"Which war is it today, Sir?"

Visited Berlin for the first time this week. When I was growing up I never had to learn the recent history of the place. It was just one of those things you absorbed. You only realise how strange it is when you try to explain it to a teenager of today. Sitting outside Starbucks on Unter Den Linden looking at school parties having their pictures taken with people dressed up as Russian soldiers and reflecting on the fact that only the other week Barack Obama (born in the year the Wall went up) appeared in front of 200,000 people by the Victory Column, you wonder at how tourism seems to take over when actual memory fades.

In the early 80s I worked in an office on Carnaby Street. I remember being amazed at how Scandinavian teenagers, who were not born at the time that the street enjoyed its six months of fame, would nontheless find their way there to buy rubber policeman's helmets and tartan bum-flaps. Reluctant crocodiles of teenagers are a common site in the centre of every major city in the world as the educational trip industry conquers the world. I did it myself in the days when it was a bit rarer. I don't remember learning anything at all.

Everybody hurts

Yesterday was an extraordinary day at the Olympics. Usain Bolt's unreal 100m run, Rebecca Adlington's second gold in the pool, the coxless four's agonising overhauling of the Australians and a lot more. There's a lot of 20/20 hindsight on the radio about the power of positive thinking, the importance of discipline and coaches who say "if you really want to win an Olympic medal you should be prepared to shoot your favourite pet". The coxless four said they were close because they'd spent seven days a week in each other's company 365 days a year for four years. But do all these examples of athletes' unbelievable dedication actually prove anything? Every race I watch I find myself looking at the person coming last and thinking 'they must have worked every bit as hard as the person who came first.' As my mother would have said, 'you all deserve a medal'.

Holiday reading

Finisterre.
I get up every morning and cycle for the bread in the teeth of an Atlantic gale. The rest of the day is spent dodging the weather. Not since a holiday thirty years ago in the long-gone land before children have I read as much as I have this week. It's one of those things that repays practice.

First, Through A Glass Darkly, Nigel Jones's biography of Patrick Hamilton, from which he emerges as a charmless snob - but we expected that, didn't we? He goes to the Daily Worker to write pieces in praise of Stalin. His mate Claud Cockburn already does so under the name "Frank Pitcairn". I love the idea of public school educated intellectuals sitting in pubs trying to come up with prole names for themselves.

Then Duncan Hamilton's "Provided You Don't Kiss Me: 20 Years With Brian Clough" which is entertaining enough but still can't come up with a reason for why he was so special other than the fact that he was a quote machine. I wonder whether he actually was any great shakes as a coach or just happened to find himself attached to the right group of players at the right time. Nobody knows what coaches do in the first place which is amazing when you consider how much ink is spent speculating about it.

I wish somebody would write a decent post 9/11 thriller. Richard Flanagan's "The Unknown Terrorist" isn't it. The only thing I can remember about it is that in Australia men's swimming briefs are known as "budgie smugglers".

I read the first part of Ian McEwan's "On Chesil Beach" in the New Yorker ages ago. I read the novel in about the same time as the action it describes. Because of the nature of the story's, er, climactic event, it may never be filmed, I fancy.

By this time I'm getting into my stride and I approach Janet Frame's autobiographical trilogy "An Angel At My Table" intending to read her childhood memoir and see how we got on. I ended up reading all three because since she's been so honest it seemed rude not to stay with her. Michael Holroyd says it's one of the great auotbiographies of the 20th century and I wouldn't disagree.

"Moondust" by Andrew Smith is a quest to meet the men who walked on the moon before they all die. The quest is not as interesting as the amazement you feel that they managed it in the first place and the wonder at the inexperience of the people charged with making life or death decisions. During the launch of Apollo 12 the rocket was hit by three lightning strikes, which caused all the electrical systems to go haywire in a way that none of their drills had envisaged. Before aborting the mission the Controller turned to John Aaron, the man in charge of the electrical system and asked him what to do. Aaron said "Try A-C-E", which is a bit like hitting "reset". They did and all their signals came back. But here's the thing about John Aaron. He was 24.

Stay tuned for these messages

Over the last hundred years we've grown used to seeing hard news interspersed with adverts for consumer products but there is something about this page from the Mirror site this morning – where the harrowing news about the couple who were murdered in the Caribbean is interrupted by commercials for air freshener and washing-up liquid – that may well have the marketing man tearing his hair out.

In praise of Radio Four

Driving down from Yorkshire today through the driving rain of an August morning we listened to three excellent Radio Four programmes back to back. Actually, the second programme was put together through the efforts of Norwegian Radio which had managed to get Leonard Cohen to talk, and talk beautifully, about his early days as a musician and his affair with Marianne Ehlen, the woman famously featured in a towel on the back cover of "Song From A Room". This was then intercut with an interview with Ehlen to make "Leonard and Marianne", an affecting portrait of how life felt to the pair of them when the going was good and, as Leonard recalls, sleeping with your friends was simply good manners.

Before that was Excess Baggage, which featured interviews with Richard Guise, who has cycled up the West Coast of Scotland, and Andrew Mueller, who has travelled to the world's most prominent trouble spots to see what they were like. I was very impressed that whenever Mueller feels tempted to complain about London's squalor and institutional fatigue he reminds himself that it's that underrated civic virtue, indifference, which makes it a more tolerant and liveable place than most.

After that came Andrew Rawnsley and "Beyond Westminster", taking advantage of the fact that the House isn't sitting to look at the growth of single-issue pressure groups and confront the inescapable fact that they're often the enemy of good government.

More on band biographies

The other day I blogged about the fact that the biogs of pop groups (particularly "indie"-fied ones) don't actually say anything useful. The one that triggered this was by Department of Eagles, who've made a record I've played quite a bit. This caused Fred from the group to get in touch and say that they'd toyed with introducing the fact that one of them had a grandfather who wrote and directed "The Hustler" but hadn't felt it was that relevant. I can see why they missed it out but I can also see why they should have put it in. He agreed that in their efforts to avoid clichés, many bands were in severe danger of making themselves just boring. We've been kicking this back and forth and I've sent him my colleague Fraser Lewry's biog because it's an object lesson in what a biog should be.

You only need a biog in the first year of your career. After that you've either earned a proper Wikipedia page, which is in the end the best solution to the biog problem, or you've disappeared or you've become Coldplay - in which case why do you need 2,000 words of unctuous drivel enumerating your platinum discs in Latin America?

In the first year of your career it's there for two reasons, neither of which have got anything to do with you or how you think it makes you look:
1. To provide a few gobbets of information that an average hack might feel moved to put in a caption. In this respect "Princess Diana once asked me the way to Marylebone Lane" qualifies but "hard-gigging four-piece who write all their own material" certainly doesn't. Too many bands describe what they're doing in completely music business terms rather than in terms that provides us with common ground. "So then we did some demos and found a new studio..." Oh really? Goodness, is that the time?
2. To give some poor local radio DJ or hack who's been put on the phone to try and write something for a gig listing something he can ask you about. To this end "so tell me about appearing on stage at Brixton Academy dressed as a white rabbit" works and "so are you really excited about your first national tour?" doesn't.

I've been thinking about this a lot recently. I had to do something with a well-known band who, like most well-known bands, aren't quite as big as they used to be. It wasn't the most satisfactory experience because they had a blasé attitude that seemed somehow fatally dated. I came away thinking 'they still think being in a band is somehow *enough*. I don't think it is anymore.' Who knows? Maybe a change gonna come.

Joey Barton

The argument about Joey Barton's last chance at Newcastle seems to be hinging on whether Kevin Keegan should "send a message" by keeping him on or sending him packing (albeit on disastrous financial terms). But surely this is, above all, a workplace safety issue. Barton has a history of unprovoked attacks on members of the public and team mates. He was convicted of causing actual bodily harm to Ousmane Dabo during a fracas at the training ground. If this were to have taken place in Sainsbury's or the Royal Bank of Scotland there is no earthly chance that any employer would give him a further chance or ask other employees to work alongside somebody who might assault them at any time. Multi-millionaire footballers have just as much right to be able to carry on their work without fear of violence as a bus driver does. Where is the Professional Footballers Association in all this?

