The different between upmarket and downmarket magazines

The story in the current Vanity Fair about at least some of Tiger Woods's women once again proves that the only difference between upmarket and downmarket magazines (or "upscale" and "tabloid" as the Americans prefer it) is how many stylists are involved.

Mark Seal's immensely readable piece is based on an interview with one former associate of the golfer's and a bunch of women, at least one of whom is in the prostitution business, who have ministered to his apparently limitless appetite. It hints that his father was a nasty piece of work and that his marriage was a show put on for the sponsors and that he was "enabled" by all manner of people who should have known better, but the bulk of it is a standard bedroom shag'n'tell. I loved it.

When the News of The World do this sort of thing it's usually "he was an animal" or "he liked to wear a Liverpool shirt when we did it". When Vanity Fair do sin they do it in the way their readership prefers it. It's full of unblushing references to penis size and the precise cost of hotel suites at Las Vegas hotels. It is however the very same thing, ministering to exactly the same prurient desire to catch the mighty with their trousers down.

But most of all it's about the pictures. The highly-styled Marc Seliger shots of four of the women in the midst of five star luxury have the effect of turning the events into the stuff of a Jackie Collins airport novel. The women themselves, having been primped, preened and digitally smoothed by some of the finest specialists in the world, look as if they can't believe their good fortune.

Meanwhile Woods returns to golf, VF smuggles a bit of smut past its advertisers, Nike sell a few more gym pumps, world turns.

Mark Damazer and "Clashes"

Mark Damazer is stepping down as head of Radio Four, after what appears to be a successful period. The most impressive thing I heard about Damazer concerned his chairing of a regular Radio Four meeting called "Clashes". At this he looked at the plans of the scores of different programmes and decided which of them could "have" various different topics. It stands to reason. There's only so much ether and only so many ideas that can be floating around in it at any given time. When it's Christmas or the Olympics is coming up, when there's a big story going around, every speech programme wants to have a piece of it. "Clashes" is the meeting at which they decide who's allowed to have what story. From what I hear, and if this is not the case I don't want to know, Damazer doesn't encourage discussion (probably because he knows it's not going to lead anywhere) and just allots subjects to programmes in the briskest possible fashion. "You and Yours can have that. Front Row can do that. In Business can have that. The Book Programme can interview her. A Good Read can have him as a guest. Loose Ends can't. Next." And so on. It sounds like a very satisfying way to pass half an hour. I love a good Chair. Somebody told me that when Paul Myners was the Chairman of the Guardian Media Group every meeting started and finished on time, no matter what was being discussed. A very rare skill.

Is this what they call extending choice?

If you happen to be up early on a Sunday morning and put on the TV or the radio you're assailed by programmes largely comprised of people reading from and commenting on commentaries that are in the Sunday papers. I find this a puzzling way to organise broadcasting. If I felt that what the Sunday papers had to say was a major priority in my life then I would have bought them and would be reading them, wouldn't I? What I really want is an old black and white film, preferably about a war. Nobody's providing that for me, are they?

A most unusual luncheon venue

Don't often do media dining clubs but yesterday was invited to lunch at an old Georgian house in Greek Street. This has been put to charitable use throughout its history and most recently was some kind of women's shelter. It now houses, temporarily at least, Quintessentially Soho at the House of St Barnabas. You go in and it's got the usual features of a media club: receptionists in twos who tap your name into a laptop, a doorman who looks as if he's wandered in from Savile Row and enormous, slightly frightening paintings lining a very beautiful old staircase. Media types sit on low battered sofas pitching apps and discussing commissioning rounds while the next generation of Alexander McQueens dispense champagne and salmon. The decorations only go so far since the club is squatting in these premises. It reminded me of a scene in a World War II film where the officer finds his old club still functioning despite bomb damage. "Most of the regulars have been evacuated. We have spam fritters for luncheon. Your usual, sir?" When I went upstairs to the gents it was like wandering into the unused wing of a stately home. In a bare room off the landing sat a homeless man eating the remains of a takeaway. Odd.

The single most valuable skill in journalism

The human race is divided into two groups: those who are always late and those who are always early. The first group are no busier than the latter group. They have simply decided that being on-time is somehow beneath them.

The same divide exists among journalists. Here it causes more problems because it usually relates to copy and the lateness thereof. I've dealt with hundreds of hacks and can count on the fingers of both hands the ones who are always on time. I can count on the fingers of just the one hand the writers who are so infallibly reliable that I would happily put my house on their delivering their copy not just on time but early. In fact I've just counted again and I still have a spare finger.

There's a slightly larger group who generally deliver on the day. Then there's the majority who, sad to say, only deliver after nagging. You would have thought that a combination of professional pride and the recession would have brought about a change in these people's behaviour. It hasn't.

The sign of a proper magazine professional is that they deliver early, partly because they know that they need to build in some screw-up time, but also because they wouldn't dream of starting something so near to the deadline that it was likely to be botched as a result of haste. Anybody who tells you "it'll be ready later today" has not done what the professional would have done, which is stay up late the night before to complete it and then got up early the following morning to give it another read before sending it off.

They also never ever tell you what else they've got to do, whether it's personal or professional. They know that's not your concern. They realise that they are being hired not merely for their artistry or professionalism; they are being hired because they take an editor's load and lighten it. They are providing that most invaluable service: once something is handed to them, the editor doesn't have to think about that bit of the flat plan for a few days. Finally, the really odd thing is that the same people who are on time always deliver copy that is to-length and spelled correctly. Now explain that to me.

If I may be so bold, Prime Minister

I read Andrew Rawnsley's The End of the Party this weekend. As well as a reminder of just how big a comeback the c-word has made in the last ten years (it comes to something when Mrs Alistair Darling is using it about the people next door), it's a valuable inoculation against the claims we'll be hearing from politicians of all parties in the next few weeks. The present government, being largely made up of lawyers, introduced a new law for every day they were in power. Many of these laws didn't have the anticipated effect, which caused immense frustration in Downing Street. In the midst of one of these bouts of soul searching the Cabinet Secretary pointed out to Tony Blair, in front of witnesses, "you have no one around you who has got any experience of managing anything". In most spheres of endeavour this would be considered a fairly basic requirement. Not in government, oddly enough.

ECOST - a practical solution to the problem of school parties in London

After spending most of the the day in the West End I'm more convinced than ever the European Community ought to pick one of its less visitor-thronged cities - Utrecht, maybe, or Sheffield - and declare it the European Capital of School Trips.

This honour will be as keenly sought as the accolade of being European Capital of Culture. ECOST, as it will swiftly come to be known, will work as follows. All the massive touring parties of students who are currently clogging the arteries of Florence, Edinburgh, Paris and, now I think of it, London, would be diverted instead to wherever happens to be ECOST that year. Doncaster, Dortmund, Nancy, Poznan, wherever. Here the absence of world-famous cultural or historical sights would leave our adolescent visitors ample time to do the things they really go on school trips to do - shop at Primark, spray their hair a comedy colour, get off with each other and walk arm-in-anoraked-arm in a fog of self-involvement four abreast down the main shopping street while remaining oblivious to the efforts of the local population to get by.

Their presence would provide a huge boost to the local economies while leaving Europe's most thrilling sites free of the pall of puzzlement and disinterest with which adolescent school parties meet anything other than a new branch of the Apple Store or a rubber replica of a policeman's helmet. Once they become independent travellers they can visit the capitals of Europe for the first time, enjoying them all the more because they are making the visit on their own dime. And no longer milling around in their thousands above Oxford Circus station.

Do we no longer need to remember stuff?

I read a book recently arguing that for the first time in human history we have recovery systems that are so cheap and easy it's harder for us to forget something than it is to remember it. When we're being informed of something or entertained by something these days we know that with a few clicks we can - and probably will - repeat the experience. I watched Arsenal-Barcelona last night knowing that I would be seeing it again and again. When Liverpool had a similar wake-up call from Red Star Belgrade in 1973 I was watching with the fierce concentration of someone who had to cram it all into the VCR at the back of my mind.

