Change and decay 6

The papers of most landowning families are testimony to their two great passions: the accumulation of land, to generate income, and litigation, to expend it upon. The Sheldons were, it appeared, more interested in the former than the latter- certainly the correspondence with the family lawyers was mainly about property rather than law. It was no surprise to me, then, that the majority of the records filling the room were legal papers, neatly tied with fading pink ribbon, sealed with cracked red wax, grubby to the touch.

A librarianship student once told me that the ‘dirty bits’ in library books can easily be found because in much-borrowed copies they become physically dirty, begrimed by hundreds of sweaty thumbs, or worse. Old title deeds are similar; the bundles of documents fall open at passages of particular interest (usually financial).

It was clear that the Sheldons were free from any snobbishness about trade: following the Emperor Vespasian’s dictum that ‘money does not smell’. As well as running their park and home farm, and leasing out neighbouring farms, they had a hand in the local ironworks, railways, brickmaking kilns and shops.

Review of Martin Amis: The last days of Muhammad Atta

Martin Amis was born to inhabit the post-9/11 world. His earlier works are rendered numinous by the sense of imminent apocalypse, the feeling that civilisation's grip on survival may slip at any moment. Amis's response has been almost personal, as if he specifically were targeted; the scrappy narrative of Yellow Dog is disordered by the viscerality of his emotion, disarming his critical intelligence. As James Thurber wrote, in the happier and more carefree days of 1930s Europe: "He had always feared that something like this would happen to him, and now it had". So it is no surprise to find that five years on he is still focused on terror and its agents; the question is whether he has been able to apply analysis beyond emotion and narrative.

The Last Days of Muhammad Atta is a longish short story, filling a gap in the real chronology of the attacks with a visit to a dying imam to collect a bottle of holy water. It is based largely on reality, so much so that arguing about what 'really' happened becomes a legitimate critical stance. But since it is also an interior monologue of someone now dead, it also is, emphatically, a fiction.

Most is based on inference. Amis has described the moral revolt of the body, the physiological resistance to ethical sickness, previously, in Time's Arrow, and it seems reasonable that Atta might suffer similarly. In trying to present the thought-processes of a terrorist, Amis is exploring the big question: Why? How could humanity do such things?

From a UK perspective, there is a long tradition of not caring very much about motivation. The tedious horrors of the IRA bombing campaign awakened no desire to know why they were doing it; a dismissive shrug implied that they must, for whatever reason, like doing these things. This may have been partly ignorance: few would have responded to a set of grievances which started in 1690, or 1649, or maybe back in 1167. But it was also the product of a determination that anyone resorting to violence should lose the right to be heard (so much so that the government had to consistently mislead parliament by denying that it was, in fact, negotiating with the terrorists while stating publicly that it would under no circumstances do so). Even 7/7 was met with bewilderment rather than curiosity. Things seem to be changing now: the recognition that there is a vast pool of ill-will rising slowly to the boil is spreading.

Even so, Amis is perhaps wrong to assume that his readers are as interested in 9/11 as he is; certainly his casual mention of the 'muscle Saudis' relies on too much detailed knowledge (the phrase seems to be one of his coinage): not everyone knows or cares too much about what happened, even if their geopolitical concerns leads them to be interested in consequences.

In some ways, Amis cheats, since he does not provide an insider's account of religious fanaticism tied up with modern technology; rather his exemplar is a steely nihilist who has rationally identified jihad as the only contemporary cause worth following. In tone, Atta sounds most like the blandly certain figure of Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent; and of course this is a reminder that nihilism is not new, going back at least 150 years.

Nor, of course, is zealotry. Although the story only shows the fanatics through the distorting contempt of Atta, this is little loss, since we know zealots, we've done zealots. They are hardly a new phenomenon. Even the suicidal element is not completely new: in the past, nationalists have been pleased to praise those who were willing to make the ultimate sacrifice, either on an individual basis, as soldiers, or on an industrial basis, like the kamikaze pilots.

So perhaps the problem Amis is picking at is not a problem at all; or only a practical problems: people behave in this way, as they have before. How to stop them? It depends on what made them that way. Atta is presented as a sociopath: his world is without laughter, or music, or love, or sex, or passion: the closest he comes to enjoyment is in spite and certitude; if one were to ask what radicalised him, one would have to ask a psychologist, not a politician.

