"Looking for business, darling?"

The day after Paul Raymond died it's good to be reminded that the old Soho still exists in pockets. This morning I went to interview Mike Leigh about his wonderful new film "Happy Go Lucky". Leigh is arguably Britain's foremost film director, a man who sits at the same table as Scorsese, Coppola and Almodovar when the great and the good gather.
I fancy if I went to interview any of those it would be in a loft overlooking some great river. To get to Leigh's office you had to go to the second floor of an address in Greek Street. On the first landing there actually was a handwritten notice announcing "French model".

Plug

This afternoon I'm on A Good Read on Radio Four. It's presented by Kate Mosse. The usual anchor is Sue McGregor. She asked for some time off because she needed to have a rest from having to read at least two books a week. Don't blame her.

The never-never

Just finished "Never Again", Peter Hennessy's history of Britain between 1945 and 1951. This is in the same week that the clamour is rising once more for a referendum on membership of the EC.
The Labour government of the time kicked into the long grass the idea of membership of what was then the Iron & Steel pact between France and Germany because they didn't want to return to where they'd just finished a war, they were too preoccupied with the problems of the pound, they were committing themselves to a war in Korea and, to quote Ernest Bevin, "the Durham miners would never stand for it." How quaint that sounds now.
France and Germany were in such disarray that they just got on with it. That's the way it is with positive action. Having no choice concentrates the mind wonderfully. Ever since then it seems that every time a nation is asked to vote on membership they vote against. Somehow it's the posture that can never be proved wrong.

Striving to better, oft we mar what’s well

I knew that in 1687 the Irish poet and hymn writer Nahum Tate was asked to do a re-write of Shakespeare's "King Lear". What they needed was a version that wouldn't rattle the cage of recently restored monarchy and sat more comfortably with the advance of the Enlightenment. They couldn't face the bleakness of Shakespeare's original. Tate's version has a happy ending with Cordelia marrying Edgar and everybody begging each other's pardon for the misunderstanding. What I didn't know until this morning's In Our Time on Radio Four was that for the next 150 years this was the accepted and most widely performed version. Presumably the original was regarded as a mistake. Which makes me wonder, what works from the Canon will we change our mind about in the future?

And ye shall know them by their TV commercials

The past is another country, sure enough.

• The captain of the England football team dropped in at his local unmolested after a match.
• There was a product called Dreft.
• People got excited about the prospect of winning five pounds.
• They blended tea specially for Northern Ireland.
• All blondes were Swedish.
• Middle-aged men wore bowler hats.
• They advertised boots on the TV.

Time and motion

I was talking to Tom Whitwell yesterday. Tom runs the community sites for The Times now but he used to be in magazines. He reckons he couldn't do magazines anymore because they're not instant enough. Certainly you're struck by the fact that in magazines you spend much of your time processing material that you're not actually going to use. They don't call it editing for nothing. However the other day I was reminded that when it comes to time spent unproductively, nothing can compare with television. Particularly prime time television.

I took part in an item about LP covers for BBC's "The One Show" which involved me turning up at Sister Ray in Soho to deliver the so-called expert's view of the development of album art from the 50s to the present day. My old pal Clare Grogan, to whom I am legally married in Memphis, Tennessee but that's another story, was fronting the item. The people doing the job were very professional but what with cutaways, noddies, different angles, close-ups of hands flicking through the racks and the rest of the palaver that inevitably accompanies even the simplest filming, there was no time to talk about the fifties, the eighties or the nineties. And that wasn't because I was talking too much. I avoided that because the director told me that the finished item was expected to run just two and half minutes. Because I was keen to avoid that conversationus interruptus that afflicts most TV nowadays, in which nobody is allowed to actually finish a sentence, I kept it snappy, believe me.

Nowadays there seems something rather old fashioned about an activity which takes days of people's time and is then gone in 150 seconds - never to return.

Er, we've won the cup

I've been to a few cup finals but yesterday's was the only one where the result particularly mattered to me. I was so pleased to be able to go in the first place that I couldn't believe it when the result went our way as well. It seemed a bit much to ask.
Before it began the PA announcer said "may we remind you that racism and foul language have no place in football".
Obviously the former has no place anywhere, and I was pleasantly impressed by the fact that the bloke in front of me kept up a steady barrage of abuse directed at Didier Zokora without once mentioning his skin colour, but the latter is stitched into the very soul of the game. The 22 men we've come to watch are cursing loudly throughout the 90 minutes (and in extra time too) and so it seems only fair that we should be able to do it too.

Take me back...

"Serendipity" is the ancient name of Sri Lanka.
It also describes one of the chief delights of the web. On the Word site we started off a thread about how quickly the latest technological marvel is, once superseded, utterly forgotten.
This led somebody who posts under the name backwards7 to compose a brilliant pastiche of Van Morrison's "On Hyndford Street", looking back at the days of Rapidshare, "Skins" and "Mock The Week".
I was so inspired by this I got Barry McIlheney to recite it and put it on YouTube.
Why? Because it wasn't there, I suppose.

Being Dave

In today's Times David Aaronovitch writes about how 2008 is the year of David (or at least Dave). The prominent Davids consulted in the sidebar have all had the same crisis at one time or another - the fact that their friends all prefer the shortened form, which somehow makes you sound like a painter and decorator.

I was Dave from my teens on. It was only when my shortened name first appeared in print on a review in the NME that my mother said, with a smidge of asperity, "you have a perfectly nice name, please use it." (I have since discovered that a parent says this with the same emotional force that they might say "don't marry that man" or "don't tattoo yourself all over". Because they don't want to see what they've brought into the world irredeemably ruined.)

Since then I have been David professionally even though my work friends call me Dave. Anybody I know through my wife calls me David. Was it Thelma in The Likely Lads who fought a losing battle against her husband being called Bob because she felt it might impede their social ascent?

People who don't know me but are vaguely aware that some people call me by the diminutive compromise by referring to me as "Mr Hepworth", which remains stranded somewhere between sarcasm and matiness.

Opinions'r'us

I wrote a piece for the Independent's op-ed page about the Brits. It's appeared today with the headline "David Hepworth: these silly awards are pop's most absurd anachronism". So there.

Death of a Ladies Man

In November I mentioned "George Melly's Last Stand, an excellent documentary about the last few months of his life. Last night they showed it on BBC2 so for the next week you can catch up with it via the iPlayer. I think in the future we'll see more documentaries like this. Our stars will live longer, our programme makers will get more demanding and we'll get even more appetite for revelation. Anyway, you should see it.

She's a laugh

After experiencing that unique tristesse that I imagine follows a stand-up show that goes over just marginally less than socko, blogger Clair Woodward, whose musings I cannot recommend too highly, concludes that the game isn't worth the candle. She reckons:

"So as a woman on the box, you can either be funny, or sexy, but not both, right?"

As evidence to the contrary I would beg to offer Julia Louis Dreyfus, who played Elaine in "Seinfeld". As actresses go she's pretty without being va-va-voom - but that doesn't matter. The charisma comes off her in waves and with it comes the quality that so often follows. I could watch her for days.

The show exploits it brilliantly because every now and then she does something to make the three men in the cast stop treating her like a friend. Believe me, it doesn't take much.

Pull the other one

This last week, the record companies' campaign to get copyright in sound recordings extended from 50 to 95 years, which was kicked into touch a few months ago, got fresh impetus from the European internal markets commissioner. The leading edge of their argument was that non-writing performers such as Cliff Richard and Roger Daltrey would benefit from their labours in later life. The Gowers Review of Intellectual Property rejected this on the grounds that in reality the only people who would continue to benefit would be the record companies.

This morning I found a lovely Ben Webster/Joe Zawinul tune on an MP3 blog. It came from the album "Soul Mates". I found this on Emusic and bought the whole album. They made this record in 1963. Webster died 35 years ago, Zawinul just a couple of months back. If either of them were around I guess they would tell you that, the odd freak hit apart, they had never made much from record royalties.

