PRIMATES AREN’T HUMAN
That's a fine show of hypocrisy we had this week from His Grace the Archbishop of Westminster, Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor, head of the Catholic church in England and Wales. Seeking to scupper the government’s legislation that is designed to render illegal discrimination against homosexuals in all social and business transactions, he wrote to every member of the Cabinet to suggest that, if adoption agencies are obliged by law to accept same-sex couples as adoptive parents, the Catholic church will cease to operate an adoption service. Happily, the Cabinet has shown some spirit in rebuking this attempt to interfere with its legislation.
This of course is the same prelate who, ten years ago, sat on his hands while a child-abusing priest in his Arundel and Brighton diocese – whom Murphy-O'Connor had systematically shielded from investigation by the law – was finally convicted of attacks on a dozen boys. The Cardinal argued at the time that paedophilia was “little understood”. More objective observers felt that it was perfectly well understood by its victims.
Down the centuries and all over the world, the Catholic church has provided a safe seat of power from which countless paedophiles have abused the children they affect to help, protect and guide. The present pontiff handled the issue for his predecessor and no doubt was responsible for John Paul II's complacent statement on abuse by priests, that “grave scandal is caused with the result that a dark shadow of suspicion is cast over all the other fine priests who perform their ministry with honesty and integrity and often with heroic self-sacrifice”, merely allowing a crumb of “concern for the victims”. Still today, priests fleeing from arrest on this charge are offered sanctuary in the Vatican, the abused children no succour at all.
If any evidence existed that children placed with adoptive parents of whatever sexual orientation were remotely in the kind of peril they routinely face at the hands of the Catholic church, the Cardinal might have a useful point to make. As it is, his masterful silence on the subject would become him rather better.
Seemingly gratuitously, Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, weighed in to support the Catholic hierarchy’s stance. The reason for his unusually dogmatic stance is soon found. Next week, the Anglican bishops and archbishops gather in convocation. That the beanfeast takes place in Dar es Salaam will only reinforce the fact that the homophobic backlash in the Anglican church is being led by the African primates, gay sex having been tolerated even less among black communities through the ages than among whites, despite heterosexual sodomy being the preferred method of contraception among African if not West Indian men (this is why Aids is so epidemic on the African continent, unprotected anal penetration being the most perilous activity for those at risk of infection).
The African bishops are fully prepared to provoke a schism and to break up the Anglican episcopacy. They know that they have Williams on the ropes. He wants to be remembered neither as the Archbishop on whose watch the church broke up, nor as the prelate who went against his own inclusive instincts and excluded the gay community. Either stance will drive out thousands of adherents. It’s hard to see how the Church of England is anything other than done for, its only future in its native England as a harmless sect of home counties spinsters and bachelors making jam and singing ancient hymns round a domestic piano.
The matter of adoption by gay people has exposed many of the contradictions at the heart of the supernatural delusion. If the working philosophy of a movement such as a religion has discrimination at its heart – between, for instance, “good” and “evil”, “saved” and “damned”, “devout” and “profane”– it is impossible for that movement simultaneously to embrace everyone. Religion cannot be simultaneously inclusive and exclusive.
Any priest can confirm that Catholic adoption agencies will, without a moment’s hesitation, place a child with a heterosexual, atheist couple. In the most literal sense, then, its homophobia is more important to the Roman church than the very tenets on which it is founded. And yet that church has been the most systematic instrument of child abuse – mental, physical and sexual (hetero and homosexual) – in human history. It is truly a strange conundrum.
The more “liberal” traditions of the Church of England have led it to adopt the “hate the sin, love the sinner” approach, cautiously accepting gay people and even gay vicars on the dubious, barely-spoken understanding that they do not “practise” or rather, in practice, that they do not say that they practise. The Catholic church, redder in tooth and claw, formally denounces lesbians and gay men as “objectively disordered”. I can think of nothing more objectively disordered than entertaining a supernatural delusion. It’s not as if believers can’t help themselves: indulging this delusion is a conscious choice. Being gay is not. To dismiss being gay as disordered is like dismissing being deaf or tall or black or diabetic as disordered. No wonder that the naturally kindly Dr Williams finds himself in a high degree of discomfort. He has a great many disobliging allies alongside him in the battle to come.
Saturday, January 27, 2007
Friday, January 26, 2007
FRUITS de MER
The looters of Branscombe Beach have shamed Britain across the world. What a spectacle they made, these native Devonians and – worse – organised gangs from much farther afield. As containers washed ashore from the cargo ship grounded in the bay, locals and visitors spent Sunday night and all Monday and Tuesday scavenging the beach and smashing open the containers. They made off with clothes and furnishings, petfood in bulk and alcohol in casks, electrical goods and motorbikes.
Good luck to them, you may say. But these were not, in large part, supplies going out to retailers. These were people’s treasured possessions. One woman watched horrified on a news bulletin as a container was torn asunder before the camera and its contents – the sentimental and irreplaceable items of her family’s history that had been on their way to furnish her new life on South Africa – were scooped up by greedy and thoughtless thieves [BBC News at 6, January 22nd].
And thieves these people are. These are the British in the third millennium, a grasping, grabbing, devil-take-the-hindmost nation who care not a fig for anyone else. One looter who spoke to The Guardian gaily described herself as “a retired teacher”. I hope she never had the gall to tell her pupils about right and wrong. “We saw all this stuff here and the police told us we could help ourselves,” she said. “So we did” [report January 23rd].
So, you fall to wondering, what kind of advice is that for the police, of all people, to give? Why weren’t they arresting the looters? On Wednesday, they finally got off their arses and closed the beach. Whether they then set about rescuing the remaining goods from the weather is not recorded. Were I the owner of any goods that were stolen, I should be taking legal advice about suing the Devon constabulary for dereliction of duty. The police have let it be known that they had been unsure of maritime law regarding booty taken from beached vessels. For a police force with one of the most extensive coastlines in Britain, this is a preposterous excuse. There is plenty of video footage and photographic evidence, taken by the coastguard and by the media outlets, that can be used to bring looters to justice. I hope the retired teacher is put in the stocks.
But of course it must be a vain hope that more than a small fraction of the loot will ever be recovered. Many items will already have been sold on eBay, which is now well established as the global successor to the geezer in the pub offering you a “gold” watch. Plenty of eBay buyers are the unwitting receivers of stolen goods. The Maritime and Coastguard Agency’s so-called “receiver of wreck” has “written to” eBay asking that looted items be taken off sale [report in The Guardian, January 25th]. You know what these civil servants are like: she probably sent it by second class post. And how will eBay know whether a particular item has come from Branscombe Beach? It would be an idiot seller who described the goods he’s auctioning as “looted from a wreck”.
Meanwhile, why did the police allow the public to put itself at such risk? It was not known what hazardous material might come ashore from spillage or indeed among the cargo. A coastguard officer told The Guardian that he had seen “parents leave children on the beach in gale force winds so that they could wade into the surf to ransack containers” [report in The Guardian, January 24th]. We have become so mercenary, so determined to get something for nothing and everything for ourselves, that we are heedless of danger either to us or to our dependants. From each according to his vulnerabilities, to each according to his greed, as Marx certainly didn’t say. Successive waves of capitalism, marketing, Thatcherism and globalization have made looting the primary means of acquisition in our society. No wonder we are going to hell in a handcart.
The looters of Branscombe Beach have shamed Britain across the world. What a spectacle they made, these native Devonians and – worse – organised gangs from much farther afield. As containers washed ashore from the cargo ship grounded in the bay, locals and visitors spent Sunday night and all Monday and Tuesday scavenging the beach and smashing open the containers. They made off with clothes and furnishings, petfood in bulk and alcohol in casks, electrical goods and motorbikes.
Good luck to them, you may say. But these were not, in large part, supplies going out to retailers. These were people’s treasured possessions. One woman watched horrified on a news bulletin as a container was torn asunder before the camera and its contents – the sentimental and irreplaceable items of her family’s history that had been on their way to furnish her new life on South Africa – were scooped up by greedy and thoughtless thieves [BBC News at 6, January 22nd].
And thieves these people are. These are the British in the third millennium, a grasping, grabbing, devil-take-the-hindmost nation who care not a fig for anyone else. One looter who spoke to The Guardian gaily described herself as “a retired teacher”. I hope she never had the gall to tell her pupils about right and wrong. “We saw all this stuff here and the police told us we could help ourselves,” she said. “So we did” [report January 23rd].
So, you fall to wondering, what kind of advice is that for the police, of all people, to give? Why weren’t they arresting the looters? On Wednesday, they finally got off their arses and closed the beach. Whether they then set about rescuing the remaining goods from the weather is not recorded. Were I the owner of any goods that were stolen, I should be taking legal advice about suing the Devon constabulary for dereliction of duty. The police have let it be known that they had been unsure of maritime law regarding booty taken from beached vessels. For a police force with one of the most extensive coastlines in Britain, this is a preposterous excuse. There is plenty of video footage and photographic evidence, taken by the coastguard and by the media outlets, that can be used to bring looters to justice. I hope the retired teacher is put in the stocks.
But of course it must be a vain hope that more than a small fraction of the loot will ever be recovered. Many items will already have been sold on eBay, which is now well established as the global successor to the geezer in the pub offering you a “gold” watch. Plenty of eBay buyers are the unwitting receivers of stolen goods. The Maritime and Coastguard Agency’s so-called “receiver of wreck” has “written to” eBay asking that looted items be taken off sale [report in The Guardian, January 25th]. You know what these civil servants are like: she probably sent it by second class post. And how will eBay know whether a particular item has come from Branscombe Beach? It would be an idiot seller who described the goods he’s auctioning as “looted from a wreck”.
Meanwhile, why did the police allow the public to put itself at such risk? It was not known what hazardous material might come ashore from spillage or indeed among the cargo. A coastguard officer told The Guardian that he had seen “parents leave children on the beach in gale force winds so that they could wade into the surf to ransack containers” [report in The Guardian, January 24th]. We have become so mercenary, so determined to get something for nothing and everything for ourselves, that we are heedless of danger either to us or to our dependants. From each according to his vulnerabilities, to each according to his greed, as Marx certainly didn’t say. Successive waves of capitalism, marketing, Thatcherism and globalization have made looting the primary means of acquisition in our society. No wonder we are going to hell in a handcart.
Tuesday, January 16, 2007
I TOO HAVE QUESTIONS
This month's spat with a formerly nationalised industry features British Gas. We had some work done in November so, needless to relate, I am now asked to complete a questionnaire ("How do you rate the engineer's hair cut: 1) elegant, 2) adequate, 3) average, 4) bizarre, 5) what hair cut?"). Naturally, as readers of my book Common Sense will know (see free download via the link in the right margin), I did not do the questionnaire. Instead I sent the Marketing Research Manager the following letter:
Dear Mr Sutton,
I have not attempted the enclosed questionnaire because, just as with every other questionnaire that any organisation has ever asked me to complete, its questions do not cover my case nor provide for the answers I wish to give.
We have indeed had a gas appliance repaired during the last three months. I telephoned to ask for the job to be done. The officer who dealt with me, though suffering the misfortune of a heavy cold, took down the details and tried very hard to persuade me to take out an insurance policy but, as I explained to him, the cost of this visit – the first in the more than eight years that we have lived here – would be very much less than the cost of eight years of insurance.
The appointment was quickly made, the engineer arrived as arranged and he identified and repaired the fault in short order. So far so good.
Just before Christmas, an envelope arrived bearing the British Gas logo. I assumed this to be the invoice for the work done but it was addressed to “Mr Rigby”. Alfred Rigby, the previous owner of this house, sold it to us in 1998 and has not lived here since. I understand that he has moved several times since then and we no longer have any indication of his whereabouts. It is of course against the law to open mail addressed to someone else, so I returned the envelope, writing upon it: “Return to sender: not known at this address in eight years”.
Shortly after Christmas, an identical envelope arrived. I wrote the same legend on the front and, on the back, gave a short history of the case and my account number but not my name because anyone might read the message.
You evidently do not have a system that crosschecks data in your various departments, nor one that reports discrepancies when they arise. After all, you have supplied gas in my name at this address since 1998.
Soon after that, about ten days ago, a third envelope arrived. I went to the British Gas website, got a customer services telephone number and rang it. The person picking up took my details but said that he couldn’t help me as the computer system was being changed. He passed me to a woman who, in turn and to my chagrin, required all the details to be repeated. I then explained the case. She went through the file and said she could find no record of any work being done at this address. She said I should open the envelope. I explained my reluctance. If it did turn out to be an invoice, it would be inadvisable to pay it because British Gas’s computers would not know how to interpret the discrepancy. It was British Gas’s error and I knew very well that, if I tried to finesse the system, it would be me who suffered rather than British Gas.
She told me that she was sure the envelope just contained some advertising and that I should ignore it and throw it away. I said that if I was going to throw it away, there could hardly be any harm in opening it so I did so. It was a final demand, threatening bailiffs and distraint. This sent her back into the system. After a lengthy pause, she reported back to me that she had corrected the error and that a new invoice in my name would be issued in a week. She apologised in a dignified way.
I thought the apology should come from the office that made the error, so I next telephoned the number given on the invoice. I had to explain everything again to the woman who replied and she said that she too would ensure that a correct invoice was issued and that I would receive a telephone call apologising to me in a day or two. No such call has been made. When your envelope arrived today addressed to “Mr Rigby”, I naturally thought at first that it was yet a fourth issue of the erroneous invoice, probably threatening public execution. Much against my instincts, I opened it and therein found your questionnaire. It at least gives me the opportunity to air my grievance.
I have been a British Gas customer for 40 years, long before the industry was privatised. Now that competition has entered the market, it seems you can get power from the local supermarket, the shop that formerly sold videotapes and a bloke passing on a bicycle. If you want to keep your customers, you had better buck up your ideas.
I hope this is helpful. I am still awaiting a formal apology and a correct invoice.
Yours sincerely ...
I shall of course report on any developments. I have yet to hear from Ofcom (see two entries back).
This month's spat with a formerly nationalised industry features British Gas. We had some work done in November so, needless to relate, I am now asked to complete a questionnaire ("How do you rate the engineer's hair cut: 1) elegant, 2) adequate, 3) average, 4) bizarre, 5) what hair cut?"). Naturally, as readers of my book Common Sense will know (see free download via the link in the right margin), I did not do the questionnaire. Instead I sent the Marketing Research Manager the following letter:
Dear Mr Sutton,
I have not attempted the enclosed questionnaire because, just as with every other questionnaire that any organisation has ever asked me to complete, its questions do not cover my case nor provide for the answers I wish to give.
We have indeed had a gas appliance repaired during the last three months. I telephoned to ask for the job to be done. The officer who dealt with me, though suffering the misfortune of a heavy cold, took down the details and tried very hard to persuade me to take out an insurance policy but, as I explained to him, the cost of this visit – the first in the more than eight years that we have lived here – would be very much less than the cost of eight years of insurance.
The appointment was quickly made, the engineer arrived as arranged and he identified and repaired the fault in short order. So far so good.
Just before Christmas, an envelope arrived bearing the British Gas logo. I assumed this to be the invoice for the work done but it was addressed to “Mr Rigby”. Alfred Rigby, the previous owner of this house, sold it to us in 1998 and has not lived here since. I understand that he has moved several times since then and we no longer have any indication of his whereabouts. It is of course against the law to open mail addressed to someone else, so I returned the envelope, writing upon it: “Return to sender: not known at this address in eight years”.
Shortly after Christmas, an identical envelope arrived. I wrote the same legend on the front and, on the back, gave a short history of the case and my account number but not my name because anyone might read the message.
You evidently do not have a system that crosschecks data in your various departments, nor one that reports discrepancies when they arise. After all, you have supplied gas in my name at this address since 1998.
Soon after that, about ten days ago, a third envelope arrived. I went to the British Gas website, got a customer services telephone number and rang it. The person picking up took my details but said that he couldn’t help me as the computer system was being changed. He passed me to a woman who, in turn and to my chagrin, required all the details to be repeated. I then explained the case. She went through the file and said she could find no record of any work being done at this address. She said I should open the envelope. I explained my reluctance. If it did turn out to be an invoice, it would be inadvisable to pay it because British Gas’s computers would not know how to interpret the discrepancy. It was British Gas’s error and I knew very well that, if I tried to finesse the system, it would be me who suffered rather than British Gas.
She told me that she was sure the envelope just contained some advertising and that I should ignore it and throw it away. I said that if I was going to throw it away, there could hardly be any harm in opening it so I did so. It was a final demand, threatening bailiffs and distraint. This sent her back into the system. After a lengthy pause, she reported back to me that she had corrected the error and that a new invoice in my name would be issued in a week. She apologised in a dignified way.
