A Fun Little HS2 Cartoon

Sam Smith: Writing's on the Wall

It is an indication of how much I really wanted to like Sam Smith's James Bond theme that I initially thought I liked it. I'd seen a link on the website of The Guardian and clicked it only to find myself being asked for my Spotify login. I don't have a Spotify login. I don't want a Spotify login. Even if I did, I damn well don't want a Facebook account so I can get myself a Spotify account. So I headed over to Youtube, typed in 'Writing's on the Wall', and clicked on the first picture of Sam Smith.

I started to listen. The song was at once somehow familiar. My first thought was that I didn't dislike it but I began to suspect something was wrong when, after about thirty seconds, Mr. Smith still hadn't start to sing. That's when I realised it was a fake. About half an hour later, I finally found a proper link.

I started to listen. The song was at once somehow familiar. My first thought was that I didn't dislike it. I began to suspect something was wrong when, after about thirty seconds, Mr. Smith has started to sing. That's when I realised it was a fake.

This is another of the fake James Bond themes, written by somebody trying to write a James Bond theme and producing something that's deep in the desert of pastiche. It's something I've noticed over the course of the past few Bond films. I think the woeful Madonna effort, for the absolute worst James Bond film (Die Another Day), made the producers wary about letting artists have too much freedom when it comes to the Bond themes. Their response was Chris Cornell's 'You Know My Name' for Casino Royale, full of sweeping strings and penetrating guitar riffs, which felt like a proper stab at writing a Bond theme. Yet it also felt like just that. An attempt at writing a Bond theme.

Bond films have passed off quite a few pastiches for the real thing. I often think the problem stemmed from David Arnold taking over the music direction for the Bond movies. Arnold professed himself a Bond obsessive, deeply influenced by the music of John Barry. I always liked his enthusiasm and love for the Bond movies but, at the same time, to these very cloth ears of mine, it always felt like he was directing his energy into something other than the song. The most obvious example was the Arnold song, sung by K.D. Lang over the closing credits of 'Tomorrow Never Dies'. Some say it was better than Sheryl Crow's 'Tomorrow Never Dies'. As a Bond song, it might well be true. As a song, however, I can't help but think that Crow's is far superior.

And that, I think, is the problem. There's a difference between writing a good song and writing a Bond theme. When the artists set out to write a great song, you usually end up with a great theme. When they set out to write a Bond theme song, you get something that's not quite as good.

'Another Way to Die', the theme to Quantum of Solace, is a fine example. The Bond riff is very evident from the outset but Jack White struggles to adapt it to his style, producing a song that was at once blues and grunge and sometimes all over the place.

'Skyfall', by contast, was just a great song which is a great song outside the content of the film's opening credits.

Sam Smith's effort is far from the worst Bond theme (take that bow, Madonna). Nothing wrong with the orchestration. Nothing much wrong with Sam Smith's voice in that years of listening to Sparks has tuned my ears to the falsetto. Lyrically it is as bland as lyrics get: a schmaltzy list of ballad clichés hastily written down (twenty minutes to write the song, Smith claims) by somebody steeped in schmaltzy ballad clichés.

Second, third, and then fourth listening, I found it growing on me but, really, not so much that I think Smith has justified the filmmakers made in giving him the honour. Smith has the wrong kind of voice for a James Bond theme or he has the right kind of voice for a James Bond who is has become the ultimate metrosexual, as obsessed with his skin cream as the Bond in the novels was obsessed with his cars and women. I don't see this changing any time soon. Might as well try to get used to it. You can't change the world, which might as well be the title of the next James Bond film.

A Donald Trump Cartoon

The Alarm Clock That Woke America

It all began with 14 year old Ahmed Mohamed and the clock he built.

He takes it into his school in Irving, Texas on the 15th of September, 2015. He shows it to his engineering teacher who praises his work but suggests that he not show the clock to other teachers but keep it in his bag. Later that day, the clock's alarm goes off. Ahmed's English teacher asks to see the clock and is so disturbed by its appearance that she alerts authorities. The police arrive and Ahmed is taken into custody, primarily because he cannot explain why he's built the clock. He is detained for bringing a 'hoax bomb' into school. There follows a national outcry against his arrest. Ahmed is embraced by the large 'maker' community, the hugely creative generation redefining invention through 3D printers and rapid prototyping, and he becomes a symbol for the institutionalised Islamophobia in America. Now a cause célèbre across the States, Ahmed is invited to the White House and the President compliments him on his 'cool clock'.

