Everyone loves to bash Health & Safety regulations - and I’m no different.

How could I forget the insane anarchy which was Jnr’s seventh birthday party at the local sports centre - twenty kids charged up on coca-cola and Haribo, screaming at the tops of their little voices whilst racing pedal cars around an echoing volleyball court like a hundred manic Mr MacHenrys, to the soundtrack of *Squirtle’s choice, Public Enemy - when we were gently advised not to play ‘musical chairs’, for reasons of health and safety. You don’t say.

I’m all in favour of protecting workers in the workplace, having grown up surrounded by tales of farmers gored and farm hands with arms torn off in agricultural machinery, but my jaw fell open when I was told that if I wanted the external walls of the house painted in spring, I could no longer rely on an odd-job bloke with a good ladder as previously but, because we have ‘raised gable ends’ (whatever they are) and the regulations have changed, I would have to hire scaffolding for a day; it’s health and safety.

Do you know how much scaffolding costs?  Somehow I think the place is destined to disappear under the slow accretion of green algae next year.

So, I was intrigued last week when Channel 4 screened Cutting Edge: The Fun Police, a programme about about health and safety inspectors. I watched idly, out of the corner of my eye (a dangerous place) at first, but a few minutes in and I was hooked; the inspectors were doing an experiment, on custard powder.

I’ve always been fascinated by custard powder, it’s **thixotropic - it runs, but you can snap it, it flows, but if you stab it with a spoon it goes rock hard - which is an interesting phenomenon to observe if making custard is the most exciting thing you’ve done all day - mmn, anyway - but I bet you didn’t know this: custard powder has coal flour in it, which is explosable.’

Fantastic. I watched as they duly exploded some under ‘controlled conditions’.

‘Did it work?’ the cameraman said.

‘There is no ‘work’, or ‘not work’,’ the dour Inspector replied, ‘there is only data.’

This programme was developing charm. I felt for Ed Friend, too, a health-and-safety consultant who seemed like a nice well-meaning chap, as he read from Richard Littlejohn’s Daily Mail rant against his profession. In one particularly sustained and vitriolic tirade, dear RLj describes the inspectors as akin to ‘Stasi’. Ed’s voice was full of wounded outrage.

So, the next day, when I listened to The Archers - okay, I confess, I do listen to The Archers from time to time - it may be deadly dull, but like hot water bottles, cocoa and cough medicine, it’s comforting; plus, I love to hate it - I had my health and safety head on.

Jill Archer got some ropey old outdoor lights from Mr Pullen at the recent swap sale. She’s donated them to brighten up the Village Hall for Christmas. Phil has checked them and claims they work, but they’ve already blown the fuse once and what with the Christmas panto coming up…

Commentators love to indulge in predictions at this time of year, so here is one of mine: Christmas Archers Special (look away now!) I predict - FIRE!

Imagine it: The string of Christmas lights flicker and fizz, sparks land on a bit of discarded crêpe paper and smoulder away whilst the panto cast are trying so hard to remember Linda’s instructions as well as their lines, and the audience are distracted by the scenery shaking in a strange way, that no-one notices the smell of smoke…

Clarrie the reluctant pantomime cow will be horribly scorched (’Oww, Eddie’); Brenda will be trapped inside and heroic Tom ‘meat products entrepreneur’ Archer will wade in courageously only to burst in the heat like one of his wretched boring sausages. Matt Crawford will stumble out like the sleazy coward he is, going up in a boozy haze like a purple flaming sambuca. The scenery will ignite and crash down to reveal - collective gasp - posh Alice Aldridge and Christopher Carter, the blacksmith, in a semi-naked stand-up clinch…

All that will be left will be Joe Grundy grunting at the smouldering heap which was to have been the Ambridge Christmas Panto, muttering in his lugubrious way,

‘Health and safety, see, I told ‘em, health and safety.’

Nah. It’ll never happen. Shame, though.

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* Squirtle: Jnr’s nickname when small. Squirtle is a Pokémon, a bipedal turtle with its most notable feature being the hard shell on its back. This shell forms and hardens on its back after birth. [Wikipedia] I.e. Cute, full of beans, but tough.

**Thixsotropic: the property exhibited by certain gels of becoming fluid when stirred or shaken and returning to the semisolid state upon standing. [Dictionary.com]

[Highly unseasonal, this one - sorry - but I'm following a thread of earlier posts through to their natural conclusion.]

There is no easy way to introduce a subject like this gently: I’m an advocate of assisted death.

Perhaps because of my personal history - blogged last week - perhaps partly because of age - several of my fortywhatever friends are now beginning to experience the terminal decline of their own parents - or perhaps because it has recently become topical, this subject came over the wire as ready for some exploration.

In 1979, when my mother died, the treatment of terminally ill patients and the care of their relatives was primitive. As she approached the end of her life, my mother was given pain relief, but proper palliative care was still in its infancy and to put it bluntly, she suffered. As a lifelong atheist/Humanist, not tied to Christian ideas about sin and suffering, I know that if she had been able to choose, she would have chosen an assisted death in a heartbeat, but that option, then, was not only not available, it was in the realm of *science fiction, positively taboo.

