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.
Saturday, December 30, 2006
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
Tuesday, November 28, 2006
NEVER HEARD SUCH LANGUAGE
When I was young, older people (women, especially) were apt to utter “language!” as a reproof when someone said something that they perceived as offensive. It was shorthand for “Please do not use bad language”. ‘Bad’ or ‘strong’ language consisted of the milder swearwords or anything generally considered vulgar or blasphemous. Expletives – “four-letter words” – were never used, save in very male company, hence expressions such as “swearing like a trooper”. And if you were unguarded enough to use ‘strong language’ without first looking about you (in the street, for instance), a man would be bound to come up to you and say, politely but firmly: “Would you mind moderating your language? There are ladies present”. These days, I am sometimes minded to approach young women who are giving it out loudly: “Please, miss, have a care. There are gentlemen present”. But they wouldn’t get it.
Nobody needs reminding how words that at one time could only be spoken sotto voce are now routinely shouted by six year-olds from the proverbial rooftops, not in order to give offence but because they are used as unselfconscious emphasis. The sense of taboo has simply fallen away. The only word restrictions that survive are upon those that might insult individuals who are different from oneself.
In 1914, Bernard Shaw could cause a theatrical frisson with – and at the same time get away with – having Mrs Patrick Campbell utter “Not bloody likely!” in the Galatea role of Eliza in the first run of his 23rd play, Pygmalion. By the time of My Fair Lady, the musical version of Shaw’s play 42 years later, ‘bloody’ had lost its power to cause a “sensation” and Alan Jay Lerner’s Eliza was instead given a vulgarity, yelled in support of her horse in the second race at Ascot: “Come on, Dover!!! Move your bloomin’ arse!!!” (I replicate Lerner’s own multiple exclamation marks).
Shaw understood exactly what swearing was about. It expressed anger, acute pain or, as in Eliza’s case, vehemence in an abrupt and graphic manner. But it was not suitable in ‘polite society’ where such evident lack of self-control sorted ill with the mores. Now that there is no longer any such thing as politeness or, according to Margaret Thatcher, society, the ‘shock’ of ‘language’ has declined.
Instead, expletives are discussed in semi-academic terms in books (eg The F-Word: the Complete History of the Word in All Its Robust and Various Uses, ed: Jesse Sheidlower) and even on telly (eg Dr Germaine Greer advocating the use of ‘cunt’ in a short visual essay). This gives the lie to the argument that ‘four-letter words’ are the purview of people who are barely one up from illiteracy.
But I always knew that was untrue. When, in the late 1960s, I read English at University College London, there were two heads of the Department. Prof Frank Kermode was the most elegant, witty and enthralling lecturer I can hope to hear. As I write, he continues to publish elegant, witty and enthralling books in his mid 80s. Joint head was Sir Frank’s fellow Manxman, Prof Randolph Quirk, now Baron Quirk of Bloomsbury in the London Borough of Camden, to give him his full, splendid title. Lord Quirk was also a witty man. While Sir Frank’s area was literature, his was language. His wonderful book, The Use of English, is still the standard text.
Now, because I stupidly failed Part I in Old English, taken a year before Finals, I had to resit the paper and, along with other failures, I received extra tuition from Prof Quirk himself. My fellow students were less diligent about attendance than me, so I sometimes found myself alone with the daunting professor. The absences irritated him. He would throw open his door and bellow into the corridor: “Where are those cunts?” The air, as they used to say, was blue. Nobody, though, could accuse Prof Quirk of having no alternative words to hand. He was utilizing the full range of language and, you could posit, appropriately in the circumstances.
Victorian novels would convey frustration by having a character (always male, I think) cry “D–– it!” or some equally bowdlerized term. This could be understood by a lady reader to stand for “dash it!”, a mild enough imprecation for her to imagine if not actually to utter. Before and since that time, many mild oaths have been corruptions of blasphemous exclamations: “zounds!”, “lawks-a-mercy!”, “lumme!”, “blimey!”, “struth!” being derived respectively from “God’s wounds!”, “Lord have mercy!”, “God love me!”, “God blind me!”, “God’s truth!”. These euphemisms avoid a breach of the Third Commandment: “Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain".
‘Stronger’ language seeped into literary novels in the early 20th century. Joyce’s Ulysses and Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover were banned outright in Britain for years. After the trial that liberated the latter book, Penguin’s famous edition circulated widely if discreetly. I remember my teenaged delight at finding a copy secreted in the kitchen drawer. Though notably prudish in all things sexual, my mother could not resist finding out what the fuss was about.
As early as 1934, Cole Porter could remark wittily on the sexual language beginning to appear in the novel:
In olden days a glimpse of stocking
Was looked on as something shocking
But now, God knows,
Anything goes.
Good authors too who once knew better words
Now only use four-letter words
Writing prose –
Anything goes.
Note that Porter’s “But now, God knows,” is frequently modulated to the more acceptable “Now, Heaven knows,” in recordings of the song.
For my generation, the literature that caused a prurient rush to the bookshops included Henry Miller (Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn), Hubert Selby Jr (Last Exit to Brooklyn), William Burroughs (The Naked Lunch) and John Rechy (City of Night and The Sexual Outlaw). These were ‘hot’ novels, not just for the ripeness of their language but more so for the inordinate behaviour that they limned. There is a (conscious) blurring here of the line between literature and pornography, preserved only by the seriousness of intent – or, some would say, the self-serving pretension of the writing.
The function of swearing, it could be argued, is to give offence. While expletives did their job, writers drew attention to themselves by employing them. But there is a perfectly respectable argument for making use of the language that is actually used in society, for writers seeking accuracy and candour in their reflection of people’s talk ...
In 1986, the National Theatre mounted The Petition, a new play by Brian Clark, much of whose work had been written for television. Sir Peter Hall cast Sir John Mills, infrequently seen on stage, opposite the charming and dignified Rosemary Harris. I saw the play in its transfer to Wyndham’s in the West End, where its audience seemed to be even more elderly and conservative than would venture to the National. A distinct froideur wafted from the stalls to the stage when Sir John was obliged to call Miss Harris “a cunt”. To most of the audience, I feel sure, such a word was deeply offensive, inappropriate and uncalled-for, both in such a play and in the mouth of a beloved senior actor. They did not want to be obliged to hear ‘gutter’ language and they resented it. I have some sympathy for their view.
My father and I were watching the late-night programme BBC3 (on BBC2) in November 1965, when that estimable imp, Kenneth Tynan, was asked by the host Robert Robinson whether sexual intercourse might be permissible on the stage of the National Theatre, where Tynan was literary manager.
“Certainly” said Tynan, seeming to answer a different question altogether. “| think there are very few rational people in this world to whom the word ‘fuck’ is particularly diabolical or revolting or totally forbidden”. Coming back to Robinson’s point, he went on: “I think that anything that can be printed or said can also be seen”.