I thought the apology should come from the office that made the error, so I next telephoned the number given on the invoice. I had to explain everything again to the woman who replied and she said that she too would ensure that a correct invoice was issued and that I would receive a telephone call apologising to me in a day or two. No such call has been made. When your envelope arrived today addressed to “Mr Rigby”, I naturally thought at first that it was yet a fourth issue of the erroneous invoice, probably threatening public execution. Much against my instincts, I opened it and therein found your questionnaire. It at least gives me the opportunity to air my grievance.
I have been a British Gas customer for 40 years, long before the industry was privatised. Now that competition has entered the market, it seems you can get power from the local supermarket, the shop that formerly sold videotapes and a bloke passing on a bicycle. If you want to keep your customers, you had better buck up your ideas.
I hope this is helpful. I am still awaiting a formal apology and a correct invoice.
Yours sincerely ...
I shall of course report on any developments. I have yet to hear from Ofcom (see two entries back).
Wednesday, January 10, 2007
DOGGEDLY DEVOTED
So-called "dangerous dogs" have been in the news again. Of course the cliché that there are no dangerous dogs, only dangerous owners, is too easy and not wholly true. But the world divides roughly into three groups – those who love dogs, those who hate (or are at best indifferent to) dogs and those who use dogs as a convenience. That third group is probably the largest.
The dog-haters and their less passionate henchpeople are easily dealt with. I have a friend who detests dogs because a relation of his was savaged by a dog when they were both children. This is understandable to a degree but irrational. You might as well hate all humanity because of what the Nazis did. Those who are "scared" of dogs are just as irrational. Scratch someone made nervous by dogs and you usually reveal someone who has never been around dogs. I have lost count of the number of our friends who, hitherto not drawn to dogs, now enquire after our two before they come on to our own health and well-being. (Of course, we happen to live with the two most charming, friendly and adorable animals in the history of the world, but I would say that, wouldn't I).
There's a theory that the world divides between dog-lovers and cat-lovers but that's too reductive for me. Plenty of people love both. I would have difficulty living with a cat because of the dead birds, mice, voles and other blameless creatures it would bring me as offerings. Cats torture and kill for sport and I find that as repellent in animals as in humans. On the other hand, cats usually like me and I feel a glow of mutual pleasure when a friend's cat curls up in my lap (along with the sheer relief when it stops digging its claws through my trousers).
I once heard it suggested that cats are for people who need to give love and dogs for those who need to receive love. Too reductive again. But the uncritical approval that dogs appear to offer – I emphasize "appear to" – is clearly good for the soul. Keeping a pet – any pet – that responds to your affection is said to reduce stress levels and promote beneficial hormones (in the pet-owner and conceivably in the pet too) and I don't doubt it. Cats are probably cooler (in every sense) than dogs and their self-sufficiency has a lot to be said for it. But I'll return to the demands of dog-owning.
Those who use dogs as a convenience forget to make the rather crucial distinction between having a pet and having, say, a microwave. Dogs have a great many "uses". Their natural abilities in detecting things beyond human capacity is still being discovered. For decades, dog have had their instincts refined by humans in order to guide the blind and sight-impaired, to herd and track, to find lost or trapped people and to sniff out certain substances. We are only now beginning to discover how profound is their astonishing ability to detect incipient disease or trauma in humans and to learn complex tasks whereby they can assist the severely disabled.
That dogs are also encouraged to tap into their potential ferocity – as guard, attack and fighting dogs – is no reflection on dogs themselves. Dog-fighting is still nauseatingly wide-spread, an underground pursuit requiring animals that, without strict control, are a danger to the public. Many people, especially men, think it adds to their (imagined) macho aura to keep a dog reputed to be aggressive – a Rottweiler, a Doberman or some variety of bull terrier. These are all dogs that need skilled handling and are not suited to being cooped up in cramped households. Perhaps the least suitable for this male-vanity purpose is the most popular breed of all in this stratum of society: the German shepherd. These dogs are highly-strung and can easily become defensively fierce.
Certain kinds of dog are made popular or fashionable by chance. The demand for Dalmatians, another challenging breed, sky-rocketed after a couple of live-action movies loosely based on the Dodie Smith story The Hundred and One Dalmatians. I'll bet a distressing proportion of them had to be re-homed. The long-running Andrex lavatory paper campaign (in which, paradoxically, the puppies' anuses are digitally removed from the footage) has helped to keep golden retrievers hugely popular, especially in child-centred households. Tragically, the market for retrievers has brought in many unscrupulous dealers who have force-bred puppies to meet the demand. Professional breeders manage whelping in a way that ensures bloodlines are kept true. Puppy farmers overbreed and use sires and dams that may be unsuited to the purpose. There are now many retrievers at large that have brain and other defects. It is no longer the breed that used to be the proverbial child-friendly dog. In fact, the Andrex campaign has been the ruination of the breed.
A golden occasionally attended the dog class at which our two are regulars. He was cantankerous from an early age and would often growl at the other dogs. He is the only dog we have known in five years of attending the class to have bitten the teacher. Later we heard that his family got a spaniel puppy for their youngest child and the retriever broke its jaw. It recovered but it had to be wired up and re-homed. I hope the child is not in any danger from the retriever.
The key word in the previous paragraph is "occasionally". If the golden had rigorously attended class, it would almost certainly have had its aggressive instincts trained away. All dogs – I repeat, all dogs – need to go to regular training classes, ideally for their whole lives so that the good things that they learn are reinforced regularly and they are kept socialized with other dogs. There are many things to know about keeping a dog and unless you do the homework you are bound to make mistakes. I wonder if, when the spaniel puppy was brought into the house where the golden retriever had been previously unchallenged, the owners were careful to wrap the newcomer in a blanket impregnated with the scent of the incumbent dog. Such a simple trick leads the resident dog to believe that the intruder must be already a part of the pack and makes the process of acceptance much quicker. In a mirror gesture, the new owners should get the pup's mother and the rest of the pup's litter to scent some piece of cloth that can be placed in the pup's bed in its new home so that it has a familiar scent to reassure it. Smell is the primary sense for dogs and its importance cannot be overestimated. Nor can the pack instinct. When a dog comes into your home, it needs to establish its own place in your family, its new pack. Beware the dog who is allowed to become the dominant member of the whole pack.
Dogs are a huge responsibility. It is not simply that a dog-owner is liable for the dog's behaviour, in law as in morality. It is also that a dog is a long-term and a constant commitment. The best piece of advice about keeping a dog is very simple: don't. A dog is as dependent on its owner as a human baby but a dog never grows into an independent life. You can't send a dog out to school, tell it to go and play in the park, send it to the shop with an order and remind it to bring back the change. Dogs don't take a gap year before university. You don't need to know where your children are every minute of the day, provided you have a reasonable relationship with them based on a degree of mutual trust. But you do need to know where your dog is every minute of the day.
Of course there are exceptions. Another retriever/labrador trait is – or used to be – wandering. My headmaster's golden would be regularly seen pacing around the town alone, negotiating the roads with practised skill and never in any danger of getting lost. But that was in the 1960s and the traffic was a lot lighter and a lot more patient. Today, it might even get stolen, unthinkable then.
No one should take on a dog unless the depth of commitment is understood and can be met. My partner David and I were both brought up with dogs and we were both broody for a dog for years. But we lived in London with no garden, we had no routine, we were out a lot. There was no question of having a dog. When we moved to the country, we both worked from home and we had not only a garden but an adjacent field that came with the house. I had always imagined that, living in the country, we would be taking regular and immense walks with our dogs but, as luck would have it, the breed we chose (a Great Dane) is notable for its lack of stamina – like all big dogs, its heart is the same size as a small dog's – and half a dozen turns round the field each day is enough for him. Our second dog, a petit basset, has little legs and is able to pace himself to the big guy and still get sufficient exercise.
We never leave our dogs in the house for more than three hours at a stretch without arranging for the neighbours to call in and give them some attention and that only happens a couple of times a year. When we are away, we have regular housesitters who know and are adored by the dogs. (This is not to say that we don't have to be careful to disguise the imminence of our departure. The sight of a suitcase is enough to set the Dane howling). And both dogs have a varied diet, entirely consisting of fresh raw food and bones. They are fit, healthy, active, well-exercised, regularly trained, curious about the world and fascinated by people and other dogs. I don't think a pet deserves or should achieve anything less. No dog should be left on its own all day while the humans go off to work. A bored, lonely and ill-exercised dog will become fractious or listless or aggressive or neurotic or ill. It simply is cruelty to keep a dog that cannot be looked after. So many people get a dog "for the children" and then find that the children change and develop other interests and the dog depends on the most reliable adult in the house. If you take on a dog, you have to plan for 12 or 15 years of having a totally dependent creature. And it is much better to have two so that the dog at least has a companion when you're otherwise engaged.
So what about the dog that savages a child ... or savages anybody, even somebody else's dog? The desire to attack doesn't come from nowhere, nor is it innate unless the dog feels the need to defend itself or feed itself. Small children can be vulnerable because they do not always understand how to treat a dog and the dog does not always understand how to relate to a small person who gives it no food or exercise. No dog, even the best regulated, should ever be left alone with a baby, simply because a baby is hard for a dog to relate to. You cannot expect to take an animal into your home, one whose DNA is informed by a long ancestry of living in the wild, and expect it by its own intuition to fit into your arrangements. Dogs have to be taught and shown, chastised and praised, given their own space and kept occupied. Their owners need to learn what they require and what they must be denied for their own well-being (chocolate, for instance, and potatoes and cooked bones). They need a routine so that they can be sure that if they can be patient for a certain familiar amount of time they will be able to go outside and have a pee and a run. Dogs do have an uncanny sense of time. When my father had a shop, he closed up over lunchtime and walked home and back but on Saturdays, his busiest day, my mother drove to the shop with his lunch which he ate on the run. Our border collie would go with her in the car. Every Saturday, he would be waiting at the back door to go to the car long before my mother did anything to indicate that today was Saturday. He just knew.
Dogs are extraordinary creatures. They deserve our unstinting support and humility. No one should take on a dog unless they can unconditionally provide all of that support and humility.
Please download my book Common Sense free of all charge by clicking the link in the right margin and following the simple instructions on the website.
So-called "dangerous dogs" have been in the news again. Of course the cliché that there are no dangerous dogs, only dangerous owners, is too easy and not wholly true. But the world divides roughly into three groups – those who love dogs, those who hate (or are at best indifferent to) dogs and those who use dogs as a convenience. That third group is probably the largest.
The dog-haters and their less passionate henchpeople are easily dealt with. I have a friend who detests dogs because a relation of his was savaged by a dog when they were both children. This is understandable to a degree but irrational. You might as well hate all humanity because of what the Nazis did. Those who are "scared" of dogs are just as irrational. Scratch someone made nervous by dogs and you usually reveal someone who has never been around dogs. I have lost count of the number of our friends who, hitherto not drawn to dogs, now enquire after our two before they come on to our own health and well-being. (Of course, we happen to live with the two most charming, friendly and adorable animals in the history of the world, but I would say that, wouldn't I).
There's a theory that the world divides between dog-lovers and cat-lovers but that's too reductive for me. Plenty of people love both. I would have difficulty living with a cat because of the dead birds, mice, voles and other blameless creatures it would bring me as offerings. Cats torture and kill for sport and I find that as repellent in animals as in humans. On the other hand, cats usually like me and I feel a glow of mutual pleasure when a friend's cat curls up in my lap (along with the sheer relief when it stops digging its claws through my trousers).
I once heard it suggested that cats are for people who need to give love and dogs for those who need to receive love. Too reductive again. But the uncritical approval that dogs appear to offer – I emphasize "appear to" – is clearly good for the soul. Keeping a pet – any pet – that responds to your affection is said to reduce stress levels and promote beneficial hormones (in the pet-owner and conceivably in the pet too) and I don't doubt it. Cats are probably cooler (in every sense) than dogs and their self-sufficiency has a lot to be said for it. But I'll return to the demands of dog-owning.
Those who use dogs as a convenience forget to make the rather crucial distinction between having a pet and having, say, a microwave. Dogs have a great many "uses". Their natural abilities in detecting things beyond human capacity is still being discovered. For decades, dog have had their instincts refined by humans in order to guide the blind and sight-impaired, to herd and track, to find lost or trapped people and to sniff out certain substances. We are only now beginning to discover how profound is their astonishing ability to detect incipient disease or trauma in humans and to learn complex tasks whereby they can assist the severely disabled.
That dogs are also encouraged to tap into their potential ferocity – as guard, attack and fighting dogs – is no reflection on dogs themselves. Dog-fighting is still nauseatingly wide-spread, an underground pursuit requiring animals that, without strict control, are a danger to the public. Many people, especially men, think it adds to their (imagined) macho aura to keep a dog reputed to be aggressive – a Rottweiler, a Doberman or some variety of bull terrier. These are all dogs that need skilled handling and are not suited to being cooped up in cramped households. Perhaps the least suitable for this male-vanity purpose is the most popular breed of all in this stratum of society: the German shepherd. These dogs are highly-strung and can easily become defensively fierce.
Certain kinds of dog are made popular or fashionable by chance. The demand for Dalmatians, another challenging breed, sky-rocketed after a couple of live-action movies loosely based on the Dodie Smith story The Hundred and One Dalmatians. I'll bet a distressing proportion of them had to be re-homed. The long-running Andrex lavatory paper campaign (in which, paradoxically, the puppies' anuses are digitally removed from the footage) has helped to keep golden retrievers hugely popular, especially in child-centred households. Tragically, the market for retrievers has brought in many unscrupulous dealers who have force-bred puppies to meet the demand. Professional breeders manage whelping in a way that ensures bloodlines are kept true. Puppy farmers overbreed and use sires and dams that may be unsuited to the purpose. There are now many retrievers at large that have brain and other defects. It is no longer the breed that used to be the proverbial child-friendly dog. In fact, the Andrex campaign has been the ruination of the breed.
A golden occasionally attended the dog class at which our two are regulars. He was cantankerous from an early age and would often growl at the other dogs. He is the only dog we have known in five years of attending the class to have bitten the teacher. Later we heard that his family got a spaniel puppy for their youngest child and the retriever broke its jaw. It recovered but it had to be wired up and re-homed. I hope the child is not in any danger from the retriever.
The key word in the previous paragraph is "occasionally". If the golden had rigorously attended class, it would almost certainly have had its aggressive instincts trained away. All dogs – I repeat, all dogs – need to go to regular training classes, ideally for their whole lives so that the good things that they learn are reinforced regularly and they are kept socialized with other dogs. There are many things to know about keeping a dog and unless you do the homework you are bound to make mistakes. I wonder if, when the spaniel puppy was brought into the house where the golden retriever had been previously unchallenged, the owners were careful to wrap the newcomer in a blanket impregnated with the scent of the incumbent dog. Such a simple trick leads the resident dog to believe that the intruder must be already a part of the pack and makes the process of acceptance much quicker. In a mirror gesture, the new owners should get the pup's mother and the rest of the pup's litter to scent some piece of cloth that can be placed in the pup's bed in its new home so that it has a familiar scent to reassure it. Smell is the primary sense for dogs and its importance cannot be overestimated. Nor can the pack instinct. When a dog comes into your home, it needs to establish its own place in your family, its new pack. Beware the dog who is allowed to become the dominant member of the whole pack.
Dogs are a huge responsibility. It is not simply that a dog-owner is liable for the dog's behaviour, in law as in morality. It is also that a dog is a long-term and a constant commitment. The best piece of advice about keeping a dog is very simple: don't. A dog is as dependent on its owner as a human baby but a dog never grows into an independent life. You can't send a dog out to school, tell it to go and play in the park, send it to the shop with an order and remind it to bring back the change. Dogs don't take a gap year before university. You don't need to know where your children are every minute of the day, provided you have a reasonable relationship with them based on a degree of mutual trust. But you do need to know where your dog is every minute of the day.
Of course there are exceptions. Another retriever/labrador trait is – or used to be – wandering. My headmaster's golden would be regularly seen pacing around the town alone, negotiating the roads with practised skill and never in any danger of getting lost. But that was in the 1960s and the traffic was a lot lighter and a lot more patient. Today, it might even get stolen, unthinkable then.
No one should take on a dog unless the depth of commitment is understood and can be met. My partner David and I were both brought up with dogs and we were both broody for a dog for years. But we lived in London with no garden, we had no routine, we were out a lot. There was no question of having a dog. When we moved to the country, we both worked from home and we had not only a garden but an adjacent field that came with the house. I had always imagined that, living in the country, we would be taking regular and immense walks with our dogs but, as luck would have it, the breed we chose (a Great Dane) is notable for its lack of stamina – like all big dogs, its heart is the same size as a small dog's – and half a dozen turns round the field each day is enough for him. Our second dog, a petit basset, has little legs and is able to pace himself to the big guy and still get sufficient exercise.
