What if … the mechanical shark had worked in Jaws?

Another little item I wrote for Word magazine, in 2009, that I’d forgotten about (and has never been published online). I was asked to imagine a “what if?” scenario from the world of entertainment.

May, 1974, Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts: first day of the Jaws shoot. The three life-size, $200,000 mechanical great white sharks designed by effects veteran Robert A Mattey work like a dream. The saltwater has no adverse effect on the steel rails running under the surface, the eyes and jaws look realistic and the polyurethane skin does not need constantly replacing. The rushes looks fantastic. The film comes in on time and on budget. Director Steven Spielberg and editor Verna Fields do not need to “hide” the shark: it appears, full face, in scene one, requiring no suspenseful two-note musical theme from John Williams. Jaws opens in 409 theatres in June; audiences get an initial shock on seeing the shark, but the film peaks too early. Word gets out. Box office tails off. The big studios see no quick way of making a mint in summer, and continue to indulge the left-field “movie brat” directors. Universal files for bankruptcy. A nervous Fox opens Star Wars in just 300 theatres. It becomes a minor cult. No sequel is ordered. The studios doggedly pursue the European visions of the new wave of auteurs throughout the 80s until moviemaking becomes a high-risk, low-return business and the new multiplexes are closed, leading to a minor boom in arthouses. Jaws enjoys a revival as an ironic midnight movie. In 1993, Spielberg finally gets an Emmy for Watch The Skies, a single-camera sitcom about a man in Phoenix convinced he’s seen a UFO. People who have been swimming in the sea without fear ever since have no way of describing rare shark sightings: “It was a like a scene out of … ?”

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Whatever | August 2010

Whatever | Guilty pleasures
They’re songs and books. What’s to feel guilty about?

In May 1933, when the Nationalsozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund decided to collectively haul themselves out of bed before the Third Reich equivalent of Loose Women and organise a nationwide purge of “un-German” literature at universities across Germany, more than 25,000 titles were burned on bonfires which must have smelt powerfully musty. Around that time and under that particular regime in that particular swathe of Europe, if you chose to leaf through a play by Bertolt Brecht in the park, or a novel by Thomas Mann on the tram, or Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet On The Western Front just about anywhere, you were by definition experiencing the illicit thrill of a guilty pleasure.

Similarly, your enjoyment in the old Soviet Union of The Gulag Archipelago, Doctor Zhivago or Nineteen Eighty-Four would have been laced with that bracing buzz of the forbidden, as each might have earned you the bracing buzz of a KGB show trial. In 2008, South Korea’s Ministry of Defence banned the military from reading an armful of “seditious” books, including that well-thumbed squaddies’ standby Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and The Secret History of Capitalism by Cambridge professor Ha-Joon Chang.

Even today, owning a copy of Dianetics by L Ron Hubbard in the new Russia carries a 3,000 rouble fine and a jail term of up to 15 days. (Most of the arch-Thetan’s canon was banned under a recent law, for “undermining the traditional spiritual values of the citizens of the Russian Federation.”) It remains illegal to read The Diary Of Anne Frank, Sophie’s Choice and Schindler’s List in Lebanon, all de-listed by the Sûreté General for portraying Jews, Israel or Zionism “favourably”. And The Da Vinci Code is conspicuous by its absence on the streets of Beirut, too, thanks to lobbying by Lebanon’s Catholic Information Center, who officially have nothing better to do.

Bear all of this in mind when you consider that in May 2010, the Guardian newspaper asked various browsers on a knoll at the Hay Literary Festival to reveal their “literary guilty pleasure”. Their willing responses included Marian Keyes, David Nicholls, Zadie Smith, Alan Bennett, “heavy metal biographies”, and The Kite Runner.

Why should anyone literate enough to attend a Guardian-sponsored book fair in a country that even Mark Thomas would be hard pushed to call a totalitarian state, feel guilty about reading Zadie Smith, or Marian Keyes, or a heavy metal biography? These answers, like the spurious questionnaire standby itself, may be lightly thrown but they reveal weightier truths about our national neurosis: we are rendered daft by keeping up appearances like a bunch of insecure teenagers. Though we have little to fear from secret police or religious junta, we merrily and self-mockingly go along with the flimsy pretext that some books, films and TV shows can be consumed without guilt, while others must be enjoyed behind locked doors. Such as, apparently, the Celebrity Come Dine With Me of literature, Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner. Hey, people might think you’re reading a book about kites, rather than the rise of the Taliban in the power vacuum after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Incidentally, the popular film was banned in Afghanistan, making the DVD a cinematic guilty pleasure in Kabul.

