Take your P.A. music and shove it

We were at Twickenham yesterday. When Chris Ashton swallow dived over for his fourth try music once again barked through the P.A.. My son, who's twenty-three, turned to me wearily and said "I don't need Mark Ronson to tell me to celebrate".

I'd like to introduce him to the misguided soul who's responsible for tarting up the basic Twickenham experience - 30 players, 80,000 souls, the smell of mud and Guinness and, in yesterday's case, sunshine - in the mistaken belief that he's somehow making the game more appealing to the young. There were lots of young people there yesterday - university students with prematurely flattened noses, small children with their Italian dads, teenage girls on a spree, young Milanese wearing gladiator's helmets - and from what I could observe they weren't remotely impressed by the fact that one Lee Mead sang "Jerusalem", that flame shot out of some barrels when the England team came out or that paratroopers abseiled from the roof of the stand with the match ball.

I'm sick of saying it. Anyone who thinks that major sporting occasions need to be made more exciting should be disqualified from having anything to do with major sporting occasions. But I'm just a carping old git. Instead it's about time the young people they purport to be appealing to marched on the offices of these people behind a banner reading "Take your fatuous notions of excitement, your celebrities who wouldn't be recognised if they were busking on Twickenham railway station, your preposterous pyrotechnics that render the field of play invisible, your utterly, utterly pointless P.A. music that the crowd always drowns out anyway and give us instead either a military band or a male voice choir. We are the crowd and we provide the excitement. You don't. Butt out."

The great thing about American rock bands

I went to a music industry showcase in a club the other night. The first act was British. You didn't have to hear the actual words they spoke to know that. You could pick it up from their body language alone. Anything that was said between the songs came over as if it had just popped into the singer's head and swiftly petered out. It was as if they hoped that if they apologised first then the audience wouldn't be too hard on them if the song didn't go too well. When they looked at each other it was to exchange sheepish glances as if they had woken up to find themselves doing something faintly embarrassing. You wondered how they'd ended up in show business.

The act who came next were a bit more experienced but just as unknown. The difference was they were American. That meant that they meant business. There was nothing apologetic about their body language. They had clearly all had experience of standing up in front of strangers and saying "I'm your server this evening and I'd like to tell you about the specials". They didn't try to banter. Anything they said had been said before. Nobody looked round to work out what was going to happen next. Because they'd all presumably served at least some time doing covers in a bar band, they could probably have whipped out a decent version of "Eye of The Tiger" if things had got really sticky.

I've been watching live rock bands for more than forty years now and it's the one thing that hasn't changed. The Americans haven't come to play. They've come to work.

On sending kids to school dressed as fictional characters

Tracey Thorn was tweeting this morning about how irritating she finds the fashion for schools encouraging children to come dressed as fictional characters in the hope that this will encourage them to read. My wife, who's a teacher, gets equally tense when this day rolls around in her school calendar. It's nothing to do with reading. Literacy, possibly, but not reading.

For years now schools have been busting a gut to externalise the reading experience. They pretend that reading's exciting in the same way that games are exciting. It's not. There is no indication that covering the classroom walls with pictures of fictional characters is likely to make children want to go in a corner, shut themselves off from human society and lose themselves in the book that the character came from. I'm not sure there's any connection. It seems to me that the two experiences are entirely different. One is social. The other is solitary. One is easy. The other is quite hard. It's not like listening to a story. It's more like telling yourself a story. There is a whole world of difference between reading Tolkien and watching some expensive re-enactment of its most action-packed moments. Reading is hard.

The really hard thing about reading is starting. It involves deciding that there is nothing else you could be doing with your time that is better than lowering yourself into a book. This applies whether you're nine or ninety. It applies to you this evening as you decide to spend an hour watching some adequate TV programme rather than turning it off and reading that book that you know is considerably more than adequate.

Elton John knows the secret of publicity

There's an interview with Elton John in the new issue of The Word. It's largely about his life-long obsession with records. (Elton belongs, like I do, to that generation of people who grew up wanting nothing more than records and he's always interesting on the subject.) Near the end of a long interview with Rob Fitzpatrick Elton threw in a few unsolicited comments about Cheryl Cole, Simon Cowell and the fakery involved in a lot of modern pop. We punted some of the more quotable jibes at the Daily Mirror, who went quite big on them. Then the Mail picked them up and the next thing we know and the internet being what it is those jibes are everywhere from Los Angeles to Mumbai. Elton's PR doesn't mind at all.

The interesting thing is how often Elton looses off a few rounds in the direction of a newsworthy name. It's often interpreted as him just being unable to entertain a bitchy thought that he doesn't speak. I wonder if it's actually an old stager knowing that the best way to increase his public profile exponentially is to be prepared to have a pop at someone else who's famous. In the same week he's given an interview to Rolling Stone in which he lays into Billy Joel about his drinking. Not long ago it was George Michael's fondness for weed. I can remember times when it was Michael Jackson's addictions, Madonna's miming or Eminem's problem with homosexuals. In the dim and distant past he used to take aim at Steve Harley or Alvin Stardust.

There will be an exchange of fire, a period of truce and then, in all probability, a high-profile rapprochement, probably in the form of a duet. (He's probably already sent a million pounds of flowers to Cheryl Cole with a "they twisted my words" note.) I have no problem with it. The world of entertainment would be a marginally duller place without Elton. But here's the thing. He's a lot more shrewd than we give him credit for.

Could football clubs ever pay fans to turn up?

There's been a lot of talk in the last couple of weeks about football losing its soul, as there is any time one club signs a player for a record amount, another one professes undying loyalty to a team before leaving and a club threatens to change its location to somewhere it can accommodate more paying customers. I'm not getting into any of those debates. Most mysteries about football can be simply unravelled with reference to Bill Clinton's dictum "It's the economy, stupid".

The reason that the English Premier League is the most widely-televised and, as a consequence, most profitable league in the world isn't because of its quality. It's because of its excitement. Most of that excitement comes less from the happenings on the pitch than from the reaction of the people watching. I'd go so far as to say that 50% of the value of the experience for the TV viewer, and hence the advertisers and hence the TV companies and hence the owners of the clubs, who with each passing week have less in common with the world of sport and more in common with other "rights-holders" such as Disney, comes from the thunderous soundtrack provided by the crowd. When a crowd opens its throat at Anfield or St James's Park or White Hart Lane it produces a note that no other entertainment experience can come anywhere near. All the years of enmity, disappointment and bruised pride come rushing to the surface. It's the Wagner of prime time television. It can make even the dullest game a quite acceptable way to sell beer, cars and gym pumps, which is after all what it's about.

So why should those people pay so much for providing that 50%? We've seen a lot of changing business models recently, many of them forged more in hope than expectation. Newspapers give their news away. Bands who used to tour to sell records now release records in order to tour. Cinemas are out-of-town retailers of carbonated beverages. Nothing remains the same. Is it possible that in the future some Premier League sides will stop charging spectators exorbitant admission prices and will instead start wooing them with discounted tickets in the hope of the "atmos" they might provide? And might they then decide what kind of spectators they would prefer to have making noise on their behalf? In 1968 the average age of a Manchester United fan standing at the Stretford End was 17. These days it's over forty. In ten years it will presumably be over fifty. That's not going to make it any livelier. As crowds get older they grow less demonstrative, as Bono is reminded every time he looks across the orchestra pit.

Of course, no business is stupid enough to give away what it has previously been successfully charging for. (Newspapers excepted, of course.) But I reckon that at some point in the next five years somebody will start talking about "inverting the model".

Matt Leblanc and the "I'm here why?" manoeuvre

Episodes is worth watching for the occasions when it throws light on the highly cultivated one-upmanship that passes for etiquette in the higher reaches of media and show business. My favourite bit so far is when the British sitcom writers Tamsin Greig and Stephen Mangan are persuaded against their better judgement to meet TV star Matt Leblanc because he's apparently such a big fan of their show that he wants to star in an American remake.

The meeting takes place in a restaurant. They're there before he is. He makes his entrance wearing sunglasses and talking on a mobile in order to make it clear that he has far better things to do. He finishes the conversation, sits down, takes off his shades and says "I'm here why?"

This puzzled display of disinterest is a classic move, whether it's authentic or feigned. The first rule of Self-Importance is you must never be seen to have instigated any interaction. The meeting is always somebody else's idea. You're the one whose time is being wasted. I've been summoned by intermediaries to meetings with V.S.I.P.s which floundered as soon as the small talk was over and the V.S.I.P. said "and what can I do for you?" At this point it seems brusque to blurt "but your people set up this meeting apparently because you wanted it". By that point the damage is done. They've got the upper hand, which is the only hand they're interested in having.

