TV: You’ve Never Had It So Much

I’m due to go on Five Live on Tuesday to compare and contrast the run-up to this royal wedding with the run-up to the royal wedding of thirty years ago. Coincidentally we’ve been clearing out the attic and we came upon this old copy of The Guardian from June 1981. Looking at the paper is educational but nothing is more telling about the differences between then and now than the TV listings for this Thursday evening.

For a start there were just three channels. Channel Four was still a year away from launch. Unless you count Emmerdale Farm, which was still in the bucolic innocence of its teatime years, there were no soaps at all. BBC still provided lots of sport, from the Test Match to Royal Ascot and the pre-Wimbledon tennis from Eastbourne. ITV had an original single-episode drama at nine o’clock. BBC-2 was showing a 50-year-old Ealing war film right across prime time. Between ten and midnight on BBC-1 it was serious news and current affairs all the way. All the channels closed down at midnight.

Whenever there’s talk of a crisis in BBC funding, Channel 4 mutters about changing the terms of its deal with the government or ITV reports poor ad revenues I’m amused by the wailing and gnashing of teeth that arises from people who have grown up amid the groaning plenty of post-80s media. To listen to the prevailing argument we are constantly in danger of losing the things that traditionally made British broadcasting The Envy of The World amid a tide of reality formats, celebrity profanity and other meretricious rubbish. The argument goes that we had heaven in our hands and we swapped it for a toffee apple.

This thinking fails to take into account:
1. TV is far less dull than it used to be;
2. Because there is infinitely more of just about every genre, none of it can ever have the impact that it had in the days of the old duopoly - although programmes like The X-Factor are as popular as anything in the history of TV.
3. The same people who like the cleverest stuff on TV also like the dumbest stuff.
4. Even taking inflation into account, there has to be infinitely more money spent on making television in 2011 than there was in 1981.
5. I don’t know whether it’s true to say that you’ve never had it so good. You’ve certainly never had it so much.

"What's the plot?" thinking and "the best pop band in the world"

If anyone asks me to recommend a record I always suggest The Silver Seas' "High Society" or "Chateau Revenge". I tell people that in the unlikely event that they don't like them they can give them away to their next-door neighbour who assuredly will.

These are not the most celebrated, successful or culty records of the last few years but they are my favourites. I've enthused about them wherever I can but mainly with a bit of decorum. I hate the missionary zeal of music journalists who think their job is A&R. I know that a few people have taken them up on the back of my recommendation. I know this because they've told me. It's clear that they get the same thing from them as I do, that tumbling exhilaration that comes when one great up-tempo pop song follows straight after the previous one. It's not a thing that happens so often that you can afford to ignore it. (You can get a perfect idea of it here, where they stream a taster of each track.) Danny Baker shares my enthusiasm. In fact on his radio programme this week he called them "the best pop band in the world today". Simon Mayo likes them too.

Daniel Tashian, the leader of the group, was in town this week to do some songwriting. These days guys like Tashian, past the first flush of youth but clearly a brilliant songwriter, increasingly find themselves helping telegenic up and coming pop stars to write their own material. This is the template for the Duffys of this world. It's a new form of ghost writing which is turning into an industry. He was on Danny's programme for an hour yesterday and we had him on the Word podcast.

It's clear that for all their manifest quality the Silver Seas are finding it difficult, not to say impossible, to get the interest of a major record label. This is not because the labels don't recognise their quality. They do. They know they have brilliant songs and have made a couple of great records. But what nobody can answer with the Silver Seas is the "what's the plot?" question.

"What's the plot?" is the question most frequently posed nowadays when you take an act to radio. It's roughly translated as "what's the wider narrative into which this band fits and can I be guaranteed that if I support their record others will do the same?" You can see "what's the plot?" thinking at its most depressing in that poll the BBC publish at the beginning of the year where they separate the sheep who are supposed to make it from the goats who won't. It's the kind of thinking you would expect from commercial radio, where they traditionally don't play a record unless they've tested it with their listeners, but you would have thought that the BBC would be above it.

It's not just the broadcasters. It happens right across the music media where everyone is watching everyone else to make sure than the minute any artist has commercial lift-off that they've grabbed themselves a fistful of coat-tail. That's how come you find yourself startled by the ubiquitousness of new acts whose records haven't even been released yet. Everybody rushes to get them while they're allegedly hot and any sense of the public choosing what it likes goes by the board. Hence acts like the Silver Seas have problems because nobody is going to be able to make their name on the back of them. They have no narrative other than the music. In the music industry that isn't enough. Given the state of that industry you'd have thought they might be questioning some of that new-found science.

The only thing a British football manager needs is hair

The majority of the twenty managers in the Premier League are over forty-five. Five of them – Ferguson, Wenger, Redknapp, Hodgson and Houllier – are over sixty. All of those senior footballing citizens have plenty of the one commodity that blokes in their sixties frequently mourn the loss of, which is hair. Only four managers in the division - Holloway, Kean, Pulis and Martinez - have anything less than a luxuriant thatch. It seems likely that a couple of those four may be slipping out of the division at the end of the season. If they do they may be replaced by Norwich's Paul Lambert, Cardiff's Dave Jones or QPR's Neil Warnock. What have these three got in common? Hair.