So far, Ahmed's story makes for a self-contained fable we might recognise. It's the American Dream writ bland. Young creative type, the stuff of which America is made, builds something notable through his own ingenuity. His genius goes unrecognised in his hillbilly school, which instead looks at the colour of his skin and his oh-so-familiar surname, and forms an equally oh-so-familiar judgement. Thankfully, not all of America is so prejudiced and that enlightened part of the nation does what it does so well: it rallies support through social media. Mohamed is released from captivity, goes to Washington and meets the President. God bless the spirit of Horatio Alger. God bless the US of A.

Yet if that were the story, it wouldn't be noteworthy. We'd accept it as believable but slightly hackneyed, especially if presented by Hollywood. IMDB 5.5. Not bad for a quiet night in with the kids.

Look deeper, however, and you begin to see the narrative twists. It makes a different story if you know that the clock was constructed inside an aluminium briefcase. Since clocks are meant to be seen, assembling one inside a briefcase does seem odd and perhaps even provocative. After all, we can't escape the cultural connotations of a clock in a briefcase. Wile E. Coyote shakes a ticking briefcase and you expect that he'll soon have a large lump of Monument Valley on his head. So were the police right to arrest young Amhed Mohamed? Is it at least understandable why they might begin to take an interest in his briefcase?

Before you decide, let's now add another twist to the tale. It now appears that Ahmed didn't actually make the clock. It wasn't so much constructed as disassembled. He had taken an old 1986 digital clock, stripped away the casing to expose the internal mechanism which he then attached it to the inside of the briefcase. Ahmed isn't a 'maker' as much as a 'meddler' who was lucky not to treat himself to some good ol' Texas justice courtesy of the exposed 120 volt transformer.

You begin to see, I hope, how at each stage, facts beget ignorance beget more facts beget tales, tropes, myths, assumptions and, soon, a whole lot of ugly politics.

For instance, when Richard Dawkins highlighted this last fact about the disassembled clock, Twitter outrage ensued. The very fact that it was Dawkins's tweeting about the clock located Ahmed's story inside an ongoing saga in which Dawkins's atheism is seen as an aggressive challenge to religious dogma. Dawkins points out the facts I've outlined above but, for many people, the existing narrative was already far too compelling. It was as though Dawkins had just stood up in the final reel of The Empire Strikes Back and explained why Luke couldn't possibly be Vader's son based on the DNA record. The disassembled clock fitted the narrative of Dawkins's as popularist naysayer. It didn't fit the romantic narrative of the young engineer and his home made clock.

Depending on where you choose to direct your focus, Ahmed's story is either about a young protagonist and his misguided actions or it's about a broader reality in American culture. The more you believe it's about Ahmed's surname, his Sudanese background, the procedural details of his detainment, the more polarised the issue and the same old voices begin to frame the debate. Sarah Palin became involved last Friday when she squawked 'That's a clock, and I'm the Queen of England'. To which you are compelled to reply: but it is a clock. It's just not the idealised notion of a clock that Palin prefers alongside her idealised notions of American, Muslim, or, indeed, Queen.

Yet, in truth, nobody but Ahmed knows why he dismantled a clock and put it inside a suitcase. His mind will be a messy nest of cultural influences, teenage angst and spirited imagination. Really, it's of no significance why he did what he did. Despite whispers of political motives and the influence of family members, in all likelihood it's probably just the dumb kind of thing that most kids do at that age. Much more telling is why the story around Ahmed has become more complex than any clock. The story has multiple interpretations, each vying for the status of accepted truth. Mohamed is at once innocent, knowing, naive,  harmless, malicious, exploited and exploiter.

It might be a long time until another story quite like that of Ahmed Mohamed and his clock comes along, meaning so much, so differently, to so many different people. For now, it is fascinating to view the fractures in American society through such a multi-faceted prism.

