New Esquire on sale II

Just for the sake of form, or in the name of promotion, here's the cover of aforementioned August Esquire.

New Esquire (UK) magazine now on sale. Includes good writing.

The August issue of Esquire is now out on the stands, and I am privileged and enthused to say that it includes my first contribution as the magazine's new regular monthly film columnist. The piece in question is a joint review of two newly released documentaries taking as their subject the Coalition invasion and occupation of Iraq - these being Heavy Metal in Baghdad and Standard Operating Procedure. Among the cultural references dropped clunkily therein are the luminous names of Keith Moon, Pablo Neruda, and Seymour Hersh. And midway I make gratuitous reference to my IFC/Channel 4 documentary (I say 'my' because I wrote and presented, but actually Saul Metzstein directed, and very well) The Name of This Film is Dogme 95. (Online I can't see any of the fine reviews this doc received after its UK broadcast premiere, but here's a nice notice from Chicago's Ray Pride.)

Back to the August Esquire: which of the two Iraq pictures under review did I prefer? Guess... Either way - and, frankly, regardless - it will be worth your while picking up Esquire this month.

Alex Cox @ The Barbican, Friday July 4

Alex Cox's work is screening in a partial but essential retrospective at the Barbican this month, to tie in with the publication of his excellent new book X Films from I.B. Tauris, and I will be chairing a Barbican Q&A session with Senor Cox this coming Friday night July 4, 8.30pm. Do get along if you can.
Some of the flavour of the book can be gleaned from Cox's provocative blog: it's not a memoir so much as a highly detailed, hugely compelling tour through the making of each of the items in his body of work - beginning with his graduation project at UCLA, through Repo Man, Sid and Nancy, Walker et al, up to the current Searchers 2.0. As such it is a workbook for any would-be cineaste of the independent stripe, and a vital contribution to film history, insofar as it records with honesty and exactitude what were the creative decisions behind some bold and unclassifiable films made by a huge talent.
I'm really looking forward to this event, and hope there'll be a lively cinephile crowd, as befits the man and the occasion. If I can dig them out of whatever box they're currently in I will take along my shabby shop-bought VHS of Repo Man and my cassette (cassette!) of the movie's awesome soundtrack, as talismans, if you will. You will recall that repo men, unlike the rest of us in general, spend their lives getting into tense situations (esp. while getting cars out of "bad areas") and we should all try to do likewise now and then...

Daren King, and Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads

I'm very pleased to share literary representation (that's Tibor Jones & Associates) with Daren King, whose fiction, from Boxy an Star to Jim Giraffe to the recent Manual, has been delighting and defying classification among readers of taste for most of the last ten years. And I'm fairly pleased to have got my boat-race onto the picture section of Daren's website by way of the shot herewith of myself and the editor whom Daren and I also share, the famous Lee Brackstone of Faber and Faber. The main reason for a smile is that I remember the particular Night In The Pub when the photo was taken - it was the Princess Louise on High Holborn, always a canny boozer but recently remodelled to an even higher standard. And it was, of course, just a night in the pub, not a photo session. The ales will have been Samuel Smith's, since that's what you get in a Samuel Smith's pub. Lee has a look - does he not? - of a man just beginning the evening, one that will surely see him progress from the arm down to the chair itself. As for me, what about the state of that bloody cardigan?

10 Bad Dates: Salon Critics Pick

A nice write-up here (scroll down some) from Louis Bayard in Salon, which I used to read very regularly but seem to have spent less time with in recent years, the more fool me. "It's been a long time", the man says, "since I've come across a set of lists quite so piquant and entertaining as Ten Bad Dates With De Niro." That was the intention, sir, glad to be of service.
I'm in good company among the Critics Picks in question, since there's also citation of Anthony Mann's Man of the West on DVD, and the new documentary about Roman Polanski's rape conviction, an affair from which the shadows seem at last to have properly receded.