I realise there are leagues where it is possible to prosper without hair. Pep Guardiola seems to manage in Spain, though it helps to be ostentatiously handsome. But over here we seem to have difficulty placing our destinies in the hands of anyone who doesn't have plenty up top. I'm not saying this is right. I'm merely observing the odd fact that whereas pressure seems to visibly thin the pates of our serving politicians when they're in office, with football managers it seems to have the opposite effect. I'm surprised no enterprising shampoo company has got round to capitalising on this by launching "Prem - For Men Who Thrive On It".

Joan Rivers and "what the fuck are we doing Monday?"

They should take Joan Rivers - A Piece Of Work and show it to anyone who's starting a show business career of any kind. Rivers is still frantically working at the age of 75, to finance a very lavish lifestyle, to pay for a large staff (and in some cases the private education of their children), to prove to everyone that she's as good as any male comedian and finally because she's got a drive to perform that almost qualifies as an illness. Her daughter points out that ever since she can remember everybody in the family has been working on "the career" and there was never any doubt whose career that was. "As soon as you make it," she says, talking about her days on the Johnny Carson Show, "you're an industry."

It's this clear understanding that she is a product as well as a person that makes the film so watchable. You get the feeling it would be impossible to bullshit Joan Rivers. Even when the one-woman show appears to be going very well she makes her assistant read out the reviews to her and zeroes in on the negatives. She knows how this works. There are also a couple of very engaging manager/agent figures who flit in and out, talking about her desperate need to keep her date book completely packed. She has to know that she's doing something different every couple of hours. The agent, when talking about how her appearance on The Celebrity Apprentice re-ignited her career, points out that lightning can strike twice in show business "but you've got to be prepared to stand out in the rain. Joan is." He also identifies the question that performers of all kinds ask themselves all the time. "Never mind the long range. What the fuck are we doing Monday?"

Do people still snog in public?

One of the least popular features of the re-born St Pancras station is the huge statue of the canoodling couple on the upper level. If you subscribe to Danny Baker's view that statuary went wrong with the introduction of the trouser you'll probably fall in with the view that it just looks false.

The other thing that strikes me every time I go through stations and airports nowadays is the farewells I witness are no longer as fond as they used to be. The couple bidding goodbye at the ticket barrier will be in phone contact throughout the ensuing journey and so there's somehow no need to get quite as tactile and tonsillar in their parting.

I was reflecting on this while reading the story about the gay couple who'd been asked to leave a Soho pub after kissing. I don't feel as if I see quite as much public snogging as I used to, heterosexual or otherwise. I don't see teenagers on park benches osculating themselves to the point of numbness. I don't see girls pulling their boyfriends towards them on the tube in that time-honoured demonstration of ownership. And another thing. I used to have a friend who worked with the Royal National Institute for the Blind and she used to reckon that her clients were the most romantically demonstrative section of the population. I witnessed what she meant on more than one occasion on public transport. I don't even see that any more. Is it possible that the public snog is yet another area of human behaviour that has been quietly changed by technology?

You don't have to love rock stars to love rock

Mark Ellen's written a big piece in the new issue of The Word about the unfortunate lot of the Rock WAG. It includes an interview with Beverley Martyn, the former wife and musical partner of John Martyn, in which she describes what in an extreme case it can be like to share the life of someone with the monomaniacal drive it takes to make it in the music business. In Martyn's case, when the drink and drugs were added to his own turbulent nature, this sometimes spilled into violence against her. "He's up there and everyone loves him and I'm just this little woman who has to put up with this stuff," she complains, not without reason.

A reader tweets "I may have to bin all my John Martyn records." Why? The work is one thing and the worker is another. You don't have to read a lot of history to realise that the standard proportion of exceptionally talented people have a deeply unpleasant side. In fact, given the pressures of living out their lives in public, it's likely that this can make them even more unpleasant in private. John Lennon, by his own admission, was "a hitter". Does this make "Help!" any less brilliant? Chuck Berry filmed women in lavatories. Does this change "You Never Can Tell"? John Martyn's "May You Never" is still "May You Never" no matter what an arsehole he was capable of being. While I never saw any violence in the times I met him, he could certainly be charmless. In fact like many rock stars he was charmless in the way that people are charmless when they are confident that most people they meet are predisposed to love them.

It's not surprising we do that. We begin by seeing pop stars through a mist of adolescent admiration and for many people - men, particularly, in my experience - that mist never lifts. Even when they grow up and realise that the people they meet in their daily lives are more complicated than they previously thought they continue to assume that because they love an artist's songs they must similarly love that artist. They feel that surely this person must embody the virtues in their songs. That's the rock star's trap. People want to think the worst about the personal side of, say, politicians but they want to think the best about the personal side of their rock heroes.

