25 Years in showbiz: a prelude

Right, Here’s a splendid photo of me and three-quarters of the band Cud, backstage at Brixton Academy in November, to put us all in a happy place at the end of one year and the tentative, under-par beginning of another one. In other words, let’s just clear up 2012 before we really get stuck into 2013. By my calculations, 2012 was my 24th year in Showbiz. Which is a glib way of saying that I’ve been working in what we must, without irony or sneering, call “the media” since the summer of 1988, when I first stepped foot in the NME office, and wangled a part-time job in the layout room.

It was, of course, through working as a journalist for the NME that I met Cud, along with countless other bands. Without the NME, I might not have played the drums for them for one song at a soundcheck at Wakefield’s Rooftop Gardens in May 1992, thus setting a precedent. Having kept up genial diplomatic relations with the band ever since, I was invited to go one better, 20 years on, and if the notion hadn’t been wiped from history in 2012, I’d have called it a middle-aged man’s “Jim’ll Fix It moment”. I wrote about it here. When you reach my age, milestones come less often. To have played the drums onstage at Brixton Academy, for one song, was one of them. It will forever nail 2012 to the map. As will my appearance, in January, on Celebrity Mastermind (it was filmed in 2011), where I scored 23 points but still only came second.

This was a milestone in the sense that I crossed the Rubicon and became further proof of the dire elasticity of the word “celebrity.” (Watching this year’s run on BBC2, I noted that in his call for future contestants, John Humphrys says, “You don’t have to be a Celebrity to appear on Mastermind.” No, and you don’t have to be a Celebrity to appear on Celebrity Mastermind, either. I wrote about my experience for Radio Times here.)

It is not to seek sympathy if I say that, on the whole, despite these two marker flags, 2012 was not a historic year. for me. They can’t all be, can they? While the Olympics, the Paralympics, and Euro 2012 ran a highlighter pen through the sporting summer, on a personal level, as a competitor in the rat race, I feel like I spent most of the year running to stand still. The recession continues to bite hard, and the price of everything rises at an inhumane pace, so, in line with the general outlook since 2008, it was a case of watching expenditure, travelling only when my journey was really necessary and reading books I already own, as per my New Year’s Resolution. When you’re self-employed, you do everything in your power to keep working, but it’s never a walk in the park.

Professionally, I was proud to have my name on the credits of school sitcom Gates, as co-writer and co-creator, which helped relaunch Sky Living in August, having been on ice for about eight months. Sadly, it didn’t ring the ratings bell and was not recommissioned. (I wrote about the show here.) Neither was a much more personal project for me, Mr Blue Sky, although I think we were all very pleased with Series 2, which went out on Radio 4 in April and May, and gathered some nice reviews. Not nice enough to earn us a third series, although it wasn’t through want of trying, I can tell you. (I wrote about Series 2 for Radio Times here.) I’ve written two further scripts, for two further broadcasters, in 2012, and one of them may yet prove to have legs in 2013, depending on how a January meeting goes. Fingers crossed. Actually, my fingers are always crossed; I am a writer. I’m also very excited to have made a ten-minute short film with Simon Day for Sky Atlantic; the all-star anthology of which it is a part, Common Ground, starts on January 14.

Back in January I did the finishing touches to a script I had in development with ITV which then disappeared in a puff of smoke when the in-house producer I was working with left ITV. This is what happens. Get used to it. My ardent hope for 2013 is to get a comedy commissioned.

In terms of radio, I’ve noticed a slight reduction in hours spent in front of a microphone. I had a couple of nice runs on 6 Music Breakfast, and a short go at Saturday mornings, solo, while they waited to fill the slot with someone more famous. (I was also offered Breakfast in Christmas week but I wasn’t around, to be fair.) I presented the Radio 4 documentary Oscar Sings in February, but that’s pretty much it for me as a “proper” presenter. However, ironically, via the tradesman’s entrance, I appeared in about 50 short films in 2012, further honing my Autocue skills for the Guardian‘s weekly Telly Addict review. I love doing this, so long may it continue this year.

I had a great time at the Edinburgh International Television Festival, hosting Q&As with Charlie Brooker, Steven Moffat, Victoria Wood, Robert Popper, Frank Spotnitz and others, and this is an area I’d really like to develop. Having sensibly put stand-up behind me, this feels like a far more age-appropriate and far less egomaniacal way of talking in front of an audience: this is the job of the facilitator. You get to meet amazing people, doing it, too. (It was cool to meet Todd Solondz before doing a Q&A with him at the Curzon, Soho, in the summer. You should never get blasé about this kind of privileged proximity.)

Socially, 2012 was quiet, but deliberately so. I avoided parties, as a rule, although the Radio Times covers party presented its annual opportunity for me to play Zelig with the stars of TV, unashamedly. Here I am with two of the ladies of Downton (and some mad-eyed feminist), and Vic Reeves and Vicky McClure.