Since then, there has been a gradual shift in the public perception of the concept of the individual choosing when to die which can be tracked partly by the language we have evolved to describe it. ‘Euthanasia’ - with it’s suggestion of chilly vet’s waiting rooms and soft-pillow murder - became ‘assisted suicide’ - still tainted with notions of illegality, sin, and squandered vigour, before transcending the emotive to become the currently accepted term, neutral, accurate - ‘assisted death’. According to a press release from the campaign pressure group Dignity in Dying,

‘Opinion polls consistently show that at least 80% of the UK population supports a change in the law on assisted dying.’

As recently as October, Britain watched multiple sclerosis sufferer Debbie Purdy fight to clarify the law around assisted death. This was followed shortly afterwards by the sad story of paralysed ex-rugby player, 23 year old Daniel James, who travelled to the Dignitas clinic in Switzerland to put an end to a life which for Daniel had become unbearable, the youngest Briton so far to elect to do so. Most recently, 13 year old Hannah Jones’ bold decision to refuse a heart transplant galvanised the debate. Medical advances are bringing unprecedented pressure to bear on the issues surrounding quality of life at the end of life.

Dignity in Dying go on to state,

‘Although only a minority of terminally ill people would exercise the right to an assisted death, many will take comfort in having this choice. At Dignity in Dying we believe that assisted dying forms part of a wider debate around choice at the end of life.’

There is no getting away from it; death is the one universal human certainty. For a culture which considers itself humane and enlightened, which has at its disposal all the advantages of modern medicine and science, all the accumulated wisdom of centuries of philosophical and spiritual inquiry, to cross into the third millennium continuing to bumble towards this certainty still pretending it isn’t waiting for each and every one of us, is, it seems to me, a supreme collective failure of imagination. Sooner, or preferably later, death must be faced.

Some of us will have accidents, some of us will die as a result of ‘lifestyle’ choices, some of us will live to be very old and develop natural ‘complications’, some of us, the lucky few, will even die in our sleep, as my father did, and some of us, according to Cancer Research UK, ‘approximately 1 in 4 people’, will die from cancer. Whichever way, we are all going to die.

Surely, it would behove our culture to try to help us face the fact by enshrining an option for assisted death?

Hand in hand with the idea of assistance, as ‘Yea, though [we] walk through the valley of the shadow of death’‘, is the concept of the ‘good death’.

Increasingly, those who work with the sick and dying, those who counsel their loved ones, talk of living wills and the good death. In essence, this notion goes beyond the secular, scientific idea that death is simply a medical matter to be controlled by advanced palliative care, managed and endured; those who have been close to the dying know that some levels of pain simply cannot be ‘managed’, they are immune even to the most powerful opiates.

The concept of the ‘good death’ also swerves away from the passivity underpinning the major religions, that in relinquishing life, we must by definition relinquish all control and submit to - what? - the whim of a capricious god? - the falling out of good or bad luck? - the endurance of outcomes with stoicism and an eye on the ever-after?

Balanced against the harsh reality of death, the best guides, the hospice workers, the pastors, priests and social workers, be they religious, Humanist, or psycho-social practitioners, recognise that it is possible to offset an assisted process, the lighting of a path towards acceptance not only of mortality but of ‘biographical pain’ - not exactly secular ‘confessional’, but akin to it - a way of accepting  and letting go of the psychic pain you have carried, the pain that others have caused you, the pain you have caused others.

A ‘good death’ means providing an opportunity, however short, however premature, however difficult, for the dying and their friends and family to come to terms with the inevitable, the end of a life. It is a bold ideal, but one whose time has come.  Individually and collectively, religiously or with secular commitment, ideally, we would all do well to prepare for a good death, but to do it, we need the assistance of a three-fold, interdisciplinary approach, a supportive and humane medical, spiritual and legal framework.

Strangely, I find myself quoting from a paper [2005] by Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury,

‘The right to be spared avoidable pain is beyond debate - as is the right to say yes or no to certain treatments in the knowledge of factors such as these. But once that has mutated into a right to expect assistance in dying, the responsibility of others is involved, as is the whole question of what society is saying about life and its possible meanings. Legislation ignores these issues to its cost.’

It really is time our litigators caught up with the public mood, moved forward, and helped us plan for our time of greatest need by embracing the concept of assisted death and wrapping it securely in laws we can all depend on. Should I find myself, at some dim and, hopefully, distant point in the future, ill, vulnerable and disempowered, I can state for the record - assisted death - I’m counting on it.

I would like to end this post with a joke about a doctor, a priest and a lawyer, just to leaven things a little here, but I can’t for the life of me think of one…  Instead, I’ll draw your attention to this:

Next week, on 08-12-08, BBC One will be showing I’ll Die When I Choose, a thirty minute programme about politician and Parkinson’s Disease sufferer Margo Macdonald. According to the BBC synopsis: ‘in this deeply personal film, she uncovers the truth about assisted dying, meeting those with illnesses like hers who are desperate to die, and exploring how British law could be changed to allow them to choose when they can.’