Philip Larkin could be an arse. He knew it better than anyone. But that doesn't make his poems any less profound. In fact it probably makes them more so. Then again Larkin didn't spend his life wandering on to stages to be greeted by a warm blast of love from a sea of upturned faces. People didn't think of him as "good old Philip Larkin". People didn't seek his autograph or want to have their pictures taken with him. He wasn't forced to hawk his personality around along with his poems. He wasn't "good old Philip Larkin".

Of course nobody ever thought people would be listening to rock records in their forties and beyond. There's nothing wrong with listening to the music but at some point you have to shake off that crippling worship of the people who made it. Some of the biggest, most admired names in rock are unbearable and quite a few of the others are nothing like as delightful as they would have you believe. And then lots of them are just like you or me, but with very special talents. I don't wholly agree with John Lennon's line "you have to be a bastard to make it" but there's some truth there. It's ridiculous to allow that to taint an appreciation of their work.

I have seen TV sport future

Watching the Indian Premier League cricket this afternoon I wonder whether I may have glimpsed the future of TV sport.

The New Zealander Daniel Vettori was bowling, the Indian Sachin Tendulkar was batting and the South African AB de Villiers was keeping wicket in front of a packed, noisy stadium. It's probably not your idea of cricket – cheerleaders, throbbing dance music between overs, fawning close-ups of the sponsor's wife, every feature of the contest sponsored to the hilt, floodlights - but you can probably imagine.

What was really remarkable was that in between balls de Villiers was talking, via a microphone hidden in his helmet, to the off-field commentator. It was an entirely new context to see a player in. No great insights were forthcoming but because he was being spoken at his actual work bench there was none of that desperate stiffness that usually attends the post-match interview. If I was responsible for increasing the profile of AB de Villiers or one of his sponsors I'd be keen for him to do more interviews out in the middle. They polled the TV audience to see how many thought it was a good idea. 83% said yes.

It seems inevitable that as sound equipment gets more discreet, coaches feel an increased need to try to control every play on the field and broadcasters want to wring every fluid ounce of drama they can in exchange for their increasingly expensive rights, we're bound to see more of this kind of thing. Where technology can go, it tends to.

Further education is just a click away

It started with listening to the recordings of former slaves on the Library of Congress site. Fountain Hughes was 101 at the time he was interviewed and said his grandfather was owned by Thomas Jefferson. This led me to reading Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made by Eugene D. Genovese. One of the sources he quotes most is Mary Chesnut's Diary. She was the wife of a senior Confederate officer. During the Civil War she maintained a diary of how the world looked from her side. I read that. At the same time I began watching The American Civil War, Ken Burns's definitive TV history of the era which also quotes Chesnut a lot. I heard great things about Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln and so I read that, by which time it began to dawn on me that 2011 is the 150th anniversary of the American Civil War. I picked up the copy of Lincoln by Gore Vidal that I'd had kicking around unread for twenty years. A simple novelisation of actual events, I could only assume I wasn't intended to throw it away. Looking for something to listen to while shaving I now find David Reynolds' Civil War series "American, Empire Of Liberty" being repeated on the BBC iPlayer.

From which I conclude that it's never been easier or cheaper to pursue an interest than it is today. Some of these were digital resources, some were three dimensional objects made from paper or carbon fibre. Some were new, some were second hand, all were below cost price. In the days before the web just finding all of that would have involved a lot of shoe leather, a lot of poring over microfiches and explaining things to shop assistants. A lot of faff in fact. Above all I would have had to remember to do it. With the web you simply take action as soon as something is front of mind.

Down in the Tube Station at midnight

Last night we watched "Heart Of The Angel", another documentary from The Molly Dineen Collection Vol 1: Home From the Hill (2-DVD set). This was made in 1989 just before Angel Tube station got its multi-million pound overhaul. The film is an echo of a vanished era when ticket-takers sat on stools in lifts that were always out of order, stationmasters were sixty-something blokes with cigarettes permanently clasped between their jaws and nobody knew what an Oyster Card was.

When the station closed for the night Molly and her sound recordist descended to the tunnels where the track maintenance engineers tramped through like weary pedestrians on the way from Camden Town to Bank, dragging sleepers behind them with pick axes. Even more amazing are the "fluffers", teams of women cleaners who patrolled the tunnel in near total darkness, removing by hand the human hair that would accumulate between the rails and risked causing an increased fire hazard.

The women in charge of the team doing this horrible, tedious, filthy and backbreaking job said that she'd inherited it from an aunt who had done it for thirty-three years. She introduced her team as her daughter-in-law and sister-in-law. In a week when the high and mighty have been making pronouncements about internships and privilege it was useful to be reminded that nepotism can flourish in the most humble jobs, even way down in the bowels of the earth.

