The Soapboxx
Thursday, November 23, 2006
We Can't Stop Man's Onward March, But One Day It's Bound To Go Horribly Wrong
In November 2007, the Hadron Collider, located in an enormous cave 100 metres below the ground near the French-Swiss border, and the largest and most powerful particle accelerator ever built, will be switched on.
And at that moment, literally anything could happen.
Should we be worried? Perhaps. A particle accelerator is a man-made device that uses electric fields to propel electrically-charged particles to high speeds, and then contains them with the use of really powerful magnets. It comes in two basic forms - linear and circular - and the Hadron Collider is, as I understand it, the former. Think Ghostbusters, think Egon Spengler, and think proton packs, and you'll be somewhat in the right area. Just much, much bigger.
The Hadron Collider is - get this - 27 kilometers in circumference, looks frighteningly like the stardrive in Event Horizon, and can charge up to seven Tera-electron Volts. To give you some idea of exactly what that means, a Tera-electron Volt, or TEV as we scientists like to refer to it, is a lot of light bulbs. If you're reading this in the UK, tera means one billion. In the US, it's one trillion, which is even more impressive. I have no idea what it is on the French-Swiss border, but it's safe to say it's shorthand for 'bloody massive'. And then you multiply the whole lot by seven. Which gives you a total that I'm pretty sure rivals even Coronation Street's kettle peak.
The whole thing has been developed by CERN, which is the European Organisation for Nuclear Research. Located just outside Geneva, CERN is the world's largest particle physics laboratory, and is also acknowledged as the birthplace of the World Wide Web. It has twenty member states, which includes the UK and practically all of Europe, and has some 3000 full-time employees, as well as utilising the services of 6,500 scientists and engineers around the world. The project costs about £5bn, which includes an annual retainer of £78m from Blighty (the second biggest investor behind the Germans), and requires the computing power of roughly 30,000 PCs to operate. It's all incredibly James Bond, and I bet even now some wannabe super-villain is figuring out a way to use the entire thing for his own evil ends.
But maybe he won't have to. You see, the problem with the Hadron Collider is nobody really knows what will happen when they switch it on. It might do nothing. Or, it might, as they hope, do something else. Something much bigger.
When the Collider is active, it will fire protons in opposite directions around the 27 kilometer ring at 11,000 times per second - a velocity approaching the speed of light - which will repeatedly collide with each other (hence the name.) This will create an energy field that will rival that of the moments after The Big Bang. Yes, The Big Bang. In theory, this has the power to create black holes. Lots of tiny ones, in fact, that will probably blink in and out of existence.
But what the Euro-boffins are really after is definitive proof of the existence of the 'God particle', which also has the slightly-less sensationalist name of Higgs Boson. First theorised in 1964 at Edinburgh University by British physicist Peter Higgs, the Higgs Boson is a generally-accepted but as of yet unobserved hypothesis that seeks to explain how particles acquire their mass. If found to exist, it will validate the 'Standard Model of Physics', which is a very big deal, as absolute knowledge of this will give us insight into how everything is made. It will allow us to shape and redefine matter.
The scientists are so sure that the Hadron Collider will work that if it fails to observe the Higgs Boson at work, then clearly it does not exist. So, either way, we're going to come away with some useful knowledge.
But it's the X-factor that bothers me.
A fear of the unknown is total duality. While it can be extremely counter-productive in human relations and matters of social function, it's bloody useful when it comes to exploration. On August 2, 1492, when Christopher Columbus departed from Parlos in search of the New World, you can be sure he was bricking himself. They still believed in sea-monsters back then, and God knows he probably half-suspected that the world actually was flat, and that he might sail off the end.
Sir Francis Drake probably felt likewise when he decided to have a go at circumnavigating the globe, but his efforts led to the establishment of Drake's Passage, a now much-used body of water found between the southern tip of South America and the South Shetland Islands of Antarctica. Drake actually ended up dying of dysentery, which is one of those examples where irony really makes the world seem a better place.
Sir Henry Morton Stanley, when he set off to find David Livingstone in Zanzibar in 1869, required the services of no less than 200 porters and thousands and thousands of pounds. Two years later, he greeted his discovery with a tongue-in-cheek "Dr. Livingstone, I presume?", as the two of them were clearly the only white chaps for hundreds of miles. Then the fear got to him, and rallying behind the observation that "the savage only respects force, power, boldness, and decision", he callously beat and slaughtered scores of them. Which clearly was the right thing to do at the time, as nobody seems to remember that at all.
I suspect that Sir Edmond Hilary did kind of give some thought to the fact that he had a pretty reasonable chance of dying when he ascended Mount Everest in 1953. Likewise, when Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon on July 21, 1969, you can bet anything you like that he looked both ways for aliens before he even got off of the ladder.
It makes sense to be slightly apprehensive when entering absolutely brand new territory, because that caution, that fear, keeps you alive. Which is why I'm slightly concerned that everyone involved with the Hadron Collider, and that includes the media reportage surrounding it, are quite so blasé about the consequences. Yes, we might discover great new things, and we might finally observe the Higgs Boson at work, and this knowledge might let us go on to work all kinds of wonders, including the slowing of climate change, anti-gravity propulsion engines, tractor beams and a self-cooling can of Coke. All of these would be great, and I welcome them.
But what if they've got it all wrong? Or rather, what if they've got the physics right, but the outcome wrong? While there's half a chance that nothing happens at all, what if instead of lots of tiny, winking black holes, we get one big, sod-off monster one, that simply refuses to go away? Surely a 27 kilometer Collider can produce a 1km black hole, and if that happens, Switzerland is toast. Which might not be so bad in a social sense, but then the United Nations would get involved and American would invade North Korea. And Germany would probably have a third and final go, too, just to save face.
What if they've got it really wrong, and the entire thing implodes on itself, reversing the conditions that caused The Big Bang and actually undoing the universe? How ironic would that be? I'm no expert, but I've given this five minutes thought and I'm pretty sure it could happen. You better start stockpiling tins of beans to be safe. And buy a decent coat; space is cold.
If you watch Lost, you'll remember the incident at the end of the second season when a few of the islanders struggled with the purpose of the hatch and ended up a making a decision that almost wiped everyone from existence. And if TV has taught us anything, it's to always go with your gut. So, if you're out in the garden in November next year, and you see a big purple flash that fills the sky, you can be pretty sure that the chaps at CERN got it all horribly wrong.
And at that moment, literally anything could happen.
Should we be worried? Perhaps. A particle accelerator is a man-made device that uses electric fields to propel electrically-charged particles to high speeds, and then contains them with the use of really powerful magnets. It comes in two basic forms - linear and circular - and the Hadron Collider is, as I understand it, the former. Think Ghostbusters, think Egon Spengler, and think proton packs, and you'll be somewhat in the right area. Just much, much bigger.
The Hadron Collider is - get this - 27 kilometers in circumference, looks frighteningly like the stardrive in Event Horizon, and can charge up to seven Tera-electron Volts. To give you some idea of exactly what that means, a Tera-electron Volt, or TEV as we scientists like to refer to it, is a lot of light bulbs. If you're reading this in the UK, tera means one billion. In the US, it's one trillion, which is even more impressive. I have no idea what it is on the French-Swiss border, but it's safe to say it's shorthand for 'bloody massive'. And then you multiply the whole lot by seven. Which gives you a total that I'm pretty sure rivals even Coronation Street's kettle peak.
The whole thing has been developed by CERN, which is the European Organisation for Nuclear Research. Located just outside Geneva, CERN is the world's largest particle physics laboratory, and is also acknowledged as the birthplace of the World Wide Web. It has twenty member states, which includes the UK and practically all of Europe, and has some 3000 full-time employees, as well as utilising the services of 6,500 scientists and engineers around the world. The project costs about £5bn, which includes an annual retainer of £78m from Blighty (the second biggest investor behind the Germans), and requires the computing power of roughly 30,000 PCs to operate. It's all incredibly James Bond, and I bet even now some wannabe super-villain is figuring out a way to use the entire thing for his own evil ends.
But maybe he won't have to. You see, the problem with the Hadron Collider is nobody really knows what will happen when they switch it on. It might do nothing. Or, it might, as they hope, do something else. Something much bigger.
When the Collider is active, it will fire protons in opposite directions around the 27 kilometer ring at 11,000 times per second - a velocity approaching the speed of light - which will repeatedly collide with each other (hence the name.) This will create an energy field that will rival that of the moments after The Big Bang. Yes, The Big Bang. In theory, this has the power to create black holes. Lots of tiny ones, in fact, that will probably blink in and out of existence.
But what the Euro-boffins are really after is definitive proof of the existence of the 'God particle', which also has the slightly-less sensationalist name of Higgs Boson. First theorised in 1964 at Edinburgh University by British physicist Peter Higgs, the Higgs Boson is a generally-accepted but as of yet unobserved hypothesis that seeks to explain how particles acquire their mass. If found to exist, it will validate the 'Standard Model of Physics', which is a very big deal, as absolute knowledge of this will give us insight into how everything is made. It will allow us to shape and redefine matter.
The scientists are so sure that the Hadron Collider will work that if it fails to observe the Higgs Boson at work, then clearly it does not exist. So, either way, we're going to come away with some useful knowledge.
But it's the X-factor that bothers me.
A fear of the unknown is total duality. While it can be extremely counter-productive in human relations and matters of social function, it's bloody useful when it comes to exploration. On August 2, 1492, when Christopher Columbus departed from Parlos in search of the New World, you can be sure he was bricking himself. They still believed in sea-monsters back then, and God knows he probably half-suspected that the world actually was flat, and that he might sail off the end.
Sir Francis Drake probably felt likewise when he decided to have a go at circumnavigating the globe, but his efforts led to the establishment of Drake's Passage, a now much-used body of water found between the southern tip of South America and the South Shetland Islands of Antarctica. Drake actually ended up dying of dysentery, which is one of those examples where irony really makes the world seem a better place.
Sir Henry Morton Stanley, when he set off to find David Livingstone in Zanzibar in 1869, required the services of no less than 200 porters and thousands and thousands of pounds. Two years later, he greeted his discovery with a tongue-in-cheek "Dr. Livingstone, I presume?", as the two of them were clearly the only white chaps for hundreds of miles. Then the fear got to him, and rallying behind the observation that "the savage only respects force, power, boldness, and decision", he callously beat and slaughtered scores of them. Which clearly was the right thing to do at the time, as nobody seems to remember that at all.
I suspect that Sir Edmond Hilary did kind of give some thought to the fact that he had a pretty reasonable chance of dying when he ascended Mount Everest in 1953. Likewise, when Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon on July 21, 1969, you can bet anything you like that he looked both ways for aliens before he even got off of the ladder.
It makes sense to be slightly apprehensive when entering absolutely brand new territory, because that caution, that fear, keeps you alive. Which is why I'm slightly concerned that everyone involved with the Hadron Collider, and that includes the media reportage surrounding it, are quite so blasé about the consequences. Yes, we might discover great new things, and we might finally observe the Higgs Boson at work, and this knowledge might let us go on to work all kinds of wonders, including the slowing of climate change, anti-gravity propulsion engines, tractor beams and a self-cooling can of Coke. All of these would be great, and I welcome them.
But what if they've got it all wrong? Or rather, what if they've got the physics right, but the outcome wrong? While there's half a chance that nothing happens at all, what if instead of lots of tiny, winking black holes, we get one big, sod-off monster one, that simply refuses to go away? Surely a 27 kilometer Collider can produce a 1km black hole, and if that happens, Switzerland is toast. Which might not be so bad in a social sense, but then the United Nations would get involved and American would invade North Korea. And Germany would probably have a third and final go, too, just to save face.
What if they've got it really wrong, and the entire thing implodes on itself, reversing the conditions that caused The Big Bang and actually undoing the universe? How ironic would that be? I'm no expert, but I've given this five minutes thought and I'm pretty sure it could happen. You better start stockpiling tins of beans to be safe. And buy a decent coat; space is cold.
If you watch Lost, you'll remember the incident at the end of the second season when a few of the islanders struggled with the purpose of the hatch and ended up a making a decision that almost wiped everyone from existence. And if TV has taught us anything, it's to always go with your gut. So, if you're out in the garden in November next year, and you see a big purple flash that fills the sky, you can be pretty sure that the chaps at CERN got it all horribly wrong.
