John Noakes and the Spirit of the Braying Mob

Excuse me if this isn't polished or even interesting. I don't have any careful arguments to weave and, even if I did, I'm not sure I have the care and attention needed to weave them. I guess I'm feeling a bit dejected with the world. I've been working hard all month trying to communicate with the world but the world doesn't seem all that interested in talking to me. Well, screw the world. I can at least talk to myself or, if I'm lucky, some other lone intellects out there that don't belong to a marketing scam robot or some Chinese plastics company intent on filling my comments with spam.

I wanted to write about John Noakes who, you might know, went missing (but was thankfully found) yesterday and I wanted to write about him without using the word 'celebrity'. I despise that word, which has to be the curse of our age. It has been elevated to the point that to possess 'celebrity' means that you're a special kind of person, worthy of special treatment and to be judged against lower moral or artistic standards than the rest of common humanity. For example, I was searching last week for a publisher and I came across one who advertised their interest in humour. You should know how rare that is for UK publishers, who largely take no interest in humour unless it's disguised as some postmodern pastiche of Polish pork butchers in the 1300s. This publisher therefore caught my eye, until I read that writers would have to pay to have their books published. There was, however, an exception. In the case of 'a celebrity', the publisher would be very interested in discussing an advance and contact.

It's a sign of how the world has become. Yet the truth is that people who are celebrities tend to be the dullest among us. To be a celebrity is different to being a writer, a musician, an actor, painter, poet, illustrator, inventor, sportsperson, or even a politician. It's why the very best writers, musicians, actors, painters, poets, illustrators, inventors, sportspersons, and politicians live ordinary lives. They don't wish to live like a celebrity. To be a celebrity simply means that you have fame and, really, there's nothing less interesting than a person famous only for having fame. The other day The Times dedicated a double page spread to Alan Titchmarsh, one of the dullest men on the planet and it was amazing how many dull things the dullest man on the planet had to say in what was, predictably, a very dull article. Yet still: he's famous and because he was famous, he even had his face in full colour on their colour supplement.

Welcome to the UK, 2015. For those that have: here have more. Those without, we want you to have even less.

Last weekend witnessed another visible demonstration of celebrity when Kanye West took the stage at Glastonbury. He walked out thinking, perhaps, that celebrity would do most of his work for him. It didn't. It was a risible performance, highlighting the fact that this was one of the least enjoyable Glastonbury weekends in quite a while. All the excellence was to be found well beyond the headline acts. Patti Smith produced the performance of the festival but I also enjoyed, as you might expect, the show put on by FFS on the last night, which was largely ignored by the media. The media were too busy talking about The Who, who did what The Who have always done but didn't do it with much swagger. The fact that they refused to allow the BBC to broadcast their set was small minded, greedy, or both. In future, no act should be allowed to headline (or otherwise) at Glastonbury if they make non-broadcast a condition of the performance. The question wasn't so much who but why? Why were The Who performing at Glastonbury? I think it was simply because they're a world famous act. They have 'celebrity'.

I arrived at the beginning of this week reflecting, yet again, on how celebrity is ruining our culture. If you're not a celebrity, then you're obviously nobody, and perhaps it's because of the problems associated with being a nobody that an otherwise excellent band like the Fat White Family (a bit blues, a bit Velvet Underground, a lot The Doors) have to resort to the tales of the sordid excess in order to get noticed and then heard. The same is true of writers, actors, artists, comedians. To get noticed, you must doing something in excess. You must run out on stage whilst Kanye West is performing. You must paint your work in your own excrement or blood. You must write your book whilst sitting in a cupboard for ten years and never seeing daylight...

Then John Noakes went missing.

I can't think of many people who have meant as much to me as John Noakes. Yet to describe what he did is to skirt around the phrase 'celebrity'. He was, of course, a TV presenter, which usually is a job that amounts to very little. Presenters are usually celebrities. Vernon Kaye and Claudia Winkleman are both celebrities but I can't honestly tell you of a single discernible skill either of them has to make them worth the money the BBC pays them. Cut their wage to a sixth and you'd still find people equally adept at fronting that kind of show. I'm serious. I fail to understand why the BBC think it important to pay millions to people who are merely presenters. A disembodied robotic voice could link segments together almost as well... Did I say 'almost'? Well, I meant to say 'better'.