Do today's ubiquitous retrieval systems mean that our memory, like the hand that holds the pen, will eventually wither away into disuse? When you know you can find out anything you need to know with a couple of clicks, what's the need for retaining it in your head in the first place? Who knows phone numbers these days? When my kids ask how many days there are in the month and I launch into "thirty days hath September" they look at me as if I'm putting the question to a higher power. Will anyone in the future say "i before e except after c when the sound is ee" or "Richard of York gave battle in vain" or "divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived"? Or will they just look it up?

Ten years ago I had to do a speech to a PRs conference. In order to get their attention I said they were going to be redundant in the future because all information would be obtained either from Google or The House Hippy, which is how I described the one person in the office old enough to remember the facts and, moreover, what those facts signified. I think I was righter than I knew.

It's a film, not Fort Knox

The events of 9/11 had the side-effect of making every American citizen in any kind of uniform feel that they could push their fellow citizens around with impunity. Now it seems the threat of piracy is having the same effect in the film industry, which has long been ground zero when it comes to self-importance.

I went to a preview of a picture last night. I can't tell you what it is because I had to sign a form promising that I wouldn't tell anybody about it for a couple of weeks (and particularly not by "blogging", note the inverted commas). There were a lot of people there and everyone had to hand in their mobile phones (or "anything which can capture sound or an image", as the blazered security people, ten in number, barked a little louder than was called for), then be electronically swept before being admitted to the theatre. Throughout the screening the security men stood at the back, sweeping the audience with night vision scopes in case anyone was recording anything. I'm not exaggerating.

If they're really that bothered about the threat of piracy that they have to put people through this tiresome, demeaning and presumably expensive ritual why not just put the bloody film out and let the critics come to their conclusion at the same time as the public? It might bother the odd magazine or newspaper but they'd soon get used to it. Either that or leave the process alone. If you want the hype around your release then you have to put up with the potential mischief that goes with it. The truth is that all the hoopla over pre-release windows has the effect of making all films and records seem far more significant than they are. A week after this film is released the very idea that anyone would bother to pirate it will seem laughable, a good deal funnier, in fact, than the film itself.

Gary Hamel says he stopped staying in hotels where the coat hangers were welded to the wardrobe because it was as if they were saying "welcome, thief". Know how he feels.

Is there a living to be made in hyper-local journalism?

I don't live in Stoke Newington but if I did I'm sure I'm sure I would appreciate Stokey Talk. This is a news blog devoted to issues local people care about, ranging from the really serious (knife crime) to the serious if you happen to be directly affected (the maintenance of the tennis courts in Clissold Park.) It's run by the estimable Matt Wells, who's a local resident as well as The Guardian's head of audio, and proves once again that if you want something doing ask a busy person.

Even before local papers came under the cosh of economic forces beyond their control it seemed they'd given up on the kind of hyper-local coverage you find in this and other local blogs. The nearest thing to a local paper in the part of London where I live was dealing with an area of thirty-one square miles with a population of 300,000. The chances of it being able to devote much coverage to the areas of my concern (the upkeep of the local bus station, the amount of vacant retail property, the argument about why they removed the speed bumps in the next road but not in ours etc) were pretty remote. In which case the local blog fulfills a local need.

At the same time I wonder if this kind of service could ever provide any kind of living for a journalist. I sometimes look at the area where I live, which is part of a suburban "estate" which was built around the railway line, and muse that there must be at least half a dozen recently redundant journalists living there, one of whom might be able to get at least part of a living out of a hyper-local news service, dealing in the daily stuff (schools, transport, planning, crime, local amenities) that people really care about. We're told that people will still pay for news, provided it's high quality, exclusive and relevant to them. Might this theory be put to the test more effectively at the bottom of the media food chain rather than at the top?

What's a Hard Working Family anyway?

I caught a fragment of an interview with Bob Crow where he was saying his union's actions would try to minimize any disruption to the holiday plans of "hard working families". This invocation of the HWF, as it shall henceforth be known, is now one of the most frequently-heard dog whistles of contemporary politics. Apart from the amusing picture it inevitably summons of an extended family taking part in an Amish barn raising or a clan of shoe-making elves whose tiny cottage fairly trembles to the sound of their frantic industry, it raises the question "who is he actually talking about?" You can only assume, as you are no doubt meant to assume, that he is talking about you and not everybody else.

It's all a nonsense, of course, designed to get us on side with whatever plan the speaker is shilling for. Stalin, Hitler and Pol Pot did a lot of talking about Hard Working Families. It was their hope that you would cheer the Hard Working Families just as you would revile anyone who wasn't HWF. You are a member of a hard working family. They are a feckless bunch of spongers. And that other lot are a bunch of leeches living off ill-gotten gains. The truth is that difficulties, whether they're little local ones or major catastrophes, are equally inconvenient for all of us. Time and chance are no respecters of whether we're Hard Working Families or not. The rain falls on everyone, Bob.

I predict the future of charging for news

The Times launch their experiment in June. I'm told that if their traffic drops to 5% of what it is at the moment, that's a result. If it goes lower they have a problem. The other newspaper groups either hope it works, then they can do the same, or pretend not to care because they're boldly predicting an ad-funded future where "new models" spring up like daffodils in spring.

Let's say it doesn't work. Let's say the take-up is 3%, it doesn't prove a fashionable thing to do, the name writers desert because they want to remain name writers and the Times and Sunday Times have to go back to the current state of affairs. Let's remind ourselves what that means: paid copy sales dropping inexorably, largely because the occasional reader who wants to read a match report or what they said about his employer, goes to the newspaper's site; on the advertising front they continue swapping off-line pounds for on-line pennies; they can't compete with Google, Facebook and any other monsters of aggregation. They keep cutting budgets and staffing, cancel print contracts and steadily reduce their distribution.

But their "product", if that's what original, professionally executed news is, remains popular. In fact the traffic to their sites goes up and up, speeded by new means of delivery. Then, one day, when I'm in a bath chair staring out at the English Channel, some bright spark in one of these organisations will pipe up, possibly at a conference (held on site because they can no longer afford a hotel), with the following:

"Since our research tells us that the thing people really value about what we do is the news, which the BBC only really scratches the surface of, why don't we just take the hard information, exclusive features and compelling comment, find a printing press somewhere and start publishing the best of it in a daily paper? Then we sell it. Some people would pay to have the core of what we do delivered to them in a form that's portable, easily navigable and requires no energy source. And at the same time, why don't we wrong foot the competition by not giving the same material away on our site? Because if they couldn't get it for free, might not some people feel that they ought to buy it?"

Just a thought.

I love watching football down the pub

We don't have Sky and I don't have a season ticket but I do have a Premiership football habit. Since our son is either away at university or too tense on match nights like last night to be in the same room as his hyper-tense father, I've recently taken to watching matches down the pub. I'm lucky that there is a small pub not far from where we live that is patronised largely by middle-aged blokes who also want to watch the match. At first I was a bit nervous going in there alone. Now I've realised I'm not the only one who slips in just after kick-off, has a pint for the first half and a pint for the second and then slips out of the door the minute the final whistle is blown. Obviously you won't know what the result will be but no matter whether it's good or bad you are guaranteed that you get to share the experience, be it joy or pain, with some other people who feel the same way. I wouldn't miss it for the world.

The one thing TV never investigates

Last night's "Dispatches" certainly didn't look good for the former ministers who were caught plying for hire. This morning they've already been hung out to dry. Nonetheless there's something about this kind of latter-day current affairs programme and its reliance on having apparently taken the camera somewhere it's never been before that raises more questions than it answers. Once the producers have got Geoff Hoon saying that he's interested in making some money at some point in the future, which is not in itself illegal, I feel they're punching the air (and planning to run that one clip at least five times in the course of the programme in case we hadn't got the point.) The programme relies for its effect on the contrast between the hidden camera shots (from the low angle in which everyone looks furtive) and the endless covering footage of their journalist musing in a sceptical manner in front of a bank of screens (he's meant to appear as the intrepid guardian of our liberties).

I barely heard a completed sentence from any of the interviewees during the entire programme and I would like to have known more detail about exactly how they were targeted and then fished in. Either they're exceptionally credulous and greedy or the programme just picked five at random. The latter conclusion would be more worrying. In fact if they'd saved some of the time they spent re-capping what they'd already told you they could have put the programme in half an hour. I realise that TV current affairs only gets made nowadays when it promises pictures that appear to have caught somebody bang to rights. We can only hope that one day they will take the same searchlight and point it in areas that never seem to get investigated at all. Like TV, for instance.