We never leave our dogs in the house for more than three hours at a stretch without arranging for the neighbours to call in and give them some attention and that only happens a couple of times a year. When we are away, we have regular housesitters who know and are adored by the dogs. (This is not to say that we don't have to be careful to disguise the imminence of our departure. The sight of a suitcase is enough to set the Dane howling). And both dogs have a varied diet, entirely consisting of fresh raw food and bones. They are fit, healthy, active, well-exercised, regularly trained, curious about the world and fascinated by people and other dogs. I don't think a pet deserves or should achieve anything less. No dog should be left on its own all day while the humans go off to work. A bored, lonely and ill-exercised dog will become fractious or listless or aggressive or neurotic or ill. It simply is cruelty to keep a dog that cannot be looked after. So many people get a dog "for the children" and then find that the children change and develop other interests and the dog depends on the most reliable adult in the house. If you take on a dog, you have to plan for 12 or 15 years of having a totally dependent creature. And it is much better to have two so that the dog at least has a companion when you're otherwise engaged.
So what about the dog that savages a child ... or savages anybody, even somebody else's dog? The desire to attack doesn't come from nowhere, nor is it innate unless the dog feels the need to defend itself or feed itself. Small children can be vulnerable because they do not always understand how to treat a dog and the dog does not always understand how to relate to a small person who gives it no food or exercise. No dog, even the best regulated, should ever be left alone with a baby, simply because a baby is hard for a dog to relate to. You cannot expect to take an animal into your home, one whose DNA is informed by a long ancestry of living in the wild, and expect it by its own intuition to fit into your arrangements. Dogs have to be taught and shown, chastised and praised, given their own space and kept occupied. Their owners need to learn what they require and what they must be denied for their own well-being (chocolate, for instance, and potatoes and cooked bones). They need a routine so that they can be sure that if they can be patient for a certain familiar amount of time they will be able to go outside and have a pee and a run. Dogs do have an uncanny sense of time. When my father had a shop, he closed up over lunchtime and walked home and back but on Saturdays, his busiest day, my mother drove to the shop with his lunch which he ate on the run. Our border collie would go with her in the car. Every Saturday, he would be waiting at the back door to go to the car long before my mother did anything to indicate that today was Saturday. He just knew.
Dogs are extraordinary creatures. They deserve our unstinting support and humility. No one should take on a dog unless they can unconditionally provide all of that support and humility.
Please download my book Common Sense free of all charge by clicking the link in the right margin and following the simple instructions on the website.
Saturday, January 06, 2007
IT's NOT for YOU-HOO
A week before Christmas, we lost our on-line connection. Getting it restored took me three days devoted to making a nuisance of myself with British Telecom. Below is the text of a letter I am sending this weekend to Ofcom, the telecommunications watchdog, copied to our MP.
Dear Sir/Madam
I have been a customer, first of GPO Telephones, subsequently of BT, throughout the more-than-40 years since I left home to attend university. I have never had a choice about it because, in recent years, I have lived in areas where cable alternatives are unavailable. For the last year or two, we have been connected to BT Broadband.
On the afternoon of Monday December 18th last, à propos of nothing at all, I found that I had lost connection with the internet. The ADSL link to my wireless router (a Belkin 54g) from the BT Broadband line had spontaneously severed itself. The same problem had occurred some two months earlier when, after several days during which I spent a long time on the phone with the BT Broadband Helpline (based in Chennai, India), the problem seemed to correct itself without discernible intervention at my end.
Once again, on this occasion, my first port of call was the Chennai Helpline. As before, the patient operatives there ordered a number of tests to be made on the line, conducted without any engineers coming to our house and, as before, they found no fault. I talked to the helpline provided by the manufacturers of the Belkin router. Because it had been suggested that there might be a problem with this router, I next day purchased an alternative, a router by Netgear, at a cost of £79.90. But the disconnection remained. The ADSL light on the Netgear, as on the Belkin, did not light up and, because there was no ADSL connection, I was unable to configure the Netgear router. The Belkin carries in addition a light indicating a connection to a phone line. This too was dark.
I persisted with the BT Broadband Helpline. I asked that the sending of a BT engineer to the house be authorized. They insisted that the problem was not with the line. So I asked the computer shop that had sold me the Netgear router to send a computer engineer. They agreed to do so, at a cost to me of £129.
The computer engineer could establish no ADSL or phone line connection to my Netgear router, nor to a router of his own that he had brought with him. He agreed with the manufacturers of the Netgear router (whose helpline I had also consulted) that the problem must be with the phone line. I reported these findings to the BT Broadband Helpline. They claimed to have duplicated the line trials and that there was no fault on the line. I asked again that they send an engineer. They said that they could not authorize this.
I spent a whole day trying to take the matter further within the BT organization. One kindly woman in BT Customer Services did volunteer to refund me the cost of the computer engineer call-out and to make an adjustment to our next bill in recognition of the phone calls I had made. I subsequently received a letter over the signature of the Customer Service Director, saying that our account had been credited £149.00 on December 21st.
But the kindly woman, like everyone else I spoke to at BT, passed me on to another department that could not help me. I was attempting to locate someone who would authorize the sending of an engineer to the house so that I might ensure that I was back on line in time for Christmas. As I grew more frustrated and ragged with BT, I began to make it clear to its representatives that if my connection were not restored in time for Christmas, any engineer coming to the house thereafter would be doing so to disconnect BT Broadband. We would get by with dial-up computing and with mobile phones.
I was eventually told that the engineers would need to do two days of tests before any home visit. I gently pointed out that the line had already been tested to destruction. I asked again why I could not be connected to someone who would authorize the sending of an engineer. I was told that the engineers could only be communicated with by email. This was Alice in Wonderland. I asked to speak to someone at BT actually authorized to use the bloody telephone.
When it became clear that no one could or would help me, I asked to be put through to the Chairman’s office. This at least had the effect of connecting me to BT headquarters. I was not permitted to speak directly to the Chairman or anyone in his office as that office operates on a return-call principle. But I spoke to someone who listened to my case and who promised to call me back the next day, it now being near the end of office hours. With a short break for lunch, I had been on the phone almost continuously from 9.00am until past 5.00pm and this was the third day on which the lack of an on-line connection had dominated my waking hours. My shoulders were knotted almost beyond repair, my left ear hurt fit to burst and I had been cured of wanting to be played Mozart (especially down a phone line) ever again. I felt sceptical that I would hear any more – several BT people had previously promised to call me back and had not done so. One had even urged me several times to “trust me” and then had not come good on that earnest of trust.
The next day I was indeed phoned by something called, I think I heard right, the Office of Higher Complaints. The man who called me promised to take charge of the case and to arrange for an engineer to visit our house. He also gave me his direct number. Sure enough, he called back to give me a date for an engineer’s visit. It would not be in time for Christmas – it was by now the Thursday and I knew what was possible and what not – but I had a firm date.
That evening, the router “spontaneously” (as it seemed to me) reconnected to the phone line. I was indeed back on line for Christmas. After the holiday (but before New Year’s Eve), a BT Open Reach van duly arrived. The engineer, it turned out, was based at a depot in our town. He explained the relationship between BT and Open Reach and was frankly dismissive of the BT Broadband Helpline. He also seemed to confirm what I had begun to suspect and what other BT customers have told me: that nobody at BT wants to do anything for you if there's no obvious profit in it for BT. He said that BT are reluctant to call in Open Reach because it means a commitment to expenditure. And he, like the officer from Higher Complaints, gave me his direct number. He also found no fault in the house’s connections but he installed a new extension box so that I no longer need to use micro-filters between phone line and router.
Revealing that there was something he could try at the exchange and that there remained a possibility that our individual line to the exchange might indeed have a faulty connection at the exchange itself, he left. The Higher Complaints officer has been diligent in his attentions – indeed, I have had to explain to him that a daily phone call to ask if everything is fine is really not necessary.
My Broadband connection has not failed since and I have permitted the Higher Complaints officer to – as he put it – close the case, though I remain braced for a breakdown as unheralded as the last one. BT has, on the face of it, finally come good but not without my losing the greater part of the week before Christmas, a time when I could have been, ought to have been and would much rather have been preoccupied with other matters, let alone my work – which, as I operate from home, relies on my having reliable on-line access.
There does seem to be a culture of avoidance at BT. The recorded messages you encounter indicate that you in turn may be recorded for training purposes and you wonder what is learned from the recordings they hold of your mounting frustration. They give you a case reference number that no one ever asks to have cited. There is evidently no direct route to the solution of a customer’s problem. Operatives at Customer Services, as at the Broadband Helpline, are courteous and patient but do not appear to be provided with clear avenues down which they can guide you to someone qualified to address your problem. The franchising of Open Reach makes no sense if BT only see it as a resource of last resort.
I hope this customer’s experience is of use to you.
Thank you for bearing with me through a rather extended account.
Yours faithfully,
W.Stephen Gilbert
I shall report on Ofcom's response in due course. Meanwhile, it might be instructive to compare this experience with the correspondence reproduced as the chapter 'A Tale of a Chubb' in my book Common Sense, free to download by clicking the link in the right hand sidebar.
A week before Christmas, we lost our on-line connection. Getting it restored took me three days devoted to making a nuisance of myself with British Telecom. Below is the text of a letter I am sending this weekend to Ofcom, the telecommunications watchdog, copied to our MP.
Dear Sir/Madam
I have been a customer, first of GPO Telephones, subsequently of BT, throughout the more-than-40 years since I left home to attend university. I have never had a choice about it because, in recent years, I have lived in areas where cable alternatives are unavailable. For the last year or two, we have been connected to BT Broadband.
On the afternoon of Monday December 18th last, à propos of nothing at all, I found that I had lost connection with the internet. The ADSL link to my wireless router (a Belkin 54g) from the BT Broadband line had spontaneously severed itself. The same problem had occurred some two months earlier when, after several days during which I spent a long time on the phone with the BT Broadband Helpline (based in Chennai, India), the problem seemed to correct itself without discernible intervention at my end.
Once again, on this occasion, my first port of call was the Chennai Helpline. As before, the patient operatives there ordered a number of tests to be made on the line, conducted without any engineers coming to our house and, as before, they found no fault. I talked to the helpline provided by the manufacturers of the Belkin router. Because it had been suggested that there might be a problem with this router, I next day purchased an alternative, a router by Netgear, at a cost of £79.90. But the disconnection remained. The ADSL light on the Netgear, as on the Belkin, did not light up and, because there was no ADSL connection, I was unable to configure the Netgear router. The Belkin carries in addition a light indicating a connection to a phone line. This too was dark.
I persisted with the BT Broadband Helpline. I asked that the sending of a BT engineer to the house be authorized. They insisted that the problem was not with the line. So I asked the computer shop that had sold me the Netgear router to send a computer engineer. They agreed to do so, at a cost to me of £129.
The computer engineer could establish no ADSL or phone line connection to my Netgear router, nor to a router of his own that he had brought with him. He agreed with the manufacturers of the Netgear router (whose helpline I had also consulted) that the problem must be with the phone line. I reported these findings to the BT Broadband Helpline. They claimed to have duplicated the line trials and that there was no fault on the line. I asked again that they send an engineer. They said that they could not authorize this.
I spent a whole day trying to take the matter further within the BT organization. One kindly woman in BT Customer Services did volunteer to refund me the cost of the computer engineer call-out and to make an adjustment to our next bill in recognition of the phone calls I had made. I subsequently received a letter over the signature of the Customer Service Director, saying that our account had been credited £149.00 on December 21st.
But the kindly woman, like everyone else I spoke to at BT, passed me on to another department that could not help me. I was attempting to locate someone who would authorize the sending of an engineer to the house so that I might ensure that I was back on line in time for Christmas. As I grew more frustrated and ragged with BT, I began to make it clear to its representatives that if my connection were not restored in time for Christmas, any engineer coming to the house thereafter would be doing so to disconnect BT Broadband. We would get by with dial-up computing and with mobile phones.
I was eventually told that the engineers would need to do two days of tests before any home visit. I gently pointed out that the line had already been tested to destruction. I asked again why I could not be connected to someone who would authorize the sending of an engineer. I was told that the engineers could only be communicated with by email. This was Alice in Wonderland. I asked to speak to someone at BT actually authorized to use the bloody telephone.
When it became clear that no one could or would help me, I asked to be put through to the Chairman’s office. This at least had the effect of connecting me to BT headquarters. I was not permitted to speak directly to the Chairman or anyone in his office as that office operates on a return-call principle. But I spoke to someone who listened to my case and who promised to call me back the next day, it now being near the end of office hours. With a short break for lunch, I had been on the phone almost continuously from 9.00am until past 5.00pm and this was the third day on which the lack of an on-line connection had dominated my waking hours. My shoulders were knotted almost beyond repair, my left ear hurt fit to burst and I had been cured of wanting to be played Mozart (especially down a phone line) ever again. I felt sceptical that I would hear any more – several BT people had previously promised to call me back and had not done so. One had even urged me several times to “trust me” and then had not come good on that earnest of trust.
The next day I was indeed phoned by something called, I think I heard right, the Office of Higher Complaints. The man who called me promised to take charge of the case and to arrange for an engineer to visit our house. He also gave me his direct number. Sure enough, he called back to give me a date for an engineer’s visit. It would not be in time for Christmas – it was by now the Thursday and I knew what was possible and what not – but I had a firm date.
That evening, the router “spontaneously” (as it seemed to me) reconnected to the phone line. I was indeed back on line for Christmas. After the holiday (but before New Year’s Eve), a BT Open Reach van duly arrived. The engineer, it turned out, was based at a depot in our town. He explained the relationship between BT and Open Reach and was frankly dismissive of the BT Broadband Helpline. He also seemed to confirm what I had begun to suspect and what other BT customers have told me: that nobody at BT wants to do anything for you if there's no obvious profit in it for BT. He said that BT are reluctant to call in Open Reach because it means a commitment to expenditure. And he, like the officer from Higher Complaints, gave me his direct number. He also found no fault in the house’s connections but he installed a new extension box so that I no longer need to use micro-filters between phone line and router.
Revealing that there was something he could try at the exchange and that there remained a possibility that our individual line to the exchange might indeed have a faulty connection at the exchange itself, he left. The Higher Complaints officer has been diligent in his attentions – indeed, I have had to explain to him that a daily phone call to ask if everything is fine is really not necessary.
My Broadband connection has not failed since and I have permitted the Higher Complaints officer to – as he put it – close the case, though I remain braced for a breakdown as unheralded as the last one. BT has, on the face of it, finally come good but not without my losing the greater part of the week before Christmas, a time when I could have been, ought to have been and would much rather have been preoccupied with other matters, let alone my work – which, as I operate from home, relies on my having reliable on-line access.
There does seem to be a culture of avoidance at BT. The recorded messages you encounter indicate that you in turn may be recorded for training purposes and you wonder what is learned from the recordings they hold of your mounting frustration. They give you a case reference number that no one ever asks to have cited. There is evidently no direct route to the solution of a customer’s problem. Operatives at Customer Services, as at the Broadband Helpline, are courteous and patient but do not appear to be provided with clear avenues down which they can guide you to someone qualified to address your problem. The franchising of Open Reach makes no sense if BT only see it as a resource of last resort.
I hope this customer’s experience is of use to you.
Thank you for bearing with me through a rather extended account.
Yours faithfully,
W.Stephen Gilbert
I shall report on Ofcom's response in due course. Meanwhile, it might be instructive to compare this experience with the correspondence reproduced as the chapter 'A Tale of a Chubb' in my book Common Sense, free to download by clicking the link in the right hand sidebar.
Saturday, December 30, 2006
CONVERGING CHANNELS
I just turned on BBC1 (at 5.12pm on Saturday December 30th) and it was screening The Weakest Link. It's not a programme that I care for, so I switched to BBC2. And that channel was showing ... The Weakest Link. How fabulous is that? Isn't it wonderful that we cannot watch television at all without paying the BBC's licence fee and yet the BBC treats us with such contempt?
I am not of the party believing that the BBC should be funded by advertisements. If the collection of the licence fee is not to continue to be the means by which the Corporation is financed, then it should be done through a direct disbursement from taxation. But the BBC needs to pull up its socks in a big way. I mounted a comprehensive criticism of its present state in my book Common Sense – freely downloadable from the link in the right margin – but I did not therein explore very far the increasing lack of distinction between the multi-channel broadcasters' respective suites of channels.
ITV has no discernible policy for the scheduling of its four channels, save that the lack of news bulletins on ITVs 2, 3 and 4 allows for movies to be placed to start at useful junctions without worrying over much about where they might end. ITV3 shows a lot of serial drama repeats but no drama series or one-offs. (The one-off play is the great missed opportunity of the proliferation of channels, where all sorts of archived treasures could be disinterred to surprise and delight an audience that has forgotten or has never known how creative and stimulating the pre-satellite broadcast world could be). ITV2 in particular would appear to be an entirely pointless entity.
