Culture, Alienation, Boredom & Despair

Philomena

I wouldn't usually go in for a 'human interest' British film with Judi Dench starring, me. Not European enough, not historical enough, not political enough, too Judi Dench~y by half.
But thank god for Steve Coogan, as if he hadn't written, produced and starred (as journalist Martin Sixsmith) in this, I almost certainly wouldn't have seen it, which would have been a massive shame, as it's excellent, one of the best of 2013. Also, thank god he took the project under his wing, otherwise it almost certainly would have been absolutely horrible. 

What he, Steven Frears et al have done here is pretty impressive - they've taken a Tuesday afternoon TV TrueMovies-esque shamltz-fest waiting to happen and turned it into a genuinely funny, warm and interesting film. And they've done it knowingly enough for 'smart' fans to get it (his phone call to his editor flagging up openly the black/white basic premise "she's the goody...the evil wicked nuns are the nasty baddies", and the recurring little digs at "horrible journalists", "doorstepping" and anything-for-story newspapers) but kept it unknowing enough, that the 'marks', or to be fairer, people just wanting a nice story, wont be disappointed either. 

Steve Coogan is one of the best people in public life - an intelligent, funny, smart-arse, someone who likes to bang on about things most people don't want to hear about - all in all a proper sound gobshite with an inflated sense of his own opinions, everything that LoT aspires towards. He is excellent all the way through this (even if playing a New Labour affiliated Russian historian was always going to be a winner, what ever the context) , and I have to think that this is the direction he should be going full-time now. It says a lot that I've seen this, and am eagerly anticipating the next series of The Trip, but haven't yet got up the courage to chance the Partridge film. 

As good as Coogan is in \Philomena, it couldn't have possibly worked without someone playing the title role off him just as well - so hats off to 'Dame' Judi Dench, who is completely believable, eminently sympathetic and steals (or is allowed to steal) the biggest laughs in the whole film with a few well-placed hilarious lines. A revelation - given that I raised no dissent when she was described by the estimable founder of this fine website as "'Garb' Garby Garbage" but a year ago.

The scene where they are together at the airport before setting off to try to trace her orphaned son in America, and Philomena describes in minute detail the book she's just finished reading begins funny and gets funny, is oddly poignant - and will ring oh-so-true to anyone who's ever asked their Gran on the sly who the fit-looking one in Emmerdale is, and been deservedly made to sit through no-plot-twist-too-small, 40 minute , exhaustive recap of the character's entire back-story as a penance. 

I suppose its possible there are some people out there who think that what should have been a pure mother-seeks-son heart-string-tugger has been sullied by the way its been done - that the very palely painted leftish tinge (criticism of anti-gay Republican policies, unflattering depiction of the catholic church) has somehow spoiled that, but I would think they'd have to really try very hard to not be won over by the overall excellence of a film I thought was nigh-on perfectly pitched throughout. 

 '1913' & Spin The Globe

Two pretty simple ideas here - one a book, one a radio programme. The common thread is picking one set point in time, then ranging off around the world to see what was going on at the same time, with little if any knowledge or communication between the disparate people and events that throws up. 

In the Spin The Globe, http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b03h36ll/Spin_the_Globe_1605/ that point is 5th November 1605, the date of "the biggest non-event in history" with the Gunpowder Plot. 

The show is only 30 minutes, which works perfectly in recreating the whistle-stop kind of effect the producers were obvious going for, with the option for any listeners to go off on their own and follow-up anything that caught their attention particularly in their own time. Now, I haven't done that, but is no reflection on the quality of the programme, which is pitched at the less-serious end of the scale when it comes to BBC Radio 4 History (like being one of the less-dastardly capitalist fellating investment banks, or in the less-dry wing of Ryvvita flavours maybe), as we get a brief introduction to, in no order, the first ever newspaper being printed in Strasbourg, a volcano erupting in Peru, the time of troubles in Russia, Polish troops occupying The Kremlin, Shah Abbas running amok in Iran (replete with "a rather proud and fantastic looking handlebar moustache") and goings on in Virginia involving Tisquantum which were particularly hard to follow. 

Far more easy to comprehend is 1913, which takes the eponymous year and investigates the cultural circumstances between the year the Titanic sank and the year the First World War began. 

The narrative is chopped up into a diary-like style and that helps the book whizz-along at a raucous pace - I did the 250~ish pages in a couple of readings. One of the highlights comes pretty early on, framing the bizarre co-incidences that led to Stalin, Hitler & Tito all being in the same Vienna park during "an icy February gleaming in snow-white splendour". The erratic hopping between people, places and disciplines adds to the enjoyment, as whenever there's something you're not really interested in, the next paragraph jags off to reveal that the author of Bambi (Felix Salten) also produced 'challenging' & 'subversive' pornography that was banned in Vienna. 

..........the first Aldi being opened, a man having his penis bitten off by a donkey, the discovery of the ozone layer, Stalin fuming because he couldn't get into the nanny of the family he lodged with, the Federal Reserve being founded in New York, 'women issues and intrigues', Hitler painting, Futurists wearing wooden spoons in their coat pockets, 'ladies dresses, perfumed draperies, pink silk sheets', Franz Ferdinand playing with model railways, 'the audience couldn't swallow - they roundly hissed the piece', Franz Kafka, Einstein, Picasso, Virginia Woolf, Sigmund Freud, sparkling win, Charlie Chaplin signing his first film contract....

