My little phoney

Belatedly caught War Horse yesterday afternoon. (It seemed like it would suit the matinee mood, and it did.) I had been forewarned by enough critics I respect that this was not Spielberg’s finest hour, and that after the clever horse’s-eye-view of the book, and the clever puppetry of the stage play, this was a pretty conventional telling of the tale, so I went in with low expectations. My expectations were met.

I have nothing against Steven Spielberg. It would be churlish to deny him the crown of the-modern-day’s-Howard-Hawks (a big compliment from where I’m sitting), but he doesn’t always knock it out of the park. How could he? But having made two strong, serious films about World War II, I’d hoped for something a bit more meaningful and original from him about World War I. Instead, outside of a couple of good, David Lean-exhuming set pieces, War Horse felt like a string of sometimes excruciating clichés and mechnical story beats. It reminded me more of Lassie Come Home, or, for a more contemporary but no less helpful comparison, Babe, than it did Saving Private Ryan. As has been pointed out already, the establishing act, set in rural Devon, was about as authentic-seeming as The Darling Buds Of May. Since Spielberg went to all the trouble of shooting it in Devon (and a bit of Wiltshire), this is a pretty unfortunate outcome.

A mostly English cast worked wonders with the Devon accent, but set, as they were, within a totally unreal, backlot vision of country life, even the august likes of David Thewlis and Emily Watson sounded hokey. It’s not giving anything away to say that the action returns to Devon at the end, but when it does, Spielberg opts to paint the sky a golden/queasy yellow, as if perhaps Michael Bay had sat in for him that day, and everything looks post-apocalyptic, rather than Gone With The Wind glorious. This heavy-handed approach is fairly typical of the whole film. Nothing is allowed to go past without being sugar-coated or drained of blood.

Based of course on a children’s book, this is a “family film” about one boy and his horse who must both go off to war without losing their 12A certificate, and as such, even the horrors of the barbed wire and the trenches and the mustard gas feel sanitised for afternoon consumption. (At one stage, the sail of a windmill in the foreground helpfully goes past to discreetly mask an act of violence in the background. Technical masterstroke, or cheap sleight of hand?) It’s hard to convey the obscenity of a conflict that killed nine million people without showing bodyparts in massive piles, but co-writer Richard Curtis managed to do it on a BBC Comedy budget 20 years ago, which is ironic.

Novelist Michael Morpurgo’s was such an interesting dramatic approach to the conflict, too; because the Great War marked the cusp of fully mechanised combat, the one million conscripted horses sent over to France from England represented the end of an era. It’s truly bizarre to see the first cavalry charge, on horseback, with swords outstretched, the beasts eventually cut down by German machine guns. This is one of the film’s successful set-pieces. Not only is it technically brilliant, it has something profound to say, and its outcome is unexpected. Spielberg pulls back from the massacre and, in long shot, shows us a field full of dead horses. This is not to suggest that Spielberg does not care about the human dead, as one rather extreme review put it, rather that he is adapting a book and play that put a new focus on the animals, none of whom volunteered.

Hey, I’m the soppy animal lover who’s supposed to lap all this stuff up. And yes, I had a tear in my eye at one point, which I won’t spoil, but I will say it had nothing to do with the suffering of a human man. To be honest, with the subject matter, and with the obligatory button-pushing John Williams score to help prompt me WHEN TO BE SAD, I was disappointed not to be in middle-aged floods the whole way through. But I found War Horse oddly unmoving for the most part, even with all those gorgeous animal actors onscreen. (Apparently Joey was played by 14 separate horses; I was disappointed they were not named in the credits, which I sat through to the bitter end by the way.)

Drama can drift into melodrama very quickly if you don’t watch yourself, and some of the broader strokes in War Horse do just that – the “comedy” goose chasing off the nasty landlord and his men; the entire village turning out to watch Joey pull a plough through an intransigent field. And yet, the film’s most audacious sequence – its equivalent of the famous No-Man’s Land kickabout of legend, whose details I won’t spoil – works.

It’s pretty clear that War Horse is not a bad film, but I fear it was a bad idea to turn an unusual book and an unusual play (I understand Curtis and co-writer the also talented populist Lee Hall took elements of both) into a usual film. Spielberg likes to entertain as many people as possible. This is an admirable ambition, and has led to some of the best blockbusters of my lifetime. But it’s significant, I think, that he went all the way up to a 15 certificate for his two WWII films.

