7 February 2016
If you want the Oscar, Ridley, better start shooting Blade Limper
If you look carefully at all the people who’ve been nominated for a big award at the Oscars ceremony later this month, you will notice that none of them – not one – is a conjoined twin, or a man who’s really a woman, or a dog. There’s no one there whose mum took thalidomide, and none was born in Yorkshire. But everyone seems to have a bee in their bonnet about the single fact that none of them is black.
There was a photograph of all the hopefuls in the newspapers last week, and it was just a lot of rich people with one head each and four functioning limbs. It was billed as ‘the white face(s) of Hollywood’, and lots of people were very cross.
Some even pointed out that in the awards’ near-ninety-year history only twelve non-US films have won Best Picture. And eleven of those were British.
But if you stop and think for a moment, you have to conclude that the silver screen is just about the least white place on Earth. You look at the really big film stars these days and for every Tom Cruise you have a Will Smith. For every Robert Downey Jr there’s a Denzel Washington. And that’s before we get to Morgan Freeman, Cuba Gooding Jr, Jamie Foxx, Forest Whitaker, Don Cheadle and Samuel L. Jackson. Oh, and this year’s Oscars host, Chris Rock.
And while none of these guys is up for a big award this time round, you can hardly accuse the Academy Award judges of institutional racism or naked Trumpery because in 2014 it was a two-horse race between Dallas Buyers Club, which was about AIDS, and the eventual winner of Best Motion Picture, 12 Years a Slave, which was about being a slave for twelve years.
In 2006 Crash, which was an excellent film about racism, beat Brokeback Mountain, which was about homosexuality. In 2009 Slumdog Millionaire, which featured no white faces to speak of – not even Ben Kingsley’s – walked off with the top gong, and in 2011 it was the turn of The King’s Speech, which was about disability.
It’s obvious, then, that the judges love a cause. They like a film that addresses issues and rights wrongs. And don’t say they avoid giving the Best Actor award to a black man, because they gave one to Washington, Foxx and Whitaker, not to mention Sidney Poitier.
However, they have never once given the top gong to a superhero film. And a blockbuster in which a rock is heading our way never gets a look-in, although, that said, the alien-fest District 9 was nominated. Mainly, I suspect, because actually it was about apartheid. This is my big problem with the Oscars. Anything even remotely populist is dismissed as being no better than the popcorn or the Palace Tandoori commercials.
And that brings me neatly on to Ridley Scott. He’s an Englander and the son of an army officer and the list of films he’s directed boggles the mind.
There was Alien, which we all know is a masterpiece. Then there was Gladiator, which managed to be huge and engrossing even though one of the main actors died halfway through the shoot.
Black Hawk Down, Black Rain, Hannibal, Thelma & Louise, Blade Runner, American Gangster, Robin Hood – you’ve seen them all many times. They form the spine of the DVD shelf in your sitting room. They are to the world of cinema what Rumours and The Dark Side of the Moon are to your record collection. And Ridley did them all.
You probably walked right past Matchstick Men one Sunday afternoon in your video-rental shop, assuming that because it starred Nicolas Cage it would be impenetrable nonsense. But it was an extremely good film about a chap with obsessive compulsive disorder. And it was the same story with Someone to Watch Over Me. Yes, it starred Tom Berenger, who came and went in Platoon. But, again, it was excellent. And they were Ridley’s too.
Of course, there are some wonky moments in his back catalogue. The Counsellor, which starred absolutely everyone, was a bit of a mess, and I’ve tried many times to understand Prometheus. But it’s like long division. I just don’t get it.
Judging Ridley on these failures, though, would be like judging Paul McCartney on ‘Ebony and Ivory’, or Terry Wogan on ‘The Floral Dance’. Because the fact is he’s a staggeringly good and versatile director who makes films people want to see over and over again. And he’s never won an Oscar.
