Following on from the previous post, about Peter Kay's laugh-an-hour 'satire' of talent shows, here's something that crams more actual jokes and proper digs at the whole genre into 10 minutes than he managed in 2 hours. And it was for charity, too, which means that it didn't actually need to be any good*. Oh, and it's 7 years old. Now, children, can you spell 'zeitgeist'?



* Joke

In the interests of remaining well-informed, I sat through the whole two hours of Peter Kay's Britain's Got the Pop Factor-wyllantisiliogogogoch. It looked perfect, but it didn't make me laugh once. As a satire (and some listings billed it as such), it was toothless, with Pete Waterman, Nicki Chapman and Dr Fox (who is, in the words of Lee and Herring, neither a real doctor nor an actual fox) all desperately trying to show how good they are at taking a joke and thus improving their own profiles in the process. As comedy, it was lazy. It seems that they'd spent so much time and effort getting the set right that they had no time to write any actual jokes. Still, we shouldn't be too surprised. Has Peter Kay been any good since he parted company with Dave Spikey and Neil Fitzmaurice?

Anyway, I can just about tolerate the existence of bad comedy, but on Monday, 'The Winner's Song' was released as a single. Extensive enquiries have brought forth no indication that the single is a charitable venture. So, it would appear that Channel 4 paid Peter Kay to make a two-hour promo for his own single, the profits from which will be going to buy his mum a bigger garden for her bungalow - I'm told she's got her eye on a little place called Lancashire. If so, am I being hopelessly old-fashioned to think that the whole setup stinks? Even the useless Ofcom must take a dim view of this sort of corruption.

For years now, I've been keeping informal tabs on who might possibly deserve the title of greatest living Englishman. Until now, Sir David Attenborough has been the clear leader, but, after last night's Friday Night with Jonathan Ross, he's got a challenger in the form of Sir Roger Moore. He was the sort of chat show guest you don't think they make anymore. Funny, twinkly, and with a neat line in Tony Curtis impersonations. Meanwhile, the genuine gleam in his eye when Wossy produced a gigantic pork pie (his favourite nosh) in lieu of a birthday cake was immensely endearing, as was saying "Is it Wall's?" in the manner of an Antiques Roadshow expert (Actually it was Fortnum and Mason's, and judging by the look on his face as he tucked in, they make an exceedingly good pie).

He gained points a while back, when it emerged that Sir Ben Kingsley was being a bit of a ninny and berating crew members who didn't genuflect in front of him and call him Sir Ben. I contrasted this with the story of a relatively junior crew member approaching Moore, asking how he preferred to be addressed and getting the reply "Call me Rog".

I think that Attenborough minor still just shades it, but the hat is doffed to Rog and his pork pies. Any other GLE nominations?

Going through the stats for this blog, I see quite a few people using Google Chrome. Nice, isn't it? However, I can't help wondering how long it will be before the first high-profile Google Chrome 'incognito window' divorce or sacking. They bill it as enabling undetected access for the purposes of present buying and surprise holiday planning. Yeah, right. It's like the cotton bud packets that tell you not to stick the contents in your ear, when that's their main purpose. The incognito window is for slacking and wanking.

The book reviews I've been doing lately and the impending publication of my new book Turned Out Nice Again: the story of British light entertainment have caused me to think far too deeply about approaches to reviewing. The one that annoys me most is the reviewer who tells you how they would have written the same book, and that the approach taken by the author is, as a result, worthless. As far as I'm concerned, a reviewer's job is to say whether the book works or not, and, if not, why not. There are many ways to reach the same conclusion, and to suggest that you have the one true path is appalling arrogance.

The other thing that annoys me is reviewers who think they're the main feature rather than a mildly illuminating sideshow. When my first book-shaped thing came out, one reviewer spent roughly half of the article talking about his own life and career before summarising the book dismissively in a couple of paragraphs at the end. Among his more perceptive comments, he said that the book was dense and confusing in places, which it was. It was a dense, confusing subject and, several years on, I'm happy to admit that I bit off a bit more than I could chew (I'm still enormously proud of the book, but I did feel the need to lob in the kitchen sink - I'd write it a bit differently now). However, as an example of density and confusion, he chose to quote a bit that I wrote in a quite deliberately dense and confusing manner (think Danny Kaye doing the vessel with the pestle) to show what a cat's cradle of guff the record industry had become.

