Does anybody have this much fun in the media nowadays?

In 1992 I was doing a weekly music show on Friday evenings on GLR, as the BBC's London station was called at the time. When the host of the morning show went on holiday they asked me to sit in.

The producer was the late Chris Whatmough. Chris said to me, if you're interested in guests, I'll get you guests. In the two weeks I hosted the programme he delivered Michael Palin, Julie Burchill, Roy Jenkins, Anthony Burgess, Michael Winner, Nick Hornby, Malcolm Bradbury, Brian Eno, General Sir Peter de la Billiere, Imran Khan and the two fat ladies, Clarissa Dickson Wright and Jennifer Paterson. There were others but those are the names that stick in my mind.

He didn't have to go out of his way to get those people, some of whom seem almost historical figures twenty years later. They were all on the publicity circuit, plugging new books or TV programmes. All the interviews followed the same form. Twenty minutes of chat, interrupted by a couple of pop records. As I look back it's the combination of serious chat with pop records that amazes me most. I'd go from asking Roy Jenkins about representing the British government at JFK's funeral to playing some record by Crowded House and then come back to ask him about wine. Many of them were people not used to hearing pop records. Anthony Burgess winced and said to me off-air "how can you listen to this kind of thing?"

Nonetheless it worked. Nobody came in with minders. Nobody tried to lay down "ground rules" for the interview. Nobody asked whether the guests were relevant to the audience or what the London angle was. Obviously it couldn't last and it didn't. All these things - radio formats, magazines, ways of doing things in different areas of the media - pass, which is as it should be. However what I can't help but mourn is the fact that there seems to be a determination nowadays, in every area of the media, that nothing quite as freewheeling as this should ever happen again. If things similarly freewheeling and odd are going, I must have missed them. If they aren't, well, I was even more privileged to have had the GLR experience.

Could millionaire footballers end up poor?

Interesting piece about Michael Owen in today's Guardian. The Premier League kicks off today and he doesn't have a club. Manchester United let him go after having hardly played him. Was that because of fitness or has he lost his appetite for the game? I was interested in this line:

...there are people within Owen's circle who freely admit he wants to work because he needs money for his horse racing empire at Manor House Stables.

Before the days of the Premier League it was quite common for top footballers to have money problems after retirement. It's always been assumed that since millionaire footballers became relatively common this would no longer happen. As long as they invested some of their peak earnings they need never work again. They used to run pubs and sports shops. These days they play for higher stakes. It's all fashion labels and football schools. And there's always the divorce court, which is the reason so many rock stars stay on the road.

 If Michael Jackson could spend his vast pile of loot then Michael Owen could certainly spend his.

What the magazine business learned from Elvis Presley's death

When Elvis Presley died, thirty-five years ago today, People was already America's most popular magazine. Amazingly, they didn't put him on the cover. The issue that was on the stands when he died featured an interview with actor Tom Bosley, which gave them an excuse to go with a picture of the new Charlie's Angels

A week after, when Presley records were topping charts all over the world, it was Sissy Spacek and a story about Keith Jarrett. The week after that they actually had his former girlfriend Ann-Margret in a two-shot with Marty Feldman but still, amazingly, they restrained themselves.

It wasn't until the September 5th issue that they allowed themselves the small panel top-left saying "Elvis - his last live-in lover raps".

The people running People aren't fools and they weren't fools then. However the things that seem clear with hindsight were not clear at the time. People had a number of guidelines. It preferred to lead with females. It tended to avoid sleaze. It had found musicians as cover subjects to be divisive. Elvis was more popular in the south than the north. In what we now realise were his later years he didn't matter to many people beyond his shrinking constituency of original fans. And celebrity death wasn't the guaranteed seller of copies that it is today. When John Lennon died, a mere three years later, everybody in the media had learned the lesson of Elvis Presley, that dead celebrities are actually more popular than living ones, and the magazine covers poured forth in an unending flow.