I don’t think you can “blame” the deficiencies of War Horse on the script, and you certainly can’t blame it on  the acting. Some of our finest thesps crop up in tiny roles and do great things with them: Liam Cunningham, Eddie Marsan, Geoff Bell, Toby Kebbel, Johnny Harris. But with all that talent on tap, and with two war horses like Curtis and Hall at the typewriter, something went awry. It must be somebody’s fault. And it wasn’t the animal trainers.

At the end of the day, it’s a battle between sentimentality and horror, and ends up in a no-man’s land of its own making.

I haven’t mentioned Coriolanus, Ralph Fiennes’ directorial debut, and his chance to play the Roman emperor onscreen, having already played him onstage, but if you like your Shakespeare in a modern setting – in this case, an unnamed war-torn Balkan country, albeit filmed in Belgrade so you get the general idea – it’s convincingly done. And Fiennes makes a pretty powerful Coriolanus, with his shaved head, dog tags and khaki vest. Less impressive is Gerard Butler as his nemesis, who mangles some of his lines, but his is not the worst crime; for me, an overcooked Vanessa Redgrave had the effect of smothering all around her whenever she was onscreen. Also, there is too much reliance of faked TV news footage to explain the action and to underline the modern re-staging, and I found Jon Snow delivering Iambic pentameter to be unintentionally comic (unless it was intentionally comic, in which case I withdraw my criticism). But I really liked Brian Cox and James Nesbitt, and I managed to follow the story, which is not always easy with what are, let us not be coy, very old plays. The story is a bit repetitive, but that’s the bloke who wrote the play’s fault, surely?

I always needed a bit of visual help when studying Shakespeare at school, and will always be grateful to the BBC Macbeth with Ian McKellen, and the BBC Othello with Anthony Hopkins and Bob Hoskins. I’m sure this will help students of Coriolanus. And hey, it’s another of the 50 films Jessica Chastain made last year. She’s the female Ryan Gosling.

 

 

Apologies for the late running of these film reviews. I am hard at work writing the second series of Mr Blue Sky and that must take priority, as you can imagine. (Deadline for all six episodes: end of February.)

Tags: cinema, Shakespeare, Spielberg, war, WWI

But who are the other two people?

The full coverage of last week’s Radio Times Covers Party is now online at the RT website, and in this week’s magazine. But they have kindly allowed me to publish this exclusive session here. About two thirds of the way through the well-oiled occasion, I asked if I might have my photo taken in the pop-up studio in the lobby of Claridge’s. Strict picture editor Olivia quite rightly declined my request and said that I could only have my snap taken with the prop RT cover if I delivered a famous person to be photographed with. Duly challenged, within moments I had delivered Vic Reeves and Vicky McClure, legends both, who happened to be deep in conversation at the time, which I cheerily interrupted. They sportingly allowed me to invade their “cover.”

You know me: I live to stand next to famous people. But this was a particularly charming constellation, I thought.

By the way, you thought the comments left on the Guardian website were bitchy and negative. Beneath the coverage on the Radio Times site, someone posting under their full name (to their credit), wrote: “And we’re meant to be impressed by this self-congratulatory event, how … ?”

Ouch.

PHOTOGRAPHS: GARY MOYES

And here’s a final crop to finish …

Tags: Photos, Radio Times, RT, self-congratulation, This Is England, Vic Reeves

Hoover-building

In any other year, I suspect Clint Eastwood’s J. Edgar would be all over the award nominations, with Leonardo DiCaprio a strong contender for best actor. As it is, it seems to have been barged out of the way, outclassed by the competition. (The film notched up one nomination at the Globes, for Leo, and has two at the imminent Screen Actors’ Guild awards, one for Leo – where he finds himself up against the expected Clooney, Pitt and Dujardin – the other for his excellent co-star Armie Hammer – who will presumably fall to Plummer or Branagh.) There’s no need for us to cry into our hankies. Clint Eastwood only has to make a film these days to earn an automatic place in the shortlists, and that can be tiresome and predictable. But the reviews for J. Edgar have also been lukewarm. Peter Bradshaw all but took it apart in the Guardian.

I went to see it yesterday with expectations lowered. And it turned out to be rather good. I have a keen interest in 20th century American history, and in US politics in general, and enjoyed seeing 40 years replayed, albeit rather more selectively and thus in more detail, than the comparable time frame covered by The Iron Lady. J. Edgar Hoover ran the Federal Bureau of Investigation from its inception at the Justice Dept in 1935 to his death in 1972, although the film, written by Dustin Lance Black, begins in 1919, when the up-and-coming 24-year-old Hoover was put in charge of a new bureau charged with weeding out radicals. This became his calling.

