RUNNING SCARED

In Oxford on Thursday, I happened to pass a branch of the Northern Rock bank and, do you know, there wasn’t a single person queuing outside. Nor would there be ordinarily but earlier this week they were doubtless queuing round the block there, as at other branches. Watching the news footage of the queues and listening to the customers’ comments, as hapless as they were arbitrary, I couldn’t help wondering whether any of those standing in line to withdraw their life savings, some of them as far ahead of opening time as 5.00am, ever thought to themselves: “Maybe by contributing to this run on the bank I am actually making the situation worse”.

Panic is a weird mechanism. No wonder the cliché adjective that goes with it is “blind”. No wonder Clive Dunn’s Corporal Jones in Dad’s Army always accompanied his cry of “don’t panic” with a well-drilled pantomime of running in several different directions simultaneously. Panic is not merely unthinking, it is also wholly self-serving. “Panic buying” is stocking up in bulk against imagined shortage. It doesn’t matter to the buyer that his cornering the market in, say, lavatory paper leaves everyone else short, even ahead of the expected drying up of supplies (I use the terms ‘leaves’, ‘short’ and ‘drying up’ with no thought to any relevance to the form or function of lavatory paper).

You might think that it ought to occur to the exampled panic buyer of lavatory paper that, once an actual shortage has set in, his neighbours are liable to start to whisper to each other that he seems to suffer no such shortage, that a deputation – even an unruly mob – could appear at his door, brandishing the unwiped bottoms of their small children and aged dependants and demanding that he yield his selfishly grabbed supply.

When there was a clean water shortage in the west country in the wake of the early summer floods, people were caught on news camera finagling more than their designated share of handed-out bottles and hotly (because embarrassed as well as self-righteous) they argued that they had family duties of some exceptional order. The fact is that panic brings out the worst in people, leading them to clamber over others in flight from the burning building or the stampeding crowd, to shoulder the weakest aside in order to grab the supplies airlifted in for the relief of famine.

A man (a Brit, happily for the news story) managed to tear open the emergency door of the burning plane wreck in Thailand, thereby allowing others to escape as well as himself and, to my surprise, he was hailed a hero when all he did was something natural and obvious. I suppose if you take Hemingway’s definition of courage as “grace under pressure”, the guy was being courageous. At least he didn’t panic.

On the other hand, the two police auxiliaries who declined to jump into a six feet deep lake to help a drowning boy who had himself jumped in to rescue his sister were robustly defended by their superior: they “weren’t trained” to save lives. Is that to suggest that trying to rescue him would have been the panicky thing to do, that phoning for the appropriate service to carry out that function was the correct response, even though the kid died? It’s not exactly a persuasive argument. I’ve never actually been trained to pay my taxes but I dare say the Inland Revenue will fail to sympathise if I try it on as a reason for getting my accounts in late this year, even if I say that I did contact the appropriate service (my accountant) and had to wait for her.

We all act in the heat of the moment and frequently regret it later. Queuing for hours is not exactly the heat of the moment and panic seems an inappropriate term for what went on at Northern Rock this week. But the self-protective instinct that panic betokens was certainly in play here. And it was just as destructive and blinkered as the panic of running about shrieking.

Meanwhile, you wonder how reflective and thoughtful was the BBC news reporter on business affairs, the fluffing, blustering Robert Preston, when he, as the BBC has been telling us all week, “broke the story”. He kept trying to justify it as important because it was “the first run on a British bank in 150 years” but of course the BBC’s coverage was the most influential ingredient in creating and spreading the panic that exacerbated the run. If the Bank of England and the Chancellor were tardy in their remedies for the situation, it was surely because they do not understand – as politicians and professionals for whom television is a marginal matter frequently do not – how influential television is on the inert portion of the population. The viewers may not believe everything they read in the papers but they still think “the camera never lies” and if it’s “on the box” it must be so. All I pray is that no latter-day Orson Welles – needless to say without a soupcon of Welles’ talent – is permitted to attempt a contemporary equivalent of the master’s wireless version of The War of the Worlds. We’ll all be killed in the ensuing hullabaloo.

HAPPY GAYS ARE HERE AGAIN

This month, as Channel 4 did in July, BBC4 has been marking the 40th anniversary of the Sexual Offences Act that decriminalised sex acts between two consenting males in certain circumstances. I was in London when most of the BBC4 programmes went out and we have resumed playing host to a steady stream of summer houseguests since then, so I only now get to blogging the matter. If it all seems rather old hat to you, dear reader, well … tough.

BBC4 took the opportunity to repeat several profiles of famous gay people (though not its film that thought itself very bold by – yawn! – outing Nöel Coward), along with a decent little series called It’s Not Unusual. Its one new programme made a pair with one of C4’s, for each channel presented a film dramatising events that directly led to the drafting of the Act. A Very British Sex Scandal, made by Blast! Films for C4, covered the trial of Peter Wildeblood and Lord Montagu, the most high-profile airing of the law relating to homosexual regulations since that of Oscar Wilde more than fifty years before. This was a mixed-genre piece, intercutting narrated history, interviews with (mostly anonymous) veterans of the pre-Wolfenden gay male world, newsreel (including an unremarked glimpse of the notoriously gay MP Tom Driberg up to no good in Moscow) and acted sequences. Montagu appeared both as an acted character and, very gamely, in his present condition, profoundly reduced by old age.

Wildeblood himself, a true hero in the story of gay liberation, was decently and credibly characterised and his life as a 1950s journalist was well caught, the Daily Mail newsroom looking straight out of Michael Frayn’s novel Towards the End of the Morning. The level of self-important ignorance that informed society’s attitudes to how other people lived their lives was also cannily invoked. There was some well-used research: the Queen’s first Christmas broadcast provided a painfully ironic counterpoint to the tightening of the screws by the authorities on illegal sexual adventuring.

If this story was new to you, I’m sure the mix of disciplines would have helped to show what a compelling sequence of events it was. But if, like me, you knew this history, it was hard to feel that here was the best way to tell it. A better scripter than writer-director Patrick Reams would have relied solely on dramatisation and would have avoided the linguistic anachronisms that occurred much too often. It always infuriates me when directors and producers lavish resources on exact detail of period locations, costumes, decor, hair, props, vehicles and lighting and then let modern phrases go by without a thought. It costs nothing to get the language right, chaps.

Lion Productions made the film Consenting Adults for the BBC. This traced the story of the enquiry conducted by John Wolfenden into the efficacy or otherwise of the laws then constraining homosexual acts and also, by the by, prostitution. Sir John, as he became, had been portrayed in the C4 film, played by Nicholas Le Prevost. He’s a fine actor but he never got close to giving a whiff of what Wolfenden was like. William Chubb, who played a chief constable in the C4 film, would have made a better match. In Consenting Adults, Wolfenden was acted by Charles Dance, a far less accomplished performer but better cast – indeed I’ve never thought him more sure-footed than in this role. Julian Mitchell, a proper writer, provided the script, though, while finding much enjoyable period flavour, he too couldn’t avoid the odd anachronism: “I have to tell you” and I’m sure we didn’t use “straight” in the current sense back in the ’50s.

The scenes between Wolfenden and his louche gay son were clearly intended to form the heart of the piece and they bore Mitchell’s most thoughtful writing and the most attentive direction (by Richard Curson Smith). But I couldn’t help wondering whether Wolfenden Jr can have cut quite such an Andy Warhol-ish figure avant l’événement – it seemed a bit drama-neat rather than actuality-rough.

There was a fictional subplot concerning a family baker and his male piece-on-the-side that was never going to pull its weight, as diluting of the main matter as were the interviews in the C4 film. Rather, playing real or representative people gave several of the performers scope to have some fun: Hayden Gwynne as a feisty committee member, Mel Smith as blustering Home Secretary David Maxwell-Fyfe, Mark Gatiss as a supercilious chief constable, David Bamber as an enquiry witness, an unrepentant but pain-wracked ‘invert’, as homosexuals of that generation were often termed.

In many ways this was an honourable summary of the way the world differed in the 1950s, without too much Shavian personification of attitudes. And it reminded us that it took another decade after Wolfenden’s report before the law was changed.

C4’s most substantial contribution to the anniversary was a new fictional drama, Clapham Junction, written by Kevin Elyot and directed by Adrian Shergold, both former actors. Elyot’s work has always foregrounded gay issues – his widest-known play is probably My Night with Reg, which began at the Royal Court Theatre Upstairs and transferred to the West End and television (David Bamber was its heart-breaking lead actor). I won’t attempt a substantial review of it here because Kevin is a friend but I will write of it as it relates to the discussion programme that I now discuss.

40 Years On presented an evolving debate with an evolving cast, chaired by David Aaronovitch. It began with Clapham Junction, which Aaronovitch described as “a drama that showed gay men in 2007 enjoying vigorous cottaging, depicted them at constant risk of sudden and terrible violence and believing that precariousness and danger are part of the pleasures of modern gayness. But is this what it’s really like to be homosexual in 2007?” This wholly reductive summary asked all the wrong questions. Elyot’s script never claimed to demonstrate what it is “really like” to be gay. It was much more about the philosophy and practice of living dangerously, something that some gay men (and some straight men) get off on doing. But to parlay that into a comprehensive statement of gay life is as absurd as proposing that, say, Coronation Street is a definitive depiction of life in the north of England. Late on in the programme, Simon Fanshawe took the opportunity to refute this reductiveness: “‘gay men’ is not a very coherent concept”.