He story has some epistemological flaws: on a couple of occasions, the author reminds the reader of what followed Atta's death (hardly necessary in any case, but in any case unknowable to Atta). There is one clear error: Amis says Atta knew that the steel would buckle, the towers would collapse. He probably didn't, since the architects who designed it didn't know; and there is an army of conspiracy theorists willing to argue that the steel did not in fact buckle, and demolition charges were needed to make it do so. It is more plausible that Atta's sacrifice was made in the expectation that the crash would be gesture, a ruthless, potent, symbol of the illusory nature of the West's invulnerability, rather than large-scale slaughter.

The story is plotted as a circle, a circle of hell, in which Atta is doomed to relive this day, with its petty and great punishments, for ever. This is a plot Amis has used before, in his earlier short story Denton's Death, itself a macabre reworking of Kingsley Amis's short short story Mason's Life. The question of justice hangs over the whole enterprise, of sufficient or appropriate punishment. Theologians across the centuries have found it easier to excuse the suffering of the righteous (since it is good for the soul, or because they have sinned) than the flourishing unpunished of the unrighteous. Amis feels that mere extinction is insufficient punishment, a feeling with popular support, although he might be surprised to find himself agreeing with those who say 'Death is too good for him'.

Although it may not be Amis's intent, his portrayal of Atta as a banal, limited, troubled individual humanises him: these are not monsters. If they were, the action required would at least be clear. But life is not as simple as that.

Sandi Thom: What if I'm crap

The moment of truth for Sandi Thom is nigh. On 31 August, her follow-up single to the No. 1 international smash "I wish I was a punk rocker (with flowers in my hair)" will be released, and we will see once and for all whether it was all hype or if she has established a fanbase. She has spent much of the last few months appearing at numerous festivals, a trick employed with some success by Roy Harper in the 60s, so it is still unlcear whether people will actually pay to see her (and in the light of the webcast saga, it is notable that so few of the people who saw her live in 2005 liked it very much).

I did quite like "Punk rocker": it was at least original in arrangment, going for acapella and then full band, when it could easliy have been Katie Melua style acoustic wibbling. I even smiled at the start, although I tended to get bored by the end. But it was catchy and instantly memorable and energetic. I've only heard "What if I'm right" once on the radio, but it seemed to be none of those things.

Lyrically, it is different (Full lyrics here): the nostalgia of Punk rocker led those who are cynical to suggest that the song was largely written by the co-writer rather than Thom. "What if I'm right" sounds more like a young person's view of the possible future. But it's not very good: here's my comments:

It wont be an uphill struggle, on you I can depend
...
you'll cover me in diamonds, there's nothing I want more

"On you I can depend" has to be one of the most awkward lines ever written, and all to achieve a poor rhyme.
Nothing she wants more than being covered with diamonds?
An odd ambition.

...
And you'll always tape the football
And let me watch my soap

Nothing like being a modern woman, is there? He'll 'let you' watch your soap (which nearly rhymes with coat).

And when I give birth to our children
I will feel no pain

Planet Earth calling Sandi: don't be so superficial. And you know, birth might hurt. You'd certainly thinks so from the screams from the delivery suite.

And you'll bring the showers

What? Showers?

You'll say I'm thin and bring the washing in

What a charming domestic vignette: you're thin, and here's the washing.

And when you need to change the light bulb
You won't hand me the chair

I'm not sure is 'handing you the chair' is some obscure euphemism: it certainly isn't a conventional phrase.

You'll sell your vinyl records
And go get us a loan

She obviously knows someone obsessed with vinyl, since it also came up in Punkrocker (unlike, I would add, Bob Dylan and Neil Young who have always been keen to explore what new technology might bring). As I put it in Written in your heart:

ED: Yes, they ought to warn you when you're 18 that you are forming your musical tastes for life. I've just been buying the Dylan remasters. It's not the same, though. There's something about vinyl. You HAD to respect it- no finger nails, keep it clean, put it away. Not like CDs - Is that a CD or a coffee mat? Answer: both. And the little booklets in one-point type. No substitute for a lyric sheet.

CHARLOTTE: Still, all my vinyl records are unplayable: scratched and warped.

ED: Oh, if you want to be practical! Spoil my Nick Hornby moment!

You'll be my sympathetic lover
And won't steal the covers
But I've got my doubts and what if I'm right?
You won't forsake me
Your mother won't hate me
...

Now, there is a strong tradition of near-rhymes in popular songs, but this is usually used to allow the use of informal and idiomatic language, not drivel about stealing covers, forsaking (FFS), and mothers in law.