Talking Archbishopric Over There...

Over at The Spectator Coffee House, something I've written about The Archbishop of Canterbury and the refugee crisis.

Pig, Pig, Glorious Pig

I've written my 'defence' of David Cameron and pork over at The What and the Why.  If you're interested in the politics of pigs, it might be worth you clicking.

This is the droid you're looking for...

I say with pride that I am a nerd. I'm also an older nerd who fell in love with the original Star Wars and spent most of my life hoping to see more from the grimy counter universe to Star Trek. Gene Roddenberry's creation may have been more intellectually sound but Star Wars was more emotional. It was bleaker and filled with as much moral ambiguity as it was filled with space junk.

Star Wars was perhaps the first science fiction movie (or, at least, the first I saw ) to introduce a note of grunge which later became commonplace. Star Wars dropped its heroes into a trash compactor in which the technology of an advanced civilization was being reduced to garbage. Where Star Trek want us to feel slavish to our technological future, Star Wars reminded us of the hubris of technology. Hard to believe given the revolution in marketing it spawned but Star Wars even seemed to have an anti-consumerist message. What other film could make us want to indulge in religious asceticism quite like that involved in becoming a Jedi? What other film before or since made young boys lust after a old hunk of junk quite like we lusted after the Millenium Falcon? What other film taught that mastery of skill was more powerful than the material wealth of an empire?

When George Lucas revived the franchise with his prequel trilogy, fans were excited and then confused as he produced three films which rejected the grime for a CGI process that gave everything a slightly unreal sheen. I always remember feeling a great sense of disappointment when I saw the Naboo royal cruiser land half an hour into Episode One. Slick like the Blackbird spy plane and entirely reflective, it just didn't fit into the Star Wars universe I knew and loved. Worst of all, Lucas produced in Jar Jar Binks a character straight from a corporate toy department. In looks, voice, and manner, Jar Jar was annoying but what irritated most of all was the sense that the films were merely a vehicle for marketing.

When Disney bought the franchise (itself a horrible word), they promised a return to the original aesthetic. So far, they seem to have made wise decisions. The films are being made on real sets, with practical special effects replacing the green screens. Whilst hiring J.J. Abrams for the first sequel appears a safe choice, hiring Garath Edwards shows ambition for the future. The opening shot of the first trailer is also promising. It was a ruined Star Destroyer and this certainly feels like the Star Wars world, where ruin and spectacle sit side by side. It remains to be seen if the shining chromium seen elsewhere in the trailer is a minor part of the aesthetic but, in my eyes, if felt too Battlestar Galactica to be truly Tattooine.

It might sound fanboyish to pick out something so meaningless as the shininess of a character's armour but there's something else going on with the relaunch of Star Wars that makes me wary. We are still a couple of months from the premier of The Force Awakens and already the market is saturated with gleaming merchandise. Lucas (and Spielberg) were never above profiting through merchandising but this is something different. This is merchandising done by the kings of the industry. This is merchandising on the Disney scale.

Slowly it begins to dawn that the beloved films of childhood have become something else. They are claws buried so deep in our collective consciousness that we have no way of resisting their pull. They have now be harnessed to the most powerful marketing machine on the planet and we're about to be dragged over some rough terrain. I wonder how we'll all feel about Star Wars after five or ten years and maybe as many sequels because, apparently, there will be a new Star Wars movie appearing in cinemas every summer (or winter). Disney have seen the success of Marvel and found an even more potent mythology to leverage. I know I'm in a minority but I feel jaded before this has all begun. Marvel's universe never particularly excited me but it has certainly diminished with repeat visits. With a few exceptions, such as the Branagh helmed Thor (2011), I've looked on the Marvel films with increasingly indifference. Stan Lee's work reminds me of the excited imagination of an over-stimulated schoolboy, with the world of Valhalla existing side by side with the genetic freakery of Hulk and the mad science of Spiderman. I remain baffled by the excitement of fanboys who claim that the Toxic Nosewrangler never wore spats or that Ostritchman would never have formed an alliance with Shazzam Fiddlesticks. I'm left wanting to scream: NONE OF THIS MAKES SENSE!

