Big Little Lies

The world of the box set, it’s no secret, is like the rest of the world - dominated by blokes. The Wire, Breaking Bad, Succession…So it’s great that Big Little Lies comes out, and is a smash hit, and it’s all about a group of five women who are drawn increasingly close together. Sure, they’re in a posh, white suburb, full of ludicrously expensive houses and competitive parents, but it’s smartly done and there’s some terrific performers - Reese Witherspoon, Nicole Kidman, Laura Dern.

The first series is a great success, so they get in a top director for the second series - Andrea Arnold, interesting, very different, very much not a hack producing routine stuff. The shoot goes well, there’s a great atmosphere, on of the stars is wearing an Andrea Arnold t-shirt - but then it all seems to go a bit sour. Arnold finished filming, and edited what she’d done. that then went back to the director of the first series, who got together with a number of editors to change what had been shot, so it fitted better with Series 1. And this is the weird bit. (1) They claimed that this was always the plan. (2) Andrea Arnold wasn’t told that this was always the plan.

The show runner, who’s in overall charge, and the director of the first series, are both blokes. Though that may, of course, be entirely incidental. But still - I’ve watched both series, and enjoyed them, though I look forward to getting the full story about what happened - and the chance to watch the footage that got cut.

Line of Duty

“Better than ever” Lucy Mangan drawls, in her Guardian review, but not for me, it isn’t. I’ve been a Jed Mercurio fan since Cardiac Arrest, and I thought Line of Duty at its best (Keely Hawes, maybe?) was wonderful. But since it went BBC 1 and mega, it’s got far too big for its boots. Huge spectacle, no limit to the crowds of officers involved in the dramatic arrests - but old fashioned probability is lying by the roadside as an abandoned casualty. Four vehicles purposefully heading to one operation - when they divert because the person in charge sees a white van. Senior woman police officer goes home at the end of the day - when we find she’s just breaking up from a lesbian relationship with a junior black officer - there you are, have that dumped in your lap as a ton of potent factors, none of them convincingly established. Oh, and said officer has a senior male officer who’s total bluster and incompetence. Clearly an idiot. But the shouted conversations going on in his office are clearly important, as we’re treated to endless prolonged shots of silent officers watching apprehensively from outside. And we thought we’d lost Vicki McClure, who’s had enough of shopping coppers and wants to do proper police work, but hey - she just happens to be working for the next person they’re going to be investigating, so maybe she’ll have second thoughts and join up with the old team again…it’s all cardboard, contrived for effect on the viewer, and I don’t believe a word. It’s sad when a decent series comes to the end of its proper life, but nothing like so sad as the determination to keep it going beyond that for the sake of the ratings.

The Twist Factory

There’s a sad moment on watching some TV serials when you’re too far in to give up, but something in your gut is whispering “you shouldn’t really have stuck with this. It’s not going to be worth it.” Industry, for instance, was always a bit of a toss-up. Bright, cocky young things at a smooth finance house in London, moving through endless aggressive sexual encounters as they try to calculate how to secure their future advancement in this dog eat dog world. It’s glossy and slickly edited, and keeps moving all the time. There are some interesting strands - the young black American rebel with the dodgy past, the dodgy senior man who takes her under his wing because he’s an outsider too, and only they are really hungry enough to succeed. Then, increasingly, there’s the intelligent middle-ranking women who try to plot an end to the male entitlement that’s all around them…Could be interesting, but what’s blown it for me is the remorseless pursuit of twists. You think this is going one way, but oops - no it isn’t. They want me to keep watching, to be amazed, to switch on for series 2, but in the process they sacrifice any sense of consistency in character, and if I don’t believe in the people, why should I care whether they’re in or out? It’s been a heady ride, but this is where I get off.

Christmas Telly

I guess my 76th birthday is as good a time as any to reflect on how things change. Earlier this week I was flicking through this week’s TV guide, wondering if there’d be anything I wanted to watch. And I wandered back down memory lane, to those innocent days when I would draw up a complex chart for at least ten days: four columns along the top for the main channels, boxes across for each of the days, and codes for what we’d be watching and what we’d be recording, so as to maximise the choices of four very different viewing tastes…Happy days.

