Talent borrows, genius steals - and sometimes it's a Big Job

This afternoon, while recording a Word podcast to mark Bob Dylan's 70th, we were talking about the lines that he borrowed from other songs and how the images that seemed to spring from his psychedelic imagination were often flown in from earlier traditions. An instance is the line about "the railroad men drink up your blood like wine" from "Stuck Inside Of Mobile With The Memphis Blues Again" which he got from Bascom Lamar Lunsford's 1924 song "I Wish I Was A Mole In The Ground" which contained the lines "'Cause a railroad man they'll kill you when he can/And drink up your blood like wine."

When I was at school I learned T.S. Eliot's "Journey Of The Magi", which begins:

A cold coming we had of it,

Just the worst time of the year

For a journey, and such a journey:

The ways deep and the weather sharp,

The very dead of winter.

Reading Adam Nicholson's excellent book God's Secretaries about the men who made the King James Bible I learned that one of their leaders was Lancelot Andrewes who preached a sermon one Christmas Day in the early 17th century which began with these lines:

"A cold coming they had of it at this time of the year, just the worst time of the year to take a journey, and specially a long journey. The ways deep, the weather sharp, the days short, the sun farthest off, in solstitio brumali, the very dead of winter."

Eliot didn't try to pass this off as his own but nonetheless starting his poem with it, and such a large chunk of it, got him off the mark and provided the rhythm that makes the poem work. I wonder whether he blushed as he read it back. Probably not. Think I'll start doing the same.

There are three great books about The Beatles

Stumbled upon my copy of Michael Braun's "Love Me Do" yesterday. I'm not sure you can get it at the moment, which is a shame. This is a 1995 reissue of the original book which came out in 1965 and was written in 1963-4. Braun was an American journalist who went on the road with the Beatles when nobody beyond the showbiz columns was interested in them. In his introduction to the 1995 version he wrote that what interested him was they were "a new kind of people". John Lennon later said that Braun's was the best book about The Beatles because "he wrote how we were, which was bastards".

They don't come over as bastards, just four blokes from unremarkable backgrounds (flicking through it I come upon the bit where Lennon says Ringo had only been to school for two days thanks to his childhood illnesses) who suddenly find themselves bulleted into a position no humans had ever been in before and somehow deal with it. It's not the most joined-up narrative. Instead Braun just records what people said amid the chaos.

It's as if the window is just closing on their real lives and henceforth we will only be able to see them through clouds of myth. It starts in the bar of the ABC in Cambridge.

In another corner John Lennon is sipping a coke which he keeps replenishing with Scotch.
"How long do you think the group will last?" somebody asks.
"About five years."
"Will the group stay together?"
"Don't know," says Mr Lennon and pours another Scotch into the coke.

The other two important books about The Beatles are Ian Macdonald's Revolution in the Head: The Beatles' Records and the Sixties, which is all about the music, and Peter Doggett's You Never Give Me Your Money: The Battle For The Soul Of The Beatles, which is all about what happened afterwards.

I don't understand people (part 27)

I once asked my mother if my father had been present at the births of his children. I was teasing her because I knew he wouldn't have been. "In fact," she added, "if he'd even suggested it I would have been horrified."

Funny how behaviour changes. What was once exceptional becomes first optional and then compulsory. We now live in a world where Test cricketers return from Australia for the weekend to witness the birth of their third child because they simply can't risk the opprobrium of not being there.

Similar case today. Somebody I know was contacted by a freelance who was wondering if they could get more work because she's expecting a baby and her partner has cut down his working hours in order to help her out. This meant there was a shortfall in the household income that needed making up.

We were reflecting that a coal miner in the 30s would have been unlikely to come home and tell his pregnant wife he was cutting down his hours underground in order to help her out. Had he dared he would have been chased back to the pit with the rolling pin of beloved cliché.

If you cry at the end of Toy Story 3 you really should grow up

I didn't take notice of the reviews of Toy Story 3 when it came out. I knew I'd see it, just like I saw and enjoyed the previous two. And The Incredibles. And Shrek. And lots of other kidult hits. Finally got round to watching it last night after sending forth a daughter to buy it in a shop - for £20, which is a ridiculous amount of money, whoever's setting that price.

Really enjoyed it. How could you not? Approaching the end I was dimly aware that there had been much talk about how the ending made grown men and women cry. There had been widespread debates about whether this was OK. I was waiting for it. Right until the end I was braced for it, particularly since the theme was sacrifice, which always makes men cry.