In 2007, commissioned by the Costa Book Awards, a YouGov poll declared Stephen King “the UK’s favourite literary guilty pleasure.” UK readers also “freely admitted” to feeling a bit self-conscious about whipping out a Rowling, a Grisham or a Pratchett without first slipping it between the covers of a decoy copy of Fiesta or Knave. Expert comment on the coffee chain’s press release came from a contributing editor of The Encyclopedia of Guilty Pleasures: 1001 Things You Hate To Love, published in hardback in 2006 and described by the Times Literary Supplement as “something of a guilty pleasure.” Its very opportunistic existence flagged up the phrase’s sudden marketability.

That this sado-masochistic concept should still linger in the popular imagination and across so many artforms is, I’m afraid, rock music’s fault, where lines are forever being drawn and redrawn in the dunes of credibility. It was enterprising London DJ Sean Rowley who first trademarked Guilty Pleasures™, which now covers an entire cheeky empire of club nights, compilation albums, SingStar tie-ins, a Fearne Cotton-fronted ITV1 karaoke show, and a mobile disco available for hire at festival tent, arena warm-up, corporate jolly and private function. Rowley was astute in locating the fecund no-man’s land between cool and uncool a few years back and bagging the salvage rights.

I don’t wish to poop the party: the pics on the Guilty Pleasures website suggest a sizable slice of ongoing camp, works-outing fun in nightclubs up and down the land – verily, it is the new School Disco. But in taking the notion so irretrievably overground, gurning wig-outs of allegiance to ELO or Journey or Japanese Boy obviate any need for guilt. We live in a world of pop pluralism and Glee glasnost, where nostalgia packages and tribute bands make everything alright and, for anyone over 30, the last vestiges of embarrassment have been cast aside like a pair of crutches at Lourdes. Now is not the time to transfer our guilt to books.

Among the Guilty Pleasures website’s “celebrity confessionals”, Russell Brand cleverly eschews the obligatory Toto or Wham and plumps for Gary Glitter. “I feel a bit guilty about this,” he declares. “What with him being a convicted paedophile.”

In the same spirit of literalism, three cheers too for Alex, 70, retired, from mid-Wales, the sole Guardian respondent at Hay to break ranks and say, “I don’t feel guilty about reading anything.” Nor should you. Now, where’s my copy of Mein Kampf? I need something to wrap around The Encyclopedia of Guilty Pleasures on the bus.

There at the New Yorker

Thanks to an enterprising gentleman/scholar called Gavin Hogg, and his ongoing blog project to log all issues of the much-missed Word magazine, I have just re-read my autumn 2005 article on the New Yorker, which is my favourite current magazine and I suspect always will be. I don’t get commissioned to write “long-form” articles that much. The occasional meatier piece for Radio Times (I’m working on a Star Wars story right now, and I’m going on the set of Peaky Blinders this week), and the even more occasional feature for the Guardian or G2 (although the newspaper’s filo-pastry-like commissioning process is sometimes as impenetrably layered as the BBC’s!), but I mostly, these days, I seem to talking again – on the radio, on the Guardian website, on further talking head shows – and my writing work is all beneath the surface, in script form, in development. So, it was an education to re-read what turned out to be an educated three-page feature in its original – and rather fetching layout. I reprint it here, as – what the heck! – I’m rather proud of it. It was from the heart, and decently researched, and comes from a place of genuine love, which is always a good place to start. I wish Word magazine still existed, but remain truly thankful that it ever did.

Whatever | November 2009

Whatever | Militant atheism
Please, Prof Dawkins, can I be a quiet, passive atheist?

As a pacifist, and a coward, I’m really not looking for a fight. But argy bargy is brewing in the ideological playground, and rather than skulk off or adopt the scarf of the side most likely to emerge victorious, I propose we have a discussion first. What I’m actually saying is: I want to talk to you about God.

Does he/she/it exist, or not? That is the question at the heart of the 21^st century’s most fashionable philosophical face-off – one that appears to have been artificially hotwired into life by a small but vocal group of deity-intolerant academics, writers and trendies, led by dashing evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, lapsed liberal and scourge of “the three great monotheisms” Christopher Hitchens and Jewish American author with issues Sam Harris. (I’d call them atheism’s cheerleaders were they not so palpably cheerless.)

Whether by accident or intelligent design, Not Believing In God has been elevated to a creed all of its own, with its own gospels – The God Delusion, The End Of Faith, God Is Not Great – and O-come-all-ye-faithless proverbs, plastered on the sides of 800 buses nationwide earlier this year (“There’s probably no God: stop worrying and enjoy your life”). The bus campaign, as inversely evangelical as any doorstepping Jehovah’s Witness, was funded by donations to the tune of £140,000 – a clear sign that the secular are taking up alms.

I should declare if not an interest, then certainly an anomaly: I don’t believe in God either. I sang O Jesus I Have Promised and learned cute Bible stories at school, but failed to make a meaningful metaphysical connection. At a base theological level, I’m with Dawkins. Bizarrely enough, I’ve even shared a variety bill with him: last Christmas’s Nine Lessons and Carols for Godless People, an evening of comedy, music and science curated by Robin Ince and New Humanist magazine. It was literally secularism as a bit of fun, like new toilet book The Atheist’s Guide To Christmas.