Insofar as I've never much of a Marvel fan (Netflix's excellent Daredevil being another recent exception), the plundering of that mythos hasn't really troubled me. Star Wars is a different matter. I fear that the sheer joy those films gave me as a child will be used to manipulate me as an adult; turning the latent anti-consumerist message of the originals into a total assault on the wallet. The BB-8 droid toy is already this year's most wanted (and pointless) toy. I doubt if it will be the last.

Elton John Over Yonder

Head over yonder to read the thing I've written over at the Spectator Culture House about Elton John, pranks, and Putin.

Anthem for Doomed Truth

The problem with freedom is that other people simply refuse to use it in ways you approve. Take Jeremy Corbyn: elected leader of Britain's Labour Party one day, refusing to sing the national anthem the next. War veterans are right to feel upset. They didn't fight for freedom just so people would have the freedom to choose their gods, politics, and songs to sing. And it’s not as though Jeremy has a problem squeezing a lung or two in public. Earlier in the week, he gave a rousing performance of the Red Flag in a London pub. It staggers belief! The new Labour leader singing the semi-official anthem of The Labour Party. Just what was he thinking?

You see, amid all the media outrage is a rarely spoken truth about freedom: we are free to do whatever it is that the majority tell us to do. Britain is a liberal and wonderfully open-minded nation, so long as you're thinking and saying what the liberal and wonderfully open-minded people think and say. Heaven forbid that you dare offer an alternative point of view on war, terrorism, migration, civil liberties, Europe, policing, crime, gender, housing, cycling, unions, beards, smoking, drugs, druids, drones, Scotland, trains, tattoos, teaching, One Direction, ethnic studies, football, Crufts, television, HS2, or ethic spoon medicine. Dare to defend a rapist and the mob will tear you to pieces, just like they did with TV presenter and journalist, Judy Finnigan, when she recently tried to make a nuanced point about a footballer's rape case. Don't mention hunting lest you provoke the opprobrium of the Countryside lobby who attacked BBC naturalist Chris Packham when he dared to express an opinion on a subject he's considered an expert. A man can't even say that Elton John's latest album rots his ears without that being taken as an attack on the entire LGBT community.

Of course, both the political left and right have their own protected airspace. On the left, it's union rights, minimum wage, and equality. On the right it's the monarchy, law and order, and immigration. There are broader taboos which exist in the public sphere and you can usually tell when you've strayed because you'll receive the 'you can't say that' warning from work colleagues. It's the nature of public opinion that the current safe zone moves like starlings on the wing: a large homogenous mass, keeping the stragglers in order should they move counter to the prevailing direction.

The problem with this is that it rarely allows true freedom of speech and popularity doesn't itself prove an objective truth. Simply because something is acceptable to the masses, it doesn't mean that an attitude is right. In the 1970s, racism, sexism and homophobia were lauded as good old honest British traits. Those who didn't play by the common rules were condemned as either outdated or misguided when decades later they would be seen as visionary or brave.

In truth, most of us know this already. There's nothing here that isn't common sense. It really comes down to how we each act based on our convictions. Most of us are pretty cowardly when it comes to our deeply held convictions. We sometimes profess to likes and dislikes simply in order to fit into the crowd. It's why the ballot box is protected and votes are (supposedly) anonymous. It takes a brave person to stand apart when they know it will draw people's ire.

Personally, I'm not much of a republican but neither am I much of a monarchist. I dislike the media sandstorms that surround the Royal Family but I appreciate the value of having a non-political head of state. I am, however, a confirmed atheist and singing 'God save the Queen' always sticks in my throat. Yet I'd have probably mumbled along to save myself the trouble of explaining myself. Laziness would have led me to mumble something. And perhaps that's what we're missing here. Corbyn could have taken the easy route. He could have moved his lips and no questions would have been asked. He didn't and that says something creditable about his character. It's just a shame that it plays into a convenient narrative for the right wing press.

Because, really, veterans are wrong to feel offended. They should be proud that their sacrifices allowed us to have a nation where individuals still have a right to express their opinion. Sacrifice in the name of your country is one of the noblest acts but let's not confuse it with the cheap tricks of politicians and the press who use talk of sacrifice, honour, memory and patriotism for their own shameful ends.