Tynan’s conclusion is a major provocation and merits debate. Sadly, his uttering of ‘fuck’, the first recorded instance on British television – conceivably on any television – raised the mother of all hullabaloos. There were questions in the House (in 2006, the great broadcasting issue exercising MPs was Radio 4’s decision to axe the early morning theme tune) and Tynan’s dismissal from the NT was widely called for. Happily, Tynan’s boss, Sir Laurence Olivier, held his nerve and the storm blew out.
Four decades on, ‘fuck’ is heard far more on television than, say, ‘socialist’, ‘existentialism’, ‘poetry’ or ‘modesty’ ...
To read the rest of this disquisition – on the general corruption of language, not merely the rise of "bad language" – see the chapter 'Never Heard Such Language' in my book Common Sense, which is available as a download, entirely free, by clicking on the sidebar link called
COMMON SENSE: The BOOK
If anything in it catches your eye, please pass the link to others.
When I was young, older people (women, especially) were apt to utter “language!” as a reproof when someone said something that they perceived as offensive. It was shorthand for “Please do not use bad language”. ‘Bad’ or ‘strong’ language consisted of the milder swearwords or anything generally considered vulgar or blasphemous. Expletives – “four-letter words” – were never used, save in very male company, hence expressions such as “swearing like a trooper”. And if you were unguarded enough to use ‘strong language’ without first looking about you (in the street, for instance), a man would be bound to come up to you and say, politely but firmly: “Would you mind moderating your language? There are ladies present”. These days, I am sometimes minded to approach young women who are giving it out loudly: “Please, miss, have a care. There are gentlemen present”. But they wouldn’t get it.
Nobody needs reminding how words that at one time could only be spoken sotto voce are now routinely shouted by six year-olds from the proverbial rooftops, not in order to give offence but because they are used as unselfconscious emphasis. The sense of taboo has simply fallen away. The only word restrictions that survive are upon those that might insult individuals who are different from oneself.
In 1914, Bernard Shaw could cause a theatrical frisson with – and at the same time get away with – having Mrs Patrick Campbell utter “Not bloody likely!” in the Galatea role of Eliza in the first run of his 23rd play, Pygmalion. By the time of My Fair Lady, the musical version of Shaw’s play 42 years later, ‘bloody’ had lost its power to cause a “sensation” and Alan Jay Lerner’s Eliza was instead given a vulgarity, yelled in support of her horse in the second race at Ascot: “Come on, Dover!!! Move your bloomin’ arse!!!” (I replicate Lerner’s own multiple exclamation marks).
Shaw understood exactly what swearing was about. It expressed anger, acute pain or, as in Eliza’s case, vehemence in an abrupt and graphic manner. But it was not suitable in ‘polite society’ where such evident lack of self-control sorted ill with the mores. Now that there is no longer any such thing as politeness or, according to Margaret Thatcher, society, the ‘shock’ of ‘language’ has declined.
Instead, expletives are discussed in semi-academic terms in books (eg The F-Word: the Complete History of the Word in All Its Robust and Various Uses, ed: Jesse Sheidlower) and even on telly (eg Dr Germaine Greer advocating the use of ‘cunt’ in a short visual essay). This gives the lie to the argument that ‘four-letter words’ are the purview of people who are barely one up from illiteracy.
But I always knew that was untrue. When, in the late 1960s, I read English at University College London, there were two heads of the Department. Prof Frank Kermode was the most elegant, witty and enthralling lecturer I can hope to hear. As I write, he continues to publish elegant, witty and enthralling books in his mid 80s. Joint head was Sir Frank’s fellow Manxman, Prof Randolph Quirk, now Baron Quirk of Bloomsbury in the London Borough of Camden, to give him his full, splendid title. Lord Quirk was also a witty man. While Sir Frank’s area was literature, his was language. His wonderful book, The Use of English, is still the standard text.
Now, because I stupidly failed Part I in Old English, taken a year before Finals, I had to resit the paper and, along with other failures, I received extra tuition from Prof Quirk himself. My fellow students were less diligent about attendance than me, so I sometimes found myself alone with the daunting professor. The absences irritated him. He would throw open his door and bellow into the corridor: “Where are those cunts?” The air, as they used to say, was blue. Nobody, though, could accuse Prof Quirk of having no alternative words to hand. He was utilizing the full range of language and, you could posit, appropriately in the circumstances.
Victorian novels would convey frustration by having a character (always male, I think) cry “D–– it!” or some equally bowdlerized term. This could be understood by a lady reader to stand for “dash it!”, a mild enough imprecation for her to imagine if not actually to utter. Before and since that time, many mild oaths have been corruptions of blasphemous exclamations: “zounds!”, “lawks-a-mercy!”, “lumme!”, “blimey!”, “struth!” being derived respectively from “God’s wounds!”, “Lord have mercy!”, “God love me!”, “God blind me!”, “God’s truth!”. These euphemisms avoid a breach of the Third Commandment: “Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain".
‘Stronger’ language seeped into literary novels in the early 20th century. Joyce’s Ulysses and Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover were banned outright in Britain for years. After the trial that liberated the latter book, Penguin’s famous edition circulated widely if discreetly. I remember my teenaged delight at finding a copy secreted in the kitchen drawer. Though notably prudish in all things sexual, my mother could not resist finding out what the fuss was about.
As early as 1934, Cole Porter could remark wittily on the sexual language beginning to appear in the novel:
In olden days a glimpse of stocking
Was looked on as something shocking
But now, God knows,
Anything goes.
Good authors too who once knew better words
Now only use four-letter words
Writing prose –
Anything goes.
Note that Porter’s “But now, God knows,” is frequently modulated to the more acceptable “Now, Heaven knows,” in recordings of the song.
For my generation, the literature that caused a prurient rush to the bookshops included Henry Miller (Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn), Hubert Selby Jr (Last Exit to Brooklyn), William Burroughs (The Naked Lunch) and John Rechy (City of Night and The Sexual Outlaw). These were ‘hot’ novels, not just for the ripeness of their language but more so for the inordinate behaviour that they limned. There is a (conscious) blurring here of the line between literature and pornography, preserved only by the seriousness of intent – or, some would say, the self-serving pretension of the writing.
The function of swearing, it could be argued, is to give offence. While expletives did their job, writers drew attention to themselves by employing them. But there is a perfectly respectable argument for making use of the language that is actually used in society, for writers seeking accuracy and candour in their reflection of people’s talk ...
In 1986, the National Theatre mounted The Petition, a new play by Brian Clark, much of whose work had been written for television. Sir Peter Hall cast Sir John Mills, infrequently seen on stage, opposite the charming and dignified Rosemary Harris. I saw the play in its transfer to Wyndham’s in the West End, where its audience seemed to be even more elderly and conservative than would venture to the National. A distinct froideur wafted from the stalls to the stage when Sir John was obliged to call Miss Harris “a cunt”. To most of the audience, I feel sure, such a word was deeply offensive, inappropriate and uncalled-for, both in such a play and in the mouth of a beloved senior actor. They did not want to be obliged to hear ‘gutter’ language and they resented it. I have some sympathy for their view.
