December 2008

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Totally Useless

Is it me, or has there been a sudden outbreak of incompetence in the world? An epidemic of uselessness, a plague of purposelessness. Has the world ceased to function correctly?

Everywhere I look, people seem incapable of, or unwilling to do their jobs. From the tele-clerk who won’t believe you are who you say you are and not the person their screen tells them you are, to the London minicab driver who doesn’t know his way from Camden Town to Oxford Street. What can you say to the N.H.S. clinic that takes three months (and counting) to order a pair of insoles you can get online for next-day delivery? And how can you chastise the Internet mail order company that answers the email sent to their online support address asking where your goods are, with a reply that says: “This is an automated response. We appreciate your feedback and look forward to your next order”?

It’s finally starting to get me down.

“They” are turning me into a hybrid of Victor Meldrew, Archie Bunker and Basil Fawlty, all rolled into one grumpy middle-aged tosser. Perhaps it’s an age thing? Would I have shrugged it all off ten years ago, or is true that the world is suddenly being run by useless idiots?

The bigger the business, the worst the incompetence. Take my bank: a caring, sharing kind of organisation and by no means the worst of their type, but even they let me down… constantly. Here’s the most recent example: exactly 22 days ago, I wrote two separate letters, asking them (a) to close down one account and (b) open an internet account for another. Not a word back about either. Except that on Saturday I received a sniffy letter from them acting all surprised that the company whose account I wanted to close, is being wound down. They received the information from Companies House they say, and add that they would “appreciate a reply within 14 days”. I would have too, but unfortunately for them, their deadline has already passed.

On a wider scale, the idiocy of politicians still has the power to astound me. As a long-suffering Labour supporter, I’m getting used to starting the day feeling depressed after hearing what “our” politicians have to say on early morning BBC Radio 4. But sometimes they really do reduce me to tears by their unbridled stupidity.

For example, when our current Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, entertained his Tory predecessor, Baroness (Margaret) Thatcher, to tea in September 2007, it was hailed by the media as something of a coup, a slap in the face for Conservative leader, David Cameron, and an endorsement of New Labour, etc. Rubbish! Not only does this show that Gordon is a moron, it also highlights the inadequacy of the British media, because that meeting signalled the start of most of Gordon Brown’s political troubles.

In case you didn’t know, Old Labour types like me, hate Margaret Thatcher with a vengeance. (Even worse than we loathe Tony Blair, Jim Davidson and Cocoa Cola.) Single-handedly she changed the face of British life forever. Deliberate unemployment, “Loads of Money”, the decimation of the mining industry, privatisations… Do I need to go on? After the disappointment of Blair, we were hoping that Gordon Brown would wipe something (anything!) off New Labour’s gleam. Back then Gordon was still in his honeymoon period, but the second he kissed the Thatcher ring, it went up in a puff of smoke. The Left were immediately alienated.

The Right immediately sniffed blood. The fact that a Labour Prime Minister felt he had to “seek Lady Thatcher’s approval” proved that the “Reds” were on the run. It boosted Tory confidence that Gordon was as vulnerable to attack as Tony Blair had been and it led to a string of Labour by-election defeats and to Ken Livinstone’s replacement as London Mayor by bumbling Boris Johnson.

I’m no expert on politics but even I saw the pitfalls in the Brown-Thatcher Love-In. So how come the media and Labour advisors allowed it to slip by? Prime Minister Brown can count himself lucky that a Global Financial Crisis came along to deflect attention from his personal and political shortcomings.

On a private level, my own incompetence stands out like a sore member. Just over a week ago, I promised to write a blog every single day. After only seven successive blogs, I failed. As a result of this abject inadequacy, I have decided to modify my original goal to produce only a blog every few days…

I am obviously no Richard Herring. For that I can only apologise.

Sorry.

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Settling The Bill

London cop drama, The Bill, has been on my TV longer than the fruit bowl. First appearing in 1983, in the guise of a one-off drama called Woodentop, it became a weekly series a year later and has passed through various formats up to and including its current one hour slot every Wednesday and Thursday, football fixtures permitting. (To be honest, it’s only 42 minutes if you don’t count the recap of what’s already happened, the ads and very annoying parodies plugging the sponsorship product).

There’s no doubt that, during its 25 year run, The Bill has had its moments. Sad that most of them occurred during the golden years when Burnside, “Tosh” Lines, and Sergeant Bob Cryer ran the roost in the late-1980s to mid-’90s. Although, to be fair, the later stories featuring Bill Murray as Don Beech did set the pulses racing.