Friday, November 17, 2006
Sure, Do It For The Children, But What About My Needs?
I can't believe it's a full twelve months since the last one, but Children In Need is back on our TV screens tonight. And I, for one, am not happy.
Now, don't get me wrong; the general idea behind Children In Need is a fantastic one. Since it began in 1980, a total of some £410m has been raised. Last year's event earned £17,235,256 alone. That's impressive stuff.
However, I have a complaint. Yes, I support the cause, but why does it have to be packaged with such dreadful television programming? While I'm happy to chip in a quid or two, do they have to do everything at my expense?
Yes, I'm whining on about the telly again. But look: it wouldn't be so bad if they screened the thing on a Wednesday, because as we've seen, it would indubitably be a notable step-up in quality. But they have to do it on a Friday, don't they, which makes no sense at all. One, because all the drunks who are most likely to be conned... sorry... convinced into getting out their wallets will be down the pub. And two, because it ruins the only really good TV night of the week.
I know, I know. I'm an old, miserable curmudgeon and nauseatingly set in my ways, but that's what happens when you finally reach thirty-five. If you stop and think about it for more than twelve seconds, you'll conclude, as I have, that life is all about spotting the patterns in things. The mathematics is all around you, dictating each and everything we all do. Honest.
And then when you reach my tender years, your own pattern becomes a critical part of your life. It's horribly spoilt, I know, but I'm used to, and actually like watching the shows I expect to watch when I want to watch them. It's like a modern take on Asperger's for those unfortunate to find themselves on the arse-end of the 18-35 demographic. Which, of course, is the only one that really matters. I'm running out of time, Goddammit. By the time Pudsey returns next year, I'll be too stupid to operate the remote control.
Normally on a Friday I can look forward to Have I Got News For You, QI and Friday Night With Jonathan Ross. These are, more often than not, the highlights of my television viewing experience. Not my life, of course, as that would be utterly pathetic, but when you've had the kind of week that I've always had, you need to chill out a bit. You need to unwind. You wouldn't believe how angry I get when I'm denied an opportunity to relax.
But these aren't good enough for Children In Need. No, Pudsey likes to usurp the quality entertainment and replace it with something he's found on his shoe. And this happens each year, without fail.
You think I'm kidding? Here are some of this evening's highlights: songs by McFly; the cast of Hollyoaks meets the cast of Celebrity Scissorhands, no doubt with hilarious results; Westlife sing, as does Coronation Street 'heartthrob' Richard Fleeshman; the new voice of the speaking clock is unveiled (Jesus, why did nobody warn us!?); more songs, this time from The Sound of Music; then the cast of Holby City sing Madonna's Hung Up; yet more singing, from Ronan Keating; and then - prepare yourselves - a chance to to hear Emma Bunton's Downtown, the official Children In Need song (I've heard it: it's rubbish) and another song by Keane; the BBC newsreaders pay tribute to James Bond (that's got to be good, surely); the cast of Bad Girls perform a Bananarama 'classic'; two comedians you've never heard of will spoof Wham!; there's a sneak peak at Wicked, the West End musical; Bradley Walsh does some swing, Amy Winehouse sings yet another song and then the cast of Evita show up to do something or other; finally - and this is nearly five hours later - the casts of Daddy Cool and Avenue Q (never heard of either, but big West End shows allegedly) round off proceedings with, I'm guessing, some songs.
Now, correct me if I'm wrong here, but doesn't that all add up to a monstrous steaming pile of shit?
First of all, how many bloody songs does one event need? Did somebody at the BBC think: "Hold on, we need some quality entertainment. Does anyone have any ideas? No? OK, let's get every Z-list celebrity we can think of to come in and, I don't know, sing or something." To be fair, he probably walked away from the meeting expecting a smörgåsbord of creation, while his team of yes-men completely ignored the 'something' part of his idea but enthusiastically made love to the 'sing'. Even Pudsey will be watching ITV. Or possibly Five if he's feeling a bit racy.
Playing fair, there is an episode of QI on tonight, and it is a Children In Need special. The only problem is that I've already seen it, last week, on BBC4's week-ahead preview.
Basically all this means that I've got nothing at all to watch tonight, so there's no point getting angry if I'm forced on to the Internet to download torrent files or Hungarian pornography. It's hardly my fault. Blame the kids.
Now, don't get me wrong; the general idea behind Children In Need is a fantastic one. Since it began in 1980, a total of some £410m has been raised. Last year's event earned £17,235,256 alone. That's impressive stuff.
However, I have a complaint. Yes, I support the cause, but why does it have to be packaged with such dreadful television programming? While I'm happy to chip in a quid or two, do they have to do everything at my expense?
Yes, I'm whining on about the telly again. But look: it wouldn't be so bad if they screened the thing on a Wednesday, because as we've seen, it would indubitably be a notable step-up in quality. But they have to do it on a Friday, don't they, which makes no sense at all. One, because all the drunks who are most likely to be conned... sorry... convinced into getting out their wallets will be down the pub. And two, because it ruins the only really good TV night of the week.
I know, I know. I'm an old, miserable curmudgeon and nauseatingly set in my ways, but that's what happens when you finally reach thirty-five. If you stop and think about it for more than twelve seconds, you'll conclude, as I have, that life is all about spotting the patterns in things. The mathematics is all around you, dictating each and everything we all do. Honest.
And then when you reach my tender years, your own pattern becomes a critical part of your life. It's horribly spoilt, I know, but I'm used to, and actually like watching the shows I expect to watch when I want to watch them. It's like a modern take on Asperger's for those unfortunate to find themselves on the arse-end of the 18-35 demographic. Which, of course, is the only one that really matters. I'm running out of time, Goddammit. By the time Pudsey returns next year, I'll be too stupid to operate the remote control.
Normally on a Friday I can look forward to Have I Got News For You, QI and Friday Night With Jonathan Ross. These are, more often than not, the highlights of my television viewing experience. Not my life, of course, as that would be utterly pathetic, but when you've had the kind of week that I've always had, you need to chill out a bit. You need to unwind. You wouldn't believe how angry I get when I'm denied an opportunity to relax.
But these aren't good enough for Children In Need. No, Pudsey likes to usurp the quality entertainment and replace it with something he's found on his shoe. And this happens each year, without fail.
You think I'm kidding? Here are some of this evening's highlights: songs by McFly; the cast of Hollyoaks meets the cast of Celebrity Scissorhands, no doubt with hilarious results; Westlife sing, as does Coronation Street 'heartthrob' Richard Fleeshman; the new voice of the speaking clock is unveiled (Jesus, why did nobody warn us!?); more songs, this time from The Sound of Music; then the cast of Holby City sing Madonna's Hung Up; yet more singing, from Ronan Keating; and then - prepare yourselves - a chance to to hear Emma Bunton's Downtown, the official Children In Need song (I've heard it: it's rubbish) and another song by Keane; the BBC newsreaders pay tribute to James Bond (that's got to be good, surely); the cast of Bad Girls perform a Bananarama 'classic'; two comedians you've never heard of will spoof Wham!; there's a sneak peak at Wicked, the West End musical; Bradley Walsh does some swing, Amy Winehouse sings yet another song and then the cast of Evita show up to do something or other; finally - and this is nearly five hours later - the casts of Daddy Cool and Avenue Q (never heard of either, but big West End shows allegedly) round off proceedings with, I'm guessing, some songs.
Now, correct me if I'm wrong here, but doesn't that all add up to a monstrous steaming pile of shit?
First of all, how many bloody songs does one event need? Did somebody at the BBC think: "Hold on, we need some quality entertainment. Does anyone have any ideas? No? OK, let's get every Z-list celebrity we can think of to come in and, I don't know, sing or something." To be fair, he probably walked away from the meeting expecting a smörgåsbord of creation, while his team of yes-men completely ignored the 'something' part of his idea but enthusiastically made love to the 'sing'. Even Pudsey will be watching ITV. Or possibly Five if he's feeling a bit racy.
Playing fair, there is an episode of QI on tonight, and it is a Children In Need special. The only problem is that I've already seen it, last week, on BBC4's week-ahead preview.
Basically all this means that I've got nothing at all to watch tonight, so there's no point getting angry if I'm forced on to the Internet to download torrent files or Hungarian pornography. It's hardly my fault. Blame the kids.
Wednesday, November 15, 2006
Do I Expect You To Talk? No, Mr Bond, But I Wouldn't Mind A Decent Song
Casino Royale, the 21st James Bond film and the first starring new chap on the block Daniel Craig, had its world premiere this week and, by all accounts, it's rather good.
At least, that's what the papers say. I haven't seen it myself. But I really hope it's true, as the hate campaign waged against Craig by the online community from the moment he was first announced as the new Bond was nothing short of absurd. Sitting here now, writing this, I hope the movie goes on to receive global acclaim and a gross of at least ten trillion dollars, if only to ridicule and dismiss that horrible collective of nerds and geeks. (He says, jotting down his thoughts on a movie he has yet to see on an Internet blog.)
However this new movie turns out, Ian Fleming's James Bond should never be underestimated, both as a character and as a force in the world of cinema. Prior to the release of Casino Royale, the twenty previous Bond films have a combined worldwide box office of almost four billion dollars, putting them second to only the Star Wars series as the highest-grossing franchise in history.
In the United Kingdom, three of the James Bond films - Live And Let Die, Diamonds Are Forever and The Spy Who Loved Me - hold court in a list of the five most-watched television broadcasts of a movie in history. Live And Let Die is number one all-time, with a staggering 23.5 million viewers. (Rounding out the countdown are Jaws, which is fair enough, and, for some God-awful reason, Crocodile Dundee.)
Everyone has an opinion on the best Bond, or their favourite (the two terms aren't necessarily common bedfellows.) For many, it's Sean Connery, who is the benchmark however you feel about the others. A frightening percentage seem to rate Roger Moore, who quite clearly was trumped by the two most underrated performers, George Lazenby and Timothy Dalton. Pierce Brosnan is somewhere in no-man's land; he looks the part, and is probably the most definitive portrayal in a cinematic sense, as he combines Connery's cool and charm with Moore's wit, but for some reason it never really added up. It didn't help that all four of his films were, at best, decidedly average.
Bob Holness? Rubbish. Or at least, he probably was, because I haven't listened to his 1956 South African radio adaptation of Moonraker, and neither has anybody else. But let's be realistic here. Smart money says Blockbusters was a step up.
There are certain things you expect from a Bond film. Some might say that they've almost become cliches, but I'm confident that we'd miss them if they were suddenly taken away. There's the character himself, of course, with all of his whims and fancies: his style, his cars, his one-liners and his inability to die, no matter how much thought and planning has gone into his demise by the main villain, who will, for the most part, be looking to either take over or destroy the world. The Bond Girls are there to catch both our eye and that of 007 himself, and each movie typically ends moments before one of them lies back and thinks of England.
But, all of these pale into relative significance when held up against the greatest part of every Bond feature, and that's the opening credits. Specifically, it's the now-familiar, but no less welcome, slightly arty montage of scantily clad (and by God, often naked) lovelies dancing, running, jumping, shooting guns, and, in Live And Let Die, suffering the awful but gripping fate of having their heads explode. No wonder it's the UK's number one film.
But what really makes these scenes is the music, which more often than not is absolutely fantastic. With the news this week that You Know My Name, sung by Chris Cornell (of ex-Soundgarden fame), and the official theme for Casino Royale, will not be included on the actual movie soundtrack, I started to wonder if there is a relationship between the quality of a 007 song and that of the movie itself. Hypothetically, if the official theme is, well, rubbish, is the film likely to be subpar as well?
I'll be honest. While I have an inkling that I might be right about this, I haven't done the research in advance. So, Gonzo-style, I'm going to whiz through the history of James Bond by film and by song, in a stream-of-consciousness kind of way, and, by golly, we'll get there together. Eventually. I warn you now, this is a mammoth piece, but the Bond franchise has been running for nearly forty-five years, and there are things that need to be said. To assist me, I'll be listening to The Best of Bond... James Bond, the definitive CD of all of the tunes, along the way.
(For the purposes of this analysis, I'll be ignoring the unofficial, non-EON Bond films, which are the TV and spoof versions of Casino Royale, and Sean Connery's reboot of Thunderball, Never Say Never Again.)
