Two incidents this week revealed quite useful lessons about responsible interviewing. The Independent’s star columnist Johann Hari was found to have been quoting interviewees from other sources, while passing the quotes off as his own interview. Here’s Johann Hari’s own explanation. And Mark Lawson’s analysis of it all is definitely worth reading before you go further.
John Humphreys' shorthand notes (BBC)
Mr Hari’s technique meant he used accurate quotes, but not ones he’d always acquired himself. Strangely the opposite problem to one I’d been bothered by throughout my career mostly in broadcast interviewing — the number of print journos approximating quotes based on poor or even no notes. Big Newspaper interviewers were often the worst for having no shorthand. I noticed when a couple came up to Oxford to interview students like me.
Victim of a 1985 German tabloid stitch up (I'm standing to the right of The Dude, bowling)
I should say that I have good reason for my lifelong concern about accurate quoting. A misquoted interview I gave to the local Leverkusen newspaper (admittedly in German while on an exchange course in North Rhine Westphalia while an an A-level student) made a front page scandal and upset the headmaster of the Gymnasium. The reporter had twisted my quotes about the difference between my private girls’ school and a mid 80s German state grammar with long haired literature teachers into their own tabloid attack on supposedly lazy, disrespectful German students and their rubbish education system . It’s funny now, but it freaked me out then.
So I’ve always been sensitive about quoting people accurately and representatively, if you’re using only 1 bite out of a long interview. While TV fakery inspires much anger, in fact broadcast news can only underquote– using ludicrously short soundbites. But reliant as it is on showing/playing actual sound/picture of the actual person, it is genuine. The biggest problem is not being able to use a long enough answer, that carries the full nuance of the point being made.
In TV in cutting down a programme interview, rather than just picking a clip for a report, it’s normal to watched back the whole interview and log the answers pretty fully, before picking the final clips. It gives you an awareness of what kind of interview you conducted, what were the most important themes and answers and what the interviewee might have expected you to take away from it. It’s a good discipline, even if you usually know which the good answers are and mark them at the time of the interview. When I do print interviews with shorthand and no tape recorder, I have carried over the habit.
Meanwhile Labour Leader Ed Miliband gave a pool interview via ITV reporter Damon Green about the imminent public sector strike, in which he parroted off pretty much the same stock answer to every question. Damon Green’s blog on the experience is a recommended read, too. He asked good, simple questions and tried to get a more “human” answer than the only one Mr Miliband was prepared to give. Worth noting that if Mr Miliband had bothered to answer any one of them properly, he would have come across a lot better.
Ed Miliband’s PR team had clearly worked out all the bits of the argument they wanted to make — “striking while talks are ongoing is wrong, parents are unhappy, but both sides are behaving irresponsibly”. (That’s my summary from hearing the same answer 6 times). In a weird reversal of the usual problem, Mr Miliband gave exactly the kind of approximate all encompassing quote , that sounded like a precis of an actual quote, vaguely remembered by a print journalist with no shorthand and no tape recorder. He did not give an interview and if he didn’t want to give more than a single answer he should have said so. It’s a terrible own goal, given the amount of control his PRs had tried to put on the conditions of filming and the content itself. While a pool interview usually results in only 1 clip being used, it’s not for the interviewee to decide which one. Attempts by politicians to control the whole process tends to backfire. It’s not usually done so ineptly, though.
So in short the lessons for good interviews are: Ask good questions. Answer the questions. And record and write them/use them fairly. If you quote from elsewhere, attribute it correctly. Err that’s it.
They were playing the jaunty TV theme tune to “Jeeves and Wooster” on Monday night when guests walked into the Financial Times summer party at Lancaster House near Green Park in London. It reminded me of how much I enjoyed the escapism of that show on Sunday nights in the early 90s when many of my friends, all in our early 20s, were losing their jobs in the terrible recession then.
Party venue Lancaster House (photo from NATO)
Politicians, city Financiers, journalists, a historian, and even that bloke who wrote The Sloane Ranger Handbook shared the summer evening on the terrace while a major public sector strike looms in the world outside. Retail billionaire Sir Philip Green, he of the Monaco-registered company, who advises the Government on more efficient tax spending, was discussing buying four pairs of very special shoes with a group of business men, while the staff served oysters, foie gras and champagne with no apparent irony.
So far so 80s – the stereotype of the superrich living in another Britain to the broken industrial towns.
A History of the 80s in 1 handbag. (photo: PA)
Just as the 60s was to my generation reduced to a collection of heavily edited images and symbols – moptops, the Pill and flower power – so the 1980s throws up totems like The Specials’ Ghost Town (number one 30 years ago); the Iron Lady’s hand bag (auctioned for charity for £25,000 on Monday), symbol of the supposed wrecking of much traditional British industry, and the Yuppie – regarded as the shiny suited, mobilephone toting leech of the new financial services industry.
Anyone who remembers Arthur Scargill, leading miners into a major strike as they headed in to spring and summer 1984, might see a superficial parallel in the decision of teachers now to strike at the end of the summer term after the end of GCSEs and A-Levels.
Ed Miliband seemed to have cottoned on to the comparison, warning of the dangers of a re-run of dark aspects of 80s political culture: a divided nation and internecine conflict within the Left. But ideologically, the big divisions are long broken down. Labour shadow ministers at the FT party were very careful to warn of the dangers of Scargill style union “extremism”. It was Gordon Brown who invited Lady Thatcher to Downing Street. A few months ago I noticed Arthur Scargill’s name on a court list at the High Court (Employment division) in a long running, but quiet legal wrangle with the National Union of Mineworkers.
Geographically, the jobs split between the southeast – especially financial services-dominated London – and the North seems to be growing anew, but nowhere near the scale of the shutting down of jobs and traditional industries of the early 1980s recession. Jonathan Porter, who was himself a very political student at Oxford in the 80s, now at the independent National Institute for Economic and Social Research (NIESR) says the scale of job losses has been far smaller, and the “pain” of cuts far more evenly distributed across income groups than in the 80s; a situation which he says, one could argue is technically “fairer”. But the sense that the financial services sector, has evaded paying for its mistakes and sponged off tax payers is what sticks in the craw of many who have long given up on a final salary pension scheme or a job for life.