We can't handle the truth

Interesting interview with historian David Runciman on Radio Four last night, He's written a book about hypocrisy in politics. It seems to argue that our apparent expectation that politicians make their actions match their rhetoric is unrealistic, forcing our leaders into adopting positions that are at odds with their personalities and not leading to the outcomes we want. He wrote a piece in the Guardian about it, focusing on how Gordon Brown measures up to these demands:

Brown in particular is paying the price for his inability to come to terms with the new confessional politics. People want to know who he really is, but if what he is really is a cautious and reserved politician who plays the percentages, then the public don't want to know. So he is forced to tour the daytime-TV sofas trying to show his human side, and ends up revealing only how uncomfortable he is with the politics of self-revelation. His caution and his constant calculation make him look like a man in a mask - the classic hypocrite with something to hide.

I can't abide the "they're all cheats and liars" view of politicians (although if that's true then at least it must mean they're a reasonable sampling of the public at large). We're the people who force them into obfuscation because we're always ready to scream as soon as they propose doing anything that might not be in our personal interests. Now that everyone in public life, from politicians through football managers to union bosses and chief executives, have taken the same course in masking the unpleasant truth behind linguistic emollients we can all now sympathise with the wise words of Carrie Fisher when she said "it's hard to be sincere in Hollywood because everybody does that fake sincerity so well."

"The Knowledge"

Last night on BBC 4 there was a pleasant surprise. They were doing an evening about cab drivers in the course of which they showed "The Knowledge", Jack Rosenthal's 1979 TV drama about the two-year ordeal that people have to go through to qualify for a cab drivers' badge. When it was originally shown on ITV there were only two TV channels. Consequently everyone you knew watched it and talked about it at work afterwards.

It was interesting, particularly to Londoners, for the light it shed on what was involved in getting to commit to memory every street within a six-mile radius of Charing Cross. Nigel Hawthorne as the inspector they call "the vampire" emphasises that no city in the world requires its cab drivers to know even a fraction of what London asks of its own. "Not many brain surgeons either. But there you are. That's how we built an empire. Probably how we knocked the bleeder down as well."

Nowadays I work near the Public Carriage Office in London and so every day I see the men in suits smoking nervously outside on the pavement as they mug up on the direct route between Manor House and Gibson Square and the hundreds of other "runs" they still have to master. Makes you strangely proud to be a Londoner.

You can watch it here for the next week.

There isn't much to say about modern pop groups

I get sent a ton of records. A surprising proportion of them are like Department Of Eagles. That's them on the left in the standard 2008 publicity shot. Hey, I know we're not rock star material but, look, we got our pal to knit in the background to prove we're not boring. Anyway I played their record and because it passed the first test by not being abrasive and noisy - I can't help it, I listen in the morning and I don't like loud noises unless I'm familiar with them - I played it quite a lot after that.

From listening to it I deduced two things: they were smart, or at least educated, sorts and they'd probably heard a lot of Van Dyke Parks. (The growing thicket of footnotes appended to rock history are increasingly the happy hunting ground of groups like Department of Eagles.) It used to be natural to find out more. That was in the days when there was something to learn. With a heavy heart I looked at their biog. I say with heavy heart because experience has taught me that what little there is to say about acts like this they are probably reluctant to tell us. If one of them has a parent who owns Coca Cola and the other once navigated the North Atlantic in a coracle, you can guarantee that they wouldn't tell us.

Like so many bands of today they met at university. Actually they're not really a band. If they were a band then one of them would not also be a member of another group at the same time. This is now standard for bands, particularly American ones. It's like in the Championship where half the players are on loan from over-resourced Premiership clubs. It's confusing. They have day jobs, which we should applaud, I suppose, but it does mean that they don't have that edge of guys who've held hands, closed their eyes and jumped off the cliff.

Right now there's probably some young hack on the Observer Music Monthly trying to cobble together a short introductory piece about them and probably thinking, there isn't much to go on here. When confronted with acts like this I wonder whether the ancient journalistic task of preparing the way for people like Department Of Eagles has just run its course. The idea that anyone would be inspired to listen to them by reading about their short lives or what they think about Barack Obama seems obsolete. Reading a great deal about something before hearing it belongs in the past. People don't do that any more, do they? Why bother when you can be nudged towards something instead? Of course you can still be prepared for something by reading about what a piece of music did to somebody else. But best of all you can get a taste for no charge.

When hacks go crazy subs run and hide

All hacks feel a bit injured when the subs have changed their copy, whether in a wholesale or a minute fashion, but Giles Coren's latest rant at "The Times" subs won't be getting much sympathy from me. This is not just because it goes in for the kind of abuse that will probably have disturbed the sleep and domestic contentment of some of the people to whom it's addressed.

It's always difficult to know what is the correct etiquette here. If it's a giant error you can get on the phone and sound wounded but you're painfully aware that this is after the horse has bolted. If it's a tiny error the problem is you'll sound like a pedant with nothing better to do.

I have written the odd thing where I was aware enough of the chances of something going wrong that I've asked to check it on proof myself. But occasionally the cock-up is so massive and the chances of anyone on the outside noticing so minute that I haven't had the heart for the conversation. Drawing people's attention to their lack of professionalism only embarrasses me.

I did something for a national newspaper not long ago. They asked for 800 words. I wrote exactly that number and submitted it. Then, in a planetary first for journalism, they asked me to make the piece longer. I added as much as they wanted, making the piece 1,200. When the piece ran they had mysteriously cut it to 600.

This would have been annoying enough if they had taken this much out of the original. To do the same damage to the extended piece was vandalism. Now believe you me, I'm not precious. I am Hacko McHack of the Ancient Tribe of Hacks in the County of Hackshire and I'll spit in the eye of anyone who impugns our tribal honour. Plus I am a stout believer in Doctor Johnson's advice that you should read back what you have written, identify your favourite bit and then "strike it out". However I'll be buggered if I'll have the striking out done by somebody because they're incapable of doing a bit of elementary space planning.

"I'm sorry about that," they always say. "We'll pay you for the full thing." As if.

So, how's your career going?

It seems to be widely accepted that Barack Obama is the best communicator and speechmaker around at the moment. He's forty-seven years old. The guy who writes his speeches, Jon Favreau, is only twenty-six. What's even more amazing is that this is his second campaign. Good for him.

Let us once more recognise the God-like genius of Nancy Banks-Smith

I haven't seen "Bonekickers" and I don't think I'll be finding the time. However I'm glad it was done because otherwise Nancy Banks-Smith would never have got to write this:

Bonekickers (BBC1) is, it has been noticed, only a syllable short of bonkers. Hugh Bonneville, a decent actor tragically seduced by the temptation of a Harrison Ford hat, plays Professor "Dolly" Parton. Based, he says, on the archaeological adviser for the series, who "literally froths at the mouth". Frankly, I'd hesitate to share a table in an all-night cafe with any one of them.

Down On The Corner

I've been thinking a lot about corners since watching "The Wire". The cops describe their progress in combatting drug dealing in terms of corners cleared. The young dealers look forward to the day when they can have their own corner. There's a whole episode in series four called "Corner Boys". That's how the school refers to those who are destined to slip into a life of crime. The series that David Simon did before "The Wire" was called "The Corner".

Creedence Clearwater Revival had a song called "Down On The Corner". The opening line of Tom Waits's "Jersey Girl" goes "got no time for the corner boys, down on the street making all that noise". Miles Davis made a whole album called "On The Corner". I've got a wonderful old record by the Isley Brothers called "Love Put Me On The Corner". (Matter of fact, it's here.)

The Corner is obviously the embassy of the sovereign state of Uptonogood. We have venues over here that perform a similar function but they're not usually corners, possibly because the high rises that were knocked down in Baltimore years ago still cling on here. So our corner boys have to make do with the pavement outside off-licences, near bus stops or in the immediate environs of fried chicken outlets. Which is nothing like as musical.

To ease the pain of idleness

The government girds its loins for another bash at changing the benefits system. There's talk of making sure that those claiming job seekers' allowance are actually seeking jobs and that those claiming incapacity benefit are actually incapable. It seems to be widely accepted among the political classes that since the carrot hasn't worked in reducing the number of people who are dependent on benefits then a little bit of stick might have to be tried.

