Elaine May: Largely Unsung, Yet So Sing-able

Back in the mid-1990s I worked a while at the British Film Institute on a number of documentaries about great filmmakers, and there I got to know many very talented and knowledgeable people, among them Mary Albert, a trained film editor who was also engaged part-time in a doctoral thesis on slow motion. So she and I used to have plenty of good chats about finessing matters of cinema, but I don’t think anything quite topped the day when we realised we were both avid fans of Elaine May’s Ishtar and – in the course of our animated conversation, and much to the consternation of the rest of the office – began to sing aloud snatches of the movie’s many musical numbers – ‘Telling the Truth Can Be Dangerous Business’, ‘The Lawnmower Song’, ‘Hot Fudge Love (Cherry Ripple Kisses)’ etc etc.
This is how we the anointed feel about Ishtar in particular, and May’s stuff in general. It would be more socio-culturally acceptable to say one were mainly a fan of the classic Nichols/May material c. 1950s/60s and, of course, The Heartbreak Kid (1972), which is probably rated as her greatest cinematic success. But for me you have to start out by defending the work that clearly served to terminate May’s directorial career, and not just on account of its commercial failure. If you read Peter Biskind’s recent biography of Warren Beatty you will be treated to the view – advanced chiefly by Ishtar’s genius production designer Richard Sylbert, but supported by significant others – that May ‘can’t direct.’ That's funny, and may be true on some level, but there really aren't that many movies I love more than Ishtar. I wrote the following in Ten Bad Dates with De Niro:

I like to imagine a parallel universe wherein May’s comedy is considered an endlessly quotable classic, hailed by the worthier critics for its accurate reflection of US foreign policy in the Middle East, MP3 files of its adeptly terrible songbook keenly swapped. None of that is ever going to happen on this planet; but such are the virtues discussed on rare occasions when two or more Ishtar fans are gathered. The rest of the world believes that May wasted Columbia’s money on some imbecile script allowing Dustin Hoffman and Warren Beatty to insult the audience as klutzy New York songwriters who dream of being Simon and Garfunkel. The duo wind up in Morocco, buffeted between leftist guerrilla Isabelle Adjani and CIA man Charles Grodin. This colossal commercial failure, funnily enough, is a heartening comedy about failure. Watch Beatty trying earnestly to talk Hoffman out of a suicide jump: ‘It takes a lotta nerve to have nothing at your age… Most guys would be ashamed. But you've got the guts to just say, ‘To hell with it.’ You say you’d rather have nothing than settle for less.’ The stricken look of dawning love on Hoffman’s face upon hearing this is worth your money alone.

A prominent member of the Elaine May Defence League is my pal Ryan Gilbey, first-rate film critic at the New Statesman. A few weeks ago I posted some YouTube clips of May on Facebook, just in a whimsical late-night spirit, but happily these prompted Ryan to devote an entire blog column to his May-love, which you can read here. One of Ryan’s specialist subjects is the ‘golden age’ of American moviemaking between, roughly speaking, Bonnie and Clyde and Raging Bull, and he places May adroitly in that moment, praising her ‘prickly sensibility’ as ‘consistent with the kind of downbeat, morally penetrating US cinema that was prevalent in the 1970s.’
If you don’t know her work, you’re wondering by now – is she actually funny? Decide for yourself. I shouldn’t say this but on YouTube you can watch the entirety of her wonderful A New Leaf (1971), which she not only directed but also shines in as a performer, playing – as Ryan thumbnails it – ‘a wealthy botanist earmarked for marriage and murder by a penniless former socialite (Walter Matthau).’
I also respectfully offer the following evidence. On the page, let’s start with her Vanity Fair Proust Questionnaire circa 2009. Turning to YouTube, let's have her tribute to Mike Nichols at an AFI Lifetime Achievement gala, one of the bits that got Ryan writing; her in her beautiful youth, cracking up the Emmys with Nichols in 1959; and some choice cuts from the opening reel of Ishtar.

Frankenstein's Remains...

I wrote a long piece for the Guardian that ran yesterday, on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, its context and legacy, and the new stage version at the National Theatre adapted by Nick Dear and directed by Danny Boyle. The essay took up a healthy double-page spread in the paper, but obviously even with 2000 words to spare you end up cutting out a fair when you’re discussing a subject with this much, ahem, life in it. 

In respect of what message(s) Frankenstein carries for the wisdom and ethics of scientific/medical exploration – naturally I would have liked to say a few words about Mary Shelley’s framing device of Robert Walton, the polar adventurer-navigator leading a full ship’s crew in search of the Northern Passage when, his way obstructed by ice, he alights upon a frostbitten man chasing a half-glimpsed giant across the arctic terrain... 

Walton is seeking paradise, he dreams of conferring ‘inestimable benefit...on all mankind to the last generation, by discovering a passage near the pole...or by ascertaining the secret of the magnet’. Of course he is also endangering his crew. As such Victor Frankenstein is a man he ought to meet. 

They are two masculine loners, obsessed by their own brilliance and taken by surprise when their great trespasses redound upon them. Frankenstein has enough dearly-bought wisdom to tell Walton to learn from his example, to see ‘how dangerous is the acquirement of knowledge’, how wrong-headed is ‘he who aspires to become greater than his nature will allow.’ And yet at the death Frankenstein is back in dangerous self-delusion, excoriating Walton’s crew as they turn mutinous: ‘You were hereafter to be hailed as the benefactors of your species… And now, behold, with the first… mighty and terrific trial of your courage, you shrink away…’ Then his dying words: ‘I have myself been blasted in these hopes, yet another may succeed.’ 

So Frankenstein is seen to be in two minds as to how far and boldly a man should go in the spirit of discovery – and as I say in the piece I think Mary Shelley felt the same. In his adaptation Nick Dear gets rid of Walton and starts proceedings fifty pages into Shelley. As he told me, he was very keen on the Walton material but found that it ‘didn’t get us swiftly into something that was meaty and bold.’ And the latter is how a play ought to be. Dear certainly does frame the debate for the audience through Victor’s refrain throughout the play: ‘We can only go forward. We can never go back.’ The ironies are there for us to mull over. 

Nick Dear also offered some very interesting thoughts on the special challenge of adapting iconic often-done material: ‘I don’t really want to know what anyone else has done, ever’, he told me, saying that he hadn’t read any of the previous Frankenstein play-scripts. Danny Boyle was equally mindful of the cinematic heritage. According to Dear he first wrote his opening scene with ‘the creature lying horizontally on a slab, as in the movies. And one of Danny’s first notes was, ‘No, I want to have him upright on a frame, so it looks different...’ 

In respect of the movies: of course there is not a great deal of Mary Shelley in the famous Hollywood version of 1931, in which Boris Karloff – gaunt, hulking, square of skull, bolted at the neck but resolutely mute – sealed the iconography of Frankenstein (see below #1).

