knew that euphoria isn't a permanence, nor is misery and despair. The effort of not trying so hard is effort well worth making, and just maybe, this means that whatever we come to call the period of 2010-2019 will continue to build on these seemingly slight but personally seismic changes that I've experienced of late. Very quietly, I can see an improvement.

Whether you're a regular reader of this irregular journal, or have just happened on this because you googled 'Gower Peninsula', a Merry Christmas to you.

The Money Still Goes to Sony BMG

2009-12-14T10:13:00.005Z

Supporting the campaign to get Rage Against the Machine's "Killing in the Name" to number one for Christmas, in so doing dashing the hopes of whoever it is who's won X-Factor (I honestly cannot remember and am not going to bother googling that), is a bit like trying to stop bulldozers by holding up a threadbare piece of cloth. The more earnest RATM acolytes (oh, let's call them bores) are intent on waffling on about how it's a statement against corporate bullshit, or to give it its official name, Sony BMG. That'll be the same Sony BMG that continues to issue and collect royalties for the back catalogue of Rage Against The Machine. So: Fail.

But even that's preferable to the absolute imbeciles, wearing the masks of grown adults, who think it would be FUNNEEEE to have 'Fuck you I won't do what you tell me' at number one for Christmas. But the only thing about "Killing in the Name" that is in any way amusing is that it conjures up the picture of Bruno Brookes going to the lav during the Top 40 in early 1993 while accidentally playing the sweary version from the CD single. The image of a short-arsed Tory zipping up with alarm at a Radio 1 urinal while the ears of West End featuring Sybil fans are assaulted by SOME SWEARING certainly triggers a snigger, but shorn of that image, 's'not funny. The only way, then, that "Killing in the Name" will be in any way effective as a party-pooper is if every DJ in the country has never heard of the song, and plays the album version by mistake. While pissing a few hundred yards away. Nearly seventeen years ago. As it stands, this joke needs some work.

Spelling B(astard)

2009-11-11T15:39:00.005Z

"Bloody Shameful", screeched The Sun on Monday 9 November. Mindful of the fact it was Remembrance Week, and even they couldn’t think of anything left to say about Jedward, it was time to spin the profound grief of Jacqui Janes into a cynical exercise of laughing contemptuously at a man whom – while important enough to be running the country – cannot see/write properly. Over three sorry days, we saw Political Editor and product of Marlborough College Tom Newton Dunn, not to mention Justine Smith (whose name is too workaday to google), stretch this minor gaffe (understandably difficult for Mrs Janes, irrelevant to just about anyone else in the world) beyond credulity. The unfortunate implication throughout has been that, had Brown written a letter that began “Sorry you’ve lost your son but shit happens” but attended that calligraphy class at night school and spelt everything right, all would have been just dandy.

Buried in amongst the paper’s obligatory humbug was Janes’ acknowledgement that it wasn’t Brown’s condolences that were in doubt, merely that she thought he couldn’t spell the word ‘condolences’. In truth, if we’re looking at handwriting skills, I’ve seen much, much worse, and from people with two functioning peepers to boot. But my favourite bit of all occurred in Tuesday’s Sun. (Here, in fact: http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/campaigns/our_boys/2720283/Prime-Minister-Gordon-Brown-couldnt-even-get-our-name-right.html) Even though the cretinous Newton Dunn has just slated Brown repeating himself with the adjacent signings off “my sincere condolences”/”yours sincerely” (with the sort of venom that suggests Brown has just shot several children at point blank range), in a neighbouring column we find graphologist Elaine Quigley offering her remarkable analysis. “Having to write to strangers on such a difficult and tragic subject is obviously incredibly difficult for him”. Bzz. Repetition of ‘difficult’. Ha ha. Are you blind, Elaine?

Yes, writing a personal, private letter to strangers is not only difficult but difficult. Could most of us claim to be able to write a letter expressing deepest sympathy without being at least slightly concerned about hitting the right tone, and about trying to emphathise with its receiver? He’s not having a conversation here, where one knows almost straight away whether engagement between the two parties has been made. I think, on balance, Brown – whatever you think of him otherwise – managed to do this, and if he doesn’t win points for penmanship, he certainly doesn’t lose them for humanity. The paper, on the other hand, loses many points simply for being so, so cheap.

Yet now we’ve reached Armistice Day, Jacqui Janes is prepared to draw a line under it all. This is curious, for her anger to have subsided so suddenly, so quickly. Can this be true? If I was her, I’d still be fuming, not just at the PM for spelling mistakes, but at the way that my distress would have been so comprehensively mined for political gain by a quasi-racist newspaper. Because of course, this isn’t about handwriting, or even about Remembrance Day. There’s an election heading our way, and with Murdoch ordering his empire to back Cameron, Brown will do no right in their eyes from now on. Expect further stories on how he broke wind in a Westminster lift, didn’t wash his hands sufficiently AND MAY HAVE SPREAD SWINE FLU, and either didn’t vote in the X-Factor final (snooty sod in ivory tower) or did vote in the X-Factor final (shouldn’t he be running the fucking country?).

Still, it’s nice to see a tabloid newspaper rail against insufficient apologies when members of the public without powerful legal representation are publicly wronged. Can we now expect to see sincere front-page apologies when newspapers print indefensible horseshit about such individuals, as opposed to miniscule, evasive faux-sorries shrouded bottom right on page 38, probably in the cracks of George & Lynne’s buns? We can? Fantastic!!!

EDIT: Funnily enough, The Sun has the advantage of being able to go back and change their gaffes. Whoops, this blog was too quick to capture it though:

http://www.hurryupharry.org/2009/11/11/the-sun-shows-how-easy-it-is-to-get-a-name-wrong/

"Oh, An Elevatoroperator'saperson in Your Neighborhood"

2009-11-09T20:45:00.015Z

I consistently claim - often quite forcibly - that advertising has no effect on me whatsoever. That I can't remember the product, that I am not prodded towards any brand when I go shopping. I am not influenced. And yet, my very favourite television series in my earliest years was nakedly intent on adopting the techniques of advertising, and applying them to the alphabet, numbers and various other educational concepts, through repetition, jingles, catchy songs and humorous skits. Hence that announcement at the end of each episode which began: “Sesame Street has been brought to you today by…”

Made from day one by the Children’s Television Workshop, Sesame Street was first broadcast in the United States on Monday 10 November 1969 on the commercial-free PBS (Public Broadcasting System). Created by Joan Ganz Cooney and Lloyd Morrisset, Vice-President of the Carnegie Corporation (one of the series’ many sponsors), its initial budget was $8 million, and 130 daily shows were made in its first year. An extremely fast-paced collision of studio activity, live action documentaries, brief animations and sketches and songs involving adults, children and puppets, its target audience in America was said to be the 3 to 6-year-old viewer who had not yet begun regular schooling.

The show’s production team were not slow to look at international sales. In January 1970, executive producer David D. Connell travelled to the UK to try and look into the possibilities of co-production, or at the very least to see if the BBC would broadcast the shows. The Corporation had started to sell its own pre-school success - Play School - around the world. However, its head of children’s broadcasting at the time, Monica Sims, rejected Sesame Street. While admiring of many of its aims, she believed that its approach was too ‘authoritarian’, obsessed with rewarding right answers. More than this, she worried that the programme-makers’ intention to ‘change children’s behaviour’ in learning was ‘dangerous’. It should also be noted that the BBC’s education and children’s departments considered themselves completely separate at the time; when another CTW series, The Electric Company - a series aimed at 10- to 16-year-olds to improve reading skills (Morgan Freeman was one of its cast members) – was bought by the BBC in 1974, it became firmly locked in a schools TV slot.

The Independent Television Authority (ITA) expressed more interest in importing Sesame Street than the BBC, but remained cautious. Could an American series, 60 minutes long, with many inbuilt cultural and linguistic differences, be used as an educational tool for British children? After a half-hour extract was presented at a Society for Film and Television Arts meeting in London in November 1970, tentative, experimental transmissions were organised in a handful of ITV regions. On Monday 29 March 1971, at 1.45 in the afternoon (just as Watch with Mother was ending over on BBC1), HTV became the first region in Britain to broadcast Sesame Street. Selected episodes were shown daily for a fortnight.

HTV was my ITV region. I was ten months old at the time, and by October 1971, HTV was running Sesame Street in a regular Saturday morning slot (as did London Weekend, Grampian in the North of Scotland, and a few months later, Granada and Ulster). Gradually, most but crucially not all ITV regions followed suit. Ironically, Midlands company ATV – who would co-produce the internationally successful Muppet Show from 1976 – was one of the last to show Sesame Street.

I can’t really remember my earliest years, and there’s no point asking older relatives about it as their memory is far worse than mine, but I am almost certain that Sesame Street – shown every single Saturday in my living room from 1971 until 1976 - fired my curiosity, and enhanced my reading ability and counting skills before I started nursery school (1973) and then school itself a year later. I can even remember being corrected by a favourite teacher that the last letter of the alphabet was in fact pronounced ‘Zed’. Not ‘Zee’. I was mystified. I think that may have been my only Americanism – I wasn’t saying ‘sidewalk’ or ‘elevator’ or even ‘jelly’ instead of ‘jam’, but my unspoken defence at the time amounted to, "What British programmes teach the alphabet?" Clearly, in this country, it wasn’t (isn’t?) a job for television to do. That was (is?) for schools, and parents.

Sesame Street had a hugely controversial beginning in the UK (and US for that matter, where the standard of quality kids TV was generally regarded as deplorable). Barry Norman, writing for The Times in 1971, sniffed that children could already glean all they needed from existing BBC fare like Blue Peter and Play School, aside from “a little verbal wit”. Chris Dunkley, in the same paper, wondered why a homegrown children’s department could not produce something comparable at a fraction of the cost. But even as the ITA was deciding how and when to broadcast Sesame Street, so ITV companies’ children’s departments were considering how to devise their own equivalents, on comparatively modest budgets. What, after all, was Thames Television’s Rainbow (which began in 1972), if it wasn’t a stripped down Sesame Street? Studio-based banter with colourful puppets, songs, stories, those 'Lines and Shapes' animations made by Cosgrove-Hall...

Really, though, my most primal, instinctive thank you to Sesame Street does not really concern its schooling techniques. I remain affectionate to it – even though I’ve not seen it properly for many years now, and some of the Muppet additions later on (I’m thinking of you, Elmo) annoy the hell out of me even in passing – because it was almost certainly the first thing I ever saw on television that regularly made me laugh uproariously. I think Barry Norman underestimated this aspect of the series, and bearing in mind that most kids TV humour in the early 70s hardly nudged itself beyond the lolly stick gags of Crackerjack, there was something about the vaudeville, tele-literate nature of Sesame Street’s comedy – much of it, I concede, aimed at parents/guardians – that thoroughly appealed to me. It says a lot that the laughter still came thick and fast just now when I watched this, and this, and in fact this.

To finish: a careless thought: Was Oscar the Grouch’s voice deliberately based on that of Barry McGuire’s (check out the chorus)? And a wish: I want a full-length version of this, which used to accompany the post-credits rollcall of sponsors for the programme. Nile Rodgers (later of Chic) was in the Sesame Street house band in the show’s early days, and I’d love to think he’s playing on this.

Primrose Hill... Statten Island... Chalk Farm... Massif Central... Gospel Oak... Sao Paulo...Boston Manor... Costa Rica...

2009-10-19T10:40:00.017+01:00

For me, few things are usually as ephemeral, as transient, and to be honest as meritless as a remix of something old. Just about passable and tolerable in a club, when half the time you're not really absorbing who things are by (not even I do that in that setting, and that's saying something), but all too often it's hard not to regard these sorts of remixes as short-term marketing gimmicks dreamt up by record companies who want to fill the free space on a forthcoming greatest hits package. And the treatment in many cases is simply to trowel on a crass slab of tinny hardhouse.

Not, thankfully, in this case, though. On sale as a limited edition, Foxbase Beta is Richard X's remix of the entirety of Saint Etienne's first-ever LP, Foxbase Alpha. The original album arrived in the shops on the 14th of October 1991 as a terrific stew of three-minute pop songs, indie sensibilities, dub and dancefloor culture, plus an eclectic plethora of lo-fi samples from radio, TV and celluloid. It only reached 34 in the album charts, and the only top 40 hit it spawned was the group's landmark cover of Neil Young's "Only Love Can Break Your Heart" (first issued as their debut single in May 1990 and with Faith Over Reason vocalist Moira Lambert singing lead). But it remains one of the most colourful and innovative long-players of its time, as much of an adventure as the more commercially successful De La Soul's 3 Feet High and Rising or Primal Scream's Screamadelica.

Foxbase Beta is both radical in form and content, and respectful of its parent album's own groundbreaking nature. Most remixes of Saint Etienne's work - and there have been some first-rate ones down the years, many of them collected on 1996's Casino Classics - have tended to throw the song in the bin and start again, but Richard X's love of the pop song has perhaps dictated that he wants to retain the heart of the originals. An excellent and enjoyable accompanying audio commentary that adorns a bonus disc - in which remixer meets artists (namely Bob Stanley and Pete Wiggs) - reveals how X tried his darnedest to mirror the original running time of the LP in the reworked version.

The commentary also reveals which songs started life under the working titles "House", "Goth", "Vibes" and "Militaria", the two reasons why track 3 is so-called, as well as tantalising us with who could have provided a cameo appearance on "London Belongs to Me", and climaxing with the voice of a bona-fide 80s pop star (well, two-hit 80s pop star anyway). Listening to the real-time discussion of the album and its remix, plenty of mysteries are solved, but a handful are deliberately left tangled, and a couple are not even addressed. What, for instance, is the significance of "June the fourth, 1989" in "Girl VII"? Is it related to the massacre by the Chinese army in Tiannenmen Square which took place on that date? Or is there a more personal reason why it gets a mention?

Richard X's first achievement is to strengthen the oddities so that "Wilson" now has an endearing keyboard motif, and the closing "Dilworth's Theme" is extended way beyond its original 33 seconds into the proper singalong it always deserved to be. As for the opening "This is Radio Etienne", which in original form was little more than a lift of a recording from football coverage on French radio, has now been doctored to establish a mood of 1990, what with a curtailed Radio 1 jingle and conversation with a fictional cab driver. X was given full access to the master tapes too, so that we get alternative footage from the decimalisation disc and episode of Countdown that feature in, respectively, "Wilson" and "Stoned to Say the Least". With a lot of the original's reverb sucked out of the mix, you can hear some of the lyrics better too. I'm not sure I'd ever deciphered the second verse of "Nothing Can Stop Us" before now.

As audiences at the group's occasional gigs this year can testify - where they have performed the LP in its entirety in a similar style - the bolder reworkings are often the most effective. The brittle and lolloping "Only Love Can Break Your Heart" has been jettisoned in favour of a tougher stomping rhythm, "She's the One" sounds thrillingly contemporary, and as we near the album's end, there are powerful treatments of both "London Belongs to Me" and the extraordinary and chilling "Like the Swallow". All in all, a superb revamp, and if it doesn't quite hit the heights of the original incarnation, it's more than worth investigating.

Why Jan Moir Just Doesn't Get It

2009-10-17T00:04:00.007+01:00

"Some people, particularly in the gay community, have been upset by my article about the sad death of Boyzone member Stephen Gately. This was never my intention. Stephen, as I pointed out in the article was a charming and sweet man who entertained millions.

"However, the point of my column-which, I wonder how many of the people complaining have fully read - was to suggest that, in my honest opinion, his death raises many unanswered questions. That was all. Yes, anyone can die at anytime of anything. However, it seems unlikely to me that what took place in the hours immediately preceding Gately's death - out all evening at a nightclub, taking illegal substances, bringing a stranger back to the flat, getting intimate with that stranger - did not have a bearing on his death. At the very least, it could have exacerbated an underlying medical condition.

"The entire matter of his sudden death seemed to have been handled with undue haste when lessons could have been learned. On this subject, one very important point. When I wrote that 'he would want to set an example to any impressionable young men who may want to emulate what they might see as his glamorous routine', I was referring to the drugs and the casual invitation extended to a stranger. Not to the fact of his homosexuality. In writing that 'it strikes another blow to the happy-ever-after myth of civil partnerships' I was suggesting that civil partnerships - the introduction of which I am on the record in supporting - have proved just to be as problematic as marriages.

"In what is clearly a heavily orchestrated internet campaign I think it is mischievous in the extreme to suggest that my article has homophobic and bigoted undertones."

--------------
"Mischievous in the extreme". Well, leaving aside the shameless back-pedalling - indeed, is there anything about the Moir act that isn't shameless? - I think we really have reached a nadir in cynical journalism. Because to assume that hundreds of complaints published on the Mail website, many from those who profess to being loyal Mail readers who have never posted about anything before, represents a "heavily orchestrated internet campaign" means that while she is just about bright enough to know what will make people complain (she's a columnist with a FABULOUS education but who knows fuck all), she isn't sufficiently clever to understand why they're complaining.

The reason you're hated on a day like today, Jan, is that you assume a readership, even a Daily Mail readership, is so spiteful that they'll cheer on any kind of salacious, wrong-headed gossip about a celebrity whose corpse has barely cooled. Interestingly, they haven't. And we've been here before. In 1986-87, Kelvin Mackenzie at The Sun tried very hard - extremely hard - to bring down Elton John's career, from badly-researched and WRONG tittle tattle about rent boys to suggesting that his guard dogs had had their larynxes removed. Not only was it a costly mistake - Elton sued to the tune of a million quid and in December 1988 the paper had to print a front-page apology into the bargain - but it backfired because the readership didn't believe in the gossip to begin with.

Newspaper readers, particularly tabloid ones, could perhaps be insensitive and unthinking, but usually only because they don't carry round a story in their heads all day. They chuckle for a few moments at the mental health of a celebrity or pass judgement on how evil a criminal might be, but they don't necessarily have an agenda. And they don't take kindly when a much-loved celebrity like Stephen Gately, who really didn't cause anyone much harm whatsoever while alive, is given a sniggering anti-tribute which no heterosexual man would have received in quite the same way. You don't have to be a Boyzone fan, or a gay man or a Guardian reader to find Jan Moir's column reprehensible old shit. But in order to see the angry response that's circulated over the last 24 hours as "a heavily orchestrated internet campaign", someone like Moir would have to have reasoned that the British public is every bit as cynical and cold as she quite clearly is. What today's events have proven - and this is quite heartening in the end - is that sometimes the public isn't idiotic and has a sense of decency that journalists can underestimate at their peril.