In praise of a 39-year old masterpiece

This weekend I restored my record deck to pride of place in my work room at home and played a lot of vinyl. I enjoyed There Goes Rhymin' Simon more than anything. Paul Simon's got a new album coming out soon. I expect it will be good but it's unlikely to be as good as "Rhymin' Simon". I doubt it will have songs quite as vivid and spare as these. That would be asking too much.

This is my thirty-ninth year of listening to this record. For most of that time I've absorbed it sub-consciously, with the result that the lyrics occasionally pop into my mind in response to different situations that life presents you with. The line from "Kodachrome" about the old girlfriends never matching his sweet imagination. The line from "Tenderness" saying you don't have to lie to me as long as you give me some tenderness beneath your honesty. The observation in "Learn How To Fall" about life being "an occupation where the wind prevails". It's not just beautiful and uniquely memorable. It's as if "Rhymin' Simon" has gone before.

So what's this about "new men" then?

I've started reading Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, which traces the careers of four ambitious young legislators who all ended up in Lincoln's cabinet during the American Civil War. I'm already struck by the fact that if we're to believe this book close friendships between educated, straight males in the 19th century were much tenderer and more intimate than even the newest of today's new men would be happy to allow. This seems at odds with our image of the Victorian era as a time when people kept their emotions as firmly buttoned as their shirt fronts.

One writes to another: "It shames my manhood that I am so attached to you. It is a foolish fondness from which no good can come. I have suffered a womanish longing to see you."

When the young Lincoln arrived in Springfield intent on starting to practice law he had nowhere to stay and no money. He went into the general store and asked the young owner if he could be given "the furniture for a single bed" on account. He planned to pay the store back if he made a success of his legal career. The man behind the counter took pity on him and said: "I have a large room upstairs with a double bed and you are very welcome to share with me." Lincoln shared that bed for four years.

At this point the contemporary eyebrow can't help but lift and speculate about the pair's sexuality. Which just shows how far we've come.

The Kindle and giving up on books

I hate giving up on a book, particularly when I've got more than halfway. It seems such a weak thing to do. That's why I don't do it often.

I gave up on Vikram Seth's 1349-page "A Suitable Boy" because I wanted to be able to look forward to a time when I wasn't reading it. I abandoned Dan Brown's "The Da Vinci Code" a chapter before the end because it was the only way I could express my contempt for its total lack of the basic suspense it was supposed to be providing. I have occasionally set a book aside with the intention of returning to it. Sometimes I have done so.

In truth the thing I really hate about stopping reading something is the conversation with the GLW.

"Oh, I thought you were reading Book A."

"Just thought I'd have a change."

"Oh." (Heavily loaded, hinting at disappointment at spouse's lack of stickability.)

Anyway, the Kindle changes all this. I used to think its weakness was that nobody knew what you were reading. I now realise that can be a strength. Since I bought it I've read eight books: Jonathan Franzen's "Freedom", Jay Z's "Decoded", Keith Richards' "Life", Max Hastings' "Finest Years", David Nicholls' "One Day", Ben Macintyre's "Operation Mincemeat", Rory Stewart's "The Places In Between"and Peter Doggett's "You Never Give Me Your Money". (I know this because my Kindle tells me.)

More interestingly, I've given up on a further two. Both "The Hare With Amber Eyes" by Edmund de Waal and "The Road" by Cormac McCarthy were books that were recommended to me by friends. If I'd been reading either of them in actual paperback - laying them on the bedside table at night, putting them in my pocket in the morning - I would probably have stuck with them. But they weren't so I didn't and I have no regrets about it at all.

They're not sitting there curling up with a look of mild reproof. They're still inside my machine. I might return to them at some point in the future, much as I have done with records that didn't make an impression at the time I got them but did many years later. We shall see.

Seriously, who wants to be a billionaire?

I just caught a fragment of a discussion on Today about wealth distribution. One of the experts was saying that people at the bottom of the heap fantasised about having the lifestyle of Wayne and Coleen Rooney. Really? Every time I look at a pictorial showing the inside of "the lovely home" of this or that wealthy celebrity a shudder passes through me. There's something about the single coffee mug placed carefully alongside the fresh flowers on the expensive kitchen table which suggests that such people have no aptitude for the simple cosiness of the domestic life most of us lead.

Giles Coren touches on the same subject in today's Times in which he wonders why any sane person would want to live in those new flats built for billionaires overlooking Hyde Park:

These people do not get to go to the shops, to ride the top deck of a bus in the rain, they don’t get to fork over the compost in their tiny urban garden, chance delightedly upon a fiver in the back pocket of their painting jeans or find an old pine table discarded on a skip that will burn in the grate for weeks. They do not get to laugh loudly in the face of possible death while unblocking the gutter on their roof, as Matthew Parris did here on Thursday. They do not get to do anything. Except sit on an expensive chair in a bookless apartment, staring out at a park they are frightened to venture into alone.

I watched Tantrums and Tiaras recently. This is the film about the home life of Elton John. The home life of Elton John appears to be all chrome, glass, expensive table settings and nervous domestics, hovering in the background laughing at one's jokes. I saw enough to know that the only person who would want that kind of home is the kind of person whose wealth and profession cuts them off from the very idea of home. It's as if they've had to get the sheet music to the tune that the rest of us can just whistle. Everybody would like to have more money, of course. If we've got any sense we don't want that money to transform our lives - we just want enough to remove the difficulties from the one we've already got.

People who invade their own privacy

In the same day that Jonathan Ross goes on the radio to publicise his new show and announces that one of his children is gay, Orlando Bloom takes a picture of his wife Miranda Kerr breastfeeding their new-born baby. The picture's copyright is assigned to Kora Organics, "an exciting new range of organic skincare, body and hair care products by Australian model Miranda Kerr." In the same week Justin Webb gives an interview to the Radio Times about how his father was the newsreader Peter Woods. These are the kind of confidences that used to be winkled out by investigative reporters. It seems they're now volunteered in exchange for publicity. Takes all the fun out of it somehow.

How to deal with stroppy correspondence

My colleague Mark Ellen has a talent which I particularly envy. He can write conciliatory replies to indignant correspondents. Most correspondents aren’t particularly indignant but the odd one seems incapable of a measured response, reaching for a tone of withering scorn when what would work best is honest puzzlement. Mark replies in the moderate tone such as a negotiator would use to talk down an armed hijacker. It’s so successful that they often end up apologising to him for the tone they adopted and offering to come round and do his ironing.

I can’t do it. My first instinct is to shoot back, particularly when, as is so often the case, people are not reacting to the words I wrote as much as the words they prefer to think I wrote. This seems to happen increasingly. People appear to want you to have said the thing for which they have a put-down standing by and they can’t pass up the opportunity. The temptation to shoot back and bury them in sarcasm is very powerful. I frequently compose emails which I don't send.

Maybe the solution is to do what Steve Martin did back in the 80s, which was to send a form reply to everyone who wrote in, whether favourable or not, asking them to “keep an extra bunk made up in case I get to YOUR TOWN HERE.” It's the kind of thing that people would treasure without knowing whether they had made their point or not. You can read it along with lots of other fascinating correspondence at Letters Of Note.

Ageism is the media's open secret

I hope all the newspapers lining up to point the finger now that the BBC has been caught putting older presenters out to grass have first made sure that the age profile of their own workforce matches the national average. That's without counting in security staff and support services in order to make your company look more like an extended family and less like a university.

Obviously as you get older the workforce seems younger. But it could be that it's more than a feeling. In my working life I've watched the average age of the media workforce get steadily younger. It certainly appears to be the case in big companies where employees over the age of 50 have become scarcer and scarcer. Whatever the reasons - the lure of early retirement, high earners being squeezed out in the latest round of mergers and acquisitions, health, personal inclination, the requirements of child rearing, people having benefited from a property boom and retired, changes in technology - I know very few contemporaries who are working their way through to retirement age in the way they may have envisaged when they were thirty.

We hear a lot about NEETS, the hundreds of thousands of young people who are not in work, education or training. I feel there ought to be a similar acronym for the many fifty-plus people I know who are in a similar position.

I thought TV was show business

I'm intrigued by the implications of this Miriam O'Reilly case. Does this mean that TV companies can no longer do what they've done since time immemorial, which is to shuffle off ageing presenters to "do a few specials, spread your wings, darling" and then gradually forget about them when they start looking a bit tired?