So, to begin. Up first, it's 1962, and Dr No. For many, the greatest Bond film of all time, and it would certainly make the top five on most aficionado's lists, and with good reason. It's a cracking film. And, of course, provided us with the seminal piece of 007 music: Monty Norman's James Bond Theme. Not a song as such, naturally, but it's an iconic bit of work and has snaked its way into not only every Bond film, but absolutely into popular culture, too. (This also marks the start of John Barry's contribution to the Bond scores; including Dr No, Barry would compose eleven of the first fourteen films.)
So we're on to a good start. Next, it's From Russia With Love, and it's 1963. Again, classic, classic Bond. Robert Shaw's Donovan Grant is one of the very best 007 villains, and Matt Munroe's vocal stands up to the task admirably. We're two for two.
Goldfinger, 1964, and the start of Shirley Bassey's reign as the Queen of the Bond theme. Goldfinger is a fantastic film and a fantastic song, even if the opening is a trifle camp (imagine Julian Clary stripping to it and you'll get my gist. I know I am.)
Three's a crowd. Thunderball, 1965. Perhaps not up to the standard of the previous films in a nitpicking cinematic sense, but it's a grand film nonetheless. And Tom Jones sings his enormous Welsh heart out, God bless him. And it's good stuff.
1967, You Only Live Twice. The plot is a bit un-PC now, and Connery does look a bit ridiculous as a Japanese, but there's nothing wrong with the movie at all. It even has Western cinema's first mainstream look at ninjas, for Christ's sake. And Nancy Sinatra's theme contains one of most beautiful melodies you will ever hear.
We're five for five, but this is where we simply must stop to catch our breath. Take a look back at that pentuple of spy movies. It's 007's finest work.
This is where Connery stepped down, and George Lazenby stepped up. And the boy done good. Many fans of the franchise consider 1969's On Her Majesty's Secret Service one of, and quite possibly the greatest of them all. Lazenby originally signed a seven-film contract, but quit on a wave of Bond criticism and suggestions that the series had run out of steam. Which is a bit of shame, as his Bond was not only good, but human. But somehow, history has resigned both Lazenby and the film to the phantom zone. Matters are made worse by the choice to return to a voiceless-theme for the title piece. It's a good piece of music, but if you ask somebody to hum it, they won't have a clue. So we'll kind of have to award ourselves a half mark here.
1971, and Connery is persuaded back for Diamonds Are Forever. Musically, now you're talking, as the Queen is back. Shirley Bassey's delivery is, without a doubt, brilliant. The film? Well, it's good, but probably Connery's worst official outing. But still good enough to stand up to the theory, I'd wager.
And then we enter the wilderness that is known as Roger Moore.
In 1973, Connery had almost quit for good, and the studio needed somebody to fill his shoes. Impressed with Moore's performance as the Bond-like Simon Templar in The Saint, he was given the nod, despite being 45-years old when he debuted in Live And Let Die. Which, you'll remember, is Blighty's all-time favourite movie. And, sure, it's fun and watchable, but quite frankly a lot of it is utter nonsense. The voodoo stuff never sat well with me at all and as for that chap with the robot hand? Well, the less said, the better, but you would have thought somebody in the effects department would have noticed it made his arm about a foot longer. Jane Seymour is, of course, lovely, but while Paul McCartney's song is a bit of a classic, I prefer the Guns N Roses version.
The Man With The Golden Gun (1974) is better, but it's a far cry from Connery's early work. It's just very hard to take a three-nippled assassin all that seriously. Lulu's theme song is pretty awful, too, and even for a Bond tune the lyrics are dire.
In 1977, Roger Moore was almost fifty, but somehow, The Spy Who Loved Me works. Not only that, it's rather good. It helps that we have the first appearance of Richard Kiel's Jaws, who, despite being utterly ridiculous when you stop to think about it, is a great character. Carly Simon's music is brilliant, too, even if one has to forgive the quite clearly forced inclusion of the film's title in the lyric. The best Moore outing by a long way.
Moonraker (1979), is poor. It tried to cash-in on the Star Wars craze (and box office) and failed dismally, delivering not-so special effects and a daft plot. Jaws was back, which was a plus, but even he was a shadow of his former self, and the film has the credit of being the only one in the franchise with a rubbish Shirley Bassey song.
1981's For Your Eyes Only is much better. Moore was 53, but he stepped up. The Academy Award-nominated Sheena Easton title song is a cracker. To date, Easton is the only singer to actually appear in the title credits.
Octopussy (1983) tried to cash in on the craze for... Fabergé Eggs, I'm guessing. Apart from that, I can't remember much about it at all. The theme, however, is rubbish, and criminally forgettable.
1985, and thankfully Moore's final turn. A View To A Kill is a notable drop in quality, which throws a spanner in the works of my hypothesis, as Duran Duran's theme is one of the very best. Okay, so the lyrics are bollocks and Simon Le Bon is a bit of a wanker, but that, as I believe the kids are referring to it these days, is a slammin' track.
The Timothy Dalton years, 1987-89. Dalton was, as I said above, massively underrated in the Bond role. He's far superior to Moore, and both of his films stand up in the franchise. The Living Daylights is a proper Bond film, and arguably the best since Thunderball. It's a shame, then, that A-ha's song is crap. So we'll scratch that one off of our list.
License To Kill, sung by Gladys Knight, is a much better song. But the film isn't as good. It's not at all bad, just a bit of a mess.
Dalton out, Pierce Brosnan steps in. At the time, this was widely applauded, as Brosnan was considered a natural choice. He had been trying to become James Bond since 1986 and was offered the lead in The Living Daylights, but was forced to turn it down due to his commitments to Remington Steele. The latter finished in 1987, and by 1994 Brosnan had signed on as Bond, eight years after originally being considered a near-automatic for the role.
If Roger Moore was a lousy Bond in a series of moderately enjoyable but mostly ineffective films, Brosnan is the opposite. His Bond is fine. Basically. He doesn't do anything particularly different, but he certainly looks the part, at least in light of what we've come to expect (perhaps less like Fleming's original vision.) He's handsome, smooth, and nicely polished.
The films, however, are shite.
Some people rave about Goldeneye (1995), but I'm not one of them. It's awful, and Tina Turner's theme, while delivered with her usual panache, is a bit too whiney for my tastes. (Goldeneye, incidentally, is named after Ian Fleming's Jamaican estate of the same name.)
And this pattern continues. Tomorrow Never Dies (1997), is entirely mediocre, and Sheryl Crowe's song is one of the worst. Garbage's The World Is Not Enough (1999) is better, and it's probably Brosnan's best, but it's still a bit dicey. Die Another Day (2002), sung by Madonna, is the worst James Bond theme to date. And the film is basically terrible, with Halle Berry's performance particularly notable for being absolutely and fundamentally awful.
Which brings us back to Daniel Craig and Casino Royale (2006, and I told you we'd get there eventually.) Now, I haven't seen the film, but as I said, I have heard the theme. And I'm slightly concerned, as the best thing I can say about it is that it's a bit of a grower. There's nothing wrong with it, per se, but it just doesn't really do anything new. Basically, you've heard it all before, years ago. And as my hypothesis has proven, this simply will not do, especially in a film that is trying to kick-start a dying franchise. And for Craig and the legion of Bond fans (and converts) out there, that doesn't bode well at all. For once, in both the film and the theme, I think we were all hoping to be stirred.
Not shaken.
At least, that's what the papers say. I haven't seen it myself. But I really hope it's true, as the hate campaign waged against Craig by the online community from the moment he was first announced as the new Bond was nothing short of absurd. Sitting here now, writing this, I hope the movie goes on to receive global acclaim and a gross of at least ten trillion dollars, if only to ridicule and dismiss that horrible collective of nerds and geeks. (He says, jotting down his thoughts on a movie he has yet to see on an Internet blog.)
However this new movie turns out, Ian Fleming's James Bond should never be underestimated, both as a character and as a force in the world of cinema. Prior to the release of Casino Royale, the twenty previous Bond films have a combined worldwide box office of almost four billion dollars, putting them second to only the Star Wars series as the highest-grossing franchise in history.
In the United Kingdom, three of the James Bond films - Live And Let Die, Diamonds Are Forever and The Spy Who Loved Me - hold court in a list of the five most-watched television broadcasts of a movie in history. Live And Let Die is number one all-time, with a staggering 23.5 million viewers. (Rounding out the countdown are Jaws, which is fair enough, and, for some God-awful reason, Crocodile Dundee.)
Everyone has an opinion on the best Bond, or their favourite (the two terms aren't necessarily common bedfellows.) For many, it's Sean Connery, who is the benchmark however you feel about the others. A frightening percentage seem to rate Roger Moore, who quite clearly was trumped by the two most underrated performers, George Lazenby and Timothy Dalton. Pierce Brosnan is somewhere in no-man's land; he looks the part, and is probably the most definitive portrayal in a cinematic sense, as he combines Connery's cool and charm with Moore's wit, but for some reason it never really added up. It didn't help that all four of his films were, at best, decidedly average.
Bob Holness? Rubbish. Or at least, he probably was, because I haven't listened to his 1956 South African radio adaptation of Moonraker, and neither has anybody else. But let's be realistic here. Smart money says Blockbusters was a step up.
There are certain things you expect from a Bond film. Some might say that they've almost become cliches, but I'm confident that we'd miss them if they were suddenly taken away. There's the character himself, of course, with all of his whims and fancies: his style, his cars, his one-liners and his inability to die, no matter how much thought and planning has gone into his demise by the main villain, who will, for the most part, be looking to either take over or destroy the world. The Bond Girls are there to catch both our eye and that of 007 himself, and each movie typically ends moments before one of them lies back and thinks of England.
But, all of these pale into relative significance when held up against the greatest part of every Bond feature, and that's the opening credits. Specifically, it's the now-familiar, but no less welcome, slightly arty montage of scantily clad (and by God, often naked) lovelies dancing, running, jumping, shooting guns, and, in Live And Let Die, suffering the awful but gripping fate of having their heads explode. No wonder it's the UK's number one film.
But what really makes these scenes is the music, which more often than not is absolutely fantastic. With the news this week that You Know My Name, sung by Chris Cornell (of ex-Soundgarden fame), and the official theme for Casino Royale, will not be included on the actual movie soundtrack, I started to wonder if there is a relationship between the quality of a 007 song and that of the movie itself. Hypothetically, if the official theme is, well, rubbish, is the film likely to be subpar as well?
I'll be honest. While I have an inkling that I might be right about this, I haven't done the research in advance. So, Gonzo-style, I'm going to whiz through the history of James Bond by film and by song, in a stream-of-consciousness kind of way, and, by golly, we'll get there together. Eventually. I warn you now, this is a mammoth piece, but the Bond franchise has been running for nearly forty-five years, and there are things that need to be said. To assist me, I'll be listening to The Best of Bond... James Bond, the definitive CD of all of the tunes, along the way.
(For the purposes of this analysis, I'll be ignoring the unofficial, non-EON Bond films, which are the TV and spoof versions of Casino Royale, and Sean Connery's reboot of Thunderball, Never Say Never Again.)
So, to begin. Up first, it's 1962, and Dr No. For many, the greatest Bond film of all time, and it would certainly make the top five on most aficionado's lists, and with good reason. It's a cracking film. And, of course, provided us with the seminal piece of 007 music: Monty Norman's James Bond Theme. Not a song as such, naturally, but it's an iconic bit of work and has snaked its way into not only every Bond film, but absolutely into popular culture, too. (This also marks the start of John Barry's contribution to the Bond scores; including Dr No, Barry would compose eleven of the first fourteen films.)
So we're on to a good start. Next, it's From Russia With Love, and it's 1963. Again, classic, classic Bond. Robert Shaw's Donovan Grant is one of the very best 007 villains, and Matt Munroe's vocal stands up to the task admirably. We're two for two.
Goldfinger, 1964, and the start of Shirley Bassey's reign as the Queen of the Bond theme. Goldfinger is a fantastic film and a fantastic song, even if the opening is a trifle camp (imagine Julian Clary stripping to it and you'll get my gist. I know I am.)