It looks as if Punkrocker was a fluke and that Sandi's natural role is as a teenage wordsmith, indistinguishable, apart from by PR, from all the millions of MySpace 'friends'.

Update: a sad statistic from the Sandi Thom official website Forum:
Most users ever online was 24 on Sun Jun 04, 2006 7:53 pm

Freeing Nelson Mandela: the inside story

One of the great mysteries of modern times is why the live TV coverage of Mandela's release from Robben Island prison in 1990 showed an hour of him not walking out in triumph, before he eventually did so. What was happening?

I think I know. As he was tidying up his cell (who knew, it might be De Klerk's next), he had a premonition of his future life outside: meeting Tony Blair and Gabrielle, Prince Charles and the Spice Girls, Oprah, Bill Clinton, Alan Titchmarsh and the Ground Force team, St Bob and St Bono.

He thought, 'Well, maybe prison's not so bad', before reluctantly concluding that suffering seemed to be his lot, and he might as well get on with it.

All at sea: review of Pirates of the Caribbean 2: Dead man's chest

If you only see one film this year, you're lucky. I've seen three already, and one of them was King Kong, and another was Pirates of the Caribbean 2: Dead man's chest, which was better, and even slightly shorter (a mere 150 minutes). Like King Kong, it could have been a lot shorter still. A swordfight inside a waterwheel careering down a hill is amusing for 30 seconds, and mildly impressive for a further minute, and just boring after that. Also like King Kong, there is an extended sequence featuring cannibalistic savages whose language is not translated. This seems an interesting cultural phenomenon: it has been a hundred years or so since such a portrayal has been acceptable: the last time we saw people with bones through their noses, they were appearing alongside Sting being credited with environmental and spiritual wisdom beyond the ken of modern man. They are, in language and dress, clearly 'other' to both European whites and African blacks: one has to wonder whether this straightforward unapologetic demonisation reflects geopolitical nightmares about the Yellow Economic Peril.

Morally, the Pirates film wriggles, attempting to highlight the evil globalisation of (British) (in) justice and economic exploitation to define one set of real baddies. Nice of that little homespun local outfit the Walt Disney Corporation to highlight this.

There are good sequences in the film, but each is too long, and there are far too many: the proliferation of plot twists is not so much confusing as irritating. There is something of the BB7 effect in seeing the return of every major character from the first film, even the dead ones. Can't we move on? The core plot is potentially interesting, an elaboration of a complex mythology around the themes of Davy Jones' Locker and the Flying Dutchman; it's a shame this wasn't more central.

It was also welcome to have both a relatively complex moral stance (few of the characters are straightforwardly good all the time) and an absence of the emotional bullying that is usually part of a blockbuster, where the music forces you to react in a certain way.

The acting is ok, too, although there are a range of styles, from Johnny Depp, who keeps it turned up to 11 almost all the time, Bill Nighy, whose humanity shows through his faceful of tentacles, and Keira Knightley who holds the film's interest for much of its length. When she's not speaking, she's fine, but unfortunately when she is, she seems out of place. Her quiet delivery might be all right in a period film, but here she sounds bored when talking and petulant when shouting.

All in all, I could forgive the film were it not for the last half hour which is an extended set-up for Pirates 3; I recognised this as soon as it happened, since it effectively destroyed any climax to the narrative, the same fault that crippled Back to the Future 2.

Overall: it's no King Kong, but still.

Change and decay 5

I started to work along the shelves, applying numbered Post-It notes to the piles of papers, when I heard the door open behind me.
‘Ah- you must be the archivist.’
I turned round to see a girl in her twenties, gracefully leaning on the doorpost, a quizzical smile on her face.
‘That’s right,’ I replied, ‘Pleased to meet you.’
‘I’m Helen – didn’t Ma and Pa say? Have you started yet?’
‘Just now, actually – it’ll take a while.’
‘Found any treasures?’ Helen asked, with a glint in her eye.
‘Well, they are all important, in their way.’
‘Even the rubbish?’ Helen laughed, ‘Are you sure?’
I laughed too. ‘We prefer the term “ephemera”, but yes, for now.’
She walked into the room, trailing her hand along the shelf. She walked with a flat-footed gait; I noticed she was wearing frayed ballet pumps. She stared at me for a second.
‘I was expecting someone older, when they said you were coming.’
‘Archivists come in all shapes and sizes, I suppose.’
She shrugged. ‘I hope you don’t find any family secrets.’
She turned to leave with an offhand ‘See you’.
I watched her go, and then went back to work.