Why it's a good thing your children won't be rock stars

In his New Yorker profile of Bruce Springsteen, David Remnick suggests that Springsteen's father Doug, the shadowy figure at the end of the kitchen table in so many of his songs and stage monologues, may actually have been bipolar. Springsteen confirms that his own disinclination to take drugs was because of a deep-seated fear of turning out like his father and adds that his parents' struggles are "the subject of my life".

Such looking over your shoulder is not what we expect from a young rock and roll star, which may be why rock stars actually become more interesting as people as they get older, by which time their music tends to be less interesting. It's only in late middle-age that people realise how much of themselves has been inherited from their parents and grandparents and how little is their own invention. When you're the same age as your rock star heroes you accept them on their own estimation. That airy way they describe themselves into the microphones of journalists and DJs is the way you would  describe your own life if only anybody was bothered to ask about it. More to the point you don't have enough experience of life to be able to wonder about the little gaps in the narrative or the incidents which may have grown in the telling. For instance, you don't question the surprising number of rock stars who claim to have been expelled from school.

When you're old enough to have children of rock star age and you look at life through the prism of family rather than the prism of self, you become more sceptical about the claims they make for themselves and start to get more interested in the circumstances of their upbringing. You realise that people are shaped more by their childhood experiences than by anything that came later. Elvis Presley's still-born twin, Lennon and McCartney's lost mothers, Joni Mitchell's months in the polio ward, David Bowie's disturbed half-brother, Brian Wilson's martinet of a father - these are the things that were driving them long before they were aware of having drives. These were the wounds and sensitivities that shaped their families and in turn shaped them. It's this that makes them run and keep on running.

I read a story about a tennis agent who said that when he was seeking fresh talent he kept a lookout for crazy parents. He wasn't looking to avoid crazy parents. He found it helped to have them. Think of that next time they cut away to the players' box during TV coverage of Wimbledon.

The Olympics won't make us better because we're not like that

I'm not sure you can learn a lot from the Olympics other than the fact that, having invented sport, the British seem to love it more than anyone else.

In the run-up to the Games the nation seemed to be full of Private Frazers. Since it started we've all suddenly become Pollyanna. The papers today are full of portentous pieces about how we can use the experience to bring about some change in the national character.

I came across this extract from a speech made in the House of Lords by the late Lord Longford:

I asked Sir William Beveridge to come to lunch. I was meeting with Evelyn Waugh, an old friend and famous writer. They did not get on at all well. Evelyn Waugh said to him at the end, "How do you get your main pleasure in life, Sir William?" He paused and said, "I get mine trying to leave the world a better place than I found it". Evelyn Waugh said, "I get mine spreading alarm and despondency" — this was in the height of the war — "and I get more satisfaction than you do".

Beveridge invented the welfare state. Waugh wrote some great books. I like to think of Longford sitting there listening to the pair of them, admiring the mischief of the latter almost as much as nobility of the former. That's the national character. And if it isn't, it ought to be.

What these Olympics need is John Arlott

If I was a commentator at the Olympics I would avoid saying "what can I say?" for fear someone might ask, isn't that your job?

Maybe the reason they can't think of anything new to say is that they don't try, preferring to flail around for superlatives when a little description is what's really called for.

All the commentators agreed that David Rudisha, who won last night's 800 metre gold, was a beautiful runner but none of them tried to tell you why or how.

John Arlott, the great cricket commentator of my youth, would have done. Arlott likened a Clive Lloyd shot to "a man knocking a thistle top with a walking stick". He described Ian Botham running in to bowl as being "like a shire horse cresting the breeze". Asif Mamood approached the wicket "like Groucho Marx chasing a pretty waitress".

He was good at describing cricket because he hadn't wasted time playing the game. He was a policeman. He was also the only commentating genius we've ever produced.

Two brilliant magazine profiles from the archives

I've just read two genuinely great magazine profiles. One is Gay Talese's story about Frank Sinatra which appeared in Esquire in 1965. The other is Janet Flanner's three-part piece about Adolf Hitler which The New Yorker published in 1936.

Both men disappeared into myth in the years that followed. The profiles probably mark the last point at which it was possible to see them as human beings. Frank wasn't yet the man devoted to acting out his own legend. Hitler was clearly a bad lot but in 1936 he was far from the incarnation of the brand evil.

