Hanging on in quiet desperation

I've just done what they say nobody does, which is watch an hour-long clip on the web. It's a lecture given recently by Elizabeth Warren, a Harvard law professor, about "the coming collapse of the middle class".

There are two reasons to watch it: she's a brilliant lecturer who, as far as I can see, is working without notes and just talking over a few Powerpoint slides. More importantly, her argument is a powerful one studded with lots of surprising details that you're tempted to introduce into dinner party conversation immediately. She sets a number of questions and then, on the basis of a study that compares the American family today to its predecessor thirty years ago, answers them. Does the average family spend more or less on clothes, food and appliances? How do hospitals become more efficient? Is it by curing the sick or sending them home? Do people believe in social mobility more or less than they believe that the moon landings were staged? Do you personally know more people who've gone bankrupt than people who've got divorced? And although the expression "middle class" summons up different pictures in America than it does in Britain – it's Homer and Marge rather than Margot and Jerry - I think a lot of her lessons could be applied here.

Heaven sent?

I'm reading John Gray's "Straw Dogs" , in which he argues that the secular humanism that passes for orthodox thought in most of Western society is merely the old religious impulse in a new guise. I hope he was watching Chelsea play Liverpool last night. That well-known Churchman Frank Lampard pointed to the sky after he'd scored his penalty, apparently "dedicating" his goal to his recently deceased mother. At the end that prominent man of faith Chelsea manager Avram Grant sank to his knees as if in thanks. In the post-match interview he muttered something about the Holocaust. What gets me about these gestures is their ostentatious nature and the fact that they appear to be playing up to some over-arching "triumph over tragedy" narrative provided by the papers and the TV.

The "deeply offended"

The Advertising Standards Authority has published its annual report into the most complained-about ads. A new language seems to have grown up around public apology. According to the BBC this morning the ASA apologised for the fact that ads for Trident gum that used voices speaking in a Caribbean accent could be "deeply offensive" and were guilty of perpetuating stereotypes. I tend to reserve my use of "deeply offensive" for people driving across the speed bumps down my road at a child-endangering 50 mph or the failure of the South African government to openly condemn the catastrophe in Zimbabwe. Even the guy who walked towards me urinating in the N1 centre the other week was pathetic more than offensive. "Deeply offensive" is grown-up code for "I'll get my Dad on you."

The worst I feel about a TV advert is "that's a bit irritating", particularly since I know from experience that every TV ad has to be signed off at every stage of its production by people whose job it is to avoid our hurt feelings. Advertising agencies are selling their gum to Afro-Caribbean people just as hard as they're selling it to me and my Greek, Asian and Russian neighbours. I believe them when they say that they consulted widely before making this ad. All TV adverts perpetuate stereotypes. They're thirty seconds long. If they didn't perpetuate stereotypes they wouldn't make much sense.

Vanity, vanity, all is vanity

The air is thick with the cloying smell of exploding humbug around the pictures of Miley Cyrus in "Vanity Fair". A bunch of powerful adults put weeks of work into taking suggestive pictures of a pretty 15-year old girl and putting them into the most prestigious magazine on the planet and then feign puzzlement and injured innocence over the fact that pressure from the public to gawp at them crashed the Conde Nast server. Everybody retreats mouthing apologies and protesting that they never dreamed they would be interpreted that way.

But really. Is there anybody involved who isn't thrilled with the outcome?
Not Miley Cyrus who has just raised the price she can ask for her first grown-up film.
Not her dad Billy Ray, a washed-up one hit wonder who suddenly finds his calls are getting answered again.
Certainly not Vanity Fair, its editors or Annie Leibowitz, who took the pictures.
And definitely not the Disney Corporation who have handled enough child stars to know that they are all corrupted sooner or later.
Move over, Lindsay Lohan. Here's some new skin for the old ceremony.

Girls talk

In 1978 Elvis Costello wrote that song about loving to hear girls talk. On a station platform yesterday morning it struck me that, thanks to the mobile phone, we're all getting to hear girls talk.

Men have generally used the phone as a means of obtaining information, whereas women have seen it as a machine that enables them to devote time to talking. The mobile's like that only more so. The young woman on the station platform was phoning her friend ostensibly to tell her that she'd been to the sale and the shop didn't have anything in her size whereas Rachel bought loads of things. In reality I guess she was just killing time until the train came by doing what girls do from about the age of six, making contact with their circle of friends and taking the temperature of their friendship. Having brought up two girls I have learned that young females have a capacity to wound each other that their male counterparts rarely bother with. They always socialise in threes which tends to mean that one is always uncertain of her position. Their mobile bills are higher than their brothers because they don't wait to be rung. They check in.

I worry that the mobile and the text and Facebook and the rest of it have provided them with new weapons to make each other feel excluded. This could be why I have noticed that the overt expressions of friendship during those phone conversations become more showy. They call each other "hon". They finish phone conversations with "love you". Even their texts manage to be high-pitched. They invent pet names for each other. I saw a colleague's leaving card recently which bore a good luck message addressed to "ladyface". The girls at the bus stop squeal when they see each other. I have a friend who is a head of a large secondary school and she now tells me they have considered building more time into the timetable to allow for all the kissing goodbye that takes place between lessons. I don't think she was entirely joking.

Many happy returns, Robert

There was a lot of coverage this week of the fact that Robert Dee, the young British tennis professional, won a match on the tour. This meant he was no longer "the worst tennis player in the world". Ho ho.

This is the kind of reflexive abuse that Tim Henman used to come in for because he never won a Grand Slam. Characterising professional athletes as "useless" is never a good idea but it seems particularly inappropriate with tennis players and doubly inappropriate coming from anyone in this country where tennis barely exists as a competitive sport.

If the average smart-arsed comic who fancied himself as a sportsman ended up on a pitch in a professional game of football he just might get to make contact with the ball on a few occasions. Put him on a professional cricket pitch he might make a catch or even score a run or two. But put him on the other side of the net from a professional tennis player and he would instantly realise that the game he was in bore absolutely no resemblance to any of his previous experiences on a tennis court.

I've played tennis against good amateur players and here's what I learned. I learned there was no point at all in my being there. The combination of skill, physical stature and racket technology in the game has now advanced to the point that the serve, like Shock and Awe, is a weapon used to make sure that your opponent never gets to actually oppose you. Do it right and he just trudges from side to side, going through the motions of assuming the position and then, just as the ball is clanging into the netting at the back of the court, lunging in the direction of where it previously went.

This is brought home once again by this ESPN piece in which their writer tries to face the serve of young American player John Isner. Isner has a serve that travels at 140 mph. That wouldn't be so bad if he weren't 6ft 9in tall. Therefore the ball is also coming down from God knows what height. The hapless hack is standing miles behind the base line and yet on the rare occasions he gets even the frame of the racket to the ball his arm is way above his own head height and therefore the chances of playing what you might call a shot are slim. Most of his "returns" end up on a neighbouring court.

And this doesn't mean that John Isner is obviously going to be the next Federer. I once took some lessons from a good young English pro and, just for a laugh, he would play a few points against me. I rarely got anywhere near the ball and he wasn't even trying. He explained to me that the British number one was better than him by the same factor that he was better than me. We really have no idea. We should shut our traps and wish Robert Dee the best of luck.

Keep up

Given the scale of the downsizing that has gone on in the music business in the last few years one would have thought that the left hand was in a better position to know what the right hand was doing. I put together the CDs that come with every issue of Word and in this capacity I get lots of approaches from PRs. Today I was contacted by one who suggested I might be interested in listening to a certain artist with a view to inclusion on one of our CDs in the near future. I was able to point that this act had in fact been included on the CD with the March edition. The reaction from the PR was faint embarrassment masked by indignation that nobody had told them. The notion that a PR is someone who has a right to be informed rather than a duty to inform themselves must be a recent innovation.