My father and I were watching the late-night programme BBC3 (on BBC2) in November 1965, when that estimable imp, Kenneth Tynan, was asked by the host Robert Robinson whether sexual intercourse might be permissible on the stage of the National Theatre, where Tynan was literary manager.
“Certainly” said Tynan, seeming to answer a different question altogether. “| think there are very few rational people in this world to whom the word ‘fuck’ is particularly diabolical or revolting or totally forbidden”. Coming back to Robinson’s point, he went on: “I think that anything that can be printed or said can also be seen”.
Tynan’s conclusion is a major provocation and merits debate. Sadly, his uttering of ‘fuck’, the first recorded instance on British television – conceivably on any television – raised the mother of all hullabaloos. There were questions in the House (in 2006, the great broadcasting issue exercising MPs was Radio 4’s decision to axe the early morning theme tune) and Tynan’s dismissal from the NT was widely called for. Happily, Tynan’s boss, Sir Laurence Olivier, held his nerve and the storm blew out.
Four decades on, ‘fuck’ is heard far more on television than, say, ‘socialist’, ‘existentialism’, ‘poetry’ or ‘modesty’ ...
To read the rest of this disquisition – on the general corruption of language, not merely the rise of "bad language" – see the chapter 'Never Heard Such Language' in my book Common Sense, which is available as a download, entirely free, by clicking on the sidebar link called
COMMON SENSE: The BOOK
If anything in it catches your eye, please pass the link to others.
Monday, November 27, 2006
FILM of DUST
Movies are not as much fun as they used to be. When there was a studio system in Hollywood and movies were turned out as if in a factory, a lot of good stuff got made by default because studio heads were too busy to pay attention. The stars were on contract, typically for seven years, and so were the writers, directors and producers. They may have been obliged to work on projects that they didn’t care for or that reinforced an image or philosophy that they would have repudiated – all of which made for a pretty big downside. Among the pluses, though, was a degree of security in a fickle industry and all the advantages of a collegiate regime of predominantly talented (even brilliant) people working to excel and to make others do the same.
Nowadays, every movie, no matter how modestly conceived or relatively inexpensive to make, is like a life commitment for at least the writer, producer and director, sometimes for some of the actors too. The biggest effort goes not into the shoot itself or the writing or the editing or the casting or the often-protracted process of post-production. The biggest effort – involving the producers, stars, financiers, production companies, directors, marketing people, even writers (and, of course, all their managers, lawyers and consultants) goes into the initial deal. It usually takes longer to set up a production than to execute it, release it and promote it (though promotion too can be a marathon). No studio system hammocks anyone or takes care of below-the-line costs. Every production is like founding an uncharted industry from scratch.
No wonder so much is compromised. If it takes months, even years, to raise the budget and sign the participants and ‘develop’ the script, it is inevitable that so many first choices – technicians, actors, locations, weather conditions, release dates – fall out of the equation. Besides, cinema is an art, not a science. People work by their instincts rather than by things they can prove. They all have an opinion based on almost nothing. As William Goldman famously wrote in his memoir of ’70s Hollywood, Adventures in the Screen Trade, NOBODY KNOWS ANYTHING (his caps).
The nature of stars has changed. In the vintage years, there was a quality that seemed essential, particularly for male stars to possess. Think of James Stewart, Cary Grant, Fred Astaire, Humphrey Bogart, Clark Gable, Charlie Chaplin, John Barrymore, Gary Cooper, Henry Fonda, Jean Gabin, James Cagney, David Niven, Spencer Tracy, Jean-Louis Barrault, Fredric March, James Dean, Errol Flynn, Charles Boyer, William Holden, Robert Donat, Leslie Howard, Alastair Sim, William Powell, Vincent Price, Edward Everett Horton, Jacques Tati, Charles Laughton, Trevor Howard, Rudolph Valentino, Burt Lancaster, Orson Welles, Peter Sellers, Edmund Gwenn, Laurence Olivier, Joel McCrea, Melvyn Douglas, Anthony Quinn, Robert Montgomery, James Mason, Claude Rains, Marcello Mastroianni. Robert Mitchum, Franchot Tone, Laurel & Hardy, Anton Walbrook, Ralph Richardson, Bill Robinson, Roland Young, Rex Harrison, Walter Matthau, Charles Coburn, Walter Pidgeon, Peter Ustinov, Don Ameche, Ronald Colman, Yves Montand, Boris Karloff, Paul Henreid, Michael Hordern, Kenneth More, George Sanders, Dean Martin, Ray Milland, Douglas Fairbanks père et fils , SZ Sakall, Rock Hudson, Roger Livesey, Joseph Cotten, Marlon Brando, Nigel Bruce, even in his way John Wayne. All had it in spades: charm.
Women stars, even the greatest, needed it less. They were sexy, decorous, sweet, fearless or fearsome. But many charmed effortlessly: Katharine Hepburn, Marilyn Monroe, Carole Lombard, Judy Garland, Jean Arthur, Marlene Dietrich, Barbara Stanwyck, Claudette Colbert, Judy Holliday, Dolores Gray, Shelley Winters, Vivien Leigh, Elisabeth Bergner, Lillian Gish, Myrna Loy, Celia Johnson, Jessica Tandy, Irene Dunne, Louise Brooks, Ingrid Bergman, Edna May Oliver, Dorothy Lamour, Marjorie Main, Natalie Wood, Hattie McDaniel, Janet Leigh, Marie Dressler, Margaret Rutherford, Billie Burke, Irene Handl, Ida Lupino, Françoise Rosay, Anne Bancroft, Ruth Gordon, Margaret Sullavan, Giulietta Masina, Hermione Gingold, Joan Blondell, Phyllis Calvert, Joyce Grenfell, Kay Kendall, Ann Sothern, Helen Hayes, Ann Sheridan, Vera-Ellen, Beryl Reid, Ethel Barrymore, Joan Greenwood, Eleanor Powell, Esme Cannon, Rita Hayworth, Beatrice Lillie, Coral Browne, Mae West, Audrey Hepburn: note how many had comic gifts.
Among today’s stars, we all can list our charmers, being careful to leave out those whom we merely fancy. If your list is rigorously compiled – and, unintended omissions aside, the absences in mine are conspicuous, even a touch harsh – it will be clear how few living stars (those under 65, anyway) possess true charm. Men typically exude a different central quality but what is it? Maybe it is something like invincibility, a carapace patented by two undoubted charmers way past 65 who, in the long view, changed things: Sean Connery and Clint Eastwood.
