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Freelance journalist blogging life, TV and media

Friday 29th June

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Hey party girl. Try and contain your excitement

You know how it is. It’s Friday, it’s the end of June, you’re getting ready to go away for the weekend and you think (again) about how you haven’t updated your blog for while.

I have been meaning to write about the Leveson inquiry since at least 22 February when Michael Gove said something about freedom of speech that I felt sat oddly with the nature of the inquiry into press ethics and practices. So that’s on my list.

Then I thought about sharing news of a briefing I went to on the Olympic torch relay and how it either will or won’t affect Salisbury and its many businesses when the relay comes through on 11 and 12 July.

This week I visited a care home to interview the manager for a county magazine and thought I’d write something about that. I filed to the magazine but haven’t updated this blog about that either.

Instead I’m simply going to wish everyone a great weekend. I hope it doesn’t rain too heavily your parade; enjoy yourself and see you on Twitter next week.

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Contemporary opera

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I am not an opera buff. The last and I think only time I saw any opera was some 20 years ago when I was a student. It was something in Italian (I think) and one of our party fell asleep.

But this week I have twice seen the most amazing new piece of opera, composed by Jonathan Dove who I’d never even heard of until this week but whose work transfixed me.

The performance was 50 minutes long and took place in Salisbury Cathedral as part of the Ageas Salisbury International Arts Festival. It’s called The Walk from the Garden and is based on John Milton’s Paradise Lost but specifically the very end of that epic poem, the last 18.5 lines or as librettist Alasdair Middleton wrote in the programme “a hundred and thirty-five of the best words ever written”.

You have to put aside – as I did – any reservations about the story of Adam and Eve. Forget truth, forget feminism for an hour. It’s a very old story and a very well-known one.

The Walk from the Garden is so moving as a piece of music and a performance by two superb voices, backed by a choir, that you simply have to go and see it if you can.

It’s very loud to start with: the choir of angels sing out Adam and Eve’s condemnation. Then poor Adam (Nicholas Sharratt) and Eve (Anna Dennis) burst through steel grey double doors wearing just white underwear and socks. The doors are marked ‘Exit’ which reads back to front. The audience, although in a cathedral, is already sitting in perpetual banishment on the other side of Eden. There is no going back.

The pair assess their new situation and surroundings: “Ash… Trash.” They recall with terrible anguish the “shattered harmony” they knew; they remember with leaping joy hearing “the voice of God walking in the garden”.

But anguish, desperation and loss dominate the piece. The voices are exquisite. At times Dennis’ voice as Eve seemed to literally grow out of the few stringed instruments playing the piece.

Gradually the pair get dressed in modern-day walking gear, put on their waterproof capes and hoist rucksacks on their backs. Slowly, they walk down the central aisle, past the incredible rimless font that sits in Salisbury Cathedral, and out of the west doors. For a few seconds their forms are framed by the medieval doors and they catch dying rays of summer light as the pair walk into a rush of greenery in such contrast to the penumbrous cathedral interior. Some of the angelic choir emerge through the steel grey doors to sing Adam and Eve on their solitary way.

I found it incredibly moving. I think you can see Adam and Eve’s walk from the garden as both a liberation and a condemnation.

As Milton wrote, “The world was all before them.”


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Henry V directed by Dominic Dromgoole

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Shakespeare's Globe presents Henry V

Henry V directed by Dominic Dromgoole

The Ageas Salisbury International Arts Festival is on this week and next and, as well as helping out as a volunteer steward, I have been getting a rush of culture from it.

Last night I watched a production of Henry V at the Salisbury Playhouse, directed by the Globe’s artistic director Dominic Dromgoole.

I approach these things as I approach most “gritty” TV drama: I kind of think I ought to see it. It was only as I went into the auditorium I saw the notice that said, “First half 1 hour 30 mins. Interval 15 mins. Second half 1 hour 23 mins.” “Three hours,” said another theatregoer behind me, echoing my own thoughts. My partner would definitely not want to have been there.

In Act One Scene Two I was remembering that I find Shakespeare’s history plays a bit tedious, certainly compared to the tragedies (Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth and King Lear) which I know far better and find more compelling. That scene of courtly advice; the lengthy contemplations of the relationship between France and England. I felt, not for the first time, that Shakespeare could have done with a better editor when it came to staging. It’s one thing to read the poetry of this verbal jousting; another thing to watch the same point being made several times in different ways by people on a stage.

