New Day failed because people don't try things any more

Trinity Mirror is canning its cheap newspaper New Day just two months after it launched. This is probably the right thing to do. You can lose fortunes and spend years of people's lives trying to prove that a hunch was right. Believe me. I know.

You can say it didn't live up to expectations, but that rather assumes that people are bothered enough to have expectations. You only have to see how the newspaper kiosks that used to be a feature of all London tube stations are now either closing or turning themselves over to selling confectionery to note that most people are not in a position to turn to a new newspaper because they long ago stopped buying an old one.

I noticed this in the world of magazines more than ten years ago. People stopped trying new things and they certainly stopped paying for new things. I bet New Day didn't fail because the publishers were disappointed how few people stuck with it. I bet it failed because not enough people tried it in the first place.

I used to work for British Home Stores

In the early 70s I had a job as a courier at British Home Stores' head office. My job was to accompany Jim, who drove a van that ferried material between their main office on Marleybone Road and their smaller office in Dorset Square. In the afternoons, when Jim had been to the pub for his standard three pints, I took over the driving.

BHS were a slightly sleepy, old-fashioned company even then. My family had never shopped there and I couldn't really work out why people did. And now they seem to be joining HMV, C&A, Woolworths, Borders, Comet and many others that were formerly a part of somebody's regular routine and now aren't anymore. The papers are full of Monday Morning Quarterbacks talking about what they should have done to save it. I don't pretend to have a plan. I know how little I miss the ones that have already gone.

Who's next? Marks & Spencer?

Victoria Wood

Ken Sharp took this picture of me and Victoria Wood. It was in the late 80s and we were talking in the garden of a pub in Salisbury after she'd played a show at the City Hall.

I often mess up the "having a picture taken with the star" moment. It's not altogether surprising. You have one person who's utterly at home with having their picture taken. Then there's you, flushed and over-excited, your professional facade entirely lost.

It wasn't a bit like that with Victoria Wood. She was happy to share whatever limelight was going. Lovely person.

Whatever Emitt Rhodes's been doing for the last forty-three years, it clearly hasn't all been fun

I didn’t mention Emitt Rhodes in my book, though he’s on my extended 1971 playlist.

 Rhodes was one of those people who was being lined up as a Beatles substitute in 1971. He could write good tunes, he played all the instruments on his albums himself and - bonus ball - he was pretty.

His albums attracted support from everybody except the record-buying public and he was locked into a contract that required him to deliver two albums a year, which was hard enough for your standard road-hardened band but was nigh on impossible for an artist who had to over-dub every part himself.

He withdrew from making his own albums in the early seventies. Now he’s back, with a rather good record called Rainbow Ends. Whereas the early records glistened with the optimism of youth, his new one starts with a song about a woman who takes the car, the house and the kids. It’s called “Dog On A Chain”.

He looks different too.

Nobody knows anything. Didn't then. Still don't.

Finishing Doris Kearns Goodwin's "No Ordinary Time" I was interested to see that at the end of the war the American proposal to turn Germany into an agrarian economy that could no longer threaten Europe and the Russian proposal to exclude the French from the post-war settlement on the grounds that they didn't have an army were both resisted and pushed back by Churchill.

On mornings like this, when the airwaves are alive with politicians talking about what will or will not happen in Europe in some unspecified future it's a good idea to ponder close run things like the above and remember the wise words of William Goldman.

Nobody knows anything.

Links to the 1971: Never A Dull Moment playlists in one place

Here they are:

A link to the full 1971: Never A Dull Moment playlist, which is made up of 265 songs, one from every significant album that came out that year.

Then links to a Spotify version of each of the monthly playlists that come at the end of each chapter. If the odd track's missing that's because it wasn't on Spotify when I looked.

January
February
March
April
May
June
July
August
September
October
November
December

The cheap and cheerful charm of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid

We were watching "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" on Netflix the other day.

In the 70s this was the acme of high end film making. The whole nation stopped and watched when it was finally shown on BBC TV.

You watch it now and the first thing that strikes you is how cheap it was. The modesty of the whole enterprise makes it seem as far distant as the silent era. There are no big set pieces or special effects. All the money must have gone to Newman and Redford, who are, it's fair to say, almost hurtfully beautiful.