A great documentary and a funny poem

Last night we watched "Home From The Hill", the short TV documentary that first made the name of its director Molly Dineen in 1987. It's the lead item in The Molly Dineen Collection Vol 1: Home From the Hill (2-DVD set), a collection of her work which somebody kindly sent me. "Home From The Hill" is about the return to Britain in the 1980s of retired colonial army officer Hilary Hook from his splendid home in rural Kenya to a rented flat in the suburbs. In the parlance of film Dineen occasionally breaks the fourth wall, a key feature of her later films about subjects such as London Zoo, Geri Halliwell and the decline of the farming industry. When Hook refuses to even try to use a can opener in his cramped English kitchen she can be heard saying "you're going to have to learn". It was quite easy to talk to him in this way because Hook was the father of her then-boyfriend and clearly adored her. At the end of the film he walks the English countryside complaining of the cold. "Let's go to a pub," he says before leaning towards her and launching into a poem:

It is not true to say I frowned,

Or ran about the room and roared;

I might have simply sat and snored -

I rose politely in the club

And said, 'I feel a little bored;

Will someone take me to a pub?'

She asks him whether he's happy. "Blissfully happy in your presence," he says, twinkling. "Otherwise I represent divine discontent."

This morning I looked up the poem. It's "A Ballade Of An Anti-Puritan" by G.K. Chesterton. Amazing.

How long do we give handwriting? Ten years?

Why iPads may not be good for "creatives"

I subscribe to iPad versions of The Times and The Economist. I find the iPad a convenient way of reading anything that's up to a thousand words long and doesn't rely on pictures, the kind of thing where you roughly know what you're going to get. The big feature, the journey of discovery, I'm not going to tackle on a screen.

I stick to the Times's Opinion section, the sport and a few other bits and pieces. In The Economist it's Bagehot and the British section of the magazine. Because I broadly know what I'm looking for and I'm more likely to find it via the navigation at the front than by idle flicking through (so much for the delight of page turning) there's less likelihood of my attention being caught by a good picture or a showy pull-quote. In fact the ideal layout for an iPad page could be this one on the left from today's Economist. Self-contained, looks long enough to read in kettle-boiling time and doesn't require the traditional picture of Eton boys and urchins.

When you're reading a publication on the iPad you're not bothered about bulk and it was the drive for bulk, which in turn was driven by specialist advertising opportunities, that eventually made me stop buying papers, particularly weekend ones. It resulted in papers that were groaning with fluff, where to find the bit you wanted to read you had to plough through tons of stuff which you didn't want to read and further tons of stuff to sort out for the binman on Monday night. I wonder whether the rise of the screen read will also result in an end to supplements, sections and some of the fluffier end of design. It won't bother me as a reader if it does.

If you're the record business, why not sell records to people?

What has happened to the music business in the last ten years was impossible to plan for and its impact was, in the words of PG Wodehouse, "like catching the down express in the small of the back". However they don't make things any easier for themselves by clinging to the wreckage of the old way. The new Paul Simon album "So Beautiful Or So What" is very good. It was originally supposed to come out in Britain in April. He did interviews about it. They organised a playback for media. They circulated copies for review. I wrote a favourable one in The Word. Then they decided to postpone the release until Paul Simon tours the UK in June.

Leave aside for a second the fact that anyone observing the careers of other boomer acts like the Rolling Stones and Paul McCartney would have noticed long ago that tours no longer sell new albums. Leave aside also the fact that any Paul Simon fan who has heard about this record will now either buy a copy from Amazon.com or get it from some PtoP site. When you have built up some anticipation around the release of anything, what on earth is the use of delaying that release and allowing that anticipation to fade into disinterest? Public attention is a finite resource and it is quickly diverted on to something else.

I asked this question of a former record label employee this week. He explained it as follows: "They'll be trying to get it to chart". Note he was not saying they're trying to get it to sell. In the old days when the record business was all about manufacture and distribution a chart entry was a useful thing in that it encouraged all the smaller record shops to stock the item and increased the distribution. Now that there are no small record shops what is the point of "getting it to chart" other than to make the marketing manager look good?

The former label man is now an artist manager. Deciding he had more chance of selling his artist's CDs to people attending his gigs than hoping they would go to shops, he negotiated to buy 500 copies from the label. The best price they would give him was over £6 a copy. "Can't you do any better than that?" he said, noting that the same record was available on Amazon for about £7. "No," they said, "because we want those people to go and buy a copy the following day - preferably at a chart return shop." He struck a better deal by buying his own artist's records from a retailer.

All too often that's the record business. The horse is already gambolling around in the upper pasture and the stable boy is busy oiling the lock on the stable door.

I learned more from a three minute record

I've had this album, "The Criminal Under My Own Hat" by T-Bone Burnett for years. It's only just now, while leafing through a new biography of G.K. Chesterton, that I happened on this quote from one of his Father Brown stories:

"No man’s really any good till he knows how bad he is, or might be; till he’s realized exactly how much right he has to all this snobbery, and sneering, and talking about ‘criminals,’ as if they were apes in a forest ten thousand miles away; till he’s got rid of all the dirty self-deception of talking about low types and deficient skulls; till he’s squeezed out of his soul the last drop of the oil of the Pharisees; till his only hope is somehow or other to have captured one criminal, and kept him safe and sane under his own hat."

