Ah, the joy of a free Press: which can (apparently) hang, draw and quarter us at will; Estonia goes for broke - it would seem literally

Like most countries, England, Wales and Northern Ireland (Scotland has its own legal system) try to ensure that those who come before its courts get a fair trial. And one way they do so is to enforce an aspect of the ‘contempt of court’legislation: once someone has been charged with a crime, the media can only report that fact and his or her name and address. This rule was once very strictly observed. and anyone straying beyond those bounds was severely bollocked and could even be jailed for contempt of court.
In the U.S., and for all I know other countries, they have a different tradition and even before a trial has started, the public can be assailed from all sides with lurid accounts of why the accused did it, how he did it, when he did it and what sentence he can expect when, as the media fully expect, he is found bang to rights. Furthermore, those same media feel no shame whatsoever when their lurid prognostications are found by a jury to be just so much bollocks. But as I don’t know too much about the legal system in the U.S. and other countries, I shall leave it at that.
I was a reporter for six years and attended a great deal of magistrate and Crown Court hearings, and the one rule we had to observe was that, in the phrase which we all know, the accused, who was only ever ‘the accused’, was ‘innocent until proven guilty’. So we had to be very careful what we wrote. One way of keeping to the straight and narrow was to stick that very useful word ‘alleged’ in front of everything.
That all changed, or rather I personally noticed that that had all changed, when The Yorkshire Ripper was caught. Peter Sutcliffe had murdered more than ten prostitutes in a number of years, and had slipped through the police’s hands more than once after being questioned. When he was finally arrested, the police said – whether informally or not – that ‘they were not looking for anyone else in connection with the murders’.
The message was broadcast loud and clear well before any possible jury would be allowed to consider the evidence: Sutcliffe did it. The irony is that had Sutcliffe chosen to plead not guilty at his subsequent trial, his lawyers might well have been able to claim the publicity ensured he would not get a free trial. In the event, he pleaded guilty. (One conspiracy theory claims the deal he cut with the police was that – as he was going down for life, anyway – he would be ensured to be sent to the far cushier Broadmoor, our hospital for the criminally insane, rather than a common or garden prison if he admitted to murdering several prostitutes he hadn’t actually done in. This, so the conspiracists claim, because the cops wanted to clear a couple of other murders from their books they knew Sutcliffe had not committed. The theory goes on the claim that there was not one but two ‘Rippers’, the second simply copying what Sutcliffe started.)
I was reminded of this by The Sun’s coverage in these past few days of a woman called Jo Yeates, who disappeared a few days before Christmas and whose body was found just over a week later. Jo and her boyfriend rented a flat from a retired English teacher who, it seems, was something of an eccentric. And within a day of telling police that he recalled hearing three people leaving her flat on the day she disappeared, Chris Jefferies, who is 65 and unmarried, was arrested ‘on suspicion of murder’. Crucially, he was only arrested for questioning. He was not charged. The Press, of course went to town: on December 31, The Sun had him bang to rights, not actually claiming he was Jo’s killer, but hinting broadly in that former pupils described him as ‘weird, posh, lewd and creepy’. It didn’t help matters that he ‘blue-rinsed’ his hair. (To be fair, other papers also pushed out the boat. The fact that I am only giving examples form The Sun doesn’t mean all the other papers behaved impeccably in this matter. It was also a stroke of luck that Jefferies had taught English at the nearby public school Clifton Colleger. Red top readers always like a ‘posh’ angle.)
A day later, The Sun produced further proof fingering Jefferies (pictured). It seemed he had ‘followed a woman’
who was a former acquaintance of the murder victim. Well! (was the implication), he’s your man! What sort of murdering weirdo does that! Except that perhaps he isn’t. He might be of course, but the police have now released him and warned that whoever killed Jo is ‘still on the streets’. That could, of course, also included Jefferies, but The Sun was careful not to make that connection. Jefferies, it admitted, had been released without charge, and it went on to quote a police chief superintendent: ‘Jo's killer is still out there somewhere. We will find them and bring them to justice. At the moment we don't know who killed her but we are determined to find out.’ Determined, eh? That’s good news, but it if very unfair to be snide about the cops who are doing their best and don’t give up. It would be far fairer to be snide about The Sun and The Mirror and all the other papers, the ‘serious’ papers included, who are only too prepared to hang, draw and quarter a man because he is odd, unmarried and blue-rinses his hair.
Naturally, I have no idea who killed Jo. It is as likely to be Jefferies as anyone else, and we could see him re-arrested and charged with Jo’s murder. And we could equally see someone entirely different arrested and charged. My point is this: why are the Press being allowed to drive a coach and four through established contempt of court legislation? In a way, the courts only have themselves to blame, in that they didn’t crack down on it sooner. Give them a yard and they will take a mile. I am not at all in favour of any legislation to curtail the Press (as many MPs who have been caught with their pants down or their fingers in the till are), but equally important as Press freedom – in which we take the rough with the smooth – is that our media should not act as judge, jury and hangman when it suits them, for which read when it is likely to boost sales of their rags.