Simple minds

Clive James was talking on "A Point of View" on Radio Four this morning about V.S. Naipaul and the shortcomings of the view that you only appreciate the work of people you admire as human beings and disregard all others. And I quote:

"Poetry like Larkin's, and prose like Sir Vidia's, is still the best safeguard we've got against the rage for simplicity, the total view that wants to achieve a false peace by silencing everyone who might contradict us."

"The rage for simplicity". There's a book for our times.

Bet you can't do this

I miss twelve inch album covers. I miss the old plastic bags from Dobells in the Charing Cross Road. They had a photograph of a rack full of records. On the way home on the tube you could read the details on the spines and just wonder what it would be like to hold them. If somebody got on your carriage and they had a bag from Virgin or One Stop or even Boots you used to go and sit near them knowing that at some point in the journey they'd get their new purchase out and read the cover. (People do the same with CDs but it's nothing like as thrilling. They end up picking away at the security tag with their finger nails. They don't look like people seized with joy.) If they didn't actually get the LP out then people like me could sometimes look through the bag and work out what it was.


Anway, Fraser and I like to think we've come up with the Rock Quiz where you can't Google your way to the solution. Here are thirty fragments from the covers of pretty well-known - in some cases multi-platinum - albums montaged together. There's a larger version of it here on the Word site where you can also find your way to the solution.

Names are dropping like flies

Last night I went to a dinner party "for" David Simon, the man who invented "The Wire". It was thrown by his publishers Canongate, who have picked up his 1991 book "Homicide" for publication later this year. Simon's in London editing his new HBO mini series "Generation Kill", based on the book by Evan Wright. The party's in Notting Hill, one part of London that I'm never entirely comfortable in. It's the kind of do where Zadie Smith drops in for coffee and sits there rolling tiny cigs which she can't smoke. Nick Cave is expected later but by then I'm on the Piccadilly line.

Simon told me a story about seeking Tom Waits's permission to use "Down In The Hole" as "The Wire"'s theme tune that confirms my suspicion that when confronted by the need to make a decision, musicians will happily don the mantle of hopelessness. Simon had made a personal application and supplied tapes of the show for Waits to look at but still had no word back and it was getting close to deadline. He somehow got Waits's home number and called him. Sorry to bother you, Mr Waits, but we were wondering if you'd got the tapes.

Oh yes, said Waits. Sorry for the delay but my wife is away at the moment and I can't work the VCR on my own. Tell you what. Go ahead.

The Chinese way

If you haven't done it already you should try to see the first episode of the BBC's "Chinese School" (the iPlayer link is here). The main character is a teenage high-flier who's expected to do well in the national examination and go to the top university. You get the impression that the whole nation holds its breath when these tests come around. If you do well you can join the elite. Underperform and you are destined to be factory fodder. When the exams take place planes are diverted and traffic is calmed to ensure that nothing interrupts the concentration of the candidates.
The day after the exams they're not down the pub or off to Ibiza. They're sitting studying the answer sheet and trying to estimate how well they did. I can't imagine anything more purgatorial. Anyway, our student looks at the answers and bursts into tears. She thinks she's messed it up. She's inconsolable.
Not surprising really. When the results came out she'd got 98%.

As the crow walks

I thought it was just me who had developed this desperate need to walk everywhere. Then I heard Will Self talking about walking from airports to the centre of cities and how it was a need to reconnect yourself with your surroundings.

But there's more. When I leave the office I can either take a short, unpleasant walk to King's Cross to take the tube or a long, pleasant walk to Highbury & Islington and then catch the overground home. I've lately come to the conclusion that the reason I don't take the former is because it's in the wrong direction. Does something happen to you when you reach a certain age that means you can no longer tolerate not heading where you're going? If I'm forced out of my way because of some kink in the transport system I get crosser and crosser and crosser. If I can take the right heading I'm happy, no matter how long the journey is.

I think Paul K. Lyons realised this before me. He's written about what it's like to walk across London in a more or less straight line south to north (which takes him past the end of my road) and east to west. Good to know I'm not alone.

A small step for man

Last night Stephen Fry devoted an hour of television to explaining how Gutenberg made the first printing press. Quite interesting, but not as good as this which Chris Bourke has just sent me from New Zealand. It's bound to be Easter somewhere.

Just a thought

China. Most powerful, richest, most populous and - for the moment at least - most controversial country in the world.
Can anyone name a Chinese person?
Go on. Statesman, sports star, inventor, author, inndustralist, benefactor or reality TV star, anyone you like.
Maybe you can. Good for you. I can't, not without looking them up. I know more Belgians.
At some stage over the next few months somebody in the Chinese hierarchy is going to persuade somebody else in the Chinese hierarchy that they maybe ought to appoint a spokesperson who can present their policies to the West in English. Whoever gets the job becomes one of the most famous people in the world overnight.

Natty tread

The most powerful indicator of actual poverty is still footwear or the lack of it. My grandparents used to talk about the kids who went to school barefoot. I have a friend who wore nothing but wellingtons throughout his early childhood. Southside Johnny called one of his albums "At Least We Got Shoes" after something that his grandfather used to say. I was struck by this when watching the London Marathon yesterday. The six Tanzanians who did the race in full Masai fig had shoes made out of car tyres. This is nothing unusual, as I discovered when I visited Ethiopia. Market traders will run you up a pair of Reef-like sandals (above) out of a lorry tire that has run out of tread.

I'm sure there's a thesis to be written about the contrast between this and the boxfresh trainers sported by hip hop stars - and even some people I see on the Tube long after rush hour. There is no flaunting of wealth quite so calculated as the regular sporting of new shoes. This is particularly the case, as a casual viewing of MTV's "Cribs" will attest, when the shoes themselves are trainers, an item ostensibly designed as an unremarkable workhorse. Missy Elliott does her own line for Adidas, known as "Respect Me". According to the manufacturer these are ideal for the start of the academic year, presumably the key time for getting people to admire you because of your gym pumps.

We were robbed

Last night we had the unaccustomed pleasure of a visit to the cinema. We went to see "The Bank Job", a very enjoyable picture embroidered by Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais on the basis of an actual robbery that took place in Baker Street in 1971. What makes it sing is their plausible inclusion of threads relating to real life figures from that time like Princess Margaret, Michael X and Lord Mountbatten. These were the people that you would read about in the Sunday papers in the days when scandal was hinted at but never quite spelled out.

It can't have done all that well at the box office because the Odeon Leicester Square had banished it to Screen Five, a former box-room at the top of the building which has space for just about forty seats. Leg room is further reduced by the thoughtful installation in the back of each seat of a cup-holder, as if to remind you that your main job as a customer is to consume their confectionery. Having paid £19 for the two of us, eating was out of the question.

A beautiful song

Before they're swallowed whole by the all-consuming tsunami of parody let us pay tribute to Michael Flanders and Donald Swann in general and "The Slow Train" in particular. They recorded it in the early '60s just as Doctor Beeching's report into the railways was sweeping away much of the network of local stations that used to take people to work or the shops in the days before car ownership.
I'm no steam fan but the litany of names, the hymn-like tug of the tune and the trueness of the recording can moisten even my dry eye. And I'm not remotely surprised that somebody has bothered to tell the true story of every station mentioned in the song.

Liquorice goes upmarket

When I wor a lad liquorice grew on trees. Or at least it came out of the ground in nearby Pontefract where it's said they brought it back from the Crusades. We bought it in sticks, in all-sorts, in round medallions called Pomfret Cakes and, when the budget was under pressure, in root sticks which used to sit like stick insects in jars in the sweet shops. It was not a prestige sweet. Even then it was old-fashioned.

And now it's re-appeared as premium priced low-sugar confectionery. It's very often called Australian Soft Eating Liquorice, you can get it at health food shops where it comes in huge soft logs and costs about three quid a bag. You may well love it. Yesterday my wife went to Fortnum and Mason and appeared home with one of those bijou carrier bags that usually contains something expensive and inconsequential. And so it proved. She'd bought about a dozen Pomfret Cakes. For just under three pounds. I'm rationing them out.

