More damage than Goering

Last night's "Romancing The Stone" on BBC Two confirmed my prejudice about major architectural projects: they're run by people in interesting spectacles, people who are keen on having things that look good on their company website but no intention whatsoever of living in anything they build. This episode was about Park Hill flats in Sheffield, one of those Le Corbusier-inspired abominations thrown up everywhere during the 50s. It's fallen into disrepair. The council wanted to knock it down but English Heritage decided it had special architectural merit and should be preserved. A trendy developer called Urban Splash was brought in and they hacked it back to its skeleton. Then came the credit crunch, the decline in property prices meant Urban Splash couldn't raise the money and work stopped. The skeleton was left, waiting for the wind to make it unsafe.

Everybody who appeared in the film, from the posh bloke from English Heritage to the Minister for Yorkshire and The Humber (there's a job that needed creating) was encouraged by a laughing voice off-camera to ascend the ladder and knot their own noose. The most telling thing about the whole film was what it omitted. Apart from an archive clip at the beginning where a toothless old lady born in the 19th-century described Park Hill as "heaven", there was no mention of who had lived there in the past and, more importantly, who might live there in the future and how. I thought Le Corbusier's theory was that form followed function. If so, why didn't they start with some idea of who the customers were going to be? Further reading tells me that it's the usual plan: upmarket apartments and business units. I think one of the planners in the film mentioned an organic supermarket, surely the mark of a man who has a First Class return ticket in his waistcoat pocket.

I learn from a friend in the property game that Britain is now full of redeveloped old buildings turned into sun-kissed City Living spaces for young professionals. They were having difficulty moving them long before the recession and so the council use them for their problem clients. The more the council do this the less desirable these places become for the young professionals. It's brutal but it's the truth. Do the men in interesting glasses ever have these kind of discussions?

The best health warning

I hope Simon Jenkins is right about swine flu being "a panic stoked in order to posture and spend". I'm not in a position to decide. I can only take comfort in the fact that whenever the mass media decide to make a big deal of something happening in an area with which I'm familiar they first over-simplify the case, then over-state it and quickly get bored with it.

Cleverness is overrated

This Australian Broadcasting Corporation programme traces the roots of the economic crash to the rise of MBA culture, which valued decision making over in-depth knowledge of how a business works. Somebody points out that George W. Bush went to Harvard Business School where the prized skill is to read a 20-page report and then make a decision. That's how the Iraq War was started.

Many of us have been in companies where we've seen firms of consultants introduced at eye-watering expense to point out how savings could be made and business processes streamlined. In most cases you could predict what they were going to say long before they said it. Some of what they say is true but impractical. Some of what they say is practical but not in their hands. Some of what they say is the kind of nonsense that plays in a presentation and won't bear a minute's scrutiny in the outside world.

The main point of outside consultants is to come into an organisation, say the unsayable and then retreat to a safe distance. This catalytic function is often undervalued and can even work if the business remains in the hands of people who have a long-term understanding of which levers operate which functions. That's what they call "domain knowledge".

Which brings me to government. The last twenty years have seen the emergence of a governing class who have little or no experience of the key management skill, which is organising people to make something happen. The previous generation gained this skill either in industry or the armed forces. People like Gordon Brown, David Miliband, Harriet Harman, Nick Clegg, George Osborne and David Cameron are all former academics, journalists or PRs. William Hague went straight from Oxford to a short career in management consulting via an MBA. Barack Obama has ascended to the highest office in the world without having had even one day's experience in actual government. These people's key tendency is to legislate and then wait for the world to behave. They are all frighteningly clever people - which rather assumes that clever people make the best governing class. They don't always.

I have had enough experience in and around the upper reaches of companies to know that their kind of Oxbridge cleverness is, except in the smallest of doses, surplus to requirement. What's needed is shrewdness, judgement, an ability to concentrate and, most important of all, a mastery of the possible. If you follow the thesis of this programme we arrived in the present pickle thanks to a load of clever people in business who thought they could change the world by moving a few columns of figures. There's some truth in that. What's even more worrying is that the clever people in government purporting to be able to get us out of it by a little quantitative easing here and the postponement of a few spending projects there know even less about how the real world works. I think they're all about to be found out.

Playing doctors and nurses

A traffic accident this weekend – don't ask, nothing broken – brought us into contact with the emergency services. In the space of a couple of hours up to twenty professionals were inserted, with due urgency, into our lives. All of them were polite and helpful but I couldn't help being confused by what they were or were not wearing.

No problem with the police and the ambulance services who are all uniformed and clearly wear the insignia of their rank. But when you get to A&E you're thrown into an environment whose occupants' habiliments range from uniform through half-hearted uniform to no kind of uniform at all. You're prodded and ministered to by nurses wearing different outfits, examined by a young doctor with his shirt outside his trousers, then another doctor who is presumably more senior because he's slightly older and finally injections and other elements of treatment are administered by people wearing the "scrubs" that are familiar to all lovers of "M.A.S.H.". And then there are the people you don't deal with directly. I was eyeballing a huge, overweight, unshaven, extensively tattooed man with some nervousness until he looked at the board at the end of the bed and I realised he was an orderly. Looking around you weren't entirely sure who worked there and who was just visiting. This may work in a fashionable hotel but I don't know how appropriate it is in this environment.

I'm sure that the treatment was entirely professional and correct but I can't help but think that it looked slovenly. And when things look slovenly, they can often be slovenly. When you're thrown into this kind of environment, usually in some distress, surely it has to help if you can immediately work out who the people are, what role they fulfil and, also, who's in charge. Obviously, I'm old fashioned. The first family doctor I remember checked my pulse against a pocket watch produced from his waistcoat pocket. I don't expect him to come back. Nonetheless I believe that at times of distress there's an enormous amount to be said for formality.

The defence rests

Today is the beginning of Slow Down London Week, a campaign to persuade Londoners of the value of taking the time to enjoy their surroundings. This seems like a good idea. Everyone of sound mind would presumably agree. So why then do the Today Programme feel that they can only interview one of the people behind it if they then follow him with somebody who's against it? I know this adversarial approach to covering issues is time-honoured (though it always favours the glib and snappy over the slow and considered) but does it really apply to something as gentle and harmless as this? Is there anybody in the world who thinks that slowing down to enjoy London is not a good idea? Anyone, that is, apart from a hack who's been rung up by a producer at the BBC and asked to oppose it?

When's the future going to arrive?

Last night I chaired a session about podcasting and audio on demand for the Radio Academy at The Guardian. Panelists were Emily Bell who oversees all the digital stuff at the Guardian, Jon Gaunt, the host of the newly launched audio show at The Sun and Steve Bowbrick who curates the best speech radio on a terrific site called Speechification. The consensus seems to be that all this material will soon be accessed via your phone.

Afterwards in the bar overlooking the canal and luxury apartments - the Guardian's new HQ really is the place where the recession seems most distant - somebody from AudioBoo "interviewed" me and then with a few keystrokes on his iPhone sent the resulting conversation into the great digital yonder.

I don't pretend to understand how any of these things work or dare hazard a guess at whether this or that technology will change the world. The only thing you can be is agnostic. It was My Space, then it was Facebook, then it was Twitter, then Spotify; tomorrow it will be AudioBoo and already somebody is putting the finishing touches to something that will make them all look quaint. They wax, they wane, they go on to the back burner and sometimes they disappear altogether. As long as you're not buying the company, it doesn't matter.

Bleep-bleep, bleep-bleep, yea

One of the most amusing aspects of doing "For One Night Illegally - The History of the Bootleg" on Radio Four (on the iPlayer for the next few days if you're interested) was the inclusion of extracts from the legendary Troggs Tapes. These are famously peppered with four-letter words; therefore we didn't expect to be able to broadcast them.

The producer spent a good deal of time involved in the "compliance" issues which, post-Brandgate, seem to occupy much of a BBC producer's time. (I met a Radio Three producer the other day who was complaining about how time-consuming all this was. On Radio Three? What are they doing over there? Placing prank calls to Daniel Barenboim? Asking him if he's got the hots for Mitsuko Uchida? Talking about being out on the lash with the Berlin Phil?)

Anyway, it was finaly agreed that we could use a section of the dialogue with the obscenities bleeped out. However we were also given a strict limit on exactly how many bleeps we were allowed. It's a bit like rationing asterisks.

