Dogme

I have just seen a film by a director who was a member of Dogme 95 and, I can tell you, it was very good. Called "The Hunt", it was about a youngish man who is accused of a sexual act against a young girl of about six years old and the dreadful consequences of the accusation: people in the village where he lives turn against him, at first just spurning him but later turn violently acting against him. That the accusation is false does nothing to prevent his downfall since, once the accusation has been made, then everyone believes it - no smoke without fire, sort of thing.
The gripping drama of the man's despair and later, when he's on the edge of insanity, is most compelling because in this day and age anyone could find himself (not often herself) facing a similar sort of dilemma. What do you if a child makes an accusation of sexual harassment against you? The child is always believed or even if he or she isn't, the police feel forced to investigate the matter and you find yourself in a similar position to the main character in this film.
Dogme filmmakers set out to go back to basic filmmaking concentrating on story, acting and theme. They set out in a sort of charter called "The Dogme 95 Manifesto" their rules for creating films: all films on location; hand-held cameras; no sound but real sound; no superficial action e.g. murders, weapons; director not credited and so on. No special effects.
The manifesto it seems was dropped in 2005 and the film-makers like Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg are a bit less inclined to keep to the rules they set out originally though the technique is basically the same: hand-held camera, no special effects and so on.
It works. You do get involved in the story and feel for the characters who are caught up in the action.
After seeing "Skyfall", this was a tonic even though the mood of the film is bleak.

Bond

I think it must be me. It seems that the whole wide world of film-goers are filling cinemas where the new Bond film is showing. In a complex in Cardiff it was showing in five cinemas at a time. Apparently it's the biggest money maker of all time for any films. Also, practically every film critic has praised it: look up the Rotten Tomatoes website and see that the world-wide critics of national newspapers and magazines give praise to it. So it must be me. I didn't like it much. I thought the opening sequence was exciting and that the song by Adele was almost as good as those Shirley Bassey's numbers e.g Diamonds are Forever. But that's about it. I had the feeling that the director Sam Mendes wanted to give some weight to the theme and characters - well, after all, he does have that status in the artistic world encompassing both stage and screen. But "stopping" to supply depth and weight made some of the film slow and sluggish - people talked instead of acted. And when they acted, things got really quite daft and a lot got to be unexplained. How did Bond escape from being drowned twice? When he prised out two pieces of metal from his chest, what were they and why didn't the analyst analyse them? Why was the girl shot? Why didn't they shoot Bond at the same time? Oh no, you can't do that - film over and finished before the villain, a particularly silly one here, had chance to quiz Bond over his relationship with M and to give the impression that his desire to kill M had something to do with mother love.
Okay, I may be wrong; maybe it had nothing to do with mother love. Maybe I was seeing depth when there was only the appearance of depth.
I like Daniel Craig as Bond: he's a more serious-minded guy that the others with their ability to dispense sly humour even when death is close. But he's wasted. I have the feeling he wants the films to be something they aren't - serious thrillers. They aren't and they never have been (maybe Goldfinger was close) and, Daniel, I'm afraid they never will be, what with the money they take at the box office controlling things. While Mendes and Craig may want to infuse depth into the formula, the producers will always insist on those "exciting" scenes that any under age person enjoys. "Cor, look at that explosion and now the gunfire: how can Bond escape from that?" Well, with one great leap Bond was free. Again.

Hand-held Cameras

I suppose filming with hand-held cameras can be interesting - especially for documentary films where it might not be conducive to set up a camera on its tripod or whatever it is on these days; or when the film-maker wants a close-up that would be particularly difficult using normal techniques. But usually, hand-held cameras moving around the place can make one dizzy.
In the film "End of Watch" it's hand-held camera for the whole film. The reason, I think, is that the director wanted to give the audience the feeling that they were close if not actually in on the action. It did the reverse. It made me so conscious of the camera that I just couldn't get interested in the story. Not that there was much a story to tell. Two LAPD coppers on their beat. Two close friends who jabbered a lot to show us hop close they were to each other. Two decent fellows who did they're jobs well, caught crooks, weren't corrupt, had pleasant wife/girl friend. Normal guys, regular guys who did their duty, got to arrest some real nasty bits of work until they upset a cartel whose boss ordered some of his gang to kill them. Which is when the real action began. Up until then it had been a sort of documentary type of film - "lives of the policemen in the LAPD" sort of thing.
But what a tedious journey it was with all that hand-held camera stuff to put up with.
Sometimes the technique is used effectively so that you don't realise the camera is hand held - it's done so smoothly. "24" for instance. But usually you are so aware that you are watching a film that it all seems contrived and false.
The director should take a good long look at a film by the Japanese director Ozu who hardly moves his camera at all.

Cooking

Cooking they say is the new rock and roll. That means, I suppose, that TV food programmes are "with it". Well I'm not "with it", nor a rock and roll fan; nor a food programme watcher. Any more. Once they seemed attractive: seeing all those colourful food ingredients the magicians of the kitchen displayed; and once they seemed so knowledgeable about food recipes. Now, to coin a phrase, I'm fed up with them. Jamie Oliver gives me a pain in the neck with his recipes that, he maintains, can be served up in 15 minutes. Can't be done. Pull the other one Jamie. I once thought Nigel Whatsisname was in a category above the others but to try to produce one of his "suppers" inside two hours would be impossible. As for the woman, the bird, the dark haired beauty - I find her painfully unwatchable now: it's not cooking, it's showing off her contours.
What's wrong with Supermarket jars of sauces? They are surely made by experts who can produce a better sauce that I could with limited ingredients (Nigel Whatsisname's pantry is full from floor to ceiling with herbs and spices). And what's wrong with pastry from the shop when I know that trying to make it would not only take me, and probably most people, hours to produce? And what's wrong with pies from Gregg's? Their sausage rolls are great.
No, cookery programmes and cookery books are a new fad. Not only that but they take up so much valuable time when, for example, one could be reading "War and Peace" or listening to Beethoven's 9th symphony or writing a play or short story.
I suppose "the new rock and roll" sums it up rather well: it's low-rate stuff posing as quality.
I have just read that The Times is, this weekend, going to present to the public the 40 best cookbooks for Christmas. Forty!!!! That means that there are probably another one hundred and forty also published.
Mmm! May publish one myself: "How to cook without cooking" maybe i.e. lists of food available from supermarkets e.g. Sainsbury's tin of Beef Mince and Onions (excellent, topped with mashed potatoe, easier than cottage pie from scratch).