My worry is the growing militancy of the atheist lobby, which is where me and it part company. As far as I see it, not doing something is by definition a passive activity. If anything, my lack of faith is an absence, a void, a missing jigsaw piece, not a soapbox from which to convert others to my non-cause. I don’t follow cricket either; but as long as cricket fans don’t come round my house and threaten me with bats, we can bump along without incident. I certainly don’t regard them as brainwashed numbskulls for their lifestyle choice. And yet, in The God Delusion, which I found compelling and repulsive in equal measure, Dawkins suggests that people “cling to religion” because “they have been let down by our educational system and don’t realise that non-belief is even an option.” In other words – idiots! – they’re too thick to be atheists. This is fighting talk.

I have no more affection for gay-hatin’, creationism-lovin’, suicide-bombin’ fundamentalists than you do – they give the Gods that go with them a bad name; the hardcore Morrissey fans of religion – but the “new atheists” can be just as actively belligerent and blind to reason, without spotting the irony. James Wood, writing in the New Yorker, asserted that the new atheism is “necessarily a kind of rival belief.” Christian theologian and author of The Dawkins Delusion Alister McGrath pictured Dawkins “preaching to his God-hating choirs … clearly expected to relish his rhetorical salvoes and raise their hands high in adulation.”

In his bracing tract Straw Dogs, political philosopher John Gray hits upon something that helps decode the virulent fundamentalism of Dawkins and his disciples: that their battle is not against God as much as it is for Science. Gray writes that Science, which brooks no wimpy notions of doubt, now claims the authority once commanded by the Church: “It has the power to destroy, or marginalise, independent thinkers.”

There seems to be a significant and meaningful crossover between the anti-God lobby and the pro-Science lobby, as if a faith in one is antithetical to a faith in the other – which leaves the majority of Christians who use hair dryers, read weather forecasts and take Ibuprofen in a vast grey area. But Dawkins’ actual title at Oxford until 2008 was Professor for Public Understanding Of Science, a chair funded by a software executive and space tourist. Even his academic post had the whiff of propaganda about it.

I propose a splinter group for quiet, passive atheists. We will hold no meetings, write no books, seek no voice, just get on with not believing in God, peacefully, in the comfort of our own homes. If we had a slogan on a bus, which we don’t, it would be: “There’s probably no God; when does Marple start?”

Whatever | July 2007

Whatever | Noughties indie
When did the indie bands get so damn greedy?

It was a standing joke among readers of what used to be called the music press in the mid-80s that Prefab Sprout would reissue the single When Love Breaks Down every six months. They did so in the hope that the Great British Public would finally recognise it for the modern pop classic it so patently was and put it in the bloody charts.

The fast track to overground glory didn’t exist for a critically acclaimed fringe property like Prefab Sprout in those days, when “chart music” had a very specific sound: thunderous, sequenced drums, elephantine keyboards, Pino Palladino. With very few exceptions – Smiths, Depeche Mode, New Order – critical darlings had to be grateful to splash around in the small pond that was the Independent Chart and hope there was no Acid House that week.

Kitchenware, a record label of character and wit, actually only put When Love Breaks Down out three times: first in October 84, when it failed to worry even the Top 75; again in March ’85, politely remixed this time, but still no Woolworths action in a climate of Belouis Some and Go West; and finally, November ’85, when it clawed its way up to number 25 and got them onto Top Of The Pops in time for Christmas. It was all very proprietorial in those days, “us” and “them”, and for one of “ours” to be seen chasing Gallup was frankly unbecoming. Prefab Sprout had banked sufficient goodwill for this willful act of gamesmanship to be filed as a moral victory.

How very different the playing field looks today. As I write, Jamie T, gifted Wimbledon street-poet and darling of the NME, is in the charts with the tremendous Sheila. But wait a minute, wasn’t Sheila in the charts last summer? Yes it was. It reached a healthy number 22 in July 2006. So why release it again? Vanity? Creative bankruptcy? For a laugh? Or might it be that Jamie T and his record company Virgin are greedy, greedy bastards who regard the kids as contemptible idiots? (Oh, sorry, it’s got a new live b-side.)

Nobody in the industry will bat an eyelid that a number 22 hit is being lovelessly reissued less than a year later just in case it can get a bit higher this time. Over the last five years, such craven acts of ideological surrender have become standard practice, with labels treating the Top 40 as a fairground Test Your Strength machine, returning time and again with a slightly bigger hammer.

Newcastle new wavers Maximo Park enjoyed their first hit Apply Some Pressure in March 2005: it reached number 20. Eight months and two further hits later, they re-released it. Same song. Same mix. Live b-side, no doubt. This time, it reached number 17. That’s three places higher. In a single chart that only requires sales of about five thousand to reach such lofty heights. Kasabian reached number 19 with Club Foot in May 2004; a year later, the reissued Club Foot reached … 21. That, ladies and gentlemen of marketing, is three places lower. Why bother?