Kenneth Branagh dug a ditch for himself by directing and starring in the 1994 movie entitled Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, though his honourable try (even retaining the Walton figure) was gratuitously maligned, and had at least the virtue of a characteristically noble performance by Robert De Niro as the Creature (see below #2). 

Christopher Isherwood was bold enough to entitle his 1973 2-part television adaptation Frankenstein: The True Story, an amusing conceit given that Isherwood turns the tale into one of super-aesthetic homo-eroticism. I must say, though, that I’m a huge fan of Isherwood’s version, in which Michael Sarrazin is both movingly pitiable and ghoulishly malevolent (see below #3). 

 

On that note, a last word from Nick Dear on one of his key departures from Shelley, namely the Creature’s realising of his chilling threat to be with Victor on his wedding night: “... I thought, in a Victorian sense, [the creature] wreaking revenge on Victor Frankenstein by terrifying everybody and showing up and looking horrible might have been sufficient. But I suppose I was looking for ‘What’s the worst thing he can do to Victor, the really worst thing...?’

The ABBA songbook

In recent weeks my elder girl’s Favourite Film pick has become the ‘ABBA musical’ Mamma Mia, which I’ve now watched about 36 times, more times than I’ve seen Au Hasard Balthazar, The Conformist or Viridiana (put together...) So, yeah, I know Mamma Mia pretty well now, and can even admire its vigour, its dramatic construction and canny appeal towards every imaginable audience demographic (except maybe Males between 28-34.) It’s no easy feat to be that popular, though the storytelling choices are just a bit easier in the genre of the wish-fulfilment Musical than they are in your standard Drama. (I was interested recently to read a hymn of praise on some creative/script-writing site to the supposedly exemplary narrative design of The Sound of Music, my elder girl’s Former Favourite Film. Yes, all very well, it moves along nicely, but I would say that when it comes to handing out the big plaudits and anointing the role models it’s not solely about how a story was told but why it was told, and with what ambition...) Sticking with what’s problematic about the creeping cultural dominance of the mass-popular form, I’ve been reading David Mamet’s Theatre, and had to laugh at his terse lament for the way all theatre on Broadway must now be tailored to the taste of the spectacle-&-star-loving Tourist: “No adult resident in London”, says Mamet, “would go to see the Crown Jewels, and no adult resident in New York went to see Mamma Mia, for to do so would have been culturally repugnant, branding him as a tourist, or dufus...”
Anyway, so, in a few weeks I’m due to go with the kids to see Mamma Mia in the West End...
Moving on – obviously I now have ABBA songs in my head morning, noon and night, which leads me to wonder: exactly how good were they? Better than Lady Gaga, whose ‘I Like It Rough’ has been ringing between my ears for the last 24 hours after one chance hearing? I suspect ABBA do deserve a fair bit of respect, especially for how their song-writing grew from foot-tapping pop tunes about falling in love to rather more wistfully melodic songs about getting divorced – which, of course, the two singer/songwriter couples that comprised the group famously did, in the late 1970s-early 1980s.
Of course there is in pop-musical appreciation this funny business of ‘credibility’ but then ABBA pretty much had that even when I was a lad. I seem to remember Neil Tennant of the Pet Shop Boys hymning the ‘Bergman-esque’ period of the Divorcing Songs, which is maybe not so surprising, but better yet I recall the moody Ian McCulloch of Echo & The Bunnymen picking ‘The Winner Takes It All’ as one of his Top Ten Tunes on a Radio 1 show of the mid-1980s. The presenter asked him rather sarkily to say why, and he said in heavy and resolute Scouse, ‘It’s just a great song’...
My favourite, though, is this ‘un.

Gordon Burn on Gordon Brown

The other day I had occasion to revisit the original transcript of the long interview I did with Gordon Burn and David Peace back in April 2008, set up by and written up for Esquire. Gordon died 18 months ago, not long before my younger daughter was born, and he's still very much missed, but I believe there are plans in the works to make a considered tribute/memorial to him later this year. Meantime, reading again his fascinating reflections on his work, in particular those grimly essential studies of murderers, I was relieved to be reminded of some simpler musings he had to offer on the then-Prime Minister, which to me show once again his great adeptness at seeing the story behind 'The Story':

"[Brown's] ineptitude in terms of being naïve about how the real world works is amazing, really. I think his lack of adeptness with the media and 'spin' - all the stuff he was supposed to stand for, and which for three or four months looked like a good thing - has just become an embarrassment. It indicates his lack of connection with the world, with people. He’s been living in Westminster since 1983, even before then when he was living in the manse and into student politics, he just seems like a total f***-up as a person. When he says he likes the Arctic Monkeys or his favourite programme is Strictly Come Dancing... you know it’s utter crap."

L'Affaire 'Andy' Carroll...

... et les cons 'Gros Mike' Ashley et 'Degsy Llambias'... Eh bien, plus ca change... mais l'homme le plus sage est M. Keegan...
The 'disco' in the clip below, BTW, is at 02:15: 'Mike Ashley doesn't know anything about football... Derek Llambias knows even less.' But to be fair, Mike knows a lot about fizzy lager and can sell you a cheap pair of elasticated shorts, while Degsy is just the man for you if you happen to own a casino and are seeking some insufferable little big-mouth to run it.

Stylist: Dr Forrest 'The Chilling Read of 2011'!

Commuting into town regularly again for the first time in a few years, I've only just begun to notice the free magazine Stylist, but I'll be paying it keen attention from now on because in a feature last week on books to look out for in 2011 it picked out The Possessions of Doctor Forrest as 'The Chilling Read of the Year.' This is really gratifying, so thanks to 'em. 'Chilling' is obviously the desired effect of this piece, so I was doubly pleased yesterday when one early reader of the proofs told me she'd been getting through it in the evenings, and had finally had to close all the windows and turn on all the lights round her house in order to steel herself for the end...

Bookhugger column: On Jonathan Powell's 'New Machiavelli'

My second Bookhugger column of the month is now posted here, and with that out of the way I hope to read no more studies of British government between 1997-2007, at least not before my dotage... I should say I wrote and filed said column before the resignation of Alan Johnson and the appointment of Ed Balls, so... well, you can imagine my mood.

