OTHER PEOPLE’s CHILDREN

Is there any child presently missing whose name is not Madeleine McCann? I ask because the media – print and broadcast, daytime and evening, tabloid and ‘serious’ – seem locked in agreement that the fate of the Liverpool girl evidently abducted in Portugal is the most compelling story of the day. The fortunes of Gordon Brown are lucky if they get to share the limelight and even he felt the need – or was advised – to utter a few mawkish platitudes on the matter.

Other parents, worried sick about their own missing children, must wonder what they should have done to commandeer such a stupendous level of publicity. Or perhaps some of them had the good taste and good sense to deny the media access to their grief. The McCanns, walking unseeing through the days and the throng, appear as though participants in some macabre reality show: I’m Available for Photographs – Get My Kid Back.

Why this child, these parents, this story? It would be unkind to suggest that the Portuguese setting allows reporters and crews to jet off to the sun and get paid for it; or that it presents the opportunity for more glamorous shots than would, say, the streets of Liverpool; or that the probability that the perpetrator is some kind of filthy foreigner takes some of the dread out of whatever the denouement proves to be and permits a barely discernible subtext of xenophobia.

How these child-horror stories select themselves for maximum coverage invites close study. Sarah Payne, the Soham girls and now this case suggest that somehow the sex of the victim is a deciding factor. With the deaths of James Bulger and Jason Swift there were other factors that weighed. The Moors Murders – long ago but still a benchmark for crimes against children – were more notable for the murderers (names that still resound) than their victims (can you name any of them?) That football can be dragged into the mix also helps to glamorise the story. If you want your missing child to be on everyone’s lips, you’d better get yourselves in good with a world-famous sports star quick.

Madeleine McCann – inevitably dubbed Maddy by scores of reporters and their readers who know nothing about her, including whether the diminutive has ever before been used of her (cf “Jamie” Bulger) – may still be lucky and be returned to her parents. No doubt there will be services of thanks in Liverpool Cathedral (both of them) at such a resolution. But in some horrible way, working to its own momentum, the tragic end is now the expected and almost the willed one. Newspapers and increasingly populist news bulletins thrive on tears and grief – “every parents’ nightmare” – and cannot but present a reprieve as a sort of anti-climax.

I suppose it must be because people want to suffer vicariously that this case, with its stark and simply understood facts, plays so strongly. Richard Bilton, the BBC1 6.00pm bulletin editor’s favourite reporter, was doing vox pops over the border in Spain the other day, showing people photographs of the McCann girl. There was an implication in his manner that anyone who didn’t recognise her was mysteriously uncaring or ill informed, this last possibility also reflecting badly on the local police (Spanish or Portuguese, it hardly mattered which). I would like to suggest, in the gentlest possible way, that declining to be bullied into obsessing about a hitherto unknown child missing on holiday is not evidence that one is a bad person. I’m sorry for the McCanns, just as I am sorry for the families of those killed in last week’s anti-government riots in Pakistan and today’s suicide bombings in Iraq. But quite frankly it doesn’t have much to do with me and if I never again see that woman clutching her child’s favourite toy, it won’t be too soon.

PS: In ‘BLAIR – REST in PURGATORY’, I forgot to mention that his first Cabinet also included a blind man, a remarkable first (I think) in politics anywhere in the world. But it didn’t include anyone who wasn’t white and, though Paul Boateng was elevated in 2002 and Baroness Amos thereafter, Britain has some way to go yet before its government is as integrated as several have been in the USA.

GUARDING the MORALITY

I sent a letter to The Guardian that concluded the same way as does the previous blog entry (BLAIR: REST in PURGATORY) but they didn't publish it. A little suspicious, I wrote the following letter to the Readers' Editor of the paper:

Dear Madam,

I have had my fair crack on the letters page of The Guardian over the years – before that as a freelance journalist in the paper’s columns – and I do not complain (aloud, anyway) if a piece of banal, barely literate fluff is preferred over an argument of substance that I have carefully crafted. But I am provoked that my most recent letter has been overlooked and I wonder whether its conclusion -– that Mr Bush and Mr Blair should be tried for war crimes, found guilty and publicly executed – has damned it in the eyes of the letters editor.

After the massacre of schoolchildren at Beslan, I wrote to The Guardian advocating that, among other courses of action, the Russian government consider executing the Chechen terrorists it then held in jail, to prevent such prisoners being again used as bargaining chips against the release of innocent civilians taken hostage. It did not seem to me that such a suggestion was quite as morally bankrupt as the philosophy of the supposed freedom-fighters who had visited such grief upon that community.

The (then?) letters editor (I do not know if the same man still holds the post) telephoned me to satisfy himself that I was indeed advocating killing by the state. He did not use the phrase “judicial murder” but I sensed its presence. “We do not” he said (I summarise) “publish the advocacy of killing by anyone”.

That is not exactly so, of course. The Guardian has run pieces advocating, supporting or rationalising warfare and invasion. Warfare and invasion encompass killing. Any invasion or waging of war that did not result in loss of life would hardly merit the description. In electing to invade Iraq and visit war within its borders (a policy by no means universally supported in their respective countries, either among the populace or among the ruling elites), Mr Bush and Mr Blair ensured that tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians and hundreds of military personnel on both sides of the conflict who would otherwise have been alive today are dead. Whatever alternative scenario may be offered, that is inescapable.

The lives of Mr Bush and Mr Blair are not, in some mystical way, more sacrosanct than those of obscure individuals who have no power over their own fate. These two men, wielding power unimaginable to their victims, conducted an invasion that was itself a breach of international law and thereafter oversaw many breaches of the international conventions that govern the prosecution of warfare and the care of detainees. In suggesting that there is a case for a war crimes trial, I merely reflect a comparatively widely held view. Many crimes – not all of them necessarily entailing the deaths of others – are punishable by execution across the world, not least in several of the United States. To contemplate such treatment of those found guilty ought not to be thought beyond the pale in a mature forum such as The Guardian.

The world has changed unutterably since the time when capital punishment was abolished in Britain. Even as a child, I instinctively recoiled from the hangman’s trade and I advocated abolition, much against the views of my parents, long before it came to pass. In those days, the whole conduct of war was an official secret. Such barbarities as were visited upon civilians and prisoners went unreported. The notions that journalists might be “embedded” with front line troops and rank-and-filers sell their stories to tabloid newspapers were perfectly unthinkable. Moreover, terrorists did not take civilian hostages and bargain for the release of their fellows. Suicide bombers did not inflict carnage upon city streets. Teenagers did not roam their neighbourhoods armed with guns. It was extraordinarily rare that the equivalent of something as paltry as a mobile phone or a pair of trainers would be the occasion for the slaying of a passer-by.

Perhaps my letter has been discarded because it is indeed the paper’s policy to avoid explicit, particular advocacy of death. Perhaps the lawyers feared there might be some response that would do the paper no good. Perhaps the letters editor merely disappeared under that convenient cloud of mist wherein editorial judgments are made about what is “appropriate” and what is “good enough” and anyway there were a lot of unexceptionable letters to chose from.

But I would be interested to know your own view … and indeed whether you can tease out a coherent editorial position,

Thank you for your time.

Yours faithfully,

W.Stephen Gilbert

I will inform my blog readers of any response.

BLAIR: REST in PURGATORY

The prime minister is expected to announce his resignation in a day or two. I don’t imagine that there will be actual dancing in the streets. After all, we’ve been awaiting this day for an awfully long time and we got bored months ago. Rather than throwing popular celebrations, I think a criminal trial would be more in order. Blair, along with Bush, should be found guilty of war crimes and publicly executed. That would be a fitting end.

You may get the impression that I won’t miss him. It’s true that there was a moment when I thought he might turn out to be quite a good thing. It was when he was shadow energy spokesman during Margaret Thatcher’s last government. By the time he was opposition leader, junking Clause IV and proclaiming “New Labour” (i.e. non-Socialist Labour), I feared he was going to be a disaster. It wasn’t – but it might as well have been – the Labour emblem of which Blake wrote: “O Rose, thou art sick!/The invisible worm,/That flies in the night/In the howling storm,/Has found out thy bed/Of crimson joy;/And his dark secret love/Does thy life destroy” [The Sick Rose]. Blair has been an all too visible worm and the Labour Party, as anyone aged over 20 knew it, has been deadheaded.

But there was a bright morning just over ten years ago when all things looked possible, even with Blair and his ghastly wife in Downing Street. His first Cabinet had more women in it than ever before, plus one out gay man and four (four!) men with beards. There were many more women in the House (“Blair’s babes”, god help us), among whom was a profoundly disabled member. It all looked like a quiet revolution, like the government might actually represent us.

Not for long. It was Tam Dalyell, the Labour backbencher and Father of the House up to the 2005 election, who described Blair as the worst prime minister during his 43 years in parliament. A mere voter, I wouldn’t dissent from that. As I wrote in my book Common Sense (freely downloadable from the link to right of screen), I didn’t vote Labour in 2001 because I thought Blair had already taken us to war too often – and this was before both Afghanistan and the invasion of Iraq that overthrew Saddam Hussein.

Blair has acknowledged his admiration of Thatcher whose own record in office is hardly more neo-conservative than his own. Reportedly, Blair volunteered a list of ten great British prime ministers from which his four Labour predecessors were conspicuously absent. He has some nerve. Clement Attlee’s government implemented the Butler Education Act and carried through the creation of the NHS that had been proposed under Churchill, as well as nationalizing the mines, railways, iron and steel and the Bank of England to the benefit of all. Harold Wilson’s lasting achievements may all have been in the narrow area of social justice – the same could be said for Blair – but at least Wilson kept this country out of the Vietnam War and never became Lyndon Johnson’s or Richard Nixon’s poodle. Wilson, James Callaghan, Ramsay MacDonald and Attlee, the last at great cost in replenishing the defences after World War II, kept this nation at peace throughout their terms. Blair has taken us to war on five separate occasions. On that ground alone, he is the most morally bankrupt prime minister of my lifetime.