. . .

I, for one, always admire courage, even of the foolhardy kind. There’s something noble about the knight who shoulders his lance, waves farewell to his damsel, then urges on his steed to gallop ever faster into certain death. So, I think we should raise a glass to plucky Estonia which on New Year’s Day ditched its old currency, the kroon, and embraced the future which is the euro. Not for them the safer waters of ‘well, given what’s been going on, wouldn’t it be wiser to slow down and see what happens?’ Apparently not.
I am obliged to be a little fairer, however, and concede that not all of Estonia is happy with the move. Just, it seems, the politicians. Those opposed to ditching the kroon in favour of the euro plastering Tallin with posters proclaiming: ‘Estonia. Welcome to the Titanic. Whether or not the hoi polloi are happy with the move depends on whose survey you read. The Estonian government reckons around half of the population support adopting the euro, while a survey commissioned by opponents claims only 34.3pc favoured the move, while 52.8pc opposed it.
This morning, the news from Estonia was gloomy. Estonians are finding it hard to come to grips with the new currency. Oh, well. You can't say they weren't warned.

. . .

The big news of the week – well, for some perhaps, although not me – is that Agnetha Whatever (the blonde one) would ‘not say no’ to an Abba reunion. To which the only sane response is: don’t do it. If there is one thing I have learnt, it is that one of the few principles worth a candle is: Never Go Back. Don’t go back to girl or boyfriends, don’t go back to an old company, don’t go back to live where you were once glad to get away and, particularly relevant for bands, don’t reform. Certainly, there will be more than enough old fans who will make it worth your while financially, but unless you are on your uppers and the taxman is breathing down your neck, stick to the principle and Don’t Do It. Ever. There is no sadder sight than some bunch of old farts, both men and women, bald, jowly, fat, paunchy, reliving their past glories and making a complete hash of it. Yes, they might be persuaded that ‘the return’ was a triumph, but that is usually by the promoter who makes a tidy bob or two and the manager who has had enough and wants to build up a nest egg.
There is a line in The Who’s song My Generation which runs: ‘Hope I die before I get old’. Well, two of them did – Keith Moon and John Entwhistle, but Daltrey and Townshend are now respected elder statesman and there is no sadder sight. Well, there is: the bloody Rolling Stones, still inexplicably billing themselves as the greatest rock band in the world, parading as though they can still cut it.

Sicily, The Leopard, food, Burt Lancaster, Visconti and was Dirk Bogarde merely ham or just a very bad actor?

