Jodie

From the heart of the Credit Crunch.

A guide to life.

Star Wars and Indiana Jones film star, Harrison Ford, who was born Richard Gibbons, got the inspiration for his screen name from a car dealership in Barnsley, South Yorkshire. The idea came to him during a visit to his Auntie Marjorie's, who lived in the town, in 1967. His first choice, which was later scrapped by Hollywood Executives, had been Slaithwaite Skoda, under which name he appears in a number of episodes of Coronation Street, playing American Hippy art student Jimbo Atkins in the July of that year. Jimbo lodged for a time with Street goodtime girl Elsie Tanner until he was ‘busted’ by the police for growing cannabis in the loft and abstracting Minnie Caldwell's electricity following an anonymous tip off.

I recently had a trip up to the Menwith Hill visitor centre in North Yorkshire. In the gift shop are a series of propaganda posters that didn't make it. This from a recruitment drive for Land Girls in 1942. Left with only women to work the land, The Ministry for Food were trying to staff turnip farms in Lincolnshire and decided to appeal to an under-represented minority:

In December 1976 the Sex Pistols appeared on Bill Grundy’s Today programme. In one short interview broadcast mid-morning and barely lasting two minutes they used the word ‘fuck’ three times, ‘shit’ twice, with ‘bastard’ and ‘sod’ being drawled out once apiece. Contrary to popular myth, and despite the witness testimony of fifty thousand would-be-cognoscenti who claim to have been in the Pebble Mill audience that day, they did not say ‘cunt’ at all. Neither did any member of the seminal punk group employ the epithet ‘cock wrangler’.

It was a watershed moment. Not least for poor old Bill Grundy who, following immediate suspension by Thames Television, found his programme axed less than two months later. His career never recovered. In the shambles Bill managed to get one ‘shit’ out himself, so to speak, on air. This was as the credits rolled and he realized what a fuck up he’d made.

Britain was appalled. The filth and the fury.

Mary Whitehouse began her campaign to ‘Clean up TV’ in 1963, shocked, apparently, by the sight of John Lennon’s fringe on Ready, Steady, Go! Two years later she founded the National Viewers and Listeners Association. Like Churchill banging Drake’s Drum in the dark days of the late 1930s, warning a lethargic nation of the brooding menace posed by Hitler and fascism, Whitehouse’s was a timely intervention in the war against filth. On Saturday 13th November 1965 Kenny Tynan, arts critic, darling of the literary left and sado-masochistic arse spanker, dropped the verbal atom bomb on an unsuspecting nation when he was the first person to utter the word ‘fuck’ on British television. We were stunned. The word would not be heard again in the 1960s. Even come Year Zero and the Bromley Contingent’s appearance with Bill Grundy on that frosty morning late in 1976, Steve Jones – the arch fucker – was only the third person to unleash the vulgar slang word – verb (1) have sexual intercourse with. (2) damage or ruin, noun an act of sexual intercourse, exclamation a strong expression of annoyance or contempt – on the British viewing public.

Between 17th October 2008 and 23rd October 2008 the Sunday Telegraph conducted what it describes as an ‘investigation’ into the use of expletives in programmes broadcast just after the 9PM watershed. In other words somebody counted them. It found that in that seven day period ‘f??? and its derivatives was used 88 times, s??? 26 times and p??? 13 times.’ Eh? Fish derivatives? Like croquettes…? Oh, no, they mean ‘fuck’. Fuck, fucking, fucker, fucked.

It is not surprising that two programmes that featured, for lazy lack of a better word, the ‘worst’ language in the Sunday Telegraph’s round up were Traffic Cops and Jamie Oliver’s Ministry of Food, both of which give the essentially middle-class, Radio Times-reading viewer a glimpse of the booze-swilling, skunk-tonking, Burberry clad underclass. You can almost smell the stale body sweat masked by knock-off Armani Code coming through the phosphors, can’t you, Sandra? Almost, but not quite.

Jamie Oliver’s programme managed to get the ‘f’ word out twenty-three times in one episode. It’s a cookery programme, for fuck’s sake! In response to criticms the programme makers – left-kicking Channel 4 – declared that it has ‘a duty to reflect real lives and people’. Or does it find itself propagating a standard of living as being acceptable? That woman on the TV told her son to fuck off, so I’ll tell mine to fuck off. ‘Ere, Diesel, fuck off!

TV teaches. TV instructs. TV standardizes.

And therein lies the toe to toe fist fight between Mary Whitehouse in the blue corner and Kenneth Tynan in the red.

Like it or lump it, television is an influence on the way we live our lives. Pernicious or otherwise. We do not watch it passively. And under its auspices, to my mind, some of the most subversive and morally corrupting television in Britain can be found in speciously comfortable middle-class sitcoms, populated in a surburban neverneverland by Mum, Dad and their precocious progeny. One thirty minute episode of Robert Lindsay’s My Family is more damaging to the parent/child relationship than the entire back catalogue of Steptoe & Son. It portrays a stereotypical image of the family containing dysfunctional parents attempting to maintain a relationship with their increasingly mercenary children through cash. This concept is repeated in the appalling Nicholas Lyndhurst vehicle After you’ve gone. It’s also the main boot up the arse to the plot in virtually every episode of The Upper Hand that was ever broadcast. And on and on and on. Consequently today in modern Britain the ungracious rapacity of comfortable middle-class kids has become an acceptable norm. This Christmas I’m going to max out my credit card getting the kids the latest PSP5i and that talking, shitting, stuffed chimpanzee ‘Boogie Ben’. Why? Because that’s what happens on TV. So to be a good parent means that you have to buy your children’s love, respect and affection regardless of how you actually behave and interact with them? The more you spend, the better the parent you are…? To paraphrase Steve Jones: You stupid fucker!