And finally, as we face the final curtain on this subject, returning to the mention of *science fiction, I remembered this scene from the 1973 dystopian cult sci-fi film Soylent Green. In a famous scene, Edward G. Robinson’s character, Sol Roth, elderly and tired of all the greed and corruption around him, takes his life to its natural conclusion; he enters a pre-paid contract to die by the administration of a lethal drug at the hands of a pretty nurse. In his last moments the planet he is leaving behind, the evanescent beauty of having lived on it, are vividly recalled through images and music.

The introduction to Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony is not the music I would choose, but you’ll get the idea…

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Additional resources: mariecurie.org: End of Life: The Facts

Personally, I like nothing better than to see a bloke whacked with a plank, but Russell Brand’s recent walk-the-plank act left me stony-faced. He - and Jonathan Ross - were in the news again today, so I thought it’d be timely, given the last few posts, to take a detour down laughter lane…

(Christ! TFFT!)

Humour is a huge subject, probably too big to do anything like justice in an idle blog post - philosophers, academics, commentators and playwrights, have, after all, been trying to analyse humour for centuries and who am I to add my twopenn’orth? Well, I’ll tell you. You probably think I’m one of the serious sort and you’re not wrong, but I do strive for balance and what better reason to become familiar with the intricacies of comedy?

As a fortywhatever woman I’m sure I don’t need to provide an excuse for an opinionated rant, either, or give it any kind of context but just for once I’ll list my credentials for you.

Er… I’ve read The Name of the Rose? I really did LOL to Portnoy’s Complaint?

No. Seriously, I’ve been a fan of stand-up comedy ever since I was old enough to pay my own way in and I’ve seen a broad spread of acts over the years at pubs, clubs and festivals, ranging from the bland (sorry Lenny Henry), through Eighties political correctness (Jo Brand, Ben Elton etc.) via the downright offensive (Jerry Sadowitz, Bill Hicks, Ian Cognito) to the gentle faux air-heads like Eddie Izzard, Ross Noble and Alan Carr.  I’m even fairly up to date on the latest crop of  Noughties vicious irreverents - like Charlie Brooker and Jimmy Carr. I love L.D - oh yes - and - I taught Trevor Griffiths’ play, Comedians, for three years in a row to a bunch of 16-19 year old goths and emos. In Weston-super-Mare. What a hoot that was.

More than that though, if you’re a parent, to some extent you have to work through your philosophy on humour. It’s all about those magical, fluctuating but important phenomena psychologists call ‘boundaries’. The first time you laugh at baby’s farts you can set the tone. Likewise, the first time you see baby slip in a paddling pool or walk into a door, watch out, you could be on your way to creating the next ‘class clown’.

Take my family. No really, please, take my family… in our house we’ve been having an ongoing debate about slapstick versus *scatology. Living with two males, one a schoolboy, the other… where do you draw the line? How low do you go? Often, increasingly recently, I’m driven to flip-out over one joke too far, especially at mealtimes. Is it an age thing? A gender thing? Moreover, which wins, slapstick or scatology, which is ‘best’?

You see, as I said at the start, I’m not averse to the odd bit of slapstick, that shiver of schadenfreude which makes me, in the eyes of my family, a bit of a sadist. Scatology and slapstick have in common that they both tap into your ‘inner child’ - gawd ‘elp you if you haven’t got one - I just prefer other people’s pain to their poo, is all.

I want to tell you a story: I had a boyfriend once who was outraged by my preferences. Mind you, he was particularly accident prone. We lived together in an old cottage for a while. The toilet was downstairs at the end of a narrow, twisty and steep staircase. He had a weak bladder, so he kept a piss-pot under the bed which he would empty in the morning. He also happened to be taller than the door jamb.

One morning when he was in a rush for work, carrying his piss-pot and negotiating the turn in the stair well, he whacked his head on the door jamb, slipped down the stairs and sent the piss-pot up into the air. It didn’t end there. Whoosh! The piss-pot came down again. On top of him. I saw the whole thing.

I’m ashamed to say I couldn’t stop laughing, not for about an hour. I mean, I ran and got a cloth, ice, a clean shirt, you know, tried to help, tried to commiserate, but… I don’t think he ever quite forgave me.

Slap and scat.  Crossover comedy? Not quite poo, but win/win, nonetheless.

Anyhow, back to scatology. Perhaps rather than an age thing, it’s a ‘family culture’ thing? (See boundaries, above.)

My parents were post-Victorians. They liked Music Hall, and The Goons, and Monty Python, but not poo jokes. J’s parents are post-Edwardians. In some respects the Edwardian era was a response to the Victorian one, and scatological humour was popular at the time, apparently, precisely as an antidote to Victorian primness, which may explain a chaotic informal parlour game I have privately come to call ‘Pee, Po, Willy, Bum, Fart’ which in essence involves my in-laws showing off in front of the grandchildren at mealtimes…

[Oh. The Youtube intro to Filth: The Mary Whitehouse Story, with the soundtrack version of Flanders and Swan's Pee, Po, Belly, Bum, Drawers seems to have disappeared. Will search for a replacement...]

See. Culture clash. Whaddya do?

