WEARING YOUR HEART on YOUR LAPEL

It’s poppy time again. Spot the parliamentarian, business executive or home-based television presenter, especially in news and current affairs, who isn’t already wearing the symbol of the fallen soldier in his lapel or on her blouse. Oh, right, there isn’t one. And now that Mr Blair is out of the spotlight, who was the first public figure to be spotted poppying this year? Oh, I think it was the Wootton Bassett council spokesman talking to reporters about the local people who drowned off the Portuguese coast when their children (subsequently saved) got into difficulties. Gordon Brown was a day or two later.

They’re all wrong of course, as is anyone sporting a poppy before Friday. The poppy’s run should be from All Souls’ Day (November 2nd) until Remembrance Sunday (which this year happens to fall on the 11th). Proper people who respect tradition know that and keep to it. I’ll bet Her Majesty didn’t wear a poppy to Matins yesterday, nor any of the royal household. Politicians of course have their electorate to impress and it’s a rash backbencher who doesn’t grab a poppy at the earliest opportunity (one Labour chap was the other day accused of saving his emblem from last year so that he could be first in the House). Braver still would be the (as yet unseen) MP who forswears the poppy or – worse yet, though widely misunderstood – counters with a white poppy. The Women’s Cooperative Guild devised the white poppy in the 1930s to memorialise the non-combatants who died in the First World War and to stand as a symbol of peace. Red poppyists are apt to blackguard the white poppy as a symbol of cowardice, appeasement, pacificism and every other unspeakable sin attributable to commies, lefties and subversives. Harrumph. It’s academic anyway. Where could you buy one?

You don’t see many poppy-wearers in the street these days because, quite frankly, you don’t see many poppy-sellers in the street. No doubt if you popped into a branch of the British Legion, you’d be able to pick one up. In my childhood, as October turned to November, there’d be a poppy-seller on every street corner, vying with the penny-for-the-guy kids, but both figures have melted away. Bonfire Night, Firework Night or Guy Fawkes Night (as November 5th was variously known) has been displaced by Halloween, an American device imperfectly grasped by British children. Those who fought in the Second World War are too old to stand on draughty street corners and their children and grandchildren aren’t interested in Remembrance. So wearing the poppy has become a phenomenon that you see on television, something public figures do.

The BBC always protests that poppy-wearing is voluntary among newsreaders, weather forecasters and other studio-visiting pundits but it seems most unlikely that anybody fronting for the Beeb who declined to pin on the symbol would hold onto their job for long. Some pretext would be found for the change but it would be for defying what is clearly an unwritten house rule. The BBC regards the poppy as politically neutral, which of course it isn’t. No reporter or presenter would be allowed to wear a breast cancer ribbon or a gay pride badge. These symbols would be thought to compromise the BBC’s neutrality. But the BBC is not neutral about national remembrance.

I have several objections to the poppy. First, I dislike ostentatious displays of charitable donation. I think a sandwich board that shouts “I gave” is vulgar and self-serving and that is what the poppy is, even if BBC people or MPs are “issued” with poppies without any actual donation being made. The fact that I don’t wear a poppy doesn’t mean that I don’t make a donation to the British Legion. You don’t need to know whether I do or not. It’s my business.

Second, I don’t see why one has to conform to someone else’s timetable. When I was a student, I bought a poppy in November, put it away and then got it out again and wore it in April. I told those who enquired that if the fallen were worth remembering in November, they were just as worth remembering in April. People got surprisingly cross. They thought I was taking the piss. Perhaps I was, I don’t remember. Mostly, I think I was making a valid point.

Thirdly, there isn’t just a poppy. There’s a single poppy, a poppy with leaf trim, a poppy with double leaf trim, a double poppy with double leaf trim and, doubtless, a poppy corsage. This brings in an element of competition, particularly among MPs, over who appears more generous or supportive or ingratiating or pretentious. So the poppy is not an affectless gesture, a simple show of respect, as BBC managers would have us believe. It is a surprisingly complex symbol of establishmentarianism. It identifies the wearers as part of a tribe, the tribe that, had it been of age then, would have been proud to join up and fight the Kaiser and the Hun or the Führer and the Nazis, even without all the benefits that hindsight brings.

If it weren’t for the fact that all factions of the Commons sports the poppy, from the unreconstructed Thatcherites and Paisleyites to those Liberal Democrats who opposed the invasion of Iraq even before it happened, we could accuse MPs of, in their own quaint expression, “playing politics” with the war dead. As it is, we are faced with a solid wall of convention, the poppy-wearing class. It is odd that such a tiny proportion of the general public now identifies with that class by the most direct and simple means, themselves wearing a poppy. Perhaps there are the beginnings here of a genuine, popular, anti-establishment movement.

NICE GUYS FINISH LASTING WORK

“For when the One Great Scorer comes/To write against your name,/He marks – not that you won or lost,/But – how you played the game” (Grantland Rice, Alumnus Football).

I cannot but wonder why anyone follows – let alone pursues – sport. Save for a very, very few practitioners and punters, sport means recurrent disappointment or (in media histrionics) heartbreak, tears, tragedy, a shattered dream, the end of the world, etc. Even for Tiger Woods, even for Roger Federer, there is occasional “defeat” to weather along with the regular “victories” to be savoured. Dominating sportsmen like these inevitably begin to aim higher and then, if they do not manage to surpass some ancient record of achievement, they feel obscurely that they too have failed. Oh please. Take up gardening.