Anyway, get yer lovely pre-orders in for the perfect stocking filler here.

Thanks go out to Sparks for flagging this up. It's the once-underrated, now-feted (and deservedly so) Craig Ferguson saying roughly the same things I think about the current financial situation, only in a far more funny manner and in front of an audience of millions.

How's this for missing the point? The Phillipine Embassy is denouncing the BBC for a sketch in a recent Harry and Paul show, depicting a middle-class householder trying to mate his neighbour's Filipina maid with his own pet Geordie. This one, in fact, just after the opening titles (embedding's been disabled, so you'll have to click through). Meanwhile, an outfit calling itself the Philippine Foundation is describing the sketch as "tantamount to racism and [the] worst sexual abuse and exploitation of the hapless young Filipina domestic worker employee". Er, no. Context is everything. Regular viewers of this rather good series (streets ahead of last year's Ruddy Hell, It's Harry and Paul) will know that the middle-class white bloke and his neighbour are the figures of ridicule in this sketch. The sort of people who can afford domestic staff and who regard them as mere livestock (I should point out for benefit of the clueless that not everyone who employs domestic staff is like this). If the mob in the Philippine Embassy and their mates in the Foundation took a deep breath before flying off the handle, they might realise that Enfield and Whitehouse are actually on their side.

As the September Literary Review seems to be off the news stands, here's the aforementioned piece about Graham McCann's Bounder and Mark Simpson's Alastair Sim.

------

JOLLY GOOD FUN

Bounder! The Biography of Terry-Thomas
By Graham McCann
(Aurum 291pp £16.99)

Alastair Sim: The Star of Scrooge and the Belles of St Trinian's
By Mark Simpson
(The History Press 256pp £18.99)

In the heyday of the British film industry, Terry-Thomas and Alastair Sim made respectable careers playing people who weren't respectable. They played characters who were ‘not quite gentlemen', but in different ways: Terry-Thomas was the embodiment of the player or bounder, while Sim depicted seedy, shabby, failed or faded gentility better than almost anyone else. The near-contemporaries coincided on screen on several occasions, so the appearance of this brace of biographies is serendipitous.

Sim was the elder of the two actors, born in Edinburgh in 1900, the son of a tailor. Terry-Thomas was born Thomas Terry Hoar Stevens eleven years later in Finchley and, despite being merely middle-class, affected a dandyish manner almost from the womb, as a way of blanking out his dreary suburban surroundings and his parents' unhappy union. Both actors achieved their greatest success playing amplified, exaggerated, grotesque versions of their real personalities, but both also had deceptively wide ranges. Sim began on stage as a straight actor before moving into film as a more manic, comic performer than he later became; while T-T was a skilled mimic, something he rarely got a chance to show.

Another thing that Alastair Sim and Terry-Thomas had in common was their work ethic. Sim, who began professional life as an elocution teacher in his native Edinburgh, was a fastidious director even when he wasn't meant to be directing, which caused no end of on-set tensions. T-T's apparent effortlessness and dilettantism masked massive ambition, drive and professionalism, the last of which he expected from his colleagues. Off-duty, however, both are shown by their biographers to have been amusing, charming men.

A populist former Cambridge academic, Graham McCann has spent the last decade or so producing books on film and comedy at a fearsome rate. In contrast, Mark Simpson is making his authorial debut, being a civil servant more used to writing government reports on private finance initiatives. Surprised to find that there had been no proper biography of such a major figure as Sim, Simpson spent the next decade finding out why, the guarded actor having left almost no trace of his seventy-five years apart from his work.

T-T's well-known film work is covered at length in Bounder, but McCann's conceit is to present his subject as the founding father of British television comedy. This is no hyperbole. Between 1949 and 1952, his series How Do You View? practically defined the medium's humorous trajectory. The BBC would have been happy with a simple act show. Instead, T-T, writers Sid Colin and Talbot Rothwell, and producer Bill Ward pushed at the limitations of the medium and paved the way for later shows like Hancock's Half-Hour. Sadly, because no recordings survive, the show’s legacy is all too often overlooked; but its contemporary effect was seismic.