An encounter with an arse

A young bloke got on the commuter train this morning. I'm guessing 18. You don't see many people that age on the train, not early on anyway. He sat there tearing up an old season ticket and then rolling it carefully into roaches. After a couple of stops he started playing music from his phone. Not through headphones. Just into the carriage. The middle-aged woman sitting opposite him, who was using headphones, asked him to turn it down. He just stared at her, like the very essence of insolence. She asked him repeatedly. "No," he said. "I don't feel like it." Various people weighed in in support of the woman but because nobody was offering to either stop the train or threaten him with physical violence he wasn't persuaded. He just sat there pointlessly spoiling the day for a bunch of people. I don't know what you do about people like that.

A pedant sees "Nowhere Boy"

Watching "Nowhere Boy" I realise that all those years spent obsessed with music have left me with a pedantic nature that makes it impossible for me to just enjoy pop biopics. I can't buy the young John Lennon pinching 45s from a rack in a record store in 1954 because even if I believed that 7" singles were widely available then I suspect they certainly weren't racked out where you could pinch them. Having stolen them John Lennon is disgusted to find they are all jazz and throws them into the Mersey. One thing I remember about the 50s is that nobody threw anything away. Records of any kind were unbelievably precious. They never threw anything away because they had no money. That's why I can't take the idea that he stops his mother in the street and gets her to give him five pounds to buy his guitar back. If anybody was carrying that much they wouldn't hand it over. Once that string is un-tuned the false notes in the script come one after another. The sex wouldn't have been anything like as easy as it's depicted and the swearing wouldn't have been as casual. Having been suspended from school for having a copy of a girlie magazine Lennon wouldn't have called it "pornography". That's a 70s notion. Teddy boys might have had flick knives but they didn't wield them on suburban streets in broad daylight. John and Paul wouldn't have formed a rock and roll band. They would have started a group. His mother wouldn't have picked up the banjo and said "think Bo Diddley". Would Mimi really have picked up the phone and dialled instead of asking the operator for the number? And on and on in that vein. It's a curse. You'll be like that one day.

Could I have done this and forgotten about it?

I don't know what Phill Jupitus was doing with a copy of the 1967 Radio One Annual. Anyway, he sent me this today. I don't think the David Hepworth who wrote that piece about Ed Stewart was me, largely because I'm not quite old enough. I'm also aware that I have forgotten about lots of things I've done professionally. People send me YouTube links to clips from old TV programmes of which I have no direct recollection. I get to the stage where I approach old events by assessing the likelihood. Did I meet the people? Did I go to the place? Therefore it's possible I may have been in that place with that person.

A couple of years ago a colleague of mine was talking to Robert Smith of The Cure. My colleague mentioned me. "Ah," said Robert Smith. "David Hepworth knows something about me that nobody else does." Obviously, he didn't say what that thing was or how significant or trivial it might be. I haven't met Robert Smith this century but back in the early 80s I interviewed him a couple of times and therefore it's possible that he did tell me something that I didn't write. He may have told me something that I didn't appreciate the significance of. I've thought about it and nothing comes to mind. Frankly I don't want to know what it is. Might make a good plot for a book, though. You know a secret but you don't know what it is.

Suddenly, I love going to the theatre

I did some dabbling in theatre when I was younger but I haven't been a regular theatre goer for years. Lately I find myself going all the time. Why?
1. It's oddly affordable. Going to the theatre used to be an exceptionally expensive night out. But compared to a night in the open air at a contemporary rock concert it's not any more. And if you get some kind of concession it can be not much more than going to the cinema. We went to see Alan Bennett's The Habit Of Art at the National for ten quid, which is what most people pay to see an unknown band in London.
2. Just about every other form of entertainment has been digitised to the point that it's no longer astonishing. Great stage acting, such as Bertie Carvel's performance in "Rope", is the last redoubt of hard-earned skill and it's particularly enthralling when you get to see it at close quarters.
3. At the same time the technology of illusion has moved on dramatically. Even truly lame pieces of work like Terry Pratchett's "Nation" can still stop you in your tracks with a stunning depiction of a shipwreck.
4. Theatre can do ideas in a way that neither film nor TV will allow themselves to do any more. Yesterday we went to see "Enron"(above), which is an examination of a corporate tragedy from every different point of view, borrowing its techniques from TV, film, musicals, documentary, puppetry and rock shows.
5. It's full. A few years ago I went to a couple of productions in front of half-full houses. It's no fun for the actors or the audience. That seems to be no longer the case. I'm told the West End is going through a good patch thanks to the number of Brits holidaying at home. Long may it continue.

If you're that bothered about the car you drive you've got problems

We flopped down in front of the TV last night and found ourselves watching a police procedural documentary. I never turn those kind of things off because I always learn something. In this case I learned about the technology used to combat the international trade in stolen luxury cars. One case involved a 7-series BMW (or something similar) that had been stolen and then recovered at the docks where it was on its way to Tanzania. The policeman at the port rang the owner to tell him that what was lost was now found. The owner was particularly relieved because he had failed to fit a tracking device in the vehicle and therefore the insurance company were refusing to compensate him. "I was going to have to sell my house," he said. The GLW and I simultaneously blurted the same thought. Why would anybody buy a car so expensive that its loss would immediately lead to having to sell the roof over your head? And why would they sell the house? To buy another luxury car? I even found myself thinking that people shouldn't be allowed to buy a house if they're also spending that much on a car.

The media professionals will be the last to realise the media has changed

A PR firm recently sent round a press release pointing journalists in the direction of their Twitter feed. I don't know that I've got the mental energy to begin to explain just how misconceived an idea this is. Journalists find the idea that they should follow a PR hilarious. It's like David Walliams following that woman home. It's like returning the call of that automated message. Of course it's perfectly possible that a PR could do a good Twitter feed but the proving of it would be up to them, as it would be with anyone else. This announcement suggests that they haven't begun to realise how the media is utterly, utterly changed and that it's no longer a feeding tube down which they can dispense warm milk to a load of eager mouths beneath. We're all at pitch level now.

When media events came out of a clear blue sky and made a pleasant distraction from the daily tedium it's conceivable that you might want to get the inside track on a press release. That is no longer the case since boredom was banished and we now compete in an attention economy where distraction is a permanent state. It doesn't really matter who you are, Universal Pictures or somebody trying to get a gig listing for a newly-formed indie band; you are no longer entitled to anybody's attention. Not the public's and not the media's. Whatever attention you manage to get you have to earn.

This seems to chime with the imminent withdrawal of CD promo copies. Journalists I talk to all shrug and say, "not my problem". And it isn't. I wonder how long it will be before the industry realises this.

A Boy Named Hilary

I've just finished "A View From The Foothills", Chris Mullin's terrific diaries of his time as a junior minister. Hilary Benn is repeatedly flagged up as a potential party leader. I've met Benn a couple of times, late at night on radio stations where he was pursuing his role as Secretary of State for International Development. He struck me as too modest and self-effacing for the top job. Furthermore I can't help but wonder if the electorate would be happy voting for a man called Hilary. If Wikipedia's anything to go by Hilary Benn hasn't saddled his own children with a similar handicap. I don't know many baby boomers who named their children Michael, James, Jonathan and Caroline. His boys' names in particular remind me of those of my own classmates. Their fathers were Stanleys, Normans, Arthurs and Ernests who reacted against their own names by giving their own sons Famous Five names like Michael, James, Martin, Philip and Peter. In turn this generation reacted by giving their own children bolder, explorers' names like Oliver, Edward, Henry and Thomas. And so it seems that it goes on and on. Names are like tattoos, to misquote Joni Mitchell, and we can't help but wonder, from time to time, what was going on in the minds of those who decided on them.

The end of the promo copy

Something happened yesterday that could have great significance in what used to be called the record business. The boss of Sony Music in the UK announced that henceforth his company would no longer be sending out review copies of their upcoming product. Instead they would be making this music available digitally. This is significant not just because it will prevent hacks and radio producers making a little extra coin by selling their promotional copies. The bottom dropped out of that market long ago. This time it matters because it's part of a process which is going to see the end of "reviews sections" in magazines as we have known them.