This seems to me the way of the world or at least the television version of the world. I can't understand how television can possibly function if it compromises its single-minded obsession with what things look like. Every TV presenter knows that they occupy a very tenuous position in the hierarchy, a bit more important than the sofa upon which they sit but nothing like as important as the theme tune.

It's not as if it's like real life where competence aces everything else. This is television. If you made it as on-screen talent it's likely that your looks played a huge part in getting you there in the first place and therefore it seems likely that their inevitable decline will play a similar role in your downfall. It's the same if you're in the chorus line at the theatre.

Is this the kind of TV you *meant* to make?

Earlier this week, while waiting for the Ashes highlights to come on ITV, I found myself flipping between two of the most touted new TV programmes of recent months. The first, "Come Fly With Me", was David Walliams's and Matt Lucas's attempt to take their "Little Britain" franchise into a new era, with a show based on those fly on the wall series set in busy international airports. The other, "Famous & Fearless", was Chris Evans's attempt to marry "The Late Late Breakfast Show" with "Sporting Superstars".

Both programmes were very big productions which must have cost a lot of money. All TV programmes are very big risks. These must have been bigger risks than most. I assume they can't have realised what disasters they both were until it was too late. It can't have been until they'd devoted months to writing, shooting and stitching together all those tiny character vignettes featuring Walliams and Lucas as stewards, immigration officers and pilots that somebody at the BBC realised that what they'd commissioned was, like lots of TV comedy, sharp, well-observed, edgy and NOT REMOTELY FUNNY. I didn't take particular exception to the stereotyping. Comedy's built on stereotyping. What I do take exception to is things not being funny. Funny's easy to recognise. It makes you laugh.

The obvious response to "Famous and Fearless" was that it featured people who didn't clearly belong under the first adjective doing things that didn't automatically entitle them to be described as the second. I saw Dame Kelly Holmes competing with three women I didn't recognise - and I'm not the least clued-up member of the audience. I bet the commissioners had to be introduced to them. I guarantee that if the people commissioning it had been told that the most famous people they were going to get were Richard Branson's son and a member of Atomic Kitten they would have snapped their cheque book shut, the programme would have gone in the Monkey Tennis file and everybody's reputation would have remained unstained.

Instead they presumably had to see it through. By then they'd spent so much money and executive credibility that there was simply no going back.

Whose soap is it anyway?

I don't watch EastEnders but I sympathise with the actress Samantha Womack, who was so upset by having to play a character who lost a baby to cot death that she's leaving the show. The producers explain it all away by saying they're trying to produce dramatic television and point to the fact that they give an action line number at the end of the show for the benefit of anyone affected by the issues.

Samantha Womack obviously feels a bit closer to her work than the people who write the scripts and says: "What Ronnie has been through is such a crushingly awful thing to even pretend might happen to you. I actually felt ill having to portray it."

Funny that this should happen the same week that the producers of The Archers, which I do follow, decided to throw Nigel Pargeter, arguably the show's most loved character, off a roof. He didn't want to leave but when the fickle finger of ratings was looking for a victim he was the one it was pointing at.

There's a lot of detached talk about story arcs and how difficult this kind of thing is to play but out here in the audience we don't want to know. You've taken away our friend and cast a pall over what is already the most depressing week of the year. We know it's not real. It's a lot more important than that.

Jonathan Franzen and Test Match Cricket

I liked Jonathan Franzen's Freedom. In a flu-ridden Christmas it was one of the few things I managed to enjoy. Lines keep coming back to me. Sitting up last night listening to Alastair Cook and Ian Bell putting the Australian bowling to the sword I thought of Patty the top college basketball player in the book and the line "Success at sports is the province of the almost empty head".

That's the same as being "in the zone", isn't it? When your body is just doing the things it's supposed to do without needing you to instruct it, when the bat has arrived at the right place before you've consciously worked out where the right place is. As Louis Menand said of any golden age (and a Test Match hundred is a golden age), it's "the time when things work in such a way as to make you think they will work this way forever".

I suspect any form of performance must be pretty much the same. You can't act or sing or juggle if you're worrying about how to do it or trying to do it in a different way. Of all the adjectives that critics employ to show how much they approve of a particular performance the most inappropriate one must be "intelligent". The best performances are the work of an almost empty head. The intelligence was all used up in rehearsals.

That's why interviews with athletes are traditionally so unsatisfactory. They say "I put the ball in the right areas" or "it just came over and I hit it" because that's the truth. Thinking any more about it isn't going to make it any easier to do and they above all know how hard it is to do.

How they subbed the King James Bible

Listening to James Naughtie's "King James Bible" on Radio Four I learned that the committee overseeing the translators' work sat in Stationers' Hall in 1608 and listened to the proposed text being read aloud. They didn't read it, they listened to it. This must explain why the King James Bible is the richest source of idioms in the English Language. The number of people who've read expressions like "a voice crying in the wilderness", "out of the mouths of babes", "let there be light" or "my brother's keeper" must be tiny compared to the number who've heard them spoken out loud. That's what they were built for.

Reading something aloud is the best form of sub editing. It's still the best way of making sure the stress falls on the readers' inner ear the way the writer would like it to. It can be testing. When you ask children to read aloud something they've written they will often read what they meant to write, not the words they actually put down. I've known adults who are just the same.

I'm very envious of those writers who can speak whole sentences into the air and then commit them to the page. All too often in these digital days the temptation is to just put a few words down on the screen and then slowly build them into a passable shape. A lot of music is made in just the same way, which could explain a thing or two.

You can't put your arms around a memory

The debate over whether or not they should knock down the childhood home of Ringo Starr has got me thinking about our urge to preserve.

Near where I live in north London is a medium-sized park. In the middle of the park is what was once quite a grand house. Parts of it are sixteenth century but it was extensively remodelled over the years as successive generations of rich merchants tried to make it more grand or more practical. It has a staircase and some murals that are regarded as being of some note. Once the ownership passed to the local council after the war it became, as I dimly remember, a mother and baby clinic, a cafe and the kind of museum where stuffed birds greeted you with puzzled stares. The exterior of the building was half-timbered but it was about as authentically Elizabethan as the front of Liberty's. It was never a thing of beauty.

In 1984 the building was struck by fire. The council wanted to demolish the building because it was no longer safe and their responsibility. Preservation organisations sprang into action to resist. English Heritage gave it Grade Two Listing. Scaffolding was erected to keep the building up and a fence erected all around to make sure that no over-adventurous kids could get near.

The scaffolding is still there. The council proposed changing the building's Covenants, which were laid down in 1903, to allow some commercial use of a restored house. Whitbread were interested in it being a family restaurant. The local residents objected, claiming that the amount of traffic such a place would attract would make a busy area even busier. In 2003 the building was entered for the BBC programme "Restoration"in which Griff Rhys Jones invited the public to choose which of a number of proposed projects was most deserving. It lost.

In the twenty-six years since the fire all manner of proposals have been examined and discarded. Grants have been secured and very often passed on to professional consultancies. (Nowadays if you want to make a bid for lottery funding you have to hire a professional to do it.) Many of the people who led the original campaign to preserve the building have retired. Some must have died.

The latest initiative comes from the Mayor Of London's Office and involves £500,000 being granted to pay for preparatory and public consultation work about the new proposals which are a combination of restoration of the house with some form of sheltered accommodation in the stable block. If this gets the go-ahead they can apparently find a further £5,000,000 to pay for it. God knows how much further cost has already been incurred holding this building up since 1984.

There's nobody fonder of history than I am. I'm no fan of the wrecking ball. I'm a member in good standing of the National Trust. But if a small attraction like this, which is only ever likely to be appreciated by the small number of people who live locally, can only be maintained by calling upon a fund from a form of central government (either national or local) then it may be time to either do it the way the Victorians did it when they first built our parks - by raising a public subscription among the people who really care - or just letting it slip away.

The Housing Minister today said that in some people's eyes Ringo's house is "a culturally important building". English Heritage have described the house near me as "historically important" and "architecturally unique". These are the kind of baggy phrases that could be extended to justify the preservation of just about anything. In this country nothing is so guaranteed to get the public tear ducts going as the threat of something being removed. Stopping the wrecking ball is the work of a day. Deciding what to do instead can go on forever.

More thoughts on iPad magazine apps

Recently released audit figures from the United States suggest that the iPad magazine apps which launched in a blaze of glory last year have not built on their success. While the owner base has expanded at a staggering rate, downloads of iPad magazine apps have gone in the opposite direction. Geeks blame this on file size; publishers on the absence of an appropriate subscription model. I think it's a lot more fundamental than that.

