Fight Corruption!

Remember the Serious Fraud Office (SFO) investigation that was called off?

You know, the one where UK arms manufacturer BAE Systems used its influence on the UK Government to put pressure on the SFO to scrap its inquiry into corruption and bribery because the Saudi government threatened to cancel a lucrative arms contract?

That’s right, the one that was quite big news before the whole Big Brother race row blew up and made any other news redundant?

Well if you happen to think the fact that a private company like BAE Systems – who sell arms to brutal and impoverished regimes and whose business dealings are actually funded by the UK taxpayer – can force Blair and his chums to over-ride a due legal process is pretty disgusting then you can do something about it.

As mentioned some time ago on this blog, the Campaign Against the Arms Trade (CAAT) and civil liberties group Cornerhouse are mounting a legal challenge to this decision and they need funding to help.

So if you’d like to play a part in fighting government corruption, or just like to play some part in giving Blair and his cronies a bloody nose, then visit the CAAT website (www.caat.org.uk) to find out more.

All donations welcome.

The Last King Of Scotland…

A newly qualified Scottish doctor turns his back on life running a small-town practice with his dad and heads to Uganda where he finds himself the personal doctor to Idi Amin.

The doctor (James McAvoy) is seduced by the power then gradually horrified by the brutality of Amin’s regime and seeks a way out, a way out only offered by an irksome British diplomat – if he murders Amin.

It’s a brilliant and engrossing drama and McAvoy proves he’s well worth his elevation to major features.

But it’s Forest Whittaker (always a strong performer in anything from Jean-Claude van Damme movies to the massively under-rated Jim Jarmusch drama Ghost Dog) who steals the show as Amin. His performance is a truly amazing piece of work, the sort of thing that stays with you a long time after the final credits have rolled.

If he doesn’t win the best actor Oscar for this role the Academy has no credibility. Not that it probably has all that much anyway (Tom Hanks a two-times winner for god’s sake!).

Anyway it’s very good.

Blair Must Go!

I was watching Question Time last night and Nicholas Soames MP was one of the panellists.

Soames is very much a Tory’s Tory. He represents the rural constituency of Mid-Sussex, he served as Minister of State for the Armed Forces from 1994-1997, until recently he was Shadow Defence Secretary and he is Executive of the 1922 Committee, a sort of latter-day Hellfire Club for whip-'em and hang-em Tories. He is also President of the East Grinstead Target Shooting Club and a Member of the Council for the Protection of Rural England.

Land, the defence industry and country ways. If ever a man epitomised what Tories see as the virutes of Englishness and the rest of us view with some suspicion he is that man.

He also has the unfortunate look of a Hogarth character who has eaten several children and is steadfastly refusing to pass them.

So basically I shouldn't like him very much. At all. Ever. But last night I found myself agreeing with pretty much every point he made about the failings and arrogance of Tony Blair.

Sorry Tony, but if things are so bad I'm agreeing with an arch Tory like Soames then it really is time to go...

24...

Me, the boy and the missus are eating breakfast. Suddenly the music for 24 comes on and an advert for the new show begins. The boy is a big 24 fan and discusses this when the missus asks him what series it is.

‘It’s the sixth series.’
‘Is that 24:6 then?’
‘Yes.’
‘I only saw the first series. I got bored halfway through the second.’
‘When I first heard about it I thought all the series followed on from each other. I didn’t realise they were all set about six months apart… But that makes sense otherwise Jack Bauer would be having a really shit week.’
‘It would be a good tag line though…’
‘What? It’s Wednesday, there’s terrorists and Jack Bauer is absolutely shagged so he’s having a nap!’
‘Yeah. Something like that…’

The boy’s comedy potential continues…

Matthew Bourne's Swan Lake: Part Two...

Me and the missus are leaving the ballet having seen Matthew Bourne’s Swan Lake.

The twist with this production is that the group of swans, which is usually danced by an all-female troupe, is played by men... beautifully toned and muscular men in fact… the sort of beautifully toned and muscular men who could turn a straight man gay. Easily.

Anyway it was a stunning production and the missus is very moved…

‘That was beautiful.’
‘Yes. It was. It’s just that…’
‘What?’
‘Did you notice the fat swan?’
‘He wasn’t fat.’
‘He bloody was.’
‘He wasn’t. It’s just that every other swan had muscles on muscles and he was merely well toned.’
‘He looked as though he’d eaten all the swan pies.’
‘There’s no such thing as swan pies. And he was my favourite actually.’
‘Yeah. Mine too… Let’s hear it for the fat swan!’