It is as Labour supporters that we have most to begrudge him. Apart from George W Bush, his closest allies on the world stage have been Silvio Berlusconi, Angela Merkel and José Maria Aznar, all of them far to the right of – to pluck a name at random – David Cameron. He has had precious little time for Romano Prodi, Gerhard Schroder or José Luis Zapatero, the leaders whose terms abut those of his friends. Even Jacques Chirac, that Conservative opportunist, has been too idiosyncratic for Blair’s taste and the PM’s office made no secret of his hope that it would be Nicholas Sarkozy rather than Ségolène Royal with whom he would do French business in his last weeks of power, never mind that Mlle Royal is a left-centrist and Sarkozy a deep-dyed neo-con radical. It is an extraordinary thing to be able to say of a Labour prime minister that the only party that could succeed his in government and pursue more reactionary policies and more reactionary allies than his would be the BNP.

And what is left for his successor? The current Private Eye cover, showing Blair peering through a magnifying glass and crying “Oh look – it’s my legacy!”, gets it just right. The words ‘chalice’ and ‘poisoned’ spring to mind. Labour’s support is in free fall, not just in opinion polls but in votes actually cast in the local authority and the Scottish and Welsh assembly elections. Gordon Brown has a hideous situation in Scotland where Alex Salmond, hating Labour as only a natural ally can hate, has nothing to lose from doing Brown a power of no good. Tam Dalyell’s famous “West Lothian question” about Scottish MPs voting on matters that only concern England and Wales is not a question that concerns the SNP which doesn’t aim to send members to London. A national Tory revival makes no never mind in Scotland; indeed, it would only take votes from the SNP’s rivals. If a Tory government arrives in Westminster, Salmond will have a more natural springboard from which to prepare for Scottish independence. He’s in a win-win position.

Prime Minister Brown needs comprehensively to repudiate the Blair programme if he is to creep out from under the dead weight of ten years of disillusionment, even if it means him having to deploy rather frequently his deprecating mirthless smile and claiming that it seemed better to stay at the Exchequer for a decade and fight (in vain) for what he believed in. No one will believe him for the first few months so he will have to demonstrate the will to follow new policies. An early task will be the extrication from Iraq and Afghanistan with the most honour he can finagle. The fact that, unlike Blair, he has cultivated numerous contacts in the Democratic Party in the States (beyond any no-brainer pals’ act with Bill Clinton) ought to help him to build a different kind of transatlantic understanding. But his hardest task of all will be the long-term shrugging off of his share of blame for ten years of deepening dismay. I don’t envy him.

ON MANŒUVRES

During the near-month that I was thwarted from going on line by BT Broadband’s tardiness, arrogance and incompetence, there were many developments in the real world that made my blog finger itchy. The capture of a group of British sailors by Iranian forces, their videotaped humiliation and the self-inflicted wounds by which they handed Tehran the moral victory once back home would certainly have drawn me to the keyboard.

The misjudgment of allowing members of the apprehended party – inevitably in practice the two dumbest sailors, Mr Bean and the chain-smoking mum – to sell their accounts to the tabloids made both the military and the government a laughing stock around the world, especially in the Middle East. Which of us wouldn’t volunteer to spend a fortnight relaxing in the custody of a foreign land if the reward were a six-figure sum for confirming a tabloid editor’s prejudices? (Not me, actually, but then I’ve been to Tehran and I have no wish to return, especially not in its present volatile state).

Meanwhile there has been a will-he-won’t-he fracas – it hardly merits the word “debate” – concerning HRH Prince Harry and his loudly expressed desire to get himself killed in Iraq, either in an explosion or by beheading as a captive. When the inevitable happens, remember how I warned you that the media would hail him as a hero, whatever he was actually doing at the time of his demise.

The establishment’s need to dress up the playboy princeling’s behaviour (past, present and future) in myth-making terms is very germane to the larger point I want to make. That concerns the military’s most ill-advised accommodation with the media’s unsubtle voyeurism about any matter that can be passed off as “human interest”.

There was a time, not so long ago, when all military matters were deemed secret, confidential and not for public discussion. To report even quite banal aspects of military management was a breach of the Official Secrets Act. Of course, the culture of confidentiality allowed all manner of ills to be winked at in service life and I certainly deplore such unaccountability. Indeed, I remain of the view that no profession, including the military, should be allowed to act as judge and jury in examinations of breaches of the rules, especially where the civil law ought to take an interest.

But inevitably the pendulum has swung too far the other way. Now top brass are becoming familiar spokesmen on news bulletins, ready with their sound bites and their pat answers. Successive prime ministers and home secretaries used to hold to the line that upon military issues they never confirmed nor denied any proposal or rumour. Mr Blair still says as much on intelligence questions but we already know a great deal more about the workings of MI5 and MI6 than any previous generation did.

As far as military operations are concerned, it is now standard practice that both print and broadcast journalists talk to military personnel on the front line, before, after and sometimes during engagement with hostile forces. A new term has rapidly established itself to describe journalists who accompany troops in war situations over a sustained period: those reporters are “embedded”.

It’s hard to figure why the commanders should believe that, on balance, more is gained than lost by this dubious accessibility. War is characterized by dehumanizing tendencies. Individual combatants are rather more likely to be seen in an alarming or shaming light than in an inspiring one, even when the unheroic is only expressed in the banality of their language.

Doubtless the front line equivalent of paparazzi will hound 2nd Lieutenant Windsor – or is he a colonel by now? – to ensure that plenty of pics are seen back home. I can see it now: “Prince Wazza!!” as the poor boy makes use of the latrine he has just dug in the sand. I imagine his majestic grandmother would have preferred it if the first intelligence of Harry’s tour of duty in Iraq had emerged upon his return. On the other hand, the Palace is no doubt advised to go for the headlines just as avidly as the rest of the establishment.

A GUARANTEE of CRAPPY SERVICE

My reader may well imagine that, like some fly-by-night celebrity blogger, I have lost interest in keeping up the project and don’t give a tuppenny damn about her/his devotion. Not so. As that loyal reader will know, I have been plagued by the corporate indolence of British Telecom over a six-month period. Having already lost our broadband connection for a fortnight in early March (the third occasion that it had happened since October 2006), the link fell at a fourth fence on March 30th and was only restored on April 19th (at a time when I was in London trying to restore some of the damage to what I laughingly call my career caused by three further weeks without access to internet or email).

I am at last on-line again but not yet able to read, receive or send emails. This is because the reconfiguration of the BT connection has disturbed the POP account details but I cannot correct those until my mail server, Macunlimited (which now calls itself by the ghastly name of Breathe), is itself restored to full capacity after a security-oriented breakdown of its own from April 3rd to 16th. I am told that mail sent to me during that period will have been bounced back to the sender but such senders as I have identified so far report no bouncing back. This also doesn’t answer the question as to what happened to mail sent to me between March 30th and April 3rd and between April 16th and 21st, on which last date mail began again to stream into my in-box at Breathe but not onto my desktop mailer.

My reader will grow impatient if I rehearse the tedium of the latest agonizing hiatus in my access to the rest of the planet so I will confine myself to some wider thoughts about BT and public utilities generally. In an internet chat room that discussed my experiences on the previous occasion, a contributor who described himself as “an ex-telecoms manager and network designer” noted that “BT and other broadband suppliers provide a non-essential service to residential users. Under this, users can happily go without a service for a couple of weeks … If someone has an essential need, such as for work, then signing up for a more expensive business package will bring better service”. He’s using “happily” in an ironic sense.

I talked to someone in the BT chairman’s office – she had been in the organization woman and girl for 32 years, which means of course that the outfit she joined was called Post Office Telephones – and, when I put it to her that residential users got a service from BT inferior to that enjoyed by those who bought a business package, she readily concurred. I got to thinking about the two-tier services offered by BT, Royal Mail, the railway operators and others. You pay more for the supposed first class service but in practice there can be no guarantee that a Rolls Royce ride is what you will receive. Putting a first class stamp on a letter only improves its chance of arriving the next day, it does not clinch it.

The other week, I was briefly marooned by a points failure on Oxford railway station. By the time the train service was resumed, the crush on the platform for the short hop to Didcot was beyond anything you’d get at rush hour. Finding myself at the entrance to a first class compartment with empty seats, I boarded it and sat, tired as I was from a heavy day’s walking in Oxford. I was ready to argue with the ticket collector when he saw my standard class ticket but none came. I looked around the first class carriage. It was filthy. Every table was covered in abandoned food packaging. There was rubbish and newspaper on the floor. I could not have availed myself of those perks you are alleged to get with a first class ticket – a gratis cup of lousy tea, a free copy of the Telegraph – because the doorway was crammed with standing passengers. So what would have been the advantage of buying a first class ticket for the journey? Well, I would have had a better chance – though no guarantee – of a seat. Big deal.

With BT, as with Royal Mail and the trains, you may well pay extra and still get a sub-standard service. The only guarantee is that if you don't pay the first class rate you will get a sub-standard service. So the two-tier system is a smart way of providing a lesser service all round and making more money from those prepared to gamble on the faint possibility of the higher charge being justified.

During my trip to London last week, I went to Selfridge’s for the first time in many months. I used to hold an account there but since we moved out of London it has not seemed worth keeping it up. Boy, has it changed. Apart from a general makeover that includes renewing the lighting and the sound system so that it no longer feels like a shop for the over-50s like me, the whole nature of the store has shifted. Now every department is franchised. For instance, it’s no longer Selfridge’s book department but an in-house branch of Foyle’s. The CD department is an HMV. The menswear department is no longer on the ground floor and it is divided into branded cells. Instead of the sales staff wearing similar suits, they dress casually as determined by each franchise so it’s impossible to know who is a salesman and who a customer unless the former is on the qui vive for those who need assistance.