Both profilers get a lot of mileage out of the things we are always interested in: what they eat, how they organise their wardrobes, their taste in cars, the nervousness of the immediate entourage, the difference they make to a place when they arrive. The profiler hangs around so that we don't have to, recording the details we would be too flustered to notice.

We learn that Hitler didn't take a salary and walks in "a hurried dogtrot" and that Sinatra is followed around by an inconspicuous grey-haired lady holding a tiny satchel containing his sixty hair-pieces.

Neither of them contain an actual interview with the subject. It wouldn't add any illumination if they did.

Interestingly, they both appeared under the kind of unpretentious headlines that wouldn't be considered big enough for a profile of even a run of the mill celebrity today. The Esquire piece is called "Frank Sinatra Has A Cold". The New Yorker piece is called "Führer".

I don't know how Olympic parents do it

P&G have been running a campaign around the Olympics celebrating the mothers of athletes. This was very shrewd. It's a way-in to the subject for people who aren't bothered about sports and it doesn't depend on picking winners.

The TV coverage has briefly made stars of a handful of proud mums and dads, from the South African Burt Le Clos through the twitchy parents of American gymnast Ali Raisman (watch how he has to lift himself out of his seat so great is his suffering) to Chris Hoy's mum and dad who are so nervous they only get out their home-made banner (above) when it's clear he's won.

Most of us who are parents have had a very distant taste of what it must be like to watch the whole world watching your child try to do something unbelievably difficult. I've stood on touchlines in earlier years watching some of mine take part in team games. They're the most intense experiences of my sporting and parenting life because on top of the usual team loyalties you have the ties of flesh and blood. There are few sterner tests of your unconditional love than an own goal or an intercepted pass that lets the whole side down.

I genuinely don't know how the parents of top athletes stand it. How they can contain the joy when it goes right. How they can disguise their disappointment when it goes wrong. I can certainly understand why Jonny Wilkinson's mother was in the supermarket at the moment her son slotted that drop-kick.

Why the Olympics on TV is making us cry

The truest thing I ever heard about TV came from a senior broadcasting executive. TV, he told me, is all about the human face going through a moment of disclosure.

It's obviously the case with the traditional TV favourites. From Mastermind to The X-Factor, the camera is ravenous for the face of a person undergoing triumph or disaster. All successful TV formats revolve around a basic money shot like this.

The interesting thing is it's also the case with televised sport. Match Of The Day is nothing without the close-ups of the player who's either scored or missed. The action is great in its own way but the drama comes from the narrative and the narrative depends on the close-up.

Jude Rogers has been at the rowing today and she reports it was exciting. I've been watching it on the telly box and the temptation to cry has been almost irresistible. That's what telly wants you to do.

The Victorians didn't just invent sport - they finished it

In The New Yorker this week:

Twenty-six sports will be played in London this summer, with medals awarded in three hundred and two events. The majority of those medals will be given in sports that originated, in their modern form, in Britain: archery, athletics (track and field), boxing, badminton, field hockey, football (soccer), rowing, sailing, swimming, water polo, table tennis, and tennis. Britain is also the birthplace of curling, cross-country, cricket, croquet, golf, squash, and rugby—which is scheduled to become an Olympic sport in 2016. No other country comes close. Three Olympic sports originated in the United States: basketball, volleyball, and the triathlon, which was invented in 1974. Two originated in Germany: handball and gymnastics.

This causes me to once again reflect on the fact that most of the world's sports were invented or codified by British people in a quite brief period of the 19th century. And since then, what? Nothing that's had even the slightest effect on the dial of public enthusiasm. It's a staggering achievement. Nobody ever invented anything as completely as the Victorians invented sport.

And given all this evidence, how come we dare to characterise them as people unfamiliar with the concept of fun? Didn't they actually invent it?

It's happened. The Olympics have made London quieter than usual

In the months leading up to the Olympics Londoners divided into two groups: the first thought it was bound to make the city unbearably busy; the second thought London couldn't get much busier and that it might well get quieter.

I've been back in the country 24 hours and it seems clear to me the second lot have won the argument.