Peter Gabriel: The Rhythmatist

Last weekend me and my family had the great good fortune to stay a few days in the country cottage of one of England’s finest composers. Quite apart from the lovely living arrangements, I even got to do a little writing in his office, having carefully cleared a space to spread my things, between the piano and the sheets of notation and the pocket metronome… The bookshelves in the cottage were fairly choice too, replete with good fiction and non-fiction, but I was especially interested in the selection of books on music. Typically, though, I zeroed in on a volume called Good Vibrations, about the history of rock/pop production techniques.
One section therein that grabbed me concerned the introduction to musical possibilities c. 1980 of the Fairlight, an early sampler which loaned itself to terrific aural experimentation. The first two musical types to invest their own money in this expensive device in the UK were Peter Gabriel, and Durham’s own Trevor Horn. And I remember, as if it were yesterday, the autumn/spring of 1982-83, running out to three separate long-playing records (vinyl, of course) that made stunning use of the new technology: Kate Bush’s The Dreaming, Peter Gabriel’s fourth self-titled solo album, and Malcolm McLaren’s Duck Rock, produced by Horn. (That last one, an early experiment in world music piracy, had some marvellous tracks, only partially marred by the presence of McLaren himself, such as the juju-inspired Soweto.)

Prior to those bits of shopping one of the big musical revelations of my young life was in late 1982 when I saw a South Bank Show on the recording of aforementioned Peter Gabriel IV. The picture it presented, enforced by amazing music, of Gabriel’s genius-like marrying of rhythmic and melodic and lyrical/cerebral qualities, was incredibly powerful to an impressionable youngster. I suppose I was particularly gripped by the description of how Gabriel’s bookish idea for a song provisionally titled ‘Jung in Africa’ became this thunderous track, The Rhythm of the Heat.

A few years later Alan Parker persuaded Gabriel to remodel the IV songs and a few others from his back-catalogue into a score for Parker's movie of William Wharton’s novel Birdy. This Birdy trailer - which also brings back a horde of memories for me in the proverbial Proustian rush - is a showcase for some of Gabriel’s choice cuts and the imagery of the film to which they were terrifically matched.

As it happened, Alan Parker went on to do me a couple of great good turns in life which I won’t ever forget. Gabriel, meanwhile, has remained one of my absolute favourite artists. This weekend I note there’s a new release forthcoming from Gabriel and Real World – Big Blue Ball, essentially a record of some diverse and glorious jam sessions at Gabriel’s studio over various summers 15 or so years ago. I’ll be buying that one, then.

Regime Change and Zimbabwe

I guess I'm just among millions of people the world over this weekend, wishing all the harm in the world upon the awful Mugabe, his Zanu-PF mafia, and those goons of his who have been running around Zimbabwe this week advising citizens that a vote cast against the Chief will be the last thing they do on this earth. (Speaking of dictators: my bedtime hour was poisoned last night, having watched news pictures of that newly ordained Man of Peace Kim Jong-il, slouching across his imperial balcony in one of his tiny jumpsuits, so as to wave a fey hand at a parade in his honour somewhere beneath him...)
Zimbabwe, but. What is to be done? I've found myself recalling (you may too) that in the run-up to the Coalition invasion of Iraq some of the loudest voices in opposition sounded not so much opposed to regime change as desirous of setting the global agenda on same (i.e. why Saddam before Mugabe?) But let's assume that was just a minor element of a bigger rhetorical argument, and that no serious parties have the appetite, will or means for knocking Mugabe off his perch. On that note I can't quite bring myself to see what the right-wing press are saying at the moment, because rightly or wrongly I fear I'll have to read some nostalgia for Ian Smith and the Good Old Days. Thickening the moral soup on this point is a piece in the New Statesman by Mark Ashurst, director of the Africa Research Institute, and Gugulethu Moyo, a Zimbabwean lawyer. They write:
"The collapse of the post-colonial pact between Mugabe and his erstwhile enemies - the Rhodesian farmers, Britain, capitalism and Empire - has triggered a keen appetite for historical vindication among western critics. Mugabe's fiercest critics are often the same people who, in the early 1980s, turned a blind eye to the notorious "Gukurahundi" slaughter of 20,000 Ndebele loyal to his rival, the late Joshua Nkomo. But in Zimbabwe today there is not much appetite to indict Mugabe for human rights abuses - if only he would go quietly."
Well, he's not going quietly today. So what next? Timothy Garton Ash had a few suggestions in the Guardian yesterday: a new UN resolution, non-recognition of the results of today’s non-poll, no US/UK investment in a new Zimbabwean platinum mine, the rescinding of Mugabe’s honorary knighthood, a petition to Thabo Mbeki, attendance at a demonstration at Nelson Mandela's 90th birthday party in Hyde Park today - and good old sanctions, as once seemed to work in South Africa and Poland. Maybe throw into that a shot of red-blooded socialist solidarity, like the case I read highlighted by Christopher Hitchens in Slate of South African dockworkers who refused to unload a shipload of Chinese weapons bound for... guess where?
So, a few encouraging thoughts for a bad day, perhaps. Others in the London area can be more active in their expression and get along to Hyde Park.