........all are interwoven with jarring background snippets such as "on June 29th the Reichstag passes a military bill approving the increase of troops from 117,267 men to 661,478" to juxtapose brilliantly the flippant backdrop to what was to come - which is extremely effective: even though you know that's never been the way the world works, there's a temptation to imagine the build-up to anything momentous as everyone just sitting around grimly waiting for the inevitable to happen. 

A brilliantly conceived and wittily pulled off book - probably best summed up by this diary extract from September: 

"3 o'clock, Gerhart Fisher funeral.

5 o'clock big dress rehearsal for William Tell play!

That's life....."

Predistribution & White-Tie Black Noise

Two very differing 'articles' I came across this week combined to give both the best indication yet of what Labour in government might look like if they win in 2015, and also pointed out an enormous flaw with their efforts so far to make that happen and shift the lumpen, miserable shower we have currently. . 

The first was an edition of Analysis on R4 with Jacob Hacker talking convincingly, engagingly and intelligently and predistribution ('an unsnappy name for an inspiring idea'). I actually listened to this on the bus home from work and realised I'm in danger of going a bit too far with this kind of thing at times - a feeling not diminished by the stubborn refusal to sit next to me for a good while. When we got up by the uni though, a reassuringly fusty looking lecturer in his 50s shambled towards the empty seat and i thought to myself 'he'll probably appreciate me listening to this if there is any seepage through my headphones'. 

But he wasn't interested at all - he sat down and went immediately on his iPhone to the Attitude website and very thoroughly reviewed a photogallery of Tom Daley's crowing 'Sexiest Man In The World'. If there was anything he appreciated, it wasn't the idea of the state acting sooner to prevent inequality through progressive taxation. And if there was any seepage at all, it wasn't from me, and it wasn't from the ear-area...

So, Jacob Hacker. He's a guy from Yale who has developed this theory and Ed Miliband is by all accounts keener on it than this guy is for the new series of Splash! to get started. 

The programme goes on for 30 minutes http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b02x6707 and if Miliband said 90% of what Hacker says, anyone who has any interest in or affection for the Labour cause couldn't help but agree:

Government should see itself as a vehicle for achieving equality and solidarity

There are ties that bind people above and beyond just being fellow consumers

Workers should have a voice (whether in a union or not)

The number and quality of jobs needs to be improved, and jobs need to pay more. Especially for cleaners  nurses and other essential jobs

Everyone should earn a fair, decent, living wage

Public sector jobs should be created to both do vital things for society as well as moving towards full employment, particularly in housing which is crying out for investment

This should produce broadly distributed gains which translate into economic gains for everyone

There is no excuse for poor public services, and if needs be aggressive taxation of extreme wealth and capital gains needs to be introduced to fund improvements - especially in certain areas (e.g. early-years childcare)

Government needs to make long-term investments in people (eg the Child Trust Fund)

In terms of welfare/benefits, the public has lost faith in this, so the contributory & reciprocal elements need to be re-inforced

We can learn from and utilise the methods used by Not-for-profit and 'foundation' companies

The trend of recent decades where society has become more and more unequal, unless things like the above are introduced, is going to become self-reproducing as the super-rich plough their money only into their own children, and opportunity becomes privatised. 

The second was this article in the Guardian written by someone who worked as a waitress at the Prime Minister's speech when he summoned all his intellectual rigour to set out his vision for the country: permanent spending cuts, more austerity, less state involvement in anything

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/nov/13/david-cameron-austerity-public-sector-cuts. 

And all whilst dressed as if he was making a bid to embody the implications of this approach as emphatically as possible.

As Ruth Hardy says "The contrast between what he was saying and where he was saying it seemed initially almost too laughable to get worked up about...The guests enjoyed a champagne reception, and then were served a starter, a fish course and main course of fillet of beef, all served with wine, dessert, coffee, dessert wine, port, brandy and whisky were served, Cameron gave his speech. Maybe Cameron didn't see the irony, perhaps it didn't occur to him that this message might not be as easily comprehended by ...those of us, disabled or unemployed or on the minimum wage, for whom austerity has had a catastrophic and wounding effect."

The combination of these two different ends the same argument should be absolutely lethal weapons for Labour- the intellectual big-picture plan. The emotional, humourous irreverence But then there's the obvious problem: neither Hacker or Hardy are actually Labour representatives

Why is it not shadow-cabinet figures making these speeches and writing these artciles?

Ed Miliband is really, really good when he steps up, better than a lot of people realise, and I can give him the benefit of the doubt for now because there is a possible strategic plan to save himself and keep himself a bit of novelty and fresh quality for when he's going to need to be everywhere in a year/18months time.

Ed Ball's role is to be 'iron discipline' personified up to the election, so it is difficult for him to match that with rabble-rousing or difficult to grasp theoretical oratorios.

Everyone else though? Hello?? What are you actually doing???

As Hacker says to sum up the idea behind and need for predistribution - 'do we want to live in a society where just the uber-well-off elite jet-set around as untouchable cosmopolitans, whilst the rest are a constrained, squeezed, worried mass of spectators peering in on an unattainable, broken world of big dollars, pounds and cents?'

I'm fairly certain more people will vote for a rejection of that, than someone who couldn't be doing any more to show he's comfortable with exactly that. But if Labour don't start actually asking people the question a bit more, they're going to only have themselves to blame if it three years time we see another set of buttons popping off this tux: