Louis Theroux has been away and now he's back, and oh, look, he's still as charming as ever, and gently teasing his subjects into opening up. His new show is as downbeat as ever, hardly revelatory, but it's message is clear - people like gambling a lot, but they always lose. The government, meanwhile, thinks casinos are the answer to their economic problems. Sigh.
Lipstick Jihad: A Memoir of Growing Up Iranian in America and American in Iran by Azadeh Moaveni is a lively biography from someone of an unusually tender age for this type of thing. But Moaveni is a wise 24 and her story is a colourful one - so it's well worth a read.
Compiled from the reality TV show episodes, The Armstrongs: The Movie is obviously very funny, but I didn't expect to find it as sad as I did. Perhaps because I was feeling ill when I watched it, I remember it as very queasy viewing. Wikipedia has collected up some marvellous quotes from it, though.
"We could get rid of Sally and make the others think 'shit'. It’ll be like taking dynamite to a naked flame festival."
"Fame is a funny old business. It can open doors for you. Me and Ann went for a meal recently and Ann got extra mash and I got an egg. I thought 'I like this'."
"We're trying to make paper airplanes out of concrete."
"You're really smart, you're like the man from Burtons. I'm like the man from ... not Burtons."
"What was was, and now what is is, and is tomorrow a new day? Yes it is."
Never mind high culture, I got stuck on a long train journey yesterday and I'd finished my book - so I downloaded The Sims 2 onto my mobile phone. I've never played the proper game, and obviously this was just a very simplistic java game for phones, but it was great fun for about an hour. Mildly addictive for another half hour after that. And boring after that. But better than reading 'The Metro' or something.
Ranting from Pinter aside ("boom, boom, boom boom... boom boom boom") Lebanon, Lebanon is a lovely collection, although it suffers from a little raw sentiments towards Israel in places.
Very impressed with the new BBC3 documentary series Sweet Sixteen so far. Tonight's was brilliant and yet rather sad - a documentary about a sixteen year old Turkish boy in London who was very clever but going off the rails; it showed his school and his sisters trying to steer him through his GCSEs, but having to combat the fact that he was absolutely obsessed with - not girls or gangs or drugs - with being famous.
He said he already thought of himself as a celebrity, and was bunking school to attend X-Factor auditions, appointments with modelling agencies. It quickly became apparent that he was neither talented nor anything approaching good looking enough to be a model. Neither of his parents engaged with him and spent most of their time in Turkey. Eventually he tracked his dad down (he thought he was working in a shop in Archway but it turned out he was in Istanbul) and convinced him to pay for him to have a (completely unnecessary) nose job.
He missed three weeks of school as a consequence and nearly missed his exams (although luckily he was intuitively bright enough to pass them in the end); then went back to all the agencies and drama schools that rejected him, confident that they'd say yes this time. Of course, none of them did. Awful.
Another really sad thing was that he was so obsessed with his career and used it as an excuse to keep saying "my mum and dad want me to get married but I've so much to do first that I'm not marrying 'til I'm 40". Couldn't help wondering if so much of his attraction to the world of drama was influenced by the fact that he seemed quite obviously to be gay, but of course in his traditional family couldn't probably even consider facing up to it.
It ended with one of those painful, defensive rants we're becoming so familiar with: "I will be famous, and everyone will be sorry - I'm totally unique, there's no-one like me, my name should be the first and last thing everyone says every day" etc... agh.
Six Feet Under is an odd one; I've been watching it a lot, as More4 is showing one a night, and my initial apathy has progressed through wild enthusiasm to furrow-browed ennui. Perhaps its the effect of watching an episode a night, but it's a show which seems to age rapidly.
Pamela Hansford Johnson is one of my very favourite authors, but I've picked up 'The Holiday Friend' on several occasions without it sticking. I don't suppose it will now either, as I picked it up this morning as a diversion from weightier stuff. Still, PHJ is a wonderful writer.