There was an interesting programme on TV the other night (and I watched it on iPlayer) by the Italian food bod Antonio Carlucci about the novel The Leopard (Il Gattopardo) by (Prince) Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, the author, the novel’s emphasis on food and the meals eaten in the novel.
The novel is about the passing of the old order in Sicily with the invasion of the island by Guiseppe Garibaldi and the slow decline of a noble family, personified by the central character, Don Fabrizio Corbera, Prince of Salina. One of the points made in the novel (which I haven’t read) was that the way of life carries on as before in Sicily with the middle class and gentry taking over the leading role of the nobility. Despite Garibaldi’s invasion to make the island part of a greater Italy, nothing changes. The Prince opposes Garibaldi, but his nephew supports him, although cynically observes that ‘there has to be change in order for things to stay the same. Lampedusa (left) was also a scion of the Sicilian nobility, which also declined and whose various palazzi were destroyed or partially destroyed in the war. He wrote the novel, his one work, in the years before he died in 1955 and lived only to see two publishers reject it for publication. It was finally published in 1958 and became a sensation in Italy and has not been out of print since. As I say, I haven’t read the novel, but I have seen seen Luchino Visconti’s film starring Burt Lancaster, which I enjoyed. The casting was odd in the Lancaster, who didn’t speak Italian well enough to act in the language, spoke his lines in English and was then dubbed. The producers wanted a star name to justify the budget and when Visconti’s suggestion proved unavailable, Hollywood cast Lancaster (below) without consulting Visconti,
who was rather pissed off about it. Alain Delon, though, who played Tancredi, does speak Italian (I think). It’s rather a good film, though very long and not one for action fans. The only other two films by Visconti I’ve seen are Death In Venice and The Damned. I also rather liked Death In Venice, but - well The Damned? What on earth was that? A charitable but honest judgment could go no further than observing that it, and everything about it, is complete bollocks.
I thought it was perhaps the worst or, at best, one of the worst films I’ve ever seen. It is - and I’m obliged to add, in my opinion - simply terrible, terrible, terrible. I suppose it underlines the danger of reputation: Visconti had an excellent reputation as a filmmaker and, I should imagine, no one had the heart to tell him his new filmd The Damned (in Italian La Caduta Degli Dei) was complete crap. It must have been something like the Emperor's New Clothes.
Everything is wrong about it, the story, the acting, the direction. In its depiction of the Nazis, it struck me as being like one of those really hammy TV movies which are churned out on a budge to fit around the adverts.
. . .

Then there was Dirk Bogarde: why he is generally thought to be a good actor is beyond me. He was OK in all those light ‘n frothy Doctor films, but then he decided he wanted to be taken seriously (nothing wrong in that, though) and went for ‘serious’ roles. But as far as I am concerned the man couldn’t act his way out of a paper bag. There is a publicity
still from the film The Singer Not The Song in which Bogarde stars as a cowboy kitted out in black leather which sums up that man and his talent for me. Ham isn’t the word.
I have just searched on the net for it, but all I can come across are the one above and the one below. The shot of him lying down on the ground - why lying down on the ground? - is particularly ludicrous and gives a further dimension to the word ‘camp’. He seems to be truly unaware of just how ridiculous he looks. What was the man thinking?

. . .
Since writing the above, I did a bit more hunting and have come up with a third still from the film, which is quite possibly even more ludicruous than the one above.
 In most careers, the manage, who is generally thought to be a little more grounded, not to say saner, than the artiste he or she represents, warns about the possibility to looking ridiculous. But as in Bogarde's case his manager Tony
Forward was also his partner, perhaps he wasn't as alert as he might have been to the possibility that the film, from which these stills are taken, could kill Bogarde's Hollywood career stone dead. Which it did.
 I don't have a down on Bogarde, it's just that I don't think he was half as good an actor as he apparently did - he and several famous directors it has to be said. In the second half of his career - the 'serious' half - he did seem to make a pointt of acting in films with a gay theme, for example as the lawyer about to be outed as gay in Victim, of The Servant, which has marked gay undertone.
 I find him especially ludicrous as Julie Christie's lover in Darling, a film which has definitely not stood the test of time. What makes it all the sillier is that his character leaves his wife and family for Christie, who then does the dirty on him, and, in some way, we are supposed to feel sorry for him.
 The screenwriter was Frederic Raphael, who thought - thinks, he's still alive - awfully clever and tried to make every second line a quotable quote. (I've heard some things by him on the radio, and in them he did the same thing.) Unfortunately, all those lines did was to make Bogarde out to be something of a hissy queen. Mind, my stepmother use to fancy him like fury when he was younger. Shame he batted for the other side.
But that's enough Borgarde for the day.