Today I paid a few pounds to Emusic for this record. A small amount of that will get back to the copyright owners, who are the people who bought the company who bought the company who bought the company who paid for the making of this record 45 years ago. The main musicians are dead. The rest got paid by the day.

So who's getting my money?

TV - where intelligence insulting is our business

Nothing is more offensive here than the suggestion that:
a) Jane Fonda spoke "inadvertently"
b) we can be persuaded that this is the case

"No, before him, surely?"

Certain exchanges in comedy attain the dream-like quality of poetry. I've been able to recite this scene since I can remember. The section that begins with "Are you a doctor then?" and ends with the discussion about Mussolini is one of the most beautiful examples of writing and acting I've ever come across. Aren't they making another film about Hancock? I don't know why they bother. What's interesting about him is here, for all to see, for ever.

"It's before my time"

It started with a stupid no-count item on the BBC news website about the Isley Brothers. I posted about it on the Word site. This drew this excellent response from Archie Valparaiso which got me thinking about the tyranny of what he calls the "now-now", the cultural/historical swerve whereby you're forgiven your ignorance about anything which either happened before you were born or didn't happen to be in the cross-hairs of your focus while you were a teenager. It's at its worst when dealing with pop music and results in news readers and politicians swapping light banter about the groups they used to like when they were teenagers, at the same time stressing their proud ignorance of anything that didn't. There's about to be a Radio Four programme called "The Jam Generation". Say no more.

Whenever I ask A Younger Person (and that covers an increasing amount of people) about anything which pre- or post-dated their "era" they will be very quick to say "before my time" with that patronising smirk that implies that one's date of birth excuses one's ignorance. I don't remember the Second World War but I know something about it. Count Basie was past the zenith of his career before I was born but I've listened to him and I don't regard his music as a message from a different planet. I've even read Dickens and he was born, oh, it must be before the First World War, surely?

I blame punk rock, he said once again. That would certainly fit in with Archie's view of the last 35 years as a continuity as far as the media is concerned. It's not to do with the music. It's the falsity of the idea that this represented a new beginning, a severing of links with the past, a marking of the time before which everything was somehow "quaint" or, in the argot of the time, "naff". It results in a failure to accept the fact that anyone who didn't live like you, dress like you, speak like you or share your value system lived their life less fully than you are living yours.

I would have more hopes for the government's plan to introduce five hours of cultural activity into the school week if it was less about herding the unwilling around art galleries and more about imparting the vital information that the world didn't begin yesterday. Educational theory today is dominated by the need to build up children's self-esteem and convince them that they are capable of great things. There's nothing wrong with that as long as it's balanced by the parallel message that I used to pick up at school. You're really Not All That.

Adventures in call centre land

So I called BT and was put through to a young man in a foreign country. He was as helpful as anyone can be at that remove. He looked at my records and said that was pretty much what I could expect living where I do. I asked for my MAC code.
"So you want to leave BT?" he said.
"I might," I replied. "I just want the MAC code."
"Hang on a moment."
I do. He comes back.
"I've just been talking to somebody in sales who might be able to help you. Let me transfer you."
Female voice from the North-East of England comes on (instant smell of toast) and tells me that they've had a look at my records, I've been a customer of BT's for a long time and therefore should have been promoted to the faster broadband. She's prepared to do that now and to lower the rate and to roll our BT phone bills into the same deal but she wants it all to go on to Direct Debit.
I've made some quite responsible decisions in my time and raised three children but I am:
a) genetically incapable of assessing deals of any kind on the telephone
b) married to a woman who is fighting a lone battle against Direct Debit
Therefore, I say, send me the details and I'll look at it.
Meanwhile, I've had lots of feedback on this blog, all of which is appreciated but most of which encourages me in the belief that if you can avoid changing your supplier, then you should.
And then I get an email from someone who'd read this blog and works for BT who might be able to help me. Hey, I'm not a crusader for consumer rights. I know very few problems that can't be solved with the help of a sympathetic soul who knows where the levers are and which ones to pull.
So I shall continue approaching this problem via the front door as well as the back. I'll let you know how it goes.

Churn Baby Churn

I've decided to change my broadband supplier.
When I first got "the internet", back when it was a fledgling miracle, I signed up with Prestel because it came top of some consumer test. When Prestel disappeared I should have learned lesson one of the Internet - everything disappears, sooner than you'd think.
I switched to BT. I think it was called BT Internet at the time. It has since changed its name to BT Connect, BT Openworld, BT Yahoo and BT Lost The Will To Live, by which point I had accumulated no end of passwords and usernames and no longer knew what my deal was.
When I upgraded to broadband an engineer actually came to my house. Takes you back, doesn't it?
On the basis of remarks by friends and running various web-based "speed tests" since then, I suspect that my broadband is not as broad as it should be. In a sane world I would call a number and talk this over with a BT employee who was in a position to do something about it. After a few calls in the last couple of days I have come to the conclusion that this will not be possible. I shall therefore adopt the policy used by a young friend of mine when dealing with phone companies:
1. Ring up
2. Say you're leaving
3. Negotiate
4. Be prepared to go through with "2".
I shall let you know how I get on - assuming I'm not cut off.

Primates were us

They're closing down one of London's oldest pet shops, Palmer's in Camden Town's Parkway. Back in the 70s they used to have a window full of sleeping puppies. However, even that was a step forward from what they used to specialise in in the 30s, as this old facia announces.

The sound of the crowd

I would be interested to see the Premiership's plan to play a number of games in foreign cities come to fruition for at least one season. I would like to see the whole circus (players, managers, media, sponsors and wealthy supporters) pack its tents and head off to Tokyo or New York. (Obviously it won't be Nairobi or Mumbai, because nobody's interested in taking the game to those supporters.)
I would like to see it because I think they would find that they'd left the key element of their world-beating "product" at home. They'd set sail without the thing that makes the Premiership madhouse work as a spectacle and that's the crowd: the howling, hydra-headed hate machine that is Anfield or White Hart Lane or Upton Park in full cry as twenty-two hired hands scrap over the bones of ancient emnities. That's what makes the Premiership. It isn't Nike or Cristiano Ronaldo. It's the fact that the loathing is in our blood, as is the loving.

If you can remember the sixties.....

I was called yesterday by somebody from the Daily Telegraph. He wanted to know if I'd ever undergone Transcendental Meditation. If so, could I write about it to mark the death of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi?

I would guess he was about twenty-five and he'd been given the job of finding a suitable candidate within a couple of hours. Presumably they've got a list somewhere of people who were alive in the 60s and can type and he was working his way down it.

I blame "Absolutely Fabulous" and the Sunday supps for propagating the notion that in the 60s everybody had long hair, wore kaftans, smoked dope and meditated. On the contrary. These things were only done by the tiniest of tiny minorities of the population. The poor hack's chance of turning up somebody who'd actually practised TM™ was about the same as finding somebody who'd fought with Che Guevera.

Other websites are available: Speechification

One brilliant thing leads to another. Speechification is dedicated to reducing the chances that great speech radio from all over the English-speaking world just floats into the ether and disappears, never to be heard by anyone outside of the producer's family and friends. It curates the best stuff and makes it available for further listening. It even does a podcast.
Through it I rediscovered "Don't Hang Up", one of the greatest radio programmes I have ever heard. This was the work of interviewer/oral historian Alan Dein and producer Mark Burman. The idea was simple but immensely time consuming. They just rang phone boxes all over the world and recorded conversations with whoever answered. The best one features a teenager on the front at Margate, a security guard in the Florida Everglades and a Kiwi transexual. It's superbly produced with an atmosphere that you rarely get on Radio Four.