I fear it won't actually work, not because it's wrong-headed but because there is nothing more draining than compelling the unwilling. I occasionally see some kids half-heartedly picking up litter on a roundabout or scraping graffiti from the park gates, presumably on some kind of punitive community service project. The person I feel most sorry for is the individual charged with supervising them. That person must be working twice as hard as any of us and for very little reward, financial or otherwise. Any teacher will tell you that the most difficult class to teach is neither the brightest one nor the thickest one. It's the one that is prepared to put most of its energies into avoiding doing anything.

Most people want to be active. They don't work just for money but for self-respect, companionship, stimulation or just getting out of the house. They would probably agree with the old biblical idea that idleness is a curse. They associate with people who are like them and probably have nothing to do with the others. "Forcing" people to work means somebody's got to do the forcing. Most of us would do anything rather than that.

In the White Room

Went to the PPA Chairman's reception last night on the way home. They have it every year just before everyone goes away to their huge holiday homes on the Algarve. It's worth calling in on because it's one of those rare occasions where you can guarantee all the senior industry people will be there, swilling white wine and talking slightly too loudly in the very echoey Palm Court of the Waldorf.

The Economist's Helen Alexander finished her year as PPA Chair by pointing out that the magazine business could do more about diversity. It was a point well-made. From where she was standing she may have been able to see a non-white face. I couldn't see any at all.

"The content of their character"

The most ringing sentence of Martin Luther King's 1963 Lincoln Memorial speech concerned his children: "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character."

Liberal opinion was agreed on one thing at the time. That it was as wrong to judge people on the colour of their skin as it was correct to judge them on the content of their character. Richard Rees used this as a stake in the ground in a penetrating Analysis on Radio Four. He looked at how since the 70s the political class has either avoided the character issue altogether or treated it as a bourgeois invention. And what's more he gets people to actually voice the idea that they were never happy talking about character development.

"It's because of the unresolved class conflict of British society," says Matthew Taylor, a former strategy adviser to Tony Blair. I bet Matthew, who's the son of Professor Laurie Taylor and Anna Coote, got plenty of character building at home and at Emanuel School. The notion that he and other expensively-raised apparatchiks of all the parties thought that this was stuff that somehow didn't apply to the working class takes your breath away.

Please Mr Postman

One of my very favourite things is seeing a new issue of a magazine I subscribe to on my doormat. I start the day in an altogether better frame of mind. If you'd like to experience similar magazine-shaped happiness and get a gift as well, then allow me to direct you here.

And still they're blaming magazines

Monday morning is the time to put out your press release. They're so desperate they'll go big on anything. This morning the Girl Guides and the Mental Health Foundation have got some play out of a report that says "Teenage girls report pressure to live up to sexual ideals". Apparently the people to blame are magazines and websites.

Tracey Murray, trustee for Girlguiding UK, said young girls often found it difficult to cope with an increasing number of social pressures. "Young girls today often feel there is a growing checklist of ideals they have to adhere to. If they don't they often feel singled out and vulnerable to bullying." A significant number of respondents felt that images and advice given in magazines and online pushed them towards adult behaviour before they were ready, she added.

While it's true to say that girls do feel terrible pressure it's preposterous to blame it on magazines. The last ten years have seen the decline and in many cases the closure of the very teenage magazines that used to be criticised by publicity-seeking MPs for perverting the morals of adolescent girls. If they read anything at all now it's the celeb weeklies which are obsessed with the putting on and taking off of weight and are quite open about it. The whole question of body image is something they gleefully mine for stories of triumph'n'tragedy. At least all girls nowadays know it's An Issue.

If you've spent any time with teenagers (girls, particularly) you'll learn that their first response to any problem is to blame it on somebody else. Turn up with a clipboard and say "tell me about the things in your life that aren't fair" and they'll talk your ear off. You'll also learn that they cluster in small social groups, exert power by excluding each other and very often take a strange delight in hurting each other's feelings. I've raised boys and girls and I know which can turn ugliest.

And actually if you want to know what really distorts a teenage girls' view of the world it's television. It's here that the presenters of children's programmes are chosen as much for their eye-candy quality as for their talent. It's here that there are whole channels devoted to soaps, high school dramas and desert island shows in which the casts are always slighly better looking and slightly slimmer than they were the year before. It's here - just last night in fact - that two BBC newsreaders popped up on "Top Gear" flicking their hair and talking about who had the nicest arse.

When cricket was a blood sport

The other day Kevin Pietersen got hit on the head by a South African bouncer. The commentators were a bit concerned about the damage he might have sustained because the blow dented his helmet. It made me go looking on YouTube for examples of just how much more of a blood sport Test cricket was in the days when batsmen took the field bare-headed, the pitches were much less predictable and the West Indian bowlers were in full cry.

They called Michael Holding "Whispering Death" because the umpire couldn't hear his run-up and terror was a key weapon in his arsenal. Brian Close, the living template of the stubborn Yorkshireman, was recalled to play for England in 1976 when he was 45 years old. In this over he faces Holding on a terrifying Old Trafford pitch with no helmet to protect his bald head. It's the most extraordinary example of "roughing up" you'll ever see. Close stands as firm as he can and is determined not to let Holding see how hurt he is, not even when he takes one right in the ribs. If you've ever been hit even in your fleshier parts by a cricket ball you can only wonder at the steel of the man. There's no sound at first.

First thought, best thought

Yesterday my iPod came up with Bob Dylan's "I Pity The Poor Immigrant". I think it's one of my favourite records of any sort. I've played that one song about five times since and even tooled about with the chords on the guitar. Last night I looked out the album "John Wesley Harding" and played it all the way through.

I love the words - particularly that line about "his gladness comes to pass". You can't separate that from the singing, which is his most restrained and precise. He hits a frequency here that he never quite hit again. But there's something more than that. "John Wesley Harding" stills falls upon the ear as a blessed relief.

It was 1967. He'd written the songs in Woodstock that summer. He recorded them in Nashville. But that doesn't tell the whole story. I read here that he recorded the whole album in just three sessions of three hours each. That's what a union session was in those days. Three hours. Most of the time there were just two other musicians in the studio, drummer Kenny Buttrey and bassist Charlie McCoy. They don't really play like a rhythm section, not as we've come to understand it. Buttrey is accenting the songs rather than driving them.

Between the second and third sessions Dylan asked Robbie Roberston and Garth Hudson to think about overdubbing the tracks. They listened and couldn't hear a way they could be improved. So they were left alone. Forty years later it's still the most persuasive argument for the view that records increase in quality in inverse proportion to the amount of time spent recording them.

If you want to hear "Immigrant", it's here.

The yes-no interlude

Just before I went out to get some lunch there was one of those polls on The Guardian website. Further to the knife crime issue it was asking its readers whether it was true that "people" were rude and thoughtless. Voting was running 85% in the affirmative.

The media is drunk on interaction. It has made the discovery that the dumber the question the greater the number of clicks. I don't know how I'd begin to answer that question, let alone reduce it to a yes or no. Most of the people I know are not rude and thoughtless. Most of the people I don't know are not rude and thoughtless. I encounter politeness and consideration from strangers everyday. I also encounter the opposite, in a range that runs from slovenliness to outright hostility, if not as yet knife crime. How am I supposed to decide which box to tick? Keep a numerical record and add it up at the end of each day? It just seems the most idiotic question to ask and is designed only to elicit anger and resentment, in precisely the same way that they accuse the Daily Mail of acting.

Anyway, when I got back to the office I looked for it and it seems to have gone. It may be just hiding or wiser counsels may have prevailed. I hope it's the latter.

The problem with film critics

I'm covering Word's film reviews while Jim White's away. This means going to a few screenings. This still has novelty value for me but it also brings me into contact with film scribblers, a sub-section of the hack fraternity which, encountered en masse, has a tendency to set my teeth on edge.

