Alan Shearer: Banzai!

Opposing fans rather than Mags got to me first with the great and terrible news of late Tuesday, so I'm still wiping the spit off my face, figuratively speaking. It's a good job Shearer has broad shoulders and a stern face in adversity, as he'll need to summon both these qualities as and when we're relegated. But, fair's fair, it will now officially be recorded in the Book of Time that whenever Newcastle called then Alan Shearer always answered. If I were him, I'd have had the missus say I was out creosoting the fence and couldn't come to the phone, like. But that's why he's the fella who scored about 500 goals in his career, and I'm the fella who stood by, usually intoxicated, and watched him score most of them... Good luck then, Al. Or should I say, 'Banzai!'?

Roeg the Warlock

Last Friday night's Nicolas Roeg tribute at BAFTA was a very special and memorable evening - for all attendees, I hope, including the honoree, but certainly for me. It's probably sufficient to say that I got to meet Jenny Agutter and Julie Christie - wouldn't you say? But really the joy of the occasion just went on and on. It's one thing to share a stage with speakers of the order of Danny Boyle, Stephen Frears, Kevin Macdonald and James Marsh. Another to be startled and moved anew by extracts from Nic's inimitable body of work. And another still to enjoy the good drink and the good crack that tends to follow such a ceremonial. (As Nic put it succinctly after taking receipt of his honorary Bafta, 'Time for a large one, I'd have thought...?') But nights such as these remind you what it's all about. My speech was big on personal reminiscence, since I can't pronounce as Nic's fellow practitioners can about why his films are the way they are (though Stephen Frears still declares himself quite baffled on this score...) But when I think about what those films have meant to me, as I did unavoidably throughout the evening, well... life to date would have been an unenlightened experience without them. Eureka, indeed.

Unquiet Men: Martyn, Mailer, Zevon, Clarke

I've become quite a fan of John Martyn's, albeit very belatedly, since the poor beggar had to die first to stir me out of 25 years of paying the barest attention to his musical gift. What finally grabbed me was BBC4's very fine documentary about Martyn, made in 2003-4, first aired a couple of years ago, but screened again in recent weeks to mark Martyn's passing in February. BBC4, it should be said, have set the bar very high for excellence in the making of docs about rock, and the Martyn film is among the best for the advantage of access to its subject, not least at a time in life when he was about to suffer the amputation of one of his legs. As the doc showed us, 'health problems' dogged Martyn through his life, because he habitually raised hell: he wasn't sufficiently kind to himself, and - though ostensibly genial and lively as a person on top of his creative gifts - he wasn't always kind to others either, including loved ones.

In the doc Ralph McTell spoke feelingly about the emotional content of Martyn's music, and Martyn confirmed the intention, speaking of 'an intrinsic sadness in any creature.' Fine words. But McTell also winced when he referred to some of the things he wished he didn't know about Martyn's personal life, and wasn't going to share with the viewers. And Martyn's ex-wife and collaborator Beverly, mother of his kids, was also on hand to prick the mood of male soulfulness: 'You can sing the blues and make people cry', she remarked with a certain rising anger, 'but it's what you do as a human being that counts.'

Of course, the lives of many eminent creative men are littered with instances of dismal and disreputable behaviour, domestic heartbreak and discord; and critics and biographers tend to require that these be dragged into the complete reckoning of the individual. And readers, listeners, audiences - they, we, want to know this stuff too, understandably. We're only human, right? So are our heroes - human, all too human, whatever their access to higher powers.

Martin Amis once (in the mid-80s) took Norman Mailer to task across a sequence of interviews and reviews, commenting in a dismissive write-up of Peter Manso's brilliant oral history Mailer: His Life and Times that the 'common background noise' of the book during accounts of Mailer's stormy conduct in the 1960s was that of 'screaming children'. Fair comment, maybe. But Amis has surely now lived long enough to realise that judgement of one's fellow practioners in these delicate matters should be exercised with a little sympathy and self-awareness.

