Philip Roth's invaluable advice to writers

I like the story about the young novelist, still waiting tables, who approached Philip Roth, proffering a copy of his newly-published first book.

It was called "Balls". Roth admired the title. Said he couldn't believe he hadn't used it himself. Then he advised his fan to "quit while you're ahead". He explained that writing was torture, that you had to throw most of it away because it wasn't any good and the young man really should stop now before he did lasting damage to himself.

When this story made the rounds some said that a successful old man like Roth had no right to be putting off anyone young and up and coming.

I don't agree. Roth said what he thought. That most novelists, like most musicians, are never going to achieve anything like the acclaim they feel they're entitled to and they really might be better off doing something they can succeed in.

And the more important point is that if the fire to write novels really burns inside you, rather than just the desire to become a successful novelist, then nothing Philip Roth says is going to make any difference.

As Laurence Olivier used to say, if you want to be an actor, you are an actor. If you're not an actor you didn't want it badly enough.

It must have been a posh girl who drew Van Morrison to Cyprus Avenue.

Last night I was in Belfast talking about Uncommon People in a pub called The Dark Horse at the Cathedral Quarter Festival.

After we'd finished local music boffin Stuart Baile took me on a quick tour of Van Morrison's Belfast. We went past the modest terraced house on Hyndford Street where he grew up, through the Hollow, the small park round the back of the house named in "Brown Eyed Girl", and up to Cyprus Avenue (above), a broad thoroughfare with beautiful old stone houses either side.

Cyprus Avenue is clearly a cut above. There's probably a Cyprus Avenue near where you live, the faintest dropping of the name of which would send clear messages to the people you grew up with.

Stuart and I were picturing Morrison as a young teenager taking the long way back from school to have an excuse to dawdle down Cyprus Avenue. Maybe it was in the hope of seeing some posh girl living in one of the grand houses.

Always seems to me one of the most powerful things that drove people to want to be rock stars: the desire to impress posh girls.

The Wanstead Tap is almost enough to tempt me to move East

I had fun last night talking about "Uncommon People" at the Wanstead Tap. In fact it was the world premiere of my magic lantern show, which I was pleased about.

The Wanstead Tap, I discovered, is not in Wanstead but in Forest Gate. It's not a pub so much as a beer shop/performance space/cafe/bar.

It was started three years ago by local TV producer Dan Clapton when he took over a building in a railway arch at the bottom of a cul-de-sac, equipped it as a bar and started putting on spoken word events. Its full story is here.

They only open three evenings a week, usually when they have entertainment. Turns coming up after me include Viv Albertine and Michael Rosen. They do a lot with the local book shop so authors can sign and sell.

It's fully seated, everyone can see and hear and it's got A/V facilities. All the locals I talked to said the same thing. They're very lucky to have this nearby.

They are.

Going back to my old school after fifty years

I left school after my A-levels in the summer of 1968. I hadn't been back since. When, in recent years, I'd been up in Yorkshire visiting family I'd driven past the place and toyed with the idea of just asking if I could have a look around. I never got round to it.

Then somebody from the school got in touch with me after I'd appeared on a recent BBC show about Whistle Test. I told her I was visiting the area on book promotion duty and I would like to drop in. She arranged it all. It was a fascinating experience.

When I went there it was a classic northern grammar school of a certain vintage. The stern central building was designed to look older than it was. They began adding modern buildings in the 50s and 60s. The boys who showed me round assumed that the one that housed the school hall had been there for ever. Actually, the foundation stone was lain in 1958. I know because I was present, in short trousers, at the ceremony.

Lots of it had changed, obviously. What used to be the library was now a reception area. The headmaster's office was in the room where I did English. The rooms that used to accommodate an entire class were now used for small tutorial groups.

People asked me if it seemed smaller than I remembered it. No, it didn't. Did it smell the same? No, it didn't.

The boys in the music room were learning to play "Sweet Child O' Mine" by Guns N' Roses. I can only hope they are as rigorous in punctuating that correctly as we were encouraged to be by Mrs Ellis back in 1962.