And has any other programme done more to erode marital values than Terry & June? Hen-pecked husband who is treated in a dismissive, patronisingly indulgent way by his wife, who in turn is wrote off by her husband as being technically inept and easy to shut up by slipping her a box of Milk Tray and some man pipe at the end of every episode? How many people now play out that particular dynamic in the their own relationship to some degree or another?

The effect of TV's depiction of violence, sex, bad language or whatever on behaviour is not immediate. But it is invidious. The question is would we have television reflect life as it is or life as we would like it to be? And who are ‘we’? Deep thoucus, man. What moral code is acceptable? The line for me is when it becomes gratuitous. There for the sake of it. To shock. Or to convert me to some other fucker's view of life by breaking down my own ideals. But the line is subjective. Contextual. That said, I don’t want to watch some Mockney chef chuntering: ‘Get some fucking greens in the pan, you daft cunt!’ at half past nine of a Tuesday evening. What the fuck would Fanny Craddock think?

Sir Richard Branson has abandoned his attempt to cross the Atlantic in a single-hulled vessel. The bearded multi-millionaire was aiming to break yet another record.

Branson’s record attempts added a bit of colour to the generally bleak news of the 1980s. Jan Leeming getting worked up as she told of the dangers from towering waves and rescues from shark infested waters off the Azores. Sandy Gall forever in a Safari suit, a bottle of Black Label under the news desk, slurring over his words to describe Branson’s balloon capacity. In 1986 Branson snatched the coveted Blue Riband (yep, I thought it was a biscuit – or is it a bar? – as well) by making the fastest crossing of the Atlantic in a boat. A year later, the Pet Shop Boys ‘West End Girls’ sound-tracking the venture, he crossed the Atlantic again, this time in a hot air balloon. No one had ever done that before.

These are feckless adventures that hark back to another age. When men with huge lamb chop sideburns would head off in search of somewhere to make it more real by being the first Caucasians to light up a cigarette there. Stood to attention next to a fluttering Union Jack, singing 'God save the Queen' to make the discovery official and legally binding. Often they only found themselves lending their names to new and deadly tropical diseases. It was the industrial age of discovery. The days of Empire when Britain had accomplished all her ambitions. Phineas Fogg making a wild bet from a Chesterfield arm chair in some smoky gentlemen’s club to travel around the world whilst hopping, Percy Fawcett trudging off into the jungle to find the lost city of gold. But back then the globe was a mystery. Where did the Nile begin? What was beyond the Atlas mountains? Which is the nearest long stay car park for Bradford’s Media Museum? These days Google Maps have sorted all that.

So why does Branson do these things? He has pots of money, his endeavors in business and the arts have made him famous in themselves and by most people’s calculations his life has been a success. So why? Perhaps Robert Louis Stephenson’s observation hits the mark: ‘to travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive, and the true success is to labour.’ Accomplishment is a void. Triumph a post-orgasmic doldrum. And so Branson lies under his duvet, a model of his latest Pendolino tilting train spooned against his cooling body. And he thinks, ‘But what now?’

My abiding image of Branson is not his spraying champagne over a Boeing 737 as he launches Virgin Atlantic or a publicity shot with Johnny Rotten, Steve and the boys when he signed the Sex Pistols, it is in an over-enlarged photograph blue tac’d proudly in the window of a Curry House in Cowes on the Isle of Wight. It shows the beaming owner of the restaurant, bald head caught in the flash, a huge smile, grasping Branson’s unwitting hand. Branson’s almost out of the door and the handshake looks like a baton handover in the 4 x 400 metres. A bemused and vaguely scared look on Branson’s face as he nervously regards the proprietor. Bloody hell! Look who it is! Sanjay, the camera! The goatee-wearing businessman nearly out of shot. Mr. Patak launches himself, hand outstretched. Death grip applied. Quick, Sanjay! Take it now! It's Rick Wakeman!

Sir Richard Branson ponders his next adventure

It looks like an art installation. 1,600 papier mâché pandas milling about at the foot of Eiffel Tower. Some staring up at the tower, curious. Others with an eye out for a bit of bamboo. Herded in the long Autumn sunshine. It has the uniformity of pop art. Reminiscent of Antony Gormley’s ‘Field’.

It should be art, but it isn’t. Or is it?

It first appears that there are loads of them. Black and white with pot bellies. Until you realize that what you see in one glance represents the entire population of giant pandas living wild in the world. It’s as if the village where I live were it for the human species (a worrying thought). The rest of the earth empty.

The display is a publicity campaign by the French wing of the World Wide Fund For Nature. They set up the pandas with each appearing in Paris in place of a living panda from the wild. It’s impressive. Both aesthetically and as a message. Consequently as art it succeeds for me where ‘My Bed’ by Tracey Emin and avant garde charlatan Damien Hirst’s preserved Tiger Shark failed dismally.

I recently adopted a tiger. Malu Pothi. I’m not sure how far my £3 a month goes towards Malu’s upkeep, but I’ll give it a go. Looking at that dwindling mob in Paris, I think I need to help out a panda as well.