Sex 'n Violence

A winning combination, sex and violence, used in dramas over the centuries: Romeo and Juliet, Cecil B. de-Mille films (with a dash, or rather a big splash, of religion thrown in), Psycho, Killing Them Softly. The last mentioned I saw last week and even I, inured over the years to the effects on my constitution of violence in films, even I found some of the scenes in this film painful to watch. OK, you can always tell yourself that the scenes aren't actually taking place, as you can when two people are in bed supposedly "having it away" on screen, but just the same when presented so realistically as it was here in "Killing Them Softly" it rather brought out the Mary Whitehouse in me: should they really be descending to such low levels in order to entertain or to make money - though when I was at the cinema watching he film there were only four other people there which says something about the attraction of the "sex n' violence" formula. Actually there was very little sex in the film, well, not visible activity, only a hooker being paid after the event.
Strangely coincidental I have been reading Somserset Maugham's book called "Ten Novels and their Authors" which, by the way is excellent in all respects but especially so for budding writers who would like to know something about novel writing and short story writing, the differences in the genres chiefly. In one passage of Maugham's introduction to the book, he draws attention to the prevalence of sex in modern literature and he writes thus: "Owing to the invention of  contraceptives, the high value that was once placed on chastity no longer obtains. Novelists have not been slow to notice the difference in the relation of the sexes and so, whenever they feel something must be done to sustain the reader's flagging interest, they cause their characters to indulge in copulation. I am not sure they are well-advised. Of sexual intercourse Lord Chesterfield said that the pleasure was momentary, the position ridiculous and the expense damnable; if he had lived to read modern fiction he might have added that there is a monotony about the act that renders reiterated narration of it excessively tedious."

Ed Milliband

I saw a film yesterday called "Killing Them Softly", a film about petty criminals and contract killers. As a sort of running background to the main action you were made aware of, on TVs in bars in which the killers sat to talk, pictures of Barack Obama and various other politicians of the period just before he became president, spouting stuff about how they were going to change America etc. (One of the themes of the film had to do with America being the same old place it always was, corrupt and occupied with big business - just like the underworld where the main protagonists of the film were located.) One of the themes of Obama's speech had to with "one nation". I thought to myself: "haven't I heard this theme before recently?" Of course, it was at the core of Ed Milliband's speech at the Labour Party conference. Just had Disraeli's speech of the late 1800's been a call for the country to become "one nation", so too was Ed Milliband's.
I thought: "some chance, mate". One nation with the Queen and company living in Buckingham Palace? One nation with bankers and their ilk trousering vast sums of cash to spend on skying trips and yachts? One nation with Eton and Oxford versus your local greasy-spoon comp?
But let them dream, these politicians. They've always have been hopeless dreamers. Clegg had a dream a few weeks ago at the Lib Dem do and no doubt, Cameron will have a dream next week.
But Milliband's speech, while idealistic and well delivered, didn't do much for me as it seemed to have done for the vast majority of the Press ("once we had the rack, now we have The Press" said Oscar Wilde). I'll tell you why. Because I can't get it out of my craw that Ed Milliband stood for leader of the Labour Party against his elder brother. Not because they had quarreled about some aspect of socialist policies that made them in fundamental disagreement but because he desired the position. Against his own brother! We are back with Esau and Jacob here. Or Abel and Cain maybe. Too strong perhaps but nonetheless I didn't like it and still don't like it.

Jimmy Savile

What I find amazing about this Jimmy Savile scandal, apart from the allegations of his abuse of children that no one in the BBC seemed to have any knowledge of (I don't think!), is that the BBC ever took him on the staff in the first place. I have always found him obnoxious. As far as I'm concerned, whenever his stupid face with that stupid hair and that stupid cigar appeared on the TV I rushed to shut it off. I just could not stand the sound of his voice. Really I could not stand anything about him. Yet, if I, as I sometimes did, voiced my objections to his TV appearances, I was always faced with the remark "Hah, but he does such good work; take Stoke Mandeville hospital for example". I wonder now if that generosity on his part had something to do with his celebrity status; maybe it was something he could boast about, something that made him safe from censure. It seems now that I'm right, it did make him safe because I have heard that he used the fact on a few occasions when reporters approached him about the rumours of his behaviour: "you print anything about those rumours and I'll withdraw all my money from Stoke Manderville".
Now Esther Rantzen says she is ashamed of having had him as a friend and feels that she and others like her colluded with him in his horrible acts. What on earth did she find so attractive in him to have him as a friend in the first place? It seems that Savile had tremendous power over his colleagues some of whom now admit this to be true.
Let us go back in time to the BBC run by Lord Reith shall we? It's beyond belief that Reith would have even contemplated employing a person of such low life, such a clown, such an oaf, such a talentless smoothy, such a monstrous caricature of a human being.
But there! Once upon a time the BBC had high taste; now it hasn't. Why? Because it wishes to compete with ITV etc to see, we must conclude, which of them can produce the tawdriest rubbish for a nation brought up on pop, rock, rap and crap.

Kipling

Many years ago, in a discussion on radio, I heard a group of intellectuals discussing what they thought was the greatest short story ever written. Some years before a similar discussion had taken place (if memory serves me well, this was on "The Brains Trust") and the general consensus of opinion was that Edgar Alan Poe's "The Cask of Amontillado" was the tops; now it was Rudyard Kipling's "The Man who would be King". I don't think there could be so great a gap of style, plot, theme or setting than between these two stories than any other two: the first is set in America, the second in India; the first is a sort of horror story, the second a bit of history; the first has two characters who know each other but one of whom hates the other, the second has two English rogues out to deceive a tribe of Afghans into believing they are of royal blood; the first is a study of  hatred (though no reason is given for it), the second is knockabout humour with tragic consequences.
I never have been able to get past the first few pages of the Kipling story until this week when I put "The Stories of Kipling" on Google and started reading it again. I find it's very good; so good, in fact, that I find myself hesitating in rushing the pleasure of reading it - like good wine you want to take it slowly, savouring every tiny drop.
Apparently John Huston wanted to make a film of this story and for twenty years tried to put it together; eventually, when he was ready production-wise to do so, he approached Paul Newman having in mind Newman and Robert Redford for the part of the two rogues, after their success in "Butch Cassidy and the Sun-Dance Kid". Paul Newman tossed the script back to Huston and said "you want Sean Connery and Michael Caine for the parts". So Huston made the film with those two but it wasn't a great success. I can't say I liked what little I saw of it but that was during the period that the short story itself hadn't appealed to me. I shall now try it again.
This week I was approached by a young man who was working on the guttering of a neighbour's roof. He asked me if I'd like the same for my roof. It certainly needed doing but I had just had two new windows for over a thousand pounds fitted and felt I didn't want more expense. But the young man was insistent and dropped his price by two hundred pounds from £600 odd to £400 odd. I still said no. The next day he saw me again, said he had some material left over from the other job and I could have the job done for £270. He was a brilliant salesman. As Raymond Chandler put it about a rogue in one of his novels "he looked at me with the innocent eyes of used car salesman". This guy did too. It was like being in the power of the ancient mariner. No, not the ancient mariner but one of the rogues in "The Man who would be King". The young fellow could hardly write my name or address - I had to spell every word out for him and he wrote each letter carefully and with difficulty. But he had a certain roguish charm that they don't teach in schools. He also diddled me out of a tenner. I had to smile.