The last film by the makers of last night's 'The Trial of Tony Blair' was last year's Blunkett satire, 'A Very Social Secretary', and given that that piece was a bit of a disappointment - a kind of blunt, heavy Adrian Mole - I wasn't expecting too much of the new film, although that instinct was tempered somewhat by the knowledge that by far the best aspect of that film was Robert Lindsay's unexpectedly brilliant portrayal of the Prime Minister. Last night Lindsay took on the lead role and the film was, rather surprisingly, rather brilliant.
Obviously any film that features Tony Blair being extradited to the Hague on charges of war crimes is pretty close to the ultimate left-wing fantasy, but the film was not merely a document of wish-fulfillment, but also a tightly scripted and brilliantly performed drama, which eschewed - a couple of predictable jokes at Cherie Booth aside - heavy satire in favour of a light comedic touch which saw Lindsay's Blair comically refusing to acknowledge his sins. Set in 2010, with a stubborn Blair finally handing over to a vindictive Brown (whose involvement in the plot admittedly stretches the boundaries of plausibility) and converting to Catholicism, the film's really about the denial of responsibility, although Lindsay, no fan of Blair, gives a sympathetic account of the PM's faults. The answer the film really wants to know, of course, is one we may never find out - whether Blair is haunted by guilt and by the images of the countless dead. In 'The Trial Of Tony Blair', he is. In real life, who knows?
I watched the first episode of Life On Mars again tonight - it's being repeated on BBC4. God, what a brilliant programme; well scripted and beautifully acted, but the real feat is the idea - we've got used to the idea of concept drama recently, but this is the first time that ... oh fuck it, alright, tonight I derived the most pleasure from watching Eddie Murphy in Coming to America on ITV2. There, I said it.
A slow day, and one during which I chose to do nothing much more than sit through four hours of period drama - the BBC's recent version of Jane Eyre, which was predictably wonderful; a tremendous, tremelous Jane and a Rochester whose every emotion is violently visible - cracking stuff.
More lovely writing from Laura Barton in the Guardian today:
"By the age of 16, I knew it took precisely four seconds to hop from my bed to the tape player. I knew just how long it took to rewind the Pixies' Hey. And I would make this little journey, back and forth, back and forth, the way a sparrow collects twigs, as if I were building a nest up there on my eiderdown".
Brilliant as ever.
The Odessa Files
You can't beat Nazis as bad guys in films. The Odessa Files is something I half-watched and enjoyed a year or two ago, so it was good to watch it again properly - its the kind of long, taut thriller that seems to be a speciality of 1970s cinema - it sags a little towards the end but it's still thoroughly enjoyable sick bed viewing, which is what I did with my day today.
The BBC finally got round to showing the The Good, The Bad and The Queen concert which myself, Andrew, Anne-Sophie and Jeanne attended in the autumn, and it was nice to watch it back and marvel over what a lovely new set of songs Damon has written (delicate folky hymns to london with maurauding dub basslines, ace) as well as try to ignore the fact that he had a hissy fit half-way through. Still, what a brilliant band - excited about the album in a couple of weeks.
The Klaxons - Golden Skans
Really enjoying this one, having been unconvinced by their previous singles; kind of a big, swooshing, soaring Spacemen 3 / Baby D car crash (scripted by JG Ballard) type thing. Yes, it is as pretentious as that. Ace tune though.
The Thick of It is unrivalled - the best and most accurate political programme on TV in living memory.
I loved the exchange between the beleaguered and rather old fashioned one nation tory and his savile-row suited spin doctor:
Stewart Pearson: Just wondering whether you're fully conversant with the new line, whether you're really up to speed?
Peter Manion: I don't know. Am I? Because I get people stopping me in the street and asking "are you still for locking up yobbos", and I say, "yeah, of course we are", and then I think, 'or are we?', because maybe I missed a memo from you. Maybe I should understand yobbos now. Or not even call them yobbos. Call them 'young men with issues around stabbing'.
(pause while PM gestures towards his shirt)
PM: No tie, you say?