Of course, women, ex-wives in particular, can be piercingly acute dissecters of masculine boorishness. As a longterm admirer of Warren Zevon's music, I have never quite gotten over reading Crystal Zevon's oral history I'll Sleep When I'm Dead, which she compiled at her ex-husband's request following his death in 2003. I had known Zevon was a very bad drunk during his lowest personal ebb, and yet his gift for a rueful love song and the melancholy beauty of his turn of phrase tended me to see him as a man who had been more often ill-used than using, more hurt than hurting. Well, Crystal's book sure turned my head round on that score, notably from the point where she first describes Warren punching her in the face... She forgave him, at length and over time, and of course the credit and debit sides must be carefully balanced by those who weren't there. But still - talk about a nail in the coffin of the myth of the romantic troubadour...

One of the best insights into this vexed matter of male-female relations as complicated by the call of the creative life came to me back in 1998 when I interviewed the poet Jehane Markham for my book on Alan Clarke, with whom she had a relationship in the wake of the breakdown of his marriage. For Jehane this was a romantic transport that turned sour somewhat once she realised the extent to which Clarke required the company of male friends/accomplices and was unwilling to ever put his work into second place. Moreover, the milieu of Clarkey and his mates was boisterously proletarian, very different to where Jehane came from. She can say the rest in her own words, and I think she sums it up:

"It was old-fashioned, working class, patriarchal, it wasn’t good. And I was a silent woman, a young woman. There was a lot of anger that would come out of Alan, often when he was drunk. So I didn’t enjoy all that, it made my life with Alan quite separate, and that isn’t a good sign. Because if someone is going to be part of your life, you kind of integrate them with your friends and family, and I couldn’t. He did love his work, he was a workaholic, maybe too much so. In my dreams of him he was always working and I would think, ‘I can’t reach him’. When we worked together years later on [the BBC play] Nina, that was resolved. But I think he knew the balance of his life was wrong, he couldn’t get the personal thing right. Obviously, he was very scared of being trapped and contained and held back by a woman or women, he had to be free and unencumbered, and I think that was a battle within him. I don’t know if he regretted that, whether he felt we could have shared a life together while also being independent artists. It’s a lovely idea, but it takes a bit more than wishes, and it wasn’t to be."

Jacqui Smith: at the point of Nick Robinson's stiletto

I don't doubt for a moment where Nick Robinson's instinctive political sympathies lie, any more than I doubted what side Andrew Marr or Robin Oakley would take on certain issues of the day when enjoying a drink with friends. Robinson himself seems to have gradually taken onboard the extent to which the public have got his number, certainly in the time since his early months in the BBC Political Editor job, when his slip was continually showing, and he didn't seem to have the nous to tuck himself in.

Still, a measure of how he's come along is in today's BBC blog entry on the Jacqui Smith debacle, in which he strikes a tone that is also increasingly present in his to-camera stuff: reasonable and rounded and personally sympathetic, to some extent, you'd have to say.

"She is not, after all, just a minister or an MP but the mother of two school age boys who may now come to hate the day their mum went into politics."

And yet, what is the quintessence of dust...? Because what one truly takes away from the piece is the unmistakeable savour of a career and a government consigned to the rubbish-bin. Get to the end and you'll see the cleverness of Robinson's construction.

Adam Sandler, Who-ligan

Always fun, isn't it, when a couple of your favourite things get happily conjoined? As Adam sings in the clip related to the image (left), everybody loves The Who (or pretty much.) Of course, not everybody loves Adam, and he doesn't always make it easy for them to change their minds. But I remain unashamedly his fan, partly because of inspired stuff like this - the curtain-raiser to some rockers hall-of-fame induction late last year. The only thing wrong with this clip is that it cuts out just as the Oo' take the stage, to the inimitable bleeping hurdy-gurdy strains of the Baba O'Riley intro. But then they've done that tune a lot, and will do it many times more before they get old...
(Photo (c) Kevin Winter/Getty)

Red Riding: Do you take it black?