David Cameron Refugee Cartoon

Corbyn Cartoon

A Jeremy Corbyn Cartoon

The Spine's Beckham Podcast: What exactly art thou Romeo?

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

Precision-Guided Cynicism

'I'll tell you what,' said the man on the 141, lowering his paper. 'I agree with what that David Cameron's done.'

'What's that?' asked the woman, who was coincidentally also on the 141 but gazing out the window towards Boots.

'He's had them bloody British Isis fighters blown up. Good riddance to 'em!'

'They were going to shoot the Queen,' tutted the woman. 'We can't be having that!'

'Indeed we can't!' I thought to myself from the seat behind.

The man and woman on the 141 were pretty typical of the mood on Britain's buses this Tuesday morning. 'Wham! Bam! ..Thank you Cam' was the exact headline on the day's edition of The Sun. I say 'exact' because I'm less sure about the legitimacy of their punctuation than I am sure about the legitimacy of the drone strikes. If running off to join a theocratic death cult seeking to replace all democracies in the world with a caliphate through forms of barbaric torture, abuse and murder doesn't make you the legitimate target for precision munitions, then I don't know what does. The only mildly questionable part of the action was the targeting of British nationals. Depending on how you spin your logic, this was either an act of national self defence or an example of state sanctioned assassination. A nation meting out justice to its own nationals seems reasonably more acceptable than meting justice out on non-nationals but others might argue the opposite. The difference is a matter for the lawyers to write cheques about. In most people's minds, the Daesh fighters gave the government legitimacy the moment they tried to weaponise their passports.

Yet beyond the general sense of it being a case of 'one of up for the good guys', David Cameron has here set quite the precedent. The UK government now claims the right to kill any person on the planet who threatens our national security. Just so long as they have the approval of a majority of people on the nation's buses, Cameron et al are on firm ground. Indeed, standing at the Despatch Box, Cameron seemed immune to criticism. He repeated a defence that has been used countless times by Prime Ministers before him. 'My first duty as Prime Minister is to keep the British people safe. That is what I'll always do. [...] I'm not prepared to stand here in the aftermath of a terrorist attack on our streets and have to explain to the House why I did not take the chance to prevent it when I could have done'.

Again, there's little to criticise in the specific details. This was a black and white case of the good guys taking out the bad. Yet set this into the broader context and you might begin to feel that the black and whites do occasionally slide into to grey.

What makes me pause to think is the timing of this murky business. These strikes took place on the 21st of August, two weeks before Cameron stood up in the Commons. It felt like such a convenient time to make this announcement. A day before, Cameron had been the subject of widespread condemnation as the British government repeatedly tried to hide behind the curtains as the world looked for somebody to aid the Syrian refugees. A day later, the couple on the 141 bus had forgotten all about the refugees and were full of praise for their Leader. Clever? Convenient? Planned? Is there any coincidence that long-term Cameron friend, Rebekah Brooks, returned to News UK (owners of The Sun) just last week? Is it a case of The Sun what spun it?

Secondly, this announcement comes just days before the Labour leadership election. It's been widely reported that the Conservatives are looking forward to testing the anti-war resolve of Labour's new leader, whichever candidate called Jeremy Corbyn might win. The drone strikes were possibly the first stage in that political war and we can expect to see the distinctions grow finer between waging an air campaign over Syria and fighting a proxy war fought trough drones. Cameron readily talks about 'meticulous planning' and this 'precision airstrike' but, tellingly, he didn't mention 'drone' (the commonplace term) but 'remotely piloted aircraft' which makes it feel so much more conventional. I should also imagine that much of the ordinance dropped from UK aircraft has the word 'precision' stencilled somewhere on their casing. It leaves me to wonder if the remarkable part of this story isn't the precision nature of the weapon but the precision nature of the politics. It wasn't the military operation that was well planned. It was the way the story was deployed at a moment of government crisis. The story left a front page crater a headline wide. The Syrian refugee story never had a chance.

 

#OpenComics The College

I drew this for the #OpenComics Untold Stories Eyewitness thingymabob over at The Guardian.

