BAD SIGHT of the WEEK

At the weekend, I sent a letter to The Observer via email. So sure am I that the paper will not run it this coming Sunday that I breathe life into it by reproducing it herebelow:

“Dear Sir,

It may be churlish to contest the consensual applause for Clive James as television reviewer, but it would be cowardly – which is worse – to delay until he has gone. For a year in the 1970s, I shared a page of The Observer with James, contributing previews alongside his review. I considered myself a champion of television practice, trying to mediate on the medium's behalf and to help build a valhalla of practitioners. I felt myself to be in an earlier tradition of Observer writing on television, that of the splendidly encouraging Cuthbert Worsley, now wholly forgotten.

Worsley's charming autobiography: pix of him are not to be found

I thought then and still believe that James led the opposite tendency, throwing rocks at the box (‘bad sight of the week’) to please the crowd. Donald Trelford declared last week that James ‘had almost the whole of modern life as his canvas’ and that was exactly what I deplored. It seemed to me that James was much more interested in developing a view of the world than of television. What's more, scoring his easy points inevitably led to a career as an on-screen pundit, phrasemaking about aspects of modern life that caught his eye.


The man himself

I went (back) into television too, but as an unseen producer in drama. My kind of writing about television (also espoused by Peter Fiddick in The Guardian and Séan Day-Lewis in The Daily Telegraph) was overwhelmed and killed off by those who preferred to follow James and use television as an aunt Sally: AA Gill, Charlie Brooker, Grace Dent. I suggest that it is no coincidence that British television's decline has marched in step with the rise of the telly reviewer as humorist.

Yours faithfully”

Why am I so convinced that the letter will not be published, or at best that it could only appear in a highly truncated form? Because, in my long experience of writing to the newspapers, letter editors carry correspondence critical of contributors and editorial policy relatively infrequently. And in this particular case I am having the temerity to demur at the canonisation of an Observer scribe who has passed into legend.

Donald Trelford was the editor who appointed me as television previewer on The Observer, which at the time (1977) was greatly expanding its coverage of television … to a whole broadsheet page! Clive James, already in place as reviewer, shared the page with my selection of programme previews, a news and comment column about the industry (also by me) and an opinion column that alternated between Melvyn Bragg and Russell Harty.

Trelford himself had no more interest in television than editors (including arts editors) generally do, which is to say that he was exercised by the politics of broadcasting (particularly as it impacted on Westminster) and by its structures, but only distracted by actual programmes when they made their presence felt on the news pages or through the enthusiasm of the chattering classes.


Trelford, whom Private Eye habitually accounted "small but perfectly formed"

Clive James largely wrote about such programmes, so that Trelford found himself naturally on James’s wavelength. I was much more interested in the programmes that defined and extended the warp and woof of the output: single documentaries, one-off plays, strands about science and culture and history and witness. I wrote primarily about producers, writers and directors, seeking to describe how a programme-maker’s craft (in the architecture of the programme, the editing, the montage, the camerawork) shaped the impact of the ideas on the viewer.

Much influenced by the writing on cinema of the great American critic Andrew Sarris (who died last week), I aimed to contribute to an auteur theory of television, whereby a pantheon of practitioners – the likes of Denis Mitchell, Tony Garnett, Ken Russell, Grace Wyndham Goldie, James Cameron, Dennis Potter, Philip Donnellan, Rudolph Cartier, John Berger, Galton & Simpson, Verity Lambert, Alun Owen, Ken Loach, Antony Thomas, David Mercer, John Pilger and so on – might come to be recognised as such.


Andrew Sarris

James had little time for such stuff or, I suspect, for me – I don’t recall him ever addressing more than a sentence to me during my time on the paper. He knew little about – and didn’t care to learn about – the techniques of live transmission, videotaping or film processing and editing. One time, he accused the documentarist Angela Pope of faking some footage in a film about schooling because he didn’t imagine she could have got such steady or concentrated shots of children in class. If he’d had the humility to ask what I thought, I could have warned him off such a charge in print. Pope duly issued a writ. James rampaged around the open-plan Observer office, denouncing this “cunt” to anyone who would listen. To be fair, his use of the word was nothing special. I had learned that James’s generic term for women was “cunts”, used, he perhaps thought, with affection. Such was the charm of the man.