A licence fee for newspapers?

Very interesting piece by Peter Preston, former editor of The Guardian, about the possibility of traditional news-gathering being paid for by a "licence fee" paid by web users. I don't think it will happen because the one thing government's not going to do is propose further taxation for anything like this. However what's clear is that the current situation where newspapers are giving their stuff away for free can't sustain much longer. The boss of the Mirror Group, Sly Bailey, made this clear on Friday.

Local papers are folding already. The next to go will be national titles. Even if they do what the digital zealots advise and migrate all their content to the web, they will only make a tiny fraction of what they make by selling ink on paper. They won't be able to sustain their operations on this revenue and so they will sink. This is something that's becoming more widely accepted with each passing day.

What intrigues me about Preston's piece is his observation that the further the BBC strays from its traditional role of providing news and entertainment on radio and TV and the increasing strain it is forced to take as the nation's primary news provider, the greater will be the pressure on the old understanding that underpinned the licence fee. And what are they going to do for content every day when they can't read out The Sun and The Times?

The aliens that are eating Florida

If you only read one long article this week, make it Burkhard Bilger's jaw-dropping "Swamp Things" in the current issue of the New Yorker. It's about how Florida accidentally became home to thousands of non-indigenous "exotic" creatures. Many started off as domestic pets and were let go when they got too big. Others were smuggled into the state to cater to a novelty-obsessed local market. Some were displaced many miles during Hurricane Andrew in 1992.
The outcome is that since 1994 the Florida Everglades have been home to a growing population of Burmese pythons. They were a few inches long when they were bought as pets. They can now grow to twenty feet and are almost-impossible to capture. They reckon that there could be 140,000 Burmese Pythons in the Everglades. This would be disturbing enough on its own but the last section of the article is about the arrival of the Nile Monitor. This six foot lizard, which is described as "omnicarnivorous", can out-run a man and is known to hunt in packs. Thanks to the canals linking the swamp with the town they have taken up residence on the lawns of a suburban community called Cape Coral.

It's a brilliant feature. The line that stays with you is a quote from one zoologist commenting on this alien invasion: "it's time to stop studying these things and start killing them".

What *really* killed Maxim

A few years ago Maxim was one of the most successful magazines in the world. Now it's closing. The decline of the so-called "lad's mag" – a sniffy name invented by the posher men's titles, who know their readers are no older or wealthier but are in the business of selling luxury advertising – is not down to a sea change in society. It's down to Photoshop.

It's years since any of the pictures in any of these magazines had even the faintest erotic charge. All the girls have got the same straight hair, the same make-up and the same pouty lips, appear to have been photographed in the same un-specific context and, where the thighs have been slimmed, the spots excised and the eyes whitened, are eventually bathed in that same Venusian sheen that leaves them looking as alluring as a pair of cable-knit tights. It's as if the advent of hyper-real cartoons like Tank Girl and movies like Toy Story encouraged the editors to grope towards an archetypal amazon. This seems to fly in the face of the fact that men are pathetically grateful for whatever they can get. That applies no less in their fantasies than it does in their real lives.

When the history of the men's magazine boom of the last twenty years is written people will go looking for the images to place alongside the tennis player scratching her backside, Farrah Fawcett Majors' incandescent smile, Alberto Vargas's forgetful blondes or Adam Hersh's lesbian kiss in the gallery of male fantasy. They'll find very few candidates.

Executive Drive Time

I used to do a radio programme on GLR. We called one of the regular features Executive Drive Time. Trevor Dann came up with that. The idea was to play driving records for people returning from their places in the country. This morning I've been trying to think of the records that were staples for that slot. These are some of them. There's a Spotify playlist here if you want to hear them.
1. Bob Seger: Roll Me Away.
When music critics use that horrible cliché "wide screen", this is what they're trying to describe. A few years ago I heard Alan Bleasdale on "Desert Island Discs". He picked this record. Said he'd heard it once on the radio while driving into London. I like to think that was me.
2. Freddie King: Going Down.
Texas bluesman King made a few records for Shelter in the early 70s. They were produced by Don Nix and Leon Russell and they're the last great blues albums. Nobody made anything in that idiom that sounded half as good again. There's a very good American comedy series at the moment called "Westbound and Down", which is all about a dumb redneck ball player. This is the theme. Perfect.
3. ZZ Top: Jesus Just Left Chicago.
Always makes me think of the adjective "thixotropic". Don't know why but dear God, what a rhythm section.
4. Ray Charles: Mess Around.
Danny Baker says this is the only record that never lets you down. I'm with him. Nothing illustrates the ecumenical nature of pop music better than this. It's all about a catfish barbecue and yet it was written by the son of the Turkish Ambassador to the United States. This record's out of the house and hot wiring the car while you're still looking for your keys.
5. Richard Thompson: Keep Your Distance.
The great thing about Richard Thompson is that he can sing the worthiest sentiments over the most impious noises. He knows the whereabouts of a chord that absolutely nobody else can strike.
6. Montrose: Rock Candy.
Ted Templeman produced the first Montrose album in the early 70s. He then made the same album with Van Halen who sold millions. All the records made since which purport to be hard rock are essentially pale copies of the first Montrose album. Every time we put this on in the HMV Shop we would sell ten copies.
7. Jan & Dean: Surf City.
The first record I ever danced to. I think the dance was called the Twitch. It was in somebody's living room in the West Riding of Yorkshire. We didn't even know what surfing was but we knew there was two swinging honeys to every guy and all you had to do was just wink your eye.
8. Warren Zevon: Searching For A Heart.
Men driving on their own are prone to maudlin sentimentality. I saw this used in a movie called "Grand Canyon" to underline just such a point. "They say love conquers all, you can't start it like a car, you can't stop it with a gun." Like he said in his last days, "enjoy every sandwich".
9. Bruce Springsteen: Drive All Night.
I once asked listeners to nominate records that they found erotic. The men's suggestions were terrible - a grotesque combination of lewdness and correctness. One woman rang up and suggested this. It's about a man being prepared to drive all night just to buy her some shoes. Not dinner. Not an iPod. Not a new summer outfit. Shoes.

Mummy will not kiss it better

John Gray interviewed in today's Independent:

"Realism is a necessary condition of serious politics and serious policy-making. And realism isn't popular. Because what many people are looking for in politics – including green politics at the moment, is a meaning for their lives. If you say to people: 'We can't move to a world in which we don't have either nuclear or fossil fuels. That's impossible,' they will say, 'That's not impossible, not if we all want it.' But many countries don't want it. Russia's not going to do it. Venezuela's not going to do it. Iran's not going to do it. Their wealth and power depend upon fossil fuel. 'Well, we can do it,' they'll say.

"And when you push it, it comes down to a kind of symbolic expressive function whereby even if the effect of certain policies – like moving towards wind power – is to be forced back to coal, then it doesn't matter, because the purpose of the policy is not actually to effect a real-world change but to keep the spirits up."

Bums on seats

Following the arrest of the Pakistani nationals who entered the UK on student visas they've been talking on the radio about ways of ensuring that only bona fide applicants are accepted by our universities. Unless I was mishearing, somebody was actually suggesting that British academics should go out to Pakistan to interview potential students there. That may or may not be practical. But if they do introduce such a procedure they should prepare themselves for some pressure closer to home from people who wonder why, with the exception of an elite handful of universities and in the case of certain courses, most British students turn up to their first day at university never having been interviewed by anyone at all. When the percentage of 18-year-olds going to university was quite small most students were selected on the basis of grades and at least one interview. Now that we're heading for fifty per cent they don't think that a face-to-face meeting matters at all. Maybe that's one of the reasons a quarter of them don't complete their courses.

She was just seven (teen)

For writers of a very particular age group - let's say anyone currently between 45 and 60 - their first professional meeting with a Beatle is a unique moment. All the writers I know who've had that privilege - and given current circs it's generally with that most reliable trouper, Paul - can remember every last second of it. By the time it makes it to the page they've done their best to conceal their palpitations behind a thin screen of professionalism. What they deliver is affectionate but slightly distanced. What they tell their husband or wife on first returning from the encounter is something else altogether. In the current issue of the New Yorker Nancy Franklin reports on her visit to a Paul McCartney rehearsal. Reading between the lines, she didn't get to meet him. What she writes indicates that it doesn't really matter. The excitement isn't, in the end, anything to do with this 67-year-old chap from London. The excitement is still inside the youngster and that youngster is still inside the adult. What it must be like to be the thin wire upon which that pulse still travels only people like Paul McCartney can know. And there aren't many people like Paul McCartney.