I cannot bear journalists who swap opinions with each other. Why would you do that? If they're interesting ones, you might be giving an idea to somebody else. If they're not, keep them to yourself. Film journalists, who move as a pack, subsisting on a diet of warm white wine and cocktail sausages, are forever telling each other what they thought of all the things they've seen lately and they do it in such a po-faced way.

The other day I heard one put his head back and, inbetween complaining about the free wine, bark "Oh, I was quite kind about it but I had reservations about the second act."

Who do you think you're kidding?

Whenever they're on the radio Members of Parliament are unable to resist the temptation to say absurdly flattering things about their constituencies. I've just heard Simon Mayo introducing the MPs guesting on his programme this afternoon. He sets up Dawn Butler as the member for Brent South and asks her to explain something about it for the benefit of people who might not know it.

It's the most diverse constituency in the UK, she enthuses, (as if that were some sort of moral quality that was embodied more here than anywhere else), and you can go to a different cultural celebration every day of the year.

"What about geographically?" he asks, which was what he wanted to know in the first place.

"Wembley," she says.

Oh.

How to write (latest in an occasional series)

Some old hand on The New Yorker described the magazine's journalism as being all about "a passionate specificness". This short item about the great Chip Taylor is a classic case. Every sentence contains at least one new piece of information, which isn't always the case. Hacks have written this piece before – Jon Voight's brother, professional gambler, wrote "Wild Thing", yadadada – but I've never heard the name or the profession of the third brother or the details of how Taylor used to combine writing country songs in Manhattan with playing the horses or – and this is presumably new information – how he's remarried his ex-wife but doesn't live with her. Wonderful.

It's a long story

Has anyone had to deal with so much change so quickly as Ingrid Betancourt, who's just been whisked away from six years of FARC captivity in the jungles of Colombia to be greeted by her own children (left), who are now adults?

A day later she is flown to France to be greeted at the airport by Nicolas Sarkozy. "How's the wife?" she presumably says. Ah. yes. Hum.

Charles Wheeler (1923-2008)

Charles Wheeler's death has just been announced. I was a big fan.

A couple of years ago I was at an "Oldie Of The Year" lunch at Simpsons-In-The-Strand. As the gathering was dispersing I noticed Wheeler hunkering down in the bar with Beryl Bainbridge, Alan Coren and Barry Cryer, intending no doubt to stay there all afternoon and put the world to rights.

I would love to have joined them. Now that they're short two members maybe I can.

What have we done to deserve this?

In one of their most puzzling programming decisions in a while, Radio Four have got Lenny Henry fronting a series that asks the question "What's So Great About?". They've already done Bob Dylan. Next they're doing Method Acting.

The minute I heard about this I was galvanised not to listen. This is, I'm afraid, because the person asking the question and presumably doing duty as the man on the Clapham Omnibus (or should that be the BBC town car?) is Lenny Henry. I've nothing against him but I can't hear him as the voice of stimulating scepticism. What are his credentials? Is he known as an original thinker? Is he a brilliant radio presenter? Has he suffered conspicuously at the hands of either Bob Dylan or Method Acting?

Then there's the subject matter. It's not as if people are leaving dinner parties in a huff having crossed swords with their hosts over Marlon Brando's performance in "On The Waterfront" or the value of Bob Dylan's Christian records. They should at least have the nerve to take on sacred cows of today like Amy Winehouse or The Apprentice or the pundits on Match Of The Day.

If, say, Clive James were to front the programme, I would expect the value to arise from an examination of the premises of greatness or not-greatness. What is good music? What do we mean when we say that acting is good? That's worth hearing. But I don't want the man-in-the-street's take on Bob Dylan because I heard it in 1963 and it was like water off a duck's back then as it is now. The only difference is now I'm bored with hearing it.

And surely in taking on this project the thought must have at some time occured to Lenny Henry that thousands of wags like me would briefly entertain the possibility of applying the show's premise to his own career?

"And the winner isn't"

This clip of Welsh Culture Minister Rhodri Glyn Thomas reading out the name of the wrong winner at the Wales Book Of The Year makes you wonder various things:
1. So there's a prize for the best English language book in Wales then?
2. If you're ever called upon to open an envelope at a ceremony it's best to know the contents first.
3. Thanks to You Tube an evening's embarrassment now becomes a lifetime of agony.

It's not that rare an occurence. Twenty years ago I was at a magazine awards ceremony where the celebrity prize giver Dame Edna Everage did the same thing. She named the wrong Editor of the Year. He was halfway to the stage when he had to be stopped with an apology. Then the real winner's name was read out and he went up to collect his (suddenly undeserved) award. The third person on the short list, my colleague Barry McIlheney, was not mentioned at all. We agreed he had dodged a bullet.

"A bolt of pecuniary fire"

I'm reading "Netherland" by Joseph O'Neill. This takes the events of 9/11 as its hinge, as does most contemporary fiction, it seems. In years to come they'll start teaching this as a distinct period. The hero's a Wall Street analyst. Here he is recalling what it was like in New York in 1998.

It was quickly my impression that making a million bucks in New York was essentially a question of walking down the street - of strolling, hands in pockets, in the cheerful expectation that sooner or later a bolt of pecuniary fire would jump out of the atmosphere and knock you flat. Every third person seemed to be happily struck down; by a stock market killing, or by a dot-com bonanza, or by a six-figure motion picture deal for a five-hundred word magazine article...I too became a beneficiary of the phenomenon, because the suddenly sunken price of a barrel of oil - it went down to ten bucks that year - helped create an unparalleled demand for seers in my line.

I've just checked and the price of oil is $141.75 this morning. Now if it's gone up by a factor of fourteen in the last ten years, that means it clearly can't do that again, can it?

Only sport can do zis

To Centre Court at Wimbledon to see Gasquet versus Murray.

At 7.15, with Murray two sets down, looking clueless, his first serve not working and facing a rampant Gasquet serving for the match, I packed away my water bottle in my back pack and made ready to go home.

It was another two and a half hours before I picked up the bag and left, Murray having won three sets to two.

And people still ask what it is about sport.

Red Harrison

I was thinking about the voice of Red Harrison, who died last week in Australia. He was 75.

Radio Four rarely carries much Australian news but in the past when it did it was delivered via Harrison's distinctive voice, which had the resonance of an Anthony Hopkins marbled with the slightly querulous overtones of a retired newspaper man who had seen too much human folly. I've been reading about his funeral the other day. They sang Jerusalem and played the Dambusters March.

Harrison had one of those voices which couldn't help but be moving, no matter what he was talking about. He sounded as if he belonged in a world where communication was rare and consequently precious. Here's a clip of one of his reports from Australia.

A month's a long time in African politics

The voting public are a fickle lot. A month ago Zimbabwe's presidential elections came so close they had to go several recounts. Polled again this week the people apparently came out 85% in favour of Robert Mugabe. Obviously, they just needed to have a think about it.

Now that he's been sworn in he can jet off to Egypt to take part in an African Union meeting. Either he can't have read Martin Meredith's "The State Of Africa", which demonstrates that since independence most of Africa's leaders have shown marked reluctance to let go of power no matter what the electorate might say, and have tended to be at the greatest risk of being deposed when they made the mistake of going overseas on business.

Persuasion is no longer a valid option. It's to be hoped that some of his fellow African leaders have the decency to use the occasion to at least shame him.

Kids With Guns

We were talking about toy guns in the office. As a child I carried a gun all the time. When we went to chapel one Christmas morning I insisted on wearing my newly-acquired cowboy outfit. I was even allowed to keep the gun with me as long as I closed the holster.

Then I had a plastic space gun. When you pulled the trigger it lit up at the end. I saved up for a black Colt 45. When I got to the toy shop they only had the silver one left. I choked back the tears of frustration all the way home.

Then there was a Winchester repeating rifle with a lever action. There was a Tommy Gun. You pulled back the ratchet which was then released noisily as you pulled the trigger. I also had rubber knifes, pirate cutlasses made of some presumably unsafe compound and a Zorro fencing foil with a rubber sucker at its pointy end. I wasn't unusual in this. All my contemporaries had the same interest in weaponry. It was considered just one of those things that boys did.