But the staging was impressive. With one set – basically a rendition of what we imagine the original Globe stage to have looked like – and very few props, the cast and particularly Brid Brennan as the Chorus brought the action to life. The start of the battle of Agincourt was brilliantly wrought by four archers; the battle scene became a piece of music and movement featuring King Harry, Exeter, Westmoreland and someone else. I particularly loved the final bit of stage business, a cross between and a dance and a curtain call representing the marriage of Henry and Catherine.

Jamie Parker (The History Boys, Henry IV Parts 1 & 2) was good in the lead role. He has the brow for a king and a young king at that. Catherine was impossibly beautiful with lovely French. Best of the supporting cast was Brendan O’Hea as a very amusing Captain Fluellen. The musicians were also fabulous and, to me, very “period” playing a couple of wind of brass instruments I’ve never seen before.

As the final applause died away, a lady to my left who hadn’t held back on her opinion of the production at interval time turned to her husband and said, “He did the main speech very well.” I struggle to think which the main speech is in Henry V as there are so many. In Dromgoole’s production last night there was, I think, only one or two moments when Harry was completely alone on the stage giving a soliloquy. It was the eve of the big battle and it was well done, although I found another moment awkward when Henry’s emotion continued on stage as the Chorus began her link.

I gather Salisbury is the last stop in a tour of this production that has taken in Liverpool, Cardiff, Oxford, Cambridge and Bath so far. Dromgoole’s Henry V moves to The Globe theatre in London on 7 June. I’m sure it will be highly rated.


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Rebekah Brooks

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Photograph: Carl Court/AFP c/o guardian.co.uk

Rebekah Brooks and husband Charlie

I am fascinated by Rebekah Brooks who was editor of the News of the World in 2000 and of The Sun in 2003 and who in 2009 became chief executive of News International which publishes The Sun and The Times. In those years I was having babies and bringing up young children in a country town. Brooks is, I think, three years older than me.

Brooks has had to give evidence to MPs about phone hacking and to the Leveson inquiry about her time at News International, her relationships with politicians of the day and meetings and social occasions she attended. Yesterday she, along with her husband and four others, was charged with attempting to pervert the course of justice, accused of removing documents from News International and concealing material from the Metropolitan Police who are investigating phone hacking claims.

Look at today’s newspaper headlines, neatly rounded up by Roy Greenslade and The Guardian.

It will now be for a jury to decide if Brooks is guilty of trying to cover anything up at her newspapers or if she is the victim, as she and her husband insist, of a witch hunt.

It is hard to see how an editor, even a former editor gone into management, would not know how certain stories in their own newspapers were stood up or proved to be true. But she and other senior folk from News Corp insist there is no evidence to suggest they knew about any malpractice.

Brooks is a striking figure who was very successful at a relatively young age within a controversial organisation, News International – part of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. That has attracted as much jealousy and spite as admiration and this may now be manifesting itself as glee and determination from some quarters as people observe Brooks’ current predicament.

I understand from experience how important it is for a newspaper editor to have good relationships with the power brokers of the day. I also know what it is like to be courted by people in an industry, some in positions of power, others seeking power, when you edit an influential publication. And I know what it’s like when a journalist does something either deliberately or by mistake that someone else doesn’t like.

Libel law exists to try to police the difference between something that is untrue and will damage others by being published and something that is true and published in the public interest. Lord Justice Leveson’s inquiry may change all that. Let us pass over thoughts about where the Crown Prosecution Service’s decision to charge Mr and Mrs Brooks leaves David Cameron, supposedly a close friend of Charlie Brooks.

Largely I feel that in many cases, let’s say all but those involving murdered people, the journalist, editor or newspaper is just the messenger of a story and you know what they say about shooting messengers. Don’t do it.


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Homeland. Good, wasn’t it?

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Clare Danes in Homeland

Wow. I totally struck gold with that last post. I’ll admit I did no research before writing it and initially thought Channel 4’s bought-in US series Homeland was a two-parter. ROFL etc.

Yet here we are some 12 weeks later and the excellent series has just ended. Already I want to watch series two and am remembering why box sets after the event are a good idea. As the C4 continuity announcer said when the totally tense final episode of the first series ended last night, series two will appear on C4 sometime in the future. We don’t know when; it hasn’t even been made yet.