How was it? Well, it didn't come close to making me cry. In the ranks of tear jerkers I have watched it ranks as no more than touching. So why the fuss?

Is Toy Story one of those juvenile things that we never grow out of? There's nothing wrong with that but we don't have to build it up into something it isn't just to make ourselves feel comfortable with our inner child. Instead of admitting that it's we who are child-like we pretend that the child-like thing has somehow become more adult because, you know, it works on so many levels? Like Doctor Who? And Kylie? And the Eurovision Song Contest? And, it seems, an increasing number of things which are pitched at juvenile adults.

What do pretty girls do?

In 1985 I was working with a friend of the musician Tim Finn. At the time he was living with the actress Greta Scacchi. She was 24, the coming film beauty.

One day I came back from buying cigarettes to find both of them sitting in my office. The impact of a genuine incandescent screen beauty in three dimensions at close quarters in your basic everyday surroundings is like nothing else. It's almost like Jessica Rabbit materialising to Bob Hoskins. You realise that there are everyday good looks and then there are the kind of good looks that can comfortably occupy a massive screen.

She's now in her 50s and playing Bette Davis in a play in the West End. She gave an interview today in which she said she hadn't turned a head in ten years. In the pictures she looks handsome but unglamorous, as if she can't bear chasing after what's gone. Contrast that with Jane Fonda who appeared at Cannes yesterday looking fit to put Bob Hoskins eyes out on stalks. She's 72 and clearly hasn't given up.

Reminds me of that wonderful old song by Kirsty MacColl called "What Do Pretty Girls Do?" Well, some of them fight it and some don't.

Anticipation: a language women speak that men don't understand

Earlier this year my wife had a birthday of some significance. It's the kind where she inevitably says "I don't want a present". This is clearly code for "I do want a present". I'm not that stupid.

I couldn't think of anything. Jewellery is a language I simply don't speak. When consulted for advice the eldest daughter said "Well, she's always wanted one of those custom-made bags from Very Expensive Bag Shop." The pair of us went to VEBS and inspected the options. They were very impressive. Even I could tell that. I asked how long it would take them to make one of these bags and get it monogrammed. "Between two and three months," said the lady. It was days until the birthday. It wouldn't do to turn up at the birthday dinner with an I.O.U.. We beat a retreat from the shop and thought again. We couldn't come up with a better idea.

I rang a female friend of the family and put my dilemma to her. She had no hesitation. "Get it," she said. "She won't mind the wait. Matter of fact she'll enjoy the anticipation." Now this advice flew in the face of everything I've ever thought about buying or receiving presents. I don't know a single male who can bear getting a present that he can't rip open and over-use on the spot. But that's males.

I ordered the bag, paid for it and got in return a beautifully embossed envelope with a nice written promissory note inside. I presented this on the evening of the birthday. It went down better than I could ever have hope. Two months later the shop rang to say the bag was ready for collection. I rang the wife, who works near the shop. "The bag's ready! You can go and get it tonight!"

She didn't get it that night. Or the next night. Or the one after that. A week later, when the time was right, she picked it up and brought it home in one of those bags big enough to carry a car in. She's unwrapped it, fondled it, hugged it to her and shown it to a few close friends. She hasn't taken it out yet because the right occasion hasn't presented itself.

Anticipation. It's a foreign language. I wish it hadn't taken me this long to learn it.

P.S. I told my wife that her eldest daughter had suggested that she had always wanted one. "I never said a word about it to her," she replied. This may indicate that the daughter has even more patience.

Whatever happened to the fish knife?

This morning we had tea from the remnants of the breakfast service my in-laws were given when they got married after the war. Apparently the cups are shaped like that to ensure that the tea cools quickly.

We have inherited all manner of cutlery and chinaware which was given to our parents (and even, in some cases their parents) upon their marriage. We have sets of fish knives, forks and slices, often encased in velvet lined cases as if they were dueling pistols. We have sugar tongs. We have silver-plated cake stands. We have what would now be called "solutions" to every serving problem that might have faced the domestic hostess in the days of Macmillan.

Looking at this arsenal of equipment you might be forgiven for thinking our parents were big entertainers. They weren't. Nor were most people in those days. Aunts in hats would be invited to tea from time to time but dinner parties were unknown and nobody ever came round to Sunday lunch (which was of course Sunday dinner). Who was all this stuff supposed to impress? I'd find it all a lot easier to understand in the world of "Come Dine With Me" than it was back then.

