Why a remake of "Brief Encounter" would be even briefer

I watched "Brief Encounter" again this morning and can report it's lost none of its power. They've remade just about every other classic film from the golden age but not this one. It must have passed through some agent's mind. With Kate Winslet, maybe, and possibly Hugh Laurie. But then they will have screened it and realised immediately it would be impossible. The film turns on the question of whether happily-married but bored Home Counties lady Laura will cheat on her husband with the equally-married Alec. Here's a key exchange.

Alec: We know we really love each other. That's true. That's all that really matters.
Laura: It isn't all that really matters. Other things matter too. Self-respect matters and decency.

A contemporary audience wouldn't have any patience with Laura. It would demand that she surrendered immediately. It would probably regard her insistence on decency as another word for hypocrisy. To expedite proceedings the scriptwriters would probably give her an alibi in the shape of an abusive husband. The dilemma would be dissolved in no time. The film would last fifteen minutes, tops.

One git doesn't mark the collapse of civilisation

An extraordinary story has passed through the Twitterverse (London section) this morning. It concerns a London Underground member of staff who has been caught on a passenger's video camera behaving appallingly to a member of the public. Jonathan Macdonald has posted a sober account of this incident on his blog together with video. That seems reasonable and responsible behaviour to me and will no doubt result in some kind of disciplinary hearing.

What disturbs me is the tenor of the comments beneath his post. If you set up any kind of digital pillory nowadays, the people who are first on the scene seem to have difficulty identifying where a genuine grievance finishes and non-specific rage about the world begins. Too many people seem to treat this incident as an excuse to vent on everything from pony tails to political correctness, from Boris Johnson to fare rises, from the economic climate to London Transport training budgets, rather than accepting it for what it is, an isolated example of very bad behaviour. I've been travelling on the tubes for 40 years. Most of the tube employees I deal with are polite and helpful, albeit sometimes lacking in polish.

Sometimes a git is just a git and not a symptom of anything.

This is what happens when the Today Programme send the radio car

For a start it's not so much a car as a van. The driver, who's also the engineer, turns up at your house about forty minutes before the appointed time and looks for a place to park. He then cranks up an enormous transmitter mast which is as high as the houses. Looking out of their windows the neighbours assume that it's a TV detector van and nervously check that their TV licence is up to date. About ten minutes before your item is due the chap comes and knocks on your door and conducts you into the tiny studio in the back of the van. The two of you sit there with headphones on and eventually your item starts. They say that cunning old foxes like Michael Heseltine always chose to be interviewed via the radio car. Not only did he get more time in bed but he also took advantage of the absence of presenter eye-contact to keep talking far longer than he would ordinarily be allowed.

Where the Kindle really falls down

I wish somebody would give me a Kindle or an Ereader or whatever they're called. I'd love to have a go. That's not to say that I believe they're going to take over like iPods have done. I can see why companies would want to see them adopted. I can see why some early adopters might want them. But I can't get my head round their one major shortcoming. Most books and magazines are read in public. In the act of reading something in public with the cover facing outwards we are advertising ourselves and our attitudes. We do it so much we don't even think of it anymore. It's the most complex and powerful sign language we know. It explains why I wouldn't wish to be seen reading a book that was repackaged to reflect the TV adaptation of some classic. It explains why there is nothing on earth more powerful than an attractive woman on the tube with her nose in a serious book, or at least a book that isn't obvious. It explains why that middle-aged lady sitting across from me is reading a dog-eared leather-bound edition of the Psalms or that young black man is wielding a copy of a book about being a young black man. A couple of years ago I read Ian Fleming's "Casino Royale" in a handsome retro edition. I felt like dangling a sign on its spine saying "Of course I read James Bond long before most of you were born and I'm catching up with this because I've never read it and I'm told it is the essence of the original character. Do I look like the sort of person who's reading it because I've seen the film?"

Reading a book in public is an advertisement for ourselves or the millions of other selves we would like to adopt. How can a brushed metal blank or a piece of nice smooth plastic begin to compete with that?

The dark secrets of the side of the road

The discovery of what Melanie Hall's father distressingly described as "a bag of bones" beside the M5 made me turn back to something I'd just been reading in Joe Moran's book "On Roads".

"If you're ever on the run from the law, I would strongly recommend that you hide in the motorway verges of our oldest motorways, like the M1 or M6. There is just enough room for a tent in the half-century of undergrowth and you could surely live like Stig of the Dump, undisturbed for months or years, in this uninhabited wilderness just a cone's throw from the road."

Stuck in a traffic jam on the M1 last week I was looking at what he calls "this liminal land" and wondering what kind of strange world might have taken root there over the years. The only sign of life visible from the road is the occasional hovering bird of prey. I never see them dive. It's as if they're trying to pretend they're doing something useful.

Bringing them all back home

We've got family friends whose son is a young army officer. Six months ago he was posted to Helmand province. I've only met him once as an adult although I remember him as a lad. It's pathetic that I should feel that this gives me some personal contact with what's going on in Afghanistan. Now that we know which battle group he's with, we pay attention every time one of those radio news items starts with the words "the army has confirmed...." One of our daughters wears a wrist band with 2 Rifles on it. None of us has the remotest clue what they're going through but I have a fraction of an idea what agony it must be for his parents and even that thought keeps me awake sometimes.

He's just finished his tour and returned and, as you can imagine, they're beside themselves with happiness. But it won't be long before they start to think about the chances of his being sent back. And if you've done any reading about this conflict - if you haven't, I'd recommend Anthony Loyd's piece in The Times or Patrick Hennessey's "The Junior Officers Reading Club", both of which are written by former soldiers who know whereof they speak - you'll realise that the men are often worryingly keen to get back, either because of ambition or solidarity with their comrades.

I'm not concerned about the rights and wrongs of how we got into this fight but I do feel increasingly soul weary about the idea of kids from leafy Surrey and not so leafy Govan being sent to be used as target practice by a foe that has only one simple objective, to kill a British soldier. And I know I'm not the only one. For once there doesn't even seem to be a newspaper beating the drum and there's a perceptible feeling in the country that these kids have been sent on mission impossible. Unless there's a radical, painful and no doubt embarrassing change of policy this will be still going on in five years time and some of the 20-year-olds losing their legs will be the same schoolkids you might see in the bus station tonight. Come the election I wonder if it will be a bigger issue than the economy.

Words muttered over the grave of Gourmet

Conde Nast in the US just announced the closure of four magazines. One of them is Gourmet, which was launched in 1941. The worldwide tribe of foodies is up in arms, blaming the loss on the insensitivity of Conde Nast management with the connivance of consultants from McKinsey. They only interrupt their thundering against these Philistines to say that of course they hadn't read it for some while since it was taken over by some vulgarian. Closures of magazines are invariably greeted by tear-stained tributes from people who stopped reading them some while before, bitter anonymous postings by people who have just lost their jobs and think-pieces from people who haven't a clue about the economics underpinning such businesses, particularly when they're based in the United States.

Jay Rayner in the Guardian refers to the lavish multiple-dollars-per-word way Gourmet was put together but doesn't seem to feel that this was part of what rendered it unsustainable. American magazines, particularly the ones that they habitually refer to as "upscale", are massively risky bets where an annual subscription is effectively given away in order to achieve the "rate-base" that advertisers have been persuaded to pay for. This is a wager that might work out as long as advertising is going up but will be quickly found out in hard times. In really hard times such as we're going through at the moment anything even slightly marginal plunges into the red overnight. Gourmet is said to have seen a 41% decline in advertising in the last year. That's not just a bad year. That's structural.