SP: No tie.
PM: Quite a nice suit actually.
SP: So we were thinking... shirt outside the trousers.
PM: Outside? Not tuck my shirt in? I always tuck my shirt in. It's part of getting dressed.
Genius.
This Life +10 was a funny programme, in the end - not a very good idea in the first place, for one thing; these one-off reunion shows, in my experience, rarely work. If you are seeking to advance storylines and tie up ten year old threads, particularly on a show where a lot happened, then attempting to do so in a little over an hour is a thankless task. If Amy Jenkins and the five actors at the centre of her show were serious about providing a resolution to the two hugely successful This Life series in the mid 1990s, they should have done more than one show, and in doing so could - just as they did initially - illustrate their conflicting actions and emotions in something approaching detail. Instead, last night's show had the feel of a heavily edited omnibus, or - at worst - a thinly sketched out and poorly scripted attempt at a Poliokoff drama.
For all that, Jenkins created a set of enduring characters (although why one of the best, Ferdy, was excluded wasn't really clear) and there were moments in the show - the interplay between Egg and Miles, Anna's rant at the dinner table - that conjured up sparks reminiscent of the old magic. Yet the characters, as befitting such a grand finale, have all become ludicrous caricatures. Egg is a super-successful novelist, and Milly a 'supermum'. Warren - presumably by virtue of his being 'the sensitive one' - is a self-help junkie. Anna is a hardnosed lawyer who specialises in getting hardened criminals acquitted and Miles is a kind of tousle-haired playboy, and a member of the landed gentry, to boot. What's more, he and Anna still have the same old fizz and - guess what - this time she's broody.
Strands of believability snake through an absurd plot. Egg has published one well-received novel but he's already having a high-profile documentary made about him, which conveniently (sorry, absurdly) means that all the characters get to do idiotic reality show style 'video diaries'. This is really stupid. And yet Egg's first novel was just a slightly fictionalised version of his flatmate's lives, and he can't write another. Shades of Amy Jenkins' writing career aside, I kind of bought this; Egg tended to be watching more than acting in the first iteration of This Life, and it's from experiences such as his that hit novels are no doubt borne.
And while Miles is still a buffoon, albeit one who has now lost any edge or believability (even, sadly, as a stooge for Anna, who is still well played by Daniella Nardini), his character gives Warren his one believable characteristic. For although Warren, one short scene in a cafe with Milly aside, is almost unrecognisable, it's through Miles that we occasionally glimpse him. Jenkins gives us just one direct example of his mental distress, but it's a shrewd one, for he is still tortured by the fact that, despite the closeness of the housemates in the orginal show, Miles never welcomed him into the group. Again, believable. Andrew Lincoln, meanwhile, through Egg, provides the occasional nostalgic lightness of touch - his brief asides, usually expressing frustration or bewilderment, are a regular treat.
Elsewhere, however, so much is wrong. It's natural given the power of Anna's character, that Jenkins should wish to return to the issue of career women and whether it's possible to have it all, but why she has to then crowd Anna and Milly into such opposing stereotypes is quite unclear. Equally, in the intervening years - not least thanks to 'The Office' - a decent scriptwriter should have learned a lot about the confusions of love and the premise of the happy ending. But there's nothing endearing about Anna or Miles' scenes together, and that's a travesty after the emotional power of their relationship ten years ago. When Miles, loopily, goes bankrupt and leaves for Timbuktu at the end of the show (I know), there's no chance of a dramatic or emotional ending, and nor does the viewer desire one. Instead, the show ends with Miles shouting 'Love you all' at his friends. Amazing and hilarious, and not in a good way. As for Anna's desperation for a baby, it's all just carried out in such a clumsy fashion - although it does prompt the worst line of the show (and there are a few zingers): "I've chosen Warren as the co-parent".