While we’re talking about magazines, 2012’s greatest loss was surely Word magazine. You can read my requiem here, although it’s worth stating that its sudden closure in June – another victim of the advertising revenue downturn and the general decline of print – was twice the loss for me. I miss Word as an employee and as a subscriber. It leaves a void. (It also means I am probably doing more prose-writing for free, on here, than I might have done previously. Sign of the times.)

Sad, too, to see Karaoke Circus go, after all these years of good-natured, have-a-go entertainment. The final showdown, at the 100 Club, on 29 October, crowned the run in suitable style, even if my overambitious rendition of Jay-Z’s 99 Problems was one of my worst. Nobody complained. And that is why we shall miss it. (The following shot of the final finale is by Russell McGovern, whose full set of pics are here.)

On the whole, 2012 was less about evenings, more about mornings and afternoons. More about meetings. I’ve had tons of them. Some have led to work, most have not. Some have been administrative, others more sociable. Some have been script meetings, as a script-editor – which, again, is a much less egocentric job to have on a TV programme. I had a brilliant time at the end of the year working on Secret Dude Society for BBC3, an actual, six-episode commission, with the beloved sketch trio Pappy’s, and although it has yet to be filmed (that happens in Glasgow in February), the majority of my editing work is done, so that ought to be a satisfying thing to look forward to in 2013.

When I look back over my 25 years in showbiz, as I am bound to do, I recognise that the bulk of my work has been entirely egocentric and self-centred; whether it’s being an opinionated music journalist, a DJ, an author, or a stand-up. It’s all been about my name at the beginning or the end. The past few years have seen me settling down into a quieter life, whereby my work is often out of the spotlight, behind the scenes, in meetings. This can only be a good thing. There are enough people out there vying for your attention with loud voices. I’m happy if you catch an episode of a sitcom I’ve written for Radio 4, brought to life by professional actors.

I’d certainly be happy if you bought the new edition of my Billy Bragg biography, Still Suitable For Miners, which Billy and I have been working on updating over the last couple of months, starting in MediaCity, Salford, where I accompanied him for his John Peel Lecture in November. The new edition is due out, in physical form and as an eBook, in the early part of this year (no fixed date as yet). Revisiting his stirring lifestory – and in order to write a new chapter, it is advisable to re-read the existing ones – has reignited my leftist fury. The Tories continued to drive me round the bend in 2012, with raids on the public sector whose bare-faced audacity would have made Mrs Thatcher blush, and a general, all-round dismantling of the state whose ease merely exposes the historic failure of New Labour to do anything to reverse the trend while they were in power.

In this sense, 2012 was an angry year for me. The reelection of Barack Obama provided some relief from apocalyptic thoughts – at least the world is spared a Tea Party in control for another four years – but the news has been ostensibly depressing most days, from ecological disaster to corporate tax avoidance to widespread child abuse hidden in plain sight. Billy Bragg reminds me that hitting your fifties, as he has, does not have to denote giving up, or tuning out, or logging off. He was as fired up by bankers’ bonuses and the Bullingdon Club cabinet in 2012 as he was about the miners and Reaganomics in 1985. We should look to people like him for inspiration.

Maybe Still Suitable For Miners is a perfect example of a project that isn’t primarily about me. It’s about Billy Bragg. I am merely facilitating its existence. That’s got to be a more dignified way forward.

Writer’s blog: Thursday

Day four

I forgot to publish my commuting soundtrack yesterday. It actually accounts for the commute in and out:

50 CENT In Da Club
WILSON SIMONAL Não Vem Que Não Tem (Nem Vem Que Não) [not 100% sure of the details but it's from the City Of God Remixed album]
SIOUXSIE & THE BANSHEES Switch
SONIC YOUTH Catholic Block
SPARKS No.1 Song In Heaven
THE VERVE Love Is Noise
YEASAYER Ambling Alp
SPEAR OF DESTINY Never Take Me Alive
THE WOODENTOPS Well Well Well
POP WILL EAT ITSELF Get The Girl! Kill The Baddies!
PLAN B No Good
YOUNG DISCIPLES Apparently Nothin’
WU-TANG CLAN Intro (Shaolin Finger Jab/Chamber Music)
YEAH YEAH YEAHS Heads Will Roll
WU-TANG CLAN Bells Of War
SONIC YOUTH Against Fascism
TALKING HEADS This Must Be The Place
SANTOGOLD L.E.S. Artistes
PSYCHEDELIC FURS Into You Like A Train
TING TINGS Great DJ
SIOUXSIE & THE BANSHEES Red Light [lots of Siouxsie yesterday)
THE TWILIGHT SAD The Room
TALKING HEADS Born Under Punches
SUGAR JC Auto
TV ON THE RADIO Wolf Like Me

Phew. Made two hot, crowded Tube journeys in inappropriate long trousers a whole lot easier.