Three's a crowd. Thunderball, 1965. Perhaps not up to the standard of the previous films in a nitpicking cinematic sense, but it's a grand film nonetheless. And Tom Jones sings his enormous Welsh heart out, God bless him. And it's good stuff.
1967, You Only Live Twice. The plot is a bit un-PC now, and Connery does look a bit ridiculous as a Japanese, but there's nothing wrong with the movie at all. It even has Western cinema's first mainstream look at ninjas, for Christ's sake. And Nancy Sinatra's theme contains one of most beautiful melodies you will ever hear.
We're five for five, but this is where we simply must stop to catch our breath. Take a look back at that pentuple of spy movies. It's 007's finest work.
This is where Connery stepped down, and George Lazenby stepped up. And the boy done good. Many fans of the franchise consider 1969's On Her Majesty's Secret Service one of, and quite possibly the greatest of them all. Lazenby originally signed a seven-film contract, but quit on a wave of Bond criticism and suggestions that the series had run out of steam. Which is a bit of shame, as his Bond was not only good, but human. But somehow, history has resigned both Lazenby and the film to the phantom zone. Matters are made worse by the choice to return to a voiceless-theme for the title piece. It's a good piece of music, but if you ask somebody to hum it, they won't have a clue. So we'll kind of have to award ourselves a half mark here.
1971, and Connery is persuaded back for Diamonds Are Forever. Musically, now you're talking, as the Queen is back. Shirley Bassey's delivery is, without a doubt, brilliant. The film? Well, it's good, but probably Connery's worst official outing. But still good enough to stand up to the theory, I'd wager.
And then we enter the wilderness that is known as Roger Moore.
In 1973, Connery had almost quit for good, and the studio needed somebody to fill his shoes. Impressed with Moore's performance as the Bond-like Simon Templar in The Saint, he was given the nod, despite being 45-years old when he debuted in Live And Let Die. Which, you'll remember, is Blighty's all-time favourite movie. And, sure, it's fun and watchable, but quite frankly a lot of it is utter nonsense. The voodoo stuff never sat well with me at all and as for that chap with the robot hand? Well, the less said, the better, but you would have thought somebody in the effects department would have noticed it made his arm about a foot longer. Jane Seymour is, of course, lovely, but while Paul McCartney's song is a bit of a classic, I prefer the Guns N Roses version.
The Man With The Golden Gun (1974) is better, but it's a far cry from Connery's early work. It's just very hard to take a three-nippled assassin all that seriously. Lulu's theme song is pretty awful, too, and even for a Bond tune the lyrics are dire.
In 1977, Roger Moore was almost fifty, but somehow, The Spy Who Loved Me works. Not only that, it's rather good. It helps that we have the first appearance of Richard Kiel's Jaws, who, despite being utterly ridiculous when you stop to think about it, is a great character. Carly Simon's music is brilliant, too, even if one has to forgive the quite clearly forced inclusion of the film's title in the lyric. The best Moore outing by a long way.
Moonraker (1979), is poor. It tried to cash-in on the Star Wars craze (and box office) and failed dismally, delivering not-so special effects and a daft plot. Jaws was back, which was a plus, but even he was a shadow of his former self, and the film has the credit of being the only one in the franchise with a rubbish Shirley Bassey song.
1981's For Your Eyes Only is much better. Moore was 53, but he stepped up. The Academy Award-nominated Sheena Easton title song is a cracker. To date, Easton is the only singer to actually appear in the title credits.
Octopussy (1983) tried to cash in on the craze for... Fabergé Eggs, I'm guessing. Apart from that, I can't remember much about it at all. The theme, however, is rubbish, and criminally forgettable.
1985, and thankfully Moore's final turn. A View To A Kill is a notable drop in quality, which throws a spanner in the works of my hypothesis, as Duran Duran's theme is one of the very best. Okay, so the lyrics are bollocks and Simon Le Bon is a bit of a wanker, but that, as I believe the kids are referring to it these days, is a slammin' track.
The Timothy Dalton years, 1987-89. Dalton was, as I said above, massively underrated in the Bond role. He's far superior to Moore, and both of his films stand up in the franchise. The Living Daylights is a proper Bond film, and arguably the best since Thunderball. It's a shame, then, that A-ha's song is crap. So we'll scratch that one off of our list.
License To Kill, sung by Gladys Knight, is a much better song. But the film isn't as good. It's not at all bad, just a bit of a mess.
Dalton out, Pierce Brosnan steps in. At the time, this was widely applauded, as Brosnan was considered a natural choice. He had been trying to become James Bond since 1986 and was offered the lead in The Living Daylights, but was forced to turn it down due to his commitments to Remington Steele. The latter finished in 1987, and by 1994 Brosnan had signed on as Bond, eight years after originally being considered a near-automatic for the role.
If Roger Moore was a lousy Bond in a series of moderately enjoyable but mostly ineffective films, Brosnan is the opposite. His Bond is fine. Basically. He doesn't do anything particularly different, but he certainly looks the part, at least in light of what we've come to expect (perhaps less like Fleming's original vision.) He's handsome, smooth, and nicely polished.
The films, however, are shite.
Some people rave about Goldeneye (1995), but I'm not one of them. It's awful, and Tina Turner's theme, while delivered with her usual panache, is a bit too whiney for my tastes. (Goldeneye, incidentally, is named after Ian Fleming's Jamaican estate of the same name.)
And this pattern continues. Tomorrow Never Dies (1997), is entirely mediocre, and Sheryl Crowe's song is one of the worst. Garbage's The World Is Not Enough (1999) is better, and it's probably Brosnan's best, but it's still a bit dicey. Die Another Day (2002), sung by Madonna, is the worst James Bond theme to date. And the film is basically terrible, with Halle Berry's performance particularly notable for being absolutely and fundamentally awful.
Which brings us back to Daniel Craig and Casino Royale (2006, and I told you we'd get there eventually.) Now, I haven't seen the film, but as I said, I have heard the theme. And I'm slightly concerned, as the best thing I can say about it is that it's a bit of a grower. There's nothing wrong with it, per se, but it just doesn't really do anything new. Basically, you've heard it all before, years ago. And as my hypothesis has proven, this simply will not do, especially in a film that is trying to kick-start a dying franchise. And for Craig and the legion of Bond fans (and converts) out there, that doesn't bode well at all. For once, in both the film and the theme, I think we were all hoping to be stirred.
Not shaken.
Friday, November 10, 2006
So You Want To Give Up Drinking? Great, Just Don't Start On A Wednesday
Last year Cardiff University spent trillions of pounds of taxpayers money coming up with a formula that determined exactly which day of the year was the most insufferable. Specifically, where in the year do we find ourselves, as a species, at our lowest point, held between the vice-like teeth of depression?
The thing is, I don't know why anyone didn't attempt this before. It seems so obvious and, quite frankly, simple. To calculate the day of misery, one simply uses the formula 1/8W+(D-d) 3/8xTQ MxNA, where W is weather, D is debt (less the money (d) due on January's pay day, which will probably still be wiped out by that last-minute Playstation 3 from Hong Kong) and T is the time since Christmas (or possibly stands for turkey.)
Q is the period since you last failed to quit a bad habit, M refers to your general level of motivation (which if the habit was amphetamines or coffee, is pretty low) and NA is the need to take action and do something about it (i.e., 'not applicable').
See? Easy. And the answer: January 24th. And, of course, that fell on a Monday.
People typically hate Mondays. Ask anybody their least favourite day of the week, and they're bound to say Monday. Geek mecca site Slashdot.com conducted a recent poll that asked their users to select the day of the week they liked the least (from a controversial limited pool of seven), and out of some fifty thousand responses, 58% said Monday.
Bob Geldof even documented the phenomenon in The Boomtown Rats' cracking I Don't Like Mondays, and then proceeded to never do anything of any lasting significance ever again.
Both Dublin and Garfield hate them, the stockmarket shat itself on a particularly black one - twice - and let's not forget poor old Solomon Grundy. He was born on a Monday and was dead by the end of the week.
The thing is, they're all wrong. Monday isn't the worst day of the week; Wednesday is. And it all comes down to the fact that there's never anything on the telly. Ever.
Now, this might not seem too bad, and even quite trivial, but you have to put it into context. Specifically, Wednesday is the worst day of the week to find yourself in the position of 'not drinking'.
See, we all go through phases where we suspect that the idea of a day off might be a good one. There's nothing especially significant that pushes us towards this decision, although you have been feeling kind of tired, lately, now you think about it, and something in your abdomen that's either a kidney or your liver seems to be dying or wishing it was. Recently, it seems to take five minutes longer to get up each and every morning, so pretty soon you'll be setting last Friday's alarm for next Wednesday. And you'll still hit the snooze button.
A period of abstinence seems wise. Indeed, it would be folly ignore the body's cries for moderation. So you make an inner agreement with yourself to stop. The big question now, is: when does that stoppage, start?
Friday is no good, and neither is Saturday. Those days are reserved for the consumption of alcohol. It says as much in the Bible (probably.) Come Sunday you always have a drop or two left from Saturday, and, well, Monday's coming up, and you know what they say about that. And, guess what? Monday was pretty hellish, so a large glass of wine or two is basically sound medical advice. Tuesday you're meeting a friend after work, and Thursday gives you a chance to prepare the body for Friday and Saturday (which is what every doctor recommends. None of this binge-drinking melarchy for you. No, sir!)
Which leaves Wednesday. Wednesday is a really empty day. Nothing ever happened on a Wednesday. OK, sure, we had a Black Wednesday there, too, but otherwise it's limited to a crappy football team from Sheffield and the goth posterchild from The Addams Family. Neither of which has much appeal to anybody who considers themselves normal.
See, the problem with not drinking is the 'not' part. When you remove something from your life that is a source of great entertainment you need to replace it with something equally thrilling, or, believe me, you will fail. So you turn to the TV, and while on every other day of the week it will do its level best not to let you down, on Wednesday it delivers the kind of life-threatening package that even Ted Kaczynski would find objectionable.
Just a quick meander through last week's TV guide will show you what I mean. On Monday we had a great new show about British prison life. Tuesday thrills us with Horizon and a double-dose of CSI. Thursday has Criminal Minds, Never Mind The Buzzcocks and without fail a cracking film on ITV2. Friday cushions us with Have I Got News For You, QI and even bloody Jonathan Ross. We're never at home on Saturday anyway, but even if we are, there's a show about Hitler and your choice of at least ten movies. And Sunday gives us Planet Earth and Entourage.
And what do we get on Wednesday? Torchwood, which is a bit like Doctor Who, except rubbish, some show about fat people walking all over England in yet another attempt to lose weight/gain attention and The Bill, which is the sort of the programme you watch only if you consider Crispy Pancakes a fine source of nourishment.
So, what happens is you get home from work, have something to eat, slump yourself on the sofa, and remain quite adamant that you're not going to drink. Then you switch on the box, and by the time you've rapid-fire remote-controlled your way from the hideous theme tune to The Bill, on to more examples of why the seriously obese are rarely full of anything except excuses, to an intergalactic drama about space whoopsies, you'll be halfway through a six-pack of White Lightning and ringing your local kebab shop for the 'special'.
And don't tell me I should consider reading, because trust me, when you've had three cans of Lightning you're doing well if you can make out the letters on the tin.
It's about six weeks until Christmas, seven until New Year's Eve, and 70 days until January 24. And here's the best advice I can possibly give you: ignore the first two, but whatever you do, make sure you've got a truckload of booze in the house come the latter. Because not only is January 24 scientifically the most depressing day of the year, pretty soon it's going to be a whole lot worse. In 2007 it falls on a bloody Wednesday.
The thing is, I don't know why anyone didn't attempt this before. It seems so obvious and, quite frankly, simple. To calculate the day of misery, one simply uses the formula 1/8W+(D-d) 3/8xTQ MxNA, where W is weather, D is debt (less the money (d) due on January's pay day, which will probably still be wiped out by that last-minute Playstation 3 from Hong Kong) and T is the time since Christmas (or possibly stands for turkey.)
Q is the period since you last failed to quit a bad habit, M refers to your general level of motivation (which if the habit was amphetamines or coffee, is pretty low) and NA is the need to take action and do something about it (i.e., 'not applicable').
See? Easy. And the answer: January 24th. And, of course, that fell on a Monday.