It does help these kinds of marital misunderstandings if you can at least trace them back to something. If I were to get all serious again, I’d look to Freud.

In Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, to paraphrase a learned friend, ’scatological (or ‘excremental’) jokes are a like ‘obscene’ jokes in general.  Freud seems to believe obscene jokes are a deflection of a sexual urge - you joke about sex because you want to have it - often with the person you’re joking with - but you can’t directly say so.’  (Which is perhaps why I find my in-laws jokes so disturbing…)

How can jokes about poo be ’sexual’?

‘Well, they echo back to the excretory functions which are attached to the ‘erotogenic zones’ (oral, anal, phallic) which are sexualised (because sensualised) during childhood.  If you think about it, excretory and erotogenic impulses persist in some adult sexual preferences…’

Whoa. I’ll stop there.

For Freud, excremental humour is an expression of an impulse that is both sexual and infantile and so it is a manifestation of infantile sexuality - ergo poo jokes are childish. Genius.

I’m not sure where that leaves slapstick, but according to that well known philosophical barrel of laughs, Theodor Adorno: Schadenfreude is the: “largely unanticipated delight in the suffering of another which is cognized as trivial and/or appropriate.‘

Appropriate! No harm done. So does that mean slapstick ‘trumps’ poo? I win?

Anyhow, on to higher things.

In the best comedy, though, the target of the humour, if not the comedian themselves, is diffuse, and the laugh which results from it comes at the expense of no-one in particular. There is no one single butt, just a we’re-all-in-it-together observation about the human condition in general, which alleviates (psychic) suffering and resonates with a laugh. Good comedians make this look easy, but it is actually much easier to crack a one-liner - linguistic trickery, it’s the way you tell ‘em - or to aim the joke at someone else.

Which brings me back to Russell Brand.

He’s clearly a clever chap, but his ‘brand’ of humour - increasingly popular, I know - leaves me cold. Instead of seeking to illuminate the human condition, he seems to set himself apart with sneers. I don’t get his appeal, not as current funny man-of-the-month, not as anti-establishment rebel without a cause (¿Que?) and certainly not as big-hair sex object. I wouldn’t have gone so far as to complain to Ofcom about his recent jape with Jonathan Ross, but I did think they acted like a pair of snickering schoolboys with their silly knock-and-run trick.

It was cheap and mean and sleazy.

But then, I’m not a big fan of the current fashion for ‘punk ‘em, prank ‘em and watch ‘em eat bugs’ either.

It strikes me that one of the dangers of the digital culture wherein every pratfall, blooper, faux-pas and drunken ramble can be captured, transcribed, blogged or posted on YouTube, is that stories like ‘Piss Pot’, above, could carry on haunting and humiliating the poor victim for years after the event.

Mmn. Perhaps if I’d had a camera phone back in 1996 I could’ve come away with the sofa and the stereo…

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*Scatology: n: obscenity, esp. words or humour referring to excrement.

Too long, this one. Sorry. Notes for something.

As Henry James said,

It is difficult to speak adequately, or justly, of London. It is not a pleasant place; it is not agreeable, or easy, or exempt from reproach. It is only magnificent.

The magnificence of London is a daily assault on the psyche and the senses. I lived there in my twenties and had a magnificent time, but just as I loved London, I hated it almost as fiercely. The two impulses were rarely reconciled. Eventually, when I was able to sustain such a tempestuous relationship no longer - the torrent of contradictions was too much for me - London and I became estranged.

I worked my way westwards, back towards the sea, *where the air is clean, the people are friendly, and everybody is in love.

But the pull of London is still there, like weak elastic. Sometimes it snaps me back. I went there last week. Here, in no particular order, are some of the things I saw.

Annie Leibovitz exhibition at The National Portrait Gallery:

Some of Leibovitz’s photographs - like the Vanity Fair cover of pregnant Demi Moore with bling, like the shot of Brad Pitt in Vegas - I find gimmicky, but this composition is arresting on several levels.

Leonardo DiCaprio is depicted as - what? - a beautiful Greek God? Zeus? Fledged ugly duckling? Or is he Leda - part of a gender reversed tableau from Leda and the Swan? - raped by fame?  The swan is a question mark asking, ‘What will the child/man become?’ Does he love the swan, or has he killed it? Is it drugged? Or dead?

Close up, the texture of Leo’s hair looks like reeds in the wind.

Those shots of Marilyn Monroe on the slab were exploitative; this photograph of Susan Sontag, deceased, is different.  It is permissible (in my view) because of the lifelong connection between the subject and the artist. Susan Sontag died as a result of complications following breast cancer treatment. Leibovitz chose this glamorous Fortuny dress and shrouded Sontag in it for the picture. The image is disturbing, startling in its intimacy.

In her book On Photography, Sontag states,

“picture-taking is an event in itself, and one with ever more peremptory rights - to interfere with, to invade, or to ignore whatever is going on”.

In the light of her comment, for her lover, a photographer, the deathbed portrait becomes almost obligatory.

Time for a stiff drink:

Loungelover: Ladykiller: 42 Below Feijoa vodka and Arette Blanco tequila muddled with mint and fresh lime and crowned with a Rosé Champagne float.  Served tall and frappé.