Because most of his private files were destroyed before the Nixon administration could seize them on his death, much of his story remains speculative, especially the infamous bit about him wearing women’s clothing – something of an own goal for a man whose reputation was built upon the old-fashioned Republican tenets of God-fearing moralism and family values. He never married, and lived with his mother (here played by Judi Dench, whose American accent occasionally wobbles but whose presence is suitably dominant), and Black’s screenplay, while never lurid, makes Hoover out to be quite the repressed “radical and subversive” himself.

His previous film was the excellent Milk, and there are similarities here, in that both are biopics of sexually unconventional political figures – albeit one out, the other closeted – told using the device of the character dictating the story of his own life for posterity. Harvey Milk is seen relaying his memoir into a cassette recorder as if certain of his own looming assassination; Hoover dictates, and embroiders, his to a series of agents at a typewriter, driven to do so by the ill-health of old age. It’s a well-worn framing device, and means both stories are told in flashback, but it helps to arrange the material in a clear and chronological fashion, which is particularly useful if you’re not familiar with the facts. (I knew little about Milk; I know plenty about Hoover.)

What seems to bother a number of critics is the way some aspects of Hoover’s career and character are foregrounded, while others are skipped over. This is built into any biopic lasting shorter than, say, eight hours. The Iron Lady got round it by providing only the most shallow soundbites to ratchet up the career highlights. J. Edgar does so by making the Lindbergh kidnapping and eventual, forensic-driven outcome its central drama, a turning point in Federal law, and in the reputation of the FBI, and thus of Hoover. I found it persuasively staged, and if it meant that less screen time could be devoted to, say, his witch hunts against the likes of Sean Seberg or Charlie Chaplin, or his failure to address the Mafia, well, something had to go. (There is a single scene with Bobby Kennedy, which touches on organised crime, one of the Attorney General’s pet subjects, but its central purpose is really to show that Hoover had to blackmail to keep his job with more moderate administrations.)

There’s no shying away from the fact that Hoover was a poisonous, bigoted hypocrite, but I found Black’s treatment of his career-long platonic love affair with his number two, the energetic and loyal Clyde Tolson (Armie Hammer, last seen playing both Winklevoss twins in The Social Network, and very good indeed here) actually rather sweet. Hoover is a mess of contradictions and repressed feelings, and would rather physically fight Tolson over challenges to his heterosexuality than kiss him, but as the two men age – call the makeup department! – their dotage brings with it a dignified acceptance that they are soul-mates even if they cannot be lovers. In the later scene where DiCaprio takes the top off Hammer’s boiled egg – the latter debilitated by a stroke – you are touched by the carefully controlled affection Hoover is prepared to exhibit in private.

This is not the same, I don’t think, as “humanising” Thatcher by showing her all forgetful and lonely in The Iron Lady. For a start, Hoover’s been dead since 1972, and his brand of red-hunting paranoia has been broadly replaced, while sexual honesty even in America has moved in apace (not least thanks to activists like Harvey Milk in the 1970s, and like Dustin Lance Black in the noughties and beyond). Because Clint Eastwood is a known Republican, it’s somewhat surprising that he would wish to make a biopic about a repressed homosexual who is shown, at one point, sniggering over the wording of a letter from Eleanor Roosevelt to an apparent lesbian lover, but Eastwood has actually made a film about old age, too. When DiCaprio and Hammer are trussed up in half a ton of latex for the Little Britain years – DiCaprio comes off better as an old geezer than Hammer – you really sense that the 80-year-old Eastwood identifies with them. There is a single kiss planted on Tolson’s head by Hoover that almost put a tear in my eye. This does not mean I forgive the man for hounding Martin Luther King and holding successive Presidents to ransom by foul means.

One of the main reasons I have stopped going to America since Bush is that I do not wish to add my fingerprints to the files of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Hoover set that in motion. His legacy is substantial. Anchored by an excellent, well-modulated turn by the Peter Pan of Hollywood, who finally carries some physical weight here, J. Edgar does a decent, if unshowy job of putting Hoover’s place in political history into some kind of personal perspective. And by kind of blaming him on his mother. LGBT activists worried that Eastwood might “de-gay” Black’s story, but he hasn’t, any more than he “de-Japanesed” Letters From Iwo Jima. Maybe he’s just getting a bit liberal in his old age. Something that never happened to Thatcher.

More soul-mates: a quick mention for Crazy, Stupid, Love, which I caught on DVD, and completes the set of Ryan Gosling’s Films of 2011, along with Drive, Blue Valentine and The Ides Of March. I thought I’d like it the least, but I didn’t, it’s actually my third favourite of those four films. This is a romantic comedy with a truly offputting title that conceals a significant dose of actual drama from writers/directors Glenn Ficarra and John Requa, whose first film behind the megaphone was gay true story I Love You Phillip Morris, which in truly professional style, I’ve only seen bits of, on telly, so cannot comment upon in an meaningful way.