The most startling difference between then and now is how the political classes are nervous of being seen to be posh. Margaret Thatcher learned to talk posh, but these days 20 yr olds cannot remember a time before Tony Blair dropped his h’s and we were invited to think of David Cameron as ”Dave”. Public resentment now is of not of self made wealth itself, but of excessive tax avoidance and suspicion of the authenticity of empathy claimed by the Chancellor and Prime Minister pushing through severe austerity measures, while living off or standing to benefit from inherited fortunes.
At the start of the 80s , The Sunday Times rich list was dominated by inherited wealth. A strange parallel to the 60s is that much of the swinging in London, when you look closely, was done by aristos and old money, partying with the working class heroes who we choose to remember, at the hip art galleries and music venues. Check out the story behind the lyrics to A Day in the Life, if you don’t believe me.
And what of the parallel 80s Royal Wedding? With her 1 O-level and a modest nursery assistant post at the “Young England” kindergarten, Lady Di may have been mocked at the time, but she did hold the kind of entry level job that’s disappearing for so many modern school leavers. By contrast, one could argue that royal Housewife Kate Middleton’s part taxpayer- funded University education hardly seems worth it.
A proper schoolleaver job
As for Lady Thatcher, Oxford dons famously snubbed the former Somerville research scientist in 1987 by refusing to grant her an honorary degree, because of her government’s higher education cuts. The gesture was criticised by some then, too as the arrogance of a privileged elite on the grocer’s daughter who challenged such cabals – the medical profession was another. But now it’s only the medical establishment that’s managed to fight off the brunt of NHS ideological changes. The Dons’ grand gesture seems almost comic when compared to the cuts inflicted by the LibDem backed Tory coalition.
Ideological game playing with the futures of the young continues at a breathtaking pace. Even as some universities are slashing degree courses to cope with funding withdrawal, Universities’ Minister David Willetts announced on Wednesday plans for manipulated market “competition” among them. Student protests were ignored last year, as much as in 1984, when mounted police charged those on Westminster bridge, protesting over the introduction of tuition fees.
And what could be more bizarre a contrast with the Specials’ anthem for doomed youth, Ghost Town, than UKUncut demonstrators being wrestled to the ground protesting U2’s tax avoidance at Glastonbury? Where the early 80s saw inner city youth riots over obvious triggers – the loss of many traditional starter jobs, police racism – school leavers now appear to be in danger of turning into an atomised generation. Trapped living with parents for years more, fearing the size of university fees, and the lack of worthwhile jobs, they might not riot, but internalise their anger. Depression, alcoholism, domestic violence, even suicide? How would you know? When they turn the 2010s into a sequence of visual snapshots for one of those nostalgia shows, I wonder if that will register?
To finish, where I started, it’s worth reviewing Privilege from maverick film maker, Peter Watkins. His vision of popstars exploited by the political and Religious Establishment may seem heavy handed, and is certainly not a literal prediction come true; particularly given the steep decline in influence of The Church of England. But in his dark view of media manipulation and propaganda there is something to ponder. Jerusalem is of course the anthem they sang at the Royal Wedding in April.
This has been superceded by the longer post abovewhich is the full comment piece on how far we really are re-living aspects of the 1980s: major strikes, job cuts, recession, Two Nations. Since the Royal wedding in April I’ve been thinking about parallels and differences a lot. Particularly as the 80s has, like the 60s was for me, been repackaged into a selective set of icons.
Here’s a clip from maverick film maker, Peter Watkins’ cult movie, Privilege. His vision of 60s popstars exploited by the political and Religious Establishment may seem heavy handed, and is certainly not a literal prediction come true. The Church of England’s decline being the most obvious difference. But there is something to ponder in his dark view of media manipulation and propaganda to divert public attention from social division and unrest. The posh accents of the corporate executives and politicians captured the inconvenient truth about the 60s which, like the early 80s, saw inherited money and privileged people dominate the major spheres of influence, even if we’ve chosen only to remember the working class heroes of pop music and art. Jerusalem is of course the anthem they sang at Prince William and Katherine Middleton’s wedding.
The liberal hoax for a “good cause” has a long tradition. Most bizarre in Tom MacMaster’s defence of his long and increasingly reported fake identity as Amina Arraf, an imprisoned lesbian Syrian blogger, was his claim that he was challenging Western “orientalist” attitudes to Middle Eastern women.
A heartbreaking work of staggering genius?
On his “damascusgaygirl” website, where he admitted the hoax on June 12th, MacMaster wrote: “While the narrative voıce may have been fictional, the facts on thıs blog are true and not mısleading as to the situation on the ground.”
It’s a defence that has been used for decades by those who wrote fake Holocaust memoirs, that have been turning up since the 1960s. One of the most significant was “Fragments” from 1995. It turned out Binjamin Wilkomirski was not a Polish Jewish child but a Swiss journalist, Bruno Doessekker, who for some years posed as a Holocaust survivor till the truth was discovered in 1999. When it was, a literary argument blew up about whether his memoir still told an essential truth.
And of course such memoirs take longer to uncover as hoaxes. As Sociology professsor Frank Furedi once put it:”The notion that a victim’s version of events should not be questioned conveys the idea that they have some privileged access to the truth.”
No one disputes the importance of fictionalising or simplifying where necessary in an authentic memoir. If This Is a Man by Primo Levi, the Italian chemist who survived Auschwitz, was started in January 1946. Every day he would write down memories on scraps of paper as they came to him.
If there is a a comparable scandal to Macmaster’s it’s probably Alex Haley’s novel “Roots” (1976) and TV miniseries, which helped transformed American attitudes to its legacy of slavery and had a huge impact on black people round the world. The American writer, claimed to have traced his real ancestors back to Kunte Kinte –brought from Africa and even to have found relatives in Gambia. Haley was successfully sued for plagiarism by Harold Courlander for lifting passages from his earlier novel “The African”(1967). And Harvard University professor, Dr Henry Louis Gates Jr admitted in 1998: “Most of us feel it’s highly unlikely that Alex actually found the village whence his ancestors sprang. Roots is a work of the imagination rather than strict historical scholarship. It was an important event because it captured everyone’s imagination.”
A fiction based on fact that had a politial impact in the USSR
Perhaps the strangest thing about hoax memoirs/blogs is that fiction such as 1984 has often done more to expose totalitarian regimes. Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s A Day In the life of Ivan Denisovich (1962) was clearly based on real knowledge of the Soviet gulags, but didn’t claim to be a memoir.