On the way, I saw this advert:

‘Someone sneezed nearby.

Their germs will be with you shortly. Boost your immune system with Echinabrand.

Text ‘GERMS’ + ‘YOUR NAME’ to get a free information pack today.’

Fran Lebowitz said London is,

‘a place you go to get bronchitis.’

On the tube, this poem by Robert Graves:

She Tells Her Love While Half Asleep

She tells her love while half asleep,
In the dark hours,
With half-words whispered low:
As Earth stirs in her winter sleep
And puts out grass and flowers
Despite the snow,
Despite the falling snow.

Everywhere, headlines about ‘Baby P’:

Beside me, a few seats up, I saw a schoolgirl with a baby on her lap. The cream-coloured baby-gro was really grubby. I looked closer. The baby was a doll. She was a bit old for a doll. I looked again. The doll had no head. There were wires coming out of its chest leading to an I-Pod.

When we stood to leave the carriage, the girl frowned irritably and held the baby by the toe of its garment. It dangled there, headless, upside down.

It was one of those simulation babies given to girls ‘at risk’. They’re supposed to act as a contraceptive/deterrent.

Sarah Lucas: Penetralia:

I’ve blogged about Sarah Lucas before, she’s one of my favourite Brit Artists, so when I read about this current exhibition, a visit was on the cards. The exhibition was billed as:

a series of objects assembled from plaster casts of penises and flint…. to pose a challenge to ideas of gender stereotypes and sexual allegory…. in some of the sculptures bits have snapped off and been stuck back on…. a performance between artist and model.

The exhibits work as artefacts from an archeological dig, as objects from museum cabinets, or evocations of ritual and fetish, as funny bones.

I rather enjoyed the sunny morning walk through Mayfair to the exhibition, as well.

What else?

Bacon at Tate Britain. Rothko at Tate Modern.

Both very good. There was a display at the Rothko using UV light analysis to demonstrate the artist’s layering technique. Illuminating.

Oh, and some woman called me a cunt.

Why?

After seeing her aggressive and badly behaved small child whack a wobbly old man on the hip as he passed in the aisle on the train, I had the temerity, when same child grabbed the edge of my coat with every appearance of hanging on forever, to look him in the eye and - gently, mind you, nicely - ask him to please let go…

Snap!

* Frank Zappa : The Lost Episodes

At 9:17pm this evening, ITV will be showing a potentially life-saving public information film, billed as ‘not the Hollywood heart attack, but the reality of a heart attack.’

Clear those diaries people!

For guess who is to play the role of the afflicted one? None other than the multi-talented playwright, actor and theatre director, Steven Berkoff.

I’ve seen Steven Berkoff in Sink the Belgrano! East, West, Greek, Decadence, Kvetch, Metamorphosis and The Fall of the House of Usher. In every performance he was unforgettable - brilliantly twisted, violent, angst-ridden - utterly compelling.

Berkoff is without doubt one of my favourite all-time luvvies, the uncrowned master of the red-faced, vein-bursting, apoplectic (meaningful) hissy fit.

This new British Heart Foundation advert is a must see.

I can only describe the casting as a stroke of genius.

(Yes, sorry. Sick.)

Well, ladies, what do you think of this weather, then? It’s grim, isn’t it?

Here’s something which might cheer you up.

I’ve never been a fan of day-time t.v., but sometimes, if I stop for lunch at the right moment, I do watch the BBC News at One.

As the news comes to an end and the anchorwoman, Kate Silverton, or Jane Hill, is about to introduce the weather forecast, a little frisson passes between her and the (as yet unseen) weatherman. The bespectacled one is almost flirty. Then, with indulgent, slightly proprietorial tones, she’ll say, ‘And now for today’s weather. It’s over to’ - and I knew who it’d be when Kate perked up - the News at One’s very own cheeky chappie, none other than - ‘Tomasz Schafernaker.’

However dire the news, however grim the weather, fierce gales or blazing sunshine, the mood lifts. Our faces relax. There he is. The world at one ‘o’ clock can’t be all bad, not if Tomasz is telling it.

Maybe it’s in his earnest hand gestures - the way he swirls them passionately, but vaguely, inaccurately, across the weather board - as if trying to create for us a break in the clouds.

Perhaps it’s because we remember the time last year when, in an attempt to minimise the gloom, he tried to explain that only a very small minority of viewers were going to experience the bad weather, and gaffed,

“The nicest of the weather is across Northern Ireland and parts of Scotland,” he said, and, as the graphic rolled across northern Scotland, added: “This lumpy stuff you can see here, these clouds have actually been producing a few showers, but it’s mainly in the Western Isles, mainly in Nowheresville, and it looks as though the east of Scotland will keep the sunshine.”

Nowheresville? The few, but vociferous viewers on the isles of Lewis, Harris and Skye were not impressed. But the rest of us? We just loved his apology.

There’s something irrepressible about him, like that time he got the giggles over the ‘frozen ball‘ incident.

And there was that time recently, when we saw him compose his serious face, heard him put gravitas into his voice. He didn’t want to tell us, but he had to; it was a dirty job and somebody had to do it. The nation was about to be battered by severe gales, in June.