Faber and Faber online in style

My esteemer publisher's brand-new and redesigned website is now available for public scrutiny, with lots for the browser to mull over and enjoy, including an exclusive Q&A with James Bradley, author of The Resurrectionist, which is a 'Summer Read' pick of the Richard & Judy show. There's info on the recently launched and much admired Faber Finds imprint whereby long-unavailable works of distinction are brought back into print. And currently there's a link to me and my stuff from the Authors page.

How Andrei man, have yuh hurd o' tha Toon?

Per my previous thoughts on Euro 2008 - the Germany/Austria match the other week was probably the last we will see of Mario Gomez in this tournament. So does that shorten the odds of Newcastle making a daft bid for him? In the Freddie Shepherd era, perhaps. But nobody knows quite what Mike Ashley wants to do with his money in these belt-tightening times. Much may depend on the charm and world-renowned acumen of Dennis Wise...
Belatedly, I learned that the Toon's crack scouts (or scouts on crack?) had been keeping an eye on Andrei Arshavin. But the Russian lad's own belated but bloody electrifying entrance to the tournament has been as good as a kick in the eye to any such pipe-dreams. As the fella on ITV said the other night, Alex Ferguson should take the £60 million he could get for Ronaldo and use about one-third of it on Arshavin.

The Sean Penn Administration, Cannes 2008

Last weekend I had a really interesting conversation with Sean Penn about his service as Jury President at the recent Cannes Film Festival. (That's him in the photo, having a smoke and looking slightly concerned - whether by the gentleman next to him or the paparazzi gang behind, we're not to know.) Anyhow, an edited account of aforementioned conversation will run in the next issue of Sight & Sound.
After Sean was announced as this year's Cannes Prez I was struck by the number of media outlets who decided to run the rule over the Festival's choice, so rehashing the legend of Penn the Dangerous Hothead of 1980s tabloid lore, as if ignorant of the fact that inter alia he had previously competed in the Official Selection at Cannes both as actor and director, and won the Acting Palme for She's So Lovely in 1997. But, such is the general standard of reporting on cinema out there, and particularly when bracketed to coverage of the Cannes Festival, where the celebration of what is very best in film is inevitably shackled to a realisation that movies are consumed far more widely and profitably by devotees of Spiderman and Batman, be they young or old.
Sean has been on the record umpteen times in the past about his particular problems with the Hollywood mainstream, and the outriding assumptions about the audience. And this subject naturally arose in the course of our Cannes discussion: 'As an audience member', he remarked, "I always feel frustrated by the monoculturalism of American cinema, and in so many places it’s American monoculturalism that people buy." (Yes, 'Hollywood Movie Actor' is still his own main occupation, but the closest he's ever got to the Hollywood mainstream is working for Clint Eastwood, whose creative control over his own work is the envy of film artists everywhere.)
There is a certain caste of film critics for broadsheet newspapers, in the UK as well as the US, who see themselves as the scourges of that 'American monoculturalism', but very often I think they're kidding themselves, if not their readers: their own finicky sense of personal discernment is what comes top of their agendas. The thought reoccured to me when Sean described how he and his jury ignored all the daily critical chatter about the films they were adjudicating upon: a discipline that resulted in his feeling aggrieved on the part of certain films and filmmakers once he reviewed the press coverage in the aftermath of the Festival and saw how movies he admired unreservedly had been instantly weighed in the balance by The Critics and found wanting.
At Cannes the deadline-driven comprehensive-coverage rush to judgement can be very injurious to a movie. Of course, judgement is always waiting round the corner for any creative undertaking and cannot be hidden from. But I know how Cannes works, and what is the daily routine for most film journalists out there (it's long, but not arduous, not by any reasonable standard, other than on the liver...) And it's a matter of fact that Cannes is not the ideal place for arriving quickly at a considered view of a picture, much less for conveying that to readers. Hence Sean's lament, particularly on the part of Steven Soderbergh's Che, on which his jury bestowed the Best Actor prize for Benicio Del Toro, but which had a rough ride in a lot of print outlets. "The diminishment", Sean told me, "is reminiscent of the bad reviews Bonnie and Clyde got, or Apocalypse Now, or the 'failure' Wizard of Oz was or It’s A Wonderful Life was." This remark I think is particularly useful, because the critical tendency is very often to make the best the enemy of the good. But with a lot of critics who regularly refer to the masters and masterpieces of the past, all you have to do is imagine what they would have said of those great originals had they been reviewing at the time: most likely, "Not without interest, but with (sighs) a lot of problems..."