This weekend, apparently, Christine Hamilton (whose talent I have evidently underestimated) failed at the last to win some driving contest, having led the race all season. (I hadn’t known one race could go on so long). I guess she’s still a shoo-in for BBC Sports Personality of the Year, a title that I have always thought to be the most extreme contradiction of the multimedia age. Good grief, it’s been won in the past by a woman wholly devoid of personality, Princess Anne’s numbskull daughter, who proudly boasts that she’s never picked up a book in her life. (Sports Bore of the Year would be a much more close-run contest).

Before Christine’s shame, some bunch of rugger buggers was seen off in Paris by a team from a nation that surely needed the psychological boost of victory more than England did. I read that the English players had been so written off at the contest’s outset that, had they won, many bookmakers would have been bankrupted (aha, one tangible reason to have wished the English team good fortune). To have done as well as they did was apparently a remarkable achievement and “they can hold their heads up high” unless, like me, you think they should have grown out of such a schoolboy activity long ago. (I saw the English rugby captain on a news bulletin. He sports one of those so-called cauliflower ears that boxers always had in the comics of my childhood. Not attractive).

To pursue or follow any sport is to elect to spend almost all of your time sunk in dismay. After all, “there can only be one winner” (sport is of course rife with cliché). This means that trailing behind the winner is a crowded field of losers and also-rans, all of them disheartened, self-disgusted or proclaiming forlornly “we wuz robbed”. Most of them anyway are on steroids and other performance-enhancing (i.e. cheating) drugs. Why would any sentient human being want to subject his leisure hours – or worse, his (inevitably short-lived) career – to recurrent frustration?

I suppose the only comparable field is politics. J Enoch Powell, a shrewder observer than he was political operator, once declared that “all political careers end in failure” and with very few exceptions he must be deemed right on the money. Most politicians want to get their hands on one or two of the levers of power and, once having done so, begin to fancy their chances in the top job, be it president, prime minister or dictator-for-life. Consequently, almost all of them fail as the number that reaches what is sometimes called “the top of the greasy pole” is of course a vanishingly small proportion of those who think they might like a shot at it. Of those who do get to perform the top job, even fewer leave office with enhanced reputation and the enduring love of the people. There are barely any winners in politics, only better or worse losers.

Sport is not dissimilar. Even those who rise to be champions again and again inevitably continue to compete when their skills are waning and so at last fall to younger, fitter, hungrier contestants who want to become even more famous champions than those they supplant.

The arts offer so much more satisfying a field of endeavour. Of course there are meretricious awards and lists of supposed “greats” so that the media and, to a lesser extent, followers and consumers of the arts can feel that they have tamed the artists by providing a framework of competition and struggle and so a spurious sense of triumph and loss. That shrewd old bird, the Irish playwright Brian Friel, graciously accepting an Olivier award for his magical play Dancing at Lughnasa in 1991, declared to the assembled dignitaries: “Success is merely the postponement of failure”.

But happily the arts are not measured by the mechanistic standards of sport: score lines, worth totted up in points. In art, in self-expression, “success” and “failure” are far more complex and subtle notions than the winning of a tennis game “to love” or a golf match “four and three” or a cricket match “by an innings and 17 runs” or a wrestling bout by "two falls, two submissions or a knockout". Accordingly, books and paintings, movies and musical compositions, verses and dances, plays and programmes have a more lasting and mature relationship with their audiences than a sports event ever can. Of course sports fans mistily recall a George Best dribble, a Len Hutton cover drive, an Arnold Palmer sand chip, a Muhammad Ali upper cut and in such images lies the poetry – all the poetry – of sporting prowess. But who would prefer a whole season of flat racing to a single bar of Bach or a stanza of Shelley? Plenty of people, you reply, and I counter: “but they’re all STUPID people”.

And of course there are far more stupid people than the other kind, so sport is perceived to be more popular and newsworthy than the arts and therefore Doris Lessing, Nobel literature laureate (not in competition with anybody for that award), gets considerably less media coverage than the aforementioned Christine Hamilton. It seems to me, however, that Lessing brings far more credit to this country for the recognition of her extensive body of work over many years than does the failure of various journeymen in the objectively judged struggles of this week's sporting event. No motorcade to Trafalgar Square for Lessing. No special stamp issue. I hope there was a message from the Queen and a statement by the Prime Minister but I heard tell of neither. Lessing at least has this consolation: if there are humans still extant a hundred years from now, her work will still be read when all trace of Johnny Wilkinson – is that his name? – is forgotten.

SCHWANENGESANG of DEAR LEADER?

Five minutes ago, David Cameron’s position as leader of the Conservative Party was under some pressure. Now Gordon Brown’s in the Labour Party is reportedly being questioned by so-called Blairites (I suppose we should be calling them counter-counter-revisionists). And always, always, the press is out for the head of Sir Menzies Campbell served up on a silver charger.

