How Hard Can It Be? Page 10

  My banker can’t help. He, like everyone, is caught up in a whirlwind of uncertainty. I asked him a million questions and he hasn’t been able to answer one. Advice? There’d been plenty in the good times – but now? I might as well have asked my dog for guidance.

  It’s the same story with the newspapers and the government. There is much finger-pointing. Blame is flying every-where. It’s the bankers. It’s the Mexicans. It’s capitalism. It’s the price of oil. It’s the Chinese. And, on the BBC of course, it’s global warming. This is all very natural. But it doesn’t really help.

  And so it’s up to me to come up with what I hope, for once, is a spot of sensible advice for those who are in the same boat.

  Because there is no safe haven for your money, you need to give it to someone else. That way, it becomes their problem. So, why not pay your income tax early? And call your kids’ school to see if you can settle all forthcoming fees in advance. Need a new car? Why not buy one now?

  Certainly I’ve decided not to send out any invoices right now. I simply wouldn’t know where to put the cash. And so with that in mind, if you are the accountant at the Sunday Times and you are reading this, the payment I would like for this week’s column is four lamb chops.

  Sunday 28 September 2008

  Fingers on buzzers, you bunch of ignorant twerps

  Current plans to cut ITV’s obligations as a public-service broadcaster would mean it’d have no need to fill the cracks in its open-the-box, come-on-down schedules every night with regional news programmes.

  That would be excellent. I loathe regional news programmes. They’re always full of fat women wearing ‘Save our school’ T-shirts that they’ve hurriedly pulled on over their normal clothes for the cameras, and pointless vox pops, and puffed-up councillors and green issues and plans for incinerators and recycled press releases, delivered with a solemn voice by a woman in an ethnic headscarf, in a bid to give them credence and weight.

  However, while the demise of Grantham Today is a cause for celebration, I do believe this is yet another rivet removed from the aeroplane wings of civilization, and soon you’ll turn on Newsnight to find Jeremy Paxman in clown shoes urging parties from either side of the political divide to settle their differences in a bout of mud wrestling.

  Sadly I believe that television mirrors society. It was in black and white because we were. It made fun of West Indians when we did. It featured Terry Scott because we told lame jokes as well, and when we went to the pub, we didn’t like all that ‘foreign muck’ on the menu either.

  This is the problem with what’s happening today. Because anyone with half a brain and speech genes that function properly is derided as a hoity-toity snob, all of television is aimed at the Heat-reading halfwits who literally don’t know anything. We celebrate our ignorance of the Large Hadron Collider, we make sneery noises when someone from Fulham appears on a game show, and as a result, when we tune in to BBC1 on a Saturday night, Vanessa Feltz is being pushed into a swimming pool because she can’t lie on the floor with her legs wide apart.

  At the moment, television companies imagine that they must cater to the bovine masses or else their viewing figures and advertising revenue will dwindle to nothing. They know that when Jade Goody gets cancer the nation mourns and when Stephen Hawking speaks everyone laughs. So they fear that if they do not make shows for pig-ignorant northern lard buckets the nation will switch off the set and do something else with its time instead.

  But what? The internet? Oh come on. This is a horrible place full of lies, hate, pornography and a billion apostrophes all in the wrong place. What’s more, eventually it will cause you to end up in bed with someone inappropriate, or you will upset a German who will come round to your house and stab you in the heart. Or maybe the television execs imagine that we will all say, ‘Well, Vanessa Feltz isn’t falling into a swimming pool tonight so I shall read a book instead.’ Really? Can you imagine Jade Goody saying that? Or Shannon Matthews’s mum? Or anyone you saw in town today? Basket weaving, then? Or brass rubbing? Or maybe they think we’ll all spend our evenings embroidering kneelers for the local parish church. Maybe in Simon Heffer’s village. But not mine. Or yours. Or anywhere real.