The other week I was talking to a Great British Filmmaker who, inter alia, was madly enthused about the previous evening’s transmission of 1980, the second of three instalments in Channel 4’s production of David Peace’s Red Riding novels (this one directed by the esteemed James Marsh, he of Man On Wire and others.) So, yes, Great Filmmaker was blown away, thought it was all wonderful, etc. I don’t think he’d had as much pleasure in front of a television set since they cancelled Twin Peaks.
At the same time he was a tad puzzled and frustrated as to why such ostensibly ‘dark’ dramatic material could be made in such a ‘bold’ stylistic manner for television, without any apparent qualms, whereas any commensurate attempts to be ‘dark’ and ‘bold’ with a feature film project are struggling more than ever to get off the ground right now. Great Filmmaker was speaking from rueful recent experience: the demands and expectations of ‘genre’ have become the bane of his life. (Moreover I’m aware of what a hard fight it was for Revolution Films and Channel 4 to get Red Riding into production and onto screens, for all the talent that was assembled in front of the camera as well as behind it.)
But as one film executive recently put it to me, the only movies getting made right now are ones that have ‘a very clear idea of their target audience.’ On that level it will be interesting to see how the feature version of David’s The Damned United fares upon its UK release next Friday. Certainly it’s being offered to the public as a far friendlier, more approachable work than Red Riding, which was unabashed about its aura of suffocating bleakness and virulent Yorkshire-born evil.

Sarah Kane

You reach a certain age in life where – well, for one thing, where it becomes very natural for you to begin a sentence as dismally as ‘You reach a certain age in life…’
Where was I? Ah yes. No, but really. Over time you may well get to the point where you start to see your university contemporaries popping up all over the place in public life. I went to a university that was pretty big on drama and media, indeed I expended most of my own ostensible B.Sc study-time staging plays and writing/editing on the student paper. Consequently I’m always pleased to see my ex-collegiate editors appear on the telly, whether Peter Hyman on Newsnight, or the radiant Susannah Reid on BBC Breakfast, in-between her maternities. Today I noticed another student paper associate, Tom Chesshyre, in the Times, and it seems he has a newish book out.
And on the drama side of things – I’ve never even seen Little Britain and yet still I find it hard to avoid David Walliams/Williams on TV. Most eminent of the drama bunch, I suppose, was the late playwright Sarah Kane. Last weekend I was in company with someone significantly older than either Sarah or myself, who has already made a close study of the Kane oeuvre as part of an English/Drama qualification. Naturally, talk turned to the first, celebrated/damned production of her play Blasted at the Royal Court in 1995. I was then asked if I could say what Sarah was ‘like’? Well, I knew her only slightly, the proof of which is probably implicit in the fact that I found her always very friendly and engaging and full of drive. In other words, she didn’t strike me as a depressive – but then, I’ve subsequently learned that no-one ever does until you know them extremely well; and even then, ‘the ruin is within’, as the poet said. But Sarah certainly struck me as a full-blown artist, perhaps the first contemporary I’d met close-up who’d had that effect, mainly because on the one occasion we shared a rehearsal space she so clearly knew exactly what effect she wanted, and she wasn’t afraid to shout about it.
The last time I caught sight of her was in 1998 at the Edinburgh Festival where she was presenting her play Crave and I happened to be curating a season of films by Alan Clarke, most of which, I was delighted to see, Sarah came along to. I should have guessed there would be an affinity for her in the uncompromising nature of Clarke. After a screening of Made In Britain that had knocked the audience dead, or so I thought, Sarah came up afterward to give me an affable bollocking about the poor sound quality. Very finical, you see. Six months later she was gone. But I see that only the latest of her revivals, 4.48 Psychosis, is blessed with and animated by the presence of Isabelle Huppert. A powerful testament, and there will be more, for sure.

Hull 1 Newcastle 1: Time for a long lie-down

So much for that effing Crunch-Cup-Tie. Hard to see what the NUFC players or flailing interim management thought they were doing to positively take away three points from a full-blown six-pointer. So, one it was, then – inadequate, like everything about the Toon this season barring the support; and so three weeks tomorrow the team go to Stoke for the next bloody crunch-cup-tie/six-pointer, by which time I can’t believe we’ll be sitting anywhere other than second-bottom of the league. The side that runs out against Arsenal at SJP tomorrow will be picked from a near-as-damn-it full-strength squad. And still, there’s no hope. True Faith says it all: ‘So far this season this squad have failed to beat any of the following teams (opportunities in brackets): Hull (4 times), West Ham (twice), Blackburn (twice), Everton (twice), Man City (twice), mackems (twice) and Wigan (twice). The others are still to be determined. Is this really the kind of team that deserves to stay up? If this was the mackems or the smoggies we’d be p*ssing ourselves laughing.’