The younger women have what was always demanded, plus a sense of exposed sexiness. Nobody advocates a kind of Hays Code, imposed in 1930 and operative for three-and-a-half decades, whereby restrictions governed what could be shown in a movie distributed in the States. Many of these strictures were notoriously silly, such as the stipulation that, where a man and a woman were seen (fully clothed, of course) on a bed, the man must keep a foot on the floor; and it was odd always to see married couples in separate beds. But the useful function served by the Hays Office was to oblige filmmakers to be inventive, artful, witty and blithely subversive in conveying sexuality.
Now that there are no restrictions, there is neither any mystery. Actresses – and increasingly actors too – are routinely expected to divest themselves of clothing and expose their parts to the public’s dispassionate, incurious gaze. This is hardly conducive to nuance ...
Remarkably many actresses allow themselves to be conned into believing that there is some mysterious “artistic” imperative that requires them to get their kit off in front of the camera. So they agree to do it, unmindful that the director is (by the by) relishing his power to demand to look at their tits. It doesn’t take very deep analysis of most movies to see that the necessity to bare the performers’ bodies is no necessity at all.
Some actors need little persuading to let it all hang out. Glenda Jackson did disrobe on a regular basis in her movies. The breasts of Helen Mirren were filmic fixtures through the 1970s. The hoax reporter Dennis Pennis asked Demi Moore (unkindly but not unjustly) if she would consider a role that required her to keep her clothes on. And you could expect the young Simon Callow to bare all on stage or screen as reliably as Katharine Hepburn would take to the water.
But for every gratuitous flash of nipple, testicle or pubic area, there is some telling shot that may have cost the performer something to do but yet enhances the movie. In Transamerica, Felicity Huffman plays a pre-op male-to-female transexual. To cast a woman is the movie’s best idea (the screenplay has no ideas remotely as good) because, having set up a roadside shot at night in which Huffman is seen peeing from a (prosthetic) penis, writer/director Duncan Tucker can then linger briefly on Huffman in the bath, post-op and ‘transformed’. A leading performance of sublime perception and exact judgment transcends the movie’s other shortcomings.
In an exquisitely turned episode of the Channel 4 drama serial Shameless, the 60-ish actor Paul Copley played a temporary suitor to Marjorie Yates’ Carol (the neighbour’s unreliable mother). That he would prove to be rather too sexually adventurous for her was signalled from the first morning of his stay, which he passed in the stance of a naturist. Copley’s willingness to appear in any situation naked fuelled the comic momentum that the story strand needed.
These are not instances of gratuitous nudity. You don’t shift gear from watching a character to ogling an actor. The actor stays in character and the performance is deepened by the moment. This is not what most screen (or stage) nudity is like. The trendy Nederlands Dans Theater once came to London with a ballet performed entirely naked. As one critic delicately remarked, the focus of one’s view alters dramatically when the dancers’ parts are visible. One certainly found oneself distracted from the niceties of the choreography.
An RSC revival of Marlowe’s Dr Faustus addressed the perennial problem of how you carry off the magical, silent appearance of a vision of Helen of Troy by having an actress stroll naked across the Stratford stage. It was striking of course but in no way magical. A production by the Oxford University Dramatic Society trumped it. Having secured OUDS graduate Richard Burton to play Faustus, director Frank Hauser persuaded his then wife Elizabeth Taylor to walk on as Helen. It was heart-stopping, even though my fellow theatre-goer Tony Coult and I had earlier had the potentially myth-destroying experience of following the Burtons up the front steps of the Randolph Hotel, upon which occasion the generous width of Mrs Burton’s seat was proclaimed by the electric yellow of her jeans ...
To read on, see my book, Common Sense: this segment comes from the chapter entitled 'Film of Dust'. You can download the book entirely free of charge, along with its index (itself a pleasant diversion), by clicking on the sidebar link above:
COMMON SENSE: THE BOOK
Movies are not as much fun as they used to be. When there was a studio system in Hollywood and movies were turned out as if in a factory, a lot of good stuff got made by default because studio heads were too busy to pay attention. The stars were on contract, typically for seven years, and so were the writers, directors and producers. They may have been obliged to work on projects that they didn’t care for or that reinforced an image or philosophy that they would have repudiated – all of which made for a pretty big downside. Among the pluses, though, was a degree of security in a fickle industry and all the advantages of a collegiate regime of predominantly talented (even brilliant) people working to excel and to make others do the same.
Nowadays, every movie, no matter how modestly conceived or relatively inexpensive to make, is like a life commitment for at least the writer, producer and director, sometimes for some of the actors too. The biggest effort goes not into the shoot itself or the writing or the editing or the casting or the often-protracted process of post-production. The biggest effort – involving the producers, stars, financiers, production companies, directors, marketing people, even writers (and, of course, all their managers, lawyers and consultants) goes into the initial deal. It usually takes longer to set up a production than to execute it, release it and promote it (though promotion too can be a marathon). No studio system hammocks anyone or takes care of below-the-line costs. Every production is like founding an uncharted industry from scratch.
No wonder so much is compromised. If it takes months, even years, to raise the budget and sign the participants and ‘develop’ the script, it is inevitable that so many first choices – technicians, actors, locations, weather conditions, release dates – fall out of the equation. Besides, cinema is an art, not a science. People work by their instincts rather than by things they can prove. They all have an opinion based on almost nothing. As William Goldman famously wrote in his memoir of ’70s Hollywood, Adventures in the Screen Trade, NOBODY KNOWS ANYTHING (his caps).
The nature of stars has changed. In the vintage years, there was a quality that seemed essential, particularly for male stars to possess. Think of James Stewart, Cary Grant, Fred Astaire, Humphrey Bogart, Clark Gable, Charlie Chaplin, John Barrymore, Gary Cooper, Henry Fonda, Jean Gabin, James Cagney, David Niven, Spencer Tracy, Jean-Louis Barrault, Fredric March, James Dean, Errol Flynn, Charles Boyer, William Holden, Robert Donat, Leslie Howard, Alastair Sim, William Powell, Vincent Price, Edward Everett Horton, Jacques Tati, Charles Laughton, Trevor Howard, Rudolph Valentino, Burt Lancaster, Orson Welles, Peter Sellers, Edmund Gwenn, Laurence Olivier, Joel McCrea, Melvyn Douglas, Anthony Quinn, Robert Montgomery, James Mason, Claude Rains, Marcello Mastroianni. Robert Mitchum, Franchot Tone, Laurel & Hardy, Anton Walbrook, Ralph Richardson, Bill Robinson, Roland Young, Rex Harrison, Walter Matthau, Charles Coburn, Walter Pidgeon, Peter Ustinov, Don Ameche, Ronald Colman, Yves Montand, Boris Karloff, Paul Henreid, Michael Hordern, Kenneth More, George Sanders, Dean Martin, Ray Milland, Douglas Fairbanks père et fils , SZ Sakall, Rock Hudson, Roger Livesey, Joseph Cotten, Marlon Brando, Nigel Bruce, even in his way John Wayne. All had it in spades: charm.