I am not a Liberal Democrat. I was never a Liberal when the party was called The Liberal Party and I wasn’t a supporter of the short-lived breakaway from the Labour Party that called itself The Social Democratic Party and that went on to merge with the Liberals to form the present Liberal Democrats. The critics of Sir Ming who have actually put their heads over the parapet – apart from the ever perverse Simon Hughes – are former Social Democrats like William Rodgers who, in his dotage as Lord Rodgers, has come facially to evoke Ken Dodd, a resemblance that doesn’t assist his (never very deep) credibility.

I voted Liberal Democrat in the general elections of 2001 and 2005, however. As I have written before, there were particular reasons in 2001 to vote against the Blair government and against its representative who was our MP at the time. By 2005, we were domiciled in a constituency that is represented by a Conservative – one who has become personally controversial since the last election and who certainly will lose some of his base when the next election comes – but that is never going to elect a Labour MP. The best hope of unseating the sitting tenant is to vote Lib Dem which is what I did last time and, no doubt, what I shall do next time. Ideology tempered by practicality seems to me the most civically responsible as well as the most efficacious spirit in which to cast one’s ballot. In any case, I feel I can vote Lib Dem in good conscious as a democratic socialist. On almost every issue in recent years, the Lib Dems have been well to the left of New Labour. Come to that, so has David Cameron. If you had told Nye Bevan that there would one day be a Labour government that was actually the most right wing grouping in the Commons, he would have said … well, he would probably have said “I wouldn’t be a bit surprised, boyo, but don’t ask me to support it”.

How should Ming Campbell deal with the continuous undermining of his leadership in the media? It is, as I have observed before, a measure of how shallow and trivial the media has become but, as Orson Welles used to declare, it’s no good moaning about the unfairness of the system, you have to play the hand you’re dealt.

I think, if I were Sir Ming, I would make a speech specifically aimed at his own party. I should make the point I just made, that the media is crap but you have to get used to it. I should add, however, that the most pernicious collaborator in this crap is the MP who gives off-the-record briefings. It may be – indeed, in these base and unprincipled times, it is a certainty – that political correspondents are often making it up when they claim that they have been told “privately” that this or that is happening or should happen. Because it’s an unattributed claim, it can’t be verified or tested. How convenient. On the other hand, Westminster is a seething nest of gossip and speculation and it would be unthinkable that all backbenchers – or even ministers and shadow ministers – could resist the temptation to spread some occasional mischief and thereby imagine that they are influencing events in a way that their official status does not permit.

Campbell should point out that the opinion polls, taken between elections when attention on third parties is characteristically confined to reports of supposed trouble, do not reflect the support the party actually wins in by-elections at either parliamentary or council level. He should denounce anyone who briefs anonymously, calling them cowards and fools who are undermining not just his leadership but the credibility of and prospects for the whole party, and propose that they should make their comments openly or hold their tongues or stand down and resign the whip. He should further note that the pot-stirrers who conduct a whispering campaign (if there actually are any such) make a number of rash assumptions: that he, Ming, will voluntarily step aside; that the gossip in Westminster and Fleet Street accurately reflects sentiment among the party’s grassroots and indeed among the wider electorate; that a change of leadership, either by his stepping down or by some kind of coup, will automatically improve the party’s standing; that any likely successor has sufficient recognition among the public to raise the party’s profile, the named candidates being obscure and not exactly charismatic (he could well risk such a jibe); that a leadership election will not precipitate a policy argument, even an ideological struggle; that a week in politics is not a long time. Ming could say that he doesn’t know, any more than anyone does, whether any of those assumptions is correct, save for the first and last. And he can tell them the answer to the first one: he isn’t going to step down.

Politics is a tough trade. Public opinion is volatile and shallow: if the England rugby players win whatever the tournament is that is presently going on and, shortly thereafter, the England football players qualify (or whatever it is they have to do) to play in whatever the next big thing is in their sport, the resultant euphoria among volatile and shallow people might boost Gordon Brown’s standing back to its summer level. That in turn might make Ming look stronger in contrast to Cameron. Stranger things have happened. An MP could die, precipitating a by-election at which the Lib Dems do much better than their opinion poll rating suggests. That would ease the pressure on Sir Ming, at least for a while. A week is still a long time in politics.

SMALL EARTHQUAKE in WESTMINSTER – NOT MANY DEAD

As sensible people expected, there will be no general election in 2007. It may come as a surprise to those who spend their lives turning over stones in Westminster but I can confidently inform them that the vast majority of people who do not go picking through the entrails of “sources” did not give a rat’s arse whether the Prime Minister called a “snap” election or not. Only journos, backbenchers, political wonks and men with very small willies worried their silly little heads about this matter.

Unfortunately that same cast of ne’er-do-wells has a disproportionate influence on what the chattering classes chatter about and what is imagined by those chattering classes to be News (with a capital ‘N’). Consequently, the last three weeks – what is known in the trade as “the conference season” – have been hijacked by endless, empty speculation about The Election That Never Was.