Criminals

Bernard Shaw said that "all men mean well". I don't believe it. Take the TV play from Sicily called "Inspector Montalban": the first installment featured some very shady dealings in which young boys were shipped from North Africa, Morocco, Tunisia etc. to Sicily in order that they, according to an investigating reporter, were to be sold off to various people to beg on the streets and to be "owned" by paedophiles. Now, this is a piece of fiction and might not actually represent reality, but I hardly think that the author of the books on which the TV series is based would make this up for sheer entertainment. No, it must be true that this sort of thing happens. And it's pretty obvious that the men involved in this nefarious activity do not "mean well"; they do it for money with little or no thought of morality or humanity involved. Just as the slave trade ran for centuries with so called "respectable" people greedily helping themselves to the profits. They didn't "mean well".
Another play on TV recently in the series "Silent Witness" involved young Asian men in the north of England grooming young white girls and drugging them in order to sell them for profit to older men who paid for sex with them. This, of course, went on in reality. One could hardly believe it, that there were such men that had no regard for the feelings of the young girls. They didn't "mean well".
Shaw believed poverty to be a crime and that it led to other crimes. Maybe some crimes could be explained or excused by people's poverty as in, for example, Les Miserables where the man is deemed to be a criminal because he stole - was it loaf of bread? - to feed his starving family; but not the two kinds mentioned above that the two TV plays bravely and brilliantly highlighted.
I say "bravely" because, in the case of the Asian youths, there is a reluctance to draw attention to what is thought to be by some the "cultural differences" between "us and them". And it being the BBC that produced the "Silent Witness" episode mentioned above, I have to admit that I was rather surprised that they produced it since there is, to my mind, a reluctance in the BBC to bring certain matters relating to cultural differences to the fore lest someone's feelings are hurt.

Prince Harry

"D'you mean to tell me that that geezer of a bloke is third in line to the throne?"
"I do."
"But he's just a jerk, a bit of a fool, a nerd with no more sense than a worm."
"Wrong. He's well educated...."
"Eton I suppose."
"Yes. Then Cambridge or Oxford, one of the two."
"S'pose they gave him easy passes."
"II don't think so. He's quite intelligent, I'm told."
"Intelligent? Getting hisself photographed naked with his balls in his hand? I call that stupidity myself."
"The lad was just having a bit of fun, that's all."
"All very well I dare say 'cept that all the rest of us have got our heads down trying to make ends meet."
 "Sowing wild oats while he's still young."
"Young! He ain't young. He's twenty eight. That's old. Old enough to know better anyway. I wonder what the army thinks of him."
"Well, the upper reaches of the army, I'm told, haven't taken too kindly to his behaviour."
"I'm not surprised, him being a hofficer and all. Fine thing for a hofficer with ordinary blokes under him to be cavortisising with a group of unclad young tarts - setting a good example, eh?"
"He'll grow out if this like Prince Hal."
"Who he?"
"Shakespeare's Prince Hal in Henry the Fifth: fun loving, womanising, jesting and joking when he was young then, when he became King, he dropped all his friends like Sir John Falstaff and became a man, taking on the French at Agincourt and licking them."
"How old was this Prince Hal before he changed?"
"O quite young, early twenties I'd say."
"Not twenty eight."
"No."
"So he wasn't still cavortisising at twenty eight."
"No."
"I think most people, 'specially those who work hard for the general good of this country, would tell him it's time he grew up. Don't you think so?"
"I suppose so."

Clooney

George Clooney is superb in his film "The Descendants". But he's always pretty good. He usually plays the part of an upper middle-class guy whose life seems satisfactory yet there's something going on in his head that makes him doubt it. He can do comedy but of a sort that is sophisticated; a bit like Cary Grant - though he's not as funny as Grant at his looniest. David Thomson compares him to the early William Holding but I can't see that: he's gentler than Holding; Holding could play dirty, a cynic whereas Clooney can only play clean, open-minded, charming. He tends to play men with a problem to cope with in their lives; not a physical problem like a mountain to climb but a moral one. He's on the left in real life but not so much a socialist, I think, as a liberal; he cares about how people are governed, how they are treated by big organisations, how they are manipulated. This feeling of good will he takes on in the characters he plays so that when they are themselves a trifle ruthless as in "Up In The Air" he gradually becomes conscious of this and, while he doesn't do anything drastic to change things, he does feel deeply about it so that you think "yes, he might try to change things for the better".
His character in "The Descendants" has many traits: he doesn't know how to handle his teenage children because he has never learned to - his wife has managed that; he can't face up his wife's infidelity but he struggles to find some aspect of it he can cling to - he doesn't seek revenge on his wife's lover but, rather, wants to make the man go to the hospital where she lies in a deep and deadly coma, something he feels he owes her.
The film is enjoyable on many levels but not least for the performances it produces. Not just Clooney, though he is in every scene and dominates most without being dominant, but his two daughters and other members of his large family, mostly cousins, are played to perfection. And there is a young man in it who, whenever he's on the screen, induces chuckles - he is simply a lug with a coarse sense of humour and a tactlessness that makes Groucho Marx appear saintly.
There's a scene between the lad and Clooney that is simply superb. Clooney cannot stand the boy but, one night when he can't sleep, he accidentally wakes the lad and they chat, and gradually you see that the boy is actually a human being and that Clooney begins to like him. It's a masterclass in acting from both but the boy's job is easy while Clooney uses all his technique and charm to show the gradual change in his character. It's beautiful to behold.

