I confess that I'm mentally and emotionally having a bit of hard time at the moment. I'm trying hard to hold it together, to keep on working, but life has suddenly got very difficult. I simply can't get my mind around the Tory win.
Oh, you might scoff and I can't reasonably explain why I'm feeling so utterly dejected and why I'm finding it hard to find much purpose in life. The passion has gone from my work. Yet I'm not some rabid left winger who hates Tories for ideological reasons. I'm fairly apolitical but I do believe in certain things which are suddenly anathema to the new Tory government. It's like my belief system has been entirely invalidated by the nation. Everywhere I look, I feel like I have dead eyes looking back at me. Dead eyes that see through me. Dead eyes and dead minds which cannot comprehend why a man should feel this low.
If there's one thing that sums up this dejection I'm feeling, that one thing is the appointment of the new employment minister, Priti Patel.
Patel has constantly been on TV over the election campaign. She caught my eye because she was one of those polished performers that the Tories produce so well and Andrew Neil does so well in embarrassing. They have the fixed-distance stare of a trained killer, so certain are they that their policies are right. In a few performances on the Daily Politics, Patel revealed herself to be immensely dim and though I hesitate to call somebody stupid, frankly, yes, she was stupid. She is stupid in the very same way that Katie Hopkins is stupid. They are stupid because they both lack humility. They are incapable of understanding that their belief in their own intelligence limits their intelligence.
There can be no surprise that both of them come from the vacuous world of PR. They are similar in temperament, attitude, and fierceness when it comes to their own twisted morality. I keep finding myself reaching for the term 'Loose Women' but that's what strikes me about both. They have the mid-afternoon ITV rage of the small business owning woman who would sooner slice you open with a razor blade than they would look on you kindly. It's the sense that to compete in a male world, they've had to adopt male attitudes but take them to a new blazing level of cruelty. Oddly, it's an attitude that Thatcher never had. Thatcher's strength was more of an intellectual strength. Love her or hate her, Thatcher occasionally engaged her brain. It was intellect that taught her that to be powerful, you lowered your voice and spoke more slowly. Patel and Hopkins are not thinkers. They are dilettantes who have retained their femininity but you get the sense that when they come out fighting, they do so with fingernails raking the eyes and heels spiked into shins. Their politics are a shriek. They would sooner seek out the extreme than spend time thinking hard about an issue.
Patel is a strong conservative, by which I mean, on the Tebbit wing of the party. She believes in hanging, which says everything you need to know about a person. Think about that deeply and consider what kind of person believes in a practice that was already considered barbaric in the 1950s. Think about how dumb a person needs to be to fail to understand why civilized nations turned their backs on hanging. Think about the psychology of a nation that carries out hangings; about the people who would have to carry out state sanctioned killings. Think about fault lines in the legal system, where mistakes can happen. Think about the simple morality of hanging a person until they're dead.
No issue cuts so deeply to the heart of who we are as a people. No issue is quite so complicated or require such a broad range of expertise to fully understand in terms of the biology, the psychology, the ethics, jurisprudence, government, and even theology. To believe in it shows how little humility they have but, moreover, how little humanity.
That shouldn't surprise anybody who has done a little reading up on Patel. Before she became an MP, she helped tobacco companies communicate with the Tories and then she went to work for an alcohol company. In other words: she was the kind of mercenary gun-for-hire who cares nothing about the harm her work does but is happy to do it so long as it's well paying.
And now she's in charge of the benefits for people who are sick, disabled, low paid and vulnerable.
Just writing that line does nothing to alleviate my pain. I can feel myself slipping into a deeper despair.
Showing posts with label Andrew Neil. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Andrew Neil. Show all posts
Monday, 11 May 2015
Wednesday, 6 May 2015
The Spine Election Podcast - Episode 8
A last minute change of mind and I have 28 minutes to post this before it's officially polling day.
This one isn't about the election as much as I wanted to write and say something about the role of the media. Not sure it helps. Not sure anybody listens. Yet it helped me to clarify a few thoughts, have a moment of hissing at certain pundits, and filled a rainy afternoon. Enjoy or don't enjoy. I'm weary with the effort of giving a damn. When will I ever learn?
This one isn't about the election as much as I wanted to write and say something about the role of the media. Not sure it helps. Not sure anybody listens. Yet it helped me to clarify a few thoughts, have a moment of hissing at certain pundits, and filled a rainy afternoon. Enjoy or don't enjoy. I'm weary with the effort of giving a damn. When will I ever learn?
Tuesday, 5 May 2015
Friday, 24 April 2015
Coming down from the Spire
I always rub my boots on the back of my trouser legs before I walk into these places. In poker terms, it's what's known as 'a tell'. I also suppose it's a ridiculous thing to do. People don't really judge you by the shine of your toecaps but my toecaps have no shine and I always feel absolutely ashamed by them. I feel an overwhelming wish to explain and confess my life to these people when I arrive on their doorstep, as though I can somehow justify myself by my writing, my books, my cartoons, or my education. Yet none of that matters. No matter how many degrees you have, books published, or blog posts read, they only judge you by one criteria and, in my case, it's a criteria accurately summarised by the shabby state of my boots.
In the last few years, my boots have trod the carpets in too many hospital receptions. For reasons too complicated to go into, I've spent half a decade accompanying my sister to her various appointments. I could give you a long medical history but books the length of 'War and Peace' are no longer in vogue unless they're about spanking, dwarves, or both. The flash non-fiction version of the story is that my sister has some problem which the NHS are still struggling to identify. We occasionally see consultants privately but that route is a truly horrifying financial strain. So we bounce through the system.
This week, she's felt so ill that she became desperate and desperation usually means expense. She decided to have her blood tested done privately. Nine months ago, a consultant requested that certain tests be done and we had them done on the NHS. They're tricky tests, which require all manner of arcane magic that you normally only see done in vampire movies starring Wesley Snipes. So we had blood samples taken at the local GP's surgery and the local GP's surgery proceeded to lose the blood samples. We only discovered this after waiting six months for the results. Naturally, we had the tests repeated but, three months later, we've still not got the results and nobody has a record of what happened to the samples. Which is why we decided to have them done again but this time privately, meaning the results should be available within a week.
Yet all of that is mere backstory to explain why I was up at seven o'clock this morning and sitting in traffic-locked taxi cab in the heart of Warrington by eight. What I wanted to write about was the experience of 'going private' from the perspective of the guy sitting next to his sick sister who nobody is willing to help. I thought it would be fun to do that because the contrast is so enormous as to be faintly comical, whilst it also says so much about our country and our culture.
Yet this isn't going to be about medical procedures. I rarely go in 'the room'. This is just my perspective on the experience of somebody sitting waiting outside and drawing cartoons whilst trying not to feel too out of place whilst surrounded by people from a different plane of existence. And, believe me, their extra-planar credentials are never in question.
Take, for example, this morning and the woman sitting across from me. She was clearly 'in the money' and her buttocks obviously knew their way around a Caribbean Lilo. Even her shins were wrinkled from the sun. I've never seen wrinkled shins before. I never knew shins could wrinkle. And I mean wrinkle more than anything in this world could wrinkle with the exception, perhaps, of Keith Richard's scrotum. I was thinking of drawing her shins, Robert Crumb style, or at least including them in a future cartoon. They really need immortalising. That woman's shins are the sort of thing that, once witnessed, inform an artist's vision for the rest of his life.
She was with her husband who was of that upper-managerial type that dominates the landscape south of Warrington: red faced, elderly, and in his best weekend golf gear despite it only being a Friday. I've worked for the type. They dress for golf on a Friday but still turn up at the office to remind their employees that, whilst it is still only Friday, the boss is free to play golf.
As I noted all this, a replica of the gent walked in: same clothes, stance, attitude. This one looked like my favourite art critic, Brian Sewell, a scarf wrapped around his neck in a fashion that you rarely see men adopting since Oscar Wilde made it passé at the same time as he invented sodomy around the start of the last century. It's all typical stuff for Tory heartlands and by that I guess I mean the wrinkles, the scarves, and the sodomy. I later spent the thirty five minute ride home talking to the taxi driver about politics. We'd struck lucky and found the only taxi driver in the country who is as big an Andrew Neil fan and This Week as myself and he was happy to talk about the general election. He pointed out all the Tory signs (not even posters but proper on-a-stick-stuck-in-the-herbaceous-border signs) and explained how Warrington South is a marginal being fiercely contested by the sitting MP David Mowat. The Tories are clearly pouring their hedge fund cash into the area. The signs were like triffids peering out of every expensively trimmed garden hedge otherwise shielding the expensive houses from the road.
I suppose it's wrong to say that all these people all the same but there's much that's shared between the residents. They are no doubt good people but representatives of that Britain that is succeeding. They're the people doing well out of the economy and their money is sensibly being put to good use looking after themselves inside the private healthcare system. I don't dislike them. In many respects, they're people like myself: cultured, quiet, believers in politeness and some notion of right and wrong. The gulf between us is perhaps more about outcomes, opportunities and, of course, service.
For example, when I go to our local GP's surgery I usually deal with some nose-breathing servant of Sauron, who can barely restrain her utter distain for me as though I'm a wood elf from a Murkwood slum. In contrast, go privately and you get to meet The Most Beautiful Woman In The World and, if that sounds like an exaggeration, let me assure you that it's not. It happens too often for it not to be a universal truth about private healthcare. Private hospitals have a direct line to God. This morning, the Most Beautiful Woman In The World had an American accent, hipster glasses and a Monroe air. She should have been in movies. Scarlett Johansson has the face of a blistered dingo compared to her.
That is something I sometimes find as shocking as I find it profound. Reflect deeply on Fate and you see that there's so little that separates each of us except for a few twisted threads of DNA and a whole lot of circumstance. How often do you see Hollywood stars interviewed and asked 'what would you be doing if you'd not become a movie star?' 'Oh,' they'll smile, 'I'd be frying chicken in a mall and giving everybody listeria'. Audiences laugh yet behind the laughter is the realisation of a greater truth. It's the tragedy of that person who should be a movie star but is trapped working in reception somewhere. It can whither a man's soul if he contemplates it too long. It was like our taxi driver who was articulate, knowledgeable, and passionate about politics. He was perfectly suited to a life representing the people of Warrington but, instead, he is scraping a living driving around his home town whilst a chartered accountant born in Ruby serves as his local MP.