The new figures don't merely suggest that the early adopters have not been convinced. They suggest that a lot of people aren't particularly curious to know what a magazine on an iPad might look like. If they were curious the figures would at the very least have sustained their previous levels. Why should they be bothered? If you like reading Vogue or Vanity Fair then one of the things you like most about it is the feel of it under your fingers. An iPad version can only be an expensive second-best. On the other hand if you're a reader of a high frequency, information-heavy title like The Economist, who offer a very good iPad version to their subscribers for free, then you appreciate being able to have it with you at all times.

I just read Jonathan Franzen's Freedom on the Kindle, on my iPhone and on the iPad. Since it syncs across all the different platforms you can set it down on one machine and resume reading at exactly the same point on another machine. Hence I read it far more quickly, and probably with more understanding, than I would have done on paper. Electronic readers are perfectly suited to the efficient absorption of information. They're no good at replicating the idle serendipity of the standard magazine experience.

It's interesting that the iPad application which styles itself "your personalised, social magazine" should call itself "Flipboard" in honour of that very inadvertent leafing.

Finally Elton gets someone he can't fire

Having greatly appreciated the glimpse of the home life of Elton John vouchsafed in "Tantrums And Tiaras" I wonder about Elton John and David Furnish adopting a baby. That's nothing to do with their sexual orientation, wealth or, certainly in Elton's case, age.

From what I could see in the film Elton lives surrounded by more delicate, expensive, sharp edged and potentially hurtful objets than you'd be likely to find outside of Harrod's furniture department. He has so many precious photographs in his Atlanta place that he needs a full time curator to take care of them. When he goes on holiday he takes a tennis pro with him. He is accompanied everywhere by a wardrobe capacious enough to offer three separate drawers devoted to sunglasses.

The introduction of a mewling infant into this temple of self is going to be interesting at the very least. Elton is one of the world's great record collectors. We must assume he has a copy of the Loudon Wainwright song "Be Careful There's A Baby In The House" and has taken its last verse to heart:

"Be careful there's a baby in the house,
And a baby is better than smart
It can waddle through all the stuff you do
Never mind your big head start"

Have we got enough bitter lemon?

Mum and Dad weren't big drinkers. However I remember that in the run-up to Christmas every effort was made to ensure that we were as well stocked with different varieties of alcohol as we were with food. Dad would wonder whether he needed to buy a fresh bottle of Cinzano while Mum checked that there was enough Lamb's Navy Rum to splash over the Christmas pudding. Then they would order a wide array of "splits", the small bottles of Schweppes Ginger ale or Indian Tonic that would be needed to administer drinks to everyone's requirements. They were terrified that somebody would ask for a Gin & It or Whisky Mac which they might not be able to provide.

Nobody caters like that any more, do they? I've just done our booze audit. We've got champagne, fizz, white, red and beer. Anyone who isn't happy with that can, quite frankly, whistle. Funny how while we've been growing fussier about food we've become less fussy about drink.

Happy Christmas.

I don't want to spoil the party so I'll go

It was the office party yesterday. It started with a very pleasant lunch. I left about four, exhausted by holding conversations at high volume and starting to feel the tell-tale effects of what an old colleague used to call "wine poisoning". I dozed on the bus home and was in bed before ten. Obviously the younger members of the firm were still partying at five this morning. This hasn't stopped them getting in for nine o'clock this morning, which is admirable.

Age is the dawning anticipation of consequences. At the age of 18 you're too focussed on the pleasure to think about the consequences. At my age you think of the consequences before you think of the pleasure. The minute you think about the consequences you leave, a decision you very rarely regret. If you're worried that you might not be able to exercise your judgement when the time comes then you order a cab to arrive at an appointed time. If you're paying for it yourself you take it.

You never regret it.

Anthony Howard and Brian Hanrahan

This weekend brought news of the deaths of two prominent journalists. In his long career Anthony Howard was the editor of the New Statesman and The Listener and a deputy editor of the Observer. I knew him best from TV. Ever since I can remember he was the bloke they brought on to late night politics programmes to comment on the latest plots at Westminster. Inevitably dressed in a pinstripe suit with a spotted tie and a decent collar he looked as if he’d come straight from dinner at Rules. He talked like a mandarin out of a John Le Carré novel. He spoke the esperanto of Whitehall fluently. What I came to value most was the fact that, unlike most political journalists, his experience went back before Margaret Thatcher. He could draw parallels between what was going on at the moment and the careers of RAB Butler or Reg Prentice. He must have spent his life reading political biographies. The New Statesman’s tribute to him includes his recommendations from this year. I shall follow them up.

The death of Brian Hanrahan was announced this morning. Hanrahan was one of those BBC lifers whose quiet professionalism built the corporation’s reputation. He is best known for having said “I counted them all out and I counted them back again” as the Harriers left the aircraft carrier during the Falklands War. I know him as the bloke who lived round the corner from me. We used to take the same bus occasionally. I often thought about engaging him in conversation but you don't, do you? Don’t exactly know what I would have said. Now he’s dead at 61.

Condolences to the families of both.

You're always more popular when you're past it

I’ve been reading about this year’s reunion of Suede. The band, who were a going concern between 1992 and 2003, announced at the beginning of 2010 that they were getting together for just one show. This was so successful it turned into a full tour, much of it in far bigger venues than they would have played back in “their era”.

The excited reception they’ve been given by their fans, many of them now in their forties, reminds me of the way that 60s heroes like Eric Clapton and Neil Young became far more popular in their middle age, when they were past it, than they were in the first flush of their creativity. When Neil Young was writing “After The Gold Rush” he would have been lucky to sell out Hammersmith Odeon. When he was putting out “Fork In The Road” he was headlining Glastonbury.

This is because the market gets bigger all the time and you can’t achieve mega-fame if you’re only appealing to one generation. Time means your original constituency is joined by later generations of heritage kids, the people who weren’t on board first time round and the people who want to see you because you’ve finally achieved legend status. Add in the fact that a middle-aged audience has more money to spend and less entertainment options and you’ve got the reason why Suede ended up at the O2 and acts like Take That sail blithely on into middle age.

But there’s another factor. It’s not just the scale of the reception. It’s also the fervour of the reception. No crowd is quite as passionate as a middle-aged crowd celebrating what used to be before it’s too late.

Now that we don't have to buy them we're all newspaper readers

I tweeted a recommendation of a very good column by the Daily Mail's Martin Samuel. Somebody tweeted back that, "while I never read the Daily Mail", the column was very good. Which can only mean that he read it and therefore it's not strictly true to say that he "never reads the Daily Mail".

It strikes me that these days it's as anachronistic to describe yourself as a militant non-reader of a particular title as it is to call yourself a reader of another one. Being a reader of a newspaper in the old fashioned sense implied buying a newspaper at the station on the way to work and then reading it in public in such a way that it advertised something of your social status or world view.

Now that the newspapers have done us the enormous favour of giving away all their content for free we have no need to announce ourselves as a reader of one or another. Instead we go merrily clicking over the wide savannah of the internet oblivious to the jurisdictions we may be crossing. There's strong evidence to suggest that the Daily Mail website became the most popular site in Britain because it is patronised equally by people who would describe themselves as "readers" as "non-readers". What both groups have in common is they read it.

The Kindle's making me read more

Having had my Kindle for a month now I can confirm that it makes you read a lot more. That's not novelty so much as convenience. It's thin enough to carry in a jacket-pocket. This means that you can take it out, not just on trains or in normal commuting situations, but also when standing outside a shop waiting for the GLW or queueing for the Channel Tunnel. If you've done things right it's kept your place and so there's no scanning back and forth to see where you'd got up to. At the bottom of the page is a percentage reading, showing how far you've got in the book, which provides a spur all of its own. I might set the book aside at 39% but I'm more likely to wait until I've read 40%. Of course you can do the same things less scientifically with a traditional book. But I probably wouldn't.

People who miss deadlines

It is a golden rule of publishing that the higher the frequency of the title the more efficient is the magazine. Weekly magazines are easy to work on because the workflow is steady. It has to be. If they stopped pedalling the bicycle would fall over. Monthlies are less efficient because each month starts with a week of idle pondering and ends with a week of frantic production. Quarterlies are so inefficiently produced you may as well do each one with an entirely new staff.

When it comes to individual contributors the golden rule is that the busiest people are always the first to file their copy. The promptest will deliver the night before the work is due. The tardiest will get in touch before the end of the deadline day and try to negotiate a postponement. You’re almost embarrassed to talk to them because they’re not ashamed to ask.

The very best people are never ill, elsewhere or detained on family business. If they are they don’t tell you about it. They know that when you say Friday you mean it. They don’t see it as a starting point for negotiation.