In later years, The Bill turned into something of a soap opera in uniform, sharing a small pool of actors with BBC undercover rival, Eastenders. A seeming shortage of actors who can pretend to be vaguely comfortable in an east London setting, means that the same ones keep turning up in different roles. Roberta Taylor, one of the Walford exiles, appeared as three separate Bill characters, before surfacing in 2002 as Inspector Gina Gold. And she’s not alone.

Bruce Byron, who plays cocky cockney DC Terry Perkins, had previously appeared on the other side of the Thin Blue Line, as Mr Smee in October 1994, Paul Archer in 1997 and John Shaw in 1998. Then, in 2000, he was introduced as Detective Inspector Lomax before being demoted and reappearing as Terry. Then, blow me, if in the interim he didn’t turn up in Eastenders as Gary Bolton. And there are dozens more.

Imagine my confusion a while back, when watching a rerun on UK Gold – as it was then. Superintendent Adam Okaro appeared in the undercover role of an African war criminal. Any minute now, he’s going to whip out his warrant-card and nick everybody, I thought. We reached the end of the episode and his deportation before I realised that actor Cyril Nri was there merely as a representative of the approved actor’s pool.

You can’t really blame the producers and casting directors. After all, there are only 200 living actors in the whole of Britain. I’ll check online: no, it appears that there are estimated to be 10,000 British actors, 95% of whom are said to be regularly out of professional work at any one time. They must be pretty crappy if the ones who appear on The Bill and Eastenders are the pick of the crop. Or perhaps the casting directors find it easier just to keep calling the same couple of agents over and over again. Surely, that can’t be true…

I’ve been off The Bill for a while. A period of melodrama and totally unlikely domestic plot lines made me look elsewhere for my TV thrills. Plus the cops unrealistically referring to witnesses and criminals alike by their first names (as in, “So, looks like Terry killed Carla in a fit of rage and Mick, Colin and Darren all lied when they said they were with Mel and Kim?”) grated. It had all got so fantastic – in the unreal sense. A while ago, I dreamt that Star Trek Deep Space Nine type aliens were scattered among the cast and I woke up believing it had actually happened.

Although Sun Hill is supposed to be in Tower Hamlets, most of the filming takes place in south-west London, as near to the studios in the old Triang factory in Morden as they can get. A thesp who worked on The Bill in its early years told me in confidence that, because actors tend to be significantly smaller than real-life policemen, Thames TV had constructed scaled-down sets, with reduced sized doors, filing cabinets and chairs to make the characters appear “proper sized” and suitably imposing.

For some unfathomable reason, last night I drifted into the first episode of a new Bill story, “Forgotten Child”. Despite the predictability an 8pm ITV drama demands, it was far better than I was expecting and I got to the end without feeling I’d been cheated. I even wanted to find out what happens next. Praise indeed…

The story centred around an underage girl runaway from Leeds, whose drug-scarred body had been found behind a strip-pub in Sun Hill. Investigations pointed to a nationwide ring trapping underage girls and luring them into prostitution and drug-dependency. Just another story of life in the present-day version of Dock Green, you’d think.

Although the story was multi-dimensional, a couple of aspects of “Forgotten Child” were mildly annoying, including a character who was supposed to be from Leeds having a definite Liverpool accent. You can almost hear the assistant chief producer saying: “But it still says ‘Northern’, dahling” – assuming anyone on-set even noticed. Then there’s the clever but unrealistic plot device by which minor characters impart important information (“We’ve found the pub landlord’s DNA all over the dead girl’s body”) as the investigating DC and Superintendent amble down the corridor, recapping the main points of the plot for slower viewers. In my limited experience of the real Bill, Superintendents and DCs don’t tend to mix too much, never mind stroll down corridors, practically arm-in-arm.

To be fair, it isn’t meant to be real life, it’s The Bill. And when one of your main characters attempts to commit suicide in his dressing room because he’s been axed from the programme as Reg Hollis, er… actor Jeff Stewart did in 2007, it’s possible to regard aliens showing up on screen as quite normal. Even in a dream.

Note: The Bill finally came to an end on ITV-1 in August 2010.

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Amazing Book Bargains

I used to be a publisher. Not someone who worked for a big international corporation, mixing with bestselling authors, famous film, TV and sports personalities and their less glamorous ghostwriters, but an important part – or at least I liked to think so – of a one-man operation.

