Happy Valley

I can’t be doing with cop shows. Most of them are formulaic and unconvincing, even when hey try hard. “Without Sin” looked promising, had good actors, but I couldn’t get beyond the second episode. It’s all about Vicki McClure, minor characters and plot are twisted around, so as to provide further twists, without any concern for detail or consistency.

But “Happy Valley” is different. Sally Wainwright knows about crime and its effects, but she also knows about people. Like everybody else, she has a flawed cop as a central character, but they don’t just loom around looking significant. They also have warm, genuine colleagues who say “You’re hard work”, and mean it.

Above all, she’s brilliant about families, and what goes on within them. For some reason, TV thinks the greatest compliment it can pay successful writers is to allow them the expensive compliment of a large-scale police raid (see the decline of “Line of Duty”). But what’s rivetting about “Happy Valley” is the tension between the two sisters, and how that intricately affects all the people around them. Even if there wasn’t a crime in sight, this would be brilliant.

Golden Oldies

I do remember, back in the old days, skimming through the Radio Times, making a chart in columns so we could make sure that each member of the family saw or recorded each programme they wanted to watch…Those were the days.

There’s hardly anything actually being transmitted over Christmas that attracts me. Instead, I bathed in nostalgia, rooting around in iplayer for stuff I’d seen before, but which defied the ravages of time. The Crow Road and Wolf Hall were very different from each other, made at very different times, but provided four and six hours respectively of satisfying viewing, and that doesn’t happen very often.

So it’s a real disappointtment to report that Tutti Frutti has not aged well. Its best moments remain magical- some of the musical numbers, the electric double of act of Thompson and Coltrane. It was way ahead of its time on domestic violence and gender politics, but there’s still far too much of shouty male arguments, tedious comedy unnecessarily prolonged. Like the rest of us, it’s showing its age.

World Cup Final

Whatever else was going on, in football terms the Qatar World Cup went out with a bang. Despite the French barely turning up for the first seventy minutes, this ended up as totally gripping roller coaster ride, with Messi and Mbappe living up to the billing by managing five goals between them. But there was subtler stuff going on as well. Remember Jude Bellingham, how he was dominant against Senegal, then struggled against the French? And here was Griezemann, many viewers’ player of the tournament, majestic against England but hardly visible here. Was that because of the virus, or did the Argentinians take Karen Carney’s advice to physically bully him out the game?

We may never know, but we certainly didn’t get any answers from Guy Mowbray, who for someone at the BBC is the person best placed to provide comentary on the most important game of the year. Before the game, he talked about compiling a dossier of information, so he has handy little snippets to hand out when nothing’s going on. But he insists he doesn’t polish special lines in advance - he has to be free to respond to the situation, to read what’s on the pitch. And what do we get as a result? One of the best team goals of the tournament is characterised as “engineered by a bloke from Brighton” (Argentina’s Alexis MacAllister). A camera shot of Argentinian veterans weeping with joy gets “Do cry for me, Argentina.” It’s the poetry of tabloid headlines. Is this really the best we can do?

The End of the Line

So that’s it. The seasonal adventure into optimism - “Can England win this time?” - is over for another year. It could have been a lot worse. True, there was Harry’s second penalty, and the interesting absence of abuse shelled out to Rashford, Saka and Sancho last time. But apart from that, we didn’t make huge mistakes, we did get the French rattled from time to time, and they are a very good side. “Last eight” is probably a realistic assessment of our ranking at the moment, and if we could shed the old assumption that we used to have an empire and ought to be world champions, that’d be fine.

One thing we really do need is decent commentators. I watch matches with the sound turned off, but for this one relented because my son was joining me. He doesn’t rate the commentators either, but feels happier with the sound on. So we get Sam Matterface continually droning on about why England should have had a penalty (despite the resident expert referee telling him that the decision was right), and not telling us any of the interesting stuff - why does Griezemann have so much room, but Bellingham doesn’t? He’s got a resident e-player next to him, but doesn’t encourage him to offer comments, preferring instead to unload his huge store of unnecessary information and jingoistic waffle. Surely we can do better than this?

Knockout Competition

Who’d have thunk it? Right now we’re not hearing so much about migrant workers or human rights, simply because the World Cup football is rivetting. And it’s particularly rivetting at this stage - the final games in the qualifying groups. Regardless of how well any time is playing, the format cooks up instant drama, where in some cases any two of the four might qualify, and a goal scored elsewhere might suddenly boot you out of the competition. FIFA, predictably, are thinking of ditching this format, because a longer, more boring pattern would bring in more teams, create more games and suck in more revenue. Let’s hope they’ll see sense, though the track record doesn’t encourage optimism.