"Very courageous, Mr Lebedev"

I remember the days when there were two evening newspapers in London. I think I'm right in saying that the Evening News, unlike the Evening Standard, published on a Saturday which meant that if you were leaving the West End after six on that day you would get the football results printed in a stop-press column on the front. The News disappeared years ago and now, in a move that nobody appears to have seen coming, Alexander Lebedev has announced that the Evening Standard is going to be free. Of all the times to make this move, this is by far the oddest. Not even the most cockeyed optimist thinks the advertising recession is going to stop any time soon and there are those who think that we may have seen the end of the kind of advertising that traditionally financed newspapers and magazines. It appears that Lebedev is saying goodbye to circulation revenue of £15m a year in the hope that by doubling his circulation he can make it up in advertising. That's as good a working definition of an optimist as I've seen in a long while.

Why is government wasting its time *pretending* to do things?

When John Major was Prime Minister somebody stole the radio from my car. I reported it to the police who said there was nothing they could do. They gave me a crime number and I claimed on the insurance. Some years later, when Tony Blair was Prime Minister, somebody else stole the radio from my car. I reported it to the police who said there was nothing they could do. They gave me a crime number and I claimed on my insurance.

The only difference was that this time somebody rang up asking how I felt about the experience and, hilariously, enquiring if I needed counselling. For me that difference seemed emblematic of a shift that had taken place in the way we were governed. Neither government offered an improved outcome but one of them wanted to know how I *felt* about things. You couldn't help feeling that there was some Peter Capaldi in the bunker beneath Whitehall who was constantly calculating how people in marginal constituencies felt about everything apart from the weather.

After that I began to note how the rhetoric of government has gone one way while the experience of being governed took another path entirely. I had another glimpse of that disconnect today. In the same week the Attorney General has had to answer some embarrassing questions about the immigration status of her Tongan housekeeper I have had to supply a TV production company with a copy of my passport so that they can pay me a small, one-off sum. Among the things I had to copy and supply was the cover of my passport. Go and look at yours. I think you'll find that one is indistinguishable from another. They apparently require all this because they need to know whether I have the right to work in the UK. They need to know this even though I have supplied them with a VAT number.

I can only assume that a new arm of some mammoth bureaucracy is creating a lot more work for lots of other people - in this case the production company, me, my accountant - in order to guard against something untoward happening. In doing this it probably won't prevent that thing happening but it will certainly make life more complicated, expensive and tiresome for the rest of us.

Sometimes bad is bad

The papers and news programmes today are frothing at the mouth about the mother who killed herself and her daughter after suffering terrible harrassment from local delinquents. What were the police up to? Why didn't the council know what was going on? Why didn't somebody do something?

The PM is about to make a speech at the Labour Party Conference in which he will promise more legislation about combating anti-social behaviour and giving "problem families" something euphemistically called "support". Seems to me we have had lots of legislation to deal with isolated but no doubt upsetting outbreaks of what you might call bullying. Statutes are introduced, usually at great expense, and years later it's decided that the statute was not the appropriate measure. The Dangerous Dogs business was a classic case of this. It doesn't appear to have reduced the number of pinheads with threatening dogs on chains larging it in Chapel Market. I know this might seem like a counsel of despair but are we fooling ourselves in thinking government can do anything to make some people behave better?

The film that goes on giving

The last time I watched "This Is Spinal Tap" I didn't laugh much but I watch all the later Christopher Guest films – "Waiting For Guffman," "Best In Show" and "A Mighty Wind" – again and again. Last night it was, once again, the last-named. In every case the first time through I thought the film was a bit of a disappointment and gradually came to love it like you come to love certain albums. They're the polar opposite of the average 21st century Hollywood film, which tells you more than you need to know in the first fifteen minutes and then leaves you determined never to sit through it again. It's the apparent lack of ambition that allows these films - which are all, I note, about people on the frontier between the amateur and professional realms - to sink in gradually. Maybe it's because Christopher Guest knows you're going to come back more than once that he allows everything to unfold in such an unhurried fashion.

Things teenage girls do on shopping trips

Test the nail varnish colours in Boots.

Once we were gods

I wonder whether Sol Campbell's week-long misadventure at Notts County is only the first of a series of personal/professional crises we're going to see as the first generation of born and bred Premier League superstars reach the point where they can't play at the gold standard any longer. Footballers have always had to face the day when their knees wouldn't hold them any longer and their lack of pace was cruelly exposed by some kid who was playing in a park not long before. The difference with this generation is that they were paid fortunes and treated like royalty throughout their careers. Facing mortality at the age of thirty-five must be particularly hard to take for the golden generation. Retired footballers used to lose their nest eggs on chains of sports shops. The money made by today's superstars will probably go the same way. It may take longer to go but it will go nonetheless.

How to get your own back on millionaire sportsmen

I have blogged in the past about the frustrations of spending money on cartridge razors. Those are the ones that use Tiger Woods and Thierry Henry as pitchmen, run TV ads that imply they're as hard to manufacture as jet fighters and minutely change their design regularly in order to get extra pounds out of you and leave you with a bathroom cupboard full of obsolete blades. On the advice of a friend (this sounds like an advert already) I sent off for a Merkur razor and a bunch of blades of the kind my father used to use. I've had it a few weeks now and, well, it works. I wouldn't claim it shaves closer (that probably takes a lot of practice) but the warm feeling I get out of knowing that I'm not helping fund some stupid advertorial in GQ featuring John Terry gives me no end of satisfaction.

Why nobody should read a press release ever again

Just now I got an email from a junior at a PR company. He'd obviously been given the job of double-checking their email database. His email enquired, with a baldness that must have been unintentional, "is this the right address or do you just ignore everything that's sent to you?" I have so far resisted replying to him and saying that the answer to both questions is yes. Every day I get 50 emails from PRs that go straight into the trash unread. This is not just because I'm a cynical old hack. Anything that is addressed to me specifically and contains some piece of information that's of interest to me, and not just anybody, I read. The rest get a scan of a subject line and then I pull the lever.

It wasn't always thus. When press releases arrived on paper they were actually read before being thrown away. They were sent to media outlets in the hope that these media outlets would choose to publish their contents. Media outlets read them because they often contained interesting information. When they began arriving on email two things changed: 1) They were distributed far and wide with no thought of cost; 2) their contents were no longer of any interest to the media outlets to whom they were addressed. Press releases used to have a relevance because they meant that for a while the media knew something that not everybody else did. That is no longer the case. At the precise instant that the PR tells me The Flaming Lips are going to release a new record then that same information is going to be available to, at the very least, the guy who runs the Flaming Lips fan site, for whom it's the most important announcement since the Armistice. All the people who care most about this news will know it already. When you send out any piece of information on email you are effectively publishing it. You're putting it on your corporate website, for instance, where people who are interested will find it. You're putting it in a place where people can pull it towards them. Why should you expect a media organisation to fulfil their old role of pushing it towards people? If the media are interested in that information they will link to it. If they're not they'll ignore it. So why is anyone still bombarding me - and thousands of other people - with this information? Could that be because a client's paying them to? And the money that they're paying the PR with, is that the money those same clients previously spent on advertising?

Affluenza in Winchmore Hill

I don't buy into the relative poverty argument that surfaces on the Today programme every year. I'm not sure of the significance of the fact that there's a greater wealth gap than ever before between an Albanian beggar on Oxford Street and, say, Roman Abramovich. I can't see where that gets you. My working definition of real poverty in the first world comes from Robert Caro's biography of Lyndon Johnson. Caro describes a school Johnson taught at in the Texas hill country during the twenties where they had to have a major fund-raising campaign in the local community to buy the basketball team a basketball. It's never about money. It's about what you have or don't have and the expectations that flow from that.