Am I being horribly old-fashioned and prudish in expecting younger, more idealistic bands in the first flush of success to act with a little more dignity?

It was Harry Hill who, in the mid-90s, said, “I like the indie bands. Pulp, Blur and Oasis, they’re the main three, aren’t they?” A decade later and everybody’s an indie band, a bottleneck that leads to desperate measures, and the “firework bands” phenomenon, whereby we see a glut of credible bands who enjoy disproportionate success with their debut album – Hard-Fi, Editors, the Kooks – but may struggle to keep the blue touchpaper lit as younger indie fans, who’ve turned out to be just as fickle as pop fans, wander off. Arctic Monkeys may endure, but then, they have never re-released a single song, ever.

The indie sector first bent over in the early 90s, when great white hopes were signed to majors for sums indexed largely on NME and Melody Maker coverage and then dramatically failed to recoup. Fontana, having paid £400,000 for the House Of Love, managed to secure a Top 20 placing for a reissued Shine On only by putting it out on seven separate formats. Follow-up The Beatles And The Stones came in ten formats. It reached 36. The kids, whom the band’s previous label Creation claimed to be “doing it” for, were not impressed. These days, the kids don’t give a fig for honour or principle.

Hence, aforementioned Birmingham gloom-rockers Editors, whose discography is so engorged with reissues it actually reads like a haiku: Bullets, Munich, Blood, Bullets, Munich, All Sparks, Blood. The reissue of Blood, I hardly need mention, peaked 20 big chart places lower than the original.

Mind you, Editors are signed to Kitchenware.

Published in Word magazine, July 2007

Whatever | January 2009

Whatever | Animal racism
Is the gun-toting “management” of the grey squirrel class war?

This year I have mostly become obsessed by the Mitford sisters, those intrepid darlings of the decadent Vile Bodies era who dallied at both poles of political extremism, Unity befriending Hitler, Jessica running away to fight Franco, while Pamela, a lesbian, became an expert in rearing chickens. Their collected correspondence, Letters Between Six Sisters, spans virtually the entire 20^th century, touching on everything from appeasement to the Kennedy assassination.

I should by rights be nauseated by the privileged, ball-going, cousin-marrying exploits of these tweedy scions of the gentry. Instead, they have captivated me. I like to think they represent the last of a doomed uberclass, their extinction predicted by Orwell in The Lion and The Unicorn and memorialised in 1954 by linguist Professor Alan Ross: “A member of the upper class is no longer necessarily better educated, cleaner, or richer than someone not of this class.”

But don’t be hoodwinked by John Prescott’s claim that we are all middle class now. I recently opened the Observer magazine and staring back at me was the objectionable 6^th Baron Redesdale, a congenitally balding 41-year-old in checked shirt and hacking jacket, standing in one of his several hundred rural Northumberland acres and toothily guffawing for the camera as he held out a dead grey squirrel by its lifeless tail.

Redesdale, a Liberal peer, really hates grey squirrels. He and his all-weather army of volunteers have killed 19,500 of them in 18 months, ethnically cleansing England’s northernmost county. They are the Red Squirrel Protection Partnership, whose patriotic, conservationist aim is to restore the native red to rightful prominence by trapping and shooting greys “just behind the ear – if you hit them in the middle of the skull you can miss the brain”. Britain’s greys carry a strain of parapoxvirus that kills their shy, russet cousin, outnumbering them by around two million to 140,000. Thus, the population must be “managed.”

Now, I’m a townie. I’m typically squeamish about talk of genocidal culls. Worse, I’m one of those animal lovers who actually thinks the world would be a better place if it was run by cats. (Well, we’d certainly get more holiday.) I’m also a Darwinist, and if one breed of squirrel does better than another, who am I to arrogantly step in and redress the balance? Sorry to namedrop, but as the vegetarian Paul McCartney once said to me, “A fox’ll kill a sheep. It’s nature. I understand that a hawk kills something. It’s his gig.”

Equally, it’s the grey squirrel’s gig to be hardy and predator-free. Don’t start waving the blunderbuss around like you own the place – even if, due to some hereditary accident, the paperwork says you do. It’s like those simpletons who coo at a nice robin on their fencepost at Christmas but say they hate pigeons. The pigeon’s most heinous crime is to thrive. Why? Because we stuff muffins and croissants into our mouths while we walk along the street and strew crumbs everywhere. To favour one bird or squirrel species over another, particularly on the basis of fur colour, is surely a form of racism.

Listen to the braying Lord Redesdale: “Dipton woods: we took 2,000 out. If you clear a woodland you suck all the surrounding population to it. Then you hit ’em again. Suck ’em in, hit ’em.” Sorry, is he reading from Beatrix Potter or Andy McNab? “In the winter there’s no cover. They all get together in the cold. You can get eight or nine with a couple of shots. All huddled together. We annihilated them.”