None of this compulsive quality is actually down to Qatar, although to be fair the overall management seems to have been efficient, and money has done the things that money will do. In one key respect they’ve managed to exacltly mirror how we do things in the West - their version of VAR is quite as cockeyed and intrusive as ours. So embarrassing, watching a ref view the same footage over and over again, because he doesn’t think it shows that he was wrong, but he hasn’t got the nerve to be summoned to the magic screen, and then announce his conviction that he was right in the first place. Huge anticlimax, massive undermining of his authority - who is it, exactly, that gains from this charade? Certainly not the players, or the fans.

Playing Away

It’s good to be reminded - though we shouldn’t have forgotten - that Gareth Southgate is really good at cultivating a team spirit, a shared atmosphere of aspiration in which more than twenty talented footballers recognise that only eleven can be on the pitch at the same time. Pretty basic, you’d have thought, but looking around - Germany? Belgium? - by no means standard.

What’s interesting is that they actually seem to enjoy being away from the UK. Take two Manchester United players, for example. Partly because of the change of manager at home, Rashford is unrecognisable - in other words, back to his young, promising best. No, he hasn’r been diverted from playing football by getting involved in food poverty; but he does benefit from supportive management, skilful teammates, and being further away from the poisonous drip of social media. Harry Maguire the same. He hasn’t had that resurgence of form for his home club, but playing for England in Qatar he doesn’t automatically get booed every time he touches the ball, and with the acknowledgement and support of other England players he’s starting to show the reason why he was picked originally. Suddenly, it doesn’t seem ludicrous that he’s wearing an England shirt.

Football as usual

They told us this would happen, and it has. After the early background stuff about Qatar, working conditions, LGTB rights, now games have actually started all the focus is on who’s playing who and how many goals they have scored. The worst nightmare scenarios have not been fulfilled. Playing conditions don’t seem impossible. On my TV there’s a lot of flat pitches, balls running smoothly, players busting a gut but not collapsing from exhaustion.

Some are playing better than others. Spain and France look good; Germany and Argentina not so much, but it’s early days. After the curse of a brilliant start, England are back to being fallible and human again, passing the ball from side to side, pointing purposefully sideways or backwards, and moaning about decisions that don’t go their way.

Biut we shouldn’t complain. They’ve set it up like a painless drug, which gour games spaced through each day so that if you want to sit like a zombie in front of wall-to-wall football, that option is available.

TraumaZone

I’m so glad Adam Curtis is there. for years on end we hear nothing about him, but then he resurfaces with the latest piece of intelligent television, doing something that’s very different from what’s normally served up, but which will stimulate and provoke in a way that is all too rare.

I remember previous series on advertising and politics, but nothing prepared me for the latest - TraumaZone. This is a seven-hour (yes, you heard that right: seven episodes, one hour each) series about the recent history of Russia, showing what it was like to live through the collapse of communism and democracy in the Soviet Union. And it’s all old footage. Mostly from BBC camera operators, sometimes reporting on very mundane, everyday stuff.

It jumps around between different parts of Russia, from important political events to trivial routine to comic, eccentric stuff that you can hardly believe, but the editing is brilliant. It’s not dull, it’s quick moving, and it has some really witty juxtaposition of material that seems unrelated but turns out not to be. There’s no spoken commentary, but there’s some simple, devastating captions which make sure that you get the point of what’s going on. And the long-term point is how grim it was for most Russians to be alive at this time, and how plausible it seemed that Putin might be offering a route out of despair, after the chaos of what preceded him.

We watch Yeltsin move from being the heroic saviour of free Russia to being a drunken fool, and it’s all there in the footage. He must have sat though hours and hours of really boring stuff to come up with this tantalising selection of snippets, but it’s brilliant to watch.

Bolsonaro

Most of us know the cartoon outline - Latin American Trump, crude campaigning, useless over Covid, threat to the Amazon. But again it takes a detailed documentary to spell out the detail, and depress the daylights out of the viewer. “Bolsonaro: the boys from Brazil” sounds catchy and superficial, and has some graphics which might support that impression, but it also provides horrendous material I’d never seen before. Yes, he’s macho, disrespectful of women and likely to say repulsive things. But I hadn’t grasped how deeply that goes into family. The worst example is probably his treatment of his first wife, a local politician in her own right, popular and effective. And, by Jair’s logic, a threat to his masculinity. So he works through all three of his sons, trying to pressure them into standing against her. Two refuse, but the weakest agrees, and with the Bolsonaro machine behind him he duly gets elected.