Discovering Japan: review of Lost in Translation

Lost in Translation arrived on Film Four laden with praise from intelligent critics. It was something of a surprise, therefore, to find it tedious, mean-spirited and unconvincing, but there you go. Bill Murray hasn't aged well. Whatever cheeky charm his face may have displayed in Ghostbusters had been replaced by a craggy careworn sack by the time of Ghostbusters 2 and Groundhog Day, and he now looks like a well-preserved mummy. His character's annoyance at being mistaken for a contemporary of Sinatra and the 'lat-pack' is therefore undeserved. Incidentally, it does seem unfunny and tactless to attempt to play for humour the fact that an entire nation has learned a foreign language and has some slight difficulty with some of the sounds. Reviews singled out the 'hilarious' scene where Bill has to decipher the photographer's valiant attempts to pronounce names of film stars as the comic highpoint, which might have been warning enough.

Not that it aspires to be a mere comedy: it is a study of character. Well, I don't mind studies of character if they are interesting. Bill's character is lightly drawn as an actor who is less successful than he used to be but still famous, with an unfulfilling home life as husband and father. He looks pained a lot, especially after sleeping with the (awful) cabaret singer, but articulates nothing more than a generic feeling of dissatisfaction.

Scarlett Johansson, meanwhile, is also lost, finding that accompanying her new husband to a foreign country while he works is a bit boring, something that years of academic training had failed to prepare her for. She doesn't really 'get' Japan, or at least seems not to: she spends a long time wandering around sampling classical and popular culture with a bemused look on her face, but we don't find out exactly what she thinks. Her background is even vaguer than Bill's: she 'tried writing but hated what she wrote'. Try something else, then?

Everything in the film takes a long time. Sofia Coppola obviously learned from her father that you can't make a film too long. But films shouldn't try to represent boredom by making us share it. What I think Sofia has managed to do is to create an art-movie lite, something that looks and sounds like a serious film but which has no insight to offer. It's dated too: these days, Scarlett would stay in her room, blogging.

Another blogger gets dooced

Petite Anglaise is the latest victim of blogging at or about work. It's not entirely clear on what grounds her employer sacked her: general loss of trust seems to be the line. This is partly because they claim that her blog revealed that she had not given the full reasons for her absence on two occasions. The hysteria of their response is reflected in this: in any other circumstance, an employee would be asked to explain themselves, rather than sacked outright. After all, there is no reason they should be taking the blog as the truth. It is interesting that the fictional case in my radio play Dooced got it so right, down to the creepy sexism of the male managers (not that that requires the skills of Nostradamus). Of course, blogs do frighten people, not least because they know that whatever they say may be used and given in postings, with whatever spin their employee wishes to place upon it. That's also why company hate tribunals: usually they have very tight control on what emerges into the public domain, but you never know what sort of dirty linen or DNA-stained dresses might turn up in the course of public questioning.

Celebrity Titanic: Love Island and the death of ITV

Love Island isn't a very good programme. Even the deluded who convince themselves that BB7 is worth watching know this. Love Island has managed to deliver the lowest ratings in ITV's history, at a time when success was vital for the survival of the company. It may well be that Fearne 'Jonah' Cotton's latest victim will be an entire television channel.

On the otehr hand, it's good news. It goes to show that it is possible to go broke underestimating the taste of the audience. You can imagine the production meetings when they're planning the series:

"The audience love BB when it's drunken fights and sex: so let's give them that all the time. And we'll make sure she get rid of the wrinklies and fatties, cos who wants to see them up close and personal."

Where did they go wrong? Part of it lies in the premise. Although BB's sexual antics achieved some notoriety, what people remember best was not the quick fumbles beneath the sheets, but rather the developing relationships over time between Paul and Helen (Dumber and Dumberer) or Preston and Chantelle, in which sex hardly featured.

ITV has a difficult task, of course. The BBC can roll out its audience-pleasers, safe in the knowledge that its worthy-but-unwatched and edgy-experimental other product can be shown at other times, on other channels. ITV has to get it right all the time, delivering a stream of viewers who can be sold off to advertisers; if noone watches, no money is made. That is why their scheduling is usually completely ruthless: they literally cannot afford to keep showing underperforming series. And why they have risked so much (£20 million) on creating a programme to take on BB and win. Except it hasn't. Even when potentially moderately exciting things happen on Love Island, nobody knows it: the press have lost interest, the public were never interested to start with. I can only assume that the programme hasn't been shifted to 12.30, when they know nobody will be watching, because they realise 1. that any replacement will also come off worse; and 2. an admission of failure of the ITV's trump card will immediately lead to collapse of the share price and a renewed takeover bid.