This breaking up of large institutions and outsourcing of their functions is the prevailing mode. Lord Birt destroyed the BBC, in the opinion of most of those who have valued it over any period of time, by dismantling its collegiate structure and turning each segment into a freestanding, discrete unit with a brief to thrive or fail in competition with outside suppliers of similar services and functions. BT has followed the same path – its present chairman, former Tory politician Sir Christopher Bland, has also chaired the BBC – and its various departments are now separate entities with no privileged access to each other. Thus BT Wholesale, which owns the phone lines much as Network Rail owns the rail tracks, is an enterprise unrelated to BT Retail, BT Broadband, BT Talk Together, BT Open Reach or BT Fusion.

BT agreed to a ruling by Ofcom, the telecommunications regulator, that BT Wholesale cannot move faster on behalf of BT Broadband or BT Retail customers than it does for those of rival ISPs and broadband suppliers such as Orange, Tiscali, Sky, AOL and so on. It should never have agreed such a nonsense. The ruling discriminates against BT itself. Customers of BT Broadband – like me – rage against BT Wholesale because it delays a token five days before attending to any line problem. This delay is meant to reflect any laggardliness that might obtain if BT Wholesale found itself asked to fix a line on behalf of a customer of, say, Virgin. But the Virgin customer would of course be encouraged by Virgin to blame BT (rather than Virgin) for such a delay. So we all curse BT and, because BT owns the lines, we cannot usefully vote with our feet (unless we are lucky enough to have access to a satellite connection) because any rival supplier of broadband would be just as dependent upon BT Wholesale’s husbandry of the phone lines.

Franchising and outsourcing means that the organization handing out the contracts loses a degree of control over the service that its customers receive. Moreover, the loyalty to the central brand does not survive in the servicing companies. Generally, the only wholly truthful remarks you ever hear about BT Wholesale, BT Retail and BT Broadband are those made by the engineers and line managers of BT Open Reach (an independent entity, as I have indicated). Their assessments are characterized by a heavy application of scorn. These guys don’t feel the need to apply the spin that is built into the scripts from which you are read to by the BT representatives at Customer Services, Higher Complaints, Technical Support and other call centres.

The public utilities are in very bad odour just now. British Gas is caught up in a billing nightmare, finding itself responsible for asking small-scale power consumers to pay absurd four figure bills, threatening to cut off customers who pay their bills not to British Gas but to Powergen. Thames Water (which bizarrely is based in Swindon and is the operator of water and sewerage services in parts of Scotland as well as in London) has accidentally pumped millions of gallons of untreated sewage into the Firth of Forth. The outsourced task of household garbage collection is widely dwindling from a weekly to a fortnightly service ahead of a summer that all indications suggest will be a scorcher: nice timing. The railway companies have finally admitted that they can never provide enough seating accommodation for the passengers who need to travel during the twice-daily rush hour, provoking a series of campaigns of disobedience by those revolutionary trouble-makers, the commuting classes. And the Post Office is in the process of selling much of its over-the-counter business to WH Smith, a high street brand that is anyway in deep trouble of its own.

Meanwhile, the everyday courtesies that used to be taken as read in the great public utilities as in the better class of retail establishment are going hang. On four occasions over the last six months, we have been informed that a BT Open Reach engineer would be coming to the house and that we would need to be at home. On the most recent occasion – April 19th – we were enjoined to set aside the whole day until 6 pm and, as I was in London, my partner was obliged to abandon any plans to shop or run errands that day. On each one of the four occasions, no engineer materialized, no BT representative telephoned to inform us that no engineer would be coming and no BT representative telephoned to apologize for the non-appearance of the respective engineers. They treat the customer with utter contempt.

In a similar vein, countless BT operatives have assured me that they will call back “in ten minutes”, “within two hours”, “in the next 24 hours” and almost none has actually made good on the promise. An operative in the Higher Complaints Office (so-called) swore to me last Friday that he would call me at 11.00 am today, Monday 23rd, to ascertain that the BT connection was successfully operating again. I called his office at 11.30 to ask why I had not been called and was told that his shift was not due to begin until 1.00. I left a message for him. He finally called shortly before 5.00, reckoning that he hadn’t got to the office until 1.00 because of traffic jams on the M1 and that the man I had spoken to had copied down my number incorrectly. These people lie to you without blushing. Also on Friday, a man in the BT chairman’s office had called me to discuss my on-going complaint about BT’s efficiency and lack of customer care and we had agreed that I would call him today (Monday) when I was back up to speed after my trip to London and had more time to talk. When I called today, the operator took almost five minutes to ascertain that he wasn’t due in to work all day.

That I could phone these two unreliable representatives at all is not common. Very few BT employees have their own direct line; most work in large open-plan offices with dozens of fellow spokespeople so you can rarely trace back someone who has called you. Although, in a case like mine, an extensive file is built up tracking the course of my complaint and (conceivably also BT’s failure to resolve the problems it is imposing on me), one has to start from scratch every time one calls BT and speaks to another operative who begins happy to assist and is soon disabused.

I take no pleasure in grumbling and shouting at call centre staff who are themselves not responsible for the failings of their employers, nor in pursuing long-winded complaints about inefficiency and lack of service and searches for some form of compensation. But I do it doggedly because I don’t think the bastards should get away with it. Senior managers in these enterprises are very handsomely remunerated. Major shareholders dip deep into the profits that might otherwise be ploughed back to improve the service. Unfortunately, shareholders no longer concern themselves with the efficient running of businesses, only with maximized dividends. That’s modern capitalism for you.

GORDON’s GIN TRAP

The star of the past political week is almost universally expected to be confirmed as our next prime minister in a little over three months’ time. Given that this is so widely assumed to be a foregone conclusion, you could be forgiven for feeling a little surprised that the Chancellor should pull such a dubious stunt in seeking to wrong-foot the opposition by his announcement of a two-pence cut in the basic rate of income tax as the parting shot of his last Budget.

As surely as the night follows the day, politicians and commentators immediately began the search for the classes of persons who would enjoy no benefit from the tax changes of which the 2p cut was the showpiece. And, rather to his own disadvantage, it was soon found that those who would be worse off were overwhelmingly members of that stratum of society that used to be referred to as those in “genteel poverty”; which is to say, not those subsisting solely on state benefit and chips but those in low-paid service jobs who cannot afford to get onto the property-owning ladder. They’ll all be voting for David Cameron, then.

Gordon Brown is inevitably hoist with the petard of the Blair governments’ reputation. He has to “sell” the government’s economic policies, just as his colleagues have to talk up their own achievements (if such they are). And of course the danger must be pretty high that Labour’s present, very hard-earned reputation for economic competence – a reputation conspicuously lacking under previous Labour governments – will start to unravel before the next general election, as much due to global conditions as to any loss of touch by the Chancellor or his successor.

I always assumed that, after Blair’s third election victory, he would shift Brown to the foreign office, the logical post for an heir presumptive. The next prime minister would only benefit from greater exposure on the world stage, becoming a more widely familiar figure ahead of taking over the top job. After all, can you name the present secretary of state for economic affairs in Washington? Neither can I. But we all know Condi, don’t we.

If Blair wouldn’t countenance Brown as foreign secretary – or Brown wouldn’t countenance the idea himself – purely because of differing notions on how to develop the policies over Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and the Middle East, then that reflects well on Brown. If he wouldn’t move because he wouldn’t relinquish control of the economy, then he’s made a big mistake. He could have had a blameless two years at the FO, becoming a formidable global player, while the slow worsening of the economy began to tarnish his successor. As it is, who except Brown’s creature (Ed Balls) would willingly go to the Treasury in a Brown government? The PM would be on your back on a daily basis.

Gordon Brown needs to shake off as fast as he can the reputation for government by gimmick, sound-bite, tabloid agenda and polling returns because it is damaging. Among those who may run for deputy leader is one who has introduced a new irregular verb into the political lexicon: to blear. This means to blah and blur on behalf of Blair and it is to be found in the observation “Hazel blears”. Members of the present cabinet do a great deal of blearing. While Sir John Major’s governments became irredeemably associated with “sleaze”, Blair’s are stuck with a reputation for blather as well as for “spin”. Brown is not noted among the public for straight talking, even if his bluntness is more evident to colleagues at Westminster. And he has no reason to thank whoever it was who persuaded him to start flashing that unexpected salesman’s beam in mid-sentence, a habit now as ingrained as Thatcher’s change of vocal pitch. It’s more likely to frighten people than to reassure them.

There is one factor about Gordon Brown that I have never seen mentioned in the press so I will (of course) raise it here. It is that he is Scottish. Not only that, he sounds Scottish. Blair was born in Edinburgh but his roots are English and nobody would think him a Scot. In the era of broadcasting, when the appearance and sound of politicians have gradually become available to everyone, there has only been one British prime minister who did not sound English. Ramsay MacDonald, from Lossiemouth, Morayshire, was the first Labour prime minister, briefly in 1924 and again in 1929. It was a period of parliamentary stalemate and these were minority Labour administrations. MacDonald found it impossible to sustain power and invited opposition leaders to form a National government, an act for which the Labour party never forgave him.

So MacDonald is an unhappy precedent for Brown. The only other Labour leader with a Scottish accent was Blair’s predecessor, John Smith. Whether the English electorate would have accepted him was never put to the test for he died suddenly while leading the parliamentary opposition.