What’s most worrying about Macmaster’s fake blog is that it could only work by masquerading as documentary fact. He attempted to run with breaking news events at a time when social media has enabled a mass public to follow every development as it’s uploaded. It’s hard to see how he wouldn’t have been caught out sooner rather than later. There is probably a tale about how in the privacy of one’s home, he was seduced by the attention into embellishing his creation.
MacMaster’s caused outrage among bloggers, particularly given the real risks some Middle Eastern bloggers are taking to get out news despite threats from the authorities. What’s so distressing about the nature of his hoax, is that it was about Syria, where the regime’s clampdown on foreign journalists has left the outside world desperate for eyewitness accounts.
Perhaps reassuringly for journalists working for recognised news organisations, though, the hoax has also revealed the importance of basic fact checking and authentication. Refugees at the Turkish border are revealing much about the brutality of the Syrian security forces. Nothing though, removes the nasty feeling among those who were following Amina’s posts that their real concern was exploited by a man who still insists he was telling some kind of truth.
This was written for the Channel 4 News website. You can read the original here.
Looks like chess, but Gaddafi is really playing poker
This bizarre image of the Libyan colonel playing chess, while continuing to defy NATO airstrikes and international condemnation made headlines round the world. And according to a new book, fuelling the Miliband brothers’ Labour leadership feud, Ed Miliband was a serious teenage computer gamer: “As a child, Ed loved playing computer games such as Manic Miner, on his ZX81 home computer, when he was not studying.” But who says that’s a slur? Read on.
In the 1985 Cold War geek classic WarGames, the Pentagon’s war simulation computer is an expert at chess, but it’s unable to distinguish the board game from reality. It is only when Matthew Broderick’s teen gamer forces it to confront the simple futility of Noughts and Crosses that World War Three is averted.
Teen popcorn fare it may have been, but it captured the idea of how games shed their meanings over time. Chess started out as a battlefield simulation for Indian princes. It evolved into a game of strategy so stylised that being good at one has no connection to being good at the other. Napoleon was a rubbish chess player.
Computer games make it hard for humans to distinguish the game from the real thing. The US Defence technology research agency, DARPA, is currently enlisting gamers to hunt submarines in simulations. Their crowd-sourced strategies will be fed into a neural network that will guide real underwater hunter drones.
Games tell us a lot about the motives of their inventors. But their evolution tells us more about the societies who play them.
Capitalist trumps Quaker values
Take Monopoly, claimed by its owners to be the most popular modern board game. It was
originally patented as “The Landlord’s Game” in 1903 by the Quaker and Georgist economist Lizzie Magie to illustrate the evils of America’s property focussed capitalism and the need for a land value tax. A key aspect of game play — selling properties at a fixed price – was to accord with Quakers’ opposition to auctions.
As a critique of capitalism, Monopoly was a massive own goal. First it got stolen: Charles
Darrow pretended to have invented it and sold it to the Parker Brothers in 1935. And secondly, it turned out that people enjoyed pretending to be the plutocrat with the top hat, exploiting their tenants.
Board games have served as immersive propaganda for more than just capitalists and Quakers. According to Irving Finkel, a games historian, and assistant keeper of cuneiform inscriptions at The British Museum, Nazi Germany couldn’t get enough of ideological board games. “Bomber uber England” (1940) awarded points for hitting major cities, London was worth 100, Liverpool 40, while deducting points for hitting areas already under Nazi control, such as Brussels. “Juden Heraus” (Jews Out) (1936) a Parcheesi-type counter game, rewarded players for dispatching Jews to the 4 deportation squares. The patriotic inventor actually raised the ire of a senior SS commander for creating entertainment out of a very serious national mission.
In the drab 70s and 80s simple board and puzzle games, such as the code-breaking Mastermind (not the TV quiz) and Yahtzee flattered us into thinking we were glamorous intellectuals. Meanwhile Dungeons and Dragons offered adolescents an escape from dull suburbia.
In the 90s and 2000s the National Lottery and Jedward-style X-Factor successes have fuelled a plethora of nerve shredding games on TV. They promote luck over judgement and low cunning over knowledge. Huge numbers watch poker, Deal or No Deal and its imitators. I once found myself in an ITN makeup room explaining to Golden Balls host, Jasper Carrott that the finale of his TV show was the Prisoner’s Dilemma, as expounded in Game Theory.
Jasper Carrott: The Prisoner's Dilemma
Each player must separately decide whether to share or hoard the jackpot. Depending on the combination of answers, one or both may walk away empty handed. Like in The Apprentice, it’s your abilities as a stitch-up artist that we’re interested in, not your brains.
If Monopoly was the game that defined the Great Depression, the game of our era is the German bestseller, The Settlers of Catan, which has sold 15 million sets in 30 languages since 1995. It’s a “God” game, like The Sims and Civilisation. The premise is of conquering “terra nullius”. Settlers compete to build roads, settlements and cities, trading natural resources – ore, timber, livestock. Robbers occasionally take supplies. The game has proved a global success, notably in its online version in Silicon Valley, reportedly played by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg.
Settllers of Catan: German Kolonisation gaming
Niall Ferguson would no doubt approve. Irving Finkel says he’s stunned by how monumentally boring the game is, but it’s proved a long term hit with even the Wii generation. Was Catan really uninhabited before the settlers arrived? I haven’t found any players who care. Maybe the German designers remain unencumbered by the kind of colonial guilt that would make such a game an impossibility to invent in Britain. The latest variants include the Old Testament –era Settlers of Canaan (each player is a different tribe of Israel). The popularity of The Settlers of Catan reveals only that board games can be forgotten or reinvented in a country as quickly as political regimes.
The Twitter-fuelled regime changes in North Africa also benefit from a games-based
perspective. Bush approached foreign policy as a Texan plays poker, calling Middle Eastern leaders’ bluffs. Obama plays it as chess. Meanwhile, the Arabs in the streets are playing Angry Birds.
That’s what the uprisings in Egypt, Tunisia and Libya were quickly dubbed after the addictive Finnish computer game, in which birds are driven to exact extreme revenge against the green pigs who have raided their nests. Parodies of the game, featuring Gaddafi in a bunker, managed to capture the simple underestimated power of people who’ve suffered years of burning injustice.