Women stars, even the greatest, needed it less. They were sexy, decorous, sweet, fearless or fearsome. But many charmed effortlessly: Katharine Hepburn, Marilyn Monroe, Carole Lombard, Judy Garland, Jean Arthur, Marlene Dietrich, Barbara Stanwyck, Claudette Colbert, Judy Holliday, Dolores Gray, Shelley Winters, Vivien Leigh, Elisabeth Bergner, Lillian Gish, Myrna Loy, Celia Johnson, Jessica Tandy, Irene Dunne, Louise Brooks, Ingrid Bergman, Edna May Oliver, Dorothy Lamour, Marjorie Main, Natalie Wood, Hattie McDaniel, Janet Leigh, Marie Dressler, Margaret Rutherford, Billie Burke, Irene Handl, Ida Lupino, Françoise Rosay, Anne Bancroft, Ruth Gordon, Margaret Sullavan, Giulietta Masina, Hermione Gingold, Joan Blondell, Phyllis Calvert, Joyce Grenfell, Kay Kendall, Ann Sothern, Helen Hayes, Ann Sheridan, Vera-Ellen, Beryl Reid, Ethel Barrymore, Joan Greenwood, Eleanor Powell, Esme Cannon, Rita Hayworth, Beatrice Lillie, Coral Browne, Mae West, Audrey Hepburn: note how many had comic gifts.
Among today’s stars, we all can list our charmers, being careful to leave out those whom we merely fancy. If your list is rigorously compiled – and, unintended omissions aside, the absences in mine are conspicuous, even a touch harsh – it will be clear how few living stars (those under 65, anyway) possess true charm. Men typically exude a different central quality but what is it? Maybe it is something like invincibility, a carapace patented by two undoubted charmers way past 65 who, in the long view, changed things: Sean Connery and Clint Eastwood.
The younger women have what was always demanded, plus a sense of exposed sexiness. Nobody advocates a kind of Hays Code, imposed in 1930 and operative for three-and-a-half decades, whereby restrictions governed what could be shown in a movie distributed in the States. Many of these strictures were notoriously silly, such as the stipulation that, where a man and a woman were seen (fully clothed, of course) on a bed, the man must keep a foot on the floor; and it was odd always to see married couples in separate beds. But the useful function served by the Hays Office was to oblige filmmakers to be inventive, artful, witty and blithely subversive in conveying sexuality.
Now that there are no restrictions, there is neither any mystery. Actresses – and increasingly actors too – are routinely expected to divest themselves of clothing and expose their parts to the public’s dispassionate, incurious gaze. This is hardly conducive to nuance ...
Remarkably many actresses allow themselves to be conned into believing that there is some mysterious “artistic” imperative that requires them to get their kit off in front of the camera. So they agree to do it, unmindful that the director is (by the by) relishing his power to demand to look at their tits. It doesn’t take very deep analysis of most movies to see that the necessity to bare the performers’ bodies is no necessity at all.
Some actors need little persuading to let it all hang out. Glenda Jackson did disrobe on a regular basis in her movies. The breasts of Helen Mirren were filmic fixtures through the 1970s. The hoax reporter Dennis Pennis asked Demi Moore (unkindly but not unjustly) if she would consider a role that required her to keep her clothes on. And you could expect the young Simon Callow to bare all on stage or screen as reliably as Katharine Hepburn would take to the water.
But for every gratuitous flash of nipple, testicle or pubic area, there is some telling shot that may have cost the performer something to do but yet enhances the movie. In Transamerica, Felicity Huffman plays a pre-op male-to-female transexual. To cast a woman is the movie’s best idea (the screenplay has no ideas remotely as good) because, having set up a roadside shot at night in which Huffman is seen peeing from a (prosthetic) penis, writer/director Duncan Tucker can then linger briefly on Huffman in the bath, post-op and ‘transformed’. A leading performance of sublime perception and exact judgment transcends the movie’s other shortcomings.
In an exquisitely turned episode of the Channel 4 drama serial Shameless, the 60-ish actor Paul Copley played a temporary suitor to Marjorie Yates’ Carol (the neighbour’s unreliable mother). That he would prove to be rather too sexually adventurous for her was signalled from the first morning of his stay, which he passed in the stance of a naturist. Copley’s willingness to appear in any situation naked fuelled the comic momentum that the story strand needed.
These are not instances of gratuitous nudity. You don’t shift gear from watching a character to ogling an actor. The actor stays in character and the performance is deepened by the moment. This is not what most screen (or stage) nudity is like. The trendy Nederlands Dans Theater once came to London with a ballet performed entirely naked. As one critic delicately remarked, the focus of one’s view alters dramatically when the dancers’ parts are visible. One certainly found oneself distracted from the niceties of the choreography.
An RSC revival of Marlowe’s Dr Faustus addressed the perennial problem of how you carry off the magical, silent appearance of a vision of Helen of Troy by having an actress stroll naked across the Stratford stage. It was striking of course but in no way magical. A production by the Oxford University Dramatic Society trumped it. Having secured OUDS graduate Richard Burton to play Faustus, director Frank Hauser persuaded his then wife Elizabeth Taylor to walk on as Helen. It was heart-stopping, even though my fellow theatre-goer Tony Coult and I had earlier had the potentially myth-destroying experience of following the Burtons up the front steps of the Randolph Hotel, upon which occasion the generous width of Mrs Burton’s seat was proclaimed by the electric yellow of her jeans ...
To read on, see my book, Common Sense: this segment comes from the chapter entitled 'Film of Dust'. You can download the book entirely free of charge, along with its index (itself a pleasant diversion), by clicking on the sidebar link above:
COMMON SENSE: THE BOOK
The DOWNLOAD PATH
As you may know, the world has degenerated into a sorry place – a loud, thuggish environment in which, with a few honourable exceptions, the race goes not to the swift but to the steroid-enhanced; the spoils go not to the victors but to the party donors; and history and philosophy are written not by historians and philosophers but by comedians, soap opera actors, day-time chat-show hosts, ghosted footballers and people who have thrust themselves onto what is laughingly called “reality television”.
In such a world, out-dated qualities such as expertise, modesty, kindness, wit, knowledge, reticence, honesty, irony, patience and understatement go not so much unrewarded as incomprehensible to the decision-makers and opinion-formers.
It follows that having had three books previously published is no passport to the publication of a fourth. After a long and disheartening struggle, I have elected to offer my latest volume as a free download to anyone minded to dip into it. The book is called, somewhat combatively perhaps, Common Sense. It is a tour d’horizon of the world as seen by a baby boomer for whom the age of 60 is just around the next corner.
You need be no whiz kid of the computer to access this text. Simply go to the sidebar link on the right above that says
COMMON SENSE: The BOOK
This links you to my website; just follow the instructions you find there. You can readily download the book and its index onto your own desktop: the book occupies 2.7MB of space and the index (which itself, I suggest, is a diverting dip) 352KB. The thumbnail device on the left side of the Adobe reader will facilitate finding the page you want (the Chapter Headings will be found on page 3 of the volume).