The end of EMAP: director's cut

My piece in today's Guardian about the end of EMAP was the victim of a misunderstanding about length. Here's the full version:

It takes years to build a company. It takes about forty minutes to wind one up. In a Bloomsbury hotel last week a random assembly of pensioners, long-time investors and former employee shareholders of EMAP met to rubber stamp the sale of the company's magazine and radio assets to H. Bauer, the German publishers of Take A Break, Bella, TV Quick and other women's weeklies. We held up our voting cards as if the decision hadn't already been taken by a handful of fund managers. A few questions were put, along the lines of "was this really the only course of action?" and "how secure are people's jobs?", questions which the chairman Alun Cathcart was able to field with the precise opposite of charisma that is called for on these occasions.

Nobody mentioned that this meant another of Britain's major magazine companies in foreign ownership, possibly because they didn't want to be the first ones using the expression "the Germans". Hachette is French and IPC is American, as are Conde Nast and National Magazines. Only Future, Haymarket and the BBC among the majors remain in British hands. The parallels with the Premiership are strong. How come overseas investors see value whereas, as Cathcart correctly pointed out, the UK stock market prefers to put its money elsewhere?

Maybe it's the difference between an investor and a buyer. The story is already gaining ground that Heinz Bauer, the fourth generation of the family to be at the helm of this private company and, according to Forbes, merely the 410th wealthiest person in the world, swung the purchase over the competition because he was the only one at the table who could tear off a cheque for the full purchase price of £1.4 billion there and then. It can't have been as simple as that but the story illustrates the advantage that a private company enjoys in negotiations like these.

Herr Bauer's company is less vulnerable than most to advertising downturns. He doesn't have to persuade any teenage scribbler that there will be jam tomorrow. They only have to look at the 175 million weekly copies that he already sells ever year. He won't be in any hurry to move them online. At the stroke of many noughts he becomes the leading magazine publishing company in Britain as well as Germany and no doubt thinks about what former EMAP titles he can take into the emergent markets of Eastern Europe and beyond.

Ironically, EMAP's troubles can be traced back to 1998 when they made the cardinal error of travelling the other way and buying a publishing company from the Americans. When transatlantic transactions like that take place in any sphere, it's like Captain Mainwaring buying from Sgt Bilko. You fear it's only going to go one way.

Following the meeting a bunch of the company's former executives were waiting outside as the pub across the road opened its doors. Having ordered their drinks they addressed the company's demise with that peculiar combination of sentiment and bitterness that characterises corporate wakes. There was a time when EMAP was the city's darling, recalled a Large Orange Juice. Ah, but that was also the time that magazine sales were breaking records every year, pointed out a Pint of IPA. Ever since then, interposed a Guinness, the company had been in the business of promising the City that two plus two was about to make five. Yes, I remember when masthead programming was going to make magazine companies rich, added a Bloody Mary, wiping a tear of hilarity from the corner of her eye. Then there was buying magazine companies overseas, recalled Fizzy Water. Don't get me started on the internet, muttered Large Gin and Tonic. The Large Orange Juice sighed and said he felt deeply uncomfortable the first time he heard somebody use the expression "leveraging the synergies between magazines and radio".

The talk grew darker when it turned to more recent events. When the Boston Consulting Group came in, they sniffed round the place and then made the suggestions you would expect them to. Plenty of talk of content, platforms, hubs and cost-cutting. Why not use one editorial team on Heat, Closer and Grazia? (Why not use one consultants report and send it round from company to company because it always says the same bloody thing?) It may not be entirely satisfactory to point out that magazines don't behave like FMCG but over the last twenty years millions of pounds have been wasted proving it to be the case. In June of last year Simon Stewart joined EMAP as Chief Marketing Officer across magazines, radio, web and the rest, in the hope that his experience in the drinks industry and widely hailed "outside-in" perspective could transform the company's marketing. The night before the shareholders meeting it was quietly announced that he was returning to the drinks industry.

Any day now EMAP's problems will be Bauer's. It couldn't come at a tougher time. The publishers of the mass-market women's weeklies are already getting their bad news out ahead of the ABC figures. The EMAP titles, as they were prepared for sale, had not been spending the marketing money they normally would do and are unlikely to be outperforming the market. Will Bauer face the future with a platform-agnostic's breezy and baseless optimism or will they go below and ride out the storm like ancient mariners? It's perfectly possible they don't know themselves yet and their profile in the UK industry is so low they won't have any trouble keeping the lid on whatever they decide. I don't think they'll be larging it. But either way, it's going to be a bumpy ride.

Lies, damned lies and mobile phones

Like most things in this country, the debate about crime is generally expressed in terms of left and right. It goes like this:
The Daily Mail: We're going to hell in a handcart.
The Guardian: Oh, it's not as bad as all that. In fact, if you look at the statistics....
Into this dialogue of the deaf, just occasionally, a fact intrudes and makes you stop and think.
The British Crime Survey is the gold standard of crime stats. It's what governments quote from, at least when it suits them.
Rewind. When I was a teenager, hardly any of my peers had been the victim of any kind of crime.
Come back to date. I know lots of teenagers today and I don't know one male teenager who hasn't at one time or another been the victim of some kind of crime, generally involving having their phone "jacked". It happens so often they don't bother to mention it. I am horrified by how everyday it is.
Which makes it all the more remarkable that the British Crime Survey only records crimes involving sixteens and over. It can't be right.

The most unreal thing about Reality TV

Caught the last half an hour of "The Choir" last night. It's not a bad idea. Charismatic young choirmaster attempts to persuade a bunch of cripplingly inhibited teenage boys at a school (which has somehow attracted the addendum "sports college") that they can sing. He tries to coax the ones with talent to take lessons, he tries to persuade the more musically inclined ones to sing un-self-consciously at each other; to the rest he simply points out that if they sing "nobody dies".
Near the end he is getting discouraged by their mulish insistence that singing is "boring" or "gay". (How this chimes with the government's "come and work with the most exciting people in the world" teacher recruitment campaign I do not know.)
To gain encouragement he goes to visit another school where choral singing is hugely popular. The BBC can't be seen to mention the fact that this one is some form of selective school but it smelled like that to me.
Anyway, the last five minutes featured him waiting in the hall to sign up volunteers to join his choir. At first he was on his own, contemplating the failure of his project. I looked at the clock. Two minutes air time to go. They clearly weren't going to leave it like this.
Sure enough. One boy turned up to volunteer. Then another. Then a few more. Then yet more until there was a queue of shiny-faced adolescents begging to join. He ended up with, if memory serves, 170 names. "I can't believe it," he blushed. Well, nor could we. There had clearly been some major manipulation that we didn't see to bring about this very televisual resolution.
Many things betray the credibility of reality television but the thing that really gives it the lie is the fact that IT ALWAYS WORKS OUT IN THE END.
You can see "The Choir" here.

Someday we'll look back

Britney Spears is hospitalised because of her mental instability.
Amy Winehouse has to be driven into rehab following increasingly "erratic" behaviour.
Jonathan Ross, David Walliams and Russell Brand retreat under a hail of abuse after attempting to placate a crowd during a Morrissey concert.
David Beckham takes his bat home to Los Angeles after failing to get picked for his hundredth international cap, leaving disappointed guests at a charity dinner.
For years people have been speculating that the tide was about to go out for celebrity fever. This may be the week it finally turned.

Forty-part harmony

"Spem In Alium" sounds like it ought to be on the menu for school dinner. It is in fact a motet by Thomas Tallis and one of the most profoundly haunting pieces of music you will ever hear. Radio Four's "Soul Music" examined how it is constructed and talked to people who've been affected by it. I liked the idea of the human rights lawyer drawing upon it while defending an apparently hopeless case in Alabama. You can listen to the programme here.