Get on with the bloody game

It looks like this week's debacle will be the last time that the Olympic torch will be toured around the world's capital cities. Good. And while we're at it can we get rid of all the attendant hoo-hah that has grown up around all major sporting occasions in order to satisfy the cravings of sponsors, TV producers, politicians and anyone else who seeks to use such events to "harness the power of sport" to sell gym pumps, energy drinks or a country's political system.

Let's also see an end of: choreographed dancing displays, huge flags passed down from the back of the stand to the front, any form of singing that could be said to be organised, ticker tape that some poor bugger has to pick up, pre-match firework displays in broad daylight that leave the action invisible for the first ten minutes, the cup "delivered" by abseiling parachutists, prize presentations that involve the hurried building of stages in the middle of the pitch, minutes' silences for any tragedy that didn't directly involve the people involved, pop singers doing melismatic versions of national anthems and, yes, even small children holding the hands of hung-over millionaires.

Anyone who thinks that major sporting occasions can be rendered more gripping by the addition of such nonsense should be disqualified from ever having anything to do with a sporting occasion. We don't need it. It gets in the way. It's nothing but trouble.

The most dangerous path in the world

I can't stop looking at this and thinking how lucky I am not to have to walk on the real thing. I'm bound to dream about it soon.

Snow-oh!

This is the view from the kitchen this morning. The snow was forecast to arrive but nonetheless we still react to it with the same delighted surprise as we did as a child.

Tradition dictates that whoever gets up first will always open the curtains and exclaim "Oh!" in precisely the same voice.

VIP coming through

Walking down Upper Street yesterday afternoon at four I passed the Prime Minister going the other way. To the summit in Watford, presumably. I've seen the PM's motorcade on a few occasions. There are police cars fore and aft but the main body consists of two black Range Rovers and two black Jags. I suppose the idea is that the potential assassin doesn't know which one contains the target.

It's nothing compared to the American President. I was in Sydney, Australia when Clinton was visiting and everywhere I went in that quite small city my progress was held up by his endless motorcade, plasma trucks and all. I eventually gave up and returned to my hotel room overlooking the harbour. I opened the curtains just in time to see Clinton and John Howard's boat pushing off from the adjacent dock. Looking around for someone to wave at, they waved at the only available person, which was me. I waved back.

A few years later I was passing through Green Park on a summer's evening and made to cross the Mall just as a limo bearing the royal standard came off the roundabout in front of Buckingham Palace. I was the only pedestrian on the Mall as the car went slowly past me. The passengers were the Queen and Prince Philip. They waved. I waved back.

If age but could and youth but would

This morning, in an attempt to impart to my youngest a few tips about comprehension that might prove useful in her upcoming GCSEs, I suggested that we go for a walk. She arrived at the front door in sandals and bare feet. Between both parents it was suggested on no less than six separate occasions that such footwear might lead to pain. This was batted back with everything ranging from a mild "I'm fine" to an indignant "Do you think I'm stupid?"
As I've observed before, we nag kids because we know it doesn't work. Halfway through the walk she had to sit down on a park bench such was the pain. When she got home she spent half an hour with her feet soaking in the bath. When I left this afternoon she was lying face down on the bed having extensive surgery on her blisters. By now she will have worked up to the need for a pair of brand new surgical shoes.
Age is about the steadily-dawning anticipation of consequences. Being 15 is about not daring to think of those consequences in case they stand in the way of one's immediate desire.

Charles Dickens's desk

They're selling the desk and chair that Charles Dickens wrote "Great Expectations" on to benefit Great Ormond Street hospital. They estimate it might realise up to £80,000. Is that really such a lot for something with such associations? Obviously it's beyond my budget but in a world where people pay fortunes for football shirts allegedly worn by Michael Owen on one particular Saturday, is it really that much? There are a lot of wealthy individuals and institutions around. This is the desk on which our greatest novelist wrote our greatest novel. This is the ink stain he contemplated as he sucked his pen. This is where he laid his head and probably sucked his thumb when inspiration failed to arrive.
Tell you what, I'll put a fiver in to start the ball rolling.

Podcasts: not just hear for the nice things in life

Walking to and from the West End just now I listened to two podcasts, each of which featured one sobering fact,
The first was in Radio Four's Analysis on the management of drug addiction and it goes like this:

• Heroin was invented by a British scientist in the 1870s to get people off opium.

The second came from the same network's File On Four programme about sovereign wealth funds.

• Chinese reserves of the dollar rise by five hundred billion dollars every year.

Sleep well.

Art for Art's sake, Money for God's sake

This morning I was dragged to the William Morris collection in Walthamstow. Whenever I visit an art gallery I realise what a verbal person I am. My wife looks at the exhibits and reads the captions afterwards. I do things the other way around.
The building was Morris's home and the permanent collection seemed to do a good job of providing an introduction to him. I preferred looking upstairs at the work of Frank Brangwyn but then I'm a sucker for a good propaganda poster (left).
Since visiting I learn that the place is under threat of curtailment, if not closure. I sympathise with the councillors of Waltham Forest who have to line this up against all their other outgoings and decide whether it's something they should be funding; on the other hand we turned up expecting to pay and were told to put our money away. I think Morris, who spent most of his life trying to make sure his mother's mining shares could continue to underwrite his adventures in socialism, would have taken it.

When I was dressed by HM Government

Returning from dropping my son off at Victoria at an unearthly hour of this morning I was amazed to see that Laurence Corner has closed. This shop near that corner of the Euston Road that always seems to vie for the title Windiest Place In London has been there ever since I've lived in London. For those who didn't know it it dealt in what used to be called "army surplus" and eventually grew into an assortment of items that were roughly khaki in colour and looked as if they could be some use on a camp site.

I may have bought the odd thing at Laurence Corner but the 60s were the true army surplus era for me and I did most of my surplus shopping in Yorkshire. When I was sixteen fashionable clothes weren't really available in the shops and if they had been I wouldn't have had the budget to buy them. It didn't matter. The army surplus store was where the grammar school boy with boho pretensions would shop by choice in those days. It was here that we bought double-breasted Merchant Navy greatcoats, strangely frocked black oilskin coats such as a trawlerman might wear to go on deck in the North Sea, ex-Korean War fatigue jackets which, if you were lucky, would have a name like "Kowalski" printed on the pocket, canvas shoulder bags in which field medics used to carry morphine, voluminous, itchy off-white polo necks that were standard issue on the Arctic convoys, pale fawn collarless military "grandad" vests, webbing belts with buckles that were impossible to lock and berets such as Robert Lindsay subsequently sported in "Citizen Smith".

Our fathers, who had been given these exact items of clothing to wear free of charge when they were conscripted into the army in 1940, would shake their heads and wonder why we chose to dress this way and yet in every other respect showed no military inclinations whatsoever. They would be even more amazed if they could see us now, eagerly devouring history books about wars they fought in in search of the very same authenticity by proxy that the accident of our birth has made us lucky enough to avoid.

Let us now praise Nancy Banks-Smith

I stopped watching "The Apprentice" some while ago. I loved the early series but the central problem, that no talented, ambitious person without a serious personality disorder would really want a job with Amstrad, now gets in the way of my enjoyment of the programme's genuine insight into how teams function. I take my pleasure second hand now via the peerless Nancy Banks-Smith whose review in The Guardian today combines bone-dryness and stiletto acuity in scientifically calculated amounts. Here she is on the contestants and their hilariously inflated job titles:

This year's crop are not crippled by false modesty. "I rate myself as probably the best salesperson in Europe" (Jenny). "There's nobody at my age who has achieved what I have" (Lindi). "People come up to me and say, 'You're arrogant!'. I say, 'You are 100% right. What are you going to do about it?'" (Michael). And, my particular favourite, "I don't play games. Every-body wants me on their team" (Simon).