Nobody knows anything

I won't pretend to have read Nassim Nicholas Taleb's book "The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable" but I do like his Ten Principles for a Black Swan-proof World. I've got particular sympathy for his point that "complex derivatives need to be banned because nobody understands them and few are rational enough to know it". Just as the most important three words in a marriage are "you were right", the most important three words in business are the three you rarely hear - "I don't understand."

The area I work in doesn't have the potential to decimate your pension, even if it's really badly run, but nonetheless in my working life I've seen the media morph from a business whose processes were largely transparent to one that has grown increasingly opaque. For a couple of years after the widespread adoption of what was then known as Desk Top Technology I used to half-heartedly suggest that we set aside one day a year when we would put together a magazine in "the old way", just to reassure ourselves that we still knew how to do it. That seems ridiculous now. But what applies to business practices also applies to business models. For instance, I find it hard to believe that there is anyone at the top of any of our big media organisations who really understands how web advertising and marketing really works. I suspect they're glad that nobody ever asks them.

If Taleb is looking for an eleventh principle, I'd suggest a rather broader point. I use it to bore and occasionally encourage my children. It's this. "Cleverness is overrated."

It's only TV, Parky.

Michael Parkinson: "Jade Goody has her own place in the history of television and, while it’s significant, it’s nothing to be proud of. Her death is as sad as the death of any young person, but it’s not the passing of a martyr or a saint or, God help us, Princess Di. When we clear the media smoke screen from around her death, what we’re left with is a woman who came to represent all that’s paltry and wretched about Britain today. She was brought up on a sink estate, as a child came to know drugs and crime, was barely educated, ignorant and puerile. Then she was projected to celebrity by Big Brother and became a media chattel to be exploited till the day she died.”

Max Clifford rides to her defence: “What Michael forgets to mention is that Jade already has saved countless lives of young women through her battle with cervical cancer. And she has provided the best possible education for her boys and stressed the importance of that.”

What neither the prosecution nor the defence can bring themselves to mention is the fact that Jade Goody was just a TV star. TV stars tend not to be a noble breed. Like all TV stars her fame was, by the standards of the wider world, undeserved. She was as fortunate as the next bozo who woke up to find they were the kind of person the camera happened to like. Along with her producers she arrived at a shorthand version of her actual personality and milked it for all it was worth. Pretty much like Michael Parkinson - a man who has spent forty years in the public eye playing upon his "roots" as if they were a banjo and as far as I can recall not doing or saying much that's been surprising or remarkable - has done. I don't mean that in a bitchy way. It's that very dullness and puppyish willingness to slavishly go along with the expectations of the audience that makes for long careers in TV. You'd have thought he would have known that and kept his counsel.

Belt and braces. Then another belt.

Whether the UK version of Wired will work or not will depend more on the buoyancy of the UK print advertising market and the health of the American parent title than anything else. However, I was intrigued to see that the launch issue comes with a peel-off day-glo orange sticker describing it as "the new magazine about what's next". This suggests that after the usual nervous conversations about what the first cover should look like, what would make the appropriate cover image (looks like Manhattan but it's actually London) and the exact combination of cover lines that position the title - "ideas/technology/culture/business" - with more pointed invitations to read further inside - who could "the genius who killed the economy" possibly be? - and the designer's painstaking efforts to incorporate the announcement "UK launch issue" into the logo so completely that you don't actually notice it, somebody profit-responsible has come in there at the last minute and said "what this needs is a sticker saying what it is".

The great English pursuit

Went for a quick drink after work last night to mark a birthday. It was in a place called Smithy's down an unpromising street near Kings Cross. Everybody's drink was served in a glass bearing the branding of the drink they ordered. Presumably the idea is to carry the messaging of advertising into the retail environment itself, the better to engender loyalty and to ensure that even the drunkest customer approaching the bar ten minutes before closing simply has to thrust the glass forward and say "more of *this*".

I've just finished H.W. Brands' biography of Benjamin Franklin. Franklin spent his life commuting between the American colonies and England and never got over not just the amount the English drank but also the energetic, determined way they went about it. Brands quotes a contemporary account of an evening's entertainment in 18th century England.

"We continued," he says, " drinking like horses, as the vulgar phrase is, and singing till many of us were very drunk, and then we went to dancing and pulling of wigs, caps, and hats; and thus we continued in this frantic manner, behaving more like mad people than they that profess the name of Christians."

I can't get the image of people "drinking like horses" out of my mind.

Give us a wave, love

I've blogged in the past about the occasions I found myself being waved at in a very personal way by both Bill Clinton and H.M. The Queen. Michelle Obama turned up to visit the secondary school round the corner from the office just now. A crowd of people gathered from Chapel Market. This is not a section of the public best known for its interest in the Special Relationship. All they wanted to do was catch a glimpse. But when the motorcade of identical black vehicles drew up their windows were all blacked-out, meaning not only did people not see anything, they couldn't even tell that they were waving at the right vehicle. People moved away with a peculiarly flat feeling.
If Her Maj can make herself visible to all the citizenry, gunmen and all, I don't see why the wife of the President can't do the same. After all, as Mick Jagger says, all you've got to do is give them a glimmer.

Maybe it's because I'm a Londoner

Matthew d'Ancona's programme on Radio Four about the nature of Britishness was interesting – if not quite as enthralling as The Men Who Fell To Earth, a brilliant documentary about military parachuting that came later this morning – but the more I'm asked whether I feel British or English or European the more I think of myself as a citizen of another nation altogether – London.

I was born in Yorkshire but I've lived in London since 1968. My children have all been born and brought up in London. They think of themselves as Londoners and so do I. It's not that strange now, is it? Before there was a place called Italy people called themselves Florentines or Neopolitans. I wonder whether the world's going back that way.

In the time I've lived in the city London has undergone a historic transformation. One third of the people living in London were born overseas. Just think about that. One third *born* overseas. That's not counting the number of people whose immediate forebears came from overseas or the people, like me, who were born elsewhere in the UK. That doesn't disturb me at at all. In fact I think it's reason for rejoicing. This must mean that we are heading for the almost unique situation of living in a city populated by families who all somehow chose to be here.

I don't make any claim for London as some sort of rainbow community and, like all Londoners, I am sufficiently aware of its shortcomings to raise my eyes to heaven when a provincial visitor squashed into a tube carriage exclaims "Gosh, I couldn't do this every day!" but I identify with the place increasingly strongly. On 7/7 my dominant emotion, apart from compassion for the dead and maimed, was outrage that a bunch of misanthropic twats from mono-cultural streets in Leeds should let off bombs on tube carriages and buses in London, a place they knew nothing about. If they had done they would have known it was the one place on earth apart from New York where they were most likely to have slaughtered a representative sampling of the population of the earth.

Prudence, meet Frugality

I've been reading a biography of Benjamin Franklin. In 1775 the American colonies had defied the British government and were embarked on a war with the foremost military power in the world. It was more likely to go wrong than otherwise. On one side was the prospect of defeat and ruin. On the other was the prospect of risking ruin in the process of avoiding defeat. Franklin wrote the following in a letter to his son.

For my own Part tho I am for the most prudent Parsimony of the public Treasury am not terrified by the Expense of this War should it continue ever so long. A little more Frugality or a little more Industry in Individuals will with Ease defray it. Suppose it a 100,000 a month or 1,200,000 a year. If 500,000 Families will each spend a Shilling a Week less or earn a Shilling a Week more or if they will spend Sixpence a Week less and earn Sixpence a Week more they may pay the whole Sum without otherwise feeling it. Forbearing to drink Tea saves three fourths of the money and 500,000 Women doing each Threepence Worth of Spinning or Knitting in a Week will pay the rest. I wish nevertheless most earnestly for Peace this war being a truly unnatural and mischievous one but we have nothing to expect from Submission but Slavery and Contempt. I am ever Your affectionate Father BF

Nothing about quantitative easing there.

I know it's only a film but...