Yet Noakes wasn't simply a presenter. He was an accidental comedian. In fact, when I think of what I like in comedy, I think about those qualities that Noakes embodied. He was relaxed and slightly unprofessional in a way you can perhaps see in the very best comedy. You see it in the Marx Brothers but also in Robin Williams or Steve Martin. Noakes made mistakes and allowed people to see his mistakes, a bit like Stewart Lee does when he highlights a mistake and weaves it into his set. Noakes was a clown but doing serious work in the very same way that Clive James would always use humour to make a deeper point. Yet beyond all of that, Noakes was simply likable and so very and utterly human. He was the best uncle many of us have ever had with any degree of regularity in our lives.

When he went missing yesterday, I was upset. I don't know why. I'm not ashamed to admit that when I tried to explain it to somebody later on, I actually found myself getting teary eyed. I didn't realise how much John Noakes meant to me. He must have meant a lot because I even used Twitter to look for updates. Perhaps I wanted to find other people who shared my upset and I was genuinely heartened to find that there were others just like me. It reminded me that not everybody on Twitter is a hate filled troll.

Yet there were, predictably, a few others who saw it as another opportunity to make cheap jokes about the disappearance of an 81 year old man suffering from Alzheimer's. They are the people who made me quit Twitter or, at least, have minimal contact with social media. They are the always-looking-for-a-laugh narcissists, who are always at your elbow playing everything for laughs. They're the Colin Hunts of the online world who give a bad name to anybody who has ever tried to make people laugh for a living.

I suppose what I find irritating about them is that I could easily be one of those people myself. When I first used Twitter, I used it as a way of writing jokes and being 'witty'. Yet you soon find it's an insatiable medium. Your best material is stolen by others and the many of the people also in the business of being funny are quite happy to steal their material from old joke books. People who aren't serious about comedy seem unable to stop trying to be funny. Serious comedians are often described as sulky and miserable when they're not on stage but that's because people assume that to have a comedic outlook on life means that you're always 'up for a laugh'. In my limited experience, it's quite the reverse. It's why I despise Twitter. It's also a place where you're always encouraged to be that little bit more edgy. When I write what I write about real people, I don't mean to hurt them. I write knowing there's a distance between my writing and the chances of their reading what I write. Twitter is very different. Your words too easily end up in their timeline, seen by their eyes. Twitter magnifies the venom and I quit the moment I realised this. I quit the moment people began confusing my comic creation with the real Richard Madeley.

Others didn't share my concerns and still don't. Twitter comedians are no comedians in my eyes. They're precisely the people I didn't want to become when I was growing up. What I wanted to be was some latter day John Noakes, who was a free spirit, fascinated by the world but never to the point of pretension. He was funny but never to the point where it would begin to wear on you. He was balanced pretty evenly in that place where the best human beings exist: good natured, interested and, above all things, simply humane.

It's why his disappearance yesterday upset me. Not because John Noakes the celebrity had gone missing. It was because I remembered John Noakes as simply the best example of a generous, witty but unashamedly joyous spirit there was when I was growing up. He's one of the best examples of our kind and of a better age, before Twitter exposed us all to the vile psychopaths who hurt people in the name of humour. I'm now at the stage when I actively despise people who try to be funny on Twitter. They're little more than piss-soaked mongrels howling at the heels of the braying mob. Yesterday reminded me that they're still out there seeking their celebrity. And the sad truth is: one day their excesses might become so great that they might indeed find it.

The Spine Podcast - Episode 11: Clive James and the Art of Bad TV

What Jane Austen Can Teach Us About Charlie Brooker

Somebody around here has bought a clown’s horn. I keep hearing eeeee-hhoooonk every 15 minutes or so. However, I’ll press on, even if it does feel like some surreal criticism aimed my way after a night of torrential rains and furious cross-hatching.