I suppose, at some point, the whole thing became an act of self-reflection and I began to feel so utterly sob-wrecking depressed as I sat there, staring at my shabby boots and contemplating the parts of this that I hadn't worked out until later. Life is about the fairy tales we're told and the fairy tales we believe, such as the one about 'hard work bringing just rewards'. I've always worked obsessively hard but I now see it as vile malicious bullshit whispered in our hamster ears so we'll keep running in the wheel. It all comes down to a toss of a coin, the turn of a county border, the direction that water once ran off an upland field and decided the course of a river through the heart of a county. Life might be there to direct as we will but it can only be steered so much. Sometimes there are greater forces limiting your options. Sometimes there are simply no options.
So, I as sat there, I listened to the hum of Sky News in the background, periodically broken by the beguiling accent of the TMBWITW in the hipster glasses which I tried hard to ignore because it would mean looking that way and burning my soul on something no mortal eyes should really see. And for a brief moment, I did wonder what life's like in that world or even if that world is real and not imagined.
Is it real if you pay people to be kind, considerate, and display such good manners that they ask if you'd like a cup of coffee whilst you wait? When asked by hipster movie star, I said 'no' because I really appreciated the gesture but I wouldn't put somebody to such trouble. Besides, I might have blurted out something crazy like the entirety of Byron's 'She Walks in Beauty'. Yet had fate been different, I might have been the type of person to click my fingers, wink and say 'Sure thing, gorgeous, because the world is my playground and I can afford the fees!'
But people like us can't afford the fees and therein lies the difference.
I didn't say 'yes'. I just remembered the details. I noticed the way the chairs seemed to have lost their plumpness and had been laid low by overuse by big behinds. They weren't as comfortable nor luxurious as those in Chester's Nuffield and nothing seemed as relaxing. The place was darker with too much noise and too many patients crowded next to the reception, so that those of us waiting could hear too much about other people's ailments. Thankfully, there was free wi-fi available without the need to go ask movie stars for passwords, so I searched the surprisingly responsive web for source images of ugly politicians and I doodled a picture. Then I watched a doctor arrive in his sports car and, in that moment, the whole experience was perfectly summed up.
Doctors in private healthcare don't look like NHS doctors. Doctors in the NHS look like the nerd you knew at school who went into medicine, started to earn a fortune, and likes to remind the world that they were bullied in school but now they hold the power.
Doctors in private healthcare look like the guys who used to deal out the beatings in school. I watched one arrive and he utterly fitted his fitted suits with their ridiculously Apollonian proportions. He also had a 'fuck yeah, life is good' swagger which matched his features, wide and flat like something peeled from a movie poster. He looked like cricketer Graham Hick, a less scarred version of Harrison Ford. Again, you could argue about fate dealing him a bad hand but it's hard to feel quite as despondent when that person is a high wizard of healthcare driving a pornstar sports car and with a complete Mastery of the Elements vibe. I didn't feel so bad that he won't be the next Indiana Jones. I didn't even look to see if the receptionist swooned as he walked past. That would have been too much to bear. Because private healthcare might be there to improve your health, but, deep down, none of this makes you feel good. You might have a good soul but you know what you look like naked and it's not a pretty. Your body goes out where his goes in and in where his goes out. You're at opposite ends of the colour chart. If you were colours by Dulux, you'd be 'Bjork alabaster'. He'd be 'Tom Jones circa 1974'. It's all so utterly demoralising.
It would be easy here to be bitter and surmise that he'd be bad at his job but you could tell the opposite. Watching his manner as he greeted his first patient, I saw the biggest difference of the day. The last NHS consultant my sister saw spoke to her for about five minutes, scribbled something on a sheet, and dismissed her with a cursory word. Six months wait for five minutes of indifference and I was left to deal with all the tears and the hurt. These guys come out and greet you with a warm handshake. They smile and ask you how you're doing.
Try to imagine that. Doctors who ask you how you're doing...
It's a sad measure of our country's decline when you don't expect such things. Sadder still when these things only happen when you pay for them.
In the last few years, my boots have trod the carpets in too many hospital receptions. For reasons too complicated to go into, I've spent half a decade accompanying my sister to her various appointments. I could give you a long medical history but books the length of 'War and Peace' are no longer in vogue unless they're about spanking, dwarves, or both. The flash non-fiction version of the story is that my sister has some problem which the NHS are still struggling to identify. We occasionally see consultants privately but that route is a truly horrifying financial strain. So we bounce through the system.
This week, she's felt so ill that she became desperate and desperation usually means expense. She decided to have her blood tested done privately. Nine months ago, a consultant requested that certain tests be done and we had them done on the NHS. They're tricky tests, which require all manner of arcane magic that you normally only see done in vampire movies starring Wesley Snipes. So we had blood samples taken at the local GP's surgery and the local GP's surgery proceeded to lose the blood samples. We only discovered this after waiting six months for the results. Naturally, we had the tests repeated but, three months later, we've still not got the results and nobody has a record of what happened to the samples. Which is why we decided to have them done again but this time privately, meaning the results should be available within a week.
Yet all of that is mere backstory to explain why I was up at seven o'clock this morning and sitting in traffic-locked taxi cab in the heart of Warrington by eight. What I wanted to write about was the experience of 'going private' from the perspective of the guy sitting next to his sick sister who nobody is willing to help. I thought it would be fun to do that because the contrast is so enormous as to be faintly comical, whilst it also says so much about our country and our culture.
Yet this isn't going to be about medical procedures. I rarely go in 'the room'. This is just my perspective on the experience of somebody sitting waiting outside and drawing cartoons whilst trying not to feel too out of place whilst surrounded by people from a different plane of existence. And, believe me, their extra-planar credentials are never in question.
Take, for example, this morning and the woman sitting across from me. She was clearly 'in the money' and her buttocks obviously knew their way around a Caribbean Lilo. Even her shins were wrinkled from the sun. I've never seen wrinkled shins before. I never knew shins could wrinkle. And I mean wrinkle more than anything in this world could wrinkle with the exception, perhaps, of Keith Richard's scrotum. I was thinking of drawing her shins, Robert Crumb style, or at least including them in a future cartoon. They really need immortalising. That woman's shins are the sort of thing that, once witnessed, inform an artist's vision for the rest of his life.
She was with her husband who was of that upper-managerial type that dominates the landscape south of Warrington: red faced, elderly, and in his best weekend golf gear despite it only being a Friday. I've worked for the type. They dress for golf on a Friday but still turn up at the office to remind their employees that, whilst it is still only Friday, the boss is free to play golf.
As I noted all this, a replica of the gent walked in: same clothes, stance, attitude. This one looked like my favourite art critic, Brian Sewell, a scarf wrapped around his neck in a fashion that you rarely see men adopting since Oscar Wilde made it passé at the same time as he invented sodomy around the start of the last century. It's all typical stuff for Tory heartlands and by that I guess I mean the wrinkles, the scarves, and the sodomy. I later spent the thirty five minute ride home talking to the taxi driver about politics. We'd struck lucky and found the only taxi driver in the country who is as big an Andrew Neil fan and This Week as myself and he was happy to talk about the general election. He pointed out all the Tory signs (not even posters but proper on-a-stick-stuck-in-the-herbaceous-border signs) and explained how Warrington South is a marginal being fiercely contested by the sitting MP David Mowat. The Tories are clearly pouring their hedge fund cash into the area. The signs were like triffids peering out of every expensively trimmed garden hedge otherwise shielding the expensive houses from the road.
I suppose it's wrong to say that all these people all the same but there's much that's shared between the residents. They are no doubt good people but representatives of that Britain that is succeeding. They're the people doing well out of the economy and their money is sensibly being put to good use looking after themselves inside the private healthcare system. I don't dislike them. In many respects, they're people like myself: cultured, quiet, believers in politeness and some notion of right and wrong. The gulf between us is perhaps more about outcomes, opportunities and, of course, service.
For example, when I go to our local GP's surgery I usually deal with some nose-breathing servant of Sauron, who can barely restrain her utter distain for me as though I'm a wood elf from a Murkwood slum. In contrast, go privately and you get to meet The Most Beautiful Woman In The World and, if that sounds like an exaggeration, let me assure you that it's not. It happens too often for it not to be a universal truth about private healthcare. Private hospitals have a direct line to God. This morning, the Most Beautiful Woman In The World had an American accent, hipster glasses and a Monroe air. She should have been in movies. Scarlett Johansson has the face of a blistered dingo compared to her.
That is something I sometimes find as shocking as I find it profound. Reflect deeply on Fate and you see that there's so little that separates each of us except for a few twisted threads of DNA and a whole lot of circumstance. How often do you see Hollywood stars interviewed and asked 'what would you be doing if you'd not become a movie star?' 'Oh,' they'll smile, 'I'd be frying chicken in a mall and giving everybody listeria'. Audiences laugh yet behind the laughter is the realisation of a greater truth. It's the tragedy of that person who should be a movie star but is trapped working in reception somewhere. It can whither a man's soul if he contemplates it too long. It was like our taxi driver who was articulate, knowledgeable, and passionate about politics. He was perfectly suited to a life representing the people of Warrington but, instead, he is scraping a living driving around his home town whilst a chartered accountant born in Ruby serves as his local MP.
I suppose, at some point, the whole thing became an act of self-reflection and I began to feel so utterly sob-wrecking depressed as I sat there, staring at my shabby boots and contemplating the parts of this that I hadn't worked out until later. Life is about the fairy tales we're told and the fairy tales we believe, such as the one about 'hard work bringing just rewards'. I've always worked obsessively hard but I now see it as vile malicious bullshit whispered in our hamster ears so we'll keep running in the wheel. It all comes down to a toss of a coin, the turn of a county border, the direction that water once ran off an upland field and decided the course of a river through the heart of a county. Life might be there to direct as we will but it can only be steered so much. Sometimes there are greater forces limiting your options. Sometimes there are simply no options.
So, I as sat there, I listened to the hum of Sky News in the background, periodically broken by the beguiling accent of the TMBWITW in the hipster glasses which I tried hard to ignore because it would mean looking that way and burning my soul on something no mortal eyes should really see. And for a brief moment, I did wonder what life's like in that world or even if that world is real and not imagined.
Is it real if you pay people to be kind, considerate, and display such good manners that they ask if you'd like a cup of coffee whilst you wait? When asked by hipster movie star, I said 'no' because I really appreciated the gesture but I wouldn't put somebody to such trouble. Besides, I might have blurted out something crazy like the entirety of Byron's 'She Walks in Beauty'. Yet had fate been different, I might have been the type of person to click my fingers, wink and say 'Sure thing, gorgeous, because the world is my playground and I can afford the fees!'
But people like us can't afford the fees and therein lies the difference.