In the end, Moir can bluster about being misunderstood, but no. Actually, quite a lot of us understood extremely fucking well what she was trying to do: trivialise the death of someone into ignorant copy, before going on to talk about scones and The Nolans' onstage costumes in exactly the same gushing bitchy syntax. She may think she's Dorothy Parker. She's nowhere near Dorothy Squires. There's no insight there, not even impassioned hatred, but something far worse: careless, icy indifference.

I've already given her Daily Mail email address on here - though (why not?) here it is again: jan.moir@dailymail.co.uk But you might also want to give a piece of your mind to the editor of the Mail's Femail section, who would have greenlit the article. It is Andrew Morrod, who was appointed to that position in February 2008. His email address is andrew.morrod@dailymail.co.uk

If A Columnist Writes Something Offensive, Ignorant And Stupid (As They Often Do), Don't Write A Comment On A Board They Will Never Read

2009-10-16T11:40:00.007+01:00

Email them instead.

The Sun: firstname.surname@the-sun.co.uk
Daily Star: firstname.surname@dailystar.co.uk
The Independent: firstnameinitial.surname@independent.co.uk
The Guardian: firstname.surname@guardian.co.uk
The Telegraph: firstname.surname@telegraph.co.uk
The Times: firstname.surname@thetimes.co.uk
The Mirror: firstname.surname@mirror.co.uk
News of the World: firstname.surname@notw.co.uk
Express: firstname.surname@express.co.uk
Daily Mail: jan.moir@dailymail.co.uk

Convenience Food

2009-10-15T00:13:00.010+01:00

October means only one thing. OK, it doesn't just mean one thing, as there's the Horse of the Year Show, the Booker Prize, the clocks going back, Halloween, the deadline for sending your tax returns by post, and the bank holiday to coincide with celebrating the birth of Hazell Dean. But really, Octobers exist to remind us that the Christmas decor is about to suffocate every shop's innards within a matter of a few weeks, and that what heralds the pre-Yuletide build-up even more than greatest hits albums or the emergence of live DVDs from people who've been on Mock the Week is a lot of cheap, gaudy additions to the humour sections of bookshops. Stocking fillers. Books to dip into. Toilet books.

If there's something that constitutes a toilet book, it's a tome that isn't really linear. Try starting Anna Karenina at page 271 and next switch to page 80 and it won't really work, but no matter what page you stop at in Is It Me Or Is Everything Just Shit?, chances are that your reaction and appreciation of the text will be exactly the same.

I was going to invent a sarcastic spoof title for an Is It Me...?-type book but then reasoned that, like the names of thrash metal bands, or of porn films, it is impossible to parody the titles of toilet books. The genuine articles cannot be beaten. And so, it is with great pleasure that I welcome on to the shelves of bookstores everywhere a piece of work that aims to make sense of the convoluted history of the much-disrespected toilet book - namely the terrfically entertaining and informative Closet Reading by Phil Norman, which is subtitled "500 Years of Humour on the Loo". Over 250 pages, he traces the story of how we got from The Decameron to Crap Towns, an itinerary with many breathers along the way: conpendiums of riddles, bawdy stories, periodicals, mock-ups of Radio Times listings, and - fittingly - the borrowings of daubings from lavatory walls (the latter courtesy of Nigel Rees's many volumes of graffiti in the 1980s). Clowns called Roger, farmhands in 1595 called 'John-a-Nokes', the innate feeling that a book by the game and prolific Gyles Brandreth is never far away, regardless of the subject under discussion.

I'd dearly like to know how Norman amassed all the ingredients for Closet Reading for this well-researched journey. Either he was bought a skipful of pulp each December throughout his childhood (and adulthood?), or he has set out with grim thoroughness to test that reported claim that 'The British Library is bound by law to keep a copy of every book published in the United Kingdom'. Or has he, on the other hand, not logged out of eBay since March 2002?

We've all bought or been bought many titles celebrated or at least eyed suspiciously in Closet Reading - even if we haven't gone as far as to actually share our living space with What a Week! with Bruno Brookes or Angela Rippon's West Country. Admittedly, my own personal collection of toilet books ranges from nearly all the Not the Nine O'Clock News ones, The Goodies Book of Criminal Records, The Peter Powell Book of Pop, and seven annual volumes of The Rock Yearbook (Virgin Books, throughout the 80s, usually containing at least one ponderous phoned-in rant from Tony Parsons), to a free copy of Viz's Crap Joke Book (from when I bought a tape deck from Richer Sounds in 1992), Paul Manning's How to Be a Wally, and - given to me at the age of EIGHT by friends of my parents - Ronnie Barker's Sauce. I met these people again at a family gathering a few weeks ago, and despite being roaringly drunk and therefore far more likely than usual to ask weird questions, never thought to enquire, "Now, did you ever open that Ronnie Barker book before giving it to me, seeing as it was almost literally page after page of black and white archived photographs of naked women?" And in case you're wondering: no, a song from Barbara Dickson did not turn up for the centrefold.

Toilet books are oft-maligned and rarely given their due, so it's gratifying to see Norman pay sincere tribute to many of these titles. For instance, I'm still not sure if after all these years any book has made me laugh as loudly, as agonisedly, as Stephen Pile's The Book of Heroic Failures (1979) and its sequel The Return of Heroic Failures, with such entries as "The World's Worst Garage" (had three steps leading up to its entrance), or "The World's Most Useless Ornament" (the woman who owned it discovered it was a live bomb). Heroic Failures isn't mentioned in the same breath as Decline and Fall very often, and I'm certainly not suggesting it's better either, but what I cannot doubt is that few Christmas presents have given me such uncomplicated joy.

Norman's own prose, rich and evocative, demonstrates he's a gifted humorous writer himself. His summing up of Les Dawson's lecherous Cosmo Smallpiece is too inspired for me to toss away on a mere blog post - buy the book! - and I'd like to think that Dawson himself would have approved of his description. Juggling factual material and humour can be fraught with difficulty; it's easy to get bogged down with diligently researched information, or get carried away with witticisms and evaporate into pointless whimsy, but this author has a lightness of touch, a lively imagination and sticks to the point.

Will Closet Reading become a toilet book itself? Here's the irony. It's not a toilet book, not really. No pictures for starters, you have no choice but to read many words one after another with no other distractions, dammit. No chapter is terribly long, but it's less of a bog book than, say, Chris Evans's newly-published autobiography, which - diverting as it can be - rarely prods any chapter past five sides of paper. It has a thematic structure and is designed to be read from cover to cover. But then again, I suppose anything could be a toilet book, if you so desired. Maybe Clarissa, if pushed, although only if you were locked in.

Here's a second paradox. Even though I myself have been instrumental in writing a book that became a toilet read for an ex-school friend and his legendary musician flatmate (clue: rhymes with 'Latex Bin'), I don't read in the lav, nor have I ever done really. I have read in the bath, I would probably pack a book if I had to go hand-gliding, but I never think to read books on the toilet. I save that time for some kind of contemplation, even if it's simply to try and remember what I'm supposed to be doing after I wash and dry my hands and leave that room. Or maybe it's because I once houseshared with someone (I promise this is not me) who insisted on keeping lots of issues of FHM in the toilet and rather gave himself away by leaving them open at particular pages.

Closet Reading is gregarious, benevolent, filthy, charming, funny and intelligent. What's more it is the only way this Christmas - unless you can track down Michael Parkinson's 1973 offering Confession Album - of discovering just what is Patrick Moore's "greatest misery". Plus it reprints a Tarby line about a farting Goon that is so wilfully unamusing that it had the opposite effect and made me howl with mirth for a few minutes. Rescue it from the shelves and read it in any room, on any seat, that you wish. Merry October.

Major Dad

2009-10-10T08:29:00.002+01:00

Meet my dad. This posting might be the first-ever reference to him on the worldwide web. Most of the rest of my family are googleable, even if it’s just in an incidental manner, but my dad never managed this “honour”. Exactly 15 years ago today, before the internet had become firmly established, he died at the age of only fifty-six. From time to time, during the dozen or so years I’ve had regular net access, I’ve idly entered his name into a search engine, and placed outside those all-important inverted commas words relating to his hometown, where he grew up, where he worked. Maybe someone he once knew has written about him, or mentioned him. One of the main reasons I signed up to Friends Reunited was to see if anyone at his secondary school mentioned him. No such luck. (By the way, does anyone else in the whole world still look at Friends Reunited? Or does everyone else in the world simply ask if anyone else in the world still looks at Friends Reunited?)

As a child, I may have regarded Dad as some kind of prototype internet. He seemed to be a mine of information, most of it useful, and quite where he’d absorbed some of this from was always a bit of a mystery. Some of it came from school, where he gained four O-levels, but I think he was a bit of a closet swot. He never claimed to be an expert on anything – and something that maddened my mother consistently was his tendency to say “I think” after stating something that was very obviously a piece of factual information. He knew all the stuff I don’t know and always have to look up: how things worked, names of trees, birds, flowers, land features, history. While I found him a bit intimidating when I was very young (I think because he worked so selflessly hard to provide for us, he was either working or sleeping, when he could not be disturbed), we would come to bond over a love of physical comedy – one of the things I miss most of all is his cackling at Fawlty Towers or Tommy Cooper or Tom & Jerry – and, as any regular readers of this blog may already know, music.

He really did like music of all kinds, from Allegri to Motown, from Fairport to Stan Kenton. But you couldn’t tell what he’d suddenly fall in love with, or what he was cool towards. A working drummer for over 30 years, he was bound to take a dim view of synth-pop, given that it put his own profession under threat, but a spell in hospital in 1983 where he would be subjected over and over again to The Human League’s “Keep Feeling Fascination” led him from extreme irritation to... well, fascination. He became a fan apparently overnight, though he drew the line at “Being Boiled”. I never quite found out what changed his mind, but I know myself the number of my very favourite records which I have disliked on first hearing. Although he epitomised having a catholic musical taste, he was not above being a bit of a snob on times. My mother still recalls with shuddering pleasure Dad’s horrified reaction when a then family friend visited their house in the mid-60s, leafed through the LPs and enquired, “Got any Jim Reeves?”

Dad met Mum around 1952 on a Sunday school outing. He was about 13 or 14, and the resulting friendship would lead to courtship, and from 1963, a mostly extremely happy 31-year marriage. But his early life had been turmoil-filled. From the little I know – even when he was alive, we rarely saw his side of the family – he lost his mother to tuberculosis before he reached his second birthday. By then it was wartime, and he and his elder brother were evacuated to Carmarthenshire. After the war, their father married someone else and moved to the Midlands, whereupon his children were brought up by benevolent if slightly scary foster parents. His foster mum was still alive when I was small and if she had “mellowed”, I still found her more threatening than any teacher I had. (She still adored us all, though.)

And then she died, mere months after the sudden death of his brother while abroad. I never quite knew to what extent all this, or come to that the upheavals of his early life, affected him. Indeed, I never knew whether, overall, he was a happy man. He seemed stoic enough, someone who kept going, but I never really got the chance – at the risk of sounding like Mike & the Mechanics – to ask him about his life. What you’ve just read is most of what I know for sure.

But here are some other random thoughts about him: He had no ego. I don’t think he had a cruel cell in his body. He was a compact but strong man. He apparently told Mum he was at his happiest in work when he was a bus driver (during the 1960s). He was at his happiest off work either when he was walking our pet borzoi dog, or spending time with us, when he got the chance. He understood my bookishness and hatred for sport. Equally he related to my brother’s opposite nature. He loved his family, but he never seemed fazed by solitude. He would talk to animals. His snoring was, I regret to say, seismic, and even when we tape-recorded the row one night, he insisted that he was just snoring for effect and he knew we were taping him.

He loved us.

His last years weren’t easy ones either. At the end of the 80s, after 20 years as a fitter and turner at the docks, he was made redundant. He scratched around for temporary work, and the drumming duties continued for a time, but then he became seriously ill and had to stop. He grew more and more tired, and this quiet man who had always played LPs far louder than his children had became quieter still. The last time I was with him (I had left home by now, and lived fifty miles away), we watched a TV documentary about the history of variety presented by Paul Merton. I wish I could remember what we talked about afterwards. What I do remember, though, is that we talked.

The detail is, I guess/I hope, not important. Just remembering him is the main thing. And, 15 years on, I do just that every single day. To this sweetest of men.

The Evil Hiss Was Robbed

2009-10-06T02:29:00.009+01:00

I've just returned from a celebratory weekend with my family. My mother - whose milestone birthday it was - is a regular listener to BBC Radio Wales, and it seems that whenever I go back there, I seem to hear the same records. One of which is 1979's "The Devil Went Down to Georgia" by The Charlie Daniels Band. It was their one and only hit in Britain, while in the US, they'd crossed over from Southern rock to country-rock and had several further smashes ranging from the markedly patriotic ("In America") to the pro-vigilante ("Simple Man"). We've been spared in the UK, I suspect. But he was also on Leonard Cohen's Songs of Love & Hate and Dylan's Self-Portrait. Fair play. Even if he is fairly, if not extremely, pro-Republican.

Loads of people have covered "The Devil Went Down to Georgia", from The Levellers and Primus, to a handful of UK acts who have reasoned that the funniest joke in the world is to use a British place name instead of an American one. Into this category, rather than a deserved hole full of rats, falls Jim Davidson, with - for Christ's sake - "The Devil Went Down to Brixton". Not to mention, only I'm mentioning it, Sunderland's Toy Dolls, improbably still going 25 years after "Nellie the Elephant", who have punished a transgressive world with "The Devil Went Down to Scunthorpe". What did we do to deserve either or both? Whatever it was we did, we did it.

For anyone who doesn't know, the original song - itself based on a tune called "Lonesome Fiddle Blues" written by Vassar Clements in the 1940s - is a musical duel between the Devil and a fiddler named Johnny. It's a novelty record but a memorable one at that. The Devil offers him a golden fiddle if Johnny can outplay him, but there's a catch: if Johnny fails in his bid, the Devil can claim his soul. I don't think it's a massive spoiler to mention that Mr Satan is more than happy to give in to Johnny's talent and profess him to be the winner of the contest and the golden fiddle. Except: for thirty years, I've never been entirely convinced that Johnny deserves the prize, at least not without a recount or a sizable judging panel, or maybe a referendum for listeners. The Devil's showpiece section - admittedly all fireworks and glissandi and screeching bravado - is to my ears a more impressive section of musicianship than Johnny's adept but standard reworkings of various down-home tunes.

We're told that the Devil retires, defeated, while Johnny cockily asserts he's the "best there's ever been". But what evidence do we have that he is better? Merely that we've been told by Daniels' narrator? Is it just that good must triumph over evil? That Georgia, and therefore America, must emerge victorious over anywhere else? Hell included? Because based on musical criteria, it's like comparing windows and coffee.

Maybe, musically speaking, Daniels and his co-writers should have made the gulf between the two instrumentalists' abilities more glaring. Sure, if you want Johnny to emerge victorious from the start, make the Devil's performance useless. Why not have him suddenly finding that his violin is made out of polystyrene, that he can only play two notes - F and F# - with a bow constructed from a windscreen wiper, and that just before the contest begins, his instrument has just been crushed under the wheels of a Pickfords removal van? The only drawback with that possibility is that it was supposed to be the prize in the contest. Let's see you play "Fire on the mountain, run boys run" on the remains of that, young Johnny.

Me, I'm More Excited About "Hooch Meets the Impressionists"

2009-10-01T18:39:00.006+01:00

But, for the moment... Best. Sequel. Ever.

World of No Sport

2009-09-28T14:15:00.001+01:00

Now that I have an FM radio at work, Woman’s Hour on Radio 4 has become a part of my daily routine again. I don’t know if it’s because I’m a man but half the time, it doesn’t even register that it’s supposed to be a programme for women. I just find it an interesting listen, far less combative and up itself than Today, and with a complete absence of Mark Lawson (thus meaning it’s automatically miles ahead of Front Row).

Lynne Truss was on it this morning, talking about her new book Get Her Off the Pitch, about how she went from being a sports ignoramus to someone who can’t shut up about it. All well and good, and that phrase probably reveals just about everything about my own attitude to sport. I don’t even hate the practice, as that would presume that I spend lots of time working up a flurry of ire over it. I am indifferent to it. The sports content on the news – I have come to realise my mind has wandered by the time the introductory words ‘And now sport’ have been uttered.

Not only that, but until writing this, I don’t believe I’ve even thought much about how little I think about sport. And so when Jane Garvey on Woman’s Hour asked Truss how she had previously been able to have no interest in sport – given how ubiquitous it is supposed to be – and Truss responded, ‘Well, I don’t know a man can survive the modern world without a passing interest in sport’, I felt the sudden but very urgent need to reach for the iPod instead.

Avoiding sport conversation or action: it is incredibly easy. Never picking up Shortlist on the bus. Going out on Saturday afternoons. Having friends who don’t bang on about it, and don’t have a dig at me for my lack of interest. Responding to taxi drivers who say, ‘What about the game then?’ with an unapologetic ‘Sorry, I don’t really follow football’. (It’s amazing how often that does the trick.) Reading lots of books when it’s the World Cup, the Olympics or the US Masters, to name but three. Not listening to Five Live (former home of Jane Garvey, which may be why she has found sport unavoidable all these years), unless it’s Danny Baker’s show, and that has next to nothing to do with sport anyway. I did cheer outwardly during Baker’s Saturday show when he said how boring he finds most people who indulge in sporting conversation.

I don’t mind sport existing, then. If you like it, good for you. But it’s far trickier to live in Britain in 2009 without hearing “Here Come the Girls” by the Sugababes or without seeing Frankie Boyle’s face. In comparison, sidestepping sport is a doddle. The fact it’s the last thing on the news or in a newspaper should give you a clue: it’s not really all that important.