Creatures that inhabit the ether survive by word of mouth or, I suppose I mean, word of keyboard. If you find anything in the text that engages, enrages, amuses, enthuses, mystifies, edifies, horrifies or revivifies you, please direct the occupants of your address book to the download. Who knows? – perhaps one day some lame-brained publisher will come to rue the day she failed to project a whole book from a sample chapter or, more common still, he declined to read it at all.
Thank you for your indulgence.
As you may know, the world has degenerated into a sorry place – a loud, thuggish environment in which, with a few honourable exceptions, the race goes not to the swift but to the steroid-enhanced; the spoils go not to the victors but to the party donors; and history and philosophy are written not by historians and philosophers but by comedians, soap opera actors, day-time chat-show hosts, ghosted footballers and people who have thrust themselves onto what is laughingly called “reality television”.
In such a world, out-dated qualities such as expertise, modesty, kindness, wit, knowledge, reticence, honesty, irony, patience and understatement go not so much unrewarded as incomprehensible to the decision-makers and opinion-formers.
It follows that having had three books previously published is no passport to the publication of a fourth. After a long and disheartening struggle, I have elected to offer my latest volume as a free download to anyone minded to dip into it. The book is called, somewhat combatively perhaps, Common Sense. It is a tour d’horizon of the world as seen by a baby boomer for whom the age of 60 is just around the next corner.
You need be no whiz kid of the computer to access this text. Simply go to the sidebar link on the right above that says
COMMON SENSE: The BOOK
This links you to my website; just follow the instructions you find there. You can readily download the book and its index onto your own desktop: the book occupies 2.7MB of space and the index (which itself, I suggest, is a diverting dip) 352KB. The thumbnail device on the left side of the Adobe reader will facilitate finding the page you want (the Chapter Headings will be found on page 3 of the volume).
Creatures that inhabit the ether survive by word of mouth or, I suppose I mean, word of keyboard. If you find anything in the text that engages, enrages, amuses, enthuses, mystifies, edifies, horrifies or revivifies you, please direct the occupants of your address book to the download. Who knows? – perhaps one day some lame-brained publisher will come to rue the day she failed to project a whole book from a sample chapter or, more common still, he declined to read it at all.
Thank you for your indulgence.
WHEN WILL THEY EVER LEARN?
It always seemed to me, innocent as I am in weapons technology and realpolitik alike, that if Saddam Hussein really did possess the famed “weapons of mass destruction”, he would be bound to use them against the allied forces massing on his borders ahead of the invasion. If not then, when? What other occasion would he have to use them? What point would there be in developing them if he weren’t going to use them against an enemy determined to overthrow him by whatever means? Did Bush and Blair send in their troops believing that there was a real risk that WMD would rain down on their heads? Or did they know full well that there was no such risk?
I always had difficulty understanding the basis for the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Bush and Blair modulated the argument as they went along, personalizing the issue onto Saddam Hussein. What I call “the bogeyman theory of history” (or ‘boogieman’ in American) seems to me a facile kind of worldview. Demonize a country’s leader, call him a madman and despot and pretty soon you have a rationale for invasion, provided the country is much weaker than yours and your electorate are profoundly ignorant of that country’s history, culture and political system or of whom his successor might be ...
My greatest difficulty with the demonizing of Saddam Hussein was that every time an allied spokesman described a president who had not been legitimately elected, who flouted the will of the UN, who did not recognize the remit or indeed the very existence of international law, who invaded smaller and weaker nations, who imprisoned enemy troops without trial, who tore up treaties and who was developing more and more terrifying weapons of mass destruction, I thought he was talking about George W Bush.
This is no mere debating point. It is too easy to argue that the actions of our leaders are taken in full transparency and honour and good faith, while the other guy pursues the same policies out of malice and guile and bad faith. There is a fearsome irregular verb to be conjugated in description of what governments call ‘defence’: “I am a strong, moral leader who is developing his nuclear deterrent in order to protect the sovereignty of his nation and the greater security of the world; you are a leader who is not to be trusted with such a nuclear capability and who must reduce your stockpile of weapons; he is a mad despot to be disarmed by force of all his weapons of mass destruction”. If it is dangerous for the other guy to have nuclear capacity, how come it is merely prudent for us to have it? If we are powerful and responsible enough not to need to acknowledge the fears of other nations, why is he too foreign and wilful to be trusted?
Western diplomacy appears to believe its own propaganda and conducts itself as though the black-and-white world politicians depict for their electorates is just as simple in reality. Bush’s “axis of evil” may play in Peoria but appears merely foolish in Damascus, Tehran and Beirut and indeed in Moscow, Paris and Strasbourg. One woman’s terrorist is another’s freedom fighter: that was always true. Those who believe that the ‘War on Terror’ is a comic-book struggle between ‘good’ and ‘evil’ will never understand the complexities of the means by which peoples of different faiths, tribes and traditions hunker down and co-exist.
Tony Blair began to address these matters in a most significant speech to the World Affairs Council in Los Angeles at the height of the hostilities between Israel and Hizbullah in the summer of 2006. After an implicit acknowledgment of President Bush’s child’s-eye view of the world – “there is an arc of extremism now stretching across the Middle East and touching, with increasing definition, countries far outside that region” – he developed an argument that force alone was inadequate for “our strategy to defeat those that threaten us”.
Blair proposed that "we will not win the battle against this global extremism unless we win it at the level of values as much as force, unless we show we are even-handed, fair and just in our application of those values to the world … tolerance, freedom, respect for difference and diversity … This war can only be won by showing that our values are stronger, better and more just, more fair than the alternative … Unless we re-appraise our strategy, unless we revitalise the broader global agenda on poverty, climate change, trade and, in respect of the Middle East, bend every sinew of our will to making peace between Israel and Palestine, we will not win … This is not just about security or military tactics. It is about hearts and minds, about inspiring people, persuading them, showing them what our values at their best stand for".
Much of the rest of the speech was a post hoc rationale of US/UK actions in the Middle East, Iraq and Afghanistan, crediting radical Islam with a long-term strategy of destabilization, a strategy which Blair considered “virtually obvious” despite the west’s unerring ability to play the role that the strategy assigned to it. "The purpose of the provocation that began the [present] conflict was clear. It was to create chaos, division and bloodshed, to provoke retaliation by Israel that would lead to Arab and Muslim opinion being inflamed, not against those who started the aggression but against those who responded to it".