Channel 4's support channels, E4 and More4, mostly allow a pattern of repeats, sometimes with the first screening taking place on More4 and the follow-up appearing on C4, much as BBC2 carries selected repeats from BBC4 and even BBC3. Even when it was a subscription house, you never needed to worry about movies on Film4 passing you by because they always turned up sooner or later on C4 and they continue to do so. Sky Two appears to be a channel wholly dedicated to reruns, while Sky Three's schedules seem unfamiliar but contain nothing that any sane viewer might be moved to sample (eg "Monster Waves: accounts of giant walls of water that crush everything in their path" according to the Radio Times billing for today). Five Life and Five US also look like schedules of unseen material with no appeal – I can't imagine anyone I might know being drawn to a title like Pimp My Ride.
BBC3 is a closed book to me and I take as definitive the remark made of it (which I can no longer source) that, while switched to it, "you are never more than an hour and a half away from a repeat of Two Pints of Lager and a Packet of Crisps" (I swear to any god you care to cite that I just glanced down at Radio Times in case that title was in view so that I could verify that I had reproduced it exactly and there it was directly under my eye, at 11.25pm today). BBC4 has become the repository of the kind of programming that used to make up BBC2. New and archive editions of the arts magazine Arena, which originated on BBC2 and became a staple of that channel, are now only to be found on BBC4. Documentaries about popular culture – often really very popular culture and presented in a patronising way, replete with 'celebrity' contributions and dramatised scenes – have become the characteristic form for BBC4, the kind of programming you might think would be perfectly marketable on BBC2 or even, not so long ago, on BBC1. There is nothing remotely demanding on BBC4 but its output is considered – by the BBC planners and presumably elsewhere – as the nearest thing television now approaches to what used to be called the highbrow. I can vouch that, 50 years ago, much more demanding fare was frequently broadcast on the BBC's only television channel, to audiences far larger than any that BBC4 might dream of today.
BBC2 is now the home of repeats of Porridge and Dad's Army, Strictly Come Dancing and Match of the Day off-shoots, Dan Cruickshank and Adam Hart-Davis, Simon Schama and Bill Oddie. It's an awful long way from the BBC2 of Michael Peacock and, in his controller phase, David Attenborough. If it can overlap an edition of The Weakest Link with an edition showing on BBC1, it really does have no separate identity left. In which case, what is the point of it?
What's more, all the terrestrial broadcasters' channels are losing audience, save at present C4, both with their terrestrial and with their Freeview satellite channels. That their schedules have sacrificed character and definition is clearly a large part of their problem. There must be a significant audience for what became known briefly in the 1980s as "quality programming" that would cleave to BBC2 if it became apparent that such programming might characteristically be found there. But as BBC2 has got down in the garbage can with everybody else, it no longer commands a loyal following, only defining itself by such viewers who have always shunned it because they thought it was elitist and fancy. Boy, are they out of date.
I just turned on BBC1 (at 5.12pm on Saturday December 30th) and it was screening The Weakest Link. It's not a programme that I care for, so I switched to BBC2. And that channel was showing ... The Weakest Link. How fabulous is that? Isn't it wonderful that we cannot watch television at all without paying the BBC's licence fee and yet the BBC treats us with such contempt?
I am not of the party believing that the BBC should be funded by advertisements. If the collection of the licence fee is not to continue to be the means by which the Corporation is financed, then it should be done through a direct disbursement from taxation. But the BBC needs to pull up its socks in a big way. I mounted a comprehensive criticism of its present state in my book Common Sense – freely downloadable from the link in the right margin – but I did not therein explore very far the increasing lack of distinction between the multi-channel broadcasters' respective suites of channels.
ITV has no discernible policy for the scheduling of its four channels, save that the lack of news bulletins on ITVs 2, 3 and 4 allows for movies to be placed to start at useful junctions without worrying over much about where they might end. ITV3 shows a lot of serial drama repeats but no drama series or one-offs. (The one-off play is the great missed opportunity of the proliferation of channels, where all sorts of archived treasures could be disinterred to surprise and delight an audience that has forgotten or has never known how creative and stimulating the pre-satellite broadcast world could be). ITV2 in particular would appear to be an entirely pointless entity.
Channel 4's support channels, E4 and More4, mostly allow a pattern of repeats, sometimes with the first screening taking place on More4 and the follow-up appearing on C4, much as BBC2 carries selected repeats from BBC4 and even BBC3. Even when it was a subscription house, you never needed to worry about movies on Film4 passing you by because they always turned up sooner or later on C4 and they continue to do so. Sky Two appears to be a channel wholly dedicated to reruns, while Sky Three's schedules seem unfamiliar but contain nothing that any sane viewer might be moved to sample (eg "Monster Waves: accounts of giant walls of water that crush everything in their path" according to the Radio Times billing for today). Five Life and Five US also look like schedules of unseen material with no appeal – I can't imagine anyone I might know being drawn to a title like Pimp My Ride.
BBC3 is a closed book to me and I take as definitive the remark made of it (which I can no longer source) that, while switched to it, "you are never more than an hour and a half away from a repeat of Two Pints of Lager and a Packet of Crisps" (I swear to any god you care to cite that I just glanced down at Radio Times in case that title was in view so that I could verify that I had reproduced it exactly and there it was directly under my eye, at 11.25pm today). BBC4 has become the repository of the kind of programming that used to make up BBC2. New and archive editions of the arts magazine Arena, which originated on BBC2 and became a staple of that channel, are now only to be found on BBC4. Documentaries about popular culture – often really very popular culture and presented in a patronising way, replete with 'celebrity' contributions and dramatised scenes – have become the characteristic form for BBC4, the kind of programming you might think would be perfectly marketable on BBC2 or even, not so long ago, on BBC1. There is nothing remotely demanding on BBC4 but its output is considered – by the BBC planners and presumably elsewhere – as the nearest thing television now approaches to what used to be called the highbrow. I can vouch that, 50 years ago, much more demanding fare was frequently broadcast on the BBC's only television channel, to audiences far larger than any that BBC4 might dream of today.
BBC2 is now the home of repeats of Porridge and Dad's Army, Strictly Come Dancing and Match of the Day off-shoots, Dan Cruickshank and Adam Hart-Davis, Simon Schama and Bill Oddie. It's an awful long way from the BBC2 of Michael Peacock and, in his controller phase, David Attenborough. If it can overlap an edition of The Weakest Link with an edition showing on BBC1, it really does have no separate identity left. In which case, what is the point of it?
What's more, all the terrestrial broadcasters' channels are losing audience, save at present C4, both with their terrestrial and with their Freeview satellite channels. That their schedules have sacrificed character and definition is clearly a large part of their problem. There must be a significant audience for what became known briefly in the 1980s as "quality programming" that would cleave to BBC2 if it became apparent that such programming might characteristically be found there. But as BBC2 has got down in the garbage can with everybody else, it no longer commands a loyal following, only defining itself by such viewers who have always shunned it because they thought it was elitist and fancy. Boy, are they out of date.
Friday, December 29, 2006
IN the BLEAK MID-WINTER
You can get 50/1 at William Hill on no "white Christmases" before 2050. It sounds like a sure thing to me. Irving Berlin's couplet "I'm dreaming of a white Christmas/Just like the ones we used to know" was written at a time when seasonal snow was still common: it was a kind of cosy, fake nostalgia for a time that had not even yet passed. The Independent [White Christmas bets 'on way out', December 26th 2006] quotes the bookie to the effect that global warming may well cause such weather to be "consigned to the history books", however. White Christmases will indeed be something we used to know.
If you were born after the 1950s, there's a lot you won't know about cold winters. My generation was brought up before the arrival of central heating. Public buildings, institutions and very grand houses had big chunky cast-iron radiators that circulated hot water around appropriate areas but these were too unwieldy for ordinary houses. Double glazing, loft insulation and efficient draught excluders were in the future. On cold winter mornings, we were deeply reluctant to get out of bed because the bedroom would be freezing. On the windows, frost would have left intricate patterns. Unless you lived through that time, you cannot imagine the dazzling effect of this curious phenomenon, so magical that it had to be anthropomorphized: the author of this handiwork was named Jack Frost. The greatly increased warmth of modern houses killed off Jack Frost for ever.
In those days, bedrooms often had grates. If your room was above the living room, you might have a coal fire that shared the chimney with the fireplace below. Many bedrooms were fitted with gas or electric fires, but one was never allowed to keep a fire in after bedtime because of the danger that a counterpane slipping from a bed in the night might catch alight. Flame-resistant fabric was in its infancy then. So any heat that was permitted at bedtime was long since dispersed when you got up.
In my early childhood, in the late 1940s, there were still many houses without electricity. We used sometimes to visit an old friend of my grandfather's, JS Bruce, born like him in the 1870s, who lived with his unmarried daughter Alice and whose house in Kettering was illuminated by gas light. My grandfather, mother and I would sit in the drawing room with him and his daughter taking tea, I perched on a low stool in the corner, forbidden to speak unless spoken to. There would be extended pauses in the conversation, during which the longcase clock ticked remorselessly. The room would grow dim as the afternoon dwindled until Mr Bruce would direct Alice to light the gas and draw the curtains. There was also an immense heavy curtain across the door to divert the draught that whistled down the stairs from the Arctic of the upper floor. To say that the impression that remains with me of those visits is one of oppression would hardly do justice to the case. The life lived in that house would barely have changed since before the first War.
Most houses in those days drew their warmth from a coal fire in the living room, from the oven in the kitchen, perhaps from some kind of stove in the kitchen or the parlour and from an airing cupboard where what was known as "the copper" resided, providing the hot water and allowing space for bed linen and towels to be aired. Coal fires threw out rather less heat than log fires but you could still use them to toast muffins and crumpets and, if you had dogs or cats, you could be sure they would express their preference by lying on the hearth. (Some people's dogs still lived in outdoor kennels at that time). The coal would be banked down with coke or anthracite over night, "kept in" until such time as the ashes had to be cleared out and a new fire built.
If your mother took pity on your complaints that the bed was freezing, you could take a hot-water bottle to bed. I'm sure many people still do that, even in this age of electric blankets, but "a bottle" seems a most archaic object to me. I can just remember us having a stone bottle that could be filled with boiling water and used to heat up a bed but all the later ones were of rubber. There was a certain amount of lore surrounding hot-water bottles. You had to let the water go off the boil so it didn't scald the rubber. You never filled it to the lip but you needed to squeeze out the excess air. These were probably urban myths.
The milkman delivered his wares door-to-door back then, frequently so early that, by the time your mother brought in the milk bottles, their contents were frozen solid. If blue tits lived near your house, they would take advantage of this free milk, peck holes in the foil caps on the bottles and sample the delights below. The cream of a pint of full-cream milk would rise to the top and so-called "top of milk" was always the most desirable part, unless the tits had already got to it.
Fortified by a hearty cooked breakfast, you were packed off to school or to play in the snow. A proper winter is such a vivid season. Few sights are as arresting as a group or a line of trees, every tiny twig of which is picked out in snow. I am not at all surprised that the classic winter landscape is becoming more rare. Maybe the immense amount of heat pumped out by our homes – unimaginable fifty years ago – is making its own critical contribution to global warming.
This piece is not in my book, Common Sense, which you can read for free by downloading it from the link in the right sidebar.
You can get 50/1 at William Hill on no "white Christmases" before 2050. It sounds like a sure thing to me. Irving Berlin's couplet "I'm dreaming of a white Christmas/Just like the ones we used to know" was written at a time when seasonal snow was still common: it was a kind of cosy, fake nostalgia for a time that had not even yet passed. The Independent [White Christmas bets 'on way out', December 26th 2006] quotes the bookie to the effect that global warming may well cause such weather to be "consigned to the history books", however. White Christmases will indeed be something we used to know.
If you were born after the 1950s, there's a lot you won't know about cold winters. My generation was brought up before the arrival of central heating. Public buildings, institutions and very grand houses had big chunky cast-iron radiators that circulated hot water around appropriate areas but these were too unwieldy for ordinary houses. Double glazing, loft insulation and efficient draught excluders were in the future. On cold winter mornings, we were deeply reluctant to get out of bed because the bedroom would be freezing. On the windows, frost would have left intricate patterns. Unless you lived through that time, you cannot imagine the dazzling effect of this curious phenomenon, so magical that it had to be anthropomorphized: the author of this handiwork was named Jack Frost. The greatly increased warmth of modern houses killed off Jack Frost for ever.
In those days, bedrooms often had grates. If your room was above the living room, you might have a coal fire that shared the chimney with the fireplace below. Many bedrooms were fitted with gas or electric fires, but one was never allowed to keep a fire in after bedtime because of the danger that a counterpane slipping from a bed in the night might catch alight. Flame-resistant fabric was in its infancy then. So any heat that was permitted at bedtime was long since dispersed when you got up.
In my early childhood, in the late 1940s, there were still many houses without electricity. We used sometimes to visit an old friend of my grandfather's, JS Bruce, born like him in the 1870s, who lived with his unmarried daughter Alice and whose house in Kettering was illuminated by gas light. My grandfather, mother and I would sit in the drawing room with him and his daughter taking tea, I perched on a low stool in the corner, forbidden to speak unless spoken to. There would be extended pauses in the conversation, during which the longcase clock ticked remorselessly. The room would grow dim as the afternoon dwindled until Mr Bruce would direct Alice to light the gas and draw the curtains. There was also an immense heavy curtain across the door to divert the draught that whistled down the stairs from the Arctic of the upper floor. To say that the impression that remains with me of those visits is one of oppression would hardly do justice to the case. The life lived in that house would barely have changed since before the first War.
Most houses in those days drew their warmth from a coal fire in the living room, from the oven in the kitchen, perhaps from some kind of stove in the kitchen or the parlour and from an airing cupboard where what was known as "the copper" resided, providing the hot water and allowing space for bed linen and towels to be aired. Coal fires threw out rather less heat than log fires but you could still use them to toast muffins and crumpets and, if you had dogs or cats, you could be sure they would express their preference by lying on the hearth. (Some people's dogs still lived in outdoor kennels at that time). The coal would be banked down with coke or anthracite over night, "kept in" until such time as the ashes had to be cleared out and a new fire built.
If your mother took pity on your complaints that the bed was freezing, you could take a hot-water bottle to bed. I'm sure many people still do that, even in this age of electric blankets, but "a bottle" seems a most archaic object to me. I can just remember us having a stone bottle that could be filled with boiling water and used to heat up a bed but all the later ones were of rubber. There was a certain amount of lore surrounding hot-water bottles. You had to let the water go off the boil so it didn't scald the rubber. You never filled it to the lip but you needed to squeeze out the excess air. These were probably urban myths.
The milkman delivered his wares door-to-door back then, frequently so early that, by the time your mother brought in the milk bottles, their contents were frozen solid. If blue tits lived near your house, they would take advantage of this free milk, peck holes in the foil caps on the bottles and sample the delights below. The cream of a pint of full-cream milk would rise to the top and so-called "top of milk" was always the most desirable part, unless the tits had already got to it.
Fortified by a hearty cooked breakfast, you were packed off to school or to play in the snow. A proper winter is such a vivid season. Few sights are as arresting as a group or a line of trees, every tiny twig of which is picked out in snow. I am not at all surprised that the classic winter landscape is becoming more rare. Maybe the immense amount of heat pumped out by our homes – unimaginable fifty years ago – is making its own critical contribution to global warming.
This piece is not in my book, Common Sense, which you can read for free by downloading it from the link in the right sidebar.
Monday, December 25, 2006
LADY MADONNA?
The rock musician, Mr Bono, is to receive a knighthood for his services to crooning and to trying to persuade governments to give financial support to poor nations (though he himself is noted for moving his arrangements to countries where there are tax advantages). As he is an Irishman by birth, the honour will be notional rather than usable, like that of (Sir) Bob Geldof. But were he in a position to flourish the title, what would he be called? Sir Bono? It is ridiculous. Would he revert to his given name and become Sir Paul Hewson?
Taking a daft name for showbiz purposes does rather leave one open to difficulty if one survives long enough to become respectable. Being British citizens, both Sting and Lulu might find themselves in a dilemma if suitably honoured. Sir Sting? Dame Lulu? Sir Gordon Sumner or Dame Marie Lawrie would do better but some of their fans would wonder who they were. Both Sir Cliff Richard and Sir Elton John have retained their showbiz names with their knighthoods, rather than becoming Sir Harry Webb and Sir Reg Dwight respectively, much as Sir Rex (actually Reg) Harrison and Dame Ninette de Valois (formerly a Wicklow girl called Edris Stannus) did before them. But all these showbiz names were honour-ready when chosen. Prince clearly never had this dilemma to consider.
Bono's theoretical problem would be greatly compounded if his guitarist were to be able to follow him into the ranks of knights – mercifully he too would be debarred from styling himself 'Sir' by virtue of Irish birth. For the humbly christened David Evans is known to rock posterity as The Edge. I always thought this was the most unbearably pretentious and self-important name in all of rock until I heard the U2 band's vocalist speak of him in an interview. With his Irish accent and pronunciation, Bono calls him "The Hedge". It's a great pity that there is no chance Mr Evans will ever be raised to a seat in the House of Lords, where he could take the title Baron The Hedge of Reason.