At a decisive House of Lords debate in March 2006, one Lord Chorley warned of the grey menace, even now scurrying across Europe: “There are three colonies in Italy, at least one in the process of crossing the Alps. If they get to Germany there will be a complete invasion.” It’s an unsavoury mixture of incipient island paranoia (“They come over here, they take our dreys”), nostalgia for a lost, Baden-Powell era (It was the Scouts founder’s inaugural camp in 1907 on Dorset’s red squirrel stronghold Brownsea Island, which helped popularise Nutkin as a symbol of English heritage) and a macho trigger-happy bloodlust redolent of tiger shooting in the Raj. It could make class warriors of us all, even in a post-Obama utopia.

The killing joke is, it was the colonial toffs who brought grey squirrels over from America in the first place, as pets. And a pair escaped. Oh, and Baron Redesdale’s name is Rupert Mitford: he’s the great nephew of my six favourite aristocrats. Well, Unity’s pal would have been proud of him.

Published in Word magazine, January 2009

Whatever | August 2008

Whatever | US Election ’08
Barack Obama is redrawing the map of US politics. Can you imagine any of our lot doing the same?

I did a double-take the Chuckle Brothers would have been proud of in the first week of June, when I glimpsed the front-page headline of The London Paper, one of our great capital’s three appalling free newspapers. It read: AMERICA’S FIRST BLACK PRESIDENT. Already? I know the run-up to the US Presidential Elections drags on for years, but as a keen student of primaries and caucuses, I found it hard to believe that I’d missed the Big One. On closer inspection, the announcement turned out to have a weedy question mark on the end. (Can a query actually be a newspaper headline? FIRST MAN ON MOON? SHEEP SUCCESSFULLY CLONED? MADDY STILL MISSING?)

Never mind the tantalising possibility of Barack Obama becoming the first black president, it’s thrilling enough that the Kenyan goat-herder’s son is the first black presidential candidate. This is, after all, a country where some folk still proudly fly the Confederate flag and consider lynching to have been just a bit of fun. Even if he loses to the ancient John McCain, tautological “liberal republican” and Vietnam war hero, Obama has made history. (Not something you could say about Kerry or Dukakis or Mondale or any of the other great losing Democrats of our time.) It’s a mug’s game for foreigners to get too caught up in the faraway pomp and tickertape of American politics, for when the time comes on November 4, we’ll be the ones turning up at the church hall and asking why we don’t actually get a vote.

Since the outcome affects the lives of, hmmm, let me see, oh yes, everybody in the world, wouldn’t it be fairer if we all received a postal ballot? After all, even as a two-horse race it’s going to be a hundred times more exciting than the general election that waits around the corner for us in two years’ time. A black man versus a white man. A young man versus an old man. Hawaii versus Panama. African blood versus Scots-Irish and a dash of English. A man who opposes the war in Iraq versus one who declared in 2003 that it would be “one of the best things that’s happened to America in a long time.” (Still, I like his oven chips.)

Barring a major upset, such as a gormless coup in the Court of Gordon Brown by any number of Millibands, or Liberal leader Nick Clegg admitting an affair with the other Cheeky Girl, our next national polling day will be untroubled by Sky One’s Gladiators: a 57-year old white Scot against a 42-year-old white Englishman and 41-year-old white Englishman. (Add two years to their ages if that’s how long it takes for the Scot to stabilise the economy using all his powers and all his skills.) The Scot thinks we would all be better off with ID cards. The Englishman doesn’t, or at least says he doesn’t. The other Englishman doesn’t, but won’t get in so it’s hypothetical. One of them claims to have enjoyed The Jam when he was at Eton (“I don’t see why the left should be the only ones to listen to protest songs”). One of them claimed to like Arctic Monkeys (they would “really wake you up in the morning”, he told New Woman, but the Number Ten rebuttal unit later repositioned the Chancellor’s statement as hypothetical, although he had heard Arctic Monkeys). One of them claims to like Johnny Cash, although when discussing him on Radio Four’s Music Group programme, he got the name of Folsom Prison and Walk The Line wrong.

I don’t want my politicians to be cool. I don’t even want them to be interesting. I certainly don’t want them admitting to “no more than 30” sexual partners in GQ. I want them to be passionate advocates and belligerent ideologues with their own hairstyles and unconventional tastes, ready with an unscripted riposte and a gift for oratory, rather than kids enrolled at the London Oratory. While I accept that only an American could get away with land-of-our-fathers schmaltz like, “Hope is the bedrock of this nation … in this moment, in this election, we are ready to believe again,” but I wouldn’t mind hearing a few words from Cameron or Brown that might unite a few more people than some delegates in braces at the Confederation of British Industry.

It’s amazing how quickly you become blasé about seismic socio-ethnic shifts in mainstream politics though, isn’t it? I’m bored of the idea of a black US president already. I demand a gay atheist. An unmarried Muslim. Someone who’s had more than 30 partners. Come on, it’s time for change.