Aside from an army of authors, artists, freelance proof-readers, designers, printing and binding workers, packagers and distributors, independent sales reps and PR prats, I was The Do-Not Press. I battled fearlessly against the publishing and bookselling establishments for ten years before I finally fell, fatally wounded, in 2004. My Waterloo was the Compass Spring Sales Conference. (Don’t ask).

I only mention this, not because I’m about to relate a whole series of publishing horror stories, but because the experience scarred me and changed my book-buying habits for life. Even now, four years, four months and six days after our last book hit the shelves (or not) of Britain’s major bookshops, I cannot bring myself to buy a book from W.H. Smiths or Waterstone’s. (I’m a bit iffy about Blackwell’s, but that’s only because in 1966 Sir Basil Blackwell tried to prevent the UK publication of Last Exit to Brooklyn. I have a long memory).

Whenever I need a book and I’m in central London, I’ll walk past all the fancy Borders, Waterstone’s and whatever and head for Foyle’s in the Charing Cross Road. Disorganised, badly laid out and ineffecient as they might have been back then, (they’ve improved now), at least they stocked almost all of our books – and even sold a few.

Being an independent publisher of some panache, you’d have thought independent bookshops would have been keener than the chains to stock our toothsome output of contemporary fiction and suchlike. Not a bit of it. With a handful of notable exceptions – Newham Bookshop, Murder One, Foyle’s, Housman’s and Bookseller Crow, being the only ones that spring to mind – smaller bookshops tended to avoid us entirely. One even went as far as invoicing me for the fax paper I’d used up notifying him of an impending publication by a local author.

In my experience, most independent booksellers are pompous middle-class twits who are dead keen to stock mountains of what’s on the top of the bestseller charts but will not risk upsetting their clientele by having anything vaguely “interesting” in the building. “Oh, that’s very hard to get,” is a common put-down.

Buying online is even trickier for me. Amazon have everything I need, it’s usually cheaper there than anywhere else, and the service is invariably second to none. And yet I feel guilty about feeding money into a US corporation with a virtual worldwide monopoly. Silly, isn’t it?

I get around this by buying from The Book Depository, whenever I can. An independent British operation (sorry international readers), The Book Depository offers free delivery and prices that undercut even their obese American rival. Plus they push the product of independent British pubishing at every opportunity. Well done, I say.

The Do-Not Press website still gets 100 hits a day and is at http://www.thedonotpress.com

The Book Depository can be found at http://www.thebookdepository.co.uk

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Cooking Perfect Rice – Easily

Rice provides one-fifth of the calories consumed in the world today. Or slightly more if you eat at the Wong Kei restaurant in London’s Soho, where servings are particularly generous.

A long time ago, before even the Sex Pistols were a glint in someone’s eye, I was taught to cook “Indian” vegetarian food by a Pakistani chef called Mr Murzer. He was a friendly man from a family of great chefs and a strict teacher. One of his many rules was that I must only ever cook with genuine basmati rice. Grown in the Punjab region of India and Pakistan, its grains are long and slender and the flavours and aromas it releases when correctly cooked are unmistakable. The name “basmati” comes from a mixture of the Hindi and Sanskrit words for “fragrance” and “perfume”.

I have not seen Mr Murzer for over thirty years and, as he must have been in his mid-to late-fifties back then, I assume he’ll be dead by now, or at the very least, incapable of boxing my ears as hard as he used to whenever I made stupid mistakes, such as not tempering my spices properly or letting the yoghurt curdle. On that understanding, I can reveal that in the subsequent years I have been known to occasionally summon up the odd risotto with arborio or carnaroli rice, but generally speaking it’s been basmati all the way for me.

The first thing to be sure of is that the rice you buy is really basmati. The high cost of producing and ageing genuine basmati grains makes it lucrative for unscrupulous fellows to repackage any old long grain rubbish as the “prince of rices”. Those garish packets you sometimes find in Indian supermarkets at half the price of everything else is unlikely to be the genuine article. Although this is not something I ever apply to other products, the only sure way your rice is really basmati is to buy a recognised brand, such as Tilda, Veetee or TRS.

Basmati rice comes in two forms – white and brown – and each requires a simple but entirely different cooking process. In both cases you will need a fairly small pan with a tight-fitting lid. You’ll find that anally-retentive types will almost certainly employ a special rice pan. Mine holds two pints and comes with two small metal handles instead of a single long plastic one. This is so you can stick it in the oven without melting the handle and stinking out the neighbourhood.

