You can always tell a Yorkshireman - but not much

Last night's Richard Macer documentary on BBC Four was about Milner's, a tiny department store in the Yorkshire Dales town of Leyburn. Milner's specialises in garments with elastic waists for farmer's wives in their sixties and fitted curtains and blinds for their houses. The film, which is one of a short series, was also about the always poignant business of generations changing hands. Here boss David Milner had to be driven towards retirement to allow his daughter and son-in-law to take over.

But what kept me glued was its unflinching depiction of that readiness to squabble that seems so much part of the disposition of a lot of people in Yorkshire. David and his family were capable of arguing about the most trivial matters. The angle of a light, the precise wording on an invoice, the number of chairs they needed for their fashion show. All families can do that. But only in Yorkshire are people so determined to pursue their point no matter how much embarrassment is caused that they are prepared to let a man with a camera stand right between them as they have a raging fight about a matter so trifling that it's clear it's merely a cipher for a struggle that goes much deeper.

I'd recommend "The Department Store", particularly for anyone who's enjoyed the films of Molly Dineen.

They've all gone to look for America

I caught fifteen minutes of Stephen Fry In America last night. I feel I've seen no end of prominent British broadcasters wander around America with a film crew in tow: Clive James, Michael Palin, Alistair Cooke, even Jonathan King. There must be plenty of others that have slipped my mind. Memory may be playing me false but it seems that now they spend less time finding out anything about the places they're visiting than they ever did. Last night Stephen was in Alaska. I gathered the following:
1. It's cold;
2. It's beautiful;
3. The Inuits hunt whales;
4. Some of the fish are very ugly;
5. Stephen Fry has been there.
Then he went to Hawaii. I learned the following:
1. It's warm;
2. It's beautiful;
3. The Hawaiians resent the tourism;
4. The sunsets are very beautiful;
5. Stephen Fry has been there.

Then I got a bit anxious watching Fry interview people. In real life he is probably a very good listener but that's not his TV persona. He looks like a hyper active kid who's been told to fold his arms and sit still. We expect him to be spouting forth while other people listen to him in wonder and admiration. And he's very self-conscious about his size and shape. He lacks the streak of fearlessness that made Palin so good at this kind of thing. When he was lowered in the cage to be filmed swimming with some apparently docile sharks he really couldn't wait for it to be over.

The future of dogs

I have nothing against dogs but I do not wish to own one. I think now may be the time to rationalise the numbers of such pets. This could be organised in a way that would be beneficial to both mutts and mutt-lovers. All public parks should have dogs tethered at their gates. Anyone taking a turn around the lake for a constitutional would be free to unhitch said dogs and take them for a stroll. At the end of this perambulation they would be returned to their place, refreshed by the exercise and having widened their social circle. It's an arrangement I can see myself taking advantage of.

For those who don't want to actually interact with the dogs but simply wish to look at them for a short while when they're at their most appealing I can only hope that Puppycam is but the first of a series of similar services. I've visited it about twenty times today.

We love you

To the 02 Arena for the first time to see an immaculate show by Leonard Cohen.

The audience didn't behave like crowds of 20,000 tend to do. When the house lights were extinguished there wasn't the usual delighted cheer. As far as I could tell there was only one person in that whole crowd who felt the need to announce their location with a war whoop. People applauded instrumental solos when they were distinguished enough to demand it. What conversation there was was kept to manageable levels, suggesting these people had all been to libraries or funerals and were therefore familiar with the principle of shutting the fuck up on occasion.

Inevitably they took pictures on their mobile phones but that's a form of madness too far advanced to turn back. And, inevitably also, some person felt moved to wait until there was a silence and then shout "We love you, Leonard!" What possesses such people? Do they imagine that this makes the artist feel secure? Or does it increase their worry that out there in the dark lurks the odd person who might turn up in their kitchen in the middle of the night with a knife or dedicate their lives to drawing full-sized portraits of them?

I've been at James Taylor shows where women shout this. To be fair, women have the decency to say "I love you, James", thereby at least claiming personal responsibility for the sentiment. Taylor has an elegant way of deflecting such compliments. "That's very nice of you but I think it's best we don't know each other."

Madame Tussauds and the inexplicable nature of tourism

Back in the 50s, when there was only one channel of TV and we were easily impressed, I was taken to Madame Tussauds near Baker Street. I was a bit frightened by the Chamber of Horrors. Actually, I was frightened by the idea of the Chamber of Horrors. I'm not sure I even went in. Even to my eight-year-old eyes Madame Tussauds was a tacky proposition. The notion of a good waxworks had limited appeal. The idea that in the heart of one of the greatest cities in the world there was a particularly poor one was inexplicable even then. If ever there was a tourist attraction that should have shrivelled and died, that should have been rendered risible by the march of time and the advance of technology, it's Madame Tussauds. And yet, every time I go past there I am amazed that it continues to draw huge numbers. People from all over the world, where they presumably have their own museum of bad likenesses of their own celebrities, continue to flock to its door.

This is even more amazing when you consider that a ticket for an adult is £25. The blow of this is presumably softened slightly when you learn that a child is a mere £21. If it still seems a bit steep to you, then you can take a family for a bargain £85. Couple of cokes and the tube fares and you've spent £100.

Wandering around London you often run into tourists wearing that over-tired, faintly disappointed expression of visitors all over the world. It's the look that says "where am I again?" and "when can I go and buy something that I could have bought in my own high street but for slightly more money?" These people are already at the end of their tethers. How a visit to this mausoleum on the Marleybone Road does not push them over the edge is a puzzle. How Madame Tussauds was not burned down long ago by mobs of angry visitors who have paid out thousands of pounds per tour party to gawp at a few rotten wax figures I am at a loss to know. How it continues to get the traffic in 2008 is genuinely amazing. Could it be that quite a few of those twenty-five pounds go to the tour companies who deliver the people to its doors? Are people enjoying themselves in an ironic way, like visitors to Graceland? If it didn't cost so much I might go in and find out.

Our friends in the North

"It's been tried in Canada and it works very well," said David Cameron on the Today programme just now. I don't know what he was talking about. It doesn't matter. What interests me is the reference to Canada. Whenever anyone in public life in the UK is proposing a radical solution to anything they always point to the fact that it's been tried in somewhere in the North: Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland and now Canada. They never say it's been tried in Spain or Brazil or Sri Lanka. It's always somewhere snowy. Is that because they have detected that we associate cold places with wisdom and rectitude?

Suicide not painless

People usually regret letting television into their personal lives. Michael Portillo's Death Of A School Friend (which is on the iPlayer for the next five days) may be a rare exception. This is the story of Gary, a classmate of Portillo's, Clive Anderson's and Jeffrey Perkins's at Harrow County Grammar School in the late 60s, a bright boy who suffered from undiagnosed depression and committed suicide two days before his sixteenth birthday.

Gary's parents and younger brother, having endured the forty years since without talking about their agony, agreed to participate in a film about him, in the hope that it might persuade any young person contemplating suicide to reconsider and also to help them in their own ceaseless grieving. It's a powerful, humbling piece of television that should be shown in schools. Seeing how Gary's absence crushed the life out of his parents and even afflicted their relationships with their unborn grandchildren, you can only conclude that the dead get off lightly.

Still life

People say the web is increasingly about video. Maybe it is. Nevertheless, the most eloquent media coverage of the sub-prime crisis I've seen is this sound and pictures presentation from Magnum's Bruce Gilden. It's called "Foreclosures" and it's made up of pictures of boarded-up boxes in Florida together with the life stories of the people who used to live in them. You should watch it. It takes eight minutes.