Lateness is clearly a state of mind, though what exactly it denotes is not easy to explain. There’s certainly an element of arrogance about it. The late contributor always assumes that other people’s promptness has made their own lateness less of a problem. It also seems to show a terrible lack of confidence. It’s like bands who spend years in the studio. That’s because they like making records but can’t bear finishing them. When they finish them they know they will be judged. They don’t like that one little bit.

Have Americans tourists got quieter and have we got noisier?

The noisy American tourist used to be a staple of British comedy in the 50s and 60s. Garlanded with cameras worn over noisy Hawaiian shirts, he was generally called Hank or Elmer and smoked a cigar. But the thing that got the British goat, and supplied the tension that led to the comedy, was that he talked so loud you couldn't avoid hearing him. The thing everyone agreed on was that Americans were all mouth. This was taken to be the expression of their new-found economic virility.

Last night I took a number of trains into the West End, which is doubly busy in the pre-Christmas period. On one train were four American university students, presumably over here as part of their course. They talked quietly and their demeanor was, if anything, faintly apologetic. It struck me that I hadn't heard a noisy American in London in ages. You can attribute that to the reduced amount of tourism from that part of the world and the fact that the last ten years have made Americans acutely aware that their nationality can make them a target, but it's certainly happened.

On the other hand, while the visiting Americans have got quieter and more polite an increasing number of Brits seem incapable of recognising that not everyone who's sharing the public space with them wants to hear everything they have to say and consequently talk louder and, though they probably don't realise it, more aggressively than ever. And in most cases they have pitifully little to shout about.

You don't think they decided that today, do you?

I've sat on company boards for the last twenty-five years and I've never seen one occasion when a serious vote was taken without the chairman either: a) being pretty certain of the outcome or; b) having already prepared some means of deferring the decision if it looked like it might go the other way. All the important board meetings I've been involved with were preceded by quiet consultations during which likely outcomes were rehearsed and discussed. The idea that such an experienced bureaucrat as Sepp Blatter would go into a meeting like today's choice of World Cup venues without having a fair idea of how it was likely to turn out is a bit far-fetched for me.

iPad magazines remind me of "Stonedhenge" by Ten Years After

In the late 60s every rock band suddenly wanted their album to be in stereo. To convince themselves and whoever was paying that they'd put the expensive new technology to the best use they would always have at least one track where the stereo panned from left to right and back again. Some kind of nadir was reached on Ten Years After's "Stonedhenge" when drummer Ric Lee used the stereo "picture" to play "Three Blind Mice". It's a trick that wore out its welcome very quickly.

I was reminded of this when looking at Project, the all bells and whistles iPad magazine from Virgin Media. Jeff Bridges, the "cover star", moves, for instance and every "page" has buttons and panels which scroll or expand or plunge you into a gallery or otherwise animate the experience. It has so much functionality that it needs a "spread" to explain it all. Like the other ambitious iPad magazines I've tried so far, it's so full of functionality that you can't access its primary function, which is to be something you can read. The very reasons that advertisers find this new medium attractive, the chance that you will brush your finger on a button and find yourself watching a TV ad, are the same reasons I never go back to these apps.

On the other hand I can easily see the appeal of those apps, such as The Economist, the Daily Telegraph or New York Times, that simply take the publication's material and arrange it for the screen. As a means of accessing a magazine that you already have a relationship with, they seem to do that job pretty well and the publishers are either making them available for free or providing free access to subscribers. I'm sure there are iPad developers who would call their policy timid and would criticise the publishers for not taking advantage of the manifold possibilities of the medium. Well, they would, wouldn't they?

I fear at the moment we're in the psychedelic stage of iPad magazine development, where the digital equivalents of stereo panning, extreme reverb, phasing and backwards tapes are being used to distract attention from the fact that in the end it's all about the tunes.

Have the middle classes gone downmarket?

My ears pricked up the other day when Ed Milliband said that Labour had to to get back to doing something for "the middle classes". This seems like the latest step in the Americanisation of British politics. Most of my voting life British politicians have avoided mentioning the middle classes in anything other than a sneering voice, for fear of summoning up images of napkins and gravel drives. When American politicians talk about the middle class they're referring to regular folks. Homer and Marge.

I was thinking about this when I was watching the football in a pub at the weekend. It was full of middle-aged blokes drinking pints and swearing quite freely. I'd guess most of them had not gone to university, but owned their own homes, which their fathers probably didn't. Maybe they're the middle class that the coming generation of politicians is talking about. If that's the case then a lot of alternative comedians (and there's nothing more middle class than an alternative comedian) are going to have to start re-thinking their arsenal of slights. In the 70s "middle class" meant Tom and Barbara Good in "The Good Life". I suppose in my head it still does.

Don't tell me to go to the cinema, Simon

Tonight we went to the cinema. It was a cold night, this is no longer a cheap evening, even at the Barnet Odeon, and because the Odeon chain's credit card booking system seem to have an an aversion to my web browser, I wasn't even certain we were going to get in. However we did, and there among the trailers and the adverts for beer, was a very polished commercial in which Simon Pegg and Nick Frost congratulated us for coming out to the cinema rather than just waiting until the film came out in DVD. Only in the cinema, they said, could you enjoy the film as it was meant to be seen, with a big picture and the best sound.

Now it's probable that when Simon Pegg and Nick Frost see a film it's in a nice preview theatre in Soho with airplane seating and proper projectionists. They don't have to sit, as we did tonight, in a room that feels like a strip club. They don't have to watch an expensively shot commercial for Orange being screened in the colour pink, proof, if proof were needed, that nobody is actually running the programme and making sure that we are seeing things as they are meant to be seen. They don't have to put up with the sound of the special effects from the Harry Potter film coming through the plasterboard dividing this strip club from the slightly bigger one next door. And nobody accidentally switches on the house lights fifteen minutes before the end. And is presumably so far removed from the experience of the customer that they remain on. The members of the audience just laugh. What are they supposed to do? Go off and complain? It would be a day's march before they found anyone.

As we exited at the end one woman was asking the youth in the foyer whether there was a manager she could talk to. He was busy doing what most cinema employees spend most of their time doing - putting carbonated beverages in a refrigerator. I didn't help her because I wanted to get home. On the way back my daughter said that the last time she'd been there she'd had to point out to a member of staff that the roof was leaking. Compared to that our experience had fallen within a range of acceptability.

Complaining about the contempt with which cinema chains treat their customers is as bootless as pointing out that people swear at football. Despite the blandishments of Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, I shall henceforth vote with my feet, which will remain in the "up" position. At home.

Television is all about faffing around

I did a filmed interview for TV the other day. It's good to be reminded every now and again that TV is a visual medium.

The interview set-up was in a small office with a door that led into a larger outer office. The previous interviewee had been filmed in a different room in the same building. Obviously I couldn't be shot in the same place in the same way because TV grammar being what it is the viewer would have concluded I was in some way associated with the previous speaker.

To move even the simplest camera, sound recording equipment and lights from one room and set it up in another never takes less than an hour. The cameraman finally got me lined up. These were the early shots in a documentary for a proper TV channel and so they had to decide on a style. I was leaning forward. They liked that and so they composed the shot that allowed me to do that. The background was the outer office, carefully lit and artfully unfocussed so that it apparently looked like nowhere in particular. They spent a lot of time looking through the lens at the things behind me.

If you'd been doing the interview for any other medium the very first thing you would have done is shut the door to ensure that you weren't disturbed and the interviewee was not in any way inhibited by the thought of being overheard. But TV abhors a wooden door, particularly when it can have an arty blur. So the door remained open and the production assistant was sent into the outer office to shush anyone whose work might be picked up by the microphone.

There were lots of similar faffing around. When they had me lined up they decided it might be better to have the questions coming from off-camera left rather than right. So they moved everything - sofa, camera, microphone, me - and tried it from that angle. Then they worried about a straight line somewhere in the distance. Then they worried about whether you could see the lights properly. Finally we started.

The time spent filming was maybe a fifth of the time spent faffing. This delay wasn't because the people were in any way incompetent. It's just that TV is one long faff. It has to be. One of the most curious aspects was that later in the interview the cameraman kept jerking the lens away from me, as if he was having trouble with the tripod. I wasn't sure whether to keep talking or not. It turns out he was just providing some of that jerky quality that they now put into interviews to give the impression of looseness.

Over the years my slight exposure to TV has left me wondering how anybody could have the patience to do it for a living. More profoundly it's also left me with the firm conviction that nothing that you see on television "just happened". TV is more planned than Bach. If anything had "just happened" the camera would undoubtedly have been looking the other way. And they would have done it again, this time with better lighting.

