Magnetic Footage

It's a while since I watched a cricket match with any interest, but the highlights of the last day of this year;s first test against India were totally compulsive. It wasn't perfect cricket. Both sides made mistakes, and it could easily have gone the other way - but it's those tight margins which make it riveting. It's at moments like that that the star performers stand out - and I can't be the only person of my age of thereabouts for whom Ben Stokes is a reminder of Botham in his prime: all that hunger effort and determination.

Which brings us all back down to earth when see the footage of the night-club attack for which he must be facing a prison sentence - and yes, there's the same determination and hunger, the refusal to be diverted into wiser, safer alternatives. It's a highly combustible material is male aggression, with huge potential both ways.   

Travels in Trumpland

Seeing advance clips of Ed Balls in a wrestling costume wasn't that enticing. we've seen him prat about before, and it's not an edifying sight. Press reports indicated that Yvette Cooper (who must be wearily familiar with this territory by now) had suggested that there might be red lines which he should be careful bot to cross, and maybe this was one of them...So I wasn't inclined to watch Travels in Trumpland.  

But I was wrong. It's terrific. the silly stuff in thw wrestlibng outfit was actually part of a very intelligent analysis of the parallels between Trump's approach to PR and the atmosphere generated in a wrestling arena - and Ball's expert guide, himself a thoughtful Trump suippurter, agreed totally on the closeness of the similarities. it's not surprising that Balls has all kinds of reservation about Trump, but he doesn't try to thrust these down the throats aoof the very varied and fascinating Trump voters with whom he comes into contact. To my surprise, he has something to Grayson Perry's talent for simply getting on with people, talking to them and listening to what comes back, which make for much more interesting viewing. You watch this series of documentaries, and you end up wiser. It really is as good as that.   

Reporting Trump's First Year

The New York Times, way back at the start of 2017, makes this brave decision that they'll let a TV documentary crew film what goes on inside their offices, as they work out how to respond to the tsunami of news coverage that's implicit in the Trump presidency. In four one-hour episodes we get the fruit of that - a wonderful, lively portrait of intelligent professionals at work, getting the stories but also working out just exactly how the rules have changed. and then there's the impact of Google, and loss of revenue, the need for the paper to reorganise - the only way they can hire the extra investigative reporters they need is to cut down on the editorial staff they used to need when digital was a dream. Lots of people on opposite sides of the fence, both being totally rational. And then there's the buzz of Twitter, to which many reporters are openly addicted. They're smart, they're fast, they're popular - but it isn't always the cleverest way for the paper to be seen...Lots of tough decisions there. It's a wonderful series. Maybe the most chilling moment is watching a Trump rally, where he's directing the crowd's attention to the lying scum of the press - tantamount to urging on a lynch mob. We see the reporters, familiar faces by now, nervously packing up their gear, because this might be the moment when they get attacked. Dangerous times.      

Football Heaven

And the heatwave goes on, apparently for ever. My second poetry outdoor gig of the week involves reading my Jo Cox poem at the Great Get Together picnic, on Much Wenlock Church Green on Sunday afternoon. It lasts from 2.00 till 5.00, but I reckon if I produce lunch early I can just sneak in the first half of the England v. Panama game before I go - 1.00 pm - 1.45. Oh boy. As good a forty-five minute stretch of football as I've seen any England team produce - so many different kinds of good, of thought, of skill. A five-nil lead at half-time - I don't ever remember that. OK, so Panama weren't great, and they moaned about the two (perfectly clear) penalties which were awarded against them, delaying the taking of the kick, in a way which might have worried you in previous years. Not Harry Kane. Bides his time, and when the ref is ready, blasts it into the top left corner of the net. Twice. But there's also Jesse Lingard's sweet goal, all flowing movement and sudden power. Not to mention the hilariously clever rehearsed free-kick routine which produced Stones' second goal. we might win the World cup and we probably won't, but we've already had more pleasure than we could reasonably expect. Thanks, guys.   .   