After a minute of evident discomfort as he delivered the weather warning, we watched his face brighten, the relief was palpable, there would be ‘light at the end of the tunnel’, and by Monday, we were told, the outlook was ‘actually not too bad’.

Tomasz looks on the bright side. We like that one of his favourite phrases is, ‘a lot, lot better’.

Tomasz wants to deliver the good weather. He wants us to be happy. And so we try to be.

Some days, we half expect TomSchaf to break into a tap dance.

Plus, we’re sure we know what he’ll wear in Panto.

If we could only knit, we’d knit him a jumper for his cheeky ickle face. Yes we would.

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According to his biog on The Beeb,

Tomasz was born in Gdansk, Poland and attended school both in his native Poland and in the UK.

Tomasz joined the BBC Weather Centre as a Broadcast Assistant and became the youngest male to present regional BBC Weather forecasts at the age of 22.

Tomasz lives in west London with his two housemates, he enjoys jogging and his local gym. He frequently travels to Gdansk but he also loves the climate of south Florida and one day would wish to live in the surrounds of palm trees and tropical weather where highs reach the “90s”!

According to Wikipedia, ‘whilst Tomasz is a very talented artist his real passion was always for the weather.’

Tomasz can be seen on News24, BBCi as well as BBC World.

Funny how threads come together. Teeth. Patty Hewes. Just a moment ago I saw a trailer for a new movie, Teeth. I can’t believe it. Is this just pernicious schlock-horror, teenscream nonsense, or is it part of an expression of a new (more overt) cultural anxiety? I haven’t seen it yet, maybe I shouldn’t pre-judge, but here is the synopsis:

(No, I’m not going to link to the web site.)

‘High school student Dawn works hard at suppressing her budding sexuality by being the local chastity group’s most active participant. Her task is made even more difficult by her bad boy stepbrother Brad’s increasingly provocative behavior at home. A stranger to her own body, innocent Dawn discovers she has a toothed vagina when she becomes the object of violence. As she struggles to comprehend her anatomical uniqueness, Dawn experiences both the pitfalls and the power of being a living example of the vagina dentata myth.’

Someone tell me - please - what is going on?

As you know, I just love a good American crime serial.

After racing through The Wire too fast this winter (Omar gone :( ), I was starting to feel a void post-watershed, so when I came across the blurb for Damages, a new legal drama which has been a big hit Stateside, I thought I’d found a filler. It has at its centre a ‘brilliant but-ruthless’ litigator played by Glenn ‘I’m-the-Mama-bunny-boiler’ Close, and a pretty young ingénue lawyer about to embark on her shiny new career. Together, you are led to believe, they will penetrate the evil forest of corporate greed and corruption to nail the Big Bad Wolf, charismatic billionare businessman, Ted ‘I’m-still-quite-sexy-even-with-grey-hair’ Danson. Betrayal, revenge, twisted female rivalries, psychological torment, blood - excellent - right up my street, I thought. So I queued it up and waited for the first DVD to arrive.

The Wire, it seems, has succeeded in stretching the popular viewing attention span beyond the self-contained fifty minute mini-narrative, and trained it up for the long haul. Damages, like The Wire, promised a convoluted, extended storyline which builds over the season. Great.

I determined to reserve judgement until I’d watched the first three episodes, which I did over three evenings. Before long, I realised that Damages is simultaneously more simple and more disturbing than I’d expected.

Glenn Close has the kind of hatchet-sharp features which make her perfect to play a witch, (as in Fatal Attraction), and the noir-ish camera work and dark interiors combine to make her character, Patty Hewes, suitably sinister. In some shots her eyes glitter, they are black. Ted Danson, on the other hand, is pure poster boy; his character, Arthur Frobisher, twinkles, he moves through the narrative in a halo of smiles and all-American affable charm.

Sounds like pantomime, doesn’t it? Well, the first episodes were exactly that. I kept watching expecting there to be a twist. Patty (’since I was six years old I’ve known I would die a violent death‘) will soften, I thought, whilst Art (’I struggled with my dyslexia‘) will be revealed to be a venal, destructive egomaniac. As for the beleaguered ingénue lawyer, Ellen, making all the wrong choices on her unwitting path to hell, well, surely she will turn out to have some depth? Or something.

On the simple level, then, I was disappointed. The psychology is paper-thin. The plot, such as it is, rather than being intelligent and convoluted, challenging and unpredictable, is just turgid, incomprehensible and full of pointless red herrings. The acting is good, but it’s wasted against such a tortuous backdrop.

For sure, Patty Hewes is driven, there is no doubt that she’s out to get her man (and we suspect sexual rejection somewhere along the line), but the details of Frobisher’s corporate crimes (a Maxwell-like pension heist, compounded by bribery and murder) fade into the background fast, and we’re left puzzled, ‘What can this nice man with his even teeth possibly have done to deserve such a heinous harpy in hot pursuit?’