This analysis begs virtually obvious questions: if the purpose of the provocation was so clear, why did the west allow Israel to play so readily into the hands of the wicked provocateurs? Does the west really embody “tolerance, freedom, respect for difference and diversity”? Are western values “stronger, better and more just, more fair than the alternative”? Beyond the rhetoric, we must look at UK and US social policy, the execution of law and justice, immigration and asylum measures, the provision of health, of education, of housing and of benefits for the poor, control over trade manipulation and powerful vested interests and avoidance of sleaze. Is our culture so wholesome that we can offer it as a better way than that of radical Islam? Or is it all too easy for even a moderate imam to point to “western decadence” and warn against such a fate? If Mr Blair were ever to wade through all that I have written here, he will see that I – and those who agree with any of my thesis – have grave misgivings about the tenor of contemporary life in the western democracies. Who would want to import our culture? And remember that Blair sacked Jack Straw from the Foreign Office for his Muslim sympathies.
The ‘destruction’ – easier said than done – of movements that came into being because significant numbers of people feel aggrieved can never be achieved unless those grievances are addressed. The very existence of Israel is the most long running and intractable of such grievances. No politician will ever dare to alienate the numerous and powerful pro-Israel lobby in the United States – that is, unless and until the Arab demographic exceeds the Jewish. But the Middle East will never be at peace unless an American regime is prepared to force boundary concessions upon Israel instead of continuously underwriting her occupied territories with a blank cheque.
Neither Hizbullah nor Hamas is listed by the UN as a terrorist organization, the USA, Israel and Canada dissenting. The EU, UK and Australia regard Hamas as terrorists but not Hizbullah. Hamas, which is a Palestinian, Sunni Islamist grouping whose name means ‘Islamic Resistance Movement’, won the 2006 election in Palestine and formed a government for the first time. Hizbullah, a Lebanese, Shi’ite Islamist grouping whose name means ‘Party of God’, was founded 25 years ago specifically to free southern Lebanon from Israeli occupation. It was its capture of two Israeli soldiers that precipitated the sustained attacks on Beirut, Tyre and other Lebanese centres by Israel in 2006. Hizbullah’s resistance was more resolute than Israel had anticipated ...
to read the rest of this essay, see the chapter 'When Will They Ever Learn' in the book Common Sense by W Stephen Gilbert, available as an entirely free download by clicking on the link in the sidebar above:
COMMON SENSE: The BOOK
It always seemed to me, innocent as I am in weapons technology and realpolitik alike, that if Saddam Hussein really did possess the famed “weapons of mass destruction”, he would be bound to use them against the allied forces massing on his borders ahead of the invasion. If not then, when? What other occasion would he have to use them? What point would there be in developing them if he weren’t going to use them against an enemy determined to overthrow him by whatever means? Did Bush and Blair send in their troops believing that there was a real risk that WMD would rain down on their heads? Or did they know full well that there was no such risk?
I always had difficulty understanding the basis for the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Bush and Blair modulated the argument as they went along, personalizing the issue onto Saddam Hussein. What I call “the bogeyman theory of history” (or ‘boogieman’ in American) seems to me a facile kind of worldview. Demonize a country’s leader, call him a madman and despot and pretty soon you have a rationale for invasion, provided the country is much weaker than yours and your electorate are profoundly ignorant of that country’s history, culture and political system or of whom his successor might be ...
My greatest difficulty with the demonizing of Saddam Hussein was that every time an allied spokesman described a president who had not been legitimately elected, who flouted the will of the UN, who did not recognize the remit or indeed the very existence of international law, who invaded smaller and weaker nations, who imprisoned enemy troops without trial, who tore up treaties and who was developing more and more terrifying weapons of mass destruction, I thought he was talking about George W Bush.
This is no mere debating point. It is too easy to argue that the actions of our leaders are taken in full transparency and honour and good faith, while the other guy pursues the same policies out of malice and guile and bad faith. There is a fearsome irregular verb to be conjugated in description of what governments call ‘defence’: “I am a strong, moral leader who is developing his nuclear deterrent in order to protect the sovereignty of his nation and the greater security of the world; you are a leader who is not to be trusted with such a nuclear capability and who must reduce your stockpile of weapons; he is a mad despot to be disarmed by force of all his weapons of mass destruction”. If it is dangerous for the other guy to have nuclear capacity, how come it is merely prudent for us to have it? If we are powerful and responsible enough not to need to acknowledge the fears of other nations, why is he too foreign and wilful to be trusted?
Western diplomacy appears to believe its own propaganda and conducts itself as though the black-and-white world politicians depict for their electorates is just as simple in reality. Bush’s “axis of evil” may play in Peoria but appears merely foolish in Damascus, Tehran and Beirut and indeed in Moscow, Paris and Strasbourg. One woman’s terrorist is another’s freedom fighter: that was always true. Those who believe that the ‘War on Terror’ is a comic-book struggle between ‘good’ and ‘evil’ will never understand the complexities of the means by which peoples of different faiths, tribes and traditions hunker down and co-exist.
Tony Blair began to address these matters in a most significant speech to the World Affairs Council in Los Angeles at the height of the hostilities between Israel and Hizbullah in the summer of 2006. After an implicit acknowledgment of President Bush’s child’s-eye view of the world – “there is an arc of extremism now stretching across the Middle East and touching, with increasing definition, countries far outside that region” – he developed an argument that force alone was inadequate for “our strategy to defeat those that threaten us”.
Blair proposed that "we will not win the battle against this global extremism unless we win it at the level of values as much as force, unless we show we are even-handed, fair and just in our application of those values to the world … tolerance, freedom, respect for difference and diversity … This war can only be won by showing that our values are stronger, better and more just, more fair than the alternative … Unless we re-appraise our strategy, unless we revitalise the broader global agenda on poverty, climate change, trade and, in respect of the Middle East, bend every sinew of our will to making peace between Israel and Palestine, we will not win … This is not just about security or military tactics. It is about hearts and minds, about inspiring people, persuading them, showing them what our values at their best stand for".
Much of the rest of the speech was a post hoc rationale of US/UK actions in the Middle East, Iraq and Afghanistan, crediting radical Islam with a long-term strategy of destabilization, a strategy which Blair considered “virtually obvious” despite the west’s unerring ability to play the role that the strategy assigned to it. "The purpose of the provocation that began the [present] conflict was clear. It was to create chaos, division and bloodshed, to provoke retaliation by Israel that would lead to Arab and Muslim opinion being inflamed, not against those who started the aggression but against those who responded to it".
This analysis begs virtually obvious questions: if the purpose of the provocation was so clear, why did the west allow Israel to play so readily into the hands of the wicked provocateurs? Does the west really embody “tolerance, freedom, respect for difference and diversity”? Are western values “stronger, better and more just, more fair than the alternative”? Beyond the rhetoric, we must look at UK and US social policy, the execution of law and justice, immigration and asylum measures, the provision of health, of education, of housing and of benefits for the poor, control over trade manipulation and powerful vested interests and avoidance of sleaze. Is our culture so wholesome that we can offer it as a better way than that of radical Islam? Or is it all too easy for even a moderate imam to point to “western decadence” and warn against such a fate? If Mr Blair were ever to wade through all that I have written here, he will see that I – and those who agree with any of my thesis – have grave misgivings about the tenor of contemporary life in the western democracies. Who would want to import our culture? And remember that Blair sacked Jack Straw from the Foreign Office for his Muslim sympathies.