I'm sure there must have been one or two of us who grew up with an unhealthy interest in real guns but it's difficult to believe that it had much to do with early conditioning. When I think of it we were a peacable lot. It wasn't because of any hippy doctrine. The "peace" philosophy came much later. We just didn't see the point. There was the odd playground punch-up but I have no memory of any child carrying a real weapon with a view to either using it or deterring anyone else from doing the same.

Many of the kids who've been raised in the last thirty years have had their access to so-called "war toys" restricted by disapproving parents. The rising incidence of violent crime among teenagers seems to fly in the face of the neat theory that if you deny them this grisly tackle in their formative years they are more likely to grow into peaceful citizens. It doesn't seem to work like that.

Some of this stuff is just hard-wired into the male of the species. When our son was tiny he bit a square out of a slice of toast until all that was left was an L-shaped crust and then pointed the business end at his mother. At the time he'd never had any toy gun and he hasn't grown up with any interest in weaponry.

My theory of youth violence is it's all about prestige. I read an account by a sociologist who described gang behaviour as being all about "parading". It's "get out of the way of my bike", "did you scuff my trainers?" or, in its most chilling form, "are you looking at me funny?" Once adopted these are the kind of stances that cannot be retreated from.

Of course such "fronting" has always gone on. But back in the day the indignation might have been real but the guns weren't. These days it's likely to be the other way around.

Germany 3 Turkey 2 BBC 0

Tonight was not one of the BBC's more distinguished nights.

It was passing strange even before the signal was lost. 5Live's desperate need to pass on information as soon as they have it was manifest in the first half when John Murray interrupted his commentary to tell us the verdict in a deeply sad murder case; a second later he had to change gear from sober news reader to rattle-twirling Turk-for-a-day as the unfancied side went into the lead. The effect was distasteful.

The intermittent loss of signal underlined once more the great truth of TV sportscasting. This is that the person not there knows more than the person who is there. You would have thought that the BBC would have left one person at home in front of their TV whose job it was to tell them when they were broadcasting, with what signals and to whom. It was evident throughout the evening that they didn't know.

Finally there wasn't a voice anywhere on the network prepared to concede that the reason Germany had won was because they had scored three perfectly legitimate goals to the Turks' two and that while their performance was far from distinguished it was not dreadful. Had a British side gone through under the same circs they would have regarded it as a hard-earned victory.

Asked beforehand if he thought the Germans would be complacent, Hansen said "The Germans do arrogance but they don't do complacency." He presumably forgot to add that they don't like it up 'em.

What magazine editors should consider before they appear on video

In the near future magazine editors will be hired as much for their ability to "front the brand" as to decide what goes on page 60. Now that cheap video has come together with cheap broadband a few of them have been tempted to go in front of the camera. It's not as easy as it looks. How come?

10. In young people's magazines the editor is generally old enough to be the readers' mother. Seventeen is America's leading teenage girls magazine. Most of the team who pop up here in this hectic tip-athon are in their mid-twenties. I'm guessing the editor-in-chief is a bit older.

9. If you let daylight in on magic, well, you can see just what arm-twisting, log-rolling and bogus sincerity is involved in getting a celebrity as earth-girdling in her fame as Jessica Alba to do anything. Here she meets the hundreds of interns at Seventeen magazine. And my, aren't they a wonderful reflection of the diversity of America?

8. Although women's glossies promote messages about being comfortable in one's own skin and finding one's own personal look most of their editors refuse to appear in front of the camera. This is because they are consumed with uncertainty about their personal appearance that borders on self-loathing. If you find an editor's video message from the big glossies I want to see it.

7. The youngest and blondest member of the editorial team will always find themselves charged with the job of fronting the video. I've no doubt Valerie Jamieson is more than qualified to introduce New Scientist's round up of science clips but if Tomorrow's World ever comes back, they won't see her for moondust.

6. At Word magazine we take the belt and braces approach by having the new issue clip fronted by anyone who could be described as either young or blonde.Rob Fitzpatrick and Kate Mossman go where neither Mark Ellen nor I will tread without a makeover. Note high quality production values, achieved through Fraser's camera phone. Which is a reminder...

5. Anything that has an opening titles sequence featuring tumbling logos over copyright-free music means that the production company is trying to do something to justify all that money you're paying them through your nose.

4. There's nothing in media quite so nauseating as a hack telling us how fabulous it was to meet a fabulous person. Peter Castro of People reporting back on his encounter with Jennifer Lopez's twins is a classic of the genre. It also proves that if you hire a TV pro to front your video all it will achieve is to make your hack look even geekier.

3. Men's magazine editors should never appear on a camera because they always look as if they're getting less sex than the readers. Somebody should tell the editor of Loaded. Just have done.

2. Confidence is a great thing. Graydon Carter of Vanity Fair is the perfect representation of his brand. He looks like an educated man dedicated to gossip who has had a fair number of lunches in the pursuit of said gossip. His little intros to the new issue of Vanity Fair are further distinguished by the appearance of the Vanity Fair Orchestra.

1. But really, this is how you do it. Runners World magazine celebrate their industry award with a clever, watchable, funny self-administered pat on the back. It's fronted by an editor who has not been hit by the ugly stick and features all of the team, young, blonde and otherwise. For the moment this is the gold standard.

To the lighthouse

To Southwold yesterday. It was a delight being there. Reminded me that what I really want is to live near a small lighthouse. Also reminded me that you can't have a grief-free day out in the South of England. On our return the roundabout where the A12 met the M25 was completely grid-locked and the queue must have been going back for miles. By taking evasive action we eventually got on to a North Circular Road that appeared to be closed entirely in one direction. By the time we got home it takes about an hour to shake off the frustrations of the journey. Given that, and the price of a tank of petrol, is it worth it?

*Now* he tells us

Interesting piece in the Guardian by Daniel Taylor about Cristiano Ronaldo. Arguing that Manchester United should just let him go he cites a few occasions on which he and a number of football writers have witnessed and been shocked by Ronaldo's back-stage behaviour and paints a picture of a spoiled multi-millionaire who is used to getting his way at all times. Recalling the scene created by a petulant Ronaldo on a day the club was commemorating the victims of the Munich air crash he says "It was such an unpleasant scene the journalists decided not to write about it". This confirms what you have always suspected about sports writers - that far from competing they put their heads together and agree their party line. And they only spill the beans when they have nothing to lose by doing so. The comeback from readers on the Guardian site will, I think, surprise him. People are starting to feel shortchanged by this kind of cosiness.

Twenty20. Where's the tragedy?

To Lords yesterday evening. We were invited to a hospitality box to enjoy champagne, dinner and the lengthening rays of the sun over the loveliest lawn in the world. (Thanks, Chris.) The match was a Twenty20 encounter between Middlesex and Sussex. The first time I saw one of these games it was between England and the West Indies at the Oval and there was plenty of hitting the ball out of the ground, the sort of thing the marketing men love.

This one was a walkover for Middlesex. They batted first and Sussex never looked like making their total. This meant that the match was more of a non-event than even the least eventful traditional game of cricket could ever be. The beauty of cricket is the tension. This had none. Obviously the world game is now being reorganised in the light of the success of Twenty20 and you can see the reasons why, not least that people can turn up after work and get home in time for News At Ten. But I wonder whether a game can develop in the long run if it doesn't have that essential drama.

All the great world games have a tragic dimension that keep us coming back. Rugby is like war in that momentum is all. In the sense that the defences nearly always win, football is like life. In Test cricket even the greatest reputation can be undone through a microsecond of miscalculation. Golf is man against himself. And so on. But Twenty20? It's a laugh, which is a good thing now, but it's not enough in the long run.

Teenagers, the mobile phone and the lure of the better offer

One of the characteristics of people under thirty is that, having grown up with the mobile phone, they have never felt the need to plan. Teenagers no longer rendezvous. They swarm. They set off to meet each other and change their meeting point according to some strange new form of mathematics that can calculate where the majority of them will be at any given moment. They set off to Camden and call you an hour later from Shoreditch.

There's nothing particularly wrong with this except where it runs up against the traditional form of life planning used by the rest of us. This involves such things as calendars, invitations, tickets, bookings and commitments. For years we used to spend New Year's Eve with the same family. This wasn't a three-line whip. This was what all generations wanted to do.