When the first music monthlies were launched back in the mid-80s it was believed that big, alphabetically arranged review sections were a good idea because readers appreciated their apparently comprehensive nature, they attracted accompanying advertising and you could afford to run them at a reasonable cost because freelances liked the idea of getting hold of records before anybody else could.

None of these is any longer the case. Now that we have You Tube, Spotify and multi-channel radio and TV, any reader who reckons they can't get to sample something new isn't trying. Most records - and, ironically, there are more records than ever before - aren't supported by any form of print advertising so that imperative has gone. Now hacks won't even be able to get their hands on physical copies of records.

This will further change the way people talk about those records. Traditionally reviewers weren't just trying to communicate the pleasure of listening to something. They were also communicating the joy of possessing something. You can't do that if you're moored to your computer, listening to an incoming stream.

I know all the arguments about the decline of physical product but this move shows that record companies don't understand what goes on in the head of a hack who gets scores of new records every day, most of them by people he's never heard of. In a tiny minority of cases he just looks at the cover or the name, thinks "that looks interesting" and puts it on the office CD player. If it's any good somebody else in the office will say "what are we listening to?" and a short conversation will ensue. This conversation is the very first tiny step in getting known. It's a social event in the physical world in response to a physical object.

I'm sure there are lots of good reasons for Sony making this move. Should send a shiver through the Jiffy Bag business for a start. I also predict that within a year when they want reviewers to take notice of something they'll start sending out copies again.

Remembrance of radio protests past

In 1999 I used to do a radio show on GLR. It was a couple of hours on a Friday night. I loved doing it. I did it, one way or another, for ten years. They used to pay me next to nothing. It was so little that I only used to invoice them once a year. There had been rumblings for a while that the BBC planned to bring GLR into line. The management who had re-launched it as a speech and music station for adults had moved on and the powers that be wanted it to conform with all the BBC's other local stations. They had been running trails announcing a "period of consultation" about the changes.

One Friday night I turned up and Brian, the guy who used to handle the phones, announced that the changes were going to be implemented earlier than we thought. "This could be the last time," he said. (He didn't know any of this for a fact but we all know the first casualty of war is the truth and anyway he'd been to the pub. Meetings in the pub are always a feature of media disputes.) I immediately decided to go out in a blaze of glory. I started the programme with the Rolling Stones' "The Last Time" and peppered the rest of the two hours with a combination of similar message songs and trails about the period of consultation. It was my Rex Bob Lowenstein moment. There was nobody there to stop me and so I carried on. They rang up on Monday and asked if I'd resigned. I said I had.

The next few weeks were great fun as I found myself co-opted as a figurehead for a "Save GLR" campaign. I invoiced the BBC for the money they owed me for the show and used it to hire the Conway Hall for a protest meeting. I spoke. It was like Citizen Smith. At the same time I was using what little leverage I had to force the authorities into some form of negotiation. I wrote to the Chairman of the BBC, Sir Christopher Bland. I'd met him at a drinks party to thank those "experts" like me who'd been brought in to give the thumbs-up to various parts of the Corporation's output. I said that if our opinion had been worth something then it was clearly worth something now. Taking the point he arranged a meeting with Mark Thompson, who wasn't the Director General then but counted local radio among his responsibilities. Alongside him sat the middle manager who was charged with overseeing the changes. At least we were spoiling her day.

He said he'd get back to us. He never did. I'm sure he felt he'd made a gesture by seeing us. I don't much blame him. By then the steam had gone out of the protest, not least because many of the GLR people who were most likely to object had got their eyes on new roles at 6 Music, the new digital station that the Corporation was making ready at the time.

I learned a lot from that experience. I learned that righteous indignation tends to blow itself out quickly and that certain people like the idea of being a temporary member of an oppressed minority. I canvassed lots of GLR presenters for their support. Many gave it readily. Others made themselves difficult to contact. Bob Harris sent me a note saying "it's my experience that when management has decided to do something like this, they've thought about it a lot and nothing is going to change their mind." At the time I thought it was a cop-out. Now I think it's nothing more than the truth.

Podcasts don't need polish and professionalism; they just need a groove

There have been some very interesting issues raised following my recent post about podcasting, particularly when it concerns advertising. Podcast listeners clearly don't have any problems with advertising. They accept that as long as there is no practical way of charging them to listen to podcasts then they may have to be exposed to some commercial messages. People who carp about this kind of thing have their heads in the sand. If you hold the view that in the future all media will be free than you must accept the concomitant erosion of the traditional division between editorial and advertising (what Time Inc used to refer to as "church and state".)

On the other hand it's not an issue as yet because most advertisers don't see how they can get value out of podcasts. As Phil says, they're afraid of being alongside anything the listeners have a powerful affection for. I'm determined to challenge that with the Word podcast. I can think of quite a few advertisers who ought to be able to see a benefit in having their product associated with the idea of private time. But it's certainly true that the few advertisers or sponsors I hear on the podcasts I listen to regularly (which are mostly football ones) are sports betting sites. They're not seeking to build up brand loyalty. They're trying to encourage people to place a bet and it stands to reason that the people who want to spend a lot of their time speculating about what might happen when Saturday comes have a greater than usual predisposition to do that. In addition these people are just as likely to bet if they support Tranmere Rovers as if they support Chelsea. And these companies' only cost is marketing so they have more money to splash out than anyone at the moment.

Far as I can see the BBC don't do podcasts. They just make their radio programming available to time shift. This is fine but it's not podcasting. Podcasting has an emotional tug that most radio doesn't. I have this discussion/argument all the time with radio friends like Trevor Dann of the Radio Academy. They think radio does most of this stuff and I don't think it does. Radio is organised to minimise the likelihood of people changing the channels. Radio is push. Podcasts are pull. At the exact moment you worry your podcast is getting too obscure or self-indulgent or detailed, it's probably just finding its groove. Face it. If you wanted a balanced diet there are no end of places to get it. Podcasts shouldn't be trying to be professional and polished. I can't abide podcasts that begin with a menu that tells us what's coming up. What's the point of that? It's more likely to make you change your mind about listening to it than persevere. I also hate the feeling that people are reading from scripts. I wince when I hear journalists trying to crack the same kind of jokes that look OK in print. We don't need any of that print or radio or TV baggage. Podcasts are punk rock. They're the first thing that comes into your head. They're an evening down the pub. They blitz the divisions between the speaker, the thought and the personality. They have little use for conventional professionalism. They're so direct they're hardly media at all.

The Missing Page

Spoke yesterday to Philip Ball, the author of "The Music Instinct". He's a science writer and his book examines "how music works and why we can't do without it". We talked about the problems of getting permission to reproduce even the shortest passage of published music. For his book he transcribed a little of a Beatles tune and then applied to the publishers for permission. (This is rarely a good idea. What usually happens with a reasonable application to an organisation which holds all the cards and has nothing to gain from an assent is a long delay followed by a refusal. This gives the person dealing with it time to pretend it has been referred to a higher authority.) The book went into production. By the time the Beatles publisher came back with their refusal the book was already printed and bound. To Philip's amazement his own publishers, Bodley Head, arranged to change the page in question, reprint it, take the wrong one and then bind the replacement into the finished copies. We both found it extraordinary that they can do that sort of thing.

Podcasts preach to the converted. That's why I like them. It may be why advertisers don't

I love podcasts. I love listening to them. I love doing them. There are times when I think they're the most perfect form of media ever invented. Gather a few people with views on something around a microphone and let them talk. Then put the finished product in a place where it can be found by the people most likely to appreciate it. People respond to the human voice in a way they don't respond to anything else and because people have pulled it towards them rather than having it pushed in their direction they'll give it slack that they wouldn't extend to anything else.

At the same time I think there are inherent problems with podcasts. They only appeal to people who listen to podcasts. Clangingly obvious, I know. I'll go further. People who don't listen to podcasts don't begin to understand them. They don't know how they work, how they reach people or what makes people warm to them. Mark Ellen has done hundreds of Word podcasts with me and I know he wouldn't mind me saying that not only has he never listened to one, he wouldn't know how to listen to one. It's just not one of the things he does and nothing is going to change that. He's not the only one. Recently we had a guest who asked "is it live?" That's a question I didn't know how to begin to answer. We did an interview with an artist on a podcast not long ago. Three weeks later the PR got in touch asking if we could send him the podcast and asking when it was going to be "released". I had to point out that it had been "released" three weeks before, within two hours of it being recorded. He was dazed. He was twenty-eight, which goes to show that it's not only old gits who don't understand how these things work.