The claim that this was all an exercise in what politicians like to call, in their lofty way, “playing politics” would have some merit if the media didn’t so energetically and obediently pick up the ball and run with it repeatedly to the same corner of the field. Thus every news bulletin during the Liberal Democrats’ conference focussed on whether the party might dump Sir Menzies Campbell and every bulletin during the successive Labour and Tory conferences was concerned primarily with whether there would be an election on an imminent date, gradually narrowing to November 1st. Consequently, it was something of a triumph on the Tories’ part – and one rapidly reflected in the way-too-influential public opinion soundings – that within the hubbub they managed to get heard the notion that they would slash inheritance tax if elected.

A most revealing account of this media madness was offered on the Radio 4 programme Feedback yesterday by the producer in charge of BBC Radio’s coverage of the conferences – though, as his name was given as Jamie Donald, he sounded more likely to have been in charge of entertaining the tots in the conference crèches. Jimjams, as I think of him, was quizzed well and persistently by Roger Bolton (who happily is not credited as Rog) and his answers (with my annotations) to the extensive grumbles conveyed from Feedback listeners who, like me, wanted some substance and less froth in the news from the conference halls are worth quoting at length:

“It may well be that the listeners and viewers aren’t looking at the totality of what the BBC offers …” (oh, right, so it’s our own fault then, we shouldn’t expect, say, The News to tell us the news, we need to distil the news from a 24-hour watch on the whole output, bearing in mind that Farming Today, The Archers and The Most Annoying TV Moments might all be germane) “… I do accept that as part of our coverage we have looked in detail at issues like the election, the presentation, the branding and the leadership …” (well, excuse me but “the election” wasn’t an actual issue because no election had been called, so it was merely a subject of gossip. As for “the presentation, the branding”, did you know that these were “issues” because I certainly didn’t? Does Jimjams come from a career in Marketing by any chance?)

On the subject of news bulletins, Jimjams got himself into something of a pickle “… you have to remember that they have 15/20 minutes to cover the world … When you’ve got crises like Northern Rock, Burma and other things going on, are you seriously saying that they should chuck out international and major national stories to cover policy in detail when other parts of the BBC … are covering that policy in detail? …” (No, but we are saying that repetitive and pointless speculation about Ming’s chances of survival and Gordon’s election strategy is even less appropriate and more time-wasting on the news than detailed policy discussion. In any case, nobody expects the bulletins to “cover the world” and if we did we’d be sorely disappointed),

“An election is one of the most important moments in our political life. This idea that we might have an election has burst upon us over the last two or three weeks. It’s a time when the entire country needs to be mobilised to understand that this is the high point of our democratic system. If it turns out on Monday that’s what the country will have to do, our last three weeks will be extremely well spent”.

This, in its turn, is the high point of Jimjams’ delusion so I propose to look at it in some detail. As it turned out, we didn’t even get to Monday before we knew that that was not what the country would have to do, so Jimjams’ messianic fervour was not only misplaced but misplaced by a whole weekend. In the absence of an election, does he still think that the BBC’s last three weeks were well spent? What is he planning to do to prevent the country’s excited state of mobilisation – orchestrated (he would claim) by the BBC’s news coverage – turning into the kind of behaviour that occasions the mass issuing of ASBOs? Does he really think that we are so stupid, so overawed by the so much more significant doings of Paris Hilton, Amy Winehouse, Britney Spears, Jade Goody, the Beckhams and the rest of the sideshow freaks that we don’t understand what an election means? And how does it get to be the job of BBC News to remind us? Just give us the facts, ma’am, we’ll interpret them for ourselves. Moreover, this idea “bursting” over us: wasn’t it the BBC and the other news media that pricked the balloon that unleashed the fine spray of blather over us all the last two or three weeks?

Jimjams now returns to the Lib Dem conference, seeming so long ago already (do remember, as Gordon Brown certainly does this weekend, the truest thing – perhaps the only wholly true thing – that Harold Wilson ever said: “a week is a long time in politics”): “Ming Campbell’s age isn’t the issue but to suggest for example that there wasn’t a great deal of discussion behind the scenes, that members of his party weren’t discussing among themselves and briefing journalists privately about the issue of the leadership would be to misunderstand the nature of that conference. We have a duty to report both what the parties want us to and what’s really going on there …”

This raises the matter of “private briefing”, a source of great irritation to viewers of and listeners to news bulletins, whether the news editors like it or not. Phrases like “sources indicate”, “a frontbencher let it be known to the BBC privately” and “off-the-record, I was told that” make the viewer feel excluded from some masonic process and, more significantly, undermine everything that is said publicly and for attributable consumption. Moreover, while the correspondents doubtless believe themselves to be sophisticates who wholly comprehend “what’s really going on” in the Machiavellian game of power politics, you do wonder about the motives of anyone in the political battle who briefs anonymously. How can the correspondent be sure he himself is not being played for a sucker? It’s incredibly likely that, if a cabinet minister or shadow spokesperson lowered his voice and told you, out of the corner of his mouth, that “I shouldn’t be telling you this and it must never be known that it came from me but …”, you’d feel a tad flattered and “important” and you’d want to share with your viewers this conviction that you’re at the cutting edge. Indeed, you’d need to be a very canny old hack indeed to put it through your internal shit-detector and come up with the foolproof conclusion that your secret-teller is just using you as a conduit through which to fly a kite. That of course is what most of the unattributable stuff is surely about, however.