Citizen Campbell at the Staggers

On a day like today - when I'm feeling rather like the creaking old horse who would be most kindly served by a sharp bolt to the head - it's surely a chance at inspiration to look and see what sort of a fist Alastair Campbell has made of editing the New Statesman for a week. (After all, I went for a couple of runs this week, my first such in maybe a year, and my calves, thighs and soles are still riven with pain; whereas Mr Campbell, famously, could jog for England, and still seems to get all his writing done, unlike me.)

Campbell's NS editorial is a gee-up speech to get Labour aroused and proactive for the next election. He comes out jabbing with a crack at the Opposition ('The Tories are not that far ahead. More importantly, they are not that good') and for sure that sounds like the forceful, entitled voice of experience, given Campbell's former dynamic position at the heart of government - though, somehow, still, I can't stop thinking that said position was not one to which I or anybody else in the country elected him.

In his view, "the Tories, Lib Dems and nationalist parties are not being subjected to sustained policy attack" and that of course would be his stock-in-trade were he back at the helm, but I'm not sure even Campbell could shoulder-charge the scrutiny away from government all that effectively when nearly every day has the potential to be a Bad News Day. (I mean, I was on a plane yesterday and so read the FT cover to cover... Jesus Christ, pass the revolver.)

AC's big planks, it seems to me:

1. "There has to be an excitement to the pre-manifesto process."

(Seconded, comrade. Let's have a carnival of ideas.)

2. "This government has saved [the NHS], as promised. Yet health – and education – have virtually disappeared from the political battleground..."

(Not true. For better or worse Cameron has proposed that the Tories contest this very Labour-like ground, so we've heard plenty already and we'll hear yet more.)

"[B]oth [health and education services] would be at risk if the Tories were returned. Young voters in particular need reminding what Britain under the Tories was like."

(I don't think that's going to wash. You can't fight Margaret Thatcher or John Major in 2010, only what's in front of you.)

3. This is what Campbell thinks Labour should important from Obama, and not just a lot of verbless sentences, but: "A clear, robust strategy. Teamwork. Organisation. Values. Hard work. Rebuttal. Attack operating at several levels. Message discipline. Creativity. Enthusing and empowering new supporters. And never even contemplating defeat."

All well and good and motivational. Maybe a bit thin for a weary Party trying for a fourth win in a row, whatever faith Campbell has in the cleansing, past-eradicating qualities of a strong message. But then I'm sure he's keeping his best stuff back for private consultations with Labour's Top Team. I mean, probably.

The Killings in Northern Ireland

Early this week PoliticsHome surveyed its political mates in the know, most of whom seemed to feel that Sinn Fein's first public response to the killing by republican dissidents of two British soldiers at Massereene Barracks was, in the well-known phrase, "mealy-mouthed." "One left-leaning media panellist says: 'Sinn Fein has to decide which side it is on.'" Interestingly a Tory MP told PH that he felt Adams gradually got more in synch with the tone of McGuinness, whom he felt 'from the start has been tougher on the dissidents.'

Anyhow, all this has changed, if not utterly, since the killing of the Catholic police constable Stephen Carroll, McGuinness's description of the killers as 'traitors', and his call upon PC Carroll's widow in the company of DUP First Minister Peter Robinson. Lord Tom King (who, when Northern Ireland Secretary back in the late 1980s, came to my school one day to open a sports hall) today declared himself impressed by the Sinn Fein leadership: “It's the big test for them, I think. The first couple of days of the real test has been encouraging."

'Traitors' is not a word you will hear Gerry Adams use, for many awkward reasons, rehearsed in this Times article by Kevin Toolis which unpicks a wearily familar recent history that I hoped I would never have to revisit. So here we are again. But things have changed, no question.