And the nature of that machine has to be seen to be believed. Like all successful contemporary populists, it’s rooted in social media - but not a glossy, efficient campaign. It’s remorseless low-tech posts, glorying in the low-level technology involved, and partly because of that being circulated by a growing horde of supporters. The determination to clear the amazon is worse than you’d feared, but what’s scariest of all is his sense that he’s been put there by God, so nothing - certainly not a majority vote against him - can remove him from power. With your hands over your eyes, watch this space.

Imperial Incompetence

As the evidence of our past incompetence grows, so too does the ability of TV documentaries to chart that process in excruciating detail. “Partition in Colour” (Channel 4) made a lot of the technical changes which enables us to turn historic black and white footage into colour, giving it a more realistic and contemporary feel.

But the story it tells is still one of bungling and insensitivity, of Brits taking rapid decisions in their own short-term self-interest, with little awareness of the consequences that these will have for the people who actually live in the country. To watch Mountbatten’s vanity and personal prejudice foul up any notion of a rational, fair negotiation is embarrassing - but that’s far too weak a word when you add up the number of people who died as a result.

If 1947 seems a long time ago, watching “Afghanistan: Getting Out” provides no reassurance that anything has go better. British and American decision-makers blunder through a series of contradictory decisions, trying to minimise their own discomfort without any recognition of the consequences for the allies they are betraying. And on both cases these programmes have expert local witnesses, Indians, Pakistanis and Afghans, who watched these disasters unfold, warned against what was likely to happen and were fatally ignored.

It’s uncomfortable viewing, but it also explains why the West has found it hard to gather truly international support for the cause of resisting Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Europe is mostly onside, give or take the occasional lapse, but across the world our track record of exploitation and selfishness does not look all that different from Russia.

Marriage

The TV channels have to keep turning out drama series just to survive, and some of them roll off the production line with very little impact. “Marriage”, though, is a bit special. It’s very different, and as a result has divided reactions - with a load of people dismissing it as slow, uneventful, boring.

It’s a four-hour exploration of a family, and a marriage in particular, without huge dustups or dead bodies, and some have turned off as a result. I think its brilliant. I’m biased, because I loved “Him and Her”, and “Mum” - each very different, but warm, detailed studies of relationships. And as usual, good writing attracts great actors, so Sean Bean and Nicola Walker aren’t there by accident.

There isn’t showy dialogue, because a lot of what’s important is what isn’t said, what might be thought but for various reasons remains unexpressed, which might or might not be a good thing. There’s a wonderful moment when their teenage daughter complains about them holding stuff in, not being honest - which leads to two separate outburst of truth-telling, each devastating in their own way. Necessary maybe, but certainly not a simple moral lesson which doesn’t carry a cost.

No, it’s not for everyone, but it’s certainly worth a try, and I’d be amazed if anyone watched all four hours and then thought it wasn’t worth it.

Euros Champions

And they did it. The Lionesses, having promised great things throughout the tournament, finally delivered on the greatest stage of all - a Wembley final, against Germany, in extra time. It was a stunning achievement, and even if the decisive goal was a tad scrappy, England’s first goal was a thing of beauty - a glorious pass from Keira Walsh, calmly controlled by Ella Toone and exquisitely chipped over the approaching goalkeeper. Just sublime.

There were some disappointments. The fascination of wondering how they might deal with the threat of Alexandra Popp was deflated by her withdrawal because of injury - desperate for her, and a serious blow to her team. And I didn’t enjoy the final few minutes, when England’s women ushered the ball to the corner flag, and stood over it, making sure no useful play could take place. Yeah, it’s what the men would have done. Maybe it’s what German would have done. But it was a contrast with the positive, creative way they’ve approached the rest of the tournament.

But it is an amazing achievement, and particularly for Sarina Wiegman and her team. Managers don’t usually want to field the same starting eleven for six games running, but if they do they’re stopped from doing so by injury or suspension. Not here. The same starting eleven, every time. When asked for her secret, Wiegman sometimes refers obliquely to “agreed behaviours”. That seems to mean constructive criticism and honesty, within a commitment to total confidentiality - no rumours on social media., no leaking to the press. And it’s worked like a dream. Just imagine, if we had a government practising teamwork like that, how different everything would be. Including the way we feel.