Stay interested to live for ever: the man who disagreed but the Guardian thinks it's worth a punt

The big news of the week is that, quite apart from not being able to retire at 65, the government is now insisting that we all live to be at least 100. I can’t see the point myself. Reporting the news on Radio 4 yesterday, some hack managed to dig up an 108-year-old woman who said being over 100 wasn’t at all bad as long as you still managed to ‘take an interest in life’. To my ears, that sounds rather like establishing that staying alive is not particularly difficult ‘as long as you keep eating food and drinking water’. I once knew an old codger (I should write ‘older codger’ because the young things at work regard me as an ‘old codger’ these days) who lived to be 92. You can say he ‘still kept an interest in life’ because he carried on writing a newspaper column until more of less the week he died. It had appeared four days a week for the first 33 he worked on it (he didn’t actually establish it, although he took over were soon after it was established), and then weekly for the last 15 years. I shan’t say who it was, because that might strike some as name-dropping (and over these past few days I am becoming very sensitive and have become aware that my every jot and tittle might well be minutely scrutinised for any sign of flawed humanity - see below), but I include a cartoon from the chap’s column (tho’ as it’s in colour, I wonder whether it actually appeared, because
columnar illustrations were always in black and white) which, as it happens - I think be design - bears a marked resemblance to the chap himself. This guy was extremely well-read, known for his dislike of cant of any kind, sharp and very, very funny. I only knew him in the last 20 years of his life and towards the end he did rather lose interest in what went on. This puzzled me at first until I realised that by the time you have reached your 90s you will most certainly not have heard it all, but you will most certainly have heard a great deal of it. And as many of us have a very bad habit of repeating - regurgitating would be more accurate - what we have read and largely misunderstood, hearing some piece of mangled wisdom or a misquoted mangled witticism for the umpteenth time must get more than a little tedious. So he did get a little morose in his final years, although he and his wife managed two annual trips go Cornwall until the year he died.

. . .

Most certainly there are enough lively and quote-worthy centenarians to go around - more than enough for most industrious hacks to track down to obtain the necessary quote - but I feel that does put a rather phoney gloss on the issue. For example, almost four years ago, my stepmother suffered a very severe stroke and is now housebound. It happened when she had just turned 70, and the irony of it all is that compared to many her age, she was extremely active, spending all day gardening in the gardening seasons and taking her two dogs for a walk twice a day - one walk always being a long one, usually on the moor. She didn’t smoke, she didn’t drink a lot and she eat healthily, but suddenly had a stroke.

. . .