And now, there’s almost nothing being transmitted that I want to watch. But there are riches galore on catchup, Netflix, mubi.com. So on iplayer alone in the last week I’ve savoured Death of Stalin, The Happy Prince and Paddington 2. You couldn’t get a wider spectrum of subject matter and tone, but all put together with vitality and intelligence, teamwork at the service of the grateful viewer.

And that’s leaving out Rocco and his Brothers, a three-hour monster from Visconti, which I watched as a spellbound sixthformer more than fifty years ago - and it still comes snarling off the screen, even if there are bits that now seem over the top. So it doesn’t matter too much that the weather’s not great. I can listen to the video of my son’s family performing Happy Birthday on What’s App in their dazzling Lidl Christmas jumpers, and know that I shan’t be short of entertainment.

Great Art

“Gentileschi, Hockney, Steve McQueen.” That’s what my diary says, for the first weekend in May. But that’s May 2020, so it didn’t happen. I haven’t been inside an art gallery this year.

So you make up any way you can. My current route is Great Art, on ITV. It’s at 10.30 on a Tuesday night, so thank God for catch-up. But it’s well worth it. This current series of five has just finished - Van Gogh, Monet, Vermeer, Matisse and Renoir. Interested?

I don’t actually like Renoir much, and the biggest collection of his work is in the States - an eccentric benefactor called Barnes bought 180 of them. Thanks to the programme, I can get to look at lots of them, and hear really smart experts talk about them, often in extreme but articulate disagreement with each other. And I can watch a contemporary artist show me how the actual painting process works. All that in an hour, for free. But it’s on ITV hub, where they don’t tell you how long they’ll keep it for. Catch them while you can.

Rule Britannia, remix.

I’ve long believed that the Brexit project was rooted in imperial nostalgia, and you can say that’s a consoling myth for Remainers, but the evidence is mounting up. No.10 wanted union jacks on the Oxford/AstraZenica vaccine, Matt Hancock was sure that our vaccine development and availability was down to Brexit, and Gavin Williamson is just sure that we’re better than any other country at…well, just about anything.

And then there’s Oliver Dowden. If I were culture minister, I’m not sure what would be worrying me most. Struggling performers, theatre management, art galleries under pressure…but no. Top of Oliver’s agenda is persuading Netflix to educate their ignorant viewers that The Crown is not a documentary, it’s a DRAMA. You couldn’t make it up.

The World of Zoom

Another Wednesday afternoon in lockdown. Same old, same old…Well, not quite. At 2.00 pm I’m joining a poetry reading by Steve Pottinger, which is also being beamed to students and staff at a college in Dubai, though for them it’s an evening gig. This is a Black Country poet describing a late-night bus from Birmingham to Wolverhampton…although as he’s also dealing with Trump, a Mexican woman who’s been “disappeared” and a young musician last seen near a Swansea beach, you couldn’t describe it as parochial. Whatever he’s doing, they love it. And so do I, but after ninety minutes I have to break off and have a quick cup of tea, because at four pm I’m watching the Putney debates.

A work-out for the mind, as lawyers and academics wrangle over the balance between the legislature and the executive, and distinguish between parliamentary sovereignty and parliamentary supremacy. But this all needs putting into context i.e. British history from the middle ages and the current practices of lawcourts across the world in ensuring social justice…Phew! But it makes a change from Brexit caricature about the will of the people. And it’s all there, available in the ether, for free. What did we do before zoom?

A global prayer

Like atheists the world over, I’ll be spending much of the next week in fervent prayer. More than ever before, it matters to all of us who the next American president is, and the notion of another four years of Trump is simply unbearable. And yet, so many of those who voted for him still think he’s the best man for the job.

Quite apart from the usual calculations about votes and swings, the difference between popular vote and electoral college, the way predictions last time were wildly inaccurate, there’s now a whole new science of “What might Trump do if he thinks he’s lost?” Obviously, he’ll claim he’s won. And he’ll use lawyers and judges to question Democrat votes and possible Democrat wins in states he needs to take. But exactly how far will he go, and whose job will it be to stop him? When has he ever conceded that he got things wrong, that he might have lost?

Biden won’t e the greatest thing since sliced bread, and even if he and the Democrats get the majorities they dream of, running this fractured USA in the time of Covid won’t be enjoyable any time soon, but there’s no question it will be better than the alternative. so we sit and wait. And pray.