A decade ago Saddam Hussein went all-in on a bluff that he had weapons of mass destruction. George W Bush called his bluff and raised him Operation Desert Storm. Barack Obama is more a of a straight chess player. The high score of killing Osama Bin Laden after a decade long hunt required linear computer gaming logic and stamina. The kind of endurance that makes professional online gamers wear nappies to see them through to the win.
Computer gaming requires stamina, not cunning.
With a maverick like Gaddafi, Obama made the classic mistake of amateur chess players who believe that they’re playing a game of logic.At Grandmaster level, chess is as much about bluff as poker.
In match six of their 1993 World Championship duel in London, Nigel Short exploited a
21st move error by Gary Kasparov that should have secured Short victory. (See how in the analysis above: watch from 7:45). Kasparov, though aware he was in real danger of losing, played his 25th move and, as documented in Dominic Lawson’s “End Game”, with only 8 minutes on the clock “sat back in his chair with a relaxed expression on his face, put his watch back on his wrist and walked off the stage.” Short, flummoxed by Kasparov’s apparent confidence, lost his own, and ended up drawing the game he could and should have won.
Gadaffi: Mad Dog sometimes. Maverick always
Though Gaddafi’s letter to Barack Obama, expressing hopes for his reelection was trumped by the Abbottabad mission, the Colonel continues to outsmart NATO’s supposed moral mission in Libya: Take his recent encouragment of boatloads of African migrants across the Med where their presence creates humanitarian embarrassment for NATO, and Italy and France squabble over keeping them out. Cunning beats brains.
And what about our own Prime Minister? His defence cuts, just ahead of NATO operations in Libya might have lowered our standing in a traditional military board game like “Campaign” (1971).
Campaign: Napoleonic era gaming from 1971
But David Cameron’s £650 million pound education aid package for Pakistan in exchange for tackling corruption and terrorism, unpopular at home in many ways, is exactly the sort of mutually beneficial trade that would score a couple of victory points in The Settlers of Catan. And I also hear that he’s played every level of Angry Birds.
I haven’t been able to do fair analysis of the rapidly changing situation in Syria and Robert Gates’ scathing comments on Friday June 10th about European NATO allies’ “unacceptable” military attitude. Perhaps “Campaign” is not so irrelevant after all.
Written with special thanks to the font of knowledge that is Irving Finkel, a games historian, and assistant keeper of cuneiform inscriptions at The British Museum who kindly took the time to talk to me, particularly about the Nazi games covered in this article. And also to Brian Millar (@arthurascii) — a master of gaming in his own right.
I was fascinated by an interview with two Cardiff schoolboys on Radio 4 this morning. Their school team had won a national “Shares for Schools” competition and two of them were interviewed in the business slot about how they’d outperformed the FTSE 100 by 34% — well above the highest rated fundmanagers. It made me wonder what had changed since before the economic crash that was blamed on macho culture in high finance.
“Well obviously, we went for high-risk”, said one of the students, when asked how they’d done it. Both young men were charming and refreshingly no nonsense about their strategy. They said they’d put the bulk of their £1500 initial sum into high risk shares, pulled big profits and then moved the gains into safer stocks for the rest of the competition period. Commodities attracted them, because their high prices confirmed to the children that natural resources for making stuff were “scarce.” They also said they tried to avoid buying and selling too much, keeping close to the minimum of at least 1 trade a month, to avoid losing money on fees.
To be fair investment adviser, David Buick, tempered his praise with a note for listeners about the potential pitfalls of investing in very small high risk companies. And we are all familiar with news stories of the senior citizens’ share clubs that outperform the City dealers,too. We all delight in that. But is a fundamental principle unchanged? Is it still perfectly logical for the self-styled Masters of the Universe to gamble big, because that’s the only way you win? The rules of the school competition — with a fixed sum to invest, a fixed time frame to aim for give the whole exercise the feel of a game.
One of the students said he was definitely planning to go into share investment as a career. We all wish them well. But I wonder if anyone could come up with a simulation about how their generation is going to negotiate building up a pension while trying to buy a first home, and paying off tuition fees? That’s not something the pure linear gaming of share dealing answers. Super Mario as opposed to Chess?
Former Nightclub bouncer Levi Bellfield is on trial at the Old Bailey in London for the murder of 13 year old Amanda Dowler and the attempted kidnap of 11 year old Rachel Cowles in March 2002. This is my report for Channel 4 News today when his ex-partner, Emma Mills gave evidence about the days before and after Milly’s disappearance. In 2008 Levi Bellfield was convicted of the murders of Marsha McDonnell, 19, in 2003 and 22-year-old Amelie Delagrange in 2004 with the use of a blunt weapon. He denies all the charges in this trial and the case continues.
Further reading: Background on evidence in the trial to date at the bottom of my article on the Channel 4 News website.
This was written for the RHS Chelsea Flower Show magazine. Thanks to them for permission to post it here.
Foreign correspondents don’t have a great reputation for gardening. What with a new OJ Simpson trial about to start, an imminent presidential election, and Golden Age Hollywood celebrities having a habit of dying unexpectedly, I didn’t think I’d be any different. It was August 1996 and I was moving into the BBC Los Angeles Correspondent’s apartment – at the top of a plain concrete triplex on a steep hill in the old suburb of Silverlake, just above the 101 Hollywood Freeway.
But the first time I stepped inside I felt like Dorothy after the cyclone; opening a door from a black and white world and stepping into a Technicolor Oz. The front door opened not into a room, but onto a generous open air deck, built on the edge of a steep hill, partly shaded by a wooden pergola. Green tendrils hung carelessly around the edges of a stunning view of Downtown LA’s skyscrapers, which were outlined against a pure blue sky. A look around the deck revealed a sorrier picture. It was like an insult to that view: A tinsel green piece of Astro Turf for a lawn, a white plastic patio table and chairs. There were two long but empty flowerboxes along the balcony and, in a grey hexagonal planter, I saw the wizened skeleton of some sort of unidentifiable plant. A paper like husk fluttered from the tip of a wing. The soil was grey in its state of dehydration.