Mceducation

McDonalds are going to be allowed to offer training courses which could form part of the standard A level. This is being encouraged by the government in order to bridge something called "the skills gap". We can predict objections from the NUT and others. Presumably somebody in Whitehall is looking at stats that suggest that huge numbers of UK teenagers are unemployable. I don't know quite why this should be except we seem to have slipped into a situation where all jobs demand the prestige, but not the actual training component, of some kind of higher education qualification. When, in the 60s, I stayed on to do A levels, one of my friends left at sixteen and walked into a job with the local estate agent. He did some form of day release but most of his time was spent at the counter answering queries from members of the public. I don't see the teenage estate agent today and the tradesman visiting my home no longer arrives with a 17 year old hammer-holder; a whole stratum of the economy that used to be occupied by "kids" is now occupied by people six years older who've done courses, courses which in many cases can't amount to much that they couldn't pick up in a couple of months on the job. The courses, which are aimed at the increasing number of kids who want to join the glamour professions, are growing in number just as the amount of places offering science or languages is declining dramatically.
I'm doing some work at the moment with somebody who did a degree in Music Management at the University of High Wycombe. A friend of ours is doing a Masters in Physiotherapy. I get called all the time to go and speak to people who are apparently doing a Masters in Magazine Journalism. Meanwhile I read that China already has 40,000 English speaking hackers picking up intelligence from Western web sites. In the light of all that the "skills gap" seems more like history working itself out than a problem in need of the smack of firm government.

It pays to advertise

I'm reading Nadeem Aslam's absorbing "Maps For Lost Lovers". I love it when there are signs that writers have been carrying round little nuggets from real life, looking for places to set them down. As in this:

He raises a hand in greeting to a plumber from Calcutta whose van bears the legend, You've tried the cowboys, now try the Indian.....

Grey power in action

My late father-in-law was a small shareholder in various companies, blue chip and otherwise. In retirement one of his regular diversions was to come up to town for their various AGMs. He's gone but the breed lives on, as I saw yesterday when I went to the EMAP General Meeting at which the vote was taken whether or not to sell the magazines and the radio.
Of course the decision had already been made by fund managers in the City wielding millions of votes, but I was pleased to see that this army of white-haired warriors still have one weapon at their waist in these contexts and that's the power to cause the directors on the platform to shift slightly in their seats as they field their questions from the floor.
A man stood up and extolled the virtues of one of the company's railway magazines, musing aloud whether this title and its estimable editor would continue to flourish under the new dispensation. A retired executive wondered how many of the company's employees were working themselves out of a job. An elderly lady whose husband had sold his exhibitions company to EMAP many years earlier and was presumably paid partially in shares asked how she was going to deal with the tax implications of the dividend. Should she sell the shares now?
The chairman blushed and said he wasn't empowered to give financial advice. No doubt, like most of the people on that side of the table, he can afford to pay somebody to sort out any tax issues pursuant to the deal.

"On The 5.15" by Pete Murray

Funny how the things we actually do spend our lives talking about, like house prices, kids on the buses, smoking in pubs and the purgatory of commuting, never seem to find their way into our pop music. But there was a time, not sure when, when that wasn't the case. Can't get this tune, which comes from a cylinder, out of my head.

Tottenham 5 Arsenal 1

Who was it wrote that song called "Woke Up Smiling"?

Speed reading

I've been asked to be on A Good Read on Radio 4. This involves first of all picking a book that you can talk about. Not as straightforward as you might think because the chances are that some other guest will have had it within the last few years. Then you have to read the books that the presenter and the other guest have chosen. Yesterday they arrived. I have a week to read two novels. I'm not used to reading against the clock. I have no techniques to deal with it. I could do to take some tips from those people you meet in book publishing who can read a new manuscript in a day.

Walkin' By Myself

I think I'm turning into a walking bore. I have become obsessed by the fact that the easiest way to find your way around London is to walk. Taxis cost a fortune and spend most of their time waiting in traffic. Buses you have to wait for. Tubes take you out of your way. I often go from our office in Pentonville Road to Broadcasting House by just walking through Bloomsbury. I don't know exactly how long it takes. It's probably about forty minutes and the great thing about walking is that if you're late you go quicker and if you're early you dawdle a bit. Tell anybody at the BBC that you've walked and they look at you with new admiration. Recently I had to go to the Albert Hall from Islington via Covent Garden and I walked the whole way. I make that four miles, thanks to my new discovery Walkit, a site that provides you with pedestrian routes through the capital and tells you how far they are. I now calculate that I walk four miles a day getting back and forth to work. My smugness is complete.

You wouldn't do that at home

The striking thing about Ghana vs Guinea, the opening match of the Africa Cup of Nations, was not the grass, which was long enough to obscure the ankles of the players. It was the complete lack of the usual on-pitch hysterics. These were big, strong men playing at maximum intensity and not once did I see anyone complain of a tackle, let along lie down and try to get a free kick. Not that they're saints. Once these guys are back in the Premierhip or Serie A, they'll be back at it. All it shows is that it goes with the territory.

ANC

It's nice to be able to say that you can learn something from a near-tragedy such as the Heathrow crash landing.
Apparently the standard operating procedure for BA pilots in a crisis goes in this order:
1. Aviate
2. Navigate
3. Communicate

Fog on the Tyne

In his business dealings Newcastle owner Mike Ashley is no doubt as ruthless as most multi-millionaires. After a few months immersed in the madness that is north-east football he is sufficiently drunk on sentiment to give in to the clamour for the easy option and appoint Kevin Keegan. (This after a week spent unsuccessfully pursuing three other options, which he presumably thought were better bets.)
The appointment may or may not work but it is definitely not a rational act. It's the desperate, desperate desire to be loved. It's the cornered teacher giving in to the difficult class by buying them all an ice cream. It's Pontius Pilate giving the crowd Barrabas. It's pathetic.
And when in due course things don't go according to plan and he has to issue a statement calling on the fans' patience, I hope somebody points out to him that it was one his own employees who headlined the press release "Geordie Messiah to return".
Fans en masse are children. It is the job of owners to tell them what they can and can not have, not give in to their most shrill demand.

Rattle Of A Simple Man

If you're going to try the BBC iPlayer - and you should - try it on "The Secret Life Of Norman Wisdom Aged 92 3/4". This is the story of how his two middle-aged children deal with the fact that his carer is retiring and their dad can no longer look after himself at his home on the Isle Of Man. Not long ago I blogged about a film portrait of the last year in the life of George Melly, in which his relatives confessed that he'd always taken up more than his share of the family's oxygen. This was similar. Wisdom appears to have no inner life to refer to as he drifts in and out of dementia. The only thing he clings to is that he's famous. There's a heartbreaking scene near the end where he buttonholes one of his grandson's young schoolfriends and says "do you know who I am?"
The boy says "Greg's grandad."
"No," he say. "I'm Norman."

Do they mean us?

The hero of Jay McInerney's first novel Bright Lights Big City was a fact checker at one of America's most prestigious magazines, a thinly disguised version of The New Yorker. The job of these salaried pedants is to take the manuscript that says "it was a sunny day" and then check with the meterologists that on the day in question in the place in question the weather could fairly be described as such. But sometimes the search for what New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik calls "passionate specificness" leads them astray. There was a case last year where they said Alan Bennett came from Bradford when in fact he comes from Leeds. Trifling, I know, but they wouldn't make the same mistake if they were dealing with American cities.
Now in the course of a terrific piece about Kate Nash in the current issue, Sasha Frere-Jones describes her home suburb of Harrow as "posh". I like the fact that American publications try to colour in the social background in a way that British titles don't but they can so easily be led astray. Just because it is home to a fearfully posh public school of the same name (which is actually in Harrow On The Hill) doesn't mean Harrow's anything more than a part of the suburban sprawl on North-West London and will be home to a wide variety of socio-economic groups.

Charlie's good tonight, isn't he?

I don't dine Up West very often. However today I went to the Wolseley, the former car showroom and bank in Piccadilly which is now London's swishest eating place. If you're going to have celebrities it's important you should have real ones, not people you have to set up as "you know, he was in that thing on Channel Four". So I'm pleased to report, at different tables but both surrounded by adoring females, Jeremy Irons and Charlie Watts. That's ten points, surely?