Richard T Kelly at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, August 16 2008

The programme for this year's Edinburgh Book Festival is now published and online. I'll be there, I'm pleased to say, and my joint event is billed as follows:

Nick Harkaway & Richard T Kelly
Saturday August 16 7:30 PM - 8:30 PM
First Fiction: A BOOKCASE EVENT
Two of the most talked about debuts of the year. Nick Harkaway, son of John Le Carré, pours massive exuberance into his giddying fantasy of a post-apocalyptic Britain, The Gone-Away World. Richard T Kelly's equally ambitious Crusaders is a socio-political epic, people struggling to survive in the run-down, swift-changing North of England."

So. Maybe I'll see you there...

I've not been in Edinburgh at Festival time since 2001 - the last of four years I did as consultant to the Film Festival, also Lizzie Francke's last as Artistic Director, and the year when Sean Penn came to town - that was certainly the start of something... Previous to that, I tried out the whole Edinburgh thing in a few different categories. I was part of the Young Programme-Makers sidebar of the Television Festival in 1996. Further back, in 1993, I directed a stage production of David Mamet's Edmond on the Fringe, with a team of young performers from Bristol University far more talented in that field than myself (among them Neil Cole, Claire Wille and Samantha LeMole, to speak only of those whom I know to have carried on performing.)

So, looking back, I have to say I gave it a go.

Euro 2008: Not a Full-Back's Tournament...

How's it been for you so far? I must say I think some of the games have been bloody good. All the obvious things have been said correctly about Holland, Spain, and Portugal. What of the Germans, the pre-tournament faves who started so nicely? Here I should interject that:
a) I hold no brief whatsoever for the England team, and am relieved by their absence from this tournament, since the side is largely compromised of players I hate from club sides I hate; so I have no problem taking a friendly interest in the Germans (though I did hate them back in 1990 and 1996, when England sides more properly composed of the staunch likes of Beardsley, Gascoigne and Shearer were cruelly robbed.) And,
b) Following on from the above, though I can get interested in teams that don't feature players I know of and/or like, I'm instinctively more interested in teams who can claim some relationship, however tenuous, to Newcastle United. Turkey vs Czech Republic was a funny one last night, since Emre Belozoglu and David Rozehal lined up on opposed sides but both are headed out of St James's Park. But frankly you rarely get to see too many Toon players at the highest international level. What you do tend to see a lot of are the conspicuously over-priced duffers whom Newcastle are likely to offer for once their post-tournament price has sky-rocketed. Most such players go to Man United or Real Madrid, or even Spurs, or these days probably Portsmouth. But if they're really crap they may just end up being paraded in front of a dubious Gallowgate End. For instance Kenny Dalglish in his ill-fated 18 months at Newcastle made a strange and spectacular hash of buying players who would fail miserably at the 1998 World Cup.
I return to this sore subject with a bit less regret, because a month ago I learned Newcastle were keenly tracking Mario Gomez of Stuttgart and Germany, a shooting-boots sensation who clearly had no interest in coming up the Barrack Road to play for the Geordies against Wigan next season. Still, I've watched Gomez closely in this tournament, and so far the alice-band-wearing charlie hasn't managed to hit a cow's arse with a banjo. 10 minutes ago he achieved the Miss of the Tournament against Austria. Maybe he'll fill his boots in the second half. But for the moment Newcastle are looking lucky...