A Very English Scandal

You're never quite sure what they'll do. Even though there's considerable talents involved (Russell T.Davies writing, Stephen Frears directing) big names can still produce turkeys. But not this time. A Very English Scandal has been a total treat.

At first sight, I wasn't sure. Jaunty music, chirpy camerawork, as though the whole thing were a spiffing wheeze, when it's also a dark parable about the corruption of class and power. I needn't have worried. Those aspects were fully, intelligently explored, but with a tone of laughs on the way, and some terrific acting - Hugh Grant, Ben Whishaw, Alex Jennings. All three were given clever things to do and say, so it was always entertaining, but for those of us who remember that time, it was also chillingly recognisable - yes, that's exactly how Thorpe spoke and behaved, that tempting mixture of charm and arrogance. and the level of deceit and self deceit - about homosexuality, and power, and morality - was almost incredible.

Except that - thanks to the cussedness of Tom Mangold, a nosey reporter who didn't accept the Director General's advice that his documentary should be ditched, we have the conclusive evidence of his film, buried at the time because of the surprise acquittal - virtually demanded by the judge - which got Thorpe off and added to the further humiliation of Norman Scott. some things have got better. 

Manchester Hate

It's a year on from the Manchester bombing, so there'll be some looking back, to see what's happened since. If it's all as good as tonight's documentary, we'll be fine. Most of it was really heartening, with the community determined to hold together, heal the wounds, insist on a multi-cultural community which would not be torn apart by fanatics. The efforts of the police and the imams, often working together (to their own surprise) were heart-warming.

The downside was the gangs of feral kids, some of them 10 or 12, who feel they now have the licence to shout at, spit at and attack anyone who might possibly be Muslim. The problem is taken seriously, and again the police are working their socks off to try to tackle it, but when they get the kids into custody centuries of resentment kick in. "What's your name?" No comment. "Why did you kick her?" No comment. "How do you think she feels?" No comment. it's a pointless, mindless ritual which says "Don't bother. You're not dealing with anything rational here. I just hate them, and I'm not going to change." Huge problem. But a good programme.   

The Split

Oh boy. I've always been a fan of the playwright Abi Morgan - loved Sex Trafficking, though less keen on The Hour (which pinched its central situation from the film Broadcast News, without sustaining its power). But The Split is a real treat. A bit glossy, sure, and unashamedly feminist - big family drama, with Mum and three daughters, right? But it's so intelligent, and the fact that they're almost all divorce lawyers gives the scope for all kinds of exploration into middle-aged marriage/fidelity/honesty/cowardice/boredom. Beautifully done and acted, with tonight's climax a dinner party scene where lone rebel Nina decides this is the right moment to tall the rest of the family where they're going wrong - in detail,. and one at a time. They can all see it coming, knows she's had too much to drink, try to talk her out of it - but no. She wants this scene, so here it comes. Just wonderful. 

Alfie Evans

Generally, I plan to keep up with the news, but there are some stories i just can't bear to follow. The current one is Alfie Evans, the terminally ill baby whose parents are desperate to keep him alive, against the considered opinion of medical professionals. It's a desperate situation for everyone, but what makes it unbearable is the hysteria of those who seek to exploit it. the Christian missionary Christine Broesamle, for instance, proudly proclaims that "Alder Hey hospital really hates me because I've worked so hard for Alfie's defence." Presumably she thinks that they haven't, that the hospital is part of the attack on Alfie, so the more anger and rage that can be generated against hospital workers, the better it is for Alfie's side. It's so blinkered, intolerant and sure of its own rectitude. I don't know what should happen. But I do know that it's complicated and good people are working hard to try to resolve it. Pretending that it's a kind of Star Wars battle between good and evil isn't any kind of answer. 

Stephen Lawrence

Amazing how some names retain their potency for years. just those two words, and the images flood back - five stroppy youths, looking for a fight with an angry crowd. the three part TV series did a good job of tracking over the ground, and incidentally threw up a wonderful contrast in police attitudes. the hardened professional, who'd worked in the Met for over twenty years, and just knew it wasn't racist - so all that evidence, analysis, and thought just wasted. throw it down the drain. But then there was the real hero of the piece, a slightly fussy, very old-fashioned guy who didn't seem to be anything special but actually made all the difference, by a meticulous search for and analysis of the evidence that the earlier inquiry had so blatantly mishandled. some things do get better, if only a bit at a time. 