In my ceaseless quest to stay abreast of the latest things happening in movies, last night I watched a film called "The Devil Wears Prada", which purports to be set in the world of high-end magazines. I know it's an eclair of a film but nonetheless I have to take issue with:
* the notion that anyone would get an interview for a job at a top magazine without having at least heard of it
* the idea that the editor arrives at the office after everyone else
* the wholly misleading hint that there are any magazine writers as implausibly handsome and poised as Simon Baker
* the fiction that the person designing the jacket for the new Harry Potter book gets the manuscript as well - oh, and copies it as a favour
* having made a success of her job the heroine leaves for - just hold my sides a second - a newspaper.

What it costs at "the pictures"

The Young Victoria is as good as a film about people writing letters to each other can be. Even if it were Citizen Kane I'd be spending most of its running time thinking about how much I'd just shelled out for four adults (two of them being sixteen) to get in.
I know these are West End prices but still. God knows what it would have cost if I'd taken the "premium" option.

In defence of the three day week

In the face of declining revenues, the New York Times has imposed a 5% pay reduction on its staff. In recognition of this they have given them ten extra days off as compensation. I'm sure people will take it. There can't be many other places that Times staffers can go. They aren't the only employer who are introducing some form of reduced working hours. These moves are being presented as desperate measures for desperate times. Maybe they're a harbinger of something more permanent.

Thirty years ago people speculated that the working week would get shorter and everybody would have something called "leisure time". What actually happened was the people with high status jobs devoted more time to work - not because they needed to but because they liked it that way. I think for a lot of people "busy-ness" is a pose. We talk about our increasingly busy lives as if they're a function of the modern consumer society. They're not. Compared to a peasant farmer we're all dossing. If we're so all-fired busy how have we managed to find time to watch TV or play with Google Street View or blog? One of the great achievements of "The Office" was that it hinted that office politics fill the vacuum that used to be occupied by productive work.

The greater truth is we always find time to do the things we want to do. In the current climate a lot of people are going to find that they can do what they have to do in far less time. It won't make anyone richer but it might make us better off. The shorter, more intensive working week may be here to stay.

All TV is kids TV

TV is obsessed with the time constraint. When there isn't one they make one up. When Anekka Rice used to build village halls it was always against some spurious clock. We grew to expect that. Though why in last night's Baroque! From St Peter's To St Paul's Waldemar Januszczak had to pretend that he was going to see how many Wren churches he could get round in fifteen minutes I'm not quite clear. They managed about five before he came puffing back into shot. Now none of the TV crews I've worked with could shoot that many locations in that time so they must have been a particularly swift team. I do hope they weren't indulging in exaggeration. I would have been just as happy if he'd stood there and said "there are twenty Wren churches within a mile of where I've standing". I think I could take that thought on board.

Teach them Betjeman, not Bebo

A friend has just come back from Costa Rica and tells me that if you climb the highest mountain you can see the Pacific in one direction and the Atlantic in the other. That stirring thought stirred something in me; dim memories of the line "upon a peak in Darien" and reading some history about one of the great European explorers who, I learn from a Colombian I recently had dinner with, are known locally as "pirates". When I got home I settled it with the help of Google. The line is Keats:

Or like stout Cortez, when with eagle eyes
He star'd at the Pacific - and all his men
Look'd at each other with a wild surmise -
Silent, upon a peak in Darien

Further reading indicates that it was Balboa, not Cortes, who climbed the peak and first caught sight of the Pacific, a moment in the history of exploration which is staggering and kind of funny at the same time. The poem is "On First Looking Into Chapman's Homer" which is inspired by a literary experience of looking at the world through fresh eyes.
Nuggets like this, from which the implications glint in lots of different directions, are the things I remember most fondly from my school days when we would get the teacher off the point and it didn't matter whether we were doing history, geography, literature, politics or philosophy. I learned more in those interludes than I did in the regular lessons. It also instilled the only valuable thing an education can instill - curiosity.
My teacher friends all agree that the National Curriculum has made tangents like this impossible. I'm not encouraged by today's announcement that the primary curriculum is to be revised to make pupils familiar with internet tools like Google and Twitter. I have a feeling that tools like these are at their most effective when they're filling the gaps left by traditional education and I find it hard to imagine primary teachers showing an eight-year-old how to use Facebook (which by then will have been supplanted.) Maybe they should take the time they're planning to devote to Twitter and use it to read a poem to them.

It's a press release. It's the opposite of news.

EMI have announced some personnel change at the top of the organisation which involved the elevation of someone called Cory and, more interestingly, this curious statement:

EMI Music CEO, Elio Leoni-Sceti, said: “Cory is a highly talented executive with a passion for music and a unique technology-based skillset. He will help us deliver our goal of leveraging the power of digital across our business, particularly in the key areas of consumer understanding and analytics, content creation and digital marketing in order to strengthen the relationship and interaction between our artists and their fans."

Now I have a degree in bullshit and have worked around the media and music businesses for thirty years and I cannot begin to hazard even the vaguest guess at what he actually means by those words. Then it struck me. It's not supposed to mean anything. It's a bunch of clichés rounded up yesterday by some corporate flack, roughly rearranged so that to a passing space traveller it just about resembles a sentence and then given to the boss to sign. The boss will have said 'you reckon this is OK?' and sent it out to various news oulets who will all have cut and pasted it on to their sites. The people it's really aimed at, the people who work within EMI, will probably be combing it right now for meaningful omissions.

The view from behind the scrum

Watching England play Scotland at Twickenham from a seat behind the try line you realise how we're short-changed by TV's pursuit of the ball to the exclusion of everything else. The side-on shot means that on TV runners from deep suddenly appear out of nowhere like actors bursting out of wardrobes. With the view from behind you can see the overlaps, the decoy runners, the obstruction of the chasing tackler and all the elaborate chess moves required to get a yard of space for a ball carrier. You can also see how wide the pitch is, which made Ugo Monye's dash from one wing to another to stop Thom Evans all the more remarkable. I wonder whether with TV's getting bigger we'll eventually see some kind of split screen with simultaneous shots from different angles. Or is that one of those things that the mind can't process?

If a man is tired of London....

Took this today at the Building Centre just off Tottenham Court Road. It's a model of the city including recent and proposed planning submissions. Worth popping in to have a look at.

And ye shall know them by their small ads

Whereas the colour spreads of advertising at the front of the book express the aspirations of a magazine's readers, it's the small ads tucked away at the back that tell you what they're really like. Small advertisers, usually selling products you can only buy mail order, only advertise in places where they definitely get response. One of Smash Hits' biggest advertisers in the early 80s was Danilo, who would sell you a bum-flap or a pair of two tone shoes. This was in the days when such things were not available in the average high street. They wouldn't have been paying the rate if they weren't making enough profit to make it worthwhile.

Post-internet the small ad is a threatened species but in certain places it hangs on. The back pages of the New Yorker are full of products aimed apparently at the Niles Cranes of the Eastern Seaboard; highly-educated, Anglophile and apparently yearning for a more genteel life. There's Precision Hangers - "the dimple-free hanger solution", Upton - "purveyor of the world's finest teas", Mark Mormar, a biographer "who will tell your story when you're gone", John Christian, who will research and then produce your own family crest for $709 and, most poignantly, the Pavillion at McLean Hospital which promises "unparalleled psychiatric evaluation and treatment". All ads speak to the readership. But only with the small ads can you be certain somebody's responding.

It's more important than that

Last night I finally watched "Friday Night Lights", the drama about inter-school football in Texas. I haven't seen anything that depicts quite so well how different the Americans are. The whole notion of school sports being that important is alien to us and, I imagine, to most other nations as well. No matter how seriously a school or college game may be taken here there is still somebody at some level prepared to remind us that it's only a game and that what really matters is education. Here, on the other hand, they play the final at the Astrodome and it's televised.

In the world of Permian High School and the community of Odessa, Texas, there is only one thing that matters and that's "winning State". Billy Bob Thornton plays the highly-paid coach dealing with a bunch of senior High School kids. They're allegedly seventeen. They don't look it but then again all sportsmen look older than they are because of the strain on their faces. "You've got two more quarters. Most of you will never play the game again in the rest of your lives," he says in the big scene. (It's here.) That makes you think. Maybe American rhetoric is studded with football metaphors because it's associated with a time of life when the world was full of possibilities. At the end of the film they stand in the car park and say goodbye to each other, resigned to the fact that nothing can ever be this important again.