The man in Sight & Sound accused the plot of Crazy, Stupid, Love of being “mechanical”, and it is, in that it seems to tell a number of random stories about love – the crazy kind and the stupid kind – which turn out to be interlinked in clever ways. But two of these links were complete surprises to me. I didn’t see either of them coming. So something must be going right. Gosling is the bar shark, whose pickup rate with available women is around 100%. But the star of the film is recent divorcee Steve Carell, whom Gosling takes under his wing and retrains in the art of seduction. Julianne Moore, Emma Stone and Marisa Tomei round out the high-class cast, but it’s good to see Carell dialling down the gurning a bit, and he shows signs of being a decent serious actor here, among all the coincidences and occasional broad, comedic strokes. There’s a scene where one character makes a speech at a public event which was one conventional, forced set-up too many, and some of the minor characters – particularly Emma Stone’s dopey boyfriend – were too much like cutouts compared to the warm-blooded leads, but overall, this was a well-written, offbeat drama.

There’s a running gag in J. Edgar – yes, a gag – about Hoover’s paranoia not about Communist plots, but about his waistline. Two characters refer to his extra bulk as “solid weight.” You expect a historical biopic to carry solid weight, but less so a romantic comedy with a terrible title. Crazy, Stupid, Love bucks that expectation. Give it a spin.

Tags: cinema, Clint Eastwood, comedy, Politics, ryan gosling, US history, US politics

The Fall

Yes, this week’s Telly Addict returns indulgently to the subject of Sherlock on BBC1, specifically its brain-teasing ending (don’t worry, you’ll get no theories from me, just supplementary praise and at least one clip of Molly), plus Stargazing Live on BBC2, the Golden Globes on E!, and a quick look at Nick Hewer on Countdown on C4. I hope you like my shirt.

Tags: Awards, BBC, BBC1, BBC2, C4, Guardian, Sherlock, Telly, Telly Addict, TV

Hung, er

It’s a talking point film, Shame. You’re sort of obliged to see it, so that you can talk about it afterwards to other people who’ve seen it. When I saw it, last year, at a preview screening, I ended up talking about it in the pub afterwards with fellow critic Adam Smith for about an hour. We didn’t go to the pub to talk about it. We went to the pub to have a drink and catch up. But we couldn’t stop talking about Shame, despite the fact that neither of us thought it the equal of director Steve McQueen’s debut, also starring Michael Fassbender, Hunger. It is still an artistic, thought-provoking piece, and Fassbender gives another raw and physical performance, but I’m not sure anything could live up to Hunger, which is one of the best films I’ve seen this century and haunts me still.

Shame is causing a stir because it’s about sex addiction, although not about shame, really. A tough sell, as anyone without an addictive personality will probably think being addicted to sex isn’t much of a hardship, but it clearly is. Also, you make a film about sex, and people are going to expect to be titillated, even if they don’t admit it. Shame does not titillate. Its job is to do the opposite, in order to get inside the mind of Fassbender’s Brandon, who has one of those identikit high-flying office jobs in New York that means he gets to live in a nice apartment, wear nice suits and drink in expensive bars. The film reminded me of American Psycho, although Brandon’s psychosis doesn’t really hurt anyone else, it mainly hurts him. And his sister, Carey Mulligan, whose surprise presence in his life hints at something incestuous but only hints.

Shame, written by McQueen and the currently feted Abi Morgan, does a lot of hinting. This is not a problem. I don’t need motivation spelling out, or backstory told in flashback, as long as the action and characterisation strike me as real. In this, Shame succeeds. It frames Brandon’s disease against a glamorous backdrop – hey, we’re in New York, even the dirty streets and trains seems glamorous! – and all this does is accentuate his inner turmoil.

It’s not an easy film to watch, as it throbs with discomfort and awkwardness. When Mulligan walks in on her brother masturbating, or he walks in on her showering, it knocks Mike Leigh into a cocked hat. Or a hatted cock, if you prefer. This might be a film about New York, or cities in general, and their ability to inflict deep loneliness and disconnection. This city never sleeps, and nor do its inhabitants. When Brandon goes outside and runs off his demons and his spare energy, we run with him, in an extended sequence that is McQueen’s bravura moment, one to rival the mopping up of the piss in Hunger, or indeed its extended 17-minute, one-take scene between Fassbender’s Bobby Sands and Liam Cunningham’s priest, Father Dom. It’s not quite the equal of either, of course.