I've just returned from Sainsbury's where I was kept entertained by a 19-year-old who was talking on his mobile as he pushed the trolley round with his mum. Being English I am obviously compelled to make a guess at his background from his accent. He had a pierced ear and was dressed by Hackett. I am guessing that a generation ago his family would have described itself as working-class. His great-grandparents might have rented a radio and holidayed at Southend. In the course of a ten-minute conversation with his friend he recounted which three pubs he and his friends had been to last night, which ones they planned to go to tonight, which clubs in Essex various people were deejaying at, how the Freshers Ball at his "uni" was being held at Pasha and it was only £15 and how he and some mates planned to find a cheap hotel in Brighton so they could stay over when they went clubbing there the following weekend. The fact that they had access to cars was taken for granted. I guess they had most of the things they wanted.

His was clearly not a life of simple pleasures. It's highly geared, as they say in the city. There's something about hearing this round of pleasure being airily outlined on a device that twenty years ago would have been the sole province of merchant bankers that brings home to you just how massively the expectations of ordinary people have grown in the same period. And is the future going to inevitably disappoint our friend on the phone, will he find a way to continue to pay for it or will he be marching in the streets within the next few years, wanting to know what happened to the Good Life?

True Stories Told Live

The inspiration for True Stories Told Live was Malcolm Gladwell, who told me about a long-established story-telling club in New York called The Moth. I mentioned this to everybody I ran into who might be interested in such a thing and nobody could see anything wrong with the idea; that idea being that a bunch of people gather in a bar to listen to a a few people tell true stories. Along with my confederates, actor Kerry Shale and radio producer Kate Bland, I spent months combing London for an ideal venue. Everything was either too big, too noisy, too expensive or too restricted in some way. In the end I went to see John Rensten at The Compass, a pub at the end of Chapel Market which has recently been refurbished as a pub/restaurant, and he offered the use of a very nice small room they've got upstairs.

Thus we kicked off on Wednesday night with our first invitation-only evening. Kerry was MC, I began – on the basis that I couldn't ask anyone to do anything I wouldn't do myself – with a story about my suit, Sue Elliott talked about tracing her birth mother and being traced by her sisters, Chris Difford talked and played a song about going back to Ireland with his mother, Andrew Collins wondered whatever happened to carsickness and Dragan Aleksic described a misadventure involving an art gallery. Some people were quite experienced speakers, others had hardly done it all and when you've got to do up to fifteen minutes without notes it can take quite a bit of nerve.

The reception was warm enough for us to plan another couple between now and Christmas.

The thing that Gareth really has to fight against in "The Choir"

I watched most of The Choir last night. I've never seen the beginning of this programme but I've seen the end of it lots of times, so successfully does it sink its hooks into me. The current series is about Gareth's efforts to encourage the locals to sing in South Oxhey, an unpromising overspill estate near Watford. He has some success, thanks as ever to some middle-aged women who are among nature's joiners, a few kids who are genuinely keen on music (and being on TV), a smattering of people using the choir as a way to ward off personal crises and a few charismatic locals who have been frogmarched to rehearsals so that the producers can depict their "personal journey".

The refuseniks refuse on the grounds that people like them (i.e. working class people) don't turn up and sing in choirs. This is patently untrue. In the north of England and in Wales and probably in other parts of Britain there's a long tradition of working class people doing precisely that. But thanks to some combination of social atomisation and the dictatorship of cool the people of South Oxhey have come to believe that these things are not for them, that their role in life is to work, raise kids and watch TV. In each programme Gareth's biggest obstacle is not their lack of musical aptitude or interest. It's their crippling English self-consciousness.

Mind your language

A pleasant little local restaurant has changed management and stuck this flier through our door. I've removed their name to spare their embarrassment. It's fair to assume that English is not the first language of the new management. I'm sure they're aware of that. Why they didn't get someone English to run an eye over this flier before it went out I cannot imagine.

In praise of Philip Hoare's "Leviathan"

Yesterday afternoon my family were either at rock festivals or in bed sleeping off colds or hangovers and so I repaired to the sofa, covered my knees with a blanket to ward off the sudden chill and read the second half of Philip Hoare's "Leviathan". I'm not really a nature boy so the fact that I was so captivated by a book about whales should be worth some of the usual asterisk-studded superlatives. One of the things that makes the "creative non-fiction" category so seductive for writers is the way it allows them to stretch out in many different dimensions - history, literature, philosophy, science and others - simultaneously but I don't know any who've managed to do it in such a triumphantly non-boring way as Hoare. I can't recommend it too highly.

The thing that doesn't make sense about the BBC cutting money for "top talent"

Bruce Forsyth is the latest BBC star to announce that he's taken a pay cut. The explanation is the same as it was for Chris Moyles and Alan Davies. These are hard times.

There's nothing wrong with their action. It's the explanation that doesn't make sense. In this climate if you're running a commercial operation, or one that relies on conventional tax revenue, you're only too aware that times are hard. People running commercial media organisations are taking pay cuts because revenues are down. But I can't see why the BBC's revenues would be down. Their licence fee income is the same as it was pre-recession and - to their chagrin - much the same as it will be after. The only reason to cut Bruce Forsyth's fee now is because you can. And you could have done that before. But you didn't.

David Beckham has forgotten more about show business than the rest of football will ever know

I went to Wembley last night and saw England qualify for the World Cup Finals by beating a below-par Croatia team 5-1. With ten minutes to go Fabio Capello did what the commercial interests demanded and brought on David Beckham. Far as I could see he barely connected with the ball. At the end the team applauded what remained of the crowd, a third of whom seem to have left before the whistle. As they made their way off Beckham was the only one to take off his (presumably sweatless) shirt and give it to a girl in the crowd. That's the kind of thing that endears him to the sponsors. He's always thinking.

Billy Liar, your train is still waiting

We watched the film of "Billy Liar" on Friday night in honour of its creator Keith Waterhouse. It's a terrific film, directed by John Schlesinger and starring the marvellous Tom Courtenay. Whether as a novel, a stage play, a film or as inspiration for artists like Morrissey, the story of Billy Fisher, who dreams of going up to London and making his name in show business, sits in the back of the mind of anyone who was brought up in the north and ached to get away, particularly in the 60s. The fantasies into which he disappears seem dated now, as does the idea of a grammar school boy going straight into a dead end job rather than being "at uni", but for all the fine talk about devolution there is still something about getting on the train for The Smoke that's as powerful as ever.

The Welfare State seen through the bottom of a glass

Watching Benefit Busters on Channel Four, I can't help but wonder what William Beveridge and other architects of the Welfare State would have made of such hopelessness amid such apparent plenty: the rooms full of unemployed teenagers amusing themselves on mobile phones, looking up jobs on the internet and then buying fast food on the way home. It would have badly shaken his faith in the idea that the state should help people back to their feet, this apparent emergence of a group of people who, on being assured that somebody is standing behind them when they fall, fall all the more readily.

The programme is about the government's attempts to get the long-term unemployed back into work by paying private companies to sort the malingerers from the unfortunate. I don't know who to feel most sorry for: the people with genuine sickness issues, the staff whose job it is galvanise the "demotivated" or Kieran, who claims a bad back sustained in a post-clubbing balcony climb makes it impossible for him to do anything much outside watching daytime TV. None of us are in a position to say whether he's shamming or not. What's abundantly clear is that he has persuaded himself that the world owes him a living.

I don't side with right or left over what to do about this. The withdrawal of benefits is not going to turn the shameless into useful members of society. Similarly throwing more money at the problem isn't going to solve it either. And the emergence of a million NEETs doesn't say much for the effectiveness of "education, education, education" in bringing about a change in the long term.