Bresson vs Mailer on the Meaning of a Bad Day

For a lot of years, and most especially on days when things aren't going so well for whatever apparent reason, I have treasured this comment of Robert Bresson's from his bracing little book of aphorisms, Notes on the Cinematographer. To wit:
"These horrible days – when shooting film disgusts me, when I am exhausted, powerless in the face of so many obstacles – are part of my method of work."
That's the spirit, I've tended to think. Don't fight a prevailing ill wind too hard. Accept that at certain hours the odds just aren't in your favour. Regroup and fight again tomorrow. See it as all part of the process.
But another of my heroes has just made me think again on this matter. Yes, Mailer, and in the course of the Q&A book On God as mentioned below. Insofar as I take the idea of karma seriously, as some objective accounting of our daily bravery and goodness or otherwise, which may have repercussions for us in a life to come as it has from some previous lives - I do so only because of Mailer. He always insisted that something spiritual was at stake in every instant of our lives, however seemingly banal and quotidian. And inevitably this led him to an integrated theory of Bad Days too, to wit:
"Whenever you have a bad day, there’s a lot of reasons for the downer. I can give you twenty causes for such an hour. Some are serious, some are passing. But, no, I won’t let you hide behind the notion that a bad day is no more than a slot on the roulette wheel… Whenever we have an emotion we can’t account for, good or bad, I expect that the root is karmic… Intense and unaccountable emotions can come from one’s karmic past."
So - I'm going to have to think this over anew. Does one give the devil his due if only for 24 hours? Or fight the devil at all times and all costs? Even when having a cup of coffee, or waiting in for a tradesman to call...? Some of Mailer's examples in On God are only marginally less bathetic. But I know what he's driving at.

Don't Shoot the Messenger, whether from Helmand or Arkansas

By a little and a little in this life I have learned to read and engage with the arguments of writers and commentators I was formerly inclined to disagree with on sight. This is no great achievement, of course, but I think it's been good for my health. Max Hastings was much too Establishment a figure for me in the 1980s and 1990s, but having begun to read some of his military history I'm much the better for it. This piece of his on the British mission in Afghanistan is for the Daily Mail, which is a different sort of Health Warning in itself, but it also reflects a substantive body of informed opinion, and while I wish the facts therein were otherwise, sadly they feel like facts nonetheless.
Then, to sink right below the waterline of decency... Dick Morris is someone I can't find an excuse for, but this Republican spinner/strategist was certainly made more than welcome in the Clinton White House, and as I recall he had no bigger fan than the Lady of the House. As such, the Devil knowing His own, I'm sure Morris's reckoning of Mrs Clinton's current schemes and motives is correct or near-as-dammit.

Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky? The Debate Continues.

Say what you like about Vanity Fair magazine - that, for instance, it's Hello for people with degrees, or that its left-leaning political coverage might pack more clout if it wasn't swaddled in dime-a-dozen glossy worship of the Rich & Famous - but I have to say that Jim Windolf's blogging piece on Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, and translations of both plain can't be beat for covering all the key issues in a sharp and serious and amusing manner. Windolf seems to be as interested as I am in Nabokov's famously high-nosed dismissal of Dostoyevsky and all his works.
This was not just a matter of public pronouncement for Nabokov but a stubborn refusal to teach so much as a word of the author of The Brothers Karamazov to his Russian Literature undergraduate students at Cornell University back in the mid-1950s (i.e. when Nabokov was still teaching for his pennies, rather than reclining at ease on royalties from Lolita.) Hard to argue with Nabokov, of course - but, really, this was muleish of him.
The recurrent debate on whether having a favourite between the two Russian masters implies a personality type (or disorder...) feels like mere dinner-party sport to me - certainly not a serious question once one's undergraduate years are past. It seems to me the older you get the more you're bloody grateful to have the pair of them around, if only in spirit on the shelves...