Clapham Junction’s producer Elinor Day was put up to field on its behalf, not an ideal advocate in that she appeared to concede that some exaggeration had crept into the film. (No it hadn’t). Matthew Parris reckoned that, insofar as the film depicted male gay life, it was twenty years out of date, just about the length of time that Parris himself has been well enough known not to be able to cruise Clapham Common anonymously. The rapper known as Q Boy, much younger, was much more supportive of the film’s credibility. Mark Simpson, a widely recognised commentator on gay politics, offered a highly confused response, from which I extract the preposterous suggestion that the film represented “a desperate attempt to make gayness seem perhaps more interesting or more dramatic anyway than it perhaps is now”. Fancy a dramatist writing drama!

Later, Simpson spoke up for the right of people to express distaste for homosexuals, a curious concession that would hardly pass the test of substituting non-whites or the disabled in the argument. This occurred in a diffuse discussion about how far gayness is “still an issue”. The fact that Aaronovitch felt it necessary to indicate twice that he was among, in his patronising phrase, “the tedious old heterosexuals” provides the answer.

Male promiscuity was briefly but usefully discussed and Paul Sinha, a comedian-cum-GP, made the challenging point that “there is no reason for us to believe that the whole world is our sexual playground”. Julie Bindel, pressed into representing the otherwise missing lesbian view (“we didn’t need to be decriminalised because we were under the social control of men”) was listened to in eerily respectful silence by the fellers. On civil partnerships, the sceptical Mark Simpson missed the whole point: taking these vows is not done to ape heterosexuals but to avail ourselves of the tax breaks that go with them.

Simon Callow repeated the Simpson line on civil partnerships in a new documentary on C4 called How Gay Sex Changed the World. This was a superficial gallop through gay history since before the Act, touching all the bases but doing no more than touch, with a lot of sweeping generalisations and easy phrase-making in the script (“the uptight, sexually-conflicted straight world”). Simpson turned up again in this. If he’s an expert on gay matters, he really ought to know that horizontal stripes put fat on you.

Mark Turnbull’s film for October Films demonstrated all the shortcomings of contemporary documentary-making: snatches of interview taken out of context; unchallenged inaccuracies; wild assertions; the notion that a viewpoint is more important and indeed more true if spoken by a celebrity. The fact is that all these witnesses are immensely privileged, even if they weren’t necessarily so when they were growing up, and that disqualifies them from representing ordinary gay experience.

We got to see actual ordinary men in another C4 docko called Queer As Old Folk, except that these mature chaps were … I don’t want to say extreme cases but they were certainly quite extraordinary. There was the camp old couple doing the civil partnership thing on Tenerife after 43 years together – but the kiss at the ceremony was their first and, says the one who never allowed kissing, “I’ve never had sex with a man with my penis, ever in my life … there are other things that you can do sexually”. There was the 57 year-old who’s gone gay only recently and who runs around like a teenager with a permanent hard-on (“in the last two weeks I’ve had sex about a hundred times with at least seventy different people”), who weeps over the liberality of his wife and whose 17 year-old son has the shrewdest take on this new life. And there was the former deputy head teacher who’s 'married' to a former student almost forty years his junior and who manages his strapping young partner’s career as a male stripper. There’s no soap opera anywhere on the box that could do justice to these inordinate stories.

Had Kevin Elyot put such characters in a fictional film, David Aaronovitch would have asked if what they were all doing was “really” what it is like to be homosexual in 2007. I think Andy Wells’ film (for Transparent Television), like Elyot’s own, simply showed that the gay world is just as rich and varied as any other. There was one odd little thread through all the programmes except Queer As Old Folk, however. This could have been called the Richard Lintern Season because that actor, not exactly a household name, turned up in all three of the acted films and was even glimpsed in a Bronski Beat promo that was excerpted in C4’s gay history programme. I hope it helped his career and hasn’t fatally type-cast him.

ANY OTHER NAME WOULD SMELL AS SWEET

In a typically busy week for the celebrity class, Lord Attenborough (Richard to movie credit compilers, Dickie to the press) excelled himself as a guest of honour at the unveiling of the Nelson Mandela statue in Parliament Square, at the memorial service marking ten years since the death of the Princess of Wales and, I shouldn’t wonder, at the switching on of the Blackpool illuminations by the actor currently cast as Doctor Who. In another part of the forest, I was rather surprised by her family’s revelation of the crack cocaine habit suffered by Mrs Mary Whitehouse. I don’t think I shall risk booking for her next tour.

But much the most compelling story for those seeking to find names to drop was that carried by the BBC news website of the New Zealand baby whose parents wished to name him 4Real. This grave decision, they solemnly explained, was reached because it was only upon first seeing an ultrasound image of the foetus that they “realised” that he was “for real”. Biology has clearly been neglected in the school curriculums of the former colonies. I blame the Victorians. What the parents – themselves rejoicing in the names of Pat and Sheena Wheaton – do not seem to have considered is the alternative of an American expression that perfectly describes their grasp of parental duty: “for shit”.

Their noble quest has been sadly thwarted by an unimaginative bunch referred to rather loosely by the BBC website as “the authorities in New Zealand”, later revealed to be personified in the figure of the Registrar of Births, Marriages and Deaths. This hapless official goes unnamed – perhaps he is called Getalife Tosser – but he rejected their choice of name on the surprisingly narrow ground that it is not permitted to begin a name with a numeral. The Wheatons argued that if someone can be called, for instance, John Williams III, then 4Real ought to be equally acceptable. Sophistry and casuistry clearly go as unrecognised as biology in the Antipodes.

Crushed by the cruel weight of New Zealand regulation, the Wheatons have put up an alternative name for the innocent object of this titanic tug-of-war, one yet more splendid than the first. For 4Real Wheaton, now read Superman Wheaton. The BBC website adds (and my reader will be so relieved at the news) that the Wheatons “have said they will refer to him as 4Real”.

I think the inevitable shortening that kids do to first names produces a happier result in the first instance – Forey has a certain mellifluous quality – than it would with the rather watery Supe. The BBC website implies that the Wheatons, seeking to throw off the chaff, may not be out of the woods, if I may mix the metaphor. “The law also advises parents to avoid names that could cause their child to be teased or made fun of” it says, surely not quoting the relevant statute verbatim. I think it unlikely that any nation’s law takes it upon itself to offer (frankly somewhat patronising) advice and to offer it in such imprecise terms. If parents are not free to make their children’s lives miserable, what is the point of them?

A word of caution against any old-country smugness on this matter: the BBC states rather darkly that “the UK’s rules on baby names are among the most liberal in the world”. Hence the emergence in London of Fifi Trixibelle Geldof, Apple Martin, Brooklyn Beckham, Zowie Bowie and the rest of the celeb kids of the last few decades. In California, Frank Zappa’s children were named, successively, Moon Unit; Dweezil; Ahmet Emuukha Rodan; and Diva Thin Muffin. (My partner, who spent part of his youth in Derby, says that “thin muffin” is a solecism and such a bakery item is properly called a pikelet in the Peak District; I think Diva Pikelet Zappa has a certain ring).

The Zappas were baulked – and then temporarily – only in the naming of their second child, to whose handle the hospital where he was born raised objection. When the seven year-old child discovered that the name Dweezil, the only one he knew, was not on his birth certificate, his distress prompted his parents to fight and win a court case to have the certificate changed [Zappa info courtesy of Wikipedia].

I’m glad the Zappas prevailed. Dweezil, who turns 38 this Wednesday, has clung to his given name in adulthood, following the family trade as a rock musician. Of course, it’s easier to live with such a name in the inordinate worlds of music, movie and sport superstardom than it is down the pub or in an ordinary neighbourhood school. Superman Wheaton, though still known to his doting, drooling parents as 4Real, will be constantly pilloried in the humdrum world and will probably rename himself Zak or Kody or whatever the fashionable boys’ name is in five or six years’ time. When they voyage out into the world, it is almost a universal desire among children to conform or at least to find an accommodation with the prevailing conventions. Being conspicuous because of your name – particularly one that proves difficult to live up to – soon becomes a cross to bear. You could argue that this is good and character-building. It probably depends on each individual’s case.

Meanwhile, if parents want to hand their kids a stick with which to beat them in later life, so be it. After all, 36 children, both boys and girls, have been registered in Britain under the name of Arsenal. There are two British boys who were indeed christened Superman. Idiocy has its place. So does whimsy and I hope it is in a whimsical spirit that the Wheatons alighted on their boy’s name. As King Lear didn’t quite cry, let leprechaunication thrive!

The CORNER STROP

I’ve been queuing at Costcutter. You nearly always have to queue there because, although there are two tills, it’s rare that both are open, even when (as just now) there are people waiting to pay.

I was only in for a paper and I had the correct change. In years gone by, I could have waved my paper, called to the woman on the till that I had the correct money and left it on the counter. You can’t do that now because they get in a panic if they can’t swipe the barcode. How would they know what to enter on the till?

Costcutter is a chain of small general stores. In my childhood, most such shops were independent businesses and you saw the same proprietor and/or his wife and/or an employee at the till every day. They knew you and of course they let you owe them a few pennies until the next time if you didn’t have the right money. That’s impossible now because the shop staff leave so frequently and none of them has the power of such a profound executive decision. The branch manager is too important to work the till.

What’s more, if you had to wait even a moment or two, the old-style shopkeepers would be profuse with their apologies. At Cocksuckers (as we call it), the staff are blithely unaware of the customers. They are wholly absorbed by the challenging business of swiping barcodes, haphazardly loading plastic bags and picking out the correct coins to make up the change that the till tells them to give.