Why they should export the Royal Wedding

Every year the American National Football League elects one if its fixtures to be played overseas. Two teams arrive in London and compete at Wembley Stadium with much attendant hullabaloo. The aim is to extend the reach of the brand, access new revenue streams and introduce a bit of novelty.

Why doesn't the Royal Family do the same thing with the wedding of William and Kate? As far as I can see there's not a lot of interest in the upcoming nuptials in this country, regardless of people's opinions about the monarchy. So why not take the banner event and have it take place somewhere people are really interested and are relatively pomp deprived? There's America of course, where they traditionally go big on this sort of thing. But the Windsors could look further afield. They could have people bidding for it, as if it was a Rolling Stones tour. China, Kazakhstan, Dubai, New Zealand, all sorts of governments and peoples might be interested in having our ancient rite played out on their streets and on their TVs, the frocks and rocks cooed over by their TV hosts, the scandal about the stag party chewed over by their gossip magazines, their own celebrities squabbling about who gets a decent seat at the service.

It would pay benefits, not just in terms of net receipts but also in terms of the subsequent boost to tourism. I think it bears thinking about. Times are tough. You've got to go where the market is. When they came back they could have some sort of homecoming ceremony, possibly even a renewal of vows. Then they could open the gallery at Buck House and let us gawp at the staggeringly tasteless ornaments they've been bought by their new foreign friends. Come on. It's win-win.

The thing I most often want from music nowadays

When I came home from work in my twenties it was my habit to play a record very loud. I suppose it was a reaction to the accumulated tension of the day. In those pre-Walkman days you couldn't spend a large part of your day behind a curtain of noise and so it was nice to be able to do it once you were home.

Nowadays, when we can take our personal choice of roiling chaos and clanging rhythm with us on the tube, I find that what I want from music when I get home is a sense of peace. It's almost a case of wanting the music to mark out a space away from everything else and help knit the ravelled sleeve of care. This is the new epic45 record, which I've played three times this morning. It seems to hit the spot.

Something doesn't add up in digital news

The Huffington Post is starting a British site this summer, which means there will be even more entertainment, media and current affairs in the British media market. It's customary for the newspapers and sites that are already in the British market to puff out their chests and suggest it won't affect them because what they do is different. This could be a mistake. Nobody is ever displaced by somebody coming along and doing what they already do. In fact they're never actually displaced. Instead they find their oxygen - whether that's in the shape of ad revenue, circulation revenue, viewing hours, leisure pounds or brain space – cut off by somebody coming along and doing something which is just sufficiently like what they're doing but for less money or no money at all to cause problems. In the case of the Huffington Post they have a huge advantage over the newspaper groups because the majority of their material is contributed free.

Some of the newspapers think they can survive by paying for the generation of content which they then give away for free and monetise with advertising. I don't, nor does the CEO of one of the biggest advertising agencies. He suggested this week that the newspaper groups could revive reading by giving away 100 million iPads. (Agencies are always strong on how other people should spend their money.) I still think it's not too late for the media owners to come to their senses and stop giving all their content away for free. The really galling thing about the likes of the Huffington Post stealing their lunch is the fact that those same content aggregators rely on the traditional news gatherers skills to provide the reporting on which their clouds of speculation and comment depend. What are they going to link to when they've all gone bust?

Elizabeth Taylor: it's really not easy being beautiful

On the radio this morning nobody seems to know what to say about Elizabeth Taylor that doesn't use the word "icon", which is the word they reach for when they want to say that somebody's significant but they're not sure why. It's even more difficult in Taylor's case because most of the films she made were remarkable largely for having her in them. It gets even more difficult when they talk about whether she was "a good actress". I'm not really sure what that means, though I suspect it's too often confused with big, sweaty displays of impersonation. I'm also not sure what being good at acting has to do with being a movie star. I suspect it's more to do with being able to move people by projecting certain qualities that they can't get enough of.

I had a look in The New Biographical Dictionary of Film. One of the things I like about David Thomson is that he's strong on the things that we read into stars. He remembers her appearances in her twenties as "the vague eligible debutante that she infused with insolent wantonness, half asleep from being stared at." Half asleep from being stared at. I like that.

Why National Service is a good idea which will never happen

The other day Mark Ellen and I were mulling over the benefits of bringing back National Service with the carefree air of codgers who will never be called upon to do it. As the registered owners of offspring who are in or have recently passed through the age group in question we know there's something to be said for it, and since since no government is ever going to have the nerve to bring National Service back it seems safe to rehearse some of the arguments.