Please read more in my freely downloadable book, accessible from the link in the right sidebar, Common Sense.
The rock musician, Mr Bono, is to receive a knighthood for his services to crooning and to trying to persuade governments to give financial support to poor nations (though he himself is noted for moving his arrangements to countries where there are tax advantages). As he is an Irishman by birth, the honour will be notional rather than usable, like that of (Sir) Bob Geldof. But were he in a position to flourish the title, what would he be called? Sir Bono? It is ridiculous. Would he revert to his given name and become Sir Paul Hewson?
Taking a daft name for showbiz purposes does rather leave one open to difficulty if one survives long enough to become respectable. Being British citizens, both Sting and Lulu might find themselves in a dilemma if suitably honoured. Sir Sting? Dame Lulu? Sir Gordon Sumner or Dame Marie Lawrie would do better but some of their fans would wonder who they were. Both Sir Cliff Richard and Sir Elton John have retained their showbiz names with their knighthoods, rather than becoming Sir Harry Webb and Sir Reg Dwight respectively, much as Sir Rex (actually Reg) Harrison and Dame Ninette de Valois (formerly a Wicklow girl called Edris Stannus) did before them. But all these showbiz names were honour-ready when chosen. Prince clearly never had this dilemma to consider.
Bono's theoretical problem would be greatly compounded if his guitarist were to be able to follow him into the ranks of knights – mercifully he too would be debarred from styling himself 'Sir' by virtue of Irish birth. For the humbly christened David Evans is known to rock posterity as The Edge. I always thought this was the most unbearably pretentious and self-important name in all of rock until I heard the U2 band's vocalist speak of him in an interview. With his Irish accent and pronunciation, Bono calls him "The Hedge". It's a great pity that there is no chance Mr Evans will ever be raised to a seat in the House of Lords, where he could take the title Baron The Hedge of Reason.
Please read more in my freely downloadable book, accessible from the link in the right sidebar, Common Sense.
Sunday, December 24, 2006
SPEAK UP, I CAN'T HEAR YOU
"There's nothing more surprising and enjoyable than getting a comment on your blog" wrote Guy Browning in The Guardian Weekend magazine the other day ('How to ... Blog' December 16th). I'm sure what he suggests is true but I really (clearly) wouldn't know.
When I worked as his producer on the television serial King of the Ghetto, the director Roy Battersby said many things that I remember and by which I remain nourished. Pertinent to the matter in hand is his description of taking home rushes (the daily unedited footage on tape) for long and detailed discussions with his family. "Christ," I thought when I first heard this, "I'll be lucky if anybody in my family even gives me any sort of indication that they watch it on transmission, let alone volunteering to put in their twopenn'orth during the process of making it".
My father who, as the saying goes, "never read a book in his life", certainly never read any of my three books published in his lifetime; or, if he did, he never told me so. My mother lived to read my novel, not a work she would ever have encountered had it not been, as it were, related to her. Her only comment was to deprecate a passing reference in the story to a man taking a shower, pulling back his foreskin and soaping the glans of his penis. It was hardly the pivotal moment of the story and I waited eagerly for her to find something in the main traffic of the plot to remark upon but she never did. While they were both alive, I published a large body of journalism which, I fondly imagine, she at least would comprehensively have read, but as to whether it ever entertained, educated or informed her, I remained unenlightened. My father used to spend a long time with his face buried in "the paper" but I never heard that he read anything that his son wrote. Maybe it was just a cover for snoozing, or avoiding issues.
Even my partner of nigh on 27 years, as voracious a reader as I know on seven continents, is not what I would venture to call forthcoming about my own stuff. If he has read my book Common Sense (freely downloadable from the link to the right of this entry) and if he reads this passing squib, I do not expect ever to discover it (but if I do, I will report back).
Why is this? Is it something about me? Is it something about writing? Some 15 years ago, I worked for a while in a bookshop. The shop manager was also a singer in the local choral society, a highly regarded body of voices that has appeared on professional recordings. Now, you understand, she was one voice among many. Even so, she manifested lasting indignation that, while working at the shop, I omitted to attend a performance by this choir, the choir needless to say playing a supporting role in which, as I say, she was but one unidentifiable voice. I thought – but did not say – "I wonder which if any of my books you have read. Books, after all, are your business as a book shop manager. And a book is a considerably more personal investment for its writer than is a performance in a choir by one of its members". I did not lay indignation on her. But I thought her own indignation was, to put it mildly, disproportionate.
Performers do seem to think that they are entitled to a remarkable degree of reassurance. All the actors I have known over the years – quite a few – have expected me AS A MATTER OF COURSE (I don't want to shout but I have yet to find how to access italics on this blogsite) to make the effort to witness their performances, however paltry the role in however humdrum the telly serial or play above a pub, however fugitive the advertisement or inaccessible the regional rep production. I think to myself: "Here I am forcing myself to watch an episode of The Bill that I would really rather not bother with for one scene towards the end but to how much trouble does this actor put himself in order to read all or any of my exquisitely honed pieces of journalism? Does it even occur to him that to seek my pieces out would be an appropriately equivalent gesture?"
I have been hugely gratified by the volume of downloading that my book has attracted. Of course, in one's fantasy version, one anticipates THOUSANDS of downloads so that, after just a week or two, one can tell the sceptical publishing editors who thought one was "too intellectual" for their market (ha!) that one has attracted sufficient readers that, were they paying, one would be in the best seller list. (Well, dear reader, unless you pass the word as assiduously as I hope you might, this will not be achieved for all that the download has exceeded my expectations). But I really wish I had a better idea of what response the stuff has wrought. Instructively enough, with the odd bright exception, the initial feedback came from writers of one kind or another, not least the aforementioned Mr Battersby, an auteur manque if ever there was one (as well as italics, I have still to find accents here). They KNOW that writers need quite as much reassurance as performers do. I don't want to bleat but I do wish everybody understood that.
So please, if anything in this blog or the associated book touches any chord at all for you, either positively or negatively, do take a few moments and a deep breath to say so. It makes far more sense to me than an uninterpretable digit on a visitor counter. And do have a cool yule.
"There's nothing more surprising and enjoyable than getting a comment on your blog" wrote Guy Browning in The Guardian Weekend magazine the other day ('How to ... Blog' December 16th). I'm sure what he suggests is true but I really (clearly) wouldn't know.
When I worked as his producer on the television serial King of the Ghetto, the director Roy Battersby said many things that I remember and by which I remain nourished. Pertinent to the matter in hand is his description of taking home rushes (the daily unedited footage on tape) for long and detailed discussions with his family. "Christ," I thought when I first heard this, "I'll be lucky if anybody in my family even gives me any sort of indication that they watch it on transmission, let alone volunteering to put in their twopenn'orth during the process of making it".
My father who, as the saying goes, "never read a book in his life", certainly never read any of my three books published in his lifetime; or, if he did, he never told me so. My mother lived to read my novel, not a work she would ever have encountered had it not been, as it were, related to her. Her only comment was to deprecate a passing reference in the story to a man taking a shower, pulling back his foreskin and soaping the glans of his penis. It was hardly the pivotal moment of the story and I waited eagerly for her to find something in the main traffic of the plot to remark upon but she never did. While they were both alive, I published a large body of journalism which, I fondly imagine, she at least would comprehensively have read, but as to whether it ever entertained, educated or informed her, I remained unenlightened. My father used to spend a long time with his face buried in "the paper" but I never heard that he read anything that his son wrote. Maybe it was just a cover for snoozing, or avoiding issues.
Even my partner of nigh on 27 years, as voracious a reader as I know on seven continents, is not what I would venture to call forthcoming about my own stuff. If he has read my book Common Sense (freely downloadable from the link to the right of this entry) and if he reads this passing squib, I do not expect ever to discover it (but if I do, I will report back).
Why is this? Is it something about me? Is it something about writing? Some 15 years ago, I worked for a while in a bookshop. The shop manager was also a singer in the local choral society, a highly regarded body of voices that has appeared on professional recordings. Now, you understand, she was one voice among many. Even so, she manifested lasting indignation that, while working at the shop, I omitted to attend a performance by this choir, the choir needless to say playing a supporting role in which, as I say, she was but one unidentifiable voice. I thought – but did not say – "I wonder which if any of my books you have read. Books, after all, are your business as a book shop manager. And a book is a considerably more personal investment for its writer than is a performance in a choir by one of its members". I did not lay indignation on her. But I thought her own indignation was, to put it mildly, disproportionate.
Performers do seem to think that they are entitled to a remarkable degree of reassurance. All the actors I have known over the years – quite a few – have expected me AS A MATTER OF COURSE (I don't want to shout but I have yet to find how to access italics on this blogsite) to make the effort to witness their performances, however paltry the role in however humdrum the telly serial or play above a pub, however fugitive the advertisement or inaccessible the regional rep production. I think to myself: "Here I am forcing myself to watch an episode of The Bill that I would really rather not bother with for one scene towards the end but to how much trouble does this actor put himself in order to read all or any of my exquisitely honed pieces of journalism? Does it even occur to him that to seek my pieces out would be an appropriately equivalent gesture?"
I have been hugely gratified by the volume of downloading that my book has attracted. Of course, in one's fantasy version, one anticipates THOUSANDS of downloads so that, after just a week or two, one can tell the sceptical publishing editors who thought one was "too intellectual" for their market (ha!) that one has attracted sufficient readers that, were they paying, one would be in the best seller list. (Well, dear reader, unless you pass the word as assiduously as I hope you might, this will not be achieved for all that the download has exceeded my expectations). But I really wish I had a better idea of what response the stuff has wrought. Instructively enough, with the odd bright exception, the initial feedback came from writers of one kind or another, not least the aforementioned Mr Battersby, an auteur manque if ever there was one (as well as italics, I have still to find accents here). They KNOW that writers need quite as much reassurance as performers do. I don't want to bleat but I do wish everybody understood that.
So please, if anything in this blog or the associated book touches any chord at all for you, either positively or negatively, do take a few moments and a deep breath to say so. It makes far more sense to me than an uninterpretable digit on a visitor counter. And do have a cool yule.
Wednesday, December 13, 2006
SAFE on the STREETS
[Like its two immediate predecessors, this is a new piece, not to be found in my book which is freely downloadable by clicking the Common Sense link in the right-hand sidebar ... ]
So, how indeed can sex workers be protected? Suffolk Constabulary, confronted by an unprecedented series of murders of women prostitutes, have been taking some stick for "not doing enough", whatever that may be, to keep the women safe. In their turn, police spokesmen have begun to sound a touch exasperated that prostitutes are still out alone at night in a land that sounds faintly absurd to anyone who has vainly sought an edible evening meal in the town: "the red-light district of Ipswich".
Those women still working the Ipswich streets say they simply can't afford not to. You can see their dilemma, whether it be to feed a drug habit or to feed fatherless children. Like any other parent, they are under the cosh of capitalism's high season and its central obligation: to give the kids a fabulous (i.e. expensive) Christmas. If anything is still sacred to this season of the year, it is the spending of money. If the shops don't have "a good Christmas", then evidently no one else can have one either. Those long-lost yule traditions – carol-singing, a good long walk, non-electrical decorations, parlour games, exchanging family news – cost nothing. They have been replaced by the shopping spree, the blow-out, the hi-tech goods, the 24-hour television and the doubling of the power bill on lights all over the house. It's particularly tough for an unskilled mother who is the sole breadwinner.
But if a red-light district is policed, it will die. The johns will move out and look elsewhere. It is in the nature of casual and anonymous sexual encounters that they take place in the shadows. Al fresco group sex aside (and that is less rarefied than you might think), anyone partaking of a furtive sexual encounter does it on a one-to-one basis, not with the possibility of other people seeing. And that requires a high degree of trust on both sides concerning the unspoken rules. Anyone – be they hunter or hunted, looking for cash or just looking to get their rocks off – steps into this world knowing that it carries risks. If there's someone out there who has no compunction about killing cold-bloodedly or beating up or passing a sexually-transmitted disease or just robbing, it's easy enough to abuse that trust. As one who has gone out "cruising" in his time – looking for a quick encounter with another guy – I know that the undertone of danger and unpredictability is part of the experience. For some, it's the most important part. No one wants to end up beaten to a pulp with his underpants round his ankles, but the constant need to be watchful and intuitive about strangers and situations adds a piquancy to the quest.
Many of the women working the Ipswich streets will no doubt hate the life – a far higher proportion, I submit, than that of the gay men who haunt the town's cruising grounds. That they find themselves obliged to pursue a desperate course is compounded by the present danger. What's more, the punters must have substantially dwindled in number. Any man out looking for a biddable woman is liable to make himself a murder suspect. Only the really determined are going to run the gamut of police patrols and alerted prostitutes (who are perhaps carrying weapons for self-protection), not to mention the raggle-taggle army of the media.
The press and broadcast coverage seems to me to be simply bizarre. Why do bulletin editors think they are serving a useful function by sending their anchors to Ipswich night after night to go over and over the same bare facts and the same obvious and routine observations? Any half-intelligent viewer could do as good a job from his armchair without setting foot in Suffolk. Anyone who does enter Ipswich is certain to be "interviewed" by a researcher and, provided she says something wholly banal ("yes, it's very worrying"), she's bound to get on air. It all builds up a miasma of worry and concern to no purpose, a sort of vicarious dread, designed, I guess, to drive us off the streets and in front of the telly.
If there are further casualties and even then there are prostitutes still working the streets, the police will surely consider imposing a curfew on any women going out after, say, 9.00pm. I have a pre-emptive suggestion. In a situation like this, it is not women who are the problem. It is men. If anyone should be confined indoors during certain hours of darkness, it should be men.
But the sex workers won't thank the police for any controls on their or their customers' movements. After all, it's only one john who is wreaking havoc. I would imagine that market forces have by now heavily raised the rates to make up the short fall in punters. Whatever the danger, the working girls still need to work. Police, media and others visiting this underworld for a short period tend to forget that such danger has always been the context in which that market conducts itself.
[Like its two immediate predecessors, this is a new piece, not to be found in my book which is freely downloadable by clicking the Common Sense link in the right-hand sidebar ... ]
So, how indeed can sex workers be protected? Suffolk Constabulary, confronted by an unprecedented series of murders of women prostitutes, have been taking some stick for "not doing enough", whatever that may be, to keep the women safe. In their turn, police spokesmen have begun to sound a touch exasperated that prostitutes are still out alone at night in a land that sounds faintly absurd to anyone who has vainly sought an edible evening meal in the town: "the red-light district of Ipswich".
Those women still working the Ipswich streets say they simply can't afford not to. You can see their dilemma, whether it be to feed a drug habit or to feed fatherless children. Like any other parent, they are under the cosh of capitalism's high season and its central obligation: to give the kids a fabulous (i.e. expensive) Christmas. If anything is still sacred to this season of the year, it is the spending of money. If the shops don't have "a good Christmas", then evidently no one else can have one either. Those long-lost yule traditions – carol-singing, a good long walk, non-electrical decorations, parlour games, exchanging family news – cost nothing. They have been replaced by the shopping spree, the blow-out, the hi-tech goods, the 24-hour television and the doubling of the power bill on lights all over the house. It's particularly tough for an unskilled mother who is the sole breadwinner.
But if a red-light district is policed, it will die. The johns will move out and look elsewhere. It is in the nature of casual and anonymous sexual encounters that they take place in the shadows. Al fresco group sex aside (and that is less rarefied than you might think), anyone partaking of a furtive sexual encounter does it on a one-to-one basis, not with the possibility of other people seeing. And that requires a high degree of trust on both sides concerning the unspoken rules. Anyone – be they hunter or hunted, looking for cash or just looking to get their rocks off – steps into this world knowing that it carries risks. If there's someone out there who has no compunction about killing cold-bloodedly or beating up or passing a sexually-transmitted disease or just robbing, it's easy enough to abuse that trust. As one who has gone out "cruising" in his time – looking for a quick encounter with another guy – I know that the undertone of danger and unpredictability is part of the experience. For some, it's the most important part. No one wants to end up beaten to a pulp with his underpants round his ankles, but the constant need to be watchful and intuitive about strangers and situations adds a piquancy to the quest.
Many of the women working the Ipswich streets will no doubt hate the life – a far higher proportion, I submit, than that of the gay men who haunt the town's cruising grounds. That they find themselves obliged to pursue a desperate course is compounded by the present danger. What's more, the punters must have substantially dwindled in number. Any man out looking for a biddable woman is liable to make himself a murder suspect. Only the really determined are going to run the gamut of police patrols and alerted prostitutes (who are perhaps carrying weapons for self-protection), not to mention the raggle-taggle army of the media.