Getting used to a small portions world

According to the Guardian, "Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle started poorly with just one million viewers" the other night. By whose lights is that "poor"? Considering that he's not a household name and there had been no big press campaign, I think the fact that a million people watched him indicates that inertia remains the greatest force in determining the size of a TV audience. It's simple mathematical fact that as media options increase, the number of people choosing any one option must become smaller all the time. TV has more trouble than most coming to terms with this because it still feels somehow entitled to command our attention.

One of the most interesting representatives of the modest tendency in entertainment is Moby who many years ago said that in the future there would be less millionaire rock stars. He's posted (via the Lefsetz letter) about his new album. "I like the idea of humble and reasonable metrics for determining the success of a record," he says and admits, "for even one person to make the effort to listen to music that I’ve made is pretty remarkable, and I need to be humble and respectful in the face of that." I'm sure his record company aren't keen on him saying that but it's true.

University challenge

We wake to the shock news that university chancellors want an increase in students' tuition fees. Obviously, if the BBC had bothered putting the same question to every other service provider in the UK, they would have said the same thing. Here, in case government is paying attention, is how I would deal with the problem. Agree to the increase on the condition that university courses are shorter and more intensive. That might mean a two-year course with four terms a year and no increased cost to the student. The universities will either adopt this solution or go strangely quiet, as they do when anything is proposed that might upset the academic lifestyle.

How sports coverage parted company with sport

Since reading What Sport Tells Us About Life and talking to its author Ed Smith a few weeks ago I've become increasingly fascinated by the contrast between what happens in sport and what hacks say happens in sport; between the events – which are generally, as Smith described them to me, "chaos upon chaos" – and the narrative imposed on those events by commentators and journalists.

Last week ITV's Andy Townsend hailed Manchester United's four-nil victory at Fulham with the words "well, they're so far ahead of everybody else, they must be wondering who can give them a game." He'd already forgotten the previous Sunday when an under-strength Manchester United were held to a goal-less draw for 120 minutes by an under-strength Spurs team. I was at that game and found it hard to see any resemblance between the events – desultory stalemate with defences on top – and the narrative in the paper, which turned out to be something to do with iPods. This was the first time I'd seen a penalty shoot out live. Without the overheated commentary provided by television it's about as gripping – and as much to do with sport – as drawing straws on the halfway line.

I wonder what Townsend had to say about this Saturday's game when the same Manchester United got beaten four-one at home. You can say that's the wonderful unpredictability of sport. You could also say, that's the irrelevance of people like Andy Townsend. And it's not just him. The same applies to the most sage wordsmith cranking out 2,000 words for the broadsheets. None of them can bear to say what every fan mutters to himself every week. It could go either way.

Something similar happened this weekend with England rugby. In the past week the commentariat were united in the view that England were slow, unadventurous, ill-disciplined, borderline-hopeless. They stopped short of saying that there should be another regime change. They were saving that one for Monday morning. In the event they didn't get to write that story because, in the most one-sided contest in recent Six Nations history, England unexpectedly beat France 34-10. If they'd examined recent events before building their narrative they would have seen that England's defeats in this year's tournaments had been by small margins, they had scored more tries than anyone else and they had not conceded a try when they had fifteen men on the field. So the sensible analysis, and one held by all their opposing managers, was 'misfiring but might come good'. What kind of story is that?

All the firmly-held opinions of two weeks ago look ridiculous today. England have won, Manchester United are having a crisis-ette and Liverpool are daring to dream. But people like Ferguson and Johnson and Benitez know that's it got nothing to do with what anyone writes in the papers or says on the wireless. It's not the tide of history. It's not payback for what somebody said at a press conference. It's not part of the long wave of a continuing story. It's the bounce of a ball, the timing of a pass, the foothold that doesn't give way, Michael Essien's fortuitous mis-kick yesterday, somebody reaching out to nudge the unforgiving moment, that makes the difference between this victory and that defeat. Before the game yesterday the BBC were asking Martin Johnson if he thought his pack could out-muscle the French. He gave the only honest answer which is, "we'll see".

That's not what they wanted to hear. I told Ed Smith what Danny Blanchflower had said when he was asked who was going to win. "I don't know," he said. "That's why they're playing the game." I asked him if that was the most banal thing ever said about sport or the most profound. He thought it was the latter. So do I.

The alarming rise in the number of things people can't live without

According to the financial wisdom of the moment, "it's only when the tide goes out that you can see who's swimming naked". I'm not sure about that. Sometimes you never get to see. Whenever my children would come home talking about how much wealthier other people were I'd always quote my father who would say, you never know how well-off people are, you only know how much money they spend. He first said that to me when I was about eight and I returned from tea with a school friend saying "They're so rich. They've got two TVs and a dog." There's your nineteen-fifties, right there.

Wealth is even harder to assess nowadays when credit, cheap or otherwise, is regarded as a human right. Everybody knows that they have to cut back. That should mean working out what things they couldn't do without. But in the last ten years that threshold of comfort seems to have been raised dramatically. My parents considered a washing machine a necessity and a TV a luxury. They would be shocked at the things many people regard as standard today. People on presumably average earnings have things even I would consider luxuries: plasma-screen TVs, Sky subscriptions, Premiership season tickets, top of the range phones, expensive foreign holidays, gym memberships and cars designed for amusement as much as transportation. The issue doesn't seem to be wealth so much as expectation.

We had dinner recently with friends living in a lovely house that won't be worth what they paid for it for quite a while, if ever. We were talking, as middle-aged, middle-class people do right now, about the prospects for our university-age children. While we all know about tuition fees, student rents and the impossibility of getting on the housing ladder, we are also aware that people born in the last twenty-five years have grown up with mobile phones, designer beers, night clubs, jeans that come in at three figures and a couple of trips abroad a year. Luxuries like these, which were once the preserve of the rich, are now, thanks to credit, available to everyone who wants them and is prepared to live with debt. The underlying cause of the current malaise is the dramatic growth in the number of people who can do just that.

When I was in my twenties none of those things had been invented so they weren't options. That was a blessing. I didn't take a taxi until I was thirty. When I left college and got a job I had no expectation that life would suddenly become any better. That's not the case anymore. I meet people in their mid-twenties now whose education and background and media consumption has led them to believe that life ought to be a bit better than it has turned out to be. Everybody who works in the media can reel off the stories of the work experience person who quit after a few days because "this isn't what I thought I'd be doing." It could be that the ideal preparation for a life in the professions formerly known as glamorous was an upbringing of unrelieved dullness. Well, it's too late to get that back.

We are where we are. You're not going to have soup kitchens and bread lines. You're not going to turn Jonathan Ross's audience into Wilfred Pickles's audience. A lot of people, the young and the burgeoning section of the population who still think like the young, may cut down on the luxuries. On the other hand, because they don't regard them as luxuries so much as the possessions that define who they are, they may just extend their credit in order to hang on to them. It's perfectly possible that they might get through this unpleasantness without making more than token cutbacks. They will simply extend the amount of their loans and the term of their payback and comfort themselves with the thought that "something will turn up". After all, it's only what the government are doing.

From the sublime to the ridiculous, a bunch of things that interested me this week

• Barry Schwartz in a presentation at TED says we should be worrying less about rules and more about the development of what he calls "practical wisdom".
• Simon Jenkins in the Guardian arguing that the fashion for blaming the current unpleasantness on Margaret Thatcher entails a complete ignorance of the facts. "British history is getting like Soviet history under the commissars, a prisoner of the world view of its partisans."
• Rod Liddle in The Spectator moves the Myerson business up several gears, saying that she belongs to the generation born in 1960 "who take but will not give".
• And my son sent this video of a dog having a bad dream.

OK magazine turns the "merge pictures" command into a publishing strategy

Times are tough at the magazine stand and there are some pretty desperate publishers out there, none more so than the people behind Richard Desmond's OK. The picture magazine seems to have decided that if they can't get the right shot then, hey, they can always bake their own. The UK edition has apologised for Photoshopping two completely separate shots of Cheryl Cole and Victoria Beckham together over a "quote" which actually came from "a friend of".
The U.S. version has been even busier with Jennifer Aniston digitally put in the arms of her alleged boyfriend and even the children of Tom Cruise and Angelina Jolie finding themselves paired off digitally. Of course anybody who's taken Desmond's shilling must expect that he's going to do this kind of thing but nonetheless it is quite breathtaking in its contempt for the intelligence of the readers. You wouldn't be entirely surprised if this is part of the "negotiation" leading towards the acquisition of the genuine article, if that's the appropriate expression.