It's only a word

"....facing challenges from falling CD sales and piracy."
Thus every BBC newscast this morning regarding the big EMI meeting.
"Piracy" is not the word they mean. Piracy is the selling of counterfeit goods. It happens to music but only the same way as it happens to everything. It faces every consumer-facing brand from Gucci to Coca Cola.
What EMI, and every other record company face more immediately, is copying, largely done by amateurs and not for profit.
Different thing.

Guy Hands, EMI, Robbie Williams and Monty Python

The classic record company began as a distribution business. It had a pressing plant, lots of employees in white coats and a fleet of vans to get the product to the point of sale. The charts were devised and perfected because they gave the business a way to decide which record to distribute more of and which not to bother with.

Then it discovered that big talent properly handled could make a lot of money. To increase their chances of attracting that talent they needed money. Hence they became banks. Their main function in the career of a Led Zeppelin or Spice Girls was to pay enough money to sign or re-sign them.

One of the main problems facing Guy Hands, the new owner of EMI, is that he's bought a big record company just as the virtues of bigness are in question. The manufacture is contracted out. The distribution gets less important as tangible product declines in importance. It's no longer about having the promotional muscle to get your act on the TV. Being big is in fact nothing but pain. You have large corporate overheads which mean that you must release a huge number of records you know will never pay back purely in order to give your staff something to do.

I'm sure that there have already been lots of interesting meetings between Hands' people, who know about business, and the inumbents, who know about the record business, meetings at which the underlying business model - to wit, for every hundred Erin Mckeowns you might get one Norah Jones - has been called into question. This must have had something about it of the Monty Python merchant banker sketch during which Hands presumably took the John Cleese role - "I don't want to seem stupid but it looks to me as though I'm a pound down on the whole deal."

Maybe Guy Hands has decided that he no longer needs the structure of a large record company. Maybe he's going to contract out all the record company services - from those things that are mission critical to the "fruit and flowers" - to independents and just put his energies into the one function of the record company that he really knows all about. That's banking.

But the problem for Hands then is who do you lend your money to? Robbie Williams who's sulking in his tent and whose days as a recording artist are probably behind him? Radiohead, who give the impression of slowly turning into the Grateful Dead, and are probably not going to sell any more records than they do at present? Not Paul McCartney. He's got more than you.

You could always invest in untried talent. Now just imagine this for a second. You tear off a cheque totalling a fifth of this year's development money on a kid who is to all intents and purposes off the street in the hope that one of those demos that the a&r man comes and plays so loud in your office could in a year's time turn out to be Robbie Williams's "Angels".

I don't know if I'd have the nerve. Imagine it were your money. It's the longest long shot available in any kind of business anywhere. You get no security. You have nothing you can sell on. You cannot even promise that the product will be ready in time. Or on budget. You cannot even promise that there will be a product of any kind.

The air is thick with artists talking about how clueless the record companies are. Let's see them putting their money where their mouth is and not only financing their own recordings but also taking the next step and signing up the next generation. Of course, they won't. In the history of the music business no artist has ever used their own money to sign up another artist. Why not? Because in ninety-nine cases out of one hundred you may as well go and draw £250,000 out of the bank and set light to it in the street. That's the economics of the record business. And if the traditional record companies are losing their stomach for it, who else has the nerve? I don't see anyone.

Last night's TV

Last night we used to the BBC iPlayer for the first time to catch up with a missed episode of "Sense and Sensibility". They've now got a Beta version up and running for Macs but you can't yet download. It hung up a couple of times at first but basically it worked. It's interesting how when the riches of broadcasting are all laid out for you how many things you couldn't imagine yourself ever wanting to stream on to a computer. "Ready Steady Cook"? "First Minister's Question Time"? "Extreme Pilgrim"? "Arrange Me A Marriage"?

Edmund Hilary (1919-2008)

All the New Zealanders I know know each other and all New Zealanders referred to Edmund Hilary as "Ed".
The story is that he was the first man at the summit of Everest – but, frankly, given the staggering danger of what was then unknown, who cares? – but Tensing Norgay had never used a camera before "and this was no time for a photography lesson".
Hence the picture of Tensing at the top.
Noble, whichever way you look at it.

The idiot box

BBC TV News about five minutes ago on the death of Sir John Harvey-Jones: "He seemed different from the usual pin-stripe brigade. He had long hair and wore colourful ties."
He looked different. Therefore he was.
Is this the British Broadcasting Corporation or is this the world as seen by a small child?

Attack radio

Five Live have got the same problem as Radio Two: they're desperate to hire people who they think are known from TV because, sadly, they find it pays in increased ratings.
Last night, the night Sam Allardyce left Newcastle, they found themselves with Tim Lovejoy fielding the post-match phone calls on 606.
Lovejoy's a brilliant TV presenter because he's completely at ease under the scrutiny of the camera. But on the radio he simply doesn't have the crackle, the energy, the presence.
Just heard the darts commentator Sid Waddell and the racing man John McCririck bantering about Newcastle on the same station. Somebody should sit Lovejoy down to listen to it. The attack that these two pensioners put into it must have left them physically drained.

Gissa a job

My favourite detail of the Newcastle United story regards Alan Shearer. Unnamed sources say he is too "happy with his job on Match Of The Day" to wish to be the manager at this moment.
His job? Let's get this straight. What this means is that rather than working twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week in all weathers, in the pitiless glare of public scrutiny, dealing with spoiled multi-millionaires with less loyalty than attention span, standing still and taking it while thousands of people chant abuse at you, knowing that your kids will come home crying from school because of what some kid said about you in the playground, knowing that unless you're very, very lucky you will lose more than you win and most Sundays will be spent in the pit of black depression, relieved only by strong drink or a gambling addiction, having to make sure than you are accompanied by a bodyguard in public in case some drunk spits abuse at you in the supermarket car park, knowing that your painstakingly acquired professional judgment can be undone by the bounce of a ball, the decision of linesman or the side of the bed that a superstar got out of this morning; rather than doing all that you'd take a high six figure salary for spending Saturday afternoon in a warm dry studio watching highlights of the Premiership, putting on a clean shirt and saying "he'll be disappointed with that" for a full five minutes before going out to dinner.
Really, call punditry on Match of The Day anything you like, but don't ever call it "a job".

EMI: who's driving?

It's not really surprising that Tony Wadsworth, the CEO of EMI Music in the UK, has decided that he can't get on with the new owners Terra Firma and has left. When people pay a fortune for companies they tend to quickly come to the conclusion that they're more likely to get their way if they part company with the incumbent management. It's a shame for Tony, who is an excellent bloke and a record man to his fingertips, but it could be that they don't want a record man any more. They can see that the old way of doing things is not going to make back the £2.1bn Terra Firma paid and bring them a profit on top. This is the kind of dynamic that you see again and again when somebody buys an old business and tries to wish a new model into life. It's no use expecting the current engineer to do things in a different way. But the problem is without an engineer they haven't a clue which levers to pull. Everybody knows that the old way of doing the record business is dead. But the new way has not yet been born.

Career Opportunities

I've been re-reading John Colville's "The Fringes Of Power".
It's the diary of Churchill's private secretary during the war. He was at Chartwell on the June night in 1941 when Churchill, Eden, Beaverbrook and Roosevelt's envoy were staying there.
The following morning he was woken by a telegram informing him that Hitler had invaded Russia. What that meant was that Britain was going to get away with it. It was probably the most significant piece of news for this country in the 20th century.
He went from bedroom to bedroom passing on the news.
He was twenty-five years old.

Tea break over. Back on your heads

I can't remember whether I've:

1. Thought this and not written it down
2. Written it down and not published it
3. Submitted it and it hasn't been published yet
   
4. Published it and lost track of it

But it's only when I saw this on Fistfulayen this morning that I felt vindicated in my dawning belief that the key currency nowadays is attention. This might seem obvious but most media businesses are still behaving as if they were operating against a background of scarcity. Furthermore this seems to chime with Seth Godin's observation that people talking about you is far more effective than talking about yourself.