Their name liveth for evermore

I see the Commonwealth War Graves Commission have announced they are going to undertake the maintenance required to make sure that the names of the hundreds of thousands of soldiers remembered in their cemeteries and memorials are re-inscribed so that they are not washed away by time and the weather. It's the Forth Bridge of the stonemason's art.

The last time I went to the memorial at Thiepval, which bears the names of 73,357 British and South African men who died on the Somme and have no known grave, a mason was busy adding new names in a corner. He told me that they had to do this kind of thing regularly. This is not because they've found a previously undiscovered body (although that does happen) but because they find that there's been a tiny slip in the usually faultless bureaucracy. A name has been double-counted or the spelling isn't right. This is a different Arthur Smith from the other twenty Arthur Smiths on this panel or maybe they've got his regiment wrong. The dedication to correcting this kind of thing is moving in itself.

The cemeteries of the Somme and Flanders are unique, not just for their vastness. If you haven't gone, you should. An entire generation of young men from Britain (and from what was then the Empire) left home for the first time in their lives, set up camp in one particular part of the countryside and subsequently died. So there they remain. Most of them didn't fight in the traditional sense. They were just there to be shelled, as were the Germans. The books in the entrance to the cemeteries record the names of their parents and their addresses: Railway Cuttings, Primrose Cottage, Sea View, Alma Street, the Meadway, the Vicarage and so on.

Before the First World War there had been no call for memorials on this scale. In 1920 it was agreed, following a public debate, that bodies should not be repatriated and that the so-called Silent Cities be created and maintained at public expense. And they are. How long for is an interesting question.

Meanwhile the dead from Afghanistan and Iraq are flown home. Here's a remarkable piece from the New Yorker in 2004 explaining what happens today when the dead come home.

What Obama should know about power

Presumably Barack Obama hasn't had time to watch all of "The Wire". If he can only manage one it should be the episode from Season Four called "Unto Others". It begins with the scene (left) where Tommy Carcetti, who's running for mayor, has a talk with former officeholder Tony.

Tony explains to him what it was like on his first day in the job. There he was, installed behind the big desk, when his aides came in one at a time bearing bowls of shit. This one's from the unions. This one's from the blacks. This one's from the Polacks. It becomes clear that his role as mayor is to eat up each bowl.

That's what office must be like.

What British TV won't face about the American election

It's American election night. BBC reporters are in position from sea to shining sea. Channel Four and ITN are there as well. Why?

What are they going to bring us that we won't get via the CNN site or Huffington Post or the New York Times? What early intelligence on the winners and losers are they going to bring us ahead of ABC or NBC? Which of the movers and shakers are going to speak to the BBC before they talk to CBS or MSNBC? Which noteworthy events are going to take place in front of the BBC's cameras? Anything that happens will be on YouTube within seconds. That's how it's been throughout the campaign. We've watched most of it via Flash video.

Of course any BBC political reporter worth their salt will not pass up the chance to be where the action is but they can't justify their expenses like they used to. They won't be first with the news. Their presenters will be telling us what they've just read on the very same websites that we're looking at.

Why you can't make sport *more* exciting

When I turned in last Saturday night Juande Ramos was the manager of Spurs and they had two points. I woke up Sunday morning to a text from my son saying we had a new manager. Since then they have played three games. They've won two of them and, in incredible circumstances, drawn the other. Of course all these were down to the most extraordinary combination of luck and renewed belief but they do underline, if it were needed, why football has such as grip on the national psyche, eloquently expressed this week by Danny Kelly's microphone-shattering screech of "I *love* football, Stan!" on Talk Sport.



Contrast this with the hollow farce of the England cricket team's participation in the million dollars-to-the-winners Stanford match in Antigua. The local team won and got the cash. Good luck to them. But if Stanford or anyone think they will seed interest in the game this way, they're mistaken. Stanford is the man who thinks Test cricket is boring. This alone should disqualify him from having any part in the game's future. It'll be a long time before anyone shouts "I *love* Twenty20, Aggers!"

I know you've been wondering what I think about Manuelgate

I like Paul Gambaccini but he does reach for the extra colour before it's called for, likening Lesley Douglas to Achilles on Five Live this morning. What he has to say is broadly very true: that only presenters who "drive the desk" have the radio professional's approach to their work or awareness of their responsibilities to their audience.

Somewhere in Brand and Ross's minds must have been the thought that somebody else would save them from themselves by cutting the controversial bits out, as they would undoutedly have done in a pre-recorded TV programme. Nobody did.

I've talked to a bunch of people in radio this week, in the BBC and elsewhere. Their view boils down to this: if you hire people like Brand you must at least try to produce them. If you can't control them because you're 25 and this is your first job, you pass it up the line to somebody who can. If you're going to use the word "fuck" in a pre-recorded item on any BBC service it has to be signed off by a senior executive. That's literally "signed off".

All the stuff about the Daily Mail, Mosley, how much Ross is paid, how many people complained, the effect on the licence fee, the eventual fate of "edgy comedy" and all the rest is just a distraction., no matter which side of the argument you're coming from.

When are you free, ladies?

In praise of the seaside photographer

I don't think we had a camera in the family until the sixties. Prior to that photographs were entrusted to professionals: men from the local paper, specialists in "scholastic" photography who came to school every couple of years and then, once a year, the chaps who appeared in front of you on the prom at Filey or Scarborough and fired off one exposure. They would give you a ticket to produce at their HQ, which was usually a hut. Your picture would be up there with hundreds of others. If you liked it, you bought a print, took it home and put it in a frame.

My sister turned a few of these up the other day. The one here shows her with Mum and Dad, probably in about 1947. We were amazed at the quality of all of them. They're nothing flashy. What's amazing is how with minimum cooperation - they never even asked people to stop - they nonetheless managed to get their quarries properly framed and in focus. Did they even have focus on the cameras they used? These shots, which were the least ambitious pictures imaginable, are leagues better, somehow easier to read, more satisfying to the eye and more full of information, than anything done by even good High Street photographers after colour came along.

Peaches, Kerry and the Olsen Twins: what hath fame wrought?

I urge you to see Peaches: Disappear Here. It's a show on MTV. The producers are Ten Alps, a company in which her father is a principal. The idea here is that Peaches gets to produce her own ideal magazine. She is provided with an editorial team whose interesting haircuts and total absence of relevant experience interacts with Peaches combination of cluelessness and idleness to produce the least convincing depiction of the actual magazine experience I have seen since "Absolutely Fabulous". Peaches issues manifestos to her staff and then buggers off to the United States.

I imagine many of us can recall doing or saying stupid things while working on a sixth form or student magazines. That's fine. Nobody was filming us and holding us up to public mockery. Every now and again in this film a reaction shot captures the uncertainty and fear in what are after all some very young faces. James Brown, who is supposed to be mentoring Peaches, doesn't need to say much. His eyebrows do most of the heavy lifting. The producers can't be bothered to follow through on the central conceit of the magazine. We don't actually see much of it and the climactic moment at which they supposedly pitch the idea to proper publishers has been re-cut so that we don't hear a single word that is actually said. Nobody comes out of it looking very good. At TX time they are still waiting to hear back from the potential publishers. Get away.