The gardens of Camberley are probably resounding to the noise of sit-upon lawnmowers driven by civil servants "working from home" at the moment. Well, if any of them feel like popping into the office they could probably drive that lawnmower into town, so little traffic is there.

We arrived back at Folkestone at six o'clock on Monday evening and breezed round the M25. I have literally never seen the road so quiet, not even in the middle of the night.

This evening we went into town to see Eugene Onegin at the Holland Park Opera. (Fantastic. Go. Oh. Too late.) There were fewer people on the tube than usual.

Of course, large numbers were on the move. 70,000 people were on their way to Wembley to see football. This is 10,000 fewer than usually go.

The waiters in restaurants on High Street Kensington were looking dolefully out of the windows in the hopes of tempting customers in. You could hunt buffalo inside most dining establishments.

On the way home we changed at King's Cross and the extra LT staff were massing around the barriers looking for any exotically dressed visitor they could help.

Don't listen to those people on the radio, warning you to stay at home. They've all gone to work, haven't they? And if you're thinking of going into town for any reason, give the whole "London's impossible" crowd two fingers and go. Those restaurants and theatres will be glad to see you.

If you're going to make up quotes, don't make up Dylan quotes

I see another smart young writer from a smart publication has been caught misrepresenting quotes, this time from Bob Dylan. That's never a good idea.

Jonah Lehrer claimed that the quotes came from an unreleased interview done for the film No Direction Home. He said that he'd been given access to this by Jeff Rosen, who is not so much Dylan's manager as his Boswell. An experienced editor would have raised an eyebrow at this point because this kind of thing doesn't happen.

Oddly enough, while artists and their representatives rarely complain about being misquoted, their most devoted fans are often the first to smell a rat. It's these people that Lehrer should have been worried about because they know the most and care the most.

I interviewed Bob Dylan in 1986 for a magazine which was yet to be announced. I got back from New York later that week and was accosted, at a press event, by somebody who said "I understand you interviewed Bob Dylan on Tuesday night".

That was my first meeting with the late John Bauldie, at the time Britain's leading "Bobcat". I was spooked by the fact that he knew. However the more I learned about John's world - and this was in the days before the web accelerated the sharing of information between like minds - the more I realised that there are some artists who are not so much followed as stalked. Dylan is foremost among that group. The stalkers may not know everything straightaway but they get to know everything eventually. Lehrer should have picked somebody else.

A big thank you to the people who sat out last night's show

We watched last night's opening ceremony thanks to the hospitality of the German family holidaying next door to us in Brittany. I managed to stop myself saying, forgive the sentimentality but public displays of national characteristics don't come naturally to us.

I'm told Danny Boyle removed half an hour from the running order just last week, which must have been heartbreaking for those who were due to take part and didn't. However in the end it was the ruthless pacing of the whole thing that made it work so brilliantly. Nothing lingered long enough to become boring. The hits were coming so thick and fast I was leaning towards the screen for fear of missing anything.

It seemed like a bit of a triumph to me, for which we have to thank Danny Boyle, his celeb wranglers, all those volunteers and, most of all, the people who were in the half hour that was cut. They're the ones who made the biggest difference.

Why Hilary Mantel's books aren't historical fiction at all

What I like about historical novels is the feeling of god-like superiority that comes from knowing things that the characters don't yet know. I've just come from reading Barry Unsworth's Sacred Hunger, set in the slave trade of the 18th century, and Ian Pears' An Instance Of The Fingerpost which is wrapped up in the scientific discoveries of the late 17th, to Hilary Mantel's chest-thumping Bring Up The Bodies, which is all about Thomas Cromwell and Ann Boleyn.

In the first two books you feel your knowledge of the way things turned out might give you an advantage over the key characters. Not so Thomas Cromwell. The character in Mantel's book has burrowed so far into the hearts of men that, even with the advantage of a further 500 years of history, you suspect you really couldn't tell him anything at all.