At the same time idleness is costing the state a head-spinning amount. I can't get my head around government spending but I do occasionally try to look at it in terms of beer. There's somebody I see regularly who hasn't worked for twenty years. There was no doubt a time when they could have done. That time is passed. I assume they're living on benefits. I see them in the morning on their way to the shop to buy four cans of Special Brew. In the late afternoon I see them going back for another four. I calculate this person drinks 56 cans a week, which adds up to nearly three thousand cans a year, and in the absence of any other means of support I have to assume that this beer is paid for by the public purse. I make that £3,750 a year on Carlsberg Special. That's a lot, of course, but that's not the most worrying thing.

What causes me to take a grip on a firm surface is the realisation that the average male living in the North West of England earns £21,100 per annum and pays £3,670 a year in tax. Therefore this person's tax would not be enough to pay for the beer that the government is buying for my neighbour. Something's got to give.

Are people starting to talk like their jobs?

When George Bernard Shaw said it was impossible for one Englishman to open his mouth without making another Englishman hate him, he was referring to the way tone of voice and accent communicated class distinctions. In "The Tailor Of Panama", John Le Carré describes a character as "like all Englishmen, branded on the tongue".

If you listen to as much speech radio as I do you're increasingly struck by the way that occupations seem to have developed accents and ways of speaking.

Top lawyers and civil servants still have the wintry drawl of the old-fashioned upper class. Scientists and naturalists, on the other hand, sound provincial and tentative. The latter group also seem to have a greater than usual tendency towards nervous tics.

Anyone who's made their living selling something to young people talks down their nose and avoids the consonants at the end of words. Actors talk quietly in an effort to muffle the natural richness of their voices. Rock stars never use sentences and will just reel out a ribbon of uninterrupted vocal noise in the key of "I" until you fade them out. Trade union leaders shout. Football managers seem to be the one professional group who cling fiercely to their regional accents as if their dressing room authority depended on it.

The majority of voices heard on the radio have been called upon to field some little local difficulty, whether it's penal policy or the flavour of yogurt, and they all tend to adopt the same non-specific, "I should point out" voice of redbrick reason. They have a rare skill for discussing a subject while killing further interest in it.

Muirhead Bone

Went to see the Muirhead Bone exhibition at the Fleming Collection in Mayfair. Bone was one of the best architectural engravers of the first half of the last century, specialising in summing up the scale of massive engineering projects like this one of the great gantry at Charing Cross station. He also served as an official war artist in both wars. It's a terrific exhibition if you're in the area.

Pop is a verb

I wrote a piece recently in The Word about The Beatles. It's here. It was an attempt to rescue them from beneath the dead weight of all that social significance and point out that what made them exceptionally good was the catchiness of their records, particularly the early ones. I got a reader's letter which was so derisive that I almost felt like turning up on his doorstep. His argument seemed to be that their greatness was so Olympian it couldn't possibly be reduced to mundane matters of craft. How could the word "catchiness" possibly do justice to their achievements? There's no point arguing with customers so I'll pursue my theory here.

Somebody recently slipped me a copy of an excellent documentary called "The Wrecking Crew". It's about Los Angeles session musicians of the 60s and 70s. It features the reminiscences of people like Hal Blaine, Carol Kaye, Tommy Tedesco, Earl Palmer, Plas Johnson and Glen Campbell, the people who played the actual music on everything from "River Deep Mountain High" through "Somethin' Stupid" to Herb Alpert's "Lonely Bull". It's like going under the bonnet of a whole era of peerless pop music, from The Byrds "Mr Tambourine Man" to the theme from "Hawaii 5-0", and seeing what makes it tick.

To hear Carol Kaye (pictured) and Al Casey talk about how they arrived at the backing sound of "These Boots Are Made For Walking" is to realise how much of a hit record's emotional stickiness arises from the uniqueness of a particular performance. This in turn owes a huge amount to the idiosyncratic ear of a certain musician. Nancy Sinatra has performed that song thousands of times since that recording date but she hasn't found anyone who plays the distinctive bassline like the combination of Chuck Berghofer on string bass and Carol Kaye on electric did on that day. "It's very difficult to capture," she says. Capture's the word.

"The Wrecking Crew" proves how wrong my Beatles correspondent was. And I think most rock fans are probably every bit as wrong in exactly the same way. They think greatness in pop is all about soul and inspiration and having your heart in the right place. It's not. It's about the tiny details that, in the words of some musician here, "make the tune pop". If it doesn't pop all the elements - song, singer, musicians and that unspecified box of skills which we in our ignorance summarise under the word "production" - just lie there on the slab.

When these musicians used the word "pop" it's as a verb, not a noun. That's my learning for the week.

Edward Kennedy (1932-2009)

Some time in the late 80s I was in Washington, DC for work. In those days you could visit all the main sites of the capital, including The White House, without any great security hoo-ha. A colleague and I went to the Capitol, had the tour and then decided to drop in on The Senate, which was in session. I remember climbing many stairs and then being admitted to a gallery looking down on the Senate floor. The chairman was there plus a bunch of pages, lobbyists and functionaries. A debate was going on between two senators. Hardly anyone else was in the place. One was Jesse Helms, legendary Republican from North Carolina. The other was Edward Kennedy, legendary Democrat from Massachusetts. Just occasionally, your timing turns out to be perfect.

St Pancras Old Church

Today I went past St Pancras Old Church. The graveyard has been shaved a little to accommodate the Eurostar Terminal. It's not the first time. When the Midland Railway was being built here in the 1870s young Thomas Hardy was the architect with the job of relocating graves. It's reckoned to be one of the oldest sites of Christian worship in Europe. It was also one of the venues on the Beatles Mad Day Out photo session, as seen in the gatefold of the red and blue albums.

Why nobody waits for the fat lady anymore

During this climactic sporting weekend of the summer media coverage of sport overtook the games themselves. During Test Match Special on Saturday the Australian commentator Jim Maxwell, who was otherwise impeccable, kept having to tell his listeners back home to walk away from the radio while he updated them on what was happening in the rugby match between Australia and the All-Blacks. I fear that they wouldn't have thanked him for reminding them of something they either knew already or were taking rigorous steps to avoid knowing. On Sunday I was keeping up with the last overs via a combination of Cricinfo and the Ashes thread on Twitter. This latter told me that catches had been dropped seconds before Cricinfo did. It was a classic case of a thousand amateurs being faster and more accurate than one professional. Before the last batsmen had arrived in the middle the crawler on the Sky Sports Score Centre on my iTouch was confidently announcing "England Win The Ashes".

I was even more disturbed by the Premiership table on the BBC Sport website. I am told that this now updates automatically as matches are going on. This meant that they were showing Spurs at the top of the table with nine points seconds before the final whistle had gone at Upton Park. I know it would have taken somebody even more pessimistic than me to think that England and Spurs weren't about to win but there's something not quite right about this habit of spending emotional capital before it has been gained. It reminds me of the flat feeling you get if you open a birthday present as soon as it arrives, rather than waiting for the big day. All media is acutely aware of the fact that they're only one of thousands of different ways of getting information and therefore their natural reaction is to make sure they're the first with the news, even if it hasn't quite happened yet. Witness OK's Jade Goody "tribute issue" which went on sale before the poor woman had died. I fear this is the way of the future.

Once every ten years I put away all my records and feel a rare sensation of peace

Who can conquer Mount Cassette?

A while back I mentioned I had scores of unlogged, disorganised tapes of my old GLR radio shows. Some saintly souls offered to digitise them. Well, now I've actually got them in one very big box. How do you feel about it now?

Introducing a genuinely exciting item of information technology

The Pilot G2 "Pixie" pen, if you want to get technical. Like a normal pen but small enough to go in the pocket of your jeans. Or, at this time of year, shorts.