I’m sure we all know ‘old Jim’ or ‘old Susan’ who put man and women half their age to shame, they’re so active. But then I’m sure, if we’re honest, also know among our acquaintance many who, in attitude and outlook, have rather more than one metaphorical foot in the grave. I personally get thoroughly fed up with those around my age, and even younger, who wallow in nostalgia and bemoan how it’s all gone to the dogs and why, oh why, can’t they right a good tune these days! More acerbic - for which read wilfully critical readers - might now ask in that case, what on earth am I doing earning my daily shekel in the employ of a certain newspaper, to which I would reply: it’s very simple - I’m earning my daily shekel, and their shekel is as good as any one else’s shekel. And anyway, all that ‘golden age’ bullshit is nothing but an extremely successful marketing strategy. (Incidentally, it has occurred to me more than one: was there ever a golden age of golden ages? Is so that must have been a hell of a time.) As for successful marketing strategies, isn’t it about time the Guardian came up with one. I read the other day that it had sold off the Manchester Evening News to the Trinity Group, which strikes me as extremely daft beyond the call of duty, given that the Guardian hasn’t turned a profit in over 300 years and was wholly subsidised by the MEN and other local papers in GMG Regional Media. I have just looked it up and note the sale last March was for ‘£7.4m in cash and £37.4m in the value of a printing contract from which Trinity Mirror’, which I, who admittedly knows nothing about these matters, would have thought was pretty cheap. The remaining part of the Guardian Media Group is said to have ‘a strong portfolio which has to be in the right shape to achieve’ the goal ‘of securing the future of the Guardian in perpetuity’.
By the way, many cite ‘the Scott Trust’ as proof that at the heart of the Guardian beats a liberal conscience which eschews turning a profit as its prime motivating principle. The Trust itself claims the Trust was set up to safeguard the journalistic freedom and liberal values of the Guardian’. Well, not quite: it seems the Trust was established as a means of avoiding pay death duties which the then owner of the MEN felt could cripple the company. It has since been wound up and a limited company, The Scott Trust Limited, is now in charge. So bullshit isn’t just the sole preserve of the right-wing press.

Tweedledum and Tweedledee - note the ‘twee’ - gather on The Archers messageboard. And an invitation to all living ‘abroad’