Smith’s predecessor, Neil Kinnock, led Labour to two general election defeats. Kinnock is – and more importantly sounds – Welsh. I have always believed that Kinnock’s accent counted heavily against Labour in its English seats. Don’t let’s mince words here. The English hate the Welsh. When I come across this hatred (which is surprisingly often), I am always astonished by the way its irrationality – as baselessly absurd as all racism and prejudice – is matched only by its vehemence. The English hatred for the Welsh is exceeded only by the Scots’ hatred of the English. This at least has some historical justification. It is just as ugly and malign, though. I don’t think the Welsh entertain any feelings, one way or the other, for the Scots and all of course merely despair of the Irish.

Now, I suspect that Brown’s Scottishness will tell against Labour in English seats at the next general election. Indeed – and, as a rule, I eschew political predictions as a mug’s game – I would not be a bit surprised if Labour does not go down to a rather bigger defeat after two or three years of a Brown premiership than any pollster predicts now or will be looking for then. In the privacy of the ballot box, voters can express their prejudices without anyone being able to expose them. Why do you think people vote for the BNP in the numbers that they do? They don’t tell pollsters that they are inclining that way.

I really don’t want David Cameron to win the next election, if for no better reason than his youth. The great movie director Billy Wilder once said that he knew he must be getting old because he was older than the pope (who at the time was John Paul II). I have been wrestling with the disheartening sensation of being older than the prime minister for the past ten years. But to find oneself old enough to be the prime minister’s father would really take the biscuit.

On the other hand, I have never before known a time (or dreamed I would ever know a time) when a Labour government – "New" Labour in Blair’s glib marketing speak, but nonetheless a Labour government – was to the right of every parliamentary opposition party, including the Tories, on just about every issue. Really, they need to be turfed out of office for the good of the Labour party. For Brown to reverse that perception – widely held if not perhaps in the terms in which I have expressed it – would be a Herculean task. I have an awful feeling that, irrational though it be, Cameron’s cultured Englishness set against Brown’s son-of-the-manse persona will be enough to make it impossible for Brown to stay in office. But who knows? – perhaps Sir Ming Campbell’s very home counties version of Scottishness will be enough to hold onto the balance.

ANOTHER BROADBAND BROADSIDE

My blogging has been suspended again because of a recurrence of the disconnection of my BT broadband/ADSL link as first occurred last October and again in the week before Christmas. The pattern of my dealings with British Telecom over the last fortnight has been a disheartening variation of what played out before.

The connection spontaneously died on Tuesday March 6th. Initially I phoned those contacts whom I had found helpful last time. The engineer who came to the house just after Christmas and who was bracingly scornful of the BT Broadband Technical Support line in Chennai, India did not return the messages I left on his mobile. Admittedly, he had told me that he was being promoted and was not likely to be the engineer who would come to see us if there were a recurrence of the disconnection. But I thought that he might at least pass on the message to someone who could deal with it. No such luck.

The man at the grandly named Office of Higher Complaints in Coventry who had been diligence itself last time – to the extent that I had to discourage him from phoning daily, after the engineer’s visit, to assure himself that the problem remained resolved – was successively “not in yet” and “off sick”. I then spoke to a man who claimed to be him (but I knew that he wasn’t) and he said that nothing could be done until a new ticket was issued from BT headquarters because the file on the matter had been closed. I then rang the woman at BT HQ who had issued the ticket on the earlier occasion but she too had been promoted – clearly negotiating with this particular relentless customer wins many brownie points at BT – and all she could suggest was that I call Chennai.

So I began a repeat progress down the British Telecom rabbit-hole, characterised as before by earnest but broken promises to make return calls, referrals to departments that were rather less helpful than their predecessors had been, refusals to accept that BT’s own equipment was in any way at fault and endless procrastination in face of my increasingly angry demands that an engineer be sent to the house. I knew from the first that, unless I made a nuisance of myself and refused to accept BT assurances that the problem was not theirs, I would not get my connection restored. So it proved.

After several fruitless conversations, repetitions of identifying data and useless expressions of apology, I finally (on the Friday) got myself put through to BT’s technical area. Three times members of the line maintenance team promised to instruct the line engineers to call me to make an appointment for a visit to the house. On the first two occasions, the line engineers sent me texts to say that they could find no fault on the line and had therefore closed the case. Both times, I called the line maintenance team again (the line engineers themselves are not available by phone even within BT and can only be raised by email) and said that the fault was not rectified. I had, I said, been again told that there was no fault on the line but, despite what the line engineers reckoned, there was no fault on my computer or on my wireless router. Perhaps then the fault lay with the junction box and/or the built-in filter, both of them BT property. Hence, I was therefore unilaterally reopening the case and it would remain open until, if necessary, it came before the high court.

On the second of these exchanges, I was told that the line engineers would call me “within 24 to 48 hours”. I said “you mean ‘within 48 hours’ because any time within 24 hours is within 48 hours”. “Er … yes” said the line maintenance man. On the third occasion, I was promised a call “within 24 hours” but after some 30 hours I had had no call. They must have got bored with me.

So I went back to the Account Management Desk that had put me in touch with the line maintenance team in the first place. My contact there prevailed upon the line maintenance team to call me again and this time they undertook to book an engineer to visit the house, perceiving perhaps that any customer this persistent was not about to go away. From a preliminary assessment of the problem from their end, it was decided that a conventional line engineer should do the honours. I was warned, as I had been warned several times previously, that there would be a charge for this call-out. Anyone would think it could run into six figures. I was told that it would be some £200. Fine, I said, but I didn’t expect to be charged for a fault on BT’s own equipment. I was told that if the main junction box was more than a year old, there would be a charge. It seemed to me that this item was BT property in a way that, for instance, the phones were not but I wasn’t about to haggle over £200.

I had a further call from the maintenance team to say that they had decided after all to send a broadband engineer to the house. He would be with us between 8.00 and 11.00 the following morning (Tuesday 13th) and would call ahead of his visit to say that he was on his way. The Account Management Desk man said that he in turn would be calling at 11.30 to see what had transpired.

The engineer telephoned the next day at 11.20. He said he had isolated a fault in the local exchange that affected our line and the one adjacent to it. He didn’t need to come to the house. So it was after all a fault with BT’s own equipment, something that ought to have been spotted in routine maintenance at least six months ago. The engineer said that he knew how to fix the fault but, being a broadband engineer, he was not allowed to touch it. The equipment belongs to something called BT Wholesale. He, like all the engineers, works for a franchised operation called Open Reach.

I asked if there were not someone else there who could do the job. He explained that, under Ofcom’s rules, BT Wholesale is not allowed to repair faulty equipment for five working days (a week in the customer’s life) because that would be how long it might take to do such a job on behalf of Tiscali, Orange, Virgin, Sky or any other broadband rival that uses BT’s phone lines. BT is not allowed to favour its own customers – those whose ISP is BT itself – as this would amount to unfair competition. I found it hard to believe that he was in earnest but he promised that he was.

I called my contact at the Account Management Desk but he was unavailable. The man I spoke to (who said he was a manager) refused to put me in touch with the man who had been on my case. I explained what I had been told by the engineer and the manager expended a great many convoluted sentences neither entirely confirming nor entirely denying that what I had been told was true.

At this point, I began the process that I believed would allow me to register a formal complaint but that I hoped would also raise a BT employee sufficiently senior – or having sufficient gumption – to be in a position to ensure that the fault was put right at once or sooner.

This proved less straightforward than on the previous occasion, perhaps because the woman at BT HQ who had helped me greatly then had been promoted out of harm’s way. I was now informed that I had to find a department manager who would be in a position, in BT’s curious jargon, “to escalate the complaint”. I talked to a manager in the UK Technical Help Team who was not able or willing to tackle any escalation himself but who gave me the number of the BT chairman’s office. Someone on that number gave me the address to which to write to make a complaint: Customer Service Director, Correspondence Centre, BT plc, Durham DH98 1BT – evidently they only disclose this address in exceptional circumstances but you, dear reader, may have it from me for nothing. It seems bizarre to me that of all organisations it should be BT that obliges you to write your complaint rather than phoning it.

I was also given a number for the BT Fault Management Service (0800 800 151). On this number I talked to two men successively, the first of whom found it difficult to credit much of the saga that I repeated, the second of whom seemed only too familiar with what I described as an Alice in Wonderland operation. “I realise you can’t comment on that” I said. “No, I can’t comment on that” he said. “But I can grin”. Neither of them was able to direct (officially or unofficially) that the fault be put right in fewer than five days. At this point, I decided I had to admit defeat.

During the course of this long week (and another week will have passed by the time we are reconnected and I can post this blog), I have become horribly familiar with BT’s customer service style. If ever I encounter the most used on-hold muzak in later life or in some different context, it will fill me with Pavlovian gloom. It’s a slow dirge for harp, strings and oboe or electronic simulacra thereof, presumably designed to calm the savage breast but all it does to me is enrage. The conversational style of the respective call centre staff in Chennai and Delhi is punctilious to a fault but (in their very patience and apologetic assurances) utterly maddening. They are always undertaking to “do the needful”, a charming phrase surely not heard in Britain since the 1950s but very current in modern-day India which is in so many ways a living parody of Britain in the 1950s.

There is also the ever-present suspicion that those employed to deal with the public are not able to be wholly candid, frequently referring as they do to scripted formulae and unable as they are to accede to the customer’s criticisms, save in a very generalised way. One begins to fall into familiar patterns of response oneself so that one hears oneself yelling, for the umpteenth time: “yes, well, a succession of your colleagues has already apologized profusely but what good is that to me? I can’t eat it. I can’t spend it. I don’t want apologies, I want action”. And all the calls end with their routine mantras – “is there anything else I can do for you today, Mr Gilbert?” and “thank you for using BT Broadband”. In almost every case, I have declared, at some point in the exchange: “if you won’t authorize an engineer to come out to fix this disconnection then I shall be summoning an engineer to remove BT Broadband altogether and I shall subscribe to one of your rivals instead”. Still they thank you. And BT really should instruct all its staff to avoid the cant phrases “no problem” and “not a problem”. They don’t play well with a customer who has already passed the end of his tether.

