Dark Forces

The most interesting aspect of the Andy Gray affair is the revelation that he was suing News Corp for alleged phone-tapping by the News of the World. The man’s opinions are deplorable but they were only intended to be shared with a fellow neanderthal, not - as a consequence of being secretly recorded by someone within Sky News and leaked to the Daily Mail - made public property.
His fate is just another example of the message we’ve seen delivered for years: don’t mess with Murdoch or something unpleasant will happen to you; co-operate, like the Metropolitan Police, and there’ll be a drink in it for you. Avoid promoting policies which you think might upset the Dirty Digger, however close to your heart, and his media empire will swing in behind your party whether you’re Labour under Blair or Tory under Cameron.
The revelation, though, is the extent to which Murdoch has infiltrated his agents into rival news organisations. Because it’s no more in the Mail’s interests for Murdoch, posing as a champion of women’s rights, to divert attention away from the threat posed by his taking complete control of BSkyB than it was in the Telegraph’s to have Vince Cable neutered. To be replaced by a man whose take on Sky’s boss - ‘We … wouldn’t be saying that British TV is the envy of the world if it hadn’t been for him’ - is so patently absurd that I’m surprised the Tea Party haven’t offered him honorary membership. If Walter Shandy was right about their names determining people’s character one can only conclude that Naughtie and Marr succeeded in finding the name Hunt had ‘Before the World Was Made’.

The Truman Show revisited

OMG - as the tweeters, texters, Facebook ‘friends’ and other semi-literate creatures lurking in the world-wide web's undergrowth would say- an article by Simon Jenkins in today’s Guardian has rudely awoken me from the complacent dream-world I’ve been inhabiting for the past 67 years. The Truman Show isn’t located in Dubai as I thought last November; it’s here and I’m part of it.
Last year I naively described the plot of Larsonn’s The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest as a gothick version of New Tricks. How wrong. Jenkins revealed that the UK has its own version of The Section, one far more extensive and frightening than that described by Larsson. The Association of Chief Police Officers is no longer a benign trade union for Chief Constables: that sanctimonious blaggard Blair turned it into a private company which, in Jenkins’s words runs ‘a murky organisation called the National Public Order Intelligence Unit (NPOIU)’.
So the inhabitants of the UK are all unknowing participants in The Truman Show. Occasionally they’re shown glimpses of the real world in Spooks, which the poor deluded creatures are deceived into thinking is a television drama. On the contrary, it’s the reality; they’re the ones on the telly.

Winged Chariot's Brakes Fail

Never mind single men with money looking for wives, a more important truth, likewise universally acknowledged, is the fact that the older we get the faster time flies. Most people first notice this in their twenties or early thirties. I’ve yet to meet anyone in his forties who hasn’t.
Although nobody who’s made the acquaintance of Swift’s Struldbrugs would want to live for ever, most of us elderly folk rather wish Shakespeare had put his brief candle in a holder bought from Ikea’s shop in Dubai (see photo above). We all seem to have different theories to explain time’s acceleration. My own is that as we grow older each measure of time - week, month, year etc - represents an increasingly smaller percentage of our lives. And our life is our yardstick. When you’re five you have to wait a fifth of your life for Christmas to come round again. These days, though, as a proportion of your life relative to that infant self, it pops up again in less than a month!
And this year, thanks to the Christian calendar, things seemed to be accelerating faster than Jeremy Clarkson having an orgasm in a Ferrari. Christmas Day was on a Saturday, but to all intents and purposes it was a Sunday: all the shops closed and compulsory mass for papists like me. To be followed immediately by the actual Sunday itself. It felt that a whole week had gone by so fast that I hadn’t noticed it. Yesterday we had New Year’s Day, again a Holiday of Obligation and all the shops shut. And today it’s bloody Sunday again. Stop, please brake before I break.

The Pantomime Season

Unlike the English, the Italians don’t put on pantomimes at Christmas. With Berlusconi providing an endless supply of corny gags, why would they? This year’s annual pantomime in Ambridge is proving unusually absorbing. The BBC itself has announced that Sunday’s episode will “change the Archers for ever” and everything seems to point to some catastrophic event at the Village Hall which will decimate the cast. Something along the lines of Tony Hancock’s The Bowmans.
This morning Radio 4’s Today programme introduced its own edgy pantomime which inspired me to offer the following item to the spoof web-site News Thump (formerly known as Newsarse).

“Instead of a man dressed as a woman, this morning's featured Pantomime Dame was a Dutchwoman born in Canada pretending to be British. ‘Dame’ Clara Furse wowed the audience with her insights into British culture and ‘foods’. Radio 4 listener Signor Grandicoglioni - ‘Hey you canna call me Don’ - here on a business trip from Sicily said, ‘Wadda fica. She no Breeteesh. Me, yes. Porca madonna, we Italians rulla your poxy little island for 400 years until those bloody English eemmigrants arrive and take alla da good jobs.’”

Don’t get me wrong, like Defoe I not only recognise that we’re a mongrel race but rejoice in the fact. When I read Hugo Rifkind’s article in today’s Spectator, ‘Nothing makes me feel as Scottish as an English New Year’s Eve’ I didn’t sneer and think ‘You’re not Scottish, you’re an Eastern European Jew’. Like his father, the former Scottish Secretary, Rifkind was born in this country which in my book makes him as British as any of the successive waves of immigrants - Anglo-Saxons, Danes, Normans - who’ve colonised or - Romans, Scandinavians, French, Dutch and Germans - ruled this island. Dame Clara, though, is a different kettle of fish. Being naturalised, she’s technically British, but only someone with the complacent arrogance and lack of self-irony which this former head of the Stock Exchange displayed today would pick Britishness as a theme when invited to guest-edit Today. Like the banker she is, she thinks everything’s for sale in the globalised world she extolled in the programme. ‘Hey, I fancied being British, so I bought it!’ She’s no more British, than living in Italy for another twenty years and getting naturalised would turned me into Signor Grandicoglioni.