I told the headmaster that the thing I most often thanked my education for was what Mrs Ellis used to call "clause analysis". This involved taking apart sentences and identifying the different parts of speech. The headmaster, who is of course way younger than me, told me this was coming back into fashion after thirty years in the cold. "There's nothing new in education."

Every now and then on my tour I turned a corner and found myself whisked backwards. Different things triggered it. The corner of the playground where I once put my hand in my pocket and discovered half a crown I didn't know I had. The feeling of an 19th century bannister worn smooth by the hands of decades of boys. A leaded window though which you could look out at the same sky. The steps up to the Lecture Hall where I first recited Wilfred Owen's "Strange Meeting", a poem I still know by heart. The parquet floor of the school hall (above) where I played Troilus in "Troilus And Cressida".

I'm glad I did it.

Instead of writing a song about being on the road here's a blog

Perugia's an ancient hilltop city in Umbria. Every year it's taken over by the International Journalism Festival. Hundreds of young hot shots descend on this place from all over the world and deliver presentations on what to do about Fake News or How To Interview a Really Dangerous Person or How To Get Round Censorship When Running A Website In The Middle East. The sessions take place all over this most picturesque of towns and in the evenings the restaurants are full of people listening to the sound of their own voices as they slip smoothly from their own tongue to English to Italian and back.

What I was doing here you may well wonder. I was invited by the organisers, presumably to provide some light relief and because my 1971 book has been published in Italy by Big Sur. I was interviewed by Luca Valtorta from La Repubblica in the splendour of the Teatro della Sapienza, which dates back to 1362. I was worried there would be just a few people scattered across the stalls but it was full. This is probably thanks in no small part that entrance to the festival is free and therefore the student population of Perugia tends to show up. You can watch the session here.

I've been to well-organised festivals before but this was on another level. There were two interpreters stationed in a booth backstage at my event and people could listen on headphones if they had difficulty with the languages. All the sessions from all thirteen venues were streamed live throughout the day and archived the minute they were over. Then the organisers gave you a ticket which bought you dinner plus wine at one of a number of partner restaurants throughout the town. Everything worked as it's supposed to.

As a bit of gentle run-up to this appearance at the festival my Italian publishers organised a whistlestop tour of Milan, Turin and Rome, which took in five live radio interviews, as many interviews with journalists, two appearances at bookshops and an hour's chat to a bunch of students at Scuola Holden, which is a storytelling academy in Turin. To get to all these appointments took long train trips, colourful journeys in the back of city cabs, often going the wrong way up one-way streets, and a two-hour coach ride in the Italian equivalent of a Greyhound, sitting behind a man who made no less than twenty-one separate phone calls in its course.

After just four days of this kind of schedule I felt as spaced out as most musicians feel after four weeks on the road. I see what they mean. Either you're trying to wake yourself up because you have a performance to do or you're trying to calm yourself down because you know you need to sleep. You're either starving hungry or you never wish to see an item of food ever again. Either you want to jabber excitedly or you want to check out of the conversation completely. There's no inbetween. Luckily I shall not be writing a song about it.

Another reason Harry Truman's my favourite President

The day FDR died Harry Truman suddenly had the biggest job in the world thrust upon him – at the very moment when that job was hardest to do.

Hitler was still alive, the war in Europe wasn't over, Stalin was seeing what he could get away with, there were senior people in Washington who thought Germany should be reduced to an agrarian economy, the war in Japan was looking as though it might cost a million American lives and this guy from Missouri who looked like a small-town haberdasher, which is what he had been, was suddenly behind the desk of the man who had been widely regarded, both in the USA and abroad, as the saviour of the world.

Over the next three months he had to make the most momentous decisions any President has ever had to make: to drop the atomic bomb on Japan, to back democratic governments in Europe, to extend the credit needed to rebuild a continent, to walk into a room at Potsdam with Stalin and Churchill, neither of whom knew him from Adam, and tell them how things were going to be.

It's a story I never get tired of reading. This new book has lots of detail I didn't know. When Truman got back to the White House at the end of those three months this is what he did.

Did an LP ever get anybody into bed?