Incidentally, I was wearing long trousers on a short trousers day because I had a meeting in the middle of the day yesterday at the Groucho Club. As usual, I am unwilling to reveal which media luminary I was meeting there, as it was the first time we’d met and it may one day evolve into a “project”, which I must not jinx; suffice to say, I very rarely cross the threshold of this or any other private members-only Soho media watering hole, and such, it’s always a tiny thrill.

I have never been a member of any club that charges a large amount of money for me to be a member of it, even if the club would have me as a member. (The gym is the closest I’ve ever come, and I haven’t been a member of one of them for four years.) I’ve been in the Groucho as a guest on a number of occasions down the years, and had some media fun in there, but I once met a powerful media figure there while I was off the booze and the media figure was so disgusted that I wouldn’t take an alcoholic drink I genuinely fear the evening cut off a whole avenue of work for me in the future. It appears to be a social club, but it is in fact a series of meetings, even after hours. I spent a happy evening watching a World Cup game in the upstairs bar with genial Inbetweeners co-creator/writer Iain Morris in 2010. And after a big 6 Music/Radio 2 Christmas bash when such things were allowed, Rowland Rivron got about 20 of us in as his guests and would not let anybody pay for anything. That felt like a definitive Groucho Club experience, with the definitive Groucho Club host.

Anyway, I had two coffees and it was a very promising meeting indeed. You wouldn’t want to go in there in shorts, even on a hot day, although I expect Keith Allen has been in there with his top off during his pomp.

Now, I deleted my mentions of Tom Daley’s Twitter troll from Twitter yesterday, as by even mentioning this damaged individual on his favourite forum risks glorifying his actions further. As you can see, I even smudged out his @Twittername in the grab I made. (Anyone who has cared to follow this obnoxious story will know that he’s @Rileyy_69 – which seems safe to mention within the unsearchable sancity of this blog entry – but I sincerely urge you not to visit his feed.) He seems to have been released by Dorset police after his malicious Tweets to Daley, although I understand a whole litany of previously offensive Tweets, some of them overtly racist, are still to be investigated. But if he’s under caution at all, he really ought not to be broadcasting on Twitter. And yet, he is, and full of himself. He’s obviously proud of being “famous” and “a legend”, and of putting on over 30,000 new followers since he entered Daley’s radar, and he’s in fact back to insulting Daley, albeit not using the diver’s @Twittername this time. So he has learned something.

I know I appear morbidly fascinated by the story, but it’s not about him as an individual – he’s only 17, lives alone in a bedsit, and was said in a Daily Mail report (which contained an interview with his despairing, hand-washing dad) to have a form of ADHD that he is not being medicated for. (The Mail piece also had an erection about the fact that he’s “on benefits”, but that’s irrelevant.) I’m not sure why Twitter haven’t suspended his account – all of his original offending Tweets are still up, and the racist ones before those. They were quick to suspend the account of Guy Adams of the Independent. Maybe if Rileyy-69 had insulted a corporation he’d have been in more trouble.

Anyway, to happier matters. I was so taken with the new Radio Times office – much more agreeably air-conditioned than the shed in White City, and laid out with geometric efficiency unlike the old jumble, such that it might be mistaken for the Washington Post – that I chose to come back here today, rather than trek to the Library. I still have vouchers for the coffee bar, too, which clinched it.

Maybe the stars are aligned for me today: just saw a Tweet from the British Library saying that it’s closed due to a fire alarm. Thank you, random swirl of the universe.

Oh no! Came home early (in order to make a soup with the chicken stock I made yesterday, of which more presently) and found the new New Yorker on the mat. Disaster! I’m still two whole issues in the red. These two, if you’re following the saga:

The new one looks terrific, with a piece on the Olympics so far (Medals and Marketing by Ben McGrath) which promises to be wise and analytical; a profile of Imran Khan (Sporting Chance by Steve Coll, a man you can trust on geopolitics); and a piece by lively TV critic Emily Nussbaum (who seems to have replaced lively TV critic Nancy Franklin) on Big Brother‘s 14th “season” on CBS. I’ve already read David Denby on The Bourne Legacy, as I always read The Current Cinema first, because it’s only ever two digestible pages long. It’s my treat. How I’m going to resist tearing into the meat and potatoes of this new issue before I’ve finished the previous two, I do not know. “First World Problems”, eh?

I hate the Twitter hashtag #FirstWorldProblems. It’s intended as a knowing admission of bourgeois hand-wringing for those with missionary guilt and is applied to the end of a mundane gripe. Fine. If you must. What it isn’t for is to apply to someone else’s Tweet, as a touché. Someone, now blocked, did this to me when I Tweeted about not being able to decide which biscotti recipe to try off the internet. I’ll be the judge of whether this is a #FirstWorldProblem, thanks. And I judge that it is not, as I do not recognise the First, Second and Third World rubric. It’s an outdated Cold War precept, and for me, has the nasty tang of colonialism, to designate an implicitly noble and authentic part of the world as “third”, where problems are more, like, real, man. We all understand the disparity between rich and poor nations, fully industrialised and rural economies and all points in between, but it’s not as simple as a league table. To even point out a #FirstWorldProblem is a #FirstWorldLuxury, so stop it. Good, glad to get that off my chest.