The perils of a three-goal lead

Phew! three wonderful nights of football. Liverpool, Barcelona, Real Madrid and Arsenal all go into their respective games with a three-goal lead. So they think it's all over? Hardly.

Man City totally dominate Liverpool, score an early goal, and then have another wrongly disallowed. You can feel the air oozing out of their ballloon. So I cleverly switch channels, in time to catch Roma conjuring the impossible escape, scoring three goals against Barcelona without reply, so that the magic away goal they scored in losing at Barcelona the previous week becomes the magic key to the semi-finals. On Wednesday it's deja vu all over again, as another cocky favourite, Real Madrid, gradually concede three goals without managing one of their own. they do eventually get a dramatic last-minute penalty, the legendary Buffon is sent off for harassing the ref, and Ronaldo preictably puts the penalty away - but it was close. So what chance Arsenal, my beloved, heart-breaking team, doing things the easy way? Not a hope. They defend disastroulsy, give the ball away, lose endless 50:50 clashes, and only escape by the skin of their teeth. Football can be an amazing game, the away goal rule does have an uncanny kind of magic, and I'm so relieved that I signed up to BT Sport. (Yes, guys. You may use that in the adverts.)  

Litvinenko moment

A nasty little nugget, retrieved from the acres of Skripal coverage. when Litvinenko was murdered in London, his dad Walter was in Italy, furious at the Putin regime which had ordered the killing. But years later Walter's back in Russia, sitting on a sofa in a TV studio with Lugovoi, one of the men responsible. they're chatting amiably, and shaking hands, so that the Russian viewers can clearly see that the whole thing was a nasty plot, made up by the West to smear the motherland. (Remind you of any recent coverage?). So what exactly went on to persuade Walter to change his mind? We may never know, but all the guesses are deeply unpleasant. There are no restrictions or limits to get in the way of the main objective - making Putin look good. 

Russian doping

Well, why not? Might as well call a spade a spade. I'd had a sense of Russia getting away with stuff on the doping front, slightly reinforced by odd asides as part of the Winter Olympics coverage. But now the scales have fallen from my eyes, and the whole picture is dazzlingly clear.

And what makes the difference? Watching the Netflix documentary Icarus, that's what. It's one of those quirky autobiographical documentaries which starts as as something completely different, but then becomes rivetting as a whole new story unravels before your disbelieving eyes. Ryan Gilbey is a keen amateur cyclist and film-maker, who gets intrigued by the possibility of training himself in the illegal use of drugs to improve his performance - if he can do it, starting from scratch, then surely anyone can. First he gets an American expert to help him, who then gets second thoughts, because this might harm his professional profile, but as a parting gift he puts Ryan in touch with Grigory Rodchenko...

Who just happens to be the mastermind behind Russian Olympic doping. They develop an odd kind of jokey friendship, until things start to unravel. WADA is looking into doping, and seriously investigating what the Russians do. Rodchenko is under pressure, but also scared that he may get ditched as a scapegoat (it has happened before. He got locked up in an asylum, and was only released because Putin's mate needed him to come out and run the programmme. So maybe it's safer to go to the Us...but should he help prosecute the Russians, or try to protect himself by going to the press? It's confused, fascinating and scary, but on the way it provides absolutely total proof that this was a watertight, state-approved programme of deceit, on a massive scale. anyone who thinks that the Russians are the victims of political pressure, or have suddenly cleaned up their act with miraculous precision, is kidding themselves.    

Hard Sun hubris

Yes, it's official. As a TV viewer I am hard to please. Starting off with a clutch of half a dozen drama series that looked promising, I've watched almost all of them come apart. This weekend I thought I'd do my duty and finish off watching Hard sun, although I had serious misgivings. It started off - promisingly - being about the end of the world. then it diverted onto much more predictable serial killer territory, and then in the final episode it did a sudden sharp turn towards assisted suicide and weird transformation of victims who seem to have been lobotomised.