I didn't say 'yes'. I just remembered the details. I noticed the way the chairs seemed to have lost their plumpness and had been laid low by overuse by big behinds. They weren't as comfortable nor luxurious as those in Chester's Nuffield and nothing seemed as relaxing. The place was darker with too much noise and too many patients crowded next to the reception, so that those of us waiting could hear too much about other people's ailments. Thankfully, there was free wi-fi available without the need to go ask movie stars for passwords, so I searched the surprisingly responsive web for source images of ugly politicians and I doodled a picture. Then I watched a doctor arrive in his sports car and, in that moment, the whole experience was perfectly summed up.
Doctors in private healthcare don't look like NHS doctors. Doctors in the NHS look like the nerd you knew at school who went into medicine, started to earn a fortune, and likes to remind the world that they were bullied in school but now they hold the power.
Doctors in private healthcare look like the guys who used to deal out the beatings in school. I watched one arrive and he utterly fitted his fitted suits with their ridiculously Apollonian proportions. He also had a 'fuck yeah, life is good' swagger which matched his features, wide and flat like something peeled from a movie poster. He looked like cricketer Graham Hick, a less scarred version of Harrison Ford. Again, you could argue about fate dealing him a bad hand but it's hard to feel quite as despondent when that person is a high wizard of healthcare driving a pornstar sports car and with a complete Mastery of the Elements vibe. I didn't feel so bad that he won't be the next Indiana Jones. I didn't even look to see if the receptionist swooned as he walked past. That would have been too much to bear. Because private healthcare might be there to improve your health, but, deep down, none of this makes you feel good. You might have a good soul but you know what you look like naked and it's not a pretty. Your body goes out where his goes in and in where his goes out. You're at opposite ends of the colour chart. If you were colours by Dulux, you'd be 'Bjork alabaster'. He'd be 'Tom Jones circa 1974'. It's all so utterly demoralising.
It would be easy here to be bitter and surmise that he'd be bad at his job but you could tell the opposite. Watching his manner as he greeted his first patient, I saw the biggest difference of the day. The last NHS consultant my sister saw spoke to her for about five minutes, scribbled something on a sheet, and dismissed her with a cursory word. Six months wait for five minutes of indifference and I was left to deal with all the tears and the hurt. These guys come out and greet you with a warm handshake. They smile and ask you how you're doing.
Try to imagine that. Doctors who ask you how you're doing...
It's a sad measure of our country's decline when you don't expect such things. Sadder still when these things only happen when you pay for them.
Tuesday, 14 April 2015
What Classless Society?
I've had a few emails in the past few days from people asking about my accent. At least two thought that I'm from Yorkshire.
I didn't think much about it until I read this morning an excellent interview with the actor Christopher Ecclestone who hails from Salford just down the East Lancs from here. He talks about class in the UK and I liked particular the way Ecclestone talked about himself. 'I was a skinny, awkward-looking bugger with an accent, as I still am,' he said, in words I've probably used a few times to describe myself. 'Bugger' is a word I find myself using quite a lot. It's distinctly part of the vocabulary of the North West of England.
Yet it's what Ecclestone went on to say that is more significant. 'British society has always been based on inequality, particularly culturally,' he explained. 'I’ve lived with it, but it’s much more pronounced now, and it would be difficult for someone like me to come through.'
I lingered on this paragraph because just the other day I was discussing with a friend if we really live in a so called 'classless' society. I have never been an advocate of 'Class War' and my politics have never been so far to the left that I'd ever consider myself 'left wing'. Yet I maintain that the past five years has seen class divisions grow even deeper. I'm even more aware of my own alienation from British culture where a privileged elite enjoy the arts and the rest of us scrape around looking for greater meaning amid the closed libraries and non-existent gallery space. I write a lot of essays, books and poems, draw my bad cartoons whilst pretending I'm not attempting to be 'arty', and I study culture through multiple sources. I have so many qualifications I've made myself largely unemployable. You could argue that I'm deeply cultured except I don't exist in that world where such things are cherished. I live in a deeply working class town where I'm very much the oddball, the outcast, and clearly unwanted. It's the rich BT engineers who rule the town. They have the money. They dictate our culture or lack thereof.
Yet I digress slightly. I've read a few times in the past twelve months of some London-based social critics proclaiming that we're now living in an age without class. I suppose to David Cameron, the UK does look classless. I imagine it looks amazingly homogenous if you surround yourself with friends from Eton. Yet that's not my perception of the UK. Nor, it would seem, is it the perception of one of our best actors.
It goes back to the problem of people not recognising my dialect. It would never have occurred to me that anybody would confuse the Lancashire and Yorkshire accents, any more than somebody would mistake a Newcastle accent for the accent of Cornwall or Birmingham. Yet perhaps the confusion is actually not that surprising given than the accents on the TV tend to be of a very narrow range. There are little bits of the Welsh accent, quite a lot of Scottish, occasional Geordie or Brummie, and once or twice you might hear a Scouse twang. Yet really the rest is just that same flat English of the estuaries or what Ecclestone calls the 'milky, anodyne culture'.
At a tangent slightly: on The Daily Politics a couple of mornings ago, Andrew Neil made passing reference to the Labour Party's manifesto launch taking place in Manchester. Neil suggested that Labour were only doing so to avoid scrutiny from the press. This led to a big family debate and I found myself on an unusual side of the argument.
Normally, I defend Neil to the hilt. There's no journalist I admire more. Yet on this small matter I thought he was wrong. My argument ran: 'Why shouldn't Labour launch their manifesto from Manchester? Labour are strong in the north and we're as much a part of the electorate as anybody in London'.
I was being naive, of course, and Neil was right. All the main political journalists are based in London and though they could travel easily to Manchester, there were possibly fewer of them up north to ask questions of the Labour leader. Yet if Andrew Neil was right in fact, he was wrong in spirit. And that's what I'm trying to argue here today.
I never think of myself as having much of an accent. I don't really think much about accent. I watch a lot of TV news. I enjoy debates and newspaper reviews. I enjoy the Neil triumvirate: the Daily Politics, the Sunday Politics, and This Week. I watch Question Time and the new show hosted by Tom Bradbury on ITV whose title escapes me. I watch the Daily Show and Bill Maher's weekly panel talk show. I don't consciously think accent. Yet when people think I'm from Yorkshire, it makes me realise how little my Lancashire accent is really heard on TV. When it is, it's usually the twisted perversion of an accent coming from the mouth of Johnny Vegas. (Incidentally: I really like Vegas but I hate how he represents our area. It feels like he plays the stereotype that confirms people's worst prejudices about a boorish uneducated North West.)
This might be a trivial point but I'm not entirely sure that it is. Individuals don't form opinions. Opinions are formed as if in a collective consciousness, as good points are repeated and carried forward by people engaged into the community debate. So, for example, I might watch the news and see Kevin McGuire on Sky News say something I agree with. I hear somebody repeat that on the Daily Politics and the idea hardens into a personal opinion that I might repeat. It enters into the public debate at multiple points and the arguments circulate around it, help develop and refine it, and then the whole mass of ideas moves on as new opinions are generated.
Yet what I notice is how many of the people engaged in that debate live in a closed intellectual biome. Even those like McGuire who speak with an accent do so from a somewhat privileged position. For example, you rarely hear from somebody from Eccles talking about their experiences living in Eccles. Newspaper reviews have the same London suburbanites speaking from a very limited worldview. The news agenda is incestuous; set by people whose outlook is formed by living a few miles around Westminster, or, more broadly, within driving distance to the main TV studios. It means that their perceptions of culture are different to the rest of the country. They view public transport differently to how people might view it if they live in a poor town in Yorkshire or in the Scottish borders. They are the people who think, for example, that to enjoy culture, those of us in the North can simply hop on a train and visit London. Logically, they might make sense but they lack the practical experience of trying to do that which would demonstrate why it's impossible. They wouldn't know, to further my example, that trains into London in the morning are prohibitively expensive, whilst trains to the North in the morning are astonishingly cheap. Trains out of London are prohibitively expensive late in the day, whilst trains into London late in the day are cheap. It makes it easy to travel out of London in the morning and home at night. It's nearly impossible to do it the other way around. People in London can explore the rest of the country cheaply but those of us in the north are economically restricted from accessing our capital city. You have to travel on a late afternoon train, travel home in the morning, paying for a hotel overnight. It's hardly a 'day out'.
This is just one example of many I could use. My point is: as I've noted before, it's remarkable and deeply depressing how politics and political debate is largely confined to people with London identities. I was no fan of either men but, unlike the 1980s, there are no figures like Derek Hatton or Arthur Scargill to provide a different view of reality. Why do none of our big cities such as Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds, and Newcastle have people who are recognisably part of the city like Boris Johnson represents London? Where are the social critics giving the point of view of the North West or Manchester or Warrington? There simply are none.
Classless society? I suppose it is if you completely ignore nine tenths of that society and act like the poor buggers don't exist.
I didn't think much about it until I read this morning an excellent interview with the actor Christopher Ecclestone who hails from Salford just down the East Lancs from here. He talks about class in the UK and I liked particular the way Ecclestone talked about himself. 'I was a skinny, awkward-looking bugger with an accent, as I still am,' he said, in words I've probably used a few times to describe myself. 'Bugger' is a word I find myself using quite a lot. It's distinctly part of the vocabulary of the North West of England.
Yet it's what Ecclestone went on to say that is more significant. 'British society has always been based on inequality, particularly culturally,' he explained. 'I’ve lived with it, but it’s much more pronounced now, and it would be difficult for someone like me to come through.'
I lingered on this paragraph because just the other day I was discussing with a friend if we really live in a so called 'classless' society. I have never been an advocate of 'Class War' and my politics have never been so far to the left that I'd ever consider myself 'left wing'. Yet I maintain that the past five years has seen class divisions grow even deeper. I'm even more aware of my own alienation from British culture where a privileged elite enjoy the arts and the rest of us scrape around looking for greater meaning amid the closed libraries and non-existent gallery space. I write a lot of essays, books and poems, draw my bad cartoons whilst pretending I'm not attempting to be 'arty', and I study culture through multiple sources. I have so many qualifications I've made myself largely unemployable. You could argue that I'm deeply cultured except I don't exist in that world where such things are cherished. I live in a deeply working class town where I'm very much the oddball, the outcast, and clearly unwanted. It's the rich BT engineers who rule the town. They have the money. They dictate our culture or lack thereof.