Anonymous Hack Spits Spite: Part 3 Trillion

2009-09-27T22:52:00.006+01:00

Rule one of this blog when I revived it in June was: Don't refer to anything in the Mail, don't link to it. Life is too short to bother getting angry at newspapers you would never normally pick up in the newsagents. The only reason I read it is because it's free online, and people often do that thing of sending you a link and saying, "Fuck me, have you seen this?!!" Whereupon I make the mistake of clicking on the link, I then read 500 words of faux-furious balderdash with a particular agenda of its own, and hey presto, I spend the next hour pacing the office like Jerry Sadowitz with earache.

This is why in a perverse way charging for online news content may be a good thing in my world, for the selfish but simple reason that my life would automatically become a sunnier web of goodwill and time not wasted growling at Amanda Platell's poorly-researched and deliberately inflammatory opinions. For instance.

However, and you knew that 'however' was coming, and I know this invalidates the whole of the above preamble, but this cannot pass without comment for several reasons. The death of Piers Merchant, a Tory MP who embarked on an affair just before the 1997 general election, has meant that the Mail has permitted itself to dredge the whole thing up again. Which I'm sure is bound to delight no end not only Merchant's widow Helen/Natalie (bless, the Mail can't decide. Who needs sub-editors anyway?), but also the 17-year-old he cheated on her with. Who is unnecessarily named again. Just what you want: it's 12 years on, your life has probably gone in a completely different direction, and the cuttings file has been reopened.

But it's that headline that really makes me want to smash in Northcliffe House's windows. Just what sort of mind does someone have to have to be a scintilla away from glee over someone's agonising death? No-one in newspapers has ever cheated on their partner, have they? Really?!

I won't write about this paper again. You have my word.

My Life in Beatles

2009-09-10T21:48:00.009+01:00

I was discussing with a friend over a thoroughly enjoyable meze platter recently about my moderate fandom of The Beatles. I'm enjoying the current season of documentaries on BBC Four, but don't have the dosh to spend on all the remasters. In fact, I don't even have all the albums to start with. I've never quite gone through that obsession with them, in truth, even though I regard them unquestioningly as the default pop group. Perhaps the closest I came to such adoration came in the year after I graduated, when I had very little money, was still a member of the recordings library in my hometown and dubbed off cassette copies of all the compact discs. The ones I kept going back to were Rubber Soul, the White album, Abbey Road and the second volume of Past Masters.

That was in 1992-93, and I'm not sure why that's when it happened - it's not as if there had been Beatles overload in that time, unless you count Michael Jackson's mangled remake of "Come Together" and I most certainly don't. Or that Ringo supergroup with Todd Rundgren and Joe Walsh, come to that, which I don't count either, mainly because I've never heard them. Yet when the Anthologies proliferated (1995-96), I was relatively indifferent. Contrary for the sake of it? Not deliberately. And I feel the same way about the remasters now. There's plenty of time. Besides, I need to book a holiday and buy a new phone.

Several years before I was born, my dad had bought Beatles albums. Admittedly, he owned just three: Beatles for Sale (which is a little like establishing your personal Dylan catalogue with Under the Red Sky), Help! and, saving the day, Rubber Soul. I don't know why he stopped after that, and I wish he was still around to answer such a question. (And still around for another billion reasons or so.) Rubber Soul was the only one I recall being spun in my 1970s boyhood, and even then there was only "Girl" and "Norwegian Wood" that stuck in the mind. But the latter only really lodged in the subconscious perhaps because Dad was more likely to have put on a raucous 1967 cover of the song by the Buddy Rich Big Band. (Buddy Rich was the first gig I attended, incidentally. September 1984)

Throughout the 70s, The Beatles seemed to me a relic, mentioned by many but strangely rarely heard. I did not really grow up in a Beatles-obsessed household, as even Dad's three LPs didn't often get played. It didn't feel like you heard their records on the radio much, although occasionally, they'd show some footage on television of ecstatic adolescents hollering from about 1963. As a small child, I was troubled by this, not least because you couldn't really hear the music underneath it. I started to categorise them in with, of all people, The Osmonds, because their fans behaved much the same way, only in colour.

Just as it took a while in subsequent years to discover that John Cleese had in fact been in Monty Python, so I didn't quite know that the bloke from Wings had a past. I knew "We Can Work It Out", but through Stevie Wonder, and I'm convinced my exposure to "Hey Jude" came via Wilson Pickett. As for "Something", I was more familiar with Isaac Hayes' 12-minute epic reading for The Isaac Hayes Movement, a record which was all but worn out in our house. Elsewhere, Brian Cant or possibly Don Spencer covered "Octopus's Garden" on Play School, there was a BBC2 testcard version of "Yesterday", and I nearly perished of fright as a toddler on hearing Ringo Starr playing a pederast for the orchestral version of The Who's Tommy, with the London Symphony Orchestra. The trauma of hearing him ad-lib "Lift up your vest" in the closing seconds of "Fiddle About" may well have scarred me for life. It's on Spotify. You have been warned. There was a reissue campaign in 1976 of most of the singles, whereupon "Yesterday" became a hit for the first time in the UK, but it passed me by, and not because I was pogoing at the 100 Club either.

Hilariously, I was so ignorant of the Beatles' achievements that, aged eight or so, I heard "She Loves You" via my classmate Paul, and believed it was called "Yeah, Yeah, Yeah". Making me the obvious person to organise the Sergeant Pepper film, I suppose. (I still rate Earth Wind & Fire's version of "Got to Get You into My Life", though.) When Lennon's life was abruptly ended in 1980, I reverently went out and bought the "(Just Like) Starting Over" single and helped it leapfrog back up the charts to number one. I can't remember ever playing it, though.

But to be honest, the main reason why I tend to redden when the subject of Beatles comes up is that when it finally came to the crunch, the first thing I ever bought with their name on it - in June 1982 - wasn't the Red and Blue albums, though they would soon follow. Or that MFP Rock & Roll Music tape you could buy in newsagents in the early 80s. No. It was this. Could it have been worse? Well, only if I'd bought this.

Come to think of it, Beatles for Sale is fantastic really.

What Shall I Buy Instead?

2009-09-09T14:48:00.012+01:00

Exclusively to Happily Stupid, apart from all the other websites that also have such information, here's the full track listing for Prefab Sprout's new album, La La La And La:

1) I Like G Minor

2) Saint Sammy Cahn

3) Love and Kettledrums

4) Pray Silence Please For G Minor

5) Music Sounds Better With You

6) Mahler Took Off My Pants

7) Oh Wait, On Reflection G Major Is The Best Key

8) Music Was My First Love And It Will Be My Last

9) Treble Clef: A Short History

10) Semibreve Encounter

11) Final Answer: C Major

12) The Cockney Rejects Make Me Sigh

13) Something About Kurt Weill, Probably

14) Jesus Jazz Johann Jive Jamboree Jugband JoBoxers

'Ello 'Ello 'Ello Goodbye

2009-09-09T12:13:00.005+01:00

http://uk.news.yahoo.com/5/20090908/tuk-hello-999-i-ve-left-my-coat-on-the-b-45dbed5.html

It’s been a long time coming but at long last Britain’s favourite emergency service (apart from maybe fire and ambulance) have got their act together and flooded the public domain with the most hotly anticipated releases of the year. The Police first made their name in the drab early 1960s of Britain, influenced heavily by America’s The Detectives, whose brand of assistance and corruption had become a hit with victims of crime of all ages. At one point such was the Police's cultural importance that they headlined at the Royal Variety Performance, scored a top thirty hit in Australia, and even inspired their own cartoon series, Hanna-Mandlikova’s Sergeant & the Pussycats (1967-69; renamed Boss Cardboard for UK audiences). They inspired anyone who came into contact with them to scream with hysteria, or sometimes with fright. But in 1966, at the height of their fame, the four officers withdrew from public performances. Their Boxing Day TV special, The Police Unexpectedly Commit Crimes On Holiday, received a mixed response, and by the turn of the 70s, it was clear that the British public were looking for new emergency services to worship.

Yet The Police were never to be quite forgotten, embraced by generation after generation, and today sees the release at long last of all the wrongly imprisoned people who were victims of miscarriages of justice due to… no? Well, at least there’s the release of the Revolution 999 boxset to be going on with. A cool £200 (or slightly less if you want them in stereo) and you can enjoy some of the sounds that got police station ansaphones and switchboards buzzing over the years. The tracks, including “I Left My Coat On The Bus Today, Oh Boy” and “There’s No Credit on My Phone, Oh Boy”, are well-known to fans of those intrusive police messages you used to get when trying to get a decent Radio 4 signal on VHF, but only now can they be enjoyed by a whole new generation of idiots. The tracks are expected to be some of the most in-demand additions to iTunes this week, although strong opposition is predicted from Mercury nominations The Firemen and Those Ambulance Drivers.

Stick to Crashing The Vocals On Billy Joel's River of Dreams, Terry

2009-09-05T16:38:00.007+01:00

Another autumn, another Woganised book, and another splurge of coasting and opinionated - but quite often misplaced - sarcasm. This year sees him chuckling sardonically at the pomposity of television news. As this SPOILER in the Telegraph says, it's a sideswipe at newsreaders and the easy life they enjoy, with a lot of pre-broadcast pampering and reciting words off an autocue. The work is done for them, is Terry's gripe. And he justifies his opinion by saying he used to read the news himself, at RTE in the 1960s.

There are tougher professions than newsreading, it's true. But if Wogan really is citing (the presumably unnamed) Philip Hayton as the epitome of an overindulged complacent puppet, he's chosen poorly. In fact, he's chosen ignorantly. Because what wikipedia's biographer of Hayton doesn't say, doesn't remember or doesn't bother to find out, is that for many years the man worked thousands of miles from the comfort of White City's news studios. As a foreign correspondent, Hayton reported from Uganda, where he witnessed the fall of Idi Amin, as well as covering the revolution in Iran, independence in Zimbabwe, General Franco's death in Spain, and a host of other events, many of them rather dangerous. This while Terry was presenting What's On Wogan and Blankety Blank. Whether or not RTE's ex-autocue echo had reported from the frontline of 1969's Battle of the Bogside isn't clear, but I wouldn't have thought so.

Whatever Hayton's differences were with Kate Silverton which led to his resignation from the BBC is none of my business, nor of Wogan's. But I do find it striking that Wogan, whose annual salary is widely known to be far above any newsreader at the Corporation (even Fiona Bruce), and who is the only person to be paid for Children in Need (where his contribution to the event in any case is mainly to bully for money people who don't have money, gurn confusedly at the camera and verbally stumble), criticises newsreaders for accepting generous pay packets when others do most of the graft. Here is a man who does not choose the records for his radio show. Nor does he contribute most of the original speech material in between those cuts, which are instead submitted by listeners under punny pseudonyms. Worst of all, if he used to be quietly, dryly witty on Radio 2, these days I'm slightly relieved when I discover he's on holiday.

I don't write this to say that news and current affairs is necessarily a more valuable job than what Terry Wogan does. He at least used to be good at what he did and does. But Wogan's version of newsreading is a far cry from that of Hayton. As with his current declining DJ show, he has never really dirtied his hands.

EDIT: In the interests of balance, and also through concern that newspapers do tend to cherry-pick the more sensational bits out of memoirs and autobiographies, I felt it only fair to check Wogan's own original text in his book. And he does say immediately after the section quoted by the Telegraph, that he wasn't of course a journalist. Still not sure this legitimises the rest of his haphazard argument, though.

One Year On

2009-08-29T08:16:00.004+01:00

I thought I'd lost forever what follows, as a computer crash wiped out my previous blog (which I'd also deleted from the net). Luckily, I had a copy scribbled in long-hand which I found the other day. So as it's exactly a year today since writer, producer, talent-spotter, sometime actor and performer Geoffrey Perkins died suddenly in Central London, I thought I'd re-post this tribute.

------
29 August 2008

Geoffrey Perkins (1953-2008)

Ordinarily, when a veteran creative talent in television passes on, a tribute showing of their most famous show, or occasionally a hastily-prepared clip show, is pushed into the schedules at the last minute. In the case of Geoffrey Perkins, though, who died suddenly and horrifyingly today, one is flummoxed as to what to select; pick a night on multi-channel television, and tributes to him are already being shown through the hundreds of hours of comedy that he has been responsible for, as a writer, performer and producer. Currently running on weeknights, for instance, UKTV Gold are running episodes of Ben Elton's The Thin Blue Line (Tiger Aspect/BBC1, 1995-96). More4's never complete without a Sunday night double bill of Father Ted, for which he suggested to writers Graham Linehan and Arthur Mathews that they should turn their mock-documentary about priests (rejected by TalkBack) into a bright, surreal studio sitcom (accepted at Hat Trick). He left that show after series one to become Head of BBC Television Comedy, where he presided (as executive producer) over How Do You Want Me?, Kiss Me Kate, Happiness and Big Train. Even after tiring of Corporation management politics and returning to production at Tiger Aspect, he was to produce the shamefully neglected Swiss Toni and the slightly overexposed Catherine Tate Show. He always seemed to be producing something. Even now, he's about to have a new series transmitted: Enfield and Whitehouse's new run of Harry and Paul (from Friday 5 September on BBC1). Maybe the announcement of his death is a great big fib and he's hard at work on something else. Fingers pointlessly crossed.

That was a long opening paragraph, and I've not yet even grazed the first 20 years of Perkins' comedy career. Harry Enfield's Television Programme (Hat Trick/BBC2, 1990-92) was a fascinatingly consistent cavalcade of character comedy, which Perkins didn't just produce, but also co-wrote (with Enfield, Whitehouse and Charlie Higson). That's him doing the tutor voice on 'English for Aliens'. It is.

Through the Enfield/Whitehouse/Higson connection, first cemented through Saturday Live's second series and Friday Night Live's only one (LWT/Channel 4, 1987-88) and Norbert Smith - A Life (Hat Trick/Channel 4, 1989), Perkins encouraged Enfield's co-writers to pitch their next motley creations to LWT. The ITV company first expressed interest only to blanche at the 'lack of stars'. Fast forward just a few years, and thanks to BBC support, all seven supposed walk-ons were stars. Yes, The Fast Show (BBC2, 1994-2000).

And I've still not mentioned his three years succeeding John Lloyd at Spitting Image (Central and not Hat Trick, thanks BBC News, 1986-88), or that Robbie Coltrane special on Channel 4, or Ben Elton's The Man from Auntie, or all those shows that even if I didn't like them, many did: Hippies, Game On, Benidorm.

But my most personal relationship with Perkins' work came through the medium of sound. He was centrally involved in the first two radio comedy series which gained a white-hot reaction from me, a child of the early 80s: as a young producer, The Hitch-Hikers' Guide to the Galaxy (Radio 4, 1977-80, although it was the pilot's producer Simon Brett who had first spotted the potential of Douglas Adams' script), and as a slightly older writer-performer, the peerless Radio Active (Radio 4, 1981-87).

While many will write tributes to his production skills on the former, I will dwell on the latter. Although Perkins was not in the 1980 pilot of Radio Active, which grew naturally out of the 1978 and 1979 Edinburgh Oxford Revue shows (Perkins was older than the rest of the cast and had left Oxford in 1974), he was to write fifty episodes with Angus Deayton over seven series. In one sense, Radio Active (later to spawn KYTV on BBC2) was a traditional variety show for radio - listen to how the audience cheer with delight at the slightest murmur of Michael Fenton-Stevens' useless hospital radio DJ Martin Brown - but in another it was a gasp of horror at the stupidity of broadcasting, from current affairs discussions to faux-trendy religious shows, from mindless and unwinnable quizzes to dreadful live drama. By 1984, it had also inspired Perkins - now a freelance producer - to team up with Deayton and the late Jeremy Pascall for Capital Radio's Uncyclopedia of Rock, which after a shaky start, turned into that rarest of things: a sketch show for independent radio which easily matched its BBC rivals. There's no Capital equivalent of BBC7, and in any case maybe Dr Fox ate the master-tapes in the early 90s, but occasionally you may find a copy of the spin-off book in a charity shop, whereupon you are guaranteed to piss yourself laughing.

BBC7 don't have the rights to Uncyclopedia, although Radio Active is regularly revived there. Not just now, regrettably. If you've never heard it, keep a look-out over their listings. It's never long before a repeat run starts again. If you have, you'll probably understand why a lot of comedy fans will be deeply saddened to hear such a great loss to the comedy industry. He didn't always get it right: just before his move from BBC management to Tiger Aspect in 2001, it was he who tempted David Jason and Nicholas Lyndhurst into three "being millionaires" specials of Only Fools and Horses... It was a rare moment of water-treading for Perkins, who was always smart and curious enough to keep on discovering new hits and nurturing fresh programming. The only problem (problem?) is there's so much of it. How would you sum up this man's career?

Spelling Mistake?

2009-08-27T01:17:00.005+01:00

This letter appeared in a magazine called Impact in Wales (later retitled Impact) in March 1988.

Your recent appraisal heaped unworthy praise on bands who cannot aspire to anything more appealing to students to clutch to anything the hope of originality, alternativeness - 'Oh we are so weird', so fucking stupid, every band you mentioned has failed to chart, not one top forty hit, not a single grain of hope to affect or change anything - ah but in to-days world you can't change anything can you, being in a band means that you have to be fun - throwaway pop music. All todays indie bands do is fawn to the industry in the hope of getting a major deal so they can create 'perfect pop'. Remember when music meant danger - Stones drug busts, The Clash being run out of every hotel they ever entered and what do we now have - Bobbie Gillespie worrying about his fringe!

What happened to the spirit of the Beat Generation speed, love, hate attitude, shake yourselves up and join the tidal wave of THE BLUE REVOLUTION, embrace all that rises above crass mediocrity - set your sights to the sky - become something more than writing about jazz. I mean, this jazz is not even cool, street jazz, bop of keruoac - it's placcid, static, dead, black, grey, dead. it's fucking dead - CREATE , you have the power, I've got the talent - we have our van, our band-poetry readings of passion and fire-exuberance-genocide-amphetamine features - why sleep when you can live all the time. Our production of TEAPROOF - the first play of the generation is soon to be put on in Swansea University, of which I am an English student - fucking boring it is but it allows me to finance and help my fellow beat, blue poets and car thieves - to take risks - take us and what we've started will spread like spiders across the universe. Give us a feature, make me a writer - I'll change the poxy middle class coffee table aspirations you seem to possess - kick them out and embrace THE BLUE REVOLUTION.