I’ve been moaning about the mysterious absence of Tyrannosaur from the Bafta lists, but Shame is not exactly a popcorn movie. It’s art, and difficult art. And to see it racking up award nominations is gratifying. We’re so used to seeing sex onscreen and the conventions around its depiction, which even in intelligent drama dictate that the act itself fades from lovingly dissolved close-ups of hands on bodies while suitable music plays, to the next morning, when light creeps in on discarded underwear and lovers wake up looking a bit disheveled. Nothing so conventional here.

Hunger was a personal, historical film – not exactly a biopic but certainly a depiction of an event in a man’s life – and a subject that meant something to McQueen, who remembers the hunger strikes in 1981 from his childhood and researched the subject thoroughly. (His co-writer was Irish playwright Enda Walsh, who will have had an even closer understanding of the story.) In it, everything came together, and McQueen was able to take the filmmaking that had won him acclaim in the art world into a new setting. Anyone expecting a pretty series of artistic images would have been disappointed. There were beautiful images in it (a snowflake dissolving on a bruised fist), but these did not detract from the seriousness of the subject, nor disrupt what was a very straightforward narrative.

Shame is, in many ways, easier to watch, and its narrative is characterised by ambiguity and missing information. This, I guess, is why it’s such a talking point. That and the sex. It’s a deeply sad film. And you get to see a lot of Fassbender again, if you like a bit of lean, lithe, pale, hairless Irish/German flesh. He really is an incredible screen presence, and although he’s casting flavour of the month, I think he has a lot of integrity and talent, and he will outlast his own fashionability. Although he looks good naked, he’s not vain. You only have to see Hunger to know that.

If you haven’t seen Hunger, best rectify that first. Then have a look at Shame, but don’t see either with a date.

 

Tags: Bafta, cinema, Fassbender, Golden Globes, Oscar, Sex

Cheer up

And well you might look sad, Olivia Colman. Despite producing one of last year’s stand-out performances in film, namely, as abused wife and Christian charity shop manager Hannah in Paddy Considine’s devastating debut Tyrannosaur, you have been overlooked by the membership of Bafta in their 2012 nominations (which can be seen here in full). Instead, Leading Actress will go to one of the following five: Bérénice Bejo for The Artist; Meryl Streep for The Iron Lady, Michelle Williams for My Week With Marilyn; Tilda Swinton for We Need To Talk About Kevin; and Viola Davis for The Help (which I haven’t seen, for the record). All of the above are great performances – and I’m sure Davis is good in The Help, let’s give her the benefit of the doubt – but it seems a crying shame that Colman didn’t make the final five.

It’s a shame, but it’s not a scandal, as many peers and commentators have made it seem on the internet today. If you want to understand the Bafta voting system, it’s explained in detail here. Basically, the 6,500 Bafta members vote the starting list of about 250 contenders down to 15, the longlist, then vote that down the shortlist, after which they vote for their favourite from that list of five. In other words, their vote is not influenced – at least not directly or explicitly – by such cynicism-feeding factors as who will look good on the front row at the ceremony on TV, or who deserves an award because they will make the British film industry look good, or the who will make us look good because they are American and will therefore stop the Baftas looking parochial and insular.

I’m sure Bafta members ask their friends who they’ve voted for, in secret (just like Big Brother housemates always seem to do) or who they intend to vote for, but with 6,500 of them, a consensus is bound to arise, and it will, you have to expect, accurately reflect the views of the membership. This is not the Hollywood Press Association, or the public, it’s 6,500 mostly professional people from within or in the vicinity of the industry.

In other words, across those 6,500 members, Olivia Colman might actually have been their sixth favourite Leading Actress, as she was rightly included in the 15-strong longlist. She was also longlisted for Supporting Actress for The Iron Lady, interestingly enough. It would have been ironic if she’d made the shortlist for that but not for Tyrannosaur.

Frankly, as is well known, Tyrannosaur is easily one of my favourite films of last year – right up there with Kill List – and I’m hardly on a limb in this regard. But in both cases I can see why Bafta members might recoil from the subject matter, and the execution. Neither is an “easy” film. Certainly not as “easy” as My Week With Marilyn or The Help (which I haven’t seen, but I will eat my hat if it doesn’t have an uplifting message, something that Tyrannosaur doesn’t, at least not in the conventional sense). Tyrannosaur gets a nomination for Paddy Considine, which is cheering news, but that is the full extent of its Bafta recognition.