The press and broadcast coverage seems to me to be simply bizarre. Why do bulletin editors think they are serving a useful function by sending their anchors to Ipswich night after night to go over and over the same bare facts and the same obvious and routine observations? Any half-intelligent viewer could do as good a job from his armchair without setting foot in Suffolk. Anyone who does enter Ipswich is certain to be "interviewed" by a researcher and, provided she says something wholly banal ("yes, it's very worrying"), she's bound to get on air. It all builds up a miasma of worry and concern to no purpose, a sort of vicarious dread, designed, I guess, to drive us off the streets and in front of the telly.
If there are further casualties and even then there are prostitutes still working the streets, the police will surely consider imposing a curfew on any women going out after, say, 9.00pm. I have a pre-emptive suggestion. In a situation like this, it is not women who are the problem. It is men. If anyone should be confined indoors during certain hours of darkness, it should be men.
But the sex workers won't thank the police for any controls on their or their customers' movements. After all, it's only one john who is wreaking havoc. I would imagine that market forces have by now heavily raised the rates to make up the short fall in punters. Whatever the danger, the working girls still need to work. Police, media and others visiting this underworld for a short period tend to forget that such danger has always been the context in which that market conducts itself.
Sunday, December 10, 2006
SOME SHOWS
Like the previous entry, this is new stuff, not extracted from the book Common Sense, which you can download for nothing by clicking on the link in the right hand margin ...
I was in London last week, catching up with old friends, new shows and some Christmas shopping (though I much prefer to do the latter in Bath these days). Choosing what to see in town on a short visit is fraught with the danger of disappointment. You have to follow your nose and hope for the best. And what you see is inevitably dictated by the critical consensus as well as by the shape of the time you have. I specifically chose to visit last week so that I could be sure to get to the musical Caroline, or Change at the Lyttelton, picking up day seats at the box office first thing on the day of the performance. Being in the National Theatre's repertoire, the show isn't always available. Everything else I saw in town fell into place around that centrepiece.
Now, I greatly admire Tony Kushner's work and my interest in his first musical (as lyricist and book writer) was inevitably sharpened by the plaudits it has received and by its winning an Evening Standard award the other day. And Kushner's wish "to explore the civil rights movement, race relations, African-Americans and southern Jews in the early 1960s" (programme note) appealed to me strongly.
But how was it? Well, there's a helluva lot to like in the show. It's very nicely staged and it has a terrific cast, led by a really wonderful performance by Tonya Pinkins as the eponym. On the night I and my friend were there, the three young boys (the roles have alternate players) were particularly accomplished, much more convincing as Americans than English child actors usually manage. It seems perverse, however, to cast in a (grown-up) role that requires a minimum of acting but a great deal of clarinet-playing an actor who has to mime the instrument.
The downside is uppermost, though. The score is not strong. It's through-composed and it rarely resolves into a discrete number. Towards the end, Anna Francolini's somewhat one-noted stepmother had a sequence that actually rhymed and began to shape into something like a song, at which point the show came closest to being Sondheimesque and musically interesting. Elsewhere, the discursive score made the plot appear to meander. That flavour was compounded by the show's worst flaw: everything – every scene, every sequence, every aria and piece of recitative – was just too long. You wanted to call out "ok, we get it already, move on". As a result, the show feels thin. With a more demanding director or producer, the whole story it tells could easily have made for a first act, leaving a second to take up the implications and run a lot further with them.
A highly-praised movie that left me a great deal colder than Caroline was Borat. The Guardian's film critic, usually the hardest to please of the current crop of reviewers (unless the movie in question is at least 25 years old), named Borat as one of his top five films of the year – as the list wasn't alphabetical and he put it first, it may well have been his topmost film of the year. I suspect he will come to revise that opinion. Just in terms of simple film-making, Borat is far from notable. A film of the year ought to display a bit of craft, let alone a bit of art. (The same critic cited as one of his movie moments of the year "Penelope Cruz singing her heart out in Volver" and, as Cruz is patently dubbed, you fall to wondering if Mr Bradshaw has given very much thought to his list).
It seemed to me that, for a knockdown comedy, Borat was fatally unfunny. Humour is a matter of taste ... up to a point. What is deemed funny can be analysed without the comic essence of it being washed away. The relentless misogyny and anti-Semitism of Borat's character is supposed to be forgivable because a) it's so hilarious and b) Borat's creator Sacha Baron Cohen is Jewish (though not female). Intriguingly enough, there is also a good deal of homo-erotically orientated humour that is rather less broad and (mock-)offensive. It seems clear enough to me that Cohen's natural audience is one made up of male adolescents who relish being "grossed out". A friend who loved it – male, gay, Jewish, 59 – and who, unlike me, saw it with a full evening audience (I reserve my London evenings for the theatre) reports that his loudly appreciative fellows were of all ages and both sexes. I think that just goes to show that we are all lads now.
One of the aspects of the movie that most repulsed me was that I believed hardly any of it. Documentary has always been a dissembling form, artifice masquerading as unmediated actuality. I sensed that almost everything here was a put-up job. It is quite funny (and poetic) that the ghastly, mouthy frat boys who are suing Twentieth Century Fox for the way they are portrayed are the ones who evidently least needed to be provoked into expressing their stupid views by Borat. In their sequence he is unusually withdrawn, letting them hang themselves. Clearly some of the other participants were conned into appearing in a different vehicle from the one they were led to expect and I find myself sympathising with them. Did they sign a release before or after filming? Never mind that most of them are dumb-ass rednecks and absurd evangelists. (Indeed, the attitudes of some of Borat's victims are capable of more than one reading. In Sight & Sound, Ali Jaafar's review describes "a dinner party of white Southern respectables who leave the moment Borat's guest is revealed to be black" but I would submit that it is rather her patent function as a prostitute that precipitates the exodus).
Generally the people whose advice Borat seeks treat him with a lot more grace and decency than he treats them. A woman to whom Borat goes for guidance in etiquette maintains her dignity with exquisite poise, despite everything Cohen throws at her, not least photographs of his "son" brandishing his cock. If you laugh at this sequence, what is it that you are laughing at? That Borat does something "shocking"? Well, it doesn't work. The woman is too dignified to give him the satisfaction of outrage; rather, she plays a completely straight bat. Is that funny? At whose expense?
From Jonathan Routh to Noel Edmonds to Dennis Pennis, there is something deeply repellent about hoax television, the whipping up of an audience's scorn against some innocent stooge. Only Chris Morris, a truly radical and subversive broadcaster, manages to turn hoaxing into a usefully political weapon and he uses it against those who richly deserve to be publicly pilloried (eg Gary Lineker). All the others, not least Cohen, are simply exercising gratuitous cruelty. I hope somebody is collecting the off-cuts of those moments where it goes grotesquely wrong and backfires. Borat just about gets through it at television length. As a feature, his material is stretched pitifully thin – the naked wrestling with his obese manager is the work of a man with no jokes left to tell – and its lack of structure (how much of it has anything remotely of the television report about it?) makes it look lame and indisciplined. And yes, it's a big box office hit. Well, so was Chuck Norris once. I don't think that means it's any good.
I saw a play and a movie, both by the same suddenly emerging writer and featuring the same increasingly dazzling actor. Both do something profoundly resonant and riveting with an event from recent British history, managing to crystallize in a most engaging and persuasive way a sense of irrevocable change in the socio-political landscape. I saw the movie back to back with Borat: odd that both were documentary-dramas about a British institution whose origins lie in other lands (well, I suppose Borat is as likely to be a British institution as Dame Edna Everage). Have you guessed the other movie yet? Well, it was The Queen. And what a deftly paced, delicately handled work it is, both by writer Peter Morgan and by director Stephen Frears. I know it wins its spurs as a feast of acting – Dame Helen Mirren is certainly unmatchable as Her Majesty – but you don't get acting this good unless it is underpinned by a richly textured script and controlled by an acute and watchful director. The miracle is that everyone emerges really very sympathetically, with the exception (no surprise, though) of the Duke of Edinburgh. I've never before felt quite so clearly the real potential (unrealised so far in the real world) of "New Labour", nor the importance of maintaining the traditions that hang about the House of Windsor. The careful, carefully inexplicit confrontation of these two forces and their never-stated accommodation is touched in with triumphant skill. There's not a false note or a wasted line in the whole film. It's the most enthralling broad-brush portrait of the English class balance since Gosford Park. And you only have to begin to ponder the bear-traps that such a project has confidently avoided to see how really remarkable it is.
Frost Nixon is no less an achievement. After his Tony Blair in The Queen (already familiar from Peter Morgan's television script The Deal), Michael Sheen transforms himself into a plausible, never guyed David Frost. Morgan's stage play is about far more than just the television interview with former President Richard Nixon. As Queen Elizabeth II had to bend to public expectation of an expression of her family's loss of the Princess of Wales, so Nixon had to be drawn into an acknowledgment of wrong-doing in the Watergate Scandal. In both cases, accessibility and accountability are seen becoming watchwords of the age. With an almost scientific skill, Morgan teases out the process of nudging Nixon into a place from which he cannot retreat. His director Michael Grandage realizes his blueprint impeccably. This is a major work. And what a time Peter Morgan is having. Along with his Longford script for Channel 4, he has conquered all three non-musical dramatic mediums this year.
Beside it, Caryl Churchill's Drunk Enough to Say I Love You? seems a little anemic. I adore a lot of Churchill – Top Girls, Cloud Nine and Serious Money of course – but she drives me nuts at other times. I loved the Marx Brothers madness of Heart's Desire but couldn't stand the remorseless logic of its companion piece Blue Kettle. Drunk Enough shares an irritating tic with another of her brief works, A Number, in that the characters continually interrupt each other but she doesn't write through the interruption, leaving it impossible to play without appearing stutteringly artificial. The new piece is very schematic – two men who are having an affair are rather explicitly The American and The British positions on foreign policy – and it felt too naked for me, so that there wasn't any human interest in what passed between them, only a kind of cerebral admiration for an exercise. I wish Churchill would renew her interest in and feel for character. Writing out of anger is all very fine but righteousness is not necessarily very compelling. Serious Money had rage to burn but it had a vivid theatricality too.
And then there was my dose of sex. Attitude magazine hails Shortbus as "alongside Brokeback Mountain the most important gay film of the year", though in truth it is pan-sexual, certainly not limited to gay voyeurism. And Time Out swoons: "how not to love a film that features an 'orgasmic superhero' called Shabbas Goy, a guy having 'The Star-Spangled Banner' sung up his ass and a drag queen with a megaphone?" Shortbus is a lot more engaging than John Cameron Mitchell's previous cinematic essay in the leisure hours of (sexually) driven New Yorkers, the mad and relentless Hedwig and the Angry Inch, but if it's what passes these days as a "sweetly romantic" movie (Attitude again), then give me Michael Powell's I Know Where I'm Going! any day. What it is – let's not mince words here – is porn. I have seen plenty of the recent movies, many of them of French origin, that feature unsimulated sex – Virginie Despertes Coralie's Baise-moi, Gaspar Noë's Seul contre tous and Irreversible, Patrice Chereau's Intimacy, though not Michael Winterbottom's Nine Songs (you can have too much of a good thing) – and I don't think any of them can claim to be other than porn. Porn with a degree of story and character and even occasional humour certainly, but no less porn for all that. People will get the DVD of Shortbus for jacking off purposes. Only the truly unhinged do that with sweetly romantic movies.
The mâitresse d' of the back room that gives Shortbus its title is Justin Bond, aka Kiki of Kiki & Herb who have also been in London lately. I didn't catch their show, Christmas Happens ("show business has destroyed them but they cannot live without it" says a flyer), but the gay friend I mentioned before told me that he has seen them in New York and that they're the sort of indulgent act that gives stoners a bad name. After Bond's performance in Shortbus, I certainly wouldn't have rushed to see Kiki & Herb. In the grand tradition of drag gagsters, he's not even worth mentioning.
Finally (though first in my actual chronology of viewings) was Paul Andrew Williams' London to Brighton, which makes Brighton Rock look like Mary Poppins. It's a low-life melodrama that is unremittingly horrible from beginning to end but it's a superb piece of no-budget movie-making by a real film-maker who will surely go on to make a string of masterpieces. In purely cinematic terms of old-fashioned craft – cutting, framing, structure, pace, placing of the camera, character-through-dialogue, directing of performances – it leaves Borat and Shortbus looking shoddy and unimaginative, which is largely what they are. In twenty years' time, all being well, it is Paul Andrew Williams whose career will mean something.
Like the previous entry, this is new stuff, not extracted from the book Common Sense, which you can download for nothing by clicking on the link in the right hand margin ...
I was in London last week, catching up with old friends, new shows and some Christmas shopping (though I much prefer to do the latter in Bath these days). Choosing what to see in town on a short visit is fraught with the danger of disappointment. You have to follow your nose and hope for the best. And what you see is inevitably dictated by the critical consensus as well as by the shape of the time you have. I specifically chose to visit last week so that I could be sure to get to the musical Caroline, or Change at the Lyttelton, picking up day seats at the box office first thing on the day of the performance. Being in the National Theatre's repertoire, the show isn't always available. Everything else I saw in town fell into place around that centrepiece.
Now, I greatly admire Tony Kushner's work and my interest in his first musical (as lyricist and book writer) was inevitably sharpened by the plaudits it has received and by its winning an Evening Standard award the other day. And Kushner's wish "to explore the civil rights movement, race relations, African-Americans and southern Jews in the early 1960s" (programme note) appealed to me strongly.
But how was it? Well, there's a helluva lot to like in the show. It's very nicely staged and it has a terrific cast, led by a really wonderful performance by Tonya Pinkins as the eponym. On the night I and my friend were there, the three young boys (the roles have alternate players) were particularly accomplished, much more convincing as Americans than English child actors usually manage. It seems perverse, however, to cast in a (grown-up) role that requires a minimum of acting but a great deal of clarinet-playing an actor who has to mime the instrument.
The downside is uppermost, though. The score is not strong. It's through-composed and it rarely resolves into a discrete number. Towards the end, Anna Francolini's somewhat one-noted stepmother had a sequence that actually rhymed and began to shape into something like a song, at which point the show came closest to being Sondheimesque and musically interesting. Elsewhere, the discursive score made the plot appear to meander. That flavour was compounded by the show's worst flaw: everything – every scene, every sequence, every aria and piece of recitative – was just too long. You wanted to call out "ok, we get it already, move on". As a result, the show feels thin. With a more demanding director or producer, the whole story it tells could easily have made for a first act, leaving a second to take up the implications and run a lot further with them.
A highly-praised movie that left me a great deal colder than Caroline was Borat. The Guardian's film critic, usually the hardest to please of the current crop of reviewers (unless the movie in question is at least 25 years old), named Borat as one of his top five films of the year – as the list wasn't alphabetical and he put it first, it may well have been his topmost film of the year. I suspect he will come to revise that opinion. Just in terms of simple film-making, Borat is far from notable. A film of the year ought to display a bit of craft, let alone a bit of art. (The same critic cited as one of his movie moments of the year "Penelope Cruz singing her heart out in Volver" and, as Cruz is patently dubbed, you fall to wondering if Mr Bradshaw has given very much thought to his list).
It seemed to me that, for a knockdown comedy, Borat was fatally unfunny. Humour is a matter of taste ... up to a point. What is deemed funny can be analysed without the comic essence of it being washed away. The relentless misogyny and anti-Semitism of Borat's character is supposed to be forgivable because a) it's so hilarious and b) Borat's creator Sacha Baron Cohen is Jewish (though not female). Intriguingly enough, there is also a good deal of homo-erotically orientated humour that is rather less broad and (mock-)offensive. It seems clear enough to me that Cohen's natural audience is one made up of male adolescents who relish being "grossed out". A friend who loved it – male, gay, Jewish, 59 – and who, unlike me, saw it with a full evening audience (I reserve my London evenings for the theatre) reports that his loudly appreciative fellows were of all ages and both sexes. I think that just goes to show that we are all lads now.
One of the aspects of the movie that most repulsed me was that I believed hardly any of it. Documentary has always been a dissembling form, artifice masquerading as unmediated actuality. I sensed that almost everything here was a put-up job. It is quite funny (and poetic) that the ghastly, mouthy frat boys who are suing Twentieth Century Fox for the way they are portrayed are the ones who evidently least needed to be provoked into expressing their stupid views by Borat. In their sequence he is unusually withdrawn, letting them hang themselves. Clearly some of the other participants were conned into appearing in a different vehicle from the one they were led to expect and I find myself sympathising with them. Did they sign a release before or after filming? Never mind that most of them are dumb-ass rednecks and absurd evangelists. (Indeed, the attitudes of some of Borat's victims are capable of more than one reading. In Sight & Sound, Ali Jaafar's review describes "a dinner party of white Southern respectables who leave the moment Borat's guest is revealed to be black" but I would submit that it is rather her patent function as a prostitute that precipitates the exodus).
Generally the people whose advice Borat seeks treat him with a lot more grace and decency than he treats them. A woman to whom Borat goes for guidance in etiquette maintains her dignity with exquisite poise, despite everything Cohen throws at her, not least photographs of his "son" brandishing his cock. If you laugh at this sequence, what is it that you are laughing at? That Borat does something "shocking"? Well, it doesn't work. The woman is too dignified to give him the satisfaction of outrage; rather, she plays a completely straight bat. Is that funny? At whose expense?