Then I saw the hosepipe right there next to it. By instinct I put down my suitcase and turned on the tap. Within 24 hours the skeleton began to reanimate. The paper husk turned from sepia to deep cerise, softening and opening up like a Chinese paper lantern trick. Within a week I recognised it with delight as a thriving bougainvillea, just like the elegant jewelled green creepers that filled the city – growing wild by the cracked concrete freeways and along the high walls of the manicured gardens of Bel-Air.
Paper flower trick — Bougainvillea (Copyright BDunn)
My weekdays were spent rushing between courthouses, downtown offices and movie studios to file my reports back to London from a windowless box of a room in the ABC Network News studios. But that first weekend I went to a garden centre where, unable to fathom the seasons idle thoughts of James Ellroy’s noir thriller ‘The Black Dahlia’ made me, on a whim, try a packet of dahlia seeds in the barren flower boxes of my balcony.
Newly married, but separated by my six month posting, I turned my attention to my little deck garden. It seemed to take so little effort to make it flourish. Just regular watering, the California sun did the rest. A neighbour did have to complain once that my diligent watering occasionally leaked through gaps in the deck to their apartment below.
Soon I had fat dahlias in bright cheeky colours – red, orange and yellow. They sat there happily as I sipped my Earl Grey tea, reading the morning papers and watching the sun rise behind Downtown’s skyscrapers each morning. I strung up a simple washing-line – the warm breeze drying my clothes in an hour and scenting them faintly of clean grass, while my American neighbours ran the energy hungry electric dryer in the laundry room. In the evening I would go running past the pointed heads of the Bird of Paradise flowers, which grew in the grander gardens of the Spanish Mission and Modernist homes around the sparkling Silver Lake Reservoir. But I’d end my day on my deck, the dusky haze lit up by police helicopters buzzing like insects over the city’s sprawl.
My garden had a view like this
Bird of Paradise flowers — the daffodils of Silverlake gardens
The surprises of my LA garden continued when my husband came to stay at Christmas. He expressed his concern about the large papery wasps’ nest he’d spotted in the carport. While we stood there looking at it, there emerged an emerald green flash and a whir of tiny wings. We smiled at each other in our shared discovery of the hummingbirds.
During that posting my apartment got burgled. They took my Victorian engagement ring with its cat’s eye rubies and diamonds. But I remember my time on Westerly Terrace with love, for the jewels that grew and flew in my secret garden.
While there’s been much surprise at the choice of Kenneth Branagh to direct Marvel Studios’ action film Thor, there’s plenty of evidence that he was an inspired choice. This is my post today for The Spectator Arts Blog. Thanks to Simon Mason and Scott Jordan Harris for letting me post it here, too.
The bastard brother. In the tastiest characterisation of the film, Loki plots and schemes like Edmund in King Lear, but Is he really born to evil? Stolen from his race, Loki inspires much sympathy. Intelligent and patient for longterm victory, not an impetuous warrior, Loki is also Octavian to Thor’s Mark Antony. Anthony Hopkins, a veteran of King Lear, brings epic depth to the ageing King who may not be fair in passing on his kingdom.
Hamlet and Gertrude. The Oedipal complex. Evidence of the watering down of stronger drama comes in the bedroom scenes with the regal Queen Rene Russo. We all await a confrontation like Hamlet of Gertrude; as Odin lies asleep and vulnerable. Unfortunately she gets to do almost nothing. Bet Ken could’ve done really good stuff here.
Courtship. With only 1 topless shot of Thor’s rather seriously cut abs, and two chaste kisses on the hand for Astrophysicist Natalie Portman, this is definitely an action hero from the old school. Anyone else find themselves remembering the courting of the French princess from Henry V?
Brian Millar (@arthurascii) pointed out after we saw the film that Thor is Shakespeare’s Coriolanus — he is the great general who won’t be humble. He can win battles, but has no humility to win over the common people. Unfortunately in Thor the crowds of common Asgardians who gather for Thor’s coronation seem to disappear for the rest of the film (another victim of Marvel’s demand that the film focus on the antics on earth?). So the sense of a kingdom at stake is rather lost.
Non-Shakespearean influences.
In his interview for The Hollywood Reporter (April 22 2011), Branagh listed his favourite films including Cool Hand Luke, Black Narcissus and Dog Day Afternoon. While I failed to spot explicit references to any, Thor does come in the shadow of some truly great action movie moments:
Superman II (1980): The show down in the small town
Lester’s film, unlike Thor, captures the menace of villains who were stupid, malicious or psychopathic suddenly discovering they are endowed with superpowers.The horror of the scene where Terence Stamp makes the US president “kneel before Zod” on live TV just months after the real life humiliation of the Iranian embassy hostage crisis is what Thor sorely needed. And a major personal gripe. How come, in the age of rolling news and instant Twitter updates,Thor fails to have any news media turn up as alien technology starts landing on earth and blowing up New Mexico?
The Dead Presidents: Point Break (1991)
The underutilised but hedonistic gang of warriors who hang out with Thor — some with almost no backstory — add to the sense that Thor is a cosmic surfer; with his own Point Break style band of buddies. Potential here for a spin off with The Silver Surfer?
Astral Romance: Starman (1984)
Despite the strong casting, the romance with Natalie Portman fails to grip. I suspect, again, the victim of too much rewriting on the script. The X-Files did atmosphere much better. There is little sense of threat to Earth or of love across the divide. For a model in scripting a film about alien romance and government agency pursuit, with its own desert locations, I point you to John Carpenter’s charming Starman, with Jeff Bridges and Karen Allen.
Finally, while he apparently was sent every back issue of Thor in preparation for shooting, I wonder if Kenneth Branagh took a little inspiration from this underrated 80s female bratpack movie:
Adventures in Babysitting (1987)
If he gets to do the Sequel, here’s hoping they let Branagh really make it his way.
You can read the original post on The Spectator Arts Blog here.
Since David Cameron claimed class war anthem “Eton Rifles” as one his Desert Island Discs, many political journalists seem to have bought the argument that they are “The Jam Generation”; the subject of a recent Radio 4 series. It seemed a good time re-post my piece for The Spectator arts blog writtten after they came to power last year about the cultural deadzone of the mid 80s. I should know. I was there.