Published in Word magazine, August 2008

Whatever | September 2009

Whatever | Festivals and work/life balance
Why blanket media coverage of Glastonbury has puréed its spirit

Thanks to extensive coverage in all BBC-hating national newspapers – ie. all national newspapers – we know that the Corporation dispatched “almost as many” reporters, presenters, producers, technicians and support staff to cover this year’s Glastonbury festival as it did last summer’s Beijing Olympics: about 400. Sky News described it as a “sun-soaked event” (counter to the newspapers’ preferred caricature of a “mud bath”), as if to underline the mealy-mouthed assertion that this was a massive “junket”; Matthew Elliott of the purple-faced TaxPayers’ Alliance announced, “All 407 staff can’t be there doing proper work.” Well, sorry, but I think providing three days of output across three channels and red-button interactive services as the festival’s worldwide broadcast partner probably counts as proper work, even when it’s sunny and Dizzee Rascal’s doing Bonkers. And I bet the toilets and mobile reception were better in Beijing.

The question mark hangs not over whether 400-plus BBC employees were working, but whether what they were working on is any longer worth the almighty faff. I find myself in a relatively decent position to judge: a moderate veteran after half a dozen working Glastonburys between 1989 and 1995, I had retired from the annual pilgrimage with no inclination to return. Then, after a rash, sherry-influenced decision at Christmas, I agreed to return, older and wiser and ready to be dismayed by how, hey, corporate and sanitised it had become. I camped for five days without the aid of a backstage wristband or freebie ticket. And guess what? It was just as vast, unfettered and bamboozling as before, the cumulative effect quite unlike either the family holiday or wartime conscription of modern shorthand. Having happily kept up in the intervening 14 years by watching Glastonbury on telly, I was struck by the vast sensory chasm which – more than ever – exists between the event itself and the way it comes across on BBC4, or Sky News, or in a pullout souvenir in the Observer. More Glastonbury coverage does not mean better Glastonbury coverage.

The armchair music festival season now begins in early June with the Isle Of Wight – broadcast partner ITV2; hosts Fearne Cotton, Rufus Hound; Absolute Radio “set up camp [no they don’t] … to bring listeners around the UK exclusive live performances, interviews and backstage news and gossip.” Come September, the home festivalgoer will have “experienced” T In The Park (BBC3, Edith Bowman; Radio 1; Radio Scotland), Reading/Leeds (BBC3, Edith Bowman, Zane Lowe; Radio 1), V Festival (4Music; Absolute), Bestival (C4; 4Music; Radio 1), Latitude (Radio 2, Stuart Maconie, Dermot O’Leary, Claudia Winkleman, Janice Long; Radio 4; 6 Music), Cambridge Folk Festival (Radio 2) and T4 On The Beach (C4, Steve Jones, Miquita Oliver). Although “Glasto” – as even Andrew Marr now calls it – continues to occupy a regal place on the calendar, it too gets puréed into indeterminate, flag-and-kagoule mush by all this relentlessly upbeat, uncritical, blanket reportage of anything that steps onto a stage, or into a puddle. Festival season is to a certain type of thirtysomething, jeans-wearing, Ting Tings-loving presenter, what pantomime season is to dwarfs. For the rest of us, it’s a surefire way of growing bored of live music. I texted civilisation during Neil Young’s set on the Pyramid Stage and ascertained that he was “boring” on TV; in situ, on a warm evening in Avon, he was mesmerising.

The sad fact is, Glastonbury and the other major pasture-based gigs are now part of the arts furniture, slotted in between Glyndebourne, Hay, Edinburgh, Cannes, the Proms, even the non-horsey bits of Ascot: all subject to their own set of visual and written clichés. A glance through the Telegraph’s online “picture gallery” from Glastonbury is dominated by fragrant young ladies and apple-faced kids in the mud, despite the fact that it only rained once and the ground was bone dry by Saturday. I particularly liked, “Two girls walk through the site with blow-up airbeds.” Pictorially, Glastonbury is the new A-Level results for newspapers like the Telegraph with no real interest in the music or the vibe.

In 1992, the NME made music press history by turning its Glastonbury coverage round by – gasp! – the Wednesday after the festival, rather than waiting a full week to call in all the copy. Why hurry? Nobody expected to read about it the moment they got home in those pre-enlightenment days. Nowadays, Q magazine comes out daily, onsite. And yet, if it didn’t, the festival would go on. When Michael Jackson died, reporters were desperate to tell the world that a grief-stricken hush had fallen across Worthy Farm. It hadn’t. We were a bit surprised, and then got on with eating a burrito and joining the queue for the Orange phone-recharging chillout tent.

In short, I shall treat all coverage of Ascot with extreme suspicion from now on.

Published in Word magazine, September 2009

Whatever | April 2010

Whatever | 3D or not 3D
Will Avatar take Hollywood to the next dimension, or are those glasses making us blind?