What’s more, the story is changed by the reporters themselves as the days roll by. I saw the snatch of interview on the news with Chris Huhne, the Liberal Democrat MP who is unsurprisingly spoken of as potentially the next leader of his party – after all, he did stand for the leadership last time when Ming Campbell won it. Huhne was asked about his present intentions and answered, reasonably and straightforwardly enough, that it was “premature” to talk in such terms. There was no reason to believe that he had heard Nick Clegg, another MP spoken of as a potential leader, answer to a similar question – in an equally reasonable and straightforward way, if differently but why would it be a significant difference? – that he would indeed stand “if there was a vacancy”.

This innocent, straight-bat stuff is parlayed in today’s Daily Telegraph into “a thinly-veiled swipe at Mr Clegg” on the part of Mr Huhne. Until the day comes when MPs answer every media question with the formula “no comment” – and it would go hard against the grain for a profession that lives to talk at length – it will be an unusually twinkled-toed politician who can ensure that no passing remark he makes is ever left unexamined for resonance, subtext, insincerity and spin or, if free of all four, is not then misreported by some enemy newspaper or, unlike the Queen’s invented huff with Annie Leibovitz, not moved to some timeframe that makes it seem rather more hurtful than it naturally is.

Insofar as Gordon Brown’s team was, as many reporters indicate, slipping out nods and winks; insofar as there was tangible evidence of the option of a November election being kept open (the government let it be known that certain hirings and arrangements were being put in place); and insofar as Brown could have talked more openly about the exercise he was undertaking with his advisors if only his every sinew wasn’t bursting to do David Cameron a piece of no good, the PM could be said to have done himself and his party some harm – probably not lasting harm – over the last weeks. Brown does know what the media’s interest is like and his people clearly do go in for playing trusted reporters off against less trusted editors. By not stamping on the rising tide of hysterical excitement, he has allowed the Tories (in particular among opposition parties) to panic themselves into pulling the party together and settling for the leader that they’ve got rather than some mythical alternative no more capable, in practice, of offering credible opposition to Labour. By electing to wait until 2008 or 2009, Brown has given himself time to build an irresistible electoral juggernaut. Of course, he has given his rivals the same amount of time. If a week is a long time in politics, eighteen months is an aeon.

Meanwhile, we could hardly have hoped for a more eloquent argument for fixed-term parliaments than that provided by this cheesy episode. I would advocate a 54-month term so that general elections alternate between, say, the third Sunday in March and the third Sunday in September four-and-a-half years later. That way, whatever advantages or disadvantages are imagined to lie in the spring are balanced by the counter-arguments concerning the autumn. The earliest Easter Sunday ever falls is March 23rd – it does so next year in fact – and that is the fourth Sunday of the month. The clocks would still be on Greenwich Mean Time but the lengthening of the days is very evident by mid-March. By the third week of September, schools are back but not universities and that might make a difference in college constituencies. But at least knowing the date of the election would allow for the kind of planning – by electoral officers, MPs and voters alike – not now possible.

It is often said that determining the date of the general election is one of the most powerful advantages in a prime minister’s armoury but, as Gordon Brown has found, it needs to be deployed with masterly subtlety, otherwise that power becomes a stick with which your opponents may beat you. He would leave an important legacy if he were to be the premier who changed electoral law and, as Ming Campbell has consistently argued, gives us fixed-term government.

STUDIO PORTRAIT

The most interesting thing on television at present is Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. I’m sure the endgame of The Sopranos on E4 is really the high point of current British transmission but I wasn’t able to tape the first episode of the renewed screenings – it was bizarre of Channel 4 and its satellite channels to break the last series into two chunks – and when I tried to set Sky+ to catch the same-week repeat there was a mysterious block on recording that particular slot on the hard drive. So I let it go. I can wait; I’ll catch it on its C4 screening (in the spring perhaps) and that anyway will be without the disfiguring channel ID in the top left corner of the screen.

Aaron Sorkin’s successor to The West Wing shares that legend’s sensibility. It assumes an unusually literate, educated, liberally-minded and well-informed audience. There are far more allusions in the scripts than on any other programme, often to really quite abstruse matters and people, with a special concentration on British subjects, beginning with Gilbert and Sullivan in the pilot episode.

The milieu of the drama serial is a late-night satire show, televised live across the US from Los Angeles. I worked in and around British television for a quarter of a century, so this of course has a powerful interest for me. There isn’t really much reason to expect it to have wide appeal, however, insofar as viewers on both sides of the Atlantic have never been encouraged by television to take much interest in the background of the medium itself, whereas the behind-camera personalities, industry workings, history and techniques of cinema-making have been meat and drink to television for decades. Accordingly, Studio 60 never did well in the US ratings and seems not to have been inked in for a second series. It picked up five Emmy nominations, an impressive haul, but only won with John Goodman as guest actor.

Studio 60 is, I think, a failure but a most interesting one. Its failings are surprisingly large. By far the least convincing aspect of the show is the show-within-a-show. I know a lot of topical comedy doesn’t travel too well but the glimpses we get of the show that everyone is working on so earnestly are lame in the extreme. I suspect that the writing team – I mean Sorkin’s writing team, not the one depicted in Studio 60 – lacks any old pros from the television comedy game. The young drama-scripting turks, along with Sorkin himself, think they know how to mimic another genre but one of the things television drama gets most wrong is the true smell and feel of non-drama television, whether it’s news, chat shows, game shows or comedy. This is a pity and it undermines Studio 60’s credibility.