He’s up for Best Picture at the end of the month for The Martian, and I can pretty much guarantee he won’t win, because it’s too exciting and too funny and too popular. So he’ll have to sit there and gurn as someone else goes on to the stage, and I don’t doubt he’ll feel gutted.
But cheer yourself up, Ridley, with something Jilly Cooper once said: ‘Jeffrey Archer and I would trade all our sales for one prestigious literary award. In the same way that people who win prestigious literary awards would trade their statuette for a tenth of our sales.’
In a much smaller way, I know what she’s on about, because Bafta never gave Top Gear an award. The great and the good from the world of British TV never thought our efforts were worthy of recognition, and I had to sit there in my frilly dinner shirt as someone who’d made a programme about social workers in Oldham was given the gong by someone who’d presented Britain’s Heaviest Paving Stone.
I could smile, though, and I did, because our show was really popular with the viewers. And that’s who we made it for. Not a dame from Islington.
The Revenant may win Best Picture. And Best Actor will probably go to Leonardo DiCaprio, who has never won before, probably because he’s never been forgiven for being Jack Dawson in Titanic. That’s fine. It’s a good film and I enjoyed it.
But I enjoyed Avengers: Age of Ultron even more. And that hasn’t even been nominated. An omission that, it should be noted, has nothing to do with the fact that Samuel L. Jackson is in it.
14 February 2016
I’m aching like billy-o and dying for a fag. It’s a fat man’s holiday
Very rich people are able to control their lives extremely well. They are able to control their sightlines and their address book and even the droopiness of their breasts. They never have to look for a parking space or pop to the shops for milk or sit next to someone on a plane. And they don’t have to worry about how their children are doing at school, because whatever happens, they’ll be fine in the end.
If you invite a very rich person to your house for dinner, they may well accept, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they will turn up, because very rich people may decide at eight o’clock, when they should be getting ready, that they’d rather watch Ray Donovan, or go to St Moritz.
Very rich people are always doing precisely what they want to be doing at all times of day and night. And the moment something starts to be dreary, or damp, they just start doing something else.
However, there’s one thing they can’t control: their health. They can make sure that they are surrounded at all times by perfect people, perfect weather and perfect food and wine, but they cannot do a damn thing to stop one of their cells deciding one day to become cancerous.
Very rich people, however, will not accept this. They have it in their minds that because they breakfasted, in Rome, on an otter’s nose, smeared with the still-warm earwax from a famous horse, that of course they can control their bodies too. So they go mad.
When a normal person goes on holiday, they get up in the morning and immediately lie down again, in the sunshine, with a book. They relax until it’s time for lunch, after which they find some dappled shade and go back to sleep again. Until it’s time for dinner and bed.
Very rich people, however, do not see the typical holiday as a time for relaxation. They see it as an opportunity to stop their hearts bursting and their livers breaking down and their lungs becoming black and scabby and tumorous. They see holidays as an opportunity to buy a bit of ‘extra time’ at the end.
There’s a small island in the Caribbean called Mustique, where very rich people get up in the morning, do exercise and then walk up and down some very steep hills. Read a book? Not a chance. Not when you could be on a tennis court, or a horse, or a treadmill.
The treadmill is almost certainly the world’s bigg
est killer of very rich people. Some die because their designer clothes get caught in the rollers and they’re strangled. Some because they fall over and hit their head. And some because their heart goes, ‘What the hell are you doing?’ and then explodes.
And so they lie there, having their faces rubbed off by the still-functioning belt, thinking in their dying moments that it’s impossible. ‘I bought my neighbour’s house because I didn’t like the sound of his children playing. I can control sound. So why am I dying?’
That’s broadly what I thought this morning. I’m spending a few days with friends in Barbados and we are now at a stage in life when we too think that if we actually move around all the time, we’ll buy ourselves a little bit longer in an old people’s home.
And so this morning, instead of lying down with a book about a secret agent called Clint Thrust, I was to be found hurrying through a small fruit salad so that I could make it to my fitness session on time.