McCann's other achievement is to convey what jolly company and rollicking good fun the real-life T-T must have been. Harry Secombe called him ‘the finest raconteur ever’, and that quality shines through here. No sad clown he. It's impossible not to adore a man who, upon meeting Pablo Picasso, asked the artist if anyone had ever requested ‘a word in your eye’. Unfortunately, the book suffers from a lack of original interview material with colleagues and contemporaries. McCann's excellent earlier books on Morecambe and Wise and Frankie Howerd were leavened liberally by such anecdotes. Apart from occasional observations from Sarah Miles, Jonathan Cecil, Barry Cryer and T-T's cousin Richard Briers, Bounder is mostly a survey – admittedly a very thorough one – of the paper trail left by T-T himself in articles, interviews and BBC contributor files.

In contrast, the privacy-obsessed, interview-shy Sim left no such trail (whatever the question, his standard reply to journalists was ‘I don't know’), so Simpson is to be commended on having found as much material as he has, particularly with regard to the actor's early years. Similarly, Sim's long and fruitful association with the now unfashionable Scots dramatist James Bridie is chronicled well. Simpson has spoken to many who worked with Sim, and their reminiscences help build up a picture of a stubborn, difficult, exacting, but ultimately kind and lovable man. This picture is obscured very occasionally by sloppy editing: cinematographer Otto Heller becomes 'Otto Helier', for example.

Sim's kindness towards young actors and actresses, such as George Cole, has been well documented. Simpson acknowledges the ‘murkiness of innuendo’, wondering whether Sim's privacy obsession did not mask darker impulses. After all, when Sim met his wife Naomi, he was twenty-six, and she was twelve – but the friendship was purely platonic for many years. Although Simpson, unintentionally, makes the waters even murkier in the way he broaches the subject, the answer is ultimately supplied by friends like the child actor-turned-BBC executive John Howard Davies, who testify to Sim's honourable intent.

As you'd expect from a seasoned biographer like Graham McCann, Bounder is pacy. Conversely, Mark Simpson's book can be a little dry in places, which might be the influence of the day job. Alternatively, it might be the subjects themselves imposing their considerable personalities on these welcome books.

So, Mandelson. I'm not an expert on card games, but I thought a flush could only bust once? And the US bailout has gone through. It was Hobson's choice, really, but I think they made the wrong decision. At the other end of this, the bankers, financiers and politicians who got the world into this shite in the first place will still be claiming that they know best. They, like the arseholes who demanded compensation when their Railtrack shares tanked, need to be shown that there's no such thing as a risk-free punt. Even with a shedload of taxpayers' money propping the whole corrupt, ineptly-run system up, a lot of people are going to lose jobs, businesses and homes. Refusing the aid package would have punished those who truly deserve to suffer.

Having waited 20 years for any meaningful movement on Crossrail, I'm currently filing this one under 'believe when see', but, horribly, it appears to be a Tory policy announcement that I support fully. Obviously, the fact that these are the people who turned a flawed, but functional nationalised industry into the worst advert for capitalism ever must not be forgotten, but I fail to see how any government can be committed to environmental responsibility and airport expansion at the same time. And the risible Ruth Kelly calling it "economically illiterate" is, perversely, the biggest endorsement I can think of. I'd still never vote for the Conservatives as long as there's breath in my body, though.

You can't buck the market, oh no. You've got to let the market decide. For the last 30 years, this has been the mantra, first of Thatcher and her cronies and then of the bleeding Labour party. The City boys knew best - intervention would be foolish. And now all of these supposedly-unbuckable financial institutions are needing to be baled out by government money, both here and in the US. This whole situation is coming as cold comfort to those of us who maintained all along that the market couldn't be trusted to run a whelk stall, and that a balanced economy requires intervention and heavy regulation, but, hey, it's something to cling to. With any luck, it'll be the start of a new age of scepticism and questioning in politics, but chances are the big public will remain just as bovine as it ever has. I despair.