They say your musical and cultural tastes are frozen by the time you’re in your early twenties. So what does it say for much of the new government that they hit that seminal moment in the mid-to-late 80s? The first thing you need to do is forget all their suspicious Estuary English and Tony Blair and David Cameron’s ‘you know’ blokeisms; and most of all, forget Dave’s choice of ‘Eton Rifles’ on Desert Island Discs. This was the era of Red Wedge and ‘Lady In Red’. ‘Oxford Blues’ inflicted Rob Lowe and a posse of poshies led by Julian Sands on our cinemas.
As someone who happened to be at Oxford at the same time, I have been lifting the repressed memories of what had been the crucial cultural influences around the group now running the country. Let me take you on a personal journey through the fashions, music and politics of a bygone age: a cultural history of the 80s in a dozen or so objects and a kind of criminal trial, hence the lettered pieces of evidence. It’s not a pretty story. Read it and give your verdict at the end.
And it begins with a dress.
Exhibit A: A Laura Ashley magenta brocade dress with leg o’mutton sleeves and big bow at the back. £33.50.
A scarlet dress for a decade that should hang its head in shame
Bought to wear to THAT 1987 Union Valentine Ball at which David Cameron also made an appearance and was photographed for posterity in black tie.
The dress still lives – hidden – in the back of my wardrobe waiting to be worn as fancy dress when my daughter’s old enough, or turned into a pair of curtains. But it survives mostly as a chilling reminder that in fashion, as much as in print, TV and politics, the 80s were the last time that it was COOL, that many teenagers aspired to look as though they’d inherited money. The curtain theme was important. An alternative to the big meringue dress was the skin tight short ruched and often strapless number (to maximise coltish legs) made, apparently out of Austrian blinds. Mustard yellow was a popular colour at the Valentine Ball of ‘87.
Exhibit B: Athena print . Ideally of a large cocktail with an umbrella standing in front of a Venetian blind- as displayed on many student bedroom walls.
Cliff Richard remained a key cultural influence through the 80s
The print is notable for its total lack of visual depth or texture. It is brightly coloured and conveys 80s glamour and excitement: Wham’s ‘Club Tropicana’ transposed into ink and paper. You could drink such cocktails at Freud’s a bar in a deconsecrated chapel.
Exhibit C: Video box set (though I doubt it was then available) of award-winning ITV drama serial Brideshead Revisited.
Contemplate with horror that ITV’s Brideshead Revisited (only 5 years old) was apparently a lifestyle guide to many new undergraduates. I remember pudgy chaps in stripy blazers and flannels taking me and my girlfriends punting: Billy Bunters trying to channel Jeremy Irons and Anthony Andrews. The one accuracy, of course, was the broken glass and vomit-flecked antics of the Bullingdon and the sporting clubs that interrupted our Saturday nights with predictable regularity. The only sign of good taste and catering? The intense American Rhode Scholars heading for careers in high finance who put on proper English Mayday breakfasts with champagne, strawberries and scones and networked: ‘Where’d you go? Not-er Dayme. Good schoool!’
The 80s was also the Era of Two Tribes. Sloane Rangers v Red Wedge.
Exhibit D: Video of Series 2 Episode 1 of BBC Comedy Series The Young Ones (first TX 1984)
The ‘University Challenge’ episode of The Young Ones, though already a few years old, is probably your best visual snapshot of Oxford’s extremes of style and political stance. Opposing Scumbag College on University Challenge was an Oxbridge team encompassing debs, hoorays and Camden boy Ben Elton, whose dad ‘bought me the Social Workers’ Party for my birthday’.
Exhibit E: A pair of stripy boxer shorts
According to my copious scribbling from the spring of 1987, Magdalen College JCR hosts a ‘plebs not debs’ party. A posh, possibly Etonian fellow student at St Edmund Hall who is to eventually go into the City is running an ‘Oxbox’ boxer shorts company from his rooms (boxer shorts are, of course, a very 80s thing) and has taken to calling me ‘Sharon’ whenever he sees me (it is his idea of a joke about the lower orders). I look to widen my social circle. I note that ‘the Socialist Workers Party, Latin American Society and Third World First are supposed to be great places to meet new people’. I don’t know who told me this and, though never explained in the diary, I actually never try out any of them. There are Young Conservatives everywhere. Militancy is wreaking internal havoc in the large Labour party contingent and future Oxfordshire MP Evan Harris is a worryingly intense and organised presence in the Liberal-SDP alliance for the General election campaign that the Conservatives win comfortably.
I have also done my first political interview for the university paper – with Labour Student Union president Stephen ‘Were you up for Portillo?’ Twigg. As with the odd subsequent politicians the subject is rather miffed that it’s not entirely complimentary. And by Spring 1987 I’ve written my first policy feature for ISIS – on panic about ‘too many’ immigrants. The only difference? The immigrant campaigners I interviewed then all now have peerages.
Time for some music now. In my room I have a small radio cassette player. Record players are on the way out, and certainly too bulky to bring up to college. So…
Exhibit F: The mix tape, with its song titles written in capitals in fading biro and entitled, though the writing is too faded to be sure: ‘Oxford 1986’.
The billets-doux of 80s courtship
The format of the day. Pretty crappy quality. My first mix tape made on my sister’s stereo in the summer holiday after A-levels is dominated by the Communards with a single Dire Straits track: ‘Romeo and Juliet’. My contemporary Toby Litt confirms my memory of ‘Don’t Leave Me This Way’ as the anthem of ‘86 to ‘87. American Glamour, led by Prince, dominated the singles charts. Tiffany, Debbie Gibson, Duran Duran, Kim Wilde and Genesis are all in the top 40. Tinny anthems fill commercial radio. (‘Nothing’s Gonna Stop us Now’ – Starship; ‘I Wanna Dance with Somebody’ – Whitney Houston). It is surely no coincidence at this point that I discover Radio 4 and do not re-tune my radio for the rest of the decade.
At the Teddy Hall freshers’ party I remember dancing to The Bangles’ ‘Walk Like An Egyptian’ (a big hit that year). Then the DJ plays Abba and all us 18-year-olds laugh. How hilarious. How novel. Abba tracks in an ironic way. Just a few years after their last hit.
The rest of my mix tape features Kate Bush’s greatest hits (I’d kind of been too young in the 70s and am catching up). My favourite mix tape track is David Sylvian and Ryuichi Sakamoto’s ‘Forbidden Colours’ (there was a big mid-80s Japanese thing that fuelled a lifelong fascination with the country. I get to meet some lovely Japanese students through future Tory culture secretary Jeremy Hunt.)