NICKY WILE [probable sic]
SWANSEA

Those car thieves, eh? They've always had a raw deal. And as for that 'Blue Revolution', maybe he's adopted the ideology of Buxton. The cat, not the town.

As for the spelling, grammar and syntax, who knows? Could be the sender, could equally be the magazine's subbing staff. And, whatever you think of the above (and I winced audibly several times), you can't deny he made it.

Never Meet Your Heroes. If, That Is, They Are Your Heroes

2009-08-18T17:18:00.007+01:00

I sense you're spotting a pattern emerging around here. What tends to happen is: I digest something about a public figure or celebrity, then manufacture irritation about the methods of the individual who wrote the article, and finally assume that the journalist's section editor is someone who doesn't even read the copy that's been submitted.

I'd best clarify something at this juncture. I'm not a serial defender of celebs. While most of the ones I've ever met have been charming, friendly (as far as you can tell from a brief or even half-hour conversation) and cordial company, I've been mightily careful at whom I've approached. A lot of 'famous people' simply do not interest me. If a celebrity or their security blanket of an entourage are arseholes, I do believe in their being revealed as such. But only if the journalist in question has done their homework prior to turning up, else it's a complete waste of time, for the subject, the hack and the reader. Journos and editors, after all, can have their own agenda. And there are certain press interviewers who tired me out a long time ago with their own very specific brand of big-headed solipsism. Does Deborah Ross still find herself infinitely more interesting than anyone else does? Remember this rot?

But what I really hate is when interviewers who know they're slumming it a bit don't do their research properly, and then go and pretend that their subject's a flop. A case in point:

A-ha got interviewed for yesterday's Guardian, and the writer seems a tad disappointed that the melancholic Norwegian pop trio are not appearing on the Legwarmers Reunited 80s Tour (sponsors: Courage Best in association with TVS) with other 80s icons like Belle & the Devotions, Blue Mercedes, Artists United Against Apartheid, The Doors, Alien Sex Fiend and Gilbert from TV's Get Knotted! She seems angry about something and I'm not quite sure what it is. That A-ha are a bit po-faced? That'll be most pop groups and certainly most rock groups ever then. That they're not releasing a version of "Take On Me" with Peter Kay and some pieces of ironic felt for Comic Relief? Or that they're not satisfied with entering Eurovision (which is, after all, all that most Europeans deserve, right Guardian journalists?)? Big in Germany? Not to be sniffed at, seeing as it's a bigger record market than the UK. In any case, A-ha are still doing well enough here, certainly compared with the recent releases of other teenybop stars of yore like Duran Duran, New Kids on the Block, and Take That (fair play, bad example that last one). But A-ha's last album got to number five in Britain in June, and they last had a top ten single only three years ago. They are pointedly not the Simon Dee of pop.

This is a terrible article, seriously. It's one long snidey snigger at a group who, bar a handful of stinkers - "Touchy!" springs to mind instantly - have been admirably eager to keep going with their bittersweet brand of operatic, expansive and anthemic pop. It's hardly Morten, Mags and Pal's fault that dear Jessica hasn't had the faintest idea of what they've been doing since... well, about the time "The Sun Always Shines on TV" tumbled out of the top ten. While some of Morten's outpourings on philosophy don't exactly leap off the page, nor do many of the questions that he and Mags are asked (Pal sensibly cried off attending, perhaps claiming a dental appointment or something). The worst thing about it all is that Decca's supposed to have been a fan. Now, I know she's more used to eliciting exciting and award-winning exclusives from the likes of Alistair Darling (Weekend magazine, 30/08/08, oddly not online anymore), but is this really the best she can muster with a pop band, and one she claims to have been fond of, even if many years ago? "Chasing stardom"? They really weren't, they were three good-looking blokes who became a little surprised that "Take On Me" took off internationally on its second re-release after four years of reasonable success in their homeland, and became scream idols because, to all intents and purposes, Duran Duran and Wham! had taken a year off. I believe them when they say they were "reluctant pop stars", because they looked reluctant in 1985. And I wasn't even an especially big fan.

Very slowly, G2 - where this bollocks appeared in the hard copy - is starting to resemble a daily suicide note, and if Murdoch titles are going to set a precedent, and we really are obliged to pay for online newspaper content, all broadsheet titles are going to have to raise their game. To 'borderline readable'. And don't even get me started on this idiocy about being woken up by seagulls, which for heaven's sake was in the main section of the paper...

I know journalists are warned off using wikipedia, but at least it's better than relying on nothing.

The Thinking Man's Cliche

2009-08-17T13:57:00.008+01:00

Joan Bakewell was good value on Desert Island Discs last week on Radio 4, a programme that's been vastly improved since Kirsty Young replaced Sue Lawley's mixture of primness and spite nearly three years ago. Unfortunately, as with any Bakewell encounter, there will always be room for the question that runs, 'How do you feel about being dubbed "the thinking man's crumpet" all those years ago?' Dame Joan sighed and put it down to bad editors with no imagination still rehashing the same cliches, despite all those years she spent on Late Night Line-Up, Newsnight, Today, Heart of the Matter, that series about taboos that showed erections and clips from Salo, and more recently, The Brains Trust and Belief on Radio 3. Her affair with Harold Pinter in the 1960s not only inspired Pinter to write a play about the experience, but even unwittingly led to a late-period Seinfeld episode of the same name. And how many arts presenters can boast anything similar? (Oh, alright, there's that Humphrey Burton reference in "The Junior Mint", and the Alan Yentob cameo in "The Bris", but name another, eh?)

So there's much more to Joan Bakewell. But curiously, we're now also at risk from Frank Muir - who coined the dreaded phrase in the first place - being reductively associated with the same single utterance. Never mind that he practically invented (in partnership with Denis Norden) British sitcom in the 1940s (with radio's Take it from Here), and went on to be a comedy consultant and writer for years and years after that - check out his sterling autobiography A Kentish Lad - Muir seems destined to be remembered for that undeniably sexist remark alone. And there's something very smug about the way that we are reminded of that comment in every Bakewell article and interview - as if we would never be able to get away with saying or writing such a thing in the late noughties. I feel that every time it arises, a journalist or editor is congratulating themselves on their own cleverness in not dropping the clanger themselves, yet using the same clanger on which to hook the entire piece.

Actually, here's a much more interesting question: Does anyone know in what context Frank Muir said or wrote that? I'd be fascinated to read or hear the whole piece as, like most well-worn quotations, the context it originally appeared in would be crucial. It's unlikely to have been a column in 60s Nuts. Or perhaps that second never-made pilot of Mainly for Men?

Give This Woman A Column, A Film Deal Or Whatever She Wants

2009-08-04T03:27:00.013+01:00

It's been too long since Jane Bussmann's had a book out, the last one being her irreverent and chaotically funny guide to rave culture, Once in a Lifetime. When that appeared in 1998, she was already an acclaimed comedy scriptwriter. In partnership with pop journalist David Quantick, she had graduated from the nursery slopes of Loose Ends, The Fast Show and Brass Eye to an internet sitcom about heroin addicts (The Junkies), and a short-lived but highly entertaining late-night sketch show for Radio 4, Bussmann & Quantick Kingsize. Here, barmy quickies and recurring characters (eg a hapless Melvyn Bragg in a damaged relationship with Ike Turner, or the affecting Rabbis in Love) were juxtaposed with droll monologues from the two leads. BBC7 needs to repeat these. Just remind them that Peter Serafinowicz was in it as well, and they'd bite. Or you'd hope so.

Bussmann's new book is the staggering The Worst Date Ever. It's already been an Edinburgh show, and is appearing again this year under the title Bussmann's Holiday. It's part-travelogue, part-memoir, part-investigation and chunk-accident, detailing her disillusionment with Hollywood showbiz hackery, abortive plans to write a romcom, and then having her life turned upside down by fancying the pants off a man named John Prendergast, whose job is to travel to very dangerous parts of the world as a 'conflict resolution expert'. Having cornered him in Washington DC, and established that he's off to Uganda on his next mission, Bussmann tries every trick in the book to land a feature for a British newspaper in spite of punishing indifference, and get out there to try and ensnare a man whose commitment to saving the world is total. The rest of this breathlessly-told yarn, if the pursuit of genocidal maniacs and those who shamefully protect them or excuse/ignore their obscene practices can be reasonably described as a 'yarn', documents the way her understandably flippant approach to celebrity journalism is challenged time and again by damning wake-up calls.

The Worst Date Ever is both absolutely hysterically, snortingly funny, and unflinchingly ghastly, often within the same sentence. 'Ghastly' has two very different meanings in this book - firstly, as an exaggeratedly frustrated response to the stupid entertainment industry, then its true, sickening, indecent definition. Bussmann's supreme achievement is to use the anger she's built up in LA to use constructively in Kampala and its environs. In neither place can you be sure who your friend is - especially if they insist that they're your friend. But her relative (OK, complete) lack of experience as a war correspondent, is often to her advantage, and may even save her life.

Be warned: some of the material here is horrific, yet Bussmann somehow manages to find humour in (almost) every situation, if only to establish how inadequate her skills are. There are lapses of taste at times (mostly down to the tone of the tome), but she does not patronise the locality, nor does she canonise it, as many would. She even breaks rule number one of what reporters should not say to those in need: "I'll try to help." Eventually, ashamed and embarrassed by her surroundings, she concedes she has no funny left.

As you'll have gathered by now, The Worst Date Ever is a hard book to categorise, which is of course one of its strengths. There can't be many publications that juggle official documentation about atrocity statistics and photos of torture chambers with signs outside which may or may not read 'Lint Marketing Board' with flaky anecdotes about Jackie Brambles. And certainly none that do it without feeling forced or crass. What finally emerges is that, whether coccooning A-listers or hiding murderers, the PR industry is no help whatsoever. A brilliant book, then, but you'll need a strong stomach.

(Bussmann interview here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2009/jul/03/jane-bussman-genocide-africa-book)

(And it's not just Uganda, quite obviously. Here's Susan McKay from Sunday's Observer on similar atrocities going on in Liberia. Sometimes there's nothing you can say about things like this.)

Hey! Over Here! Read Me! Please Read Me!

2009-07-30T23:16:00.007+01:00

The ill-informed seem to be muscling in over in the broadsheet world, and if you already thought that a fair few newspaper columnists were having severe trouble in completing their 1,500-word quotas without mislaying the thread of an intelligible argument, then those who blog on broadsheet websites about topical matters are on even shakier terrain. There are some who pithily react minute-by-minute to reality TV formats, and they're bad enough, but then there are the controversialists. You know the ones, the ones who think that it's enough to have an opinion that flies in the face of everyone else's but can't or won't bring themselves to elaborate, analyse and explain. That would require hard work, and wit, and perfecting a standard and style of writing that can boast intelligence, insight and flair.

Newspaper bloggers don't have that sort of time, though, and certainly aren't expected to make that sort of effort. Expecting the new Pauline Kael to burst through on the Guardian's Culture blog would be hopelessly optimistic on my part, but even I have been taken aback by the readiness of that site to publish and be... well, laughed at. Some of its bloggers - who in another age would have had their green-inked ramblings torn up and disposed of before they got anywhere near the letters page's postcode - now find that all you really need is a) Contrary Viewpoint, b) Self-Belief That This Is Enough, and c) Nothing Else.

This fool is a case in point. It's not his opinion in itself that bothers me. Everyone's entitled. But, you know, it's 2009. Father Ted finished 11 years ago, and would have finished 11 years ago even without the sudden, shocking death of its star, Dermot Morgan. You can ignore the conventions and reconstructions as easily as you can ignore the bloke who stood at a by-election pretending to be Basil Fawlty, or Clive Dunn appearing in anything else. When I clicked on the link first of all, I assumed that the beef of the complainant was a frustration that More4 is still running Ted without fail on Sundays.

Worst is discovering that he doesn't even hate Ted, merely feels it's overrated. One gets the impression that he really hates his parroting friend who quoted the whole first series. It doesn't take long for him to declare that it's better than Two And A Half Men. Well, he could have reached for My Family as his Universally Endorsed Easy Target, I guess. But either he or his web editor has decreed that lobbing grenades is a good way to snare 85 fans of Father Ted to say, "Oh no, you're quite wrong. It was genius. After all there was the bit with the 'My Lovely Horse' video". And so, the inevitable result of such a poorly-argued column is that most of the respondents cannot be bothered to raise their game either. This, of course, is exactly what Guardian Online wants. It doesn't matter how your readers get there, or what they post about, or how they post. The fact they do at all is the main thing.

But then, I blame those some of the hard copy columnists, the Hadley Freemans and Tanya Golds and Tim Dowlings and Sam Wollastons (and those who commissioned them), whose formless twittering dipped a toe in the quasi-blogging world and have enabled the likes of McManus to hurl himself off the top diving board. Into a waterless pool, unfortunately for him. It was Wollaston's contrivedly obtuse (verging on spiteful) review of Young Musician of the Year five years ago which seemed to set the tone for the Guardian's populist arts writing. Short sentences. Unfailingly first-person. Not just full of errors but taking pride in its generally ignorant tone. I mean, just look at this. That would be met with a red "See me" in Primary Three. But not, it seems, if you're part of a dynasty.

And I know what you're thinking. I've fallen into the same trap by listing my own grievances about the practice of journalistic blogging... on a blog. But at least it's my own blog, I don't expect or even want anyone to comment on it. Nor am I trying to project some kind of provocative and inflammatory yet oddly misshapen and badly-considered opinion on to the information superhighway in order to get a Weekend cover story where I go and round up all my past letting agents, including the ones I shagged.

Eye Laughed. Finally.

2009-07-24T10:07:00.005+01:00

I LOLZ!!! at Private Eye so rarely that it's only fair to mention it when I do. No question the organ's second-to-none with investigative reporting, campaigning against miscarriages of justice, and exposing media hypocrisy. The books pages are usually worth a scan too. But when it comes to its comedy content, I feel pummelled by the murderous over-use of puns and the equally tired relocation of a nursery rhyme character to indicate economic downturn/swine flu. Full marks to Craig Brown in the current issue, though, for using his Diary page - intended to be a parody of the Piers Morgan/Katie Price ITV1 summit - to simply repeat himself for over 1,000 words. The rescue services have set out to track down some jokes that got lost on the way to that column. (Alternative suggestion: Try harder, Craig. Suggesting that Piers and Katie also 'try harder' will not suffice.)

If I'm entirely truthful on the matter, the funnies in the Eye ceased their tickling of my laughlines two decades ago. But very occasionally, something will still hit the mark, usually a cartoon. No, of course I'm not talking about Ken Pyne's incoherent strip about the BBC. It's a cartoon by this chap - Ed McLachlan. As you'll see if you click on that link, his work has appeared in lots of publications, including the Eye. He also created the books of Simon in the Land of Chalk Drawings, which spawned a TV series I adored when I was about five, and which was later redubbed into Welsh as Seimon.

McLachlan's cartoon in the current Eye is simple but brilliant. It depicts a man in an office meeting who has become so bored that his doodling has migrated from his notepad to the table, and the whole frame. Only his own face, body and pen remains free of light blue scrawls. It's the attention to detail in the doodling that caused me to howl, though: not merely noughts and crosses and games of Hangman (against whom was he competing?), but also balloons, puzzled cats, eyes, flowers, several variations of a species somewhere between homo sapiens and gonk, stray feet, lots of spirals, and semi-readable phrases such as 'LEICESTER RULES', 'ABCDH', and most pleadingly of all, 'I AM HERE'. He's really captured the mentality of doodling: bored but impatient, unable to see any drawing or pattern through to its conclusion. I could look at it for hours. While laughing.

Funnier than a list of composers with puns on 'coughing' shoehorned into their names, anyway.

No 'Look Back in a Bad Mood'?: At Last Smith & Jones Volume 1

2009-07-21T16:24:00.016+01:00

Griff Rhys Jones claims in the new Radio Times that no-one else did a sketch show on television for as long as he did. He may well be right. His TV partnership with Mel Smith after their time on Not the Nine O'Clock News began in late 1983 with the recording of the first series of Alas Smith and Jones. By the time 1998 rolled around, the twosome had fronted nine series for the BBC, along with a handful of specials and a series of comic playlets in 1989 called Small Doses. Of course, the duo some continuity announcers addressed as 'Messrs Barker and Corbett' did achieve a 16 year run with The Two Ronnies, but that was more of a variety show which contained sketches. Did anyone do sketch shows for longer than Griff (who after the last TV series continued with a Radio 2 sketch show of his own for a few years)?

Should you want the endlessly-delayed At Last Smith & Jones DVD set, and you must surely be slightly curious, get your skates on. Volume 1, which covers the 1984-88 patch of Mel and Griff's career as a double-act, was apparently cancelled by FremantleMedia, but copies have surfaced anyhow in HMV and the Cambridge Circus branch of Fopp in London. Volume 2, which tracks the '89-'98 period when the sketch show transferred from BBC2 to BBC1, lost its Alas prefix, and discovered Linehan and Mathews, may never appear. No-one is quite sure why.

These are not series-by-series sets, they are compilations, but chances are many of your favourite sketches will be present and correct. Volume 1 features two half-hour 'best-of's for each of the first four series, along with Small Doses (one of which was never broadcast) and two gloriously uncut specials: 1987's Home Made Xmas Video, and Alas Sage & Onion, which on its original 21/12/88 transmission for BBC2, was enveloped by sobering news flashes about the bomb on board Pan-Am Flight 103.

Purists concerned at the selective approach to the early series of Alas may find solace in the knowledge that at least one of each series' compilation episodes has most of an originally transmitted episode as a backbone. About 90% of the first episode of 1986's series three - a contender for the best half-hour Mel and Griff ever did - is all here. It featured the Docherty & Hunter-penned hi-fi salesmen item ("What do all the buttons do?"), an unforgettable Head to Head on the trappings of wealth, the supermarket bomb disposal task, the austere professors trying to write the definitive volume of collective nouns ("a gin and tonic of stick insects"), and a memorably uncomfortable graveside sketch which was scripted by none other than Paul Merton and his fellow scribe and former schoolfriend John Irwin. Oh. There was a song as well. The 'Do-It-All' parody. You may be familiar with it. And it's all on this DVD.