Woody Allen

In a new documentary film about Woody Allen, someone says (may have been him) that he achieved everything he wanted to in his life: he wanted to write gags for comics, he became a successful stand-up comedian, he acted in films, usually his own, he became a famous film director/scriptwriter, he married late successfully (not so successfully sometimes) and has two wonderful kids. The one thing that eluded him was a box-office success, he said. No sooner had he said it than he achieved that too with "Midnight in Paris" which brought in millions of dollars.
The main obsession he has, it seems, is with death. He said something like he didn't fear it but didn't want to be there when it happened. He was always a good joker about serious things. Maybe that was his way of facing up to them. He has a lot to say about God, especially about his non-existance. But even that he makes jokes about.
I think he's one of those people who was brought up in a rigorous religious way so that his Jewish-ness and its effect on him is always there, as it were peeping around a corner at him even when he's engaged in dismissing it and God with it. I have known Catholics who say they were lapsed Catholics, yet when it came to the crunch, taking communion, going to funerals etc they can't seem to shake off the influence of the church. I don't think Woody has completely shaken off his Jewish religiousness: it's always there watching him as he goes about the business of denouncing it.
Some of his films are just good stories with jokes: they aren't about serious topics or issues or have moral themes. But some deal with the one serious topic that concerns him: death and earthly justice. In both "Crimes and Misdemeanours" and "Match Point" a man, the main character, kills someone or gets someone to kill someone and gets away with it. Not just gets away with it but lives "the good life" afterwards. Indeed, lives a better life afterwards. I don't know if this is telling us something important but it does tell us that Woody Allen is a pessimist and an atheist. But a peculiar form of atheist: one that has no moral values.
So, is he saying that you cannot have moral values if you are an atheist; moral values only come from religious values - which he doesn't have? A peculiar form of existentialism, maybe.
I think he's a great film maker because he is a cinema stylist. He's up there with Ozu I believe.

Jack Matthews

I'm told Jack Matthews invented the crash tackle. Certainly, he used it a lot in his games for Cardiff and Wales when he played at centre with Bleddwyn Williams. One game I recall: Cardiff were playing Coventry, at that time a quality team, not so now I believe. Soon after the start Jack found himself on the ground with the Coventry forwards, possibly revenging themselves for tacjkles in previous games, putting their boots into the small of his back. He got up, probably had a word with his scrum half telling him to let the Coventry backs have the ball, and, when his opposite number received the ball, he received the canon ball that was Jack Matthews with it. The poor bloke was knocked clean out; he lay there on the ground like a dead man. Revenge was, no doubt, sweet.
I did hear once or twice that Jack had once killed an opponent in a tackle. While of course it was possible I don't think it happened; it was one of these tales that went around which told the listener how powerful his tackles were.
I know that he once did his best to save a player's life. Someone who had played with Jack Matthews in the forces told me that in a certain game, something happened and a player lay there on the ground with blood pumping out of his neck. Jack went straight to him and, being a doctor, knowing what to do, put pressure on the man's neck where it was needed and kept the pressure there until an ambulance arrived.
He was not considered as great a player as Bleddwyn Williams but they complemented each other in the way that Jack could penetrate the opposition with his hard and fast runs while Bleddwyn could penetrate with his side-step. They were in the fifties a lethal combination in the Cardiff side and in the Wales team.
Now Jack Matthews is dead but he will be remembered by people of my age and admired for his skill and of course for his tackles. I wouldn't have liked to have been a centre playing against him.
O yes, I almost forgot: When he was a young man in the forces he met, in a boxing ring, Rocky Marciano who was then in the American army. They went three rounds and the match was drawn. Was Rocky over-rated or Jack under-rated I wonder.

Andy Murray

There are, I'm afraid, certain people whom I dislike without having any credible reason for disliking them. Emma Thomson is one. And Andy Murray is another. Or, I should say, was another. Because after seeing him beaten by Federer on Sunday I felt a lot warmer towards him. I felt really sorry for him. There was a picture of his face in yesterday's Telegraph that, I felt, summed up the disappointment he felt. Well, not so much simple disappointment but it showed a man looking as if he was staring into the abyss.
Unlike Stephen Glover in today's Mail - together with millions of other Britains - I was not cheering for Murrray during the game; I was secretly hoping Federer would prevail. But after the game I realised what the loss had meant to the Scottish player and I suddenly felt guilty that I had not supported him (not that my support would have done him much good, sitting as I was on my settee at home).
But Murray had previously come across as a rather arrogant Scottish Nationalist, a man with little charm, a poor interviewee who didn't seem to want to be talked to, a bit of a bore in fact. Now he appeared almost human and almost likeable.
And he could have won. As Boris Becker (another person it's not easy to warm to) reported yeaterday, if Murray had broken Federer's servive in the second set when they were 40/40, he probably would have won. But he didn't. And that, said Becker, is where the difference between a winner and a loser rests: the winner can take the vital point at the right time.
It would do Murray good to not only have Ivan Lendl (there's another not quite likeable guy) as his coach but someone who could coach him in the social graces. Can't think of anyone offhand.

Chairs

Why are chairs in pubs so uncomfortable? Maybe so that you have to get out of them to get more drinks down you. All the pubs I have been in in the past few months have chairs that have struts across the back which stick into the bones in my back. And since I have discovered that I have a fracture in a bone there, the discomfort is worse. This pain due to a small fracture came about by.... I know not how. Maybe from sitting on pub chairs. When the doctor sent for an X-ray and told me I had the fracture I thought: "Osteoperosis or something! A gradual crumbling of my bones to dust! Slow death as my body loses all its muscular power so that I just fall slowly to the ground like a broken toy..... But after a test of my bone density I was told I had no crumbling, no osteperosis - nothing of the kind. What then? The doc didn't know. But I did: pub chairs of course.
I once heard a radio programme in which arty critics discussed theatre, films, books etc and, on one occasion, a design exhibition. They were going on about what wonderful designs the furniture had until someone commented on a certain chair: how wonderful its design was. Then up spoke the Joe Bloggs of the company: "I always judge a chair first on is it comfortable to sit in." Well done Joe, I thought. What is the point of designing a chair if it can't be sat on with pleasure? None.
So, I am in search of a pub that has chairs that are comfortable to sit on, not the ones I keep finding with hard struts in the backs that, for some unknown reason, are always the same height from the seat as my factured bone. Ouch!

Drinking

Carol Midgeley in The Times quotes Kingsley Amis on pre-lunch behaviour. Amis said that the most depressing words in the English Language are "Shall we go straight in?" She agreed. So do I.
She goes on to comment on David Cameron's pre-lunch drinking. She says that she now has at least one thing in common with him: they both like beer as a pre-lunch drink.
I used to when I was younger; now that I'm old I prefer a sherry. Beer fills you up too much I find. As the Germans say "It's a food".
And she disapproved of drinking wine before a meal (she approves of it with a meal). I don't. For one thing, if there's no sherry available or it's too dear in a restaurant then wine suits me fine. Again, sometimes if you order a meal first and the wine second, the wine might not arrive in time for the meal - I have known it come after the meal has finished. So I always order the wine as soon as I sit down at the table, before even looking at the menu; then I order the meal after the wine has arrived so that I can have a glass before dining and a few while dining.
I always order house red wine. It's usually quite good and, of course, reasonably priced - only about twice that amount you'd pay in the supermarket!
I once ordered the state-owned wine producer's cheap stuff in Malta. I had a hangover for days afterwards. I think it retailed at about 50p a litre. It made me give up on the idealism of socialism and become a capitalist. Sort of.