No money has changed hands in connection with this message.

What I did on my holidays

Picture: Imogen Hepworth

The pity of war, the pity war distilled

On holiday in Brittany I had to hide "D-Day" by Anthony Beevor whenever the German family next door dropped round. I'm sure they think we're obsessed with the fifty year old past. I suppose I am. In my defence it's the way I was brought up, at the teat of the nation's sustaining myth. I can't claim to follow every thrust and counter thrust of the Normandy campaign. Earlier today I drove up through the bocage and tried to relate this peaceful, tidy landscape to the killing ground described in the book. I couldn't.

What I love in Beevor's books are the gripping details of human nature under unrepeatable duress. The mid-western farm boys who had little concept of a world beyond Kansas but were profoundly moved by the sight of Normandy cows desperate to be milked. The fact that the invaders stripped dead German soldiers naked for the souvenir value of their uniforms. And the head-spinning story of the three French whores who had set up a brothel in a burned-out landing craft on the invasion beach on the evening of D-Day.

The future of journalism (latest in an endless series)

There's a piece in today's Times about Liverpool's chances of winning the league which is notable not so much for what it says as for the way it chooses to say it. The opinions in it are those of Patrick Barclay, who has the title Chief Football Commentator, but it's based on an interview with Ben Smith, who presumably doesn't have an exalted title but can be relied upon to tee up the great man with a few questions (possibly on the phone from his holiday home) and then write up his responses.

This kind of approach is as much of a straw in the wind blowing through the media as all this talk about pay walls. The Times pay Patrick Barclay for his opinions and the more directly they can access those opinions the better. If they send him off to compose his thoughts it probably takes hours, even if he's quicker than most. If they just stick an apprentice in front of him with a dictaphone it probably takes five minutes and for the end-user the result is exactly the same.

50 odd gigs

Last night John Innes sent me this:

[Following Jude Rogers' lead....] OK, here are the rules. Test your memory and your love of live music by listing 50 artists or bands (or as many as you can remember) you've seen in concert. List the first 50 acts that come into your head. An act you saw at a festival and opening acts count, but only if you can't think of 50 other artists. Oh, and list the first concert you ever saw (you can remember that, can’t you)?

It was raining last night so I tapped out this:
1. Chuck Berry and the Animals at the Bradford Alhambra, 1965. 
2. Bob Marley and the Wailers, Lyceum, 1975. Best rhythm section I ever heard. Front line not shabby.
3. Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, Madison Square Garden, Thanksgiving, 1980. Afterwards they had a party in the bowling alley.
4. Earth Wind and Fire, Wembley Arena, 1980-ish. The drummer levitated and turned upside down while playing a solo.
5. Diana Ross, Wembley Arena, 1983? She had a tantrum over the sound and kicked a whole monitor off the stage with just her tiny foot.
6. Little Feat at the Rainbow on a Sunday afternoon in 1974(?) The Doobie Brothers literally couldn't follow them.
7. Haircut One Hundred at the Hammersmith Odeon at the height of Heyward-mania. Mark Ellen and I only men in the audience.
8. Yes at the LSE in 1972. We sat on the floor.
9. The Jam at the Hope and Anchor in 1976. Ten people in the audience.
10. Randy Newman at the Barbican a few years back. Funniest and wisest man in pop.
11. Tom Waits at the BBC TV theatre in 1981. Audience had been bussed in to see Jim'll Fix It.
12. The Modern Lovers at Aylesbury Friar's in 1978. I Introduced them on stage.
13. Elton John at Wembley Stadium in 1975. Hot day. Girlfriend (now wife) and I sat baking on the turf. He played the whole of his new album in dispiriting sequence.
14. Paul McCartney at Earl's Court. It was the first gig that my whole family (youngest member, 7) demanded to attend.
15. Son House at the Commonwealth Centre in 1971(?)
16. Elvis Costello Sunday night residency at the Nashville Rooms in 1977.
17. Maria Muldaur at Ronnie Scott's in 1975. Shook the hand of Amos Garrett.
18. Richard Thompson at the 100 Club on the night before Cropredy a few years back. Teddy was playing guitar. The woman standing next to me was Linda.
19. The last night of the Naughty Rhythms Tour at Holloway Poly. I still have one of Pete Thomas's drum sticks.
20. Jean Michel Jarre lighting up the skyline of Houston in 1983.
21. The D'Oyle Carte Opera doing The Mikado at the Savoy Theatre ten years ago. Best performance of anything I've ever seen.
22. Led Zeppelin at Knebworth in 1978, watched from a lighting tower.
23. Stiff talent night at Eric's, Liverpool in 1977. Jayne Casey and Holly Johnson singing "I'm sticking to you because I'm made out of glue."
24. Marillion in Poznan, Poland, 1986. Band paid in zlotis which they drank afterwards in the hotel bar.
25. Ian Dury and the Blockheads, Sheffield City Hall, 1980. They screened "Deep Throat" on the coach afterwards.
26. The Headboys at the Moonlight Club in West Hampstead. Formerly Klook's Kleek.
27. Tinariwen at the Shepherd's Bush Empire last year. I have finally found my perfect vantage point.
28. Van Morrison and the Caledonia Soul Orchestra at the Rainbow.
29. The J. Geils Band at the Midnight Court at the Lyceum in 1972. We walked most of the way home.
30. The Move at the Queen's Hall, Leeds in 1967. They didn't play but came on stage to apologise.
31. Geno Washington and the Ram Jam Band in Leeds, 1967. Somewhere in an arcade.
32. The B 52s at the Paradiso in 1979.
33. Greg Kihn and Sammy Hagar at some County Fair in upstate California in 1976.
34. The McGarrigles at Carnegie Hall. Rufus Wainwright came on and organised them.
35. Humble Pie at Walthamstow Poly 1971. Steve Marriott spat in the air and then walked under it.
36. Crowded House farewell at Sydney Opera House.
37. Took 17 year old son to see Bob Dylan at Wembley. "He'll be crap," I said. "He was crap," he said.
38. Louis Armstrong at Batley Variety Club in 1967.
39. The Decemberists at Shepherd's Bush Empire a few years ago.
40. The Rolling Stones at the 100 Club. They were rubbish.
41. Britney Spears sound check at the Smash Hits Poll Winners Party in 1998.
42. Status Quo at Reading in 1977.
43. Michael Jackson at Madison Square Garden in 1986. I was in the same hotel as Bubbles.
44. Live Aid.
45. Culture Club at the Dominion Theatre in 1983.
46. Boz Scaggs with his blues band at the Jazz Cafe ten years ago.
47. David Bowie on the "Station To Station" tour at Wembley. The longest, dullest drum solo in history.
48. The Grateful Dead at Wembley twenty years ago. Even duller drum solo.
49. Neil Young at Hammersmith Odeon when he played solo in front of bare brickwork.
50. Toumani Diabate played for me in his back garden in Bamako, Mali in 2007.

Remember him this way

Reading John Le Carre's "The Tailor Of Panama" on holiday. He based the titular character on his old friend and tailor Doug Hawyard who died last year. To refresh my memory I consulted Hayward's obituary in the Telegraph which included this beautiful detail:

Hayward lived in a flat above his shop, and spent weekends at a house on Lord Hambleden's estate in Oxfordshire. But he remained proud of his Cockney roots; and every week until her death in 1984 he visited his mother, Winifred (who had worked in a bullet-making factory during the war), presenting her each time with a £1 note to pay for her meals-on-wheels.

When she died the family found this money preserved in 15 ice-cream boxes under her bed, along with a note reading: "This money is to get Doug out of prison when they finally get him." She did not believe that her son could earn so much money as a tailor, and assumed that he must have criminal connections.