The best TV talking head ever?

The American Civil War - a film by Ken Burns is a masterclass in historical documentary making. It shows that a good script, extraordinary photographs and well chosen sound effects can easily ace corny dramatic reconstructions of officers writing their diaries and looking pensively out of the window.

But above all it has wonderful voices: Morgan Freeman as Frederick Douglass, Garrison Keillor as Walt Whitman and Sam Waterston as Abraham Lincoln. Providing the context, on camera, is Shelby Foote, probably America's best-known Civil War historian. His contributions must have delighted the producers because they are perfectly measured in length, packed with the ideal balance of dry fact and poignant anecdote and delivered, from beneath sad eyes, in a voice that sounds like it comes from the same time as the melancholy events it describes.

He died five years ago. A fan made this for remembrance.

Notes after three glasses of wine with an old mate

One day, if you're lucky, there'll be an occasion, possibly a Sunday lunch, maybe during one of the big festivals of the year, maybe just one of those unheralded days that crop up at the beginning or the end of summer, when you'll find yourself hosting Jane Austen's definition of a good party. She said that was too many people in too small a room.

It won't be perfect.

Somebody will be late. Something will burn. A child will refuse to eat something. There won't be enough chairs to accommodate boyfriends, girlfriends and whoever else turns up. At some stage it will strike you that everybody's talking over everyone else and you've drunk too much red wine. Somebody will turn off your precious playlist of Sunday lunch music.

At that precise point, if you'll take my advice, you'll stop, breathe, listen and savour the moment. Because that moment, right there, is what it's all about. It never gets any better than that.

When is it OK to call someone a slapper?

We had an interesting discussion in the office yesterday about the word "slapper". Somebody had used it in a feature about footballers and their marriage difficulties. It said that since the Sunday newspapers started paying out to anyone who could produce a story about having slept with a footballer, "every slapper from Newcastle to Newquay knew that they could get rich".

Eyebrows were raised about the use of that particular term. Couldn't it be replaced with something more decorous such as "gold digger" or "floozy"? Well, no. Slapper means a woman who will sleep with lots of men. There is no male equivalent because the idea is deeply ingrained in our culture that most men will, if given the chance, sleep with lots of women. You can't tweak that prejudice out of existence.

The etymology of "slapper" is unclear. It's not in my 1991 Shorter Oxford Dictionary. It doesn't appear in the usual American Dictionaries on-line. In Jonathon Green's Dictionary of Slang it's traced back, possibly to "schlepper" which might mean a slovenly person or one who paints her face. For me it's always evoked the sound of Chaucerian flesh on flesh. Although Green has it down as "a promiscuous woman", which seems about right to me, he also thinks it might mean "prostitute". I'm not convinced about that. As Mark Ellen pointed out, "prostitute" suggests the calculation of a professional and is increasingly replaced by the almost approving "sex worker".

Somebody further objected that "slapper" could be taken to denote class. I'm not so sure. I think it's a term that can be applied as freely in the smart wine bars of Chelsea as it might be in Wetherspoons. Then somebody said that by referring to Newcastle we might be conjuring up a vision of Viz's Fat Slags in the Bigg Market. Of course, since slappers are sprinkled among the population without any particular regional bias, that must say more about our prejudice about Newcastle than the writer's supposed prejudice against the place or its inhabitants.

And so on. In the end it was decided to leave it alone because we know what slapper means and it is the perfect noun for this context. We might not like to feel that we're the kind of people who would use the term, of course, but that's our problem.

I know what I like

I can't get on with the new batch of torchy female solo artists. I'm talking about the ones that seem to waltz effortlessly on to big radio playlists and are acclaimed as the voice of the year before the year has actually begun. Duffy, Rumer, Pixie Lott, Lissie and so on.

I think it's the songs.

Because most of them work alongside factory songwriters, old hands who have spent years kicking about in no-hoper bands but have a Ph.D in what works, their songs are constructed artfully enough. They have all the surface characteristics of catchiness without actually being catchy. Not at least to me.

I've never written a song so what do I know? I have however listened to billions of songs so I have a point of view. It seems to me a good pop tune has a perfect balance between familiarity and strangeness. The lyric offers you a ribbon that's easy to take hold of and invites you to pull that ribbon to find out more. A good song lifts like a curtain, surrendering its meaning at a pace that the listener can keep up with. The great records aren't just catchy on the surface. At the same time they're hinting at the promise of further layers of catchiness to come.

I'm not picking on Lauren Pritchard. She's simply the latest to get this treatment. She went to Hollywood when she was 16 and for some reason lived with Lisa Marie Presley. She starred in an off-Broadway show. She was in a pop duo. She fronted a reggae band. And now she has a contract with one of the few major record companies and is getting The Treatment. Colleagues of mine like her record Wasted in Jackson She'll probably do very well. I just don't get it. This is her first single.

I've got a strong suspicion that there's no tune in this song. There's a lot of very musical work in there but not a tune you could hum to yourself. The lyrics are difficult to catch, particularly at the beginning. There are no great pop songs that don't have good opening lines. Further into the song the stress doesn't seem to fall where it should. The hook line is "no painkillers make it go away", to which the casual ear wonders why there's such a long "no" and the pedant wonders "make what go away?" It continues. "If I tried to over-dose it wouldn't bring no change," which is a really strange line in that it neither echoes everyday speech nor helps the tune along.

To prove to myself that this is not just an old scrote's prejudice against the new generation, I do like Amy Lavere's record Anchors and Anvils, which came out last year. She's a similar age and background. She has a song called "Killing Him Didn't Make The Love Go Away", inspired by something a woman said after she'd killed her husband. I love this song because it explains something to you and it's all about the performance not the production. After one listen you come away knowing what has happened and how the woman feels. After two listens it has imposed its pattern on you, you're anticipating the chord change on "he said he'd give her the sun and the moon/now all she's got is this eight by eight room" and the cheap poetry of the title is embedded in your memory.

Pop music changes regularly. If you listen to a lot of it you retune your ear to adapt to those changes. It's only occasionally you find yourself wondering if everybody's out of step but you, whether everybody else has settled for songs that are well-made when they really ought to be stopping you in your tracks,

Watching "Fela!" up close

Last Saturday I went to watch a preview of "Fela!" at the National Theatre. It's a production that's come from Broadway but all of the cast except the lead were hired and rehearsed in London. With a live band on stage, a twenty-strong troupe of dancers, ramps extending towards and through the audience, the entire arsenal of National Theatre sound and lighting at its disposal and the wide open spaces of the Olivier Theatre to roam in, this is about as technically demanding as a performance can be.

I was fortunate enough to watch from the front row. One of the delights of seeing anything - whether it's a theatrical performance, a rock show or a sporting event - at such close quarters is that you can see the performers dealing with the tiny practicalities of their trade. You see the looks exchanged between them. You can tell that chair has been moved because something is about to happen in the place where it stood. You can see somebody being handed a prop that is about to play some part in the action. You notice when somebody covers for somebody else. At certain angles you can see performers in the wings getting ready to come on. When Sahr Ngaujah came downstage drops of his sweat fell into the front row.

During previews the cast are getting ready to face first the press and then the general public. They've done their technical rehearsals and their dress rehearsals. The previews are about ironing things out and getting up to speed. The only thing which appeared to go slightly awry on this occasion was a piece of the set that refused to move. The actors and the lighting crew were so quick to adapt it's unlikely anyone beyond the first few rows even noticed. When the show had moved on I could see from my angle a technician attacking it with a screwdriver. Apart from that you would never have believed they hadn't been doing it for months. It was their first preview. The level of accomplishment beggars belief.

I love doing anything with actors because they always assume things are going to go wrong. They rehearse and rehearse even the tiniest things, not so much to make sure they don't as to ensure they are mentally ready when they do. I'm sure that's a lesson that applies far beyond the theatre.

The strange allure of documentaries from your childhood years

To the NFT to see A Day In The Life: Four Portraits of post-war Britain by John Krish. These films were made in the late 50s and early 60s for organisations like the N.S.P.C.C. and the N.U.T.. They cover the last tram in London; an old soldier living on his own; a bunch of children from deprived backgrounds taken to the sea for the first time; a day in the life of a secondary modern school in Watford in 1962.