It was all quite jolly to start with. We made jokes and pulled faces as we were made to jump up and down and stretch bits of elastic. But after ten minutes it stopped being jolly and we started to hate our instructor, who was a bit like that drill sergeant in Full Metal Jacket. After another ten minutes I started to wonder what he’d look like without skin, or a head, and I may have said this out loud.
For the final ten minutes none of us made a sound. We were too exhausted even to grunt. And then we had to do the wind-down, which involved adopting a series of extremely unnatural positions and leaning this way and that until it hurt. The position I wanted to adopt most of all was called ‘the Private Pyle’. I really did want to be on a lavatory with a mad stare and an M14 rifle.
An hour has elapsed since I gave the sergeant-major a fistful of dollars and I still don’t even have enough breath to light a cigarette. And I’m thinking, ‘I’ve been here for three days now and I’ve done nothing but play tennis and pick things up and put them down. I even went on a golf course yesterday and gave myself a cricked neck by repeatedly swinging my bat into the ground near where a ball was lying.’
And what has been achieved, exactly? Well, I ache everywhere. My buttocks, in particular, feel as though they have caught fire. My arms are so numb they can’t even pick up a glass of wine, and for what? So that many years from now I can suffer from Alzheimer’s for just a few more days.
You may imagine that I will at least have a less ridiculous-looking body as a result of these exertions, but I’ve just seen it in a mirror and I thought I was staring at a weird picture of a six foot five inch beluga whale with idiotic tan lines.
But this is the done thing today. And so when I get home I shall be compelled to employ a hundred Poles to create a vast subterranean world beneath my house that I shall then fill with bits of equipment that can be used to break my heart and my neck.
Except I won’t be compelled to do that. Because what this break means is that I’ve earned the right when I get back to spend a few nights on the sofa, watching television with a takeaway curry and a delicious bar of Cadbury Fruit & Nut chocolate.
21 February 2016
The NHS new towns are Nazi nonsense. We need Call of Duty garden cities
Having established that it’s jolly good at mending broken legs and even better at getting mildly political songs to number one in the hit parade, the NHS has decided it would like to start designing towns.
So it’s trying to sell us a vision of newly created urban areas where health is put at the top of the agenda. There would be no fast-food shops near schools, and children would be encouraged to go for a walk rather than sit at home shooting aliens and terrorists on their games consoles.
‘Virtual’ care homes would be created so elderly residents could speak to nurses and one another without going outside. And roads would be designed with special signs to help those suffering from dementia.
Of course, we’ve seen this sort of thing before. The Dutch have been building Camberwick Green-style cycling-friendly towns for years, and before that Hitler built the Prora resort, where German workers could go to the coast and do star jumps from dawn till dusk.
But it’s the first time that ‘strength through joy’ towns have been contemplated in Britain, and already ten areas have been identified as potential sites. I hope and pray, however, that none comes to fruition, because it’s the stupidest idea since Sir Clive Sinclair decided we’d all like to drive to work in an electric slipper.
The problem is simple. New towns, or garden cities as they are sometimes called, cannot work, because they are built to address the issues we face now. Not the issues we will face in ten or a hundred years’ time.
Take Welwyn Garden City, in Hertfordshire, as a prime example. A neo-Georgian town centre was erected in the 1920s, and all the roads were designed to be fringed with wide grass verges on which children could play with their hula hoops and the grown-ups could do star jumps. Lovely. But it was decided that lots of different shops would be messy and unnecessary, so just one was provided. Yup. One.
Then you had Milton Keynes. It came along in the 1960s, and by then planners had realized that more than one shop was a good idea. They’d also worked out that people didn’t want to do star jumps all day long and that they’d rather drive a car instead. So the town was chopped up into little pieces by a grid system of dual carriageways that had 70mph speed limits.
And there would be no pesky traffic lights. Every main junction was a roundabout so you could whizz about in your Humber or your Austin more speedily. I rather liked Milton Keynes. And I still do. But I think everyone else would argue that building a new town around the car isn’t really what we want today.