Blogging Joseph and His Brothers by Thomas Mann

In my teens I enjoyed what was for me a very useful correspondence with the Scottish singer/songwriter Momus (Nicholas Currie), who responded very graciously to umpteen dogged queries I had about his delightful recordings, in particular some of their literary underpinnings. I remember my chasing him about Jean Genet and he saying essentially that one or two of the plays were fine and dandy but that the novels (Our Lady of the Flowers and so forth) he planned on 'saving for his old age', along with Kafka's America. I found this very impressive, and shortly thereafter affected a similar if less meaningful stance toward the later novels of Thomas Mann. Thankfully the pose didn't last and I gave in to Doctor Faustus, of which I can say there is scarcely a novel I like better. But I was daunted still by Mann's slightly earlier tetralogy Joseph and His Brothers, all 1400+ pages of it. 'Only the exhaustive is truly interesting', Mann is believed to have said. (But then he never had to get through Crusaders.) In any event a friend has just made me an excellent present of the recent translation of Joseph by John E. Woods, and some low-but-building thrill tells me this is the very moment to crack those forbidding pages. I'm probably old enough now. But how long will the whole take me, in this age of distraction? Hard to say, maybe all year, but as a project I will log my impressions of it occasionally as I go along. Next year, I don't doubt, all the readers' groups will be at it like rats up a drainpipe...

Robert Bresson's Lancelot du Lac on DVD

In the Ten Bad Dates contributors listing I cite this as my favourite movie, for whatever that's worth. I've put up with a dodgy second-hand VHS of it for ten years now, but last week I discovered it's new to DVD. So that's good. I wrote the following for a festival program in 1999:
'Among the elite group of acknowledged cinematic masters, Robert Bresson is the most mysterious, the most forbidding, the most intensely revered. On the strength of these slightly thankless distinctions, he was also reckoned to be box-office poison. But understand that Bresson was neither hostile to or aloof from the movie-going public. Au contraire: no director could have respected an audience more, been more desirous of their attention and appreciation. “You must leave the spectator free”, Bresson fretted during a Cahiers du Cinema symposium with Godard. “And at the same time you must make yourself loved by him. You must make him love the way in which you render things. That is to say: show him things in the order and in the way that you love to see them and to feel them…” From this you get a savour of the great man’s seriousness, and the depth of his passion. Of course, if each man’s love were the same as the next, we’d all get into a terrible punch-up. As it is, Bresson’s inimitable way of seeing can still divide a crowd. Five or so years ago, I took an American friend to the re-release of Bresson’s Lancelot du Lac at London’s Everyman. We were fellow film students, accustomed to casting a self-consciously cool eye over each other’s favourites. On my home turf, so to speak, I was a little anxious, not having looked at Lancelot in years. Yet within minutes of projection, I was bobbing happily on the edge of my seat. After all, who but Bresson had the nerve to make films like this? Towards the close, as Lancelot tersely rallied his comrades for their doomed last stand (“Pour Artus contre Mordred!”), I wondered why this moment couldn’t inspire the same misty cinephile reverence as Warren Oates’ analogous “Why not?” in The Wild Bunch. Nevertheless, en route to the pub, my buddy was wryly sceptical of what he’d just seen: ‘Man. All those shots of feet…’'

Norman Mailer: On God

I'm reading this extraordinary book of dialogues between Mailer and his friend the scholar Michael Lennon, recorded in late 2006. They confirm and elaborate upon those spiritual convictions of Mailer's that have always erupted out of individual novels in the past, but which were abundantly present on every page of what turned out to be the last work, The Castle in the Forest. It's all quotable stuff, but this is a particular speculation that I was mentally underlining within moments of first meeting it:
"All right - we are going to be reincarnated. Whether we know what our reincarnation will be, I doubt. I expect it will be full of surprises, most unforeseen. Some, given our vanity, are likely to seem outrageously warped."

The Boss vs Lionel Bart...