I can’t abide standing uselessly in a queue, forced to listen to the extruded plastic that passes for musical entertainment on the chain’s ringmain. It’s made worse by the stupidity of so many of the customers who, like the woman in front of me just now, pay a £3.47 bill with a credit card (“would you like Cashback?”). I don’t anyway approve of chain stores selling a small selection of newspapers and downmarket magazines, thereby taking custom from the newsagents who try to keep a good range of publications (“Plays International? Oh, I don’t think we stock that”). But my need for more exercise is not so keen that I want to spend a good half-hour strolling to the nearest newsagent and back when I can get a paper at Cocksuckers in a few moments (not including the couple of hours of queuing).

Why I still patronize the bloody place I begin to wonder. Recently, they opened a new stand for the sale of reheated food. I don’t know how low an IQ you would need to register in order to trust a chicken portion microwaved by one of the inadequately trained temporary staff at Cocksuckers. Certainly the smell given off by their warmed-over pies would not disgrace an abandoned abattoir.

The other week, I called in there for a carton of milk. As usual, I had to wait in line. Behind the hot food stand, an assistant was extracting frozen chickens from a freezer and freeing them from their plastic encasements. After watching her for a while, I asked her whether she couldn’t open the other till so that those of us with purchases to pay for could cut our waiting time in half. “Not just now, no” she said. I listened for a “sorry” in vain. “Very well, then. I’ll go somewhere else,” I said. And leaving the milk carton on the counter, I stalked out. I imagined the other shoppers shaking their heads and tutting at my graceless impatience. I was tempted to stride back in again and ask the offending chit what the point of her being there was if it weren’t to look after the customers, this emporium being a shop for the retailing of goods to people whose patronage paid her wages. But I decided the moment had passed. It would have to stand as an esprit de l’escalier.

Of course, this kind of imperious gesture is a cutting off of the nose to spite one’s own face. I now had no milk and the aforementioned half-hour would have been necessary to devote to finding it elsewhere. So, conscious of the pitiful emptiness of the sequence of behaviours I was manifesting, I eked out what little milk was left at home for a few hours and then crept back to Cocksuckers, hoping against hope that the same useless assistant was not on duty to serve me (or not). Happily her shift had ended. I picked up the same carton of milk from the chill cabinet – the only one of skimmed milk left in the shop on both this and the previous occasion – and waited obediently in the queue, wondering idly how long the milk had stood meantime deteriorating on the counter.

Costcutter’s merchandizing policy has changed over the years that we have lived here. There is now a whole shelf of wines on sale. On those occasions when the queue stretches back along the shelves, I look wonderingly at these wines. A woman behind me clocked me looking at them one day and said pleasantly “makes you thirsty, doesn’t it”. Of course I should have agreed nicely with her and left it at that. But surveying the ranks of Australian Chadonnay and Chilean Rioja with their garish labels and their suspiciously low prices, I could only reply (no doubt rather unpleasantly) “there’s really nothing here I’d want to drink”. “No, I suppose not” she said, mentally putting me down as a snob, I feel sure.

Frankly, I trust Costcutter for very little that I would want to ingest. Their brands of prepared food are cheap and dubious, their supposedly fresh items look unappetising and their range of comestibles is dictated by the nature of the clientele, which seems to consist heavily of people who scoff rubbish in front of the telly. The old corner shop tradition of good wholesome fare from local suppliers has died and Cocksuckers, with its emphasis on snacks and knickknacks, does not fill the void.

At least there has been one welcome development at our branch (and so I suppose uniformly at branches all over the land). In recent weeks, a card has been standing on the counter displaying badges with flashing lights. All the badges have been functioning, creating an entirely oppressive spectacle turned towards the waiting queue. Had it not been for the injunction on the card not to touch, I should long ago have torn the card from its moorings and pitched it into the street. Now however the lights are off. Perhaps, as I have long predicted in my mind, some customer has suffered an epileptic fit. If so, I hope a writ is in the post. I know that I shall collapse with a fit at Cocksuckers one of these days: a fit of impatience and boredom.

A DANGER to the PUBLIC

A good question came up on this week’s Any Questions?: “Has our society lost its grip on anti-social behaviour?” Fortunately it’s August so there were no MPs on the panel. David Ramsbotham, the former chief inspector of prisons suggested that Tony Blair’s famed undertaking to be “tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime” would have been just dandy if he hadn’t got diverted into attending to the causers of crime instead of the causes. “What worries me,” concluded Lord Ramsbotham, “is that we seem to have lost our grip on the way of developing people so that they concentrate on a social, a lawful and a useful life”.

The writer Bonnie Greer pointed out that “cities have always been violent”. None of the panel was in any mood to propose a means of containing the anti-social behaviour. But the questioner wasn’t talking about people shouting and throwing up in the street at night. She was talking about the rash of murders in several urban centres these last few weeks. Since Any Questions? went out there have been more. These murders are often but not always gang-related; they sometimes claim as their victims householders who try to protect their property or upbraid the miscreants. It’s all very well for Greer, who was brought up in Chicago, to comfort herself with the thought that cities are innately violent places: cities – in Britain at least – have not before been home to teenagers armed with guns and lethal blades.

I’m all in favour of our tackling the causes of crime, just as long as we’re prepared to face up to what those causes are. First, we have evolved into an inordinately acquisitive society. This has been the inevitable by-product of the triumph of capitalism. Everybody wants to have money and goods and health and sex and the time and space to feast on treats. Fifty years of advertising pumped into our homes through television, radio and now computers and mobile phones has persuaded us to accept marketing as part of our lives rather than as a gross intrusion. We want to be told what we want and we want to be able to have what we’re told we want as fast as possible. If that means knifing somebody in the street to get it, why would anybody be surprised?

Then we have a culture that heroicizes people who behave boorishly, selfishly and crudely. Paris Hilton is apparently a major celebrity because her home sex videos got onto the internet and she went to jail briefly for driving offences. Sportspeople are noticed if they throw tantrums and cheat. Self-publicists become television stars. “Celebrities” who get caught and punished are paid insane amounts of money for their “stories”, usually written by somebody else. We don’t have a culture that rewards diligence, loyalty, kindness, straight dealing and plain speaking. We canonize those who put two fingers up to the camera.

And our popular culture, so much of it churned out by America, pretends that real men carry guns and don’t flinch at killing “the bad guy” in a way that seems to leave no consequence. George W Bush must have bought into that myth when he defied Iraqi rebels to “bring it on”. Well, he got his wish. In the real world, dying hurts and the “bad guys” are not so easily identified as in the wild west and defeat is a good deal easier to stumble into than victory is to achieve.

But there’s time for all that later. Earnest discussions about how to tackle the malaise that breeds shooting and knifing on the streets can be indulged at leisure when we have it. The urgent need now is to stop the mayhem before it spirals into an unprecedented crisis. The government needs to act decisively, comprehensively and immediately. Putting more bobbies on the beat is just a sticking plaster on an amputation. The only result will be more police officers killed.

Here’s my solution: entirely rewrite penal policy. Only those convicted of a crime that may be categorized as constituting a danger to the public should go to prison. All other convicts should be punished in other ways, either by community service or by one-off or long-term financial penalties or by restriction of movement while remaining based at home. There are far too many people who should not be in prison. No white-collar crime, no drugs offence, no petty theft or vandalism or affray or refusal to pay a fine is appropriately met with incarceration. The government’s advisors should bend their minds to devising much more constructive treatment that both benefits the community (not least the victims) and keeps the offenders away from the dangerous (and dangerously influential) types they will otherwise meet in those breeding-grounds of serious crime that are our overcrowded prisons.

The prison places thus freed up should be reserved for those who are demonstrably a danger to the public. Murderers, rapists, muggers, violent hoodlums, sexual predators and anyone convicted of torture, assault, kidnap, stalking and threatening behaviour should go to jail. So should anyone who kills or maims through drunken, dangerous or reckless driving. And so should anyone, of whatever age, who is found to be carrying a gun or any other weapon that is palpably offensive. What is more, I would make these sentences profoundly punitive, both so as to remove dangerous individuals from the streets and so as to have a deterrent effect on those who might think of emulating them. I would make it a presumption that anyone found guilty on any of these counts would be held until they have passed the age of 60, at whatever age they committed the offence. There would be no parole and no remission in my scheme. A teenager might think twice about packing heat if the prospect of some 45 years in jail was the price of being caught. A mugger might baulk at trying to wrest someone’s mobile phone if she remembered that she will pass more than half of the rest of her days in Holloway if she has left her image on a CCTV camera.

Of course there would need to be some leeway. No nine year-old would go to Strangeways for half a century for having a penknife in his pocket. Social workers could be permitted to make a case that some people might need self-protection – what in some of the United States they call “armed response” – in some neighbourhoods. I do not advocate that everyone against whom a corrupt cop or two could concoct a “public danger” case would automatically be put away until they draw their pension. But I do believe that, in the face of a real urban crisis, drastic remedies are needed to bring some order. However young the current generation of violent offenders, they have to understand that they must take responsibility for their own actions. Long-term measures to make their prospects more enticing, their choices wider and their support systems more clued-up must follow. But as things stand, yes, our society has lost its grip on anti-social behaviour. And having remade our penal system so that it affords us all much greater protection, we do need a serious national debate on what sort of society we want to live in.