Just before Christmas in 1952, United Artists released a functional African jungle adventure called Bwana Devil. The first feature to be exhibited in Natural Vision 3D, its publicity made the famous promise, “A lion in your lap!” Advertising standards would take a dim view of the flimsiness of this leonine proximity claim today, but desperate times – as the 1950s were for Hollywood during TV’s first boom – called for desperate measures.

Just before Christmas in 2009, 20^th Century Fox released a functional Pandoran jungle adventure called Avatar. The first feature to be shot in 3D using various bespoke gizmos in the field of motion-capture, its publicity revolved around special tie-in bottles of Coke Zero and director James Cameron talking the film up big-style at sci-fi conventions. No explicit promises were made, but Avatar might have been sold with the guarantee, “Little floaty specs of ash caused by an air strike raining down around your shoulders like dandruff!”

This is not meant as a facetious comparison, even though I have carefully written it as one. In actual fact, not that much has changed between the lion in the lap and the dandruff down the back, except that 21^st century audiences are less gullible and more reticent to tear themselves away from small glowing boxes. Bwana Devil did well enough at the box office, as did the knock-on 3D flea circuses that propagated in its wake – House Of Wax, It Came From Outer Space, Robot Monster, The Creature From The Black Lagoon – at least until the sums stopped adding up. But none of them performed like Avatar, even if figures are adjusted for inflation, which they never are or else Gone With The Wind would always be number one and the all-time box office charts would cease to act as a team-building exercise for studio accountants.

The tin-hat difference between Bwana Devil and Avatar is that the former was conspicuous by its absence at the 25^th Academy Awards – it was all 2D confections like High Noon and The Quiet Man that year – while the latter scored nine nominations at the 82^nd. By the time you read this, you’ll know whether or not it took home Best Picture. If not, having already shamed his last film Titanic into second place with a world-beating $2.3 billion take (at time of going to press), Cameron will be able to dry his eyes on hundred dollar bills and toss them into a waste paper basket woven from the eyelashes of angels.

The twinkling aura of success that fizzes and pops around Avatar provides a welcome firework display to momentarily distract from an inconvenient truth: that the movies are in trouble. In posh film journal Sight & Sound, Nick James made his own prediction: that the Oscar will indeed go to Avatar, because, as he foresaw it, “this year the industry will vote for the financial, not the aesthetic Best Picture … The business will cheer the money, because they’re scared and they hope that 3D can save them.” In the same issue, Nick Roddick, writing as “Mr Busy”, penned a de facto obituary for Hollywood as we know it: “the studio system is like a dinosaur in a tar pit.” With execs being fired on a daily basis – two of them, Universal co-chairmen Marc Schmuger and David Linde announced that we live in “an era where brands have become the new stars” just before they received their redundancy packages – the impression is of an industry in panic. Why? Didn’t some film called Avatar just make, like, more money than any other film ever except Gone With The Wind and who cares about that old thing? Yes it did. In 17 days. (Now there’s a block graph on an overhead projector that’s going to make up for the lack of croissants at the News Corps shareholders meeting.)

Just as the success of Nirvana led to the signing of Tad, post-Avatar, film studios are literally sending completed blockbusters back to the menders and ordering up an extra dimension, from Clash Of The Titans to the final Harry Potter double-bill Deathly Hallows. The Times reported that LA’s celluloid-to-digital conversion labs are fully booked (“We can turn an older film into 3-D in around 16 weeks,” said the man at one such, Legend Films in San Diego), while super-geeks Peter Jackson and George Lucas are salivating at the prospect of running their respective sagas through the machine, just as Pixar have done with Toy Story. “2D or not 2D?” – that is not the question.

I wish it was a passing craze, like Sensurround™, Illusion-O™ and Vinnie Jones™, but with 3D tellys being rolled out, 3D Blu-Ray on the horizon and 3D football matches bringing new meaning to collecting up the glasses in pubs, it may be that the man from cinema chain USC was right when he told the Times, “It’s no longer a gimmick, but an expectation.” Not in my house. And I speak as someone who queued up to see Friday The 13^th 3D as a teenager in order to experience a pitchfork handle in my face. Nick James is astute when he describes Avatar as “a film for 15-year-olds that grown-ups enjoy for its technological breakthroughs.” I also worry that all this tech-fetishism makes gawping idiots of us all.

Hey, I’m all for the industry being saved – I really like films – but Avatar is not exactly a quick fix. It took years to make and cost $310 million, plus $150 to market. It would be cheaper to release an actual lion into every punter’s lap.

Having said that, those wraparound 3D specs did create the dazzling illusion that Cameron’s one-dimensional characters were two-dimensional.