They all had jobs which, like the peace of God, passeth all understanding. Helena, for instance, was a global pricing leader, which probably trumps
Sara, an international car sales strategist.

I can see them now.

The driving force

The death of Neil Aspinall has been announced.
He was 66. It was only a year since he had retired as the head of Apple Corps. He'd worked for his school friends the Beatles for 45 years. When Lennon and McCartney asked him to come and drive their van he had to give up a potentially secure career as an accountant to take them up on the offer.
Most members of the inner circle are gone - fellow roadie Mal Evans, PR man Derek Taylor, manager Brian Epstein and two members of the group - but nobody knew as many secrets as Aspinall. Up until last year he clocked in every day at their West End HQ, guarding their legacy, warning off corporate raiders and orchestrating reissues like the massively lucrative Anthology series. There can't be many people in any business who have worked for the same employer for so long. He was in the van, in the hotel room, in the studio, on stage and in the meeting room with them when anything of any significance took place.
And he never blabbed, which was remarkable for somebody of his generation and inconceivable for anyone who's been entrusted with that degree of confidence since.
The fourth sentence of the report of Aspinall's death on the BBC website goes as follows: "Despite no musical training, he sang in the chorus of 'Yellow Submarine'."
Half an hour ago it was headlined "Beatles guru dies".
They've just changed it to "Beatles ally dies".
Watch this space.

How they took the good news from Mexico to Montreal

Driving round the M25 this morning I caught the first part of Nick Barraclough's "Border Radio" programme on Radio Four. This concerns the inimitable but frequently imitated Wolfman Jack who broadcast in the 50s and 60s on America's equivalent of the pirate stations, the so-called "border blasters" that sent powerful signals into the United States from transmitters just over the Mexican border. Some nights when the ionosphere was right the signals would "bounce" from the upper atmosphere and back to earth, so that they could be heard as clear as day as far away as New York and Canada. That's how the young Robbie Robertson and Bob Dylan got to hear strange sounds coming out of the south, records they would have no chance of hearing on their restricted local stations. I'd always feared that this was just the kind of myth that appeals to people like me. It turns out to be true.

Public rhetoric and the Wimbledon effect

Barack Obama is clearly a brilliant public communicator - better than Hilary Clinton, almost as good as Bill - but even in this speech he has not conquered the central problem of using a conference teleprompter, which I call the Wimbledon effect. He's using two transparent screens placed either side of him like so. This means he is always looking either to the left or to the right, never straight ahead, much like the crowd at Wimbledon. His gaze moves from left to right and back again regularly, apparently to talk directly to the crowd but actually to make sure that he delivers every word of this highly nuanced speech perfectly. It has the effect of making him seem relaxed, which is what's required of a TV performance, and after all this is what this is, but maybe it lacks drama. There are no climaxes, no halts apparently to let the idea sink in but actually devised to allow the speaker to organise himself. I know this is neither a fair nor an appropriate comparison but it's worth looking at it next to Martin Luther King's Lincoln Memorial speech. King looks down at his text, up at the sky, down at the crowd, then back to his text and so on. It's only when he has got near the end and he's clearly back to a familiar riff about "the mountains and molehills of Mississippi" that he seems to abandon the lectern and let fly like a great soloist.

Man about town

Last night the Word's crack quiz team came a creditable joint third in Time Out's London quiz. Highlights included Mark Ellen attempting to work out on a piece of paper how many journeys began and ended at Victoria in an average year and Andrew Collins trying to remember the name of the character who was written out of EastEnders but suffered the indignity of seeing his dog remain.
It took place in a bar at the University of London Union. Glad to see they're doing their bit in the battle against binge drinking. Three pints of Guinness and two of lager cost £11.10 and they were doing shots of Drambuie for a pound. Which is nice.
BTW It's very nice of Clive James to say something flattering about my piece on The Wire though he reckons the white out of black design of this blog makes it hard to read. Normally I'm very careful about this kind of thing but I've never had any trouble dealing with it. Anyone else reaching for the pince-nez?

Pissing off

I don't hold the view that we are surrounded by examples of terrible behaviour. Every so often, however, we see something that stops us in our tracks.
On the way home this evening I cut through a small modern shopping precinct in Islington. Approaching me among the shoppers and schoolchildren on their way home was a small, shabbily-dressed individual.
He was about forty.
In his hand he was holding his penis.
He was urinating as he walked.
Chaps, that's not easy, is it?

Out of Africa

Peter Godwin's "When A Crocodile Eats The Sun" is a compelling book, the kind you read in a few days. Godwin was brought up in Zimbabwe and the book is about his return to look after his elderly parents as the country slides into chaos and random violence. He quotes from a conversation he had with the scientist Jared Diamond about why Africa is the way it is. Diamond points out that the Islamic movement from the north halted as soon as it hit the region of the tsetse fly. He also argues that Africa is handicapped by the fact that it has no indigenous pack animal. If the rhino wasn't an intractable, territorial beast he reckons the Zulus would have conquered Europe hundreds of years ago.

"Are there any questions?"

In the current issue of The Word Andrew Collins writes about going back to his old college to make a speech and how he was shocked at the fact that when they asked for questions there were none.

I went to Manchester yesterday for "a speaking engagement" and as usual the host asked if there were any questions. There were enough to make it respectable but in my experience if people have sat still and listened throughout then there's an expectation on their part that they'll be released into the wild the minute you've finished. I sympathise. The questions you're asked in public tend to be the ones where the interlocutor feels he can use your presentation to win an argument he's been pursuing within the organisation for some time. The more interesting ones are put to you in the bar afterwards.

Andrew was talking about his disappointment with the fact that a section of the population as traditionally voluble as students didn't seem to have much curiosity in them. I think there's something in his point that they don't want to be seen to stand out from the crowd or run the risk of making a fool of themselves. One of the explanations for the widespread adoption of the high rise terminal into speech patterns is that it turns categorical statements into requests for agreement, thereby smoothing out the edges of argument.

More worrying was an experience I had at a university not long ago. I was asked to take part in judging some final project work from students on a specialist publishing course. They had come up with magazine ideas in groups and looked at them from all the usual points of view: editorial, advertising, costs, distribution etc. We in the notional Dragon's Den had to interrogate the project. Believe me when I tell you we weren't particularly tough. If we had been these people would have crumpled into tears. We just asked the kind of questions you would get asked in a standard publishing company. Where would you put this in WH Smith? How do you expect the competition to react? What if you can't get this advertising? They didn't have any convincing answers and I didn't expect them to. What was dismaying was the surprise that was written on their faces that they were being asked at all. I got the usual thank-you for taking part letter from the person in charge of the course, who said that none of them had ever been asked difficult questions before.

It seems to me that your time at university should be largely devoted to the asking and answering of difficult questions. You're in an environment where if you're wrong it's not disastrous. You're at a time of life when you might change your mind. Rehearsing the arguments is surely how you learn. From what I know of it this rattling of cages is what the most old fashioned universities devote most of their time to. This place, on the other hand, was as redbrick as can be but the students were few enough and in small enough groups to be taught that way. I still can't see why they weren't. Nobody ever learned anything by devoting most of their time to wrestling with PowerPoint.

The Wire: can a TV show really change the way you think?

This is my column from the April edition of The Word.

I don't know if The Wire is the best TV drama ever but I've watched the first four series of this story set in the decaying port city of Baltimore and that's enough to decide it's one of the few TV programmes that has changed the way I look at the world. I felt much the same after listening to Another Side Of Bob Dylan. I don't think it happens with music any more. The world's problems are too complicated to be diagnosed by even the best folk singer.

"The Wire" begins with a tight focus on undercover police mounting a surveillance operation on a drug dealer's business. It pulls out to examine the parallel hierarchies of dealers and law. The shot then widens to allow us to see how the drug economy works, how successive generations join "the game" as pre-adolescents, graduate to running their own corners (incentivised by a generous bonus scheme) and, if they're lucky and don't do too much jail time, end up in the officer class. Or dead.