The sooner they 'fess up and switch to showing Crocodile Dundees and Die Hards in constant rotation, the better.

Change and decay: work in progress 4

I opened the door and breathed in slowly. This was the bit of my job I loved. Archivists have the reputation of being fussy or authoritarian, protecting their collections from users. But this is just a product of their role – they are responsible for the safety of the archives. If somebody damages a document, then to them it is an accident; to the archivist it is a failure. Not surprisingly, archivists end up being cautious: everything is done according to the rules, documented, carefully; this makes it hard to go wrong. Except now. Before anything had been listed, counted, described – here I could devalue the collection in minutes by rearranging things. As it stood now, the records room’s organisation reflected the process of managing the estate: documents were field together because they were used together. So, before moving any of the bundles, piles, boxes, and (in the corner) heaps of paper that filled very flat or near-flat surface in the room, I walked along, mentally classifying them into types: legal documents, business letters, accounts, and, most common of all, general miscellaneous. All administrators seem to grasp the first principle of record management: keep all the papers you might need. The second, keeping them organised, was usually beyond them.

The revenger's comedy: interpreting The Information by Martin Amis (1995)

I

The plot of The Information is essentially simple; Richard, unsuccessful novelist and book reviewer, attempts to wreak revenge on his friend Gwyn, unaccountably successful novelist. Richard enlists the aid of Scozzy, a self-styled wild boy and drug dealer, to deliver physical punishments escalating in seriousness; after a tour of America in which Richard’s unsellable unreadable novel literally threatens the life of Gwyn and himself by causing a near-crash in a light plane, their relationship changes, and Gwyn loses the inhibitions resulting from his previous envy of Richard. Scozzy’s assaults prove counter-productive: only Richard suffers.

Even in this bald summary, it is clear that the book is much more than the story of two men, although you wouldn’t know this from the reviews it received at the time. This may have been because those reviewing it in Little Magazines were being cautious, since the book is scathing about the quality of British reviewing and questions the entire edifice of modern literary journalism.

II

The rivalry between Richard and Gwyn had a real-life equivalent in the friendship and sporting contests between Julian Barnes and MA which had run from their student days into adult life. Although MA has argued often that it is the job of writers to invent their fictions, he has often used real life as a source, in The Rachel Papers (teenager attending crammer school to get into Oxford), Success (art gallery assistant), Dead Babies (weekend of disasters with various friends and couples), and Money (screenplay writing in America). Since in The Information almost all description adopts the viewpoint of Richard, it is easy to assume that he represents MA (there are short passages where the narrator shifts to cover Scozzy and Gwyn, and MA appears speaking for himself briefly). This lazy equivalence is perhaps justified by MA’s ascription to Richard of his own experiences, including being given a set of bound volumes of the little magazine when he left, and seeing someone reading his book on an Underground train.

The book proved prophetic in its treatment of the other characters: the Julian Barnes friendship ended in the gap between Amis finishing the draft text and its being published, as a result of MA’s decision to drop Pat Kavanagh, Julian’s wife, as his agent. Agents too, particularly lazy agents, have a hard time in the book, particularly Gal Aplanap. MA does not reveal how much he drew on this event in finalising his text, but the rivalry, and its revelation as being not friendly but unfriendly, is structural. So much so that it seems legitimate to wonder whether the strength of Barnes’ reaction was partly in response to what must have read like a barely-veiled critique of his person and work (although it is doubtful that anyone would call his novels unliterary, Flaubert’s Parrot was nominated for a Booker prize, after all).

So rivalry is a theme, but not the main one. Richard himself says so: “Gwyn didn’t do it. The world did it.” (p. 140). It takes him a long time to realise that his campaign against fate is therefore aimed at the wrong target.


III
The novel ends with a paragraph which has been criticised as being meaningless or pretentious; but it provides, through back-references to previous events, an abstracted argument, a summary of ‘what the novel is trying to say’ (although Richard gives such questions short shrift: ‘It’s not trying to say anything. It’s saying it. […] It’s saying itself. For a hundred and fifty thousand words. I couldn’t put it any other way’. (p. 340).