The Queen

I have to say I felt a little sorry for the Queen having to suffer those celebrations as she did.
The four hour journey down the Thames with the rain coming down in bucketfuls and the
piercing cold of a winter’s day to bear. That and then the evening concert: another three hours or so of pop music, of Elton John, of Cliff Richard - God help us all! Enough to make anyone throw up.
But she bore it gallantly and may have even enjoyed some of it. But I bet she was glad to
get back to the palace warmth and to bed with a gin and whatever she has with it.


It must be a strange feeling being a queen in this age when the word queen and the word
royalty seem anachronisms. She has no power. Only the power to order an egg for breakfast
or a glass of what she fancies when she is alone or within the confines of her private quarters.

So what is she when she’s not an ordinary human being? A figurehead. A representative of a
nation who is presented to the world as.... As what? A centre of regard of a patriotic nation?
Except that the nation is not so patriotic as it may seem at times of celebration.

And what has been celebrated? A length of time. Sixty years of being a figurehead.
A celebration of someone who has done her duty perhaps. Her duty? What is that exactly?
Her duty in being a figurehead of course.

Art

I went to see a Beckett play last week at the Bristol Old Vic - not in the main auditorium because it's still being renovated but in a studio theatre which held about a hundred people. The play was Krapp's Last Tape which I remember enjoying when it was broadcast on TV many years ago. I can't say I enjoyed this production though I think the one actor did a good job. Beckett's a bit of a mystery to me. Can't say I like his so-called masterpiece "Waiting for Godot" in which two tramps wait for someone who doesn't turn up. But that may be the point of it, the attraction of it to some people, the sort of people who like to discuss what it was all about after the performance. Waiting for death, maybe. Well, Beckett is very interested in life after death if there is one, or, rather, interested in the nothingness that comes after death. A bit like Schopenhauer possibly.
Libby Purvis in yesterday's Times thought there was just too much talk, too much theorising about art these days. I think she's right. Like those people who like to see hidden depths in abstruse plays a la Beckett, she points a finger at art critics and perpetrators of some of art's monstrosities. She writes: "When did words become so significant that visual artists could assemble any old roadkill, excrement or crude pastiche and critics would force it into fame? Much is said about the commercialisation of the art market. I am more fascinated by the verbal hype".
I believe that there are quite a few so-called artists about who have little talent except to be able to advertise themselves for financial gain. Damien Hirst surely; Tracey Emin is another. That perpetrator of barbie-doll-like plastic works large and glossy and almost sick-making stuff.... his name escapes me - as does his talent. Yet they get talked about in glowing terms by some critics, not all, not Robert Powell for example who saw more art in the man who "caught the f....ing fish" than in that of the man who put it in a cage and who called it, mystifyingly and cryptically, "The Physical Impossibilty in the Mind of Someone Living"? Makes you think, eh? Makes you want to discuss it, eh? Makes me want to puke.

Shakespeare

I'm trying to think when was the last time I enjoyed a play by Shakespeare. It's certainly a long time ago. I have enjoyed some of his plays which have been made into films but not usually (if ever?) those perfomed on stage. Partly this is my fault since in recent years my hearing hasn't been good and so I miss a lot of dialogue; but only from some actors. So, I blame acrors a lot. This week I went to see a Globe Theatre production of Henry V which was on tour and which stopped off at Cardiff's New Theatre for a week. It began, of course, with the Chorus saying "O for a muse of fire...." etc. This I heard perfectly. But from then on I had difficulty hearing what was said and I blame the actors for their poor enunciation. But I know the play well enough to follow what was going on. I left during the interval.
This was a professional production with professional actors in a splendidly suitable set, yet it lacked something. Was it the direction? Was it me? Was it Shakespeare?
I have to say that I have had it "up to here" with Shakespeare's comic characters. They just ain't funny. Were they ever? Well, yes, some have been;:I recall a couple of characters in The Tempest who made me laugh. But the ones in this Henry V weren't amusing at all. I saw a production of "The Comedy of Errors" at Stratford a few years ago - which had had glowing revues - and I was bored.
So I think it must be me. I have outgrown my pleasure in Shakespeare's plays - except Hamlet, Othello and Julius Caeser.
This reminds me of a famous translater of Ibsen's plays who said, in his old age: "I have spent the best years of my life being bored by the great works of literature".
Whatever, it's no more Shakespeare for me on stage. Films maybe.

House of Lords

Reform of the House of Lords. How those words inspire! How they make the adrenilin flow!
If I were to consult some of the habitual denizens of my local pub I think I can guess what their answers would be if asked the question: "Do you think the House of Lords should be reformed?" It would either be "Couldn't care less" or "Yes, they should just get rid of the House of Lords altogether."
The Spectator's editor believes that it works quite well as it is so we should follow the advice given by Viscount Falkland in 1614: "When it is not necessary to change, it is necessary not to change." Or, as it might be put today: "if it ain't broke, don't fix it."
Nick Clegg is someone who believes, it seems, with an almost religious conviction, that the Lords should be reformed. According to Simon Heffer, writing in the Daily Mail, "Mr Clegg's desire to reform the House of Lords is gratuitous, narcissistic and ignorant." But, Simon, it's in keeping with everything that Nick Clegg has done over the past year or so: first was his admission that he had slept with 30 women (which, when Nicky got up in parliament to say that in a constituency meeting a young woman had approached him.... had inspired a remark from another MP : "Thirty-one!") which is not, as I suppose he imagined it might have been, something that would prove him to be "at one" with the ordinary guy; then his assuming that the vote on proportional representation would go through; then ..... Too many cack-handed things to list.
Reforming the House of Lords is about as interesting as watching cricket when it's raining or reading articles about the imminent election of a London mayor when the two main candidates are buffoons.
Apparently, according to a recent poll, "only 42% are interested in politics." As much as that!
People are finding it hard to make ends meet and our beloved politicians are pondering over reform of the House of Lords. As the Daily Mail might put it: "you couldn't make it up."