I post the following as catharsis for anyone who has ever been let down by technology:

I instruct all of you to go and buy the September issue of the Literary Review. Already the finest periodical for bibliomanes everywhere, it has, this month, chosen to improve its standing yet further by printing my review of Graham McCann's new Terry-Thomas biography Bounder and Mark Simpson's book about Alastair Sim.

I'm having to choose my words very carefully here, but in the cases of the two seaside piers that have 'gone on fire' in the last few weeks, is the fact that they both changed hands recently significant in any way?

Speeding along Lowestoft's busy London Road South on my bicycle earlier today, a teenager in a hooded top shouted something to me as I passed. I couldn't quite make out what he'd said, and assumed it had been something insulting. I was just about to slam on the anchors and give hoodie boy a piece of my mind about cheeking your elders when I realised that he'd merely said "Oi, your back wheel's following you". Perfectly innocent, not at all insulting, agreeably absurd but logical and clearly designed to make me think "What the f....oh, I see". Judge not...

Here's the deal. I'll write about something other than death when my heroes stop dying. Sir Bill Cotton was, by common consent, the best head of light entertainment that BBC television ever had. He was also, in his retirement, unfailingly kind and generous to herberts like me who rang him up and asked him questions about his dad, the Generation Game and the Albanian delegation at the 1968 Eurovision Song Contest. Although he made a rather fine knight, those who worked with him longest always called him 'young Bill', rather like the various Mr Graces in Are You Being Served?, a hit show introduced on his watch.

He was the second person I interviewed for my forthcoming book Turned Out Nice Again. Noel Edmonds was the first, in the morning, at his office in Hammersmith, and when I said who I was seeing in the afternoon, Noel told me to pass on his very best wishes to a gent whom he regarded as "the ultimate showman". Noel was right in his assessment of Sir Bill's showmanship, but he was much more than that. Clever without ever being pretentious, he was the only light entertainment executive in the BBC's history to reach the board of management, where as managing director of the television service, he oversaw the full run of programming. Jim Moir, one of his proteges and a close contender for the best head of LE title, described him as "a very shrewd man, who knew the place and the worth of entertainment in the BBC's hierarchy. He saw the BBC not only as informer and educator, not only in terms of gravitas and journalism, but as an entertainer. He knew its power. I'm not saying the others didn't, but Bill was certainly among the first to articulate the need for it successfully".

Sir Bill was always diplomatically careful to avoid saying that modern TV was ghastly: "What I say can be construed as a bloke who thinks that he’s absolutely marvellous, and nobody knows how to do it now, and all that. You just get yourself kicked to death. Oh, that old fart walking around saying all these things. But the fact is, not only in television, but in so many things in modern life, where there was fun to be had in work, there’s not the same type of fun now. Things are too serious, or are made out to be too serious."

The "hysterical" programme review board meetings were a perfect example of the old sort of fun. The earnest journalists, the power-seeking missiles from Lime Grove would be right at the front of the table, as close to the chairman - the controller of programmes - as possible ("All auditioning," as Bill put it). The LE delegation would be as far from the seat of power as possible, making witty comments and starting paper fights. Meanwhile, head of outside broadcasts Peter Dimmock, shoes off, "used to sit behind, on a couch, doing his in-tray". When he became controller of programmes, Huw Wheldon rearranged the seating: "I want light entertainment sitting here, and outside broadcasts sitting here, then we’ll have one meeting".

The aforementioned Albanian delegation is another example of Sir Bill's idea of behind-the-scenes merriment. In short, over lunch with a few young LE producers, it was decided to wind up Tom Sloan by turning up at the Royal Albert Hall claiming to be a nation who wished to enter the Eurovision Song Contest. With the full might of the BBC wardrobe and make-up departments at their disposal, the trio - Terry Henebery, Roger Ordish and Brian Whitehouse - managed to fool Sloan for a gratifyingly long time. The full, glorious story (and pictorial evidence) is in the book.

The fun had its place, but when it came to making the programmes, he was deadly serious. "Good entertainment is a highly professional business, it requires a lot of experience, a lot of care. You don’t take short cuts." RIP Young Bill.