The soup, since you ask, is another jazz recipe which I made up as I went along: the gorgeous chicken stock (made from a carcass and some onion and celery) was added to a pan in which some spring onion, more celery, courgette and previously blanched green cabbage had already been softened in oil. I ground up some cumin and coriander seeds, too, and threw in one and a half chillies, as is my wont. It smells bloody lovely, simmering away there on a hot evening, while a Perroni speed-chills in the freezer. For me, this soup is all about stretching a chicken that has already provided two meals into at least two more, and uses up some of the less glamorous vegetables before they pass their peak. Clearly, it would work with vegetable stock.

Someone suggested on Twitter than I start a food blog. Would that I had the time. I don’t even have time to do this. I started it to help with my writer’s block and I’ll see it through to tomorrow, Friday, but it was intended to help me write this – pardon my language – fucking script, and not replace it! (The fucking script is moving in the right direction, which is: three steps forward and two steps back. That’s winning.)

I predict an evening of eating, drinking and watching either another foreign film on DVD in the kitchen, or some token Olympic action when the famous person Usain Bolt runs in something important.

Writer’s blog: Wednesday

Day three

Each day I walk to the local shop to get the paper. I like this walk. I pick up the obvious paper, as it is my paper, and I spend a while gazing at the other papers, which are helpfully arranged so that I can see their covers. It’s always an enlightening way of taking the temperature of this great nation of ours, with the Mail frothing about something that signifies that rationing has sadly ended, the Express literally talking about the weather, the Sun and the Mirror and the Star shouting about a minor indiscretion among the celebrity class, the Independent doggedly restating its independence by highlighting an uncool issue, and so on. Not these past two weeks: every cover story has been the same.

It’s odd to see the whole gamut of daily newspapers covering literally the same basic story, every day. Big pictures of smiling or grimacing athletes abound, assorted puns on keywords like “gold”, “medal”, “Hoy” etc. Is this really the united nation it gives every appearance of being? If so, what’s going to happen after Sunday? Who will we cheer? What will we do with our cape-sized Union flags? What will we watch on the telly? What will the newspapers write about? What will the commentators commentate on? How will we maintain this unification of optimism in the face of cold, hard reality? It could be quite a comedown.

Anyway, GOLD!!!!!!!!!!

As you can see, I won an Olympic gold medal today. It was a chocolate one, but I sort of won it, as I didn’t pay for it. I found it in the “welcome pack” at my new office. It isn’t strictly my office, it’s the new office of Radio Times, where I go to work once a week, as I have done for many years. (Just as, when I was a kid, Thursday was the day my Nan came round, Wednesday is the day I go round to Radio Times.) This used to mean going to a building owned by the BBC, when the BBC owned BBC Magazines, but the BBC had to sell BBC Magazines, along with some of its buildings, when the Murdoch government negotiated the Licence Fee to stay the same until 2016. Radio Times is now published by Immediate Media, who had to move us from the BBC building to a new one, which is in Hammersmith.

Although I quite rightly fear change, it’s not a bad space. They don’t seem to have finished the ceiling – unless it’s a tribute to the film Brazil – but there’s a cafeteria that seems competitively priced and there was also a £10 voucher in my “welcome pack”, of which I spent £4 on posh coffee and the kind of muffin I would never ordinarily buy to celebrate the move. It was free, like my gold medal, which I ate at my desk before even setting up my email account. Priorities.

I was delighted to be commissioned by Radio Times editor Ben to write an account of my life as an Olympics widower: looking after the shop while the rest of the country is glued to the Games. I am happy to be that steward. (And always happy to write something for what we in the Film Unit call “the rest of the magazine.” You can read it next week. They’ll probably put in online, too.) Wow, I ate that muffin next to no time. It’s almost as if it is mainly made of air.

Note to self: don’t buy muffins.

Another evening in the adjoining room while the Olympics played out in earshot. I sense that for Team GB, the Games are sort of over. They’ve certainly peaked. I’m no expert, but I think “we” failed to win any sort of medal today. No golds, at any rate. This is the downside to achieving so much more than anyone realistically expected. You have to readjust to real life afterwards, where there is no podium for you to “podium” on, no medals to “medal”, no similar nouns to “noun” into a verb.

Anyway, I watched another Michael Haneke film on DVD from my big box of foreign-language DVDs: The Piano Teacher. (You don’t know this, as I wasn’t writing a diary last week, but I plucked Haneke’s Code Unknown from the box and thoroughly enjoyed that, hence the yen for some more.) It’s a brilliant but disturbing experience. Isabelle Huppert is, as every awards committe on the planet seemed to spot at the time, superb in it. Brave and subtle and, hey, she can even play the piano really well. It was, I’m guessing, a very different experience to the one on offer in the living room, which seemed to be all about BMX bikes, then hurdling. (I had planned to break off from Haneke to watch Usain Bolt in a final of something at 20.55, but I had misread the RT supplement – it’s on tomorrow at 20.55. This is just as well; you can’t break off from Haneke.)