But it's still only beginning. "The Wire" then pulls out further and you see how the characters are hemmed in by the modern city, how crime results in "white flight" and a dramatic drop in the tax base, ending in a situation where the city's schools are fifty million dollars in the hole and even the new broom in the mayor's office can't pay the police to clean up the streets, other than by taking money away from the schools and thereby putting more kids on the streets.

"The Wire"'s long lens retreats again as the action switches to the port, where long established white working-class elites are under threat from emerging economies in the East and the "cans" they handle could contain anything from Apple Macs to 19 year old hookers from Eastern Europe. It's to the great credit of the show's devisers, who have personal experience as teachers, police and crime reporters, that they don't offer a simple solution.

For African-American actors "The Wire" must be as significant as the advent of sound. It provides them with twenty key characters who are as complex and imperfect as the people their white counterparts have been playing for years. For once not hidebound by the need to present "positive images" they play havoc with the archetypes: the overweight drug lord repairing a toaster at his pawn shop, the police captain putting on his uniform to help his estranged wife get elected, the ruthless killer who expects respect for the Sabbath, the youth worker who can't stop hitting on his charges' mothers, the lieutenant in the crack gang studying economics at night school. The casting mixes real people with actors to disorienting effect. It's only among the DVD extras that you learn that the churchman, with the voice like Brahms and molasses, is played by an actual retired gangster.

If "The Wire" proves one thing it's that even ostensibly "cutting-edge" entertainment, with its desperate need for cleansing moments, whizz-bang climaxes, spectacular violence and roles in which the actor can look good, has failed to do justice to the way we live now. Not that "The Wire" is a headline chaser. Its text is human weakness under duress and the ancient truth that in the midst of life we are in death. Characters die, disappear or are disgraced just as you are getting used to them. They turn up in the least expected circumstances and no explanation is forthcoming. Terrible things happen and nothing occurs to make them alright again.

When the cop breaks the child's fingers to stop him stealing more cars, when the well-meaning teacher is forced to coach his class through meaningless exams to keep the school's results up, when the bad mother begs the police to put her teenage boy inside "to make him a man", when the monstrous police boss bullies his officers into "juking the stats" so that the mayor can pretend he's winning, when the nice guy politician sends his wife home and suddenly shags (there is no other word) that nice woman he runs into at a fundraiser, when the tiny Jewish lawyer slaps the young black thug he's just sprung from custody and says "when will you people learn?" you know that for some part of the world we live in, near or far, like it or not, regardless of political stripe (as if that could make any difference), this is the way it is.

For that alone, for painting that picture in a way no other medium could, The Wire could be the best TV drama ever. What's certain is that watching it is the most educational thing you can do this year and you'll never react to those overnight news reports of gang killings with quite the same dumb exasperation again. No pop record I've heard recently comes close to equalling its impact.

"Will this do?"

We all know fashion magazines are not like life but would it kill the people that work on them to make it clear to the readers from time to time that they recognise what a farce it is and they're actually on their side and not the PRs?
The cover of this week's edition of Grazia proclaims "Kate Moss talks to Grazia".
Now clearly she didn't say anything of consequence because that would have been splashed all over the cover but even low expectation readers like myself were surprised by how little was lurking under the slug "Grazia world exclusive" inside - to wit, three pages of product shots of the new Top Shop range with comments on each item below that purported to come from Kate. Now it could be that when Kate opens her mouth such pearls as "it's such a pretty top. Its kaftan feel and fluid silk gives it a beachy feel" pop straight out. Or it could be this was written by a PR, retyped by a hackette and then flung in the general direction of what they clearly believe is a fairly undiscerning public by people who really should know better.

In praise of "The Archers"

I hold the view that a balanced life has only got room for one soap opera and that should be something you can attend to while doing something else. Hence, I have followed The Archers for longer than I care to remember. This last week or so it's been attempting to drum up interest in a conventional soap cliffhanger (will local nob Brian Aldridge disinherit his kids in favour of his "love child"?) by running trailers all over the network and generally trying to act like "EastEnders".

So far so predictable. But then, right in the middle of this, they dropped one of those plot twists that The Archers does better than anyone - a genuine everyday tragedy. The baby expected by young couple Roy and Hayley suddenly arrived three months early, was successfully delivered but then whisked into neo-natal care and wired up to monitors. We stood there in the kitchen and listened to the last five minutes, hardly daring to breathe.

They've done this before with established characters when the actors wanted out. John Archer was killed in a tractor accident. Betty Tucker had a heart attack. In both cases it was out of a clear blue sky, which is how these things happen in life, and it happened to somebody that you'd had a long-term relationship with. I know this sounds stupid but Clarrie and Eddie Grundy got married around the time that we did and their kids are around the ages of two of ours.

So for the next few weeks we shall be pressed up against the window of the neo-natal unit with Roy and Hayley. And, this being The Archers, there's no guarantee that it's going to have a happy outcome.

Yorkshire Bitter

Last Orders, last night's documentary by American film maker Henry Singer about a working men's club in Bradford, was a genuinely haunting piece of TV. For a start it was content to keep the camera on its subject long enough for them to get a complete sentence out. One of the old men charged with trying to keep this enterprise alive as everything seemed to be conspiring against it actually said "I wish I could be happy again", which is more than your usual soundbite. The young men didn't want to come anymore, the heavy industry had vanished, the supermarkets were offering cheaper beer, nobody was interested in the clubland turns or the Strictly Come Dancing evening and now the smoking ban had hit them like a 2 by 4 in the solar plexus. Every week the committee met to find that they had run at another loss and so they needed to draw on the club's savings to pay the bar staff and the number of jowly, stubbly men chewing down the pints of Tetley's in the cheerless bar area was reduced further by the death of one of their number during the filming.
Rumbling away in the background was their not very well disguised tendency to blame everything on the immigrants, whether they were Pakistanis who have been there since the early 60s or the East Europeans who have arrived recently. One of the offspring of a regular sat in front of a Union Jack on which somebody had inscribed an upside down swastika and said he would vote BNP - but first he needed to register. He didn't look as though he'd get round to it.

"Here, please, after you, no, I insist.."

On the Piccadilly Line this morning, sitting sideways, I looked up from my book to find my eyes adjacent to the midriff of a young woman and right in the middle of one of the most pressing social questions of the day.
Is that midriff pleasantly rounded in a manner that Rubens would have appreciated? Or is it three months pregnant?
Do I allow my eyes to travel further north to see if she's looking at me in a meaningful way suggesting that I should give up my seat to her?
Or, knowing that I'm due to get off soon, do I sit tight and keep reading?
And what do I do if the bloke next to me makes the decision that she is pregnant and gives up his seat to her?
And why am I suddenly really tense and reading the same line again and again?
I suggest a system of badges. Possibly a huge rosette saying "Hooray! I'm pregnant!"
Or would these go the way of disabled parking stickers and end up being appropriated by women who just fancy taking the weight off their feet?
Or maybe men could wear a badge saying "Will stand if need-be. Please ask".

The missing page

Just heard Margaret Hodge, Minister for Culture, on Front Row talking about how our public libraries could learn a thing or two from Borders or Waterstones - and using the expression "wanna" rather more than I'd like a Minister of the Crown to do.
She reckons that if they installed an espresso machine, introduced 24 hour opening and had an online ordering service then things would be better. Can we take that as a tacit acceptance that public libraries currently have tumbleweed blowing through them and it's about time the public and the government had a grown up debate about what part - if any - they should play in the national life? She's seen people buying three for two on Oxford Street in a highly engineered retail environment and wants to know why we can't have that vibe in East Cheam's public libraries. Dear God.
Do these children believe what's in their latest press release? Nobody will utter the truth. Knee jerk defence of the public libraries is at its strongest amongst people who would never dream of using them. Libraries flourished in an era when people couldn't afford books even if they could find them. That's not true anymore. The only way that councils can get any footfall in the places at all is by promoting the DVD section, which fulfils very little cultural/educational purpose. I couldn't believe it when I was working in the West End a few years ago and the mobile library would park up at lunchtime in order to make sure that office workers IN THE WEST END OF LONDON could borrow the new Tom Cruise.
Dickens must be spinning.