When the action moves from the West to South America it's done via a montage of stills. And we don't see the big ending. They come out shooting and the frame freezes. They would never do that now, I said to a young person. No, he said, because for a start they would already be shooting a sequel.

I went to see Batman v Superman. Here's my one-sentence review

I know nothing about comics but I've seen enough action films to know that two and a half hours in which you have not been made to feel: a few moments of genuine curiosity about what's going to happen; that familiar tightening in the pit of the stomach when the hero is about to encounter a danger we can see but he can't; the satisfying feeling when a puzzle planted early in the film is solved; the welcome expulsion of nervous laughter when the jeopardy turns out to be harmless and the growl of assent in the back of the throat when the baddie gets his just desserts, then it either means that the film maker has stumbled on a new way of doing things or he simply doesn't realise just how much he has failed to do.

Would any radio station in Britain allow me to play these ten records?

Music Selection (These can be of any genre as long as they mean something to you).
1. High Wide And Handsome by Loudon Wainwright III
2. Slow Train by Flanders and Swann 

3. If I Fell by The Beatles
4. Family Affair by Sly and the Family Stone
5. Vine Street by Harry Nilsson
6. Trenchtown Rock by Bob Marley (must be from Bob Marley live at the Lyceum)
7. You Never Can Tell by Chuck Berry
8. My Foolish Heart by Bill Evans
9. Will You Love Me Tomorrow by Carole King (from Tapestry)
10. Hills Of The North Rejoice by the Huddersfield Choral Society

The above questionnaire I completed for Martin Kelner's "One On One" feature on BBC Radio Leeds asked me to come up with ten records. Those are the ones I named. 

I was due to do Martin's show in a couple of weeks. Then BBC Radio Leeds decided they could do without him. They asked me if I still wanted to go ahead. I said no. These down-the-line interviews are OK if you've got some rapport with the person you're talking to. They're difficult if you don't.

In his explanation of how he came to leave his job Martin mentioned that an affinity with popular music is dangerous in local radio. I know what he meant.  BBC Local Radio managers are easily frightened by any selection that isn't thuddingly obvious. 

So now Martin's got no programme, which is very bad for him, and I'm left to put one question - is there any radio station in Britain that is not yet so heavily formatted or ham-strung by the need to be seen as hip and edgy that it would a actually allow those records to go out on its airwaves?  I know Desert Island Discs, but apart from that where?

Another thing about George Martin that's often, er, overlooked

He was a tall man in an era where it was quite unusual. Furthermore he worked in a business where it was even more unusual. It went with the accent he'd taught himself during the war and the upper middle class manners. His height helped him pull rank without seeming to.

Think about all the great groups of the sixties. Beatles, Stones, the Who and obviously the Small Faces. Most would be considered almost diminutive by modern standards.

Go to a standing gig nowadays and you'll have trouble seeing the stage though the forest of young men and women in their twenties. Compared to the beat generation they're like giant redwoods.

Calm down, Leo, you're only running the jokes

On the day when we're supposed to take actors and film directors as seriously as some of them take themselves it's good to be reminded of how Alfred Hitchcock looked at his trade.

I was watching a doc about the making of "Frenzy" in 1971. Jon Finch remembers that Hitchcock had an old-fashioned way of asking if he wanted to rehearse.

"Do you want to run the jokes?"

What if free media isn't the future? What if it's a dead end?

Two interesting pieces of media futurology. The fact that they're both written by people who used to be in senior positions at the Guardian makes them even more interesting.

Emily Bell, who used to be in charge of the Guardian's digital assets, wonders if the days of newspaper websites might be numbered.  As she says, there may not be much room for them in a media market that increasingly "tolerates the micro, favours the mega and rolls over most entities inbetween."

At the same time Peter Preston, who used to be the Guardian's editor, is sceptical of The Independent's claim that their move to digital-only means they'll be "as focussed and uncompromised as any start-up but with all the authority and trust of an established news brand." As he points out, the start-ups don't try to do all the stuff that the newspapers have traditionally had to do to justify the costs of the package.