What we have here is a disconnect between a broad consensus and the personal passion of a number of individuals. It happens. It happens in elections, too. As we have established, in a democracy the middle ground wins elections, and not the fringes. The Artist may be French, and in its own way radical, but it’s easy to like, and will prevail, I think, in all the big award categories this season. Considine did not write his first feature film so that it would bag him an Oscar, but he might, in his heart of hearts, dared to imagine it being recognised by Bafta. Unfortunately, if it wasn’t eligible as an “Outstanding Debut” (which it is), we would be looking at a total snub.

Except it wouldn’t be a snub. It wouldn’t be the insidious result of an agenda, or of internal politics. It would just be a larger group of professionals not liking a film about horrible, depressing abuse and brutality, than those liking it.

Which doesn’t make it any easier to be Olivia Colman today, who has arguably delivered the performance of her career so far – because Considine cast her in a non-comic role and gave her so much more to get her teeth into – and it has slipped beneath the radar.

It is not abuse. It is the way of the world. You wanted democracy. You got it.

PS: It has been suggested – by none other than that nice man Boyd Hilton on Twitter – that both Shame and We Need To Talk About Kevin, nominated for best film, are less conventional than Tyrannosaur. It’s an interesting point. I would say that Tyrannosaur’s “conventionality” or otherwise isn’t really the issue here; it’s more about its unrelenting misery, all-round tone of grey despair and scenes of sadistic violence. Shame is about a rich man who has a lot of mechanical sex but can’t get a girlfriend. It’s a powerful film, but actually pretty glamorous with its New York setting, and the only abuse is really self-abuse. Kevin is definitely disturbing, but it has moments of happy home life at the beginning (against which the nightmare plays out) and again has a bright, aspirational, middle-class setting (again, which points up the nightmare). But do discuss!

Tags: Awards, Bafta, British cinema, nominations, Tyrannosaur

Do you want ice with that?

Still wearing the jumper, still watching the TV programmes and talking about them. This week’s Telly Addict from backstage at the shrinking Guardian newspaper looks at Dancing On Ice on ITV1; Borgen on BBC4, or BBC Denmark as it’s soon to be rebranded; and two new sitcoms, The New Girl on C4, and Stella on Sky1. Nothing on the new series of Celebrity Big Brother, as I only recognised five of the initial 12 housemates, and from now on, I’m operating a strict 50% Celebrity Recognition Threshold system. (This seems only fair. Even if I hadn’t recongised me on Celebrity Mastermind, I would have scored 75% recognition, and that’s only one edition; across the series, it would definitely have averaged out at more than 50%.)

Oh by the way, the Big Brother house has two twins in it, who might count as two, which makes five out of 13, but I hadn’t heard of them collectively or individually, so it makes no real difference.

Tags: BBC4, C4, Danish, Guardian, ITV1, Sky1, Telly, Telly Addict, TV

Republican party reptiles

I find myself unnaturally interested in American politics. I have been ever since Mad magazine introduced me, satirically, to President Carter in the 70s and I was forced to learn about his predecessors in order to understand the jokes. Clearly, around Presidential Election time, my interest swells. As a loyal and voracious subscriber to the New Yorker since 2005, I am fed information on a weekly basis about the comings and goings not just of the Democrats the left-leaning magazine explicitly supports, but also of the colourful Republicans and Tea Party luminaries who, since Obama’s election in 2008, have been jostling for position to take him down. (As you can see above, I attended the CNN Election Night party in November 2008, held in a church in London, and watched the early results come in with other political junkies – and some freeloaders – although we were, ironically I think, kicked out before the decisive states were called. They handed out partisan badges on the way in. )

I have been following the progress of this year’s Republican hopefuls with long-distance enthusiasm and bemusement, as they seem a particularly rum bunch. One of them will actually be challenging a frankly damaged Obama for his second term; it’s sometimes hard to believe that any of this shower could run a country, but then, look at George W. Bush, a man who wore his downhome ignorance on his sleeve and won two terms – or at least, got in twice.

We’ve lost Lutheran congresswoman and climate change denier Michelle Bachmann since the Iowa caucuses, which in terms of morbid entertainment value is a shame. (After all, she’s the Tea Party nutter of choice, post-Palin, accusing Obama of being “anti-American,” trying to get rid of energy-saving lightbulbs, gunning to get the minimum wage capped, and damning same-sex marriage from a pulpit where the Pope is considered the anti-Christ, if I’ve read the literature properly.)

Of the other column-inch-snaffling front runners, former restaurant tycoon, business lobbyist and Baptist talk radio show host Herman Cain also withdrew, before Christmas, after allegations of sexual misconduct, which is another blow for entertainment value, as he seemed not to have a clue what he would do if elected to office, other than cut tax to a basic 9% across the board. Doesn’t really matter, as he will never take office.