Last night, around 9pm, my mobile started ringing. I recognised the Caller ID and answered, only to hear dim ambient noise, the hubbub of a group of people, some distant music. I figured My Mate had triggered his Blackberry accidentally down the pub, and so ended the call. Moments later my phone rang again, and this time the music was louder and clearer, as were the lyrics, and people were singing along: 'Because the night/belongs to lovers...' Finally my brain started working, this after a long torpid day. My Mate was at the Springsteen show at the Arsenal Emirates, and the E Street Band had just lit into the tune Bruce gave to Patti Smith. And My Mate just wanted to share a little of that magic with me. It sounded fantastic, though not as glorious as 'She's The One' when My Mate duly called me back 3 minutes later...
Would I had been there. It would have much amazed me. Very like... But the asking price was £125 face-value for a ticket, and I can't live with that. In any case my missus was watching the Andrew Lloyd Webber music show I'd Do Anything on BBC1 and I was getting more and more interested as it came down to a public vote between two girls vying to be cast as Nancy in a new Cameron MacIntosh West End production of Oliver!
Then came an unexpectedly great moment of television - or as good as these extended-advert talent-contests can manage: both Lloyd-Webber and Macintosh showed their hand in advance of the public vote, and said they favoured 18-year-old Jessie (Irish, flame-haired, clearly highly gifted, understandably a tad vulnerable) over the mid-20s Jodie (from Blackpool, with a good big voice, and a heroic weight-loss behind her, in all a typical model of what you'd want for Nancy if you intended the show to be much like the film etc.)
But I certainly respected their preference: god knows who'll play Bill Sykes this time out, but the idea of young Jessie as his deluded and masochistic female doorstep suddenly proposed an unusually strong, interesting - even disturbing - Oliver! Alas, the British public know what they like, and clearly wanted this Oliver! to have all the heft and originality of an episode of Eastenders, and so plumped for Jodie. Jessie couldn't hide her tears, but the camera kept a fairly dignified distance from these. Anyhow I hope she'll do very well in something else in due course. But as for Lord Lloyd-Webber and Sir MacIntosh, well, they just had to stand there and applaud their second preference, something that two men of their wealth and standing must find a bit galling. Still, in these dog days for the West End, they have enjoyed another extraordinary PR boon for their project on BBC primetime (a state of affairs that Kevin Spacey was sounding very annoyed about on behalf of Dame Theatre a while back.)
Meanwhile over at the Emirates I assume the Boss had moved onto The Rising or Born To Run or however it is he closes his shows these days. Yes, I should have been there. I don't believe in being puritanical about musical taste, but it's better for the soul to stay attuned to the Good Stuff, and listening to Jodie earlier giving it karaoke-style welly to a version of Whitney Houston's appalling I Have Nothing was a grim reminder of the stuff that will otherwise creep into the void between one's ears.

William Hill: Brown 6/4 to go before the next election

As reported in the Spectator, "Brown is 6/4 to go before the next election 7 to 2 to leave this year 15/8 to be replaced in 2009, 11/10 to go in 2010." This is tough-minded betting. In the Independent the other day Johann Hari was suggesting that Brown accept he's lost the next election and embark on some berserker spree of red-blooded socialism for the 2 years he has left. And John Rentoul, the smartest biographer of Blair, was chastising those disciples of the former PM who fell in meekly behind Brown last year, after a token bit of moody shilly-shallying. David Aaronovitch in the Times raised the issue of all that rancid karma Brown and his best pals stored up for themselves during the presumptive Blair-baiting wait for succession. (And I have to say to my eye the worst of Brown is his rotten taste in political allies and little proteges.) It's hard to see a bracing blast of economic good news sufficient to save Brown within the next 18 months, the time-frame he would need. I can't see him going out in some blaze of redistributive glory. I don't see how Charles Clarke or Alan Milburn could lead the party, though perhaps as stalking horses they could smoke out a more considerable stiletto-wielder. I don't think the public are ready to accept a second consecutive unelected PM, least of all in these grim circumstances. And I'm not sure a smart young man like David Miliband wants to bet the house this year or next, and risk fast-forwarding to the end of his and all political careers, i.e. failure. So what do I think is going to happen? What would I like to happen? I'll decide once there's a bit of clear blue water between us and the Crewe and Nantwich by-election.