Unlike Mark I now listen to podcasts more than I listen to music. I prefer the burble of speech to music as I walk to the station. I know from talking to Word podcast listeners that they're largely a question of habit. I meet people all the time who tell me where and when they listen to them: walking the dog, jogging, taking the kids to school, enjoying a precious sliver of private time that they don't have to share with anyone else.

Podcasts can't be promoted the way conventional media is promoted. It's little use pointing people towards the contents of special editions of them. You want the lot or none at all. You don't dip in and out. Adding a new podcast to your repertoire is like deciding to have a new friend. It's a commitment. As with friends, you don't expect them to be sensational or surprising. You'd find them a bit tiring if they were. You want them to be dependable. You want them to be there.

And as many people have found, they're a nightmare to sell advertising or sponsorship around because advertisers don't understand them, find them too fiddly and not quite mass enough. They're very quick to say that they want media which engages with an audience but can't be bothered to find out enough about podcasts to see which of them do engage and which of them are merely "subscribed" to after a lot of unpaid radio promotion and never listened to. A couple of years back I spoke to somebody at a digital advertising agency and he advised making the Word podcast an enhanced podcast so that we could get a sponsor's logo on the screen of your iPod. "The clients will never listen to it but that way they can show it to each other."

The speaker's fear of the feedback

Last week I took part in an event called The Story at the Conway Hall. This was put together (or do we say "curated" these days?) by Matt Locke who works at Channel Four and was intended to reflect the apparently growing interest in narrative. There was a SRO audience of a few hundred who seemed to be drawn from that loose affiliation of web people, bloggers, consultants and crystal ball gazers who can take a Friday off without the economy grinding to a halt. I told the only story I've polished enough to tell in front of strangers and it seemed to go OK. I couldn't see anyone actually asleep. That's as good as a point away in my book.

What I hadn't banked on is when you get on your hind legs in front of this kind of crowd you are setting yourself up for feedback. This kind of crowd all blog or podcast or tweet. Like all bloggers or podcasters or tweeters - and I'm no different - they have an above average tendency to comment on anything they've seen, read or heard. And thanks to Twitter's hash tags, whereby you can track the debate on any subject as it fans out, plus the desperate neediness that drives people to volunteer to get on stage in front of people at an event like this in the first place, you can follow the subsequent Chinese Whispers as they echo and fade.

Somebody publishes a link to their blog where they've put their "take" on the event and you have to look to see if they've mentioned you and, if so, what they've said. Then somebody else announces that they've commented on the first post and you need to know if they've commented on you. And if they have you are then compelled to track back through their posts and see who they are and whether they matter. It's not worthy, of course, but that doesn't stop you. I imagine if you get a lot of this kind of thing a whole new form of madness lies that way.

Why American acts never forget the first time

I've reached the chapter of Terry Teachout's biography of Louis Armstrong that deals with his first trip to Europe in July 1932 to play at the London Palladium. This could be the template for nearly every trip taken to the old world by an American musician ever since. Buddy Holly would have recognised lots of this, as would Midlake. The pick-up band, the strange food, the sudden exposure to the vulgarity of local taste (Max Miller was on the same bill), the confusing embrace of the press and the realisation of how distance has lent enchantment and, in that process, altered who you are. Armstrong reckoned the first person who called him "Satchmo" was Percy Mathison Brooks, the editor of the Melody Maker. The Englishman was simply trying to get Armstrong's nickname "Satchelmouth" past the creaky gate of his own drawl.

In America they faced institutionalised discrimination. In England it was more puzzlement. They were turned away from the first posh hotels but eventually found one. In the American press they were alotted their place on the cultural map according to where they came from. The British press could only speak as they found, which wasn't always pretty. One British critic described him as being "an untrained gorilla". However another one said, with inelegant perception, his "savage growling is as far removed from English as we speak or sing it - and as modern - as James Joyce".

The experience of their first British tour is something that makes a profound impression on American acts because it exposes them to a sudden blast of curiosity, affection and scrutiny that never happens anywhere else in quite the same way. They learn a bit about who they are and go home changed. If it goes well it's a kind of relaunch. Armstrong kept his British press clippings throughout his life, even the unkind ones. He wasn't the last.

What kids really mean when they say they're tired

There's a big discussion on The Today programme this morning about whether kids are getting enough sleep and how much it's got to do with the TV in their bedroom. Newsround did a survey in which a lot of kids said they wished they got more sleep. I've heard this one before.

In the course of raising three children I've learned that children and young adults habitually claim to be tired, but they hardly ever make this claim in the evening. The time they make a display of being tired is in the morning, which is when you want them to be up and doing, as my mother used to say. The tiredness is in many cases a sham, intended to mask the fact that they would prefer to stay in bed, not talk to you any further and establish the fact that they have no responsibilites beyond their own immediate comfort.

This starts to change when they miraculously get a job. It begins to dawn on them that it's bad manners to be conspicuously tired in the morning because it suggests that the people you're working with must somehow wait for you to get up to speed. The time when it's OK to be really tired is when you come home from work. In fact it's expected of you.

Eventually you have small children and fantasise about how wonderful it would be to go to bed early or spend more time in bed in the morning. By the time the children have grown up sufficiently to allow you to have this time in bed, you are so wracked with anxieties and responsible for so many different things that you are no longer capable of just snoozing.

The main reason that adolescents spend such an unbelievable amount of their time sleeping is that they sub-consciously know that never again in their lives will they be able to. It's not the sleep of the just but it's sleep nonetheless.

"It's out of stock"

Before Christmas a small publisher put out a picture book called "Lost London" which was largely given over to pictures of London before the wrecking ball and the developer. It attracted very good reviews and in the run-up to the festive season it sold out entirely. I've been trying to find a copy ever since. Amazon have none, nor do any of the book shops in London. The publishers have been trying to distribute a second impression for two months now. I keep calling into Waterstones in Islington to see if it's come in yet. I tried for the third time tonight. They still hadn't received it but they did tell me that this one shop had placed orders for sixty-six copies. That's sixty-six copies of a book with a list price of £29.99 ordered by just one shop. That's nearly £2,000-worth of turnover. In one shop. Assuming this is replicated all over the London area, that's a quite decent profit for the publisher and a nice feeling for the author. He'll probably never again do anything quite this popular. It beggars belief that in this day and age, with supply overwhelming demand in every other area of the economy, that the book publishing industry thinks it can still get away with keeping people waiting this long.

Apple, Sony and Desire

I'm a judge for the Sony Radio Awards and they've sent me all the entries in my category pre-loaded on a Sony MP3 player. It's actually what they call a Sony Walkman these days. It's certainly a good idea to send the entries in this fashion rather than expecting judges to juggle cassettes or CDs. The Walkman's very neat. It has a radio, it records and probably makes tea as well. Playing with it just now it struck me how difficult it must be in the personal electronics space these days, having to compete with Apple. It doesn't matter how many qualities your product might have, Apple is the one that holds the high ground where dwells desire. A year ago a young friend demonstrated all the features of his iPod competitor, many of which were superior to Apple, but he did it more in sorrow than conviction, as if he knew that the playground prestige battle had already been lost. I stand on the Tube platform looking at the huge cross-track posters outlining the features of something that looks a bit like an iPhone but isn't, feeling sorry for the marketing man who has to persuade a 17 year old that this is what he wants. We were talking about this with friends at dinner last night, the way our rational side pretends to weigh the arguments over how we spend our money while our emotional side waits, drumming its fingers, knowing that in the end it will always win out.

Dreaming of a 48" TV

On Saturday I found myself at a home occupied by Young Professionals. This was evident by the size (48") and quality (HD) of the television in the living room. It occupied prime position, pretty much as proper hi-fi might have done thirty years earlier, defying everything else to make the best of whatever space remained.

My parents' generation preferred TVs that could be pushed into a corner, preferably disguised as traditional items of furniture. In my flat-renting days TVs were distressed portables, the signal often delivered by an arrangement of wire coat hangers. New ones were too expensive to buy and so they were rented.