The next yawning hole in the show is the lack of a really persuasive or well-realised female character. Amanda Peet is impossibly glamorous and exquisitely clad as the station’s director of programmes. This is not the main reason why she doesn’t begin to convince as a big player in television but it doesn’t help. Sarah Poulson has to try to bring alive a gratingly flaky character as the still-smarting ex of the show’s co-resident genius. This latter is played by top-billed Matthew Perry, not my favourite actor. (One of the reasons I was never attracted to Friends was that, of the six leads, only Lisa Kudrow held any appeal for me).

Another problem is structural. Sorkin clearly made an early and surely a correct decision that he couldn’t have every episode constructed as a filleted week, climaxing with the weekend transmission of the satire show. But he hasn’t found a satisfactory substitute. The episode most recently broadcast here (#9, entitled ‘B-12’ after a virus, the role of which was not at all clear in the plot) suffered badly from what I took to be deliberate continuity shifts back and forth between different days. I say that I took them to be deliberate. More4, which shows Studio 60 here, managed after an ad break to rewind and play a second time several minutes of one segment the other week. It really is time More4 solved its problems in its presentation suite, not least the one that continually mangles its own transmitted sound. That wouldn’t matter if the linkpeople would shut up during the programmes but when they talk over the end credits the music always starts to break up because the sound is now being augmented by the permanent glitch in the presentation suite sound.

Much of Studio 60’s appeal lies in seeing how its inherent problems will be addressed in each episode. Snatches of music by guests, some of them as famous as Sting, seem a little desperate. On the other hand, a running discussion on product placement had me looking for the advertising deals that Sorkin himself has done and one just knew that the fruits of this were being flourished in a spirit of post-modern irony-and-realism mix. In a way, that is the main thing that floors Studio 60. It’s just too self-aware for its own good. Its gestures are there because they’re smart, rather than because they’re germane to story or character. That’s why in the end it’s not as successful as Ugly Betty or Desperate Housewives. But hey, like those invigorating imports, it beats anything home-grown that British television can offer since the end of Green Wing. Unless I am to except The IT Crowd. And I’m not quite sure that I am to …

BOOKS DO FURNISH A ROOM

Having admired her earlier book, Jack, I meant ages ago to buy the novel This Book Will Save Your Life by AM Homes but I neglected to do so. Then I picked up a copy in a branch of Waterstone’s, our local independent bookseller having run through his quota. The copy I bought had in its top right hand corner one of those “3 for the price of 2” stickers: they never have any influence whatsoever on my purchases but Waterstone’s use them to favour books that are already selling well – you’d think it would make more sense to use the ploy on underselling titles. When I got it home, I peeled off the sticker and found beneath it a circular promotion for something called “Richard & Judy”. This was not a sticker but an overprint on the cover.

Upon enquiry, I established that this mysterious couple are a daytime television programme. The presenters are clearly so famous that they don’t need surnames, like Bill and Ben. It (the programme) promotes various books that come its way and, it seems, a mention on the programme can have its effect on sales. This is a deplorable development. In the States, apparently, no book sells any copies at all unless it has been blessed by the Oprah Winfrey programme. At a time when corruption in television is a daily news story, the broadcasters will need to be especially vigilant that the money to be made out of such television exposure is not tempting publishers to attempt to influence the producers of the programme. There might well be a case for suggesting that the use of a book cover to promote Richard & Judy – a piece of reciprocal product placement, if you like – is itself a corrupt practice.

On three separate counts, I did not want to own a copy of this book defaced by this piece of cover advertising. First of all, I am a proper grown-up book reader. I don’t need to be told what to read by the presenters of some daytime television programme. They are not, I take it, professors of semiotics or critics from the intellectually reputable journals. As a rule, I only allow myself to be guided to a hitherto unfamiliar writer by reading a combination of reviews by critics with whose tastes I am already comfortable in the better newspapers and magazines.

Not even friends are necessarily reputable guides when it comes to books. Over many years, one particular friend has strongly recommended just two novels to me. I read one and thought it a piece of derivative twaddle. I have never read the other although it sits pristine on the bookshelves. Quite recently, my friend’s partner revealed that my old friend almost never reads fiction at all. It would be putting it too strongly to suggest that I felt a sort of betrayal on the part of my friend in perhaps only ever having read two novels and then presuming to recommend both of them to me; but I was sorely aggrieved. For myself, I can think of hardly any book that I would commend wholeheartedly to everybody. Just occasionally I will tell a friend about a particular book that I fancy might appeal to her. This is a gambit used very sparingly.

But I digress. My second objection to the publisher’s despoiling of the cover of Ms Homes’ novel concerns the slither down into the murky world of marketing that has been imposed upon literary fiction. These days it’s hard to find a paperback edition of a novel that is not festooned with promotion. Either there is a quote from some such goon as Nick Hornby, Tony Parsons or Stephen Fry on the cover, as if their approbation is any kind of commendation: after all, Fry will be revealing on a television programme tomorrow night that among his pleasures are Countdown, darts and Led Zeppelin. And I am meant to be encouraged by his sensibility? Otherwise we must be assured that the novel in question was “shortlisted for the Booker Prize” or even, dear god, “longlisted for the Booker Prize”. Any day now I expect to pick up a paperback that proclaims it was “overlooked for the Booker Prize”.