Trump on the Stump

No way, of course, will Trump put up with an online debate. That way, someone can just press a switch and turn him off. So he insists on the ‘Town Hall’ format, just him and a moderator, and some questions from the public. So it all depends on the quality of the moderator, and recent experience suggests we shouldn’t be too hopeful. But Savannah Guthrie is a revelation. Smart, polite, cheerful, she stays completely focussed. Puts up with rambling, blustering, toe-curling attempts at charm and condescension, but completely in charge of her brief. She knows which bits of evidence contradict Trump’s most recent lie, she knows which parts of his record don’t match the ludicrous claim he’s made. They range over a huge spectrum of topics, but on every one she knows more than he doe, and won’t let him get away with rubbish. “You’re not someone’s made uncle, you’re the president of the United States” is probably the highlight, but it’s not alone. To my amazement, it actually was worth sitting through the whole hour to savour the experience of intellignce at work. If you haven’t got the stomach for that, I’ve provided a snappy summary in rhyming couplets - When the Donald Met Savannah, in my Poems from the News, also situated on this website.

The future of debate?

It’s a while since I looked forward to a televised “debate.” Tory leadership election? 2019 general election? No thanks. The penalties for failure are so severe, and the effort - preparation, spinning, threats of retaliation - so intense that the chances of any unexpected insights emerging is slim.

But now we have the trainwreck that is Trump v. Biden. Even worse, we have the retrospective thoughts of the moderator, Chris Wallace. He was touted beforehand as someone with the nerve to stand up to Trump, but it didn’t work out that way. He tried to ask him tough questions, he tried to shut him up. None of it worked. Trump bullied like he does, ignoring the question, interrupting Biden’s answers, shooting off at any tangent that happened to appeal.

This is how it looked to Wallace. At the start he was thinking “This was great - this was a debate!” Really? “I guess I didn’t realise…that this was going to be the president’s strategy, not just for the beginning, but for the entire debate.” Had he not watched Trump v. Clinton? Was there any evidence to show that Trump might become more reasonable as the evening wore on?

Wallace has read subsequent reviews. “I know some people think…I didn’t jump in soon enough.” They do. Other people think he has a mic switch, he can cut off Trump’s sound, and restore some order to the debate. Insist that he lets Biden finish. Require him to answer the question about the Proud Boys. But he doesn’t.

So whose fault is it? Two alpha males getting carried away? Or was it Trump who derailed the debate? Wallace can’t bring himself to say what is obvious to anyone unlucky enough to watch. “Well, he certainly didn’t help. But to quote the president “It is what it is.” “

And that’s it? A brief shrug of the shoulders, and go home? That’s all the broadcaster has to offer on a fiasco for which he was responsible? It’s not surprising that we’re in trouble, if the guardians of impartiality have given up like this.

Regulating social media

If you have no idea about the effect of social media, “The Social Dilemma” is a good place to start. It’s a ninety minute documentary from Netflix, which features a huge range of tech experts who in various ways have become disenchanted with the effects of the monster they’ve created. Nobody quite set out to make it this malevolent and destructive, but the evidence is growing - mental health of kids, mounting intolerance and social division, lack of democratic accountability, and physical violence, some of it rising to genocide.

Shoshana Zuboff is my favourite guru in this area - see her magnificent “the Age of Surveillance Capitalism”. In the film she says “We regulate the trafficking of people, and of human organs. Why not the trafficking of human data?” and it is entirely reasonable. But also contrary to the recent tide of legislation, which favours international firms at the expense of powerless individuals and nation states. Who is actually going to put together a package of legislation which will control what these people do?

One answer might be the EU’s GPDR, which is a move in this direction. Dominic Cummings sees it as a bad idea, and “Brexit means we will still be able to bin such idiotic laws.” I’d guess Trump isn’t a fan either, so if any moves in this direction happen in the US, it’ll come from the Democrats. Now comes the scary part. If you’re Facebook, and you want to keep making the money you currently make without any changes in the law, who would you like to see win that election?