From Jonathan Routh to Noel Edmonds to Dennis Pennis, there is something deeply repellent about hoax television, the whipping up of an audience's scorn against some innocent stooge. Only Chris Morris, a truly radical and subversive broadcaster, manages to turn hoaxing into a usefully political weapon and he uses it against those who richly deserve to be publicly pilloried (eg Gary Lineker). All the others, not least Cohen, are simply exercising gratuitous cruelty. I hope somebody is collecting the off-cuts of those moments where it goes grotesquely wrong and backfires. Borat just about gets through it at television length. As a feature, his material is stretched pitifully thin – the naked wrestling with his obese manager is the work of a man with no jokes left to tell – and its lack of structure (how much of it has anything remotely of the television report about it?) makes it look lame and indisciplined. And yes, it's a big box office hit. Well, so was Chuck Norris once. I don't think that means it's any good.
I saw a play and a movie, both by the same suddenly emerging writer and featuring the same increasingly dazzling actor. Both do something profoundly resonant and riveting with an event from recent British history, managing to crystallize in a most engaging and persuasive way a sense of irrevocable change in the socio-political landscape. I saw the movie back to back with Borat: odd that both were documentary-dramas about a British institution whose origins lie in other lands (well, I suppose Borat is as likely to be a British institution as Dame Edna Everage). Have you guessed the other movie yet? Well, it was The Queen. And what a deftly paced, delicately handled work it is, both by writer Peter Morgan and by director Stephen Frears. I know it wins its spurs as a feast of acting – Dame Helen Mirren is certainly unmatchable as Her Majesty – but you don't get acting this good unless it is underpinned by a richly textured script and controlled by an acute and watchful director. The miracle is that everyone emerges really very sympathetically, with the exception (no surprise, though) of the Duke of Edinburgh. I've never before felt quite so clearly the real potential (unrealised so far in the real world) of "New Labour", nor the importance of maintaining the traditions that hang about the House of Windsor. The careful, carefully inexplicit confrontation of these two forces and their never-stated accommodation is touched in with triumphant skill. There's not a false note or a wasted line in the whole film. It's the most enthralling broad-brush portrait of the English class balance since Gosford Park. And you only have to begin to ponder the bear-traps that such a project has confidently avoided to see how really remarkable it is.
Frost Nixon is no less an achievement. After his Tony Blair in The Queen (already familiar from Peter Morgan's television script The Deal), Michael Sheen transforms himself into a plausible, never guyed David Frost. Morgan's stage play is about far more than just the television interview with former President Richard Nixon. As Queen Elizabeth II had to bend to public expectation of an expression of her family's loss of the Princess of Wales, so Nixon had to be drawn into an acknowledgment of wrong-doing in the Watergate Scandal. In both cases, accessibility and accountability are seen becoming watchwords of the age. With an almost scientific skill, Morgan teases out the process of nudging Nixon into a place from which he cannot retreat. His director Michael Grandage realizes his blueprint impeccably. This is a major work. And what a time Peter Morgan is having. Along with his Longford script for Channel 4, he has conquered all three non-musical dramatic mediums this year.
Beside it, Caryl Churchill's Drunk Enough to Say I Love You? seems a little anemic. I adore a lot of Churchill – Top Girls, Cloud Nine and Serious Money of course – but she drives me nuts at other times. I loved the Marx Brothers madness of Heart's Desire but couldn't stand the remorseless logic of its companion piece Blue Kettle. Drunk Enough shares an irritating tic with another of her brief works, A Number, in that the characters continually interrupt each other but she doesn't write through the interruption, leaving it impossible to play without appearing stutteringly artificial. The new piece is very schematic – two men who are having an affair are rather explicitly The American and The British positions on foreign policy – and it felt too naked for me, so that there wasn't any human interest in what passed between them, only a kind of cerebral admiration for an exercise. I wish Churchill would renew her interest in and feel for character. Writing out of anger is all very fine but righteousness is not necessarily very compelling. Serious Money had rage to burn but it had a vivid theatricality too.
And then there was my dose of sex. Attitude magazine hails Shortbus as "alongside Brokeback Mountain the most important gay film of the year", though in truth it is pan-sexual, certainly not limited to gay voyeurism. And Time Out swoons: "how not to love a film that features an 'orgasmic superhero' called Shabbas Goy, a guy having 'The Star-Spangled Banner' sung up his ass and a drag queen with a megaphone?" Shortbus is a lot more engaging than John Cameron Mitchell's previous cinematic essay in the leisure hours of (sexually) driven New Yorkers, the mad and relentless Hedwig and the Angry Inch, but if it's what passes these days as a "sweetly romantic" movie (Attitude again), then give me Michael Powell's I Know Where I'm Going! any day. What it is – let's not mince words here – is porn. I have seen plenty of the recent movies, many of them of French origin, that feature unsimulated sex – Virginie Despertes Coralie's Baise-moi, Gaspar Noë's Seul contre tous and Irreversible, Patrice Chereau's Intimacy, though not Michael Winterbottom's Nine Songs (you can have too much of a good thing) – and I don't think any of them can claim to be other than porn. Porn with a degree of story and character and even occasional humour certainly, but no less porn for all that. People will get the DVD of Shortbus for jacking off purposes. Only the truly unhinged do that with sweetly romantic movies.
The mâitresse d' of the back room that gives Shortbus its title is Justin Bond, aka Kiki of Kiki & Herb who have also been in London lately. I didn't catch their show, Christmas Happens ("show business has destroyed them but they cannot live without it" says a flyer), but the gay friend I mentioned before told me that he has seen them in New York and that they're the sort of indulgent act that gives stoners a bad name. After Bond's performance in Shortbus, I certainly wouldn't have rushed to see Kiki & Herb. In the grand tradition of drag gagsters, he's not even worth mentioning.
Finally (though first in my actual chronology of viewings) was Paul Andrew Williams' London to Brighton, which makes Brighton Rock look like Mary Poppins. It's a low-life melodrama that is unremittingly horrible from beginning to end but it's a superb piece of no-budget movie-making by a real film-maker who will surely go on to make a string of masterpieces. In purely cinematic terms of old-fashioned craft – cutting, framing, structure, pace, placing of the camera, character-through-dialogue, directing of performances – it leaves Borat and Shortbus looking shoddy and unimaginative, which is largely what they are. In twenty years' time, all being well, it is Paul Andrew Williams whose career will mean something.
Thursday, November 30, 2006
REWRITE THAT SENTENCE
Earlier postings were extracted from my book Common Sense, which can be downloaded free from my website – just click on COMMON SENSE: The BOOK in the sidebar. Here are new thoughts, previously unpublished, provoked by current events. Feel free to engage ...
Two teenagers have been sentenced at the Old Bailey for murder this week. They stabbed a man in the street, making off with his mobile phone, his oyster card and a small amount of cash. They were given "minimum terms" of 21 years (for the 19 year-old) and 17 years (for the 18 year-old). Frankly, I don't think it's enough.
Now, I wasn't in court and I haven't read the transcripts. It's unwise to make sweeping assumptions based on newspaper reports of trials. Nonetheless, this appears to be a peculiarly straightforward case with no detectable mitigating circumstances. And the sentences are consistent with those meted out to other opportunistic, petty-theft-related killings. So I cleave to my view. I don't think it's enough. Even should the younger killer serve his full term, he will be 35 when released, a mere four years older than was his victim at the time of his death. 17 years from now, the victim would have been 48, probably at the peak of his career. His fiancee, his parents, his friends feel bereft and robbed. I think they'd be wholly entitled to feel vengeful too.
Vengefulness is not an emotion we are supposed to indulge. We are expected to forgive, to turn the other cheek, to bury our grief by hoping for the killers' redemption. Well, bugger that. If anyone I loved were taken from me by knife-wielding thug, by suicide-bombing fanatic or indeed by drunken driver, I suspect that my instinct would assuredly be to go out and kill somebody in their turn. Don't let's be squeamish about these things. If you're religious or liberal, you perhaps genuinely can find some degree of charity in your heart for the killer. Not me.
My question, I feel sure, would be Lear's: "Why should a dog, a horse, a rat, have life,/And thou not breath at all?" (King Lear, Act V, scene III). Why indeed should those rats, those who killed for trash, live? As one bereaved by murder, required by the ghoulish media to make some public statement on the steps of the Old Bailey, I fancy I should want to say something like this:
"21 years is a piffling punishment for robbing someone else of perhaps 50, 60 or even 70 years of life and for robbing me of that person's love for so long. Why should these dehumanized husks of men have any kind of expectation of a resumed life? If the juridical process cannot eliminate these degenerates who, at 40 and 35, will certainly not be too advanced in years to visit similar crimes on others, then I, if I have wind and limb, will seek them out and do so myself at some point after their release. Or rather, to make a better match with their cruelty to me, perhaps I will seek out and eliminate their own loved ones, if they have any such". Even were the threat more token than real, the making of it should a) provoke a useful public debate about the role of vengeance and b) give the murderers a worm of dread to eat into what passes for their minds while they serve their terms.
Is there an argument for restoring the death penalty? I supported abolition as vehemently as anyone in the run-up to its enactment 40 years ago. It was a different world then. Guns were only known to the denizens of organized crime and barely at all to the police. The knife culture was an unimagined concept. Kids roamed in gangs and fought with fists and maybe with bike chains but they did not go about armed, save for the flick-knives that were more feared than actually carried. Murder was so rare as to be sensational, usually a crime passionnel or some Frankenstein's monster-like misfortune perpetrated by some retarded soul. Capital crimes were really rare.
Today barely an edition of the 6 o'clock News passes without bodies being found or somebody being sentenced for murder. And these are just the cases that make "a good story". The majority of killings go virtually unreported, meriting no more than a paragraph in a local newspaper, if that. The want-it-now philosophy reinforced continuously by the bombardment of advertising has its impact on people's tempers too. Why should I simmer down, "count up to ten" as an earlier generation advised, when I can have what I want – the end of a relationship, peace and quiet, triumph over a rival – by a nice quick killing? Murder, like sex crime, is really about exercising power over someone else. Our culture urges us constantly to seize power, to stand up for our "rights", to grab what we want, to triumph. To end someone else's life is to impose the ultimate sanction, to be like a god.
Tony Blair, a great one for squirming in the face of contradictions, got cross with journalists who persisted in questioning whether his support for the execution of Iraqi justice meant that he agreed with the execution of Saddam Hussein. Blair, with his Christian conscience and lip-service to liberal social policy, couldn't bring himself to say that any human being should die, however "evil" (his word, not mine). You wonder how he squares that with his knowledge that he sent troops into Iraq to kill thousands of innocent civilians. Ah yes, "collateral damage". Unfortunate but an inevitable price to be paid for a necessary operation. Not the same as deliberately stringing a man up. Oh, think it through, Tony.
I don't in the end rescind my opposition to capital punishment, even for the two teenaged stabbers whose claim for mercy seems to me to have less merit than any I can imagine. But I don't think they should be out of jail before they are 60 years old. Let us feel safe from them. There could hardly be a crueller fate than to be murdered – or to have a loved one murdered – by someone who has been released into the community after doing time for a previous murder. In such circumstances, I'd want to take my vengeance on the judge who imposed an inadequate sentence and the parole board who released the killer. Suppose that goon Michael Stone had managed to breach Stormont security and carry out his mission to assassinate Gerry Adams. Where would that leave the ludicrous policy of granting a so-called "political amnesty" to subhumans who claim a political justification for murder and mayhem? No less bankrupt than before but at least demonstrably so to politicians, that's where.
So, I have a Modest Proposal. Let sentencing policy be determined less by some academic tariff set for the severity of the crime and more by the need to keep the individual perpetrators out of circulation. How can it be fitting for a convicted murderer to be walking the streets a free man at the age of 35? Which of us will be safe from him?
And yes I know that the jails are overcrowded and to keep people in for much longer stretches would only exacerbate the problem. But I suggest that we have too many crimes that carry a jail sentence. The fool of a man who works as "royal editor" (whatever that means) for the News of the World and his contact, supposedly a "private detective", evidently qualified themselves for jail sentences by tapping into private phone conversations. To stick them in jail would be most satisfying to the vengeful feelings that many will have allowed themselves in the light of their guilty admissions. But this kind of white collar crime can be punished in other ways. Fine them. I mean, really fine them. Let independent auditors go through their personal accounts and, on the basis of their findings, let the courts impose stringent on-going financial penalties that will keep them impoverished for a couple of decades. Again, the penalties need to be tailored not to some standard tariff but to a level that determines a precise period over which these individuals will suffer penalties. The public purse would be satisfyingly swelled too.
Earlier postings were extracted from my book Common Sense, which can be downloaded free from my website – just click on COMMON SENSE: The BOOK in the sidebar. Here are new thoughts, previously unpublished, provoked by current events. Feel free to engage ...
Two teenagers have been sentenced at the Old Bailey for murder this week. They stabbed a man in the street, making off with his mobile phone, his oyster card and a small amount of cash. They were given "minimum terms" of 21 years (for the 19 year-old) and 17 years (for the 18 year-old). Frankly, I don't think it's enough.
Now, I wasn't in court and I haven't read the transcripts. It's unwise to make sweeping assumptions based on newspaper reports of trials. Nonetheless, this appears to be a peculiarly straightforward case with no detectable mitigating circumstances. And the sentences are consistent with those meted out to other opportunistic, petty-theft-related killings. So I cleave to my view. I don't think it's enough. Even should the younger killer serve his full term, he will be 35 when released, a mere four years older than was his victim at the time of his death. 17 years from now, the victim would have been 48, probably at the peak of his career. His fiancee, his parents, his friends feel bereft and robbed. I think they'd be wholly entitled to feel vengeful too.
Vengefulness is not an emotion we are supposed to indulge. We are expected to forgive, to turn the other cheek, to bury our grief by hoping for the killers' redemption. Well, bugger that. If anyone I loved were taken from me by knife-wielding thug, by suicide-bombing fanatic or indeed by drunken driver, I suspect that my instinct would assuredly be to go out and kill somebody in their turn. Don't let's be squeamish about these things. If you're religious or liberal, you perhaps genuinely can find some degree of charity in your heart for the killer. Not me.
My question, I feel sure, would be Lear's: "Why should a dog, a horse, a rat, have life,/And thou not breath at all?" (King Lear, Act V, scene III). Why indeed should those rats, those who killed for trash, live? As one bereaved by murder, required by the ghoulish media to make some public statement on the steps of the Old Bailey, I fancy I should want to say something like this:
"21 years is a piffling punishment for robbing someone else of perhaps 50, 60 or even 70 years of life and for robbing me of that person's love for so long. Why should these dehumanized husks of men have any kind of expectation of a resumed life? If the juridical process cannot eliminate these degenerates who, at 40 and 35, will certainly not be too advanced in years to visit similar crimes on others, then I, if I have wind and limb, will seek them out and do so myself at some point after their release. Or rather, to make a better match with their cruelty to me, perhaps I will seek out and eliminate their own loved ones, if they have any such". Even were the threat more token than real, the making of it should a) provoke a useful public debate about the role of vengeance and b) give the murderers a worm of dread to eat into what passes for their minds while they serve their terms.
Is there an argument for restoring the death penalty? I supported abolition as vehemently as anyone in the run-up to its enactment 40 years ago. It was a different world then. Guns were only known to the denizens of organized crime and barely at all to the police. The knife culture was an unimagined concept. Kids roamed in gangs and fought with fists and maybe with bike chains but they did not go about armed, save for the flick-knives that were more feared than actually carried. Murder was so rare as to be sensational, usually a crime passionnel or some Frankenstein's monster-like misfortune perpetrated by some retarded soul. Capital crimes were really rare.
Today barely an edition of the 6 o'clock News passes without bodies being found or somebody being sentenced for murder. And these are just the cases that make "a good story". The majority of killings go virtually unreported, meriting no more than a paragraph in a local newspaper, if that. The want-it-now philosophy reinforced continuously by the bombardment of advertising has its impact on people's tempers too. Why should I simmer down, "count up to ten" as an earlier generation advised, when I can have what I want – the end of a relationship, peace and quiet, triumph over a rival – by a nice quick killing? Murder, like sex crime, is really about exercising power over someone else. Our culture urges us constantly to seize power, to stand up for our "rights", to grab what we want, to triumph. To end someone else's life is to impose the ultimate sanction, to be like a god.
Tony Blair, a great one for squirming in the face of contradictions, got cross with journalists who persisted in questioning whether his support for the execution of Iraqi justice meant that he agreed with the execution of Saddam Hussein. Blair, with his Christian conscience and lip-service to liberal social policy, couldn't bring himself to say that any human being should die, however "evil" (his word, not mine). You wonder how he squares that with his knowledge that he sent troops into Iraq to kill thousands of innocent civilians. Ah yes, "collateral damage". Unfortunate but an inevitable price to be paid for a necessary operation. Not the same as deliberately stringing a man up. Oh, think it through, Tony.