I worked a long day drawing on Saturday. I finished two cartoon strips (three panels each) which I’ll eventually post here. I’ve agreed to draw them (and more) for the Liverpool fanzine, Red All Over The Land. I don’t know how many I’ll manage over the course of the coming season but we’ll see…

Honk! I can see this is going to drive me crazy…

This morning I noticed there’s been plenty of talk in the papers about ‘the world’s most savage TV critic’ Charlie Brooker. I don’t read his stuff but my sympathy is firmly with him if the reports are true that he’s trying to get Guardian bosses to turn off the comments beneath his articles. Of course, I understand the criticism aimed at him by those who believe in free speech. Free speech is one of the supposedly immutably good things in the world loved by people who also believe in the cleanliness of Bono’s underwear and the curative effect of Richard Branson’s chin whiskers. But elsewhere, free speech isn’t making as good a case for itself. Caroline Criado-Perez, the journalist who campaigned to get Jane Austen’s face on our banknotes, is now receiving threats of rape via Twitter. This time (rightly) there is no talk about free speech yet both stories highlight a difficult dichotomy that exists when people voice their opinions.

But first an aside: I’ve always detested Jane Austen’s novels. I had to study ‘Manfield Park’ for my English A level and, at university, we read a novel of hers every week during the first term (alongside all the other books we were studying). For six weeks, I was reading ‘Sense and Sensibility’, ‘Pride and Prejudice’, ‘Mansfield Park’ (again!), ‘Emma’, ‘Northanger Abbey’ and then ‘Persuasion’. I got through them all but whilst I understood her gentle wit and I admired her prose, she was just a writer whose world didn’t sit easily with my grim working class outlook. It was like being in the company of a journalist who deliberately turns their attention away from the big issues of the day to discuss the rate at which grass grows. There aren’t many English writers whose face I wouldn’t prefer adorning our bank notes.

But how valid is my criticism?

This is the age of the internet so every response is valid (say its supporters). It is the assumption that any act of criticism is of equal importance to any act of creation. I’ve never bought into that myself and it’s partly the reason why I quit academia. I could never buy into concept of failed writers (which many academics are and I would have been myself) opining about successful writers. Nothing filled me with more hostility that witnessing some poindexter standing at the front of a lecture theatre affirming Orwell’s greatness as if Orwell needed the affirmation of a humourless freak in a black turtle neck and sandals.

In the real world, the remarks often aimed at J.K. Rowling by hacks, bloggers and literary pundits are generally about as meaningful as any snide criticism we might make aim at Jane Austen. The best critics (indeed, the only critics I try to read) produce secondary acts of creation in response to their subject. The great Clive James writes criticism infinitely better than the subjects of his criticism rightly deserved. James Wood, one of our best critics, writes as well about great literature as great literature itself speaks about our lives. Martin Amis too is a blisteringly fabulous critic; much better, I would say, than he is a novelist.

To put that differently: there is no value in my writing ‘I think Jane Austen is shit’ but there is slightly more value in my writing ‘Jane Austen gave Julian Fellowes a good career’ or ‘Jane Austen is the Jeremy Clarkson of the veiled aside’ but even these are obviously not a patch on what Austen herself might have written. And I guess that’s the point I’m trying to make. If we want to go on the attack, we must raise our game.

Mark Twain probably came the closest when he said: ‘Every time I read “Pride and Prejudice,” I want to dig [Austen] up and hit her over the skull with her own shin-bone.’

Now that is worth immortalising on our bank notes! Criticism is the act of heckling in written form. Every comedian can talk about the perfect heckle and I think they would recall them with a certain pride. Sometimes comments beneath articles can be better than the article itself. In those instances, a person has raised their game, produced something of value, and that is to be welcomed and cherished.

Yet if people can’t raise their game to Charlie Brooker’s level, then he has a right to ask for the comments to be disabled. Jane Austen belongs in my pocket until that moment I can put some suitable criticism into words as well formed and enduring as her own. In fact, the more Jane Austens in my pocket, the better…

The comments, as ever, are open and hecklers welcome.

On Colin Hunt and Clive James...

Drawing this, I thought 'too misogynistic', which it is, I suppose, when I was only hoping to be misanthropic.