This was in same week that Kerry Katona spilled on This Morning. I could only watch this one through my fingers. As ever the backstage story was illuminating. Here was this damaged sample of humanity mounting the auction block to have her teeth inspected by a posse of comfortable media professionals. Furthermore, the minute details of her humiliation were being documented by MTV and so she was being tailed by one of their crews who laid down the interview ground rules. This interview had been arranged by the PR of the publishers of Zoo Magazine who had paid a sum of money for first look at her new bosom. When the interview went out Richard Desmond (the original daily beast) was furious, having already paid for a Katona column in his own "OK" magazine and consequently feeling he had some prior claim to those mammaries. (Media Guardian reckons he pays £500,000 for this privilege. I find it hard to believe he can keep his empire afloat if he's paying this kind of money.) Then Philip Schofield, in my experience a very decent individual, went on Chris Moyles to explain how it all went down. Everybody gets a piece.

I blame real stars for creating the vacuum into which these microbes of the fame game have rushed. The big stars of TV and music and film have either retreated behind their castle walls or imposed such inhibiting conditions on their encounters with the press or made themselves so boring that it's no surprise that the media prefer to play with plasticine people like Katona and Geldof. They're cheaper and there is no humiliation to which they will not submit. If you want to know what you have escaped thanks to this celebrity reticence please have a look at the Olsen Twins appearance on Oprah where they recount in some detail what they have for breakfast with a soul-weariness previously unglimpsed in people so young.

Nation shall speak old news to nation

Now that we finally have every means short of teleporting to bridge the oceans we discover that we no longer have anything to say that the people on the other end don't already know. We've just been in video-enhanced communication with the son and heir in Brazil via the miracle that is Skype. I remember the days when we communicated with relatives in Australia via a Christmas Day phone call that had to be booked weeks in advance. Once connection was established, each party would unload a news bulletin, often from a prepared list. Each item was like water to the thirsty man at the other end.

He was Skyping us while simultaneously instant messaging four separate groups of friends all over the world and watching the (British) football, more widely available overseas than it is at home. Most things we said were met with the words "I know". There wasn't an awful lot you could describe as news anymore. Maybe I should start inventing some.

Break a leg

A few weeks ago Radio Four's Front Row sent me to see a play called "Riflemind". This is not my usual beat. However, many years ago in another life I studied drama and directed plays. Hence I've probably got more insight into how theatrical productions work than I do rock bands.

The reason they sent me is that the play, written by Andrew Upton, was about a rock band getting back together. The reason they were bothering to cover it is that Upton is married to Cate Blanchett, the play was the opening production of a deal intended to bring plays from Sydney to London, it was directed by Philip Seymour Hoffman and starred John Hannah.

Not being a regular patron of the legitimate theatre - I gen'lly go to things long after they've been pronounced hits - I wasn't sure whether "Riflemind" was par for the course. To my eyes and ears it seemed very bad. "Mortifyingly bad," is how one critic described it the following day. At the interval I found myself sitting next to the mother of one of the actors. She worked out that I was there to review it. She looked at me with some sympathy. "But what are you going to say?"

Anyway, I did my bit on "Front Row" the following night and, thanks to Google alerts, I was able to track everything that was written about the show. Shows like this live or die by the reviews and "Riflemind"'s were so bad that the "reviews" section of their website still said "coming soon" a full week after the opening. Then there were the special offers with £50 seats going for £20, which still seemed quite a lot for such a trial of an evening. Today it posted closing notices. It's coming off two months before it was supposed to. The credit crunch gets the blame.

I don't exactly know how such a terrible play was given a West End production though I suspect it's something to do with the fact that nobody likes to lay down in the path of a few stars with a shared purpose. The people I feel for in this situation are the actors, the poor cannon fodder on whom such an enterprise depends. Every night for a month they've had to go on in front of an auditorium empty enough to hunt buffalo and give this wretched play their best shot. They will have known it was terrible long before I did. That's bloody hard work, in the words of Nicholas Craig, actor.

For God's sake, stop asking Randy Newman about "Short People"

Randy Newman is on Desert Island Discs this weekend. Radio Four have been hammering the trailer the last few days. I keep hearing Kirsty Young asking him about "Short People".

I've loved Randy Newman's songs for forty years now. I've interviewed him a few times. He's the funniest person In Rock. I've never once felt the need to ask him about "Short People". If ever there was a record that didn't beg a question it's "Short People". The only people who would find that song in any way worrying would be the people who had never heard "Simon Smith & His Amazing Dancing Bear" or "Davey The Fat Boy" or "Rednecks".

The "Short People" question is always directed at getting him to distance himself as an individual from the person singing "they got little hands, little eyes, they walk around telling great big lies". Then Randy has to perform some act of atonement. He might even have to say that he's just satirising prejudice, a sentiment so trite it exhausts me to type it.

Anyone who thinks Randy Newman songs can be panned for nuggets of folksy wisdom or moral teaching has missed what makes them unique in popular music. When I asked Neil Young what songs were he said they were "just thoughts", still the best definition I've heard apart from Bob Dylan's "a song is anything that can walk by itself". I've talked to hundreds of songwriters and they all say the same thing. A song is something which just occurs to them. It alights on a writer's shoulder. It comes to them as they're waking. It is not something they quarry towards. I hate nothing more than hacks trying to use some less than pleasant sentiment in one of a writer's songs as a stick to beat them with and subsequently cast them out of the presumed shining city where the good people live. If there were such a place Randy Newman wouldn't want to live there. I wouldn't either.

I always picture Randy Newman lying on his sofa, flicking through the TV channels, waiting for incoming ideas, hyper-sensitive to the exact sentence and the precise nuance that betrays our real, often unworthy selves. If you need to have "Short People" explained to you or, worse, somehow apologised for, you've missed the overarching truth that all his songs have been inching towards - that we're all complicated, ambivalent, insecure, sneaky, self-justifying, lazy, half-baked, very rarely noble and, in the final analysis, alone.

More signings for The Wire FC

This one could run and run.

Excuse me, could you fix my camera for me?

We'd just finished recording the Word podcast, in which Mark Ellen and I agreed that Ringo Starr was right to stop complying with the wishes of everyone who expected him to sign anything they sent him, and I set off for a meeting in town.

While walking through Bloomsbury I saw three blokes ahead of me. One of them was attempting to work out how a mobile phone camera worked. The camera belonged to one of the blokes. The chap doing the fixing was Simon Pegg. I went past them. Twenty yards on I looked back. Pegg was now dutifully posing with each of them in turn while the third snapped away.

Witnessing this scene, it's little wonder that Pegg was trying to hide his face beneath a flat cap with a prominent brim. It obviously hadn't worked on this occasion but without it his progress through the West End would take far longer.

It's not quite standing up in a hammock but it can't be an awful lot easier

All news stories leave me wanting one further, usually trivial, piece of information.

The one about the British couple sent to jail for having sex in public in Dubai leads me to wonder: What kind of sun lounger were they allegedly having sexual congress upon?

All the loungers and recliners I've ever had the pleasure of using would not permit any activity more strenuous than lounging or reclining. I can't help but feel that the manufacturer of any chair commodious enough and sufficiently stable to permit the amount of thrusting and undulating traditionally involved in sex should be shouting their product's qualities from the tallest minaret in the locality.

The truth is out

Real events lapped by out of control news cycle

I get the feeling that the media is now moving so quickly that it finds that the actual events it's covering a little bit slow. Even the madness of the last couple of weeks, where people like Robert Peston have been putting out stories on the hour and governments have been changing their policies daily, don't seem quite pacy enough for them. The broadcast media love this kind of thing, where they feel at the centre of events and so much takes place in their studios they don't even have to cross their own thresholds in search of stories. If an hour goes by without a new storyline you can almost hear them drumming their fingers and looking at their watches.