I'm trying to imagine which obituaries of the future will hint at the same sort of raffish life.

London. There's no shortage.

Took a trip on London Transport this morning which was a reminder what a huge, multifarious city it is. Because I was on my own I was able to focus on my fellow travellers. The people on the Piccadilly Line early this morning, predominantly Afro-Caribbean or Filipino, were clearly on their way to church. The people on the Docklands Light Railway on their way to the London Triathlon at the ExCel Centre in Docklands (above, 10,000 competitors each day) were overwhelmingly white and middle-class. Mum, children and grandparents were gathering to cheer on super-fit 35-year old Dad who was trussed up like Paul Rutherford during the early days of Frankie Goes To Hollywood. Afterwards I went to Stratford to see if it looks like an Olympic venue. It does, kind of. All my fellow passengers on the train-replacing bus that took me from there to Highbury and Islington were East European apart from a couple of hangover-nursing posh girls who were "rear tyred". When we got to Highbury there were armies of red-headed Glasgow Rangers supporters pouring out of the station on their way to a friendly at the Emirates.

"Darling, I could have calibrated words differently"

Obviously the three little words that matter most in a marriage are "I was wrong". In that context they lead to forgiveness, sooner or later. In politics on the other hand they are the inevitable precursor to weeks of public scorn and wounding criticism, which is why politicians seldom utter them. They approach the press conference lectern intending to say them but at the last minute they can't bring themselves to do it and retreat instead into a tongue no man other than a politician ever used. They "mis-spoke". Or in the case of Obama's clarification over what he said about the Henry Gates case they "could have calibrated words differently".

This is a very subtle way of putting things, as befits a very subtle man. It suggests he should have said things in a different way while also, by employing a term often used in the world of artillery, implying that had he known the impact his words would have had, he would have pointed them at somebody else. How he must yearn for the days when Presidents weren't expected to have a quotable reaction to every small convulsion in the nation's daily life.

Play up, play up and play the game

I was looking at my brother-in-law's copy of The Sportsmans Who's Who of 1957. The foreword included a quote from Milton which gives you an idea what world this came from.

A fair number of the people listed played more than one sport. Fred Titmus didn't just bowl off-breaks for England and Middlesex. He also played inside-right for Hendon in the Athenian League.

Many of them were amateurs and therefore they provide a home address rather than that of a club. Eric Dominy of 18, Hamilton Way, Finchley learned judo in a German P.O.W. camp from which he managed to escape. Hubert Doggart of 66 Kingsgate Street, Winchester played test cricket for England versus the West Indies but could only manage to play for Sussex in August. He also wanted to mention that he played squash, rackets, rugby fives and soccer for Cambridge as well as turning out at inside-right for Corinthian Casuals.

Lloyd George clearly didn't know my grandfather

This is the picture known in my family as grandfather with Lloyd George. Since he's in the top left while the former Prime Minister is trying to get away to resume his pursuit of some young filly we may assume that their legendarily close relationship was going through one of its chillier periods. I don't suppose there's an expert on liveried servants out there who might be able to date or place this picture?

Hur-hur-hur

I don't hold the bien-pensant view of Jeremy Clarkson. If anything I'm a fan but the story about him describing the Prime Minister as a see you next Tuesday during a Top Gear audience warm-up does shine another light on what happens when that unique admixture of money, celebrity and yobbishness goes off as it does all the time these days.I can't imagine any public context in which I would use the c-word about anyone, from the Prime Minister to the lowest in the land. If I was employed by an organisation and used it in front of that organisation's clients I would expect to be fired on the spot and wouldn't expect any redress. If you were in charge it would definitely happen.

So what possessed this educated, upstanding member of the bourgeoisie to drop the c bomb in front of an average bunch of licence-payers, most of whom probably wouldn't dream of using that word even if they hit their thumb very hard with a hammer? It's not a heat of the moment thing or you would hear rock stars use it on stage and footballers in post match interviews. It doesn't escape. It's deployed. So why did Clarkson do it? Was he momentarily struck by the terror of the man who knows he's meant to be funny but has nothing funny to hand? Maybe it's the increasingly desperate pursuit of that low "hur-hur-hur" of (largely male) approval that can usually be elicited without need for material that is actually funny. I was talking to Danny Baker about this very thing earlier this week. He didn't do "hur-hur-hur" because it wasn't his sense of humour and women didn't like it. Nonetheless he noted that it was the easiest way to do material that broadcasting bosses considered acceptably "edgy".

Pets win prizes

I watched a programme on BBC1 last night. That doesn't happen often. It was called "The Rat Pack", about as bog-standard a piece of slice-of-life telly as you can imagine. The BBC may be overpaying certain of its stars but it's good to see that they can still make a series like this for the change they found down the back of Graham Norton's sofa. It was about two brothers whose business was ridding hysterical Londoners of rats. But really it was about their dog Charlie, a Jack Russell who had found, late in life, a true purpose to existence; clamping rats in his teeth and shaking them until their necks broke. The producers made it clear at the top of the programme that this was going to happen and so you had to hang around for the money shot, which came, as ever, near the end. It only worked out because one of the brothers took the precaution of putting the rat in a bucket, thereby making it near impossible for Charlie to fail. You can only conclude that TV viewers have no problem with cruelty to animals, providing it's the right animal dishing out the cruelty and the right one on the receiving end.

You won't believe what happened to me when I called BT

I've been buying broadband from BT for ten years now. During that time they've irritated me by changing the name of the service from BT Openworld to BT Connect to BT Yahoo. Everything, in fact, except BT Meets The Upsetter At The Grass Roots Of Dub. I have three BT lines. A phone line, a burglar alarm line and another number that carries the broadband. Because I have only one point that delivers this last line I wondered if I could transfer the broadband to the main phone line, which has more sockets. I'd put off doing it for a couple of years because I couldn't bear the draining, uncomprehending conversations with distant call centres, the cost and upheaval of engineers or the risk that I would be left with no phone lines at all.

I was talking to Fraser about it. He said it ought to be possible for them to just switch it over. Fearing it couldn't be as simple as that, I put it off for a further couple of months. Eventually, I took my courage in both hands and called the BT Broadband queries line which connected to somebody in Bangalore who gave me another number to call in sales. They then put me on to the change of address section who said they could switch over the line but it might take seven days. Over the next seven days I received a series of automated phone messages promising that the process had been instigated and then a final call noting that the deed had been done. A couple of days later an actual human being called and asked if it was working. It was.

So there you are. The story of something working as it should and good customer service. I couldn't let it go unremarked.

No more heroes

I grew up surrounded by men who'd fought in either the First or the Second War. Some must have served in both. None of them talked about it much, partly because they had the traditional ambivalence of old soldiers and also presumably because they didn't wish to appear to be taking the limelight of somebody more worthy. Old combatants rarely show off about it. If anything they're slightly embarrassed to have survived. At his death at the age of 113 First World War veteran Henry Allingham was widely referred to as a hero. I'm sure he would have been appalled to be called any such thing. It seems that the less experience of military service anyone in the media has the more ready they are to dust off the h-word for anyone who's done what they would have modestly called their duty.

Why is junk always so poignant?

I've spent the day listening to the Test Match and, in a very half-hearted way, trying to throw out a lot of junk. Here, in the words of Julie Andrews, are a few of my favourite things.

The box is one of many packed full of unmarked cassettes. For ten years I did a radio show on GLR. I used to slip a tape into the machine before each one so that I had a record for my own reference. I didn't bother recording the dates. It probably wouldn't have made any difference had I done so. I don't even have a functioning cassette player to play them on at the moment. This is a classic Stuff Dilemma. I can't bring myself to throw them away but I am very unlikely to ever listen to them.