Oh, and I announced on Twitter, pointlessly, that I was about to watch The Piano Teacher and one joker responded, “dirty old man.” Yes, because what better film to watch if you are a dirty old man? I’m not sure I can think of a less arousing film. Unless you are turned on by Schubert and razor blades.

Holding pattern

Hello, all. Another rolling apology for not tending to the blog garden as regularly as I should be. Not only am I up against the aforementioned Mr Blue Sky script delivery deadline, which looms ever closer each day (the first full cast read-through happens on March 5, on which day all six scripts will need to be in shape), but I’m doing 6 Music Breakfast all this week and next. It goes without saying that I enjoy both jobs, and could have said no to 6 Music, but I am determined to fit both in, and emerge triumphant and not as throaty and tired as I feel today. (I’m mainlining Vitamin C, and going to bed as early as 9pm, and not drinking, so I’m looking after myself.)

Breakfast is a blast. I like the photograph above of me hugging Alex Horne, and he hugging me back. I thought I’d publish it to raise a smile. Also, lest we forget, it means I am podcasting on a daily basis. The bite-sized best-of Breakfast Podcast is available all week right here. Yesterday’s includes the Alex Horne interview, too. (He does too many things, as I do, many of them in the evening when I am nodding off in front of Friday Night Lights, and he has a young family. I don’t know how he does it.)

I am also beholden to Radio Times to supply at least a weekly blog for their website, so, if you don’t already, why not bookmark this page, and maybe have a glance at my most recent blogs about The Muppets, and J. Edgar. I’ve been managing to fit in numerous film screenings, so there’s a massive backlog of reviews I’ve not had time to write: Martha Marcy May Marlene, A Dangerous Method, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, Girl Model, Carnage, the DVD of Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows Pt 2, the list goes on.

Thank you for bearing with me. It’s amazing that the blog still gets over 500 visitors a day, even when I don’t post anything new. Normal service will be resumed. And there’ll be another Telly Addict on Saturday. I don’t remember when I was last this busy, but the self-employed do not complain about such things.

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 …

Storm in a teacup

Here’s something I need to put out there. I reviewed the film An Education in the Radio Times because it was on the telly. This is what I wrote (you can skip to end of the penultimate paragraph):

An Education

Fleet Street grande dame Lynn Barber first wrote about her experiences as a 16-year-old schoolgirl whose dreams of applying to Oxford in 1961 were sidetracked by an older man in Granta magazine. It grew into a book and, thanks to the screenwriting skills of novelist Nick Hornby, a film, which gives a new spin to the apparently swinging 60s we usually see on screen.

Barber-surrogate Jenny (Carey Mulligan) lives with her parents in old-fashioned, curtain-twitching suburban Twickenham, so when she meets metropolitan charmer David Goldman (Peter Sarsgaard with a passable English accent) and he whisks her off to London’s West End for cocktails and foreign films, she is besotted. Her parents – a scene-stealing Alfred Molina, and Cara Seymour – take more convincing, as does her starchy headmistress Emma Thompson.

This will chime with anyone who was told by their parents that they were throwing their life away, which is why An Education works as more than just a nostalgia-inducing period piece.

With a fine supporting cast including Dominic Cooper, Olivia Williams and Rosamund Pike, Danish director Lone Sherfig (Italian For Beginners) makes convincing work of recreating English life as it was lived then – apart from one glaringly erroneous single teabag dunked into a mug. (In 1961?)

Carey Mulligan is the chief revelation, though – 23 at the time, she brings incredible depth and subtlety to Jenny’s flowering, which does not run smoothly. AC

Not exactly a controversial review. However, it led to a subsequent letter being published in the magazine – from a gentleman called Jay Rayner who I understandably assumed to be restaurant critic Jay Rayner, but wasn’t. (I asked Jay Rayner the restaurant critic and he said it wasn’t him.) Anyway, the other Jay Rayner challenged my knowledge of teabags, pulling me up in a moderately superior manner on my assertion that it’s unlikely someone would have dunked an individual teabag into a mug in 1961, when the film is specifically set. Here is the letter in full:

Storm in a tea cup
Andrew Collins needs to brush up on his teabag history before rubbishing the film An Education (13 May BBC2) for depicting a teabag being “dunked into a mug” in 1961. Britain has enjoyed (?) these nifty little timesavers since at least 1953, when Tetley introduced them to an admittedly suspicious public.
Jay Rayner
Witney, Oxfordshire

Well, let me back my assertion up. According the the UK Tea Council website and its excellent history of the teabag, yes, teabags were introduced onto the market before the war in this country – having been “invented” in America in 1908, when samples of tea were sent out in small silken bags by merchant Thomas Sullivan (although infusers go back centuries) – but the British public didn’t take to them as readily as the Americans had. Even after the war, Brits remained skeptical and stuck to loose-leaf tea, infused in a teapot and poured through a strainer.