Back in the far more dangerous early years of the post-Good Friday 'process', the former priest and mediator Dennis Bradley drew on his theological training to advise Sinn Fein that it had to follow the logic of its public position: if the republican movement was In this process and not Out, then there could not be two armies within one state. Bradley, an excellent man from Buncrana, knew exactly where he stood, and was even made to suffer for that stance in a nasty incident at a Derry pub. But the logic remains, has got harder yet, and has clearly impressed itself on McGuinness and on Adams, whomever is the more vocal or less tongue-tied of the two.

Esquire (April 2009) now on stands: includes Clint, + RTK on The Damned United

They say Clint Eastwood has retired from movie acting, though I don't have to believe it, any more than do the many newspaper scribes (some of the same vintage as Clint) who have been penning nostalgic can-this-really-be-the-end? pieces in the wake of Gran Torino. (Peter Preston, for instance, former Guardian editor and film buff, who must quietly fancy himself as a bit of a veteran gunslinger.)

In any event, Clint the Director marches on. The Cannes Festival just gave him an honorary lifetime-achievement Palme d'Or, something they only bestowed once before, on Ingmar Bergman no less. Whatever you think of Clint the auteur, it's a fact that had he not existed then French film critics would have had to invent him, so closely does he resemble what they require American Cinema to be, or to mean.

Anyhow, here's Clint on the cover of another excellent issue of Esquire, just out. My contribution this ish is a piece about the new film version of David Peace's The Damned United. Among the more digestible things I say therein, this gobbet, after describing the picture as 'a typically English love story':

"[The film] shouldn’t be judged against Peace’s novel, but nor should it be forgotten that the novel is essentially a hate story – specifically the demoniac hatred Peace’s Clough feels for Revie and Leeds, worsened by other baneful spirits (including booze.)

Alastair Campbell: Reading Him Writing on His Watching Himself

As blogs go, Alastair Campbell's is of more obvious interest than most, although - as with his bestselling Diaries, and as with the public pronouncements of his former boss - you really have to read hard between the lines to separate what he means from how he wishes you to see him. But then that's also true of a lot of less famous bloggers...

Still, if you want to really tie yourself into knots on the subject of the relatively small but endlessly dynamic and self-referential world of Meeja, do read Campbell's account of attending a private screening of Armando Ianucci's already much-acclaimed movie In The Loop, and his careful explanation of exactly how, why and when he will be contributing to the publicity drive for the film. You could say it's a study of a master at work; or you might feel less charitable; or whatever. Mr Campbell won't mind, he's made of sterner stuff, as we're quite often reminded.

Miners Strike Redux: David Jenkins & The People

If it's more recall and analysis of the Miners Strike you're after, then there's plenty to read this morning. The Daily Mail is jumping up and down on the corpse of Scargill's 'legacy', assisted by reference to a new book from Francis Beckett and David Hencke, though the sneering eventually winds round to a few critical comments about the Government of the day. The Guardian have given Scargill space to claim once more that he actually won the thing, at least on principle, and that his hitherto unheralded efforts to reach consensus were spurned. In an editorial far too drab too link to, the Guardian asserts that neither side deserved to win the Strike - this presumably a conscious echo of the famous enthronement sermon of 1984 delivered by David Jenkins as he was became Bishop of Durham, his point being that neither side should lose. Jenkins was interviewed the other day by the Northern Echo and sounded much like his old self: “I was a friend of the miners and a champion of their families, but I was by no means an uncritical supporter of the NUM. I’d been landed with this, so I had to do something about it. I’m a simple believer and I think God is in favour of people.” If only that last bit were true in any respect, then we'd all be a lot better off, I daresay.

I don't think anybody wanted Crusaders to be longer than it is, even those critics who liked it (though the man at the TLS rather kindly seemed to fancy a few more chapters.) But it does make people laugh (or else groan) when I say that the last few months' work I did on the book was to cut 35,000 words out of it... Among the non-vital stuff that I snipped a good deal sooner, from the midst of the book's revisiting of the Miners Strike, was a bit about the figure of Jenkins, who is the kind of priest that the young John Gore really aspires to be. This is his reaction to hearing that enthronement speech:

"It was good as cracking open a book of an evening to find one's inchoate thoughts of that very afternoon emblazoned on a page in best prose. ‘We are all concerned’, Durham had stressed. He had spoken of communities. He had been most specific about affluence, material gain, how the fortunes of some should not inflict misery on many. And he had lashed the government for its intransigence. For his troubles he had been pelted with calumny ever since... But he seemed to be a fellow ready to stand up in the market square and suffer a stoning. And that, John respected."