Yet I digress slightly. I've read a few times in the past twelve months of some London-based social critics proclaiming that we're now living in an age without class. I suppose to David Cameron, the UK does look classless. I imagine it looks amazingly homogenous if you surround yourself with friends from Eton. Yet that's not my perception of the UK. Nor, it would seem, is it the perception of one of our best actors.
It goes back to the problem of people not recognising my dialect. It would never have occurred to me that anybody would confuse the Lancashire and Yorkshire accents, any more than somebody would mistake a Newcastle accent for the accent of Cornwall or Birmingham. Yet perhaps the confusion is actually not that surprising given than the accents on the TV tend to be of a very narrow range. There are little bits of the Welsh accent, quite a lot of Scottish, occasional Geordie or Brummie, and once or twice you might hear a Scouse twang. Yet really the rest is just that same flat English of the estuaries or what Ecclestone calls the 'milky, anodyne culture'.
At a tangent slightly: on The Daily Politics a couple of mornings ago, Andrew Neil made passing reference to the Labour Party's manifesto launch taking place in Manchester. Neil suggested that Labour were only doing so to avoid scrutiny from the press. This led to a big family debate and I found myself on an unusual side of the argument.
Normally, I defend Neil to the hilt. There's no journalist I admire more. Yet on this small matter I thought he was wrong. My argument ran: 'Why shouldn't Labour launch their manifesto from Manchester? Labour are strong in the north and we're as much a part of the electorate as anybody in London'.
I was being naive, of course, and Neil was right. All the main political journalists are based in London and though they could travel easily to Manchester, there were possibly fewer of them up north to ask questions of the Labour leader. Yet if Andrew Neil was right in fact, he was wrong in spirit. And that's what I'm trying to argue here today.
I never think of myself as having much of an accent. I don't really think much about accent. I watch a lot of TV news. I enjoy debates and newspaper reviews. I enjoy the Neil triumvirate: the Daily Politics, the Sunday Politics, and This Week. I watch Question Time and the new show hosted by Tom Bradbury on ITV whose title escapes me. I watch the Daily Show and Bill Maher's weekly panel talk show. I don't consciously think accent. Yet when people think I'm from Yorkshire, it makes me realise how little my Lancashire accent is really heard on TV. When it is, it's usually the twisted perversion of an accent coming from the mouth of Johnny Vegas. (Incidentally: I really like Vegas but I hate how he represents our area. It feels like he plays the stereotype that confirms people's worst prejudices about a boorish uneducated North West.)
This might be a trivial point but I'm not entirely sure that it is. Individuals don't form opinions. Opinions are formed as if in a collective consciousness, as good points are repeated and carried forward by people engaged into the community debate. So, for example, I might watch the news and see Kevin McGuire on Sky News say something I agree with. I hear somebody repeat that on the Daily Politics and the idea hardens into a personal opinion that I might repeat. It enters into the public debate at multiple points and the arguments circulate around it, help develop and refine it, and then the whole mass of ideas moves on as new opinions are generated.
Yet what I notice is how many of the people engaged in that debate live in a closed intellectual biome. Even those like McGuire who speak with an accent do so from a somewhat privileged position. For example, you rarely hear from somebody from Eccles talking about their experiences living in Eccles. Newspaper reviews have the same London suburbanites speaking from a very limited worldview. The news agenda is incestuous; set by people whose outlook is formed by living a few miles around Westminster, or, more broadly, within driving distance to the main TV studios. It means that their perceptions of culture are different to the rest of the country. They view public transport differently to how people might view it if they live in a poor town in Yorkshire or in the Scottish borders. They are the people who think, for example, that to enjoy culture, those of us in the North can simply hop on a train and visit London. Logically, they might make sense but they lack the practical experience of trying to do that which would demonstrate why it's impossible. They wouldn't know, to further my example, that trains into London in the morning are prohibitively expensive, whilst trains to the North in the morning are astonishingly cheap. Trains out of London are prohibitively expensive late in the day, whilst trains into London late in the day are cheap. It makes it easy to travel out of London in the morning and home at night. It's nearly impossible to do it the other way around. People in London can explore the rest of the country cheaply but those of us in the north are economically restricted from accessing our capital city. You have to travel on a late afternoon train, travel home in the morning, paying for a hotel overnight. It's hardly a 'day out'.
This is just one example of many I could use. My point is: as I've noted before, it's remarkable and deeply depressing how politics and political debate is largely confined to people with London identities. I was no fan of either men but, unlike the 1980s, there are no figures like Derek Hatton or Arthur Scargill to provide a different view of reality. Why do none of our big cities such as Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds, and Newcastle have people who are recognisably part of the city like Boris Johnson represents London? Where are the social critics giving the point of view of the North West or Manchester or Warrington? There simply are none.
Classless society? I suppose it is if you completely ignore nine tenths of that society and act like the poor buggers don't exist.
Sunday, 12 April 2015
Wednesday, 8 April 2015
My Problems With Being Richard Madeley (Revisited)
I'm not a man much given to hero worship. I have people I admire and whose work has inspired me. I could rattle off a long list of people who I hold up so they catch the light and sit bathed in a slightly angelic glow. Does that make them my heroes? Perhaps it does, though I've never really seen myself as a person who has 'heroes'. When I see celebrity in the flesh, I've always been a person who tends to give a shrug my shoulders and walk on, even if they're people I like. I see them as just human beings and I'd never want to impose myself on them nor demean myself by being 'fan like' in my admiration. It was good to meet Steadman on that day when I'd travelled to London to see his exhibition not knowing he was going to be there. Yet I was so conflicted. I didn't want to stand in line to meet him because I don't do that kind of thing. Yet fate had placed him in the same room as me on the one day in about ten years that I was actually in London. How could I not meet him and make a bit of a fool of myself? So, it was good to meet him but I really didn't meet him. I was presented to him and, in that sense, I think I lost something that day.
The reason I'm talking about this is that I realised today that many of the people I most admire in life are journalists and, if you count cartoonists as journalists (and I think you should), then they're probably entirely journalists. It means that I have a raised awareness of journalists and I have a respect for their kind. To be a journalist is to be one of the good people in the world. It's to be among the ranks of people who give my life meaning. It means being among that gifted literati that includes P.J. O'Rourke, Andrew Neil, Ann Treneman, John Simpson, Jon Ronson, Mathew Parris, Tim Marshall, Bryan Appleyard, Henry Porter...
It means that it's always a bit of a shock when I realise that many journalists are not P.J. O'Rourke or Jon Ronson. Many journalists are complete clowns.
I'm taking about this because I got an email this morning from the BBC.
That, in itself, is not unusual. I occasionally get emails from the BBC but never from the BBC departments from whom I'd actually welcome emails. I never get emails that begin 'We read your article on X and wondered if you'd like to write something about Y'. The emails I always get begin the same way and always involve the words 'Richard Madeley'.
This morning's email came from one of the BBC's regional radio stations. I won't name them because I don't want to shame them. The email was bright and familiar. It asked me if I wanted to appear on one of a regional breakfast show talking about niche societies.
The 'journalist' had discovered 'The Richard Madeley Appreciation Society' and assumed that it was a society dedicated to the UK's Richard Madeley fans. They wanted me to talk about my devotion to Richard Madeley.
Now, if you're new to my blog and don't know who I am, I should explain. I once wrote a website called 'The Richard Madeley Appreciation Society'. I began it in a pique of self-hatred. I'd sold my first novel to a company which was bought by Harper Collins and part of the purchase involved the cancellation all their forthcoming books including my own. At this time, Richard and Judy were the nation's arbitrators of what constitutes literature. I, on the other hand, was a prolific writer, cancelled author who had countless degrees in English Lit and felt that the world was slowly going insane. So I spoofed Richard Madeley, thinking I'd be spoofing celebrity and publishing.
The only joke I had initially was that the real 'Richard Madeley' had launched a blog and given it the humble title of 'Appreciation Society'. This was in the days before Twitter and before celebrity spoofs were as rampant as they are now. I was one of the first people, I guess, to create a fake Twitter account and I tweeted as @richardmadeley for a long time. I gave up once the real Richard Madeley took to Twitter and the game lost its spark. I stopped updating the blog for a variety of reasons, primarily because it was my most popular blog and also because I'd moved on to other projects.
Primarily, I felt a great sense of failure that everything I did as 'Richard Madeley' was hailed as funny and hilarious. Everything I did as myself was passed over. It taught me a hard lesson about celebrity and how the context of celebrity fools us all into attributing quality to work.
The great literary critic I.A. Richards famously used to make his students read poetry from which the author's name had been removed. It was a simple trick yet groundbreaking and became a new form of literary criticism (so called Practical Criticism), which attempted to judge the words on the page instead of the preconceived notions of quality that are passed on via the name of a famously lauded author.
The argument is simple. You see the name Coleridge or Shelley at the top of a sonnet and you read it with a certain detached admiration. If you don't like it, you think it's a problem with your thought processes. You don't ever consider that it might simply be a bad poem. Strip away the name of the author and, hopefully, you judge it as a poem.
'The Richard Madeley Appreciation Society' is probably a bad poem with a 'great' name attached. If my writing or cartooning or humour meant anything, it wouldn't be here on a barely read blog. It would be between the covers of books in bookshops, the pages of newspapers and magazines. All I know is that this morning's email makes me revisit all these long forgotten thought processes. I get annoyed and so depressed that of all the things that I've done in my life, my only success comes because of a man who really did nothing on TV other than talk to other celebrities.
It's why I've been so perverse in my approach to my work, believing that the quality of the work should be judged and not the name of the author. It's why I stupidly wrote 'Second Class Male' under a pseudonym, thinking I was following in the footsteps of the great Henry Root. I never put my name first when perhaps I should. Perhaps names are more important than I've ever realised. Perhaps I should have mine at the top of the blog. At least it gives people an identity on which to hang all judgments good or bad.
The reason I'm talking about this is that I realised today that many of the people I most admire in life are journalists and, if you count cartoonists as journalists (and I think you should), then they're probably entirely journalists. It means that I have a raised awareness of journalists and I have a respect for their kind. To be a journalist is to be one of the good people in the world. It's to be among the ranks of people who give my life meaning. It means being among that gifted literati that includes P.J. O'Rourke, Andrew Neil, Ann Treneman, John Simpson, Jon Ronson, Mathew Parris, Tim Marshall, Bryan Appleyard, Henry Porter...
It means that it's always a bit of a shock when I realise that many journalists are not P.J. O'Rourke or Jon Ronson. Many journalists are complete clowns.
I'm taking about this because I got an email this morning from the BBC.