Why Hodder should give £500,000 to Jonathan Bate, Stanley Wells or James Shapiro

Blimey, I thought, elbowing myself from under the sheets this rain-splattered AM. The sound on the window was like ball bearings jumping in a frying pan and I smartly reached for my ten inch to check for weather alerts. It wasn't too far from here that hailstones recently fell the size of coconuts and I wanted to be sure that I shouldn't slip into my Kevlar PJs before continuing to idle through my Sunday morning.

Now, you might wonder about my proximity to high tech but it's my usual habit to wake and immediately check the news on my Android tablet. I like to know the day's running order and to see what the various tyrants have been doing whilst I was otherwise engaged. It was how I came to see the headline about Boris and why I untangled myself from the sheets as my bleary eyes took in the details. If the reports are correct, Boris has been commissioned to write a book about Shakespeare and Hodder are currently shelling his back garden with half a million in bundled fivers. I expect him to catch them all too, with those big novelty-sized hands of his.

All of this resolved itself into the loud sob I gave before sinking back into my pillow.

I fell back to sleep and had one of those strangely lucid dream sequences which shifted the stage scenery with remarkable fluidity. One moment, I was an MP, spending  my every waking hour trying to help the people of my constituency. The next moment, I was Mayor of London and there wasn't an hour when I wasn't trying to earn the trust of London and improving the state of the city. Then somebody pulled a few ropes and my dream shifted again. This time I was a newspaper columnist and it was my life. Every day I'd devote to writing the most blistering column and earning the respect and trust of my readers. Then, just before I woke up, I was trying with every particle of my being to write the best biography of Shakespeare that I could.

Eyes open, I groaned again. It was still raining and Boris Johnson is still doing none of his jobs properly because he's being paid handsomely to do all four.

I don't quite know what to say now that I'm fully awake. Perhaps my response is just the jealousy of a man who struggles to earn a living from either his writing or his cartoons, no matter how much time and energy he invests into them. £500,000 would set me for life and I'd write twenty books, drawn thousands upon thousands of cartoons... Hell, I'd even do all that for a tenth of that.

Perhaps it's the disgust of a man who finds it hard to value his own work and could not write anything for anybody unless he'd put his soul into it. Perhaps this is what 'aspiration' means in this modern Conservative Britain. Is Boris simply one of those 'hard-working people' the Tories are always banging on about? Or is he simply greedy?

Apparently (thank you Google) as Mayor he earns a recently-reduced salary of £47,970 a year. As an MP he will be earning £74,000 plus allowances. As Shakespeare's biographer, he's going to earn £500,000. All of that in addition to what is apparently a £275,000 salary from The Daily Telegraph.

It would beg the question 'why' if it didn't also beg the equally obvious answer.

Boris is a name. You might have noticed that I've so far omitted the name 'Johnson'  from this post, yet, if you live in the UK, I'm fairly certain you'd have still known who I'm talking about. There isn't another 'Boris'. Boris Becker is 'Becker' and Karloff is 'Karloff'. No other Boris is just 'Boris'.

The name means everything in a culture dominated by brands. The Boris brand is easy to describe. It's fruity, bumbling, larger than life, Edwardian, disheveled, witty and displaying that brand of intellect that is also slightly shallow as befits a man who read the Classics and received 2.2 from Oxford. Boris is the kind of man who can make any dumb idea sound brilliant simply by quoting Phaedrus's fable of the charging rhinoceros. Take some non-cyclists and put them on heavy unwieldy bicycles before throwing them into heavy London traffic? Why, as Phaedrus's rhinoceros says when it's about to gore the baobab tree: 'Boris Bikes are spiffing idea...'

The resulting book will reflect the Boris persona and if it sets the charts alight (and I'd be surprised if Hodder get their money back) it won't be because of the scholarship. There are few major figures in British history about whom we know less than Shakespeare and unless Boris has access to a secret library unavailable to the major scholars, Boris's book will be full of speculation and plenty of the old verbatim, cemented together with a pithy jokes in the style of a slightly glandular Jeeves. Boris's Shakespeare will be the Shakespeare of biscuit tins and tea towels. It will be the flag waving Bard whose history is presented as a homily to modern bombastic British conservatism and the next Tory leader. Huzzah and hurrah!