People typically hate Mondays. Ask anybody their least favourite day of the week, and they're bound to say Monday. Geek mecca site Slashdot.com conducted a recent poll that asked their users to select the day of the week they liked the least (from a controversial limited pool of seven), and out of some fifty thousand responses, 58% said Monday.
Bob Geldof even documented the phenomenon in The Boomtown Rats' cracking I Don't Like Mondays, and then proceeded to never do anything of any lasting significance ever again.
Both Dublin and Garfield hate them, the stockmarket shat itself on a particularly black one - twice - and let's not forget poor old Solomon Grundy. He was born on a Monday and was dead by the end of the week.
The thing is, they're all wrong. Monday isn't the worst day of the week; Wednesday is. And it all comes down to the fact that there's never anything on the telly. Ever.
Now, this might not seem too bad, and even quite trivial, but you have to put it into context. Specifically, Wednesday is the worst day of the week to find yourself in the position of 'not drinking'.
See, we all go through phases where we suspect that the idea of a day off might be a good one. There's nothing especially significant that pushes us towards this decision, although you have been feeling kind of tired, lately, now you think about it, and something in your abdomen that's either a kidney or your liver seems to be dying or wishing it was. Recently, it seems to take five minutes longer to get up each and every morning, so pretty soon you'll be setting last Friday's alarm for next Wednesday. And you'll still hit the snooze button.
A period of abstinence seems wise. Indeed, it would be folly ignore the body's cries for moderation. So you make an inner agreement with yourself to stop. The big question now, is: when does that stoppage, start?
Friday is no good, and neither is Saturday. Those days are reserved for the consumption of alcohol. It says as much in the Bible (probably.) Come Sunday you always have a drop or two left from Saturday, and, well, Monday's coming up, and you know what they say about that. And, guess what? Monday was pretty hellish, so a large glass of wine or two is basically sound medical advice. Tuesday you're meeting a friend after work, and Thursday gives you a chance to prepare the body for Friday and Saturday (which is what every doctor recommends. None of this binge-drinking melarchy for you. No, sir!)
Which leaves Wednesday. Wednesday is a really empty day. Nothing ever happened on a Wednesday. OK, sure, we had a Black Wednesday there, too, but otherwise it's limited to a crappy football team from Sheffield and the goth posterchild from The Addams Family. Neither of which has much appeal to anybody who considers themselves normal.
See, the problem with not drinking is the 'not' part. When you remove something from your life that is a source of great entertainment you need to replace it with something equally thrilling, or, believe me, you will fail. So you turn to the TV, and while on every other day of the week it will do its level best not to let you down, on Wednesday it delivers the kind of life-threatening package that even Ted Kaczynski would find objectionable.
Just a quick meander through last week's TV guide will show you what I mean. On Monday we had a great new show about British prison life. Tuesday thrills us with Horizon and a double-dose of CSI. Thursday has Criminal Minds, Never Mind The Buzzcocks and without fail a cracking film on ITV2. Friday cushions us with Have I Got News For You, QI and even bloody Jonathan Ross. We're never at home on Saturday anyway, but even if we are, there's a show about Hitler and your choice of at least ten movies. And Sunday gives us Planet Earth and Entourage.
And what do we get on Wednesday? Torchwood, which is a bit like Doctor Who, except rubbish, some show about fat people walking all over England in yet another attempt to lose weight/gain attention and The Bill, which is the sort of the programme you watch only if you consider Crispy Pancakes a fine source of nourishment.
So, what happens is you get home from work, have something to eat, slump yourself on the sofa, and remain quite adamant that you're not going to drink. Then you switch on the box, and by the time you've rapid-fire remote-controlled your way from the hideous theme tune to The Bill, on to more examples of why the seriously obese are rarely full of anything except excuses, to an intergalactic drama about space whoopsies, you'll be halfway through a six-pack of White Lightning and ringing your local kebab shop for the 'special'.
And don't tell me I should consider reading, because trust me, when you've had three cans of Lightning you're doing well if you can make out the letters on the tin.
It's about six weeks until Christmas, seven until New Year's Eve, and 70 days until January 24. And here's the best advice I can possibly give you: ignore the first two, but whatever you do, make sure you've got a truckload of booze in the house come the latter. Because not only is January 24 scientifically the most depressing day of the year, pretty soon it's going to be a whole lot worse. In 2007 it falls on a bloody Wednesday.
Wednesday, November 08, 2006
The Curse Of [M]arriage [T]ele[V]ision
So, Britney Spears and her husband, Kevin Federline, or 'K-Fed', as ghastly people insist on calling him, have filed for divorce, and have once again blamed that most hideous of marital crimes, "irreconcilable differences."
So, no real surprise there, then.
But, come on, let's be fair. They have been married for over two years, which in the world of modern celebrity is pretty good going. If one dog year is equal to seven human years, than a year of celebrity marriage must be equal to at least ten of Mr and Mrs Joe Average's. Britney's previous marriage only lasted 55 hours, remember, which when you do the math works out about as long as the national average.
The thing is, they had absolutely no chance of this ever working out because they made a fatal error right from the very beginning - they agreed to do a reality TV show.
No, I didn't see much of it either, but it's true. Entitled Kevin and Britney: Chaotic, the show consisted mainly of home video footage with was overdubbed with engaging commentary by the couple (who'd been hitched for about eight months when production began.) It only lasted for five episodes, which means that if one episode of rubbish television equates to two seasons of quality, it was as successful as Seinfeld.
This isn't a new phenomena. It's been going on for quite some time now, and as with most of the important things in life, the blame can be laid pretty firmly on the doorsteps of MTV. First, we had Nick Lachey and Jessica Simpson in Newlyweds. This is the big one; the linchpin. The Watergate. Simpson and Lachey were married in October 2002, the show was greenlit in August 2003, and by December 2005 they were fighting over who gets to keep the Roy Rogers wagon wheel in the courts.
Next up were Carmen Electra and Dave Navarro. She, of former Baywatch (and 12-minute marriage to Dennis Rodman) fame, and he, ex-Jane's Addiction guitarist and, according to one of my very heterosexual male friends, 'the sexiest beardie alive'. It didn't really matter. The couple were wed in November of 2003, doing Til Death Us Do Part: Carmen and Dave (on MTV) the following year and, lo and behold, separated in July of this year and were divorced a month later.
Travis Barker, ex-Blink 182 drummer and Shanna Moakler, ex-wife of Oscar de la Hoya, married in October 2004, signed on to MTV for Meet The Barkers in 2005 and, incredibly, packed in two seasons and a divorce by August 2006.
Even David Gest and Liza Minnelli weren't unnatural enough to stand up to the curse; their marriage lasted just 16 months, even though their reality show, Lisa & David, was axed before it was ever aired.
No celebrity couple seems to realise it, but when you agree to do a reality TV show about your fantastic life what you're basically signing on for is a divorce within one to three years (usually depending on how successful the series is.) The trick is: is this calculated in advance, and if so, who exactly is duping whom?
There's one pretty consistent theme that runs through all of these stories and that's the desire for fame. By agreeing to do a show of this kind, you're automatically boosting your profile as a couple. Moreover, in pretty much every case here, one member of the couple is far more famous (and, indeed, lucrative) than the other around the start of the relationship. Interestingly (in a trite celebrity sense), by the end of the show, they've either become fairly equitable in their celebrity standing or have even swapped places.
Again, and for reference, we return to the benchmark in all this - when Newlyweds began in 2002, Lachey, ex-member of we've never heard of them over here, but they were massive over there boyband 98 Degrees, was the draw. As the show's popularity peaked, it was the lovely Jessica who became both the centre of attention and the star, equally for as much as what she said as how she looked. The epitome of the dumb blonde, she became incredibly popular, and despite the much-heralded Christian values she claimed to possess, her low-cut tops and desire to shoot pop videos under waterfalls certainly did not hurt at all. As her own father later tellingly observed, 'those suckers are double-Ds.'
And that scenario is pretty constant. Who'd even heard of David Gest before he met Liza Minnelli? Shanna Moakler was a total unknown before Meet The Barkers. Now she's 'wowing' them in the US version of Strictly Come Dancing and beating up Paris Hilton. And Federline? He's gone from backing dancer to self-proclaimed rap superstar to WWE professional wrestler. It's a farce, sure, but the boy done good, certainly relative to what he had before.
The dismal record of celebrity marriage is nothing new, of course, and certainly isn't limited to those who have appeared together on TV. If you take a moment to consider all the celebrity marriages you know of that are considered a success (where both couples are or were famous going into the relationship), you'll probably come up with two. Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell are not married, and neither are Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon. Catherine Zeta-Jones and Michael Douglas? Sure, but nobody is comfortable with that. So that leaves Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, and the Osbournes, who despite fronting a major reality TV show and having been married since 1982, have slightly bigger fish to fry. When your husband has tried to kill you and pissed up the Alamo, it tends to put things into perspective. MTV was a walk in the park.
Jordan and Peter Andre? Well, they met on I'm A Celebrity, Get Me Out Of Here!, and have gone on to make another series about their marriage. For all of our sakes, I hope it sticks, as the last thing the human race needs is either of them going back out into the population to breed. As Darwin probably suggested when he was pressed about this very situation, it's always best to stick to your own.
Meanwhile, Federline - sorry, "K-Fed", is seeking a $125m divorce settlement. If he even gets a tenth of that, well then maybe it's not such a curse, after all. And before you start to think he might have just been in it for her money, think again - he's got his own, now.
So, no real surprise there, then.
But, come on, let's be fair. They have been married for over two years, which in the world of modern celebrity is pretty good going. If one dog year is equal to seven human years, than a year of celebrity marriage must be equal to at least ten of Mr and Mrs Joe Average's. Britney's previous marriage only lasted 55 hours, remember, which when you do the math works out about as long as the national average.
The thing is, they had absolutely no chance of this ever working out because they made a fatal error right from the very beginning - they agreed to do a reality TV show.
No, I didn't see much of it either, but it's true. Entitled Kevin and Britney: Chaotic, the show consisted mainly of home video footage with was overdubbed with engaging commentary by the couple (who'd been hitched for about eight months when production began.) It only lasted for five episodes, which means that if one episode of rubbish television equates to two seasons of quality, it was as successful as Seinfeld.
This isn't a new phenomena. It's been going on for quite some time now, and as with most of the important things in life, the blame can be laid pretty firmly on the doorsteps of MTV. First, we had Nick Lachey and Jessica Simpson in Newlyweds. This is the big one; the linchpin. The Watergate. Simpson and Lachey were married in October 2002, the show was greenlit in August 2003, and by December 2005 they were fighting over who gets to keep the Roy Rogers wagon wheel in the courts.
Next up were Carmen Electra and Dave Navarro. She, of former Baywatch (and 12-minute marriage to Dennis Rodman) fame, and he, ex-Jane's Addiction guitarist and, according to one of my very heterosexual male friends, 'the sexiest beardie alive'. It didn't really matter. The couple were wed in November of 2003, doing Til Death Us Do Part: Carmen and Dave (on MTV) the following year and, lo and behold, separated in July of this year and were divorced a month later.
Travis Barker, ex-Blink 182 drummer and Shanna Moakler, ex-wife of Oscar de la Hoya, married in October 2004, signed on to MTV for Meet The Barkers in 2005 and, incredibly, packed in two seasons and a divorce by August 2006.
Even David Gest and Liza Minnelli weren't unnatural enough to stand up to the curse; their marriage lasted just 16 months, even though their reality show, Lisa & David, was axed before it was ever aired.
No celebrity couple seems to realise it, but when you agree to do a reality TV show about your fantastic life what you're basically signing on for is a divorce within one to three years (usually depending on how successful the series is.) The trick is: is this calculated in advance, and if so, who exactly is duping whom?
There's one pretty consistent theme that runs through all of these stories and that's the desire for fame. By agreeing to do a show of this kind, you're automatically boosting your profile as a couple. Moreover, in pretty much every case here, one member of the couple is far more famous (and, indeed, lucrative) than the other around the start of the relationship. Interestingly (in a trite celebrity sense), by the end of the show, they've either become fairly equitable in their celebrity standing or have even swapped places.