GOOD CAUSES

You’re not supposed to say this kind of thing and yet of course many of us think it. The trouble with the National Lottery is the random nature of its largesse. To put it crudely, the jackpot so often goes to people on whom it is simply wasted. Now you and I, gentle reader, we know exactly what we’d do with £35.5 million. We would use it wisely and well. But the Scottish postal worker, at whom the fickle finger of fate pointed last Friday, had evidently never given the matter a moment’s thought.

That she still hasn’t given it any thought is clear from her public statements and demeanour since. The first thing she should have done – as you and I are sophisticated enough to know – was to say very firmly to Camelot “no publicity”. Camelot are not permitted to release the names of winners if those winners do not wish it and, were they to do so, they would find themselves with publicity a good deal more unwelcome than the innocent Scottish postal worker is giving them just now.

Instead, the life of this Euromillions winner will be made a misery. Now that she is identified, she will be inundated with pleas for financial support, some of them really quite plausible in their heart-wrenching detail: “my daughter, who has won a place at university, needs an urgent operation to save her sight; it can only be performed in the United States and we simply do not have the funds …”, “my little boy will never walk again unless …”, “my business and the livelihoods of the 250 people I employ can only be saved by a modest input of capital …”, “pay me now or your kid gets it …”

It ought too to have crossed her mind that her relationship with her family, friends and work colleagues will never be the same. Today, they claim with ever so slightly set faces that they are delighted for her. Tomorrow, when the gas bill arrives, they will reflect how it wouldn’t be any problem for her to settle. She will of course move away and she will find herself in a neighbourhood where she has no friends and a society where she has no place. Already she is cast adrift from her moorings, separated from all that is familiar by the extraordinary thing that has happened to her.

And what do you do with £35.5 million? She went out and had a manicure, the first of her life, and she told the press about it in terms suggesting that it never occurred to her that any of the reporters, even the female ones, had the remotest notion of what a manicure was like. And she bought a new dress, not a very expensive one if that was it on the news bulletins. She really has no idea how wealthy she is. The press kindly put it in perspective for her. She’s better off than Wayne Rooney. She’s better off than Prince William or Prince Harry. They didn’t add that she’s not remotely as wealthy as Tiger Woods or Madonna or JK Rowling or the Duke of Westminster but she probably hasn’t considered moving in their circles. What would she have to say to them if she did? “Oh, sorry, I think my son’s read one of your books”? So what in god’s name is she going to do with her wealth? Take up polo? Have a box for the season at Covent Garden?

Divorced as she is, she won’t want for male suitors for long, that’s for sure. Indeed, there will be attention from all sorts of quarters and, before many weeks have gone by, very little of it will be welcome. “You’re not interested in me” she will find herself saying. “You’re only interested in my money”. Just as well Anna Nicole Smith is no longer with us.

In short, this win may be the worst thing that ever happened to her unless she can become canny enough to handle it, which means considerably more canny than she has been so far. It has already priced her out of her natural market and cast her into a world of wealth that she doesn’t know or understand. Many kids, newly enriched by fame in sport or music or acting, go badly off the rails but at least all of them have access to professional advisors, support systems and contemporaries in a similar situation. And they clearly wanted wealth and fame or they wouldn’t have set off into those worlds. This poor cow just did the lottery, much like the rest of us, not really considering what sort of an impact unimagined riches would have on her life. She couldn’t even have kept quiet and then pretended that she made a windfall on investments (without disclosing to anyone the extent of her new income) because the bull market is over for the time being.

The best thing for her, candidly, would be for her to give the great majority of the money to a charity. Those of her family and friends (old and new) feeling some entitlement would be hard put to argue with such a gesture. Now, it so happens that I have a charity that I can strongly commend to her …

RAGBAG TIMES

As happens most weeks, I picked up the new issue of Radio Times with a sinking feeling. Emblazoned across the bottom of the cover is the legend “IS THIS THE GREATEST BRITISH FILM EVER MADE?” and above this absurd question is a shot of Robert Carlyle in a peaked cap, beginning to unbutton his shirt. Not only is The Full Monty nowhere remotely near being “the greatest British film”, it’s not even Robert Carlyle’s best film.

Turn inside and you find that this is just one of four different Radio Times covers on the same issue. Me, I’ll collect anything that there’s more than one of, but even I draw the line at buying four otherwise identical magazines for the pleasure of “the full set” of covers. That’s what RT hopes some will do though, and, while they don’t mention it this time, they’ve gently but firmly suggested that readers might “collect” the differing covers issued on past occasions.

And what are the other three candidates for GBFEM? Why of course: Four Weddings and a Funeral, Trainspotting and Zulu. Er … Zulu? Even the doyen of movie guides, Leonard Maltin, only awards this ‘masterpiece’ three stars and he’s not exactly hard to please. (He gives Monty three-and-a-half and the others three each). Zulu apart, these movies only begin to nudge the frame if you’ve seen nothing made more than fifteen years ago. So the EM part of GBFEM (EVER MADE – do keep up) is not really under consideration here, is it.

These four reasonably diverting but hardly important movies – actually, I exempt Trainspotting, which is indeed considerably more original and significant than the others – turn out to appear in a list compiled from the votes of 2,500 Radio Times readers (if indeed anyone actually reads the rag any more), these votes weighted by being cast from lists of genre candidates chosen by that dreary old middle-of-the-roader Barry Norman and RT’s staggeringly dumb film editor. Movies can only be classified by genre nowadays, otherwise we wouldn’t know what to think about them.

It’s noticeable that these initial lists spread themselves through the history of film since 1935 (nobody considers silents any more) but the voters heavily favour relatively recent fare. So, all the voted-for movies are in colour, with the single exception of Brief Encounter (which has grown in stature over the years and which was greatly helped to its position on the overall list by its category – Love & Romance – being less obviously represented by film-makers in the past thirty years). But there’s a curious anomaly here. In the Love & Romance section, Brief Encounter actually polls third behind Four Weddings and Gregory’s Girl, the latter of which doesn’t make it to the list of lists. How does that work, then?

The readers’ list is, in votes order: Monty Python’s Life of Brian; The Full Monty; Four Weddings and a Funeral; Trainspotting; Lawrence of Arabia; Shaun of the Dead; Withnail & I; Brief Encounter; Zulu; Monty Python and the Holy Grail. There’s a suspicion of an organised Monty Python write-in there, I would submit. It’s fascinating that the only true auteur represented here occurs twice: David Lean directed Lawrence and Brief Encounter. I would argue that his Great Expectations is quite the equal of these two undoubted masterpieces and that Oliver Twist and Hobson’s Choice are not far behind. In Which We Serve, This Happy Breed, Blithe Spirit, The Bridge on the River Kwai and Doctor Zhivago are all greatly superior to anything else on the RT list. Danny Boyle, director of Trainspotting, is the only other director here doing rather more than a job of work and I doubt that many could name all (or indeed any) of the directors of the other movies. In my extremely well-informed opinion, the only top ten for which Withnail & I qualifies would be top ten most overrated.

An accompanying list of seven chosen by the British Film Council suggests that the pros are not much more discriminating than the public, save that their list at least reflects some history: Goldfinger; Brief Encounter; Billy Liar; Henry V (the Olivier version); The Wicker Man; The Dam Busters; and (good grief) Withnail & I. Again though, the absence of auteurs, of artists rather than journeymen, is striking. Where in either list are Michael Powell, Carol Reed, Anthony Asquith, Robert Hamer, Alexander Mackendrick, Sidney Gilliat, Tony Richardson, Lindsay Anderson, Karel Reisz, Terence Fisher, Joseph Losey, Richard Lester, Ken Loach, Nicolas Roeg, Peter Greenaway, Derek Jarman, Neil Jordan, Terence Davies and Mike Leigh? Where is the most famed British director ever, the one who virtually invented the auteur figure, Sir Alfred Hitchcock? Again, only the buffs would not be hard pressed to name the directors of most of the films on the Film Council’s list. And where is the work of Britain’s most instantly recognisable studio brands: Ealing, London, Gainsborough and Hammer?

When Radio Times conducts the same exercise about British television – if it already has, which seems most likely, I have happily put it out of my mind – it will undoubtedly name Doctor Who (in its present manifestation only) as the greatest television programme of all time. Pish. Tush. And fiddledy dee.

What we have in this idiotic feature is something perfectly tailored to the present state of Radio Times: trivial, superficial, celebrity-driven, second-hand, meaningless and with no sense of history or quality. All its section editors and regular columnists subscribe to the same petit bourgeois notion of an uncritical, celebrity-led celebration of being constantly diverted, of a set of vacuous values received as a list rather than the demanding discipline of individual thought and constant reappraisal.

Some time in the 1980s, I wrote in a national newspaper about the then decline of Radio Times, though the magazine of that vintage was to its successor as Scrutiny or Encounter was to Titbits. Its editor, a man of intense demeanour in an end-of-the-pier bowtie called Nicholas Brett, invited me to lunch and brought with him an issue from before his time that featured a very young Michael Barrymore and some showgirls on the cover. He seemed to believe that this somehow proved that the magazine had not gone downmarket under his stewardship – I had rather crisply compared it to the kind of free publication you used to find at a supermarket checkout.