A message arrived just now from my mate Alex asking if I'd heard that Johnny Griffin had died. I hadn't. Back when I was assistant editor of Crescendo and Jazz Music, one of my most pleasurable assignments was an annual trip to the Wigan Jazz Festival. One of the magazine's other writers did the bulk of the reviewing, so I was left to prop up the hotel bar with the musicians and generally have a nice time. When the Little Giant (as Griff was known) was in town, I had a blinder of a night just listening to him hold forth, as he laid waste to the bar's supply of Bushmills. I think I might have helped a bit. There was a hairy moment when his female German manager - a delightful lady until crossed - passed the table and rumbled the contents of his tumbler. He was, she made quite clear, under doctor's orders to avoid spirits. Johnny smiled sweetly and explained that one of the nice people at the table had bought it for him, and he'd felt it would be rude to refuse. I'm lucky that my work's brought me into the presence of greatness on several occasions. That night was one such occasion. Remember him this way:

My Independent obituary of Hugh Mendl appears in today's paper. The Times - Hugh's own newspaper of choice - devoted its lead obit page to him a couple of weeks back (quite right too), and Music Week's Ben Cardew wrote a very nice piece in which people as elevated as Seymour Stein stressed Hugh's importance and influence. Hopefully, the existence of these tributes will ensure that he's remembered as the major figure he was.

Back at schloss Cheeseford after nearly a week sampling the qualities and quantities of 'that London'. Reason 1 for the visit was the Lambeth Country Show in Brockwell Park, a gloriously incongruous combination of dub reggae, sheep-shearing and the Lambeth Horticultural Society's big annual show. To be frank, you can keep the dub reggae - the sub-bass emanating from some of the tents hurt my ears and loosened the soles on my walking boots - but the other stuff's really rather life-affirming, particularly because it happens where it does. LHS veterans have told me with pride of the year when a certain amount of unpleasantness down Brixton way threatened to spread as far as the Country Show, and they all prepared to see off the rioters and riot police with nothing more than firm, polite Englishness, and possibly their dibbers if it got a bit heated.

Reason 2 was a friend's birthday party, at which guests were encouraged to represent an elpee's worth of toons in some way. Full marks to the host for coming as Animals by Pink Floyd, having crafted a scale model of Battersea Power Station out of cardboard, and added a tiny pink pig on a wire. Honourable mentions also to the chap who came as Hex Enduction Hour by the Fall, a Mr & Mrs who came as BBC Transcription Discs and the other husband and wife team who came as Derek and Clive (Live) (him - white shirt with accurately-scrawled lettering on it) and Songs in the Key of Life (her - 7 quid's worth of orange cardboard and a pair of Sunnie Mann's old sunglasses). Me? Ever keen to pursue the easy life, and not overly fond of schlepping a hundred-weight of props on the Tube, I wore the bottle-green corduroy suit I got married in and claimed to be this. At least a certain amount of malice aforethought went into it. One friend only realised on the way to the pub that his choice of shirt and trousers had inadvertently allowed him to attend as Black and Blue by the Stones.

Reason 3 was to head to North Greenwich to see Return to Forever at the IndigO2. When most of my school contemporaries were listening to Jesus Jones and the Wonder Stuff, I was scouring second-hand record shops for anything involving Chick Corea or Stanley Clarke. This, along with my complete and utter lack of interest in competitive games and, well, most other aspects of my personality, marked me out as a bit of an oddball. My love of a decent bit of 'difficult jazz' (a fondly-remembered section heading from one of the aforementioned diskeries) has remained intact to this day, but I resisted the temptation to spring for tickets for a long time after the reunion tour was announced. There were a couple of motivating factors behind my lack of motivation. Firstly, in recent years, the price of concert tickets has outstripped inflation at a rate that suggests that someone, somewhere is taking the piss something rotten. Yeah, yeah, reduced record sales mean that the talent has to make up the shortfall somewhere, but when the cheap seats are £50 - before you've even allowed for transport, nosh and a couple of throat oils - it makes one powerfully selective about which shows to attend. I don't think it would be wildly inaccurate to suggest that Ticketmaster must shoulder some of the blame. Secondly, the thought that a certain proportion of my £50 (OK, it was really £49.50 - £45 plus £4.50 booking fee) would be heading straight for the coffers of the cult of Scientology (Chick's a long-time member, Stanley Clarke left years ago and became a 'suppressive person' - as critics of the cult are known - I bet they have a laugh in the dressing room) was enough to make me sit on my credit card for a bit. However, one night, in a moment of weakness after digging out Hymn of the Seventh Galaxy, I contacted a Corea-friendly mate and asked if he wanted in.