This morning, following the partial recovery of shares in the Far East, they seem to be saying we should all bask in a feeling of relief. I even heard an interviewer just put the question "Is the worst of it over?" My grandmother was no economist but she would have known that was a stupid question.

And at the same time the very people who said a few weeks ago that Gordon Brown was fatally wounded have now decided that he bestrides the world of affairs like a Colossus. Across the Atlantic the media seem to have already banked Barack Obama's poll leads and decided that he should start picking out curtains. The blogs about him have that feeling of a new crush that accompanied Blair into Downing Street. It's the depth of the unrealistic infatuation that makes the subsequent disillusionment so bitter.

Plus there's the satire cycle. If you go on to Huffington Post it's impossible to tell whether people are responding to the events or the satirical spin on those events. They say Sarah Palin is about to appear on "Saturday Night Live" to check on Tina Fey's impression of her. A week ago John McCain cancelled on David Letterman. Letterman made such a fuss on the air that he's forced to change his plans and appear. Letterman made a joke about the road to the White House leading right through his studio. He was joking, I think.

Kids do the darndest things

When your children are small you spend all your time making sure they don't wander into the road or bash their head on the corner of that table. Eventually they leave home and actively seek out danger. When our son was on his gap year he sent me a text message from Brazil. It read:

"This afternoon I'm going hang gliding over Rio. It looks dangerous but it's cheap. P.S. Don't tell Mum until I'm down."

Now he's at university in Sao Paulo. We spoke on Friday. "This weekend I think I'm going sky diving," he said. There's no point saying "don't do that." There's not even much point saying "please do that safely". You just say "let me know the minute you're down" and spend the next 24 hours knotted up with anxiety. Eventually we got a picture.

Weather forecasting and the limitations of graphics

This morning we were in Central London. This afternoon we've been at home. I haven't seen a single cloud all day. Where do the BBC get the weather from?

One man, one vote

There's an elegant but rather long-winded editorial in the New Yorker explaining why "the editors" will be voting for Barack Obama. I don't think we would have expected them to do anything else.

But democracy being what it is, their vote counts for the same as these people's, filmed at a recent McCain rally in Ohio.

Both sides vote from the gut and then invent the reasons afterwards.

Invading your own privacy

I genuinely sympathise with celebrities pursued by photographers. But for every one who has their privacy invaded there is another energetically invading their own privacy to advance their career. Two cases in point from this week.

Up and coming rugby player Danny Cipriani (20) and model girlfriend Kelly Brook (28) are allegedly snapped by a passing paparazzo while enjoying a quiet cup of coffee outside a cafe in Notting Hill. Whoever matched up this pair must really think we're all stupid. The flawless focus on that picture indicates that the photographer had been given enough time to take Polaroids. And the kiss! I've seen more convincing oscular contact between an eight-year-old boy and a moustachioed aunt. Revenge is already being wreaked by Cipriani's team-mates. God knows how much worse he's going to find it when he comes up against a gang of vengeful Celts in the Home Internationals.

Then there's Brad Pitt taking pictures of his wife breast-feeding for the cover of that well-known organ for the nursing mother, W. Exactly where do they get the conceit from? Look! Look! We can do things just the same as you proles do them, only more beautifully. We were so taken with ourselves we couldn't bear for our private pictures to be private for one minute longer.

These are the people who have been the victim and beneficiary of so much publicity that they literally don't believe anything about their own lives until they read about it in the paper.

Why football going bust could be good news

There's a piece in today's Guardian by Richard Williams about the chances of the credit crunch hitting the over-borrowed football sector just as it has hit the over-borrowed banks. I don't doubt this could happen. It's hard to see why we should care.

Apart from the improvements in the grounds that took place in the wake of the Taylor Report, it's difficult to see in what ways the billions of pounds that have poured into the game in the last eighteen years have benefited the fans or the game. We can see how Sky has prospered. We can see how agents have done very nicely. We can see how the players have become so routinely rich that the only people who can afford to meet their wage bills are billionaires. An old colleague of mine used to say he wouldn't mind his club putting their season ticket price up every year as long as he could deliver the difference in person to the wife of the highest-paid foreigner on the team. Either that or just arrange a money order in favour of Harvey Nichols or Porsche. Since that was where the money was going to end up, why didn't he just cut out the middleman and save on admin?

The last eighteen years has seen Britain turned from a football nation into a football market. This decline might bother the average fan but doesn't trouble most of the people with their noses in its overflowing trough. So what if there were less swill in that trough? Are we bovvered? If the downturn means less money coming into the game, how does a football fan suffer? There's not a lot of headroom on ticket prices. Down my street they've taken to selling Sky door-to-door which indicates that take-up is at saturation point. Everyone I know who took up a Setanta subscription is finding it's an organisation harder to leave than the Moonies. The pips have been squeaking throughout the game for a good while now.

If the tap were turned off then the most expensive players would obviously go where they can make the most money. Who knows where? Spain? Italy? China? Kazakhstan? The top British players, being timid home bodies by nature, will probably stay, thanks to the premium they are paid for being home-grown. More British players would get a shot at a career, which ought to benefit the national team. Of course the perfectly-manicured lawns of Highbury and Old Trafford would no longer be graced by the world's most expensive players but wouldn't that allow the clubs to lower their prices sufficiently to admit the occasional member of the working class, along the lines of the assisted places schemes at the major public schools? The rise in fuel prices might even encourage some of their long-distance supporters to adopt somebody nearer to home. Surrey might sprout some football clubs.

A lot of the glamour would go, of course. The thud and blunder of honest toilers (or maybe Joey Barton) would probably replace the stiletto passing of a Deco. The spectacle would look less like a computer game and more like a muddy tiff. Nigella Lawson would no longer be a big fan and politicians would stop pretending that they have always supported a club – but would that really affect the number of people going through the gates? I don't think so. The tsunami of hype that has washed through the game in the last eighteen years has increased its popularity but also pushed up its price. The fans have paid more for their subscriptions and season tickets in order that their club can pay yet more money to people who already have more than they know what to do with; this has been done in the largely vain hope that by hiring them they're going to be able to elbow their way to a position of solvency. It's like a gambler rushing out of the casino mid-session in order to shake down passers-by for the money to fund one more bet.

It can't go on. One day the oligarchs and carpetbaggers will move on. They'll probably leave in the middle of the night like the holders of sub-prime mortgages, slipping the stadium keys through the bank's letterbox before setting off for pastures new. Once they've gone the game will still go on, albeit at a less sophisticated level, driven by the ancient tribal hatred that has animated the game for the last century. That and the enduring desire of tens of thousands of young men to play the game for a living, even a relatively modest one. Because that's what they did once and may do again.

A Day At The Races

Went racing in Paris with friends who know about this kind of thing. They buy all the papers, cruise the bars in search of further tips and then ring home to see if the odds are any better. I don't. I just look for any horse whose name has anything that could be construed as a pop music connection. Hence:
First race: Styx - still running
Second race: Green Manalishi (false start, race to be re-run later)
Third race: Pill - allegedly ran but couldn't personally confirm
Fourth race: Intense Focus - invisible
Fifth race: Lady Gloria - pulling a milk float near you right now
Prix De L'Arc De Triomphe: no pop music connection on the card so I backed Youmzain each way and it had the decency to come second.
We had to leave before the last race. I was on the way to the Gare de Nord when I was informed there was a horse called Ledzep in that one. It won, of course.