Whenever I catch "lifestyle" programmes on television I am left with the impression that the majority of the nation now live in a converted terrace house with a living room knocked through to the kitchen. The floors have been stripped and polished and the fireplace is occupied by a big flat screen TV. What was previously a source of actual warmth is now replaced by a flickering digital version of the same thing.

This is not to say I wouldn't like the 48" HD. I would. I have, however, been married long enough to know that I would be left to enjoy it on my own.

Global warming: it's all superstition

A survey says that 25% of British people are sceptical about global warming, reports the BBC website with an audible tut. But if any more than 75% of us did believe in it, wouldn't that be worrying in itself? The idea that the whole population should, in the space of a few short years, adopt a belief in something that can't be proved makes you deeply concerned about our gullibility.

I behave as if I believe in it, not because I've examined the evidence and come to a rational conclusion. Of course I've seen "An Inconvenient Truth", avoid taking the car anywhere if I can and get ill-tempered and messy sorting rubbish every Monday night, but I could no more explain to you why the earth is getting warmer than I could let you know the workings of the internal combustion engine. My belief in it is as scientifically grounded as my mother's economics. That is to say, she knew nothing about it but she believed, with some justification, that if you'd enjoyed a period of prosperity without working for it then it was bound to be followed by a period of relative poverty. She was always right. I think her economic views were shaped, not by any examination of the facts, but by a combination of her youth in the depression, in-bred northern scepticism and the drip-drip-drip experience of chapel-going christianity. If you'd spent like a drunken sailor you were bound to face a reckoning at some point. This is true but it's not rational. It's what they used to call superstition.

Anybody want to buy the world's most famous recording studio?

Today's announcement of the travails of Guy Hands' EMI is about more than the decline of the CD selling business. It also indicates that all companies bought on borrowed money are facing potentially catastrophic problems as the economy threatens to flatline. This applies as much to Manchester United and the government as it does to EMI, who paid £800 million in interest last year. If the banks decide to cut their losses the company will be passed around the business world like a fizzing cartoon bomb with everybody hoping that when the music stops they'll be left with the profitable bits and not the loss-makers. I've written a big piece about the decline of the recording studio for the next issue of The Word. One of the things I discovered is that the company's legendary studios at Abbey Road would be "in play" if anyone came along and was prepared to make a sensible offer. The problem, as in the case of the aforementioned football club, is that they can't afford to take a sensible offer when there's the distant prospect of an offer that attempts to put some value on the place's mystique. Any offers?

The best actors play the tunes we never get tired of hearing

To the National to see Alan Bennett's "The Habit Of Art". We had fifth row seats, close enough to see the spray of the actors spit. They were £10, in case you're wondering. The play's based on a theoretical meeting between W.H. Auden and Benjamin Britten in later life at Oxford where they have an extensive kickaround on the theme of biography, the distinction between the artist and the art, pederasty, the old ladies of Aldeburgh, old age and the fact that many men come to resemble their scrotums. It's presented as an afternoon's rehearsal of the play with the actors coming in and out of character and also discussing their trade. Daughter two nudges me when the first player turns out to be Adrian Scarborough, the put-upon husband of "Gavin and Stacey". What she doesn't know is that he's alongside Uncle Monty from "Withnail And I", the vicar from "Cranford" and that the woman playing the stage manager was once Miss Jones to Leonard Rossiter's Rigsby. The stage, in fact, is seething with characters and types that we have lived with for quite a long time. Billy Wilder said that most actors had a couple of things they could show you but then their shelves were cleared. Blessed are those who have a narrow range of notes (we're not going to see Richard Griffiths playing a holy man, for instance) but can nonetheless stir us again and again.

I know you're dying to hear what I think about the iPad

I Twittered asking for one reason why I would want an iPad. The answer returned most often, apart from the fact that it would be cool and I am clearly the kind of bloke who goes in for new gadgets, seemed to be that this was inevitably the way that newspapers and magazines would be delivered in the future.
This may be true. I repeat, this may be true. Once again, for the avoidance of doubt and in case anyone thinks I am a future denier, this may be true. However, it is not necessarily true even though it is a truth which the unholy trinity of Apple, panic-stricken media owners and the punditry seem to have decided is self-evident.
Through the thicket of self-generated hype of the last 24 hours I haven't yet picked out the one-sentence reason why anyone would feel they *had* to have one. Would you like to watch football in high definition? Would you like to make phone calls wherever you are? Would you like to have thousands of tunes in your pocket? Yes, yes and yes again. Revolutionary devices succeed when they answer what people feel to be their needs. I don't see what the need is here. I can see the supplier push but I don't see the equivalent consumer pull.
I don't think the readership of newspapers is ebbing away because people are waiting for them to be delivered via a device. They're ebbing away because people can get what they used to get in a paper for free via the web and they have lots of other things to occupy their time with. And I don't think they're waiting for enhancements like embedded video. These things are nice to have but they're not so compelling that people will pay for them.
The newspaper and magazine businesses were built, like the record business, on their control of manufacture and distribution. They could leverage their strength in these areas to set a cover price and sell advertising at a price that created, if everything went well, a profitable business. Every decision they made about production values, editorial policy and frequency was made in the light of how they would affect a particular package. The problem, as the record business has found, is that once there is no longer any need to manufacture and iTunes owns the distribution and sets the price, the package is quickly unbundled and it's very difficult to make any money.
The huge challenge of the web for media and entertainment is that it un-bundles everything and in so doing reduces rather than increases its perceived value.

If they must have teenagers in Ambridge...

First it's the policemen who get younger, then it's the casts of soap operas. On the occasions I accidentally watch Coronation Street these days it looks like an episode of "Footballers' Wives" set in a terraced house, so short are the skirts and sticky is the gel. Meanwhile, over on the radio, The Archers has gone youth-crazy and Ambridge is now the only rural community in Britain's pastoral wasteland where there seems to be a net inflow of young people, all busily occupied making their own cheese, launching marketing campaigns for the local milkman and looking for jobs. I keep waiting for one of them to say 'sod this, I'm going to the big city to get a telesales job and blag my way into a reality series'.

The most problematical of this gaggle of texters and bottled beer drinkers is Pip Archer, the teenage daughter of David and Ruth, the current occupants of the series's central farm. Because Archers writers are stranded between their desire to equip her with the plausible characteristics of an adolescent and their equal need to say the right things about wimmin and youngpeopletoday, they have made her bright enough to go to Oxford but timid enough to want to stay at home and run the family farm into the ground by pursuing the sort of loony tree-hugging policies that would make even Al Gore take her for a walk and give her a stern talking-to. They have given her a boyfriend but made him the sort of unbearable prude who elbowed her because she shows too much leg. I'm sure we've all met loads of 17-year-old boys like that.

If the Archers really want to depict a plausible teenager they should add her to the category some cartoonist used to call "Unseen Of Ambridge". She should be, like Pru Forest and Mr Pullen, a character who is referred to but rarely seen. That, in my experience, is the true defining characteristic of a teenager.

Bertie Who?

"Right now Bertie Carvel is my favourite actor in the world."

So says The Spectator's theatre critic Lloyd Evans of Carvel's performance as Rupert Cadell in the Almeida's revival of "Rope", Patrick Hamilton's hit play from the late 20s. I'd never heard of Carvel until Thursday night. Now I'm prepared to add my voice to Evans's.

It's not accurate to call "Rope" a murder mystery because we know whodunnit from the start. The tension comes from the question of whether Cadell will work out what's happened and, given his terrible war injuries, bring the culprits to book. Snob, aesthete, moralist, war hero and heroic drinker ("I wonder if I might have another spot"), Cadell as delivered by Bertie Carvel is a riot of physical tics and strangely mannered speech. When he speaks you lean forward, much as you would if you were in the room with him. I've never been in a room with anyone like Rupert Cadell but Carvel makes me believe that I have been. This is a very rare gift.

When he's got a knighthood and is wasting his talent playing Moses in some computer-generated nonsense based on a comic I'll be able to say I saw Bertie in his pomp.

Can the heavyweight press get a bit less heavy, please?