What’s frightening about these grinning, glad-handing, evangelical loons is that one of them could theoretically capitalise on the right-facing zeitgeist and beat Obama in November, taking office in 2013. After all, Republicans do get in. And the electorate does seem pretty disappointed with Obama, on both left and right, and especially in the middle, which is where elections are won and lost. Last week’s New Yorker provided profiles of both Ron Paul – the gurning 76-year-old Texan obstetrician and “white-haired, wide-eyed prophet” who seriously wants to ban Income Tax and end all foreign aid – and Newt Gingrich – “Mr Speaker”, political veteran, “swashbuckling geostrategist” and inveterate debate winner who shut down the federal government during the Cinton era over Medicare premiums, earned $1.6 million in consulting fees from Freddie Mac, the government-sponsored mortgage lender, and recently made reference to the “invented Palestinian people.” Of this loopy pair, it’s Gingrich who was seen as the biggest threat to Mitt Romney. (Good heavens, they have excellent names, the Republicans, you have to hand that to them.) But Rick Santorum almost caught up with Romney in Iowa. He’s the Fox News-friendly ex-senator and attorney with the goofy grin who was just eight votes behind Romeny in Iowa, and is an intelligent design fan, considers sodomy to be “antithetical to a healthy, stable, traditional family” and seems to think that liberal values are to blame for the Catholic child abuse scandal.

Mitt Romney is a Massachusetts Mormon and CEO of management buyout merchants Bain, who “kept a well-groomed appearance” at university during the campus upheavals of the 60s, according to a Boston Globe profile, seems to have built his reputation as a can-do kinda guy on his miraculous turnouaround of the Salt Lake City Winter Olympics in 1988 and is not to the tastes of the more evangelical wing of his party because a) he’s a Mormom, and b) he used to be pro-choice, but switched to being pro-life in 2005. This reputation for u-turns dogs him; he certainly upped his far-right views during his 2008 run for Presidential nomination. He seems like a slick wheeler-dealer and kind of looks like a President.

Post-Bachmann, they’re all men of a certain age, which is boring, and they all seem to conform to the image of an American politician, from the relatively youthful John Huntsman, 51, to the 76-year-old Paul. In other words, they either look like James Brolin or John Mahoney, and all points inbetween. Rick Perry is the most Bush-like of the current crop, the grinning Governor of Texas, former Eagle Scout, USAF pilot and “hyper-masculine cowboy” who sets out his stall in a YouTube video, saying “there’s something wrong in this country when gays can serve openly in the military, and your kids can’t openly celebrate Christmas”; Gingrich is the most experienced in the ways of Washington, and Romney still seems fresh from his failed attempt to run in 2008. They would all strip the financial industry of what little in the way of regulation remains and “shrink” government, which is the Republican creed. If any of these reptiles gets in, taxes will be lowered, or scrapped, and Iran will either be ignored (if Ron Paul gets in: “no more foreign wars; no more foreign aid; not even very much foreign policy”, according to Nicholas Lemann in the New Yorker), or nuked (if any of the others get in).

I will continue to follow this dangerous soap opera closely. They’re in New Hampshire right now for tomorrow’s vote, with Huntsman – another Mormon, also a former Reagan staffer, Utah Governor and ambassador to China under Obama whose “moderate” views play well to more liberal-minded Republicans – endorsed by a number of key local publications. There’s still everything to play for.

For anyone not in the least bit interested in US politics – I fear we ignore these God-fearing, gun-toting, gay-bashing, healthcare-hating, people at our peril.

Tags: 2012, Democrats, Obama, Republicans, US Election, US politics

Holmes under the hammer

First Telly Addict of the New Year and second avuncular outing for my jumper, which I’m starting to like: on this week’s review for the Guardian, it’s three big hitters from the three big channels – Sherlock, BBC1; Endeavour, ITV1; and Treasure Island, Sky1 – thematically linked in all sorts of ways. I hope you enjoy it. My jumper, that is. Warning: contains pre-watershed nudity that may arouse some Daily Mail readers. It’s here.

Tags: BBC1, Guardian, ITV1, nudity, Sky1, Telly, Telly Addict

Snowdon

At last, it’s in the public domain: episode 8 of the ninth series of Celebrity Mastermind. It’s on the iPlayer here but if you want to avoid knowing the score, please look away now and read this another time. I’ll throw in the traditional screen grabs to give you the chance to bail out before we talk numbers.