Again, and for reference, we return to the benchmark in all this - when Newlyweds began in 2002, Lachey, ex-member of we've never heard of them over here, but they were massive over there boyband 98 Degrees, was the draw. As the show's popularity peaked, it was the lovely Jessica who became both the centre of attention and the star, equally for as much as what she said as how she looked. The epitome of the dumb blonde, she became incredibly popular, and despite the much-heralded Christian values she claimed to possess, her low-cut tops and desire to shoot pop videos under waterfalls certainly did not hurt at all. As her own father later tellingly observed, 'those suckers are double-Ds.'
And that scenario is pretty constant. Who'd even heard of David Gest before he met Liza Minnelli? Shanna Moakler was a total unknown before Meet The Barkers. Now she's 'wowing' them in the US version of Strictly Come Dancing and beating up Paris Hilton. And Federline? He's gone from backing dancer to self-proclaimed rap superstar to WWE professional wrestler. It's a farce, sure, but the boy done good, certainly relative to what he had before.
The dismal record of celebrity marriage is nothing new, of course, and certainly isn't limited to those who have appeared together on TV. If you take a moment to consider all the celebrity marriages you know of that are considered a success (where both couples are or were famous going into the relationship), you'll probably come up with two. Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell are not married, and neither are Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon. Catherine Zeta-Jones and Michael Douglas? Sure, but nobody is comfortable with that. So that leaves Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, and the Osbournes, who despite fronting a major reality TV show and having been married since 1982, have slightly bigger fish to fry. When your husband has tried to kill you and pissed up the Alamo, it tends to put things into perspective. MTV was a walk in the park.
Jordan and Peter Andre? Well, they met on I'm A Celebrity, Get Me Out Of Here!, and have gone on to make another series about their marriage. For all of our sakes, I hope it sticks, as the last thing the human race needs is either of them going back out into the population to breed. As Darwin probably suggested when he was pressed about this very situation, it's always best to stick to your own.
Meanwhile, Federline - sorry, "K-Fed", is seeking a $125m divorce settlement. If he even gets a tenth of that, well then maybe it's not such a curse, after all. And before you start to think he might have just been in it for her money, think again - he's got his own, now.
Labels: Britney Spears, Celebrity, K-Fed, Music
Monday, November 06, 2006
Saddam's Been Given The Death Penalty, And He Wants David Beckham To Take It
Earlier this week Saddam Hussein was found guilty of crimes against humanity by the Iraq Special Tribunal, and sentenced to death.
Immediately, of course, a huge fuss kicked up with everyone and their Auntie suddenly stamping their feet and saying, "Okay, so he might have been a despot who murdered tens and maybe hundreds of thousands of people, but by God killing him is just so not right. Think of the children."
It's a complicated case with a lot of history, but will now almost certainly come down to a lengthy debate on both the fairness of the trial itself and whether hanging Saddam is the best way to go forward. I'm wondering: best for whom?
As far as I can tell there are two main oppositions to the death penalty. The first is that in many cases it's nigh-on impossible to be one hundred per cent certain that we have the right person. The rightly-feared 'wrong conviction.' In these examples, putting somebody to death is irreversible, whereas sticking somebody in jail can always be reversed, even if it's years later. Fair enough, except that why do we grant the legal system the authority to determine if somebody is guilty beyond reasonable doubt, and then put an asterisk next to the punishment box?
The second opposition is one of morality. That we, as a civilised, modern society, don't think that 'an eye for an eye...' or any perspective resembling that is at all appropriate. That by sentencing a murderer to death we are committing murder ourselves, and are therefore equally as guilty. That we all have a 'right to life.' Again, in many senses that also seems fairly agreeable, but at the end of the day, is it our call?
This, to me, remains the key point, and is particularly relevant in this example. Saddam is guilty of the crimes under which he has been tried. This isn't some shady murder cases where there is always going to be a smidgen of doubt; Saddam has had a hand in genocide. He's no O.J. Simpson. The glove does fit.
So that's the first argument of opposition out of the way; this could never be seen as a 'wrong conviction'. It's right.
So we're left with an issue of morality which, when you get down to it, and like it or not, is absolutely a personal choice. It's your perspective. It might also be the legal perspective of your country, like it is in the UK, but then so is Vernon Kaye's right to a career in television, and nobody really agrees with that.
The blatant hypocrisy with punishment governed by morality in the legal system is that it flies very much in the face of the well-observed (if not outwardly legislated) adage that the court can never be personal. The case is heard, evidence is presented, witnesses are called, and everything is very serious, triple-checked and absolutely based on fact. One of the jurors didn't like the accused because he confessed he never read the Bible? Doesn't matter, ignore it. Another wasn't too happy that he listened to death metal and quite clearly rarely washed? If it's not relevant to the case, throw it out. The guy in the box is a notorious Devil-worshiper and fornicator with tattoos, facial piercings and everything? Look the other way.
Yet, when it comes to the sentence, suddenly all these things are vitally important. Because a moral objection to the death penalty is not only a fundamentally personal decision, I'd dare to suggest that it isn't even your decision, at all.
So what to do: let the victim, or the victim's family, decide the sentence? There's madness in that route, I'm sure, but I think that to some extent they should be heard. And what do the Kurds and Kuwaitis think about it all? Perhaps not all that surprisingly, they're happy with Saddam's sentence.
The Americans are too, of course, but they would be, as they've got something that's quite possibly unprovable to prove. And some important mid-terms to influence. So we can ignore that. Who isn't in favour? Pretty much everyone else... who wasn't involved. It does seem to be a reasonable constant that people who aren't directly affected by a given crime tend to be more criminal-favourable (and victim-unfriendly) in their attitude towards the level of punishment that is warranted. Things often become very different when something crops up in your backyard, and while a governing attitude that's fundamentally in that direction is not desirable, there's definitely some room for thought somewhere down the middle.
The victim should be considered, is the bottom line. What they want should be made known. This doesn't mean that what they (or their families) desire becomes law, but they should be heard. It should go on record. The judge should absolutely consider it before delivering his verdict. It is important. If we're going to let morals determine outcomes, then surely it is only fair if the morality of all sides is considered? And on a case by case basis, if needs be. Not in a general sense.
I think those in favour of the death penalty would probably be far more accommodating if some kind of guarantee could be made regarding the harshness of a prison sentence. If we're really going to make the punishment fit the crime, then stick Saddam in a box and turn out the lights. Civil rights? If his prison conditions went on to become anything less than relative luxury I'll think twice before invading Kuwait myself.
Saddam and his legal team have, I believe, 30 days to appeal against this sentence. I think there's a very good chance that the weight of international opposition against the death penalty will see that it might well be overturned. Then again, it may not matter, as coming up next he's set to undergo additional trials for his involvement in genocide, the Iran-Iraq war, the invasion of Kuwait and other crimes in war and against humanity. It's a tall order to imagine he'll successfully appeal against everything.
After the Dujail verdict was announced, Saddam stood up in court and, by all accounts, shouted, "Long live the Iraqi people." Let's face it, mate: probably not in your case.
Immediately, of course, a huge fuss kicked up with everyone and their Auntie suddenly stamping their feet and saying, "Okay, so he might have been a despot who murdered tens and maybe hundreds of thousands of people, but by God killing him is just so not right. Think of the children."
It's a complicated case with a lot of history, but will now almost certainly come down to a lengthy debate on both the fairness of the trial itself and whether hanging Saddam is the best way to go forward. I'm wondering: best for whom?
As far as I can tell there are two main oppositions to the death penalty. The first is that in many cases it's nigh-on impossible to be one hundred per cent certain that we have the right person. The rightly-feared 'wrong conviction.' In these examples, putting somebody to death is irreversible, whereas sticking somebody in jail can always be reversed, even if it's years later. Fair enough, except that why do we grant the legal system the authority to determine if somebody is guilty beyond reasonable doubt, and then put an asterisk next to the punishment box?
The second opposition is one of morality. That we, as a civilised, modern society, don't think that 'an eye for an eye...' or any perspective resembling that is at all appropriate. That by sentencing a murderer to death we are committing murder ourselves, and are therefore equally as guilty. That we all have a 'right to life.' Again, in many senses that also seems fairly agreeable, but at the end of the day, is it our call?
This, to me, remains the key point, and is particularly relevant in this example. Saddam is guilty of the crimes under which he has been tried. This isn't some shady murder cases where there is always going to be a smidgen of doubt; Saddam has had a hand in genocide. He's no O.J. Simpson. The glove does fit.
So that's the first argument of opposition out of the way; this could never be seen as a 'wrong conviction'. It's right.
So we're left with an issue of morality which, when you get down to it, and like it or not, is absolutely a personal choice. It's your perspective. It might also be the legal perspective of your country, like it is in the UK, but then so is Vernon Kaye's right to a career in television, and nobody really agrees with that.
The blatant hypocrisy with punishment governed by morality in the legal system is that it flies very much in the face of the well-observed (if not outwardly legislated) adage that the court can never be personal. The case is heard, evidence is presented, witnesses are called, and everything is very serious, triple-checked and absolutely based on fact. One of the jurors didn't like the accused because he confessed he never read the Bible? Doesn't matter, ignore it. Another wasn't too happy that he listened to death metal and quite clearly rarely washed? If it's not relevant to the case, throw it out. The guy in the box is a notorious Devil-worshiper and fornicator with tattoos, facial piercings and everything? Look the other way.
Yet, when it comes to the sentence, suddenly all these things are vitally important. Because a moral objection to the death penalty is not only a fundamentally personal decision, I'd dare to suggest that it isn't even your decision, at all.
So what to do: let the victim, or the victim's family, decide the sentence? There's madness in that route, I'm sure, but I think that to some extent they should be heard. And what do the Kurds and Kuwaitis think about it all? Perhaps not all that surprisingly, they're happy with Saddam's sentence.
The Americans are too, of course, but they would be, as they've got something that's quite possibly unprovable to prove. And some important mid-terms to influence. So we can ignore that. Who isn't in favour? Pretty much everyone else... who wasn't involved. It does seem to be a reasonable constant that people who aren't directly affected by a given crime tend to be more criminal-favourable (and victim-unfriendly) in their attitude towards the level of punishment that is warranted. Things often become very different when something crops up in your backyard, and while a governing attitude that's fundamentally in that direction is not desirable, there's definitely some room for thought somewhere down the middle.
The victim should be considered, is the bottom line. What they want should be made known. This doesn't mean that what they (or their families) desire becomes law, but they should be heard. It should go on record. The judge should absolutely consider it before delivering his verdict. It is important. If we're going to let morals determine outcomes, then surely it is only fair if the morality of all sides is considered? And on a case by case basis, if needs be. Not in a general sense.
I think those in favour of the death penalty would probably be far more accommodating if some kind of guarantee could be made regarding the harshness of a prison sentence. If we're really going to make the punishment fit the crime, then stick Saddam in a box and turn out the lights. Civil rights? If his prison conditions went on to become anything less than relative luxury I'll think twice before invading Kuwait myself.
Saddam and his legal team have, I believe, 30 days to appeal against this sentence. I think there's a very good chance that the weight of international opposition against the death penalty will see that it might well be overturned. Then again, it may not matter, as coming up next he's set to undergo additional trials for his involvement in genocide, the Iran-Iraq war, the invasion of Kuwait and other crimes in war and against humanity. It's a tall order to imagine he'll successfully appeal against everything.
After the Dujail verdict was announced, Saddam stood up in court and, by all accounts, shouted, "Long live the Iraqi people." Let's face it, mate: probably not in your case.
Saturday, November 04, 2006
Oh Crap, I'm Turning Into My Dad
The other day I was watching The Hits channel on Freeview. And by 'watching', I of course mean I was reading whilst it was on in the background giving, at most, casual attention. My 10-year old son was in attendance, however, and was observing the current show quite keenly, which from what I could tell was some kind of countdown that had been determined by viewers' requests.
At one point, I looked up, studied the screen for a moment to figure out exactly what was making that hideous whine.
"Who is this," I said, then paused for a moment. "Keane?"
I noticed the change in my son's face immediately. Suddenly, it became clear that the weight of the world have been thrust upon his youthful shoulders, and the look he gave me was full of the kind of scorn I typically reserve for grown men and women who buy and claim to enjoy Haribo.
"Does it look like Keane?" he said, clearly unable to bear my blatant oafishness a moment longer, "It's Kasabian."