The ‘destruction’ – easier said than done – of movements that came into being because significant numbers of people feel aggrieved can never be achieved unless those grievances are addressed. The very existence of Israel is the most long running and intractable of such grievances. No politician will ever dare to alienate the numerous and powerful pro-Israel lobby in the United States – that is, unless and until the Arab demographic exceeds the Jewish. But the Middle East will never be at peace unless an American regime is prepared to force boundary concessions upon Israel instead of continuously underwriting her occupied territories with a blank cheque.
Neither Hizbullah nor Hamas is listed by the UN as a terrorist organization, the USA, Israel and Canada dissenting. The EU, UK and Australia regard Hamas as terrorists but not Hizbullah. Hamas, which is a Palestinian, Sunni Islamist grouping whose name means ‘Islamic Resistance Movement’, won the 2006 election in Palestine and formed a government for the first time. Hizbullah, a Lebanese, Shi’ite Islamist grouping whose name means ‘Party of God’, was founded 25 years ago specifically to free southern Lebanon from Israeli occupation. It was its capture of two Israeli soldiers that precipitated the sustained attacks on Beirut, Tyre and other Lebanese centres by Israel in 2006. Hizbullah’s resistance was more resolute than Israel had anticipated ...
to read the rest of this essay, see the chapter 'When Will They Ever Learn' in the book Common Sense by W Stephen Gilbert, available as an entirely free download by clicking on the link in the sidebar above:
COMMON SENSE: The BOOK
Sunday, November 26, 2006
HOW I STUMBLED on COMMON SENSE
At the beginning of the 1990s, I was working at a television production company. Euston Films, now defunct, was the subsidiary that made drama on film for Thames Television when the latter held the ITV franchise for broadcasting on weekdays in London.
Rather to my surprise, for it was hardly my natural territory, I was acting as script executive (script editor, as we called the post when I began in television and as I think of it still) for one of the big guns in ITV’s drama output, Minder. It fell to me, indeed, to devise the character – name, relationship to Arthur Daley, general function – who would replace Dennis Waterman’s Terry as the eponym. I am happy to report that the casting did not come under my purview.
One day a call came through to my office from Michael Church, an old chum from journalism days, who was then features editor on a national newspaper. He asked if I would like to consider writing a regular column for the paper. Most would no doubt accept such an offer at once and wing it. Doubtless too diligent for my own good, I instinctively felt that my script editing was a full-time job and that I could render neither it nor a column justice by trying to do them simultaneously. Without more ado, I reluctantly declined.
But “consider” lodged in my head. Middle-aged as I was, I had begun to feel utterly out of sorts with the times, not merely with the drawn-out demise of Tory rule but with the whole Zeitgeist. I had only to stroll down the street to feel alienated. As that camp old gargoyle Ernest Thesiger said of fighting in the World War I trenches: “My dear, the noise! And the people!” Of course it was a function of getting older but it seemed more deep-rooted than that. I felt that our values had come adrift and that this everyone-for-the-lifeboats and devil-take-the-hindmost mentality, much gingered up by the cult of greed that characterized the Thatcherite view of anti-society, was manifesting itself in multifarious ways, both vast and minuscule.
The promise that fulfilling the script editor function on Minder and on Euston’s short-lived and fraught new project (a drama series-cum-serial about a psychiatric practice called Shrinks) would be rewarded with my return to producing was not made good. Anyway, I got taken off both shows. Towards the end of the second year of my contract, it was clear that Thames would lose to Carlton its fight to keep the ITV franchise and, one by one, the company script editors were told that their contracts would not be renewed. By this time, needless to say, Michael Church was no longer a features editor.
I put together a few sample columns under the title ‘Now Don’t Get Me Started …’ and sent them around. No features editor was remotely interested. Eventually the country had had enough of the Tories and elected something calling itself New Labour. By the time well-merited disillusion had set in with that regime, I had decided that Now Don’t Get Me Started … could be a book ...
To read entirely free of charge that book, now entitled Common Sense, please click on the link in the sidebar
COMMON SENSE: The BOOK
and you will go to the webpage where the book is available as a download
At the beginning of the 1990s, I was working at a television production company. Euston Films, now defunct, was the subsidiary that made drama on film for Thames Television when the latter held the ITV franchise for broadcasting on weekdays in London.
Rather to my surprise, for it was hardly my natural territory, I was acting as script executive (script editor, as we called the post when I began in television and as I think of it still) for one of the big guns in ITV’s drama output, Minder. It fell to me, indeed, to devise the character – name, relationship to Arthur Daley, general function – who would replace Dennis Waterman’s Terry as the eponym. I am happy to report that the casting did not come under my purview.
One day a call came through to my office from Michael Church, an old chum from journalism days, who was then features editor on a national newspaper. He asked if I would like to consider writing a regular column for the paper. Most would no doubt accept such an offer at once and wing it. Doubtless too diligent for my own good, I instinctively felt that my script editing was a full-time job and that I could render neither it nor a column justice by trying to do them simultaneously. Without more ado, I reluctantly declined.
But “consider” lodged in my head. Middle-aged as I was, I had begun to feel utterly out of sorts with the times, not merely with the drawn-out demise of Tory rule but with the whole Zeitgeist. I had only to stroll down the street to feel alienated. As that camp old gargoyle Ernest Thesiger said of fighting in the World War I trenches: “My dear, the noise! And the people!” Of course it was a function of getting older but it seemed more deep-rooted than that. I felt that our values had come adrift and that this everyone-for-the-lifeboats and devil-take-the-hindmost mentality, much gingered up by the cult of greed that characterized the Thatcherite view of anti-society, was manifesting itself in multifarious ways, both vast and minuscule.
The promise that fulfilling the script editor function on Minder and on Euston’s short-lived and fraught new project (a drama series-cum-serial about a psychiatric practice called Shrinks) would be rewarded with my return to producing was not made good. Anyway, I got taken off both shows. Towards the end of the second year of my contract, it was clear that Thames would lose to Carlton its fight to keep the ITV franchise and, one by one, the company script editors were told that their contracts would not be renewed. By this time, needless to say, Michael Church was no longer a features editor.
I put together a few sample columns under the title ‘Now Don’t Get Me Started …’ and sent them around. No features editor was remotely interested. Eventually the country had had enough of the Tories and elected something calling itself New Labour. By the time well-merited disillusion had set in with that regime, I had decided that Now Don’t Get Me Started … could be a book ...
To read entirely free of charge that book, now entitled Common Sense, please click on the link in the sidebar
COMMON SENSE: The BOOK
and you will go to the webpage where the book is available as a download
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