The sound of silence

Did an interview with Clive James and Pete Atkin yesterday for Word's Backstage series of podcasts. Clive's got a new book out and therefore he was going straight home to have a look at how it was doing on Amazon. He's not the first author to succumb to the irresistible lure of looking at his Amazon ranking. It must be the least scientific way of keeping track of sales success since the last one.

For years magazine people have been fishing for good news by going into WH Smith and trying to work out if the stack of their latest issue was diminishing at the required speed. I don't know why they do it but they do, everyone from editorial assistants to CEOs. It's a professional disease and professionals should know just how unreliable it is. You don't know how many they've got in the back. You don't know how long they've been out there. You don't know how representative that particular outlet is.

If you want to know how well anything's doing - a record, a book, a magazine - my advice is just stay indoors and see if anyone gets in touch. The most reliable indicator of success in any endeavour is that people can't wait to tell each other anything that could ever be interpreted as good news. Silence usually means they haven't got any.

Autocue and the credit crunch

We know that politicians have their speeches written for them. We know that they're reading from transparent prompting systems. A few have the knack of making it appear as if they're just plucking their thoughts from the air. Some people, like Tony Blair, became so good at it that they eventually overdid the pauses and the general "look, no hands" approach.

George Bush, on the other hand, not only looks as if he's reading it but actually looks as if he's reading it for the first time. This is particularly distressing at a time like this when concern should be balanced by an impression of confidence.

Working with prompting technology is an odd experience. Because it relieves the speaker of the need to remember his words it leads to the temptation to stop thinking and let the mouth do the work. Because it keeps scrolling it tends to make people talk more quickly than is natural and results in sentences that carry too much freight for the listener to take it in. Most serious of all, because it only shows the paragraph, or even the sentence, that he is speaking it can result in the speaker being struck by the terrifying thought - what am I about to say next? That's what the look on George Bush's face says to me.

The Bad Samaritan

A stranger knocked on the door just now. He was full of apologies for intruding. Everything seemed to take him a long time to say. I kept asking him what he wanted. He pointed in the direction of his car which was apparently parked down the road. He would leave me I.D. and he would pay it back tomorrow but - and he realised that there was no reason for me to trust him - he needed "four or five pounds". Because I have a massive suspicion of anyone who turns up at my door, I said no.

I then started to wonder whether I'd turned my back on some deserving citizen. You never know. Alyson recalled the woman in Marks & Spencer who'd once paid her shopping bill when she found herself without a purse. And I remembered lots of other acts of kindness from complete strangers. What kind of monster had London turned me into?

Putting the bins out later on I bumped into a neighbour. There's a bloke working the street, he said. Trying to cadge money from people. Another neighbour had turned him away, then thought better of it, got a spare can of petrol out of his shed and gone looking for the bloke. He found him. Funnily enough bloke didn't want petrol.

So I was right. Restores your lack of faith in human nature.

Pictures of war

In the current issue of "The New Yorker" there's a portfolio of pictures of Iraq War service personnel taken by the British photographer Platon. They're remarkable pictures. However none of them seem to be actually taken in Iraq. I don't blame him. I wouldn't go there either, not for all the professional kudos in the world. In a podcast he explains how he took these pictures, how cooperative the subjects were and how much time he worked on them afterwards.

Although Iraq provides the peg to make comfortable "New Yorker" readers like me suddenly interested in the tribulations of young people I am unlikely to meet, the fact is that at any stage in the last fifty years they could have sent somebody to photograph people who had sustained terrible losses in the armed services. They're photographs of warriors rather than photographs of war. We don't see many photographs of the actual war but we suspect if we did we would find them very disturbing rather than somehow uplifting, as Platon's are.

Robert Capa reckoned if your picture wasn't good enough it was because you weren't close enough. He demonstrated that on D-Day when he landed on Omaha Beach with the 1st Infantry Division. He was kicked into the sea by a bosun who thought he was hesitating. He had a camera in either hand. The pictures are all the more extraordinary because only a few survived. A mistake in the lab meant that 100 were ruined. Only ten remained. They're no masterpieces. They're just the kind of thing you and I would take if we were up to our chests in freezing water and terrified out of our minds.

Roxy Music's not-so-secret ingredient

I caught "The Roxy Music Story" via the iPlayer. It was OK. All the members past and present appear reassuringly sane. I could hug the drummer Paul Thompson if my arms were only long enough. They rowed everyone out to talk about them. Richard Williams, who discovered them. Michael Bracewell, who talked about their artistic credentials. Steve Jones was there to give them a free pass on behalf of punk rock. Siouxsie did the same thing on behalf of wimmin. Simon Reynolds explained where they fitted in critic-wise, which is funny because, if Wikipedia is to be believed, he was only nine when their first record came out.

But these documentaries are always so busy trying to underscore the seriousness of the subject that they invariably miss the elephant in the room. Roxy Music were, for about four years, the hottest ticket in the UK, because Bryan Ferry was a bigger sex symbol than Robbie Williams and Kylie Minogue combined. Plus they made records that perfectly framed that sexuality. It wasn't just chin-stroking Velvet Underground fans and customers of Zandra Rhodes who loved Roxy Music. It was girls in Leeds. It was brickies in Cardiff. People screamed. People swooned. People dressed up. When Bryan Ferry appeared on stage dressed as a G.I. out of "South Pacific" everyone I knew talked about the way he had his tie tucked into his shirt. In the mid-70s there was a glamour and swagger about Roxy Music that has not been equalled by anyone in British music since. Of course the Americans didn't buy it and so it was inevitable that they would implode as nearly every British group has done ever since. But at their height they were more dazzling than they're given credit for.

Holding Robert Hughes's coat

When the venerable art critic puts you down, you stay down. This is him in the Guardian on Damien Hirst's recent rights issue:

One might as well get excited about seeing a dead halibut on a slab in Harrods food hall. Living sharks are among the most beautiful creatures in the world, but the idea that the American hedge fund broker Steve Cohen, out of a hypnotised form of culture-snobbery, would pay an alleged $12m for a third of a tonne of shark, far gone in decay, is so risible that it beggars the imagination. As for the implied danger, it is worth remembering that the number of people recorded as killed by sharks worldwide in 2007 was exactly one. By comparison, a housefly is a ravening murderous beast. Maybe Hirst should pickle one, and throw in a magnifying glass or two.

Some favourite records

Met somebody at a party at the weekend who asked me what music was worth listening to. Recommendation is a hazardous business. Sharing a taste is one thing. Being on the same wavelength is another thing entirely. Anyway, these are some of the records that have given me the most pleasure in the last few months:
Loudon Wainwright: Recovery
Redoing a lot of his best early songs with Joe Henry, the producer of the moment. Speaking of whom...
Joe Henry: Civilians
Love that dry, basement sound and the string bass
Various Artists: Take Me To The River
Three CDs of classics of Southern Soul - arguably the greatest compilation ever compiled.
Bon Iver: For Emma, Forever Ago
Makes me wish I was a sensitive 19-year-old.
Mulatu Astatke: Ethiopiques Vol 4
Gorgeous Ethiopian jazz.
Burial: Untrue
The sound the Victoria Line makes after everyone's gone home.
Lykke Li: Youth Novels
The Swedish Kate Bush.
Sir Victor Uwaifo: Guitar Boy Superstar
Brilliantly lo-fi music from 70s Nigeria.
She & Him: Volume One
Actress Zooey Deschanel and M. Ward make the record Cass Elliott never got round to.
Mary Gauthier: Genesis (The Early Years)
The female John Prine.