Practical Parenting

Interesting debate raging about parenting on the blogs of Andrew Collins and Clair Woodward, both triggered by media depictions of apparent trends in modern parenting.
My offspring are mainly in their twenties now and I know that if I had to start again tomorrow I wouldn't be any the wiser. Most parents try to impose behavioural standards and pass on values but it's really, really hard and there's never any sign that you're getting anywhere. (My Dad taught me to drive and I would pretend to be ignoring everything he said. Forty years later I can remember every word.)
The wisest thing I ever read about parenting was by the late, lamented Martyn Harris in New Society. He said something like "having a child is like possessing something more completely than you can ever possess anything and then losing it more utterly than you can ever lose anything. Nagging is the index of loss."
So parents today nag because there's nothing else they can do. My parents used to nag but there was always the chance that the nagging would reach a climax at which point a sanction would be applied, sometimes physically. (And no, I don't resent it.) The balance of power has changed since then. A friend of mine realised this when at the age of 14 he was having an animated argument with his father, rose from his chair to emphasise a point and noticed his old man was cowering, saying "don't hit me!" The challenge of modern parenting is that when push comes to shove you have no shove. And I don't know many experienced parents who could go on TV and keep a straight face while they passed on to others their advice on how to go about it.
In fact, if we're in the market for a swift, at-a-stroke radical improvement in the behaviour, health, politeness and educational standards of our young people, can I venture to suggest that it starts with doing something with the box in the corner as opposed to watching it?
When mine were younger I used to regularly take the plug off the TV. Friends used to react as if I'd turned into Wackford Squeers. It was the only weapon I had.

"Language, Timothy!"

Just watched episode 35 of The Wire, which contained:

1. The re-emergence of a character I thought was dead
2. A major surprise about the sexual orientation of another
3. The most jaw-dropping profanity I've ever heard on any TV show ever

Good discussion about what it all means here.

The Look Of Love

I shall be interested to see what happens with "Just A Little Lovin'", the new album from Shelby Lynne. Since she first emerged in 1988, the countryish end of the music business have wondered what exactly they could do with her manifest vocal talent and handsome appearance. She's duetted with George Jones, been put in hot pants by Glenn Ballard, fashioned as an alt.rock diva and even appeared in "I Walk The Line" as Johnny Cash's mother. Nothing has really taken.
And now, at the suggestion of Barry Manilow, she has relaunched herself as a Dusty Springfield for today. Or at least she's recorded a load of songs made famous by Dusty, ditched the big arrangements and the bittersweet flourishes and done them as a bunch of deeply sad torch songs. I particularly like the pause in her version of "Just A Little Lovin'", which you can hear a taste of here.

What Katy Watched Next

I don't particularly mind because, as my daughters frequently observe, I am a bit of a girl myself. However last night I felt I'd wandered into an area of the TV schedules that was designed exclusively with the female in mind.
For a start there was Andrew Davies's adaptation of "Sense and Sensibility", which began with a whispery unlacing scene which could have wandered in from "Emmanuelle Goes Regency". (It certainly didn't wander in from Jane Austen.) What followed, a succession of indecently handsome men throwing themselves at demure-looking maids on wind-swept cliff tops, had obviously been honed in focus groups to which no man had been admitted.
This was pursued by "Jam and Jerusalem" which seems to feature every actress over the age of forty who has ever worked for the BBC and was moist with self-congratulation. Then there was a trail for the upcoming "Lark Rise To Candleford", which seems to use the same actresses who were recently seen in "Cranford" and "Jam.." in different costumes.
Then there's "Mistresses", "a sexy, sophisticated and bold take on the lives of four women" and "Honest", in which a clutch of brassy blondes attempt to make honest men of the criminals in their life.
I once read a study of TV viewing habits which came to the conclusion that the remote control always resided on the right hand chair arm of the senior male in the family (which, as I know, does not always mean the oldest one). If this schedule is anything to go by, all this must have changed.

Kevin Greening

Most of the successful DJs I've met have had an exaggerated sense of their own importance. There's something about opening a fader and talking to nobody that attracts the unstable.
Kevin Greening, whose death at 44 was announced today, was at GLR when I used to do a weekly show and he was different - he was modest to a fault. So modest, indeed, that he was fitted into an extraordinary range of slots - from newsman on GLR through desk-driver for Zoe Ball at Radio One to safe pair of hands at every station from Five Live to Smooth FM. His own career somehow got lost in his professionalism.
Anyway, everybody who knew him liked him, which is rare anywhere. In the media it's almost unknown.

Slip off your shoes

"Conned and frightened, our nation demands not actual security, but security spectacle."
Patrick Smith on the absurdity of airline security in the New York Times.

Guess who's killing music now?

We all know the record business is being brought to its knees by a small, highly motivated and unscrupulous minority of individuals who don't care how much damage they do to the fragile ecology of the exchange of money for music as long as they personally benefit from the chaos they cause.

Yes, lawyers have got a lot to answer for.

Seeing the current panic of the industry as a once in a lifetime opportunity to make money out of desperation, they have leapt in with sledgehammers in the hope that they can crack nuts and affect consumer behaviour. They are not easily discouraged because they are the one section of society who get paid no matter how disastrously they perform. As one initiative after another has failed they have kept on billing an increasingly impoverished industry with the promise that they are just one action away from success.

It's lawyers, in diabolical cahoots with the peddlers of software, who flogged the clueless babes at Sony their disastrous rootkit solution, who have tried to convince us that we should enter into agreements to pay a monthly fee whereby we rent the music and have impressed nobody on the the financial pages with their efforts to take institutes of higher education and single mothers to court because they've been party to the swapping of Metallica's execrable racket. (The members of said group should go down on their knees every night and thank whatever bearded deity they worship that there are people on these planet who care enough about them to steal their music.)

And now, as if to underline the fact that they have taken quite a strong moral argument and steadily rendered it wholly indefensible in the eyes of the consumer, the RIAA have announced that they believe that even ripping a CD that you have legitimately purchased is a crime. According to some highly paid nitwit at Sony/BMG, this is just "a nice way of saying 'steals just one copy.'"

I don't have the energy to count the ways in which this is unworkable hogwash but I would strongly suggest that the next intervention made by the RIAA should involve raiding the premises of a major record company, where they will find untold thousands of unlicensed recordings which have been ripped in exactly that way. Start with the legal department.

Car crash media

Stephen King is in Time magazine bemoaning the fact that we're more interested in Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan than Iraq. This is a horror writer and he's complaining about our obsession with triviality. In the pages of Time magazine.

I've got nothing against King or Ricky Gervais or Damon Albarn but I am getting tired of prominent people using their bully pulpits to publicly wonder why we're (it's always us, never them) so interested in the misadventures of over-stimulated young airheads. Surely, they say, this is a conspiracy on the part of the media. Surely we're only consuming it because it's jammed down our throats.

Well, no. We like a good story about the wheels coming off a prominent life because it's a rare example of the spin machine breaking down and allowing us to see things as they really are. Over the last twenty years PR has invaded every sphere of our lives with the result that most of the information and entertainment we get has been drained of the tang of real life. Everybody is so concerned about saying the wrong thing that they no longer say anything at all. Celebrities no longer say anything memorable on chat shows or in magazine interviews. No wonder we have invented our own mini-celebs who can be depended on to blurt at the drop of a hat.

So if Britney or Lindsay or Amy is weeping in the gutter at the end of a difficult evening we will slow down and have a look. As will Stephen King. I don't think we'll stop and get out. That would be ghoulish. But let's not pretend we're not interested.

The difficult last episode

The only actual laughs in the Christmas "Extras" were provided by Stephen Merchant. The scene where he rushed at - and failed to clear - a BBC security gate was all the funnier for the fact that you didn't actually see it. The best you could get out of the rest of the 90 minutes was a knowing smirk, provided you knew about things like the amount of energy expended in the media in getting a table at the Ivy.