Simon Mayo messaged me to say he'd quoted me in his new column in the Telegraph. This led me to do something I stopped doing years ago, which is buy a newspaper at the weekends. I stopped wading through over-inflated weekend papers when I realised that they could only be read at the expense of things that were worth reading, like books. Anyway, vanity always gets the better of me and so a trip down the end of the road and and one pound and sixteen shillings later I am confronted by the sheer bulk of a contemporary Saturday paper, even in these straitened times. Never in the history of media has so much fluff been combined to manufacture so much mass. There's a newspaper. There's a review. There's a sport section. There's the family bit. There's the gardening bit. There's the travel bit. Then there's a magazine with, inevitably, Corrine Bailey Rae on the cover. There's a DVD of "The Odd Couple". That's the kind of thing they used to support with TV advertising. Not any more. Now they just chuck it in the lucky bag. Then there's lots of advertising supplements, a TV thing and no doubt plenty of other things that I'll never get around to locating, let alone reading. As the newspaper business careens towards hell in a handcart you'd think that somebody would bite the bullet on their central problem. They're giving people too much about not enough and charging too much for it.

Not that this applies to Simon's column which is required reading for all middle-aged Spurs supporting fathers who wake up in cold sweats worrying that their sons are being drawn to the Dark Side. There have been times, thankfully long past, when my own f & b almost fell victim to the blandishments of the Woolwich Wanderers but after a stern word pointing out that the supporting of the Lily Whites is a guarantee of iron in the soul and a steady moral compass, he came around. That did the trick. As did the sight of his possessions in a tidy pile at the bottom of the garden path.

I'm dreading the first Twitter election

When Abraham Lincoln was running for the American presidency in 1858 he had a series of debates with his Democratic opponent. He would speak for an hour, the opponent would respond for ninety minutes and then Lincoln would have another half an hour. Obviously the electors of those days hadn't had their attention-spans killed by television but there was more to it than that. The time they took to explore the issues facing the Union at the time was a token of the seriousness with which they took the issue's complexities. This may have been handed down to generations of schoolchildren as "all about the slaves" but that wasn't how the debate was framed at the time.

I've been thinking about this as the opening shots are fired in what is clearly going to be the first Twitter election, where any issue that can't be boiled down to 140 characters won't play. 140 characters is enough room for a slogan or a meretricious appeal; it's not enough to say anything more useful. In that sense Stalin would have loved it. Lincoln not so much.

Kate McGarrigle

Kate McGarrigle died today. She wrote some great songs. Mark Ellen likes to say "Heart Like A Wheel" is the best love song ever. He may be right. My personal favourite is called "Matapedia" after a fast-flowing river in Quebec popular with those fishing for salmon. When she was a teenager Kate had an affair with a man. The song describes her and the young man trying to race the river back to its source, just like the salmon.

Many years later when her daughter Martha Wainwright was about the same age she went to the place where her mother had had the affair and met the same man. He was dumbstruck, convinced he was looking at her mother. I love what happens next.

He put his big middle-aged hands upon her shoulders
And he looked her in the eyes
Just like a boy of nineteen would do

I can't recommend the visual resolution of this clip but it's good enough to listen to.

By my own hand

I had to write a thank-you just now. I'm very picky about pens and paper. The first has to have the right traction on the other, particularly since I'm increasingly convinced that all these years of keyboards and texting have robbed me of the ability to write with my hand, as I could when I was twelve. When I sit down with pen and paper I feel the strength drain from my hand when I get near the end of a line. If I grip tighter my writing becomes more cramped. If I try to loosen up I can't hold a straight line. Then I find myself trying to write familiar words without spelling them out a letter at a time. The natural, practised flow that used to form familiar words such as my own name has gone. This is exacerbated by the fact that the ink in rollerballs and biros either flows too freely or has to be coaxed out. I can no longer write in a relaxed way. To help get over the problem I dug out my fountain pen, replaced the cartridge and wrote the note with that. It's amazing how much more satisfying it makes the whole letter, both to write and probably to read. And this in the same week that I wrote a 600-word film review on my iPhone on the Tube journey home from the preview.

"Oh, Miss Smith, you're brilliant!"

Reviewing the musical of "Legally Blonde" on Front Row tonight, the talk is of the plot twist where an airheaded blonde, in pursuit of her man, turns out to have a first-class legal mind.

I can't decide whether this kind of dramatic transformation is of a higher order than the transformations that used to take place in movies of the 50s where severe-looking lawyers in glasses were encouraged to release the airheaded blonde inside.

One seems pretty much as preposterous as the other.

Africa is a continent, not a country

The reaction to today's machine-gun attack on the Togolese team in Angola illustrates the extent to which Africa seems to be an abstract concept to many in the media. Presenting "Fighting Talk" on Five Live this morning (and in all other respects making a good job of it) Alan Davies made some comment about Didier Drogba being the first to claim to be hit by a bullet. This gag, which seemed to imply that he thought Drogba played for Togo and not the Ivory Coast, would have been considered tasteless if the victims of this outrage had been European or - imagine it - British.

Then there's tonight's press coverage which seems to be all about whether this will have an effect on the World Cup in South Africa, the implication being "well, it's all very well for African players to be risking life and limb in pursuit of their trade but this event involves *us*, for God's sake!" That's not to say that South Africa doesn't have its own security problems but to link those to what was going on in a war-disrupted region of Angola seems to betray a want of basic geography, let alone common decency.

At least somebody believes in the devil

Artie Lange, sidekick of the U.S. shock jock Howard Stern, has survived a suicide attempt. This consisted of six "hesitation wounds" and three deep plunges. Stern was quoted demanding that the press back off because "everyone has their demons, including myself, but he's wrestling with some serious stuff".

Apart from noting that The Hesitation Wounds is a great name for an indie band, I can't help musing about the phrase "wrestling with their demons". This seems to be exclusively applied to anyone going through a high-profile personal crisis despite being wealthier and more famous than the rest of us. When a father murdered his family on a housing estate over Christmas nobody said he was wrestling with his demons. Wrestling with demons, which seems an activity reserved for showbiz or sport, somehow dignifies all manner of outrages and carries the hint that demonic behaviour may be an inevitable side effect of genius.

It's odd that an expression like this, which derives from an era when demonic possession was a widely-held belief, should be pressed into use to explain excesses in such a Godless milieu.

Calm down. It's only: 1) some snow; 2) a comedy film and; 3) a songwriter

1. This morning the BBC news said that the snow was "creating havoc" all over the country.
2. Last night somebody said to me that the Will Ferrell movie "Anchorman" was "brilliant".
3. Last week on Desert Island Discs David Tennant said Elvis Costello was "one of the all-time great musicians".

Seems to me these are all examples of qualitative inflation. Now I'm sure with 1) there were a number of people who were badly inconvenienced, others who were caused real distress and then lots of people who carried on as usual, battling "the havoc" by changing their footwear.

As far as 2) is concerned, if you do think "Anchorman" is funny then it's unlikely to be by some distance your favourite funny film. If there are, say, twenty films that are funnier than "Anchorman", then the adjective "brilliant" is unlikely to be the appropriate one.

And then there's 3). I admire Elvis Costello, as do many people, but I think it's pushing it to call him "one of the all-time great musicians". Where do you put him in relation to Sydney Bechet, Burt Bacharach, Bach, Brahms, Beethoven and the Beatles, to scratch only the surface of just one letter of the alphabet? And the first one to point out that such praise does him no favours whatsoever would be Elvis Costello.

In all three cases, the appropriate expressions - "causing problems", "really funny" and "very talented", respectively - wouldn't be enough to communicate what the speaker wanted to put over. Whose fault is that? All the over-claimers who went before. So remember, the expression of excessive approval doesn't just affect you. It also spoils it for the next person to come along.

Why I don't listen to demo tapes

I have a rule. I never listen to demos sent to me by would-be recording artists, allegedly for my opinion or just "to see if you can point me in the right direction". I follow this policy for the same reason that I do not judge Most Beautiful Baby competitions: because experience has taught me that if I say I like the demo people will then expect me to do something to make them successful; if I say I don't like it then I am an unfeeling, heartless bastard.

Unless you are the late John Peel with ten hours of airtime a week just itching to be filled up by bands nobody has heard of or you run your own record company for which you make all the major creative decisions, there's very little you can do for a band. The only way to deal with these requests is to develop some diplomatic form of rejection letter, pointing out that quite honestly I am not a talent spotter and my track record on identifying the next big things is not enviable.