Why Television Match Officials are not going to make sport any better

Last night's sport underlines that it's no use relying on what commentators lump under the word "technology" to ensure the better adjudication of games. The Test series between England and the West Indies has been played under a referral system whereby batsmen and bowlers could ask for a certain number of decisions to be reviewed by an official watching TV pictures of the incident. Human nature and professional sport being what they are, by the time it came down to the last nail-biting hour they had used up all their "lives". At the same time the umpires in the middle had, like rugby union referees, been increasingly happy to abdicate their responsibility to make decisions on the spot to some bloke in the pavillion, at great cost to their own personal authority.

Meanwhile over in Turin Drogba's shot clearly crossed the line and was smuggled out by a Juventus goalkeeper whose embarrassment was evident to everyone apart from the referee and the linesman. Both of them were in a tearing hurry to resume the game and must have thanked the Almighty when Chelsea scored seconds later. Maybe there is a case for "goal line technology" but it's not as strong as the case for officials who are a bit stronger than those at Juventus. All the gismos in the world aren't going to make football any fairer or prove that beneath that pile of bodies a try has been scored. It's not science. It's sport. You do not ask sporting officials to establish the truth. You hire them to ensure something called "fair play", which is a different thing altogether.

And the reason that there are so many controversial incidents in football is because all footballers cheat instinctively. Managers have the gall to criticise a ref for unfairness and at the same time send out eleven players with direct instructions to deceive that same person. If professional football was run using a referral system it wouldn't be long before you would have lawyers on the bench, games were being held up as a matter of course and the man in the middle was happily letting somebody else be the arbiter. TV would love it, of course, but it wouldn't make the game any fairer.

The Myerson saga and the lives of others

The Daily Mail have been enjoying themselves all this past week at the expense of Julie Myerson and her book about her skunk-hound son. That's to be expected. Successful, photogenic, liberal, well-paid members of the chattering classes must expect that when something goes wrong with their lives the defenders of the great unlettered will rush to put the boot in.

But I bet her husband Jonathan Myerson wasn't expecting the reception he got from the visitors to the Guardian site when he published his own defence of the family's right to publish the story. The viciousness of some of the responses here seems to come from the same streak of English envy that runs through the Mail like bacteria through cheese. Everybody's entitled to their view on whether the Myersons were right to go public about their problems with their eldest son. But anyone who has lived with even the most biddable teenagers knows full well what hurt they can cause and should thus refrain from commenting on how trying the boy might have been in this particular case. In summary the attitude of the Guardian readers seems to be "ten years of intensive skunk use never did me any harm and anyway what do you expect if you write for the posh papers?"

Still find it hard to believe that Schadenfreude isn't an English word.

Looking after the pennies

This week's Analysis on Radio Four has more pertinent things to say about the current malaise than any number of Robert Peston reports. It's titled, a little lumpily, "The Threat Of Thrift" and it wonders whether we are likely to meet hard times as my parents (or your grandparents) might have done or whether we need to have things put in a new context. It exposes the way that governments from both wings spent like sailors while claiming to practise the housekeeping of the corner shop and the manse. It has interesting things to say about how cheap credit took the waiting out of wanting and in the process changed us as people. That's the big question to me. What are the chances of deferred gratification making a comeback?

Two likely lads advertise their availability

Tom and Shaun are two final year design students at the Lincoln School of Art. They've just spent a week working in a shop window to advertise their imminent availability.

While I have no jobs to offer them I can only hope that the initiative they have demonstrated by doing this will bring them some work. (Spelling could do with some improvement though, chaps.)

There is nothing quite as entertaining as a really bad review

A few weeks ago I'd never heard of "Watchmen". It says a lot about the hysteria that accompanies new releases nowadays that already I don't wish to hear of it again. I feel like this about the U2 album as well and I haven't heard that either. If I do see "Watchmen" it will be by accident. I concluded that superhero films had nothing to say to me not long ago when I accidentally watched *The Dark Knight*. I found it surprisingly boring for something so expensive and busy, managing the rare trick of being simultaneously leaden and empty. And what the fuss is about Heath Ledger's performance I fail to see.

My favourite critic Anthony Lane sets about Watchmen in The New Yorker. Not since Clive James described Arnold Schwarznegger as resembling "a condom full of walnuts" has one review packed quite so many zingers. (Actually, while you're at it, you could read Germaine Greer's savaging of Baz Luhrmann's "Australia".) In reference to an earlier film of Alan Moore's work, he says it was "not quite as enjoyable as tripping over barbed wire and falling nose first into a nettle patch". He describes Billy Crudup in this one as looking "like a porn star left overnight in a meat locker". He's not completely negative about it, allowing that the opening credit sequence is "easily the highlight of the film".

There's something about a thunderingly negative review that makes it the most exhilarating of reading experiences. It might be as effective as taking a peashooter to a steam engine but the sound of that pea pinging off steel is nonetheless strangely warming. This particularly applies with huge blockbuster films because it helps to remind us that the bigger they are, the more likely it is that they are also absurd.

Ronaldo: a face only a mother could love

Manchester United's Cristiano Ronaldo and Newcastle's Steven Taylor had one of those bust-ups in the tunnel last night. According to Five Live it went like this:
Ronaldo: You're a terrible player.
Taylor: You're very ugly.
I love this. Obviously Taylor must have briefly entertained the idea of shooting back with "so are you" or "my dad's a policeman" but something told him that the reference to Ronaldo's "face of Crimewatch" physical appearance might just hit him where he lives.
I like to think that had it been me I would have had the presence of mind to say "I shall pass over your physical appearance. Suffice to say that you, sir, are a very talented but remarkably charmless individual that even hardcore Manchester United fans find curiously difficult to love".

Arena: it's the economy, stupid

The closure of magazines is inevitably accompanied by two kinds of commentaries. Those, generally written by people who have never read the magazine, seeking to prove that its passing says something about wider society. Then there are others, written by people who worked for the title, seeking to pretend that it all happened because those in power didn't take notice of their advice. A classic example of the latter attempts to explain the closure of men's magazine Arena on Media Guardian. I texted a man who used to have management responsibility for the magazine to tell him about it. "He says it's the nipples," I said. "No, it's the overheads," he retorted.

Arena had been limping along for the best part of ten years, squeezed between GQ's superior ability to sell upmarket advertising and FHM's greater popularity. It was also increasingly burdened by its inherited belief that it had to do everything in a Business Class fashion. When EMAP bought Wagadon they didn't want Arena but had to take it. Since then it has gone from one repositioning to another. EMAP and then Bauer wouldn't entertain any offers to sell it. They managed to find licensees to publish it overseas, which can't have made closing it any easier. The last copy I saw had Danny Cipriani on the cover. It appeared just as he was dropped by England.

Arena was the first men's magazine of the modern era but that alone doesn't guarantee anyone's survival. As they say in the Wild West, pioneers are often dead men with arrows in their backs.

Strangers on a train

I came back from Wembley on Sunday in a Tube carriage packed with disappointed Spurs fans plus one Man Utd fan. Because he was ten pints drunk and could not entertain a thought without giving it tongue, we learned all about him. He was forty-eight, he'd been in prison, he was a Londoner but he assured us if you cut him he bled Manyoo. He sang a poisonous song about Liverpudlians as if he was being controversial. It's all a bit lost on Londoners to whom all northerners are much of a muchness. He was the kind of sociopath who swore a lot and then asked the retired lady in his immediate vicinity if she minded. He probably thought this gave him a rough sort of charm. It didn't really.

When he saw the police at one station he slurred "Look at the fucking Dibbles" and then started singing "Harry Roberts is our friend" under his breath. I presume he was referring to Officer Dibble, who used to police the alley occupied by Top Cat, and Harry Roberts, the career criminal who murdered three policemen in Acton. The strange thing is that "Top Cat" dates from 1961 and Roberts' crimes took place in 1966. What kind of person dispenses insults that require footnotes?