I applaud. The missus stares at me. I stop. The missus continues in her adoration of the male swans.

‘And they all moved so gracefully. Such grace coupled with such power…’
‘It’s a bit of an odd story, though, isn’t it?’
‘How do you mean?’
‘Well it’s about a man who wants to shag a swan.’
‘He’s not really a swan.’
‘He had a swan costume.’
‘It was a fantasy.’
‘So he goes around dreaming about shagging swans.’
‘He was disturbed.’
‘And male swans too. Are some swans gay?’
‘In the original ballet it’s a woman.’
‘Gay or straight it’s still some nutter wanting to pop his Toby up a swan.’
‘Toby?’
‘Yes...’
‘What’s a Toby?’
‘It’s a name for… a man’s…’
‘And who exactly calls it a Toby?’
‘Lots of people…’
‘It’s just you isn’t it?’

Pause.

‘Let’s hear it for the fat swan!’

Matthew Bourne’s Swan Lake: Part One…

The missus is a sucker for ballet and she likes Matthew Bourne so we are now in the habit of going to Sadlers Wells whenever he has a show on. And Saturday night we saw his version of Swan Lake.

To nutshell this it tells the story of a psychologically disturbed prince who’s starved of affection by his cruel mother. Not comfortable in his public role of a prince and starved of real love, he’s on the verge of suicide when he sees/dreams about swans at play in a lake and falls for one of them, thus deciding not to top himself.

Now happy that he has a reason to live he carries on as a prince but eventually loses his mind yet again because he can’t have the female object of his affections and he ends up trying to shoot his mother. Instead he shoots the girl he once/possibly still loved.

He’s then carted off to an asylum where he sees/imagines the swan coming to save him but the bird gets killed by his swan peers for deserting the pack (or whatever groups of swans are called).

The story sound utterly bonkers and it gets a bit more bizarre when one of Bourne’s main twists (apart from drawing parallels with our own royal family and the paparazzi) is that the swans are an all-male ensemble.

It’s a stunningly beautiful and moving evocation of repressed emotion, loneliness and denial versus the redemptive power of love and the imagination. Or it’s about a nutter who wants to bum a swan. You decide…

The Trial Of Tony Blair…

There are times when Channel 4 should be thoroughly ashamed of itself.

This year’s Celebrity Big Brother is a case in point. But if you turn TV into a zoo then sometimes you may not like all of the species on show, especially when some of them offer a stark reminder that at heart a lot of Brits are thick, racist fuckers.

You know, the type of thick, racist fuckers who assume that everyone from a Middle Eastern country – or sometimes somewhere that just sounds vaguely Arabic – is a suicide bomber or a terrorist. And if they’re not exactly from around there then anywhere near will do. Where you from again Shilpa? Bollywood? Well it’s near enough…

But there are good reasons this climate of hatred and racism has been allowed to grow in the UK at this present time – which brings us nicely onto Tony Blair and his role as American lapdog and arch bomber of Iraq.

For although Channel 4 should be lambasted for Celebrity Big Brother, it should also get some praise for producing and screening drama like The Trial Of Tony Blair.

In this 90-minute one-off Robert Lindsay portrayed Blair in the year 2010 when he stands down as Prime Minister and begrudgingly hands over the reigns of power to Gordon Brown.

Lindsay’s Blair is essentially a vain man seeking reassurance that he’s secured his place in history as a politician of stature and dignity, while at the same time being haunted by the bloodshed he’s caused in Iraq, being pursued by the Hague for war crimes and seeking redemption through the Catholic church.

This drama sees Blair failing in his post-PM life as the big UN job never materialises and the scenes of him pottering around a huge Thames-side office as he waits for the phone to ring are bizarrely quite moving.

There’s also a wonderful scene where a publisher rejects his memoirs because Blair refuses to acknowledge the gulf between how he sees his legacy in print and how everyone else sees it in reality. There’s also a smart scene where Blair and his wife end up in the casualty department of a hospital waiting treatment and he is forced to see how rundown the service has become.

The drama ends with Blair betrayed by his US allies and by Gordon Brown as he is indicted to stand trial in the Hague.

It’s an entertaining but not fully satisfying 90 minutes. By humanising Blair to such an extent and focusing on his tragedy (ie. He’s basically a decent man who made a very bad decision over Iraq) viewers aren’t faced with the reality that he is also a ruthless politician who has ridiculous amounts of blood on his hands.