So, off we toddled, and were both amazed and relieved not to find Tom Cruise Fan Club recruitment leaflets on the T-shirt stand, or e-meter personality tests on offer by the bass bins. However, not all was apples. Stanley Clarke had obviously got the Brockwell Park massive to EQ the electric bass that he used in the first half. It was thuddy and muddy, making his intricate playing painful to listen to. Watching his fingers, it was clear that he was playing some awesome licks, but they sounded like Campbell's condensed cream of shit. Second observation: Why is it not standard practice to offset the rows of seating at venues, especially when - as in the case of the IndigO2 - they don't have a raked floor? Just place every other row a couple of inches to the left or right of the one in front, meaning that you don't spend the entire show looking at the back of someone's head. Job done. Failing that, Ticketmaster can use some of their ill-gotten billions to develop software that allocates seats by height and/or head size of purchaser. Third observation: Why pay a fucking fortune to go to a concert if you're going to watch it through your cameraphone, held up in front of your face and restricting the view of the poor schlub behind you? Save your money and wait until it all turns up on YouTube the next day - as ice-cool and very groovy drummer Lenny White acknowledged would be the case during his mini stand-up act between numbers. Fourth observation: the British like queuing for no apparent reason. Over half of the audience waited dutifully in line outside the venue for about an hour, while the other half stood outside the bar opposite, drinking and laughing at the silly sods who were queuing despite already having reserved seats. Fifth observation: The O2 is the restaurant at the end of the universe.

Thankfully, for the second half, Stan switched to double bass, and sounded proper lovely. Apart, that is, from when he slapped and punched the instrument. Unaccountably, these antics got huge cheers and 'wooohs' from some of the more cloth-eared members of the congregation. I love Stan the man, and think he's too good a musician to be cheered loudest of all for bringing a clenched fist down on his beloved and very expensive instrument. These reservations apart, by the time I returned to the Jubilee line, I felt I'd got my half a ton's worth. Despite his dubious beliefs, Chick Corea's still one of my favourite pianists, and hearing him flit between a real, live Fender Rhodes and a concert grand was a thrill. Al Di Meola - whose 54th birthday it was, marked by his re-appearance for the encore in an Arsenal shirt, bearing his name and the number 54 - sounded just grrrrrrreat, whether on electric guitar or acoustic, and Lenny White sounded as effortlessly wonderful as he does on all those albums I've hoarded for the last 20-odd years. I wasn't watching the clock, but I think 'Romantic Warrior' charged past the half-hour mark. Self-indulgent? Oh yes, but I wouldn't have missed it for anything.

Another sad demise, this time in the form of my old employer Publishing News, which closes in a fortnight - full story here. My 4 years there weren't a period of complete joy, due to personality clashes with a senior colleague and the fact that the chairman was one of the most unpleasant individuals it's been my misfortune to encounter. However, on balance, it was fantastic experience, and, without it, I wouldn't be doing what I'm doing now. Despite the chairman's iron whim, which resulted in some pretty rum editorial decisions and a few ulcers from the poor bloody infantry forced to put them into action, it was a good paper.

One story from the PN days. In the run-up to a London Book Fair (or was it Frankfurt?), when reams of picture captions and "At stand E984, the Badger Press will be gassing live badgers to illustrate their new range of Christmas books..." were needed, I felt the aforementioned chairman's breath on the back of my neck. "Kosovo" "Pardon, Fred?" "Kosovo" "Yeees, what about it?" "KOSOVO!" "Sorry, Fred, I have no idea what you're on about". At this he threw a paragraph of copy I'd written the previous week about a book on Kosovan refugees onto my desk, grunted "Picture'd be nice" and stalked off to make someone else's day a misery.