Swindled by the shaving industry once again

My wife bought me the wrong razor-blades. Easy mistake to make. They're sold in sealed packages that ensure you can't see whether the fitting on the back matches the razor. And you don't know you've bought the wrong one until you've ripped it open and can't return it. So then I went to the shop and, after spending five minutes going through the options, bought what appeared to be the right one. Took it home, ripped it open, only to find I'd also bought the wrong one. Now I have more than £10-worth of useless blades. Never mind. I'll go and by a razor that fits the blades. I set off for the shop again and stood there puzzling over the options. The male chemist offered to help. I explained that I wanted a Sensor razor to use my Sensor blades with. He explained that they didn't make the razors any longer but they still sold the blades. So I had to buy a completely new razor which came with one blade to go with my ten useless blades. Some people waste their time hating the banks or the arms industry. One day a piece of technology will come alone that will supplant the monopoly of the shaving companies and destroy their businesses. I shall be cackling the loudest.

Did anybody ever drink like they do in TV drama?

Watching the BBC's "Margaret" makes we wonder how come I've never been in a work context of any kind where somebody's said "you need a drink" and reached for a bottle of Scotch on a silver tray to pour me three fingers of Glenlivet into a crystal tumbler. Is this a dramatic device based on something that people used to do or is it, like people marching down a corridor pursued by aides answering questions, something that began life as a device and has now turned into something we think we should be doing as well?

A pox on corporate web sites

Going to the theatre in Hammersmith tomorrow night so we're looking for a Wagamama where we can eat first. This ought to be simple. Searching on the interweb leads us to a corporate site which invites us to choose a continent and then, having narrowed down the world to manageable land masses, wonders whether we are interested in eating noodles in Leeds or London. Slowly and agonisingly – how much I hate drop-down menus – it's evident there isn't one anywhere near. When the web design company presented this no-doubt expensive website design to the Wagamama board, did anybody say "and why would any of our customers ever be interested in finding our restaurants by continent?" They could have added "and why do we have a pointless Flash animation featuring a jumbo jet?" and will anyone be persuaded by our slogan "positive eating and positive living", let alone interested in what's going on in our "noodle news" section? But they didn't. They just said "that's brilliant", signed the cheque and never looked at it again. I've looked at it four times because that's how many times it's crashed my browser.

It's all got to go somewhere

People never used to pick up dog crap. There again, maybe there weren't as many dogs as there are now. Coming through Clerkenwell yesterday I happened upon one young couple apparently obeying the new etiquette with a plastic bag. The attack dog she was wrangling on the far end of a stout chain had just relieved itself and she was bending down to clear it up. As I overtook them and walked on I heard him mutter "Now throw it over the wall". (The path runs alongside the high wall surrounding an old primary school building turned into flats.) I couldn't bring myself to look round to see if she had complied. All the way back to the office I couldn't help wondering if some poor soul on the other side of the wall was also wondering what they had done do deserve this noisome visitation.

It takes a lot of flunkies to get one beautiful person to the Oscars

During the awards season there's an over-supply of pictures of photogenic people dressed up to the nines. I'm a bit bored with them and so I prefer to shift my focus to the people behind them. They fall into three groups:
1. Anxious-looking women with clipboards, laminates and ear-pieces who have spent months wondering what to wear in the depressing certainty that nobody will be looking at them at all.
2. Muscly blokes in dinner jackets whose job is to protect the talent from an attack from a sniper or, even worse, a journalist with an unsanctioned question.
3. Super-camp stylists who occasionally scurry into shot to ensure the starlet's train doesn't get caught in her stilletos.

Who killed the Oscars?

They're giving tonight's Oscars ceremony a facelift. There's talk of the presentation having a theme. What? Other than the Oscars theme? I'm feeling embarrassed already. Apparently, in keeping with the times, it will be more restrained. That memo didn't get through to Angelina Jolie who's trying to get hold of a $20 million necklace to wear on the night.

TV audiences have been dropping steadily over the years and the producers would like to restore an element of surprise. It's strange because all the elements they're trying to change - the tight focus on a couple of films as potential winners as pre-selected by lots of lesser awards shows in the run-up, the parading of all the starflesh on the red carpet beforehand, the leaking of details of the show in the press - have been deliberately introduced by the industry in an effort to maximise the evening's impact and ensure its subsequent box office clout.

Some business academic ought to put a name to the process by which businesses, in seeking to extend their control over a golden egg machine, invariably kill the goose. Witness the death of the singles chart. Slaughtered by the fell hand of the music business, the very people who most needed it to survive.

And what has Spotify ever done for us?

If there's ever an internet music play that appears too good to be true, it's Spotify, which has taken over the world of The Word in the last week or so. Effectively, the Spotify player means you can stream music from the world's biggest jukebox, stocked with tracks provided with the blessing of the record labels.

What's the catch? Your listening will be peppered with advertising. If you pay a monthly fee you don't have to put up with that. At the moment they're rolling it out a bit at a time and you have to be invited to take part. You could try following this link to a playlist I've set up and see how you get on. You might even be able to add things. Please don't add whole albums. It quickly becomes tiresome if people do that.

What has Twitter ever done for us?

I've never seen anything take off as quickly as Twitter appears to have done in the last couple of weeks. It seems a classic case of the way that ideas now spread. They travel through circles of friends. You join because you know a few friends who have joined it already. If you didn't know anyone who had tried it nothing else would ever possess you to give it a go. Here's mine.

I've come round to the view that people are now drawn to many things - books, bands, magazines, particularly magazines - through friends. In that sense propagating a magazine today is less a question of introducing the magazine to new readers than was formerly the case. Instead it's like expanding your circle of friends. You do it through baby steps and close encounters rather than by giant strides and big gestures.

I also wonder if the current financial situation has provided Twitter with the perfect moment. Right now people want to hold hands, even if it's via a screen. It costs nothing. And for those who are coping with unemployment it's the perfect way to say "I'm still here."

ITV: a lesson from history

I feel sorry for anyone who's livelihood might be affected by the cuts that ITV is said to be contemplating in the light of the fall in its advertising revenue. I also remember how ITV used to boss the market when it held a virtual monopoly over TV advertising in this country. In the early 80s I was involved in the launches of mass circulation magazines supported by TV advertising. In cases like these you had to be able to buy the first break in, say, Wednesday's "Coronation Street". Of course, you'd have to pay top dollar for the privilege. Nevertheless, as your advertising agency would explain to you, you had no guarantee that the ad would actually appear. If one of their bigger clients, such as Proctor and Gamble, came along in the late afternoon and wanted that slot instead, they would have no compunction about replacing your ad with theirs and your whole, carefully planned campaign would be holed below the waterline. That's irrelevant now but, well, I remember.

If you've got an hour, this could cheer you up

Today I heard a wonderful thing. It was a lecture called "Speaking In Tongues" given by Zadie Smith in New York. I'm too stupid to be able to capture any more than ten per cent of what she has to say but I found even that percentage inspiringly sane. She starts with what it was like to be a girl from Willesden who went to Cambridge and came out with a different voice and goes on through Eliza Doolittle's desire to get a new voice in order to work in a florist via Cary Grant's transformation from Archie Leach to Pauline Kael's "the man from Dream City" to a timely examination of Barack Obama's brilliant way of knowing how to adopt different voices to speak to different elements of America. (She could have added Bob Dylan's transformation from Jewish storekeeper's son to the eternal hobo outsider but that would have just been for me.)

In the second half she celebrates equivocation and looks at how our greatest poet, Shakespeare, was forever nipping back and forth over the frontiers of belief. (In this she credits Stephen Greenblatt's "Will In The World" which you should read if you have the slightest interest in, well, that kind of thing.) She wonders why we expect politicians to exhibit the very certainty which is our least appealing characteristic.

I don't know what the weather is going to do tomorrow but if it's anything like fine I think you should download this recording of her delivering this lecture, put it on your iPod and go for a walk long enough to listen to it. If you don't come back feeling slightly better about mankind, well, at least you'll have had some exercise.

Why I Twitter

Well, you've got to, haven't you?

How the media works (latest in an endless series)

A well-known Radio 4 programme just called me. They wanted to do a story about the magazine ABC figures and needed a comment. I took my "tell me what you want me to say and I'll tell you whether or not I'll say it" stance. It turns out that out of these thousands of figures, all of which tell a story to initiates but may as well be in Aramaic as far as outsiders are concerned, they had identified two threads.

One was fairly well-based. However once the broad brush had done its work it was bound to be wildly misleading. What's the point of me going on the radio to say, what you've just said is not the case for these reasons? That's going to mess up their neat and tidy narrative and make me sound very pedantic.