It's mostly enormously enjoyable, and Mel Smith is I think remarkably underrated as a comic actor, but a few things struck me on rewatching all these years later. It's one of the most male comedy shows I've ever seen, for one thing. Carol Cleveland in Python was given more to do than the occasional feedline. Women are practically invisible in the Alas years, both in onscreen speaking roles, and even more so in the writers' room, with only Cliffhanger's Rebecca Stevens, and later Abi Grant landing material in the broadcast edits. Only the Home Made Videos, featuring the likes of Diane Langton and Jenny Jay, give women any real screen time. This is not to say that Smith & Jones were necessarily excluding women, simply that they were scarcely considered. I'm not sure why this was, although things would change near the end of the decade with the supporting cast including Lindsay Duncan and Diana Quick.

An impressive aspect of Alas is that it makes no concession to being likeable. While Mel and Griff are personable leads, the sheer numbers of scriptwriters (at least 50 are credited on this DVD compilation) dictate that the comedy can be impersonal, even cold, taboo-busting and on occasions, ugly, from the opening titles inwards. It's hard to remember now just how uncomfortably a subject like death in comedy was received as recently as the mid-80s, and in terms of impact, a one-minute quickie at a funeral is always going to be more startling than a sitcom sub-plot on the same subject. But there's one sketch, from the first show of series four in 1987, that although funny, and still relevant 22 years later, is impossible for me to sit through.

It's not it, though, it's me. I should qualify immediately that it's one of the best sketches of that series. It's a parody on location of In at the Deep End, a BBC documentary series in which reporters Paul Heiney and Chris Serle (both former correspondents on That's Life!) tried to master a profession in a very short space of time, whether it's becoming an opera tenor or directing a video for Bananarama. Alas takes the inappropriate route to extremes, not only plucking the job of heart surgeon from the air (Griff as Serle, turning to camera: "And I've got just eight DAYS!"), but needing to find a child donor for the patient. It has impeccable logic as a sketch, continues to have resonance in these days of reality television, and I laughed like an imbecile when it was first broadcast all those years ago on BBC2. But when The Smith & Jones Sketchbook resurrected it three years ago, and I was looking forward to enjoying it again too, I had to switch off. It suddenly made me feel quite ill, in the way that the film Derek & Clive Get the Horn does. I tried again with the DVD, and still couldn't get to the end.

I'm not exactly sure why. It's true I'm not the biggest fan of heart surgery. (Watching it, I mean. I don't object to it taking place...*) But there are other factors as to why I can't take the sketch, and paramount among them is 'Serle''s unwavering, bungling and misplaced jauntiness. I get as far as when he's driving along wondering where he's going to find a donor from - and then he knocks someone over (a child). Whereupon the colour drains from my face quicker than it does on the sketch's washed-out film look that you get on most 40 Minutes docs. The bit with the Tesco carrier bag... I can't. I just can't.

*I'm fine with the movie of M*A*S*H, though. Which has a pretty graphic operating theatre scene after only minutes.

Respect and suchlike to the writers, producers John Kilby and Jamie Rix, and the crew for making such a nauseatingly black and yet comedically credible sketch. But I had to bail out. I am a comedy wimp. I'm sure you're made of stronger stuff than me, though. Despite this purely personal stumbling block for me, it's nevertheless a beautifully-packaged DVD which, if it doesn't quite contain every sketch you longed to see again, still has most of them. Good luck on tracking down a copy.

King Bore I

2009-07-21T10:00:00.009+01:00

I've got to say, if there's one more reason (to add to all the others) to cancel the Radio Times now, it's the prospect that about once every six to eight weeks, they'll ask Michael Parkinson to fill two-thirds of a page with ill-informed and bitter burblings about how television is awful now that it doesn't have the intelligence to deal with all his brilliant ideas. (Like All-Star Secrets and The Help Squad.)

In this week's mess, we are told that he was turned down for inclusion in an upcoming series of Who Do You Think You Are? on the grounds that he was too boring. If only other media outlets would follow Wall to Wall's example.

He then goes on to say that Who Do You Think You Are? is the only "celebrity show" (his phrase) he'd appear on, before launching an attack on all those celebrity shows like Celebrity Rehab, which not even the production team's close relatives skyplus. It's a revealing distinction, on several counts.

Firstly, it's not enough for Parky to have had a glittering broadcasting career in which, for much of it, he has had a stern grip on what he does and how he does it. How many broadcasters, for example, can decide to take their talk show to a rival channel simply because it's on an hour later than they believe it should be? That sort of self-importance has been creeping into Parky's act for many years (qv Wogan, Edmonds, Tarrant), but we've now reached the point where he yearns for immortality. And so, the gravitas of Who Do You Think You Are? appeals to his frazzled ego. "If they can accept the ancestry of a - hmph - Big Brother presenter," he might snort, "why not mine?" This is Parkinson on the one hand claiming that celebrity culture doesn't matter, but then on the other, longing to be judged ahead of the McCalls and Moyleses whose genealogy is being laid bare on BBC1.

But it runs deeper than that. I believe that the thing about Who Do You Think You Are?'s take on celebrity - that is, if you assume it is about celebrity (Parkinson has severely misunderstood the point of the programme - it's about history) - is that you don't have to compete for screen time on an equal basis with other celebrities. Here is a man with an entrenched fear of competing, of getting his hands dirty, of being like other people. Don't be fooled by that "Oh it's about the guests" tosh of his chat show. He was always in control of that, make no mistake. And so, when he ends his column by wondering why there's no room for Ben Elton's stand-up routine on television anymore, what does he do? Recalls the time Elton was such an excellent guest on his talk show time and again. Yep, we're back to his old scabby obsession of "Why am I not on television doing exactly what I want anymore?"

Never mind, Michael. At least you've still got a column in a widely-circulated publication where you can write exactly what you want. Even if it's all wrong.

Smash Hits Reborn and Hopefully My Last Word On Michael Jackson

2009-07-20T00:18:00.014+01:00

"We're back! (Er, for one issue only!)", screeches then apologises the front cover of Smash Hits' special commemorative Michael Jackson issue, which marks the first time since early 2006 that the publication has appeared on the news-stands. It's been edited by Barry McIlheney, who was the editor of the magazine between 1986 and 1989. McIlheney, who had previously worked at Melody Maker, nowadays writes for The Word magazine, and is reportedly writing a book about his time at SH.

While most of the other Jackson tribute magazines jostling for space on newsagents' shelves either try to outdo each other in Caring The Most, or fizz with sensationalist clutter, Smash Hits is your best bet. A three-quid price tag may seem steep for a 52-page brochure, but anyone with a passing interest in either Jackson or pop is advised to snap it up. Highlights include reprints of Chris Heath's excellent 1987 report from Jackson's first-ever solo gig in Tokyo, Ian Birch sneaking into the 1984 Manhattan party to celebrate those record-breaking sales of the Thriller LP, and Tom Doyle's 1988 account of accompanying the star on his UK tour.

But the main attraction here is unquestionably Mark Ellen's unexpurgated 35 minutes of telephone chat with Michael Jackson himself. It has not been seen in print since it featured in 1985's Smash Hits Yearbook (which was edited by one Neil Tennant), but amazingly, when it originally appeared in the magazine - in the very first issue of 1983 - it was cut down considerably to a 1,000-word piece. This was the last time that Michael Jackson gave an interview to anyone in the British press. There are some first-class contradictory quotes ("I love movies. All movies*. But I don't like scary movies."), and a conversational style that eschews concentration or too much analysis. Yet it's compulsive reading. You also get to read all the plans for projects that never came to pass - the Steven Spielberg collaborative film, the duet with Barbra Streisand - and, brutally, the ones that would happen, like the promise of completing the Jacksons' rotten Victory LP (the one with "State of Shock" on it). And then you get the unbridled lust for the Beatles back catalogue, the very prize he'd snatch from his old mate McCartney within two years.

*A Zed and Two Noughts? Three Hats for Lisa?

Generally, the best thing about this revived issue, though, is the refusal to canonise Michael Jackson, with the stupendously daft "Bubbles Story" from 1988, and better still, a sample of original reviews of his singles and albums, many of which are lukewarm and even highly critical. Comments abound from Neil Tennant, Gary Kemp, The Communards, Lenny Henry (as Delbert Wilkins), Eighth Wonder's Patsy Kensit and "somebody called Zodiac Mindwarp..." All accompanied by some of the most garish sleeve design pop music has ever accommodated. It's just a pity that Smash Hits didn't rifle through its archive a bit more and find room for its reviews of all the Off the Wall releases too. Or include the marks out of 10 for the albums (Thriller got seven-and-a-half from the magazine's disco writer Bev Hillier. I can't remember what Tom Hibbert awarded Bad now.) Still, at least it implicitly knows that after the 80s, Jackson was in decline. The only acknowledgement of the past 20 years is represented by the lyrics of Black or White, a timeline of the lifetime, and some abysmal Kipper Williams cartoons. Which seems about right. And at no point does anyone, not even Jackson's UK Head of Press, ever find themselves spouting the dreaded utterance "King of Pop".

(Autobiographical note: It was a Michael Jackson career biography, condensed into 1,500 words or so, which could be said to have kick-started my writing career. It was certainly the first substantial piece I wrote for a 'public' audience, as it were. Published circa May 1984 - just before the reissue of "Farewell My Summer Love" - in a secondary school magazine with a cover the colour of urine. And he's done very little since that I love.)

Thank God He Never Said The Phrase 'Guilty Pleasures'

2009-07-19T11:56:00.006+01:00

Rare to have a celebrity interviewee as frank as David Mitchell, talking to Kirsty Young on today's Desert Island Discs. Some may afford themselves a snigger regarding his eight soundtracks to being stranded, but then Mitchell is, I suspect, not a man to listen to music out of choice. All his selections are overheard, the favourites of people he knows, or just music that has association with periods of his life he has enjoyed. I've already read a few terribly clever souls on the net with their painfully relevant record collections passing judgement on what he selected, and while much of it is not something I'd choose to battle against loneliness on a desert island, something inside me cheers the fact that he didn't come on and pretend to like Trout Mask Replica or whatever. Nothing wrong with Trout Mask Replica, but good on him for not muttering, 'I'm on Desert Island Discs. Must choose things that impress people'.

I can't imagine life without music. David Mitchell has, to him, more important things on his mind. Who's got the problem here? If he finds "Stranger on the Shore", "Spanish Flea", "Walking on Sunshine"* and Kermit the Frog singing "Rainbow Connection" give him pleasure - and without trowelling on a level of deathly irony - so be it. It would have been infinitely worse if he'd shown up and opted for seven Coldplay records and Pachelbel's "Canon in D".

*I bought this on seven-inch vinyl a week before it got into the charts in 1985. So there. "Que Te Quiero" was quite nice as well.

Endless, Shameless

2009-07-14T23:35:00.007+01:00

I must confess that I don't know a lot about current theatre, to the extent that I had to look up who's in the present run of Art (for the record, Krishnan Guru-Murthy, Stirling Moss and Orm out of Orm & Cheep), and check that Ben Elton's musical based on the back catalogue of Mai Tai, Our Love is His!tor!y!, hasn't closed yet. But even I have to raise an eyebrow of concern over this forthcoming production.

Kurt and Sid. No, not Kurt Vonnegut meets Cyd Charisse, or even Kurt Russell meets Sid Waddell, which is a shame as "Russell and Waddell" would have had a ring to it. No. With snoozing inevitability, it's Kurt Cobain meets Sid Vicious in a new play to open at London's Trafalgar Theatre in September. Set just before Cobain's death in 1994, with Vicious in shadowy ghost form, the pair will doubtless chew over their self-destructive urges and muse on the downfall of fame. I can't wait.

Still, never mind, it's an amazing thought that Michael Gambon is to tackle the role of Vicious. Sadly, though, via the sort of punishment that only the real world can dole out to the unsuspecting public, that'll have to stay an amazing thought, as the part has been won by Danny Dyer, star of 28 series of Lahndan's Hardest Gaffs (Bravo) and that appearance on All-Star Mr & Mrs (Sky Arts).

It's easy to sneer at this, which is exactly why I've done so. Dyer is another whipper-snapper too young to have experienced punk but misguided enough to cite the tragic figure of Vicious as a hero. What's more dispiriting is the notion that Cobain regarded Vicious as his own special idol. It may get bums on seats, but as any even casual devotee of Nirvana will be well-aware, Cobain adored hundreds of bands - not just the non-musical bits of the Sex Pistols - in his formative years, from Black Flag to the Raincoats to the Young Marble Giants. Can there be anything left to say about these two men's take on self-destruction? I'm not quite curious enough to buy tickets. Maybe it will be unmissable. Maybe.

Such productions as Kurt and Sid are proliferating, though. It's been estimated that one in every one of Radio 4's Afternoon Plays is a two-hander of one now-deceased star having an imaginary conversation with another. And it won't stop there. Already heading for the West End in the autumn is Teresa and Georg, in which Sir Georg Solti (Mathew Horne) and Mother Teresa (Jennifer Ellison) (gimmick: They Died On The Same Day!) compare notes on famine, poverty, conducting the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and walking out of the Brit Awards when the KLF collaborated with Extreme Noise Terror. Then for 2010, there's Larry Grayson/Larry Olivier, Robin Cook/Peter Cook, and most eagerly awaited of all, Steve Irwin/Bambi's Mum.

Oh, So That's What Happened To...

2009-07-13T10:12:00.012+01:00

Record Collector magazine has an article in the new August issue about ultra-rare folk LPs, which has answered one of the many questions I've had burrowing through the back of my mind for years and years.

This is Mary-Anne Paterson, a singer, songwriter, guitarist and teacher from Edinburgh. Early in 1970, she issued an album entitled Me. It was recorded at very short notice, and Paterson didn't promote it as she was preparing to set up an arts centre, which she continues to do. The album was in fact reissued on CD in 2006, but original vinyl copies are worth an estimated £300.

But it's a throwaway line at the end of the RC piece that instantly connected with me. It mentions that rather than pursuing a recording career, she concentrated not only on setting up the arts centre, but also diversified into writing songs for radio and television. And I remember her, or at least one of the projects she followed.

At around the time he began his career in children's television on programmes like Ragtime and Play School, the marvellous Fred Harris also co-presented a schools programme on maths aimed at junior school age. Figure It Out, made by the Midlands ITV company ATV, began around 1972 and ran until 1978 or so, after which it was replaced by the rather more bizarre and whimsical maths schools series Leapfrog.

My memories of Figure It Out are hazy and sketchy, as befits a schools programme that was intended to be a transitory aid for children improving their numeracy skills, wasn't designed to be re-evaluated over three decades later, and wasn't even a series we watched at school. The little I can squintingly call to mind is that there was a giant calculator on an otherwise minimalist studio set in Birmingham. Fred Harris had a female co-host, whose name escapes me, but in the later series, 1975-76?, there was also an interval song every week. Performed by... Mary-Anne Paterson, strumming folk guitar and singing a song, presumably self-penned, that had something to do with maths of some kind. There was definitely one about multiplication, with the echoey refrain of "many times more". I hope she did one about fractions. It's funny to think that I can remember her name (I was a reader of TV credits inexplicably early in my life). Even stranger, to me anyway, is the possibility that she may have completely forgotten the name of this programme, given the direction her career has subsequently taken.

When I've interviewed writers, actors, performers, producers and so on, a regular remark of wonder that I hear from the subject is, 'You know more about my career than I do!' The first few times I heard it, I couldn't fail to feel flattered. Once reason kicked in, though, I realised it was inevitable that I would know more. I should know more. If artists in any field obsessively documented and analysed their list of credits, they would never get anything done. Most are too busy experiencing the career, just passing through a project, and what memories they carry about it may have little to do with the work.

There are names from the past, whether they're classmates who gradually and hauntingly tumbled off the radar, or minor celebrities who poked their heads into the public glare for a matter of days or weeks and then vanished. The word 'celebrity' may be misplaced in Mary-Anne Paterson's case, although it does seem from reading the slivers of biography on her that stardom was never her goal in the first place. But I'm heartened to find she's still around, particularly when I see what she's doing now.

Andy Coulson

2009-07-10T10:17:00.006+01:00

You really shouldn't hand over the responsibility of editing whole newspapers (even tabloid ones) to people whose apprenticeship amounted to editing The Sun's 'Bizarre' page. Because the gaps in their knowledge and their reliance on the sensational but simplistic are always likely to end in catastrophe.

It was darkly amusing to witness Kelvin Mackenzie ranting about a 'socialist conspiracy' to Newsnight reporters. But then... go back 20 years: Elton John, larynxless dogs and rent boys (with bugger all evidence. Result: £1m fine and a very grovelling apology), and using the same sort of bravado and guesswork to conclude that the dead were pissed on at Hillsborough and headlining it 'THE TRUTH'*. It's really not that hard to see how News International - if The Guardian's findings really are true - got into this mess in the first place with gits like Mackenzie in charge during the 80s.

*Mackenzie has still never quite apologised properly for this.

Mrs A and the Bristol Stool Chart: Getting On (BBC Four)

2009-07-08T22:30:00.034+01:00

I used to flatshare with a friendly, outgoing American, whose taste in television tended towards the glossy. She couldn't, for instance, begin to understand why anyone would want to sit through dinnerladies. "It's just so bleak," she would sigh. I doubt, then, she'd have made it past the opening titles of Getting On, BBC Four's new sitcom from the makers of Bremner, Bird & Fortune about the geriatric ward of an NHS hospital. Its title has been used before in a TV programme, appropriately a Sunday morning magazine programme about ageing for ITV, presented for many years by Gillian Reynolds*.

*The only national newspaper radio critic who is consistently worth reading, regardless of whether you share her opinion or not. Still at the Telegraph.