It was the final show. Andy Millman had an attack of bad conscience while in the Celebrity Big Brother house and turned his back on the hollow sham of celebrity. This came at the climax of a programme in which everybody from Hale and Pace through June Sarpong to Gordon Ramsay turned up to riff upon their public personality. 

Savage ironic twist or ultimate case of having your Christmas cake and eating it? 

Kings of Pain

BBC Three is the digital service that Mark Thompson most often finds himself having to defend. Its public service remit is not easy to see at the best of times.
Last night it devoted two hours to recalling The Most Annoying People Of 2007. You would have thought that even those with Serbian memories for slights would have considered an hour ample time to list the most prominent pests of the past year. But somebody at Three must have a very thin skin indeed.
Every time I flicked back we were being reminded of yet another minor reality TV face or unfortunately dressed actress by an over-styled and under-prepared talking head purporting to belong to an "entertainment journalist". After a while it was difficult to tell who was the complainer and who was the complained about. Which might as well have been the case anyway because most of the people doing the complaining had spent the year bringing us news of the very people they were claiming to find most tiresome.
No doubt they will have found 2007 instructive in this regard and will spend next year keeping us up to date with the careers of more worthwhile people.

The shop - an old curiosity

On Thursday afternoon I bought a new iMac on-line from Apple. I completed the transaction at around 3.30 pm.
It arrived at my home at 11 am the following day.
It's ages since I bought anything substantial from an actual shop but I seem to recall that it was a stressful, frustrating business. With rare exceptions the person selling the item knew less about it than you did and half your time was spent establishing which product you wished to buy. When you had decided on what to buy you then had to wait while they established whether they actually had the thing they were proposing to sell you. Then you either had to pick it up from Customer Collection and haul it to the car or arrange a date three weeks hence when they would deliver it to your home. Every element of the transaction was arranged for the greater convenience of the shop.
Ah but, say the Ah-buts, what happens if you buy something on-line and it goes wrong? I've had that experience and I've actually found it easier to deal with than taking something back to an actual shop in the West End. Often I've just contacted the vendor and they've said "box it up at your front door and we'll arrange to have it picked up and replaced". It's not faultless but it's a sight more convenient than the last time I hauled a heavy amp back to a shop in the City then hauled it back six weeks later after it was repaired.

"No one likes us..."

The public and media fascination and, let's face it, glee over the Manchester United party scandal is not merely the standard British delight in seeing the wealthy brought to heel.It's also indicative of just how much our contempt for top footballers has grown in direct proportion to their wealth and also our fascination with them.
We may support them, envy them, read about them, discuss them in the pub as if they were racehorses and wish we were like them, but we don't actually like them any more. Now that they don't need us to support their testimonial, now that they don't appear to occupy the same planet as us, now that their girlfriends write columns in the press talking about how much money they've spent, now that every single last one of them will change clubs the minute the deal is right, we are all storing up our resentment just waiting for them to give us an excuse to get a bit of our own back.
Look at how fast the nation turned following the Croatia result. The nation doesn't just want results. It wants somebody to be punished.
In the midst of this Sol Campbell turns up on the Today Programme moaning about the abuse he got from the Tottenham fans last week. I'm sure it must be horrible.
But if spewing a little verbal poison is what a fan can do, he will do it. It's all he's got.

For a short season only, the best Christmas record ever made

It's traditional at this time of year for me to share with a few close friends The Greatest Christmas Record Ever Made. It's called "It's A Big Country" by Davitt Sigerson and it was made in the early 80s. Because of the size of their land-mass, Americans feel distance and separation more keenly than we do, particularly during the holiday. That's what Sigerson's record taps into so beautifully, the idea that you can't possibly get to see everybody but you're thinking of them.
"Merry Christmas, girls, you're crazy, but I guess you know..."

Rome or away?

The allegations of sexual assault around the Manchester United players party throws a little daylight on to the Roman social lives of many top Premiership players.
The party started at lunch time at a restaurant, moved to a pub and a lapdancing club and then adjourned to a very expensive small hotel at around 9.30 pm. All the rooms at the hotel had been booked out for the party. According to The Mirror one hundred girls were invited to the party at the hotel, "after wives and girlfriends were told to stay away".
You wouldn't have to be Julie Andrews to see what misunderstandings might arise, would you?
And the spin is that Sir Alec was very reluctant to let it happen after problems with previous socials.
If Alec Ferguson can't control these guys, who can?

The thickness of it

Just caught Newsnight for the first time in years. They led with an item about the election of a new leader for the Liberal Democrats. Having obviously decided that the story was a dead duck, they decided to set it up as an X Factor pastiche, complete with fake titles and digitally got-up images of the contenders as boy band members. Television is at its most irritating when it's desperate to make everything into television first and content second. Have they done some research that indicates that people are more likely to tune into a current affairs programme if all its items are tricked up like student skits?

Bullshit watch (latest in a probably endless series)

I'm not against jargon. I actually quite like learning new examples. And I don't get particularly bothered about clichés like "driving the business forward" because at least I know what they're trying to say, as does the person using them. The idea has taken root in British culture that we are a nation of stout, unpretentious souls who are held back by a managerial class who talk in unintelligible gibberish. I don't buy it.
But where I do fall out with the writer of press releases - and press releases are the key instrument of touchy-feely government and please-love-me business - is when I feel that the awkwardness of the language is there to hide the fact that the writer doesn't know what they are supposed to be saying. Either that or they know only too well but are afraid to say it. One anonymous poster described the Sony example as "a desire to communicate ideas which are either totally fanciful or beyond the writers' vocabulary." I think the former is certainly true.
Somebody asked "does anybody actually believe this stuff?" and the answer, interestingly, is no. But that doesn't matter to the organisation, which is just keen to be seen to be doing something.
All this in the same week that the government's Minister For Children announced that they wished to make children happier by "securing a holistic approach to tackling children's issues." Apart from the fact that "holistic" is just "co-ordinated" for people who shop at Ikea and there is no such thing as "a children's issue", I just want to say this. As the owner of three children, most of whom aren't children any more, I can assure the government that it is quite beyond the power of parents to make their own children happy, let alone somebody in Whitehall. Christmas is the annual festival provided for us to learn this lesson time and time again.

Bullshit watch (3)

I was taught English by Mrs Ellis. This was back in the days of black and white and so we spent endless hours doing what she called "clause analysis", which involved breaking sentences down into their component parts.
I'm sure some people would say I am emotionally stunted by the fact that we didn't do "creative writing" but there's hardly a week goes by when I don't thank Mrs Ellis for what she taught me.
When confronted by the quote from the Sony chap below I am even more sure of the value of what Mrs Ellis said. She would have taken him apart for his grammar and language, thereby exposing the hole at the heart of the project.
You cannot have "a tangible view", she would say, because the noun describes seeing whereas the adjective means touching.
You cannot "evolve a perception" because "evolve" is not an active verb. Evolution does not occur as a direct result of an action. That's why it's an evolution. What you really want to say is "changing" but you prefer to pretend that you are just helping along a change that is already taking place. Is that true?
At the sight of "clearly illustrating Sony's joined-up story of content creation to content enjoyment" I fear she would begin to reach for her slipper. She would probably ask whether what you actually meant was advertising.
Nobody ever spoke this paragraph into the empty air to see if it made sense.
It was assembled by, I'm guessing, a number of people. A number of expressions were lined up, herded in the rough direction of the sentiment, moved around a bit, tapped gingerly into place, approved by about six people and then finally somebody pressed "send".
Mrs Ellis, if she were here, would neatly write "see me" at the bottom of the page.