It’s a trial that didn’t really call him to account. A bit like hanging a former dictator for one crime when he should have had to face justice and be called to account for so much more.

It almost makes Big Brother not very important. But if Blair isn’t sorting out the culture of hatred he’s helped create then a so-called responsible broadcaster should at least not be perpetuating it – and that’s why Channel 4 should be called to account…

Blasted…

Playwright Sarah Kane cut quite a swathe through 1990s British theatre. Her stark and often brutal plays, including Blasted, Cleansed and the posthumously produced 4.48 Psychosis, earned her a loyal following – and made her the subject of blistering attacks from a right-wing press shocked by her scripts’ graphic language and violence.

Well that’s basically what I knew about Sarah Kane before last night and, as anything that upsets the Daily Mail is usually good enough for me, I headed to Soho Theatre confident I was in for a good night, especially as this version of Blasted was being produced by Graeae Theatre.

And Graeae didn’t disappoint with a smartly staged and interesting production with strong performances, particularly from Gerard McDermot as racist, misogynist journalist Ian and Dave Toole as the un-named soldier who rapes Ian and sucks his eyes out before shooting himself.

Kane includes stage directions as spoken dialogue and Graeae included this on a projected backdrop so it became part of the audio-description. This helped emphasise the Spartan dialogue and the backdrop also played film of a signed interpretation of the play which added a haunting quality to the production.

Sadly it was the script I had major problems with. They were a few funny lines and the power struggle between Ian and his young lover was tightly written but after that it was just violence and brutality metaphorically hammering home the point that Kane’s world view is one without love, hope or redemption.

It was grim without the humour, interest or eloquence of a Howard Barker and brutal without the style or epic sweep of an Edward Bond, both of who have covered similar thematic territory about the loss of humanity and the depravity of humankind but in a more dramatically affecting way.

This is the first Kane play I’ve seen and the others may be better but it had a feeling of the emperor’s new clothes to me. I can see why young theatre radicals would possibly think it was – and possibly still is – something challenging but for me it was essentially a badly written play whose only saving grace was a strong production.

Ten Years On…

The missus whisked me away to Bath at the weekend to celebrate our first decade together.

We had originally planned to visit my family in Yorkshire to see my new niece for the first time – until we found out that the cheapest return rail travel was £150. Each. And as £300 is roughly what I paid for me and the missus to visit and stay in Barcelona for three days last year, I felt a little aggrieved at forking out the same money for us to sit on a grotty GNER train to Goole.

So with an unscheduled free weekend the missus pulled out all the stops and on Friday told me we were going away. So the following day I found myself on a train (this time costing a mere £20) with the missus heading to Bath.

And it was pretty splendid...

The Roman Baths were fabulous and easily worth the £11 entry fee and the new Spa complex was also worth the £20 entrance to have access to a rooftop open-air pool, an indoor pool and a very swanky sauna room.

We also visited the tiny Jane Austen Museum, which was quite a bizarre as she apparently hated the place despite setting two of her books there. Even though I find Austen very tedious as a writer I really liked the museum with its very enthusiastic and very sweet young woman guide and it’s no-frills exhibition and tearoom.

In many ways it’s the Rocky Balboa of Bath fighting against the much bigger and much flasher Apollo Creeds of the Roman Baths and the multi-million-pound Spa.

The most amazing thing, though, is the fact that the missus has put up with me, my ceaseless egotism and my crackpot ideas for so long.

It could be love. In fact it probably is…

Out Of Site…

Myself, the boy and the missus are at home. We have a new broadband provider and we are keen to finalise the name of our domain which will provide us all with new email addresses. The discussion is not going well.

Then the missus hits on what she thinks is a winning suggestion…
‘How about @tintin.com?’
‘That’s rubbish,’ replies the boy.
‘But it’s comics and we all like some sort of comics.’
‘It’s not proper comics, though, it’s some weird Belgian thing.’
‘It’s only one of the most famous comics in the world.’
‘I’m not having an email address that had my name followed by some weird Belgian thing…’

Silence. So I make my first suggestion of the night.
‘How about @sexdwarf.com?’