  Television companies need to be brave. They need to accept that, because there’s nothing else to do of an evening, especially when money’s tight, they may as well broadcast shows that enlighten us a bit. Unfortunately this is not going to happen, because shows are like nuclear weapons. Once one broadcaster is transmitting a Day-Glo bucket of primordial sludge to suit the average ignoramus, all the others have to follow suit. There can be no unilateral disarmament. They all have to agree to ditch Vanessa. Or it won’t happen.

  And so with that in mind I have come up with a proposal for Ofcom, the broadcasting regulator. Instead of removing the chocks of decency from the wheels of human degeneration you must stop thinking of TV as a mirror and insist it becomes a beacon.

  Quiz shows should be designed to reward the bright and humiliate the stupid. Chris Tarrant must be banned from commiserating with the contestant who doesn’t know anything and encouraged instead to look incredulous. There must be debates on Ibsen in every episode of Coronation Street, and Stephen Fry will be made to appear on everything. There will be peak-time Greek from Boris Johnson. QVC will be forced to drop the trinketry and sell fine English shotguns. And I want a show featuring Eton boys who go to a different northern city each week to laugh at the people who live there.

  Ofcom must be made to remove the pink, the saccharine, the goofy, the idiotic, the cheap and the nasty and replace them all with Paxman. There will be no more traffic cops pretending that what they do is interesting and a lot more Kevin McCloud.

  For guidance, I direct all of you to Harry and Paul, the latest BBC1 series featuring Harry Enfield and Paul Whitehouse. Here we find a couple of performers who presume the audience have a modicum of knowledge and a scintilla of intelligence. If you don’t know what The Duchess of Malfi is or how the Sicilian Defence can be used, you won’t get it. It is not aimed at Jade Goody. It’s not even aimed in her general direction. It is, however, even though they’ve been jolly mean to me, the best television comedy I’ve seen since Monty Python. I’d like to think it’s more than an island for the bright in a sea of purple and blue snot. I’d like to think it’s a launch pad to fire a thousand rapier-sharp Oxbridge wits from the Footlights and into the comedians who strut about on TV these days imagining that they’ll get a laugh if they climb on to Vanessa Feltz and make her eat a centipede.

  Sunday 5 October 2008

  Play it my way, kids, and you’ll save rock’n’roll

  Any slim hope we might have had of a Pink Floyd reunion tour was dashed recently by the death of the keyboard player, Rick Wright. Oh, sure, the remaining members could still settle their differences, find another keyboard player and get back on the road but, and here’s the thing, would I go? Would I be watching Pink Floyd? Or nothing more than a facsimile of the outfit that provided a soundtrack to my life thus far?

  We see much the same thing today with Queen. Or ‘the Queen’, as my dad liked to call them. They’re out there now, strumming and banging their way through all the old favourites. They even have Paul Rodgers on vocals – and Paul, in my opinion, is the greatest rock singer of them all. But is it Queen without Freddie Mercury?

  As you may know, I am a very big Who enthusiast. I saw them first in 1975 at the Bingley Hall in Stafford, and it was the start of something wonderful. But then Keith Moon shot into the next life through a puddle of vomit, and every time I’ve seen them since – it’s thirteen and counting – I’ve always felt that, despite the best efforts of Kenney Jones and Zak Starkey, I’m not really seeing the band that gave us Who’s Next. And now, with Entwistle gone, the problem will be even bigger.

  Over the years, we have seen many bands hit by the untimely death of a member. The Pretenders were particularly unlucky. They’d been going only four years when James Honeyman-Scott died after a drug
overdose. Then, less than a year later, the original bassist was dead as well. Meanwhile, being in the New York Dolls was more dangerous than taking part in the all-comers’-East-African-sex-without-a-condom competition. Recent plans for a second comeback tour were almost aborted when one of only three remaining members decided to up sticks and drop dead. Today, I’m told, Thin Lizzy continue to tour. Great. Until I tell you the band is actually made up of one bloke who played rhythm guitar on ‘Whiskey in the Jar’ and ‘some other blokes’. That’s not really Thin Lizzy, is it? And it’s the same story, apparently, with the Four Tops, who really ought to be called A Top and Some Interlopers.