And the point is?

In the same week that Vanity Fair publish their portfolio of pictures in which people like Keira Knightley, Gwyneth Paltrow and Renee Zellweger repeat the poses of stars like Grace Kelly in classic stills from Hitchcock movies, Lindsay Lohan decides she's going to channel the spirit of Marilyn Monroe by repeating her last session with original photographer Bert Stern.

Which makes you think two things:
1. How insecure must these actors be that they need to dress up as stars of an earlier era?
2. Could you make an actual film for the price of the catering bill for these sessions?

"Looking for business, darling?"

The day after Paul Raymond died it's good to be reminded that the old Soho still exists in pockets. This morning I went to interview Mike Leigh about his wonderful new film "Happy Go Lucky". Leigh is arguably Britain's foremost film director, a man who sits at the same table as Scorsese, Coppola and Almodovar when the great and the good gather.
I fancy if I went to interview any of those it would be in a loft overlooking some great river. To get to Leigh's office you had to go to the second floor of an address in Greek Street. On the first landing there actually was a handwritten notice announcing "French model".

Plug

This afternoon I'm on A Good Read on Radio Four. It's presented by Kate Mosse. The usual anchor is Sue McGregor. She asked for some time off because she needed to have a rest from having to read at least two books a week. Don't blame her.

The never-never

Just finished "Never Again", Peter Hennessy's history of Britain between 1945 and 1951. This is in the same week that the clamour is rising once more for a referendum on membership of the EC.
The Labour government of the time kicked into the long grass the idea of membership of what was then the Iron & Steel pact between France and Germany because they didn't want to return to where they'd just finished a war, they were too preoccupied with the problems of the pound, they were committing themselves to a war in Korea and, to quote Ernest Bevin, "the Durham miners would never stand for it." How quaint that sounds now.
France and Germany were in such disarray that they just got on with it. That's the way it is with positive action. Having no choice concentrates the mind wonderfully. Ever since then it seems that every time a nation is asked to vote on membership they vote against. Somehow it's the posture that can never be proved wrong.

Striving to better, oft we mar what’s well

I knew that in 1687 the Irish poet and hymn writer Nahum Tate was asked to do a re-write of Shakespeare's "King Lear". What they needed was a version that wouldn't rattle the cage of recently restored monarchy and sat more comfortably with the advance of the Enlightenment. They couldn't face the bleakness of Shakespeare's original. Tate's version has a happy ending with Cordelia marrying Edgar and everybody begging each other's pardon for the misunderstanding. What I didn't know until this morning's In Our Time on Radio Four was that for the next 150 years this was the accepted and most widely performed version. Presumably the original was regarded as a mistake. Which makes me wonder, what works from the Canon will we change our mind about in the future?

And ye shall know them by their TV commercials

The past is another country, sure enough.

• The captain of the England football team dropped in at his local unmolested after a match.
• There was a product called Dreft.
• People got excited about the prospect of winning five pounds.
• They blended tea specially for Northern Ireland.
• All blondes were Swedish.
• Middle-aged men wore bowler hats.
• They advertised boots on the TV.

Time and motion

I was talking to Tom Whitwell yesterday. Tom runs the community sites for The Times now but he used to be in magazines. He reckons he couldn't do magazines anymore because they're not instant enough. Certainly you're struck by the fact that in magazines you spend much of your time processing material that you're not actually going to use. They don't call it editing for nothing. However the other day I was reminded that when it comes to time spent unproductively, nothing can compare with television. Particularly prime time television.

I took part in an item about LP covers for BBC's "The One Show" which involved me turning up at Sister Ray in Soho to deliver the so-called expert's view of the development of album art from the 50s to the present day. My old pal Clare Grogan, to whom I am legally married in Memphis, Tennessee but that's another story, was fronting the item. The people doing the job were very professional but what with cutaways, noddies, different angles, close-ups of hands flicking through the racks and the rest of the palaver that inevitably accompanies even the simplest filming, there was no time to talk about the fifties, the eighties or the nineties. And that wasn't because I was talking too much. I avoided that because the director told me that the finished item was expected to run just two and half minutes. Because I was keen to avoid that conversationus interruptus that afflicts most TV nowadays, in which nobody is allowed to actually finish a sentence, I kept it snappy, believe me.

Nowadays there seems something rather old fashioned about an activity which takes days of people's time and is then gone in 150 seconds - never to return.

Er, we've won the cup

I've been to a few cup finals but yesterday's was the only one where the result particularly mattered to me. I was so pleased to be able to go in the first place that I couldn't believe it when the result went our way as well. It seemed a bit much to ask.
Before it began the PA announcer said "may we remind you that racism and foul language have no place in football".
Obviously the former has no place anywhere, and I was pleasantly impressed by the fact that the bloke in front of me kept up a steady barrage of abuse directed at Didier Zokora without once mentioning his skin colour, but the latter is stitched into the very soul of the game. The 22 men we've come to watch are cursing loudly throughout the 90 minutes (and in extra time too) and so it seems only fair that we should be able to do it too.

Take me back...

"Serendipity" is the ancient name of Sri Lanka.
It also describes one of the chief delights of the web. On the Word site we started off a thread about how quickly the latest technological marvel is, once superseded, utterly forgotten.
This led somebody who posts under the name backwards7 to compose a brilliant pastiche of Van Morrison's "On Hyndford Street", looking back at the days of Rapidshare, "Skins" and "Mock The Week".
I was so inspired by this I got Barry McIlheney to recite it and put it on YouTube.
Why? Because it wasn't there, I suppose.

Being Dave

In today's Times David Aaronovitch writes about how 2008 is the year of David (or at least Dave). The prominent Davids consulted in the sidebar have all had the same crisis at one time or another - the fact that their friends all prefer the shortened form, which somehow makes you sound like a painter and decorator.

I was Dave from my teens on. It was only when my shortened name first appeared in print on a review in the NME that my mother said, with a smidge of asperity, "you have a perfectly nice name, please use it." (I have since discovered that a parent says this with the same emotional force that they might say "don't marry that man" or "don't tattoo yourself all over". Because they don't want to see what they've brought into the world irredeemably ruined.)

Since then I have been David professionally even though my work friends call me Dave. Anybody I know through my wife calls me David. Was it Thelma in The Likely Lads who fought a losing battle against her husband being called Bob because she felt it might impede their social ascent?

People who don't know me but are vaguely aware that some people call me by the diminutive compromise by referring to me as "Mr Hepworth", which remains stranded somewhere between sarcasm and matiness.

Opinions'r'us

I wrote a piece for the Independent's op-ed page about the Brits. It's appeared today with the headline "David Hepworth: these silly awards are pop's most absurd anachronism". So there.

Death of a Ladies Man

In November I mentioned "George Melly's Last Stand, an excellent documentary about the last few months of his life. Last night they showed it on BBC2 so for the next week you can catch up with it via the iPlayer. I think in the future we'll see more documentaries like this. Our stars will live longer, our programme makers will get more demanding and we'll get even more appetite for revelation. Anyway, you should see it.

She's a laugh

After experiencing that unique tristesse that I imagine follows a stand-up show that goes over just marginally less than socko, blogger Clair Woodward, whose musings I cannot recommend too highly, concludes that the game isn't worth the candle. She reckons:

"So as a woman on the box, you can either be funny, or sexy, but not both, right?"

As evidence to the contrary I would beg to offer Julia Louis Dreyfus, who played Elaine in "Seinfeld". As actresses go she's pretty without being va-va-voom - but that doesn't matter. The charisma comes off her in waves and with it comes the quality that so often follows. I could watch her for days.