In the 1970s you could ask a girl back to your place "to listen to my albums" without being openly laughed at.

Why was that? Primarily because the only way you were going to hear Neil Young's "Harvest" or Marvin Gaye's "Let's Get it On" at the time they came out was to go to the home of somebody who owned a copy. The experience of listening to records like these simply wasn't available any other way. Saying "I have a record" was a legitimate overture.

As well as the small bump of delight that came from hearing something you hadn't heard before, there was also the fact that certain long playing records imbued their owners with prestige. In the early 70s I was aware there were other males who spent their disposable cash on cars rather than records but reasoned correctly there was no future in a girl who was more impressed by an old MG Midget than the new album by Todd Rundgren.

There was also something intimate about the two of you just listening to a record in your room, a place with no other facilities or distractions. It wasn't like watching a video was to become in the following decade. Responding to a record was something both personal and public. There was nothing to look at apart from each other and the album cover. In this way playing a record to a girl turned into a form of wooing. With a little bit of luck the record – its sound, its appearance, its fresh, unscratched surface, its manifold associations – would melt the space between you and render possible things that without it would have been impossible.


But you could overdo it with the boudoir albums. When I worked in the record shop we would smirk knowingly at the would-be Lotharios who came in to get an import copy of Roy C's album "Sex And Soul". This was a standard Southern Soul album which opened with the line "a man can't go no further than a woman let him" and had a woman on its cover apparently delighted that she has extended just such permission. They were clearly planning to use it to facilitate a seduction.

 I've never been convinced that any albums "worked" just like that. Maybe that was just my failing.

Is this the reason Mum works?

I can't think of another sitcom where the lead has no funny lines. The way we look at her younger family through Lesley Manville's eyes and find them hopelessly weird is exactly the way the young heroes and heroines of her youth looked at the adults in their lives in films like "The Graduate" and "Billy Liar". Maybe that's what makes it work. It's a twist on the traditional teenage misfit movie where she doesn't get to leave. Instead she stays at home where everybody depends on her while fooling themselves they can get by without her.

"Uncommon People" is coming out in paperback and I'm Very Nearly On Tour

The paperback of “Uncommon People” comes out at the beginning of April. In the upcoming weeks I’m out and about talking about this book, the earlier “Never A Dull Moment” and whatever else comes up all over the country and overseas. Please come along if I’m in the area.
March 6th, London. Talking about podcasting at an event organised by the @BSME. This is probably just for magazine people but in any case details are at http://www.bsme.com/march-event.
March 7th, Ipswich. Talking to the Suffolk Book League.
April 4th, Stoke Newington. Talking at Soundstage. Details at http://www.soundstage.thespace.uk.com/index.html.
April 9th, Islington. At Word In Your Ear with Mark Ellen and a very special guest. Details soon. Join the mailing list at wiyelondon.com to be sure you don't miss out.
April 14th. Speaking at @journalismfest in Perugia, Italy.
April 17th, 18th, 19th, Yorkshire. Speaking at events in God's Own Country. Details soon.
May 1st, Islington. At Word In Your Ear with Mark Ellen and another amazing guest.
May 2nd, London. Doing whatever's required – telling stories, collecting glasses, selling copies of the War Cry – at The Wanstead Tap.
May 5th, Belfast. Speaking at The Cathedral Quarter Arts Festival.
May 12-13th. Guernsey. Speaking at Guernsey Literary Festival.
May 20th. Bath. Speaking at Bath Festivals.
There's also a series of Johnnie Walker's Long Players going out at the moment on Monday nights at ten on BBC Radio 2.
Any queries about appearances, publicity opportunities, vacant soap boxes to Sally Wray at Transworld Book-Publishers.

The Peace and Love generation were raised on War and Hate

I just saw a presentation from VSC, the people who regulate and rate the video games industry. This gave us a glimpse of the kind of things that will get you an 18 rating. It was quite brief but the thought did cross my mind that somebody in the room might faint. If you're not used to seeing digital heads being cut off it can come as a shock. I'm certainly not used to it. I've never gone in for video games myself and the kids were never big on them so it's a world I know very little about.