• There are 770,000 British people between 19 and 24 who are not in work, education or training. Barring the sudden revival of the country's manufacturing base or the return to sense of the professional bodies who've made a degree a basic requirement to entry to their ranks, that's not going to change. It's going to get worse.
• The habit of work is the most important life skill you can acquire. Young people who've spent years watching daytime TV are going to find it impossible to pick up the reins of a productive life.
• Take John Peel. He was a classic case of a young man who hadn't a clue what he was going to do with his life and National Service threw him in with a whole load of types he would not otherwise have met, sent him overseas, no doubt put him to work doing some mind-numbing tasks, taught him to rub along with other people and probably did him more good than daytime TV would have done.
• If you talk to anyone of any distinction in their seventies and ask them how they ended up doing what they did, they will frequently say "it was National Service".
• If we had a conscript army there is no chance of a government of any stripe getting involved in overseas adventures like Iraq, Afghanistan or Libya. It would simply not be worth the political risk.
• It's bound to result in less pallid indie bands.

Has anybody heard a joke in the last five years?

When did somebody last tell you a joke? By a joke I mean a funny story which involves the introduction of a couple of characters, some dialogue, some action, a development and a conclusion, preferably a funny one. I can't remember when I last heard one. Comedians do "bits". Funny websites take playground gags and apply them to adult subjects. There have never been more places you can go to for humour. In fact humour pops up in all sorts of places where I'm not particularly looking for it. But jokes? I never hear any.

When I look back I recall what seems like whole days spent telling and listening to jokes. What else did we do in the sixth form at school or in the pub at college? How else did men communicate with each other? The joke was the basic unit of exchange and a young man's head was teeming with comedy Irishmen, cavemen, blondes, psychiatrists and policemen. Jokes, it seemed to me, told you more about narrative than any amount of English Literature. But now they seem to have gone, which seems to me more chilling than even than the decay of handwriting.

My favourite joke. Two rhinos walking through the jungle. One in front. One behind. They walk and walk and walk. Then the one in the front stops. Consequently the one behind stops. The one in front turns his head to the one behind and says "Do you know, I can't help thinking it's Tuesday?"

Are all middle-aged men know-alls?

An old colleague of mine used to say that the reason there were so few magazines for middle-aged men was that they weren't interested in finding out new things so much as boring you senseless with things they already knew. He reckoned that in most social situations men would carefully move the conversation to something that they knew a lot about and would then seek to dominate the exchanges. I argued he was rather overstating his case but I do recognise the syndrome. Maybe blogging is an outlet for the same impulse.

I was reminded of this when I finally got round to watching The Trip with Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon. Tired of the fact that Brydon won't listen to his lectures about Malham Cove, Coogan strides off along the limestone pavement to admire the view. As he does so he's joined by another walker who is determined to pass on his superior knowledge of the geology that formed the feature. Coogan isn't merely bored. He's also desperate to demonstrate that he knows almost as much. In the end he simply has to walk off. You can see the scene here.

Listening to Richard Keys and Andy Gray on Talk Sport

I drove down to Oxford this morning. Seeking to luxuriate in Tottenham's progress to the last eight of the Champions League and not wishing to listen to Woman's Hour, I tuned to Talk Sport for the journey.

Richard Keys and Andy Gray, recently let go by Sky Sports in the wake of their unfortunate remarks, are still settling down to their somewhat reduced circumstances on TalkSport's morning shift. They asked their guest Graeme Souness how he had enjoyed being in Barcelona earlier in the week. It was quite poignant. Had they not mis-spoken as they did they would have been inside that particular red rope, not stranded on the other side watching the quality.

On the drive back I listened to Paul Hawksbee and Andy Jacobs doing their afternoon show. All the TalkSport presenters are all essentially doing the same job, chewing over last night's events until every last bit of flavour had been extracted and throwing forward to what might happen tonight. It's a pub conversation carried to insane lengths.

What was interesting is that the TV refugees had hardly anything to say. Their banter was stilted, their laughter mirthless, their lack of originality really quite startling. Once deprived of TV's ace card, which is its sense of a big event, they were exposed as the men with the least interesting opinions in the pub. Hawksbee and Jacobs, by contrast, who are presumably paid a fraction of what the morning guys are paid, had some warmth, some rapport, some willingness to try things.

The contrast made me think of the first series of Alan Partridge on the radio, which I'd been listening to again via the iPlayer. The reason Alan is such a profoundly sad character is that he desperately wants to be on the television and regards everything else as second best. Alan thinks he's just passing through radio on his way to a better world. I wonder what Keys and Gray think.

Are even turkeys made with loving care?

Watching the "making of" documentary that comes with "The Social Network" I came to the conclusion that these films are mainly done to gratify the egos of the film's makers by underlining just how seriously they take their work. From the scenes where David Fincher, Aaron Sorkin and the two lead actors sit in a conference room and weigh every word of the dialogue (most of which is going to go right over the audience's heads) through the ninety-nine takes of the opening scene in the bar to a Winklevoss twin confiding that somebody had pinned his character's notional Harvard timetable next to his desk, it was a portrait of almost demented fastidiousness. This being "The Social Network", it's all seen as worthwhile, but people must presumably be going to the same trouble on films that are going to open on Friday and then close a day later.