Admirers are writing about James now because he is terminally ill. I cannot deny that he has a great many admirers, including people of whom I expected more. The effect James seems to have reminds me of a remark by a much greater Observer critic than James, the late Ronald Bryden, whose theatre reviews were always pitched at the highest level of perception, generosity and wit. Bryden wrote that, while he could always engage critically with Shakespeare, he became helpless when confronted by a play of Ben Jonson’s and would find himself just rolling over and purring. James’s column seemed to have a similar effect on quite a lot of intelligent people.


Ronald Bryden

The day after Trelford’s encomium in his old organ (http://bit.ly/Mr6rFj), Charlie Brooker wrote James a love letter in The Guardian (http://bit.ly/OqxO6i) – the paper thought so well of it that it was flashed on the front-page strap. Brooker cites only one example of what he admires in James’s television reviewing. Here is how he introduces it: “He has a way of gliding through sentences, effortlessly ironing a series of complex points into a single easily-navigable line, illuminating here and cogitating there, before leading you face-first into an unexpected punchline that makes your brain yelp with delight. He can swallow images whole and regurgitate them later as hallucinogenic caricatures that somehow make more sense than the real thing. He famously described Arnold Schwarzenegger as looking like ‘a brown condom full of walnuts’. That's just brilliant. Every TV column I ever wrote consists of me trying and failing to write anything as explosively funny as that, for 650 words”.


Schwarzenneger: "You wanna say that in my hearing?"

This provokes me greatly. Leave aside the question of its “just brilliance” – if you laugh at that gag, then that is the sort of gag at which you laugh. But let’s look at the nature of the gag. It’s unarguably disobliging, personal, even unpleasant. I could say that Brooker’s face looks like a duck’s arse that has just farted what it thinks is a joke, but I don’t go in for that kind of material (even though the resemblance is unmissable).


DA Brooker

The subject of the gag is someone whom a metropolitan smartie-pants would then have considered low-class; remember that, when James wrote this, Schwarzenegger had yet to marry into the Kennedys or embark on a political career. He was just a small-time movie actor and – oh, my dear – a body-builder. In more recent times, James would certainly have been pleased to smarm up to him “in the library”. Besides his assumed insignificance, Schwarzenegger was never remotely likely to see the column, so he could be safely insulted from thousands of miles away. And finally – and this is the clincher for me – what the fuck has he got to do with a television review? Why is a London-based television reviewer straining to come up with a self-serving phrase about an Austrian muscleman who’s getting started in Hollywood?

Of course Brooker adores James. James gave Brooker the licence to write the same kind of scoffing, arrogant showing-off that James pioneered. The nascent attempt by serious critics to establish a tradition of respectable writing about television has been snuffed out by the howling mob. Another piece I submitted last weekend that has no hope of being published – this time to The Guardian – was in response to a feature in Saturday’s Guide section. The paper has a facility called Response that I used on this occasion for the first time. Sending one’s Response does not guarantee any response, I discover.

The original article may be read here http://bit.ly/OqJYvZ. This is my response:

“One demurs at the sneering orthodoxies of Twitter at one’s peril, of course. I did have a Twitter account for six months last year but gave it up after a novelist accused me of ‘dig dig dig’. I had no wish for tweeting to turn me into that person. (That she had previously tweeted that I was ‘a moron’ rather reinforces my case, I venture).

According to The 5 Rules of Hate Watching (Guide, June 23), the ‘dross’ that presently exercises the scorn of the twitterati is Theresa Rebeck’s television drama serial about the mounting of a Broadway musical entitled – rather hopefully, perhaps – Smash. This is screening here on Sky Atlantic, not, as the inattentive reporter had it, on Sky1.