On Being a Whisky-Drinker

My last birthday was a Big One and so I did rather well for gifts, not least in that I was presented with several very fine bottles of malt whisky over which I crowed for days to anyone who’d listen. In fact more than one friend was moved to remark that he ‘hadn’t known I was such a whisky drinker...’ Well, a bloody good thing too, pal, for if it were more widely known that I favour the amber then I daresay I’d receive a lot more of it on gift-giving occasions (since apparently I’m reckoned to be ‘a bit hard to buy for...’) And if there were racks upon racks of first-rate whisky just lying round my house all the time...? Aw boy, I’d be in trouble then.
Let me say quickly that out of all the malts I choose the Glenlivet, which is certainly not a connoisseur’s pick but one that you could put your house on. I won’t try to describe its complexity on the tongue and in the throat, sadly I’m not that accomplished a writer. I’ll just say that I began drinking it (as I began doing many things) on account of something I read by Norman Mailer – in this case, the early pages of Harlot’s Ghost where retired CIA man Harry Hubbard receives a nocturnal visit from his old spook associate Reed Rosen, offers him a dram and, while pouring, is annoyed to hear Rosen ‘go on about its merits.’ The main point is that Hubbard pours it neat – and ‘screw him if after all that praise he secretly wanted ice...’
The finest, most discerning piece of writing I know about whisky and its ways is Don Paterson’s poem 'A Private Bottling' from the 1997 collection God’s Gift to Women. If you don’t have it, do yourself a favour. The following stave offers only the barest flavour of a poem that concludes magificently with a glass raised in toast 'not to love, or life, or real feeling,/but to their sentimental residue;/to your sweet memory, but not to you...' But just as a passing evocation of the taste of the ambers - it's unimprovable.

O whiskies of Long Island and Provence!
This little number catches at the throat
but is all sweetness in the finish: my tongue trips
first through burning brake-fluid, then nicotine,
pastis, Diorissimo and wet grass;
another is silk sleeves and lip-service
with a kick like a smacked puss in a train-station;
another, the light charge and the trace of zinc
tap-water picks up at the moon’s eclipse.
You will know the time I mean by this...

Against AV

This blog has had little to say on politics of late, possibly because this blog is increasingly Old, while politics has allegedly got New (while nonetheless looking to me about as sprightly as ‘an old bitch gone in the teeth.’) Consider this recent gobbet as quoted in the Independent:
‘A Labour source said: "Those opposing reform are from the old generation, rather than what some have called Generation Ed. Ed [Miliband] is prepared to work with Nick Clegg in the interest of something he believes in. This is what we mean when we talk about new politics..."’
Urgh. Still, it seems worth offering my tuppence on electoral reform, since everybody else is. I’m against AV, emphatically – there are no circumstances under which I’d welcome it, end of, even when first-past-the-post has been referred to by the Younger Generation as ‘an analogue system in a digital age’ that is due ‘an upgrade’... (Urgh 2.)
A chap called Mark Fuller spoke for me and others, I’m sure, on Twitter the other week: ‘I'll be voting No in May because I see nothing wrong in whoever gets the most votes winning...’ The most keenly-stated riposte to this position that I’ve heard is: ‘But under First Past the Post being popular just means having one more vote than the next guy.’ But it doesn’t ‘just’ mean that. Surely if it means one thing alone then that would be ‘popular as in none of the other ‘guys’ got more votes than you...’
The argument over the vote seems to be getting more fractious as we slouch toward polling day, and a good few advocates of AV have begun to wax irritable over the seeming non-comprehension by those of us agin. Let me at least try to nail down the planks of my position, in no particular order.
1. I’ve heard it said that AV reduces the need for tactical voting. I know that it didn’t manage to do so in the election for Labour leader last September. I know of several David Miliband supporters who, knowing DM would ‘get the most votes’ and yet was vulnerable still to defeat, voted for Ed Balls #1 and DM #2, solely because they rightly figured Balls would be the last of the also-rans to be eliminated. The ruse didn’t work on this occasion, but I daresay that particular electorate may know better next time. The point is that tactical voting will be alive and well under AV.
2. I’ve further heard it said AV ‘requires every MP to get the support of at least half their constituents.’ No it doesn’t require this. What if none of the voters, or a negligible share of them, chose to state more than one preference? This scenario is not so massively unlikely. And AV is bad, in any case, at measuring what we call 'support' in the proper, active sense.
3. This is the pro-AV line that makes my skin crawl – that it ‘categorically ensures that no candidate can be elected who is actively opposed by a majority of voters.’ No it doesn’t, per #2 above. Moreover, I find the notion of this spoiler/veto principle, to be wielded by the Mass of the Unpopular against S/he Who Got The Most Votes, pretty repellent. I’m sure most of its upholders would say they live in fervent abhorrence of the BNP (even though the polite name given to the menace in public seems to be ‘divisive candidates’, a category into which the aforementioned and perfectly mild David Miliband fell last September.) Well, I’d say first-past-the-post is doing well enough at reflecting and appropriately rewarding the BNP’s level of support in the country, which is negligible.
4. AV-ers have said that their desired reform will eradicate the supposedly moribund, corrupt (cf. expenses) business of ‘safe seats.’ Well, here we approach a crux. I do believe that most of us live where we live for good and/or salient socio/cultural-economic reasons, and that We the People then define the character of that given area, also the shade of political representation that area broadly endorses. By which measure, there ought always to be relatively ‘safe’ seats. The idea that the character of an area is something we think ought to be in continual flux from election to election seems to me queer, undesirable, worrisome.
5. I have to take this seriously as it is stated by the estimable John Rentoul:
‘[B]eing able to rank candidates in order of preference gives more voters more of a chance of a say in the outcome... and reduces wasted votes.’
Well, if you really feel you need such a 'say', that the right to vote is in itself just not enough, then I humbly defer to you. I speak as one who, in 22 years of voting, has not once had the pleasure of voting for a candidate who went on to win. But I can’t complain about any of those results that I failed to influence, and I accepted that my neighbours had spoken, their will had been done. If I had needed so badly to feel warm and fuzzy about my voting preference then I would have taken steps to up sticks and move elsewhere. But the area where you live needs to send one representative to parliament, and I believe it should be the person who comes out on top after the ‘Likes’ have been totted up – not the one who slips over the line once all the ‘Dislikes’ or ‘Don’t Minds/Not Bothereds’ have been brushed up into the dust-pan and dumped all over the count.
So, yes, I hope AV is voted down, but its supporters can take some small heart from my long and indefatigable record of having failed to endorse a winning candidate. For what it’s worth, the point I have found most incisive in all of this was made by the Independent’s Andy McSmith:
"What the FPTP does is give an unfair advantage to parties whose votes are geographically concentrated at the expense of those whose support is spread widely but thinly. In England, that is a bias in favour of both Labour and the Conservatives at the expense of all the others... The coalition government has passed legislation which simultaneously promised a referendum on the FPTP voting system and imposed a redrawing of constituency boundaries. The referendum may or may not reduce the bias in favour of the two big parties. Redrawing the boundaries will certainly benefit the Conservatives at the expense of Labour."

Kevin Macdonald's Life in One Day

A conversation I had with the outstanding Scottish film director Kevin Macdonald for The List magazine, in respect of Macdonald's new movie Life in One Day, is now online here.
One of the glories of Macdonald's work is that he can tell compelling stories that reach out to wide audiences without compromising the discerning, questing intelligence that informs his choices of what he does. For instance, he's not only an Oscar-winning documentary maker but also co-editor of a definitive source-book on documentary history, Imagining Reality. And though Life in One Day would seem as up-to-the-second and box-fresh as a documentary could be due to its association with and use of all the speed and facility that digital cameras and YouTube have to hand... still, Macdonald can speak easily of drawing inspiration from Humphrey Jennings' Listen to Britain and Nikita Mikhalkov's Anna From 6 to 18.
And then you look aside from the intimate marvels of Life in One Day to the mud and muscle and glorious scale of Macdonald's upcoming feature film The Eagle... This is quite some career in cinema taking shape, you'd have to say.