That, in itself, is not unusual. I occasionally get emails from the BBC but never from the BBC departments from whom I'd actually welcome emails. I never get emails that begin 'We read your article on X and wondered if you'd like to write something about Y'. The emails I always get begin the same way and always involve the words 'Richard Madeley'.
This morning's email came from one of the BBC's regional radio stations. I won't name them because I don't want to shame them. The email was bright and familiar. It asked me if I wanted to appear on one of a regional breakfast show talking about niche societies.
The 'journalist' had discovered 'The Richard Madeley Appreciation Society' and assumed that it was a society dedicated to the UK's Richard Madeley fans. They wanted me to talk about my devotion to Richard Madeley.
Now, if you're new to my blog and don't know who I am, I should explain. I once wrote a website called 'The Richard Madeley Appreciation Society'. I began it in a pique of self-hatred. I'd sold my first novel to a company which was bought by Harper Collins and part of the purchase involved the cancellation all their forthcoming books including my own. At this time, Richard and Judy were the nation's arbitrators of what constitutes literature. I, on the other hand, was a prolific writer, cancelled author who had countless degrees in English Lit and felt that the world was slowly going insane. So I spoofed Richard Madeley, thinking I'd be spoofing celebrity and publishing.
The only joke I had initially was that the real 'Richard Madeley' had launched a blog and given it the humble title of 'Appreciation Society'. This was in the days before Twitter and before celebrity spoofs were as rampant as they are now. I was one of the first people, I guess, to create a fake Twitter account and I tweeted as @richardmadeley for a long time. I gave up once the real Richard Madeley took to Twitter and the game lost its spark. I stopped updating the blog for a variety of reasons, primarily because it was my most popular blog and also because I'd moved on to other projects.
Primarily, I felt a great sense of failure that everything I did as 'Richard Madeley' was hailed as funny and hilarious. Everything I did as myself was passed over. It taught me a hard lesson about celebrity and how the context of celebrity fools us all into attributing quality to work.
The great literary critic I.A. Richards famously used to make his students read poetry from which the author's name had been removed. It was a simple trick yet groundbreaking and became a new form of literary criticism (so called Practical Criticism), which attempted to judge the words on the page instead of the preconceived notions of quality that are passed on via the name of a famously lauded author.
The argument is simple. You see the name Coleridge or Shelley at the top of a sonnet and you read it with a certain detached admiration. If you don't like it, you think it's a problem with your thought processes. You don't ever consider that it might simply be a bad poem. Strip away the name of the author and, hopefully, you judge it as a poem.
'The Richard Madeley Appreciation Society' is probably a bad poem with a 'great' name attached. If my writing or cartooning or humour meant anything, it wouldn't be here on a barely read blog. It would be between the covers of books in bookshops, the pages of newspapers and magazines. All I know is that this morning's email makes me revisit all these long forgotten thought processes. I get annoyed and so depressed that of all the things that I've done in my life, my only success comes because of a man who really did nothing on TV other than talk to other celebrities.
It's why I've been so perverse in my approach to my work, believing that the quality of the work should be judged and not the name of the author. It's why I stupidly wrote 'Second Class Male' under a pseudonym, thinking I was following in the footsteps of the great Henry Root. I never put my name first when perhaps I should. Perhaps names are more important than I've ever realised. Perhaps I should have mine at the top of the blog. At least it gives people an identity on which to hang all judgments good or bad.
Sunday, 5 April 2015
The Spine Election Podcast - Episode 4
Rushed. No time to edit this better, perfect my vocals or do any of the hundred other things I was intending on doing. So, it was either publish it as it is, or waste everything I'd done so far. Anyway, for what it's worth: enjoy.
Wednesday, 1 April 2015
Friday, 20 March 2015
The Asymmetry of Hugh Edwards
It was good to watch last night's 'This Week' since I'd been mildly annoyed at the BBC on Wednesday. Their Budget coverage was in all respects a typical 'Daily Politics' except they'd dropped Andrew Neil in favour of Hugh Edwards and I never really understand the point of Hugh Edwards.
Somebody inside the BBC clearly believes that Hugh is the new David, the old David (or previous Hugh) being David Dimbleby. It's not that I hold any particular grudge against Hugh but he doesn't have that devilish edge which elevates him above the mere average. His chief quality is an asymmetry which he does well but I've never really cared (literally) one way or the other about asymmetry. Nor have I ever been much of a fan of an Elvis lip. Hugh definitely has an Elvis lip, which he usually combines with his asymmetry to produce the Hugh Edwards effect, which makes women swoon and men wish they could swoon.
Perhaps the BBC think Andrew Neil lacks the glamour to front a national event and they replaced him with Hugh in order to satisfy their occasional viewers. News compulsives would be watching irrespective of the host but Hugh Edwards would calm the minds of those who occasionally dip their toes into politics, perhaps to see if a few pence would be knocked off the price of beer. An asymmetrical Elvis lip will always calm that kind of fear.
Hugh is also a safe pair of hands. His hands, I suspect, are as unlike Jeremy Clarkson's hands as you could possibly go without adding extra digits. I also think the BBC like Hugh because he's Welsh. I know that doesn't sound like a reason to hire a man but I suspect the BBC find ways to fulfil their regional quota without going the full dialect. Hugh is a bit Welsh but the kind of Welsh that doesn't have hair on his knuckles or become too impassioned if you speak English west of the Wrexham. The Welsh are a proud and sometimes fierce nation. I don't live all that far from the Welsh border and I know that their language dominates our public transport as far as Manchester (or 'Manceinion' as our local trains announce it) and beyond. Perhaps it's that proud sense of nationhood that the BBC fear. Hugh is Welsh enough to count without disturbing the marmalade brigade in Hertfordshire.
But, I digress. 'This Week' wasn't as feisty as last week's episode but probably a more solid show. The standout performances were by Nihal Arthanayake from the BBC Asian Network and the always wonderful Anne McElvoy. Abbot and Portillo were good but they're always good. I'm never quite sure where Portillo would sit on the Conservative spectrum but I more often than not find myself agreeing with him. Perhaps that's why he's no longer an MP. He's not ideological enough and has broadened his mind to the pleasures of common sense.
As is also usual with 'This Week', I usually zone out during the final ten minutes, which was this week dominated by another comedian with nothing particularly interesting to say and even less to say that was funny. I suspect it's just me but I've had other 'This Week' fans assure me that it's not. They need to think of a new format for the last ten minutes. I might have to give it some thought and summarise it in a letter... Perhaps Andrew Neil should consider more asymmetry and getting himself one of those Elvis lips.
Somebody inside the BBC clearly believes that Hugh is the new David, the old David (or previous Hugh) being David Dimbleby. It's not that I hold any particular grudge against Hugh but he doesn't have that devilish edge which elevates him above the mere average. His chief quality is an asymmetry which he does well but I've never really cared (literally) one way or the other about asymmetry. Nor have I ever been much of a fan of an Elvis lip. Hugh definitely has an Elvis lip, which he usually combines with his asymmetry to produce the Hugh Edwards effect, which makes women swoon and men wish they could swoon.
Perhaps the BBC think Andrew Neil lacks the glamour to front a national event and they replaced him with Hugh in order to satisfy their occasional viewers. News compulsives would be watching irrespective of the host but Hugh Edwards would calm the minds of those who occasionally dip their toes into politics, perhaps to see if a few pence would be knocked off the price of beer. An asymmetrical Elvis lip will always calm that kind of fear.
Hugh is also a safe pair of hands. His hands, I suspect, are as unlike Jeremy Clarkson's hands as you could possibly go without adding extra digits. I also think the BBC like Hugh because he's Welsh. I know that doesn't sound like a reason to hire a man but I suspect the BBC find ways to fulfil their regional quota without going the full dialect. Hugh is a bit Welsh but the kind of Welsh that doesn't have hair on his knuckles or become too impassioned if you speak English west of the Wrexham. The Welsh are a proud and sometimes fierce nation. I don't live all that far from the Welsh border and I know that their language dominates our public transport as far as Manchester (or 'Manceinion' as our local trains announce it) and beyond. Perhaps it's that proud sense of nationhood that the BBC fear. Hugh is Welsh enough to count without disturbing the marmalade brigade in Hertfordshire.
But, I digress. 'This Week' wasn't as feisty as last week's episode but probably a more solid show. The standout performances were by Nihal Arthanayake from the BBC Asian Network and the always wonderful Anne McElvoy. Abbot and Portillo were good but they're always good. I'm never quite sure where Portillo would sit on the Conservative spectrum but I more often than not find myself agreeing with him. Perhaps that's why he's no longer an MP. He's not ideological enough and has broadened his mind to the pleasures of common sense.
As is also usual with 'This Week', I usually zone out during the final ten minutes, which was this week dominated by another comedian with nothing particularly interesting to say and even less to say that was funny. I suspect it's just me but I've had other 'This Week' fans assure me that it's not. They need to think of a new format for the last ten minutes. I might have to give it some thought and summarise it in a letter... Perhaps Andrew Neil should consider more asymmetry and getting himself one of those Elvis lips.
Friday, 13 March 2015
Review: This Week (12/03/2015)
This Week* remains, for me, the best show on TV. The current brouhaha about Clarkson would pale compared to my reaction should Andrew Neil ever receive the BBC poleaxe. The virtue of the show is that it's rarely about policy. The various issues of political debate are rarely highlighted as much as the debate itself. The show is really about the meat and bones of Westminster: the personalities, the strategic calculations, and the great machinations of state.
The show is at its best, as it was last night, when the nasty underbelly of politics is exposed and tickled. This week, that nastiness arrived in the form of Michael Gove's wife, Sarah Vine, who also happens to be a Daily Mail columnist with a particularly vile line in acid. Both Michael Portillo and Alan Johnson attacked her strongly for the astonishingly vicious piece she recently wrote about Ed Miliband's wife. If anything, their visible anger didn't go far enough but what we had was a riveting exchange and a highlight of my week.
If This Week has a failing, however, it's always the final segment when they try to broaden the appeal of the show by inviting somebody from outside the political sphere to contribute to the debate. It's often some uber hip member of a reality TV show or the saxophonist from a 1970s supergroup who has since moved into organic truffles. Last night it was an astonishingly irritating nineteen year old who swaggered into the studio with an attitude that wouldn't be out of place in a prime ministerial address to the nation. It wasn't just the nascent sideburns struggling to stretch from his ears to somewhere beneath his puppy fat chin. Nor was it the black cravat he was wearing. It was the sheer banality of his views that made me sit up and wonder how the hell Tyger Drew Honey has come to the producer's attention. He proceeded to give the 'yoof' view of social issues and offered such a bland summary of life's problems that it would only endorse a view that people under twenty one don't really know enough about anything to have an 'opinion'. Yet, good guys to the last, both Portillo and Johnson patronised him with their favourable words. He was 'opening their eyes' to issues but, really, had they not been aware of those issues, then you'd question their place on the sofa.