Over some sixty years, I have seen several dozens of Broadway musicals and many hundreds of teledramas, yet I have failed to remark the present serial’s alleged but unspecified ‘missteps’. By any measure of realism, myth-making, stock characterization, plot contrivance and breezy over-confidence, Smash suffers comparatively little if set beside 42nd Street, Kiss Me Kate, Top Hat, The Band Wagon, A Chorus Line, The Producers, There’s No Business Like Show Business, Merrily We Roll Along or the Garland/Rooney puttin’-on-a-show movies.


Smash: here comes the inevitable album

It is arguable that the ingenue of Smash does not give the season’s most compelling performance – my own major misgiving about her is that her singing voice is of an inappropriate style – but only a cad retreats to disobliging and subjective remarks about the cast. In any case, after Ruby Keeler in the Busby Berkeley movies, every musical performer looks like the child of Apollo and Aphrodite.

But as a whole, Smash is smart and well-turned. Compared with the absurdly overpraised Glee, indeed, it is little short of a masterpiece. Nothing in Smash is as puerile as the token gay character in Glee suddenly revealing a hitherto undiscovered ability to kick a ball like a pro, a miraculous talent that allowed him to become acceptable to the other characters and, by inference, to the audience. This passing-for-jock moment was patently never to be called upon again, having served its purpose.

The Glee actor taking the gay role certainly has a lovely voice, but after he was not permitted to sing the whole of the exquisite Bacharach/David number ‘A House is Not a Home’, I gave up watching. Thus far, there are at least four gay characters in Smash, though even that is unrealistically restrained for the milieu of musical theatre.


Glee: multiple albums so far

Unlike Glee, Smash has a largely original score, written by Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman whose credits include Hairspray. Their new songs tread a deft line between pastiche and hommage and the scripts deploy them with considerable shrewdness – a number staged on the wing in Times Square at night was especially rousing.

That the reporter who drew my unwonted attention to the supposed phenomenon of ‘hatewatching’ is not a reliable guide was confirmed by his description of Aaron Sorkin’s Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip as a ‘bloated one-season wonder’, as though network renewal is the only measure of worth. That serial was certainly a failure, but a considerably more interesting and chancy failure than many a safely conventional show that racks up multiple seasons. Better two runs of Better Off Ted than eleven of My Family, after all.

The larger point here is that conventional wisdom appears to dictate that Thumper’s time-honoured advice is turned on its head into: ‘if you can’t say something nasty, don’t say nothing at all’. Perhaps this is as it should be, as we prepare for the last hurrah of Clive James, the writer who pioneered scoffing at the box as a crowd-pleasing substitute for truly engaging with it as an art form”.

As you see, I was already primed to bite back at Clive James before our one-time employer went in to bat. I know of course that mine is a lone voice and an unregarded if gallant one. But that, I reckon, is just what permitting responses is designed for.

SAVE the NELLIE ELEMENT

Our Los Angeles friend Jane wrote overnight and gave an account of driving 30 miles on Monday to a polling station where early voting is permitted. She was heartened to see so many African-Americans queuing – the wait was about two hours – though she feared that many of them would be voting “yes on 8”.

It’s an idiosyncrasy (a fabulous one) of the electoral system in the States that many posts and issues are up for a vote at the same time as the presidency: delegates to either or both of the houses on Capitol Hill, state officers including governor, attorney general and on through sheriff and even city dog-catcher, depending on the state constitution; and also specific proposals for changes in state law.

Proposition 8 on the California ballot paper this year is entitled “Eliminates Right of Same-Sex Couples to Marry” and would add to the golden state’s constitution the clause that “only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California”. It was in May of this year that the California Supreme Court voted 4-3 in favour of permitting same-sex marriage. Less than a month later, Proposition 8 was accepted for the ballot paper. In the five months since the court’s ruling was enacted, some 16,000 couples have availed themselves of the dispensation.