Possessions of Doctor Forrest: A cover! And a comradely mention

Over at Amazon my new novel is now properly attired for its upcoming debut on June 2 2011. Meanwhile the excellent Australian novelist and critic James Bradley, author of The Resurrectionist and a co-oarsman of mine on the Faber fiction list, was kind enough to mention Doctor Forrest in his picks from the prospects for 2011 (and also to cite Crusaders as 'one of the more striking debuts of 2008').

Return of the Bookhugger!

My so-called 'regular column' is back, as trailered, and another one will follow hard upon at some point this month, inspired by Jonathan Powell's excellent The New Machiavelli.
Just to elaborate on a point left hanging in the column, to do with batting technique. If my admiration for Kim Hughes and his style at the crease had carried over analogously to the England First XI of the time c. late 1970s-early 1980s, then my hero ought to have been David Gower, similarly blond of curl and insouciantly ready to show off his range of shots. And yet Gower always looked a bit too enamoured of himself, not even terribly bothered when dismissed. He seemed to think he was taken care of in this world, and sure enough he was proven right.
No, the man for me was Nottinghamshire's Derek Randall, whose international career was as supported by his fielding brilliance just as Mike Brearley's was by his captaining skills. Randall was a batsman of fidgety and erratic brilliance, a cheerful/'daft' fellow by repute (as in the photo, doffing his cap to Dennis Lillee after a bouncer - a trick Kim Hughes might have tried.) But Randall was also somewhat neurotic in habits and superstitions, always likely to drive his fans into anxieties of their own. He seemed to play entirely on instinct and confidence. When these were there, runs flowed. When absent... well, his feet could be leaden at the crease, and he was out leg-before without score probably more often than any other England batsman in history.
I'll remember and cherish him always, though, as below:

Hammered at the tills, from dawn to dusk

Having lately moved my fiction into the realm of the supernatural I suppose I ought to be more comfortable abiding in a place of darkness and desolation... And yet a shadow looms that I fear may engulf me - good God, all of us! And that is the rise in the general level of prices of goods and services, and the consequent erosion in the purchasing power of our money. Yes, inflation.
FT Alphaville brought me the grim, grim news today:
According to the Office for National Statistics, air transport, rising petrol, diesel, gas and food prices were the most significant drivers to the increase in annual inflation between November and December.
Transport: prices, overall, rose by 3.6 per cent, the largest ever monthly increase on record... fuels and lubricants where prices rose by 2.8 per cent, the largest increase for a November to December period since 1996...
Housing and household services: prices, overall, rose by 1.4 per cent, the largest ever increase for a November to December period. The largest upward effect came from gas where average bills rose due to some of the major energy suppliers increasing their tariffs in December 2010...
Food and non-alcoholic beverages: prices, overall, rose by 1.6 per cent, the largest rise for a November to December period on record. The upward effects within this category were widespread with the most significant coming from fruit and vegetables...
Obviously the trick is not to panic - stay under your own roof (if said roof you can afford), eat less healthy stuff and try to cook it with a naked flame, while drinking strong lager, which remains reassuringly inexpensive. Sleep with the candle lit, and maybe that will keep the wolf from the door...
Iain Martin of the WSJ, as often, frames it well: "The politics of this are thus highly dangerous for ministers. They are trapped, between an independent central bank that focused too much on narrow inflation targeting in the boom years and now says it doesn’t matter because higher inflation is just a blip, overextended debt-laden consumers who want interest rates low to keep their show on the road, and hard-pressed savers (many of them older, and likely to vote) who are being fleeced..."

'No tears in baseball!'

My monthly Bookhugger column will resume next week after a short and unplanned winter break, and I’ll be writing about a fascinating biography of the former Australian cricket captain Kim Hughes: a dashing batsman in his day but, sadly, remembered more for the tears he shed at the press conference where he resigned the captaincy after his team took a pasting off the invincible West Indies side of 1984.
Boys don’t cry, as they say generally, and I guess Australian boys in particular are made to fear reprisals and eternal scorn should they succumb, not least when the matter in hand is sport. It’s a mite more acceptable/manly, I think, to shed a small tear in victory than in defeat – even to let go with the full waterworks, like Alex ‘Hurricane’ Higgins after the 1982 world snooker final. Or if, say, some staunch veteran colleague is hanging up his boots or hearing his last hurrah – in which case a fella on the field or in the stands could be permitted to look a little dewy round the eyes. But the idea that as a brawny sort of a sportsman you might be really and truly upset about something bad that’s happened... Jesus mate, you might as well walk yourself round to the Ladies’ Room for a session with the powder-puff, before your comrades or the team’s supporters drive you there with burning torches.
One alleged exception to this rule is Paul Gascoigne, whose desperate, blinking, red-eyed blubbing following his yellow card in the semi-final of Italia 1990 was widely felt to speak for the feelings of England fans as they contemplated a quite colossal disappointment.
For me the most utterly wrenching instance of a sportsman’s visible distress is without doubt Pete Sampras’s wracked effort to play the fifth set of his 1995 Australian Open quarter-final against Jim Courier, the tears streaming down his face even as he prepared to serve. His coach Tim Gullikson had been diagnosed with four separate brain tumours that week, and Sampras had been running daily between the tournament venue and the hospital. In the match, having gone two sets down he fought back to level, whereupon some airhead in the crowd thought it a considerate exhortation to yell, ‘Come on Pete, do it for your coach...’
The story is told in the documentary excerpt below, and watching Sampras wrestle with it , even now, is highly affecting. The highest level of individual sport is a lonely, intense, super-concentrated universe with scarcely an inch of space for error of weakness. I had though Sampras overpoweringly dull, if brilliant, as a player, and so hardly thought of him as a person, but post-1995 I became his keenest fan, the revelation of his deep feeling helping me belatedly to see him as the supreme athlete and competitor he undoubtedly was.

Our Best-Loved Authors... and Prospects for Books in 2011, Mine Included...