The little tics, meanwhile, are as annoying as the absurdities of the plot. In one scene Egg and Milly's son swallows a coin. They're frantic with worry. Seconds later he's forgotten and doesn't appear for the remaining twenty minutes. What happened? Did he die? Elsewhere, Egg and Miles embark on a furious argument when the former discovers the latter voted Tory at the last election. Am I the only one who just assumed that all of the characters in the initial This Life were natural tories? OK, maybe not Egg, and Anna might have escaped that burden by virtue of being a Scot, but Jenkins, looking for significance in her original series, is exaggerating things if she felt it presaged and heralded the arrival of New Labour. It was about a bunch of rich lawyers, for god's sake.
And then a few moments which crack and fizzle, a few scenes which remind us why This Life was such a great show. And then you ask, "was it such a great show?". Probably not, but it was loud and brash and rude and funny and, at the time, pretty unique. Amy Jenkins manages to stir up moments of nostalgia, but ultimately adds little to the pot. Never mind - it was nice, despite the flaws, to have it back for the evening. I don't suppose in ten years time there'll be any clamour for a This Life +20, however.
I live alone.
I think I might have found love,
But I just don't know.
There's something wrong".
I'm a big fan of Mariella Frostrup and her no-nonsense relationship advice column in the Observer, so the first time I heard this song that's the bit that jumped out. That's pretty neat, I thought, a love song in the shape of a letter to an agony aunt.
The next few lines somehow somehow slipped by unnoticed for a while, but then I noticed them:
"Cause he has another love,
and she's been buried a year.
And there might be a passing resemblence,
but dear Mariella, how can I compare with the girl, with the girl, with the girl, with the girl
who was too beautiful?"
And all of a sudden the song is in a much darker place altogether. The protagonist, expertly voiced by the marvellous Bec Newman, is preocuppied with her partner's dead lover, and begins, despite the warnings of those close to her, to assume her predecessor's persona.
"And all my friends say that it's not right,
but I don't care, I'm gonna change my hair.
Cause he wants her.
And I just want somebody there."
The next verse raises the drama. The bit where Newman sings "Dear Mariellia / It's gone from bad to worse / It feels like I'm chasing a hearse / And now I'm even wearing her clothes / I feel like a ghost" is plain shocking. Worse still is to come.
"And just the other day, staring from across the street,
I think I might have seen her mother, but dear Mariella,
She didn't see me. Just a girl.
Just a girl, just a girl, just a girl who was too beautiful".
By the song's end, the by now wretched sounding Newman is almost totally subsumed, asking and threatening "would you wanna let go, like I wanna let go, and I need to let go?" and concluding, finally, "I am the girl who was too beautiful". It's a deliciously Hitchcockian theme, simultaneously dark, knowing and sexy, and brilliantly performed. The tune itself positively sizzles, bursting with tremendous melodies, keyboard riffs and it even briefly swoops into an indie-disco breakdown without breaking its stride.
Odd how so much press time has been expended on the (admittedly great) Long Blondes while the Hot Puppies are bubbling under - it was great to see Kate Jackson up near the top of the NME's supremely daft Cool List this year, but surely Bec Newman deserved a place too. Hopefully they'll be massive in 2007 - they deserve to be. Doubtless half of the blogs in my sidebar and starting to put together their yearly round-up lists, and I probably will soon too. And this is a serious contender for best single of the year.
Don't get me wrong, I love Michael Palin's travel programmes - they do a superb job of chronicling distant lands in amazing insightful detail. But where, if you sent Michael Palin to Mexico and asked him to research the Aztecs, he would talk of feathered serpents and folk mythology with a very BBC sense of ironic detachment, it's a great pleasure to watch DBC Pierre deliver the same lines, the same portents of dread, dead straight to camera with reverent seriousness. Palin may return from the Himalayas enthused, but he doesn't come back possessed. Actually, Pierre looks possessed at the beginning of his journey, never mind the end, if only by Mexican firewater, but it makes his 'The Last Aztec', a channel 4 film which I caught repeated on More4 tonight, brilliantly enjoyable.