Writers who have yet to join Valhalla routinely have their Nobel laureateships emblazoned on the covers of their books: see Coetzee, Grass, Morrison, Saramago, Mahfouz and so on. Happily, the old masters who received the same recognition – Tagore, Kipling, Mann, Mauriac, Steinbeck, Shaw, O’Neill, Sartre and so on – are evidently sufficiently classified as “classics” for their Nobels to be omitted from the marketing.

Finally, I have an aesthetic objection to the promo on the cover of the Homes. Its paperback cover design is a symmetrical arrangement of six doughnuts, quite a cute image. The promo obliterates one of the doughnuts, ruining the look of the book. What is the point of a publisher paying good money for a jacket design if he’s then going to spoil it with trash?

I visited a great many bookshops in the dwindling hope that an overlooked copy of the Homes with an unsullied cover might lurk but bookshops are less musty and disorganised that they used to be, sadly for the customers. Evidently the publisher had recalled the pre-Richard & Judy copies and replaced them.

There was nothing for it but to contact the publisher direct. I emailed the Sales & Marketing Department of Granta. A gentleman called Julio Ferrandis replied, saying that he had “a hard copy of this book sitting on my desk (it’s a new copy!) for you”. Well of course I didn’t want a hardback copy. I could buy one of those at a bookshop and save the postage. What I wanted, as I had explained carefully, was a paperback without the Richard & Judy promo. Had they really pulped all the early editions? It seemed so wasteful. I wrote again, in self-deprecatory terms (“grateful for … your patience with what I am sure you will see as my unnecessary pickiness”). Sr Ferrandis wrote back saying they had no “pb copies without the sticker at the present. What I can send you however is a picture of the pb cover without the sticker! Hehe”. That “hehe” seems calculated to be offensive. I feel disinclined to believe Sr Ferrandis on the lack of copies but I shall not pursue the matter with Granta. I shall look for a decent copy of the book in a second-hand shop.

Even if I eventually find an acceptable copy of the Homes, I shall probably never get to read it. The American novelist Jonathan Franzen (The Corrections, which I have read) once declared that he had calculated his life expectancy, reckoned up how many books he read in an average year and realized that he already, in his mid-30s, owned more books than he could possibly read. I too probably passed that point in my mid-30s but I continue to amass books at a rate that, by true bibliophile standards, is very modest. There is something blissful about the home none of whose internal walls can be seen for the mass covering of bookshelves. We do not go that far, we have pictures too. And a few empty spaces. Oh, and videotapes (thousands of those).

There is a quotation from Cicero on display in one of our guest rooms: “If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need”. I think I might add a kitchen and a means of listening to music but I like his thrust. People sometimes find a display of books a bit overwhelming, especially perhaps if they never read a book from one month’s end to the next.

Occasionally, some visitor (usually a woman, perhaps because men are less likely to notice such things) will exclaim “Look at all your books!” and you rejoin, with a tiny touch of asperity, “oh, this is but the tip of the iceberg” while you wonder “did you never enter a cultivated home before?” And then comes the inevitable corollary, as predictable as it is dull: “have you read them all?” “And where,” you ask yourself pityingly, “would be the pleasure in that?” To have a myriad of masterpieces – and diversions too, let’s not be precious – from which to choose is to be alive and engaged.

I know that there are copies of books on our shelves that will remain virgin until after I am gone. There are, as a New York teeshirt often worn by my partner declares, “too many books, too little time”. But that is the condition of our short passage through this vale of tears. We can never see all the places, meet all the people, indulge all the joys, sample all the flavours. Rousseau complained that “the mountain of books is making us ignorant” and that was 250 years ago, even before Barbara Cartland added several small hills of books to the range. Maybe I can do without This Book Will Save Your Life altogether.

LEFT WRITE WRONG

Lately I have been conducting a bracing debate with a fellow blogger, Panopticon, on his lively site at www.thinkhard.org. We have been considering politics or, more specifically, politicians. Panopticon is a hardened sceptic. I will not go so far as to say that he is a cynic. But he is convinced that anyone who chooses to seek a role in the political arena is, to some degree, a control freak wishing to interfere in people’s lives and arrangements. I summarize no further; it is not for me to (mis)represent his arguments; indeed, he is of course most welcome to restate them and develop them himself in this forum.

Inevitably, in the heat of a dialectical situation, I have occasionally been tempted to overstate my case, either for the sake of provocation or to (imagine that I) clinch an argument. I do not in reality support unstintingly the notion that professional politicians as a breed stand for probity and altruism in all things. Politics is clearly a subtle and treacherous mistress and those who pursue her favours may be easily persuaded to begin to forget about duties, principles, scruples, even old friendships.