It caused me to reflect upon the fact that my generation of baby boomers grew up with unfettered access to every possible variety of war toy: tin guns, rubber knives, home-made bows and arrows and even catapults given as birthday gifts by indulgent uncles. We read War Picture Library comics in which beefy sergeants with enormous fists would take out whole platoons of stormtroopers with just one swipe of their mighty arms. All the films we watched were war films. We couldn't have been exposed to more violence.

And yet we were the generation who grew up to lace daisies in each other's hair and embrace, on the surface at least, the hippie ethos. The Peace and Love generation were raised on War and Hate.

One of the best books I've ever read

I've been reading The Warmth Of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson.

It's the story of the Great Migration of black Americans from the South to the North and West told through the lives of three people.

There's Ida Mae Gladney, the wife of a sharecropper who leaves Mississippi in the 1930s after a family member is almost beaten to death by a white man over the disappearance of a turkey, and begins a new life in Chicago.

There's George Swanson Starling who gets out of Florida one step ahead of a lynch mob, moves to New York and then spends his life working the trains that conveyed millions of people between the New world and the Old.

Finally there's Robert Pershing Foster, a doctor who marries into the coloured aristocracy of Georgia but has to head out to the West Coast to escape the shadow of his father in law.

It's not a standard account of a journey from darkness to light. In fact the journey was from a life that was unbearable but simple to a life that was tolerable but increasingly difficult to negotiate.

If, like me, you've grown up absorbing ideas about the Great Migration through references to it in music, reading this opens up a whole world you never guessed at.

Every night when I put it down I said to myself "this is one of the best books I've ever read".

The genius of Summer Heights High

I was introduced to "Summer Heights High" a few years ago. We were marooned by storms in an old farmhouse in Brittany. A friend had all the episodes on his laptop. I loved it. So much, in fact, that I've watched it at least half a dozen times since. Now it's on the BBC iPlayer, so I've been watching it again.

It's the work of Chris Lilley, a sort of Australian Steve Coogan. At Summer Heights School he plays three characters: break-dancing bully Jonah Takalua, 16-year-old vamp Ja'mie King, who's arrived there on an exchange programme with a local private school, and Greg Gregson, the drama teacher who convinces himself the kids adore him and know him affectionately as Mr G.

"Summer Heights High" was first broadcast in 2007. Lilley's done variations on this format since but nothing is quite as perfect as the original. What I love about it, apart from the richness and cleverness of the characterisation, is that it depicts perfectly the way that a school becomes a substitute for a real world and also takes such pleasure in describing what monsters both children and teachers can be.

Couldn't happen here, of course.

In praise of The Marvelous Mrs Maisel

I like The Marvelous Mrs Maisel, the Amazon series which stars Rachel Brosnahan as the young wife and mother who scandalises her impeccably bourgeois Jewish family by making a name for herself as a comic in late 1950s Greenwich Village.

A lot of its exuberance comes from its use of popular tunes from the era in which it's set.  These might be Broadway musical hits like "I Enjoy Being A Girl" from "The Flower Drum Song" and Anthony Newley's "It Isn't Enough" from "The Roar Of The Greasepaint - The Smell Of The Crowd", curiosities like "Vyoch Tyoch Tyoch" from the Barry Sisters,  who were a kind of yiddish Andrews Sisters, scene-setters like Charlie Parker's "Scrapple From The Apple" and pop hits Mrs Maisel can twist to apply to her personal circumstances, songs like Blossom Dearie's "The Gentleman Is A Dope" or Peggy Lee's "Pass Me By".

All these contribute to its infectious sense of optimism. What makes it even more interesting is that at the end of most episodes the music breaks character, comes out of the fifties and universalises its point by using songs like Dave Edmunds' "Girls Talk", David Bowie's "Rebel Rebel" and, most effectively, "Dear Madam Barnum" by XTC.

I loved it. But then, as my daughters frequently remind me, I am a bit of a girl.