Dear Progressive Safety!

As you are one of the UK’s leading distributors of safety footwear, protective work wear, personal protective equipment and workplace safety products, I felt I needed to get in touch with you following an encounter with one of your employees.

To set the scene for you, I was driving along Rotherham Road, Barnsley on Monday afternoon at 1PM, the new Oasis album on the stereo (not bad in places but not a five star performance) doing a steady 35mph when I came to the point where Rotherham Road is intersected by a Give Way at Cliffe Lane, Monk Bretton.

I was about twenty yards from the junction, travelling towards Cundy Cross, and was aware of a red van moving from my left along Cliffe Lane, approaching the Give Way. ‘He’ll stop at the junction,’ I thought to myself, humming along with Liam. The fella approached the junction, looked at me, looked back at the junction and kept on trucking without any attempt to stop, slow or give way, causing me to brake considerably. Liam missed the note and I almost found myself in the back of the PSF van along with the boxes of Concept Full Peak Vented Helmets, Nato 50/50 Deluxe Weight Wool Mix Jumpers, Eurotec Bodywarmers and Moldex dust respirators.

I’m not sure if it was the sunshine that did him and he needed a pair of Crackerjack CE EN166 1FT Scratch resistant, polycarbonate lens, non-fog, ultra lightweight, night blue temples (CEBA non-scratch only) gigs on, but I thought the front of my Audi was a goner.

Now if this is a new advertising ploy I must say it’s been met with only mixed success. Admittedly I am now aware of your company – given that the tip of my car’s bonnet was almost inseparable from the back of the Vito (registration mark YR05 UZG) where all your details were emblazoned – however also given that my heartbeat had now been raised to that of a lion-startled gazelle and my blood pressure had been sent through the roof, I did feel a certain degree of antagonism between myself and your company’s representative due to his blatantly anti-social manouevre. This particular publicity stratagem had a negative affect.

Now, we can all make mistakes and obviously he’d got his PSF Task Force TF1SM boots on. No acceleration control with those steel toe-cappers! But if you could get him to remove the Bilsom Thunder® T1 Dual Dielectric ear protectors for a few seconds and drop him a Health and Safety approved volume level word about his driving I’d appreciate it.

Progressive he may have been – safe he wasn’t!

Best wishes.

PENDING REPLY

Football. I used to love football at school. Jumpers for goalposts, chopping the legs off some kid from a rival form in sickeningly brutal tackle, one man Wembley, curving pass to the tall lad whose hormones had woken up early and made the rest of us look like hairless dwarves. But that was playing. From one bell to the other we’d be kicking each other up in the air, crafty shimmies, dropping the shoulder, artful feints, going past three, sneaky elbows, catching the trailing leg of some fucker who thought he was Zico streaking down the wing. That said, sexy game though Ruud Gullit may believe it to be, football is not porn. Watching it does not encourage me to take part myself. And my days of trap, dribble, shoot! are gone.

At work I’m surrounded by canteen pundits. Dave and Tim, the Saint & Greavsie of tea break. Johnny doing his Gary Linekar Football Focus spiel over a cheese bap. Each with their own loyalty to some local ‘firm’. The Tarn, the Blades, the Owls, Donny Whites, the Mighty Millers, Dirty Leeds. But the thing is, I sense that these men were shit at the game when they were at school. Always picked last, ‘toe bunging’ passes at oblique angles, screaming foul when they got scythed down by a perfectly honest sliding tackle. But now, thanks to Sky+ and parroting the words of Alan Hansen, they’re all experts. I think Tommo needs to use a squarer back four. He’s playing Matty too wide, the lad’s natural game is on the instep, the long ball is a blind alley when it comes to youth development but Ritchie just can’t see it… Every burst of Sky Sports 1 with Vicky Gomersall (phwoar!) is like a testosterone shot in the arse. England internationals dissected and discussed like the battle plan of the Somme; the resemblance is there, I’ll give ‘em that. Chest slapping masculinity. I know about football, I’m one of the lads, OK so I secretly fancy Joe Cole but I’m still a bloke’s bloke… Bollocks. You’re just an annoying fucker. Now switch the telly over and let’s have some Murder She Wrote.

And then there are the players and clubs themselves.

One can ask what is the effect of a large reward on the perception of a pleasant task. The answer is unequivocal: it devalues the task in the eyes of those performing it. Nursery school children were provided in their playtime with brightly coloured Magic Markers and attractive drawing paper. Those who showed an interest in drawing were subsequently given the same apparatus in the classroom and encouraged to draw. One group was promised a glossy certificate for good drawing, while another group was given no reward. Two weeks later the material was again provided and the children were told it was up to them whether they wanted to draw or not. The group previously given the certificate showed a marked decline in interest, while the other group drew as much as they had done in the previous two sessions. Presumably the children thought that drawing could not be much of much interest in its own right if a reward was needed to make them engage in it.

From Irrationality by Stuart Sutherland

Jules Rimet is no longer gleaming. English Premier League footballers were recently polled and asked which award they would most like to win. Of those that spoke English and could understand what the pollster was on about 5% opted for the World Cup, a further 7% said they’re dream was to lift the Premier League trophy. A whopping, overwhelming 87% stated that the highest point in their career would be to receive – at a lavish bash surrounded by their envious peers – Hello! magazine’s best haircut of the year.