I grew up in the late 60s and early 70s and this is how I remember all tea being made. We didn’t even have mugs. Teabags  may well have existed, but none ever crossed the threshold of my house, or the houses of my family and friends. A good decade after the year An Education is set, and the teabag was still a foreign object. Now, the book and film are set in suburban London, and we were in provincial Northampton, so I accept that Metropolitan types may have adopted the bag before we bumpkins did. That said, the character who dunks one in An Education is Olivia Williams’ kindly schoolteacher (she makes a mug for herself and one for Carey Mulligan’s heartbroken teen in her modest flat). She is not some early-adopting trendsetter or radical. Nor rich. And teabags seemed like a pretty fancy way of delivering tea, even in the 70s. They must have been more expensive per cup, as they were sold on convenience, not price.

This is why I am sticking to my anecdotal certainty that a schoolteacher would have possessed neither the money nor the adventurousness to buy individual teabags to dunk in mugs in 1961. Even in Twickenham. Even though Tetley had launched their teabag in 1953, by the early 60s, according to the UK Tea Council, bags made up only 3% of the British tea market. Of course it is physically possible for a teacher to be part of that 3% in 1961, but, I would argue, still unlikely. And not normal. If one of Mulligan’s trendy London friends had whipped one out, I’d have bought it as a cultural signifier. But I’m going out on a limb here and I’m saying that the two dunked teagbags – that’s individually dunked, not dropped into a teapot – are an anomaly.

But I need backup. Anybody old enough to remember 1961? Did you ever see anyone dunk a teabag? I am prepared to let the other Jay Rayner win. But I have a hunch that he’s wrong. What do you think?

STOP PRESS:
If I’d continued to read the Radio Times letters page I would have seen this letter on the same subject. Unfortunately it goes against the grain of my argument, too. Mind you, I reckon we’ve all been looking at the same UK Tea Council website!

… Teabags were invented in 1908 and became commercially available in the 1930s. They were fairly common in the UK by the late 1950s. My wife and I used teabags and teapot at that time. Hardier souls simply dropped a teabag into a mug, exactly as Andrew tells us is shown in the film.
Pat McKelvey
Lower Denby, West Yorkshire

Five Angry Men and One Woman

Well, not angry, exactly, but animated and exercised and passionate about whether the music from You Only Live Twice is better than the music from Goldfinger or not. (It is.) On Friday March 18, I was invited by BBC Radio 5 Live to join a jury charged with selecting the Top 10 instrumental film scores of all time for a forthcoming concert by the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra, whose running order would be based upon our hard-fought selection. It’s all part of BBC Philharmonic Presents … a week of concerts themed around the proclivities of various BBC radio networks [find out all about it here]. 5 Live’s was chosen to be film-themed, and goes out live in two Fridays’ time, June 10, from 2pm, curated and presented by its cult film-reviewing/bickering duo Simon Mayo and Mark Kermode, whose “Wittertainment” initiative has defied nature and survived Simon’s move to Radio 2 (it remained in place on a Friday afternoon on 5 Live, which shows just how valued it is by the Beeb). The idea of these concerts is to officially launch the BBC’s new Salford Quays home, MediaCityUK, which has a venue built in. I wish I was going up to Manchester for the gig, but I am too busy. Should be a fine afternoon’s “instrutainment”. Tune in.

You can see us all gathered around the warm glow of a green studio light that bright Friday afternoon, a jury of six charged with the ludicrous task of stacking up a dozen great orchestral film scores. From left, then: Mark Kermode, the good doctor, linchpin of the Corporation’s film coverage and – as luck would have it – a skiffle musician in his own right; chairman, the genial Simon Mayo, and Mark’s unofficial handler; the Philharmonic’s General Manager Richard Wigley (who’d just flown back, with the band, from Japan, when the earthquake hit – if you want airlifting out of a stricken country, be connected to the BBC!); eminent and garrulous American conductor Robert Ziegler, who actually conducted one of our shortlist, and about which he was extremely humble and gracious, There Will Be Blood; colourful, platinum-selling pop singer and actress Paloma Faith, the only jury member to dress up and wear a massive hat for the occasion as if it was on TV (unless she always looks like that, or was on her way somewhere else); and me. I had my laptop out because I’d forgotten to print off my own personal shortlist.