I demurred and still do. I am old enough to remember when Radio Times had as its mainstay features on the background to all types of programmes to be broadcast on both radio and television in the coming week. No doubt the current editor would claim the same but she’s wrong. (I heard her not long ago being interviewed on the Radio 4 programme Feedback and she clearly doesn’t entertain the idea that she could ever be wrong). What her organ actually majors in is fawning stuff about celebrities. The current issue has puffs for Griff Rhys Jones, Sanjeev Bhasker, Barbara Windsor and June Whitfield, apart from the usual columns on soap opera, pop music, sport and something mysteriously called “living”. The only coverage of a programme not hung around the star presenter or performer is of a sordid-sounding “drama documentary” about the fatal car crash of the Princess of Wales, Dodi Al Fayed and their driver. This has its own celebrity thrust, of course. There is also a think piece about the programme by the magazine’s editor of television coverage, though her pieces never betray anything as developed as thought, just knee-jerk reaction from the conventional wisdom.

Brett’s version was already well down this path to uselessness. In his day, he may have felt that there was always The Listener to provide grown-up and thoughtful background to the broadcast media for those who wanted it. Tragically, that “always” was misjudged. The Listener perished years ago.

Reluctantly, I still take Radio Times regularly because its listings are the most comprehensive and informative I can find. There is much room for improvement even in the listings: it’s maddening that BBC3, ITV2 and ITV3 each get more space than BBC4 or More 4 while Film4 is pointlessly listed twice. But the clincher is that there is so little competition. Other printed guides look like the cheapest kind of trash and you know you’ll never be able to find therein the identity of the writer of a drama episode you might be interested in or the director of a movie whose title you don’t remember. Sky Arts has just revamped its website, seemingly with the purpose of making it look much more dramatic while removing all information that might be of any use to a potential viewer. Other websites – Channel 4, the BBC – look exhaustive but never seem to answer the one thing I want to find out.

There is no chance that Radio Times will get any more useful under the present editor who is almost certainly doing exactly what the current BBC regime wants. As a follower rather than (as in the ‘60s) a leader of fashion and style and thinking, the BBC will perhaps change if the hunger for celebrity trivia and things organised into lists ever wanes. Don’t hold your breath.

HOW IT REALLY IS

Tony Blair never learned one of the basic laws of politics: how it looks is more important than how it is. He imagined that the constant use of the techniques of spin-doctors would make everything right. But the proportion of the electorate that swallows the doctored medicine is not large enough for the gambit to be worth it. Most of us see these nostrums for what they are. (Incidentally, surprise has been widely expressed that doctors and other health workers have appeared to be the moving forces behind the recent bomb attacks in Glasgow and London. I don’t know why. Doctors have always been rogues and vagabonds. Among the most disreputable characters in Dickens’ Pickwick Papers is a pair of young general practitioners to whom you would hesitate to entrust a scratch on a finger).

Blair never got his head round the problem that the invasion of Iraq and its lamentable consequences couldn’t possibly be made to look desirable, successful, wise, necessary or even a fairly honourable failure. To most impartial observers, it came across only as repellent, vain, dumb, misguided and a craven catastrophe. It made no difference how many times Blair assured us that it was “the right thing to do”. That was never going to be how it looked. He could argue until he was blue in the face. Iraq will be written on his heart just as Calais was written on Queen Mary’s.

The case that, whatever the final outcome, is going to go down in the annals of the Blair years as The Cash for Honours Scandal was also one that could never be made to look other than fishy. It is his misfortune (and Blair’s) that, no matter what high degree of probity he evidently brought to the task of raising money for Labour’s coffers, Lord Levy strikes you as oleaginous, ingratiating and insincere. You want to lock him in a cupboard with Daniel Corbett, David Dickinson and Michael Winner. I have no doubt that the Daily Mail singled Levy out for grotesquely biased treatment, underwritten by a subtext of anti-Semitism. That’s about The Mail’s level (I aver, without actually reading the paper) and I hope Levy sues them and makes off with a healthy cheque for damages. But that doesn’t mean I have to want to cosy up with him myself. If Blair couldn’t see that Levy would not come across to the public as someone you would rush to trust, he certainly wasn’t able to get his head round the notion of how it looks.

It will be hard for the voters to walk away from this saga without suspecting at some level that there can’t be smoke without fire. The director of public prosecutions may have concluded that there is “not enough evidence” to proceed but the public requires no such rigorous examination of the prospects to form its conclusions. Blair is, across a broad range of matters, a busted flush. Gordon Brown has been shrewd to make it his priority to put as much discernible space between his style and method and those of his predecessor as possible. The handy side effect is that, the further Blair slips into history, the more irrelevant is made to seem his true stylistic and spiritual heir, David Cameron. The voters of Southall and Sedgefield seem to have thought so. In a perverse and roundabout way, the tarnishing of Blair’s golden image may have done Labour a favour after all.

* * * * * * * * * * *

Late last evening, we strolled down to the local shops. My partner reads the Harry Potter books (I had had my fill with two) and had ordered the final volume. At my prompting, we decided to join a ritual that will surely never be repeated in our lifetimes: the midnight massing of children and adults outside a bookshop.

There must have been a hundred people there, a far cry from the 6,000 or so apparently queuing outside Waterstone’s biggest store on Piccadilly but astonishing enough for a small town. The mood was festive and friendly, only briefly compromised by passing teenaged drunks. The two kids who had made the most effort in their appropriate costumes were rewarded with a free copy each. Then the rest of us filtered into the shop to pick up our copies. (I bought The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins).

Had I been JK Rowling, I would have supplied independent book sellers with free or at least heavily discounted copies so that they could undercut the supermarkets and chain stores that can sell at a discount through their bulk and preferential deals. But perhaps Bloomsbury would have vetoed such a gesture. It’s a pity, however, that a brand that has made so much money could not have done more to help the dwindling independent sector. The individual shops like our local one could not but open at midnight in order to avoid surrendering important territory to the big guys that only stock the bestselling titles.

I don’t subscribe to the view that the phenomenon of the Potter books (along with the vast successes of Josephine Wilson and Philip Pullman) indicates a new golden age of kids getting their noses into books. Unless kids read stuff that isn’t relentlessly marketed at them through the large and small screens that occupy their eyes for most of the time, all they are doing is obeying Big Brother. When I see a child reading Robinson Crusoe and Kidnapped, Billy Bunter and Just William, I’ll believe that junior fiction is still alive and well.

IT AIN’T WHAT YOU DO, IT’S the WAY THAT YOU DO IT

I was in London last week. The main focus of my trip was a belated house-warming party given by a couple who have finally domiciled themselves and their children in a big enough home, just before the elder child leaves for university. Since we sold our own flat in town two or three years ago, we have both been obliged to rely on the kindness of friends who have a spare room, or at least a spare bed. Happily, neither of us wants (yet) for ready invitations. But equally neither of us wants to outstay our welcome, to miss that moment when our hosts and/or hostesses start to whisper behind their hands “can’t we be ‘away’ next time he wants to come and stay?”

These things can be delicate. One of my keener benefactors – who anyway has been promising without issue to come and stay with us again for more than a year – was overdue for the benefit of my own lodging but there was a question mark over the party: would she have been invited and, if not, would she expect me to take her as my (uninvited) guest? I decided to avoid this bear trap. There was a pair of likelier candidates who were happy enough to offer their spare room (a relatively comfortable one; at my age, these things weigh). So I enquired discreetly of the party-thrower if she had indeed invited them, wanting (as I did) to avoid a ticklish situation in which the houseguest goes off to the party, leaving the host(ess) languishing at home. “You are wonderfully tactful,” she declared in her email, confirming that they had indeed been invited too. I’m not sure that I was being other than modestly wary.

The party was on the Saturday evening. I wanted to stay for a few days so it made sense to travel up to London on the Saturday afternoon and take my few days after the party, thus avoiding the bad train travel times (Friday – expensive; Sunday – delays). It meant that I was able to go straight to the house where I was staying, rather than having a day and evening in town before rolling up at the lodging shortly before bedtime, which is what I do when I travel up in the week. Thus I could take a bouquet for my hostess from our fabulous local florist, who knows exactly what flowers to choose for surviving a couple of hours on train and tube. I don’t like to arrive empty-handed but, if you’ve been in town all day and sat in a theatre all evening, few gifts still glow with rude health. Even chocolates are a little wilted from a couple of hours in a bag in a theatre cloakroom. And I rather baulk at taking wine, which smacks of students’ parties. It’s hard to know just what wine is appropriate, unless you’re very sure of the victim’s taste. So unless I’m going straight to the house, there is often no alternative but to make some gesture at the end of the stay.

The flowers were well received, as were (overwhelmingly so) the flowers I had had delivered ahead of the party. Said party was a total delight and its hostess and I yakked on the phone for an hour on the Sunday. I called her on my mobile, not wanting to tie up the household phone for a chat call, and as a result I had to be sparing for the rest of my trip because the battery had run very low.

When I got in late on the Monday evening, I heard that the party hostess had been trying to reach me by phone: her mother had died that morning. I decided it was too late to call, but missed her next morning and again during the day and we didn’t get to speak until late on the Tuesday evening. The funeral would be on the Thursday and she hoped I would come. I had thought ahead about this. I felt I had to decline because I had brought no clothes with me remotely suitable for a funeral. My host had already offered me the loan of a tie but that, I felt, would not have been sufficient to cover my discomfort. The bereaved daughter declared that she and her sister wouldn’t mind how I was dressed. “But I would mind” I said and she saw that this was conclusive.