A lot of TV history seems intent on proving which civilisation was the best or the strongest or most civilised - Egypt or Greece, Roman or Aztec. Certainly any sense of journalistic impartiality is absent in Pierre's film - he points out that "while we as a culture were chucking shit out of windows into alleys in London, these people had drainage, they had courts, they were living off spring water and vegetables. While we were dying of the plague and scraping around in the grime, these folk were wandering like gods". He reveres the glorious and magical history of the Aztecs.
Again, unlike Palin or his fellow TV journalist contemporaries, Pierre refuses to conform to type. For a start it's quickly clear, through a combination of his appearance and his driving, that our host is absolutely trashed. In truth, despite the historical content, the film is really a gonzo road movie in which Pierre's passion takes centre stage as recalls his childhood in Mexico city, the stories that fuel his imagination, and explores his thesis that the heart of Aztec Mexico is still throbbing hard under the surface of the capital city.
And indeed it is, literally - wherever tears appear in the world's largest city, he shows us, the ruins of the Aztec empire are exposed, and we watch archaologists uncovering sacred grounds, the bodies of Aztec children and shards of Aztec stone. This most spectacular civilisation, Pierre reminds us, was carved by a stone age society. Indeed, without not only steel, but also without wheels. He finds the place, locked away behind an iron gate, where Cortes, the Spanish usurper, met Moctezuma first - he was welcomed not as an invader but as a God. Once more, Palin might film the spot through the gate. Not DBC Pierre - he just bribes a policeman and gets in that way.
So, allowed in as Gods, the Spanish took the Aztec Empire, and Moctezuma was stoned by his own people for letting them down. Pierre is intent on mourning the collapse of the civilisation which inspires him so. "There's only one way to get over the decline and collapse of an empire", he tells us sourly, sitting in a seedy bar. "And that's to get completely lashed ". He throws back a tequila, shaking his head, looking around. "I can't say it feels any better". So he has another.
Incensed, he decides to take the Palace back for the Aztecs. He is approached by a local, outside. "Do I want an official tour?", he says disdainfully, preparing to storm the place, "what the fuck is that?". He banters with the guard on the gate, but gets no further. By now, anyway, his misanthropy knows no bounds, so what does he do? He drinks lots more, he reminisces about a dead girlfriend and the centrality of death in the Mexican character, and goes out at night looking for fresh corpses. When he finds some, he takes photos. By now I am thinking this is surely one of the oddest bits of TV I've ever come across. Back in the daylight, pissed, he wanders into a church, lights up, and starts rambling about Dracula.
Mexico, he tells us, has dreamt up a unique cocktail of death-fascination, where the pre-Spanish culture of death worship has combined with the Christian concept of mortality. He asks a priest about it, making sure he mentions Christians ripping the hearts from still-living children in the process. Yet Aztec magic still holds sway, and as Pierre decides he wants to climb a mountain to find the resting place of Moctezuma, he realises that he had better have his soul cleansed first. He buys some dried hummingbirds, for starters. It will ward off curses, apparently.
The Sierra Madras mountains are his destination, a magical realm, and he starts his climb, intent on finding spirits, "secrets from the past", living remnants of the Aztec world, and gold. Most people, as he climbs, are too frightened to talk of the spirits. Pierre has been here before, actually, and he seems scared too - after all, he points out, "the last time I left this valley, many years ago, my life went hurtling into a downward spiral from which I've only just recovered". He keeps climbing anyway.
But, just in case, he sacrifices a couple of chickens first. By the time's that done, he's "as clean as a whistle", he says, "a poet". And he needs to be cleansed. "There are many things that happen to you, physically and emotionally", he says, "which leave a smudge". The bit where the first chicken is beheaded - with kitchen scissors - is horrifying. And after all that, standing in the swirling mist, Pierre is still too scared to climb the mountain. So he gets absolutely slaughtered again, then turns back: the gonzo journo who turns back! Give him another beer and he'll do it, I was shouting.