Right, if you’re still reading, you obviously either saw it, or don’t care enough to see it, so I can compare scores with impunity. I’ll tell you this much, if being in the famous chair is nerve-wracking, it turns out not to be half as nerve-wracking as watching the programme go out, on the television, with a roomful of your relations! All I have been telling people since recording the show in mid-November is: I didn’t make a total tit of myself. Which is, I think, true. My final score of 23 is not exactly off the charts, and it must forever genuflect at Richard Herring’s mighty 35 (which should please him), but it’s respectable and I think I can hold my head up in public, despite saying Snowdon to a general knowledge question whose answer was obviously Everest. (In mitigation, as if mitigation is required when you’re on bloody Mastermind, the question was to do with the height of the mountain being recalculated, and the keyboard in my brain called up the Hugh Grant film, The Englishman Who Went Up A Hill But Came Down A Mountain, in which he was sent to measure a mountain in Wales, so the wrong synapse crackled as a split-second result. Carve it on my gravestone if you must.)

I was no match for DCI Barnaby off Midsomer Murders, who scored a copper-bottomed 29, having stoically stormed his specialist round on Philip Larkin, and kept the same cool head for general knowledge. The close camera angles were not kind to Barnaby’s method of calling up information which involved physically pressing buttons on the keyboard inside his brain using only parts of his face, but like many actors, I doubt he will be watching his performance back, so we may snigger all we like: he won by a mile.

I had hoped that Canadian comedian Stewart Francis, who’d been called up off the subs’ bench at midnight after David Gest sent a sick note, would be unprepared, but he did well with his specialist subject of the Toronto Blue Jays – he may have been cooler than the rest of us because he’d already done a comedians-only Children In Need special edition of Celebrity Mastermind in 2010, when his subject was the Toronto Maple Leafs. (Spotting a theme?)

I had also hoped that Sandie Shaw would be nuts, and to a charming degree, she was. The life and soul of the green room from the moment she stepped glamorous and surprisingly shod foot in it, she really made our edition of the programme fun. What you didn’t see on television was the moment when, on the walk back to her seat, the battery pack of her microphone slipped from its moorings somewhere up her minidress and it fell down between her knees, dangling in a most unbecoming way. She laughed it off, and I asked if it was her puppet on a string, a wisecrack that went pretty much unheard. That’s showbiz.

Here are the final scores anyway.

I must admit, I am kicking myself over the questions I got wrong in my specialist round. I thought I’d revised disaster movies thoroughly, but gave the name of the director of The Medusa Touch when the question required the name of the man who wrote the novel. (“Jack Gold!” “Peter Van Greenaway.”) This just shows you how easy it is to give the wrong answer when you know the right one – who else would know the name of the director of The Medusa Touch, never mind the novelist? Both are, by definition, useless bits of information. But in this artificial situation which you have volunteered to be in, they become vital bits of information. Actually, unlike Richard’s experience, mine is not one bedevilled by retroactive frustration. Even if I’d got the Medusa Touch question right, and the Everest one, and the one where the answer was my favourite film The Poseidon Adventure and I said The Towering Inferno, I still wouldn’t have caught up with Barnaby. So I am able to sleep easy in my bed.

Lots of nice, supportive comments on Twitter, which I really appreciated. My parents thought I did well, although my Dad admitted that he was shouting, “Everest!” at the screen in Northampton. Oddly enough, after the show had aired, I was demonstrating how Twitter works to a family member who didn’t understand its appeal or how it worked but was curious to see it in action. He started an account and I was steering him around the basics. I showed him how to search for an account and he put in my name. In doing so, as well as my Twitter account coming up, he also started reading the stream of Tweets mentioning me by name, but not referring to my Twittername. I never do this, and was of course dismayed to find some less complimentary comments, which, in fairness to those who wrote them, were never aimed at me. Best not to dwell on them, especially not the one from the person who said I looked old, but one basically accused me of choosing a “nostalgic” subject, as if perhaps I was only capable of thinking about the past. I’m afraid I politely replied to them and said that I had asked the producers if I could ask questions about the future, but they had turned down my request, so I had to do the past.

Another asked me why I didn’t shake Stewart Francis’s hand, or at least why I left him with his hand out for seconds without shaking it. Here’s why: it is, as far as I know, Mastermind etiquette to congratulate the winner at the end. We all shook DCI Barnaby’s hand. However, Stewart thought he should shake my hand as well, which is very nice, but having shaken Barnaby’s, I  was not looking to my right, but straight ahead. I shook it when I noticed it though.

Honestly, it’s a social minefield! When you are on Mastermind, remember my mistakes. Ultimately, I am proud to be listed on the Wikipedia entry for Celebrity Mastermind, even if I am not a winner. I am among friends there. And I am still not a celebrity, thank God.

Tags: BBC1, Celebrity Mastermind, cinema, disaster movies, Mastermind, quiz, Telly