Not everyone observes it these days, but I have always held that the immediately bereaved are the focus of attention at a funeral, the bride and (to a lesser degree) her mother at a wedding, the parents at a christening or bris, the confirmand at a confirmation or Bar or Bat Mitzvah, the graduate at a graduation and so on. It is not the purpose of the guests to be conspicuous, either by commission or by omission. It is as heinous to be underdressed as overdressed on these occasions. Better not to attend at all than to pull focus from those on whom the spotlight should fall (if I may mix the movie-making metaphors).

You could say that this whole piece is about an observance that is almost lost in the me-me-me scream of contemporary life: etiquette. The unwritten rules that govern social behaviour still mean something, even if the great majority are not even aware that they exist. I cannot trace whoever it was who first observed that “a gentleman is never unknowingly rude”, an exquisite aperçu that leaves on the table the certainty that asperity is never inadvertent. But whoever it was remains so right.

PS: in my last entry, I misspelled Lord Carlile. This was not the rudeness of a cad but the misapprehension of an ignoramus. I beg his pardon.

TAKING LIBERTIES

I have a lot of time for Alex Carlisle, appointed from the Liberal Democrat benches by Tony Blair as the government’s independent reviewer of terrorism legislation and retained by Gordon Brown. On The World at One today, he was talking about the issue of the limit on police detention of terror suspects (currently at 28 days) and calling for “a mature debate … free of party political points scoring”. I eagerly join such a debate.

Lord Carlisle proposed that any number of days is an arbitrary limit and that the police ought to be able to detain terror suspects for as long as the investigation takes, always provided that such detention is monitored regularly by a representative of the judiciary and, he implied, according to stricter tests than now obtain. He cited as support for this line the fact that the Glasgow police are currently holding a man who requires lengthy hospitalization because of the burn wounds he suffered when the car in which he was travelling rammed the entrance of Glasgow airport and ignited some of the combustible matter contained therein. It would of course be absurd were he to have to be released without interrogation because of the time lost while he underwent medical treatment.

This strikes me as a pragmatic and sensitive solution, provided it is deployed with care. I don’t as a rule believe that the police have any business arresting anyone if they don’t possess the evidence to justify holding them for any length of time. Whenever there is a terrorist incident, a flurry of arrests quickly ensues and some of those arrested are soon released. The damage that such arrests do is a serious consideration. On the one hand, they may well hurt the reputations of those wrongly held and have long-term effects on their family relationships, social lives, employment status and so on. There is no mechanism for getting redress for being herded into police custody on the whim of some officer who is concerned to make eye-catching gestures or to keep his numbers up. On the other hand, such treatment sows further resentment against the establishment within the community – at present, generally, the Muslim community. We could all do without anything that drives more disaffected youth into the power of mad mullahs. But provided that there is some better control exercised over willy-nilly police reactions to incidents, it ought to be possible in certain, minutely monitored circumstances for genuine suspects to be held pending the gathering of the relevant evidence.

But Carlisle also permitted himself a thrust that did him no credit. “Civil liberties groups have got to wake up to the reality of the situation” he said. It’s always alarming when a lawyer, particularly one who carries weight in Whitehall and Westminster, implies that we ought to stand ready to surrender our liberties. In situations such as the present state of maximum alert, it is all the more crucial to be vigilant about the instruments of the state arrogating to themselves extended or additional powers in the name of security. History, both recent and ancient, tells us that the police, the armed forces, the intelligence community, the bench and governments in full self-righteous mode are more like our enemies than our friends in the battle to keep our rights. Powers taken in supposed critical times can be handy in calmer days to employ against any group or individual whom the powerful believe they have a reason to dislike. The present government, like all its predecessors, will protest that it of course always has our interests at heart. But if it puts into the hands of a future dictator – a British Mugabe or Milosovic for instance – instruments by which he can silence his critics, jail the dissidents and hold indefinitely those he deems to be “different” while protesting that he is only making use of the powers that he inherited, the government will have done us a profound disservice.

It has been proposed that our airports should more resemble those of Israel. Unless you have flown into, within or out of Israel, you won’t know what that means. It means being interrogated individually for at least twenty minutes by someone who looks like a bright schoolgirl, being required to field questions of an often extremely personal nature (“so why are you with your partner?”, not in the sense of being together on this trip but of being together at all). These sessions are designed to wrong-foot you, to make you angry and to explore whether your story is genuine or a convenient cover for wrongdoing. They do indeed succeed in making you angry, which is probably just as well because it is when you start resenting it and contradicting yourself and failing to have a thought-through account that they begin to believe that you are an authentic traveller without an agenda. If this technique becomes the norm at British airports, where there is no such tradition of interrogation, I predict fights, riots and assaults on staff.

More seriously, I don’t think it is unreasonable to set the hurdle a lot higher for a first entry into this country, whether as a tourist or business visitor or as an immigrant or asylum-seeker. Perhaps the odd business traveller apart, no one comes here for the first time on an impulse and if they do they will just have to be obliged to think again. It ought to be acceptable for everyone applying for first-time entry, even from another nation within the EU, to agree to undergo some routine but rigorous examination of her or his background and circumstances. As the United States does, we could require a visa for entry and make the issue of a visa conditional on a check-up in the country of origin, by way of the embassy or high commission. This would have to apply to everyone entering Britain because we could not be seen formally to be discriminating against those from Muslim nations but of course in practice those coming from such nations would be examined the most rigorously as a matter of course. I think it is reasonable to expect people who do not have an allegiance to this country to have to bear with a harder test of their trustworthiness, from wherever they come. This is not an anti-immigrant issue. It is a matter of securing the borders.

But within Britain, we should not let the present emergency go to anyone’s head. We ought only to contemplate surrendering any of our hard-won civil liberties if the institutions that seek to erode those liberties agree to permit themselves to be far more accountable to the public and its representatives. The armed forces, the police and the security services cannot continue to be their own judge and jury over complaints made against them. While such outrages as the Deepcut barracks affair and the shooting of the innocent man at Stockwell underground station are allowed to stand as unresolved but generalized stains on, respectively, the army and the Met with no individuals called to account, either so that the bereaved are given satisfaction or so that the services themselves can close the matters, there can be no public confidence in these powerful institutions. Why then should they have greater powers? We need much greater transparency in the workings of all these forces – yes, including the security services. Who can doubt that MI5 and MI6 are peopled by individuals with political viewpoints of their own and with a strong institutional ethic that discounts any outside view? Let’s not forget that members of MI5 attempted to destabilize the democratically elected government of Harold Wilson and that other individual politicians – Leon Brittan when Home Secretary, for instance – have been the victims of campaigns to undermine them by intelligence officers operating (no doubt) individually but with the full protection afforded by such useful devices as unaccountability and the Official Secrets Act.

It does need to be said once again that, whatever the threat on the streets of Britain, the terrorists have won if, by over-reaction, we let ourselves be turned into any kind of a police state.

TAKE MORE WATER WITH IT

One of the earliest vivid memories I have is of the flood along the east coast of England on the night of January 31st 1953. I was five. We didn’t live there and we were yet to have a television, so the only images in my head must emanate from press coverage on February 2nd or, even more likely, from my imagination. The vividness comes from the fact that Uncle Bob and Auntie Pat were caught up in it. They lived in King’s Lynn with their little daughter and at least one elderly parent. When we learned that people were being drowned in the town (in the end 15 people there lost their lives), we had to cling to hope of good news. At last we learned that they were all alive and in reasonable spirits, given that their home was overwhelmed by the waters. Later that year, they moved to a new place out of town.

Two thousand people in King’s Lynn were made homeless that night and, along the coastline, 32,000 were evacuated. The deaths in Lincolnshire, Norfolk, Suffolk and Essex totalled 304, with a further 177 – two lifeboatmen, 45 fishermen (we had a fishing industry then) and a ferry full of passengers – lost at sea. In the Netherlands, as many as 1,835 drowned. At King’s Lynn, the sea level rose more than eight feet. Sea defences on the east coast were breached in 1,200 places. In 2003, the cost of this disaster at then values was estimated at £5billion [information from Benfield Hazard Research Centre and Flood London websites].

Of course there have been infinitely worse floods in other parts of the world. In August 1931, the Yellow River in China overwhelmed dozens of townships and an estimated 3.7million perished. Half a million drowned in the cyclone-driven floods of East Pakistan (now Bangladesh), images of which I still recall 37 years after the event. The same area suffered lesser but still murderous devastation 16 years ago [information from The Hutchinson Factfinder, an indispensable volume].

The floods in the North-East, the Midlands and the West are to such vast calamities as a chimney blaze is to The Great Fire of London, though not of course for the families of those individuals who lost their lives. In Texas and other southern and mid-western states, there has been far worse flooding this week than anywhere in Britain. Nonetheless, to have floodwater accompanied by raw sewage cascading through your home is a vile and heart-breaking blow and the cost of making good the damage will be eye-watering. Happily for us, our household was not affected by this week’s flooding. When there were extensive floods in our area three or four years back, a friend asked if we had been caught up in the deluge. “No” I said. “We’re 600 feet above sea level here”. “Ah,” came back my friend, “that’s what they said in Atlantis”.

It’s true that climate change and global warming mean that those places that have always felt safe from rising water have less cause for complacency. But the Yellow River and Bangladesh floods demonstrate that weather can bite deep without any need of help from the carbon emissions endgame. Even so, projections of threat to low-lying areas (starting with the Maldives and great swathes of the Indian subcontinent and the low countries, moving on to New York and London) are real enough. Those of us now dry will not remain unaffected by such developments then – millions will move to higher ground – just as we are not unaffected now: the costs will hit us all.