What price World Book Night in the Can't Be Arsed Society?

If the various pro-book initiatives we've seen this week are anything to go by, authors have no more business pronouncing on how the public should behave and public policy should be shaped than rock stars or footballers. They sound every bit as much like naive sixth formers in an overheated debate. First Alan Bennett likens the closure of libraries to "child abuse". (He should read the most sensible contribution to this debate, from author and library campaigner Anthony Horowitz, who indicated a way forward for school libraries without avoiding the unpalatable truth that public library use has declined by a third in the last five years.) Then Philip Pullman, speaking in favour of the scheme whereby a million books are going to be given away, says "give books to people and they enjoy them and go and buy more books." (Tell that last one to the record business, who found that giving away CDs with mass market newspapers depressed the artists sales in some cases.)

Both seem classic illustrations of the shortcomings of this whole debate. The pious pronouncements at the top don't match the actual behaviour on the ground. People's disinclination to read books is not because they don't have access to them. It's because they can't be arsed. This doesn't change because you have further pandered to their indolence by rushing up and putting a book in their hands. Furthermore, the declining handful of independent book shops complain, not without reason, that the last thing we should be doing is giving books away, thereby adding even further to the perception that a book, if it costs you anything, ought to be about as much as a bottle of supermarket wine.

In the attention economy the actual book is neither here not there. Most of the people who are being given books today have got loads of unread books at home. What they lack is the will to read them. This is because they have persuaded themselves that their lives are somehow too busy to allow reading time. Oddly enough, they don't have any trouble making time for TV. A BARB survey just found that while the average Briton claims to watch TV for 20 hours a week the true figure is nearer thirty.

Tonight BBC-2 is all about World Book Night. Lots of well-known, good-hearted people will be popping up on your screen talking about how much they love reading. Wouldn't they be better off just taking a leaf out of what the BBC used to do in the 50s, which was shut down for an hour after Children's Hour to allow parents to put their children to bed? Impossibly quaint, I know, but at least it made the point that there were some things that listening and viewing simply got in the way of. They should have a Reading Hour in which they replace their normal output with a caption saying "Read A Book. Now." Obviously most people won't, much like most students and lecturers spend most of their Reading Weeks fornicating or pruning their roses, but at least it makes the point that you should.

So tonight I will not be watching the BBC's programming about World Book Night. I shall go in the other room and read a book. I urge you to join me.

The Model Agency: modelling gets the superficial treatment it deserves

I do like The Model Agency on Channel 4 because it's looking at people who spend their lives looking. In most areas of life you're expected to apologise for being interested in surfaces. In the world of models it's the only thing anyone's interested in, a focus it shares with TV. Nobody can have a conversation without breaking off to congratulate somebody on their hair or ask whether they're wearing any make-up. Girls are described as "fat", "beautiful" or "too thin" on the basis of a one-inch variation in hip measurement. After a single meeting they can be instantly divided into "show girls" or "money girls". Show girls do catwalks and editorial and have to seem appealing to designers who are predominantly gay men. The ideal candidate here would be a 12 year-old boy with the face of a girl from a renaissance painting. Money girls (wouldn't that be a great name for a band?) on the other hand do catalogue and basic advertising work. They have to appeal to clients who are looking to sell something. Money girls smile. Show girls don't.

If you're in the modelling business you're dealing in new flesh of which there is a limitless supply. The ones who come in the door with their parents and their book of pictures taken by a friend are rarely the ones you want. They're pretty but they don't have that other-worldly, venusian look that real models have. Luckily they're usually not tall enough either which gives the model agent an easy get-out and avoids them having to say "you're not good looking enough". It's often the case that the chosen ones have never thought about it. I was particularly struck by the American booker who discovered one 14-year-old while out shopping in Kingston. He was first attracted by her thin ankles which he glimpsed under a table. His gaze travelled up her long legs to find a perfectly slim shape and, eventually, the face of Helen of Troy. He asked if she'd ever thought about modelling. She said no. I think I believe her.

Was today the beginning of the end for media?

I'm not surprised that journalists fall over themselves to get tickets for Apple's product launches. At the moment the company has that combination of charisma, excitement and surging forward motion that I felt on the day when Sgt Pepper came out.

It's journalist who create this. When the history of this era is written they will conclude that Apple's grip on the popular imagination had less to do with massive advertising campaigns than thousands of opinion formers all arriving at the same opinion. By that time most of those opinion formers will be out of work because the value will have passed from those skills that were formerly called "creative" to those that were formerly called "technological".

On the day that Apple unveiled its new iPad novelist Linda Grant tweeted that she had lunch with her agent who tells her that within five years "no-one, not authors, agents or publishers will be able to make money out of books". It's the same day that the papers report that Randy Newman, interviewed at the Oscars, remarked that getting into the music business today was like breaking into a bank that had already been robbed. It's also the same day that Rupert Murdoch made it clear that anyone who was worried about the future of diversity in news providers could take Sky News off his hands, operating losses and all.