Written by its three lead actors, Jo Brand, Joanna Scanlan and Vicki Pepperdine, Getting On has been routinely flagged in all the previews as 'very black comedy'. I don't know what this says about me, but in spite of plotlines involving faecal matter, assisted suicides and whether or not to eat the birthday cake of a just-deceased patient, I found it congenial viewing, and extremely funny, as did my partner, who trained and worked as a nurse in some of London's busiest hospitals during the late 1980s and 1990s. Her only negative point about the programme's earthy authenticity was, "It's a much quieter ward than any I ever worked on!" But then this is low-budget BBC Four, and they probably couldn't afford any more extras.

I'm especially pleased that Brand, who cheerfully regards herself as the worst actor in the world, has helped create a role (as a nurse called Kim Wilde) in which she can truly excel. This may already be the best thing she's ever done on TV, she's placed herself in an arena where her idiosyncratic trademark mix of sarcasm and humanity can exist outside the world of her stand-up persona and not feel forced (unlike the dreadful sketches on her uneven series, Through the Cakehole). Obviously, her past as a psychiatric nurse in South London has fed a lot of the material here, but even so, it's a relief and a joy that she's able to carry off this sort of part and make you half-forget her usual persona. So, in order to do that, she can't be the worst actor in the world.

The admirable central cast is completed by Pepperdine as the snooty Dr Pippa Moore, Scanlan as Sister Den Flixter who can't leave her disastrous home life outside the confines of the ward, and the ineffectual Matron Hilary Loftus (Ricky Grover). Their patients are, for the moment at least, peripheral characters, although wisecracking in a geriatric ward, in most wards, could be unlikely. When a kind heart beats, it usually belongs to Wilde. Having been patronised relentlessly by the bumptious Dr Moore, an elderly Asian patient who cannot speak any English briefly finds respite when left alone with Wilde, who can still only talk to her in English but does at least smile supportively at her while doing so. Less successfully, Wilde is subsequently obliged to try and very appproximately relay the same patient's cries of frustration down the phone to a language line. She reports back. "Apparently, that last phrase doesn't mean anything."

Sure, the whole enterprise is heavily indebted to the on-the-hoof, nervy approach of The Thick Of It - and what do you know?, Peter Capaldi is the director here - but none of this can distract from an exemplary first episode.

Getting On episode one is available on the BBC's iPlayer service until the end of July. Two more weekly instalments will follow on BBC Four.

On Overexposure

2009-07-07T20:18:00.019+01:00

Graham Norton only ever appeared in three of Father Ted's 25 episodes. Seems like he turned up more often than that, doesn't it? But in restricting those cameos, as the high-octane rash that was Father Noel Furlong, writers Graham Linehan and Arthur Mathews - whether by accident or design - ensured that you didn't get too tired of him.

You see, I'm quite fond of Graham Norton, when all's said and done. Not only was he a great turn on Ted, but he's always good value on Just a Minute, I liked the scrappy early incarnation of the So... chat show on Friday night Channel 4, and in fact, if all he did now was the almost identical rebirth of that programme on BBC2, that would be fine by me.

But it's not all he does, not by a long chalk. Instead, BBC1 is one long Noel Furlong jamboree. Go to imdb, and the Norton list of vehicles over the past ten years is bewilderingly, forgettably lengthy. Does Graham himself recall When Will I Be Famous? I can't. What was The Bigger Picture again? And what's Totally Saturday when it's at home? I can answer that one, as I was at home on Saturday 6 June when the first one went out. If you had better things to do, suffice it to say that making that show must have been akin to retrieving the crumbs of Don't Forget Your Toothbrush, Noel's House Party and Saturday Night Takeaway from the nether regions of TV's bins. Watching it was only slightly less enjoyable.

Here's a BBC insider to the Mirror on 18 April, vowing that it would alarm Ant & Dec:

"It will be classic Saturday night family entertainment - fast-paced and funny. The pilot was hugely successful and everyone was thrilled with how funny Graham can be without being rude. We're really excited."

Unsuspecting audience members will find themselves roped into funny stunts. The source went on: "They might discover that the car they thought was back home in the garage is actually in the studio - with a celebrity in the boot."

Yes, that celebrity in the boot stunt was considered such great telly that it was reused for the first show. Trapped in the trunk was someone out of, inevitably given it's the BBC, EastEnders. I can't remember who though. Maybe it was Dr Legg.

Totally Saturday (now "axed", or probably just "not coming back") was banal, yawnsome and anodyne, but bad shows are made all the time. What worries me is how Graham Norton seems to be automatic first choice for so many of them. Can there really be people out there who will pass out without a sight of him squawking inanely at an indifferent studio audience week after week? And if that's Norton, likeable in a great sitcom and in small doses, a personable, genial talk show host, what explanation can there be for giving dozens of interchangeable Saturday night formats to a dullard like Nick Knowles or anti-matter like Eamonn Holmes?

Overexposure for idiots is one thing, then. Overexposure for those who are quite good is perhaps worse. David Aaronovitch lookalike Charlie Brooker can be an entertaining writer and broadcaster. But there are limits to how entertaining he can be: a vast proportion of his jokes are surreal grotesque descriptions of public figures' faces, or references to wanking, or throwing up his hands and looking puzzled. Again, manageable up to a point, but worthy of two weekly Guardian columns, two BBC4 series about television, what looks like another series for the same channel about video games, and - started tonight - a ponderous Channel 4 quiz/clips hybrid called You Have Been Watching? Even Charlie's most avid followers must wonder if we're reaching saturation point for the man. However wonderful he's reputed to be, and the best bits of Screenwipe undoubtedly live up to such an image, no-one is so good that they can be the only port of call for one area of knowledge.

Yet this is what television and the press do time and again. Want a face to talk about films? Ah, you'll be wanting Mark Kermode's number. Classical music? Charles Hazlewood and his irksome hands. Anything else at all? Oh! It's Phill Jupitus.

Get some new people, please. Quick.

-----------

(Update: Show 2 of Charlie Brooker's You Have Been Watching, aired on Channel 4 on Tuesday 14 July 2009, confirmed my suspicions that his ideas supply is dwindling fast. I know that the point with Brooker is for him to unearth a target minor enough to hurl a barrage of swearing at, but the overlong, poorly-constructed rant in the direction of Watchdog's Nicky Campbell may just be one of the worst things I've seen on television since... well, since I last caught sight of Watchdog's Nicky Campbell. Full marks on the target, Charlton, but dearie me, when you show your workings like that.... Also, Brooker's starting to deliver his emaciated, phoned-in vitriol not, as he imagines, like his idol Sir Chris Morris, but in the manner of Andrew Neil on This Week. Bloody awful self-satisfaction, in short, and honestly time he took a step back and reflected at least a little on what he's become.)

Further Michael Jackson Bollocks in - Where Else? - The Sun

2009-07-06T13:04:00.010+01:00

Pete Samson, US Editor of The Sun, made one hell of a comparison in today's hard copy of the newspaper, concerning the memorial service for Michael Jackson at the Staples Center. He claimed, in his story "I'll Be There" on page 4, that the rush for the 17,500 tickets has been the "biggest stampede since Willy Wonka opened up his chocolate factory"*.

Quite so. I had forgotten that Willy Wonka was a real man, that Roald Dahl's book was a biography, and that two spin-off films have been biopics. I'm off to the newsagent's round the corner for a packet of Everlasting Gobstoppers.

*Samson put this realistic suggestion in speech marks, as if to place responsibility for such idiocy on a foolish spokesperson in America. I have not yet found such a quotation, though. Was Samson aware that he's been bigging up a fictional event? The paper's website seems to have dropped the entire story.

Doorstops: The England's Dreaming Tapes

2009-07-04T10:13:00.017+01:00

I don't remember punk rock. But, by thunder, I remember all the retrospectives. Since the early 1990s, it seems that not a year ending in a 1, 2, 6 or 7 can pass without the record industry and TV and radio attempting to summarise yet again Just What Paank Was Really Like.

I can remember, I think, the very first time I was aware of the Sex Pistols. True to my usual form, I was late. It was around May 1979, I was nine years old, I was waiting for Cubs to start and one of the other boys, let's call him Neil Payne, started talking excitedly and conspiratorially about this song he'd just heard. It sounded dangerous, forbidden, designed to shock and appal entire generations. As he recited from memory the lyrics to "Holidays in the Sun", we all gasped. And then he tried to explain Johnny Rotten's gibbering mumbling in the song's coda and attempted to disentangle the implications of "the new Belsen". We all vowed to get there and then a copy of whatever album it might have been on. And then we booked tickets to see them at the Roxy, where we would all duly turn up in short trousers.

I lied there. Neil Payne had not analysed "Holidays in the Sun" at all. In fact, he'd just told us the ruder bits to "Friggin' in the Riggin'" (ie, most of it), and we all pissed ourselves laughing. Neil Payne is now a columnist for Gramophone.

I'm not sure I'd really heard any Sex Pistols records even by May 1979. Sid Vicious had been dead three months, Johnny Rotten hadn't even been in the group for well over a year, and all the remainder were really doing was needling humourless teds with pedestrian remakes of "C'mon Everybody" and "Rock Around the Clock" and "Something Else". (For a much wittier take on exploding the mythology of rock'n'roll standards, Daniel Miller's alter-ego The Silicon Teens achieved it with wondrous electronic ease on 1979's Music for Parties, one of the earliest releases on his Mute label.)

"Something Else" was the best-selling Sex Pistols single, which may be a surprising fact. "Friggin' in the Riggin'" was on the other side of that single, and I guess that's how so many kids got to hear it, as Sex Pistols singles weren't normally given blanket radio and TV coverage. I'd heard adults swear before plenty of times, but it was still a bit startling to hear about something so marinated in colourful, bawdy language. But by now, punk rock did not mean The Damned (underrated in my book), or The Clash (somewhat overrated) or even Buzzcocks (the best, at least until they reformed and spoilt it all a bit), it meant Sham 69 and The Boomtown Rats. And as Jon Savage indicated several times in his punk chronicle, England's Dreaming (1991), there was a feyness to early punk rock that never quite translated to its mass market appeal later, to the Mohican tourist postcards. So many of those involved in the movement's early scene were attending gay clubs, loved early disco and dub reggae, and understood that spaces in music were every bit as important as the noises that surrounded them. Thus, what followed punk - PiL, Joy Division, Magazine - was often an improvement.

I've read far, far too many books on punk rock. Most of them are hopeless, mainly because they over-simplify and feed off the skeletal remains of the hoariest anecdotes: "The music scene was knackered, hippies were vile, then suddenly Year Zero arrived and a host of beautiful, ugly, beautiful people now ruled the roost. Nothing would ever be the same again..." You know the sort of thing, the sort of authors who profess to hate tabloid culture for the way it demonised the Pistols but who seem to use the same reductive, sensationalist approach in order to sneer at the Establishment. Equally, just because punk inspired people who couldn't play musical instruments to form bands, it doesn't follow that it should inspire people who can't write to be trusted with writing whole books about it.

So I wasn't going to buy Savage's The England's Dreaming Tapes, over 700 pages of interview transcripts with nearly sixty people he interviewed for England's Dreaming, but I changed my mind, and I'm glad I did now. Far from being needless repetition of what's already in the original book, only around a tenth of the Tapes material saw the light of day in its parent volume. Savage claims that when he conducted the research and taped the interviews, mostly during the years 1988 and 1989, analysis of punk rock was relatively thin on the ground. There had certainly been comparatively few attempts to do such a thing throughout the 1980s. Punk was not considered a priority for record companies issuing their back catalogues on CD. Even in 1986, the only concessions to 'Year Zero''s tenth birthday was the release of the Alex Cox biopic Sid and Nancy, the reissue of The Damned's "New Rose" (just as the line-up of the time were covering Barry Ryan's "Eloise" and had their biggest hit), and in August, a solitary compilation by Granada of So It Goes clips for Channel 4 entitled The Way They Were. I would argue that 1986 was an even fallower time for pop than 1975-76 had been, certainly in terms of creativity or colour. But I shall come back to that in a future posting.

Punk's survivors were operating in a completely different world by the time Savage switched on his tape-recorder. Lydon was in the bloated late-80s version of PiL, although he is funny and sharp throughout his interview (at 25 pages, the lengthiest in the book*). Malcolm McLaren was hard at work on his 'vogueing' dance album, Waltz Darling. Captain Sensible was singing 'Snookering You Tonight' for Mike Batt's Hunting of the Snark musical. Tony James, ex-Generation X, was in Sigue Sigue Sputnik and collaborating with Stock Aitken Waterman. And so on.

*The second longest chat is with Jordan, star of Derek Jarman's Jubilee, and regarded by Savage as very possibly the 'first Sex Pistol', if only sartorially. Which suddenly made me think. Was someone on the production team of I'm a Celebrity... Get Me Out of Here in 2004 something of a punk fanatic, given the involvement of Lydon and the woman now known once again as Katie Price? Or just coincidence? Yeah, the latter.

What led to the brief flowering of punk rock in British culture has a tangled genesis and evolution. No two of Savage's eyewitnesses recall it the same way, and the credit he was awarded for making sense of this complexity and devising a streamlined, not simplistic, narrative in England's Dreaming was always thoroughly well-deserved. Reading Tapes, you realise his task was all the greater, and all the more sweetly-realised. What comes across is how much key figures disagreed with each other, on everything from musical influences to how offensive the appropriation of the swastika was. (Let's just say Siouxsie Sioux's retrospective embarrassment - finally catching up with Savage's view - is the right answer.) How those often rancorous differences of opinion still lingered by the late 1980s. From then on, indeed nowadays, there could be no cosy, wistful look back, although Rotten, Matlock, Jones and Cook would occasionally reform for the money - and who in 1988 knew that even that could happen? Tapes is no love-in.

Yet the punk movement's practitioners operated as a kind of large extended family. It's telling that Tapes not only begins with the unusual family background of Malcolm McLaren (who in 1988 happened to be undergoing psychotherapy in New York), but closes its circle via an emotionally charged small hours chat with Sid Vicious's mother Anne Beverley, who would take her own life in 1996 just after the original Pistols line-up reformed. These are multi-faceted characters, and few emerge as heroes or villains, either to the key figures themselves, or to this reader.

Coming just a few months after Simon Reynolds collected up and published his Rip It Up and Start Again background research as the equally compelling inventory Totally Wired, though, it does make you wonder how many inferior books on pop will now spawn their own poorly-edited lazy spin-offs of transcriptions and off-cuts. If there are too many books on punk - and there are - the appearances of things like the Reynolds and Savage tomes suggest that plenty of opportunists will regurgitate their research notes sometime soon. Tapes, though: well worth investigating, although read the original first, if you haven't had the pleasure. Plus, yet more material, including unused material on the New York punk scene, will emerge on a Savage website. Looking forward to that.

Pop Culture Connections #2: Louis Balfour

2009-07-03T11:33:00.012+01:00

First unveiled in its second series, broadcast on BBC2 in early 1996, The Fast Show's Jazz Club quickly became a firm favourite on the sketch show. But why did host Louis Balfour (John Thomson) keep whispering,"Ni-i-ce!" before various 'guest artists' - under the watchful eye of genuine musical director Philip Pope - persisted at their compellingly wrong jazz? Could it have been a homage to the opening title track of industrial pioneers Throbbing Gristle's suitably troubling 1978 album, 20 Jazz Funk Greats?

Top Mad Deluded Story of the Day

2009-07-02T21:50:00.006+01:00

Not content with filling its pages with rumours about how Bubbles beat up Diana Ross or how ten unrecorded Jacko songs have raced to the top of the charts, liars The Sun are happy to publish this frankly doomed request:

http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/2512593/ABBA-are-wooed-to-fill-Jackos-O2-run.html

I'm delighted, I must say, especially if they all still look like they do in that photo. Because if there's one trigger for Agnetha to pop her head out from her reclusive bunker, it's the prospect of playing fifty shows because the bloke who was down to do it has popped his clogs. Call me a cynic, but I think it's unlikely they're going to say yes.

But if they're not going to do it, who will? Here, exclusive to Happily Stupid, is the full list of bands who have agreed to appear at the O2 dates, beginning on 13 July:

13 July: It's Immaterial + special guests
14 July: The Jets
16 July: Joe Jackson
18 July: Dee D. Jackson
21 July: Alison Jackson + all the best bits (ie worst bits) from Double Take
26 July: Terraplane
3 August: REO Speedwagon
4 August: Intastella
7 August: Desireless
8 August: Desireless
9 August: Desireless
12 August: Desireless
15 August: Desireless
16 August: Beatles
17 August: Break Machine
18 August: Rockwell
19 August: Desireless
20 August: Desireless
21 August: Desireless
22 August: Frank Sinatra
23 August: Farley Jackmaster Funk
24 August: Sheryl Crow's backing singers
25 August: Crispy & Company
26 August: Julia & Company
27 August: Hope & Keen's Crazy Bus
28 August: Desireless [extra show added due to popular demand]
29 August: Lou Bega and the Vengaboys
30 August: Queen featuring Richard Ashcroft
31 August: Banderas
1 Sept: Michael Jackson
2 Sept: Who Dares Wins
3 Sept: Assaulted Nuts
4 Sept: BBC2's Haywire on tour
5 Sept: A Prince Among Men Live and Unleashed
6 Sept: Urban Cookie Collective Uncensored
7 Sept: GG Allin Dead and Censored
8 Sept: McGuinness Flint: Dead and Gone
9 Sept: The Grumbleweeds: Back in the Habit
10 Sept: Doc Cox & Grant Baynham: Together at Last
11 Sept: Five
12 Sept: Five Star
13 Sept: Five Thirty
14 Sept: Five Go Down to The Sea
15 Sept: Potato 5
6 Mar - 11 Mar 2010: David Campbell & the AEG

Pop Culture Connections #1: "Just Being Kind???!"

2009-07-01T21:31:00.006+01:00

RIP Mollie Sugden, although I cannot STAND Are You Being Served? and it chills the blood to know that That's My Boy - which makes Are You Being Served? look like The Phil Silvers Show - is available to buy with money on DVD in North America. ("OVER 15 HOURS" on a "5 DVD SET". Here ends this public service warning.)

That tribute will also appear in tomorrow's Daily Telegraph.