There has been widespread criticism of government and local authorities on the ground that we were “not prepared”, that cutbacks have postponed attention to flood defences. This is a how-long-is-a-piece-of-string issue. As with the NHS, even if you throw the whole of the GNP at the target, it will still not be enough. Where are the areas in Britain that you can point to and declare with total conviction: “There will be never be flooding here”? How far up the predicted level of rise in the seas can you plan before the whole enterprise is beyond our ability to contemplate? In addition to the cost of attempting (increasingly Canute-like) to hold back the waves, what expenditure can you calculate to be earmarked in order to deal with millions of refugees?

Well, you may say (as I often do) “expenditure is all down to political will. When a government says ‘we can’t afford this’, what it means is ‘we want to spend the money on something else’. Whatever the calls on public finances, prime ministers who are determined to go to war will always manage to find and spend the vast sums that war consumes, however futile that use of the money might seem to everyone else”. But the colossal cost of making every community in Britain safe against any eventuality of freak weather and against any conceivable result of climate change is way beyond a simple matter of rebalancing the budget, however creative Alistair Darling may turn out to be as Chancellor.

I have one of my modest proposals. Let the Brown government commission the most exhaustive study of Britain’s requirement for flood defences in any credible future scenario. Let the exercise be fully costed. Let the rise in the rate of income tax required to finance the building of these defences be calculated. And then let the House have a free vote on the matter so that the people may see what each member feels is the correct response, regardless of calculations about party advantage, having canvassed her own electorate. The voter could not then argue that the government or local authorities were to blame if his home were awash with foul water because his representative would have reflected his view, constituency by threatened constituency. As well as proving an interesting experiment in determining the degree to which short-termism and self-interest inform the electorate’s thinking, the exercise would also provide an unprecedented overview of Britain’s readiness, both physical and psychological, to face a very uncertain future.

A brief PS to the previous entry: I happened to be required this week to record my postal address on a hitherto unvisited website and, as usual, was obliged to click “United Kingdom” as the country of residence. However, when the information was re-presented to me for confirmation, the nation had been magically altered to “GB”. There is still hope.

TRUE GRIT of the SPLIT BRITS

What it means to be British is on the agenda yet again. Me, I’ve always viewed myself as a citizen of the world, though admittedly there are more than enough parts of the world of which I would not care to be a citizen. There may be some who consider our move nine years ago from London to the English West Country to be only one up from going to live overseas. But I can’t imagine emigrating for any reason, especially any of the usual ones – climate, cost of living, favourable tax levels. I remember friends of my parents selling up and moving to the Caribbean after the husband was told by his doctor that he would never survive another British winter. He died anyway and his widow was then stuck on an unfamiliar island, knowing no one, divorced from her own history.

Of course, the union of nations in which I live is an area of the world uniquely fraught with uncertainty (and even dispute) about its own nomenclature, long before we get onto what it “means” to live here. I am perfectly happy to describe myself as English and to announce that I live in England. (Tom Sutcliffe, the new chairman of Round Britain Quiz which returned to Radio 4 on Monday, told us that this week’s contest was between Scotland and the Midlands, and it occurred to me that he should have used the term “the English Midlands”, thereby avoiding any implication that Scotland is in some way a region of England – not, I think, a notion that would be readily embraced by Alex Salmond).

But few now are prepared to humour me on this point (about being English, I mean). When, while sitting on a plane, I fill in a landing card, I find that my answer to the identification of “country of residence” – England – gets crossed through by the cabin staff who substitute “UK”. This makes me want to ask for the card back so that I can alter my answer to the identification of “destination” from “USA” to “North America”.

In my childhood, our country was usually known as “Britain” or, if you wanted to swank a bit, “Great Britain”. Formally, “Britain” is a short form of the precise and correct identification of our united nations as “the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland”, the term “Great Britain” specifically excluding that part of the island of Ireland that cedes to the House of Windsor as furnishing the Head of State. I rather deplore the standardization of “UK” as my homeland’s identity. It smacks too much both of the US and of the EU. It embraces the fact that we are still a monarchy (“Kingdom”) in a way that seems irrelevant and futile. It’s an ugly coinage too, suggesting a rhyme with “yuk” and worse. And we’re called Britons, the British, “Brits”, not Yookayians or Yukites.

The International Organization of Standardization designates us “GB” which is therefore what appears on, for instance, vehicular plates registered in Britain. The internet calls us, ipse dixit, “UK” and I’m not allowed (anywhere on the net, as far as I can see) to call where I live anything else. On the other hand, the Americans (who established most of the verbal conventions of the net) to a large extent refer to the whole of the UK as “England” (as in “the Queen of England”, “the Prime Minister of England”). Of course they also frequently say “America” when they mean “the USA” – as in the politician’s banker, “I love America!” – and (correctly, I’m sure) assume that no one will wonder why they should apparently so sweepingly embrace Canada, Panama and Bolivia.

So if I wanted to declare what it means to hold the nationality that I do – and indeed to say that I was “proud” to do so – I would first have to establish what I was calling my nation. Most people – Mexicans, say, or Mongolians or Malawians – don’t have this difficulty. Many people, however (if not particularly from those three countries), seem to want to come here and wrestle with this problem. And one of the motors of this debate about national identity is the delicate subject of immigration.

It ought to be possible to discuss immigration without buttocks being instantly clenched and battle lines drawn. The sociologist Robert Putnam has greatly assisted in the drawing of the teeth of this issue. Interviewed on The World at One today, he spoke of some of the findings of his rigorous study into multi-culturalism on both sides of the Atlantic, including the interesting conclusion that “the only two things that rise in more diverse communities are protest marches and watching telly”, that in every other way, neighbourhoods where there are mixed communities are not thriving as they ought in the west. His solution is not to put controls on immigration but to construct more centres where “people can learn to have an identity other than their racial identity”.

That Putnam is American greatly helps his argument to be accepted as rational here. Immigration into the States over the last 150 years has been proportionately far higher than into any European nation. Though almost all of them are ultimately immigrants, Americans have certainly not always been free of racism or xenophobia. The urgent need of a civil rights movement is only forty years old. That both Bush’s Secretaries of State have been black demonstrates how far that issue has been blunted by good sense all round.

But immigration is at present a fiery issue in the US, concerning both the waves of illegal workers into California and the remarkable influx of economic migrants from Asian and Arabic countries, to the extent that the demographic that determines that no presidential candidate can ignore the Jewish vote will soon be superseded by the need to attend to the Muslim and indeed to the anti-Israel votes.

The Muslim penetration of Britain has its own difficulties but the present flashpoint here is the immigration from the new member states of the EU. It amazes me that the European authorities cannot regulate this matter better. There are certainly concentrations in some British towns of Poles, Romanians, Slovenians and other eastern Europeans that have stirred long-buried prejudices. It’s not a prejudice to note, however, that these economic migrants have significantly taken over the kinds of jobs that students here need in order to keep themselves solvent while completing their studies. If the government will not regulate the level of EU immigration, it needs urgently to reconsider the matter of student grants before it produces a generation that is educated to the highest level but financially bankrupt. Moreover, there ought to be a presumption in any kind of local waiting list scheme that priority will be given to those who are demonstrably “local”, which is to say those (of whatever racial origin) who have lived all their lives in the community and whose families have done the same. Incomers – whether from city or country or abroad – ought not to expect that their particular economic imperatives necessarily carry any weight with the host community. I don’t think that is at any level a discriminatory argument.

There has been talk of the French building “another Sangatte” to accommodate those who gather near Calais in the hope of smuggling themselves across the Channel to seek income in Britain. I ask what I always asked when the original Sangatte operated: why don’t these guys want to settle in France? What is it about Britain that makes it the Shangri-La for economic migrants and asylum seekers? I’m trying to avoid the expression “soft touch” here, but if Britain and France are comparably liberal, civilized members of the EU, why do not all of these people, who have often travelled huge distances in appalling deprivation, throw their hats in the air with delight because they are already in a European country?

At the current European summit, Mr Blair is leaving behind a bad odour because he is refusing to sign up to most of the provisions of the “this-is-not-a-constitution” compromise prepared by Angela Merkel and supported by Nicolas Sarkozy. The EU President, Jose Manuel Barroso, made some pithy and pertinent comments about the British position. It is hard to see how we can continue to play a meaningful role in the European Union if we are to continue to refuse to accept any of those provisions that are designed to bind us together. Many people here doubt that Turkey ought to be allowed to join the EU because, it is feared, its Muslim “bias” would be called on as a reason for the country to be exempted from the observation of some of the Union’s rules. If Britain thinks itself too important to bow to the consensus, why should it expect quiescence from a newly European Turkey? It’s perfectly understandable that Blair, with his record on both world and domestic stages, would not be amenable to any degree of shared foreign policy or extended rule of law and justice from Luxembourg. That doesn’t make it a virtuous position.

But it is a curious union in which all the poor of the new member states aspire to residence in Britain and only Britain. Why not go to Finland or Belgium, Portugal or Greece? Here is a matter on which we really should sue for parity. Let all the existing member states do their bit and make their provisions just as enticing as ours. Why shouldn’t there be an Estonian enclave on the Algarve? And what should the Estonians do when they get to Faro? Why, what all immigrants should do: integrate, learn the language, tailor their own culture to the host culture. One of the greatest problems the British have with Muslims, both immigrant and native, is that their primary allegiance is so often expressed as being to Islam rather than to Britain. As St Ambrose counselled: “When in Rome, live as the Romans do”.