But when Millennium New Year's Eve was beginning to loom the young people, by then older teenagers, wouldn't commit. They were bound to be doing something special. So-and-so was having a huge party. Wotsit was hiring the Orient Express. They couldn't possibly miss that. As the months went by the plans became more ambitious and less concrete. In fact they weren't plans. They were daydreams. Nobody was prepared to say what they were doing in case that meant they missed out on something better.

The upshot of all this was that at five o'clock on December 31st they were all on the phone to each other having the same conversation. "I dunno. What're you doing?"

Read them and weep

If you've just seen a bloke coming out of Kings Cross station wiping the tears from his eyes that was probably me listening to the end of "If You're Reading This", a Radio Four documentary I caught up with thanks to the Speechification podcast. It's a simple idea and it's probably been done lots of times before. It's about those letters that soldiers write and then put away against the day that they don't come back. The last ten minutes consist of an interview with the parents of a 19-year-old English soldier killed by friendly fire in Afghanistan. The mother talks about the letter he wrote and the karaoke night organised in her son's memory but won't read the letter out. That, she says quite correctly, is mine.

Shopping

I don't believe in the principle of "oughtness" when it's applied to music as in "what ought I to be listening to?" Doesn't stop people asking, though. Hence:
The Wire: And All The Pieces Matter
Rachel Unthank and the Winterset: The Bairns
Justin Adams: Soul Science
Orchestra Baobab: Pirates Choice
Mary Gauthier: Genesis
Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers: Greatest Hits

Czech Republic 2 Turkey 3

Another extraordinary game tonight. I don't know if we'll sleep in north London tonight if the sound of car horns right now is anything to go by.

Next to this Wayne Rooney's wedding just started looking even wetter.

We think it's all over

The football has been fantastic at Euro 2008. Last night's game between Holland and France was the most fun I've had watching an international match since that game between Argentina and Holland in the 98 World Cup. There's ten minutes of highlights here if you're interested.

But every time the BBC go back to the studio my ardour is dimmed by the dullness and complacency of the punditry the Corporation has seen fit to put there. The energy drops immediately Lineker fills the screen with "What a thoroughly entertaining forty-five minutes", uttered like a man called upon to enthuse about attending speech day when none of his children have won anything. He tosses up a soft ball to Alan Hansen who then makes an observation of such plinking obviousness that your attention immediately wanders to the subject of how they arrive at a dress code for these occasions. What does this particular encounter call for, boys? Smart suits or light-coloured shirts with huge collars? But even Hansen's insight is piercing compared to the one which inevitably comes next. Alan Shearer has apparently passed up the manager's job at Blackburn because he feels duty-bound to treat the nation to his views about international football. Maybe we should get up a petition assuring him that we'll muddle through somehow. Martin O'Neill is obviously worlds better but he's shrewd enough to have read the situation and realised that trying to raise the game of this particular bunch of log-rollers would be like trying to bring up the subject of the crisis in Zimbabwe in the golf club bar.

And thus it continues, nudged along by some leaden banter, until it's time to go back to the live commentary. The nation long ago Dolbied out the actual words employed by John Motson, reserving its amusement for the nervous laughs that follow his attempts at a joke and the involuntary barks of excitement which accompany anything that occurs in the goalmouth, but occasionally he makes a pronouncement of such monumental, transcendental fatuity that you can distinctly hear the shades of John Arlott and Peter Jones muttering darkly into their ambrosia from the depth of their leather chairs in the commentators' Valhalla.

He'd already shown himself equal to the lyricism that the occasion called for by making the observation "good skill" when Thierry Henry twisted the Dutch full-back's blood but he saved his best for last when Sneijder made it four with a looping shot from outside the area. "The Dutch have gone goal crazy!"

Dear God.

"Wise guy on line one"

The welcome return of Danny Baker to Five Live's 606 football phone-in underlines how in this interactive world we're all reliant on the sparkiness of audiences. Suddenly the bar is raised and it's not easy to find people who can clear it. It wasn't easy to get the average Five Live listener coming up with limericks that contained a rhyme for Switzerland and his call for contributions from people who had an irrational antipathy to certain competing nations solicited not much more than "France. Because they're French." It was only when his old listeners came on the line, readily identifiable through their "Ahoy Ahoy" salutation, that the idiosyncratic aircraft of his humour began to lumber into the air. As soon as it reaches cruising altitude Euro 2008 will be over and Five Live will presumably resume their efforts to turn the estimable Tim Lovejoy into something he's not, a radio broadcaster.

When you open up the lines the best you can actually hope for is a ready-made experience or gag. I heard such a one this morning. Nicky Campbell was asking for contributions from people who had married their childhood sweethearts. "I've been married to my wife for thirty years," said one. "I haven't spoken to her for the last twenty. It seems rude to interrupt." How have I never heard that one before?

"Excuse me, you've left behind your state secrets"

I use public transport and I'm an averagely observant person. Therefore I'm obviously disappointed that I've yet to stumble upon a briefcase full of documents labelled "Top Secret". Yesterday's story about the Cabinet Office official leaving the Joint Intelligence Committee reports about Al Qaeda on a train further boggles a mind already fairly boggled by the previous story about the lost MOD computer that had the personal details of 135,000 people who'd applied to join the Services, the hard drive that had the names of three million driving test candidates and the MOD laptop that was pinched in McDonalds.

The fact that nobody has yet reported finding equally sensitive material from the private sector suggests either that, say, Tesco executives are not daft enough to leave a laptop containing all the name and addresses of their club card members in Burger King or that members of the public are turning up such commercial gold dust all the time and can't be bothered to hand it in.

Can I suggest that until the Civil Service is confident enough that it doesn't have a load of staff who habitually leave stuff on trains or in their cars they cease putting the words "Top Secret" at the top? I've always believed that the easiest way to get anything ignored is to shout it from the rooftops.

In praise of "The Supersizers..."

Somebody told me that the BBC now name their programmes with search engine optimization in mind. Maybe that's how they ended up with "The Supersizers Go....", a terrible name that undersells the only appointment TV in our house at the moment.

It's the standard approach - a spoonful of celebrity sugar makes the medicine go down - except Sue Perkins and Giles Coren aren't quite red carpet material, probably by their own choice. In each show they travel back to some bygone era and live with its diet for a week. This provides ample opportunities for kitchen gore. We've seen chefs attempt to hold back the bilious tide while trying to recreate recipes for which their forebears won medals. We've seen how during the Restoration dining was a gross display of wealth and power. We've seen how long an eel continues objecting after it's been chopped in two.

Last night they went back to the 70s, to the land of Black Tower hock, half a bottle of spirits for each guest, food covered in gelatine and cigars on Concorde. The learning was that despite the apparent heaviness and fattiness of the fare, people were actually slimmer in those days. This could be, as Coren pointed out, because in those days there was something called manual labour.

Perkins and Coren are a brilliant team, as charming and funny as anyone on British TV. They're both fast talkers but they manage not to step on each other's lines or upstage each other. Presumably they don't need a scriptwriter to come up with observations like "Advocaat. A drink made from lawyers." Whatever they're presented with they attack with relish and aren't afraid to enjoy things that are bad for you.

And I know they send themselves up but am I alone in detecting a distinct strain of what breakfast TV producers call sexual chemistry? And I know they're both spoken for in different ways but there are some people who turn into flirts as soon as they hear the words "turn over".

You can watch it here.

Italian takeaway

What I loved about last night's game between Holland and Italy was the rare sight of an Italian side being given the hurry-up. Two-down at half-time is not a situation that they are at all used to dealing with. Usually they wear the seen-it-all look of men who are confident that the result at the end of the ninety minutes will be close and in their favour. Seeing them forced to inject some urgency into their time-honoured way of doing things was the first really interesting spectacle of this championship.

Quote of the week

"Everybody in politics lies. But the Clintons do it with such ease, it's troubling."

I wouldn't pay much mind to that kind of sentiment were it not for the fact that it was expressed by David Geffen, a veteran of the music and the film business. Makes you think.