Or, at least it might have been. It was definitely a band beginning with the letter 'K', but that doesn't mean much in today's musical climate, as it seems that all you have to do to get a modicum of success in Britain is to pick up a guitar, flick to the 'K' part of the dictionary and pick a name at random. Keane, Kasabian, The Killers, K.T. Tunstall, and, if you're a prat, even Pete Doherty has an invisible but audibly offensive 'K' in his surname somewhere. Within a week Kajagoogoo will make a critically-acclaimed comeback and the NME will be wetting themselves over a controversial but Daz-friendly Southcoast rock act called The KKK. With that name alone they're bound to sell ten million records.
When I was thirteen or fourteen, and obsessed with electro and the early days of hip hop (although back then it was known as 'rap music'), I was walking to the car with my father when I started humming the melody to some house track.
"What's that?" my father asked.
I told him, and then rewarded his interest with a little extra effort.
"Ah," he said, turning away, "That stuff all sounds the same to me."
This is, of course, a rite of passage for all fathers. No matter how much you think you are 'with it' and how much you pride yourself on your 'incredible album collection', there will come a point in your life - and it literally is a point, an apex - where you'll suddenly realise that not only are you basically out of touch with modern music, but that you don't care at all and that your father was right - it does all sound the same. Quite frankly, it's all rubbish.
I know, that sounds like madness, especially if you're currently in your early twenties, consider yourself a bit of a muso and you have a Playstation 2 and an Xbox-360. But, believe me, and I know this hurts: one day, you'll look up and go, "This is all shit."
And only a decade ago it seemed pretty good.
Nirvana, of course, changed everything. Both with Nevermind and Kurt Cobain's timely death, because that's exactly what it was. If he was still around today, he'd have turned into Chris Martin. And nobody wants that, as one of them is bad enough. 27 seems to be the right age for every rock God to die and Cobain must have been aware of this when he was pulling the trigger. The release of Nevermind in 1991 not only had a massive influence on music for years to come, but for guitar converts like myself it also had an enormous backtracing effect as well, as Nirvana's influences (and choices of cover tracks) pushed me, and millions of others, to make an eager visit to the past. The Who, The Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, Blondie, The Doors and, yes, even The bloody Beatles suddenly became essential. And from here you discovered The Clash, The Jam and The Sex Pistols, and, you swear, for five minutes at one point in 1995 you thought that Steve Harley and the Cockney Rebels Make Me Smile (Come Up And See Me) might very well be the greatest song ever written. Even though it was originally a hit in 1975. You can still make an argument for it.
And then, post-Nirvana, the UK had its own music revolution in the Britpop movement. And it was a movement, as at least half of the bands involved were shit. Still, for a moment there it was a bit like the 1970s again. Rock was back. Oasis made two fantastic albums before they got swallowed up by the khasi. Radiohead actually managed two and a half, then found themselves trapped in a Pink Floydesque mire of pretentious fretwanking and commercial obscurity. Pulp wrote at least five good songs. I quite liked Blur's Song 2. I'm sure Suede did something.
The problem is, and remember I'm saying this as both a father of three and someone whose 35th birthday is less than two weeks away, when you've been privileged with that kind of majesty, where the hell do you go from there?
You certainly can't go up. And so inevitably at one specific point in your life you suddenly become aware that you're trapped in this entertainment limbo. Your iPod bears the brunt of your displeasure. You'll find yourself uploading all the latest albums, listening to them once (partially), and then deleting them a week later to make room for L.A. Woman.
I thought I'd figured a way to cut out the middle-man by picking up one of the myriad of compilation albums but I'd stripped out four-fifths of that before the day was over, and within a week all that was left was Pulp's Disco 2000. Which I already had.
And it's not as if any new records from your now-ancient favourite bands help at all, either. Those of them selfish enough to still be alive like Robert Plant and The Rolling Stones just can't cut it anymore. And even when you see that a new album by The Who is getting great press, you refuse to pay any attention because you know it won't be any good at all. It can't be. Roger Daltry is 85. Nobody wants to see that.
So, what to do? Well, you can stop watching The Hits, for starters, as you're never going to get anything out of that. Otherwise, the best advice I can give is to make yourself a really good sandwich, grab a bottle of beer, find a nice, quiet place in your house, and sit there in the dark with your iPod on shuffle. And if your 10-year old son happens to wander over and asks you what you're listening to, tell him to sod off. We have to keep some things for ourselves, after all.
At one point, I looked up, studied the screen for a moment to figure out exactly what was making that hideous whine.
"Who is this," I said, then paused for a moment. "Keane?"
I noticed the change in my son's face immediately. Suddenly, it became clear that the weight of the world have been thrust upon his youthful shoulders, and the look he gave me was full of the kind of scorn I typically reserve for grown men and women who buy and claim to enjoy Haribo.
"Does it look like Keane?" he said, clearly unable to bear my blatant oafishness a moment longer, "It's Kasabian."
Or, at least it might have been. It was definitely a band beginning with the letter 'K', but that doesn't mean much in today's musical climate, as it seems that all you have to do to get a modicum of success in Britain is to pick up a guitar, flick to the 'K' part of the dictionary and pick a name at random. Keane, Kasabian, The Killers, K.T. Tunstall, and, if you're a prat, even Pete Doherty has an invisible but audibly offensive 'K' in his surname somewhere. Within a week Kajagoogoo will make a critically-acclaimed comeback and the NME will be wetting themselves over a controversial but Daz-friendly Southcoast rock act called The KKK. With that name alone they're bound to sell ten million records.
When I was thirteen or fourteen, and obsessed with electro and the early days of hip hop (although back then it was known as 'rap music'), I was walking to the car with my father when I started humming the melody to some house track.
"What's that?" my father asked.
I told him, and then rewarded his interest with a little extra effort.
"Ah," he said, turning away, "That stuff all sounds the same to me."
This is, of course, a rite of passage for all fathers. No matter how much you think you are 'with it' and how much you pride yourself on your 'incredible album collection', there will come a point in your life - and it literally is a point, an apex - where you'll suddenly realise that not only are you basically out of touch with modern music, but that you don't care at all and that your father was right - it does all sound the same. Quite frankly, it's all rubbish.
I know, that sounds like madness, especially if you're currently in your early twenties, consider yourself a bit of a muso and you have a Playstation 2 and an Xbox-360. But, believe me, and I know this hurts: one day, you'll look up and go, "This is all shit."
And only a decade ago it seemed pretty good.
Nirvana, of course, changed everything. Both with Nevermind and Kurt Cobain's timely death, because that's exactly what it was. If he was still around today, he'd have turned into Chris Martin. And nobody wants that, as one of them is bad enough. 27 seems to be the right age for every rock God to die and Cobain must have been aware of this when he was pulling the trigger. The release of Nevermind in 1991 not only had a massive influence on music for years to come, but for guitar converts like myself it also had an enormous backtracing effect as well, as Nirvana's influences (and choices of cover tracks) pushed me, and millions of others, to make an eager visit to the past. The Who, The Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, Blondie, The Doors and, yes, even The bloody Beatles suddenly became essential. And from here you discovered The Clash, The Jam and The Sex Pistols, and, you swear, for five minutes at one point in 1995 you thought that Steve Harley and the Cockney Rebels Make Me Smile (Come Up And See Me) might very well be the greatest song ever written. Even though it was originally a hit in 1975. You can still make an argument for it.
And then, post-Nirvana, the UK had its own music revolution in the Britpop movement. And it was a movement, as at least half of the bands involved were shit. Still, for a moment there it was a bit like the 1970s again. Rock was back. Oasis made two fantastic albums before they got swallowed up by the khasi. Radiohead actually managed two and a half, then found themselves trapped in a Pink Floydesque mire of pretentious fretwanking and commercial obscurity. Pulp wrote at least five good songs. I quite liked Blur's Song 2. I'm sure Suede did something.
The problem is, and remember I'm saying this as both a father of three and someone whose 35th birthday is less than two weeks away, when you've been privileged with that kind of majesty, where the hell do you go from there?
You certainly can't go up. And so inevitably at one specific point in your life you suddenly become aware that you're trapped in this entertainment limbo. Your iPod bears the brunt of your displeasure. You'll find yourself uploading all the latest albums, listening to them once (partially), and then deleting them a week later to make room for L.A. Woman.
I thought I'd figured a way to cut out the middle-man by picking up one of the myriad of compilation albums but I'd stripped out four-fifths of that before the day was over, and within a week all that was left was Pulp's Disco 2000. Which I already had.
And it's not as if any new records from your now-ancient favourite bands help at all, either. Those of them selfish enough to still be alive like Robert Plant and The Rolling Stones just can't cut it anymore. And even when you see that a new album by The Who is getting great press, you refuse to pay any attention because you know it won't be any good at all. It can't be. Roger Daltry is 85. Nobody wants to see that.
So, what to do? Well, you can stop watching The Hits, for starters, as you're never going to get anything out of that. Otherwise, the best advice I can give is to make yourself a really good sandwich, grab a bottle of beer, find a nice, quiet place in your house, and sit there in the dark with your iPod on shuffle. And if your 10-year old son happens to wander over and asks you what you're listening to, tell him to sod off. We have to keep some things for ourselves, after all.
Thursday, November 02, 2006
The Rise (And Pies) Of The British Hick
A couple of years ago I went to Germany over my birthday, and had a jolly old time. In a four-day stay I visited Dusseldorf, Magdeburg and Berlin. Both sides. The East was a bit drab and dreary, and seemed to have been painted entirely in battleship gray, but it was somewhat understandable. After all, David Hasselhoff had only worked his magic some fifteen years previously.
But you know what the best thing about Germany was? The bars. Not only were they almost without fail clean, respectable and, of course, efficient, but the alcohol flowed freely and cheaply, the waitress actually came to your table to take your order for more drinks, and the barman kept the place open until the last person left. And, typically, that was me.
But wait, it gets better. I must have visited twenty bars over my travels across the Fatherland and not once - and I mean not even the remotest hint of a sliver of an eyelash kiss of a nod to a wave of a suspicion - did I encounter anything resembling violence.
Hang on. Twenty venues serving alcohol? In Germany? That sounds like a recipe for the Fourth Reich, but believe me, Hans knows all too well how good he's got it now. And so does Hans Jr, because, as we've seen on our own shores in the past few months, it's the kids what started it.
Kids. You can't even read the word with uttering a dismissive tsk, and I used to think that was entirely justified. But it suddenly seems far more serious than it was back when I was a nipper. When I joined my secondary school as a wide-eyed, mostly middle-class wet-behind-the-ears oik I, like pretty much all the kids in my year, quite simply shat ourselves at the thought of the burly near-blokes in the fifth form. Some of them had beards and everything, and even an unintentional look in the wrong direction (i.e., towards them) could and often did result in severe beatings. We'd been told during our entire primary school education how bad it was going to be and, believe me, they were right.
However, when I left the sixth form in 1990, the new crop of first-formers were amongst the mouthiest little shites it's even been my displeasure to witness. Clearly, something had changed.
But what? I've got a few theories, and most of them have something to do with Sunny Delight and Ginsters Pies. But whatever it is that triggered this social change has snowballed to the point where you can't even go three pages in The Evening Standard without reading that some fifteen-year old cretin, somewhere, has stabbed, killed, eaten, urinated on, threatened, bottled, stolen the hubcaps of and/or crucified somebody else. And that somebody is usually an adult and, usually, middle-class.
Hold on, hold on, what's it all about. Class war? I didn't say it, but Jesus, have a look around. With the news today that 49% of ASBO holders go on to breach the terms of their order, you only have to take a walk around your local park to see it certainly isn't that nice Timothy Smithe from The Mews who's feeding his neighbour's cat to his pitbull.
There's definitely something in the water, and it can't be in Evian because, well, I drink that, and I've yet to spend even five minutes outside my local chip shop cheering on two white-tracksuit clad 14-year old girls beating the living crap out of each other. Girls, fighting? Call me a sexist pig of the highest magnitude, but that shit just ain't right.
I'm not living in the past; I'm well aware that there were snotty little punks back in my day, and most of the days before that, too. But they were concentrated. Rare, even. Just a few. Now, these pockets of aggression seem to be blossoming everywhere.