Jenkins' own book The Calling of a Cuckoo is worth a read for any interested parties.

David Peace: Cometh the Hour

If you want to feel a bit sick before bedtime, take a look at this skimpy nonsense that the BBC News site has posted up to mark the 25th anniversary of the walkouts that began the last Miners' Strike. Maybe one wouldn't feel so scornful if they hadn't decided to pour a skipload of rubbishy period pop music over the still images; but the effect of same is trivialising at best, and actively loathesome at worst - after all, somebody picked and sequenced that execrable music, just as they picked and sequenced the still photos and the newsreel soundbites, which culminate ('Everything Must Change') in Margaret Thatcher's characteristically deranged, myopic and evil comments on the subject of industrial relations.
But if you turn the sound off and just look at the photos, I daresay one visual element, one creeping stain across all things, will strike you hardest, and that's Uniformed Police, legion upon legion, outnumbering striking miners, any hour of day or night, yes sir. What can one think, but that these officers must have been sorely committed to that cause, or else were being handsomely paid for their pains?
Tonight I was originally minded to pen a few words about the TV adaptation of David Peace's Red Riding which has just begun its run on Channel 4; but thankfully there's plenty more to come on that score. I imagine anyone who watched Episode 1 this evening has come away with somewhat charged feelings about the 'thin blue line' and where it cuts through our body politic. And since all those writers who are truly worth the candle are plugged into currents that run deep and fierce under the endless banalised surface of our society, so it seems fitting that Red Riding is airing to coincide with the miners' unhappy anniversary, since David's novel GB84 is also lying out there in wait for anyone who fancies an account of the Strike that is free of the customary image repertoire (or the strains of the Style Council) and who cares to give some serious thought to the question of who or what is our nation's Enemy Within.

On Digging That Cat Bob Dylan...

It was my friend the massively erudite and prolific author/journalist Kevin Jackson who first introduced me to the technical term 'BobCat', maybe 2-3 years ago now? As I recall, it was while we were dining with the polymathic filmmaker Paul Schrader, a hero to this Blog, and himself a conspicuous BobCat. But the very fact that the whole BobCat business was all news to me as recently as then is testimony to the truth that I'm only a very amateur and third-rate sort of a Bob Dylan Fan.
I do have most of his long-playing records, and I dabble on the fringes of Dylan scholarship, albeit far removed (even alienated) from the serious esoterica and apocrypha. Moreover, like a whole bunch of practising novelists, be they good, bad, or mediocre, I often write with music on for the purpose of mood and glancing inspiration; and so I can say that a fair bit of Crusaders was written to the soundtrack of Dylan's so-called 'Christian' albums (Slow Train Coming, admittedly, much the favourite of these.) But that's about the size of my Bobcatness. (Actually, hang on, for what it's worth there are a few hommages to Dylan lyrics in my The Name of this Book is Dogme 95, which were astutely spotted and thrown back to me by the Copenhagen-based scholar and Bobcat Carsten Jensen.)
So why are these selective Visions of Bob now keeping me up past the dawn? Well, for one thing, the aforementioned K. Jackson recently dropped me a line to let me know he was ploughing 'through all of F. Scott Fitzgerald's books', and I was slow enough to ask him why... It so happens that Kevin is writing another of his daunting scholarly works, this one on the modernist literature of the 1920s. But still, honestly... No BobCat, I, to have missed that glaring reference. Nonetheless, however weakly, I managed to shoot back to Kevin that I 'couldn't even touch the books he'd read', in point of numbers at least... And we had a good exchange about the particularly Dylanesque love/hate of lists of learned reading, a matter on which Bob expounded further in the little-read Tarantula, which is as near as I get to his esoterica.
Furthermore, me and this Blog are pleased to have received another commendation from the excellent and previously cited The Story and The Truth maintained by Anna French and Dan Hartland; and while rooting round that site I just read this fine essay by Hartland on the 'great late trilogy' formed by Dylan's most recently released trio of albums. Again, like a heretic, I must admit that of the three in question only Time Out of Mind gets much play round my house. But then I played it just the other day, during novel-writing hours... See, I'm tryin' to get to heaven, before they close the door...
On which topic, I must just squeeze in this morsel from Ian Parker's assiduous observational New Yorker profile of Christopher Hitchens, published back in 2006 - one of those journalistic snapshots that just sticks with you, both the story and the telling of it:
"Hitchens went into the house and put on Bob Dylan's 'Tryin' to Get to Heaven'; he stood in the doorway and sung quietly along. He quoted Philip Larkin on Dylan: a 'cawing, derisive voice.' He repeated Larkin's words a few times, approvingly. His daughter got out of the pool, and said, pleasantly, 'Can we close this door, so nobody else has to hear this?'... She went back to her friends. 'Look,' Hitchens said happily. 'They're waiting for us to die.'"