If all proceeds according to plan then I will have two books published into stores during 2011. My novel The Possessions of Doctor Forrest, now in bound proofs, is set fairly squarely for June, and the revised/updated edition of my Sean Penn: His Life and Times will follow in the autumn, subject to Mr Penn’s movements about the globe and also, I suspect, the international release schedule of Paolo Sorrentino’s This Must Be The Place. By any measure this double publication is a pleasing prospect for a writer, albeit with attendant/irreducible anxieties. A book is like a small child in some respects, you push it out into the world and hope that a goodly few people – someone, at least! – will take a shine to it. But I’m very thankful for what I’ve got, be assured. The making of books contains its own profound satisfactions, so long as one feels content that the final text represents what one actually intended to write. (I will never forget sitting with my then editor in 1998 as he and I turned admiringly in our hands the first copy off the presses of what was my first book, Alan Clarke. ‘Better than a PhD, eh Richard?’ he said to me with a grin. And there was no doubt in my mind.)
Of course, the high privileged gleam one might see across the surface of one’s own published endeavours can easily lose its sheen in the event of a sluggish take-up from book-buyers, or a disparaging review that people actually read. All the more reason why one must first make sure to please oneself: you never can be certain anyone else will show to your party, so you may as well enjoy a quiet moment to yourself.
In terms of making the reading public aware of these forthcoming publications: the Penn book will likely be linked, as I say, to whatever Sean is doing this year, and I expect to be running a long exclusive interview with the great man in the Telegraph newspaper come late summer/autumn. With Doctor Forrest we will just have to see what the readers of those early proofs think to it, though already I've been encouraged by the outcomes of submissions made for film/television rights and to foreign language publishers – news to follow as it’s all confirmed. But before this month is out I expect to be launching a new blog devoted solely to the novel, www.drforrest.co.uk: what I hope will be a sort of grand Gothic concordance celebrating the sort of literary/filmic/mythological darkness that informed the novel.
In such ways and by such means one tries to deliver one’s letters... The future of the book as a physical object/commodity is of course a much debated matter now, e-reader sales being tracked with particular zeal this Christmas. The user-friendliness of the new touch-screen systems has made a dent, it seems to me, in the formerly staunch cadres of readers who insisted they would never give up on printed books (or at least never fall in love with squinting at words on a screen.) The future does seem to work, though, and one might say that a text is a text, its merits integral however it is consumed. But I intend to treasure every minute of my stuff being printed and bound between covers for as long as that process is viable.
There’s a very commonsensical reason why reports of the book’s demise continue to be exaggerated, and that is the gift impulse that Christmas elevates to fever pitch. As a friend of mine opined recently, if there were no more physical books what on earth would you give as a present to those friends of yours who don’t do fragrance? There has to be something chunky and wrappable to be put into hands on the special occasion. Hence, it seems, the regrettable failure of the Rubberbandits to withstand the X-Factor’s drive to #1 in Ireland over Christmas: evidently the Bandits sold a stack more downloads than Simon Cowell’s lackey, but their CD single just wasn’t in enough stores, whereas Whatsisface’s was everywhere, and with a picture on the sleeve.
However, as the dogs in the street know, the success of the Book-as-Gift is near-wholly dependent upon that picture on the jacket, and whom it depicts: hence, as the Bookseller reported today, “Jamie Oliver scored the final number one of [2010] with Jamie's 30-minute Meals easily outselling the second-placed title Michael McIntyre's Life and Laughing… Both McIntyre and Stephen Fry received sales boosts in the final week…”
I haven’t ‘read’ (or, rather, cooked from) one of Jamie’s books in some years, partly because his TV shows have declined in interest sharply of late. (I hazarded upon his 2010 Xmas Special, saw him sitting down in matey fashion with Jonathan Ross, and dived for the remote.) By contrast, to speak of another bestseller, Nigella Lawson keeps doing the same voodoo, sashaying fetchingly around a soft-focus West London as if she were not actually married to Charles Saatchi, whipping up yummy dinner-party-grade stuff in her kitchen with a requisite number of slatternly from-a-tin shortcuts. I won’t gripe, though, since her How To Eat, given again to my wife this Xmas after our last copy got pinched, is really excellent. And even as I was tutting over a repeat of her telly show one Saturday morning before Christmas, I was suddenly gripped to watch her whip up a blinding-hot green chilli salsa that she claimed to favour for cocktail hour round her place (or what, round mine, is the kids-abed moment when I crack a beer...)
So it’s no mystery to me why these authors have readers – though to these eyes Michael McIntyre’s stupefying success still has the feel of witchcraft or sorcery about it. But, in the manner of Dr Faustus and of Dr Forrest, I shall be practising hard at spells of my own in 2011.

Did the movies get tired or was it me?

In my memory Christmas used to be quite definitively a time for exciting movie premieres on the telly: for checking the seasonal Radio Times keenly to see who was showing what and when. That all seems an aeon ago. Still, if you don’t see that many new films (and last year I think I saw about six) then you do get to catch up a bit over the holidays, for better or (usually) worse. From last year I remember the ghastly experience of catching the Miami Vice feature film – incredible high-end po-faced rubbish, its low point (or alleged romantic high-spot) the risible sequence of Colin Farrell and Li Gong power-boating over to Cuba so as to consummate their ‘passion’. This year’s flabbergasting post-prandial watch was the last Indiana Jones movie on the BBC. Are you actually telling me that Steven Spielberg directed that? And David Koepp wrote it, and Cate Blanchett wanted to be in it...?
Of course, you might riposte that I really ought to have been watching a film that was intended for grown-ups; and you would be right. Yet out of the half-dozen new movies I saw last year, probably the two I liked best were Sherlock Holmes and The Wolf Man – a grim return, not least for a supposed cinephile who belongs to a private society of Robert Bresson votaries. Still, these days one feels more and more worn out come nightfall... This Christmas I even sat through Terminator: Salvation on foreign-subtitled cable, just waiting and waiting for one good crunchy fight between Man and Robot. I had to wait the entire picture, and when it came it was the exact same fight as in Terminator, or Terminator 2, or the two of ‘em spot-welded together. Needless to say the irony of this discovery was entirely at my expense.
To speak of higher things, franchise-wise, The Godfather Part III was on Film Four tonight. When I edited the Ten Bad Dates with De Niro book a few years back quite a few contributors took a pop at this movie, including the Coen Bros, who claimed ("let’s not kid ourselves") that it was "not so hot." True, the things that are wrong with it are very obvious. But the things that are right are very right.

Goodnight Pete Postlethwaite

This was the first one I saw him in - saw it at Cannes in 1988, in fact: one of those screenings you don't forget. 'Will you have a drink with me, Dad...?' Good as Postlethwaite was, I'm not sure he was ever better.

My brother took this too... Magic! Happy Xmas, see you in 2011

The Rubberbandits: #1 in our hearts, no messin'...

This blog is a longstanding subscriber to Viz comic, believes that a little coarseness in humour can go a long way - can even be morally necessary - and so it has keenly supported the efforts of Limerick's Rubberbandits to beat the victorious X-Factor candidate to Christmas #1 in Ireland, courtesy of their quite delightful 'Horse Outside' record. Alas, today's Irish Independent brought grim news:
"It was always going to be a David and Goliath struggle and it seems the dark horses have lost. With this year's Christmas Number One to be announced tomorrow, it looks as if 'X Factor' winner Matt Cardle will take the top spot ahead of Limerick Youtube stars Rubberbandits. Latest figures reveal that Cardle has sold 33,281 copies of his debut single 'When We Collide' ahead of Rubberbandits' 'Horse Outside' with 13,533 purchases, both physical and download. Last night the gap of almost 20,000 units was described as "insurmountable" by one industry expert, but a spokesman for Rubberbandits claimed there was still everything to play for until shops closed this evening..."
It looks bad. But sure the battle's not done 'til it's done, right fellas? Or how else would the Irish Republic have been won...?