PS If you want my poetic summary of the whole tournament, look at “Dreamland” in Poems from the News.

Mansplaining

The women’s euros football has been brilliant. the skill and tactics, the atmosphere at the grounds, the purposeful, businesslike nature of the games - tough no-nonsense refereeing, and fewer tantrums. The one extreme case of a dive, feigning a serious foul, stood out remarkably because it was such an exception. And yes, it’s been a delight to have an English team which is clearly able and well-organised. They enjoy what they’re doing, have the freedom to try stuff that’s occasionally risky, and somehow Sarina Weigman has discovered the knack of making everyone in the squad feel valued. A pleasure to watch.

And then along comes a bloke to spoil it. I’d been very happy with the women commentators and women pundits, but I gather that out there in the shadows blokes have been muttering that we need a male commentator, and somebody’s decided to let Jonathan Pearce cover Germany v. France. What a disaster. He’s much more interested in the factsheets he’s accumulated than in what’s actually happening on the pitch, and feels obliged to involve Lucy Ward, his co-commentator, in ludicrous spin-off chats about “the team of the tournament” or the player of the match. He thinks it’s one, she doesn’t agree, so he gets upset - “We’re supposed to be working together…there is no I in team.” It’s totally pathetic, and the only negative feature in a brilliant, absorbing game. God knows who makes these decisions, but if he’s doing the final I’m turning the sound off.

The media and Mick Lynch

Strikes in the news. We know how this is meant to go. Smooth-talking reporter sidles up to union boss. Gets a few outdated quotes about solidarity, provides the killer punch giving the details of their personal pay package, and leaves them gasping in the dust, an outdated relic that can safely be ignored.

But somebody forgot to tell Mick Lynch. He’s bright, cheerful, friendly. He’s also totally on top of the factual detail which gives him a massive advantage. And he’s not scared of pointing that out, of demonstrating just how out of touch Pier Morgan and Kay Burley actually are. But he’s not angry, strident, pompous, like the caricature says; he’s down to earth, relaxed but very serious, because the cause he serves is an important one, which many people fail to understand.

It’s very much our shared loss that we’ve allowed the very idea of a union to sink into ridiculed oblivion, but now’s the ideal time to resurrect it - now that thousands of people’s economic survival is under threat. Mick Lynch, of course, is not the only one. There’s tons of smart, hard-working people trying to represent their members and promote the cause of justice, and it’s high time the media recognised that and gave them some respect.

Fighting for Freedom

It’s irresistible, watching people who know that they’re fighting for their lives, that the cause they serve is the most important thing there is, even though the enemy seems all-powerful, and any reasonable guess is that they’re bound to lose. Netflix have had “Winter on Fire”, their documentary about Ukraine, available for a while now, but in the past couple of weeks it’s become almost unbearably topical. Young girls, fed up with being told by old men that they can’t have the country they want; army veterans, watching these kids being beaten up by the police, reckoning they have to help them out with some training in techniques of survival. The odds are impossible, but you can’t just sit there and give up, writing off the chance of fighting for something better, while that window of opportunity is there.

In the film, short-term, they win a kind of victory, but we know now that it isn’t secure, and that they’re currently confronting a much greater threat. The defiance, courage and community spirit are still marvellously impressive, but that doesn’t mean they’ll win. Tahrir Square, Belarus, the brilliant Storyville documentary “President” about elections in Zimbabwe - the evidence is that strong men will do almost anything, spend any amount, break any rules, to hang on to the power they think is their by right. But still, I love it that they’ll stand up for what they believe, and shame the twisted little man who’s determined to crush them.

Mare of Easttown

As the years go by, we do Christmas presents less and less, shrinking to almost nothing - which is fine. But the attractions of “what’s on the box” over Christmas seem to do the same. Back in the day, I can remember assembling careful timetables of what’s on which channel, and what each member of the family wants to watch, so we wouldn’t miss any of the riches unrolling before out eyes. Not any more.

This year I planned ahead. Seeing there was very little I wanted to watch, and knowing I wouldn’t be getting any surprise packages of unexpected box sets, I went out and bought myself Mare of Easttown, about which I’d heard good things. I thought it might help pass the occasional empty evening.