Every man in his station

The Management has finally accepted that attempting to go anywhere at the weekend by car in the South of England is stressful, expensive and laughably slow. Therefore when we want to see friends in Hampshire today we took the train from Waterloo. On days like today this provided a good place to view what Elvis Costello called "London's Brilliant Parade". It was Derby Day and so the punters were gathering on the concourse. There were burly Al Murray-alikes in short sleeved shirts hoisting pints of lager, faintly blowsy young women in high heels that would probably be shed by the third race and the furtive figures of serious racegoers, their pocket seams struggling to contain form books. A very smart hen party was assembling under the clock, each member dressed in a variation on a theme of red and black.

We waited in the queue for tickets. In front of us was a ruddy faced retired gentleman of the shires, resplendent in his town uniform of hounds tooth check jacket and dazzling shoes. In front of him were two loudish Americans who were trying to get to Southampton to join an ocean liner. I turned round and was confronted by an actual toff in full morning attire, top hat included.

Sometimes London doesn't let you down.

In praise of Anthony Lane

The film critic who makes most others read as if they're typing in boxing gloves. In the New Yorker he has this to say of "Sex And The City":

You cannot simply shift a load of television actors onto a movie screen and expect them to command its greater expanse; only one in a thousand will be able to summon that mysterious confluence of presence and reserve on which stardom relies—the will both to offer oneself to the camera and yet to keep back the hidden, unguessable sources of that self.

Alongside that 99% of reasoning about film, let alone writing, is just hot air.

Mixed signals on the way to work this morning

1. At the station. A woman carefully goes through every page of the giveaway magazine "Sport" to make sure there's nothing in that will traumatise her nine-year old boy. Meanwhile he waits patiently and looks up at her expectantly.
2. On the platform. A woman with a seven year old boy who's wearing one of those anti-pollution face masks.
3. On the train. A woman with a well-dressed two year old boy. He turns to look out of the window and puts one of his feet on the seat. She immediately smacks him once on the backside. He starts crying, more out of shock and embarrassment than pain. She lectures him in some East European language for about ten seconds and then tries to cuddle him into submission. He, being male, is immediately placated. So she gives him a Milky Way.

Londoners Diary

To the Orange Broadband Prize For Fiction ceremony in the ballroom of the Festival Hall. I've no idea why I was invited. On the rare occasions I've expressed any view on this it's been to question whether we still need a fiction prize for women novelists. On the basis of the remarks from the stage it's precisely this kind of male observation that is most valued by the organisers because it helps keep the siege mentality at simmering point. Anyway, the occasion was notable for:

• the man from Orange making the best judged sponsors speech I've heard in a while
  
• the main prize going to the estimable Rose Tremain
• the candidates for Best New Writer being described as "three great women who've written great books"
• the sun arrowing over the Thames as I crossed Hungerford Bridge on one of those evenings that make you think "dull would he be who could pass by" etc etc
• The rapture on the faces of the cloakroom staff as they watched the paparazzi shoot frame after frame of token showbiz person Geri Haliwell
  

I'm no Home Secretary but...

...if the story in today's Times is true about 42 people having been caught trying to break into jails in the last five years, isn't it reasonable to assume that a certain number must have evaded detection. Are they still there? Have they come back out? Have they been released?

I'm no economist but....

....the first thing I heard this morning on the Today programme was a representative of the fishing industry saying "it no longer makes sense to fish because the cost of the fuel is greater than the value of the catch."

I thought to myself "I wonder if I'll remember this day."

I blame hen weekends for divorce

One of the many sobering facts in the first volume of David Kynaston's "Austerity Britain" is that in the 1930s the UK divorce rate was around 6,000 a year. By 1950, thanks to wartime upheaval, it had gone up to 20,000. That's partly because more people (425,000) got married for the first time in 1940 than in any other year since records began.

The UK divorce rate is now running at over 150,000 a year. I wonder whether the divorce rate rises in direct relation to the increase in fuss around the business of a wedding. In Barcelona the other weekend we came into contact with stag and hen parties from all over Europe. Bleached blonde girls from Carshalton wearing deeley-boppers at breakfast in the hotel, young Frenchmen dressed in nappies at the Park Guell and burly Brits in their late thirties striding round the Gothic Quarter in matching tee shirts.

Our daughter assures us this is now an obligatory component of the pre-match ritual. It's not something you have a choice about. It's important that you be seen to publicise your decision, particularly among your friends. When we got married nearly thirty years ago there were two ways to do it: you either organised it as a family occasion or you simply went to the Register Office and then told people about it afterwards. I know a few people who did this. I get the feeling nowadays that would be seen as passing up a unique opportunity to draw attention to yourself.

Censorship is always in a good cause

I realise this isn't the sort of place this blog normally goes but since Matthew Parris has broken cover to question the idiocy of the government's plan to make obscene drawings involving children illegal I should add my barely audible squeak of agreement to what he says in today's Times:

Maria Eagle, the Justice Minister, said that the move was not intended to curb creativity or freedom of expression but to tackle images that had “no place in society”. Crikey - the intellectual sloppiness! The move does curb creativity and freedom of expression: it curbs both in pursuit of what its proponents consider the greater public good. No censorship in history has ever been advanced on any other ground.

With the apparent connivance of the legal profession and encouraging moos from the media this government continues to act as if it finds itself faced with forms of evil that have never before been encountered in human society, crimes that require whole new laws to combat. I'm a simple soul but I've always understood that the law was there to deal with the consequences of people's actions and not the contents of their hearts. If this is passed into law it will subsequently be repealed by people who'll wonder what on earth Maria Eagle was thinking of. They'll also be amazed that the rest of us just nodded it through because we were afraid of appearing to be on The Wrong Side.

Be sure your SMS will find you out

Very good piece in the new issue of Wired describing the "spying" scandal involving Ferrari and McLaren. American magazines are strong on this soup-to-nuts storytelling. You can even overlook the references to "Surrey county" because you get a story that even Formula One unbelievers like me can understand. You also get some idea of how it's next to impossible for misbehaviour to remain undetected nowadays. The story first came to light when the wife of a McLaren employee took a 780 page document into a copy shop and handed it to to a guy who happened to be not just a Formula One follower but also a Ferrari fan. (How one can be a fan of a car company is something I can't come to terms with.) When the scandal came to light the FIA got records of no less than 288 SMS messages and 35 phone calls between the two alleged culprits. In such a world it seems par for the course that Max Mosley's little session with Miss Whiplash would end up in the News of The World. And the fact that Mr Whiplash works for MI5 does not cause us to raise even an eyebrow.

We are all in each other's pictures now

The digital camera is a wonderful thing but it has encouraged an infinite number of people to take an infinite number of infinitely unremarkable pictures. We were in Barcelona this weekend and visited the Casa Battlo, a rich man's house designed by Gaudi that has become one of the city's premier tourist attractions. Here you find yourself in a room with, say, twenty people, at least half of whom are taking pictures. This results in a strange new process of triangulation whereby no matter where you stand you are in somebody's picture. I was brought up in an era when photography was rare enough for you to be able to keep out of people's shots. It doesn't seem to be possible anymore. And photography is one of those things that increases in inverse proportion to people's competence. I have a friend who is a professional. It's very instructive to be a tourist in his company. He'll walk into a place where all the amateurs are snapping away as if they've got a once in a lifetime opportunity to capture a unique image and immediately say "there's no picture here".

Champions League Final

When you're watching penalty shoot-outs you usually have some skin in the game. Because I genuinely didn't care who won last night's European Final, penalties made for a most unsatisfactory conclusion. The trouble is the shoot-out gives the media permission to break the whole evening all down to individual tragedies and triumphs. This is really not what any football game, let alone last night's, was all about. This morning it's van der Saar's heroic save and Terry's tragic slip and is Ferguson the best manager of all time? This is just post justifying waffle. It could have gone either way. It was on the edge of chaos throughout. The managers stood there soaked and screaming and powerless like they always do. The winning team had their luck in a different order than the losing team. There was no moral.