For myself, I have never embraced the desire to be married, which is why I was so satisfied with the British invention of the civil partnership – all the legal, economic and social rights that go with conventional marriage and none of the cant – and why David and I entered into a civil partnership two-and-a-half years ago. Being a rationalist, I never felt the need for some kind of superstitious ingredient in my primary relationship. By the same token, I never quite comprehended why gay people would want to enrol in the police, the military, the city, professional sport, parliament or any of the other bastions of homophobia. Life is too short to waste it being a crusader in a lost cause. I’m thrilled that so many uniformed police joined the Gay Pride march in Manchester this year – about 300, supposedly (and believably) the largest gathering of gay fuzz in the world’s history – but I would still feel more comfortable in the company of a straight actor, care-worker, teacher or nurse than a gay prison warden, club bouncer, priest or asset-stripper.

Nonetheless, if lesbians and gay men want to be “married”, they should have all the joy and security of it that it allegedly brings to straights and without the fear of being retroactively outlawed. The proponents of Proposition 8 are the usual suspects in such matters: reactionaries and the espousers of fairytale delusions. But among the nay-sayers are all six Episcopal diocesan bishops in the state, a large number of Jewish organisations including the Board of Rabbis of Southern California and many education organizations and boards. Governor Schwarzenegger’s careful position is that he doesn’t believe that a Supreme Court ruling ought to be open to being overturned by a popular vote. The hopeful signs are that the proposition is not all that popular. The no faction had a significant lead in polling until very recently but there is the danger that Jane identified, that Obama voters will not necessarily oppose the proposal; and Obama himself has taken much the same position as Schwarzenegger.

Musing on this has oddly reminded me of a documentary I saw when it was released thirty years ago. Word is Out was, I believe, the first to gather views from lesbians and gay men to tell, as the movie’s subtitle had it, “stories of some of our lives”. It was wonderful but it quickly seemed to drop from view. Searching on the net just now, I learn that its producer Peter Adair died of Aids in 1996 and that a 30th anniversary DVD has been released (actually a year late) and was shown in June, very properly, at a film festival in the Castro district of San Francisco (which I visited myself a couple of years after the filming was done).

All of those interviewed in the film were adorable and memorable, perhaps none more than George, a camp version of Oliver Hardy with a quiff. George reminisced about his discovery of the gay community in San Francisco in the early 1950s and, heartfelt and weeping, he told of the way groups would put their arms round each other at the end of meetings and sing ‘God Save Us Nellie Queens’.

Our friend Jane and her guy voted early because they plan to spend 14 hours today working to maximize the no vote on Proposition 8. She doesn’t have to do this but I love that she wants to. And of course she sees it as a matter of decency and politics and comradeship, supporting those who, though embracing a different sexual orientation, are still her sisters and brothers. Though they live in a different part of the world, the lesbians and gay men of California are also my sisters and brothers and I send them my love and support. Deliver all of us Nellie queens from oppression, marginalizing, stereotyping and the denial of full and equal rights everywhere in the world. And please don’t forget to elect Senator Obama while you’re about it.

The PRIVACY of the VOTING BOOTH

The time zone difference ensures that events unfolding in the late afternoon and evening in the United States occupy the small hours here in Britain. In years past, I could take in my stride sitting up all night, even on a pretty regular basis. But not any more. Even the Oscars now have to wait until next day.

Four years ago, I went to bed after Bob Worcester of the MORI polling organization had “called” the presidential election on ITV. I was staying at a friend’s house at the time and, had I been at home, I would surely have dallied a little longer. Sadly, Sir Robert (as he was able to style himself the following year, having by then taken British citizenship, which rendered his honorary knighthood “substantive”) had called the election for Senator Kerry. I awoke to the dismaying news that George W Bush had won a second term. It will be interesting to see whether ITV repeats its invitation to Worcester to add his supposedly expert take on the vote this time. Perhaps, if it does, I shall email an embarrassing comment.

Eight years ago, needless to say, the dawn found me still glued to all the American channels that our satellite dish could reach as the astonishing dead-heat drama played itself out in Florida. It went on, as you will recall, for several weeks (though I did go to bed betweentimes), thanks to the “hanging chads”, a phrase that veterans of that saga will forever utter with hushed reverence.

On the night of Britain’s 1997 election, thousands retired exhausted and exhilarated after the proverbial “Portillo moment”, the unexpected taking of a major Tory scalp by a charming and sweet gay man who was a lot more “out” than the defeated minister. But I lasted much longer and enjoyed many announcements almost as sweet. Bliss was it in that near-dawn to be watching live.