The Man in the Moon is getting younger every year. [1] Your watch knows exactly what time is doing to you: tsk, tsk, it says, every second of every day. [2] Every morning, we leave more in the bed, more of ourselves, as our bodies make their own preparations for reunion with the cosmos. [3] Beware the aged critic with his hair of winebar sawdust. [4] Beware the nun and the witchy buckles of her shoes. [5] Beware the man at the callbox, with the suitcase: this man is you. [6] The planesaw whines, whining for its planesaw mummy. [7] And then there is the information, which is nothing, and comes at night. [8]

1 The Man in the Moon appears on p. 476 The Man in the Moon dates back to the time when humanity thought itself the centre of the universe; as we get older, we move towards knowing that we are temporary and unimportant; and we know we get older because policeman, doctors, professors even, look young.

2. Tempus fugit. Who has ever needed a skull as a memento mori? Who could forget?

3 This sentence appears on p. 197. We live with decay and dissolution; time’s arrow only points one way.

4 The critic is mentioned on pp. 432 and 476; he has lost his place in the world, his purpose, sidetracked by excess, and no longer matters to anyone.

5 The nun appears on pp. 213, 221 and 413. Why should anyone beware a nun? Partly because they act as a warning: they leave noone behind; but mostly I think because they know something. They already know the information, and accepted it: they are stronger than you.

6 The man at the callbox has cropped up on pp. 46 and 447-8. He is the man without home or family, desperately phoning around to find someone so that he doesn’t have to face death alone.

7 The planesaw whines on p. 172, as one of the urban sounds (although there is no such thing as a planesaw), reflecting the absence of community, the lack of fellow-feeling characteristic of modern life.

8 This sentence appears on p. 452.

It is clear from this analysis that the paragraph is carefully written, and, since it runs through the book, it follows that the novel as a whole is, too. Its style is a little flashy, but that is compensated by sentences, whole pages, of such beauty and clarity that the reader pauses in astonishment. This does some violence to credible characterisation, unfortunately: it is hard to believe that someone who thinks and speaks as eloquently as Richard does should write novels whose highest praise was that ‘nobody was sure they weren’t shit’, and it is notable that dim bland Gwyn and mad Scozzer share a common interior language with Richard, and MA.


IV
So what is the information? The more astute of the reviewers says that it is death, but they are wrong. If the novel were about death, it would treat it more seriously: Anstice and Richard’s doctor are despatched quickly, simply, as jokes. Demi’s father, whose gradual decline in a rotting mansion is described, parodying Catholic Lord Marchmain in Brideshead Revisited, is also killed in a sentence. It is not death as such; the information is the knowledge of one’s own mortality. The world is telling you to start saying goodbye, to prepare in the face of inevitable, increasing humiliation.

Without blunting the force of this message, MA does suggest what can help in this task: love, children, and humour; throughout the book, these are quietly advanced as moral markers, good in themselves, and signifiers of goodness. Gwyn’s novels are shown to be bad partly by being humourless; Gwyn’s refusal to have children defines him as bad; Gwyn’s turning away from love is his badness. Because of this, MA is able to end his novel with Richard in what by any objective standard is a worse place than where he started, but being credibly happier all the same.

BB goes off the boil

As T S Eliot says, human kind cannot bear very much reality (Burnt Norton) , and he was of course thinking of BB 7 and Love Island (not Celebrity Love Island, as we shall see).

Big Brother, despite the media hysteria it has engendered, has singularly failed so far to drum up any great enthusiasm in its audience. Watercooler television it is not. You can imagine the producers find this hard to believe: have they not provided madness, surgery-enhanced breasts, screaming fits, and various near-couplings? Well, yes, and more than enough. But BB has also overpacked the house with too many too similar people, and by the tedious and unoriginal second house concept has meant that we still have almost as many inmates as we started with. The main interest as the series develops is usually the interplay between tensions within the house leading to nominations, and then the judgement of the public on those chosen. BB has ridden roughshod over both elements, and there is much less interest in watching the arbitrary acts of an absolute tyrant. Nevertheless, BB has proved a ratings juggernaut, presumably because its target audience, the young, are too lazy, drunk, drugged or stupid to consider doing anything other than watching.