It's strange how the chronology of your own childhood helps you date things. I could tell when each of these films was made by looking at the kids' haircuts and styles of clothes. I can look at anything from the 60s or 70s and narrow it down to a two-year period quite quickly. Land me in the 80s or 90s however and it's a blur. Childhood stays in your memory very precisely, arranged by academic years, girlfriends, pop records and other useful markers. You only regain the same kind of accuracy when you have children of your own. You look back and work out the chronology of events by referring to their lives. "That must have been 1993 because so-and-so was at such-and-such school."

In some respects the past is spookily familiar. "I Think They Call Him John" is a pretty agonising film from 1964 about widower John Ronson, leading a lonely life in a high rise flat. On Sunday evening he puts on the D.E.R. television set to accompany his ironing. It's "Sunday Night At The London Palladium". We don't see it but I did recognise the voice of the presenter. Bruce Forsyth.

Watching a Chapel Market funeral

Round the corner from the office in Chapel Market is a pub called the Alma. Britain is full of pubs called the Alma. This one's for hard drinkers, many with market connections. Customers are usually hoisting pints of lager at nine o'clock in the morning. It's been like this long before the licensing laws were reformed. The smoking ban meant the pub's patrons, all of whom are smokers, were suddenly extruded into the daylight as if in a sock that had been turned inside out. People who had spent their days in the darkest corners were forced to drink and smoke outside. None of these people look healthy, which is not surprising if they're drinking and smoking all day. Quite a few of them seemed to have lost limbs, presumably not at the Battle of the Alma.

Every now and then you'll see a small poster run off a home printer and placed in the window. This will bear a picture of a man who looks 75 but was probably in his early 60s and announce that Patrick or Jim or Michael has died and that his funeral party will be either departing from or terminating at the Alma. When we went out for something to eat yesterday lunchtime one of these parties was taking place. Through the window we could see and hear a musician singing "The Fields Of Athenry" through a portable P.A. while the regulars lifted pint after pint and the horse-racing flickered silently on the TV above the bar.

A knot of mourners watched the proceedings from outside so that they could smoke. We sat down in the chip shop opposite. One of the mourners, a 12-year-old boy, wearing a buttoned-up suit and sporting a huge star-shaped stud earring, came in, bought a saveloy and then went back across the road to re-join the mourners and eat it.

How did Dad become the family whipping boy?

I got a haircut yesterday. It was a bit shorter than I intended but I'm happy enough with it. I walked into the usual banter at the office but none of it was actually unkind, even from old friends and colleagues who are extended a free pass in that area.

It wasn't the same when I got home. The three women in my life looked at me and said "Oh my God!" This wasn't said in a good way. Later on that evening they were still tutting at me. Their central objection was that it was too short. Obviously there's a remedy for that.

Now clearly if the shoe had been on the other foot and I had reacted in anything like the same way when they came back from the hairdressers I would expect to be accused of everything from sexism through rudeness to mental cruelty.

I'm not looking for any sympathy but I do think it indicates how Dad is the only member of the contemporary family that the other members no longer think they have to be careful with. Everybody else is surrounded by an eggshell area to which they are entitled by virtue of having given birth (which is serious) or being a teenager (which is a passing condition) or having a hangover (which is fleeting).

Not Dad. Dad is, as Bruce Springsteen pointed out last week, furniture. Dad is the only person in the world whose clothes you can criticise, whose head you can pat, whose gut you can prod without the slightest chance of any come-back at all. But those people should watch out. Because I've got a blog now.

Obama swallows the bitterest pill

Everyone expects Barack Obama to get a bloody nose in today's mid-term elections. That's what traditionally happens to presidents. I'm sure he expected nothing less when he was elected all of two years ago. Nonetheless he must surely be bitterly disappointed by the number of his top people who have announced that they are planning to leave. Rahm Emmanuel, his chief of staff, is just one. To put this in West Wing terms this is like Leo McGarry buggering off at the end of Season Two because things were getting a bit too hot. There are more.

I expect all Obama's media admirers, who gushed over his election as if it were a hinge moment for civilisation, to melt away the minute he has to do what people in government have to do, make some unpalatable choices. I expect many of the voters to have the attention spans of mayflies. But this sudden disappearance of so many of the people who were professionally connected to him is further proof that no wing of politics has a monopoly of the basic human virtues. I used to know a grizzled old press baron who when asked what he considered the most important virtue would bark "Loyalty" . At the time I thought he was overrating it. I don't any more.

I still like a book

I've just finished In Europe: Travels Through the Twentieth Century by Geert Mak. I was so impressed with it I've bought a few copies to give away as Christmas presents.

This is the copy I've been carrying around with me for the last couple of weeks, with the receipt I've been using as a book mark. It's an 800-plus page book so I felt the usual sense of achievement that I was not merely getting through it but also enjoying it. I liked feeling it in my hand and putting it on the bedside table at night.

I've also bought myself a Kindle, which clearly has a place for anyone who does a lot of reading. But if I'd read "In Europe" entirely on the Kindle I would miss not being able to look at it. If you've invested this much time in something you like to be able to see it and touch it.

I'm the same with music. Downloads are fine if all you want to do is listen. But if you really appreciate something you want to own it.

The gas poker - a truly blood curdling piece of domestic kit

When we moved into our house twenty-three years ago it had no central heating. There was a coal-fired boiler in the kitchen that the elderly couple we were buying from kept going all the time. Of course as soon as we moved in it went out. The only device that could get it started again was a gas poker. I explained to this to the gas engineer we had working in the house yesterday. Nice bloke, in his thirties, I should think. "What's a gas poker?" he asked.

I explained it was a device such as you might use for poking the fire but if you connected it to the gas mains and applied a match to it flames would shoot out of holes in the side. Then you pushed it under the fuel on the fire until it got a glow going. That's a gas poker, I said.

He gulped and handed me a safety leaflet.

What the Walkman took from us

Sony have announced that they're stopping production of the Walkman. They presumably think that having sold 220,000,000 units they would be pushing their luck carrying on. I can clearly remember my first encounter with the miracle that was the original Walkman. It was 1979 and I'd gone to Stewart Copeland's flat in Shepherd's Bush to interview him. The Police had just come back from Japan and he produced this blue house brick of a tape player and handed the spongy earphones to me. "Put these on," he said to me with the air of a man who'd been performing the same party trick with all kinds of people since his return. I can't remember what music it was playing but I can clearly recall my breath being taken away by the realisation that all this sound was emanating from such a small device. Compared to that one giant leap the move to the iPod was just a minor adjustment. The Walkman changed things so completely that I still don't think that we realise the full extent of its impact thirty years later. With its arrival music stopped being what it had primarily been since the dawn of time, which was a social thing.

Clarence Shaw

I just received the latest edition of my school's old boys magazine. It carries the obituary of one Clarence Shaw, who died earlier this year at the age of 93.

Clarence was a miner's son. In 1936 he became Head Boy of the grammar school. He got a scholarship to Oxford. He married in 1939, the same year he enlisted as a private in the Royal Artillery. During the war he served on convoy protection duty. He was torpedoed twice. On the second occasion he survived two weeks in a lifeboat before rescue. By the end of the war he had made Captain. When he was demobbed he trained as a teacher and entered the profession. He retired in 1980 as the Headmaster of a school near Barnsley. He had six children and liked to read the classics in the original Latin and Greek.

Just saying.

Marianna Palka points the way to a post-PR world

This morning I got an email from Marianna Palka. To my shame I'd never heard of her. In 2008 The Guardian called her "the young British director who's taking the world by storm". She made and starred in a film called "Good Dick". Anyway, she's on her way to the UK from Los Angeles to do some press and she says she's an admirer of my work and wonders if I could advise her who might be interested in interviewing her. It's not unknown for the admiration to be flannel and her PR will know better than me who's interested in interviewing her.

What interests me is the direct, specific approach. Every day I go through my inbox and delete about a hundred PR emails unread. The PRs who send them probably don't care because what they're really bothered about is being able to tell the client that they've informed me and a few thousand others. Job done. Invoice in post. The only ones I read are those that have subject lines of particular interest to me or appear to be clearly aimed at me alone. By sending this kind of email Marianna Palka has acquired the most valuable currency in The Attention Economy. She's got someone to stop and think about her for half an hour. Shame (for her) it has to be me.

This is not unprecedented. I've had a few approaches recently from PRs saying that this or that artist is a big fan of the Word Podcast and would love to be on it. Frankly, I don't believe them because if the artists were that bothered they would get in touch themselves. That way we might believe them. Why, in this day and age, would you send any kind of message through an intermediary?

Anyway, if you are a hack and she sounds like your kind of story, Marianna's clearly an exceptional cove. She was born in Scotland, moved to New York to act at the age of 17, she's already written, directed and starred in her first feature film and she's not yet 30. Best of luck to her.