When those papers moved online they brought the elements of the package with them. Sections devoted to opinion, sport, music, films and think pieces about Breaking Bad expanded to fill the space available to them, which was suddenly limitless. The BBC did something similar, albeit their commitment to even-handedness meant they weren't much good at the comment. At the same time the borderless world of the internet meant that the fluff being done by the U.S. papers and websites was suddenly just as accessible as the home-grown fluff. We now live in a world where if you want to know what columnists thinks about what Lena Dunham said about what Kesha said about Dr Luke then you could spend your every waking hour reading that and nothing but that.

This century's fluff explosion was bankrolled by newspapers in the belief that it would be followed by advertising. Now they've realised it won't be. Paywalls are going up everywhere. Newspapers are closing. At the same time even the BBC is having to cut back on some of its fluffier website content.

I wonder if in a few years time this Niagara of free stuff will have been turned off and we'll realise that it only came to pass during a brief window when the people who produced it thought there was some benefit in giving it away. Free wasn't the inevitable way of the future. It was a dead end.

This is what you could shop for in Green Lanes in 1948

This is an extract from a 1948 directory of businesses on Green Lanes in Haringey, north London.

It's a reminder of a world that was starting to slip away when I was a kid, a world where most people worked for small firms and most of those small firms were specialists in one very particular area. They sold yeast or knitting wool. They loaned money or fried fish. They manufactured shoe trimmings or fireplaces. They advertised trades like mantle maker-up and hem stitcher that are entirely mysterious to us now.

If you drive down Green Lanes now the shops are overwhelmingly owned by members of immigrant groups who arrived after 1948 and seem to offer food, phone cards or hairdressing. Presumably in another twenty years it will have changed out of recognition all over again. Makes you wonder why anybody talks about "planning".

The political magazines are benefiting from the misfortunes of the newspapers

Another strong set of circulation figures for the political and current affairs magazines like The Spectator, Private Eye, Economist and the New Statesman in the year just gone. People say it was because there was an election. People say it's because there's a European referendum coming up.

I'm not convinced. Seems to me they've been the direct beneficiaries of the decline of the daily papers. People stop buying the papers but still feel a need to read something on paper they can hold in their hands.

Daily is too frequent. Monthly is not frequent enough. Once a week is just perfect. I think this market will grow.

"Disappointed" is the weasel's weasel word

When FT columnist Lucy Kellaway was less than respectful about some airy fairy remarks made by Hewlett Packard boss Meg Whitman at Davos, a wise head of marketing and communications would have told his boss to just suck it up as the price you pay for speaking in public.

Instead he did the single most disastrous thing you can do, which is pen a formal letter saying how "disappointed" the company was with Kellaway's column. Of all the weasel words in the contemporary lexicon of passive-aggressiveness, where the objective is always to cast yourself in the role of the victim, "disappointed" is the one I loathe the most.

And now the story is about him, which is never a good look. He's now made his boss look like somebody who can't fight her own battles. He looks like somebody who runs round trying to anticipate her wishes by kicking the nearest arse available. And he's made this publicly-quoted company look as if they make marketing and advertising decisions based on what side of bed they happen to have got out in the morning.

Nice "communications" work.

If footballers won't leave London the clubs might have to move south

You don't often get lateral thinking from footballers but Stan Collymore made an interesting suggestion on Talk Sport last night. Talking about the fact that northern clubs find it difficult to recruit overseas players because they all want to be based in London, he wondered why Liverpool, for instance, didn't invest in a training ground near the M-25. That way their players could live in London and just travel to Liverpool once a fortnight to play a home game.

It's not without precedent. FC Anzhi Makhachkala are based in Dagestan on the Caspian Sea. Because Dagestan is an unlovely spot with a terrible reputation for violence the players live in Moscow, which is almost two thousand kilometres away. The club's owner has suffered some financial reverses of late so Anzhi is running on a smaller budget right now but only a few years ago they could afford to make Samuel Eto'o the highest paid player in the world.

Every couple of weeks the players would board a chartered jet in Moscow, take the long flight down to Makhachkala, be conveyed to the stadium under armed guard, play the match and then be on the plane back to their Moscow penthouses before their fans had got home. And did those fans complain that the men wearing their shirt weren't rooted to the local area - or at least in some luxurious gated community an hour away - or did they just figure that as long as they were winning it was fine?  What do you think?