'Tyger' came out with, frankly, feeble nonsense such as 'I know a lot of adults think that kids have the intelligence not to do these things, but I think that's ridiculous because put yourself in the position when you were a teenager, when you knew something was wrong, you'd still try to get away with it'. That wasn't true when I was a teenager and it's no longer true now. Yet, I guess, I can't speak for everybody. He then proceeded with this gem. 'I think we need to think about educating moreso the adults in the above generations as to what precautions you can put in place to actually stop my generation from being able to do certain things, on the internet especially'.
In other words, parents should keep any eye on what their children are doing and watching. Astonishing. Quite the novel idea. Not sure where I've heard it before...
It is only with hindsight that his words become particularly ironic and are the reason I'm writing this now. Wondering who the hell I was watching, I went onto the internet to research 'Tyger Drew Honey' and to understand why the producers of This Week thought his views should matter. I didn't have to look far. Thankfully, Wikipedia has all the answers. It all begins here:
Drew-Honey was born in Epsom, Surrey, the son of pornographic actor and director Simon James Honey and adult actress Linzi Drew.
Following the father's link, takes you to:
Simon James Honey (born 23 May 1956 in Sittingbourne, Kent), better known as Ben Dover, is an English pornographic actor, director and producer
Follow the mother's link, you discover she was:
'a Page 3 girl, stripper, glamour model and porn actress and was at one time the editor of the British edition of Penthouse magazine'.
She was also, incidentally, on the cover of Roger Water's excellent album, 'The Pros and Cons of Hitch Hiking', a cover designed by Gerald Scarfe.
I know the sins of the father aren't those of the son but I find it telling that in the supposedly egalitarian society of modern Britain, it's the son of the man who made 'Ben Dover's British Anal Invasion' (1997) and 'Ben Dover's Soccer Sluts' (2003) who is sitting on TW's sofa telling us that it's the older generation who should be our moral watchdogs. By the looks of things, it's his elders who have largely contributed to the moral degradation of our society, earning a small fortune in the process and funding his education at Epsom College (Patron H.M. The Queen) where fees range from £7,335 to £10,730 a term, a privileged start to life which has now helped launch him into a career in TV punditry.
You couldn't make this stuff up and, as great a show as it is, it makes me wonder what kind of researchers are working on This Week. Andrew Neil, Michael Portillo, and Alan Johnson deserves better because, last night, knowing what I now know, their responses looked mildly ludicrous to a Tyger who did not burn particularly bright.
* That's right. The title of the show is 'This Week'. Anybody who'd call it 'The Week in Politics' clearly doesn't know what they're talking about. However, it's an easy mistake to make. There are so many of them: The Daily Politics, The Sunday Politics, Strictly Come Politics With Andrew Neil. It's easy to get confused...
Thursday, 5 February 2015
The Tim Marshall Letter
Apropos of almost nothing: is there a more annoying song than 'Things Can Only Get Better' by D:Ream feat Professor Brian Cox? I didn't actually know Cox was in the band until he was talking about it in The Independent this morning. I'd forgot how annoying that song is, though not musically. I mean the lyric: 'things can only get better'. It's a terrible song for a political party to adopt as its anthem. It's like saying, 'we can't do much worse than the last lot', though, obviously, there's always room for things to get worse. I would have thought a professor of astrophysics would have realised. Unless we're talking about the complete heat death of the universe, there's always a 'worse' direction for entropy to go.
Right. Glad I got that off my chest. I was slightly reluctant to blog today simply because I didn't want to push my previous post down the page. I rarely look at anything I've done and think it particularly good. I don't believe a person can ever gets real satisfaction from their own work until enough time has passed for them to forget the process by which they arrived at the finished article. You write what you know about and therefore nothing you read back to yourself can be much of surprise. Yet having said that, my previous blog post is one of my favourites. I think I dug deep enough to find some genuine blood and spit.
It's been a week and I've still not heard back from James Harding, aka 'Harding the Hack', aka the honcho in the chief's poncho down at BBC News. It's a nervous wait though I can't separate that mild nervousness from a deeper dread since I'm waiting to go to the hospital where my sister has an appointment to see a consultant. I expect nothing from the appointment other than a sense of frustration. However, deep breath and hope for the best.
In the meantime, I might as well post my original James Harding letter here so as to keep my records in order. The story so far: Tim Marshall announced that he'd left Sky News and I was determined to do something about it so I dusted off my Stan Madeley mask and once again became my alter ego as the UK's top Richard Madeley lookalike and cabaret chisel thrower to the stars.
Right. Glad I got that off my chest. I was slightly reluctant to blog today simply because I didn't want to push my previous post down the page. I rarely look at anything I've done and think it particularly good. I don't believe a person can ever gets real satisfaction from their own work until enough time has passed for them to forget the process by which they arrived at the finished article. You write what you know about and therefore nothing you read back to yourself can be much of surprise. Yet having said that, my previous blog post is one of my favourites. I think I dug deep enough to find some genuine blood and spit.
It's been a week and I've still not heard back from James Harding, aka 'Harding the Hack', aka the honcho in the chief's poncho down at BBC News. It's a nervous wait though I can't separate that mild nervousness from a deeper dread since I'm waiting to go to the hospital where my sister has an appointment to see a consultant. I expect nothing from the appointment other than a sense of frustration. However, deep breath and hope for the best.
In the meantime, I might as well post my original James Harding letter here so as to keep my records in order. The story so far: Tim Marshall announced that he'd left Sky News and I was determined to do something about it so I dusted off my Stan Madeley mask and once again became my alter ego as the UK's top Richard Madeley lookalike and cabaret chisel thrower to the stars.
Wednesday, 28 January 2015
Goodbye Tim Marshall, The Last Good Reason To Watch Sky News
It's 6.50pm. I've only just finished wailing at what I've just read on Twitter.
Tim Marshall has left Sky News.
I only have ten minutes to write this before I go out so forgive the typing... This is top of the head stuff.
This might sound hyperbolic (or just utter bollocks) but Tim Marshall was the last good reason to watch Sky News. He was one of the older crew who were around in the days when Sky News was a serious news operation. He never looked at home in the new rolling reality of their current 15 minute repeat and rinse coverage that never penetrates into the thicker fabric of the news. I regretted the day that Sky News started to boast about 'the headlines every fifteen minutes'. I never understood why they thought it was somehow commendable that they believed we might forget the news agenda every quarter of an hour. In reality, it meant that they never had time to get their fingernails dirty. They cheapened their output by repeating the same script every 900 seconds. It largely became unwatchable.
Marshall always stood apart from that reductive approach to the news. He would always explain things in interesting ways. He'd educate me like I've not been educated since I stopped sitting on my PhD supervisor's sofa at university and drinking his horrendous Turkish coffee. Tim Marshall explained why things weren't black or white. He understood the world's grey zones; where politics merged with tribal customs and the 'truth' wasn't easily summed up in a neat headline. Sky News can still hold its own but only during specially selected events when some chief in the News International hierarchy gives the go-ahead to pump resources into coverage. When bad things happen, Sky News are great. Between those times, the coverage is thin, vapid, lacking substance. In other words: lacking everything that Tim Marshall brought to their glassy table.
I'd noticed he'd gone missing months ago. I think I'd secretly hoped the BBC has hired him. He is the closest thing I've ever seen to John Simpson and, in my book, there's no greater praise. He always was Simpson's heir. I'm not sure what had happened. Marshall's role had been taken by lesser journalists who lack his key quality. That quality was hesitation and pause. It was the way he'd suck on his teeth and would reply 'well, not really' when asked what sounded like a simple question. Lesser journalists tend to say 'Yes, that's absolutely right, Kay' and repeat some easy to memorise formula. Tim Marshall would often wince when asked something straightforward. 'They're not of that tribe,' he'd reply or proffer a 'that's not strictly true' before launching into an enlightening run down of regional allegiances.
I watch very little Sky News these days. My loyalty has shifted to the BBC who have commendably discovered the more relaxed style that Sky News had made their own in the days of the great Bob Friend. It's now Sky News who have become the 'professional' news channel, with everything cut to fit seamlessly between the ads. There's no hair out of place, no autocue missed. Yet it's precisely that spontaneous quality which the true news obsessive tends to cherish. It's what I miss the most.
I hold onto a distant hope that Tim Marshall will reappear on our screens. I know he'd find a natural home at the BBC and I hope (probably without much hope) that he'll eventually turn up on News 24. The fact that the BBC has become a natural home to Andrew Neil is proof that they cherish character, intelligence, and (a broad phrase but I'll use it) a kind of humanism that is so much better that the so-called professionalism you see everywhere else on TV as well as in life.
And that, I guess, is what I want from TV news. I'd like a channel that's the living embodiment of myself. It would be like this blog: random, full of humour (I hope), occasional (forgivable) rants, and a general willingness to understand a confusing and complicated world without falling into the trap of dogma or ideology.
To put it another way: my favourite night of the week is the night when I watch 'This Week with Andrew Neil' and follow it up with Bill Maher's 'Real Time' which I'll have found online. There's no show on British TV remotely like 'Real Time', though 'This Week' comes the closest. It's edgy, sometimes shocking, abrasive, argumentative, enlightening, unstructured, and compelling viewing. It's filled with intelligent people disagreeing and arguing and it's everything that intelligent TV should be. In an ideal world, that would be the stuff of my ideal news channel. It would the window onto a real newsroom, filled with non-photogenic journalists eating fast food whilst hammering out stories. It wouldn't break for ads to sell us TV channels we don't want. News wouldn't be an 'add on' to the sports and movie channels. It would be the pride of its network. It would take pride in being the best. It would stay with an interview for as long as the expert would be willing to keep talking. It would simplify but only in order to build on that explanation to further our knowledge. It wouldn't patronise us by repeating the same thing every fifteen minutes. It would assume we can wait for the top of the hour when it would present the updated headlines before continuing its debate with the audience. It would be pretty much like BBC News 24 is now but with some added Andrew Neil, plenty of Lyse Doucet, and a good deal of Tim Marshall.
I can't believe Tim Marshall has left Sky News and there's still only seven hits on my new website. I'm going to as poor as a computer programmer as I'm penniless as a writer and cartoonist. What an utterly crap day.