Fraser Lewry, the digital Jeeves

Closing a magazine is one thing. Closing its accompanying web site is another, particularly one as dependent on its users as The Word blog. It would have been rude to have abruptly unplugged the jukebox, flicked on the strip lighting and ushered people towards the car park. Instead we gave the hard-core site users a couple of weeks to make alternative arrangements to move the community to a new site.

Many and tearful were the tributes to the oasis of civility which had been built here over the last few years. That garden has been tended 365 days a year, sometimes from distant tyrannies with indifferent internet access, by Fraser Lewry.

If you thought this job called for technical competence you'd be right. If you guessed that it would also suit somebody whose sense of duty didn't stop at normal office hours, you wouldn't be far off either.

What you probably underestimate is the saint-like reserves of patience it takes to run a web community, even one as generally polite as this. You only have to look at the comments on the Guardian site to see how the ownership of an internet connection has turned us into a nation of preening know-alls dispensing redundant advice at the scene of traffic accidents. There wasn't much of this on the Word site but there was some.

Every so often in the nether regions of some thread about Manic Street Preachers B-sides it would kick off. My natural instinct would be to charge in there shouting "you're barred", after the style of Al Murray. Not Fraser. Like Jeeves he was never far away. Like Jeeves he never did anything as vulgar as entering a room. Instead he would shimmer in, materialise or, when the occasion called for it, ooze.

He would keep an eye on each succeeding post - as he did every single word that was ever posted on the site - and then, judiciously picking his moment, intervene with a pithy post usually combining practical advice with, for those who had ears to hear, the distant whisper of consequences.

He rarely had to banish anyone because most regular visitors to the site had learned, as the rest of us in the office had learned, that you shouldn't get on the wrong side of Fraser. That's because the very few people who are on the wrong side of Fraser have one important thing in common. They're wrong.

Can a chipmunk derail the Wrecking Crew?

It's three years since I blogged about music doc "The Wrecking Crew" and it's still not released. Last night they had a screening at BAFTA. I spoke to producer Denny Tedesco about the thing that's holding it up, the slow process of getting permission to use the scores of records on the soundtrack. (There's a full list here with links to the original musicians union contracts. This is a decent Spotify playlist of the kind of records involved.)

Tedesco still needs three hundred thousand dollars to clear the hits his father and other Wrecking Crew members played on, which range from "Be My Baby" through "Mr Tambourine Man" to "California Dreaming". He's keen to stress that many people have been helpful and generous. Artists such as Herb Alpert who own their masters have granted permission. Wealthy music industry people have written cheques.

The track he's having special trouble with is, ironically enough, "The Chipmunks Theme". The Chipmunks were the invention of Ross Bagdasarian who had some hits at the end of the 50s by speeding up his voice in playback to create the sound of a pop-singing squirrel. Ross died in 1972 but his son keeps the Chipmunks franchise going. In 2000 he and his wife sued Universal Studios for $100 million for failing to properly promote the Chipmunks and thereby "destroying an American icon".

Fictional creatures always bring out the worst in people. As many lawyers have ruefully advised after going to court with the Disney Corporation, "you don't mess with the mouse."

There's a screening of "The Wrecking Crew" next Friday at the Bethnal Green Working Men's Club. Details here.

You can't take a record back once you've made it, Def Leppard

Having fallen out with their former record label Universal, Def Leppard have taken a kind of revenge by re-recording their biggest hits. They claim these versions are so close to the hit versions that even the producer of the originals, Mutt Lange, was impressed.

Down the years scores of acts have gone in for this kind of self-plagiarising. It may work for the performer, who's probably quite happy to have the chance to iron out weaknesses in the original performance. It never works for the fans because they know those records better than anyone else possibly can.

What musicians don't understand is that once a record is out there in the world it's no longer theirs. A big pop record is listened to repeatedly and internalised more completely than anything in human history. These listeners aren't aware of what went into the record but they're hyper-aware of what they got out of it. The imprint of their favourite records is something they carry deep inside. One of the reasons Paul McCartney has been able to recreate the sound of the Beatles' records on his recent tours is because his band is made up of people who grew up as Beatle fans and consequently know those records in a different way than he does.