The other was a thread about an initiative that somebody's trying to get off the ground. I'm prepared to bet my house it won't work but again what's the point of going on the radio to pour cold water over something that most people have never heard of and will never get to hear about? That will make me sound bitter. So I politely declined, leaving the producer a bit miffed.

The media - particularly the broadcast media - has a series of dance steps worked out. What it's looking for is a partner who's prepared to follow. The last thing it wants is somebody who's going to stop and say "why are we doing the waltz when we should be doing the foxtrot?" Some of this frustration is unavoidable. Elvis Costello was talking about this in a recent issue of Word. He found the tedious thing about being interviewed is that the interviewer always came along with a preconception that wasn't true. Then he started his own chat show and discovered he was doing the very same thing himself.

I'm sure this says something profound about the media but I don't know exactly what

The lead story on the Mail's website today credits The Sun.

The widow's mite

Last night I had a drink with somebody who runs a small charity with magazine attached. He was explaining how a lot of their income comes from people who make a bequest of a small percentage of their modest estates. If that estate turns out to include a house in the south-east of England the small percentage can amount to a significant sum. That certainly applied before house price inflation went into reverse. Because many of his subscribers were elderly he was accustomed to the call from a widow informing them that their husband had died and the subscription should stop. These calls came about a year after the death. This chimed with the experience of one former colleague of mine who was editor-in-chief of a well-known magazine with a reader profile on the far side of 65. He reckoned that at any given time about 10% of his subscribers were dead. Their subscriptions hadn't been cancelled because their widows couldn't yet face cutting that particular chord.

The best insults descend from a great height

I think Rowan Pelling was on to something in the Daily Telegraph today:

You have to be careful what you say nowadays. A teacher is facing disciplinary procedures at a school in Hampshire after she told a 13-year-old that her itsy-bitsy skirt made her "look like a slut". The problem, it seems to me, was not the nature of the insult, but the language it was couched in. My old headmistress, who had once been a missionary, used to tell brazen girls that they looked like "painted Jezebels". The more elevated the language, the greater the freedom to abuse: that's what I learned at school.

Sofa, so good

We bought our first house nearly thirty years ago. The couple we got it from were divorcing. Because neither of them had the room to house it, they bequeathed us a beaten-up old sofa. We were delighted. At the time any furniture at all was a bonus. When the kids subsequently came along the old sofa was put into one of their bedrooms. They jumped on it without mercy. Scores of over-stimulated little visitors would climb on its back. Its possibilities as a trampoline, bus and shire horse were explored with some rigour. We didn't mind because we hadn't paid for it. We deduced from the fact that we obtained it for nothing that it must be on its last legs. Kids were ill in it - and probably on it. They had stories read to them on it. I've lost count of the number of times we've fallen asleep on it with some spark-out child cutting off the circulation to an arm. It's been terribly mistreated and yet through all that it has remained the most comfortable item of furniture in the house and the house after that.

Until a couple of months ago we thought that was mere sentiment. Then we got an upholsterer round to examine our furniture and see what was worth improving. He looked at a few different sofas and eventually pointed at the old one. "That," he said, "is a very fine piece of furniture. If you could buy something like it today it would cost a lot of money." He explained all the design features that made it so comfortable. This was an unexpected bonus. It was like suddenly finding out that chocolate was good for you.

We paid for it be reupholstered. Today it came home, no longer to be covered in discarded shoes, empty cereal bowls and copies of Heat in an upstairs bedroom, but to take pride of place in the sitting room. It's expected to be receiving visitors in due course.

Hedgehoppers Anonymous

We've all visited some holiday island where the landing strip at the airport didn't seem to give the pilot much room for error. That's nothing compared to St Maarten in the Caribbean where an arriving jumbo could probably take the flake out of your 99.

Tell me, what attracted you to the famous multi-millionaire?

A.A. Gill was on the radio just now talking about how modern men should guard against gold-digging women. The Today Programme's attitude was "does that kind of thing still go on?" which just how naive we've become. You only have to look around you to see the thing still going very strong indeed. Find a rich man and, quite often, you'll note that he is accompanied by a woman who is younger and more physically attractive than he is. What's surprising is how surprising we seem to find it. Chaucer would have taken it for granted. Darwin wouldn't have batted an eyelid. Jane Austen would have said "Durrr?"

Randy Newman, who deals with all the subjects too obvious for most songwriters to notice, touched on this recently in a song called "The World Isn't Fair", which is supposed to be addressed to Karl Marx. Here he describes going with his second wife to the parents meeting at his young children's new school:

I went to the orientation
All the young mommies were there
Karl, you never have seen such a glorious sight
as these beautiful women arrayed for the night
just like countesses, empresses, movie stars and
queens
And they'd come there with men much like me
Froggish men, unpleasant to see
Were you to kiss one, Karl
Nary a prince would there be

The art of tea

Tea is an underrated meal. Matter of fact, it seems odd to call it a meal. Today being a family birthday, we had tea at the Wolseley in Piccadilly. There was tea in proper teapots. Arrayed on one of those triple decker spinner plates were sandwiches with the crusts removed, scones with jam and cream and a medley of little cakes. Afterwards we wandered up Bond Street and looked in the windows of shops that were safely closed. Once home we opened presents and ate some absurdly expensive Beaufort cheese with a bottle of Nyetimber. This is sparkling wine from Sussex. I am in a position to tell you that it's very good indeed. Knocked sideways by its quality, some of our party have already turned in. I shall do the same once this Everton and Liverpool game is over. This may, of course, be early by your standards. But that's the great thing about tea. It's at tea time.

Technology is still all a blur

It's the fifth anniversary of the launch of Facebook. Isn't it also the 30th birthday of the Mac? How these things can go from obscurity to ubiquity that quickly has gone from breathtaking to commonplace. These things spread so fast that very soon you can't remember what life was like before they came along. At the same time you can't remember when they came along. I feel we need a new vocabulary to describe the effect such phenomena have on our memory.

My past life is marked out by academic years, the stages of the career of the Beatles, the arrival of punk rock, the ages of my children and the launches of magazines. I don't have a mental timeline that I can consult for the arrival of the mobile phone, the desktop computer, the internet or Facebook. As the snail said after he was mugged by the tortoise, "It all happened so fast."

Snowballs

Taken in the local park this morning.

The rise of the words "not appropriate"

When did the expression "not appropriate" become the all-purpose signifier of disapproval? I just heard it again on the news. It's increasingly applied to everything from intemperate outbursts by radio presenters to child abuse. It's a favourite of apologising officials. There's something very mealy-mouthed and prim about it, isn't there? Presumably it was adopted to avoid an overly-judgmental adjective like "wrong".

The world hasn't gone mad but this woman and her doctor may have

Alan Bennett famously said "All families have a secret. The secret is they're not like other families". Too true. I wonder what he'd say about Nadya Suleman, the mother of the Los Angeles octuplets. As this woman recovers in her hospital bed and negotiates with America's biggest magazines and TV shows, fragments of information emerge about her personal circumstances.

We start with the most remarkable of all. She's not on welfare. Which is pretty remarkable when you consider she's already got six children, doesn't work, has recently completed her studies into child development and lives with her mother who is divorced and recently fended off personal bankruptcy. Mother says Nadya has always been "nuts about children". Move on. She had the previous six children by in vitro fertilisation. The father was not her husband. She was recently divorced from him. He's gone to work as contractor in Iraq. Move on.

So then there's the next eight children. I'm a bit hazy about how these things work but one must assume that at some point she went along to a medical professional and said "You know the six kids I've already got? Well, I'm so tickled with them I'd like some more." And one must assume that the medical professional said "Of course. Let's try eight, shall we?"

There's an entire book to be written about how this comes to pass in a country where most people dread having to go into a hospital, not because of the MRSA but because of the cost. Anyway, the cab driver side of my brain sides with Arthur Caplan, a bioethics expert from the University of Pennsylvania, when he says "anyone who transfers eight embryos should be arrested for malpractice." I might add that my wife always says "some women have children to give love, some have children to get love." Well, she shouldn't go short with fourteen of them.

I don't know what all this means. Oh, hang on, I do. As Paul Simon pointed out years ago in song, some folks lives roll easy, some folks stumble and fall through no fault of their own. What he should have pointed out in a final verse is that some folks have a deep seated desire to make their lives more complicated than they already are. And these are infallibly people whose lives are already very, very complicated.