The elusive essence of 'Conradian'

Over there on Faber Finds I've written a post on Joseph Conrad, whose marvellous A Personal Record (1912) Finds has made available between covers. I didn't mention Conrad's political disposition, which I usually never fail to point out in a writer, whether or not I care. (But Conrad was, of course, a pillar of reaction, with a bleak view of general humanity. Still, to his great credit he didn't - much - let that get in the way of his stories or deface his characters.)
I do say that there aren't any good film versions of his novels, and I daresay that remains the case: I never saw Mark Peploe's Victory despite wishing to, but then the whole venture was widely reckoned to be waterlogged from an early stage. Anyway, it's better, I think, that great novelists be undefiled by hopeless films; and Conrad's artful, atmospheric prose has often left admirers with cameras quite at sea over how to replicate that quality in images. Even one so gifted as Christopher Hampton, who has spent a fair bit of time engaged with this very difficulty, hasn't been able to crack it, as you may surmise from the trailer for his version of The Secret Agent (below).

Momus: This charming man...

1988 probably isn’t rated a banner year in the history of culture but I don’t think I’ve ever since read as many challenging books, seen as many slightly risque foreign-language movies, listened to as many Central European string quartets as I did over those twelve months. It was all to do with being 17, and the early stirrings of avidity for all things arty, the slight vertigo you get in starting to understand the real depth and breadth of what’s already out there in the world.

When you’re that age, though, you need encouragement, someone to give you a lead to follow. In this way I’m reminded of Nicholas Currie, the Scottish-born singer-songwriter who has for 25 years now written and recorded and engaged in all manner of superior cultural production under the name of Momus. In 1988 I discovered his early albums Circus Maximus, The Poison Boyfriend and Tender Pervert; and for a boy who was studying Ancient History, imagining what Japan was really like, and beginning to alphabetise his Penguin Modern Classics... well, it was a revelation to discover a songwriter who knew how to mix high culture, esoterica/erotica and intimate personal confession with such well-turned scurrility.

I wrote Currie a number of fan letters to an address printed on the back-sleeve of Tender Pervert, all of which he replied to very patiently and amiably, and the effect of all my gauche questions for him was that he pointed me in the direction of an awful lot of good reading and looking and listening that was hitherto alien to me. Certainly it was at his suggestion that I read Gide and Bataille, looked at Picabia and Dix, heard Schoenberg and Jacques Brel and The Threepenny Opera.

In the summer of 1990 I made a pilgrimage to the Edinburgh Festival to see a rare production of one of Mishima’s modern Noh plays, directed, if I remember rightly, by the great Yukio Ninagawa. I remember how not particularly surprised – though very pleased – I was when I clocked that Momus was sitting in the row in front of me. (Even in the dark his profile was very distinctive.) I went up to him afterwards and said hello – something of a miracle, as all through my adolescence you could hardly get a word out of me without using pliers – and he was very pleasant, as you want people to be when you’ve admired them from afar.
Momus has kept on writing and recording and getting up to all sorts. He blogs at iMomus. In this interview on YouTube he gives an interesting account of his career against the shifting backdrop of independent music labels over the last three decades. The promo clip below is a rather Neil Tennant-ish number that was probably the closest Momus came to a hit record in the UK.

NUFC: Loveless Marriage, Divorce Too Expensive

Admirable professionalism from the Newcastle United team this weekend, carefully worded responses to media from Captain Nolan, and exactly the right response from the fans at the game – all the way to the final whistle and the segueing effortlessly from cheers for a top performance/three points to renewed jeers for that minty pair of toe-rags still squatting in the board-room of this club. The Match of the Day cameras kept looking for Ashley’s pie-eater grins, but the microphones must have been pointing the wrong way, i.e. not at the Leazes End. Memo to Ashley & Llambias: we wish most earnestly and urgently that you could live your dream, get shot of us and go catch your effing taxi. Yet you persist (like morons, really) in going quite the wrong way about making NUFC appear an attractive saleable entity. Thankfully there are some footballers at this club, many of them improved immeasurably under the management of Chris Hughton, and yesterday it was clear they were still playing for him. Moreover we were lucky it was Liverpool visiting: a club clearly in an awful lot of bother. Had it been Blackpool or Blackburn or Wigan, strangely enough, I expect we’d have lost. The next four games are looking tough, though, with Spurs and Citeh in the middle of the sandwich. Over to you then, Alan Pardew. Or ‘Sort it out, Curbishley’, as I believe some comic genius sat near the NUFC dug-out addressed the new ‘gaffer’ on Saturday...

Dovegreyreader, too, tips Doctor Forrest...

The estimable dovegreyreader wrote a very kind and considered notice on my Crusaders back in February 2008, and I'm pleased to (belatedly) catch up with the news that she's keeping the faith in my stuff, by way of her preview of a few 2011 fiction lists (amusingly headlined 'Reasons to be Cheerful about Publishing'...) in which she highlights The Possessions of Doctor Forrest (scroll down) amid the Faber schedule.
Picture above is, of course, of a forest - or a dark wood - or selva oscura, if you will...

High Passions at the Place for Lost Books...

I've been serially unfaithful to this blog over the last few weeks: it's the charm of novelty, I regret to say. The thing with Twitter has been cheap and easy and, in my defence, everybody's doing it... But closer to the Things We Do for Love has been my developing commitment to The Place for Lost Books, the Faber Finds blog. It's certainly more than a one-time thing as far as I'm concerned. That's why I've posted lately on subjects as varied as Tolstoy's eminence, Enoch Powell's 'rivers of blood', the eerie appeal of J.Sheridan Le Fanu, and F.R. Leavis's place amid the intellectual feuds of Cambridge English. I consider all this to be meaningful labour, moreover it's an outright pleasure to have a remit to write about such subjects, with the Faber Finds list offering all the riches it does. And I could affirm all of this by appending a picture of George Eliot, say, to this post - bearing in mind that Eliot is one of the few English novelists who might be compared to Tolstoy, and that Leavis wrote with particular distinction on Middlemarch. But instead, I'm going with this pic (above) of the recently deceased and sadly missed Ingrid Pitt, one of whose finest hours came in an otherwise disreputable Hammer Films version of Le Fanu's 'Carmilla', of which more in the Le Fanu post above. I'm all for the high road, you understand, but sometimes the low one also gets you there, or thereabouts...

My brother took this...