It’s brilliant. The first time I sampled it I watched four episodes on the trot before deciding that at my age I really should be in bed by midnight. Yes, it’s an intricate murder story, with different plots intertwining and the usual tangle of complicated clues which only get worked out in the final last few minutes. It’s also the occasion for a stunning performance from Kate Winslet, developing the notion of “troubled cop” into a marvellous, complex portrait of ex-basketball star, daughter, mother and granddaughter, not to mention friend with some intense but volatile friendships with other women. Oh yes, and she’s also the cop. But it’s not just a vehicle. It’s also a close, loving portrait of small-town Pennsylvania - very shabby in many ways, but always interesting and never dull. There’s characters here you’re tempted to skim over, take for granted - but that would be a mistake. In a good, convincing way, this is full of surprises - definitely one to own and rewatch.

Social Media and Us

The other night at a zoom poetry session, I read a couple of poems relating to social media. One of the comments on the chat said “But it’s not the social media. It’s the people.” Which sounds like common sense, but it’s rankled, because I’ve been thinking about it, and I’m really not sure it’s true.

I do think that social media is changing the way people think and behave. The thresholds - for personal politeness, and even for physical violence - seem to have changed. Evidence? I just happen to have followed three recent sources, all of which have brought me to this view. Channel 4’s Qanon:Cult of Conspiracy ws quitae as scary as you’d think, a brave exploration of the underworld of the American right, which made very clear that beneath all the bluster and the lies, there are serious human casualties from this stuff.

Jon Ronson’s BBC Sounds podcast is more quirky, a very personal delve into the history of some of these disputes, with some fascinating stories and characters, but equally disturbing conclusions about what’s going on and how we’ve changed. and then there’s David Baddiel, gobby commentator and comic who’s quite open about the self-promotion potential of Twitter but also worried about its effects on users - partly because of the experience of his own teenage daughter. Add these three together and I’d say it’s not just people, same as always; it’s a whole new game, where we don’t know the rules but we need them, very soon.

The wonder that was Blair

To wistful Labour supporters, watching the five-hour documentary series about Blair and Brown has been a strange blend of pleasure and pain. Winning elections? Remember that? But then to see how much potential and goodwill was frittered away on macho rivalry and trivial disputes.

They have this deal, and Tony knows he ought to give way - but then there’s his transformation agenda, which only he fully understands, so he has to stay on for as long as possible, because he’s the only one who can do it. And it is, of course, nothing to do with the Labour Party, or the cabinet - it’s just what Tony knows is right. But it involves fragmenting education and the NHS to give as much room as possible for choice - i.e. private profit.

And that’s what got us into the Iraq War, about which he’s still sure he was right. The nearest he’ll get to any sign of a rethink is his wondering amazement that Saddam’s dictatorship was holding together a country riven by religious factions, which without him might implode in sectarian violence. Well, who knew? Quite a lot of people, actually, who’d done the groundwork of learning about the area, knowing the history and talking to people who lived in it. But Tony didn’t have time for any of that. He knew he was right, so he just trusted his gut.

Afghanistan

The photos are horrendous. As are the reports, with professionals like Lyse Doucet conveying the terror sweeping through friends and ex-colleagues, as they contemplate the future of Afghanistan. It’s easy to assume that Biden has got it wrong, but if Trump was there he’d be doing very much the same, and in strictly rational terms it’s easy enough to understand. What exactly was the plan? How were we ever supposed to go, being happy with what we’d leave behind? For those of us old enough to remember twenty years ago, it’s no consolation to say “we told you so”, but we did, loudly and often. All the way through, there have been rational voices warning that this was a mistake, that it hadn’t been clearly thought through, and that it was likely to end badly. So here we are, and it’s ending badly. And what that does o how we look to the rest of the world is not hard to work out - why should they believe anything we say, ever again? For those with poetic tastes, there’s a new poem, Afghan Sunset, at another part of this website, Poems from the News.

Life with the Lions

Just about coming to terms with mourning the failure of the Lions to win the recent series in South Africa. It was amazing to see the difference it makes, bringing on Finn Russell for Dan Biggar - but that conjures up all sorts of “what might have been?” s, if there’d been a different approach.

For me, two moments in that last test summed up the difference between the teams. In both the full back’s approaching a defender, with a winger outside him. Willie Le Roux draws the defender, passes to the winger, who goes on to score. Liam Williams tries to sell a dummy, doesn’t manage it, and the chance goes begging.

My hearts says we could so nearly have won, but my head says we didn’t really deserve to.