The heart of the corporate failure remains what it was during my last encounter with the BT hydra. The company will not send out an Open Reach engineer until it has absolutely no choice precisely because the engineering is franchised out and therefore costs BT to activate. A number of times, a harassed BT spokesperson told me gravely that if an engineer was sent out it might cost me money. At this I would scream that being without internet or email contact for a week was already costing me money hand over fist and that if it cost £10,000 to restore the connection it would be worth every penny but that, if the fault were found to be BT’s – as of course it would be – I would not expect to be billed for BT’s failure, rather that I would expect some kind of handsome recompense. This did not bring the arrival of an engineer at the house any nearer.

What BT needs is obvious to any customer who has the misfortune to have to resort to it for assistance. It needs to provide one all-purpose number that may be dialled which will raise someone who is empowered to say “yes, sir, leave it with me. I will [if necessary] do the needful and expedite the assistance you require. I will call you within 15 minutes to bring you up to date with the situation” and then to do that very thing, preferably with the words: “will it be convenient if an engineer calls at your address between 9.00 and 11.00am tomorrow, sir?” It would be handy too if one were not obliged to choose between a number of recorded options, none of which precisely fits the case at hand.

BT also needs to rethink its corporate attitude to its customers. Gordon Selfridge’s great dictum – “the customer is always right” – has been forgotten by the vast majority of commercial enterprises in Britain and across the world. Customers have grown used to being treated as mere economic counters in an accountant’s dream of share-holder profits but when those who work on the front line for corporations like BT encounter a customer who is not prepared to be walked over, there ought to be a widely understood Plan B, designed to take the sting out of the complaint rather than to exacerbate that customer’s frustration and indignation.

And BT should never have agreed to Ofcom’s restraint of its trade in imposing such a ludicrous delay on repairs undertaken on behalf of its own customers. This is the kind of lowest-common-denominator thinking that ought to have died out in the 1970s. Nobody benefits from the policy because any fault in BT’s equipment must have the potential to affect the working of lines that BT rents to its rivals as well as those reserved for its own customers. Everyone using a service dependent on the telephone grid needs repairs to that grid to be carried out expeditiously, not after a delay and certainly not after an artificial delay. What is more, BT is in fact put at an unfair disadvantage by Ofcom’s ruling. Its own customers feel grotesquely penalised by a pointless gesture. And BT’s rivals can all say that any delay is BT’s fault because they (the rivals) are dependent upon BT for repairs to be carried out. Thus BT ends up in bad odour with, on the one hand, its own customers or, on the other, everybody else’s.

BT is placed in a curious position by the privatisation of the telecommunications industry, analogous to neither that of the BBC, nor to that of British Airways, nor to that of Railtrack. But being called British Telecom and having the duty of maintaining the national telephone grid, it is inevitably seen as the national instrument of the telecommunications service. It needs to sit down with Ofcom again and reconfigure its own status, defining once and for all what it means to be primus inter pares.

Meanwhile, at the time of writing, we still await reconnection to the broadband computing grid so that we may resume our access to email and the net and I can resume my work that has been largely on hold for two long weeks. I shall be calling the compensation line (0845 600 7030, as I believe) when I finally know exactly how long we have been disconnected and I shall expect to be amply recompensed. Of course it is impossible to compute the value of the business that I might have generated had I been on-line for the period in question. Nor can I put a monetary value on the hours I have wasted talking on the phone – or more often holding on the phone – while connected to BT staff. I do not know whether all the numbers that I have been obliged to call are free or which of them might be at national or at local rates.

What I do know is that the frustration and bafflement that BT has caused is injurious to my health. Several times I have been conscious of the waves of tension and stress as I have found myself having to give out information I have already given many times or having to insist that various tests of the equipment have already been carried out and proved fruitless. I know that no individual BT representative who happens to pick up my call is responsible for my problem, nor that he or she can be expected to grasp its elaborate history within seconds. All the more reason to have a system where one person takes charge of an issue and sees it through to its conclusion. Recorded messages frequently tell us that our calls may be recorded for training purposes. It is time that somebody listened to those recordings and concluded that BT’s methodology needs a comprehensive rethink.

The RIGHT to BEAR ARMS (and CHEMICALS)

A couple of weeks ago, the Independent Police Complaints Commission delivered its considered verdict on the notorious police operation in Forest Gate, London last June. You’ll remember that some 250 officers converged on a two-up, two-down terrace before dawn and that around 30 armed cops burst into the house and arrested two Muslim brothers, Mohammed Abdul Kahar and Abul Koyair, the former of whom suffered a gun-shot wound in the shoulder at close range.

Nothing incriminating was found at the house. The pair were held in custody for nearly a week and then released without charge. It seems that the raid was based on something called “flawed intelligence”. This could well be a euphemism for “gross stupidity” or even “racist malice”.

The IPCC heard 153 complaints from “members of the public” and upheld just five. It recommended the Met to “apologize” publicly. However, the Met declined to say sorry, as they put it, “over and over again”, which raises the question: “if the IPCC can’t even get the police to apologize, what possible power does it have to scold, command, reprimand, direct or discipline any officer or force exceeding the remit?” The brothers say they have never received an apology. More to the point, I have never seen it suggested that they have ever received compensation.

Since then, I have been awaiting the outcome of a trial at Manchester crown court. The defendant is Robert Cottage, who stood for the British National Party in last May’s local elections in his home town of Colne, Lancashire. Police raided his residence too and sealed off the street. This time they had well-placed intelligence, none other than Mrs Cottage, the defendant’s wife. Sure enough, they soon found a stash of the appropriate chemicals in sufficient quantity to cook up “a powerful bomb”, along with the notorious manual, The Anarchist Cookbook, which lists the ingredients and recipe; so at any rate the prosecution charges. Mrs Cottage confirmed the evidence of her husband’s diary that he was planning to assassinate the Prime Minister and other political figures.

The first police comment to the press was that “he’s not a terrorist and it’s not a bomb-making factory”. This quick conclusion must have been based on the fact that Cottage is white and a member of the Church of England (as well as the BNP), rather than a shy, soft-spoken foreigner who talks with a foreign accent and believes some pagan mumbo-jumbo. They must also have accepted his assurance that, along with his crossbows and airguns, the chemicals were for making “thunder-flashes” to protect his two-up-two-down terrace when civil war breaks out. As you do.

The arrest of Cottage and his co-conspirator (a retired dentist, also white and a BNP member) did not, as far as I recall, make the national media. In contrast, the Forest Gate raid was the lead story in newspapers and on bulletins for days on end in June last year. Cottage’s first appearance in court on February 13th got national coverage but thereafter the media lost interest again.

I had thought that the case would be soon over, given that Cottage was obliged to admit to possession of his arsenal of weapons and his potential explosives. But nothing was reported. Surely the verdict would be thought newsworthy. I had to trawl through the net to discover from Lancashire newspapers that, following nine days of evidence, the jury had found itself hung after three days of deliberation. A retrial has been booked for July. The defendants remain in custody.

According to Pendle Today, “the 22 chemical components recovered by police are believed to be the largest haul ever found at a house in this country” [October 6th 2006]. What’s more, David Jackson (the retired dentist) had a pair of nuclear protection suits at his house, along with sundry chemicals. Evidently, these items were “to help teach chemistry to Cottage’s teenaged son”. When teenagers are studying chemistry, you certainly need to retreat into a nuclear protection suit.

The Lancashire constabulary clearly missed a trick or two when they apprehended Cottage. After all, they could have shot him. They could have arrested and charged him under the various enormously malleable terms of the government’s anti-terror legislation; those powers, after all, have been invoked to remove a heckler in his 80s from the Labour Party conference and to arrest a woman reading out the names of dead Iraqis at the Cenotaph. I would have thought a declared intent to kill Tony Blair would have given the raiding party something to yell imprecations about. What’s more, you might think there was plenty of material here for the press – and not just the “serious” press – to investigate. But of course all the newspapers are much more interested if the defendants may be made to represent some generalised Muslim threat. And anyway, there are so many more important stories to pursue: Britney Spears, Cameron Diaz, Richard and Judy …

PUR-LEEZE, ACADEMY!

Okay, girlfriend, let’s dish the Oscars. What the hell was Anne Hathaway thinking? More to the point, what the hell was she wearing? Valentino, as it happens, and he must have hated her in The Devil Wears Prada just as much as we did. What’s more (and I never thought I’d advocate surgery but there’s a first time for everything), Hathaway really is someone who should get her eyes done. There, I’ve said it.

Emily Blunt, on the other hand, looked sumptuous, her shiny blue gown only starting at all if the camera panned down far enough. But then she effortlessly stole all the scenes she shared with Mrs Shakespeare. Indeed, apart from Emily, the divine Miss M-for-Meryl and dear Stanley Tucci, the acting in the movie was vile: the men were particularly repellent. It’s a silly little movie but such fun. Much like the Oscars, really.

On the red carpet, the designer of the night was Vera Wang. Class, class, class. Rachel Weisz was stunning in a sculpted Wang creation that made her look like a proper, womanly star – Ava Gardner in her prime, perhaps. Jodie Foster too looked serious and effortlessly stylish in a simply cut Wang number of fugitive blue. In her Valentino gown, Kate Winslett “looks like a big mouldy tree trunk”, according to The Guardian’s Jess Cartner-Morley. Catty but not far wrong. It certainly did nothing for Winslett’s ample curves whereas Wang’s cuts elongated her clients.