Whatever | November 2010

Whatever | In praise of print
The printed word is so last century. But you’ll miss the airport novel and the boarding pass when they’re gone

I am against the Kindle. There, I’ve said it. As lightweight and graphite-cool as Amazon’s proprietary e-reader clearly is, I simply don’t want an electronic device designed primarily for the purpose of reading digital books. But please don’t equate my antipathy with Ned Ludd’s violent decommissioning of two mechanical knitting machines in the early 19^th century. My aversion to the e-reader is rooted not in ideological proletarian revenge or technological nostalgia, but in the simple truth that choosing which paperbacks to pack for my holiday gives me an inordinate amount of pleasure.

One year I used up most of my Ryanair baggage allowance by selecting Ian Kershaw’s Hitler for a relaxing week in Ireland; it defined my stay as much as the choice of cottage or location, and you can see it in the holiday snaps – unlike whatever’s on a Kindle screen. I have no beef with progress. But with each incremental tweak of our eternally rechargeable daily lives by stubbled geeks riding scooters around a place of work they genuinely believe to be a “campus”, we inch further from culture’s moorings: tactility, intimacy, fallibility and, yes, its occasionally musty smell. My bullshit detector always starts to twitch whenever an electronic device is advertised as having the same qualities as previously adequate acoustic delivery systems, such as talking, reading or doing. (“iPad is … delicious … playful … friendly … literary,” lies the commercial.)

We live in a word that’s shredding its paper. We’re glued to touch-screens and reliant on the mystical power of unseen hard drives, mainframes and servers to remember everything; utility companies offer rebates for “paper-free” billing; album “artwork” is merely an unclicked file document; and we recently learned that the third edition of the voluminous Oxford English Dictionary, due for completion in ten years, will only be available online.

Meanwhile, last June I cancelled my subscription to The Ecologist magazine. Not in a fit of purple-faced pique – the decision was forced upon me when, with laudable eco-intent, its print edition ceased production after 39 years and moved exclusively online. I’m old-skool enough to consider a “digital edition” an option and not a fait accompli.

It was Massachusetts doctor Duncan MacDougal who discovered that the human body instantaneously loses 21 grams when we die; hence the attractive hippy myth that the departing human soul weighs 21 grams. If you delete the “digital edition” of a magazine, or drag an eBook to the trash, your tablet computer’s weight remains constant. Ergo, the laptop has no soul.

This July, although he didn’t live to see it, Stieg Larsson became the first author to sell a million eBooks on Amazon, a milestone dutifully fanfared in the national print media, an industry staring down the barrel of extinction because of the cleverly marketed convenience and alpha status of, well, e-readers. I for one am in predictive mourning. James Brown, who made his name in the 1990s by selling a whole stack of magazines when that’s all we knew, talks up Sabotage Times, his new online venture, by denouncing what he calls “dead tree publishing”; the very phrase makes me sad.

I hope it’s not just my age, but in common I think with many of my generation I grew up in a home full of felt tips, pads and propelling pencils; my dad brought home carbon paper, hole punches and other exotica from work; and I was educated by way of chalk, red pen and whiteboards. When I wrote my dissertation for college, Mum typed it up for me; to be “printed” bestowed legitimacy – it was proper.

My first fanzine was furtively designed at the office photocopier and printed at Kall Kwik; with it, I secured a foot in the door of the NME, where my first job involved laying out pages – that is, sticking Letraset and Xeroxed pics onto paper grids with carcinogenic aerosol glue. Perhaps I am masochistically wedded to an outmoded ideal of inconvenience. I certainly equate what you put in with what you get out. Kershaw’s Hitler is available as an eBook, as easy to cart around and read on the train as an idea or a vibration. But where’s the commitment? And if you have every book at your 3G fingertips, where’s the fun?

American business and IT expert Nicholas Carr wrote an essay for Atlantic magazine entitled Is Google Making Us Stupid? It now forms the bones of a book, The Shallows, whose subtitle is less inflammatory: How the Internet is Changing the Way We Think, Read and Remember. Never mind changing – according to Carr, who blames scrolling screens for rewiring our neural pathways, leading to “cursory reading, hurried and distracted thinking, and superficial learning,” it’s doing to our patience what Ned Ludd did to those knitting machines.

It will only be by active and militant conservation that printed matter will defy the dustbin of history. We must protect magazines, maps, documents and Post-Its as we do tracts of marshland and designated places of historic interest and natural beauty. I recently returned to Ireland – having booked my flights online but printed out the boarding passes on paper – and found myself blissfully out of wi-fi range. More grateful than ever for paperbacks to thumb and newspapers to luxuriate in, I started filling in crosswords, something I haven’t done since I was a boy. I even bought a propelling pencil.

Sure, you can pull up an infinite catalogue of crosswords online, enter and re-enter the answers without recourse to a pencil eraser, and even click on words to see if you’re right. But where are you meant to scribble out the anagrams?

Now, as is my idiosyncratic wont, before delivering this column electronically, I will print it out in order to read it back. Because only then will it be proper.

First published in Word magazine, November 2010