Smoke and mirrors at the White House

I only want to draw your attention to two aspects of the Obama/Osama business. It was pretty clear from the moment this picture was released that that group of people were not watching the events unfolding over in Pakistan. We know that cameras are mounted on pretty much all items of expensive military kit nowadays but in order for those people in the White House situation room to be able to watch anything intelligible from the compound in Abbotabad the special forces group would have had to drop out of the sky with a couple of Winnebagos full of directors and vision mixers. They would probably have needed to find the nearest Starbucks and get the coffees in before any violence began. What those people are probably watching is a link to CIA headquarters where the operation is being controlled from.

The second interesting detail I picked up from the New York Times account was that Obama was keeping an eye on the unfolding operation while "rehearsing" for his appearance at the White House Correspondents Dinner. This annual event, which takes place in front of a room full of gorgeous actresses and not gorgeous hacks, is now one of the biggest occasions of the Washington year. The President shows up and reads a load of self-deprecating jokes about himself from a teleprompter. Obviously this needs preparing for but I don't think Lincoln "rehearsed" the Gettysburg address. Had he "rehearsed" it that would have suggested it was a "performance".

Calm down, dear. They're only concert tickets.

Today's You and Yours on Radio Four was all about whether it should be against the law to sell a concert ticket at more than the face value. The lines were jammed with indignant members of the public who had been in one way or another stymied in their efforts to get a ticket for this or that musical, theatrical or sporting event. They blamed it on the touts, the secondary ticketing sites, the acts and their fellow concertgoers. To listen to some of them talk you would have thought they'd been denied their civil rights.

I don't know where this ticket-buying mania has come from but in the last ten years I've seen it turn into a national sickness. I meet people at dinner parties nowadays who are desperate to get tickets for festivals or big name gigs and they're the kind of people who would have had no interest twenty years ago. They don't go to small gigs. They only go to big ones and they're always amazed that millions of other people just like them are struggling for the same tickets as they are, with predictable consequences.

During the last ten years we've seen ticket prices more than double and it seems to have had no effect on demand at all. As soon as there's a prestige event in the offing people seem to be prepared to spend anything to make sure they can get in. A young person I know recently asked me if I could help her get tickets to see Dolly Parton at the O2. They're £75 each. That means that if she and her boyfriend went along they would be spending the best part of £200 to see an artist they don't own a single record by, have never seen before and may well be disappointed by. These are people in their twenties who can't afford to be splashing money around like this. I've known teenagers with no festival going experience who have spent a hundred pounds on festival tickets that didn't turn up. How did they get so desperate?

I paid £100 for me and the GLW to see Leonard Cohen at the same venue a couple of years ago. I only did that because I knew I was going to enjoy it. He was worth it but I wouldn't be queueing up to spend the same amount of money the following week to see anyone else and I'm probably not going to pay it to see him again. There was a time when I could get a press ticket to most musical events by picking up the phone. Those days are gone. Record companies are having to pay the same inflated sums that the public are paying and therefore they're not flinging tickets around. It doesn't bother me at all. If you can't get into the big gig, go to the small gig, go to the pub or stay at home and read a book. Calm down, for crying out loud.

I was a victim of Grand Theft Auto

It's only when you have your car stolen from outside your house that you discover, from friends, neighbours and faintly bored professionals, just what an imaginative, energetic and bare-faced lot car thieves are.

A friend of ours recently came home from work by car to discover her husband's sports car pinched off the drive and the lights on in the house. She went in to find the house had been ransacked. She rang her husband, who was overseas, to tell him. He suggested she quickly look in the drawer where they kept the second key for the car she'd come back in. It wasn't there and - by the time she got back to the phone - nor was the vehicle. The thieves had obviously been waiting for her to come back with the other car so that they could pinch that one as well. They'd passed the time waiting for her by burgling a house across the road.

Other friends living not far away were also relieved of two vehicles in similar style a year before, only this time the gang, which was fronted by adolescent boys, unlikely to suffer the full force of the law, came back the following day to take the second car.

Our loss was nothing like as dramatic. Nonetheless we lost a 15-year-old Mercedes Estate with plenty of miles on the clock. The police shrugged and gave us a crime number. The insurers gave us less than a thousand pounds for it. A man from the motor trade guessed it would have been on its way to Africa or Albania within twenty-four hours. He pointed out that every part of that car is worth around fifty quid and therefore it would be cannibalized for spares. More fool us for lovingly and expensively caring for it.