If the Magic Markers were on offer again, Wayne Rooney said he was hoping to bag a bit of wall space on Tony Hart’s Gallery and celebrate with a gummy one from some Granny in the Piccadilly area of Manchester.

The Premier League clubs are huge corporate leviathans. Humourless and remote from the indigenous fans. Owned by billionaire football dilettantes or anonymous corporations out to diversify, to get some tax relief, to add a cool club badge to their portfolio. Staffed by players who have no loyalty or pride in the club they represent. No sense of history. When Brazilian Robinho moved to Manchester City from Real Madrid for £32½ million in September 2008 he immediately endeared himself to the faithful and indicated his passion & commitment to the club by telling them how chuffed he was to be playing for Chelsea. Oops, I meant Manchester… Erm… Looks at his agent. Manchester City. City? City. Yeah, Manchester City! Big smile, hold the shirt aloft, flash photography. Job done.

I remember when John Barnes (fucking useless, let’s face it) was on £800 a week at Liverpool. Back in the late 80s. A lot of money for the day, a lot of money today. But not hugely excessive. Man-bag obsessed Cristiano Ronaldo is on contract for £120,000 per week at Manchester United. A hundred and twenty thousand pounds. Every fucking week. A worker on minimum wage in the UK won’t pull this amount of money in over the course of a decade. And this bloke gets that every week for playing a game. Even poor old John Barnes would have had to keep on playing until 2140 to claw in what Ronaldo takes home a year. And with Graham Taylor in charge he’d probably have got the chance.

OK, I can see the argument. The club is generating income through the work I do, why shouldn’t I take a decent percentage of the money it earns? The wage bill of most clubs is now over 50% of income. It has logic to it. And certainly before 1961 and the days of the Player’s Maximum wage when even top flight legends like Stanley Matthews and Nat Lofthouse were only allowed to take home £20 a week the system was wrong. But a ‘we’re the masters now’ philosophy has ripped the heart out of the game and distanced the players from the people who go through the turnstiles to watch them perform. Because surely not many people will agree with FIFA President Sepp Blatter’s comments over the recent Man U/Real Madrid spat concerning Ronaldo: ‘There is this slavery in transferring or buying players here and there.’ Slavery? Just a sec, didn’t Ronaldo sign the contract himself? And it’s not the fucking Bay City Rollers we’re talking about here. Evil managers signing away the souls of impressionable teenagers. Stick your name down on this bit of paper, Les, I’m going to make you a star… Och aye! No, Ronaldo is surrounded by a coterie of advisors and middle men. Agents, lawyers, a stylist, tarot car reader, foot spa plugger-in-er. He knew exactly what he was getting himself into and his petulant boot stamping sums up the spoilt, self-obsessed attitude of the typical footballer these days. They behave like over-grown children.

Which brings me to my next gripe. We are in an age where children are bred for sport. Like pedigree dogs or Champion vegetables whose growth is forced under glass. The Williams sisters in tennis. Ivan Lendl – the most boring but most successful of 80s tennis stars – chained to the court by his dominating mother. Tiger Woods in golf. Virtually every player in today’s Premier League. The parents have a goal – vicarious, avaricious, take your pick – and the children are groomed to achieve that ends. Which perhaps goes some way to explain the lack of personalities in modern sport. There are no George Best’s in the Premier League, no Rodney Marsh’s, not even resilient hard nuts like Billy Bremner. And, like him or not, it’s unlikely that we’ll see the likes of Paul Gascoigne again. So much effort has been expended on technique, fitness and a regime for success that no time was spent on developing a personality. Can you honestly imagine having a good laugh with David Beckham? Enjoying being in the company of Peter Crouch? Sharing a naan with Joey Barton over a super-strength Cobra? David Beckham is no Bobby Moore or even high-kicking, Rimbaud quoting Eric Cantona. He’s a brand name. And like all footballers brand obsessed. David Beckham Ltd. Frank Lampard Plc. Roy Keane, the Old Trafford legend who lambasted, amongst other footballing aberrations, Manchester United’s executive box dwelling fans (‘the prawn sandwich brigade’), summed up the modern player: ‘These so-called big stars are people we are supposed to be looking up to. Well, they are weak and soft.’

Then again, would you have bought Nobby Stiles signature collection aftershave?

Tina

The mists dark and unfamiliar scenery of home crawl past like the hours of mints and close hysterical chatter. I drive past swaddled shapes of houses, the wetlands, tired factories, the slumbering shops. A blue and flickering lighted window where I pause in envy like a restless, unsettled Yorkshire spirit. It’s me, it’s Kathy, can I get my head down?

The insomnia of the supermarket is a spaceship landed on the dead industrial site. Like Dreyfus through the Star Trek-inspired doors and onto the convenience aisle
I step into the future and I am embraced by the Tesco’s Mothership, arms wide in resignation. Clubcard points and a wire basket. Chocolate milk, a glossy magazine, some aniseed, a microwave chicken Korma, plain naan. A bottle of Sprite. The woman with the cantilevered blonde hair flirts and slides my card into the chip and PIN salaciously before she artfully steals my seed and probes my brain. Do you want some cash back with that, darling?

Cocooned in tin and plastic, the dashboard warm and comforting. Another mint lasting 30 seconds. Another random observation on a fat woman’s calves in fishnet tights. Another near miss with a suicidal rabbit. The submerged lights of an oncoming Ford Focus. A saint who places his hand upon my head and breathes a private blessing in my ear. Some moment in time fixed and noted. Remembered in that instant, knowing I will recall it with caution, revised and expanded for years to come. Annotations and illustrations. Been and gone.