Every election of which I have been aware in my lifetime has been “the most significant for a generation”. Whatever the outcome, however, the race this time is especially compelling and I am already pacing myself for an all-nighter, unconvinced though I am that my dwindling stamina will permit me to last the course. The media on both sides of the Atlantic called it weeks ago for Senator Obama, save for the BBC, which includes a health warning in all its election reports – sometimes the health warning is the report. For the last few days, it has suited both Senators McCain and Obama to talk up the former’s prospects. Both want to motivate their base and nothing gets the vote out like a conclusion that is not foregone.

But I still fear that McCain really is in with a shout. And there must be a worry far beyond the Democratic Party that this is a possibility. For if the Republicans were to pull a victory from the jaws of defeat, there would assuredly be an explosion in the cities and maybe not confined to the cities. Black America has suffered so many reverses. For it to be denied now its moment to furnish a president with so much potential for good would be unthinkable as well as unacceptable. Many would cry “fix”, for remember that it was the Republicans who, with the help of a Bush relative in the Fox camp in Florida, pre-empted the knife-edge result in that 2000 poll and hung onto the election even though Bush had lost the popular vote to Al Gore.

More likely – and more significant – than suspicions of political chicanery would be what it would say about the American electorate. The hidden, unspoken issue in this campaign is race. It surfaces in the innuendo that Obama is, in an unspecified way (but you know what they mean), not a “true” American, whatever the hell one of those is (Governor Schwarzenneger, perhaps). The unprecedented drive to register blacks to be eligible to vote and the evident high turnout of blacks in the early voting that the system now allows may very well be offset – even overwhelmed – by voters who, though they would have voted even for Hillary Clinton (a woman!), cast their vote for McCain for no better reason than that he is the white candidate. These voters – and there may well be hundreds of thousands of them – will largely not have told polling organizations of their intention because, even in the deep south, racism is only rarely something you shout from the rooftops these days. Some who vote for McCain, kidding themselves that he is the “better” man and that Governor Palin would make a perfectly adequate replacement if he were to fail to complete his term, will feel a residual, secret shame for their action, especially if he has a narrow victory.

Can the States be that racist? Oh yes. Everywhere can be that racist. Look at the ugly abuse aimed at Lewis Hamilton on a website in Spain, abuse sparked by his close rivalry for the Formula One world title with an Hispanic driver, Felipe Massa, but shaped by the fact that Hamilton was the product of a white mother and a black father. Sports fans in other European countries (especially in the newly communitaire east) reserve their most hostile receptions for black football players. And, by the way, that Spanish website, now closed down, turns out to have been owned by TWBA, an advertising agency whose HQ is in New York.

And even here in the blameless West Country of England, prejudice can raise its head more readily than one might expect. 18 months ago, there were local elections in the town to which our village is attached. In this town, where live a number of families of Asian and oriental origin but few of African or West Indian descent, a councillor was elected on the BNP ticket. It was said that this was by default, that the major parties omitted to put up candidates and so the man got in without a fight. Looking at the results on the council’s website, it was hard to see how the BNP man had garnered sufficient votes to have taken a seat in any permutation of the results. The town’s good name was restored a little when the new member came to the town hall to take up his seat and the demonstration against him was sufficient to bring television cameras to the high street. But of course it was too late to stop him sitting in council, reminding us of Burke’s adage that “all that is required for evil to prevail is for good men to do nothing”.

The Democrats, I feel sure, are savvy about the submerged racism in the electorate and will be working right up to the moment that the polls close to maximise their vote, bussing people to the ballot who have never made the journey before and may never do so again. But if it turns out that the issue that determines the result is the one that no one has frankly addressed throughout this seemingly endless campaign, I fear for the safety of businesses, properties and even people in white neighbourhoods on Wednesday. I earnestly hope it doesn’t come to that and the way to be sure is to elect Barack Obama with the handsome majority – in both houses too – that he deserves.

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