Mina

I went to Trip.com to find out which are the best restaurants in Cardiff and found a Lebanese place called Mina to be top of the list. It had a series of excellent reviews so I was tempted to go there. Recently I had received a certain amount of money from an American cousin who wanted to give me a present - I won't tell you why. She sent me a couple of hundred quid and I told her I'd use it to buy some good meals in Cardiff.
Thus my wife and I went to Mina's. It's an unassuming sort of place from the outside in an area of Cardiff where there are many Asian and Chinese retaurants. Inside,the decor was bright but not off-puttingly stark. We were shown to two seats at the window overlooking the street. The waiter was very charming and pleasant. We ordered a bottle of red house wine and soon had before us a bottle of Lebanese red wine which was delicious and cost about £11. I noticed it said 14% on the label which, to me, is quite hign, almost as much as Sherry.
The meal we ordered was chicken with mushrooms and a few other bits and pieces in a delicious white sauce, not spicey, rather bland perhaps but very tasty, with rice. Very enjoyable.
But I couldn't finish it and when the waiter looked with some apologetic wonder at my not having quaffed the lot I had to explain that now that I was "getting on in years" my stomache capacity was not what it had been when I had been a young man.
It is a little embarrasing I find. It happens whenever I go out to dine. I feel the waiter and chef must feel that the food was not to my liking but this isn't so, it's just that I get "full" after I have eaten about half to two thirds of the quantity on the plate. I wish they would cater for us olduns and serve us smaller portions (at a reduced price of course).
The desert was a lighter affair: youhurt with soft honey covered in pestachio nuts. Angel's food.
9 out of 10 for Mina's. Cost for two? £43. Good.

Mina

French Films

What is it about French films that make me cringe? Often they receive rave reviews but I see only mediocrity. A few years ago I saw a film called, I think, "Hidden" which had rave reviews; I thought it above the average for depth but to me it had a sense of believing it was greater than it actually was. There was so much in it I wanted explained. There was a mystery that, to my mind, was never solved. And that is, I think, a feature of serious French films: they present something to the eye that appears to carry intellectual weight but doesn't; they present problems that they seem not to want to solve because, if they do, the game is given away, the emperor has no clothes.
In "The Kid with the Bike" the young lad who is in a sort of Borstal asks a stranger, a woman who he has clung to in a doctor's surgery to evade capture by the school's staff, if he can stay with her on weekends. Why does she say "yes"? No reason is given. You are not supposed to ask this question. The reason? It doesn't have an answer. But the makers of this film are wiser than me: later on the boy asks her the same question: "why did you take me in?" and she replies "I don't know". She acts mysteriously in a realistic setting. Why? Then there is the boy riding his bike: long sequences with the hand-held camera (in a car, no doubt) on him. Why? Are we supposed to be thinking the boy's thoughts? But we don't know what he is thinking or even if he is thinking.
This is a film that was enjoyable to watch and infinitely irritating to think about thoughout.
But French films are like that; they always have been. Except their thrillers like "Riffifi". Why don't they make more of them instead of trying to arty and intellectual. Trying to be!

The Hunger Games

What a film! I am not a fan of sci-fi films, though I enjoyed "The Thing", the black and white version many years ago, and was not expecting to enjoy "The Hunger Games" but I did. More than just enjoyed it as if it was something nice like ice cream; I felt it had an intellectual element that lifted it above the usual sci-fi films. The action takes place in a future America which is now - then - a totalitarian regime run from a city called Capitol and run with a demonic ferocity and control that is excitingly frightening. There has been in the past an uprising by the poor people in the various outlying parts of the country, an uprising which was put down ruthlessly so that the people now live in terror and severe poverty. For the entertainment of the mass of those in control, a decadent-seeming lot of dandies, perverts and dolls, every year two young people, a boy and a girl, are taken from each of the 12 districts and forced to fight to the death in a large wooded area until only one of them is left alive. It is not only a way the dictator has of maintaining his control over the people but is also shown on TV to entertain, like some ghastly reality programme.
What gave it, to me, an extra element of interest was that, due to the masterly way in which the society was presented in the film, it made me think of the way some societies we know now, like Syria or Iran or The Sudan, function. Not just some which now exist but many of those in history. The Romans, The Pharoahs, The Chinese. It made me feel that I now know something of how it must have felt to a person in, say, China during the Gang of Four's horrific reign of terror.
I wished for some kind of solution or even just a glimpse of a solution to the state which held its people in such dreadful subjection but the film didn't give it: at the end things went on as before. And, in a way, this brought home the horror of it more scarily.

Collectibles

A distant relative of mine was a man who possessed "collectibles". I assumed that they were old comics, magazines, bits and pieces of things that were collectible because, in time, they would prove valuable - though that's rather an unkind thought since he may have collected them simply because he liked them. I don't know what happened to them when he died a few years ago but, having just seen the TV programme on Channel 4 called "Four Rooms", I have the feeling that they might have been worth a heap of money. I know that old comics can sell often at high prices and I know that he had some of these. The amazing thing to me about "Four Rooms" is that the stuff that people come to the studio to sell to four dealers is that they are worth anything at all. For example, last night a man brought along a tin can with paint brushes in it and sold it for £17000. The fact that the brushes had been the property of Francis Bacon (used when he painted a portrait of Lucien Freud) didn't mean anything to me but to the dealers it meant a lot. "I just have to have those Francis Bacon brushes," one dealer said as if he were talking about a Francis Bacon painting itself. The four dealers were all interested in acquiring them and all offered quite large sums. But the owner held out and eventually, dropping his expected price a little because he liked the dealer, sold them for £17000.
Phew! It doesn't seem to matter, with "collectibles", that they possess any aesthetic quality, only that they are collectible, that they have attained a value on the basis of their collectibilty. Book dealers aren't interested in what is written in the books they deal in, only in how old they are, what condition they are in, if they are signed by the author, if they are first editions etc. So it is with the dealers on "Four Rooms". A fascinating programme because it takes you into a world where only money counts for anything and, for most people like myself, it's into a world devoid of all that education tells us should be important. It's a bit like watching sharks hunting.

Class

Melvyn Bragg's first programme on Class brought together two writers of entirely different backgrounds, style and themes: Evelyn Waugh, the upper class twit who could write brilliantly and Arthur Greenwood, working class who wrote a famous book in the thirtees called "Love on the Dole". Bragg compared, or rather contrasted, this book with Waugh's "Vile Bodies" which I tried to read a few years ago but failed to reach page 20 (I have always, previously, found Waugh's novels entertaining and stylish but this one left me cold, even angry I think). It was a good comparision in that here was a Waugh, full of himself, looking like a gentleman (which he certainly wasn't), trying to look like a toff, which he tried hard to be but becoming only a person on the fringes of the upper class where he wanted to be and probably bitter about not being fully accepted; and here was an ordinary looking fellow in the shape of Greenwaood wanting to change the lives of working people from the gutter they were living in to a more pleasant path to some properity. Waugh wrote about the beastly upper set and Greenwood about the lower set who were forced to work hard and had liitle time to do much else. Waugh's lot didn't work at all but lounged their way through life.
I saw the film of "Love on the Dole" a few years ago on TV and while I found it rather hard going as entertainment, it got its points across well. Deborah Kerr played a young working class woman who turns to prostitution to make her life bearable - much frowned on of course by her family. The arguments were strong and the action presented them dramatically. "Vile Bodies" was just vile. I believe that Stephen Fry made a film of it a few years ago (is there anything he can't do?) but you wouldn't have got me to see it with a team of wild horses dragging me there.
"Love on the Dole" I'd like to see again.
I wonder why Melvin Bragg didn't mention Bernard Shaw's play "Pygmalion" in his treaty on "class": here was a young woman "from the gutter" introduced to high society and taught to speak properly; she has no problem with getting into the upper class. Why? Because it's not to do with "blood" or breeding as with racing horses but with how you speak and how you conduct yourself in high society. It's that simple. Devastating exposure I thought.