The protagonist of seventeen books published between 1987 and 2007, Detective Inspector John Rebus is the creation of Scottish Crime Writer and Tartan Noir pioneer Ian Rankin.

From p. 399 Fleshmarket Close by Ian Rankin

December 2004

The two men walked away from the small terraced house on Middlecliffe Lane, Little Houghton.

Late December and it was cold.

Both men were big and broad, and both walked with the same casual ownership of any space they occupied.

Bramah turned and looked back up at the windows.

'Think he did it?' Detective Inspector Rebus asked.

Bramah twisted his lips. After a minute, he said: 'Think we can prove it?'

'Does that matter?' Rebus said.

Bramah looked at the other man and frowned.

They drove over to Darfield in Rebus' Saab, Morcheeba playing low on the stereo. Bramah endured the music and looked out over the view. Held in ice under a pale blue sky.

The Yorkshireman gave directions, sending them down a back road cutting out before Cat Hill, under a broken bridge, and pulling up at a big pub.

Neither man spoke for the five minutes trip.

The pub was a long building in white. Georgian windows. A car park spreading out in front.

Inside was all trimmed up, ready for Christmas and the long night of drunken gypsy pub fights.

Rebus sat near the window.

Bramah came back from the bar with two pints. Bitter for the Scot and a Guinness for himself.

Rebus was lighting up another cigarette and glancing 'round the bar. 'Slainte,' he said, palming the glass to his mouth.

'Cheers,' Bramah replied, doing the same.

The two men sat in silence until two inches of their drinks had disappeared.

The tinselled bar was slowly filling. The older end mostly, though a group of three lads were round the pool table. Skinny smackhead types.

'So,' Bramah said, breaking the silence between the two men, 'how do you do it?'

'What?'

He glanced casually towards the pool table. 'Empathize with the dross so much?'

Rebus sat back, following his eyes. 'What makes you say that?'

'Question with a question? Bramah smiled. 'All right. Any tale of poverty and you take the bait like you’re starving. I’ve noticed it before.'

'I'm not sure I do,' Rebus replied. 'And you've never been affected by someone's story?'

Bramah looked at Rebus and shook his head. 'Not lately. I've had too many days and nights stood in some rat hole listening to hard luck stories from people who've just shat in their own kitchen sinks. I don't believe any of 'em.'

Rebus frowned. 'You can't mean that?'

'Too right, I do. You didn't do your time in uniform, did you? If you had you'd have seen what I've seen.'

Rebus shook his head. 'I'm well researched,' he stated.

Bramah let this go. 'What was it you said in Fleshmarket Close? “There’s no excuse for the detention centres”? Something like that, anyway.’

'And?'

'You wouldn't last five minutes, mate.'

Rebus studied the other man's face, then shrugged.

Bramah said: 'And don’t you think Ellen Wylie lost the plot when you went to that detention centre together? How long's she been a bobby?'

'About ten or fifteen years.'

'You surprise me. And Siobhan!'

'What about her?' Rebus asked, his face darkening.

'Well, are all the women up there getting hormones? She got her knickers in a right twist when you went to that lap dancing bar. It's only tits and arse, when all's said and done.'

Rebus paused, an angry look washing across his face, and then smiled. 'Siobhan can handle her own.'

'Yeah?'

'Yeah.'

'So she's not just a female mirror image of your psyche?'

Rebus took another sip of beer before answering. 'No.'

Bramah grinned, saying: 'Have you?'

Rebus clenched his jaw muscles and Bramah laughed loudly. 'All right! All right!' He laughed pacifically. 'So why did you become a copper?' he asked.

Rebus thought, then: 'Because I like puzzles.'

'Fucking hell, you could have saved yourself a lot of grief and just got a Rubik's Cube if all you wa' after was a puzzle. Settle yourself down with a bumper book of Sudoku.'

Rebus smiled.

Bramah said: 'Some people become bobbies because it seems worthwhile - they're usually under twenty-one when they do that; mentally if not physically - or because their family were in the police. The ones pushing thirty or over who become bobbies because it's a last chance. They've messed up somewhere, somehow. Things haven't gone quite right. But they don't want to go down or end up in a dead end job where they have to get their hands mucky. They still feel they have a right to a decent wage and a pension. And so they become coppers.'

'Is that your story then?' Rebus asked.

Bramah considered, then nodded. 'Pretty much, yeah. More or less.'

'So why do you think I wouldn't last five minutes?' Rebus asked.

Bramah frowned. 'I don't know, mate. For a start most DIs that I know never get out of the office that much, they’re too busy amending reports on £2.50 shoplifters and coming to decisions about no injury common assaults. Shit like that. That’s what police work’s about these days - public satisfaction and getting everything to dovetail. The rank and file aren’t allowed to make judgement calls on a day to day basis anymore. And, despite all this gritty realism you’re supposed to portray, it just seems to me that in all your cases you always end up with some toff in there somehow or other. It's like you're back there with Hercules Poirot and all those other detectives who can't investigate any crime that doesn't involve rich people in some way. Not like real bobbying, which is mostly dealing with the shit kickers. Do you know what I mean?'

Rebus thought about it. 'Aye,' he conceded, 'you're right.'

'Like Fleshmarket Close. Son of Scottish TV star and a portrait painter?' Bramah shook his head. 'I mean, fuck my boots.'