And no doubt many people will love it. Marketing tends to do that to a book, so long as the book is half decent. They will love it because there is nothing quite so devalued in the world like true scholarship. And that is what is so deeply depressing about this story. It is more evidence to support the hypothesis that this is no meritocracy. We live in a country in which Ian Duncan Smith, author of The Devil's Tune (Amazon, one and a half stars), decides the fate of writers and artists. It's the society where David Cameron and George Osborne talk about hard work, having lived their entire lives cosseted by the establishment.

There are people out there who would leap at the chance to do any one of Boris's jobs and most of them would treat the work with the respect it deserves. There are people who would make better MPs. There are men and women who would make  better mayors. It would churlish to suggest that some would be better columnists than Boris. The Telegraph gig is the one job he possibly deserves given he cultivated the Boris character in his writing. Yet as an biographer, we can only judge his talents based on his prior biography of Churchill which was readable and sometimes funny, but ultimately shallow and reads like the flim of history pasted together with plenty of flam.

It's hard to imagine Hodder throwing half a million at Jonathan Bate, Stanley Wells or James Shapiro to write the Shakespeare biography but for their money they'd probably get one of the best biographies of Shakespeare out there, using careful reading of the texts to justify solid scholarship and serious research to reveal new facets to the man. Yet consider this: £100,000 would be far more than even top academics get as the advance for a book, so why the hell doesn't Hodder commission five biographies from the world's top Shakespearean scholars? Except they won't because names like Bate and Wells and Shapiro don't resonate with the public who salivate at the name Boris.

Why would Hodder want authenticity when they can have Boris at five times the price?

 

Public Servant

It never fails to amaze me that Tories preach low-cost government except when it comes to their expenses. Not that any party is immune to dunderheads claiming scraps on the flawed logic that each of these small expenses mount up over a year. How much is a bad headline worth? I'm sure it's a hell of a lot more than these so called 'expenses'. I'm far less wealthy than any of these Tories yet it would never occur to me to claim pence, even if I were able. I notice that Ian Duncan Smith had his official credit card suspended after he'd maxed it out on expenses. Baffles me. We're all in it together, apparently, but as Orwell might have phrased it, some of us are more in it than others.

Thinking of a happy place: Tested.com

Tested.com gets even better with each passing week.

I found the site perhaps a year or so ago and I doubt if there's a day I don't visit morning, afternoon, and evening. Psychologically it's such a good place to be that I'm probably living my life on San Francisco time.

To understand my mild obsession, you have to know that I live in a small northern working class town with no culture to speak of. I have to travel miles into either Liverpool or Manchester to find a bookshop. We have none locally and, thanks to government cuts, our local library has already been half-demolished. Not all is bad news, however. As a town we have eight tattoo parlours. I suspect I'm the only guy in town that doesn't have a single tattoo. Not sure if you can understand how that makes me feel except to say that I feel utterly like a freak: hugely overqualified, can't find decent work, and with interests that few people share. And that's why I love Tested. It's a window onto a better world where being a tattoo-free over-educated nerd is the thing to be.

I've never been so proud of being a nerd as I've been since I discovered Tested. It's filled with articulate people talking about things that fascinate them. Amazingly for an American website, it's not shrill. It's not that horrible twisted version of nerddom you find on Battlebots, where the jocks have taken over and the nerds pushed to one side. Tested is pure unadulterated nerd: intelligent, occasionally awkward, but so totally human. I've never bought a scale replica of anything in my life and I don't intend to start now. However, for reasons I can't fully explain, I now find myself fascinated with replicas. Maybe it's the design, the artwork, or simply the craftsmanship. Never before in my life have I wanted to know how to make a foam mould of something yet I've watched more Frank Ippolito videos about learning to mould than is healthy for a man who never intends to make a mould. I even find myself growing interested in technology that has never before really been my thing, such as 3d printing, drones, miniature cameras, and virtual reality.

None of it makes any sense to me yet, somehow, the site makes complete sense.