The show exploits it brilliantly because every now and then she does something to make the three men in the cast stop treating her like a friend. Believe me, it doesn't take much.

Pull the other one

This last week, the record companies' campaign to get copyright in sound recordings extended from 50 to 95 years, which was kicked into touch a few months ago, got fresh impetus from the European internal markets commissioner. The leading edge of their argument was that non-writing performers such as Cliff Richard and Roger Daltrey would benefit from their labours in later life. The Gowers Review of Intellectual Property rejected this on the grounds that in reality the only people who would continue to benefit would be the record companies.

This morning I found a lovely Ben Webster/Joe Zawinul tune on an MP3 blog. It came from the album "Soul Mates". I found this on Emusic and bought the whole album. They made this record in 1963. Webster died 35 years ago, Zawinul just a couple of months back. If either of them were around I guess they would tell you that, the odd freak hit apart, they had never made much from record royalties.

Today I paid a few pounds to Emusic for this record. A small amount of that will get back to the copyright owners, who are the people who bought the company who bought the company who bought the company who paid for the making of this record 45 years ago. The main musicians are dead. The rest got paid by the day.

So who's getting my money?

TV - where intelligence insulting is our business

Nothing is more offensive here than the suggestion that:
a) Jane Fonda spoke "inadvertently"
b) we can be persuaded that this is the case

"No, before him, surely?"

Certain exchanges in comedy attain the dream-like quality of poetry. I've been able to recite this scene since I can remember. The section that begins with "Are you a doctor then?" and ends with the discussion about Mussolini is one of the most beautiful examples of writing and acting I've ever come across. Aren't they making another film about Hancock? I don't know why they bother. What's interesting about him is here, for all to see, for ever.

"It's before my time"

It started with a stupid no-count item on the BBC news website about the Isley Brothers. I posted about it on the Word site. This drew this excellent response from Archie Valparaiso which got me thinking about the tyranny of what he calls the "now-now", the cultural/historical swerve whereby you're forgiven your ignorance about anything which either happened before you were born or didn't happen to be in the cross-hairs of your focus while you were a teenager. It's at its worst when dealing with pop music and results in news readers and politicians swapping light banter about the groups they used to like when they were teenagers, at the same time stressing their proud ignorance of anything that didn't. There's about to be a Radio Four programme called "The Jam Generation". Say no more.

Whenever I ask A Younger Person (and that covers an increasing amount of people) about anything which pre- or post-dated their "era" they will be very quick to say "before my time" with that patronising smirk that implies that one's date of birth excuses one's ignorance. I don't remember the Second World War but I know something about it. Count Basie was past the zenith of his career before I was born but I've listened to him and I don't regard his music as a message from a different planet. I've even read Dickens and he was born, oh, it must be before the First World War, surely?

I blame punk rock, he said once again. That would certainly fit in with Archie's view of the last 35 years as a continuity as far as the media is concerned. It's not to do with the music. It's the falsity of the idea that this represented a new beginning, a severing of links with the past, a marking of the time before which everything was somehow "quaint" or, in the argot of the time, "naff". It results in a failure to accept the fact that anyone who didn't live like you, dress like you, speak like you or share your value system lived their life less fully than you are living yours.

I would have more hopes for the government's plan to introduce five hours of cultural activity into the school week if it was less about herding the unwilling around art galleries and more about imparting the vital information that the world didn't begin yesterday. Educational theory today is dominated by the need to build up children's self-esteem and convince them that they are capable of great things. There's nothing wrong with that as long as it's balanced by the parallel message that I used to pick up at school. You're really Not All That.

Adventures in call centre land

So I called BT and was put through to a young man in a foreign country. He was as helpful as anyone can be at that remove. He looked at my records and said that was pretty much what I could expect living where I do. I asked for my MAC code.
"So you want to leave BT?" he said.
"I might," I replied. "I just want the MAC code."
"Hang on a moment."
I do. He comes back.
"I've just been talking to somebody in sales who might be able to help you. Let me transfer you."
Female voice from the North-East of England comes on (instant smell of toast) and tells me that they've had a look at my records, I've been a customer of BT's for a long time and therefore should have been promoted to the faster broadband. She's prepared to do that now and to lower the rate and to roll our BT phone bills into the same deal but she wants it all to go on to Direct Debit.
I've made some quite responsible decisions in my time and raised three children but I am:
a) genetically incapable of assessing deals of any kind on the telephone
b) married to a woman who is fighting a lone battle against Direct Debit
Therefore, I say, send me the details and I'll look at it.
Meanwhile, I've had lots of feedback on this blog, all of which is appreciated but most of which encourages me in the belief that if you can avoid changing your supplier, then you should.
And then I get an email from someone who'd read this blog and works for BT who might be able to help me. Hey, I'm not a crusader for consumer rights. I know very few problems that can't be solved with the help of a sympathetic soul who knows where the levers are and which ones to pull.
So I shall continue approaching this problem via the front door as well as the back. I'll let you know how it goes.

Churn Baby Churn

I've decided to change my broadband supplier.
When I first got "the internet", back when it was a fledgling miracle, I signed up with Prestel because it came top of some consumer test. When Prestel disappeared I should have learned lesson one of the Internet - everything disappears, sooner than you'd think.
I switched to BT. I think it was called BT Internet at the time. It has since changed its name to BT Connect, BT Openworld, BT Yahoo and BT Lost The Will To Live, by which point I had accumulated no end of passwords and usernames and no longer knew what my deal was.
When I upgraded to broadband an engineer actually came to my house. Takes you back, doesn't it?
On the basis of remarks by friends and running various web-based "speed tests" since then, I suspect that my broadband is not as broad as it should be. In a sane world I would call a number and talk this over with a BT employee who was in a position to do something about it. After a few calls in the last couple of days I have come to the conclusion that this will not be possible. I shall therefore adopt the policy used by a young friend of mine when dealing with phone companies:
1. Ring up
2. Say you're leaving
3. Negotiate
4. Be prepared to go through with "2".
I shall let you know how I get on - assuming I'm not cut off.

Primates were us

They're closing down one of London's oldest pet shops, Palmer's in Camden Town's Parkway. Back in the 70s they used to have a window full of sleeping puppies. However, even that was a step forward from what they used to specialise in in the 30s, as this old facia announces.

The sound of the crowd

I would be interested to see the Premiership's plan to play a number of games in foreign cities come to fruition for at least one season. I would like to see the whole circus (players, managers, media, sponsors and wealthy supporters) pack its tents and head off to Tokyo or New York. (Obviously it won't be Nairobi or Mumbai, because nobody's interested in taking the game to those supporters.)
I would like to see it because I think they would find that they'd left the key element of their world-beating "product" at home. They'd set sail without the thing that makes the Premiership madhouse work as a spectacle and that's the crowd: the howling, hydra-headed hate machine that is Anfield or White Hart Lane or Upton Park in full cry as twenty-two hired hands scrap over the bones of ancient emnities. That's what makes the Premiership. It isn't Nike or Cristiano Ronaldo. It's the fact that the loathing is in our blood, as is the loving.

If you can remember the sixties.....

I was called yesterday by somebody from the Daily Telegraph. He wanted to know if I'd ever undergone Transcendental Meditation. If so, could I write about it to mark the death of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi?

I would guess he was about twenty-five and he'd been given the job of finding a suitable candidate within a couple of hours. Presumably they've got a list somewhere of people who were alive in the 60s and can type and he was working his way down it.

I blame "Absolutely Fabulous" and the Sunday supps for propagating the notion that in the 60s everybody had long hair, wore kaftans, smoked dope and meditated. On the contrary. These things were only done by the tiniest of tiny minorities of the population. The poor hack's chance of turning up somebody who'd actually practised TM™ was about the same as finding somebody who'd fought with Che Guevera.