Rebus shrugged. 'I work with what I'm given.'

'And poor old Reynolds - chucked to the reader as the stereotypical bigoted copper. Institutionally racist.'

'You can't say you agree with his attitude.'

'Not out loud, you're right there,' Bramah said. 'I value my pension too much. But I can't say that I disagree with him either, or his right to be what and who he wants to be. But that business with the bananas, what was that all about?’

Rebus blushed. ‘Don’t even go there,' he conceded. ‘But Ian was spot on about the immigrants, just got the right angle, I thought.’

'Come off it. You're living with your head up your arse. We've got enough criminals without importing some more. And as far as I can see, after reading Fleshmarket Close, the only thing they seem to learn from us is how to swear. And that just makes them more endearing, doesn't it?'

Rebus took a quick swallow of the beer.

Bramah smiled. 'You're so fucking objective, John. You'll end up agreeing with everyone except yourself.'

Nodding, Rebus said: 'You're probably right.'

Tony & Sandra

Property disputes on the Isle Of Man are still settled by scissors-paper-stone. Former motor racing champ Nigel Mansell recently lost his swimming pool and barbecue area after his next door neighbour drew stone against his scissors in a Douglas court room. He is currently appealing the decision, which will see him face his neighbour head-to-head in a game of bar billiards.

28/11/2001

Christine

Sunday 12th October 2008. Echo Arena, Liverpool

‘Is the scariest thing stand up? Yeah. Yes – it is. It’s the strangest thing. It’s both incredibly exciting and petrifying. You go on and you say the funny lines you’ve written and it goes from utter terror to utter ecstasy in a heartbeat.’ – Steve Coogan

Steve Coogan as Alan Partridge and other less successful characters. It’s been touted as: ‘The star of I'm Alan Partridge, Saxondale and creator of Paul and Pauline Calf will be touring the country in 2008. Steve Coogan is returning in a show featuring the characters that have made him a BAFTA and British Comedy Award winning Comedy Legend.’

So here I am. Mild October night. Over the cobbles to the Albert Dock. Sodium lights in the water and the Liver Building reflected.

Steve Coogan. From Middleton in Greater Manchester. He started off providing voices for Spitting Image, then a supporting part in Chris Morris and Armando Iannucci’s radio show On the hour where he introduced the world to Norfolk TV link man Alan Partridge. This spring-boarded to TV and from there on it was Ferraris and hot tub threesomes. 24 hour party people. The Parole Officer. A cock and bull story.

A fame less noisy than Ricky Gervais’, nevertheless he’s not gone unnoticed in America. In the past few years Coogan has had roles in several Hollywood films. Pretty appalling, to be fair. Round the world in 80 days. Fuck my boots, to paraphrase Mark Kermode. Most recently things have been better, with his brief and bloody appearance in Ben Stiller’s Tropic Thunder. He’s also gleaned tabloid notoriety for his enjoyment of Courtney Love’s hole. Though I’ve never been a fan of her music myself.

7:30PM. Coogan walks onto the stage cold as Pauline Calf, Mancunian slapper. Pauline recites her list of blowjobs, motel quick ones and back alley knee tremblers to booming laughter.

This with a Russian oligarch in a Travelodge. He gets up, kimono robe, a glass of champagne in his hand…

Pauline calls out: ‘Where are you going, you man of mystery?’

‘I’m just going into the bathroom to wash my cock and balls.’

‘Who said romance was dead?’ Council estate giggle and we’re into the song ‘The Marriott Hotel’. Each character has a musical piece. Apart from the night’s closing song, this was perhaps the most successful of the cod Chicago big numbers.

But it’s a fine line between professional performer and the people they were when they appeared in sixth form revue and infant school nativity. And there was a sense that Coogan was already wobbling.

A feeling that grew on me as I watched.

For a start, I was disappointed by Tommy Saxondale. Largely because I prefer Saxondale to Alan Partridge. The character is more sympathetic, better ‘rounded and, perhaps as a consequence, has more potential. I’ve got the DVDs, watched and re-watched. A world and imagination to escape into. But Coogan failed to adapt Tommy Saxondale for the stage. There was none of Saxondale’s anachronistic grumbling, no long moans about dance music, meandering stories about rigging up the monitor amps for Deep Purple in ’75. No descrying politicians (‘the man’), no kaleidoscopic philosophy. Instead Coogan relied on the huge screen projector that backed the stage and Saxondale – like the bloke at work who’s just cottoned onto the internet ten years after everyone else – and who insists on showing you the image of ‘Hitler’s missing moustache finally found’ and the woman who’s fallen asleep in a car with her tits out – clicked through a series of stock jpegs… Look at this, it’ll make you piss yourself… as he clicks on the picture of some fat woman in a bath. Fucking hilarious.

Tommy looked uncomfortable. Out of his depth. Unprepared. He’ll have needed some Viagra and a bit of attention from Magz when he got back to Stevenage in the ‘Stang.

Gordon Thickett – mock stand-up comedian - worked well. Playing up the expectations of stand-up and appalling open mic nights. One of Coogan’s lesser creations, he trounced Paul and Pauline.

Coogan’s run through of his characters necessitated costume changes. These gaps were filled by a cast of supporting players in short sketches. One featuring Steve Oram in a painfully unfunny piece with a stuttering man attempting to address the audience. Any humour the sketch ever contained – and it wasn’t much to start with – was dragged and pulled beyond endurance. It was a relief when Oran finally vacated the stage. The chief response was booing.