It remains to be seen whether Love Island urges them to turn over. I hope not, but that’s probably because I find the prurience of promoting on-screen sex as the sole purpose for a show distasteful. It is by now established that any discussion of Celebrity programmes must include a joke about Z listers, but I shall break that rule and instead provide a catalogue raisonee of my classification of celebrities:

A superstars whose fame and influence is so great that they can use it to succeed in fields far divorced from their initial area of success (ie Arnie moves from bodybuilding through barely coherent acting to running the world’s fifth biggest economy)
B stars who rule their chosen realm but fail when they move outside it (Neil Young filmmaker, Bob Dylan actor)
C stars who have had a varied career but are mainly associated with one key role (most of the cast of The Bill who started off in soaps)
D stars whose fame is based solely on their one major role (one-hit-wonders)
E other actors (etc) who wouldn’t be famous at all if were not for their extracurricular activities (I’m sure no-one would remember Daniella Westbrook at all if she hadn’t dissolved her nose in cocaine)
F other actors who never made it to fame
G people associated peripherally with F-listers (glamour models, promotion models)
H lovers and children of stars, who achieve fame due to media notoriety
I lovers and children of near stars who achieve fame due to media notoriety
J lovers and children who never achieve fame
K relatives of J listers


This makes some sort of sense to me. So, let’s look at the Love Island line-up. By my count, the highest anyone can get is D (ex-reality), with most in G-H. In some ways this hardly matters, if the series is seen as reality. There is however something much more interesting about Celebrity reality, because it gives an unusual view of people who have an established public persona already. People may well have suspected previously that George Galloway was a pompous bully, or Michael Barrymore was a needy paranoid, or Faria Alam was a manipulative self-publicist, but now they could test this perception, and find out, well, that they were right.

ITV are desperate to turn Love Island into the hit of the summer, having seen their audience, and advertising revenue falling for years. In the absence of positive press (you might say that since the filming is so remote, there was no prospect of bargaining by granting better access), they have persuaded a producer to blog for the Guardian.

The live reality plays directly into my office and I watch as the celebrity stand-ins getting ready for bed. Two snuggle up and I try to imagine how much more interesting it will be when the real celebs are in there in less than a week's time.

Not more interesting at all. And what do you mean, ‘real celebs’? My basic definition of a celebrity is someone you recognize without being told who they area. These you don’t recognise even after you’ve been told.

Sandi Thom: I wish I was a PR man with money in the bank

Her CD has a sticker: "The singer who webcast to the world from her Tooting basement". It is becoming clear that, far from being an impoverished artist using new technology to reach an audience, her success is a triumph of conventional marketing. The webcasts were effectively showcase gigs intended to garner major label interest, after last year's small-label release failed to get any higher than No. 55 despite Radio 2 airplay. The vagueness of ST and her backers about the numbers of viewers of the webcast smacks of fiction: if there really were 70,000 (or, later, 40,000) people tuning in having picked up on an Internet buzz, it is astonishing that so few blogged about it, mentioned in on a website measured by Technorati, or visited her MySpace site: the Internet buzz followed the press reports, not the other way round. It looks as if she used the webcast angle as a way of making unverifiable claims for popularity in order to get the labels hungry. They did, and RCA (or rather Sony BMG, trading as RCA) eventually snapped her up.

Her current success has been driven partly by expensive PR: when was the last time a debut (or 'debut') single was released (re-released) with two weeks of TV adverts? But more than that, there has been the collusion of the press, which has picked up on the webcast thing and given her massive exposure in the print media. A little digging, or even the application of memory or common sense, would have led to a more critical approach, but everyone seems to have concluded, with the editor in The Man Who Shot Liberty valance, that given the choice of telling the truth or printing the legend, you should print the legend.

The 'new star created by the Internet' story is a popular one, one that people keep trying to foist on any act with enough savvy to register their own web domain. I think the appeal lies in the Cinderella myth: the daydream that someone can become rich and famous overnight, without having paid any dues. ST has been plugging away for years, touring, recording, session singing, but that's not what people want: they want Chantelle success, similar to the daydream you enjoy in the period between buying a lottery ticket and finding out you haven't won. This is nothing new: when video first came along, Toni Basil found instant stardom (although Wikipedia tells me that her first single was recorded 15 years before 'Hey Mickey'); when Paul Macartney 'discovered' Mary Hopkin, she was already an experienced and well-trained singer in the Welsh music scene.

What is perhaps surprising is the fury that ST's success has unleashed. The air is thick with complaints about a 'cynical marketing ploy', a phrase that has always seemed to me to be redundant: what, you mean it isn't a good old philanthropic altruistic marketing ploy? Yet those who continue to be amazed at the antics of the music business always seem to forget the 'business' part. Music involves money. I can remember one rock god saying despairingly that you could tell you had made it when you were employing people you didn't even know about. Music is expensive. Mainstream acts can revel in this: the manufactured nature of the Spice Girls, Westlife, the Sugababes is part of the fun. But for left-field acts you're supposed to ignore it, so that U2, the Rolling Stones, Sting, retain some credibility (or are supposed to) while also raking in money faster than many small countries. Again, this is nothing new: Pink Floyd appeared in the 60s on the Harvest label, an EMI owned company which was intended to obscure the corporate nature of the organisation behind the band.