White basmati is milled an polished, and and is what is served as “plain boiled rice” in most Indian restaurants. You’ll need a handy measure. I use a plastic half-pint beaker and know that dry rice almost up to the top will provide four generous portions. You simply measure out the amount of dry rice you need, wash it in a sieve under running water to get rid of all the powered starch, then add it to the rice pan together with one-and-a-half times the amount (by volume) of fresh, cold water. Bring to the boil, add a pinch of salt, stir quickly, slam on the lid and turn down the heat to its lowest.

After exactly eight minutes, remove your pan from the heat and leave to stand. The longer you leave it, the fluffier the rice will be. Try and manage fifteen minutes; if it’s going to be more, stick your unopened pan inside a very low oven. Do not be tempted to take off the lid before you are ready to serve. In Indian restaurants, they make the rice at lunchtime in huge pans (one for plain; another with food colourings, oil and spices for pillau rice), leaving it in a barely warm oven all afternoon to let the grains separate and the flavours intensify.
Brown rice is the whole grain and needs 25 minutes to cook. There’s no need to wash it, but you can if you like. Simply plonk a cupful of rice and boiling water into the same pan and boil rapidly for fifteen minutes. During that time you may have to filter off the “scum” (that’s the dark brown powered starch) or top up with hot water from the kettle, as needed. At the end of fifteen minutes you need to set your timer for another ten minutes. You’ll ideally have water a tiny way above the grains, if not, add more from the kettle or boil rapidly until what’s in there has evaporated to the correct level. Add a pinch of salt, stir once and plonk on the lid, simmering on the lowest heat for whatever remains of the ten minutes. Leave to stand for at least ten minutes.

After a while, the amounts of water, rice and salt you use will become second nature and you’ll rarely have to do anything other than plonk on the lid and turn down the heat.

At the end of your resting period you will have perfect Basmati rice.
If not, Mr Muzer will come and box your ears.

Mobile Telephony

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One way to discern a person’s real age is to discover how they feel about mobile phones. If they regard them as an extension of themselves, as an add-on that continues everyday conversation, then they are probably under forty. If, on the other hand, they see them as an intrusion, something that keeps bothering them at inconvenient moments, then they are probably me.

It was revealed on the TV news last night that there are currently 65 million of the blighters active in the United Kingdom today. As the U.K.’s population is under 61 million, and as a large swathe of people – babies, toddlers, “living vegetables” and the like – are not likely to have one, that means that some drug-dealers must be walking around with 476 stuffed into their combat trouser pockets. No wonder they walk funny.

My job is primarily a concert promoter (doesn’t that sound grand?) and I have an office telephone, which is manned during so-called “office hours” and an iPhone, the chief purpose of which is to play podcasts and check how far it is from Helsinki to Swindon. (Not for any work reason, just because I get curious) As far as I’m concerned, the calls coming in are a nuisance, rather than a function I approve of. I’m just grateful that the iPhone fades in the ringing tone gently.

I haven’t given the iPhone number to more than a dozen people and yet I get more calls on it than I do on the landline, which is displayed on the website and printed on all my stationery. I even have an old cellphone – the one before the iPhone – they let me keep on for a fiver a month all-in that gets 5-10 calls a day and I’ve been telling people not to use it for eight friggin’ months.

I much prefer email, which you can respond to when you have time. Not like a mobile telephone, which is like someone screaming into your ear: “Stop what you’re doing now and speak to ME, no matter how trivial my reason for calling is! Speak to me NOW!”.

Why is it that people ring me at exactly the most inconvenient moment? Like when I’m just about to be served after queuing for 40 minutes. When I’m trying to sneak out of somewhere without being noticed (is that just me?). And ten seconds after everyone in the chapel of rest has been asked to turn off their mobiles.

I hate them. Do me a favour: only ring me when it’s absolutely necessary, OK?

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John Wayne: Big John or Big Jessie?

Unlikely as it may sound, psychiatrists recognise a condition called “John Wayne Syndrome”. Although the Duke’s ailment has since become synonymous with battle fatigue, it was originally coined to describe someone who could not come to terms with their own perceived lack of heroism.

When he wasn’t campaigning in favour of guns or against Socialism, Wayne was tormented by the realisation that the tough, macho figure he portrayed on the screen was entirely fictional. In his own eyes he was a “fag actor”. Though not likely to have engaged in oral or anal sex with men himself, the characters Wayne portrayed would have regarded actors as “fags” and in his own twisted reality, that’s how he sometimes thought of himself.