The huge VHS cassette of "All The Presidents Men" was the one I got when I joined one of the first video rental libraries. In those days you had to pay a joining fee, a sum on each rental and you had to buy the first cassette. This cost me £40 and this was in the mid-80s.

The pipes were my father's who died twenty-seven years ago. They've got his teeth marks on them.

The Birds

The only thing I took away from "Jurassic Park" was the advice that if you wanted to get an idea of how prehistoric creatures behaved, look at birds. There are herons living in our very un-exotic London suburb and when you hear their wings beating above, generally early in the morning, it can seem like you're about to get a visitation from the distant past. I snapped this one on a neighbour's roof this morning.

A portrait of the artist

I went to the first day of the Lord's Test today and found myself in a small section with this beautiful view. It was to the side of a balcony on which the photographers with long lenses perch, lining up ball after ball in the hope of getting the one that tells a story. And alongside them in their eyrie was cricket painter Jocelyn Galsworthy who spent the day dabbing away at a canvas. Seems a pleasant way to make a living.

Suffer the little children to come unto me for I've been checked by the ISA

I'm delighted that a bunch of well-known childrens' authors, with Philip Pullman and Michael Morpurgo at their head, are refusing to cooperate with a body called the Independent Safeguarding Authority in being "checked" prior to giving readings in schools. It needs a case like this to draw attention to the damage being done to all of us by the all-pervasive belief that children:
a) survive their childhood thanks only to the ceaseless vigilance of adults;
b) are at most risk from the people who are set in authority above them;
c) can be protected from predators by a cursory records check.

I've been going into schools from time to time over the years in a professional and parental capacity. In the last ten years I've grown sadly used to the feeling that I am likely to be seen as a sinister interloper unless I'm properly badged and certificated and in the presence of a licenced teacher with a stun gun. It's that depressing presumption of guilt that Pullman is objecting to. I think he and his colleagues may bring about some change. Good luck to them.

It's the mothers I feel sorry for

"It rips out my heart a little every time, the sight of those young men’s fresh, hopeful faces, and the knowledge that yet another mother, somewhere, has just had her heart ripped out for eternity," writes
Melanie Reid in The Times of the deaths of young soldiers in Afghanistan. Meanwhile in Muswell Hill the mother of backpacker Jamie Neale must have feared she would never get to know what happened to her son. (Once the relief over his return has flooded through the system I fear he'll get a public kicking for his stupidity.)

Is it strange that we instinctively feel the grief of mothers must be more painful than anybody else's? This is particularly the case with the mothers of men of that age, who seem programmed to put themselves in harm's way whether in uniform or in the fleece of a gap year tourist. Last week I spoke to the 28-year-old Patrick Hennessey who's written "The Junior Officers Reading Club" about his time with the army in Helmand province. He assured me it was common practice to tell one's mother that the fighting was taking place far away from where you were operating. I have a friend whose son is out there now who's probably spinning his mother the very same line.

Mark Ellen reckons the most poignant song ever written may be Anna McGarrigle's "Heart Like A Wheel". He may be right, just for the line "when you bend it, you can't mend it". I don't know whether the Arabic tongue deals with hearts differently but the other day I read this line in Louise Richardson's "What Terrorists Want". It's the mother of a suicide bomber speaking. She said had she known what he was going to do "I would have taken a cleaver, cut open my heart, and stuffed him deep inside. Then I would have sewn it up tight to keep him safe."

And Deliver Us From Inappropriateness

No single word pops out of the mealy mouth of modern management more frequently than "inappropriate". It manages to avoid being specific about the transgression while suggesting that the person using it has moral standards significantly higher than everybody else's.

And now it's "inappropriate" behaviour involving a researcher that has got Hardeep Singh Kohli suspended from his roving reporting role for BBC's The One Show. Somebody reported somebody else and before anyone could stop it the corporation's disciplinary procedure had swung into action and he's being hung out to dry for six months - and this is where it really sounds as if the captain of the second eleven has got pissed and thrown up at the back of the coach - "to reflect on his behaviour". Honestly. Wouldn't we rather be dismissed in shame than sent off to reflect on our behaviour?

A couple of thoughts occur:
1. In the media the standard interpersonal stuff which makes every work environment interesting is often further, er, enlivened by the presence of fame, money and influence. Part of me thinks that if you don't want to tangle with what's involved when highly competitive show-offs work closely together for long periods of time you should get a job with, say, the Church of England. But then I've read "Barchester Towers" so I know that it goes on pretty much everywhere. And the researcher who was on the receiving end of the "inappropriate" behaviour didn't formally complain. Which makes the whole incident even more puzzling.
2. What with this and the Carol Thatcher case you do wonder who's supposed to be managing The One Show. Local difficulties like these shouldn't turn up on the front pages. In my experience if you have to instigate a disciplinary procedure you've lost control. This particularly applies with freelance contributors. Surely you take them for a walk and warn them how they might be coming over to people. If that doesn't work you just don't ring them any more.

What were once vices are now habits

The 40th anniversary of the Stonewall riots provides an occasion to quote from this Time magazine piece from 1966 back when the world was, by repute, swinging.

[homosexuality] is a pathetic little second-rate substitute for reality, a pitiable flight from life. As such it deserves fairness, compassion, understanding and, when possible, treatment. But it deserves no encouragement, no glamorization, no rationalization, no fake status as minority martyrdom, no sophistry about simple differences in taste—and, above all, no pretense that it is anything but a pernicious sickness.

In the 60s the only homosexual I was aware of was our local butcher and that was because he was said to be in court from time to time. On the bigger stage there were certainly no openly homosexual actors or musicians, let alone politicians. Stonewall triggered a movement which eventually arrived here as the Gay Liberation Front. At the beginning of the 70s I was in a scummy flat in Turnpike Lane with a number of flatmates, one of whom had come out in a most flamboyant way. Our flat became a meeting place and crashpad for members of the GLF Youth Group, a movement which combined self-righteousness with copping-off opportunities that guaranteed its success. Within six months I graduated from not knowing a single homosexual to knowing hundreds of them, their language, their hang-outs, their mating habits and quite a bit about the mechanics of sexual congress. Had any of those people at the time been told that the first wedding my youngest daughter would be invited to on her own would be the civil partnership of a gay couple, I suspect they would have been amazed, as much by the fact that the couple were women as anything else.

This is the odd thing about change. It's deucedly unpredictable. We don't march in lock step towards the light. There are all sorts of curious mis-steps and wrong turnings. Gay Liberation was triggered by Stonewall. It might never have happened. Actually, the group who appeared ripest for liberation at the time were schoolkids who were loudly demanding the right to ruin their own lives, marching in the streets and waving the Little Red School Book. That's one emancipation movement that's gone backwards if anything. In the last forty years the argument that children should be shielded from real life has prevailed, often with the happy support of the children themselves who have benefited materially just as their own independence has been reduced.

When I read pieces like the Time editorial above I can't help thinking that some of the opinions held by people who think of themselves as moderate and liberal will appear equally ludicrous in ten years time.

Nobody sings like Mama Cass

Today I am mainly listening to Mama Cass. There don't seem to be any voices that are lovely in the Mama Cass way anymore. I hear belters, divas, the peddlers of empty melisma, the ones who gargle to denote high emotion and faux-naïf pixies by the score, but I don't hear a woman with a voice that can make you sit up straight and take on the day with a smile on your face like Mama Cass did on "Getting Better".