I have also put a lot of my Great Composers’ Works LPs onto cassettes. Classical music is classy in the ‘80s. The opera-themed thriller Diva is always on at the rep Cinema, the Penultimate Picture Palace. It is also French, which is very classy. I put one of my Great Composers tapes on when new potential friends come up to my room for coffee. One night a young man from the Christian Union sniffily tells me my Great Composers recording of ‘The Moonlight Sonata’ is being performed much too fast. I hadn’t thought about different recordings of classical works being good or bad. He does not become a friend.
One day I am introduced to future advertising executive and friend, David Glass, who (it’s whispered in awe) has:
Exhibit G: CD sound system with speakers and stacking storage units.
An actual CD sound system in his rooms at Magdalen. Going to visit his room for the first time is like being invited to Cern to view the Large Hadron Collider. He also possesses a CD stacking system. He owns more than a hundred CDs. In 1987. I sit in awe as he clicks the little drawer open and explains how it plays by laser. He neatly shuffles the little clicking plastic cases. I am gobsmacked by all these tiny shining circles. In my head it’s like that bit in 2001: A Space Odyssey. I am the ape throwing my club up in the air. And David is in the Pan Am space ship. Interestingly, I remember absolutely NOTHING about what music was played. In Toby Young’s imagining for Channel 4, ‘When Boris Met Dave’, it shows David Cameron playing records. I wonder if he had a CD player?
By the end of the 80s, of course, the new Independent Newspaper is running regular headlines on the music industry’s CD price-fixing cartels and later it’s widely realised how rubbish the technology is, and how easily damaged. It is scientifically proven that Vinyl delivers better audio quality.
In the holidays before year 2, I go and make a new mix tape and dig out my Sony Walkman to bring back to college to play it on. The latest tape features ‘China in your Hand’ by T’Pau. I can remember almost nothing else. When I edit Isis, the university magazine, a young contributor heads off to a Red Wedge gig full of enthusiasm for meeting Paul Weller, Billy Bragg, Norman Cook and other Labour-supporting stars on the youth music tour. He comes back distraught after being kept waiting till 2am and then told everyone’s too drunk to talk to him, and writes a bitter review about being treated with disdain and arrogance by the PR man for the vanguard of the new young Left.
I ask my English tutorial partner (and future stand up comedian) Stewart Lee, as possibly the coolest person I know, and therefore possibly ‘into stuff like the Smiths’, to review some albums. He shows impressive depth of knowledge, referencing John Lee Hooker and the Bhundu Boys. I remember it because it was so rare. I have retreated almost altogether from contemporary music. Though I have a hazy memory (repressed for my own mental well being) of going to see Dire Straits at Wembley Arena. Incidentally, why are they still even now completely beyond the pale for acceptable musical taste? (Apart from by surgeons who play them during operations, according to a 2012 Radio 4 report. )
Toby says now: ‘I didn’t really watch much TV, apart from Top of the Pops, if I was around. I went to gigs… Talulah Gosh at the Jericho Tavern. That was the so-called “Cutie Scene”. You might want to look up Amelia Fletcher from the band, who is now a very high-powered economist.’
I was unaware of Cutie Scene. I watched TOTP only to confirm my fears, and repeats of The Water Margin when I could. The JCR TV was dominated by Clint Eastwood Dirty Harry videos chosen by the rugby players. I played the piano a lot and got a free double ticket to my college ball for entertaining diners with Chopin, Debussy and even ‘The Moonlight Sonata’. After playing, I could enjoy the other performers. The vogue at Oxford Balls and parties was for torch songs – Edith Piaf covers – and vocal jazz. Mari Wilson was the only famous name I remember seeing perform at university. By my second year I was dating an investment banker (it really was the 80s) who played a lot of Miles Davis and Charlie Parker. I tried to find some jazz to love, not merely like or tolerate.
EXHIBIT H: Pimms Ad
Pimms sold in the 80s without irony
Inspiration came via a trendy Pimm’s ad (note the product) featuring Sarah Vaughan’s version of ‘Summertime’. Unexpectedly, the 80s fashion for consuming posh drinks like landed gentry led me to discover Sarah, Billie Holliday and Ella Fitzgerald, Nina Simone and Dinah Washington. I chose a women’s studies option for my degree and wrote about Black American women’s fiction (a genre I still continue to explore with fascination). But I also ended up looking at women’s crime fiction and, somehow, the subset of lesbian crime fiction (not a genre with enough quality to justify a term’s study). I think this academic decision was a reaction to, and a retreat from, all the Brideshead culture around me. I was trying to find contemporary depth. But achingly pretentious literary theory was all the rage in the 80s and I fell victim to its pretentiousness, masquerading as substance. I wish now I’d opted for Hawthorne and Melville or old Icelandic or ANY of the many other options.
At my college there is by now both a women’s group (we all get free rape alarms) and a men’s group too. I write in my diary with delight about all the wonderful men who are feminists. But at night the rugger buggers still trash the front quads and yell ‘get your kit off’ at any female taking part in the comedy revues.
At the end of my second year I edit Isis. We commission a piece about student donors at Oxford’s famous sperm bank: an early recognition of the future importance of the fertility industry. It begins with the sentence: ‘No one ever shakes hands at the sperm bank.’ We invite Fleet Street journalists to give talks and take them to central Oxford’s most trendy restaurant: Baedekers. Baedeker’s is the perfect epitome of 80s food fashion. It is a concept restaurant. The menu is ‘international’ (hence the Guidebook name) and the food comes in very small portions on…
Exhibit I: octagonal black plates. Dishes that were widely used in upmarket restaurants, conveying to customers their sophistication.
It’s not very tasty either. It comes to £90 on my Visa card for 8 people, including the Fleet Street journo we are treating. This is a phenomenal amount of money. A couple of people never pay their share. I never go there again.
And then somehow I find myself agreeing to edit the magazine of the university debating society – the Oxford Union – with future novelist Toby Litt and for the new Union President, Michael Gove. Essentially he was exactly the same as he is today, except he seemed a lot older then: a 40-year-old trapped in a 20-year-old’s body. But very charming. Toby says now he thinks we were regarded with caution as ‘arty / newsy’ types. Toby had hair that was higher than mine and carefully sculpted and gelled. Toby now describes it as ‘Morrissey crossed with a pineapple’, which is pretty accurate. He was actually from Bedfordshire, but knows about Morrissey and possibly Manchester culture, which remain impenetrably male to me at this stage.