Well, I think I’ve emerged from my dust-up with the goods folks who haunt The Archers messageboard reasonably unscathed. I’m not too sure what happened, what went wrong and why it all escalated in such an extraordinary way, but it most certainly got very silly indeed.
It all started quite innocently when, to help out a colleague who was subbing a piece about The Archers and was having trouble checking when one particular character was introduced, I volunteered to post a message on The Archers site asking for help. My message was headed ‘Urgent reply needed’ (and the fact that I had written it all in capital letters seems to have moved many Archers fans to fury) and I asked:
‘When Usha Gupta/Franks first join The Archers [sic]. A speed and accurate reply would be greatly appreciated.’
The first response (from Dusty Substances) came within minutes and though it wasn’t helpful, I can see the guy’s point:
‘No idea but I’m guessing you are post from a pub quiz? Dx
I replied that I wasn’t, but that a piece was going in the paper and we wanted to get things right. That was when there came the squall in what became a rather minor, though entirely redundant storm. Ermintrude wrote:
‘So the DM are doing a piece about a character who hasn’t been heard of for six months?’
I suspect even non-aligned readers of this blog will detect Ermintrude’s somewhat censorious tone and might accept my contention that had I said the Guardian, The Independent or even the Daily Telegraph was the paper involved, that tone would not have been adopted.
Dusty Substances returned with the answer we wanted:
‘1991 – according to The Archers Encyclopedia’,
but after that it all went downhill pretty quickly, although I must confess that my response to Ermintrude was not particularly diplomatic (but then why should it have been?)
‘Thanks for the 1991. As for the cleverclogs reply about an article concerning a character who hasn’t been heard for several months, it is a round-up of what has been happening over the years. Doh!’
But I sense that even without my reply, the mere mention of the Daily Mail made it open season for all the Mail haters out there: for this came from Dr Toad Leg:
‘High profile investigative journalism about how immigrants are taking British jobs perhaps?’
And on it went. Within a few messages the various sins of the Mail were raised such as its alleged obsession with house prices and the causes of cancer, until by Message 17, from some idiot who calls himself Marjorclanger, we get the usual prejudiced bullshit by people who are not quite as bright as they believe themselves to be:
‘Acerbic and to the point, not a fluffy poster then? Probably not a wind up IMO now. I stand illuminated and confirmed in my prejudice about most journos. Long live campaingner and debunkers, eg the child abuse in the Scottish Islands that wasn’t. As for all the other stuff written on the back of press releases or last night celebrities, well it fills the pages and passes the time.’
What?
After I was accused of being snide and had responded that a quick visit to the Guardian messageboard would illuminate posters what real hatred is all about, Majorclanger came back with:
‘A pity the Mail doesn’t go into such rough places!!! Lord Snooty and his pals from the La La Dem land would perhaps be STTC if the worm ever turned.’
What was – is – the guy talking about? But one thing one can conclude from his entry is that he is most certainly no Conservative or Labour supporter.
That was Message 21, and by Message 27, my sordid past finally caught up with me when BorchesterBolshevik, also not an ardent supporter of either the Tories or the Lib Dems, I should think, judging from his moniker, informed the other posters:
‘All the previous posts across the various BBC message boards seem to suggest a Daily Mail reader rather than a writer.’
After Auntie Rednosed Clockwise had accused me of being either ‘a fantasist or a troll’, miladou also went on the attack:
‘On the other hand, the poster is running true to journalistic type demanding that other people provide him/her with information IMMEDIATELY, rather than doing some actual research.’
In reply I pointed out that posting my query on The Archers messageboard was ‘research’, but as I had also addressed Auntie Rednosed Clockwise as ‘dumbo’, the post (Message 36) was subsequently removed by the ‘moderators’ at the Beeb for breaking house rules.
And so it went on and on and on, interminably, rather fruitlessly and utterly pointlessly, a booing and baaing of which Tweedledum and Tweedledee would have been proud. Whether I was Tweedledum or Tweedledee I shall leave it to the reader to decide. In Message 46 saffronlilly posted a link to this blog, which meant my reading figures went up tenfold in a matter of hours, which rather pleased me. (Such small things do.)
In Message 51, Chris-mas Kettle of Ghoti even suggested I didn’t exist (or something). He/she wrote:
‘For some reason, a person wanting information after seven in the evening for a piece that was purportedly going into a daily paper the following day struck me a high quality end-product of male bovine. Therefore I assumed that this poster was not being quite accurate in his assertions. However, if someone can be bothered to look through the rag in question tomorrow and find out whether it has anything about TA in it, that is up to whoever wants to do it.’
That struck me as a pretty lame ending to a rather grand ticking off, although the poster managed to establish his/her bona fides in that he/she didn’t read the Mail!
The whole thread meandered on until the current Message 151 (in which Organoleptic Icon wrote: ‘I think vegans run more towards “bloodless” ’ which only goes to show how nonsensical these threads can become.

. . .

What strikes me from these and other entries on the board, as well as the names posters give themselves, is how ineffably twee it all is. And I don’t like twee very much. I’m more a vinegar man than candyfloss.
The of-so-funny names of posters, all presumably self-imposed, are always a fair guide to how people regard themself, and it would seem this bunch think of themselves as rather a humorous lot. Oh well.
The other remarkable thing is the almost atavistic loathing many of the posters have for the Mail. Why exactly? It makes no sense. Surely to goodness they know – being the bright, intelligent and well-informed people they are or, at least like to think they are – that all the Mail does is to tell its readers what it thinks its readers want to hear?
All the papers do that, even the saintly Guardian (which this year surprisingly didn’t indulge in a seasonal bout of redundancy of its staff). Independent readers want to be reassured in their conviction that because we are all burning fossil fuels as though there were no tomorrow, the world will go to Hell in a handcart unless we do something! Now! The Guardian readers want to be reassured that the Tories are still the scum they always were. Times readers like to be reassured that being horribly middle-brow isn’t half as bad as they fear. Telegraph readers want to know that most certainly there will be further wars. And so on.
One final point: it might have struck some of you that my view of hacks is pretty similar to that expressed by many on the messageboard. But there are two important provisos. 1) I come at it from a completely different direction, and my general complaint is that hacks, with one or two honourable exceptions, are self-centred fuckwits. And, more crucially, 2) it’s all very well for me, a hack of almost 37 years standing, to slag off my colleagues and compadres, but I won’t stand for having some fucking civilians do it. Ever.