There are Muslims in Britain who advocate that Sharia law should take precedence over British law. In so doing, I would maintain, they forfeit any right to live here. I understand perfectly that, when in other countries, I am expected to observe the laws of those countries even as a tourist. As one who is, by his nature, an outlaw in certain areas of the world (being a homosexual), I am acutely conscious that local law is powerful. Some of those who come to Britain – and some of those born to people who have come to Britain – make the mistake of assuming that their own traditions and beliefs are due a special dispensation. They are not. So-called honour killings – murder in the name of supposed family honour – may be overlooked in some nations, but in Britain they should be and are treated as crimes of barbarians.

Moreover, the knighthood bestowed on Salman Rushdie is a domestic matter and no business of any Muslim country. These knee-jerk reactions from monumentally self-important people who have never seen – let alone read – a copy of The Satanic Verses should be dismissed with the contempt they deserve rather than kowtowed to as if they constitute due sensitivity. The so-called minister for religious affairs, who implied in the Pakistani parliament that the award would justify suicide attacks in Britain, should be hauled before an international court and tried for sedition. At the very least he should be relieved of his post, denied any influence over impressionable people and told to maintain a discreet silence for the rest of his days. If he had been a Hamas minister denouncing (say) Amos Oz, the Israelis would immediately have bombed the Palestinian Legislative Council.

The antics of football fans aside, we in Britain seem rather shy of proclaiming our nationality. Quite right too. The unthinking nationalism and factionalism that has riven so much of the world for so long is the last ingredient we need in our culture that has already taken on far too much of the global decline since the Second World War (see my book Common Sense, freely downloadable from the link in the right margin). So I still cleave to the notion of being, first and foremost, a citizen of the world. Perhaps if we all thought like that, we might help each other just a little more and shout witless slogans a little bit less.

ONLY BIG RATINGS WILL DO

Ahead of the grand final this coming Saturday, I have over the last day or two been watching the ten previous legs of BBC1’s Saturday night ratings banker, Any Dream Will Do. This is the follow-up to last year’s How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria? in which Connie Fisher was chosen to lead a revival of Rodgers & Hammerstein’s The Sound of Music by “you, the public”. The production company owned by Andrew Lloyd Webber, who can just about afford to run such risks as these, was mounting that revival and, seeing a fine chance of three months’ worth of free prime-time publicity courtesy of the licence-fee payers, Lord Lloyd Webber allowed himself to be cast as the Sir Alan Sugar of this particular endeavour. Any Dream Will Do is a further knockout competition to cast the eponym in Joseph and His Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. It is even more welcome free publicity because m’lord is its composer – it was his first show to be produced almost forty years ago – so he will receive many more handsome royalties from the revival’s take.

The first two episodes, screened before the series went live to allow viewers to vote for their favoured Josephs, showed the process of rounding up and then whittling down the winsome boys who would compete in the knockout stretch. There was much loose talk about how showbiz works – “this is the harsh reality of auditions” cried presenter Graham Norton in his pastel silk suit/silk shirt combo. I have auditioned a good few actors in my time and I can tell you that the real audition process is very little like this.

Initially, the judges were selecting a finite group of candidates so it made nonsense to tell the first and then the second and then the third auditioner that he was in. You can’t sensibly start selecting until you have seen the whole field. Moreover, the criteria for choice seemed random and highly subjective but then only one judge – producer Bill Kenwright – is regularly in a casting role (ALW took a back seat at this stage).

It was quickly clear that departures from industry practice were all to do with winding up the tension of the television series. In professional auditions, no one gets short-listed just because they beg to be included, nor by apparently cornering Lloyd Webber in his office and insisting on a second chance. Nor are there contrived “sing-offs”.

The level of emotion displayed by the boys was extraordinary. I don’t know which drew the more tears, being selected or not being selected. You do wonder how so many young lads who are, with a few rather surprising exceptions, wholly amateurs can be claiming suddenly that to play Joseph is all they’ve ever lived for. “I felt ashamed to be in the bottom two” one boy declared, the week after he survived a vote and a sing-off. Oh please! That kind of emotional overload doesn’t augur well for the prospects of starting to build a career in music theatre, which is presumably the true reward for winning this competition.

I may not have put myself up for audition since university dram soc days but I’ve been through many job interviews, several times as a short-listed candidate and as a runner-up (“the other guy was just hungrier”). You have to learn to maintain a healthy equanimity about the process. I once lived with a boy who was starting out in showbiz and he would feel personally slighted when he failed to land a job and would pester people for explanations. I tried to explain to him that there’s only ever one explanation for why you don’t get a part or a job: someone else got it. Except in cases of obvious unsuitability, the rejection isn’t about you, it’s about somebody else. Any Dream Will Do never tried to inculcate this important default position in any of the boys who wept their way back onto the street.

Amid all this emotion and hugging and clutching, one aspect of the music theatre world was conspicuously absent. Those contestants with girlfriends were allowed – indeed encouraged – to mention them and to have them at the live shows for cheering on purposes. Those with boyfriends remained undeclared. While judge Denise Van Outen flirted outrageously with several of the boys, neither Norton nor judge John Barrowman chose to or was permitted to allude to his own gayness. Indeed, Barrowman “accused” the contestant who seemed the likeliest to be gay of being “too camp” in his delivery of one song, a curiously inapt and catty criticism.

Once the candidates had been reduced to twelve, the viewers got to vote to reject one each week. This made for a tortuously drawn-out business but it also meant that the boys all acquired the fame that television bestows. Showbiz is packed with young strugglers who would do anything for a fraction of so much exposure; even sleep with Andrew Lloyd Webber (there must be one or two who would do that, though, to use a favoured phrase of Norton’s, “it’s a big ask”. During the Maria series, a Guardian reviewer described ALW as “a horrid toad” and, while that’s not what you’d call kind, it’s not inaccurate. I hasten to add that I have absolutely no reason to imagine that Lloyd Webber has ever resorted to the casting couch. His early writing partner, Tim Rice, did have an affair with Evita leading lady Elaine Page, however).

Another way in which the series has not reflected reality has been the extent to which the aspirants have been permitted to argue with the judges. I would have slapped that down at the outset. Whatever you may think of Lloyd Webber’s œuvre – and I wouldn’t cross the road to see one of his shows – you can’t argue with his experience, his power or his astuteness.

And these kids know nothing. They may have an idealised image of themselves as Joseph in their heads but that’s largely where it stays. Conveying that self-image to others on stage is the trick and the performers are not qualified to judge their own success at any level. Wanting it is not to be confused with earning it. Moreover, this “knowing” that “I can be Joseph” is predicated on a fantasy performance before their families, friends and fans (like in the BBC studio). Being Joseph at a Thursday matinee in February when two uncertain understudies are on and the house is dominated by dozing pensioners and restless school parties is a bigger test of their ability to sustain a career in music theatre.

As the contestants fell away, you wondered who was monitoring the vote count. Lloyd Webber, while embracing this eleven-week prime-time promotion, would have wanted to do everything short of naked manipulation to ensure that the Joseph the viewers handed to him was one who wouldn’t lose him money. In Saturday’s final, the viewers will (allegedly) decide which of the three last survivors wins. In each previous programme, ALW has been permitted to choose to “save” one of the two candidates with the lowest votes, thereby jettisoning the other. When the oldest, smartest guy went out, he boldly claimed that the phrase “conspiracy theory” was going through his head. Norton deftly palmed that aside but I hope some alert showbiz reporter followed this up in case there was any visible fire behind the smoke.

Elsewhere, the youngest contestant eliminated took defeat the best. The boy who was clearly the best singer and had received consistent rave reviews from the judging panel was still eliminated as soon as Lloyd Webber had the chance to ditch him, even over the 17 year-old whom the lord knows is least equipped to play a West End company-leading run (ALW saved him also in the semi final, this time against the contest’s most natural song-and-dance man who had foolishly oversold his own case). The decision about the fine singer was right though. He was born to play the hero’s friend, especially one who perishes nobly in the second reel. “Nice guys finish last” baseball-player Leo Durocher is widely credited with coining and, while this one got to the top six, he was never going to win. True stars have a discernible bastard streak.

My choice for Joseph was the mouthy song-and-dance man, a natural mover who possessed the stage, not least because he was the only kid we saw all series who actually was sex on legs. But he lived perilously all through the knockout and finally succumbed last Saturday. The one who’s surely been topping the vote every week – apart from the bottom two, the results are never disclosed – is the Scots shrimp who stacks supermarket shelves but who has a fabulous voice and knows how to project his slim charm. He has the sex appeal of a gerbil which of course tells you a lot about the demographic of the show’s audience: middle-aged mums. It’s not a bad projection for the musical’s natural constituency either. I expect him to win it easily.

But Any Dream Will Do has had none of the fine detail and much greater showbiz realism of Musicality, the Channel 4 competition of a couple of years back that partially recast Chicago, which is the natural mother of this show (assuming Pop Idol is the father). Where are all the Musicality kids now, one wonders? Where indeed is Sheena Easton, whom Esther Rantzen’s vehicle launched into The Big Time almost thirty years ago? Showbiz is a tough racket and anybody who thinks that one night of glory is the precursor of a glorious career is living in cloud cuckoo land. As Bryan Protheroe said judiciously in the green room of the Theatre Royal Drury Lane when my song-and-dance man asked what his attitude would be to some competition winner playing alongside him on a West End stage, “I’d be very wary”.