  But we’d better get used to this sort of thing. At the moment, the Daily Telegraph’s obituary pages are full of Second World War heroes who charged into enemy lines armed with nothing but a pearl-handled butter knife. Soon, those guys will all be gone and, instead, we’ll be reading about brave Joe Walsh, who became so fed up with fellow band members knowing he was about to break into their hotel room with a chainsaw that he bought a silent electric version. This way, they would still be in bed, asleep, when he came through the wall. In other words, the few rock stars who survived the heroin and cocaine will soon succumb to the misery of old age. And then what?

  Trying to replace them is like trying to replace the foot from a beautiful old grandfather clock. Yes, you could have a craftsman knock up a new one, and it would undoubtedly do a splendid job of keeping the timepiece upright. But every time you looked at it, you’d know all was not right with the world. And, anyway, what’s the point, when the clock face, the pendulum and the weights are about to give up the ghost as well? So what’s to be done?

  My wife insists that there is plenty of fresh talent coming along to replace the dinosaurs. She is wrong. The Franz Flighters, Car-sick Steve and the Frascatis are derivative and hopeless and I do not wish to listen to any of the noises they make. I certainly wouldn’t pay even so much as one penny to see the Red Hot Chili Peppers, who, so far as I’m concerned, could not make a worse sound if they spent an hour attacking giant sheets of polystyrene with a flock of electrocuted cats. I hate them. I want to see Genesis and Yes and Pink Floyd. I want to see Stevie Winwood and Eric and Supertramp and Bad Company. But I have the most horrible feeling that I’ve already seen them all for the last time.

  There is, however, a solution. At the moment, tribute bands have a fairly poor reputation. But I’m not sure why. When elderly people go to see Rachmaninov’s Third, no one is ever disappointed to find that it isn’t actually the man himself on the ivories. Indeed, many derive a great deal of pleasure in hearing how other musicians interpret the great man’s work. In fact, when you stop and think about it, the London Symphony Orchestra is a tribute band. It simply turns up and plays music written by someone else.

  So why can’t we encourage this sort of thing among today’s youngsters who wish to forge a career in the world of rock’n’roll? Instead of asking them to write their own material, which will be rubbish, we should ask them to interpret work by the masters: Camel, Gong and so on. At present, tribute bands try to reproduce exactly what their heroes did. Some are astonishingly good. I once saw a Floyd tribute band in Alaska who were semitone-perfect. But why can’t they experiment? Try to improve on the original? As we saw when Gary Jules rejigged the Tears for Fears song ‘Mad World’, a modern twist can be extremely enjoyable and successful.

  We see this with every performance of the Royal Shakespeare Company. We see it with every orchestra. And soon we will see it with rock music too. It’s not the real thing. But it’s the next best thing. And that’ll have to do.

  Sunday 12 October 2008

  Ditch the laptop and suit if you wanna stay alive, Mr Corporate

  It seems likely that in the next few months most businesses in the world will go bankrupt – so, to make sure yours isn’t one of them, I’ve prepared a handy cut-out-’n’-keep guide on how to get ahead in the world of commerce. And stay there.

  First of all, the laptop has to go. At present, the world’s businessmen are physically incapable of sitting down at an airport for a moment without flicking open the computer and pulling a serious face while pretending that the machine is actually doing something. It isn’t. You spend the first five minutes waiting for the damn thing to stop making Brian Eno chiming noises and the next twenty discovering that it won’t connect to either 3G or the Edge, and that you cannot remember the password you chose for the T-Mobile hotspot. Then, by the time your son’s birth date has been e-mailed to an account and you discover you can’t access that either, they have called your flight and it’s time to go.