Cate Blanchett’s Armani Prive sheath looked like some kind of armour but was becoming in a rather alarming way, topped off by a fierce bob. Then she talks and she’s soft and charming. But the gown I liked best was the one Celine Dion – of all people – wore for the red carpet (but not, sadly, for the number she performed during the show). I don’t know who designed it but it was a classic wrap-around piece in a muted shade, almost British racing green, with strategically placed and unfussy silver accessories and a gold bag. It made you really pay attention to her and I’ve certainly never done that before.

Many of the men – especially but not exclusively those under 50 – wore black ties but not proper bow ties. I’m sad that formal evening dress is dying out for men. No less than Alan Arkin was improperly dressed. If you wear a lounge tie, it makes your tuxedo look as if it might be a lounge suit. In his old-fashioned garb, John Travolta was probably the most elegant man there, even with unruly hair.

Before the show proper began, we swapped between the live coverage of the red carpet on the E! channel and the rival “exclusively on Sky One”. It soon became clear that Sky’s relay was far from live. Sky’s crew was set up right (or rather left) alongside E!’s yet Michael Sheen left his E! interview screen left and didn’t enter Sky screen right for fully twelve minutes. In between, he must have fallen into a time-warp. Later we saw Dame Helen Mirren doing her shtik with her union flag at the left edge of the E! frame but had to wait seven minutes for the Sky interview that concluded with that flag routine.

The coverage on both channels was pretty lamentable. Sky interjected witless “background” from supposed experts: “people like Helen Mirren, Kate Winslett and Dame Judi – Brits are just dominating the Best Actress category” [I’m sure Ms Streep would have something to say about that]; “in the Original Screenplay, we’ve got Patrick Morgan for The Queen” [that’ll be Peter Morgan, of course]. It’s “experts” like this that make you aware how out of fashion true expertise really is.

E! ran “viewer quotes” that were almost as witless and banal as the “expert” views. In every break on Sky, the L’Oreal ad with Penelope Cruz was run. Smart booking but I bet they wish they’d signed Dame Helen.

The interviewers on the ground were as awful as you’d expect. Sky’s Fearne Cotton kept telling the passing stars that it was her first Oscars, as if they gave a damn. But at least she had the wit to interview Wolfgang Puck, the official Oscars chef, in what was certainly the most entertaining encounter of the night. Spare Brits like James McAvoy and Sheen (whom Fearne Cotton called Martin) were very available for interview, almost pathetically so. The E! interviewer, Ryan Somebody, kept insisting that Sheen “looks just like Tony Blair to me”. “You see, Ryan’s got the good analysis” concluded his co-presenter from her roof-top platform and, of course, she meant it seriously. Now and again she was joined by a “fashion expert” (whose hair was a story in itself) armed with a “glamorstrator” with which he scribbled on freeze-frames of the gowns to no great purpose.

Back on the ground, Ryan was separated from the stars by a potted azalea. “I can barely make it over the bush” he cried, oblivious to the unfortunate term, as he craned to kiss Forest Whitaker’s wife. Later, he pumped an increasingly irritated Gael Garcia Bernal about Brad Pitt, evidently unaware that the two actors were filmed on different continents for the big ensemble piece Babel (which the Yanks refer to as Babble). You could hear Bernal thinking “he doesn’t have anything to ask me, does he”.

The emphasis on big box-office stars is maddening, of course. There were veteran actors present who didn’t have presentation duties and whom nobody interviewed: Jane Russell, Mickey Rooney. Either might be dead next year. Sky at least talked to the co-writer of Borat but we heard from no other writer or director. The first time all evening we got sight of Paul Greengrass was when the directing Oscar was about to be presented – not, as it turned out, to him.

During the ceremony, we saw plenty of Clint Eastwood and Martin Scorsese, prominently seated and familiar to a huge proportion of the supposedly billion-strong audience. There were quite a few shots of the respective directors of Babel, Dreamgirls and Pan’s Labyrinth, the last of which richly deserved its three statuettes and was unlucky not to win for Best Foreign Language Film. But Stephen Frears, resplendent in white scarf and an aisle seat, was only seen at the edge of frame until Dame Helen’s inevitable win and the directing Oscar moment. Neither Peter Morgan nor the other British writing nominee, Patrick Marber, was shown at all, save in Errol Morris’s sprauncy pull-together of snatches of nominee comment that opened the show: that’s happily available to see again on the AMPAS website. (By the by, every event-broadcaster does pull-togethers these days but nobody ever does them as well as the Academy).

In the hall, we saw Jack Nicholson frequently, though he was a mere presenter. I dearly hope that his new Daddy Warbucks look is for a part and not the result of age and self-abuse. We saw too much of Will Smith, never in the running for Best Actor and laughing way too hard at his eight-year-old’s presenting moment. At least the cutting between cameras had been well rehearsed to go with the pretend spontaneity of Ellen DeGeneres’ hosting routines. But it was a great pity that it was thought necessary to show us the Sound FX Choir rather than the movie clips the singers were dubbing so cleverly.

The awards themselves held few surprises. Nobody in the world – not even Messrs Frears, Greengrass, Inarritu and Eastwood – could begrudge Marty his Academy Award. And nobody could think The Departed is among his best pictures. He wasn’t even nominated for Taxi Driver (John G Avildsen won for the absurd Rocky which also got Best Film), for New York, New York (Michael Cimino won for The Deer Hunter which was Best Film), for The King of Comedy (James L.Brooks won for Best Film, Terms of Endearment), for The Color of Money (Oliver Stone and his movie Platoon won) or for The Age of Innocence (Spielberg’s year, for Schindler’s List). And, of what are perhaps his greatest masterpieces, his direction of Raging Bull was beaten by Robert Redford for Ordinary People, and Kevin Costner for Dances with Wolves was preferred over Goodfellas (that year he was first up against Stephen Frears, for The Grifters, which he co-produced).

Mention of Redford's soap opera brings to mind the wonderful Lillian Gish tottering on stage to announce the identity of the Best Film winner: "Ordinary Pic ..." she began, then corrected it to Ordinary People. She was right the first time and I'm quite sure she meant it.

Few expected Meryl Streep’s 14th nomination to bring her a third award but can you believe it is now 25 years since her last win? And what was that for, movies buffs? Out of Africa? Sophie’s Choice? Silkwood? The French Lieutenant’s Woman? A Cry in the Dark? These days she doesn’t get to make the kind of movies that carried her triumphantly through the 1980s.

There were no especially embarrassing acceptance speeches. Winners, notably behind-the-camera ones, still think they have to thank people but nobody’s list got really out of hand. Some of the presenters could do with a wind-up nudge from the band: Jerry Seinfeld was unfunny and way too long, as if auditioning to be presenter next year.

As for Ms DeGeneres, I thought she was fine but, like all the others who are not Billy Crystal, she made you crave really top class material. Stuff about Gilligan’s Island and her pretence of hoovering the auditorium carpet should have been excised at an early script session. I was sorry that she made nothing of being the first lesbian to host the Oscars (that sound you heard was Bob Hope turning in his grave). But at least Melissa Etheridge got to be the first woman at the Oscars to make reference to “my wife” – Tammy Lynn Michaels.

Oh, and it was Sophie’s Choice, by the way. Meryl’s last win. But you knew that.

An IMPERSONATION of a HUMAN BEING

In my book Common Sense (freely downloadable from the link in the right margin), I proposed that impersonation, as practised by the likes of Rory Bremner, was “more a knack than a skill” and pretty low in the showbiz pecking order, at least historically. It emerged at the weekend that Bremner has driven the business of mimicking public figures even lower in the estimation of thoughtful people.

On the eve of the local elections last year, Bremner evidently telephoned 10 Downing Street and, posing as Gordon Brown, attempted to contact a number of Cabinet ministers. That a more secure method of making contact through the hub of government is not in place is pretty astonishing but there seems to have been no intention on the entertainer’s part to test the system. Bremner was merely interested in creating a stunt for his Channel 4 programme. He got through to Peter Hain but, when he unwittingly revealed his ignorance, Hain smelt a rat, “so I put the phone down” Bremner told The Sunday Times. It conjures the image of a little boy ringing a stranger’s doorbell and running away.

Later he raised Margaret Beckett, then Secretary of State for the Environment. They had an extended conversation, much of it about other members of the government, Mrs Beckett believing throughout that she was conversing with the Chancellor. Bremner recorded both the calls but, reports The Observer, “Channel Four decided not to screen [sic] them as part of the Bremner, Bird & Fortune show because of Ofcom regulations banning the use of deception unless it is in the public interest”. Having released the tapes to journalists, Bremner now intends to put the material on the net.

The Observer judges that “the spoof provides a fascinating glimpse into how senior figures really feel about each other”. I couldn’t disagree more. Politicians are ordinary mortals who can’t be expected to adore all their colleagues. What it shows is how truly debased our ‘infotainment’ media have become. What is the difference between a journalist tapping into the phone calls of members of the royal family – for which the hapless hack who did so is in jail as I write – and an impersonator’s irresponsible deception? Does Bremner think he has been in some way clever and daring?

The hoax is a weasel’s method of amusing himself and getting himself a name. I suppose if anyone ever decked that egregious little twerp Noel Edmonds when he revealed that some C-list person had been ‘had’ – “gotcha!” – the thus humiliated Edmonds would have used his power to keep the tape of the decking from the public’s eyes. But at least Edmonds’ ‘victims’ were mere showbiz types. To draw a government minister into unguarded talk is to open up many risks: compromising policy, imperiling the minister’s standing and perhaps career, even endangering security. Is Bremner a serious grown-up or just a child blowing raspberries?