The boy stares. The missus gives me that look which is half-bemused and half-what-the-hell-have-I-married before asking me to repeat my suggestion.
‘Say that again…’
‘How about @sexdwarf.com?’
‘Do you think it appropriate that a 16-year-old boy has an email address that has his name followed by @sexdwarf.com?’
‘But he might have a thing for dwarves and end up with several really short girlfriends. Then we’ll probably be doing him a favour…’

The missus stares. The boy is suppressing laughter. I continue, addressing the boy…
‘I mean, do you think you’ll have a thing about dwarves?’
‘It is funny…’

Great. I may have won this round.
‘…but it’s also clearly also the suggestion of an idiot.’

Bugger. Finally the missus has another suggestion.
‘How about @Iammarriedtoanidiot.com?’

Fortunately the boy intervenes.
‘But I’m not married to the idiot. You are…’

Thanks. I think. The debate goes on…

Sports News…

It’s been a week of sporting excellence at From Beer To Paternity Towers with the punchbag taking such a severe beating on Sunday that it split in half.

I’d like to pretend that this is down to the sheer power I can unleash when in the right mood, but more realistically it’s because I bought a cheap one and it’s had three years of wear and tear.

The real sporting highlight of the weekend, however, was the start of the BDO (British Darts Organisation) World Championship at Lakeside.

Bizarrely there are two world darts championships with the PDC (Professional Darts Council) event held a week before the Lakeside one and screened on Sky. But as FBTP Towers has a ban on all things Murdoch-owned we have to settle for the BDO event on the BBC, which is essentially inferior in darting quality as all the top payers in the world play in the other one.

It’s a bit like all the top actors in the world committing to one TV station and all the top am-dram actors starring on another. The difference in quality is that noticeable…

There are still joys to be had, though, at the BBC event with Ray Stubbs, a man who always looks like a rabbit caught in car headlights, and Bobby George, a sort of Donald Trump for blinged-up chavs, doing their best to make it all sound utterly gripping.

And there’s also the joy of the roving female reporter who talks to the protagonists in the players lounge. Her name escapes me but the poor girl is great entertainment value as she quizzes various players on how and why they lost.

A sample conversation yesterday went:

‘So why do you think you lost?’
‘I didn’t hit enough trebles twenties and I missed lot of doubles…’
‘Have you learnt anything from this defeat?’
‘Yes. I need to hit more trebles twenties and more doubles…’

You get the impression that interviewing darts players, who as a rule don’t have the most extensive vocabulary and breath-taking conversational skills in the world, wasn’t the first job on her list when she got hired as a BBC reporter. But she gamely plugs away and surely deserves some sort of medal for her efforts.

Also adding his own touch of idiocy is commentator Tony Green.

The PDC event has Sid Waddell, quite possibly the greatest commentator ever. At anything. Anywhere. In the world.

But if Waddell is the Sinatra of commentary then Tony Green is a poor man’s Vince Hill. And this wouldn’t be so bad if he didn’t spend most of his time trying to convince all and sundry that this is the ‘real’ world championships rather than the real world championship’s poorer cousin which by some fluke of contracting happens to have prime-time terrestrial TV.

Having written all this, though, myself and the missus will still be watching at any given opportunity. It really is that addictive.

And at least the behemoth and Fit Club star Andy Fordham (pictured above) is still in the event and he’s always good value.

Strong Stuff!

I watched the World's Strongest Man a few nights ago with the American muscleman Phil Phister (pictured above and pronounced 'fister') competing.

There's an event called Fingal's Fingers where the strongmen have to erect long cabers (the fingers) from a lying position and the commentator spent several minutes describing how 'Phister has an excellent technique for getting those fingers right up in the quickest time possible...' and how 'Phister gets those fingers up with such ease...'

I thought I’d died and gone to double entendre heaven!

Steve Reich…

My journey into the world of classical music continues apace with the discovery of modern classical composer Steve Reich.

As well as looking good in a baseball cap, which is a decent achievement for a young chap in my opinion so it is massively impressive for a man of 70, he has a highly addictive line in repetitively rhythmic, minimalist music with a bit of electronica thrown in.

My favourite piece of his so far is called Different Trains in which he takes a nostalgic look at the constant train journeys of his youth in Forties America then compares them to train journeys taken by other Jews around the same time in Nazi Europe. It’s part-autobiography and part-Holocaust memorial and it’s unnerving and moving stuff.

I’m also quite taken with Reich’s Music For 18 Musicians and I’m sure the rest of Phases, his retrospective five-disc CD collection, will grow on me in time.

Apart from listening to Reich, the new year also kicked off in fine style with me finishing a draft episode of a new and quite bleak sitcom. And I’m now working on a new radio sitcom so the new-year-more-writing resolution is holding good so far!