Through it all our intrepid central pair of sexy pin-ups charge remorseless, apparently unfettered by any connection with the organisation for whom they work, and immune from the threatening secret services they've openly defied. And then there's their private lives. She has a psychotic son who wants to kill er, and several episodes ago was about to have sex with a reporter, but she's completely forgotten about all that. He's a loving, kind, obsessive parent - except he isn't, and has been cheating on his wife with the widow of the colleague he killed way back when.     

It's a mess. entirely unconvincing, and streets behind series like Spiral or Before We Die, which aren't models of plausibility but do have some kind of integral consistency, their own heightened world we can sort of believe in. But Neil Cross, apparently, not waiting to see how the customers react, is planning to write another four series of this stuff. Isn't it time for somebody, somewhere, to "take back control"?   

Kiri

A few weeks back, I was raving about the dramatic increase in the quality of TV drama. Oh dear. One by one, they disappoint me, settle for the easy cops and robbers route, simplify the issues, let characters lose all consistency and the plot lose plausibility - so long as it makes a good Tv moment. Cos we're peasants, and we'll settle for anything, right?

The saddest betray of all was Kiri, which in moments was a stunning look at what social workers do and what they have to put up with. But the denouement was all over the place. (SPOILER ALERT: if you haven't watched it but plan to, look away here.)

Kiri has been illegally taken off by her biological father, from whom she then got separated, and killed by persons unknown. In the last episode, it turns out she was killed by her adopted dad, who couldn't bear that she was going off with her biological dad after all they'd done for her. Only snag is, biological dad knows nothing about this. He told the police that he and his daughter got separated, and he was looking for her all over. If they'd agreed to go off together, surely he'd be sitting outside her house, engine running, waiting for her to skip into the car.

If I pick this up on one viewing, surely they could afford to have somebody (unpaid amateur playwright like me, for instance) to go through the script looking for implausibilities, before they spend thousands on spurious political demonstrations that they don't need?      

Quality TV

Having moaned at Christmas about the dross that was on offer from mainline TV channels, it's only fair to say that in the New Year things have picked up considerably. As I trawl through the week's offerings, planing my viewing, there's a lot more that's worth a look than there used to be. Drama - McMafia, Hard Sun, Next of Kin, Kiri, Girlfriends. Varied, not everyone's taste, and by no means perfect - but each crafted with a fair bit of care and intelligence, so that you don't feel insulted as soon as you start to watch. Documentaries - House of Saud, A House through Time, Working class White Men, Great Art. Again,very varied, but I've not given up on any of them, and I'm told that i'm hard to please. And then there's one off treats like the GBS bio, or next week's offering on James Joyce, not to mention Inside No. 9, which on the basis of two episodes is looking unmissable. Grab it while you can; it may not last.   

Howards End

Slim pickings on TV most nights, but that makes the exceptions even more valuable. The BBC series of Howards End, on four successive Sundays, has been a real treat. It's partly that the extra allowance of time gives room for development and subtlety. There's not the sense of pressure that you often get as a 300 page novel is rammed into 120 minutes of screen time. The acting's been terrific, especially of the Schlegel siblings, but there's also the intelligence of the script. After You Can Count on Me and Manchester by the Sea Kenneth Lonergan was already one of my favourite people in film, but here he's brilliantly self-effacing. He's quoted as saying that 75% of the script is pure Forster, but it's a very carefully selected 75%. Last time I read Howards End I found it much heavier going than watching this series. And the remaining 25% is impossible to spot - it feels smooth and seamless, but never shallow. Then there's those trademark Lonergan moments, where characters are filmed at social events talking to each other, and you can't hear what they're saying but you know exactly what is going on. Sheer magic.     

Where do you get your news?