Splendid, isn't it? Feels like it could be Moscow or Helsinki or Stockholm, right? In fact it's the Market Road estate in Holloway, London. Full story here.

Bookmunch tips Doctor Forrest...

My morning is made, because the Bookmunch site has given a generous nod to The Possessions of Doctor Forrest in its politely-titled '50 Books You Might Want To Read in 2011':

"After blowing us all away a couple of years back with his David Peace-esque political novel, Crusaders, Richard T Kelly is changing his game with The Possessions of Dr Forrest which promises to be a spine-tingling modern Gothic fable that mashes up two of our favourite doctors, Jekyll and Faustus. Am giddy about this one…"

Thanks very much, I'm giddy and all, not least on getting a mention in the company of Foster Wallace, Mistry and others.

(The image herewith is Egon Schiele's Semi-Nude Girl, Reclining, a print of which hangs on the wall of Dr. Forrest's octagonal bedchamber... It's that sort of novel...)

Blair/Hitchens & 'the heart of a heartless world...'

The public debate staged in Toronto last night between Tony Blair and Christopher Hitchens on the issue of whether religion is 'a force for good in the world' appears to have been won quite decisively by Hitchens. The New Statesman kindly offers a transcript in 3 parts. I consider these to be The Best Bits:
BLAIR:
- "What I say to you is at least, look, what we shouldn't do is end up in a situation where we say, we've got six hospices here, one suicide bomber there - how does it all equalise out? That's not a very productive way of arguing this..."
- [On what is 'the point' of religion] "Stimulating the impulse to do good, disciplining the propensity to be selfish and bad."
- "...if you are a person of faith, it's part of your character, it defines you in many ways as a human being. It doesn't do the policy answers, I am afraid. So as I used to say to people, you don't go into church and look heavenward and say to God, 'Right, next year, the minimum wage, is it £6.50 or £7...?' Unfortunately, he doesn't tell you the answer. And even on the major decisions that are to do with war and peace that I've taken, they were decisions based on policy, and so they should be, and you may disagree with those decisions, but they were taken because I genuinely believed them to be right."
HITCHENS
- "Religion forces nice people to do unkind things, and also makes intelligent people say stupid things."
- "The cure for poverty has a name, in fact. It's called the empowerment of women…Name me one religion that stands for that, or ever has."
- "...there's a sense of pleasure to be had in helping your fellow creature. I think that should be enough, thank you."
And gentlemen, thank you.

Faber Finds: Robert Aickman

In my new day-job as overseer at the print-on-demand/ebook reviver of 'lost'/classic books known as Faber Finds, I've begun blogging on some of the treasures Finds has been restoring to readers, and today I addressed an author who's dear to me: Robert Aickman. If you don't know his work, and you're ready to be greatly unnerved, then all I can say is that a luxurious darkness awaits you...

Eurozone: "Struggling a bit, aren't they...?"

The two-handed satire of John Clarke and Bryan Dawe is new to me, but on this evidence - a skit on Eurozone debt in the style of Mastermind - I'll be looking out for it from now. (The Oz accents, I admit, add greatly to the pawkiness of the humour.)

The other Lost Leader...

With Labour seemingly mired in one of its periodic phases of being led by windbags, hypocrites and small-scale connivers (it’s been that way for several years now...) it’s hard to think about ‘moving forward’, not with so much rebarbative recent history still to be digested… David Laws’ recent sour remarks about Ed Miliband (amid his hasty reminiscence of the ConDem shotgun wedding) should be set in context of Laws’ obvious Toryism and attendant hatred for Labourism. But the Mail's serialisation of Brown at 10 by Anthony Seldon and Guy Lodge made for more disconcerting reading. Let’s set aside the risible spectacle of the Mail arrogating to itself the right to determine, Socialist Worker -style, exactly who is a traitor to the cause of Labour. The rest of us just need to read between the lines and marvel anew at how such a sanctimonious and scarily self-obsessed pair as Gordon Brown and Harriet Harman wound up at the very pinnacle of the Labour Party, prior to blessing Ed Miliband as their rightful inheritor.

John Rentoul’s revival of 'AJ4PM' is tongue-in-cheek, surely, for the moment has passed, just as so many other promising Labour ‘moments’ have crashed into the rocks over recent years. I haven’t been wowed by Johnson’s despatch box performances as shadow chancellor. But, rare in a politician, he remains a recognisible human being, one with just the right mix of frankness and canniness, and unlike his Leader he's not about to bang on about the defeatingly populist notion that people ought forever to hand back more than half their income once they've made their way to £150K.

Johnson's recent tribute to his Leader has a nicely minimal feel: 'Everyone’s got their views about how we get back into government and there’s a variety of views in the Shadow Cabinet… … we have to discuss those differences of opinion like mature people which is really a mindset that I think Ed has brought into the party that is I think commendable...'

No, I don't wish to re-run redundant quarrels so even I balked a little at Rentoul's observations in his print column today: "There were disloyal whispers at Westminster last week. Anonymous speculation about Brownites organising for Yvette Cooper to succeed [EdMili]. Sarcasm about when he was going to start in his new job. Grumbles about his breaking his paternity leave on Friday to provide a soundbite for TV news on Lord Young's resignation – a Tory bad news story that needed no help from him – instead of to surprise us with his plans, say, to be tough on immigration..."

But, y'know, if the cap fits... Or as the bracingly rude Daily Mash satirises it, 'Despite assurances from David Miliband that there would no repeat of the Blair-Brown 'soap opera', his supporters said that would be f**king right...'

Plant/Page: Wanton...

I fully approved of the Plant/Page 'unplugged' revival c. 1994-5, in particular the strange, compelling Arabic/Celtic strains loaned to versions of 'Gallows Pole', 'Kashmir', 'No Quarter' and 'Nobody's Fault But Mine.' Still - and as I tweeted in response to Chris Rodley's excellent Plant doc for the BBC a fortnight back - whatever musical highways Plant or Page have honourably gone hitching down post-Zeppelin, there's unlikely to be anything there that could wholly compare to the glory of Gettin' the Led out. To wit: I missed the Plant/Page revival of 1998 and so was hugely tickled by the Rodley doc's digging out of their Later rendition of The Wanton Song off Physical Graffiti. Fifty-something geezers here, remember. Kids, you might want to duck...

Singing live, for your vote, Robert Allen Zimmerman...