The site actually makes me want to use a lathe and I have absolutely no reason to use a lathe...

I suppose it makes sense in the way their most casual conversations affect my life. The site is largely hosted by Norman Chan and Will Smith, who carry the weight of the output. Adam Savage, of Mythbuster's fame, is the Big Daddy of the operation and it's his energy which infects everything they do. However, it's Will and Norm that keep me watching because they carry their knowledge lightly, with enough humour to keep it grounded and well away from that Comic Book Guy cliche that makes that entire world so off-putting.

If you'd told me years ago that my favourite website would be about making a replica topiary, I'd have said that you were deluded. Yet that's exactly how I felt watching Savage build a replica of the Overlook Hotel maze a few months ago.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zAGu2TPt_78

What's key is that the whole thing is largely unscripted and people talk about the things that interest them without dumbing everything down. The BBC New usually begin every story about Pluto by reminding people that Pluto is far from the sun so it's cold. Tested take that stuff for granted and it's a huge relief that they do. When the talk, I find myself feeling dumb because I don't know half of the stuff they know. It triggers my brain into activity and to hunt out answers. I happily stick one of their podcasts on in the background as I work and I'm in raptures because it constantly helps me generate new ideas. I've not read science fiction in too many years but, thanks to Tested, I've rediscovered my love for hard science fiction. It's so good to listen to people who are as excited by NASA's Pluto flyby as I was.

The week before last was Comic Con in San Diego, an event that largely passes me by because I'm not a huge fan of superheroes hype. I don't read any of the comics (I tend to prefer underground comics), though I've a passing awareness of Frank Miller's Dark Knight. I'm not the full-on fan but enough that I've seen the odd animated film in addition to the live action Batman movies. Avengers leaves me cold like near all of Stan Lee's oeuvre, with the exception being Spiderman. In fact, I'm pretty picky in my tastes. I love the best stuff and I'm very dismissive of the worst. Loved the new Dredd movie, hated Captain America.

Yet Tested just knows how to work its way around my defences. Watching a grown man excited by the cooling system he's created for his cosplay replica suit from Kubrick's 2001 is about as good as the internet gets. The fact that he then introduces a second suit for astronaut Chris Hadfield and they begin to talk about how Kubrick got the sound effects for 2001...

Well, this weekend, realising I wanted to write this blog post explaining my love for the site, I thought I'd do that by putting it into a cartoon. So, here is my latest, in honour of what, for me, is undoubtedly the best site on the web.

If you haven't already and you suspect you have an inner nerd, go check out Tested.com.

Seveneves and the Crazy Final Third: Why?

Why did he do it? Why did Neil Stephenson ruin his own book? There I was, rattling along with what I thought was a sublimely good book. Then the last third happened and all my good feelings for him as a writer disappeared in an instant. Before that point, I was considering buying his earlier books. Now... I'm probably going to leave it a while before I risk again disappointing myself on this scale.

Yet all of this was avoidable. Why did nobody tell him to stop? Why did his editor not suck their teeth and suggest that he end things around page 600? The first two thirds: one of the best science fiction books I've ever read. It really was that good and barely any part of it felt like a drag. I found myself squirreling myself away in gaps in my day, just to guiltily enjoy another few pages. The moment I finish that second third, I thought: wow. Great book. Great ending. Up there with the best of Arthur C Clarke. Then that last third happened...

Why? It could have been a book in itself or it could have been a two page chapter. Other writers have done just that. What was he thinking writing three hundred page conclusion that felt like an entirely different book? I'll be honest. Tonight I gave up. I'd read about 200 of those pages but my mind had gone long before that. I found myself wondering if I had better things to do and I realised that I had. I was bored out of my mind with the endless descriptions of things I just couldn't visualise and so many neologisms that at times it felt like I was suffering from word blindness. I just couldn't read about one more snake like robot whip like tendril doing something, connecting to something, swinging at something, disconnecting from sometime... It was driving me crazy!

Sorry. I had to get that off my chest.

But if you're in the mood for some excellent sci-fi, you should try the first two thirds of Seveneves and then treat the final third as one of those sample chapters to a rather dry and boring sequel that you'll never get around to reading.

 

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.