. . .

My best wishes for the New Year to all who don’t have the good fortune to live in Blighty. A look at the stats for this blog show that one or two people in New Zealand, The Netherlands, Ireland, the U.S., Canada, France, South Korea, Slovenia, Turkey, Russia, Japan, Germany, Poland, the Czech Repulic and China have all dropped in at some point or other, so you know who you are. I like to think they all stopped off for more than a brief time, but there’s no way of knowing that. Oddly, so far no one from South America has dropped by, but I don’t think there is anything sinister in that.
Courtesy of one particular reader – and because this reader values ‘comfort’, I shall only say he/she lives and works ‘abroad’ – the scope of this blog might broaden. For this reader informed me that were they (‘they’ being the modern way of getting around the ‘he/she’ dilemma) to recount some of their experiences in the country they at present call home, no one would believe them. So I invited them to send me accounts of those experiences which, if suitable – this blog operates a ‘no one over 18 policy’ as it does not want to risk being taken seriously – I shall publish. That particular reader can be reassured that I shall treat all their submissions with discretion and that, if they wish, they can cast their eye over what I plan to publish to avoid any indiscretions.
I should like to extend that invitation to everyone else who lives abroad. We Brits are always only to happy to learn what is going on in foreign parts, especially how much they envy our way of life. If you want to take up the invitation, please get in touch with me via this blog, I shall reply from a different email address to ensure communications can remain private.
As for the reader I was initially addressing, I trust that sofa will not prove to be too lumpy, and I should be interested in hearing whatever you have to recount, however outlandish it might seem. Remember, we here in Britain have to put up with people such as Richard Branson and Jeremy Clarkson, so outlandish really doesn’t bother us.

The Archers: urban fantasy or just pie in the sky? Baby give birth to Elton John, plus the joy of self-delusion

Through an odd quirk of fate, one or two fans of The Archers might find their way to this blog to check up on whether I really do exist. Earlier tonight I was trying to help a colleague who was subbing what is referred to as ‘page eight’ (why page eight I really don’t know). In it, A.N. ‘Andrew’ Wilson did the business Mail style about The Archers and how it should be exciting but not too exciting, should contain ‘drama’ but no ‘melodrama’, and how, unfortunately, it had become a little too right-on for words. I was trying to find out when one of the characters (a Hindu solicitor called Usha Gupta who went on to marry the local Anglican vicar as our indigenous Hindus so often do in deepest rural Brtiain) first joined the list of folk in Ambridge engaged in their daily battle with a bad script.
My colleague said she had tried the BBC Archers website but couldn’t find the relevant page on the character (she should have tried a little harder) so as I already have an account with which to log onto BBC messageboards, I volunteered to post a question asking for an urgent reply. Well, for some reason that was a red rag to a bull (or rather a lot of them) and an excuse for a general slagging off of the Mail, newspapers, journalists and Uncle Tom Cobley and all. Many, if not most, of the messages were pretty illiterate, many faux clever and almost all confirmed my suspicion that a great many Archers fans are a self-regarding bollockheads who are only too pleased to subscribe to an urban fantasy of rural life.
Although I work in London for four days a week, my home is in North Cornwall in a part of the country which could not get more rural, and believe me the rural life portrayed in The Archers is a kind of fantasy. It’s not that we don’t have gays – we had a gay publican – and it’s not that we don’t have drugs or any of the other problems portrayed in The Archers. But it's that we simply don’t have the sheer concentration of ‘issues’ aired in the soap. My brother-in-law is a beef farmer and another brother-in-law is a dairy farmer and both, although unlike in their interests (one is in the process of teaching himself the accordion) are pretty typical of farmers in our neck of the woods, and they are not interested in ‘cutting their carbon footprint’ and discovering ways of recycling. On the other hand this is exactly what libs up and down the country would like them to be interested in. What is so galling about The Archers is that quite apart from indulging itself and its listeners in a fantasy world, it runs a mile from the real world of rural life.
So, unfortunately, almost everyone I know is in favour of foxhunting whether they admit to having voted Tory or Lib Dem in the last election (and ironically I am not and also do wonder why so many people get their jollies by blasting shotguns at birds in the sky). But you do not hear that particular aspect of rural life aired in The Archers. So, dear Archers, fans in your urban towers, dream on.
In fact, given the recent spat with several Yanks on the IMDB message board, I am making something of a habit of upsetting idiots. It's all rather encouraging.