At home with The Sopranos

I've been watching, very belatedly, Season Three of "The Sopranos". One of the most impressive things about these sprawling HBO dramas is not the extremes of behaviour portrayed. It's the everyday stuff the characters do, particularly the daily acts of shabbiness of which we're all capable. In "The Telltale Moozadell" it's Carmela Soprano's birthday. Her teenage son buys her a DVD of "The Matrix". He sort of apologises for not wrapping it but then says it's more personal that way. Then daughter Meadow comes home from University announcing that she's booked her mother in for a special all-day beauty treatment at a smart new salon. And to keep her company she's booked herself in as well. Oh, and she's put it on her mother's credit card. Now that's family life.

Heather Mills Maths

Heather Mills regularly embarks on media initiatives to rehabilitate herself. In each case she digs herself a slightly roomier hole. Even more than most famous people she just can't resist the opportunity to talk about herself. That must be why she does it.

She has a new publicist. She's taking legal action against the old one, rarely a good sign. This new person, called Joe Dolce, has steered her in the direction of the Daily Mail. Say what you like about the Mail, they're always prepared to give people the space to make an idiot of themselves. This is a long read.

There are many gems here, some of them arithmetical. Take the revelation that she took sixty close friends and family on holiday to the Caribbean island of Necker. Even if we were offering them a free holiday I think most of us might have difficulty mustering that many close family and friends.

This weekend she's cooking 1,000 vegan meals for poor children in the Bronx. She claims this is at a personal cost of a million dollars. Now even if she were to take the more expensive option and actually buy the meals rather than cooking them (assuming there is a quality vegan outlet in the Bronx), that would mean she was splashing out a thousand dollars a head. That's a lot of noodles.

Sex And Ye City

There's something about this still that sums up "The Duchess" and its "Grazia"-style take on life among the aristocrats of the 18th century.

A lazy Sunday round at the love nest of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire and her love toy Charles, the second Earl Grey, means just lounging around, chilling out to the latest Mozart CD, brushing croissant fragments from their Heal's bed linen while reading the gossip pages of the Bath Chronicle. Later in the day they will mosey down to the Pump Room to dally over a leisurely glass of seltzer with mates...

We shall fight them at the cocktail hour...

"The Irregulars" by Jennet Conant sounds like one for the reading list. According to the Wall Street Journal...

"Ms. Conant tells the story of a handful of young, handsome, cosmopolitan British officers sent to Washington before Pearl Harbor -- at Prime Minister Winston Churchill's direction -- to ingratiate themselves on the social scene, subvert American isolationism and advance the British cause through good manners. America at the time was officially committed to neutrality, though World War II was raging in Europe, not least in Britain during the Blitz."

Somebody has to have bought the film rights for this.

John Le Carré is my kind of guy

'I don't see many people. I write and walk and swim and drink."

The bullshit factor

"Americans fully expect bullshit from their politicians. It only matters that it's the right kind. And Sarah Palin, as we learned last night, is frighteningly full of it."

That's Bob Moser in "The Nation". It's easy for Brits to feel that this kind of thing doesn't apply to us. As a breed our leaders can't be bothered pretending to curry favour with us. They're secure in the knowledge that they know better than we do. I quite like that about them.

But they all ask us to buy into the greater bullshit, which is that they're in a position to do much about things. John McCain says he's going to clean up Washington. Barack Obama says he's going to free the better angels of our nature. Gordon Brown says he's keeping an eye on what Russia is up to in Georgia. (Got that, Mr Putin?) David Cameron is going to make people more polite. It's all the kind of hot air that they think will play. It bears no relation to what they will actually do when it comes down to grisly reality. Ask Bush and Brown whether, even in their worst nightmares, they expected to have to nationalise building societies. Tommy Carcetti would be laughing, were he not a fictional character.

If they were genuinely candid they would admit that they are volunteering for a short ride on the bucking bronco that Harold Macmillan called "events, dear boy" and if they're very lucky by the time they are thrown they won't actually have done anything.

School's out, apparently

A travel company crashes, leaving thousands of holiday makers stranded all over the world. TV crews rush to the airports to record interviews with tearful ticket holders. Families traveling with children make particularly good telly. There turn out to be a surprising number of these and the kids are anything from primary age to teenagers. This is irregular, as head teachers will note, because this week is the first of the new school year when nobody's got an excuse. Even the most laggardly establishment has re-opened its doors and even the most demob-happy one hasn't yet broken up for half term.

The main reason people take their kids out of school during term time is to take advantage of off-peak holiday deals. Given the timing this week, that must mean that most of these kids have missed the beginning of term and were planning to turn up ten days late with a deep tan, complaining they'd been sidelined by the flu. It's a strangely emotive issue. Parents caught red-handed get indignant rather than apologetic, blaming holiday companies for taking advantage of the school calendar (and its mere thirteen week holiday "window") to profiteer at their expense; that or the local education authority or heads for their lack of understanding.

Given the number of package holiday companies and airlines that are going bust I think they may have overestimated how much fat there is in the holiday business. Last time there was a furore about this the DoE was forced to issue a statement saying "we have no legal powers to fix holiday price setting." What nobody does is blame themselves. Of course we did it once, with one child when she was quite young, for just a couple of days and with the tacit approval of the head. Doesn't make us any less guilty.

The only good bloke in showbiz

Had lunch with an old radio hand. Talk fell to whether it is really the case that all stars are monsters drunk on ego. He had previously had the same conversation with a very senior executive in BBC Television and put this same question to him. This individual had in the course of a long and colourful career dealt with every major star in the light entertainment firmanent. He was challenged to name one who wasn't capable of behaving like a twat. He furrowed his brow and thought hard for quite a few minutes. Then he brightened. "Rolf Harris!"

Mobiles on the underground

I can't believe that they're really going to make it possible to use mobiles on underground trains. They're starting with Glasgow, a system with so few stations you would have thought that people would be able to wait until they'd completed their journeys to make a call.

Presumably they're already measuring up London. I think it's potentially disastrous. The only thing that gets millions of people back and forth to work in London every day is the Metropolitan Omerta. It's this code of silence that keeps Londoners sane. I may have my nose jammed up against your armpit but the fact that I am not talking to you is the best guarantee that I will not engage in any acts of open aggression against you. Out of town visitors are instantly recognisable because they're talking, usually to say something like "I couldn't do this every day". (To which all Londoners assent between gritted teeth, we wouldn't wish you to.)

Imagine a rush hour train in the stifling heat of the Victoria Line. That's bad enough. Now imagine that carriage full of people engaging in gormless phone conversations with unseen friends, business colleagues, boyfriends, insurance companies and call centres in Mumbai. I genuinely fear for the thin skin of restraint once you add that kind of provocation.

I think this is an issue that our new mayor should take the lead in. "Progress" stops here. If you want to talk, walk.

The growth of unique names

Very good piece on Salon which looks at the fashion among African-American parents for inventing unique names for their children, a practice that has brought us Beyoncé, Lashawn, Deontay, Taraje and millions of others. It finds that this is not all that new and increasingly it's not exclusively black either. It makes me wonder whether in the near future it'll be possible to pick out the middle class on the basis that they will be the only ones who will choose names that have been used before. There's a moral here about their investment in continuity that I'm too tired to explore.

A music film. And about music too

Most music documentaries aren't about music. They're about career or personality.

I've just watched "A Trip To Asia: On Tour With the Berlin Philharmonic" and it's a revelation. These are utterly accomplished players who've been hired by what is, by any measure, the best band in the world. However they accept that they're not creative musicians. They are instead, as one of them describes it, "reproducing musicians".

