The ghost of Mary Whitehouse

If you didn't see last night's Newsnight discussion on the Gordon Brown bullying uproar, watch it on iPlayer immediately.  It was brilliant TV.  Paxman mediated, and stoked vigorously, a rumble between Andrew Rawnsley (the Observer journo who broke the story), Roy Hattersley (indignantly spraying like a tomcat), David Steel and a Times hack while John Prescott's disembodied blubbery head floated above them all, bellowing incoherently via videolink.

It was a strange discussion - a group of political and media professionals attacking a journalist for not being willing to reveal his confidential sources.  You would have thought the "off the record" concept would be one with which they would be intimately familiar, but apparently not.  Prescott worked himself up into a particuarly petulant tizzy, howling like a wounded bison at one point when he though Rawnsley was being given too much airtime.

There was also a very odd example of the BBC's namby-pamby terror of causing any offence to anyone.  Paxman read out an extract of our poor doomed PM's alleged ravings that included a Bad Word.  I didn't really notice at the time, because I'm an adult who interacts with other adults in the year 2010.  Like literally 100% of the Newsnight audience.  But a few minutes later, under orders from an earpiece minion, Paxo apologised for his dreadful lapse, his big horse face clearly registering his disgust at having to do so.

It was a full 2 hours after the watershed and the Bad Word was important context as part of the discussion.  Any youngsters inexplicably watching would have been more traumatised by the scary melty-faced man on the video screen and his terrible grammar than sweary old Paxman.  A brainless concession that patronised rather than respected the audience.  Harrumph!

Yours,
Disgusted of Oval

Famous wankers

I've been enjoying this Word website discussion on famous people who are abject tools in real life:

/www.wordmagazine.co.uk/content/famous-people-you-have-met-who-are-wankers

Being a generally good natured forum it also includes plenty on very nice celebs (for example: "Michael Caine was nice as pie when my son (then 3) wee'd on his shoes in Harrods.  MC said "never mind son" in his very best Alfie voice and wiped his expensive loafers down with some toilet roll"). 

Worth a read if you're bored - given that you're reading this blog you must almost be at the sewing-name-tags-into-your-socks stage already.  A few choice samples:

• I witnessed Jeremy Clarkson reduce a pretty young sales girl to tears when she could not supply him with what he was asking for immediately.  It was awful.  It wasn't so much what he said, but the way he said it. His face contorted in that horrid, condescending, smug little snarl he has.
  
• My colleague Jane was responsible for two Morrissey album campaigns - marketing, promo etc.  She was a lifelong fan, but remained professional and scrupulous about every aspect of the campaign, accompanying him to interviews, attending to his every need - of which there were very many.
  
  Moz appeared on Friday Night with Jonathan Ross, his first TV interview for years and years.  This was A Big Deal.  Ross interviews each guest for a good 45 minutes or so, which is then cut down to bitesize for broadcast.  For 35 of his alloted 45, Morrissey, bizarrely, laid in to David Bowie, denouncing him as a fake, a sell-out, a has-been, a charlatan.  This saw to discomfit Ross, he being a lifelong Bowie obsessive.  Indeed, it appeared to be a tactic or strategy on Morrissey's part, for God knows why.  The remaining 10 minutes were full of nothing very much but uncomfortable pauses, ums and ahs.  The resulting broadcast interview, culled solely from those 10 minutes, was an embarrassing disaster.
  
  Returning to the green room, Jane sought to reassure the clearly disturbed Morrissey, offering Don't worries and It'll be fines, etc.
  
  Next morning at the office, Jane received a fax from Morrissey (he communicated mostly via fax) 'Jane, I bombed last night and you weren't man enough to tell me.  I think it would be best if we don't see each other again.'  To say Jane was upset would be something of an understatement.  Nice bloke.
• At a cricket match in Weston Supermare a young boy spots John Cleese sitting in a deck chair enjoying the day's sport apparently unrecognised by those around him.  The boy approaches and asks for an autograph. JC leans in close and whispers "What happens next is not your fault".  JC then stands up and gives the boy two minutes of the full Basil Fawlty righteous indignation and furious anger.  Arm waving, who do you think you are, I only came to watch the cricket in peace, the full package.  Those around watch in stunned silence at this appalling behaviour.  When he had finished JC leant in close to the boy again and whispered "Thanks, no-one will bother me for the rest of the match now", signed the autograph and returned to his seat.

Literary corner

This article on the Guardian website reminded me about one of my favourite books - The Old Devils by Kingsley Amis.  Well worth a read.  The article deals with the plot and so on but suffice to say it's a weird combination of brilliantly funny and horribly sad.

I tend to apply a famine or feast approach to authors, so I haven't read much Kingsley in recent years following a period of a major obsession.  This madness peaked with the purchase of his collected letters, all 1212 pages of them. They sit on my bookcase as the literary equivalent of ordering an enormous cake when you're not even hungry. Selected randomly, I give you the following indispensible classic from 27 May 1964:

Dear Miss Barber

I hereby resign from the Society of Authors.  I was just about prepared to go on paying £2-12-6 a year to an organisation that does nothing for me, but when the price goes up to £5-5-0 I jib.

Yours sincerely etc

I would put it in the bog but I'm not sure how much the missus wants to sprain her wrists wrestling with a gigantic brick just to read racist letters to Philip Larkin.

The recent publicity around Martin son-of-Kingsley's latest pile of pretentious wank-fodder has also made me nostalgic.  One of the happiest days of my life was when I realised that no one was making me read London Fields and its endless turgid sentences, and that I could just stop and read something else instead.  The only Martin Amis worth reading is his autobiography Experience, and that's because it's mainly about Kingsley and Fred West (one of whose victims was Martin's cousin).  Just skip any reference to his teeth or Saul Bellow.

That's also where I got my favourite Fred West fact - that he used to munch onions like anyone else would eat an apple.

Buxton's back

The Adam & Joe 6 Music radio show went on sabbatical at the start of the year and life has been noticeably gloomier since. My spirits lifted a couple of weeks ago when I saw that half of the genius duo, Adam Buxton, was starring a new BBC2 comedy called The Persuasionists. My spirits then simultaneously crashed face-first into the floor when it turned out to be one of the lamest TV shows I have ever seen. A poverty-stricken man's IT Crowd, which isn't that good in the first place.

Being an empathetic sort I wondered how Adam would take the universal raspberries blowing out from every review of the show. I don't need to now as he's posted the brilliant video below on his site. It's career-tainting failure dealt with head-on.