The Artist

I'm not greatly surprised to hear that some people who went to see the film "The Artist" asked for their money back when they found that it was a silent movie. Not because it's a poor film but that it was silent. They don't make silent films any more. When you go to the cinema these days you expect to see a "talkie". How is it possible to suspend your disbelief in a silent film? You cannot. Suspending one's disbelief comes with seeing something in a familiar form - watching "Coronation Street" for example; you get to know the characters and believe, in a strange sort of way, that they are real people. When an unfamiliar form of a film comes along you do not see it as being real. Thus with "The Artist": film-makers don't make silent films any more so this one becomes attractive (to some people) because it's a gimmick, it's novel. It is not stretching the form of films so that new insights into the art form (if it is an art form) are discovered. No new insights arrive with "The Artist". Nothing new, only novel.
When films were made in the silent era, only silent films were made - obviously. Silent films were the accepted form for films and people "willingly suspended their disbelief" to watch them. "The Artist" is a spoof of silent films as they then were and can't be taken seriously, neither as a work of art or as entertainment, except in the respect that it is a spoof.
It's a very well produced spoof, acted exceedingly well with a plot that is brilliant in its use of both silence and sound. But it's a gimmicky thing; it's also a one-off.
I recall Robert Montgomery making "The Lady in the Lake" in which he played Phillip Marlowe from behind the camera as if the camera was his eyes and ears; you only saw him in a mirror or two. It worked OK but it was, to my knowledge, never repeated. Neither was a sound film with no talk in it made by Ray Milland (acted and directed). All one-offs.
It seems that "The Artist" is going to win many oscars tonight but I don't think it should on artistic merit. I would have picked "Drive"but that's not even nominated.

Boxing

You don't have to be a mindless thug to be a boxer though the recently thugish British versions of the pugilist seem to be not only thugish but mindless as well. Not all boxers act in this unseemly way, brawling during a press conference after the match in the ring has already taken place. Here, for example, is a boxer who is anything but thugish or mindless: Vitali Klitschenko, WBC world heavyweight champion who, I discover, from an article he wrote today in The Times, is also a holder of a PhD and is presently leader of the Ukraine Democratic Alliance. Phew! Needless to say he deplored the "senseless" behaviour of the man he had just beaten in the ring and of the other British boxer, David Haye, and called for heavy penalties from the WBC (World Boxing Council). Maybe they will do something and maybe they won't; maybe they will say they deplore the behaviour but carry on allowing boxers before fights to snarl insults at their opponents and to push their (often ugly) faces up against their opponent's face.
Where is the gentleman boxer of old? The Tommy Farr, the Joe Louis, the Billy Conn, Gentleman Jim Corbett, John L. Sullivan? Nowhere to be seen nowadays. No, somewhere in the past the rot set in and the promoters encouraged bad behaviour because they believed the fans liked it.
I think the rot set in with the aoppearance on the fight scene of Cassuis Clay and his loud mouth. Not that he shouted obscenities at the cameras but he made his boasts almost obscene in their ugly delivery. He, like McEnroe, became experts in the art.... no, not art, there's something uplifting in art (often!).... they became experts in the technique of insult. None has ever apologised because they probably think they were behaving properly.
I recall Alistaire Cook in one of his broadcasts saying how great the indignation was in the USA amoung sports' journalists at McEnroe's dreadful behaviour towards officials at Wimbledom; many thought he should have been "brought home", they were so disgusted.
So, well done Vitali Klitschko, one of the old school, a gentleman of the ring.

Language

Bernard Shaw said that one should know one's own language well before attampting to learn another - or words to that effect. Now there is much press discussion about the dearth of foreign language speakers in this country, that schools are not paying enough attention to teaching foreign languages and that, as a result, people are growing up, getting jobs which require them to go abroad, possibly to sell British goods abroad, without being able to converse with those they are meeting. "But doesn't everyone speak English these days," many people say; "what do I need to be able to speak Spanish to a Spaniard for when he probably speaks good English? Don't they all?" Apparently there is need because over 80% of the world's populace do not speak English. Surpirised me too!
I learnt some French in school and it faired me - not very well.... I could get along sometimes but was obliged to use mime on most occasions: e.g. scrambling action for scrambled eggs (it worked sometimes with the word "oeuf" thrown in with it).
Better than nothing I suppose but I would have thought that a salesman, for example, would need a far greater knowledge of the language he needs than GCSE's. A level surely.
However, the best way to learn a language I have always thought is to go to the country and learn to speak it there over a period of a month or so. Hard going but I have known it work.
I was once on one of those schemes where they were trying to bring together the peoples of Europe after WW2. We lived together and worked together. One of the troubles was that everyone from the continent wanted to speak English; it seemed that they were already able to speak English quite fluently and they wanted to practice on us. But there was one fellow who wouldn't have any of that: he was determined to learn French so he spoke it, what little he knew - and it was quite basic - on every occasion he met up with a French person. You could see the screen coming down over their eyes whenever he tried his stuff out with anyone. I lost touch with him for a month then, when I met him again, he was speaking quite good French. He told me what he had done was learn phrases and one day they all seemed to come together. He was a zoologist so maybe that dioscipline had told him something about the human condition: perseverance maybe of a dung beatle, or stubborness of a donkey, or bullishness of a rhino.
I used to just get along with my nouns and verbs (always in the present tense - "I go to the cinema yesterday") and my mime. Flapping by arms like wings and "Poulet, Garcon, sil vous plait".