  So instead of pretending to be an international mover and shaker who cannot be out of touch for a moment, leave the damn thing at home and spend the time either thinking about stuff or reading a good book. Both of these activities will ensure you’re a better, cleverer person, and that’s a good thing because most people would rather do business with a chap who’s read The Power of the Dog by Don Winslow than some nerd who reckons a widescreen iMac PowerTrip makes him look important.

  Next. Your mobile phone. In the past few months I have spent a great deal of time in airports and I’ve noticed corporate types have started to hold the handset with one hand and use the other hand to shield their mouth. This is absurd. In a Robert Ludlum novel there are a great many industrial spies who can lip-read, but in real life nobody can. So pack it in.

  You can go ahead and have a normal conversation because the fact is we are not interested in what you are saying. You might like to think you look like an arms dealer who’s negotiating with Kim Jong-il about the next consignment of nuclear centrifuges, but we know you aren’t because you are called Steve and your clothes are from Burton.

  Which brings me to the next point. Don’t wear suits. It means you have to travel with a suit carrier, and that means you are shallow and stupid – i.e., more concerned about the creases in your trousers than the goods or services that you are trying to sell.

  Oh, and when at leisure on a business trip, do not tuck your polo shirt into your trousers. This will make you look like an American.

  Furthermore, when you are in the business lounge, do not drink orange juice. It is not big and it’s not clever. Have a beer or some wine. In fact, since it’s free, have a lot. Nobody likes a teetotaller. I would certainly not do business with any man or woman who walked into my office and asked for a glass of water. It’s a sign that you are weak in the head.

  And when staying in an international business hotel, do not go to the gym. Last week I was in Saigon, which is a fabulous city rammed with art, culture, bars and many restaurants where you can eat a snake’s beating heart and tip its bile sac into a shot of vodka. And yet my hotel’s gym was crammed with Steves lifting things up and putting them down again. For the love of God, what do you think you are doing? Get out of your shorts and go and see some paintings. You are blessed with a job that lets you travel. So don’t waste your time drinking water, putting your stupid suit in a trouser press and lifting up stuff that’s far too heavy. I know that you think it’s a business thing to do, but it isn’t. Forget your body. Think only about your mind.

  That said, if you do go out, do not try to pick up a girl. Quite apart from the itches that will almost certainly result, you will look like a colossal berk sitting at the bar with a fourteen-year-old Twiglet running her bony little hand through what’s left of your hair and claiming that you are a very handsome man. Don’t be fooled. She will put her hand in your trousers, but only if she can subsequently get her hand in your wallet. Or, better still, your hand in matrimony and consequently a passport to come and live with you, briefly, in Guildford.

  When you finally get to your meeting with the head of IT for i-IntelCorp (Far East division), don’t kowtow. When Johnny Chinaman goes to see an American businessman, he doesn’t wear a 10 gallon hat and ask the secretary to get him a Bud. So why do western businessmen do all that bowing and taking business cards with two hands? Fir
st of all, you’re going to get the depth of your bow wrong, which is worse than not doing it at all. And worse, you’re not being polite. You’re being patronizing. You might as well ruffle the man’s hair, for all the good it will do. So stop it. And don’t sit on the floor. It may work in Japanese culture, but in this respect, Japanese culture is wrong. And don’t play golf either.

  Ever since the 1980s there has been a code of conduct for businessmen, and the result is a decimated stock market and the prospect of many years in the economic doldrums. This is because the people who should have been oiling the wheels of commerce have been in a gym or trying to impress their colleagues by owning an underwater laptop with millions of portals that connect to absolutely nothing at all.

  There is a better way. Wear jeans. Read books. Talk normally on the phone. Make stuff that people want to buy. The end.

  Sunday 19 October 2008

  Take in a prisoner as a lodger and that’s two problems solved

  Disturbing news from the courts last week. A homosexual who killed and ate his lover was sentenced to thirty years behind bars. Which means, after he gets out a week on Tuesday, he’s going to come round to your house, sprinkle you with some herbs and pop you in the oven.

  Plainly, this is unacceptable and something must be done to keep cannibals out of our houses and our schools. But what?