Other websites are available: Speechification

One brilliant thing leads to another. Speechification is dedicated to reducing the chances that great speech radio from all over the English-speaking world just floats into the ether and disappears, never to be heard by anyone outside of the producer's family and friends. It curates the best stuff and makes it available for further listening. It even does a podcast.
Through it I rediscovered "Don't Hang Up", one of the greatest radio programmes I have ever heard. This was the work of interviewer/oral historian Alan Dein and producer Mark Burman. The idea was simple but immensely time consuming. They just rang phone boxes all over the world and recorded conversations with whoever answered. The best one features a teenager on the front at Margate, a security guard in the Florida Everglades and a Kiwi transexual. It's superbly produced with an atmosphere that you rarely get on Radio Four.

The end of EMAP: director's cut

My piece in today's Guardian about the end of EMAP was the victim of a misunderstanding about length. Here's the full version:

It takes years to build a company. It takes about forty minutes to wind one up. In a Bloomsbury hotel last week a random assembly of pensioners, long-time investors and former employee shareholders of EMAP met to rubber stamp the sale of the company's magazine and radio assets to H. Bauer, the German publishers of Take A Break, Bella, TV Quick and other women's weeklies. We held up our voting cards as if the decision hadn't already been taken by a handful of fund managers. A few questions were put, along the lines of "was this really the only course of action?" and "how secure are people's jobs?", questions which the chairman Alun Cathcart was able to field with the precise opposite of charisma that is called for on these occasions.

Nobody mentioned that this meant another of Britain's major magazine companies in foreign ownership, possibly because they didn't want to be the first ones using the expression "the Germans". Hachette is French and IPC is American, as are Conde Nast and National Magazines. Only Future, Haymarket and the BBC among the majors remain in British hands. The parallels with the Premiership are strong. How come overseas investors see value whereas, as Cathcart correctly pointed out, the UK stock market prefers to put its money elsewhere?

Maybe it's the difference between an investor and a buyer. The story is already gaining ground that Heinz Bauer, the fourth generation of the family to be at the helm of this private company and, according to Forbes, merely the 410th wealthiest person in the world, swung the purchase over the competition because he was the only one at the table who could tear off a cheque for the full purchase price of £1.4 billion there and then. It can't have been as simple as that but the story illustrates the advantage that a private company enjoys in negotiations like these.

Herr Bauer's company is less vulnerable than most to advertising downturns. He doesn't have to persuade any teenage scribbler that there will be jam tomorrow. They only have to look at the 175 million weekly copies that he already sells ever year. He won't be in any hurry to move them online. At the stroke of many noughts he becomes the leading magazine publishing company in Britain as well as Germany and no doubt thinks about what former EMAP titles he can take into the emergent markets of Eastern Europe and beyond.

Ironically, EMAP's troubles can be traced back to 1998 when they made the cardinal error of travelling the other way and buying a publishing company from the Americans. When transatlantic transactions like that take place in any sphere, it's like Captain Mainwaring buying from Sgt Bilko. You fear it's only going to go one way.

Following the meeting a bunch of the company's former executives were waiting outside as the pub across the road opened its doors. Having ordered their drinks they addressed the company's demise with that peculiar combination of sentiment and bitterness that characterises corporate wakes. There was a time when EMAP was the city's darling, recalled a Large Orange Juice. Ah, but that was also the time that magazine sales were breaking records every year, pointed out a Pint of IPA. Ever since then, interposed a Guinness, the company had been in the business of promising the City that two plus two was about to make five. Yes, I remember when masthead programming was going to make magazine companies rich, added a Bloody Mary, wiping a tear of hilarity from the corner of her eye. Then there was buying magazine companies overseas, recalled Fizzy Water. Don't get me started on the internet, muttered Large Gin and Tonic. The Large Orange Juice sighed and said he felt deeply uncomfortable the first time he heard somebody use the expression "leveraging the synergies between magazines and radio".

The talk grew darker when it turned to more recent events. When the Boston Consulting Group came in, they sniffed round the place and then made the suggestions you would expect them to. Plenty of talk of content, platforms, hubs and cost-cutting. Why not use one editorial team on Heat, Closer and Grazia? (Why not use one consultants report and send it round from company to company because it always says the same bloody thing?) It may not be entirely satisfactory to point out that magazines don't behave like FMCG but over the last twenty years millions of pounds have been wasted proving it to be the case. In June of last year Simon Stewart joined EMAP as Chief Marketing Officer across magazines, radio, web and the rest, in the hope that his experience in the drinks industry and widely hailed "outside-in" perspective could transform the company's marketing. The night before the shareholders meeting it was quietly announced that he was returning to the drinks industry.

Any day now EMAP's problems will be Bauer's. It couldn't come at a tougher time. The publishers of the mass-market women's weeklies are already getting their bad news out ahead of the ABC figures. The EMAP titles, as they were prepared for sale, had not been spending the marketing money they normally would do and are unlikely to be outperforming the market. Will Bauer face the future with a platform-agnostic's breezy and baseless optimism or will they go below and ride out the storm like ancient mariners? It's perfectly possible they don't know themselves yet and their profile in the UK industry is so low they won't have any trouble keeping the lid on whatever they decide. I don't think they'll be larging it. But either way, it's going to be a bumpy ride.

Lies, damned lies and mobile phones

Like most things in this country, the debate about crime is generally expressed in terms of left and right. It goes like this:
The Daily Mail: We're going to hell in a handcart.
The Guardian: Oh, it's not as bad as all that. In fact, if you look at the statistics....
Into this dialogue of the deaf, just occasionally, a fact intrudes and makes you stop and think.
The British Crime Survey is the gold standard of crime stats. It's what governments quote from, at least when it suits them.
Rewind. When I was a teenager, hardly any of my peers had been the victim of any kind of crime.
Come back to date. I know lots of teenagers today and I don't know one male teenager who hasn't at one time or another been the victim of some kind of crime, generally involving having their phone "jacked". It happens so often they don't bother to mention it. I am horrified by how everyday it is.
Which makes it all the more remarkable that the British Crime Survey only records crimes involving sixteens and over. It can't be right.

The most unreal thing about Reality TV

Caught the last half an hour of "The Choir" last night. It's not a bad idea. Charismatic young choirmaster attempts to persuade a bunch of cripplingly inhibited teenage boys at a school (which has somehow attracted the addendum "sports college") that they can sing. He tries to coax the ones with talent to take lessons, he tries to persuade the more musically inclined ones to sing un-self-consciously at each other; to the rest he simply points out that if they sing "nobody dies".
Near the end he is getting discouraged by their mulish insistence that singing is "boring" or "gay". (How this chimes with the government's "come and work with the most exciting people in the world" teacher recruitment campaign I do not know.)
To gain encouragement he goes to visit another school where choral singing is hugely popular. The BBC can't be seen to mention the fact that this one is some form of selective school but it smelled like that to me.
Anyway, the last five minutes featured him waiting in the hall to sign up volunteers to join his choir. At first he was on his own, contemplating the failure of his project. I looked at the clock. Two minutes air time to go. They clearly weren't going to leave it like this.
Sure enough. One boy turned up to volunteer. Then another. Then a few more. Then yet more until there was a queue of shiny-faced adolescents begging to join. He ended up with, if memory serves, 170 names. "I can't believe it," he blushed. Well, nor could we. There had clearly been some major manipulation that we didn't see to bring about this very televisual resolution.
Many things betray the credibility of reality television but the thing that really gives it the lie is the fact that IT ALWAYS WORKS OUT IN THE END.
You can see "The Choir" here.

Someday we'll look back

Britney Spears is hospitalised because of her mental instability.
Amy Winehouse has to be driven into rehab following increasingly "erratic" behaviour.
Jonathan Ross, David Walliams and Russell Brand retreat under a hail of abuse after attempting to placate a crowd during a Morrissey concert.
David Beckham takes his bat home to Los Angeles after failing to get picked for his hundredth international cap, leaving disappointed guests at a charity dinner.
For years people have been speculating that the tide was about to go out for celebrity fever. This may be the week it finally turned.