Class of 62

Marilyn Gaunt went to a secondary modern school in Leeds in the late 50s. Her film "Class Of '62" is about what happened to half a dozen of her fellow pupils. Last night it found them in their sixties in various degrees of contentment. Even the girl who'd apparently had a dream life hadn't had it easy. There were divorces, overbearing parents, unfaithful husbands, ungrateful children, illnesses and in the odd case a sadness so deep that Marilyn Gaunt clearly thought she should pass over it entirely. The fortitude of these women, none of whom could remotely be said to have brought any misfortune on themselves, was amazing, even including the couple who wanted to move to Greece to get away from the nanny state but then came scuttling back as soon as they wanted a bit of nannying. You can watch it here. I kept thinking of that Paul Simon song called "Some Folks Lives Roll Easy" which goes "most folks stumble and fall through no fault of their own". I tried to find it on YouTube but it appears to be the only song that isn't there.

What are TV presenters for?

"Russia: A Journey With Jonathan Dimbleby", the BBC series currently running on Sunday nights, makes you wonder. In his effort to get to the heart of this vast, mysterious land and its inscrutable people Dimbleby is somewhat handicapped by the fact that the only word of Russian he knows is the one for "thank you". The producer, whose idea this series presumably was, is fluent so she comes round the Dimbleby side of the camera to translate the star's questions and the answers of the drunk on the train or the retired collective farm worker in her garden. That means there are three people in the frame. Common sense dictates that if we had to lose one, surely it would be the star.

Rum work still pulled round the font

Britain's Youngest Grannies on BBC Three began with a clip from an early '70s BBC show in which a glamorous granny was a carefully-coiffed lady in her 70s dressed along the lines of the Queen. It went on to introduce us to three contemporary women in their thirties who had all had daughters in their teens, daughters who had returned the compliment by doing the same thing. They were very different families but all gave birth to girls who were given names like Rickeita, Lexi, Casie, Lalah and Aliyah. The naming of children gives us away. We tend to choose names that we hope they can grow into. Unless, that is, we secretly don't want them to grow up at all.

To a blind horse

In the previous post somebody picked up on the point about radio presenters nodding when they interview you. It's remarkable what a key part of the broadcasting skill set nodding can be. In daily life they would you say "yes" or "uh huh". On the radio they have to use body language to do two things:
1. Get you talking.
2. Shut you up.
I have to turn off the Today Programme when I hear a "civilian" being interviewed because I know that by the time the interviewer has managed to get them talking it'll be time to shut them up, often with embarrassing abruptness.
Hence a fairly experienced hack like me knows that my main job is to start talking straightaway and keep going, while looking out for the tell-tale tics that indicate that the presenter either wants to move me on to another point or terminate the thing with something that could be passed off as an ending.
If it's a programme I'm used to doing, like "Front Row", they will tell me how long the item is and what illustrations they want me to cue. In such cases both the presenter and I are looking over each other's shoulders at the clocks behind us rather than at each other. If it's night time radio where you have generally been brought on to give the presenter a little thinking time, once they fling you a question you keep that answer going until it looks as if he's stopped taking instructions from the producer in their headphones and is ready to rejoin the conversation.
Of course none of this works if it's a phone interview. In that case you have to listen out for the strangulated vocal noises that indicates that they might want to cut in. Either that or the dead line that announces that they've already dropped your fader.

Sony presents the prizes

Congratulations to Simon Mayo, named Best Speech Broadcaster at last night's Sony Awards. Lots of former Radio One DJs have proved equal to doing a bit of speech but only Mayo has managed to establish himself as a proper all-rounder. His Five Live show proves he can handle anything from a Presidential primary to a sports story without resorting to the old DJ's trick of putting himself at the centre of the item. In the tradition of which I should point out that whenever I've guested on his show I have noted that as you're talking he looks at you as if he's not all that impressed. He doesn't employ the puppy eyes and vigorous nodding with which most presenters semaphore that you're on the right track. It seems to work. Whether he'll follow Five Live to Manchester we shall have to wait and see.

A classy gesture in a shabby world

Saw Neil Warnock on Sky this afternoon, spitting bile at the ref after his Crystal Palace side lost against Bristol City in the play-offs. Seen from that perspective you can see why he's not on any list of the most popular men in football. In his defence, last night I went to the leaving party of a high powered magazine editor who happens to be a Sheffield United fan and hence one of Warnock's admirers. In putting together a valedictory video his colleagues had contacted Warnock to see if he would agree to take part. He said yes, despite never having known the individual. What's more, he volunteered a Sheffield United shirt signed by the entire (admittedly relegated) team as a gift.

From the Media Grauniad home page this morning

The last chance saloon?

Last year I blogged about Newsnight's tendency to dress up apparently "dry" items about politics as student skits, much to the amusement of the presenters and the bemusement of the audience. This provoked some comment, including a robust defence from the producer. I have only just had this item drawn to my attention. It ran as part of the BBC's Election Night coverage last week. Clearly they're taking the piss but whose piss is it? The politicians'? The licence payers'? Theirs?

First rule of comedy

Most of the hour-long programmes on TV should really be half an hour. I watch things which are half an hour long, such as Seinfeld, knowing they'll only be twenty-two minutes. I just watched one. This exchange between Jerry and George at a New York marathon party makes me laugh out loud every time. Sure enough, somebody's posted it on YouTube. Watch the hand that holds the cracker.

Day return

They're having another of those debates about public art tonight at the National Gallery. On the radio this morning they were talking about what happens when such projects go wrong and fell upon the example of the vast sculpture of the parting lovers at St Pancras. Londoners don't agree on much but if there were a show of hands right now it would clearly be removed.

Joan Bakewell's objections to it were that the couple were in modern dress, it was too big and it was somehow kitsch. I don't disagree with any of that but I also wonder if we are living in an age in which we are never going to agree about representational pieces of any kind.

For a start they're supposed to be saying a tender, heartfelt farewell. Do you still see that? You used to see people weeping all the time at railway stations. I'm not sure that's the case anymore. You see it at airports maybe, when Mum and Dad are returning to India and there's a chance the grandchildren will never see them again. But a young couple parting at St Pancras? They're going to be texting each other while she's on the way through Kent and they'll be on Skype as soon as she's in Paris. And anyway, she's coming back tomorrow, isn't she?

Black sabbath

Last night somebody suggested that Spitalfields Market was a good place to go on Sunday morning. Determined that I wouldn't spend the entire weekend indoors, I suggested to the CEO that we should make a visit. The CEO doesn't like going on the Tube any more than she has to and I plain refuse to take the car. You won't be coming back with the drunks, I argued. It's London on a Sunday morning. It'll be fine.

To no avail. Determined not to be faced down, I got up early this morning and said that if nobody was going to come with me I was going to go on my own. Which I did. I took the train and bus to Liverpool Street, wandered around Spitalfields and back through the City into Covent Garden and then got on the tube at Leicester Square, feeling slightly smug that I had gone out to enjoy This Great City Of Ours while my family were still under the duvet.

My smugness was soon punctured. Between Leicester Square and Kings Cross I was targeted by the most active and aggressive loon I have encountered in forty years of using London Transport - and I'm Big City blasé when it comes to the extremes of human behaviour. Presumably off his medication, this bloke wasn't just jabbering to himself. He was jabbering directly at me, loudly and unintelligibly. When I didn't look him in the eye he lunged across the carriage and put his face between me and my book. He was fairly big and a lot younger than me. He wasn't the sort of person you would expect to be carrying a knife but the casualty departments are full of people who are naive in this respect.

He bothered me. He was certainly bothering the six-year-old sitting with his mother a couple of seats away. Had the CEO been there he would have bothered her in a big way and she would never have got on a tube train outside the rush hour ever again. The whole incident probably lasted about three minutes but it felt like ten and it's not easy to shake off its effect. I believe it's known as "lowering one's scene".

I just got home. How did it go, they asked.

Oh, fine.

Nothing dates like tech

I found this in a 1982 issue of Smash Hits. It's from a photo spread where various luminaries (members of Wham!, Garry Tibbs from the Vibrators, all the quality) pose with exciting new entertainment products of the time. If they can lift them, that is. Here Annie Lennox enthuses about the new light-weight VHS camerapack from Sony and suggests that we use it to make interesting documentary films that we can send to Channel Four. The power source is presumably following on an articulated lorry.