This year’s X Factor competition? I'm wishing success on the young black woman with the Liverpool accent, who has a very good voice – but more importantly because a fortnight back, if I heard rightly, she sang a Dylan song. It’s possible she knew it by way of its more popular covers, but I’d rather believe she was displaying a spark of musical intelligence and feeling hitherto unseen among X Factor wannabes and their ludicrous panel of 'mentors'/'judges'.
Granted, it’s a ridiculous notion, Bob-does-The-X. If by some magic the young Greenwich Village Dylan were a candidate for the c. 2010 show he’d be ridiculed and kicked out at audition - partly for the voice, which Larkin (who liked it!) thought ‘cawing’ and ‘derisive’, but mainly for writing his own songs, being an artist, his own man, etc etc...
Still, I’ve begun to amuse myself by imagining an entire X-evening devoted to Bob’s songs… just as I understand there have been tributes to such heavyweights as Elton, Queen, Take That, George Michael… Most likely the biggest scrap among contestants would be had over ‘Knocking On Heaven’s Door’, with the winner probably deciding to knock off the Guns N’ Roses version – whereupon one can picture Simon Cowell doing 'that pause' and pulling 'that face' (by which he tries to pretend that he is thinking impossibly complicated thoughts, thoughts for which language, even by his high standards, is inadequate) before saying that the performance was quite unprecedented in its brilliance and the X Factor just so great because it’s so much more than karaoke, blah blah etc.
It could be done, though: a whole night of X-Goes-Bob. One of the older contestants would do ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ with a choir and get those arms a-waving in the crowd. One of the young lads could sing a new sort of number for the laydeez - maybe ‘Visions of Johanna’, or a quirkier choice, ‘Sweetheart Like You’ off Infidels? I’d expect one of the ‘girls’ who specialize in that vibrato thing they all do these days could bring a new stretched-out-ness to one of the ballads of the Christian phase – ‘I Believe in You’ perhaps. And there’d be a special prize for the claiming by any candidate who took on ‘Idiot Wind’ and strolled boldly right up to the judges’ table, spitting each syllable into their awful freeze-dried life-denying faces:
‘Idiot wind, blowing every time you move your mouth,
Blowing down the backroads headin' south.
Idiot wind, blowing every time you move your teeth,
You're an idiot, babe.
It's a wonder that you still know how to breathe…’

666: The realm of nasty numbers

At one point in his recent (rather interesting, distinctly personal) documentary study of horror films for the BBC Mark Gatiss sat down with David Seltzer, author of The Omen (hit novel and film), and put to him the big question: does he believe in the Devil? Seltzer wryly replied to the effect that if he did, then he wouldn’t for one moment have messed about writing books that presumed to speak of Him and His powers.

That’s funny, and fair enough. As Gatiss noted, Satan was a hot thing in 1970s Hollywood after the success of Rosemary’s Baby and The Exorcist. And Seltzer had a good nose for how to do something new and commercial with the Evil One. Of course there have been repeated and not wholly unfounded attempts to argue that various cast/crew members on The Exorcist were afflicted by a sort of curse in subsequent years. But it doesn’t seem that David Seltzer’s had to worry – has suffered no freak impalements or decapitations, rather, enjoyed the fruits of his labour, his imagination.
The Omen was on telly again the other night and I made the mistake of watching bits of it. God but it’s a thoroughly professional, expertly-managed, big-budget piece of depressing nastiness. (Seltzer was quick to tell Gatiss he felt Gregory Peck loaned a weight to the project that Charles Bronson - the original casting as the US Ambassador to the Court of St James - couldn’t have.) Actually I remember the film’s network TV premiere on ITV at some point in the very early 1980s. I’m sure I wasn’t allowed to watch it all but I saw enough to be feel a kind of outrage over a picture in which the baddies were so clearly being allowed to win.
Still, I must admire the gruesome effectiveness in places, and the power of the imaginative concept. I was talking to a filmmaker friend the other day about the Gothic-supernatural-steampunk trends in film, and apropos Guy Richie’s Sherlock Holmes (which we both admired hugely) he mentioned how much he prefers the sort of 'mystery & imagination' movie wherein events of a seemingly supernatural origin are later revealed to be in fact the cunning/fiendish works of man. With The Omen, you could choose to look at the narrative from a remote vantage and say that all those killings are just a chain of freak accidents and fatal misunderstandings, wrapped around a fat-cheeked piggy-eyed little 5-year-old boy... (That said, in the yet more laboriously nasty sequels Damian and The Final Conflict the maturing Anti-Christ took an active hand in murder, using sorcery to do so, so the game was up by then.) Still, such room for ambiguity may explain why the Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman once put his name to a paper entitled ‘The Exorcist and The Omen, or Modern and Postmodern Limits to Knowledge.’
Movies speak of their times and The Omen is unmistakeably the drear England of the mid-1970s, the sort of place where Satan might well seek admission to the affairs of men. (Just as The Exorcist is well located amid OPEC crisis/Watergate-era Georgetown.) Having stage-trained Brits such as Billie Whitelaw and David Warner and Patrick Troughton in the cast gives The Omen the faint air of a BBC 'Play for Today' or some gritty Royal Court production, though here the smart actors are employed only in order to be killed off in horrible ways. (The 2006 remake of The Omen was also on telly last week, and I couldn’t face it, assuming it was done purely to cast younger leads and find more hi-tech ways to kill smart actors – Pete Postlethwaite, David Thewlis etc – horribly.)
In fairness to The Omen, it bravely makes no effort to endow Satan and Satanism with any sort of perverse allure, any suggestion of luxurious darkness or forbidden pleasure in the act of pledging one’s soul to Satan. You just have to take in on trust that Billie Whitelaw’s Mrs Baylock is committed to the Anti-Christ just as some people are to Labour or the Tories. She wants a strong leader in charge and she’s grimly prepared to roll up her sleeves and do the dirty job of getting him there, shoving people out of windows if needs be, though it’s hard to see what will be her personal reward for same. In Damian, sequel #1, Lee Grant is burned to death shortly after murdering her husband in a misguided show of loyalty to Satan’s son. In The Final Conflict, as I recall, a whole network/cabal of suburban English salarymen and housewives were revealed to be in joyless thrall to the Deceiver. And that's a powerful dramatic idea, one that allows a dramatist to reveal any character as being, quite suddenly and without apparent motivation, capable of the most appalling/malevolent act. Nasty, as I say...

#9: The number of the Beast

Is it only 18 months since I sat there most weekends worrying whether Andy Carroll had adequate goals and technique in him for the 'top flight', rather being just another of those Academy nearly boys...? It's the Rooney/Walcott syndrome, 'they need to show they've got it before their 18th birthday' etc. Well, as of today the Bensham Battering Ram looks set for a first England cap. Not that I care, indeed I'd rather he kept clear of all that muck, but then there are distinguished precedents for the national team being spearheaded by pure Geordie instinct for goal... As long as Big Andy comes back from his little holidays safe and well and ready to do it all again for NUFC...

Mind you, Carroll does give the air of being impregnable as well as often unplayable. 'He's a beast', said a West Ham mate of mine during the Boleyn game of a fortnight back - said so not quite admiringly neither. And Carroll's off-the-pitch manners are a big matter for concern, no question. But as Arsene Wenger put it in his programme notes on Sunday, 'Andy Carroll has stature, charisma and quality...' Over 90 minutes on the park, in other words, he is exactly What The Boys Want.

Photograph: Stephen Pond/EMmpics Sport