I do not defend politicians; they can look after themselves. But Bremner’s self-promoting wheezes are at the expense of the credibility of the very political process. Mrs Beckett is a diligent and decent minister, justly angered by Bremner’s cowardly and spiteful trick. John Prescott, whose public image has taken a battering in recent years, could have emerged much more damaged from such an innocently conducted chat and, because the media types wouldn’t care about that, Bremner would doubtless have led him into much deeper water, had the opportunity presented itself.

Politicians – no different from you and me – need to be able to talk off the record with people whom they believe to be their friends and confidants. I’m sure Bremner would be damned sore if he found he had been conned and recorded when he thought he was talking unobserved to his scriptwriter, his accountant, his drug dealer or his clap clinic. To (as it were) hack into the political process is rather more serious than eavesdropping on someone’s personal affairs. I sincerely hope that Mrs Beckett will take legal advice on the matter. If Bremner cannot be prosecuted for his juvenile jape, the law needs to be changed so that crass tricks like his may not be pulled in future without such representatives of the ever more frivolous media suffering dire consequences.

ARE WE DOWNLOADED? NO!

As with most technology, I came late to the downloading of music. Ever since VCRs were first on sale and I bought a Phillips instead of a VHS, I’ve been leery of investing in new technology until I’m sure that it’s a lasting development or that the invariable pairing of rivals has rationalized into one top dog (squarial, anyone?). A friend was inordinately proud of his quickly extensive collection of laser discs, then downcast when the system just as quickly became obsolete and he was left with a cache of stuff that no one wanted.

For years I resisted CDs, liking vinyl records much more as pure objects and figuring that the advantages of the CD – resistance to surface damage and wear, reduced demand for space – were outweighed by the down side – cover artwork compressed to a fraction of how it was designed to look, sleeve notes abandoned or rendered so tiny as to be illegible. I no longer remember what changed my mind: probably the record companies ceasing to issue albums I wanted on vinyl or cassette tapes.

I may never have got into downloads, had not a friend given me an iTunes token as a birthday present. To use the token, of course, I had to register with iTunes. I was never able to make the token work, however, and its value reverted to the giver who then spent it on himself, so it turned out to be a proverbial Indian gift.

My own computer is an iMac so there was never any compatibility issue with iTunes. But it took a while to get used to the style of the site. The trouble with iTunes, as with other download sites, is the lack of someone organizing the material who has the appropriate mind-set for the job. To get this right you need people who have anal qualities, the kind that fire librarians and researchers. You need people who are passionate about music and in a geeky, detail-loving way. You need gay people, for god’s sake.

There is no sense in the iTunes ‘store’ that anyone who programmes it has any feel for – or even knowledge of – the broad range of music. Irritatingly, all the individual tracks are referred to as ‘songs’, which tells you eloquently enough that their heads are in pop. They no doubt know what the current best sellers are. But their interaction with their customers is mechanistic rather than imaginative.

I log in and find a section entitled ‘Just for You’. This means me. It lists two albums by each of George Michael, Jamiroquai, Christina Aguilera, Madonna, Eurythmics and (yuk!) Sugababes. I have never downloaded any of these people – nor am ever likely to – but presumably much of it derives from my buying an Annie Lennox album. I have also downloaded albums of Vivian Blaine, CPE Bach, Scissor Sisters, Bernard Herrmann, Manhattan Transfer, Kaija Saariaho, Steely Dan, Lena Horne, Gustav Mahler, Bobby Darin and Blossom Dearie, among others. Does none of these compute?

It’s bizarre and alienating that a computer presumes to “recommend” music to me based on what it imagines my purchases indicate. How does my downloading Modern Times by Bob Dylan suggest that I’d want Elton John’s The Captain and the Kid? Is it just a generational connection? And why would my buying an album of opera arias sung by Cecilia Bartoli suggest that I might want Nikolai Lugansky playing Beethoven Piano Sonatas?

Among the preferences offered for listing in your own ‘library’ of downloads is the identity of the composer of each ‘song’. Not very taxing for the computer if the recording is of Haydn String Quartets. But I downloaded a double album of standards sung by the incomparable Lee Wiley and not one of the tracks is credited to a composer (though I can name pretty much all of them; the ones I can’t I want to know now and not to have to look them up in a reference book). Someone at iTunes just hasn’t put the hours in.

When I first investigated iTunes, I felt sure that I would never use it for classical music. To begin with, all the people in their lists of what is available are organized according to first names. This is an absurdity. Fine of course if you want to download Lulu or Mantovani. But tell me – quick, now – what is Rossini’s first name? And can you spell it? If you don’t know, you’ll find it damned hard to locate a recording of Il Turco in Italia to download.

On another site, eMusic, there’s a different problem when you want to search for a classical recording. Suppose you fancy something by Elgar. You put that name in the search engine and you get this list:

Elgar
Edward Elgar
Elgar, Edward
Sir Edward Elgar
E Elgar
Elgar Howarth

Apart from the last-named (a different composer whose first name happens to be Elgar), all the others refer to the same old master but how are these cross-references differentiated? No doubt it’s to do with the formulation used on the cover of the CD or perhaps in the label’s catalogue. But the customer has no idea which particular recordings are going to be attached to which particular version of Elgar’s name. This is really no help. You can’t blame the poor, philistine computer which has no means of knowing that Elgar, Edward and Sir Edward Elgar are one and the same. But an intervening programmer who knew a modicum about music could sort this out pretty quickly. If you search for Bach in eMusic, you get 34 results, embracing twelve members of JS Bach’s family and a modern composer called Jan Bach. Good luck.

Then again, I wanted to see if eMusic had the recording of Glazunov’s 4th Symphony by the National Orchestra of Wales, conducted by Tadaaki Otaka. Of the various sub-divisions of the search engine, I chose Classical Album Title and typed in Glazunov Symphony no 4. The result of the search offered me 1,948 recordings beginning with Beethoven’s 1st and 5th Symphonies. What possible use is that?

I searched eMusic for an album of 14th century French ballades and other French songs by the group called Gothic Voices. It seemed sensible to choose the category Classical Performer and search therein for Gothic Voices. The ‘match’ I was offered was to “Various Artists” and when I clicked on that I was offered a list of 7,211 albums beginning with ‘This is Rock Anthems’. Only a computer could believe this is in any way helpful.

But is it cheaper to download music? Naxos are a famously cheap label, generally retailing in shops at £4.99 a disc. The entire Naxos back catalogue is available through eMusic and, for the deletions alone, that is great news. But is it good value? You can download 40 ‘songs’ per month for £8.99. I have a Naxos CD of John Cage’s Prepared Piano pieces that runs to 19 tracks. Two like that would use up all but two tracks of my entire month’s allowance and would cost me the same as the CDs in a shop but I wouldn’t get the booklet and recording details that come with the CD.

The Naxos collection on eMusic is highlighted in a section called, wearyingly, Naxos Nexus: “it’s a big catalog [sic] to plow [sic] through, so here are some great performance [sic] of the ‘classical canon’.” You soon twig that the writer of this illiterate tosh has never listened to any of these “great performance”. For instance, if you were looking to download a version of Mahler’s 1st Symphony, it certainly wouldn’t be Zdenek Kosler’s. Further on in the list is a mixed album of pieces by Janacek, Enescu and Dvorak credited to ‘Various Artists’. You click on ‘Short Description’, hoping to learn who the various artists might be, and there’s our old friend the list of thousands of albums beginning with ‘This Is Rock Anthems’. Do me a favour. What’s more, the Naxos list has not been updated in over a year.

To test out iTunes, I decided to see what it’s got of one of my favourite contemporary composers, Kagel. Nobody with the first name Mauricio is listed under either ‘Modern Composition’ or ‘avant-garde’, the two ‘subgenres’ (as iTunes are pleased to call them) of ‘classical music’ where you might expect to find him. So I put Kagel in search. This produced someone called Muricio Kagel under Artists. An album of his orchestral works (which I already have as a CD) listed the composer as Mauricio and the conductor – the same man, of course – as Muricio. Sloppy. There’s also a trombone album of modern pieces by various composers but you can’t download the Kagel alone, you have to buy the whole album.

On iTunes, you can buy by the album (each individually priced) or (with exceptions such as that above) by the track. On eMusic, you pay a flat rate per month that allows you to download a number of tracks. This needs careful planning to maximize your value. A big symphony – Bruckner, Mahler, Havergal Brian – is a good buy because the whole album may only be four hefty tracks. An opera may be a poor buy, using up all your allowance in one hit. I didn’t download the Gothic Voices album from eMusic because it comprises 18 tracks, some of them under three minutes long.

What are the advantages of downloading? A few minutes after seeing that an album is available, I can be playing it on my iMac. I can go straight to it on my screen and do other computing tasks while it plays. And I don’t have to shlep around a record store – not, in my view, anything of a chore.

But I can only play the download on my iMac, unless I burn it onto a blank CD or buy myself an iPod (not my style, I think). I don’t get the information that is standard on CDs, though some labels (Naxos, for instance) now expect you to go to a website for opera librettos and the words of long oratorios and song cycles and leave them off the CDs. If it’s from eMusic, I have to apply myself to get the album installed on my iTunes player, at least with the tracks in playing order, and play it all through in one sitting, otherwise the player divides it into separate ‘albums’. This can be tiresome.

Clearly a mixed blessing, then. Perhaps the definitive judgment is this: to download I only need to sit on my arse and get fatter. To buy CDs, I need to walk round shops. Well, I should get out more. I’ll stick to majoring in CDs.

And Rossini’s first name? It’s Gioachino. But you knew that.

FLU OVER the COOK-CHILL NEST

On Friday’s Any Questions, the first question was: “Will you be buying any Bernard Matthews products this weekend?” My answer would be “no” but it would be “no” any weekend.