And it's an entirely new breed. These aren't the same 15-year olds that I knew (and was) back in 1986. They're new and improved, inasmuch that they won't hesitate to leave you for dead at the station, whereas before they'd just deliver a poisonous sneer and then pull down the sign for platform two. But while a certain percentage of kids have always been thick, this new breed takes it to a previously unchartered sub-level.
We used to mock Americans. Remember how we once laughed at the concept of suing everybody for anything? Well, thanks to the now re-born Claims Direct and the ten thousand firms that copied them, now you can do it to. Slipped over your own bloody two left feet at work? Sue the bastards, take that five grand and to hell with being blackballed from the industry.
And what about country music? What's that all about? Bluegrass? That's for hicks, isn't it?
Well, if it is, expect Cotton Eye Joe to re-enter the charts at number one yet again this year and to stay there for an unprecedented ninety weeks, as, believe me, the British youth is making themselves heard. In grunts, mostly, delivered between cold stares and a shared puff on a Benson & Hedges. It's the British Hick. The Brick. Uneducated, work and contraceptive-shy, almost indestructible and pre-loaded with a disposition towards violence. They're here to stay, and short of a return to a healthy dose of national service and an elite team of Guardian Angels, I'm not sure there's very much we can do about it.
But you know what the best thing about Germany was? The bars. Not only were they almost without fail clean, respectable and, of course, efficient, but the alcohol flowed freely and cheaply, the waitress actually came to your table to take your order for more drinks, and the barman kept the place open until the last person left. And, typically, that was me.
But wait, it gets better. I must have visited twenty bars over my travels across the Fatherland and not once - and I mean not even the remotest hint of a sliver of an eyelash kiss of a nod to a wave of a suspicion - did I encounter anything resembling violence.
Hang on. Twenty venues serving alcohol? In Germany? That sounds like a recipe for the Fourth Reich, but believe me, Hans knows all too well how good he's got it now. And so does Hans Jr, because, as we've seen on our own shores in the past few months, it's the kids what started it.
Kids. You can't even read the word with uttering a dismissive tsk, and I used to think that was entirely justified. But it suddenly seems far more serious than it was back when I was a nipper. When I joined my secondary school as a wide-eyed, mostly middle-class wet-behind-the-ears oik I, like pretty much all the kids in my year, quite simply shat ourselves at the thought of the burly near-blokes in the fifth form. Some of them had beards and everything, and even an unintentional look in the wrong direction (i.e., towards them) could and often did result in severe beatings. We'd been told during our entire primary school education how bad it was going to be and, believe me, they were right.
However, when I left the sixth form in 1990, the new crop of first-formers were amongst the mouthiest little shites it's even been my displeasure to witness. Clearly, something had changed.
But what? I've got a few theories, and most of them have something to do with Sunny Delight and Ginsters Pies. But whatever it is that triggered this social change has snowballed to the point where you can't even go three pages in The Evening Standard without reading that some fifteen-year old cretin, somewhere, has stabbed, killed, eaten, urinated on, threatened, bottled, stolen the hubcaps of and/or crucified somebody else. And that somebody is usually an adult and, usually, middle-class.
Hold on, hold on, what's it all about. Class war? I didn't say it, but Jesus, have a look around. With the news today that 49% of ASBO holders go on to breach the terms of their order, you only have to take a walk around your local park to see it certainly isn't that nice Timothy Smithe from The Mews who's feeding his neighbour's cat to his pitbull.
There's definitely something in the water, and it can't be in Evian because, well, I drink that, and I've yet to spend even five minutes outside my local chip shop cheering on two white-tracksuit clad 14-year old girls beating the living crap out of each other. Girls, fighting? Call me a sexist pig of the highest magnitude, but that shit just ain't right.
I'm not living in the past; I'm well aware that there were snotty little punks back in my day, and most of the days before that, too. But they were concentrated. Rare, even. Just a few. Now, these pockets of aggression seem to be blossoming everywhere.
And it's an entirely new breed. These aren't the same 15-year olds that I knew (and was) back in 1986. They're new and improved, inasmuch that they won't hesitate to leave you for dead at the station, whereas before they'd just deliver a poisonous sneer and then pull down the sign for platform two. But while a certain percentage of kids have always been thick, this new breed takes it to a previously unchartered sub-level.
We used to mock Americans. Remember how we once laughed at the concept of suing everybody for anything? Well, thanks to the now re-born Claims Direct and the ten thousand firms that copied them, now you can do it to. Slipped over your own bloody two left feet at work? Sue the bastards, take that five grand and to hell with being blackballed from the industry.
And what about country music? What's that all about? Bluegrass? That's for hicks, isn't it?
Well, if it is, expect Cotton Eye Joe to re-enter the charts at number one yet again this year and to stay there for an unprecedented ninety weeks, as, believe me, the British youth is making themselves heard. In grunts, mostly, delivered between cold stares and a shared puff on a Benson & Hedges. It's the British Hick. The Brick. Uneducated, work and contraceptive-shy, almost indestructible and pre-loaded with a disposition towards violence. They're here to stay, and short of a return to a healthy dose of national service and an elite team of Guardian Angels, I'm not sure there's very much we can do about it.
Wednesday, November 01, 2006
Dance? I Don't Even Drive.
Earlier this morning I was on the train when the guard made the shamefully familiar announcement that there was a major problem at London Bridge and our service was going to be disrupted.
Nothing shocking there, you might think. And typically you'd be right.
However, in this instance, rather than terminating the bastard at or before London Bridge the driver made the smart decision to move the train on to Cannon Street, which just happened to be my actual destination. As I was originally going to have to change trains at London Bridge anyway, this quick-thinking saved me some fifteen minutes.
Wonderful.
Except, and this is where it all cancels itself out, yesterday evening on the train home there was a massive problem at Robertsbridge - clearly, given the names of the stations involved, South Eastern is going through some kind of a sticky patch with trolls - and I was delayed for some forty minutes in the middle of nowhere with nothing to entertain me except a mild fever and a suspiciously mustached man who insisted on talking loudly in his mobile phone.
If I can draw your attention to even earlier this morning, I had decided to excuse myself from work to polish off a couple of errands. Socialite Patricia Duff once remarked that anyone who finds themselves taking the bus after the age of thirty is quite clearly a failure. She's probably right, but then again she was married to a billionaire at the time. I'm not a billionaire, but I am over the age of thirty and yet, somehow, around 9am this morning I had the misfortune to find myself on a bus.
Buses do inevitably contain the most foul people. Really, if you want a snapshot of the dregs of society, hop on the number twenty-three to anywhere, stand in the front and gaze suspiciously towards the back. With a flamethrower and a steady hand one could efficiently and speedily put paid to many of life's problems, particularly if the emblazed vehicle could then be steered into your nearest Lidl.
However, in this instance, I had become one of them, and if the 2006 version of Travis Bickle had hopped on board (no doubt complete with iPod and authentic Che Guevara t-shirt) he would have shot me, too. And rightly so. Thankfully, I only board a bus about twice a year. When it's very cold.
What am I rambling on about? I'll tell you. I don't drive. I've never driven, don't have a license and nor do I have any desire to get one.
And here's why: I'm incredibly bloody lazy.
Actually, that's not the only reason. I'm also incredibly environmentally aware. Indeed, every time I even so much as see a programme on television that features monster trucks or a factory I feel compelled to go out to the garden and plant a tree. At least I would if I... cared.
The real reason is that I quite simply do not need it, nor have I ever. And I don't think I ever will. You see, my wife drives, and before her, my last girlfriend did, and way back when my dad used to drive too. In fact, he still does. So does my brother. Christ, I'm pretty sure both of my sons will drive one day, and then I'll be really sorted.
I'm not, never will be and have no aspirations towards being the dreaded 'new man'. But why is it that most of Western civilization has embraced a moderate downgrade of the macho man but the majority of people, particularly men, cling on to the idea that to be a man you must drive?
Don't get me wrong; I'm very pro most areas of blatant testosterone exposure. For example, I don't dance. No real man dances. Unless you're chatting directly to Jake Spears, never trust any bloke who says he can't wait to get on to the dance floor. He's clearly a social retard.
My wife would love it if I learned to drive. Really, she'd probably spend a month celebrating and then we'd have ten years or so where I drove her and the kids everywhere to pay them all back. But where does that leave me? Miserable, that's where. In other words, just like everyone else. Who wants to be the designated driver? Nobody, apart from that annoying prat you know who will never, ever get a girlfriend. Living it large like I do, I can go to Brighton by car and have a cheeky pint. Or four.
And part of me now feels that if I ever get my license it'll be some kind of open admission of failure. That ultimately I folded under the pressure and gave in to the notion that I actually needed it to be accepted as a fine citizen and, yes, a man.
Bollocks. According to Direct Line, 14 of the 33.8 million drivers in the UK are women. And one of them is my wife. And for that I say: cheers.
Nothing shocking there, you might think. And typically you'd be right.
However, in this instance, rather than terminating the bastard at or before London Bridge the driver made the smart decision to move the train on to Cannon Street, which just happened to be my actual destination. As I was originally going to have to change trains at London Bridge anyway, this quick-thinking saved me some fifteen minutes.
Wonderful.
Except, and this is where it all cancels itself out, yesterday evening on the train home there was a massive problem at Robertsbridge - clearly, given the names of the stations involved, South Eastern is going through some kind of a sticky patch with trolls - and I was delayed for some forty minutes in the middle of nowhere with nothing to entertain me except a mild fever and a suspiciously mustached man who insisted on talking loudly in his mobile phone.
If I can draw your attention to even earlier this morning, I had decided to excuse myself from work to polish off a couple of errands. Socialite Patricia Duff once remarked that anyone who finds themselves taking the bus after the age of thirty is quite clearly a failure. She's probably right, but then again she was married to a billionaire at the time. I'm not a billionaire, but I am over the age of thirty and yet, somehow, around 9am this morning I had the misfortune to find myself on a bus.
Buses do inevitably contain the most foul people. Really, if you want a snapshot of the dregs of society, hop on the number twenty-three to anywhere, stand in the front and gaze suspiciously towards the back. With a flamethrower and a steady hand one could efficiently and speedily put paid to many of life's problems, particularly if the emblazed vehicle could then be steered into your nearest Lidl.
However, in this instance, I had become one of them, and if the 2006 version of Travis Bickle had hopped on board (no doubt complete with iPod and authentic Che Guevara t-shirt) he would have shot me, too. And rightly so. Thankfully, I only board a bus about twice a year. When it's very cold.
What am I rambling on about? I'll tell you. I don't drive. I've never driven, don't have a license and nor do I have any desire to get one.
And here's why: I'm incredibly bloody lazy.
Actually, that's not the only reason. I'm also incredibly environmentally aware. Indeed, every time I even so much as see a programme on television that features monster trucks or a factory I feel compelled to go out to the garden and plant a tree. At least I would if I... cared.
The real reason is that I quite simply do not need it, nor have I ever. And I don't think I ever will. You see, my wife drives, and before her, my last girlfriend did, and way back when my dad used to drive too. In fact, he still does. So does my brother. Christ, I'm pretty sure both of my sons will drive one day, and then I'll be really sorted.
I'm not, never will be and have no aspirations towards being the dreaded 'new man'. But why is it that most of Western civilization has embraced a moderate downgrade of the macho man but the majority of people, particularly men, cling on to the idea that to be a man you must drive?
Don't get me wrong; I'm very pro most areas of blatant testosterone exposure. For example, I don't dance. No real man dances. Unless you're chatting directly to Jake Spears, never trust any bloke who says he can't wait to get on to the dance floor. He's clearly a social retard.
My wife would love it if I learned to drive. Really, she'd probably spend a month celebrating and then we'd have ten years or so where I drove her and the kids everywhere to pay them all back. But where does that leave me? Miserable, that's where. In other words, just like everyone else. Who wants to be the designated driver? Nobody, apart from that annoying prat you know who will never, ever get a girlfriend. Living it large like I do, I can go to Brighton by car and have a cheeky pint. Or four.
And part of me now feels that if I ever get my license it'll be some kind of open admission of failure. That ultimately I folded under the pressure and gave in to the notion that I actually needed it to be accepted as a fine citizen and, yes, a man.
Bollocks. According to Direct Line, 14 of the 33.8 million drivers in the UK are women. And one of them is my wife. And for that I say: cheers.
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