But how do you deal with that when you get letters from the parents of a young adult seeking to make it as a performer in the music business who has the additional problem of a physical disability? Of course you sympathise but, really, you want to say, what difference does that make? The music business is a cruel mistress, of course, but nothing like as cruel as the general public, who are indifferent to 99% of musical performers and capricious enough to like Ian Dury despite his disability as much as they appear to like Susan Boyle *because* of hers. In a perverse way, the most honest response would be to write back suggesting that he make more of his disability, even going so far as to make it the central feature of his act. In support of this I could introduce the story of Jack Good, who had booked Gene Vincent on a comeback tour, standing in the wings as his charge performed, mouthing the words "Limp, you bugger. Limp!"

Amazing Grace

In the new edition of The New Yorker my favourite film writer, Anthony Lane, writes about my favourite film star, Grace Kelly. In the course of it he reflects on the ability of great movie stars to transfix us by doing everyday things with extraordinary grace. It was apparently his mother who pointed out how, in the course of one song in "High Society", Bing Crosby smokes, brushes his jacket, arranges his pocket handkerchief and, most amazingly for those who've tried it, manages to tie a bow tie - all of it without the assistance of a single cut. It's here.

In praise of working standing up

I'm in the middle of writing a very long article. In an effort to galvanise myself and guard against the usual web-based procrastination - check the Test score, check the email, check Twitter, etc - I worked standing up for three hours this afternoon. That meant composing a sentence, then advancing toward the laptop and tapping it in before walking round the room to compose the next sentence. I don't know whether it's any good but I do know I got more done than I would have done in the same period if I'd been sitting down.

Ideally I'd like a work surface around about chest height. Then I could work either perching on a stool or standing up. I'm convinced I would get more done. I've recently concluded that I can't really think without being on my feet. When I have to really think I have to be walking. When I have to think and compose I have to be walking quite a long way. I'm sure there's some simple physiological explanation for this involving blood and the brain.

Lots of radio DJs like to broadcast standing up. Since radio is all about attack that makes a great deal of sense; so much sense that you wonder why for years studio design made this impossible. If you wanted to stand up and broadcast it was difficult to reach down and work the faders. Similarly we tell anyone who wants to take part in True Stories Told Live that they have to talk standing up. It's impossible to command a room of seated people unless you're standing up and you can't project the amount of energy you need from a sitting position. Unless, of course, you're Ronnie Corbett.

His eyes so dimmed with joy and pride.

I took this picture this morning while mooching around the City. It's an alley off Fleet Street, the kind of narrow entrance in what was then the publishing district where Charles Dickens dropped off his first unsolicited piece of writing, "A Dinner At Poplar Walk", in 1833. He later recalled:

"...my first copy of the Magazine in which my first effusion - dropped stealthily one evening at twilight, with fear and trembling, into a dark letter-box, in a dark office, up a dark court in Fleet Street - appeared in all the glory of print; on which memorable occasion - how well I recollect it! - I walked down to Westminster Hall, and turned into it for half-an-hour, because my eyes were so dimmed with joy and pride, that they could not bear the street, and were not fit to been seen there."

I don't know any other writers, from the highest to the lowest, who haven't experienced just the same combination of elation and embarrassment on first seeing their name in print.

At last, a rock novel you can believe

At some point during the last week - it may have been at a party - somebody said I had to read a novel called The Last Mad Surge of Youth. A couple of days later, while clearing out the office pre-Christmas, I found a copy. I began reading it on Christmas Eve and finished it before lunch on Christmas Day. It's the best fictional account of young men forming rock bands I've ever read. It's not perfect. Nobody seems to be able to write endings any more but that's a small quibble. Nobody has done a better job than Mark Hodkinson of describing the grubby milieu of bands struggling to make it in indie rock, the vainglorious posturing of those who find themselves at the top and the inevitably tragic effect their success has on the people around them. There is nothing in it that doesn't ring true, which is probably a first for novels set in the world of the music business.

It's set in an unspecified northern town in the early 80s and in the comfortable Home Counties at the present time. Punk rock has made it possible for teenage boys with a modicum of talent and an excess of self-belief to stage their own mad, heroic assault on everyday life simply by getting a Peel session and getting on the cover of the NME. It hinges on the relationship between the leader of the band - who turns into a drunk and megalomaniac - and the mild-mannered old school friend who left the band because he didn't have the level of demented certainty the trade demands. It understands that what drives people to make it is the urge for recognition that nothing else in their often drab backgrounds could provide.

The author has a great ear for the ridiculous claims routinely made for new performers in the febrile world of indie: in one passage he "quotes" from the feature that accompanies the star's first appearance on the cover of the NME:

"The sun shines into the eyes of John Barrett. They narrow to filter the light. A smile forms at his lips. He is handsome and scruffy-dangerous like the kid at the fairground spinning the Waltzers, born hip and burning red-hot. The T-shirt he wears has been pulled at the neck and falls twisted on his shoulders. He doesn't care. I ask whether he can believe it: the US of A, the world - all his."

I've read that kind of thing thousands of times. I may even written that kind of thing from time to time. This book makes you consider the consequences.

Good answer. What was the question again?

Mag+ from Bonnier on Vimeo.

This clip of some work being done for the Swedish publisher Bonnier is doing the rounds at the moment and causing considerable excitement. It's certainly a very polished presentation. While I'm glad that somebody is doing innovative work in the magazine industry, I can't shake the feeling that it's being done from the wrong end, so to speak, and often by people who have a tenuous grip on the magazine experience.

It's not that the work doesn't have a value. It proves it's possible to replicate all the various elements of a magazine. In many cases you can enhance the basic magazine formula of words, pictures and a crossword with moving pictures, hyperlinks, searches and lots of other bells and whistles. But is anybody asking for that? Is anybody looking at the basic magazine proposition and thinking, 'if only it did *this* as well'?

The experience of the last twenty years teaches that the version of the future proposed by the research and development wing of companies rarely coincides with what the market turns out to want. I've yet to see any evidence that you can persuade the person who currently reads Vogue or Heat that the experience of consuming the same thing via an electronic device is preferable. They may be talking about how they could use such a device to receive daily, even hourly, updates but I haven't heard anything about genuine advantages like that. Instead I hear a lot about taking the basic magazine experience and translating it to a screen. It's as if the magazine business believes it can move from one to the other without essentially changing the thing it provides.

The Guardian iPhone app, on the other hand, seems like a good idea to me because it fits neatly into an interval in our lives. Just as the podcast flourished because there are so many men out dog walking, jogging or driving cars and the web boomed because everybody is sitting in front of a computer doing anything to avoid working, this little app provides the ideal amount of content for the person stuck on a bus wanting to pass the time with a couple of stories. It doesn't need to do any more than that.

The next generation of magazines would be better off working out when and where they're going to be read than designing clever interfaces that may end up attracting the universal admiration of people who aren't magazine readers and never will be.

Does live music have to be seen to be made?

To the O2 to see Pet Shop Boys and marvel at the staggering number of great records they have made. Most of the music is actually coming off an invisible hard disk. Neil stands still and sings. Chris stands behind a podium which could be a Hostess trolley for all we can see of what he's doing with his hands back there. Terrific as the show is, it's difficult for an audience to demonstrate its enthusiasm as it normally would when the show continues as if on castors. The audience likes to feel it can influence what's going on on stage by applauding bits of the performance it particularly likes. Clearly, such observations are the maunderings of a survivor from an earlier age. However it's clear that other people feel the same atavistic impulse, judging by the way the applause swells when the dancers do something spectacular. They are clearly doing something that we know we could never do ourselves. Our traditional expectations of a concert involve music not merely being done, but being seen to be done.

Can you ever wear a sheepskin coat?

On cold days like today you realise that even your most Gore-Tex-lined Mulberry parka isn't quite enough to keep out the cold. It's on days like today that the GLW points out that we still have her father's old sheepskin coat in the wardrobe. I put it on and go out for a walk. I return with my idea of warmth redefined. A sheepskin coat provides a different kind of insulation. It makes you realise how cold you are in every part of your body not covered by the coat. Plus it has the built-in feature that all men have been looking for, pockets made to thrust your hands into. It makes me look at John Motson with a new respect. The problem of wearing a sheepskin coat, of course, is you become one of those men who wear sheepskin coats.