This is the part I found disturbing. Having now watched Season One nearly to the end, I can only conclude that Damages is a deeply reactionary show, both in its sexual politics and in the broader sense. ‘Trust no-one.’ The women characters are either psychotic (like Lila, who stalks Ellen’s Nice-Doctor Boyfriend) or flaky (like Katie Connor, the Unreliable Witness, or Frobisher’s quivery, Neurotic Ex-Wife), the lacklustre men, in their attempts to get by doing a dull but decent day’s work, seem preyed upon (Ray) and misunderstood (Gregory). There is even a dream sequence where the Doc and Ellen begin making love, she takes a playfully dominant role, pushes him onto the bed, he closes his eyes and when he opens them, he discovers - the horror - that Ellen has turned into ball-breaking Alex - er - Patty. Oh, and Patty (like Alex, who came back from the dead, remember?) has supernatural powers, too. It seems she can get into rooms which were apparently locked. Twice she materialised unexpectedly to confront a character in the toilet. What is that all about, Dr Freud?

Patty Hewes is no Erin Brockovitch, we see in her no empathy with her clients, the underdogs, no real motivation to undertake the class action lawsuit, rather she is portrayed as Kali, goddess of destruction, out to undermine initiative and enterprise (the male impulse?) at all costs. Why? Because, over-educated and excessively empowered (the subtext implies), she can. She is The Bad Mother, to blame, we are led to deduce, for the drug-seeking weakness in her teenage son. She is no equal opportunities employer, either, preferring to unsettle her minions with favoritism, grandstanding and self-serving manipulation. Patty Hewes is a female shark, irredeemable, it seems, shown as incapable of sharing power, threatened by anyone who has genuine merit, or who matches her intellect.

More importantly, Ellen Parsons, the doe-eyed ingénue character, is learning, along, I fear, with the DVD-watching young women who watch this show, to beware single-mindedness and ambition in a woman - not to be like Patty Hewes, to be anything but THAT and - perhaps - to seek happiness elsewhere, by being more like Ugly Betty or the protagonists in several narratives I’ve noticed emerging lately, to be more like Juno, to steer clear of losing their womanly souls to the Devil [who] wears Prada and go back to… having babies younger and staying at home?

No doubt it is a great role for Glenn Close, as was Alex Forrest in Fatal Attraction; Patty Hewes is a fantastic pantomime villainess, but I’m suspicious of the subtext in Damages. The popularity of the show, getting away with such a validation of naked misogyny beneath the guise of a harmless, if dark, fairy tale, profoundly depresses me.

Nope. Don’t think I’ll be watching Season Two.

The new series of Shameless started recently.

Shameless kicked off in 2004 as a ground-breaking, gritty family drama set in Manchester. The key words in IMDB say it all, really: head butt, family, housing estate, car thief, working class. It was slow to gain viewers, but then it caught fire and won a strong, loyal following and countless awards.

Three weeks ago, I began to watch the opening episode of Series 5, but ten minutes in and I became aware of that disburbing feeling; you know, the one where suddenly you realise that all your positive commentary about something is going into past tense, like the remember-when-we-used-to-have-fun? moment which happens in relationships. That moment had arrived for yet another piece of good t.v. Shameless was just not doing it for me any more, it had become lacklustre, predictable, wooden; Shameless had *jumped the shark.

Just as with the what-on-earth-did-I-see-in-him? moment, I sat down to remind myself about what, exactly, I’d liked about Shameless in the first place.

The show used to have compelling, convincing flesh and blood male characters, likeable and exasperating by turns, as they struggled with maintaining their masculinity in the face of unemployment and black market, no-hope jobs; the men are now hapless shadows of their former selves.

Shameless had edgy story-lines, realism mixed with surrealism; this thread has diverged into scatology and farce. The show captured human frailty, dysfunction and grinding economic entrapment, but, if this sounds grim, cleverly offset it by showing pragmatic survivalism and a sense of anarchic community.

It took me nearly the whole episode to work out why the things I had liked about Shameless were no longer working for me.

Tracking it back, I think the show started to go down hill when the actress who played breathy, nymphomaniac Sheila Jackson, Maggie O’Neill, left, at the end of Series 3. When interviewed on Radio 4 shortly afterwards, she hinted that the direction the scripts were going in didn’t fit with her politics. Sheila, with her oversized sex toys and OCD behaviour, was becoming reduced to a figure of fun.

It had been the female characters who kept me watching. They had foibles by the bucket-load; the circumstances of their lives, motherhood in poverty, lack of choices, had driven most of them half bonkers, but they, Sheila included, were surviving, somehow. The women were oh, so believable. But after Series 3, I began to notice that the female characters were starting to balloon; the storylines were distorting them into cartoon caricatures. The message teetered on the edge of misogynistic.

The jumped-the-shark moment, for me, came last week, in episode two, with the conflation of misogyny and the grotesque. Mimi Maguire, the hefty, aggressive wife of the show’s Irish drug-dealing gangster, was lamenting the burden of her weight. The situation dovetails neatly with the Government’s initiative on obesity. Now, we all know that soaps are used to deliver subtle social messages, and that’s fine, but did the scriptwriters really have to resort to humiliating the actress in a stripey 80’s aerobics outfit, have her roll around on an exercise mat like a Weeble, and then utter the line,

‘I have to face it, I’m a fat fuck…I’m a fucking fat fucker’?