Thank God for Lillian Boxfish

The last new novel I tried to read was Lincoln In The Bardo, the Booker Prize winner. They say it's a masterpiece. I couldn't tell you. I didn't get past page fifty. And I speak as someone who's interested in Lincoln and rarely gives up on books. God knows what everybody else made of it. Since then I've just been reading non-fiction.

I picked up Lillian Boxfish Takes A Walk by Kathleen Rooney from the table near the door at Daunts in Marleybone High Street. It was the week before Christmas and I was looking for stocking-fillers for my wife. I read the blurb and thought it was worth a go.

My wife loved it. I loved it too. Lillian Boxfish is a woman in her eighties who refuses to leave New York. During the Jazz Age she became the highest-paid woman in advertising for composing the clever light verse on the newspaper and magazine advertisements for Macy's.

Even in her eighties she believes in walking everywhere. Solvitur Ambulando is one of her mottoes. "It is solved by walking." Which explains why on New Year's Eve 1984 she walks all the way from her place in Murray Hill to Delmonico's down in the Financial District and then on to a young people's party in the yet to be gentrified Meat Packing District.

On the way she encounters New Yorkers who all enquire what an old lady is doing out on the streets alone at night. In her mind she recapitulates her life and career. And that really is the sum total of what the book's about. Lillian Boxfish believes it's her duty to be bright and entertaining without taking up too much of people's time. The book's the same.

It doesn't play brain-scrambling games with the structure of The Novel so it's never going to win the Booker Prize. It is however readable. I got up early this morning to finish it. If being readable sounds like damning with faint praise I don't mean it to.

There's only one thing you can ask of a ref and it's not being right

I'm not in favour of the video assistant referee (VAR) system being tested in British football at the moment. What drives me crazy about the arguments about football and technology are the football pundits (who are all in favour because they like the idea of anything that turns it into more of a TV show and less of a sport) saying something along the lines "they've used it in rugby and it works fine".

This fails to take into account the facts that:
1) rugby only consults the video replay on the many occasions when there's a break in the action;
2) an awful lot of time the evidence of the replay is inconclusive;
3) the coaches are up in the stands, not bellowing in the ear of the touchline official.

I can't believe those pundits who argue "if it can help us get a few more right decisions we should do it". This is a particularly daft argument for them to promote. If there's nothing to argue about there's even less reason for them to be handsomely rewarded for their services.

And what has being "right" got to do with sport? There's only one thing you can ask of referees and that's that they be fair. The more that you open up the process of decision-making to discussion the more you hasten the day – and I am confident this day will arrive –  that Jose Mourinho will have a QC on the Manchester United bench.

Two old gits push back against the tyranny of now

I've forgotten exactly how we got on to it but at some point during my conversation with Danny Baker at this week's Word In Your Ear he talked about the misconceptions about pop music lurking in the breasts of most of the people who make programmes about it. The recording's here.

A certain amount of this is only to expected – what with some of them not having been born when most of the events they're documenting were taking place – but it's made more misleading by a view of the past which can't help being condescending.

In this linear view of events each chapter of pop history has to be another staging post in a journey towards our present state of enlightenment.

In this view progressive music (boo!) must always be slain by punk rock (hooray!).

In this view nobody is permitted to have heard of reggae until the arrival of Bob Marley.

In this view all TV comedy in the seventies is an orgy of -isms which we blush to think about.

All the trousers must be either tight and narrow or extravagantly flared.

It's what somebody called the Tyranny of Now.

The podcast way to do history

I read about the Sharon Tate murders not long after they happened. I followed Watergate as it unfolded. I've clearly forgotten enough of what I picked up back then or missed enough of what memoirs have subsequently brought into the public domain to be fascinated by two recent podcasts devoted to them.

You Must Remember Manson is a spin-off from You Must Remember This, Karina Longworth's acclaimed series of looks at the seamy side of what she calls "Hollywood's first century". Recited by the author in a characteristic style, as if from the depths of a chaise longue situated beneath a slowly revolving fan, Longworth's Manson series devotes whole episodes to looking at people like Dennis Wilson and Terry Melcher who were more than incidental figures in the story. It's fascinating to hear the story told from a showbiz point of view.