Key question these days, but one I saw differently this week, through sheer accident. I was in the dining room, watching the BBC ten o'clock news. It was telling me about a deal between Myanmar and Bangladesh, who'd just agreed that Myanmar would take back refugees, that Bangladesh would return them, and everything would be fine. After what's gone on, that was hard to believe. It was also hard to believe that Bangladesh got anything out of this worth having. Were we supposed to think better of them, for washing their hands of people in trouble?

But then I needed to make a drink so I moved into the kitchen, and switched on radio 4. Same story, but with a crucial bit of background added. On the radio version, the deal was arranged by China. They bullied Bangladesh into accepting it, despite the fact that it didn't include provisos for which Bangladesh had asked. Pure muscle, making something happen because they wanted to contrive the appearance of an agreement which wasn't actually there and would make no appreciable difference to those at the sharp end. But radio listeners get to hear information which doesn't make it on to the TV screen.   

Trump

I wasn't sure I could take more of Trump, but the four-part Channel f series tracing his entire career has been really good. Not outraged or emotional, just a calm tour through the key developments, through the eyes of a range of people who were there at the time - some of them very close. There's friends, colleagues and enemies, and some who moved from one category to the other. there's moments early on when he seems almost like a normal, decent guy, but then the urge to own and to buy takes over, and he loses control. He has two thriving casinos in Atlantic city, but then the Taj Mahal comes on the market. He has to have it. It's the biggest there is, so he has no choice. Except that all financial experts are confident that he's bound to make a loss, and they're right. He sells it, wriggles out of contracts, leaves local businesses unpaid. but none of that worries him a scrap, because he's on to the next big thing. 

the same, apparently, applies to his women and his wives. He sets up Ivana as the manager of one of these casinos, and she's very successful. Tough and ruthless, maybe, but a hard and thorough worker. There's fascinating footage of a big night where she's the boss and he's the appendage - and he hates it. He really suffers, to be at a big occasion where he's not the centre of attention. No, it won't change my opinion of him, but it isn't half filling in the detail.  

Boy with a Topknot

I read one of Satnam Sanghera's memoirs, and heard him speak at a conference in Durham. I think he's a really sharp, intelligent writers, and he's interestingly different in arguing for the benefit of having a day job. Unlike almost any other writer you're heard of, he actually doesn't want everything in his life to be dependent on his writing.

So I was looking forward to the TV drama based on his account of his estrangement from his Sikh background, in parallel with his belated discovery that both his father and sister were suffering from depression. That would have been quite enough, because he explores that development with tough honesty, ready to acknowledge the ways in which he's been selfish and blind.

But of course that isn't enough. We couldn't end up with grim truths and hard-won wisdom. We have to have the cute romantic finish, the phone-call from Wolverhampton station with the girlfriend who's - look! just behind him - and happy-ever-after before the credits can roll. Richard Curtis has a lot to answer for.  

Guess who?

"All of this 'Russia' talk right when the Republicans are making their big push for historic Tax Cuts & Reform. Is this coincidental? NOT!...Sorry, but this is years ago, before Paul Manafort was part of the Trump campaign. But why aren't Crooked Hillary and the Dems the focus???? also, there is NO COLLUSION."

You guessed it. Not a teenager letting off steam, but the leader of the free world. He doesn't want to run the country, he wants to re-run the campaign - having a five star general leap on to the stage shouting "Lock her up!" is the best fun he's had in years. 

But it's not funny. A sober reminder of the personal costs of this stuff in last night's Storyville documentary coming Home, about an American soldier who left his unit, was held and tortured by the Taliban for five years, and then returned to the US in a deal involving Taliban prisoners in Guantanamo. Because of Obama, and all the politics involved, Trump was on this in a flash, passionately telling rallies that six young, beautiful Americans had died trying to rescue this deserter, who in the old days would simply have been shot. and of course, they loved it, and are still yelling for this guy to be thrown into jail for the rest of his life. Army experts, used to debriefing prisoners who've been tortured, say this man's had worse treatment than anyone since Vietnam, and should not be in prison for a single day. Oh yes, and the progrramme aslo does the legwork, asks the questions, and sets the record straight: none of the six young men were actually searching for this soldier when they were killed. It made a great story, and he told it with passion. Just turns out not to be true.