Most people ended up using these absences of Coogan from the stage as an opportunity to go for a comfort break and return with some Minstrels and a couple of plastic bottles of Corona (minus the tops).

Paul Calf appeared on stage in a motorized wheelchair, giving brief a impression of Stephen Hawkins. Longsight accent filtered through an imitation computerized voice box: ‘The universe is fucking massive…’

Bag of shite.

The interval. Some Maltesers, another tub of Minstrels. Pepsi Max and a quick wazz. House lights down and Alan Partridge bigged up.

Partridge started off well, the audience were on his side. But things drifted. The motivational speaking premise retreated back to stock sketch work and the inevitable use of the projector and yet more internet images. This was followed by Coogan as Partridge as Sir Thomas More in a play Partridge had put together to resurrect his career. I am More. An idea that comes across as some kind of warmed up hash of Ernie Wise’s ‘plays what I wrote’.

A number of people began walking out early doors, even before the first interval. Groups filing out en masse. By the time Alan Partridge had pulled on the Tudor doublet and cod piece in the guise of Sir Thomas More large numbers were leaving. One persistent heckler shouting: ‘Fucking shite, Steve! You’re a shadow of yourself!’

Coogan, characteristically for the night, kept his head down and ploughed on with the script.

It’s a curious decision to tour now, given that much of the material is re-cycled from an act he was doing 10 years ago. There is little that could not have been (and some that was) in his last stand-up tour at the height of Britpop.

The top and bottom is that this isn’t stand-up. It’s a stage show. TV characters going through rigid sketches to what is envisaged as a passive, receptive audience. Coogan isn’t bringing anything alive to the venue and throughout the evening he mostly failed to engage with the crowd. One of the few highlights of the night was when Coogan managed to reach out beyond the stage lights in his persecution of TV hard man Ross Kemp. Each of the characters having a shot [sic] at the former Eastender. Such is the shared cruelty of live comedy, we all enjoyed this. It wasn't that there weren't laughs - there were - but they were too few and too far between. Coogan never generated the mass hystera that good stand up will provoke. Moments when you end up laughing at anything.

The show closed with Coogan in character as his stage interpretation of Steve Coogan. Pitching the action in some 50s musical comedy. Straw boater, striped blazer and flannels. He meets a stage policeman. ‘Good show, Mr Coogan?’ ‘Yes, apart from that cunt over there!’ Coogan points to the part of the auditorium he was heckled from earlier, prompting huge applause. He then launched into the closing song ‘Everyone’s a bit of a cunt sometimes’. Reflecting on his own tabloid persona – snorting coke off some bird’s back while driving a Lambourghini down the M1 etc – the song had some good turns of phrase.

Unfortunately much of the audience had already left by this point.

The last word was an uncomfortable 'goodnight' when all the characters slipped away and the real Steve Coogan left the stage. Awkward and vaguely resentful.

I can’t help but think that Coogan made his way back to the Ibis, shaking the bath crystals into the Jacuzzi, warning Janice and Sharon not to get any of the Cava onto the carpet, he must have felt his evening had (so far) past without ecstasy.

English Heritage have agreed a £50,000 restoration programme for popular cockney actress Barbara Windsor’s boobs. Windsor’s classic and traditionally English pink-nippled, big and bouncy breasts, a national treasure since their first unfettered appearance in British 60s comedy film Carry on Camping, have showed wear of late according to some critics, and the restoration programme aims to preserve the celebrity briskets for the benefit of the nation. The deal, which will see both chubblies brought back to full British standards and wobbling like jelly on a plate, was sealed after public visiting rights to the refurbished mammaries was agreed by Windsor and her agent, former 60s London Gangster, Joey ‘No-Knuckles’ McMalone, and upper class negotiators from English Heritage over a fish and chip supper in the Blind Beggar public house, Streatham. Already propped up and undergoing basic structural work, the first trippers are expected to admire the completely restored fulsome handful by October 2008.

Windsor, who played chirpy Queen Vic landlady Peggy Mitchell in the BBC's Eastenders soap opera, declared herself to be chuffed by the deal, tittering, 'It's a little bit cheeky, darling, but all educational!' An excited Griff Rhys Jones, presenter of BBC’s Restoration programme, who visited the derelict and storm-damaged breasts in 2004 said: ‘I can’t wait to get my hands on them.’

Jimmy Tarbuck’s real name is Bruce Urqhart. Born in Woking to a comfortable upper-middle class family, Urqhart first took to the stage in the late 50s and performed alongside such notable comedians as Tony Hancock and Tommy Handley. Urhart specialized in polished, high brow comedy, often featuring public school house masters and foppish lovers, and was especially adept at turning jokes on fine nuances in Latin grammar.

Quick to catch on to the Media’s new-found love of working class Northerners in the wake of Beatlemania, in 1963 Urqhart invented the character of Jimmy Tarbuck, a Liverpudlian stand up comedian. Apart from some gigs in the mid-seventies, when he briefly resurrected his sadistic homosexual Fox hunting squire character Toffy Cutherbert-Brown for a sell out season at the Britannia Pier, Gt. Yarmouth (catch phrase, ‘Well that’s filled a hole!’), Urqhart has appeared and performed solely as Tarbuck. Several other names had been considered for Tarbuck including Jerry McCouser (tag line – he’s a Scouser) and Bobby Bootle before Urqhart finally settled on Jimmy Tarbuck.