. . .

The breaking news of the day is that a baby in California has given birth to two men and that the three of them are destined to live happily ever after. The science of it all is still a
bit vague as there is no previous evidence of a baby giving birth to anything. (Strictly speaking, I should say previous reliable evidence as there is evidence that a baby born 2,000 years apparently ago gave birth to what, in time, became an overweening corporation worth billions of pounds which sold punters around the world the promise of everlasting life. That promise should not be mistaken for the pledges made by numerous lotions which claim to cure male pattern baldness, make your dick twice as long, or to make you irresistible to women – or men if that’s your bag – as they are apparently just a tad more respectable.)
The baby has announced it will call its offspring ‘Sir’ Elton John and David Furnish. There has already been a great deal of controversy over the news – quite apart from the unprecedented science involved – not least because the baby is denying completely that it was merely gaining two fashion

First picture of the baby's offspring (© Getty Images)

accessories which will be trotted out at showbiz parties and premieres. The three of them, the baby insists, will live as a ‘normal family’ and any suggestions to the contrary will be referred to its lawyers who will threaten such a legalistic shit storm if the allegations are not withdrawn that suicide by the guilty party would be the lesser evil.
In response to the news, forward-thinking organisations around the world (but not Nick Clegg apparently, who claims he has other things on his plate) insist it is every baby’s human right to give birth to two men if it so chooses and suggestions that it is merely an combination of consumerism and an unhealthy vanity which has taken a step too far belong in the Dark Ages.

. . .

The mutual shilly-shallying on The Archers messageboard reminded me once again how innocently prejudiced are many people who wouldn’t think of themselves as prejudiced in a million years. Many people bang on about the Mail being ‘full of hate’ and ‘racist’, yet, as I pointed out in one of my post on the messageboard, if you want the full Monty of hate-filled splenetic fury, just visit the Guardian messageboards where you will get more than you can handle. I remember once coming across a post hoping that ‘Thatcher will die of cancer’ and various observations along the lines of ‘Tories? Hanging’s too good for them. They should be dragged through the streets bollock naked, then hung drawn and quartered’. Yet I suspect that, if questioned, those who post such drivel would regard themselves are rather intelligent liberal types who see themselves as ‘broadminded’ and who ‘care’, though about what is rather vague. I suspect that, at the end of the day what they really care about is being thought well off by their peers.
If I were to write – and I think I have recently – that our capacity for self-delusion is infinite, the obvious riposte is ‘your capacity, too?’ and I would be obliged to agree. The trouble is that by its very nature quite in what ways I am deluding myself will always be rather hard for me to spot. To others it might be blindingly obvious from one hundred paces, but were they to tell me, I should imagine I would find it hard to believe I am guilty of what they suggest. If I had more integrity, I would undoubtedly spend the next ten to fifteen minutes reflecting on in what possible ways I am deluding myself. But, to be honest, I can’t be arsed. And I suppose admitting as much is a kind of integrity in itself. An example of self-delusion might well be how all the self-appointed great and good in Britain have, as one, united behind the cause of Julian Assange. Yet to my knowledge none of them has said a dicky bird about Bradley Manning, the young U.S. Army squaddie who made it all possible, but is now looking at 200 years in chokey for daring to upset the American establishment.