[Update 19/2/2015: We have to be grateful for small mercies. Tim Marshall has launched his own website. It's pretty good.]
Tim Marshall has left Sky News.
I only have ten minutes to write this before I go out so forgive the typing... This is top of the head stuff.
This might sound hyperbolic (or just utter bollocks) but Tim Marshall was the last good reason to watch Sky News. He was one of the older crew who were around in the days when Sky News was a serious news operation. He never looked at home in the new rolling reality of their current 15 minute repeat and rinse coverage that never penetrates into the thicker fabric of the news. I regretted the day that Sky News started to boast about 'the headlines every fifteen minutes'. I never understood why they thought it was somehow commendable that they believed we might forget the news agenda every quarter of an hour. In reality, it meant that they never had time to get their fingernails dirty. They cheapened their output by repeating the same script every 900 seconds. It largely became unwatchable.
Marshall always stood apart from that reductive approach to the news. He would always explain things in interesting ways. He'd educate me like I've not been educated since I stopped sitting on my PhD supervisor's sofa at university and drinking his horrendous Turkish coffee. Tim Marshall explained why things weren't black or white. He understood the world's grey zones; where politics merged with tribal customs and the 'truth' wasn't easily summed up in a neat headline. Sky News can still hold its own but only during specially selected events when some chief in the News International hierarchy gives the go-ahead to pump resources into coverage. When bad things happen, Sky News are great. Between those times, the coverage is thin, vapid, lacking substance. In other words: lacking everything that Tim Marshall brought to their glassy table.
I'd noticed he'd gone missing months ago. I think I'd secretly hoped the BBC has hired him. He is the closest thing I've ever seen to John Simpson and, in my book, there's no greater praise. He always was Simpson's heir. I'm not sure what had happened. Marshall's role had been taken by lesser journalists who lack his key quality. That quality was hesitation and pause. It was the way he'd suck on his teeth and would reply 'well, not really' when asked what sounded like a simple question. Lesser journalists tend to say 'Yes, that's absolutely right, Kay' and repeat some easy to memorise formula. Tim Marshall would often wince when asked something straightforward. 'They're not of that tribe,' he'd reply or proffer a 'that's not strictly true' before launching into an enlightening run down of regional allegiances.
I watch very little Sky News these days. My loyalty has shifted to the BBC who have commendably discovered the more relaxed style that Sky News had made their own in the days of the great Bob Friend. It's now Sky News who have become the 'professional' news channel, with everything cut to fit seamlessly between the ads. There's no hair out of place, no autocue missed. Yet it's precisely that spontaneous quality which the true news obsessive tends to cherish. It's what I miss the most.
I hold onto a distant hope that Tim Marshall will reappear on our screens. I know he'd find a natural home at the BBC and I hope (probably without much hope) that he'll eventually turn up on News 24. The fact that the BBC has become a natural home to Andrew Neil is proof that they cherish character, intelligence, and (a broad phrase but I'll use it) a kind of humanism that is so much better that the so-called professionalism you see everywhere else on TV as well as in life.
And that, I guess, is what I want from TV news. I'd like a channel that's the living embodiment of myself. It would be like this blog: random, full of humour (I hope), occasional (forgivable) rants, and a general willingness to understand a confusing and complicated world without falling into the trap of dogma or ideology.
To put it another way: my favourite night of the week is the night when I watch 'This Week with Andrew Neil' and follow it up with Bill Maher's 'Real Time' which I'll have found online. There's no show on British TV remotely like 'Real Time', though 'This Week' comes the closest. It's edgy, sometimes shocking, abrasive, argumentative, enlightening, unstructured, and compelling viewing. It's filled with intelligent people disagreeing and arguing and it's everything that intelligent TV should be. In an ideal world, that would be the stuff of my ideal news channel. It would the window onto a real newsroom, filled with non-photogenic journalists eating fast food whilst hammering out stories. It wouldn't break for ads to sell us TV channels we don't want. News wouldn't be an 'add on' to the sports and movie channels. It would be the pride of its network. It would take pride in being the best. It would stay with an interview for as long as the expert would be willing to keep talking. It would simplify but only in order to build on that explanation to further our knowledge. It wouldn't patronise us by repeating the same thing every fifteen minutes. It would assume we can wait for the top of the hour when it would present the updated headlines before continuing its debate with the audience. It would be pretty much like BBC News 24 is now but with some added Andrew Neil, plenty of Lyse Doucet, and a good deal of Tim Marshall.
I can't believe Tim Marshall has left Sky News and there's still only seven hits on my new website. I'm going to as poor as a computer programmer as I'm penniless as a writer and cartoonist. What an utterly crap day.
[Update 19/2/2015: We have to be grateful for small mercies. Tim Marshall has launched his own website. It's pretty good.]
Friday, 12 December 2014
A Few Thoughts on Brand, Farage & Question Time
About the only thing I managed to do yesterday was catch Question Time on the BBC iPlayer. It wasn't bad, though fairly predictable. Brand clearly hadn't read my open letter to him and, as a consequence, he dropped back down in my estimation simply because he couldn't stop using 'mate' and 'love' when addressing people. He should ditch the celebrity persona of the Cockney charmer if he wants to be taken seriously. That much said, he climbed back up in my estimation once a fellow panellist patronisingly told him off for talking over a female MP. She said, and I have to paraphrase, 'this is what people hate about politics in this country: when a male voice shouts down a woman'. Hmm... Wasn't quite the same half an hour later when Douglas Murray couldn't make his point heard on This Week With Andrew Neil without being shouted down by Diane Abbott. Whatever Douglas Murray's point was, I think it was possibly intelligent, articulate and interesting. I'd looked up to listen to what he was saying because it seemed nuanced. However, he barely had chance to speak. Abbott was sitting on the edge of her seat, full of slack jawed liberal indignation, gasping and spluttering her objections whenever he even opened his mouth.
It's the problem I find myself having more often with liberals, though I'd say that I'd also consider myself to be pretty liberal. Places like The Guardian have very little true debate, with almost no cut and thrust. It's all thrust, thrust, thrust as far as I can see. They tend to be platforms where people shout the same thing, over and over again until the masses cheer. Nobody ever questions the prevailing ethos, whether that's about legalizing drugs (for which they all shout 'yay!') or going to war (for which they'll always shout 'never!'). Yet I suppose it's a perennial problem with any form of balance. They say that all systems tend towards a point of equilibrium but it's also true that any deviation from the centre is bound to result in a subsequent swing the other way. Men have had too much power so the women's movement fought for equality until we reach the current situation in the media when it's pretty difficult to express the male point of view without being called a sexist pig.
Speaking of sexist pigs: Nigel Farage was simply Nigel Farage and if you like the man, his performance would have made you like him more. If you hate the man, you'd still hate him this morning. All I can say is that both he and Brand have mastered (to varying degrees) the very thing that politics needs right now and that's the ability to speak fairly plainly about the issues. The machine-age of steam-driven politics has hopefully passed. That was synonymous with Tony Blair's time in government when people like Peter Mandelson and Alastair Campbell controlled the media machine with such authority that MPs learned not to stray from the party line. Hopefully the success of men like Brand and Farage will help loosen things up a little and make politicians realise that we vote for people, not ciphers representing some abstract party ideal. The Tories will survive in this new age, probably by voting for Boris Johnson who has a similar loose style. Labour, I expect, will find their own relaxed leader. Possibly not Alan Johnson, though he has a little of that style but doesn't seem to want the job. As for the Lib Dems, I really don't think it matters who they vote for. They've ten years of rebuilding ahead of them.
For all their faults, Brand and Farage made last night's debate interesting because they brought passion to the table. I suppose, despite what I said, the same is true of Diane Abbot. I'd rather have a few people shouting over each other than a calm mannered debate that simply sends the constituents to sleep.
On the subject of sleep: I've not had much sleep because I've spent the past 48 hours trying to make a three minute video on this hopeless computer of mine which was never built for video editing. It's been driving me crazy but it's a job I have to do that's part of my other life where I have to do things when people tell me and I end up just wanting to take a long walk off a short pier. I like to get on with jobs, not to sit here waiting 10, 20, sometimes over 60 minutes waiting for a task to complete. It baffles me why I'm have such trouble and I'm not entirely sure where I'm experiencing a bottleneck, except the PC is now a few years old and things have probably moved on. I don't think it's a memory issue since I have 16gb but the machine is running an AMD Phenom II X6 1055T, which has slowly been falling down the CPUBenchmark list of performance CPUs. It gets a score of 5.061 which used to be impressive but now the chart is topped by insanely expensive Xeon CPUs with scores over 20. For the first mainstream CPU that you'd have in a desktop, the score is a slightly less staggering 12.9 for an Intel Core i7. That's still twice as fast (plus a little more) than this CPU but whether that would translate into faster rendering speeds, I'm not entirely sure.
This work also means that I've not had time to draw or time to write. I've hardly had time to think how miserable it leaves me. Despite being something of a techhead, computers can utterly annoy me when they're too slow. Momentum is important to my workflow. Getting things working spur me on to get other things working. When I have to keep stopping like this, I get surly and feel like sticking my boot through everything electrical.
It's the problem I find myself having more often with liberals, though I'd say that I'd also consider myself to be pretty liberal. Places like The Guardian have very little true debate, with almost no cut and thrust. It's all thrust, thrust, thrust as far as I can see. They tend to be platforms where people shout the same thing, over and over again until the masses cheer. Nobody ever questions the prevailing ethos, whether that's about legalizing drugs (for which they all shout 'yay!') or going to war (for which they'll always shout 'never!'). Yet I suppose it's a perennial problem with any form of balance. They say that all systems tend towards a point of equilibrium but it's also true that any deviation from the centre is bound to result in a subsequent swing the other way. Men have had too much power so the women's movement fought for equality until we reach the current situation in the media when it's pretty difficult to express the male point of view without being called a sexist pig.
Speaking of sexist pigs: Nigel Farage was simply Nigel Farage and if you like the man, his performance would have made you like him more. If you hate the man, you'd still hate him this morning. All I can say is that both he and Brand have mastered (to varying degrees) the very thing that politics needs right now and that's the ability to speak fairly plainly about the issues. The machine-age of steam-driven politics has hopefully passed. That was synonymous with Tony Blair's time in government when people like Peter Mandelson and Alastair Campbell controlled the media machine with such authority that MPs learned not to stray from the party line. Hopefully the success of men like Brand and Farage will help loosen things up a little and make politicians realise that we vote for people, not ciphers representing some abstract party ideal. The Tories will survive in this new age, probably by voting for Boris Johnson who has a similar loose style. Labour, I expect, will find their own relaxed leader. Possibly not Alan Johnson, though he has a little of that style but doesn't seem to want the job. As for the Lib Dems, I really don't think it matters who they vote for. They've ten years of rebuilding ahead of them.