Speaking of my being misanthropic, it was strange this morning. I received a message via Twitter from a self-publishing author I slightly know who asked me to tweet all my followers with an ad for his book. I should ignore the fact that, except for my @richardmadeley account, I don’t have any followers, except to say that doesn’t it say much about celebrity that people loved my @richardmadeley account but are completely indifferent to the real me? Yet even if I had followers, I won’t retweet his message. If I don’t pester people to buy my books, I’m not going to pester them to buy the books of somebody who tells me that he's selling them by the van load. And, frankly, I can’t bring myself to be that much of an arsehole, even if being an arsehole is what it takes to be a successful author these days. It’s all about getting your name out there: inundating people with your banal tweets, your self-serving message, your big gormless grinning face, your cheerful inane banter, your ceaseless self-promotion. I love the work of writing, drawing, and now animating my work. I hate the idea of sitting here all day telling people how great that work is or that I’m always happy and cheerful. It’s the side of Twitter that I despise: the constant stream of effluent coming from would-be comedians trying to be witty. The Fast Show used to feature a character, Colin Hunt, who thought himself funny and could never switch off. Twitter was made for him. Twitter is full of Colin Hunts and I don't intend to be one of them.

As you can see from the quality of today’s cartoon, I’m running low on my very best cartoons on account of a new animation I’m working on. So far, I’ve drawn and rigged the main character and I’ve animated the opening shot, which has pleased me enormously. I’m now down to the tricky business of getting a script written so I can record it. The big question is whether I should swear or not.

I have a complex attitude towards swearing in comedy. I've always told myself that I wouldn’t do it and, generally, I haven’t. It was a restriction I set myself because I find that swearing usually gets in the way of the business of being funny. Like Jimmy Carr’s edgy jokes, I find it too easy a route to take. However, that said, some of my favourite comedy is very sweary. Armando Ianucci's ‘The Thick Of It’ and 'Veep' are the obvious examples but I also love Peter Cook and Dudley Moore’s experiments in profanity in the guise of Derek & Clive. So, at the back of my mind, I’m wondering if to push my next cartoon out into those same murky waters. If I do it, I want it to be creative swearing and to be making a point. And since my next cartoon might be something of a rant, the swearing would be apt. We'll see...

On a final, sad note, I was really upset to read Clive James’ interview with Radio 4. In fact, I read part of it but could read no more. By the same token that I despise Twitter for the superficiality of the content, the glib attitudes that turn friendship into a mere follow, I like to think that a nobody can occasionally blog something meaningful about a stranger and mean every word. I recently wrote a review of James’ latest book and concluded with the line that he’s ‘a trickster who makes us laugh before fooling us into thinking seriously’. I can think of no better way of explaining what he’s always meant to me and why my thoughts are now with him.

 

Ned

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(Click the picture for the larger readable version)

First of all, let me set the record straight: I don’t hate everybody. I’m nearly 7% less misanthropic than you’d think I am after reading the above cartoon. In fact, I'm nothing like Ned. Except I have been getting a lot of emails from Facebook recently and, try as I might, I still can't learn to enjoy social networking.

Twitter can sometimes be fun in that I can vent my nonsense somewhere with no consequences. It’s a one-sided conversation and I don’t need to lose a valuable hour of my day chatting with somebody on the other side. Facebook, on the other hand, is a long term commitment to relationships. You’re meant to be interested in what other people are doing. And the thing is: beyond the circle of my friends, I’m really not interested in learning what other people are doing. I’m really am just too busy.

I wouldn’t mind it so much, though, if it was limited to just knowing what other people are doing. Facebook continually tells me what a great time other people are having and I don’t want to know how hot it is in the Seychelles. Here in the North West, it’s raining. It’s June in a couple of days yet here I am trying to stimulate my brain with my SAD lamp.

Then there are the constant pointless messages. Join this. Vote for that. I’m a vampire, bite me! Well, I’m a socially awkward nerd, so why don’t you bite me instead? I sometimes wonder if it’s impossible to find the right audience on the web. I disappear from the blog for a few days and come back to find that my most regular visitors are people searching for ‘nipples’ and ‘royalty sex’.

Those visitors won’t read this. Which means, if you’ve got this far, you can be certain you’re not a 'Barry' and possibly not even a 'Ned'. You’re probably one of the people who might enjoy a website like ‘The Laughing Squid’. I go over there and begin to think that the world is not all bad.

And would you look at that: it’s finally stopped raining.