Over the weekend, the death was announced of Lord Gilmour of Craigmillar. I doubt that I will ever find myself supporting the Conservative Party, however reactionary the advancing years encourage me to be, but thoughtful old school Tories – whether aristocratic, Eton-educated baronets like Sir Ian Gilmour (as we remember him) or more humbly-born toilers like John Biffen who died a few weeks before – kept the decent-cove tendency alive while Thatcher was busy turning it into “the nasty party”.

Politicians like Biffen and Gilmour clearly did see a political career as a life dedicated to public service. Indeed, both were surely held back from advancement by their refusal to say ‘yes’ when they thought ‘no’ and to trim their views for expediency, fashion or support from above or below that might otherwise be withheld. If Gilmour was the person most responsible for reconciling his leader to the rise to power of Robert Mugabe, he can hardly be blamed for failing to anticipate that the first president of Zimbabwe would metamorphose into an old-fashioned tyrant of the worst kind. Mugabe’s supporters at the turn of the 1980s were far more numerous on the left and they failed equally.

Parliamentary politics is a tough and unforgiving trade. If you insist, like that ever-recalcitrant Labour backbencher Bob Marshall-Andrews, on being as sceptical about your own party’s leadership as is Panopticon about all political leaders, you cannot expect ever to be valued or trusted by that leadership or indeed by most of your fellow MPs who understand, often to their own discomfort, that there are bullets that must be swallowed when you agree to belong to a particular grouping.

Marshall-Andrews sits on one of the tiniest of electoral majorities and he cannot be surprised if the party managers feel that they would rather lose his seat (temporarily) at the next election, whenever it comes, so that he may be replaced by a candidate more congenial to the party that he claims to represent. I would feel a lot more sympathetic to Marshall-Andrews’ stance if he were less like an earlier member unanswerably skewered by Churchill as “a sophistical rhetorician inebriated by the exuberance of his own verbosity”, in other words a pompous windbag delighted by the sound of his own voice.

But I want to address here a different point. Most of us who reside – happily for us – beyond the narrow purview of the Westminster village have to study the daily doings of parliamentary politicians through the distorting glass of the media. Now nobody wants us to go back to the days when Leslie Mitchell, representing the BBC, could begin his 1951 pre-election interview with the shadow Foreign Secretary: “Well now, Mr Eden, with your very considerable experience of foreign affairs, it’s quite obvious that I should start by asking you something about the international situation today – or perhaps you would prefer to talk about home. Which is it to be?” (The entire interview had been rehearsed and Anthony Eden learned all his answers like an actor). Since at least the 1960s, when deference began its comprehensive retreat, the politicians and the reporters, commentators, leader-writers and pundits have struggled against each other, seeking to “set the agenda” for the political discussion of the moment.

The media puts great store by its assumed role as the people’s tribune but I cannot help believing that the agenda the media seeks to set – whether Newsnight and The Guardian on the one hand or The Daily Star and Planet Rock radio bulletins (if there are such things) on the other – is increasingly trivial, sensationalist and hence (if paradoxically) anti-political. Last week’s media coverage of the Liberal Democrat Party Conference was not just dominated by but positively overwhelmed by pointless, gratuitous speculation on whether Sir Menzies Campbell was going to survive as party leader. It didn’t matter how many times delegates at all levels of the party declared that it wasn’t an issue, the reporters and news scripters returned to it each day as if the airing it had received the previous day had never happened.

It is already proving to be a similar story this week at the Labour Conference where the only story in town, as far as the media is concerned, is whether the Prime Minister is going to call an early general election. Indeed, when Labour delegates reasonably reply, with increasing and understandable irritation, that they’re there to debate policy, the interviewers actually sneer (eg Martha Kearney on today’s World at One). Perhaps next week there will be a doubly narrow focus for the Tories to fend off – can David Cameron survive as party leader and does the party really want an early election? – or perhaps it will be the tired but still largely unresolved question of whether Cameron smoked/smokes dope.

Political sceptics will say that the politicians deserve it because of their use of “spin”. A little perspective needs to be applied to this argument. Tony Blair didn’t invent spin. Alastair Campbell didn’t invent spin. Politicians didn’t invent spin. The first human who spoke a coherent sentence invented spin: “I meant to bring a mammoth carcase home for dinner but the bloody thing got away”. (Translation: the hunter was too slow to catch it). Everybody uses spin on a daily basis. When Jonathan Dimbleby refers to “the Saturday edition” of Any Questions on Radio 4, what he really should call it is “the Saturday repeat” because it differs in no particular from the version that goes out live on Friday. That’s spin.

With the broadcast media’s reliance on sound-bites and the print media’s relegation of serious political analysis to page 94 (or the website), politicians are required not only to toe the party line but also to conform to what plays on telly and what is incapable of being misinterpreted when reproduced in print. Far from being control freaks, most of them are lucky if they get through a whole day without being pilloried and traduced. What’s worse, a growing proportion of us spends all the time between elections grousing about the government and then doesn’t even bother to use our democratic duty to cast a vote. As in so many of these matters of perception about the state of the world, the fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars (even our political stars) but in ourselves.

RUNNING SCARED

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

HAPPY GAYS ARE HERE AGAIN

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ANY OTHER NAME WOULD SMELL AS SWEET

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The CORNER STROP

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A DANGER to the PUBLIC

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

GOOD CAUSES

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

RAGBAG TIMES

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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