Why was Homeland such a hit? Because it didn’t strike any bum notes. On the relatively rare occasions that US drama producers make a good drama – when the drama is airing on a smallish cable network like Showtime and isn’t under pressure to get all schmaltzy – it is really good.

Our own Damian Lewis was excellent as the conflicted and last night very sweaty Sergeant Brody. Clare Danes was even better as the reasonably mad CIA agent Carrie living with bipolar disorder. More than Stephen Fry I suspect Danes will make forms of manic depression cool from now on, as in: “I’m just in my manic phase, it’ll pass.” [Cue insight of unimaginable profundity.]

Of course the nub of the series and of last night’s episode in particular was that there was method in Carrie’s madness. She did indeed crack the conundrum, she worked out the link between Brody and terrorist master Nazir just as she succumbed to anaesthesia and electro convulsive therapy which will wipe her short-term memory at the start of the second series.

I also loved Mandy Patinkin as Sol (that’s how all the characters pronounced his name, even if it’s meant to be spelled Saul). You had to feel for him last night, losing Carrie to ECT just as he lost his wife back to her native India earlier in the series. Like Toby Siegler in West Wing or Dr Green Bean in ER he’s the gruffly lovable, intellectual character totally wedded to his work and therefore unlucky in his private life.

Anyway, we got resolution in that mad Carrie did thwart a terrorist suicide bomber mission, even if she, the authorities and most of the people involved were unaware of the fact. Aside from some Mitchell and Webb-style camera work which could have been comic in other hands, scenes of Brody fiddling with his ball-bearing and explosive-loaded vest in the toilet of a secure bunker with half the US government a few feet away were tense indeed. My palms are sweating again as I think about it.

Great stuff. I now see why Lewis couldn’t say on Graham Norton’s UK chat show a few weeks back whether he would be in the second series or not. I hope he is, he’s brilliant in this part and a second series won’t typecast him forever. Just get on and make the thing.


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Homeland on Channel 4

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Homeland on Channel 4

Damian Lewis as Brody in Homeland

So many things to post about but for now I’m thinking of Homeland, the US drama featuring Brit actor Damian Lewis that started on Channel 4 on Sunday.

I find Lewis an interesting actor. He’s not my favourite person to look at on TV but I always enjoy whatever he’s in. He definitely has talent (like he needs me to write this, he was nominated for a Golden Globe). He carrys off this American supposed war hero part without a flaw. The female lead Claire Danes actually won a Golden Globe for her performance in this drama as a rookie CIA agent who has been “dealing” with her issues via anti-pyschotic drugs since she was 22. I hope her story turns out to be just as interesting as Brody’s.

The Homeland plot revolves around a particular piece of contemporary American paranoia: that one of their own soldiers may have been “turned” by radical Islamic treatment and torture into a terrorist who is out to commit an atrocity on American soil. C4 is even running an online vote on the matter, such is the intrigue about whether Lewis’ character Brody is a friend or foe. For my money, at the end of episode one, I reckon he is a terrorist but we’ll have to stay tuned to find out.

Thanks to C4 for buying in this production. It made me miss Upstairs Downstairs on BBC 1 but I didn’t see the first series of that drama anyway. Amazing how the reworked classic has been eclipsed by Downton Abbey.

I admit I did get sucked into Call the Midwife and was one of the 9 million or so watching the final episode earlier on Sunday. In some ways it was middle of the road, mumsy, feel-good Sunday night TV. But you can’t argue with the lyrics of the closing song, “Why do fools fall in love?” And you can’t ignore something featuring Jenny Agutter. A part of me will always want to be her as Bobby in the Railway Children.

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Belated Happy New Year

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BBC 1 adaptation of Birdsong

More than a month since my last post. Feels like a confession. Belated Happy New Year to you.

Great Expectations, Edwin Drood, Sherlock, Birdsong. BBC 2′s Stargazing Live. What haven’t I been watching of late? I’ve even found my box set of Mad Men and picked up where I left off in season two.

But what did we make of Birdsong last night? I found the book graphic enough and certainly shots in last night’s BBC 1 adaptation of a shelled soldier with literally all his innards hanging out were stomach turning. The sex was also quite explicit – my aunt and I (watching together) suddenly found cushions to plump and reasons to leave the room for a minute or so…

I shall be watching Birdsong again next week, not least because I can’t remember much at all of the story from the book. Except I remember a difficult scene in which our hero sits in a crater on no man’s land for some time with an expiring corpse. Or was that Pat Parker’s Regeneration trilogy? I confuse the two.