I don't in the end rescind my opposition to capital punishment, even for the two teenaged stabbers whose claim for mercy seems to me to have less merit than any I can imagine. But I don't think they should be out of jail before they are 60 years old. Let us feel safe from them. There could hardly be a crueller fate than to be murdered – or to have a loved one murdered – by someone who has been released into the community after doing time for a previous murder. In such circumstances, I'd want to take my vengeance on the judge who imposed an inadequate sentence and the parole board who released the killer. Suppose that goon Michael Stone had managed to breach Stormont security and carry out his mission to assassinate Gerry Adams. Where would that leave the ludicrous policy of granting a so-called "political amnesty" to subhumans who claim a political justification for murder and mayhem? No less bankrupt than before but at least demonstrably so to politicians, that's where.
So, I have a Modest Proposal. Let sentencing policy be determined less by some academic tariff set for the severity of the crime and more by the need to keep the individual perpetrators out of circulation. How can it be fitting for a convicted murderer to be walking the streets a free man at the age of 35? Which of us will be safe from him?
And yes I know that the jails are overcrowded and to keep people in for much longer stretches would only exacerbate the problem. But I suggest that we have too many crimes that carry a jail sentence. The fool of a man who works as "royal editor" (whatever that means) for the News of the World and his contact, supposedly a "private detective", evidently qualified themselves for jail sentences by tapping into private phone conversations. To stick them in jail would be most satisfying to the vengeful feelings that many will have allowed themselves in the light of their guilty admissions. But this kind of white collar crime can be punished in other ways. Fine them. I mean, really fine them. Let independent auditors go through their personal accounts and, on the basis of their findings, let the courts impose stringent on-going financial penalties that will keep them impoverished for a couple of decades. Again, the penalties need to be tailored not to some standard tariff but to a level that determines a precise period over which these individuals will suffer penalties. The public purse would be satisfyingly swelled too.
Wednesday, November 29, 2006
DUE CARE and ATTENTION
It amazes me that a driver who kills or injures is allowed to go on holding a licence. Anyone who inflicts such damage by dangerous or careless driving or while under the influence of drink or drugs should be permanently removed from the road as well as given a term of imprisonment commensurate with a manslaughter tariff. How can there be a second chance? Few will give murderers or rapists another shot at it. Those found wanting in their professional capacities are usually drummed out of that profession. And who of us would stay with an accountant done for fraud or a GP shown to be negligent?
Yet we have a culture in which the rights of the driver are held so sacred that the loss of a licence is considered a cruel and inhuman punishment for someone responsible for the loss of a life. The driver will plead that his livelihood depends on being free to drive. All the more reason always to drive as carefully as possible. That a road vehicle is only capable of killing, at most, a handful of people at a time is no reason to impose fewer constraints on its driver than, say, on an airline pilot whose error could kill hundreds in one fell swoop.
As Anne Karpf put it: “Courts and law-makers seem to believe that killing, when conducted through the intervening instrument of a car, when the murder weapon isn’t held in the hand, only controlled by it, is an altogether different affair … as though the car drives the driver, rather than the other way round. Car accidents are crimes almost without agency, without stigma, without a criminal”.
Needless to say, the road lobby took immediate issue with Ms Karpf’s wise words. “A driver … who kills through dangerous driving is looking at five years plus”, countered William Redgrave, “even if they have a spotless record and are destroyed by guilt and remorse. Those sentenced for careless driving are guilty only of a lack of due care and attention – which few of us could say we have never shown behind the wheel. When drivers who kill avoid prison, it is because the evidence shows that their driving was not particularly bad”.
I cannot understand why a driver who kills deserves leniency because that driving was “careless” rather than “dangerous”. For the family and friends of the victim, the loss is no less. And what court would accept that a piece of driving was simultaneously lethal and “not particularly bad”? This is just the kind of Through the Looking Glass reasoning that leads the motoring lobby to ignore the misery its members cause while it counts angels dancing on pinheads.
What is more, if Mr Redgrave is really volunteering that he sometimes drives without due care and attention, he ought to examine his conscience as to whether he is fit to run a car at all. Like most of his fellow drivers – some women, almost all men – Mr Redgrave lightly wears the awesome power of his car and the damage he can inflict if his concentration should fail him for a fleeting moment. Perhaps when – as he surely will – he knocks down a pedestrian, he will feel that it was just an accident, that it was bad luck, that he has had a good run and it’s bound to happen to you some time. He won’t of course be thinking about the real victim.
Once behind the wheel, many normal people lose contact with their brains. The popular press had a mini field day in February 2006 with the chanteuse Britney Spears when she was photographed driving with her baby laid across her thighs. Naturally, no journalist has ever taken a chance while in charge of a vehicle. The month before this outburst of meretricious outrage, I was eating a sandwich lunch while sitting on a bench on the pavement of the Fulham Road in London. The traffic was typically heavy, all stop-start, and the road surface was to a degree affected by winter conditions.
Having noticed a driver who had an open magazine across his steering wheel, I then systematically clocked succeeding drivers while I ate, perhaps a hundred of them on my side of the street. The great majority, for one reason or another, steered with one hand. Around one in ten was speaking into a mobile phone, blatantly breaking the law. If this breach was as common as I saw in a single file of traffic, what proportion of drivers does, routinely or from time to time, use a mobile while driving? One man was either texting or playing a game on his mobile. Several were eating, a pie or ciabatta held in the non-driving hand. One taxi driver had his arms folded and wasn’t steering at all. A woman was rummaging in a bag at her feet. Another woman was conducting a conversation through the passenger window with someone on the pavement, taking the odd glance at the road ahead. Several were consulting maps, A-Zs or other printed matter.
As a snapshot of driving modes, it was quite educational. I’m sure these drivers would protest that they know the route and their own limitations, they are always in control of their car, cab, truck or bus (on my evidence, bus drivers are the most diligent). But none of them can be sure that someone is not about to step in front of them or a vehicle coming forwards is not going to veer into their path. In such circumstances, each driver’s own reaction is compromised. Very many of them are going to have to make a two-handed grab for the wheel. The few seconds’ difference that this lack of preparedness makes could be the difference between a near miss and a collision, between yelling abuse and suffering or inflicting injury, even death.
People routinely take control of a vehicle lightly, assuming that to drive is second nature and that their ability to monitor this second nature is not altered by tiredness, preoccupation, distraction or the passing years. My father, a terrible driver, felt keenly the loss when his doctor said he should stop. I was glad for the rest of us. He met his end as a pedestrian, felled by a car. The driver was fined £120.
Driving is an adult responsibility, not a game of dare and not being caught. Jeremy Clarkson, a delinquent masquerading as a grown-up (I call him Juvenile Larksome), is the driver’s cheerleader. What an example he sets. With commendable lack of schadenfreude (seeing that he writes for the rival Sunday Times), The Observer reported that Larksome ran a pick-up truck into a 30 year-old horse chestnut in the church car park of a Somerset village as a test for his über-laddish series Top Gear. The BBC paid £250 compensation to the parish council. As Larksome had it in his column, “I was summoned to the office of a BBC bigwig where I spent half an hour looking at my shoes, saying I dunno, sir and it was only a tree … I wasn’t really sorry and I’m still not sorry. I only agreed to say I was because then the situation would die down and we could go to another village and crash into something else”. Maybe his co-presenter’s accident in summer 2006 will encourage him to grow up.
A quarter of a century ago, when the BBC was a tougher cookie in every respect, I was sacked from my job as a producer for talking to the press without prior written consent. So I have some personal resentment that JC acts the playground show-off, thumbing his nose at everyone including his employer. Most of all, though, I don’t understand why his driving licence is not taken away. By his own admission, he drives at the very best without due care and attention.
But of course motorists and professional drivers alike believe – indeed, know – that they are in control of the situation in which they find themselves moment by moment. So they cut legal corners all the time because they are experienced and the rules are made for others, not for them. Speed restrictions only apply to drivers unfamiliar with the route; anyway, they were imposed purely because the arseholes who live on this route lobbied their spineless local council or because some bureaucrat who’s never seen this road thought it was a good idea. Parking restrictions are the result of lefty-cum-EU prejudice against the free market so that you can’t go where you want to go and leave your car. Traffic wardens: well, we all know that in a former life they were the guards driving the Jews into the gas ovens. They’re worse than pædophiles. They have a grudge against cars. Bastards ...
“Well”, the thoughtful driver says, “I know that the volume of traffic is already too heavy for the road network we have and that global warming is putting us all at risk but what can I do? I still have to use the car to go to the supermarket, to collect the kids from school and to drive to work”. But every driver, if she is honest, will admit that the worst aspect of being on the road is … yes … other drivers. It is indeed the other fool who cuts you up, takes your parking space, prevents you overtaking by driving too slowly, causes the accident. It is the rest of the traffic that gets in your way.
So drivers must drive less. “Is your journey really necessary?” as the wartime poster enquired. There needs to be a cultural change, whereby car-owners treat their vehicles and the roads on which they drive with consideration and stop seeing themselves as independent spirits brought to earth by bureaucrats and kill-joys. No one who lives on a getting-busier-all-the-time road (who doesn’t?) thinks of other drivers as martyrs. It is for themselves that they weep ...
Read more of this essay in the chapter 'Bang to Rights', part of the free download of Common Sense by W.Stephen Gilbert which can be found at the website reached through the sidebar link above:
COMMON SENSE: The BOOK
It amazes me that a driver who kills or injures is allowed to go on holding a licence. Anyone who inflicts such damage by dangerous or careless driving or while under the influence of drink or drugs should be permanently removed from the road as well as given a term of imprisonment commensurate with a manslaughter tariff. How can there be a second chance? Few will give murderers or rapists another shot at it. Those found wanting in their professional capacities are usually drummed out of that profession. And who of us would stay with an accountant done for fraud or a GP shown to be negligent?
Yet we have a culture in which the rights of the driver are held so sacred that the loss of a licence is considered a cruel and inhuman punishment for someone responsible for the loss of a life. The driver will plead that his livelihood depends on being free to drive. All the more reason always to drive as carefully as possible. That a road vehicle is only capable of killing, at most, a handful of people at a time is no reason to impose fewer constraints on its driver than, say, on an airline pilot whose error could kill hundreds in one fell swoop.
As Anne Karpf put it: “Courts and law-makers seem to believe that killing, when conducted through the intervening instrument of a car, when the murder weapon isn’t held in the hand, only controlled by it, is an altogether different affair … as though the car drives the driver, rather than the other way round. Car accidents are crimes almost without agency, without stigma, without a criminal”.
Needless to say, the road lobby took immediate issue with Ms Karpf’s wise words. “A driver … who kills through dangerous driving is looking at five years plus”, countered William Redgrave, “even if they have a spotless record and are destroyed by guilt and remorse. Those sentenced for careless driving are guilty only of a lack of due care and attention – which few of us could say we have never shown behind the wheel. When drivers who kill avoid prison, it is because the evidence shows that their driving was not particularly bad”.
I cannot understand why a driver who kills deserves leniency because that driving was “careless” rather than “dangerous”. For the family and friends of the victim, the loss is no less. And what court would accept that a piece of driving was simultaneously lethal and “not particularly bad”? This is just the kind of Through the Looking Glass reasoning that leads the motoring lobby to ignore the misery its members cause while it counts angels dancing on pinheads.
What is more, if Mr Redgrave is really volunteering that he sometimes drives without due care and attention, he ought to examine his conscience as to whether he is fit to run a car at all. Like most of his fellow drivers – some women, almost all men – Mr Redgrave lightly wears the awesome power of his car and the damage he can inflict if his concentration should fail him for a fleeting moment. Perhaps when – as he surely will – he knocks down a pedestrian, he will feel that it was just an accident, that it was bad luck, that he has had a good run and it’s bound to happen to you some time. He won’t of course be thinking about the real victim.
Once behind the wheel, many normal people lose contact with their brains. The popular press had a mini field day in February 2006 with the chanteuse Britney Spears when she was photographed driving with her baby laid across her thighs. Naturally, no journalist has ever taken a chance while in charge of a vehicle. The month before this outburst of meretricious outrage, I was eating a sandwich lunch while sitting on a bench on the pavement of the Fulham Road in London. The traffic was typically heavy, all stop-start, and the road surface was to a degree affected by winter conditions.
Having noticed a driver who had an open magazine across his steering wheel, I then systematically clocked succeeding drivers while I ate, perhaps a hundred of them on my side of the street. The great majority, for one reason or another, steered with one hand. Around one in ten was speaking into a mobile phone, blatantly breaking the law. If this breach was as common as I saw in a single file of traffic, what proportion of drivers does, routinely or from time to time, use a mobile while driving? One man was either texting or playing a game on his mobile. Several were eating, a pie or ciabatta held in the non-driving hand. One taxi driver had his arms folded and wasn’t steering at all. A woman was rummaging in a bag at her feet. Another woman was conducting a conversation through the passenger window with someone on the pavement, taking the odd glance at the road ahead. Several were consulting maps, A-Zs or other printed matter.
As a snapshot of driving modes, it was quite educational. I’m sure these drivers would protest that they know the route and their own limitations, they are always in control of their car, cab, truck or bus (on my evidence, bus drivers are the most diligent). But none of them can be sure that someone is not about to step in front of them or a vehicle coming forwards is not going to veer into their path. In such circumstances, each driver’s own reaction is compromised. Very many of them are going to have to make a two-handed grab for the wheel. The few seconds’ difference that this lack of preparedness makes could be the difference between a near miss and a collision, between yelling abuse and suffering or inflicting injury, even death.
People routinely take control of a vehicle lightly, assuming that to drive is second nature and that their ability to monitor this second nature is not altered by tiredness, preoccupation, distraction or the passing years. My father, a terrible driver, felt keenly the loss when his doctor said he should stop. I was glad for the rest of us. He met his end as a pedestrian, felled by a car. The driver was fined £120.
Driving is an adult responsibility, not a game of dare and not being caught. Jeremy Clarkson, a delinquent masquerading as a grown-up (I call him Juvenile Larksome), is the driver’s cheerleader. What an example he sets. With commendable lack of schadenfreude (seeing that he writes for the rival Sunday Times), The Observer reported that Larksome ran a pick-up truck into a 30 year-old horse chestnut in the church car park of a Somerset village as a test for his über-laddish series Top Gear. The BBC paid £250 compensation to the parish council. As Larksome had it in his column, “I was summoned to the office of a BBC bigwig where I spent half an hour looking at my shoes, saying I dunno, sir and it was only a tree … I wasn’t really sorry and I’m still not sorry. I only agreed to say I was because then the situation would die down and we could go to another village and crash into something else”. Maybe his co-presenter’s accident in summer 2006 will encourage him to grow up.
A quarter of a century ago, when the BBC was a tougher cookie in every respect, I was sacked from my job as a producer for talking to the press without prior written consent. So I have some personal resentment that JC acts the playground show-off, thumbing his nose at everyone including his employer. Most of all, though, I don’t understand why his driving licence is not taken away. By his own admission, he drives at the very best without due care and attention.
But of course motorists and professional drivers alike believe – indeed, know – that they are in control of the situation in which they find themselves moment by moment. So they cut legal corners all the time because they are experienced and the rules are made for others, not for them. Speed restrictions only apply to drivers unfamiliar with the route; anyway, they were imposed purely because the arseholes who live on this route lobbied their spineless local council or because some bureaucrat who’s never seen this road thought it was a good idea. Parking restrictions are the result of lefty-cum-EU prejudice against the free market so that you can’t go where you want to go and leave your car. Traffic wardens: well, we all know that in a former life they were the guards driving the Jews into the gas ovens. They’re worse than pædophiles. They have a grudge against cars. Bastards ...
“Well”, the thoughtful driver says, “I know that the volume of traffic is already too heavy for the road network we have and that global warming is putting us all at risk but what can I do? I still have to use the car to go to the supermarket, to collect the kids from school and to drive to work”. But every driver, if she is honest, will admit that the worst aspect of being on the road is … yes … other drivers. It is indeed the other fool who cuts you up, takes your parking space, prevents you overtaking by driving too slowly, causes the accident. It is the rest of the traffic that gets in your way.
So drivers must drive less. “Is your journey really necessary?” as the wartime poster enquired. There needs to be a cultural change, whereby car-owners treat their vehicles and the roads on which they drive with consideration and stop seeing themselves as independent spirits brought to earth by bureaucrats and kill-joys. No one who lives on a getting-busier-all-the-time road (who doesn’t?) thinks of other drivers as martyrs. It is for themselves that they weep ...
Read more of this essay in the chapter 'Bang to Rights', part of the free download of Common Sense by W.Stephen Gilbert which can be found at the website reached through the sidebar link above:
COMMON SENSE: The BOOK
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