Even if we remove the unappetizing ingredient of Bernard Matthews from the question, I would not be buying turkey. It’s the fowl with the least going for it. Unless prepared by a cook of experience, skill and imagination, turkey is the driest, least flavoursome meat in the whole field of fowl or game. How it has become all but de rigueur for the Christmas table I do not understand. Our Christmas Day bird of choice is goose so, apart from the delicious flavour of the meat, we have a vast residue of fat for many kinds of kitchen purposes over several months thereafter. If the festive meal brings a big turnout of guests, then it’s rib of beef.

On those Christmas Days when we are guests elsewhere and turkey is unavoidable, I make up with Brussels sprouts which, according to the urban myth, everybody loathes but which I have adored since a much reminisced-upon occasion in my toddlerhood when I evidently polished off at least a dozen sprouts. Perhaps everyone else hates sprouts because they only ever eat them overcooked but all vegetables are spoiled by cooking until they are soggy.

The Bernard Matthews “product” would be no more acceptable if it were quail or lobster or truffles. Matthews’ turkeys spend a miserable existence crammed into maximum security blocks, fed on chemical slurry, standing (they have insufficient room to sit) in their own faeces and never seeing the light of day or even seeing their fellows in plain sight. After slaughtering, they are bulked up with water, preserved with chemical additives and rendered into various gimmicky presentational modes (e.g. “twizzlers”) wherein, their lack of flavour masked with monosodium glutamate, they are sold to shoppers who do not have the wit to tell their children that they will eat proper food whether they think they like it or not.

When Mr Matthews says his processed foods are “bootiful”, what he means is that he has made a great deal of booty from them. He has plundered the housewife’s purse and the househusband’s wallet on the pretext that his brutal methods have enhanced rather than destroyed any residual flavour in the poultry he processes. His is the type of processed food in this country, the adulterated, over-packaged offal that claims to take the “inconvenience” out of cooking. To maximize his profits, the miserable creatures that provide the modicum of flesh for his products pass abbreviated lives in factory conditions, conditions which we now know are no guarantee against avian flu. Hardly surprising, when the fowl have no chance to run free or flap their wings or build any kind of immunity against opportunist infection that would of course spread quickly through the insanitary conditions in which the birds exist.

Matthews has only made his pile because shoppers are so stupid. If we all gave up our addiction to cook-chill and other “convenience” food and instead bought proper organic foodstuffs and meat and eggs from free-range flocks, the birds themselves would be at far less risk of disease and so would the public.

POSTING the LIVING

When I began to collect postage stamps in the 1950s, there were rigorous rules about the kind of people who appeared on the nation’s envelopes. Since the Penny Black was first issued in 1840, only the reigning monarch was depicted on the stamps, the head and neck of Queen Victoria and Kings Edward VII, George V, Edward VIII and George VI, the head and shoulders of the present Queen, first in three-quarter face (all her predecessors had appeared as profiles, save for the younger George V), then from 1968 in profiled silhouette.

The first person seen on a stamp who was not head of state was George VI’s consort. The opening issue of his reign was a single brown stamp to mark the coronation; his wife unexpectedly took an equal share of the stamp. A couple of significant developments in stamp design had occurred in his father’s reign. In 1924 and 1925, successive pairs of issues marked the British Empire Exhibition of those years. These were the first of what came to be known as “commemoratives”, issued for a limited period and tied to a particular event, as opposed to the smaller stamps – always available and bearing only the monarch’s head with more or less decoration around it – that are known as “definitives”.

More commemoratives appeared in George VI’s time, including a set for the London Olympics of 1948 that, for the first time, included a non-royal figure. It was, however, a safely mythic one: “winged victory”. With Elizabeth II’s reign came more change. Figures began to be depicted that were not even mythic, though they were certainly emblematic: a postboy of 1660, stylized children representing Freedom from Hunger and generalized lifeboatmen.

Under the Postmaster-Generalship of the government minister then known as Anthony Wedgwood Benn, a major change took place. Apart from a great proliferation of commemoratives and the aforementioned redesign of the Queen’s head, Benn permitted the first identifiable commoner to be depicted on stamps when the quatercentenary of Shakespeare’s birth was marked by five issues, the largest set to date. The following year, the death of Churchill was even more controversially made subject of a two-stamp issue.

Thereafter, the convention has been that commoners may be depicted on the postage stamps, provided that they are no longer alive. In fact, several living members of the public have appeared, through the increasing use of photography as well as graphic design, but those depictions have been anonymous and as emblematic as the stylized postboy and lifeboatmen of the ‘60s.

Then, rather by accident, a living commoner did creep onto a stamp. In June 1999, the Post Office was partway into a project to mark the millennium with a succession of monthly sets on general themes. That month featured entertainers and the 19p issue showed Freddie Mercury on stage. Mercury was dead by this time but the other members of Queen were and are alive and, in the photograph that provided the basis for the design, the group’s drummer is visible. Thus does Roger Taylor merit a footnote in philatelic history.

Four years later, the England rugby team won the World Cup in Australia and, in the December, the Post Office issued a miniature sheet of four stamps to honour this victory. Each of the four designs carefully avoided showing the face of any player, though I dare say aficionados of the sport knew from the back views and shirt numbers which players were in the photographs and which were not.

By October 2005, the rules had been relaxed. A similar miniature sheet was issued to hail the England cricket team winning the Ashes. This time, players were seen full on and perfectly recognizable on the stamps. In that case, I couldn’t see why there shouldn’t be a stamp to mark Harold Pinter winning the Nobel Prize for Literature. But no such issue materialized.

The recent issue of stamps, which apparently “commemorates the first meeting of the young Paul McCartney and John Lennon fifty years ago”, takes the breakdown of the rules considerably further. Apart from a miniature sheet featuring Beatles collectables, the individual stamps each feature a Beatles album cover and hence the surviving members of the group, Sir Paul and Ringo Starr, are immortalized in the post. It says something about the philistine nature of the age that the first extant people in the public eye to be honoured on stamps are all sportsmen and pop stars.

Existing old masters, photographs and other images have been so miniaturized before but this issue is also a first in another way: the first time marketing images have been depicted on stamps. The reason for it quickly became clear to me. When I went to buy my own copies, the main post office in Bath had sold out of the stamps. A diligent counter staffer managed to rustle up a couple of strays but otherwise, she reported, their whole quota had gone in the first two days. Of course, collectors of Beatles memorabilia – a huge and ravening horde – fell upon this issue. It’s inevitable that the Post Office will note this and look at other subjects that have a commercial potential outside the usual run of stamp issues.

On Tuesday, a new set will be issued to celebrate half a century of the television programme The Sky at Night. Sir Patrick Moore is conspicuous by his absence. Not even a monocle indicates any connection of the issue to earth or its doings. Though BBC and ITV anniversaries have – legitimately, I feel – been marked by stamp issues, it seems nakedly populist for the Post Office to make a single television programme the subject of a set. Whatever next? A set based on I’m a Celebrity – Get Me Out of Here? A miniature sheet commemorating the Beckhams’ move to Los Angeles?

By the by, I eventually did find the remaining Beatles stamps, so please do not send me any, however poignant my plight might seem.

OH BROTHER!

I deplored in my book Common Sense (see right sidebar for free download) the increasing tendency of BBC television news bulletins to be used to trail BBC programmes. You can bet that the near-fatal spill last summer by a reckless presenter of the car-lad show Top Gear would not have occupied such a succession of reports or such repetition of footage if the programme were made for ITV. At the weekend, the miraculously restored delinquent was to give his spin-by-spin account of the accident on the first edition of the new series (cue Radio Times cover) so, needless to say, “never before seen footage” was previewed repeatedly on BBC news bulletins.

At the same time, the whipped-up furore over Celebrity Big Brother was reaching its apparently unmissable climax. You sensed the reluctance with which BBC News knuckled down, embraced the agenda of the tabloids and reported the progress of this particular spectacle on a rival channel. The reluctance was carefully tempered with the emphasised subtext that Channel 4 had done itself no good by playing host to a meretricious abomination. Evidently someone called, I think, Jaded Ghastly, had been turfed out of the “house” for making remarks of a racist tone and, since then, has taken the well-travelled path to The Priory, a mansion wherein the staff rake in the lolly but otherwise walk around in white coats looking grave and studiously avoiding wealthy, untalented and thick-as-planks people who want to feel martyred.

By the by, isn’t it odd that two notions from Orwell’s 1984, ‘Big Brother’ and ‘Room 101’, have been purloined by television production companies and had their meanings surgically removed in order to make a vacuous entertainment sound somehow weighty and significant? Perhaps television itself should check in to The Priory.

The news bandwagon has moved on to Birmingham, gathering equally empty-headed observations from passers-by about the “dramatic” police raids on supposed Muslim terrorists. Meanwhile the rent-a-prepared-to-do-anything-for-attention-crowd movement has moved to an even more ludicrous proposition, that people you can’t quite put a name to (obvious exception: Janet Screech-Talker) can learn to be nurses in the NHS. I so look forward to the first court case in which an insufficiently briefed “celebrity” is sued for infecting a patient with MRSA.

In The Guardian on Monday, that most authoritative of media commentators, Mark Lawson, was given a whole page upon which to ruminate on the climax of Big Brother. I only read the quote extracted and enlarged: “Viewers who wished to show themselves to be liberals had to switch over to watch Top Gear”. It’s quite surprising that Mr Lawson, given the authoritative nature of his commentary, has access to only two channels. But he lives in a world in which the only existence possible is watching television (though today, bemusingly, he writes about theatre, which I guess he must channel by osmosis). In our house, we watched neither Big Brother nor Top Gear. But that’s what you get with old-fashioned socialists.