Nicolas Roeg @ BAFTA, March 27, w/ RTK

On Friday March 27 BAFTA will host a tribute evening to Nic Roeg under the banner 'The Magician With A Movie Camera.' And I will have the privilege and fun of being emcee for the night. Here as a refresher is the piece I wrote on the maestro last year for Film In Focus. And the BAFTA site trailers the event with the following text (in which you may note the prominent and valued endorsement of Danny Boyle, a director currently enjoying the best of times):

"Visionary director Nicolas Roeg has created some classics of modern cinema as well as inspiring several generations of world-class filmmakers by virtue of his poetic eye and iconoclastic approach to storytelling. Danny Boyle considers Roeg to be as important as David Lean in the history of British cinema, and it's impossible to keep track of the number of contemporary filmmakers who cite Don't Look Now as among their key influences. With Performance, Bad Timing, The Man Who Fell To Earth and Walkabout, Roeg cemented his place in the modernist canon - but his influence owes as much to his uncompromising approach as to the detail of his personal creative vision. Join us for this evening where some extraordinarily special filmmakers pay tribute to a cinematic hero."

Hero, indeed. Join us, indeed. (The photo of Roeg above is by Dave Sidaway for the Montreal Gazette.)

Bolton 1 Newcastle 0: Are those bells I hear tolling?

Earlier in this awful season Shola Ameobi narrowly missed his chance to play in the old Division 2, for, I think, Ipswich. But, again if I recall right, he failed the medical. No worries, though - Newcastle kept him and also rewarded him with a new contract, clearly keen that he continue to lope on, giving Toon fans a few more years of unfulfilled 'promise', the occasional goal, but very consistent displays of a temperament suggesting that he thinks himself a bit too good for the hectic heat of a contest, and boring stuff like tackling and tracking back.

Anyhow, the raveous maws of Division 2 are yawning wide for Shola once more, just as the bell tolls for NUFC, after today's latest dismal defeat in a season of dismal defeats. I hear the fans booed Mark Viduka's appearance as substitute for Martins, not just at seeing Oba disappear down the tunnel but also because Shola remained on the park. Shola may puzzle over all this, just as he might wonder why he's the only Toon player in living memory not to be newly idolised after scoring a seemingly crucial goal against Sunderland (the reason, I reckon, being that no-one really feels the point won by that equalising penalty at SJP is going to end up amounting to a hill of beans.)

So is this the promised end? 11 games remain. Nobody reckons we'll get any points home to Man U, Chelsea and Arsenal, or at Liverpool or Villa. That leaves the visits to SJP of Fulham, Boro and Pompey, and the trips to Stoke, Hull and Spurs. Six cup ties, eh? (Shame we were garbage in the cups this year too.) Probably at least 12 more points needed - maybe a couple less but you wouldn't count on it. It's bad. But then you have to say that if there aren't 3 or 4 wins left in this team from those fixtures, then Division 2 is indeed their rightful home.