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A robust BBC

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Polar bear cubs in the wild or in captivity?

The briefest of posts, because I really want to go out to buy some Christmas stamps, to say how refreshing it was to hear BBC director general Mark Thompson being robust in his defence of the BBC at yesterday’s media select committee hearing.

It may just have been the way the Today programme’s Yesterday in Parliament slot was edited at about 06.45 this morning but Thompson came across as a staunch defender of both Jeremy Clarkson’s right to make a joke and of polar bears to be filmed in different places. If only Thompson had been this good at presenting the context for a situation when the Jonathan Ross/Andrew Sachs row exploded three years ago.

From what I heard on Radio 4 Thomson and BBC chairman Chris Patten expressly told MPs that Clarkson’s “joke” about shooting striking public sector workers in front of their families was a joke. A joke made, they said, as part of a comment on how far the BBC bends over backwards to get balance to any story. If the BBC sacked everyone who offended people with their jokes they wouldn’t have many people working for them. And, said Patten, MPs would have to explain to the many Clarkson and Top Gear fans (there are some) why their favourite presenter was no longer on TV. This, despite 32,000 complaints about Clarkson’s comment.

So different from October 2008 when Ross was suspended for six months after making a joke which only a very few people heard and complained about until the press whipped up a storm of protest. I felt there was no context from the DG back then.

Also amusing was Thompson’s single “no” to the question of whether narration from BBC 1’s Frozen Planet would be re-edited to more accurately suggest that footage of tiny polar bear cubs was filmed in captivity and not in the wild. I have watched all the Frozen Planet episodes and must admit I assumed the bear cubs were wild. At least I didn’t stop watching and wonder where and how the crew had got that remarkable up-close footage of two polar bear cubs feeding from their sleepy mother in a snow den. We had just seen a female polar bear begin to make a den, again I presume in the wild.

I was initially surprised to read this week that the cub footage had been filmed in a zoo but I totally buy the argument that those shots would have been impossible to capture in the wild and I wouldn’t have wanted my viewing pleasure interrupted by an explanatory caption about where the scenes were filmed.

So good on the BBC for being robust and defending its editorial practices. I suspect the fact the BBC got a difficult licence fee settlement from the government a year ago has sharpened its sense of independence and rightly so.

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Life’s too short

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Neeson and Davis in Life's Too Short

Life certainly is too short to be uncomfortable. And I am uncomfortable watching the new BBC 2 sitcom by Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant.

Life’s Too Short is a spoof documentary, in the style of Gervais’ first hit The Office, about a dwarf. Despite Gervais’ protestations to the contrary, it feels mean. Actor Warwick Davis plays a version of himself trying to get acting roles and running an agency for other people of short stature.

I liked the first episode of the series because it featured Liam Neeson imploring Gervais and Merchant in their spoof agency to get him into stand-up comedy. As with Extras, Gervais and Merchant are at their best when they get a major celebrity to send themselves up. Neeson kept drifting from the “comedy” into tales of death and despair. Very amusing.

But Warwick Davis sending himself up is another matter. Since the first two episodes, which also featured Johnny Depp, Davis’ futile self-aggrandising has been the basis of every scene. Gervais told the Guardian: “People confuse the subject of a joke with the target of a joke.” Yes they do. And it’s not a funny joke. Last night, I turned off.

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Keeping calm and carrying on

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Original poster

This morning again the first thing my older daughter said after waking and coming downstairs was: “I don’t want to go to school.” I nodded and tried to look sympathetic. Then carried on with what I was doing. We’ve had this before – last week after her first day at her new school when she sobbed and sobbed and pleaded to be taken back to her old school. Then on Sunday night she talked quite calmly about how the work is harder at her new school and how she doesn’t want to have to change for PE because she has to wear a tie at this new school and she doesn’t know how to tie a tie. Nor does she want to be shown how to loosen it, lift it over her head and then put it back on again after PE. Nor will she accept that she could just leave the tie off after PE until a teacher asks her why she isn’t wearing one. She doesn’t want to talk to the teacher about how to tie and tie. She doesn’t want me to talk to the teacher to say she’s finding the adjustment to a new school difficult.

When we get to school, she is mildly aggressive given we’re standing in a playground with 270 other kids and their parents and neither of us wants a scene. She shoves her book bag into me, then when it’s time for the kids to line up she says, “Go away.” She shoves me away. When I look back as I’m leaving I can’t catch her eye.