People talk about re-recording "note-for-note" copies as if that meant we would end up with a version that would pass a blindfold test. It's not the notes we're bothered about. We don't even care whether it's the original performers. It's the record we care about. That one, not one quite like it. Our familiarity with these records goes beyond the singer and the song. I know Like A Rolling Stone or Penny Lane better than any piece of prose or any scene from a film. They're inside me. I know them in the same way that I can find my way around my house in the dark.

Def Leppard will argue these are their songs and their performances, which they are. But they're competing against the records, which actually belong to the fans.

Technology won't make football any happier

They're talking about goal-line technology again. A meeting taking place today could vote to give it a try. I don't know anything about officiating but it seems to me;

This is a game into which cheating, deception, rule-bending, intimidation, finagling and arguing black's white is hard-wired. It's coached. This is Jarndyce and Jarndyce in shorts. Nobody is interested in what's right. They're interested in what goes for them or against them. There is nothing that top managers won't do to get an inch of advantage.

In the light of this the argument advanced by the proponents of goal-line technology, that its introduction will "settle the disputes", is naive.

Furthermore, arguments on football pitches expand to fill the time available for them. If there is a stoppage during which the referee has to consult, either a person or a piece of technology, said stoppage will be used as an opportunity for further argument. If there isn't a stoppage, somebody will be arguing there should have been one.

There's only one way to run a football match and that's with one official who's the final arbiter of everything that's gone on and what should be done about it. If you open it up beyond that you're getting into questions of what happened in real life. That way madness lies.

The best thing on Radio Four at the moment

The New Elizabethans is the best thing on Radio Four at the moment. Each fifteen-minute programme (also available as a podcast) is devoted to an individual who shaped British life during the Queen's reign. If you want to argue who's on or off the 60-strong list, it's here. I see Lennon and McCartney are treated as one person, which is about right.

The composition of the list is less interesting than the programmes themselves, which are authored pieces by James Naughtie. They drop in a little archive from time to time but mostly it's just Naughtie describing the things that made these people exceptional.

It's one of those programmes that should be forced on eighteen-year-olds during "reading week". There were just six people at the third performance of Pinter's Birthday Party. Edmund Hillary had to spend the first two hours of the morning of the assault on Everest holding his boots over a fire to thaw them out. When Benjamin Britten died in 1976 the story led the BBC news.

But it goes further than that. Naughtie manages to weave fact and observation together: Pinter's dialogue has a "fugue-like structure", Alfred Hitchcock was never happier than when "managing disturbance and alarm" and Phillip Larkin's poems were imbued with "the lurking fear of inadequacy and discovery".

I've learned to dread that change of gear which announces that somebody who usually presents the news is about to tell us what's in their heart. I can't even get on with From Our Own Correspondent. The "colour" is always laid in great primary slabs and the reporter seems in too much of a hurry to get on side with the good guys.

Naughtie's different. Like the best teachers he's at his most appealing when you get him off the thing he's supposed to be teaching you, in his case the news. Most news presenters sound very shaky once they're off the script. Naughtie on the other hand sounds as if he could keep his end up in a conversation about sport or soap opera or the Booker prize. I'm sure he had to do a lot of mugging up before writing the scripts for this series. But I like to think it was just revision. That's what makes the difference.

Sometimes the Stones surpassed the old masters

In yesterday's Times Richard Hawley said that the Chuck Berry original of Around and Around "pisses on the Stones version from a massive height". He's making a point about them trying to copy something and ending up with something of their own. This is valid but he's picked a rotten example. The Rolling Stones' Around And Around is far better than Chuck Berry's original. It has an electricity that Chuck's doesn't. It has a rhythm guitar, which Chuck's doesn't. It's sung from the point of view of an 18-year-old who doesn't want the night to end. Chuck on the other hand seems to be checking his watch. Look. He put it on a B-side.

I once sat on a panel at an American university talking about the British Invasion. The American rock critic Robert Christgau said that the early r&b cover versions of the Stones were terrible but they had "ironic distance". Simon Frith, who was on the same panel, leaned towards me and said "I think they were trying to make the best sound they could". I agreed. At the time it was one of the best sounds I'd ever heard in my life. It still is.