He knows what Steve Jobs knows. That the value right now is in the pipe, not the stuff that flows down it. You'd have thought more journalists would realise.

Could you all stop buying these jackets?

This is a Barbour quilted jacket. I bought one before Christmas. It keeps the cold out in the morning but isn't so heavy that you swelter when going home on the Victoria Line. I'd seen smart Spanish-looking men wearing them. I saw Dave, the transport manager in our building, wearing one and he said he'd recommend them.

Hence I got one. Since then I've hardly worn anything else. Problem is I'm clearly not the only one. There are increasing numbers of them out there in the world. There are quite enough of them indoors as well. In a fashion wave which is unprecedented in our family, my son, his girlfriend and now one of my daughters have also bought them. Theirs are not identical but they're close enough that if we all go out together we look like a sponsored shooting party. Now the other daughter says she wants one too. Enough, I think.

Why do they make it so hard to read art exhibitions?

To the Museum Of London to see their exhibition of London Street Photography. The pictures, which start with tiny, murky pictures from the 19th century and end with large, colourful shots from the 21st, are displayed around one large room. The information about the picture - what a hack like me calls the caption - is placed well below the picture and is often stacked on top of information for the picture below (right). This means that even a shortarse has to look up to see the picture and then peer down, often into near darkness, to see that this picture on the left is of recruiting sergeants photographed near Westminster Abbey in 1877.

The exhibition designer, like 95% of designers since the dawn of time, will no doubt say that it's important not to clutter what is essentially a visual experience with distracting type. I would counter, like 95% of editors since the dawn of time, that an event like this is meant to be read just as much as it's meant to be looked at and that if you separate the caption information from the picture you reduce understanding and enjoyment by 57%. (I made that bit up.)

It's the same in magazines. If given their head 95% of designers will make the pictures as big as possible before stacking up all the caption information and squirreling it away in the corner of the page. The posher (or the more amateur) the magazine the greater the chance that this will be the case. It's something that never happens in picture magazines like Hello or Heat because they know that when people look at a picture they immediately want to know who, when, where and why. Ideally they want to get all that information at once, not in a tiresome double movement.

I don't expect exhibition designers to follow exactly the same discipline but there's something to be learned, particularly in spaces where the low light makes anything but 24 pt illegible.

By the way, I learn from an 1877 book about street life in London that in those days all recruiting activity took place in an area near Westminster Abbey. Fascinating piece about it here.

An awkward lunch in the city

Having lunch in a cafe at the bottom of an office block the other day I witnessed a familiar scene. A young woman, presumably on maternity leave, had returned with her baby to have lunch with another young woman, presumably one still working in the office above. The second young woman made the appropriate admiring noises in the direction of her friend's baby but you just knew her heart wasn't in it. At the end of the lunch she stood there patiently while her old mate gathered up the baby's extensive travelling kit and got ready for the road. They said their fond farewells. One skipped towards the lift, the other started to negotiate the revolving door.

I suspect this was the last time they would meet like this. On reflection the mother would not consider it worth the trouble. The working girl, who found the whole thing a bit boring, would find a reason to put her off if she suggested it. One's got a new centre to her world. The other one hasn't. In the half hour it took them to have lunch you could sense them both realising this.

The difference between life and sums

Just caught a bit of a Panorama about Ireland's economic problems. The banks, they say, "got it wrong". The government also "got it wrong". Thousands of citizens also "got it wrong" when they bought houses that they couldn't afford even when they had jobs. "Got it wrong" seems such an inadequate expression when you're trying to describe human behaviour in general and human folly in particular. I can see how a child might have "got it wrong" when failing to carry ten in a simple sum. But "got it wrong" seems to suggest that somewhere is a Big Book Of Human Affairs which you can consult for the right and the wrong answers to every question in the adult world.

"Got it wrong" seems to have grown in popularity in the last ten years. It's particularly popular with media commentators who apply it to everything from Gordon Brown's tax plans to a football team playing three at the back. What they fail to take into account is that in most cases where people have "got it wrong" they've been aware of the possibility that they might have "got it wrong" but were hoping that over time events would work out in such a way as to make it appear that they had actually "got it right". They were guilty of hoping for the best, which is what most of us do every morning. Let's hope all the media organisations that those commentators work for don't turn out to have "got it wrong" themselves.

On looking through a load of old pictures

I've just spent a few hours sorting through hundreds of old family slides with my sister. Once they're hidden away inside unmarked Kodachrome containers, these pictures can spend decades unlooked-at. For every twenty pictures you find that recall people and occasions that you remember, there's one which throws up somebody you have forgotten altogether or another featuring a person you don't remember being there at the time. Once somebody reminds you it's as if you've come across a hidden track in the LP of your life. It makes you realise there are whole episodes of your life you have written out of the official record that you keep in your head, whether through forgetfulness, embarrassment or old-fashioned shame. It also makes you realise that when people tell you about their life, they're only telling you the version they're comfortable with.

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.