We all brought in a personal wish-list, as instructed, and to kick things off Simon asked us all to read them out. I went first, and as I remember just kind of rattled them off. Paloma went second, and opted instead to make a passionate case for each one of her choices. Because she is a singer, and had been part of a previous concert of film music, conducted by Mr Ziegler, most of her choices had been influenced by that experience. We discussed them all. (The whole judging process has been made available as a podcast by 5 Live, which is nice. If you really want to hear it, it’s here. I have yet to listen back to it, so maybe it’s not as tense and fraught as some of it felt on the day. I sincerely hope you can hear Paloma eating her ambient BBC canteen salad.) I enjoyed Robert Ziegler’s propensity for singing the themes when they came up – I seem to recall a spirited dum-de-duh-dum-dum-ing of Bernstein’s The Magnificent Seven – again, I may be misremembering. Mark kept his powder dry and was the last to pitch in with his own personal favourites, most of which were on the obscure side and many of the other jurors weren’t familiar with them. That’s the way – uh-huh – he likes it. (The production staff on the other side of the glass were heroic on the day: the session was taped, as live, over an hour, and they managed to rustle up clips to play through our headphones almost as soon as they were mentioned. Even some of Mark’s. Top work.)

The final shortlist of 11 (don’t ask) – heavily influenced, it must be said, by Richard Wigley’s valuable input on the sheer practicality/impracticality of an orchestra actually playing the extracts on the night/afternoon, and by our collective aim of not putting any composer in twice (except for John Barry, because we couldn’t help it!) – included Raiders Of The Lost Ark, You Only Live Twice, Blue Velvet (or at least a specific song by Angelo Badalamenti from it, Mysteries Of Love), Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Taxi Driver, The Mission (specifically Gabriel’s Oboe), The Godfather (one of my picks, although not exactly difficult to pitch), The Magnificent Seven, Midnight Cowboy, There Will Be Blood, and last but not least, 2046, which Paloma championed from the start as her absolute, foot-stamping must-have, a score from a still fairly obscure Wong Kar-Wai sci-fi love story by Shigeru Umebayashi, who, if he knows he made the shortlist, would be pretty surprised, I should imagine.

You’ve got to love Dr Kermode – the case he made for Badalamenti, whose most famous score, after all, is for a TV series, was so feverish, the whole room went away convinced he is as vital a film composer as Bernard Herrmann or John Williams or John Barry. (Mark looked like he might commit suicide if we didn’t allow the theme from Firewalk With Me, which hardly anybody was familiar with, but we didn’t, and he was talked down off the roof in order to accept Blue Velvet.) I also like the idea that Mark was egged on to volunteer to play the harmonica with the orchestra for Midnight Cowboy. “Oh, go on, then …”

A funny, odd and mostly enjoyable way to spend an hour, and democracy in action. Hey, it’s the only way I’m going to get back into that 5 Live studio on a Friday afternoon.

Photos by Jane Long.

Day Three

I begin this at home, in that calm period before I leave the house and throw myself on the mercy of public transport during the couple of hours that used to constitute rush hour but which has been relaxed and expanded to include everybody who roughly goes to work between 7am and 9.30am. Which, in London, is a lot of people. Day three, then. You may or may not have noticed that I have been wearing black t-shirts all week. This is unusual. I have tried to “grow up” in terms of how I dress over the last six months and have started to wear shirts as a matter of course. But I threw an old black t-shirt on and I quite liked the way it looked around my neck again. Being me, I have plucked out an identical black t-shirt every day. I’ll grow out of it again. But with the short new haircut, it’s a close as I’ll get to looking younger now that I am not young. The danger is, as you get older, “younger” clothes make you look even older! Why did nobody ever sit me down and tell me when I was young what being old would be like? (Still, I had Nick Cave’s Tender Prey on my iPod on the way to the station this morning, and City Of Refuge made me feel alive and vital and excited and dark, and that’s not something I expect to lose, even when I’m 56, or 66, or 76.)

I have reverted back from Israel by Martin Gilbert to When The Lights Went Out by Andy Beckett, the book I was reading before I allowed Israel to queue-jump when The Promise was on telly. I have returned to Beckett’s book, because a) it didn’t deserve being bumped, it’s absolutely brilliant, and b) I have grown weary of the way Gilbert tells the story of Israel, which is a compelling story that needs to be told, but perhaps not in the relentless, plodding detail of the way Gilbert tells it. I may yet return to it, but for now, I’m back in the 70s in Britain, and enjoying the fourth section, The Reckoning, which begins in 1944 at the Bretton Woods economic forum where the International Monetary Fund was founded. Britain in 1944 has been described by Beckett as one of the “creaking left-leaning nations” in need of international handouts. Between 1947 and 1971, Britain borrowed more from the IMF than any other country! It’s a compelling story, but compellingly told. (The copy of the book I have is an advanced proof which Faber kindly sent me. That’s why it’s all orange and plain. But I kind of like it.)

And here is today’s packed lunch, minus the boiled egg, which was in a pan boiling when I posed the still life. I have a packed day ahead, too, with a long stretch at Radio Times, followed immediately by 6 Music. The elements of my lunch will be released into my system at regular intervals. Well, that’s the plan. I might just scoff the chilli and the yogurt in one powerless sitting. We’ll see. (Can this diary get any more interesting?)