They talk about the need to bring all their different egos and personalities together into the tiny area in which they have to operate and the physical ecstasy when it all works. It's the nearest I've ever got to how musicians think.

Survival of the fittest

I read today that Fabio Capello didn't want to risk Emile Heskey (30) for the whole game against Andorra because that way he would be too tired to appear against Croatia four days later. This is in the same week that top class tennis players at the U.S. Open are expected to play a final just twenty-four hours after a semi-final. Anyone who's watched people like Nadal and Murray compete from close-up is amazed that they're still standing after the knock-up, let alone at the end of three, even four hours during which they're pushing themselves to a scary level of intensity. Why can't they use some of the tennis training methods on the footballers?

In the same weekend I have to say I was impressed to see 52-year-old Angus Deayton last a full forty-five minutes ploughing up and down the Wembley pitch during the Sport Aid England vs Rest Of The World match.

Bulletin from "You Couldn't Make It Up" Desk

A week ago there was only one famous Palin. This is an actual sentence from Newsweek this morning.

Among the allegations that were raised against Wooten by Palin's sister: he had Tasered his ten-year-old stepson and shot a moose without a permit.

What happened to sleeve design?

In years to come, when travelers from Mars pick through the debris of our shattered society, one of the questions somebody is bound to ask is, why did rock bands allow the covers of their CDs to be designed by people who didn't seem to understand the first thing about the principles of the packaged goods business? I noticed these four pre-releases on my desk just now and they set me thinking.

• Let's start with the top left. If a CD becomes separated from its case, how the bloody hell do you identify it? Would a company selling DVDs allow you to do that? No. And why not? Because it would be profoundly irritating for their customers. Which it is.
• Top right. One of the jobs of design is to maximise the chances of a little casual purchase by providing people with an element that they can get some kind of purchase on. Here you've got a band name that provides no clue and an album title that tries your patience. In this context if you then expect people to be intrigued by your conceptual gag as well then, well, you have a lot to learn.
• Bottom right. Go and look at the books in Borders. What's the first principle of book jacket design? That you be able to make out the name of the book and its author. Now, can you read this? It was eventually identified by somebody holding it in front of me and telling me its name. Call me old fashioned. This shouldn't be necessary.
• Bottom left. If you're a former member of Captain Beefheart's Magic Band then you should know that the marketplace is infinitely more crowded than it used to be and it's no longer tolerant of the occasional injection of the grotesque. Somebody has to reach for this in the rack and take it to the till. They are more likely to do that if they don't find the image on the cover repellent.
  

The last refuge of the PR

My favourite moment in "Money For Nothing", last night's BBC Three programme about the iniquitous growth of store cards, came when presenter Rebecca Wilcox was being filmed on Oxford Street trying to explain to shoppers why they shouldn't use them. Top Shop's PR, obviously having been called in by the store's manager, was filmed bearing down on the crew and telling them they couldn't film the exterior of the shop because they didn't have permission. Like Chinese policemen, PR people often do this. It's the single dumbest thing a communications professional can ever say.

When the traditional wheedling, arm twisting and corruption don't work, PRs are very quick to pretend that they have some sort of Law, moral or actual, on their side. They compose their features into that "you've gone too far this time" mask and act like the parent whose about to use a sanction so dreadful that it's going to hurt them more than it hurts you. In truth they're doing this because, if they thought about it for a moment, they must realise that they don't have a leg to stand on. Whenever PRs are wielding embargos or those exclusivity agreements they are always trying to get inexperienced hacks to sign, I energetically encourage them to seek redress through the law. I would love to see them explain to a judge why employees charged with getting as much publicity as possible for their paymasters suddenly decide they don't want anyone to photograph their building.

This sort of idiotic behaviour is always counter-productive, as I'm sure the police chief in Denver must have realised when he saw this clip of his men moving on an ABC reporter trying to film people arriving for a Democratic party fundraiser at the recent convention.

Funny thing, football, particularly this week

An unusual thing is happening in football this week. Usually the amount of speculation is out of proportion to the number of actual events. But this week, what with the transfer window, the Manchester City takeover, the Robinho transfer, the actual departure of Curbishley and the likely departure of Keegan, events have been ripping along at such a speed that the commentariat has barely had time to comment.

It seems that with the advent of a handful of owners for whom money is no object and a larger number of very rich blokes trying to keep up with them, and in all probability ultimately sell to them, the days of the traditional British manager are numbered. If you want some light cast on the new thinking going on in football clubs Five Live's interview with football broker Kia Joorabchian is a good place to start.

Robinho: there'll be tears

Can I be the first to point out that Robinho's thumb-sucking goal celebration is already the most embarrassing party piece since Robbie Keane dropped his gunslinger act? The fact that Real Madrid eventually sold him because, according to Ramon Calderon, it was impossible to have a conversation with him that didn't involve him crying indicates that we have some rich entertainment in prospect.

Ken Campbell

Ken Campbell has died. I remember seeing him being interviewed on TV in the 70s. He said something like "Anything that doesn't have some humour doesn't have any truth." Made a big impression on me.

How to write (latest in an endless series)

From Anthony Lane's first letter from the Beijing Olympics in The New Yorker:

To leave your hotel in the morning and have your bag and your person searched before you board a bus to the Olympic Green, as if it were a plane, is no hardship; indeed, from a professional point of view, to be felt up and patted down with such eager regularity has given me the first, helpful hint as to what life was like for Jean Harlow.

Martini Wisdom

Beneath the delectable lines of all that art direction and the rather showy drinking, there are powerful themes in Mad Men. An episode from the second series came my way recently in which one of the main characters sleeps with a woman who isn't his wife. A few days later he calls her. She asks him where he is. He says he's at home with his kids. "Ah yes," she says, giving the knife the barest twist. "When I've been out and been bad I like to come home and be good."

Glass ceilings and halls of mirrors

On the news last night I saw a film of Barack Obama sitting in somebody's living room. He was watching TV. From time to time he applauded what he saw. What he saw was Chelsea Clinton introduce "her hero", who turned out to be her mother. Then we saw her father applauding as her mother was featured in a film with her own mother. Then Hillary Clinton, who is not running for anything this time, made a speech about glass ceilings and pledged her wholehearted support of Barack. Everybody applauded even though they know she doesn't mean it because she wants him to lose so that she can have a shot in 2012. And what's even stranger is there are signs that none of this pantomime actually changes the mind of the people who will decide this election, regular people worried about their mortgages.

Meanwhile, in other news, Russia is invading a troublesome neighbour in order to defend the rights of an allegedly oppressed minority. Anyone watching "The World At War" this weekend on BBC History can be forgiven for pricking up their ears at that one, which was the favourite fig leaf of both Stalin and Hitler. When I was a kid they used to run a show called "All Our Yesterdays" which was just old newsreel introduced by a brilliantly jaded old hack called Brian Inglis. I think they should bring it back. Just two minutes at the end of a weekly news bulletin would be enough to point up the difference between government's accounts of the world and the world as it actually is.

Podcasts are like life

Podcasts are really interesting things. If you listen to one regularly you develop a strange affinity with the people on it and tend not to like it when there's any kind of shuffle of the personnel.

I'm a big fan of The Game, the weekly football podcast from The Times. Actually I'm a big fan of The Game as it was two seasons ago when it was chaired by the indefatigable Danny Kelly and featured Gabriele Marcotti, who makes Geoff Boycott seem self-effacing, Alison Rudd, who used to sing a football song every week, and Bill Edgar, an anorak's anorak. It was perfect because it didn't try to get clever. It just put the week's football events through the same mincer every Monday. I would have paid 70p a week (the price of The Times) to listen to it but nobody has yet worked out a way of taking that money off me.