It would of course be totally cynical to suggest that the press gave the Sandi story such an easy ride because Sony BMG places so much advertising in their papers. It wasn't like that in '69 or '77. Except it was- as Patrik Fitzgerald said at the time, it was "Come and get your punk in Woolworth's / Bondage trousers - twelve pounds" (Make it safe).

I was going to put a link to Sandi Thom's website, but then I thought, 'Why should I? She never links to mine!' (Copyright the estate of Spike Milligan) Her website needs Flash to view it. These crazy web nuts!


Update

Sandi appeared on BBC Radio 4's arts magazine, Front Row, on Wednesday 19/7/06, and was asked specifically about the webcast/PR controversy. She said the whole 'penniless songwriter' thing had come from the press, not from her, since she acknowldedges she had the backing of a small record label, a management company and a PR firm before the Tooting webcasts started. This is a little disingenuous, since her she has certainly seemed keen to emphasise the squalor of the 'piss-stained basement', as if to imply that she had no backing. Quized about the webcast audience figures, she preferred to talk about how cool it was that people [however many there were] were viewing from all over the world. That doesn't impress me much: even this humble blog is regularly visited by sleepless people in Southeast Asia who want to know what "Blowin' in the Wind" means , or about megalomaniacs. Sher did end by endorsing the Web as a place where people can say what they think, which is good in its way, I suppose.

Bob Dylan and the Dead Sea Scrolls

"You gotta heed the Teacher of Righteousness
If you want to know the Way
The Wicked Priest's a spouter of lies
You can't belie-ee-eeve him when he prays"

Could be a John Wesley Harding , Slow Train Coming or Infidels outtake, but in fact has been cobbled together by me: the phrases in bold are from the Dead Sea Scrolls. In Chronicles Vol. 1, and elsewhere, he has made it clear that he doesn't (as most of his commentators imply) sit down with his reference books around him and laboriously construct his songs like a crossword. Instead, he simply inhales a wide range of cultural sources and leaves them to emerge from his unconscious. But for all four of the key elements of the Scrolls texts to reflect so closely his concerns is evidence enough for me that he has at some point come across them.

BB7- the revenge of the housemates

I await with interest the Endemol producers' verdict on this series' selection process: were these really the most psychologically suited 12 people in Britain? Bizarrely, as series runs into series, while the viewing trend is generally down, the number of would-be participants continues to rise, even though it should by now be clear that even winning cannot provide lasting fame or even notoriety.

Previous series have provided most interest in demonstrating the Stockholm syndrome, as the housemates became institutionalised and came to identify with BB who exerted arbitrary power over them. This time around, it's more the Stanford Prison Experiment, as the group divided immediately into two factions and the dominant group then savagely attacked any non-conforming individuals. This might be seen as depressing, especially since many of the silent majority might be expected in other circumstances to protest against such victimisation. The risk, of course, is that to do so is to become a target oneself. But all this really shows is that tolerance is not a 'natural' product of human society: it has to be fought for.

But one has to wonder at those who volunteer to effectively be imprisoned for 3 months, with a group of unknown and possibly hostile co-prisoners, at the mercy of a capricious authority with the power to control sleep, food, and clothing. In the past, resistance by the inmates has been limited to arguing with Big Brother and refusing to cooperate in tasks. By definition, these fail. This time, the three walkers have shown the way. Rather than face the full-length ordeal, or the humiliation of public eviction, they have simply walked out once they recognised that they could achieve no more. Unless BB starts to substantially reward all those who stay the course, or really lock them up, then the merry-go-round of bringing in new housemates to replace the walked will become a standard feature of the series.

There has been some discussion about how to make the concept more interesting (now it is clear that 20s wannabe celebrities have no ability at all to say anything worth hearing), and one aspect that hasn't been explored is the exploitation of the isolation from the external world. For example, it would be very funny (for us) if, as a special concession, details of England's triumphant World Cup campaign were to be provided, so that when the victors emerge from the house, they are mystified at the despondency of the crowd who watched the early departure from the contest at the hands of plucky Trinidad. Or if BB were to announce that a Bird Flu outbreak in the vicinity meant that they would have to take all sorts of precautions, check for symptoms etc. Now that would be worth watching.