Mimi had acquired shame.

It’s not that I don’t want some kind of rock-bottom and rescue for these characters, that I’d like to see them condemned forever to a fictional purgatory, or that I don’t believe in redemption from poverty and dysfunction, but the more the script writers have turned up the therapy-speak and increased the frequency of pat extracts from the individualist’s mantra, ‘you can be who you want to be’, the more I’ve turned off.

Are we really going to be asked to believe that Frank can be put on the right programme and fixed? That Monica, after eighteen years of chaotic bad parenting is going to ‘get it right’ with the next one?

Surely, the introduction of shame defeats the whole premise of the show? These characters existed in a (fictional) environment which was precisely beyond the control of the individual; the show was warm and funny because they thrived in spite of it. I thought that was the point. Acquiring shame in the world of Shameless turns the show into something else.

Shameless is still warm, still funny, still, on the whole, humane, but the sparkle, that frisson of wild unpredictability, the sheer arbitrariness of the life reflected there, and the serious underlying political point behind it, are gone, I think.

Shameless? I used to be a fan. Sadly, we have nothing left to talk about. Time to… scatter?

(I’m off, with The Wire.)

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* jumped the shark

According to Urban Dictionary.com

“a term to describe a moment when something that was once great has reached a point where it will now decline in quality and popularity.

Origin of this phrase comes from a Happy Days episode where the Fonz jumped a shark on waterskis. This was labelled the lowest point of the show.

Cousin Oliver on Brady Bunch, Scrappy Doo.”

It’s been a while since I let rip with a good old rant about something. Here goes.

In the absence of other stimuli, I found myself one evening recently, trapped in an episode of a much trailed, widely lauded ‘new hit’ series, ‘Brothers and Sisters’.

Brainchild of the producers of ‘Alias’ and ‘The West Wing’, it promised much. An impressive cast: Patricia Wettig (elegant and eminently watchable in intelligent 80’s serial ‘Thirtysomething’), Rachel Griffiths (excellent feisty/sexy broad in ‘Six Feet Under’), Sally ‘Steel Magnolias’ Field, the homely hearth-stoking doyen of countless Hollywood weepies, and, as the centrepiece, the ditzy darling of 90’s hit, ‘Ally McBeal’, Calista Flockhart. Truly a chick-flick roll-call to die for.

[Blurted aside]: What has Calista Flockhart done to her face?

It even has an intriguing pitch; sudden death of beloved patriarch shatters idyllic family facade to reveal secrets ‘that threaten to either tear the family apart or bring them closer together.’

Now, I was never a fan of that idolised pean to extended adolescence, ‘Friends’, but I do like a bit of lightweight family drama from time to time (I do so), so I made myself a cup of tea and watched, transfixed, as the horror unfolded.

For extended adolescence, ‘Friends’ has nothing on it. The whole cast, supposedly ranging in age from about 30 - 65, seemed to be frozen in a disturbingly perpetual emotional puberty.

Here are some snatches from the plot:

Widow Mom goes out on her first date for forty years. First, she has to choose an outfit. Assisted by the best friend from hell (a grotesque pantomime cameo played by Margot ‘Superman’/I-had my-teeth-smashed-out-by-hobos, Kidder*) she trots off to a smart faculty dinner dressed in a ridiculously short skirt and low-cut top - whoops - cue charming embarrassing moment which (supposedly) reinforces her humanity.

[Blurted aside]: What has Margot Kidder done to her face? Well, we know what happened to her face, but…

Meanwhile, the two sisters go on a drinking binge and end up at a party full of frat boys, the mother of one of whom is the childhood sweetheart of Calista Flockhart’s latest serious squeeze, Senator McAllister - whoops - cue charming embarrassing moment etc.

[Blurted aside]: What is it Calista Flockhart has done to her face?

And, at the end of the episode, after one of the brothers has been chucked by his boyfriend and another has come off worst in a fight, they roll up at the family home like a couple of aimless teenagers, only to beat Mom home from her disastrous date - she arrives, in said tarty get-up, and - whoops - cue charming embarrassing moment etc. Whereupon, she offers to cheer them all up with some good old home-cooking.

Scrambled eggs over warm muffins? (Bleurch.) Just about sums it up.

I didn’t find it a compelling family drama at all; it was boring, predictable, stock full of cliches, familial stereotypes, and mawkish sentiment. Might as well bring back ‘The Waltons’.

I give up on television drama.

Postscript 1: Please, please, Rachel Griffiths, leave your face alone - don’t have a nose job, or collagen, or a neck tuck - you look ginger peachy just the way you are.

Postscript 2: * Incidentally, not wishing to sound unkind about Margot Kidder, there is a great deal more to her than meets the eye, as anyone who has read about the film industry in the 1970’s will know. Good luck to her at getting the work. But she has made mileage out of her misery, a lot of it self-inflicted during, or after-effect of, bouts of high rolling with Jack Nicholson and crew, and her performance in the above episode of ‘B&S’ was dreadful - in my opinion)

…………………………………….