At the beginning of last season Danny Kelly left and they put Marcotti in charge, which was not playing to his strengths. At one stage he was so aggressive I thought Kevin Day was going to hit him. They introduced interviews, most of which didn't work. The appeal of the podcast is it sends a gust of opinionated air into an arena in which most speech is a waste of breath. With rare exceptions its talks with standard "football folk" were the dullest part of the show. Alison Rudd disappeared and instead we got a rotating cast of football writers from the papers, most of whom don't begin to understand podcasting and give the impression that they regard it as an effete distraction from their real job of heaping ink on paper. But nonetheless I listened.

Now the new season arrives and they've got Phill Jupitus in to present. Phill's very good but you can't help but think that they went for somebody who's built upon the same lines as Danny but lacks the latter's zany attack and willingness to fill any space with his own opinions. The other thing about getting somebody like Phill in is there's presumably money involved, money that nobody in the podcasting world appears to be getting back in either sponsorship or advertising. I'm still here with my 70p but for that I might insist they get Danny back.

Y.C.M.I.U.

Overheard in a lift just now.
South African: What did you make of Paris?
Australian: Pretty everage.

If not Becks, who?

David Beckham's appearance at the closing ceremony of the Beijing Olympics made me ponder a couple of things.

If you want a man to appear on top of a double decker bus with a small child and do something vaguely symbolic involving a ball, he's certainly your man.

But if for any reason he were unavailable, who the hell else would you call?

We hear a lot about the transformation of sportsmen into superstars, how even young names today can parlay their images into big money via massive advertising campaigns for anything from pop to pumps, about how sportsmen today enjoy a level of fame that would have been unknown to earlier generations of athletes.

But if Becks had not been able to do the gig, who would you have called? There isn't another footballer who would have been able to command that degree of recognition and affection. Is there anyone from another sport? I can't think of any. Maybe they aren't as famous as they think they are. They think they're in the same business as Becks. Fact is, they're not on the same planet.

"Which war is it today, Sir?"

Visited Berlin for the first time this week. When I was growing up I never had to learn the recent history of the place. It was just one of those things you absorbed. You only realise how strange it is when you try to explain it to a teenager of today. Sitting outside Starbucks on Unter Den Linden looking at school parties having their pictures taken with people dressed up as Russian soldiers and reflecting on the fact that only the other week Barack Obama (born in the year the Wall went up) appeared in front of 200,000 people by the Victory Column, you wonder at how tourism seems to take over when actual memory fades.

In the early 80s I worked in an office on Carnaby Street. I remember being amazed at how Scandinavian teenagers, who were not born at the time that the street enjoyed its six months of fame, would nontheless find their way there to buy rubber policeman's helmets and tartan bum-flaps. Reluctant crocodiles of teenagers are a common site in the centre of every major city in the world as the educational trip industry conquers the world. I did it myself in the days when it was a bit rarer. I don't remember learning anything at all.

Everybody hurts

Yesterday was an extraordinary day at the Olympics. Usain Bolt's unreal 100m run, Rebecca Adlington's second gold in the pool, the coxless four's agonising overhauling of the Australians and a lot more. There's a lot of 20/20 hindsight on the radio about the power of positive thinking, the importance of discipline and coaches who say "if you really want to win an Olympic medal you should be prepared to shoot your favourite pet". The coxless four said they were close because they'd spent seven days a week in each other's company 365 days a year for four years. But do all these examples of athletes' unbelievable dedication actually prove anything? Every race I watch I find myself looking at the person coming last and thinking 'they must have worked every bit as hard as the person who came first.' As my mother would have said, 'you all deserve a medal'.

Holiday reading

Finisterre.
I get up every morning and cycle for the bread in the teeth of an Atlantic gale. The rest of the day is spent dodging the weather. Not since a holiday thirty years ago in the long-gone land before children have I read as much as I have this week. It's one of those things that repays practice.

First, Through A Glass Darkly, Nigel Jones's biography of Patrick Hamilton, from which he emerges as a charmless snob - but we expected that, didn't we? He goes to the Daily Worker to write pieces in praise of Stalin. His mate Claud Cockburn already does so under the name "Frank Pitcairn". I love the idea of public school educated intellectuals sitting in pubs trying to come up with prole names for themselves.

Then Duncan Hamilton's "Provided You Don't Kiss Me: 20 Years With Brian Clough" which is entertaining enough but still can't come up with a reason for why he was so special other than the fact that he was a quote machine. I wonder whether he actually was any great shakes as a coach or just happened to find himself attached to the right group of players at the right time. Nobody knows what coaches do in the first place which is amazing when you consider how much ink is spent speculating about it.

I wish somebody would write a decent post 9/11 thriller. Richard Flanagan's "The Unknown Terrorist" isn't it. The only thing I can remember about it is that in Australia men's swimming briefs are known as "budgie smugglers".

I read the first part of Ian McEwan's "On Chesil Beach" in the New Yorker ages ago. I read the novel in about the same time as the action it describes. Because of the nature of the story's, er, climactic event, it may never be filmed, I fancy.

By this time I'm getting into my stride and I approach Janet Frame's autobiographical trilogy "An Angel At My Table" intending to read her childhood memoir and see how we got on. I ended up reading all three because since she's been so honest it seemed rude not to stay with her. Michael Holroyd says it's one of the great auotbiographies of the 20th century and I wouldn't disagree.

"Moondust" by Andrew Smith is a quest to meet the men who walked on the moon before they all die. The quest is not as interesting as the amazement you feel that they managed it in the first place and the wonder at the inexperience of the people charged with making life or death decisions. During the launch of Apollo 12 the rocket was hit by three lightning strikes, which caused all the electrical systems to go haywire in a way that none of their drills had envisaged. Before aborting the mission the Controller turned to John Aaron, the man in charge of the electrical system and asked him what to do. Aaron said "Try A-C-E", which is a bit like hitting "reset". They did and all their signals came back. But here's the thing about John Aaron. He was 24.

Stay tuned for these messages

Over the last hundred years we've grown used to seeing hard news interspersed with adverts for consumer products but there is something about this page from the Mirror site this morning – where the harrowing news about the couple who were murdered in the Caribbean is interrupted by commercials for air freshener and washing-up liquid – that may well have the marketing man tearing his hair out.

In praise of Radio Four

Driving down from Yorkshire today through the driving rain of an August morning we listened to three excellent Radio Four programmes back to back. Actually, the second programme was put together through the efforts of Norwegian Radio which had managed to get Leonard Cohen to talk, and talk beautifully, about his early days as a musician and his affair with Marianne Ehlen, the woman famously featured in a towel on the back cover of "Song From A Room". This was then intercut with an interview with Ehlen to make "Leonard and Marianne", an affecting portrait of how life felt to the pair of them when the going was good and, as Leonard recalls, sleeping with your friends was simply good manners.

Before that was Excess Baggage, which featured interviews with Richard Guise, who has cycled up the West Coast of Scotland, and Andrew Mueller, who has travelled to the world's most prominent trouble spots to see what they were like. I was very impressed that whenever Mueller feels tempted to complain about London's squalor and institutional fatigue he reminds himself that it's that underrated civic virtue, indifference, which makes it a more tolerant and liveable place than most.

After that came Andrew Rawnsley and "Beyond Westminster", taking advantage of the fact that the House isn't sitting to look at the growth of single-issue pressure groups and confront the inescapable fact that they're often the enemy of good government.