"Save POUNDSSSSSSSSSS!": Great to see An Audience with Billy Connolly again (ITV4, tonight). How long has it been since I last saw this? How young, and in some cases, how gratifyingly still alive some of that celebrity audience looks. This was made in 1985, and was considered so edgy for TV broadcast that it went out, not on ITV, but at 11pm on Channel Swore. Although there was only actually one F-word in it. Always fun watching supposedly straight-laced public figures piss themselves at post-watershed gags. Take Floella Benjamin guffawing at "Then you look down and there's your first grey pubic hair". Obviously, they'd done that joke on Fast Forward the year before.

Anyway. Pop culture connections time, in which I wonder aloud if one creative talent is deliberately referencing the work of another creative talent.

Here's a pretty washed-out clip but you get the idea. This is from A Bit of Fry and Laurie, series one episode two, broadcast on BBC2 on 20 January 1989. The whole sketch is gold, but at 1'24", we hear the beggar (Laurie) argue that when people give him money, they're just being kind, a claim that is repeatedly and contemptuously echoed by Fry's selfish passer-by character. "Just being kind...?!" "...Or am I losing my mind?" Liza Minnelli's version of Stephen Sondheim's song wouldn't be in the charts for six months, but could Fry and indeed Laurie have been a fan of Follies?

Hey, Bus Shelter

2009-06-30T15:43:00.007+01:00

(...as Shirley Bassey didn't sing.)

Caroline Quentin once revealed that when she was first dating Paul Merton in the early 1990s, the two were sharing a train journey. Quentin was groaning at the leaden, luvvie prose of Alec Guinness's memoirs, Blessings in Disguise.* Merton had already read them, and felt much the same. So he chucked the book out of the train window. She regarded this as a romantic gesture, although I'm more inclined to think of it as "your boyfriend thinks Blessings in Disguise is horseshit and wants shot of it now". What do I know, though? Readers, they married. For a while, anyway.

*Haven't read this, so my 'leaden, luvvie prose' is a summary of Caroline's opinions on the matter.

From the top deck of my bus home last night, I spotted a paperback book sprawled on top of a bus shelter about equidistant between Kennington and Oval tube stations. It was content-side down, but owing to the angle of my view, I could not identify the cover, the author, a stray word, or anything that would give a clue to its identity. But it was quite an old, battered book, and I couldn't help but wonder how it had got there. It didn't look big enough to be Ulysses, but it was probably a good 500 pages. Could it have been that the person whom it belonged to had begun it with good intentions, but had got to page 96 or so, could stand it no longer, and had a more extreme brainwave than, say, just taking it home and putting it in a box to pass on to the nearest branch of the British Heart Foundation Books & Music chain? Quite possibly, the disgruntled reader had been sitting on a bus like the one I was on, or maybe was even at the bus stop and decided that waiting with nothing to read at all was preferable to the guff they were holding.

If only I had done this with numerous remaindered tomes I've purchased over the years. At least two books by one-joke film critic Joe Queenan, for example. Or the insultingly boring "The Rules of Attraction" by Bret Easton Ellis. Still, it's reminded me to have a books clearout, and not before time. I will not be hurling them out of bus windows though.

Words Are Useless

2009-06-29T13:32:00.009+01:00

Today marks exactly 30 years since the release of this single:

Much as I like Johnny Rotten and his Sex Pistols, his next group, Public Image Limited, were - for their first two albums at least - miles better. While the remnants of his old band were clogging up the charts with criminally boring covers of rock'n'roll standards, John Lydon, Jah Wobble, Keith Levene and what felt like a different drummer every week were tearing up the rule book (or whatever laughable rock critics say) with tracks like "Death Disco".

Now. I'm not really a big apologist for angry 'ggrrr' music. Tunes, chords, textures and so on are my bag. I'd opt most days for sunny pop sounds over mordant misery. But I'm always intrigued when the dark stuff gets in the charts and infiltrates the mass media, if only for a breath. And this agonised, harrowing tribute to Lydon's dying mother, who was played a demo version near the end of her life and was said to have given it the thumbs up, gets bonus points for being danceable, catchy, irreverent - and being a hit. It would reach number 20, and Lydon's first primal roar of 'Seen it in your eyes" instantly makes it probably the scariest thing to have been a major hit. Certainly the most uncompromising sight to have hit Top of the Pops, where Mike Read apparently murmured the band's name in embarrassment, Lydon stood with his back to the audience, and Wobble sat in a dentist's chair. Lydon even turned in an alienating performance on Noel Edmonds' revived Juke Box Jury the same week, and found that fellow panellist Elaine Paige agreed with most of his opinions, albeit without the withering sarcasm. And as for when they were on Cheggers Plays Pop, when they... oh. No, they didn't do that. Turns out they were double booked for Pebble Mill.

"Death Disco" still sounds like nothing else. Levene's mocking guitar lifts from Tchaikovsky, which led to its alternative title on the remarkable Metal Box, contrast with Lydon's shattered vocals and Wobble's terse, tense bass work. There is no relief, no catharsis, yet it is somehow irresistible. An obvious Single of the Week in all the inkies, only Smash Hits denounced it as rubbish. PiL would never better it, but then few others would either.

Michael Jackson

2009-06-25T23:30:00.002+01:00

I was only listening to The Jackson 5's "I Want You Back" yesterday, recorded nearly 40 years ago, and as happens every now and again when I hear it, I found myself suddenly gaping with astonishment about the young lead vocalist's performance. It's just such an extraordinarily self-assured debut, so certain, and it belies the fact that Michael Jackson is barely eleven years old. It's ironic, given the billions of subsequent headlines about his complicated journey through adulthood, that on "I Want You Back" in 1969, he sounds so grown-up with the material. Most children who perform pop are really only playing at being adult pop stars. But Jackson seemed to have come from somewhere else, the same planet that had beamed in Little Stevie Wonder (13) and the almost alarmingly raw "Fingertips" in 1963.

Unhappily, though, unlike the relatively balanced Wonder, Jackson's remarkably prodigious talent for singing and dancing was almost certainly infected by the fear he felt for his violent father. Even after he was able to escape Joe Jackson's beatings after the Jackson 5 broke away from Motown and Jackson came of age in the mid-70s, there was a sense that the attention and fame would never normalise his life. Whenever someone announces that they want to be famous, it's hard - particularly on a day like today - not to want to simply jam a photo of Jackson after about 1987 between their eyelids, and retort, 'What, famous like this?!'

The last two decades of Jackson's life have been, from this former fan's perspective, drowned in a saga of tawdry tittle-tattle, and (worse, perhaps) tuneless and unmemorable songs. I was never going to attend the planned O2 shows in London because I just felt there was something not quite right about the idea. For a man who had barely stepped on a stage in the past ten years, committing to fifty shows for fans expecting athletic dancing, and the sort of singing we'd come to expect from Off the Wall and Thriller, seemed not so much keen as foolhardy. Apparently, there was a clause in the O2 contract that he only had to appear onstage for 13 minutes at each show. Hmm. Why am I not surprised?

In truth, his Simpsons cameo (as 'John Jay Smith') was the last thing Michael Jackson did that I liked. The last record of his I liked? "Man in the Mirror", probably, and that came out in 1987. The 'King of Pop' days, in truth, stopped for me about three years earlier, long before anyone had ever referred to him by that risible phrase. By then, we'd had that purple patch of early Jackson 5 singles, and the almost-as-good late 70s/early 80s run for Epic ("Can You Feel It?", "Show You The Way To Go", "Lovely One", "Blame It On the Boogie", and not forgetting the theme to Chain Letters, "Shake Your Body Down to the Ground"). And then there are the collaborations with Quincy Jones: Off the Wall and Thriller. The key to Michael Jackson's brilliance was who he worked with, and the moment that he or those around him thought that he was the genius, and what's more the only genius, he was bound to be vulnerable. With too many unable or unwilling to say 'No' to Jackson or his ballooning entourage, how else was he expected to behave? It's the sort of celebrity fable that you'd hope won't happen again. Even as early as 1981, Danny Baker of the NME would find the circus hard to tolerate.

The sudden death of Michael Jackson is somehow both shocking and unsurprising. I managed about two hours of BBC News channel coverage, and asked myself, 'How authoritative can they be about Iran, when they can't even do this without reaching for meaningless cliche and clueless portent?' They were roping in anyone for comment, from Bonnie Greer (SHE's American) to Gambaccini (and so is he) to Lucy O'Brien (author of an admittedly quite good biography about Mic... oh, about Madonna in fact. Never mind, she'll do) to a parade of minor nonentities from music magazines (Disco 45's gofer and Kerrang!'s receptionist were notable by their absence). Oddest of all was the constant reliance on Uri Geller, such a close personal friend of Jackson's that rather than grieve like human beings do, he chose to ramble to unbriefed idiots at the BBC and then - moments later - Sky News. Was he rung up, or did he pick up the phone in the first place? Best bit was when both organisations asked when he'd last spoken to Jackson. "I can't comment on that," was his flat declamation to both. Why not? Did he kill him? (Legal clarification: Well, no. Probably not.)

I heard several people place Jackson alongside and even above the likes of Elvis and Lennon, but for all the brilliance of many of his songs, and the undeniable magnetism he possessed as a young man working in mass entertainment, I always felt a bit remote towards Jackson, even when Thriller was slaughtering the chart competition. (Let's not forget the original reviews even for that one weren't ecstatic.) I probably should have gone to see him on the Bad tour, but I liked a mere two songs on that LP, and talked myself out of going. No-one, fan nor sceptic, came back from those shows disappointed. But then, ever since his hair caught fire during the making of a Pepsi commercial in 1984, I've felt uneasy about the lurid nature of his fame.

Hundreds of thousands of articles will continue to pore over the rumours, the over-spending, the child abuse allegations he could never quite shake off, that trial, the grim obsession with surgery, the secrecy and paranoia that sprang up around almost everything he did after Thriller. I'm not sure why I've rarely enjoyed the many jokes about him (and boy oh boy, there are going to be more), but on the other hand I've found his tasteless coterie of celebrity mates, and his often unquestioning and myopic fanbase repellent too. Maybe without all that, and the ceaseless greed and control that he or those around him dictated, he'd have enjoyed his life a bit more.

So, does anyone still want to be famous now?

On Having Really Pretty Good (If Not Perfect) Pitch

2009-06-25T13:24:00.000+01:00

The current issue of BBC Music Magazine contains a feature on the gift of 'perfect pitch', also sometimes known as 'absolute pitch' (or 'AP'). It's the ability to name a musical note in isolation, and to vocally reproduce a required musical note, also without a base tone. Apparently, fewer than 1 in every 10,000 people is able to do this, and as a child learning music both in and out of school, I took it for granted that everyone could do it without thinking. Which is why it came as a bit of an unwelcome shock on the first day of the O-level music course when the teacher asked everyone in the class to raise their hands if they could name the note she was playing on the piano. My hand shot up, and doubtless turned as crimson as my face as I realised that no-one else out of 20 or more had reacted. This is in stark contrast to the experience of Chinese pianist Wu Qian, who discovered that everyone in her 25-strong class at the Shanghai Conservatoire would have raised their hands.

It was quickly established that I had 'perfect pitch', which was to be an invaluable help to me over the next few years, as aural and oral tests were as crucial to passing the O-level and A-level as writing essays on Verdi, or writing chorales in the style of Johann Sebastian Bach. In a way, it was a massively unfair advantage over my fellow students, no doubt, but then again, plenty of brilliant musicians and composers flourished despite having no such gift. In any case, perfect pitch does not guarantee you a career as a composer or musician - I am Exhibit A - particularly when you become more interested in writing...

I rather took it at face value that I had perfect pitch, though. I seemed to be able to immediately identify or reproduce notes, but over the next 25 years or so, I never really made any additional enquiries (and certainly no scientific or musicological ones) as to how watertight my perfect pitch claim was. Until this week, when the BBC Music Magazine article's links to two websites made me burst with self-importance. "Now I can show off!" I thought, and trotted off to this page at www.aip.org/148th/deutsch.html, where Professor Diana Deutsch, an English music psychologist, invites visitors to test themselves for perfect pitch. After four warm-up examples, the test proper begins: three blocks of 12 notes played individually. Merrily, I scribbled down my answers, and then opened up the PDF answers sheet, ready to congratulate myself on getting full marks, or maybe one wrong.

In fact, I had scored half-marks. 18 out of 36 correct. This was a bit of a fright. Surely, in a test such as that, one will either get all or most right or wrong. If you instinctively know the sound of one tone, you should recognise all twelve tones through sheer association and familiarity. Or so I had thought. As I checked my incorrect answers against Deutsch's answer sheet, I felt a little better; each and every wrong answer was a semitone out. In each case, I was a semitone sharp, a semitone high. So, when I was wrong, I was at least consistently wrong.

Apparently, as some perfect pitchers age, claims Dr Jane Gitschier at the University of California Genetics of Absolute Pitch Study in the BBC Music article, their pitch perceptions do tend to get sharper. '"We have one 44-year-old guy [in her study] who was a semitone sharp for every note.... It turns out that he recognised he was going a semitone sharp when he was 22 and thought he was already compensating, so in fact he was a whole tone sharp by the time he was 44.'" Due to my indifference to perfect pitch in general when I was about 22, I appear to have limited my decline in recognising and reproducing notes. At least, I'm only wrong half the time, and then not too wrong.

The thing is, does that mean I have a gift now? Is there an 'Often Perfect Pitch' garland which can be awarded to those with moderately good musical powers? Can I argue that I don't need the safety net of a reference note, as those with 'relative pitch' would require? The BBC Music article guide to terms is not quite comprehensive enough, and so I fall down the cracks. Whatever, my 100% record from the age of 14 has been severely compromised. Ah well, there's still my other talent: beautiful precise handwriting.

(NB: Dr Jane Gitschier's survey at the University of California's Genetics of Absolute Pitch Study should be accessible at www.perfectpitch.ucsf.edu/survey/page1.php. The link is not currently working, but when it is, I intend to have a stab at that test too.)

Steven Wells 1960-2009

2009-06-25T09:57:00.002+01:00

A constant at the NME for over twenty years, and latterly based in Philadelphia, 49-year-old Steven Wells (known affectionately as 'Swells') - author, poet, comedy writer, columnist, music and sports journalist, video director, political activist and campaigner - died on Tuesday 23rd June of lymphatic cancer in the US. Too upset to write a proper tribute yet, but here's his last column for the Philadelphia Weekly. He was always a questioning writer, never quite offering what you'd presume and this is typically unexpected, humorous and above all, human. RIP Susan Williams.

(Update, Monday 29 June 2009. Here's an excellent obituary from one who knew Steven: David Quantick, a fellow NME scribbler, who joined forces with him in the late 1980s for the seminal Culture Vulture columns, which led to both becoming involved on the writing staff for Radio 4's On the Hour. Marvellous piece of trivia discovered here: Born the same day as the lead singer of his least favourite group.)

On Avoiding Forums

2009-06-22T09:31:00.000+01:00

It took a long time to finally rid them from my system, but after nigh on ten years, my considerable contribution to internet forums - quantitative rather than qualitative - may have run out. It seemed so exciting to swap information and bat opinions back and forth with like-minded souls, as well as cybernemeses. In retrospect, so much of this now reads like gauche stupidity, misplaced anger and a mindset where the world can safely and soundly be divided into 'geniuses' and 'cunts'.

Some quite embarrassing things happened along the way. I picked an online fight with a stand-up comedian who at the time was gathering most of his material from disappointing service by underpaid restaurant staff. Time and again, I concluded that most things in the world were the fault of E4. (They are, of course.) I sent self-righteous parodies of previously talented comedy writers to the same previously talented comedy writers. I mailed stern critiques to Radio Times staff and wondered why my letters never got printed. Over the years, I got involved in very long-winded web arguments with furious illustrators with big tit fixations, utterly talentless British Onion rip-off merchants, fans of BBC2's The Desks, scriptwriters for Radio 4's Colin Baker Ringing Up Call Centers, men who hadn't liked any music since 1978, and people who really were bitter, twisted, one-note irritants who were never so happy unless there was a radio presenter they didn't like who was on just one of the many hundreds of accessible radio stations. On the plus side, though, I really got up Jon Gaunt's fucking nose about five years ago.

Does that make all of the other stuff defensible? All remains in the public domain, probably. Look hard enough and you can find most of it, I'm sure. Not that I'm going to waste time looking. But what I came to realise these past couple of years is that I'm not all that interested in online debate. Increasingly, I like to correspond with people holding alternative views not so I can shout at them, but just so that I can listen to them. Maybe I'm finally growing up. It's about time.

Studio Audiences (MCMLXXXV)

2009-06-17T05:26:00.000+01:00

I'd not seen any of John Sullivan's BBC sitcom about divorcees, Dear John, in perhaps 20 years. I really liked it at the time, but I approached it again with trepidation; I had also enjoyed Just Good Friends as an adolescent, and watching those back again a few years ago was a trying affair. What I had seen as a sophisticated class-based romantic sitcom turned out to be a long-winded saga of sniping. Although I urge you to watch the 1984 special, told in flashback about how the two central characters had met and fallen out with each other. It's one of the most admirably bleak offerings ever to turn up in the Christmas Day schedules. It seems to have had two influences on Christmas TV after 1984: obviously the feature-length comedy specials, most famously Sullivan's own Only Fools and Horses..., but also those startling, sobering moments of horror in Yuletide viewing that EastEnders in particular has made its own. Jan Francis's Penny Warrender even predates that Arthur Fowler scene that is all the more shocking for being in a film of a sitcom. Just Good Friends changed Christmas Day on British TV forever, and due to unclearably copious use of Rolling Stones tracks, seems to place a DVD release of the complete series in indefinite limbo. Shame. It's on Youtube, though, beginning here.