Everybody has to convince us that they're mining some inexhaustible source of inner pain. There may well have been some of that going on with Mama Cass but she didn't let it show. The best thing a singer can do is make people feel better and the first person she needs to make feel better is herself. Nobody did that better than Mama Cass on "Getting Better". It's not perfect. It's got slight slips and even wanders off the note briefly. Nobody's gone back and fixed it. It's the sound of somebody making the best of things, which we don't hear often enough. And what a love song Barry Mann and Cynthia Weill provided her with. Few people can sing the word "groovy" without parenthesizing it. Mama Cass could. Just as great songwriters can pack a line with a lot of syllables great singers like Mama Cass manage to sound as if they're discovering that line for the first time. "Now there's something groovy and good 'bout whatever we've got". Indeed.

It's the Ashes. Look away now.

Everyone above a certain age remembers "No Hiding Place", the episode of "Whatever Happened To The Likely Lads" where they sought to avoid learning the score of an England international until the evening's highlights. It seemed a bit of a stretch even then. Nowadays if you want to avoid knowing what happened in the last minute of a major sporting occasion you have to remove yourself from society entirely. Now that the Ashes has begun it's an all-day hazard once again. During the 2005 Ashes I was working in an office with a window into an adjoining room in the corner of which was a television. That meant I only had to glance up to get a rough idea of what was happening. I couldn't see detail but I nonetheless developed a way of reading the play just from the camera angles the director was selecting. Wide shot with lots of green meant a boundary. Close-up meant batsman was having torrid time. When the games were taking place overseas I followed the ball-by-ball coverage on the excellent Cricinfo. Sinister patterns begin to appear. A dot ball took no time to come up on the screen. If the page was taking a while to refresh that could mean a wicket. The reporter was busy filling out the details. It's like the off-screen yelp of the football-watching ex-pros on Jeff Stelling's programme or Alan Green saying "we're going to go to White Hart Lane in a moment" on Five Live; an entirely new form of the thousand natural shocks that sport is heir to. Compared to all this agonisingly mediated information actually being at a match is a breeze.

Contrast all this with Charters and Caldicott in Alfred Hitchcock's "The Lady Vanishes". This pair are trying to get back by train from some unspecified Mittel European country on the brink of war in time to catch the last day of the Test Match. The progress of the train is of course interrupted by disappearing women, the always distracting Margaret Lockwood, shoot-outs with secret agents and regular passport checks by fascist jobsworths. And yet they never lose their faith that they will be returned to Victoria in time to scoot across town to Euston and take the train to Manchester that will get them to Old Trafford in time to see the last day's play.

An Art critic writes

The problem with the whole fourth plinth business is that plinths are traditionally occupied by larger-than-life figures. Once you plonk an actual human being on a plinth - even one dressed as a fish - he all but disappears.

Another internet music play gets a free ride from the City pages

All stories about music companies get disproportionate space on the financial pages because they provide the section editor with an excuse to run a picture of a glamorous woman singer under a headline about being "on song". There was a classic on the front page of the Sunday Times's Business Section yesterday: Fergie from the Black Eyed Peas under "Going For The Big Notes", which announced a story about Spotify seeking to raise another £30m. In this I wish them well but I wonder if a little bit of the page area devoted to Fergie's frock could have been used to ask the odd question.

Spotify costs the end user nothing. Its revenue comes from either advertising or monthly subscriptions. Since it's signed up more than 2m users since last October you might say that the company's proud claim to be doubling revenues monthly is not quite as spectacular as it first appears.

You really don't need a weatherman

An economist on the Today programme just apologised in case he and his fellow professionals are confusing us with the latest round of figures about public spending. How could we possibly be confused? We don't know the numbers. We don't need to know the numbers. It's quite sweet that politicians of all sides think it's about the numbers, as if we can be dazzled by a little book cooking, or "re-prioritising" as some government spokesman had it the other day. If you want to know how it's going you don't look at the figures. You look at their eyes.

My grandmother was no economist but even she could have told you that when the government has borrowed as much as ours has, unemployment and its attendant costs are rising steeply, the pound is in bad enough shape to frighten anyone who buys a bottle of Chianti, let alone goes on a holiday abroad, almost a million young people are not in work, education or full-time training, the one source of taxation income, financial services, is on the bones of its arse and according to the World Bank and the ratings agencies Britain is getting a reputation among the lenders of money of a particularly bad-risk sink estate, then the fantasy that public spending won't have to be reduced and taxation won't have to rise is one that you couldn't get past Pollyanna, let alone the supposedly sensible British public.

When every business or household in the UK is planning for no-growth, decline or armageddon, the idea that the present government is going to have a leetle bit of a look-ette at the figures after the election gives you an idea of what an empty charade that's going to be. Either they think somebody else will be looking at the books after the election (which is certainly what the polls believe) or their research has told them that we'd prefer not to have our pretty little heads clouded with the awful truth. I find this kind of collective delusion a lot more frightening than the truth could ever be.

You can call me Al

There was an interesting exchange on the radio yesterday between Jack Straw and Ann Widdicombe about the rights and wrongs of releasing Ronnie Biggs. What made it interesting was that they were referring to each other as "Jack" and "Ann". This is the first time I've heard British political adversaries address each other in such familiar terms without one of them being at death's door. Perhaps they're both retiring at the next election. It was made even more unusual by the way they referred to the subject of their discussion as "Mr Biggs", which must be an indication of just how ill he is.

Mrs Slocum: the joke goes on forever

I don't suppose I've actually watched "Are You Being Served" for many years. The beauty of this kind of comedy is you don't really have to watch it as long as you carry it around in your head. It's like the Carry On series. The predictability is what makes it work. The plot is only there to provide excuses for the characters to behave in stereotypical ways.

Mrs Slocum (what a wonderful name that is) embodied a stock character that you can find in English literature as far back as Chaucer. She was the lady of a certain age who kow-towed to her superiors, lorded it over her underlings and yet remained immensely vulnerable to flattery, particularly of a romantic nature. Mollie Sugden was a master of this kind of characterisation. Her lines came front-loaded with flowery pretension before souring into fish wife abuse at the end. She was high and low in a very English way. You could smell the face powder and the "products" in her hair but she could probably look after herself in a scrap in a dockside pub.

Of course a dockside pub is as much of an anachronism as Grace Brothers itself, which had probably gone out of business by the time the series was first launched. If there are any Mrs Slocums still around they're not wearing corsets or sitting at home with their pussies. Nonetheless the joke embodied in that character, just as the joke attached to the characters played by Charles Hawtrey or Sid James, chuckles on down the years.

The banality of evil (a continuing story)

The horror of last night's Dispatches on the massacre in Mumbai didn't come from shots of the station concourse covered in brains, first-person accounts of those who were lucky to escape with their lives or even security camera footage of the gunmen cutting down guests at the luxury hotels. It came from recordings of the phone conversations between the murderers and their controllers back in Pakistan.

The squaddies with their fingers on the triggers may have been country boys who were temporarily distracted from their bloody work by the size of the computer screens in the buildings they moved through but they were being issued with their instructions by people far more frightening. Anyone inclined to believe acts like these are organised by people temporarily setting aside their finer feelings in pursuit of a sane political goal should hear this monster as he choreographs each move in his own personal festival of carnage. A slit throat here, a bullet in the back of the neck there, capricious mercy for a Turkish muslim followed by words of comfort for a Jewish woman (each Jew, he tells his team, is worth fifty ordinary corpses) who in due course he intends to have despatched.

He's sitting in a room with a bunch of fellow mobsters who are watching the events on live TV. Occasionally he has to seek advice from the rest of his management team and we hear him calling over his shoulder "should they kill them now or later?" At one stage a gunman answers the phone with the words "peace be with you." It's the kind of thing no scriptwriter would dare hand in for fear of vulgarising an event so terrible and writing a role no actor would dare play.