Over breakfast this morning she asked me in a high-pitched voice to help her, help her with a puzzle in her Puffin Post magazine. Could I just do all the puzzles on this page? Stupidly I didn’t say it’s breakfast time, I’ve only been awake half an hour and I’ve already made sandwiches and put out breakfast things, I don’t want to do puzzles at this time of day. I started doing the puzzle while eating cereal, writing the answers to missing Christmas song lyrics into a tiny space with a pencil. My older daughter complained that she couldn’t read my writing at which point I said I didn’t want to do the puzzle just then and it was hard to fit the answer into the space available. She said again that she doesn’t want to go to school.

My younger daughter meanwhile had been upstairs writing a story since she woke up. When I went upstairs to bring their uniforms and underwear down so they can dress in the sitting room in front of the telly as is their wont I told my younger daughter it was breakfast time and asked her to come downstairs. “No,” she replied. She says no to everything I ask at the moment. Sometimes, when I don’t have a blank piece of paper to give her or won’t give her a biscuit just before tea time, she just screams instead of saying no and jumps up and down on the spot. She is almost seven.

Today, when it was time to leave the house I suggested my younger daughter put on a winter coat rather than a mac as the weather is getting colder. She said she doesn’t like her winter coat so I said OK, wear the mac. Then she said she wanted to wear her Gap zip up cardigan instead. I said no, that is not for school, it’s for the weekends. She started screaming and threw her mac on the floor saying she wouldn’t wear it. I picked it up and asked her to put it on, trying to stay calm. She refused. I asked her twice more. She refused twice more. I snapped and cuffed her on the arm.

I’m not proud of it but I feel cross very quickly at the moment. Last night before tea my younger daughter was screaming about something and I slapped the table so hard the palm of my hand stung. I get so instantly frustrated with her defiance, against a backdrop of being generally wound up by either one of them whingeing and because I feel under pressure to “get things right”, to get to school on time rather than after the whistle has gone in the school playground, to get both girls to eat a decent supper, to get to sleep at a decent time so we’re all a bit less stressed out. Never mind getting a new house sorted out or doing some paid work.

“Don’t boss me about,” my younger daughter keeps saying to me. “I’m the grown up,” I say. And anyway, asking her to brush her teeth or get out of the way of an oncoming bicycle are not instances, in my mind, of bossing her about but of an adult supervising a child as they grow in the world. My younger daughter obviously sees it all as control. And when I think I’m giving them freedom to watch DVDs before breakfast and while they’re getting dressed, or to watch telly in the evening before and after tea or when I leave the computer out for them to use or offer to read them a story they either take it for granted that they should be allowed to do these things or they don’t want whatever is being offered.

One of my pressure points, or resentments if you like, is that I feel I’m doing everything I can to ease the transition to a new home and a new school. Plus I am doing all the things I usually do for them: taking them to school each day, picking them up from school so they can come home and relax, ensuring they’ve got the right, clean uniform, shining their shoes, helping them with homework without doing it for them then putting it in their bookbags on the right day, helping them with spellings and reading books, remembering an instrument, remembering the school forms that need returning, cooking what I consider to be a decent meal every night with vegetables that they don’t want, making a packed lunch that is filling but has a chocolate treat in it, and so on and so on. When they are either defiant in my younger daughter’s case or aggressive or moaning in my older daughter’s case I can feel a bit petty. I can think, “I’m not going to make you a packed lunch tomorrow.” Or, “I’m not going to cook a meal tomorrow, see how you like that.” Or even, “I might just get on a train somewhere and leave you to sort things out with daddy, who isn’t even in the house between 7.30am and 7.30pm three days a week. See how you all get on.”

I know it’s pathetic and unrealistic. I am the adult. I should be able to hold things together and not lose my temper. I should see that we are all over-wrought and we don’t need to be. We don’t have to “get things right”. We just have to be good enough at what we’re doing, to get by and be happy and healthy.

Every day I think today I won’t shout, I won’t rise to the bait if either of the children is challenging. I will lead by example, speaking calmly and quietly. And every day I fail. Today I made one of those posters that says: “Keep calm and carry on.” I’ve put one up in the kitchen. Let’s see if it helps when they’re home later this afternoon.

What’s more, I am lowering my standards so we can all feel under a bit less pressure.

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