One of the kids wanted to know why nobody could find it. After all she's grown up with the modern miracle of number plate recognition whereby the screen at the entrance to the Channel Tunnel always greets us with "Good morning, Mr Hepworth". With such technology available it ought to be possible to know where every recently pinched car in the UK is at any given time. I suspect it's one of those cases where the sheer amount of information available overwhelms the human element. In truth nobody really wants to know. The police either can't be bothered or aren't geared up for the effort. The insurance companies just want to settle. It's just one of those constantly grinding bureaucratic processes which everybody prefers to leave well alone.

Another neighbour found this when he was victim of the old fishing rod through the letter-box ruse. He got one of his two vehicles back. After he'd settled with the insurance company over the other one he started getting parking tickets for it. He went to the address on the tickets and found the vehicle, where it had clearly been abandoned. He then spent considerable time on the phone and banging on desks at the offices of the local authority, police and insurance company trying to get somebody to take responsibility for the car, which was no longer his. All concerned made it clear that they regarded him as being rather tiresome.

What TV is always looking for - and it's not talent

I caught the last ten minutes of "Britain's Got Talent" last night. This featured a 12-year-old boy called Ronan Parke (left) who has clearly been identified by the producers as the winner of the competition. Before he began singing his mother said "I do hope people like him". After he'd finished the judges said "you don't need to bother going back to school" and "you're going to be a big star".

You don't have to be a child guidance counsellor to suspect that any one of those statements could do harm to a young mind. As I was watching the carefully contrived montage - cut to the proud parents, the audience apparently rising spontaneously to applaud mid-song, the boys' shocked and delighted expression - I thought, we're going to see this bit again, probably when it all goes wrong.

Earlier yesterday I was talking to a friend with thirty years experience in a senior capacity in television. His opinion on television and "real people" was simple: don't ever go on television unless you are prepared to be manipulated. That's because manipulation is what television, at any level, does. He also pointed out something that I'd always dimly sensed but never thought about - when producers are reviewing what footage they've got the only thing they're looking for is an edit point. They're not bothered about the sense of the story or its relationship with the truth - they're looking at how they can stitch that bit to this bit in a way that maximises the energy of the whole.

On the occasions I'm interviewed for television I always start by saying "tell me what you want me to say and I'll tell you whether I'll say it". This saves a great deal of time. I've also worked out that if you're going to be on BBC-1 you have to make your answers half the length they would be on BBC-2 which is in turn half the length they would be on BBC-4, which is half the length they would be on Radio 4. However even I've been amazed at how BBC-1 or ITV-1 will chop even the pithiest answer in half if they can find an edit point. That's because, as my friend points out, they're not attending at all to the sense of what you say. They're responding to the energy with which you say it and wondering how they can cut and paste it into their own little national grid.

The Ronan Parke item last night was not a performance. It was a little drama about a performance, as predetermined and carefully scripted as an episode of Glee. Talking of which, I don't think the competitors in shows like Britain's Got Talent should be lured there on false promises of musical stardom. I think they should be paid for their appearances much as actors would be. After all that's how they're used.

That Royal Wedding In Full

I went into town this morning to see what a major event like a Royal Wedding was like without commentary. I can't bear the way TV presents these events. They don't react to what happens. They simply recite a script. My favourite tweet of the morning was @kateflett pointing out that the BBC's coverage was "either ponderous (Huw) or inane (Fearne)".

I couldn't get into St James's Park. Nor could the two would-be brides (above). The hard core had staked out their pitches long before. With thousands of others I repaired to Hyde Park where the atmosphere was like a well-behaved rock concert. You wouldn't have been surprised if Duffy had come on. The crowd was a lot younger than I would have predicted. The overwhelming majority were under 35. I kept looking around for flag waving females of my mother's generation but of course they've passed on. There were mums in leggings and tee shirts with small daughters wearing plastic tiaras. There were young professionals drinking supermarket fizz and eating gourmet crisps. There were tourists from countries which executed their royals many years ago. There were a few grown-ups in fancy dress.

We watched the ceremony on big screens. It was a relief when the liturgy took over from the commentary. At the very instant that Kate Middleton reached the altar the sun came through the clouds and everyone in Hyde Park cheered. TV probably missed that.

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".