Bullshit watch (2)

"Haymarket's approach to Sony's customer magazine delivers a tangible view of the total scope of the brand, evolving consumers' perception of the business from an electronics company to a digital entertainment brand, clearly illustrating Sony's joined-up story of content creation to content enjoyment," said Mikah Martin-Cruz, the general manager of marketing at Sony UK.
In other words, we'd like to be iTunes but we fear that we're Panasonic.
So here's a magazine.

Pre-fantasy football

Last night's Timeshift: A Game Of Two Eras tried to compare and contrast the FA Cup Finals of 1957 and 2007 to see what they said about the difference between football then and now. They looked at the weight of the ball, the robustness of the challenges, the lack of substitutes and the lack of dissent. Being TV, what they didn't look at, apart from a brief reflection on goal celebrations, is the incalculable effect that TV itself has had in imposing a fantasy narrative on top of the actual events.
In 1957 Kenneth Wolstenholme just told you what's happening. The goalkeeper is injured. This player passes to that. It's a goal. It's another goal.
He doesn't try to sell you the idea that it's a titanic struggle between small and great, good and evil; he doesn't try to tell you that this tackle is payback for that one; he doesn't try to place this match in the context of a years long journey; he just describes what's going on. A football match.
Everything else we have invented in the last twenty years to sell lager.

Our men in the don't know

I don't see what was the hurry to appoint Fabio Capello as the new England manager. Surely the FA can't be so tin pot an operation that they need to announce somebody to boost ticket sales for a no-count friendly in February.
Anybody, what I like about him is the fact that he clearly takes no lip from the press pack, who are already clearly terrified of him, and he hasn't arrived yet.
These highly paid hacks, who set so much store by their contacts, have been conspicuously wrong about nearly everything of late. They assured us it would be Mourinho. He was ready to sign. He didn't.
The truth is they're just guessing, like the people at the other end of the phone-in show.
They said Avram Grant was just a stop-gap at Chelsea. Today he got a four year contract.
They know nothing.

The acceptable face of people who go "whoo!"

Tinariwen were sensational at Shepherd's Bush last night. Best dance band in the world.
Since I last saw them their backing singer Mina has left to have a baby and her replacement does everything apart from the distinctive shrill ululations that accompany the instrumental passages. For the first few numbers something was missing and then somebody in the audience took it upon themselves to supply them. It wasn't annoying at all. It was perfect.
I couldn't see who it was because I was upstairs occupying my favourite vantage point at any gig anywhere. Mark Ellen and I happened on this at a Lucinda Williams show some while ago and decided it was perfect. It's standing but leaning forward, allowing for occasional terpsichorean forays but with the solid guarantee that nobody can get in your sight lines.
Not telling you where it is, of course.

World music and British weather

Off to see Tinariwen tonight. Was talking to somebody in Mali who coordinates their travel and apparently they really do live in tents in the desert north of the country. If you want to get in touch with them you have to leave messages at the nearest community of any size and hope that they drop in for supplies. Walked to the Albert Hall from Islington last night and for the first time this year it was properly, seasonally cold. What it feels like for a member of Tinariwen I can't imagine. Reminds me of the first time the Wailers came to Britain. They saw snow for the first time while playing in Leeds and decided to go home.

Plug

In case you're near a wireless tomorrow lunchtime you'll be delighted to know that Radio Four is repeating my Three Minute Education at 1.30 pm. It features Neil Tennant, Neil Finn, Bryan Ferry, Caitlin Moran and others.

Sound without the e-numbers

In the course of researching a piece about Toumani Diabate, I talked to the engineer Jerry Boys. Boys is widely regarded as the master of the natural sounding recording. He's the bloke who makes people look round to see where the band is when they enter a room where "Buena Vista Social Club" is playing.
He explains that it's a question of recording the room as well as the instrument and then mixing the two together. I won't pretend that I fully understand it but it seems to explain why most digital recordings are so exhausting to listen to. If there are gaps in the sound, he explained, you are drawn towards it. If it's overly dense you stay away.
The first person who flagged this up for me was Neil Young. I interviewed him in 1991 and he made this same point. You listen to an old record you feel good in a way that is to do with the sound, not just the music. I think he was right. That's why I still listen to "Harvest" but haven't heard "Harvest Moon", the album he was plugging at the time, in years.

It's the internet, stupid

Pick a detail, any detail, of the John Darwin disappearance story and you can trigger a dinner table discussion lasting half an hour. Why the...? What the...? How could we imagine he could..?
Anyway, my favourite facet is how they found the picture, which I repeat here for the benefit of anyone who doesn't think that Google has changed the world.
As the members of her majesty's press and Cleveland Police were exhausting all the specialist lines of enquiry trying to find out if the Darwins were in Panama, Britain or elsewhere, an anonymous single mother just went to Google image search and keyed in "John Anne Panama" and there, top left, was a picture of the couple with some Panamanian property agent. Try it yourself. The larger picture has gone but the cache is still there. It's even dated.
Not since the year 1910, when wireless was used to capture the fugitive murderer Crippen, has technology been used so publicly to catch somebody red-handed. And this time it didn't take an expert or a specialist. In fact those people didn't think of it. In future they will.

Morrissey and the decline of grammar

I have no opinion on the rights and wrongs of the Morrissey/NME shemozzle, although I suspect that he's over-fond of the sound of his own voice and they're over-inclined to see themselves as the guardians of public virtue. However I do think it's an example of the way that the steady coarsening of language is detaching us from reality. It's also about how serious it can be to move from an adjective to a noun.
When I was a teenager they used to use the adjective "racially prejudiced", as if this was a tendency that most people had in smaller or greater measure. Everything in my experience suggests that this is the case. We all draw conclusions about people based on their appearance, ethnicity, accent and so on. (The British do it with class fifty times a day.) The measure of our civilisation is how well we manage to curb those tendencies. I have just come back from Africa, a continent where racial prejudice is a daily reality and you are aware that everyone is making unspoken judgements about people's background and personality based on the precise pigmentation of their skin. That's just the way people are. Certainly nobody would be stupid enough to deny it.
But then at some stage in the '70s people were accused of being a "racist". This move from an adjective to a noun rather suggested that this was something people did, as if their every waking moment was occupied by thoughts of how they could subjugate another ethnic group, as in Nazi Germany or Darfur. This doesn't apply to the overwhelming majority of people to whom the label is commonly attached and only a buffoon would attach it to Morrissey.
The tendency to prejudice, like the human tendency to envy, lust or greed, is old as time and is not something that is going to be excised from human behaviour as a result of any campaign, not even one called (it hurts to even type the words) "Love Music, Hate Racism". The pretence that it can does us no favours.

It's not easy being green

While we've been distracted by the war in Iraq, another, more historically significant phenomenon has been taking place. That's the decline of the dollar.
Throughout my lifetime the dollar was the only currency you could take anywhere in the world and know it could be exchanged for everything from food to weapons. Not any more. Having been warned by Mark Ellen, who recently found that they wouldn't take dollars in Jordan, I took Euros to Mali and changed them for the local currency.
None of this has anything to do with politics. It's to do with value. As Joseph E. Stiglitz outlines in a very readable piece in the new Vanity Fair, the dollar has declined in value against the Euro by 40% in the last six years. The consequences of this shift are seen everywhere - from the dramatic decline in the value of US aid to Africa to the increasing number of US rock acts who are playing over here because they can make money to the fact that for the first time in my experience I did a job for an American publisher recently and they couldn't afford to pay me.

How to close a country for a week

And this morning I returned from Mali aboard a standing room-only Air France flight to Paris.
Being landlocked, Mali relies on airlines to supply its lines of communication with the outside world. Therefore when, a week before we arrived, the Minister of Transport decided that Bamako must resurface its only runway the news came as a bit of a shock to Air France, who run the only daily inter-continental flight out of there.
This move, which amounted to taking an entire country and hanging a sign on it saying "Closed for repairs", was made with just a couple of days notice and left hundreds of Malians stranded thousands of miles away from home with all the attendant expense, emotional wear and tear and visa difficulties.
It passed without any comment from the world's press.