For all their faults, Brand and Farage made last night's debate interesting because they brought passion to the table. I suppose, despite what I said, the same is true of Diane Abbot. I'd rather have a few people shouting over each other than a calm mannered debate that simply sends the constituents to sleep.
***
On the subject of sleep: I've not had much sleep because I've spent the past 48 hours trying to make a three minute video on this hopeless computer of mine which was never built for video editing. It's been driving me crazy but it's a job I have to do that's part of my other life where I have to do things when people tell me and I end up just wanting to take a long walk off a short pier. I like to get on with jobs, not to sit here waiting 10, 20, sometimes over 60 minutes waiting for a task to complete. It baffles me why I'm have such trouble and I'm not entirely sure where I'm experiencing a bottleneck, except the PC is now a few years old and things have probably moved on. I don't think it's a memory issue since I have 16gb but the machine is running an AMD Phenom II X6 1055T, which has slowly been falling down the CPUBenchmark list of performance CPUs. It gets a score of 5.061 which used to be impressive but now the chart is topped by insanely expensive Xeon CPUs with scores over 20. For the first mainstream CPU that you'd have in a desktop, the score is a slightly less staggering 12.9 for an Intel Core i7. That's still twice as fast (plus a little more) than this CPU but whether that would translate into faster rendering speeds, I'm not entirely sure.
This work also means that I've not had time to draw or time to write. I've hardly had time to think how miserable it leaves me. Despite being something of a techhead, computers can utterly annoy me when they're too slow. Momentum is important to my workflow. Getting things working spur me on to get other things working. When I have to keep stopping like this, I get surly and feel like sticking my boot through everything electrical.
Friday, 21 November 2014
Andrew Neil: The Best Thing On TV
Even Andrew Neil and my drawing what I thought was a good cartoon couldn't prevent my falling asleep around 3AM. The by-election result should have been in by then but when Neil said 'we're now hearing 4AM', I knew I couldn't last. I knew Private Eye would reject my cartoon like they reject every other so five downbeat minutes later, I was in bed and sound asleep.
I love watching by-elections, though they always leave me with the familiar conclusion that politics is ruined by the politicians. Last night was no different. Everything was set up for a good four or five hours of political cuts and thrusts and knees to the groin. I'm always searching for TV to which there's no obvious structure. I love to watch the free exchange of ideas presided over by a host who understands the nature of debate and allows it to breathe. In that sense, I also happen to think that Andrew Neil is the best thing on the TV at the moment. Where most top presenters have a calm ease about them, they are also generally without character and rarely stray from the autocue. The best examples of that are to be found on BBC News 24. Around 5pm each weekday night, they invite some interesting individual into the studio for an interview. Things are usually reaching the point where they've moved past the bland introductions and into some fascinating material. Just when you're thinking it's getting good enough to record and watch again, the blithering suit will cut off their guest mid anecdote and hand over to the weather or sport. And you sit there thinking: why, Christ, why? Why interrupt a fascinating interview for some pre-packaged news which you'll hear five times in the next hour?
It's to Andrew Neil's credit that he rarely does that. Neil retains the rough edges of a true journalist. His jokes aren't always slickly delivered. He might not always know which camera is on but, damn it, he owns his mistakes. It means that he's best when he's working solo, adlibbing with his guests, and ignoring the protestations of the studio manager to follow a line of argument. To watch Neil is to enjoy the unexpected or, in a sense, a debate that grows organically from the subject at hand. It's just a shame that, last night, he was let down by his guests.
The coverage came in two parts. The first was the usual The Daily Politics, ruined by an appearance by the always irritating and precious Ekow Eshun. At one time, my favourite show on TV was the 'Late Review'. It was sometimes hard gnarly TV that could annoy me as much as I loved it. Then Eschun became a regular and I'd start to turn it off before the introduction. I'd not seen Eschun on TV in a long time so I was prepared to give him a chance but I was making grim mutterings by the time Eshun had finished making a point about the misrepresentation of Africa in the Band Aid single. As an argument it was stretched and predictable and, thankfully, after a few uncertain words of support from Alan Johnson, Portillo and Neil tore into it leaving Eshun sounding like he almost doubted it too. There then followed a brief but fun mike failure, nicely ad libbed by Neil and Omid Djalili, before The Daily Politics moved into election coverage and it was here that the guests proved the point I keep making about Farage.
Farage is the political equivalent of Andrew Neil. He's another who wouldn't work well with autocue. He laughs and sometimes makes bad jokes. He doesn't always have a good answer or a slick line of prepared patter to deflect difficult questions. In an age when politicians seem to be at the Mark Reckless end of the bland scale, Farage is the anti-politician who appeals to people who normally switch off when they hear the same old policy statements coming from the mouths of our professional politicians. In a sense, Farage's greatest weapon is his sheer amateurish and we British love our amateurs. We're a nation of amateur astronomers and amateur musicians, amateur engineers and amateur artists. Yet amateur doesn't mean unskilled or lacking polish. If America has the American Dream, Britain has the British Amateur, those backyard enthusiasts who teach the world a lesson or two. Farage is the Trevor Baylis of Westminster like Andrew Neil is the James Dyson of BBC2.
Between Neil and Farage, I was hoping for an evening of edgy politics and occasional bad tempers. I didn't stay awake to see if Andrew managed to interview Nige or managed to get under his skin. Instead, I stayed awake until 3AM listening to the likes of Iain Duncan Smith (still that annoying cough) trot out the usual glassy eyed arguments that appear at every by-election. Bad night for the government but a worse night for the opposition. The general election will be different. Protest votes. Yaddah. Yaddah. Yah...
Neil did his best but the show only really came alive when he was chatting with the correspondent at the count, Chris Mason, who displayed his own brand of unscripted banter. Mason was the surprise of the evening. I could have watched five hours of just Mason and Neil but unfortunately there were studio guests and I fell asleep over my cartoon to the sound of a Tory spokesman attacking Labour on a trivial point of policy. I always say that I love politics but hate politicians. Perhaps I should amend that. I hate politicians but I love political journalists. You can keep your Strictly Come X Factors and Downton and Dec. Andrew Neil is the best thing on TV. I just wish we had a better calibre of politician to make his blood run hot.
I love watching by-elections, though they always leave me with the familiar conclusion that politics is ruined by the politicians. Last night was no different. Everything was set up for a good four or five hours of political cuts and thrusts and knees to the groin. I'm always searching for TV to which there's no obvious structure. I love to watch the free exchange of ideas presided over by a host who understands the nature of debate and allows it to breathe. In that sense, I also happen to think that Andrew Neil is the best thing on the TV at the moment. Where most top presenters have a calm ease about them, they are also generally without character and rarely stray from the autocue. The best examples of that are to be found on BBC News 24. Around 5pm each weekday night, they invite some interesting individual into the studio for an interview. Things are usually reaching the point where they've moved past the bland introductions and into some fascinating material. Just when you're thinking it's getting good enough to record and watch again, the blithering suit will cut off their guest mid anecdote and hand over to the weather or sport. And you sit there thinking: why, Christ, why? Why interrupt a fascinating interview for some pre-packaged news which you'll hear five times in the next hour?
It's to Andrew Neil's credit that he rarely does that. Neil retains the rough edges of a true journalist. His jokes aren't always slickly delivered. He might not always know which camera is on but, damn it, he owns his mistakes. It means that he's best when he's working solo, adlibbing with his guests, and ignoring the protestations of the studio manager to follow a line of argument. To watch Neil is to enjoy the unexpected or, in a sense, a debate that grows organically from the subject at hand. It's just a shame that, last night, he was let down by his guests.
The coverage came in two parts. The first was the usual The Daily Politics, ruined by an appearance by the always irritating and precious Ekow Eshun. At one time, my favourite show on TV was the 'Late Review'. It was sometimes hard gnarly TV that could annoy me as much as I loved it. Then Eschun became a regular and I'd start to turn it off before the introduction. I'd not seen Eschun on TV in a long time so I was prepared to give him a chance but I was making grim mutterings by the time Eshun had finished making a point about the misrepresentation of Africa in the Band Aid single. As an argument it was stretched and predictable and, thankfully, after a few uncertain words of support from Alan Johnson, Portillo and Neil tore into it leaving Eshun sounding like he almost doubted it too. There then followed a brief but fun mike failure, nicely ad libbed by Neil and Omid Djalili, before The Daily Politics moved into election coverage and it was here that the guests proved the point I keep making about Farage.
Farage is the political equivalent of Andrew Neil. He's another who wouldn't work well with autocue. He laughs and sometimes makes bad jokes. He doesn't always have a good answer or a slick line of prepared patter to deflect difficult questions. In an age when politicians seem to be at the Mark Reckless end of the bland scale, Farage is the anti-politician who appeals to people who normally switch off when they hear the same old policy statements coming from the mouths of our professional politicians. In a sense, Farage's greatest weapon is his sheer amateurish and we British love our amateurs. We're a nation of amateur astronomers and amateur musicians, amateur engineers and amateur artists. Yet amateur doesn't mean unskilled or lacking polish. If America has the American Dream, Britain has the British Amateur, those backyard enthusiasts who teach the world a lesson or two. Farage is the Trevor Baylis of Westminster like Andrew Neil is the James Dyson of BBC2.
Between Neil and Farage, I was hoping for an evening of edgy politics and occasional bad tempers. I didn't stay awake to see if Andrew managed to interview Nige or managed to get under his skin. Instead, I stayed awake until 3AM listening to the likes of Iain Duncan Smith (still that annoying cough) trot out the usual glassy eyed arguments that appear at every by-election. Bad night for the government but a worse night for the opposition. The general election will be different. Protest votes. Yaddah. Yaddah. Yah...
Neil did his best but the show only really came alive when he was chatting with the correspondent at the count, Chris Mason, who displayed his own brand of unscripted banter. Mason was the surprise of the evening. I could have watched five hours of just Mason and Neil but unfortunately there were studio guests and I fell asleep over my cartoon to the sound of a Tory spokesman attacking Labour on a trivial point of policy. I always say that I love politics but hate politicians. Perhaps I should amend that. I hate politicians but I love political journalists. You can keep your Strictly Come X Factors and Downton and Dec. Andrew Neil is the best thing on TV. I just wish we had a better calibre of politician to make his blood run hot.
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