On the train, which was standing-room-only (I don’t even look for seats on trains in London; I stand by default, assuming that if I sit down, someone more deserving will get on and I’ll have to give up my seat anyway, so I cut out the middle man), I saw a man reading The Economist, who carefully tore a section of the top of the front cover off and tucked it into his pocket, leaving a gaping hole in his magazine. What was it? Was it something from the advert on the reverse side? This was at the top of the page, don’t forget, so it can’t have been a phone number or a form, which usually appear at the bottom of an ad. Was it a coverline that he really liked? Or was it actually the magazine’s logo? Maybe he was embarrassed about reading a right wing magazine in a recession caused by the very system the magazine seeks to support. (When I was a Marxist, I had a letter printed in the New Statesmen correcting the figures given by the then-editor of The Economist in a column he’d written. I was very proud. My figures were based on research I’d done while writing my biography of Billy Bragg – they were to do with the old truism that standard of living improved under Thatcher, when in fact it improved for the richest people, but got worse for the poorest, a far less convenient truth for her cheerleaders, which included the then-editor of The Economist. This may well turn out to have been the only time in my life where I felt confident enough to challenge anyone on economics.)

A mention, I think, for Before The Fall, a mind-blowing new compilation album from Ace Records gathering together 24 original tracks that have been covered by The Fall. Outside of the obvious ones – the Kinks, R. Dean Taylor, Sister Sledge – these are mostly proper nuggets and obscurities covering rockabilly, Australian punk, US garage, dub reggae, novelty pop and at least one entry from a 1974 New Faces. I can’t stop listening to it. Mark E Smith is a certified genius against whom all geniuses must be measured, and this album reveals new layers to his brilliance, without him even playing or singing a note. Dan Maier, TV Burp writer and Karaoke Circus judge, helped compile it with the admirable people at Ace. Details here. A few years ago, they asked me to provide a Top 10 for their website, based on their rich back catalogue; although the biographical details are woefully out of date, it’s still there.

I arrived at Radio Times to find a new computer on my desk. In the subsection of the open-plan office where the Film Unit sits and where I get an actual desk despite only being in one day a week, we have been magically upgraded from the old monitors to these slimline new ones with no big, humming monolith beneath the desk. Typically for Apple, you have to feel around an apparently smooth, buttonless area on the back of the monitor to find the on/off button. (I have looked it up and it seems to be a 27″ iMac. Nice.)

As you can see from the picture above, which I have taken using Photo Booth on my MacBook, I like to have both computers open when I am at my Radio Times desk. I am like Rick Wakeman. And, instead of actually writing 650 words about motion-capture technology for the magazine, I have just taken a picture with the iMac’s Photo Booth application, just because I can. Now back to work.

Even though you can’t tell, this building is where they film The Thick Of it, specifically the bits where they’re walking up and down big modern wooden staircases. It is called The Media Centre, and you can’t get a mobile signal in it. There is a measure of irony there, isn’t there?

I will post this now. I will always remember where I was when I found out that Elizabeth Taylor had died: sat at my desk in the Radio Times office, packing my bag to leave, having satisfactorily written 650 words on motion-capture technology and Disney’s decision to pull the plug on the proposed digital remake of Yellow Submarine, directed by Robert Zemeckis, following the box office failure of Mars Needs Moms, which is released here in the first week of April, but has bombed over there. Because Radio Times is a weekly, we don’t really go big on obituaries, as they always look out of date. I don’t imagine I’ll get through the rest of the day without being asked to write something about Elizabeth Taylor for the magazine to mark her passing. It is sad that she has died, and she really was one of the great movie stars, and the first actress to be paid $1,000,000. (When she co-starred opposite Lassie in Lassie Come Home, she was paid less than the dog. Mind you, the dog, Pal, was male.)

Film 2001

Rather belatedly, I am drawing your attention to the fact that my weekly film column in Radio Times now goes up online automatically. My role at the magazine has mutated constantly since I became Film Editor in 2001 (bloody hell, that’s almost ten years!), certainly in terms of what goes on the page: my column has been a straightforward extended review of the Film Of The Week, then it became that plus a sort of industry insider piece, then it became a longer, broader-based “themed” piece (and my simpering face appeared at the top of the page), then back to Film Of The Week again – in fact, two: Terrestrial and Satellite, then an opinion piece again, which became unwieldy, then Terrestrial and Freeview, and now, under our dynamic, Fleet Street-schooled new editor, it has expanded to a pretty weighty, 600-word column, based around and spun off the Film Of The Week, with a personal angle built in. Phew. (So when I confessed that I used to hate musicals, but changed my mind in my 30s, the moderately misleading headline was: How I fell in love at 34 – eek!) Anyway, judging by the paucity of comments left after the online version of the column, gathered under the heading Film Watch, its presence there is little noticed. So I’m linking to it. As a public service.