Inside the cosy world of our top politicians

Having seen a brief clip, I can't wait to view the rest of "Mandelson: The Real PM". This fly-on-the-wall documentary follows Cabinet Minister's grandson Baron Mandelson in the febrile run-up to the last election. How he got away with it I'll never know.

It's made by his personal friend Hannah Rothschild, the sister of financier Nathaniel, in whose company Mandelson made his controversial visit to the yacht of Russian tycoon Oleg Deripaska, where he also bumped into Baronet's son George Osborne. All these guys must have been bantering with each other for years now, at smart parties as well as at despatch boxes. One can only be thankful that they met Deripaska because that must have been the only time that year that they'd had dinner with anyone who'd worked on a building site.

The film promises to illustrate what a narrow gene pool our top politicians are drawn from nowadays. I don't think the makers will notice but we will. As politics becomes more and more about TV it favours people who are above all things polished. During the Labour leadership election, which was contested between candidates who had all been to Oxbridge, institutions which are world class at polish, I couldn't help but wonder if David or Ed Miliband would ever have found their way to Doncaster or South Shields if they hadn't had them lined up as safe seats. Bet they're the only people from Primrose Hill to make regular visits.

Kids today really don't know they're born - and nor will the next lot

It's nice to feel like a member of an oppressed minority now and then. Bit of indignant hurt peps you up no end. In the course of an interesting debate about university top-up fees on The Guardian site somebody pops up with what is becoming a familiar refrain - since they clearly grew up in an era of plenty and didn't have to pay to go to university, why don't the baby boomers pay for all this?

I have my Baby Boomer membership card and therefore I feel the need to respond.

I came from a direct grant grammar school which every year sent a handful of boys to Oxbridge. Although this was a selective school not everyone went on to higher education, not by any means. These were the days of 13% going on to take a degree. Some left at 15 (you could do that in those days) to work as office boys or to take an apprenticeship. And this wasn't a simple economic calculation. It depended on their inclination, prospects and temperament. I knew miner's sons who stayed on and went to university. I knew kids from well-off families who got out the second they could. I went away and came to London. I did a four year B.Ed course which finished in 1972.

While I was studying my tution and board was paid. I had £40 a term for everything else (bolstered by what I managed to save from unpleasant manual labour done during the vacations). I went to the pub where I drank mild because it was cheaper. I hardly ever went into London because I couldn't afford it. The pictures maybe once a month. Clubbing obviously wasn't invented, nor were premium lagers, clothes with logos on them and designer drugs. I didn't know what a cab was. At the end of term I would go to the end of the M1 and hitchhike home.

I'm not complaining. I had a great time. I didn't work particularly hard. I loved it all and learned a lot. When I left I walked straight into a job on the recommendation of a lecturer (one of many examples of my not realising how lucky I was) where my pay was £1,500. A year. That's with a degree and London weighting.

It goes without saying that £1,500 went a lot further then than it does now. But it couldn't buy, for instance, a holiday. I did without holidays until my late twenties. When the NME wanted to send me to Hamburg for one night (you can't imagine how thrilled I was) I didn't have a passport. We got married when I was twenty-nine. On my stag night six of us went to a pub in Islington and had five pints. Our wedding was paid for by parents. It was lavish for the era. There were fifty guests. Our honeymoon was three nights in France.

Today's twentysomethings have grown used to mobile phones, Sky subscriptions, cabs, clubbing, an occasional trip to a fancy restaurant, stag weekends, Hollywood weddings and multiple holidays. In 1979 this would have been an unimaginably luxurious life. I don't think we even knew the word lifestyle. I don't begrudge them any of it. I understand only too well about debts and employment and house buying. I don't resent what I didn't have. What I do resent, what every older generation always resents, is being told we had it easy by somebody who wasn't there.

The most beautiful sound ever made by man

People talk a lot of nonsense about singing, particularly around X Factor. Sam Cooke had one of the most beautiful voices God ever gave to man. This is my favourite example of it. It's on the end of an ancient album called "Two Sides Of Sam Cooke". They call it "Humming Track". I've seen it on various CDs as "Happy In Love". I think it was probably recorded in the same session.

What is it? I don't know exactly but it sounds like Sam singing to himself far from the microphone, tapping his foot, possibly to impress a woman. I couldn't find a Spotify link so I got the disc out and recorded it. It's quiet so you have to lean towards it. It lasts less than a minute. Here it is. Let me know if this has wasted your time.

Magazines and the iPad - on second thoughts

Every magazine publisher at the moment is faced by a new problem, on top of the other ones. Do you or do you not invest in a version of your magazine for the iPad? If you listen to the futurists you have no choice. If you're adventurous you go for one of those all bells and whistles remakes such as Wired. (If you watch this little video review you can see how reviewers fudge the awkward issues – such as how do you actually read the thing? – to focus instead on the video and navigation.)

My favourite magazine, The New Yorker, has just launched their own app which means they're inviting subscribers like me to pay another $5 a week to get a version of the magazine for a tablet. Judging by the comments, I don't think I'm the only one who thinks that's a bit much. But I can see why they've done it. They have to recoup their costs and they probably reckon Apple is planning to do to the magazine industry what it has already done to the music industry, but with less lubricant, in which case it's better to set your price high.

Problem is things like this are insanely expensive to produce, aimed at a user base which is a fraction of the magazine's universe and by the time it's proven (or not) as a medium the publishers will be thousands of pounds in the hole. The only people guaranteed to make money are the developers. The only people to make money out of the Gold Rush were the people who sold the shovels. It's an old joke but it still holds good.

If you're less adventurous you could put your magazine on a platform like Zinio, which provides a PDF-like facsimile of your pages and has an interface that allows you to "turn" the pages. But even this costs money. Above all this is less about technology than behaviour. I don't feel in my water that people will inevitably use their iPads to read complete magazines on. At the moment they're using magazines to try out their iPads with, which is not the same thing at all.

Are we running out of funny?

Last night I caught five minutes of the new Harry Enfield & Paul Whitehouse show. There was a sketch about two old duffers in a gentlemen's club (good to see comedy doing its bit to preserve long-dead social history) which involved the repetition (and I do mean repetition) of the words "is he queer?", a sketch about some semi-criminals with an attack dog which involved the repetition (and I do mean repetition) of the words "shut it" and one called Mr Bean, Psycho which was about throwing a grenade into a crowded lift and then stepping in to the blood stained compartment. (I bet somebody at the BBC was more worried than most about the threatened "Mumbai-style" attack yesterday.)

It was clever, accomplished, edgy, humorous and exactly the kind of thing we have come to expect from two of TV's most popular comic actors. Unfortunately, it wasn't funny. I know funny. Funny makes you laugh. Funny has surprise on its side. Funny is - correct me if I'm wrong - the only thing that actually matters in comedy. It's like tunes in pop music. If you've got a tune you can do anything. If you haven't got a tune there's nothing you can do.

Maybe there's not enough funny to go round any more. Makes sense in a way. You've got all those channels that are looking for funny. Funny can't be an infinite resource. You've got the movies immediately signing up anyone who so much as raises a smile on TV. Then they're writing books that promise more funny. Then there's the internet. And adverts. And Twitter. And then there may be the fact that they've told all their jokes. There was Victoria Wood the other week complaining about the fact that nobody at the BBC seemed to care about her stuff anymore. But then, as people pointed out, her last big TV spectacular wasn't actually funny.

Look, I remember Morecambe and Wise. They were funny for about 20% of the time. The rest of the time they were merely comical. Seems to me we've got too much that's comical and not enough that's funny.

Dear Zachary is a film you should see

I've had a DVD of Dear Zachary: A Letter to a Son About His Father on my desk for months now. I was told I should watch it. I didn't. I'm always being told I should watch things, hear things, read things. Sometimes I do, sometimes I don't. You know what it's like. You have to be in the mood for something and when are you ever in the mood for a home-made film about the tragic death of a young doctor in Pennsylvania?

Yesterday afternoon, when it was pouring down and I had an hour to pass before an appointment, I put it on. After 15 minutes I realised it was having such an effect on me I was watching it standing up. I watched half of it last night and have just got up early to see the rest of it. By the end I was tearing up, although not as badly as the people being interviewed.

I thought about many things after watching it: how there's a level of intimacy that professional film makers and writers can never achieve which a film like this does; just how often in the wake of a senseless loss we hear the words "all protocols were followed"; how parents feel something for other parents that's unlike any other fellow feeling; how whatever you're doing this weekend really doesn't matter very much at all.

You should watch it.