And that, as I said, is the problem. When they built the Tower of London, nobody sat back and thought, ‘Right. We’ve got the dungeons and we’ve got the portcullis, but what if, one day, we need to open a gift shop?’
And when the Romans decided Bath needed a communal swimming pool, did anyone say, ‘Yes. But what if one day everyone’s house has its own bathroom?’
Which brings me neatly to the outskirts of Poundbury, in Dorset, the Prince Charles creation where people can live in a town-sized tin of eighteenth-century healthy-living shortbread.
The idea is that it’s a complete mishmash, with no separate zones for shopping, business, the rich and the poor. Everyone lives, works and buys their groceries in one big potpourri of ‘Morning, Constable’, ‘Morning, Reverend’, Enid Blyton, Cider with Rosie awfulness.
This means you wake up next to a family of Romanian squatters and walk to the factory that makes organic birdseed breakfast cereal, and then you pop out at lunchtime for a hearty ploughman’s that takes four hours to buy because the shop selling the crusty bread is two miles from the shop that sells crunchy pickle, which is half a mile from the shop that sells manky apples full of dead wasps. And you can’t drive, because that’s bad for the polar bear, and you can’t buy the whole thing in one go from the supermarket thingy because supermarkets are horrid.
If you want that kind of thing, fine. But I guarantee that within ten years all the shops selling crunchy this and organic that will have gone out of business and the Romanian squatters will have nicked your bread oven and you won’t be able to get any sleep, partly because Prince William keeps landing his helicopter in your back garden and partly because of all the Amazon and Ocado lorries bumping over the organic sleeping policemen.
It’s going to be the same story with the eco-towns that are currently very popular with planners. Yes, the houses all have new-fangled central-heating systems, and windmills to get rid of the sewage, but the time will come, very soon, when we get all our energy needs from hydrogen fuel cells. And people living in a house with solar panels on the roof are going to feel pretty stupid as they huddle round a candle for warmth and eat their parents to stave off the hunger pangs.
That’s going to be the problem with these NHS towns. They sound tremendous in the here and now, but soon they will be made to look, by unforeseen event
s, idiotic.
Of course, fans of nationalization say that, unless we do something to address the issue of obesity, the NHS will go bankrupt and that these towns are therefore absolutely vital. But come on. Ten new Proras full of people with dementia crashing into people doing star jumps and children playing Hopscotch in the middle of the road isn’t going to cut it.
They’ll house, at most, half a million people, which means that there will be 77 million other people living in Welwyn Garden City and Milton Keynes and Bath who will continue to eat McDonald’s until they explode.
Or until someone works out that all the star-jumping is giving people heart attacks and that playing Call of Duty is actually good for a child’s mind.
6 March 2016
Call up the paparazzi army to take Brussels – and keep us in Europe
After a month of campaigning in a normal election, we are usually fed up with the mudslinging and the over-analysis and the infernal polls. But this Brexit referendum seems different, because it seems we are not.
Everywhere I go, people are asking the same thing. Are you in or out? Freed from the rich-versus-poor tribalism of a general election, everyone’s listening, everyone’s thinking, everyone’s calmly trying to make up their mind.
Of course, it’s being billed by the media as some kind of personal heavyweight showdown between Bouncing Boris and Call me Dave. Which would mean we’d have to choose between a man who has screwed up London’s roads to indulge his love for a Victorian transport system. And a man whose wife we quite fancy.
Sadly, however, we are not choosing which old Etonian we prefer. It’s more complicated than that and we need the proper campaigning because none of us really knows what’s for the best.
I have spoken in recent weeks to super-rich businessmen who do not know what an exit would mean for commerce and I’ve spoken to hedge-fund managers who are similarly clueless about the effect such a move would have on the City. These guys are opinion formers. They have the ears of ministers. And they’re all standing around at parties with their palms upturned and their shoulders shrugged saying, ‘We don’t know.’
If You'd Just Let Me Finish Page 12