Leaving aside the negative aspects of being given a girl’s name, the young Marion Morrison was rejected by the U.S. Naval Academy and later was accused of purposely avoiding enlistment after Pearl Harbour in December, 1941. In his defence, it is said he did his best to sign-up but was rejected due to an old football injury. It has also been said that the U.S. Government was keen that famous actors stayed home to make propaganda films and boost morale.

The truth is that Wayne only made his name in John Ford’s 1939 western Stagecoach. By December 1941, he had yet to become a big enough draw to be given the star treatment. Equally or better known Hollywood names who were allowed to enlist include James Stewart, Henry Fonda, Douglas Fairbanks Jr. and Clark Gable. With them out of the way, Wayne became much bigger during the war and the years immediately following it.

By sticking around in Hollywood, in 1943, he was able to help found the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals, together with Mickey Mouse creator Walt Disney, and movie directors Leo “Duck Soup” McCarey and Sam “A Night At The Opera, A Day At The Races” Wood. (What is it with these Marx Brothers directors?) Wayne was elected president of the snappily-titled M.P.A.P.A.I. in 1947; fellow members included frequent co-star Ward Bond, and pals Gary Cooper and Ronald Reagan. Its statement of principles includes the line: “In our special field of motion pictures, we resent the growing impression that this industry is made of, and dominated by, Communists, radicals, and crackpots.” Just so.

Wayne was an ardent anti-Communist, and prominent supporter of the House Un-American Activities Committee. In 1951, he made the appalling movie Big Jim McLain, in which he and James Arness play H.U.A.C. investigators battling commies in Hawaii. Wayne openly boasted of being instrumental in having Carl Foreman blacklisted from Hollywood after the release of the anti-McCarthy High Noon. The 1959 movie, Rio Bravo, was intended by Wayne and director Howard Hawks as a right-wing response.

His rabid anti-Communism made the “Duke” a loud and proud supporter of the Vietnam War, and 1969′s The Green Berets  which he starred in, produced and co-directed – is the only vaguely big budget movie in its defence. Funny that. Odd too that all the main Vietnamese characters in the movie are played by Japanese-American actors.

Movie-mad Stalin was so pissed off with Wayne’s anti-Communist views, he ordered his assassination. Luckily for all concerned, the Great Dictator died before the order could be implemented and Kruschev boasted to Wayne in 1958 that he recalled the hit squad before it could put the plan into operation.

An individual is never all bad and John Wayne is certainly no exception. He had tremendous charisma as an actor and his on-screen presence was immense. The John Ford- and Howard Hawks-directed westerns of the 1940s and 1950s produced some classic Wayne performances. His 1956 movie, The Searchers, is possibly the finest and most complex ever made in the genre (sorry, Clint). Only director John Ford could ever have persuaded Wayne to play Ethan Edwards, the racist Civil War veteran who hates practically everyone, but Indians in particular. Wayne for famous for turning down roles that didn’t show him in heroic light but Wayne could see the potential of the movie and how it furthered his view that Native Americans had received a bad deal at the white invader’s hand.
Yes, the Duke was pro-Indian. Even more surprising is that he occasionally voiced the opinion that Black America was getting a pretty rough deal, too. All three of his wives were of Hispanic origin and just before he died, he gave support to the free Patty Hearst Campaign. Go figure.

Above all, Wayne was a “character”. Larger than life and a star in the true sense of the word. There is the famous story of how British film critic Barry Norman and Wayne almost came to blows on a promotional train journey to promote True Grit in 1969. At 11.30am,  Norman was presented to Wayne, who by this time, had already disposed of seventeen miniature bottles of bourbon. The subject of the Vietnam war came up and Wayne declared that he could put a stop to hostilities at a stroke, simply by phoning Kosygin and threatening to bomb Moscow. Norman laughed. “He got up, literally growling,” recounted Norman, “obviously intent on smiting me, and he was a very big man.” Fortunately for one or both of the prospective combatants, Wayne was restrained by a posse of Paramount publicity people.

Big Jessie indeed.

East Europeans Cleaning Up

We have a Polish cleaner. There: I’ve admitted it. For a liberal, woolly-minded Old Labour person like me, that’s a big admission. Or, at least, it used to be. Now it’s perfectly normal to have ‘help around the house’, and to justify my actions I’d just say that if I didn’t employ her, she’d be [...]

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My Blog Shame

It’s all Richard Herring’s fault. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. I’ll start at the beginning… One major benefit of owning an iPhone is, instead of listening to other people speaking rubbish to each other via their own handsets, you can inflict podcasts on yourself.  I subscribe to 63 at last count, ranging from [...]

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