For all that, an exhilarating programme.
Hidden, a marvellous French film about a couple, Juliette Binoche and Daniel Auteuil, who are tormented by an unknown stalker and a lost memory; the hidden past represents France's repressed memory of its colonial past - yet this is at its centre a heart-stopping and exciting thriller, and one of the best films I've seen in a long time.
Fahrenheit 9/11. The first time I saw this film I loved it, especially the first half, which really nailed Bush's ineptitude and crass manipulation of his position. The second half, though impressive, made me a bit uneasy. Funny that now I feel the other way; the first half suffers from Moore's narrative overtaking events, and the second - with all it's milking of human sadness - feels much more real and complete; by now we know the facts, and it's the human story that resonates.
Today I watched the incredibly entertaining and engaging The Leader, his Driver and the Driver's Wife, a documentary by Nick Broomfield which examines the deeply racist yet declining in influence AWB party which, led by the rather frightening Eugene Terreblanche, opposed the end of apartheid most vociferously in South Africa at the tail end of the 1980s and early 90s.
The pioneer of the faux-naive documentary style since adopted by Theroux, Ronson and, well, nearly everybody, Broomfield's work is both playful and serious, opting not to give Terreblanche the respect and deference afforded to him by the mainstream media, but rather to antagonise him, keep him waiting and treat him as what he is really is - a tin pot would-be dictator leading a bunch of thugs, rather than the leader of a serious political movement.
Instead of feigning sympathy and trying to be helpful in order to get the access he needs, as, say, Jon Ronson does in his excellent film about Omar Bakri Muhammad, Broomfield never once allows his guard to drop. Early on there is a wonderful scene where Terreblanche's driver (who provides much of the focus of the film) interrogates Broomfield on his racial stance. The camera, panning to Broomfield, as it does so often, shows him resolute and unwavering, unwilling to play along with his subject. Many of the film-makers who use Broomfield's template would undoubtedly make non-commital noises, change the subject, turn the conversation around. Broomfield stands his ground. Around the same time, one of his cameramen is beaten by AWB thugs. Broomfield and his team keep filming of course.
When, at last, after a convoluted game of cat and mouse, Broomfield meets Terreblanche, he deliberately sabotages the interview by arriving late and infuriating his subject so much that they are unable to hold a civil interview. "What man is more impotant than me?", Terreblanche rages, "This must be quite a man". "We stopped or a cup of tea", Broomfield blithely replies. If you look closely, you can see the Afrikaans' great leader becoming visibly smaller in front of him.
When he returned, at last, to the UK, Broomfield received death-threats from AWB sympathisers, and was told never to return to South Africa. One guess where he is right now, and what's he's doing?
Filming a follow up.
I know there's a lot of fuss about More4 at the moment, but has anyone kept up with the far less trumpeted 4Docs project? I was under the impression it existed as a commissioning tool for amateur film-makers, but the website appears to have important archived documentary films which are free to view! Can this be right? I haven't tried it yet, but the 4Docs page for Broomfield's film has a tantalising 'PLAY' button that is crying out for pressing. OK then - more to follow if this turns out to work.
It's John Peel day on Radio 1. Despite how much I loved his shows, and how much I respected him, I didn't get caught up in the idea of today, and even thought I probably wouldn't bother listening in. I'm glad I did. I tuned in at 7pm and since then I've heard Status Quo, some frenzied happy hardcore, The Specials and The Smiths in session, a blinding live take on Blindness by The Fall, and am currently listening to some live stuff which New Order recorded for the BBC yesterday - all Joy Division songs. Transmission and Atmosphere were just spellbinding, Barney shouting "Move back, move back" between verses, so it's clearly getting pretty hectic. After Atmosphere he said "We don't want anyone getting hurt. Least of all me". Hooky, who wouldn't be in trouble if caught in a scrum, cut him short. "Let's do this one for Ian, lads". Gulp.
They're playing yodelling now. Five more hours to go. Fantastic.