The people who fail try just as hard

Henry Worsley's last message is a rare episode in the narrative of human accomplishment. It's not often we get to hear the sound of somebody failing. But, as he says, the same thing happened to Ernest Shackleton. He shot his bolt. He came up short.

The same thing happens to most people who try difficult things. They fail. All political careers end in failure. The team trudging off the pitch disconsolate and empty-handed at the end of the big final tried just as hard as the team dancing with joy for the cameras.

Because we can't face this truth we always tell ourselves that the winners - whether explorers, athletes, politicians, actors or scientists - won through because they tried harder and longer than anyone else. They didn't. The only difference between the winners and the losers is this. They won.

The Eagles and the only truth about pop music

The first album by The Eagles in 1972 took a long time to finish because David Geffen, who managed them and was their record company boss, wanted another song by Jackson Browne with a lead vocal by Don Henley to follow up the first single "Take It Easy" and to bolster their album.

Browne supplied another song called "Nightingale" but the producer Glyn Johns didn't think it was as good as "Take It Easy". They recorded it a few times but it was never strong enough to walk on its own. Geffen insisted on Johns coming back to the United States from Britain to have another go at recording it. They tried again but it never worked.

Both songs are on the first album. Both songs are tuneful. Both are the same tempo. One lifts off and the other one doesn't. Geffen couldn't believe it was as simple as that but it is.

In the present melancholy season I keep getting rung up by radio producers and asked to explain why certain careers happened in the way they happened. Was this person a genius? Was this person a hack? The truth is underneath it all it's a business about hits and hits are all about catchiness.

These two records had the exact same inputs. One flies. The other doesn't. All the work in the world wouldn't change that. In the words of Carol Kaye, one "pops", the other doesn't. It's the only thing that matters.

It's not cool, it's not clever, it's not the kind of thinking they encourage on the arts shows; nevertheless, it's the only true thing you can say about pop music.
 

In praise of Radio 4 Extra and the joy of repeats

If you're the kind of person who complains about too many repeats on TV, you're watching too much TV. Anything worth repeating was a success first time around, which has to be a good thing.

I'm one of those people whose staple diet is increasingly Radio 4 Extra, which is nothing but repeats. It provides a reliable supply of the kind of programmes I prefer - which are either factual, comic or literary - and now that I use the phone or the iPad as the main way of accessing audio, it's becoming second nature to just scroll back through the schedule on the BBC iPlayer Radio until I find something I want to hear. Most of the time I don't want to hear what's being broadcast at the time but I can easily find an alternative.

In the last few days I've loved Julian Barnes and Hermione Lee looking at Rudyard Kipling's motoring holidays in France, John Hurt as E.M. Forster narrating a dramatisation of Howards End, a whole lot of the glory that is Ed Reardon's Week and Julian Fellowes' history of the Dorset theatre company who first performed the stories of Thomas Hardy.

When the BBC big themselves up they tend to do it through their big programmes, which I neither watch nor hear. It's the little things like Radio Four Extra, which presumably costs nothing, that make the difference for me.

The difference between "War and Peace" on the telly and "The Archers" on the radio

 War and Peace debuted on BBC TV the other night in a standard Andrew Davies adaptation. All the characters had to be introduced right at the beginning. All the bases had to be covered. All the budget had to be on the screen. There was even the standard tacked-on, not in the book sex scene that looked like it had wandered in from a pre-Christmas ad for a men's fragrance. The one actor who remained still enough to register his character was Stephen Rea (above) as the sinister, manipulative Kuragin. 

Meanwhile, in the land of radio soaps, Timothy Watson (left) just shifted up a gear as the sinister, manipulative Rob Titchener in The Archers.

They're obviously both good actors, doing different jobs in different productions.

What's interesting is the differing reactions. The performance of the TV actor is met with detached admiration. The performance of the radio actor, on the other hand, is met with demands that the BBC move him and his plotline out of the series because, frankly, it's just too damned disturbing.

TV always provides you with an escape clause. Radio gets inside your head.