The return of BT Sport

for months I’ve been giving money to BT sport and they’ve been giving me nothing. I could have cancelled, but I’d have wanted to rejoin when things started again, so I’ve been lazy and paid out. But now they’re back in business, and what a joy it’s been. The two big Euro club football competitions have both been frozen at the last stage - eight teams left - and they’ve devised the same solution. Isolate those eight teams in the same place for ten days. Do a brutal one game per round knockout of three stages, and space it out so we can watch almost a game a night for a fortnight. It’s been stunning. Yes, a little eerie, with no crowd sound or the synthetic kind, but it has the same kind of compressed drama that you get with A European Cup or World Cup with national teams - watching the field whittled down within a very tight time frame. Having only one game cuts out some of the cagier caution you get with home-and-away legs, and maybe as a result it’s been harder to predict. The Guardian experts offered predictions for the quarter finals of the Eufa Cup, and got three out of four wrong. So you know you’ll see some skilful football, but you haven’t a clue how it will turn out. Just magic.

Donald does debate

Absolutely fascinating. For some reason (nose-diving polls?) Donald Trump has decided that it’s time to go in for rational debate. We for once we have footage of him trying to engage with a journalist, listening to what’s said and then offering a reply, rather than simply blustering and insisting that he’s brilliant. He has a sheaf of papers in his hand, although he’s not totally in control of them, and can’t always find the particular bit of evidence which will prove his case, but his basic argument is that on “deaths as a percentage of covid cases” the US is doing all right. The journalist is polite but very clear; this is not the only way to look at the figures. Most people would say “what about deaths as a percentage of population?”, and on that basis the US performance is horrific. (And if you follow his logic, then it’s a good idea to maximise the number of cases, increase the exposure, so that the relative number off deaths shrinks in importance - does that sound like a smart strategy?) OK, so Donald doesn’t concede the point, or acknowledge that he may have got it wrong, but even to see him trying to play by other people’s rules is a glorious innovation.

Welcome to Chechnya

Now and again, something comes out of the TV to set you back on your heels, and realise what a cushy life you have. This week it was Storyville (again - what a wonderful strand), and Welcome to Chechnya, which looked at the persecution of gay people in Chechnya. That was bad enough. Horrific footage of people being bullied, beaten up, tortured, and complacent Kadyrov, knowing that no-one can touch him, smiling as he asserted that there were no gays in Chechnya, so there was no ill-treatment. H waves it away, as unimportant, because he has the only guarantee that counts - Putin wants him keeping the lid on Chechnya, and is happy for him to do anything he pleases so long as that’s done.

Is there anything anyone can do? Apparently, yes. A small heroic band of Russian activists build up a global network, which enables them to smuggle LGBT targets out of Chechnya and away to other countries - in secret, on the run, under assumed names. It’s gripping, terrifying stuff, and the costs to the activists are horrendous. But they do it, and mostly keep doing it, because if they don’t, no-one else will. It’s on BBC i-player, under Storyville, and it’s a tough watch - but unforgettable.

"White Lives Matter"

Turf Moor, and Burnley are just about to be slaughtered by Man City, when the TV cameras are treated to the sight of a plane flying a banner above the ground, which says WHITE LIVES MATTER. and then, presumably, we all gulp and say “Gosh - he’s right. All this taking the knee before matches start has blinded us to the fact that white lives matter, just like black lives do.”

You have to be very insulated from the rest of the human race to think that this is a level playing field. Is it really the case that whites are at a disadvantage during this pandemic - look at infection rates, death rates, casualties in the NHS, pay, job security, figures for fines imposed…the more closely you look at the evidence, the clearer it is that many scales are weighted against blacks and BAME citizens generally, and that that’s - at last - recognised by significant numbers of white people. Particularly young white people. So it’s fitting that Ben Mee, Burnley’s captain who fits into that category, should supply the perfect epitaph for this stunt. It isn’t important, it isn’t criminal. It’s embarrassing.

Cummings and Johnson

So here it was, the big showdown. Would Dominic Cummings apologise? Yes, he would. But only for coming half an hour late to what some would see as the most important appointment of his life. And then he lays out in laborious detail the process through which he went, and at each stage he thinks he did the right thing, Although - a new, meek ,rational Dom for once - he can fully understand why other people might have acted differently. Finally, he gives way to questions, and we get Laura K and Robert P doing their headliner act - emoting on behalf of the angry citizens of the UK, but failing to land a glove anywhere near the elusive Dom, who retreats back into the old, safe routine - “Did what I thought was right..Others might not agree.”