Belief

Alain de Botton has written a book called "Religion for Atheists" in which he posits the idea that the new breed of fundamentalist atheists, so to speak, miss out on some of the things that an established religion possesses. I can see his point: Richard Dawkins and Co. seem to me to be so anti every form of religion that they aspire to a wholly (not holy) form of knowledge that seems to be bereft of feeling; there is an anger manifest in their attacks on religions; they can not or will not see that there is anything in those religions but a stubborn belief in things which are, simply, unbelievable. In short, they think that knowledge is superior to belief and that knowledge requires proof.
I tend to think this way too but I still have that feeling within me, brought about no doubt by an upbringing in the Welsh valleys where to be anything but a believer in one or other of the Protestant churches' beliefs would be similar to holding hands with the devil. So, I suppose I have been brain-washed to a certain extent by my experience of religion and chapels and the pleasant people, usually, within them.
So, though I now, like de Botton, can't accept most if not all of the beliefs that religious people take for granted, I still have that inkling to enjoy those aspects of church ways that appeal to my ascetic side if not quite spiritual side.
I like the ceremonies associated with some religious denominations, especially those of the C of E; whenever I stay at a hotel I go staright to the chest of drawers to see if Gideon has left a bible there and if he hasn't I'm disappointed; one of my favourite books (which I have started about twenty times but failed to finish) is Thomas Mann's "Joseph and his Brethren" for its high-mindedness and for the wonderful story itself, told in the bible in a page or two but in over 500 pages in this book.
My father said to me; "You must read this before you die." I don't think he meant that it would help me when I get to "the other side" but that it would help me appreciate the one on this side.
Must start it again. Incidentally, every time I take up the book to read on from where I left off, I don't; I start from the beginning again.

David Hockney

Peter Oborne in The Daily Telegraph says that Hockney is a conservative painter. He quotes Michael Oakeshott: "To be conservative is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss." He follows it with: "Hockney's landscapes on public display from this Saturday are on one level a meditation on this Oakeshottian theme."
But are they any good?
Oborne draws attention to the work of Damien Hirst and that Tony Blair purchased two of his paintings (I didn 't know he did any paintings) which seems to indicate his non-Oakeshottian qualities.
In short, Hockney paints the familar landscapes of his native Yorkshire while Hirst and his ilk produce works that are new, untried previously, full of New Labour spice and life.
But is Hockney any good?
Most people, except the few art critics who like to argue a case rather than enjoy, do not have much time for Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin; they think of them as artistic frauds. Most people like David Hockney's work - the present exhibition at The Royal Academy is already fully booked.
But is he any good?
His paintings are quite pleasant. I'm afraid "chocolate box pictures" come to mind. While they are nice to look at I wonder if there is any depth in them. Quite frankly, I don't think, like Oborne, that conservative values are what one thinks of when viewing them; more "traditional landscapes" come to mind.

The Silence

"The Silence" is a German film, a thriller of sorts. If this is the standard sort of film made in Germany why don't we get more over here? Probably because most people don't like subtitles. So, when one comes along, it's not shown in the large cinema complexes but in Art Houses like Cardiff's Chapter Arts Centre.
It's a good, tense film about two murders: a young girl gets killed at the beghinning of the film and, 20 or so years later, another girl is killed in the same spot and in the same way. The invesitigation is led by the local force but a just-retired copper wants a hand in finding the killer because, not having found the man 20 years ago, he feels now that he must do to since his lack of success previously led to his life going to pieces. It's quite a complicated plot and the film seems more interested in showing the effects of the killings on the girls' relatives and the lives of the police investigators themselves. The last half hour of the film is really very tense as the pincers of the law close in on the two suspects.
However, it lacks something that say, "The Killing", the Danish TV serial had: (a) there is no central character from whose viewpoint one tends to witness the action; (b) there is no final resolution of the case since one of the assailants gets away with it; (c) there is an air of squalor somehow about it: the two suspects are paedophiles yet they are treated with an almost caring sympathy.
When films purposely end with something unresolved like the killer getting away with the crime, having been brought up on American films of the forties and fifties, I get to feel that the man shouldn't go stock free, I want to see him nailed as in The Big Sleep, I desire revenge.
So "The Silence" is one of those Continental films that leaves you guessing and a bit troubled. I think they have, over there in France and Germany anyway, the feeling that leaving it like this, not "American-finalised" so to speak gives the film profundity. Which is just not the case.

Noises Off

I seem to be at odds with many film/theatre/TV reviewers of late. There's "Sherlock" which every TV critic is raving about: wonderful stuff, clever, fast moving etc. I found the previous series wearing and this one silly. Then there's "Noises Off", Michael Frayn's popular play which, I am told, leaves people laughing until they collapse in the aisles. While I have not seen the latest version of this play in London now, I did see a produ0ction in Cardiff about twenty years ago; I did not find it in any way amusing. It must be me because everyone else seems to have enjoyed it a lot. I can see that it is a brilliant piece of playwriting: fast moving, full of slapstick humour etc. Its contruction is remarkable; it's like watching a conjurer keeping about ten balls in the air at the same time. But funny? No.
Two films recenty seen have been more to my taste: Woody Allen's "Midnight in Paris", a gently amusing, nostalgic look at Paris in the twenties when Hemingway and Scott Fitzgerald were there. And Terrence Davies's working of Terrence Rattigan's play "The Deep Blue Sea". Both these film makers work outside the commercial film world and, needless to say, neither film was shown in the big multi-cinemas; I saw them both in Chapter Arts Centre, Cardiff.
But there is one TV serial on which I am on the same wavelength as most reviewers and that is "Borgen", from Danish TV. This is better than anything done by British TV I think; it's politically interesting, dramatically thrilling and acted with spelendid fervour.
Can't wait to see the next two episodes.

Writing

There's a new book published about 40 years of Creative Writing at UAE. The course was begun by Angus Wilson, continued by Malcolm Bradbury - I don't know who runs it now. Philip Hensher reviews the book in this week's Spectator. He is surprised to find, he writes, that there are so few famous names out of the 300 or so who'd been successful - about 20, he believes, in the last 40 years. And of those who have been published Hensher has "heard of precisely 50 and have read 20, not all of whom I would regard as significant or even particularly interesting authors."
Well, I was a tutor in a Creative Writing class for about ten years: there were two of us and often 20 or so "students". These were not full time courses but weekend ones, about three or four per year. I can't recall one "student" achieving success after leaving the courses. I had the idea that many of them came (a) for somewhere to go to pass the time (b) because they had once achieved some modest success but were getting nowhere now (c) because there was something psychologically wrong with them. The first lot did very little writing and weren't particularly creative - one German woman who had been a biologist in industry told me "I 'ave no imagination". She was right, she didn't. Of the second set there were a few who had been published but something had happened, usually of a psychological or psychiatric nature, that made it impossible to take up the pen, or lap-top, to try again. We had some success with the (b)'s and (c)'s in that they went away happy, believing that now he/she had got down to work again so success would surely follow (if they returned for another dose of tuition they said that success had not, so far, come their way).
There was one successful "student" whom the Principal of the Adult College would always boast about: she had gone on, he said, to publish a stack of children's books. The truth was that she had done this before arriving at the course; the course didn't help her because she had already helped herself. Why she came there, I don't know. Probably to boast to us about her success.
I could have murdered her.