Slow Burn is a newly-launched podcast about Watergate which sets out to tell the story in pieces, which is the way it first came to light. It starts with the amazing and sad story of Martha Mitchell, the loose-tongued wife of Nixon loyalist John Mitchell, and continues with the saga of Wright Patman, the Texan populist whose committee first set out to prove a link between the money found on the Watergate burglars and CREEP, the Committee To Re-Elect The President. Where there are parallels with what's going on at the moment with Trump and Robert Mueller, let's say they don't resist them.

This is obviously the way to do history via the podcast medium - not so much by drawing the threads together as by separating them, seeing where they lead back to and treating them as a collection of life stories.

It seems to work.

My eyewitness account of nothing happening at Oxford Circus tonight

My wife and I were going into Oxford Circus station at 4:36 tonight. It was beginning to get busy. There was that quickening of the pace you can feel when people are just keen to get through before the crowd arrives. As we were at the top of the escalator a voice on the P.A. said "LT police to Platform One, please" with just enough urgency in the voice to suggest this might not be routine.

At the bottom of the escalator there were some people starting to go against the tide. They were coming through from the tunnel leading to Platform One and they looked spooked by something.  They were talking to other people and telling them to go back. They may well have been visitors from overseas.

We didn't stick around to find out. We just kept heading down the second escalator to the Victoria Line, got on the first train that came and were out of there and at Warren Street before the police were called. On the way home I looked on Twitter and could see the signs of a big story developing. BBC and Sky were all leading with the story. Armed police were swarming all over the place. People were talking about shooters, even knives.

By the time I got home, which was round about 5:36, the story was being carried by the New York Times and the Washington Post. At the same time the Met were saying that as far as they could see nothing had happened. There had been reports of a shooter in Oxford Circus station but they hadn't been able to find any evidence of any such person or incident.

I've worked in the West End on and off for over forty years. In the seventies you could have terrorist incidents in the West End and you wouldn't know about them until you picked up the paper the following morning.

Contrast that with Oxford Circus tonight. In just one hour of nothing happening the news was halfway round the world.

Here's a play for people who don't go to the theatre

Yesterday I went to the theatre on my own.  I've never done that before. I'd been telling myself for a while I had to get round to seeing James Graham's play Ink, with Bertie Carvel as Rupert Murdoch. This week I saw a poster on the tube saying that it closed in early January. I decided I had to get on with it.

Yesterday morning, using the TodayTix app,  I bought a ticket in the Royal Circle of the Duke Of Yorks Theatre for just £23 including agents fees.  The view wasn't brilliant but I've had far worse at rock gigs over the years and it didn't prevent me enjoying it.

Ink is brilliant. Fast, punchy, broad, vulgar and thoughtful, it tells the story of the first year of the Sun newspaper from Murdoch's purchase of the failing title from the complacent Mirror group to the introduction of the first Page Three girl. Its climax is provided by the tragically botched kidnapping of the wife of Murdoch's deputy.

The only thing that could improve it would be to see it with an audience more like the Britain the play describes and less like the self-selecting bunch who go to the theatre.

The latter are overwhelmingly white, senior, middle class and would be the first to tell you they have never read a copy of The Sun in their lives and really couldn't understand what anyone would possibly see in it.

Something like Ink should be seen by the widest audience possible. Not because it would be good for them. But because it would make a great experience even better.

Let's not talk about sex, chaps.

The obit of American writer Nancy Friday in today's Times quotes her on why she started writing about sex:

"Men spend a great deal of their leisure hours in pubs, clubs or washrooms talking about their sexual exploits, but women don't say anything at all. Consequently one woman never knows what another woman thinks about sex."

I don't wish to take issue with the recently-deceased but, setting aside the obvious question, "how would Nancy know what men talk about in men-only situations?", it has not been my experience that men talk to other men about their sexual exploits.

I realised this again recently in the wake of the Harvey Weinstein business when, like everyone else, I've been asking old colleagues whether we ever worked with anyone who showed any of the same tendencies.

We quickly realised that what little we knew on the subject was entirely based on what female colleagues had told us.

Obviously been going in the wrong washrooms.