What they don’t challenge is his assumption that he can - he would say, has to - do all this difficult thinking on his own. He might have asked Boris, but Boris was ill, so best not to bother him. What about other cabinet ministers? Nobody even raises this possibility. Have we all accepted as fact that they’re useless, and that cabinet government is dead? A Tory MP on PM suggested that as a civil servant Cummings might have piut his problem before the head of the civil service, and either got authorisation for what he was planning to do, or some suggestion of alternatives. No, of course he wouldn’t, because Cummings doesn’t work that way. He has no superiors, He makes his own rules. and Johnson likes it that way. We’re going to have to get angrier than this if anything’s going to change.

Isolation Stories

the only surprise is that they’ve managed to do it so quickly. ITV has four Isolation Stories, 15-minute plays performed by actors (sometimes with members of their families) all about the pressures of lockdown. But here’s the thing. They’re rehearsed and recorded in lockdown. The actual results are OK but not gobsmacking - itis interesting to be working under pressure, but it’s not a guarantee of quality.

What is fascinating, though, is to watch the Behind the Scenes documentary about the process of making them. Tecchies arrive at the front door, and laboriously unpack kit on the pavement, giving detailed instructions about its use. Then off they go, and the family are left to make some kind of sense as to how they’re supposed to operate this stuff, with running commentaries on skype, zoom and anything else that comes to hand. Surprise, surprise (QU: To which gender do leaders of successful covid countries belong?) it’s often the wives who come out as the stars - producer, camera operator, tea lady - anything but actually appearing on the screen, that’s clearly the easy bit. But it’s an interesting experiment, well worth a look.

Select Committees

A letter I sent to the Guardian today (which I don’t expect them to print):

Dear Sir

If Priti Patel were half as good as Johnson thinks she is, she would by now have sorted Windrush compensation and stopped the victimisation of ex-servicemen. Four months ago, we’d have hoped to see a select committee forensically examine the specific allegations against her, rather than trading in bland assertions and pious platitudes.

As it is, your report (“Ministers should be polite to staff, says top civil servant” 11.3.20) confirms that there’s been a systematic purging of select committees, to make sure that they no longer exercise meaningful scrutiny. Is anyone going to question this, or are we happy with dictatorship?

Post-Brexit doctors

I’m glad of my filing cabinets, with their endless stacks of cuttings, because it keeps me in touch with the recent past. So much news coverage is urgent, and instant, without any memory of what happened before. I watch Jeremy Hunt on Peston, talking confidently about the twenty thousand new doctors that Johnson has said he’ll supply, but acknowledging that of course in addition to that we’ll need more doctors from abroad. And Peston nods, and goes on to the net point, as if that were simply common sense.

Am I the only person in the country to remember the tory Party conference of 2016, when everyone was Brexit-mad, and excited by the vision of our exciting future, from which all foreigners would be barred? And Hunt was there, with a straight face, confident asserting that sure, we could have an all-Brit NHS. It was nonsense then and it’s nonsense now, but somebody needs to say that he was lying through his teeth.

More light at the end of the tunnel?

A week ago I wrote about positive aspects of the Labour leadership campaign. It keeps getting better. Lisa Nandy was on Peston last night (ITV hub, Peston 22 Jan) and she was terrific. Clear, courteous and good-humoured, but determined to get her points across, and ready to challenge the assumptions of Peston’s questions when he tried to make her pick fights with rivals or track back into the past. So, positive and forward-looking, but even better, committed to teamwork. No it wasn’t Tony Blair who won those elections; it was Tony Blair plus a number of others, across the political spectrum, working as a team. (Not a favourite media topic - they’d much rather deal in heroes and villains). And whoever wins this time, it’s not hard to see this group of candidates working together, sharing insights, celebrating each other’s talents.

That would be a real treat, and not before time. Remember the Tory party leadership, with Sajid Javid bouncing all the contestants into a commitment to investigate Islamophobia? Whatever happened to that? Boris Johnson joking that he’d pinch all Hunt’s best ideas - and then purging him, together with anyone from the party who had serious doubts about Brexit. Adults doing politics together with a realistic eye to the future - you never know, it could catch on.