In 2008, following the opening of the Liverpool ONE shopping precinct, coffee shop chain Starbuck’s opened their signature Merseyside store ‘Tarbuck’s Starbucks!’. Urqhart is under contract to work the counter once every month and is apparently a dab hand at turning out a double choc with cream.

From Wikipedia - 'Because the internet never lies'

Gordon

The credit crunch reaches the world of Marvel Comics.

How long since Definitely Maybe? Fourteen years. You're joking.

Unfortunately, despite the hype and promises, Dig out your soul is largely disappointing. Though I like the melancholy of this.

Part 1

I was diagnosed with cancer in November 2005. Morning grey and overcast. Muted colours. Orange leaves on the tarmac. I went home from the doctor’s surgery armed with a reef of prints from the internet, NHS web sites and the like and sat down to have a good look at Teratoma. Whistle blown. The muddy hell of No Man's Land waiting to get mown down with a Maxim gun, shrapnel bursting all around me, marching awkwardly with my left testicle the size of a King Edward potato. Something from the monster vegetable table at the Village Show.

I had been experiencing discomfort for sometime. My jeans too tight, my underpants not supportive enough, a groin strain... I'd made all the excuses, comforted myself with the reasonable assumptions and then, when the pain persisted, I'd decided to visit my GP. In and out, no worries. A reassuring talk and I’d be on my way. Routine. I'd no sooner pulled my pants down than I knew from the slapped look on my doctor's face that something was very wrong. 'This is serious,' he said, looking at me and then back at my swollen testes.

This is not something you want to be told while you have your pants around your ankles.

I had always vaguely supposed that a heart attack would see me off. It was part of my heritage, like Morris dancing, Xenophobia and tepid draught bitter. I had a cultural acceptance of the idea that one day Death would shake my hand, sending a searing pain up my arm and into my chest, until the life was squeezed out of me. My Grandad had gone suddenly like that one Sunday afternoon and it seemed likely that I would continue the tradition. Especially given my jingoistic pride in fried foods and stodgy desserts.

Blood tests. An ultra sound. Caught in the over-powering current of a whirlpool pulling me closer to the inevitable. A life-shattering consultation with the specialist in a small beige room at the beginning of December to learn the results: the testicle was like a cancerous Scotch egg. The tumour growing deep inside my knacker and gradually misshaping it. The only option was to have the testicle removed. And quickly. The stigma of sudden mortality. Trapped in a situation that I couldn't escape from. The folk lore of the word that is taboo to utter out loud is on me. My Grandparents' generation when the word meant an absolute and unchangeable death sentence. No road back from Mount Vernon hospital. Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, I think he's got... you know... oh, he's got...? Yeah... Cancer.

Angst-fuelled Indie pop icon, Morrissey, full name Steven Patrick Morrissey, lead singer with classic eighties band The Smiths was arrested in April 1986 after The Smiths' sell-out show at the Leadmill in Sheffield, South Yorkshire. The dour Mancunian tunesmith, noted for his trademark 'intelligent student' image, was interviewed on allegations of incitement relating to his infamous song 'Shoplifters of the world unite' and with falsely using a 'Disabled' sticker in his car.

Denying that his plaintive ode to the disenchanted was meant in anyway to promote shoplifting as a career choice to teenagers, the quiff-tousled warbler apologized for any confusion that the song may have caused and stated that he always voted Conservative.

It's believed that the title to The Smiths' final album was inspired by the event, through guitarist Johnny Marr's throwaway remark on seeing Morrissey cuffed by police in the band's Leadmill dressing room: 'Strangeways here we come'; though in fact the most likely place of any incarceration would have been Lindholme Prison near Doncaster.

The singer was released from custody without charge after further admitting that he was not in fact deaf, and the hearing aid he affected on stage was simply an ironic prop. He agreed to remove the orange badge from his Vauxhall Chevette as soon as possible.

The Smiths, darlings of the music press during the height of Thatcher's Britain, and who released their first single in 1983, spilt up acrimoniously in 1988 after Marr discovered drummer Mike Joyce eating a pork pie backstage at the Reading festival.

The wise ponderings of a former Royal Marines Commando

WARNING: Scatological

Peculiar changes to my body. For a start, in recent years I’ve been plagued by an appalling short term memory. It’s a physiological thing, the endocrinologist told me. I think. Somebody said something about it, anyway. I can’t remember who. On a day to day basis it can be a bit of a problem. For instance, last night I was walking upstairs opening my pay slip. It’s one of those security sealed things, loads of squiggly lines and so on, which you open by tearing three sides off, leaving you with three long, broad strips of white paper that need ditching plus the folded payslip itself. Coincidentally I was going to use the toilet. We’ll say ‘big job’ and leave it at that. So I’m looking at my payslip, doing sums and deciding what I was going to buy this month. Get myself the new Jonathan Meades DVD from Amazon. One True Saxon hat for the cold weather. Some books. I dropped the strips into the toilet bowl, got down to business and thought no more about them. Took a dump.

Now, I’ve always wiped my backside stood up. Don’t know why, I just have. So I stood up, Andrex tissue paper in hand and, as is customary, I glanced down to see how things were looking. An appalling rush of adrenaline. ‘Bloody hell,’ I says to myself, panicking, ‘I’ve got worms the size of Tagliatelle.’