The two of us find ourselves regularly sitting in front of Michael Gove at his big old wooden desk in the Union President’s office, rich with Heritage. Rather impressively. Michael’s introduction in the front of the magazine reads like a speech he could deliver right now as Education Secretary, all about raising educational standards in the state sector so Oxford is not the preserve of the rich. The magazine has articles about inner city decay, unemployment and homophobia. On the cover Toby and I go for just three key words: Money, Fear, Sin. (A pretty concise summary of the mid-‘80s, I still think. The fear was about AIDS.)
A result of this creative partnership with Toby is that I got to see what genuinely arty types listen to. I think Toby had a record player. I imagined he listened to a lot of synth music like Orchestral Manoeuvres In the Dark. I had no evidence of this, other than his hair and his penchant for wearing black clothes including polo necks. One night I accidentally dropped my keys in the drain outside his lodgings and he very kindly went to huge effort to retrieve them for me on his knees, improvising with sticks and wires. This is proof that arty types could be very nice people and not the poseurs who hung out at Freud’s nightclub. In fact Toby says he was listening, like me, to older stuff, though not necessarily the same older stuff: Dylan, Van Morrison, the Velvet Underground. I identify a common theme of trying to find culture from the past because what’s on offer around us is not nutritious enough.
The next exhibit is the film that defines these years. Toby’s male perspective is fascinating. He says there was a thing about going to see Top Gun repeatedly and quoting scenes. My defining film of those years (and of at least one male Oxford friend, now a major New York media executive) is…
Exhibit J: The film Working Girl 1988 Directed by Mike Nichols (nominated for 6 Oscars: best film, best director best actress – Melanie Griffith, best supporting actress – Sigourney Weaver, Joan Cusack; wins best song – ‘Let the River Run’ Carly Simon)
It’s The Graduate for the corporate milk round generation. And I definitely went back to the Phoenix cinema on Walton Street for repeat screenings. Eminently quotable, shot with epic splendour from the first shot and almost entirely in Manhattan’s banking offices, bankers’ upscale apartments and costumed in suits, we find Han Solo playing second fiddle to a WASP ice maiden (Sigourney Weaver) and a blue collar lass of ambition (Melanie Griffith). In the original movie poster Harrison Ford is actually almost completely hidden, peeping out from between their power shoulders. Both about to turn 30; both with curly hair. If it’s one of the most influential movies in MY life, I believe it must have confirmed the career choices of hundreds of future bankers, management consultants, corporate lawyers and (Carlton) PR men.
The film’s romantic leads have their most passionate sex after closing a deal in mergers and acquisitions and its plot arc is notably short term (what happens when these 30-somethings want to have kids?) Kevin Spacey steals the show in a two- minute scene in the back of a limo as a coked-up, champagne-swilling porn-obsessed banker. But it captured the Conservative dream of making it on talent and ambition, and making money. As with curly haired Margaret Thatcher, the men are just the support. The two truly disappointing aspects? That our heroine, cheated of her credit on clinching the big deal, can only be rescued by the grand old man, the CEO of the corporation, granting his semi-divine favour, like the Duke in a Shakespeare comedy. (As if Maggie would ever have relied on a man to rescue her.) And ‘Lady in Red’ by Chris De Burgh marring an otherwise very decent soundtrack. (It went on to be one of the top 40 selling singles of 1987.)
By the summer of 1989, change was afoot. After finals I went backpacking through West Germany and Austria and found myself on the night train from Vienna to Cologne sharing a compartment with, and hearing the moving stories of, East German refugees who’d started a small flood seeking asylum via embassies in the West. November 1989 and the fall of the Berlin Wall was only three months away. My heart lifts as I remember this.
The glorious end of the 80s
Fashion took a while to improve from its tropical candy colours and batwings. There were glimmers of great ‘80s culture, too, and of what it could achieve, if you looked carefully. The Pet Shop Boys’ superficially superficial pop, packed with dark fun. John Waters’ Hairspray hit mainstream pay dirt and he went on to liberate Johnny Depp from American TV teen idol status for a generation of women in CryBaby (1990) Thank-you, Mr Waters. John Hughes’ masterpiece of cheekiness with a contemporary/retro soundtrack, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (another film that saw plenty of repeat visits to the cinema) was eventually to help Barack Obama to the White House all those years later when Matthew Broderick reprised the role for a viral ad the day before the 2008 Presidential Election. A special exhibit for the defence, if you like:
Exhibit K: Matthew Broderick viral film for Obama presidential election campaign 2008
It is not, I think, a coincidence that most of these positive examples are American.
The ‘90s were better. Even with a terrible recession. Music got better. Though, judging from my own pineapple hair and shoulder pads in my BBC publicity photo, the ‘80s lasted till about 1994. Britpop arrived in time to mark the start of my relationship with my future husband, Brian Millar: a Manchester guy who knew all about Morrissey and had lived a parallel life at Oxford during those years.
Morrissey: Not my husband.
Mentally, I was able to join the 90s back to the New Wave that had made my preteen years in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s such a glorious time. The ‘80s were (like a bad Athena print) airbrushed out of my cultural history. I started going to gigs and buying loads of albums again. All on vinyl.
Toby Litt says now that the political scene and what he regarded as ‘Tory triumphalism’ were instrumental in his decision to leave Britain for Prague as the Iron Curtain fell.
As for me, well, there’s a postscript.
I had read Brideshead Revisited in one of my holidays before going up to Oxford. It’s a great but quite short read. I’d never watched the whole acclaimed ITV drama, which is, to this day, hailed as a gold standard of great TV. In September 1996, as I took up my posting as the BBC’s Los Angeles Correspondent. I found it being screened on the then-new delight of multichannel cable TV. After a long day covering the OJ Simpson civil trial, I sat down in the Land of the Free looking forward to catching up on a high point of ‘80s culture. I was stunned to find it (apart from the first Oxford episode) unwatchably ponderous, pretentious and dull. I never got beyond episode 2. The soundtrack is quite good, though. Though I mostly play vinyl nowadays, I still have it on cassette. I have never bought a CD player.
“What is this witch going to ask me next?” Oliver Stone
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