The first series of Dear John has also emerged on Youtube. I know it's become a cliche to say that something from nearly 25 years ago has not aged well, but a lot of Dear John has not, it pains me to say. Part of the reason is that emotional literacy has made quantum leaps forward since then. Or maybe it's just that I've just had more life experience since it went out. Certainly, Kiss Me Kate and Help have moved things forward in terms of intelligent comedy about therapy and support. If a sitcom were made now about a self-help group ('The 1-2-1 Club') for divorced men and women, you would hope that the supporting cast would be a little bit more subtly-drawn. In 1985, though, monotone droners like Ralph (Peter Denyer) liked their trainspotting and had a 'motorcycle combination'. Smarmy group leader Louise (Rachel Bell) only really becomes animated if the group discussions on marriage breakdown might touch on the issue of sexual problems. As for the white-suited Travolta clone Kirk St Moritz (Peter Blake), you hope with every fibre of your being that Sullivan knows that he's a caricature in the first place.

It's unnerving to hear the studio audience laugh quite so hard when one of the leading characters, Kate (Belinda Lang) reveals that her three marriages broke down because of her 'frigidity', leading to endless jokes at her expense over the weeks. But then, dreaming of torturing the audience becomes an all-consuming desire after a while. It's not just that they laugh at everything, they laugh at everything in that crass 'British being shocked' shriek. When Kate uses the word 'dickhead', the shriekometer suffers a seizure. It's as ghastly as the bits in BBC3's Coming of Age when anyone uses the word 'fuck', although at least it only happens once here, rather than 835 times per half-hour.

Nonetheless, the relentless reliance on catchphrases to prod the audience for laffs by Sullivan - which I'm told got even worse for its second series (and let's not even mention the abysmal cop-out of a Christmas special) - is not just wearying, it's limiting. The group scenes become simply annoying, circular point-scoring squabbles. The nature of sitcom is that people don't learn anything, but even wit is in disappointingly short supply. Meanwhile, Sullivan's attempts at pay-offs, which are just about credible in the shady 'everyone knows each other' world of Delboy and Rodders, stretch believability to breaking point a few times in Dear John. Take episode three, in which a broken Ralph tells the story of how a group of drunken thugs trashed his caravan and sent it flying over a cliff, while he was still sitting on its toilet. How likely is it, even for comedy, that Kirk turns out to be one of the culprits, especially what we later learn about the character? It's a desperate lunge at a punchline. Is this a spoiler? I prefer to think of it as a warning.

Yet while these are frustrating drawbacks, there are equally a number of reasons to give Dear John the time of day. Ironically, when Sullivan dares to give his creations space and develops two hander scenes - 1-2-1! - caricature falls away and character triumphs. It's easy to see why America showed enough interest to make its own version (later shown here under the title Dear John USA) when you witness the gentle developments between John himself and Kate, or - in the final episode of the first series - when John discovers the real and very different Kirk St Moritz. Much the same can be said about show five's location scene at a zoo between John and his estranged child Toby, played by Ralph Bates' own young son William. Although Belinda Lang also gives extremely convincing performances throughout, it really (lucky, given its title) is Bates' show. Not saintly by any means, languages schoolteacher John Lacey is the character one constantly roots for, he is by far the most empathetic figure and able to interpret almost anyone's point of view (it's a nice irony that he would be a far better leader of the 1-2-1 club than the disinterested Louise). Most importantly of all, given it's a sitcom, he's the most comedically believable person, and fortunately he appears in practically every scene. Despite a plethora of dramatic roles, Bates had hardly done any TV comedy prior to Dear John, and due to his appallingly early death (of cancer in 1991) never would again.

Has its moments, then, but for heaven's sake, tread carefully. And try not to listen to that bloody audience.

Slap "Bang"?

2009-06-15T12:36:00.000+01:00

So a second Blur compilation - aimed, I imagine, both at festival-going latecomers to their oeuvre and the children of nostalgic dads - has entered the public domain, and for the second time, it's a case of cherry picking the back catalogue. The Best of Blur nine years ago collected most of the A-sides of note, along with the inclusion of Parklife's "This is a Low", as if to imply that they should have put that one out as a single as well at some point. Midlife clouds the certainties of chart positions and hit singles still further, opting for LP tracks and highlights. It's about time "Popscene" - which entered the indifferent UK charts in April '92 at number 32 with a lead weight tied to its ankles - made an appearance on a British LP. All the same, with a good half-dozen of their singles missing on this double CD, there is still no official "Blur: The Singles" item. (You could of course make your own.)

Missing this time round is their first number one hit, 1995's "Country House", as well as "Music is My Radar" (which previewed The Best of Blur and is otherwise unavailable on an album), and to my own vague chagrin - as it really is one of the best things they ever did - "To The End". I speak as someone who is by no means a die-hard fan, as I don't even own all the LPs, but listening back to them is hearing the soundtrack to my twenties, from university through dead-end jobs and inebriated nights out to relative stability with the beginnings of a long-term relationship that happily continues to this day.

And if you want to know band and/or record company's take on what is boiled-down Blur, it's fair to see "Beetlebum" as the answer - as on Best Of, it's the opening track. Worth considering are the three singles that have never adorned either Blur compilation. I don't count 2003's "Crazy Beat", as that could hardly have been selected for inclusion on a collection three years before it actually came out.

1) "Bang" (1991)

"They still shout for 'Bang' in Italy," the group told its official biographer Stuart Maconie in the late 1990s. I wonder if they still would. I hadn't heard this all-important follow-up to "There's No Other Way" for donkey's years, and I don't own Leisure either, so I was anticipating something horrifying on revisiting. What I hear now is something that could only have been hatched in 1990, an unquestionably derivative but not dreadful love-letter to baggy, with a vigorous nod to "Sympathy for the Devil" (see also an estimated 40% of British singles released c. 1990-91; even Bananarama's opportunistic "Only Your Love" had sneaked out a whole year earlier). Had they carried on in this vein, oblivion would have beckoned, but it's hardly disastrous.

2) "Sunday Sunday" (1993)

Dave Balfe at Food Records deplored it, believing that no hit singles of renown sped up in the middle. I can't help but feel affection towards its giddy, messy rejection of ennui, and should I ever put together that Songs Named After TV Programmes playlist, it'll doubtless be present and correct around the Track 6 mark, bridging the gap between Howard Jones's "The Prisoner" and Kraftwerk's "News". Another slight work, though I never skip it when Modern Life is on. Then again, I always liked Madness.

3) "M.O.R." (1997)

The fourth and last single from Blur, I hadn't realised this juddering tribute to Bowie and Eno got as high as 15. The reasons for excluding this from 'best-of's is less obvious than the other two, although I personally find it a far more enriching 45 than, say, the rather papery "Charmless Man" from the previous year. Maybe you shouldn't have four singles from one LP on a best-of. Or is it missing because of the "Here comes a low" refrain, and it's just regarded as too close to "This is a low"? Anyone? Bueller? Fry?

Two last things: Firstly, the sequencing on Midlife could be better. "Sing" followed by "This is a Low"? Break things up a bit! Secondly, has anyone pointed out before just how closely "The Universal" resembled Louis Armstrong's "We Have All The Time In the World"?* The latter got reissued in late 1994, at around the time the group would have been writing Great Escape material.

*Probably everyone.

The Guardian Becomes Jim'll Fix It

2009-06-15T10:26:00.000+01:00

The Guardian today contains a story about eight-year-old Charlotte Jones, daughter of a long-time reader of the paper. She has written a letter admonishing weekend staff for discontinuing the comic section for youngsters in favour of a section about football. You might think that a girl of her age would be better off buying a publication aimed at her. Charlotte will already have outgrown the material offered by Sam Wollaston and Tanya Gold.

This story by Jon Henley worries me, though. If things really are that tight at York Way, why not pay Lucy Mangan less money (maybe none at all?) rather than cutting off a tiny compartment of a newspaper that, after all, is attracting that paper's future buyers? Furthermore, isn't there something rather self-serving about inviting Charlotte into Guardian HQ to advise what should go in G2? Charlotte, by her own admission, is not really interested in being a journalist. Why is G2 supremo Emily Bell, even just for a day, asking an eight-year-old what the features section of a newspaper for adults should be covering? The features in G2 can already plumb the depths of infantilism and shallowness, as demonstrated by the shortlist of cover stories that the complainant has to consider. Charlotte would fall asleep at most of them, and so would I, and I'm thirty years older than she is. Is a right-of-reply story like this intended to excuse the G2 supplement getting even more childish?

All Time Top Ten: 22 January 1981 - Colin Moulding

2009-06-13T22:52:00.000+01:00

An occasional foray into the back pages of Smash Hits when they'd invite a popster of the day to select their desert island discs. We start with Colin Moulding of Swindon's XTC, who in January 1981, were about to release "Sgt. Rock" from their masterly Black Sea LP.

--------
1. THE KINKS Autumn Almanac (Pye)
The song I most want to hear when I come back from touring.

2. THE BEATLES Revolver (Parlophone)
The classic album - one to listen to all the way through.

3. DIONNE WARWICK Walk on By (Pye)
Great song, great singing, great chord changes!

4. M Pop Muzik (MCA)
The record that's most likely to get me doing Leslie Phillips' dance steps in discos.

5. PINK FLOYD Arnold Layne (Columbia)
Reminder of a period. I was eleven - a difficult time for boys.

6. IGGY POP The Passenger (RCA)
Cruising around in German taxis music - mainly at night.

7. ROLLING STONES She's A Rainbow (Decca)
Different from anything else they'd done.

8. RAY CHARLES Hit the Road Jack (HMV)
Kept hearing it on Two Way Family Favourites.

9. PETER GABRIEL Games Without Frontiers (Charisma)
A landmark in the use of a rhythm box.

10. GARY GLITTER I'm the Leader of the Gang (Bell)
Terrace anthem from the biggest turkey ever to enter tinfoil.

In the Meantime, Here's Some Music

2009-06-13T19:33:00.000+01:00

I wasn't paying attention for whatever reason when its original 35-track version came out eight years ago, but the announcement that Steven Wills at Winchester Hospital Radio was reissuing the Girl in a Suitcase collection as an 'upgraded' collection made me investigate post-haste. The double-disc set now boasts 66 selections of instrumental library music, most of which were at some point used as theme or incidental music to TV or radio shows. Many of these, dating from the 1960s, 70s or in a few cases, very early 80s, are absolutely ingrained in the psyche of anyone over the age of 35, with big band, folk and jazz influences looming large. Woodwind and brass are even more important than strings in the textures of these offerings. "Oh, so that's what it's called!" has been a regular cry of mine throughout hearing the compilation, whether it's Don Jackson's "Sporty Type", which introduced ITV's World of Sport on Saturdays for years, or the Alan Parker Sound's "Motivation", aka the signature tune to Julia Smith and Tony Holland's pre-EastEnders hospital serial for BBC1, Angels.

It would have been fascinating to learn exactly when the pieces of music were composed. Copyright dates are missing, unfortunately, although that tends to be the nature with library music titles. Helpfully, the liner information on the discs does help identify in what way the music was used, but it's interesting that I remember certain selections being used in additional contexts not cited here. Take for instance, Disc 2 Track 10's "Rock Festival" by the Bruton Rock Group. Most will recall it bookending Lenny Henry, Tracey Ullman and David Copperfield's corny but award-winning comedy series Three of a Kind for BBC1, a programme which during its three runs between 1981-83 gave early writing opportunities to the likes of Ian Hislop, Hale & Pace and Ruby Wax. But "Rock Festival" - by the way, a dead ringer for the HeeBeeGeeBees' Quo parody "Boring Song" - was in addition the signature tune to a Welsh language current affairs series for S4C entitled Y Byd ar Bedwar (The World on Four). The music does not really evoke a rock festival, incidentally, unless the brand of rock you're thinking of is Sniff'n'the Tears and "Driver's Seat".

"Blue Bottle" from the Frank Barcley Group has another unforgettable connotation for Welsh viewers. It was the theme to Miri Mawr (roughly translated as 'Big Fun'), a studio-based children's programme involving rather terrifying glove puppets and which gave a generation of non-Welsh speakers seething envy that we were getting this rather than whatever HTV West was broadcasting instead. Probably Lift Off with Ayshea. "Blue Bottle" was mined for the American series Sesame Street's animation segments, as was Johnny Pearson's "Mini Walking", which UK viewers know better as Mary, Mungo and Midge music. At least half-a-dozen other tracks were used as background music on the groundbreaking Vision On, including "Goofy" (which accompanied the brief Burbles sketches, speech bubbles emenating from unseen characters living in a grandfather clock) and "Mini Clarinet" - again much used in Mary, Mungo and Midge - which backed the animated adventures of Auggie the accident-prone dinosaur.

It's also amusing to spot just how closely some of this stuff was modelled on existing hit material. Take "Holiday People 1" by James Clarke, the first 16 bars of which heralded Derek Batey's lunchtime chat show Look Who's Talking (Border, 1973-well into the 80s), taped in front of a mummified studio audience in the bottom drawer of a filing cabinet in Carlisle. "Holiday People 1" is so indebted to "Up, Up and Away" that it's a miracle Jimmy Webb and his legal eagle team didn't sue. Same goes for testcard mainstay The Syd Dale Band's "Hello Honky Tonk", almost hilariously reliant on "When I'm 64". Conversely, whenever I hear Madonna's "Don't Tell Me", I immediately think of Alan Parker's "The Free Life", which during the 1970s graced both Yorkshire TV schools programme My World and Thames Television comedy-drama Moody & Pegg. The acoustic guitar motif is uncannily similar.

There is more. Much more, from "Glad Gadabout", the theme to the Richard Baker-narrated pre-school series Teddy Edward to "Domino" by the International Studio Group, not the Van Morrison song, but the sig tune to Never the Twain, a sitcom that ran for at least 35 series on ITV. Plus there's "Sprocket Shuffle", the early 80s theme to ITV's snooker coverage, specifically isolated by my dad at the time as the single worst piece of music ever composed. I can even demonstrate a wilful ear for obscurity which outdoes even the considerable achievements of Steven Wills: the sinister frenetic jazz of "Hot Rod" by the Scottmen is listed as 'music featured in a Public Information Film'. I think I know which one. It's from the 'Follow the Country Code and leave no litter' animation where a family drives around the countryside with a steady stream of litter exhausting from their car.

There's a profound feeling of peculiar melancholy hearing some of this stuff now, some 30+ years on. It comes from a time when daytime television was a disruptive, stop-start experience, where intervals were every bit as commonplace as programmes, and where testcards, stills, delays, oddities lived in the schedules. As a small child, fully aware that television schedules were finite, and that closedowns happened, this was the soundtrack to waiting for something to start, or in the case of the theme tunes, the soundtrack to something about to end. In the case of the schools programme material here - Stop Look Listen, My World, even the transmitter information interval music on BBC2 known as "Walk and Talk" - it evokes Being Off School. A world of mumps and boredom. Quite what anyone born after 1979 would make of it all, God only knows.

"Just a Few Retakes"

2009-06-13T11:00:00.001+01:00

Thanks to a very kind last-minute invitation from an online acquaintance (and now friend), I found myself on the guest list for a recording on Monday for the upcoming series of BBC Radio 4's That Mitchell & Webb Sound. Visit here (http://tmwl.project76.tv/) for a sketch list and some behind-the-scenes info. Two shows were recorded at the BBC Radio Theatre at Broadcasting House. Until about two years ago, recordings for comedy shows tended to take place at the Drill Hall nearby - easy to gain access to, you could walk straight in, and in a packed foyer bar, you could often spot cast and crew members milling around. If easy to get in, it was admittedly more taxing to escape a tiresome recording session and leave. Radio Theatre access demands standing in a queue outside - even though we were on the guest list! - and having a security check for all our own bags, coats and beings. It felt more like checking in to fly to Washington rather than sit in a radio theatre to watch some sketches.

It was a great evening for me as I didn't have any agenda whatsoever. I've attended a lot of radio recordings as research or just a way of trying to grab a participant in order to secure a subsequent interview. This was just a case of my thinking, 'Well, I've enjoyed previous series of it, even though I didn't catch any of the last run'. After a brief introduction and warm-up from producer Gareth Edwards, he introduced the cast: David Mitchell, Robert Webb, 'surprise guest' Olivia Colman and James Bachman, the latter of whom is one of the main writers on the show.

It was highly enjoyable, and mostly very entertaining, unusually slick for a radio recording, and relatively few fluffs which required retakes at the end. Highlights included a reality show called 'Make Me A Celebrity Centaur', a running sketch which required Webb to adopt the plaintive falsetto of Pinocchio, pitched not far from Mickey Mouse, and a sketch which chewed over the various options of how Rapunzel could escape from her predicament. While all this was going on, I was thinking things like, 'David and Rob are more or less the same height'.

The only thing that concerned me a little was just how sparingly the sketches required the supporting cast, particularly Olivia Colman, an old friend and cohort of the pair. Admittedly, it's really a vehicle for David and Rob, so the focus is on them, but it seems a shame that good performers spend so much time in downtime sitting on chairs waiting for their next cue... often in two sketches time. I can remember top comedy actress Amelia Bullmore being similarly marginalised in a show a few years back, and thinking 'What a waste of someone who really can act'. On That Mitchell & Webb Sound, it's apparently an all-male writing team, which might explain why a female voice is given so little to do and certainly very rarely a funny line. Do many male comedy writers actually like writing for women? Even the likes of Graham Linehan confess to finding it hard.

Meanwhile, I won't bother linking to dismal articles by Jo Brand in the Guardian or Kathy Lette in the Telegraph about how male-oriented TV panel shows are in this day and age. I like Jo, but when I see her on QI, she appears to do little but roll her eyes and even look as though she'd rather be somewhere else. Maybe this in itself is her statement about the competitive nature of such arenas, but I still think she could try a bit harder. The much-missed Linda Smith did, after all. Meantime, Lette, never good nor funny, does her usual strained level of punning to no great effect. She was apparently all over telly like a rash yesterday and I was so glad to be at work. Which is not a phrase I use often.

The thing is, panel shows are very visible vehicles for comedians but how useful are they even for men who are good comics? I've seen the expansive Mark Watson struggle hard on Mock the Week, although not as hard as me at home struggling to watch Mock the Week. The people who succeed on such shows are filling a void, the Sun-friendly gag machine of Frankie Boyle or the shouting sub-Roy Huddisms of Andy Parsons. Do women really and truly want to be part of this world? Never mind, there's always Victoria Wood on the impending and sadly Humph-less return of I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue.