Last week I went to see Rams, a film about a dispute between two sibling Icelandic sheep farmers. It was great.
Last night I went to see Grimsby, Sacha Baron Cohen's film about a lairy underclass northerner, Nobby Butcher, reunited with his long-lost brother who just happens to be a spy in trouble.
Variety is the spice of life, after all.
Grimsby has been very largely panned. "Witless rubbish", wrote one critic. "Cohen comes unstuck", wrote another. "Class libel", fulminated the New Statesman. The tone of the reviews has been that the film isn't funny and that anyway it's unfair to pick on the working class. Baron Cohen did not dare to film in Grimsby itself, and the residents of the preferred location, Tilbury, are apparently outraged that their town was chosen as a convenient Grimsby-alike.
Oh my.
Grimsby is not subtle. It is broad, crude, violent, uneven and about as hit and miss in its humour as Baron Cohen's northern accent. But boy did I laugh. It takes a particularly sensitive soul not to find funny the scene (is that even the right word?) in which the two brothers take refuge in an elephant's vagina - bad enough you might think - only to discover that a line of he-elephants are lining up to take advantage of her. The (half-empty) cinema was united in its helpless distress. Other scenes are similarly difficult to watch.
I guess if you are offended by the shameless (or more plausibly Shameless) lampooning of the Northern working class it must be hard to find Grimsby that funny. But I can't help feeling that the metropolitan sophisticates united in their disdain for Baron Cohen's film would pay quite a lot of money to avoid going anywhere like Grimsby, and as for mixing socially with the working class, well surely those are the people one moves to London to avoid, darling. There's something funny in itself about people whose disdain for the provincial proletariat is matched by their desperation to be seen defending it.
It's true that the film's McGuffin - a sub-SPECTRE cabal called Maelstrom is going to wipe out the world's underclass by releasing deadly toxins at the World Cup final only to be defeated by Nobby and his Grimsby mates - is perhaps just an excuse for satirising the squalor and fecundity of the protagonist's home life. But firstly there's a measure of truth in Baron Cohen's portrait, and secondly Nobby is likeable as well as feckless, and the scenes in and around his home have a liveliness and enthusiasm which are touching as well as funny.
I hope Baron Cohen makes a shed load of money out of Grimsby and that his critics disappear up their own fundamentals. Where it would be diverting to imagine them being assailed by a herd of elephants.
Monday 29 February 2016
Monday 22 February 2016
Emma Thompson, Goldman Sachs and the EU referendum
Five years ago I wrote a piece on here about the Alternative Vote referendum - remember that? - in which I noted that since John Cleese, Joanna Lumley, Eddie Izzard, Stephen Fry, Helena Bonham Carter and Colin Firth were in favour of AV it was likely to be a bad idea. In a raft of contexts since then I've noticed that if the Luvvies are in favour of something it's likely to be wrong, and, moreover, almost certain not to prevail. You name it, from press regulation to migration, Emma Thompson will weigh in on one side and sensible people on the other.
Wealthy entertainers live in a world where reality is viewed through a distant and self-serving gauze, often from the heights of Hampstead or Primrose Hill. Out of touch? Moi? Simpson's Law has subsequently proved a helpful guide through many a complex thicket.
But what's this? An EU referendum looms. Where do the Luvvies line up? Ms Thompson helpfully gets the ball rolling. It would be "madness" for Britain to leave, she intoned at a press conference in Berlin. Britain is "a tiny little cloud-bolted, rainy corner of sort-of Europe . . . A cake-filled, misery-laden, grey old island". Notice the unattractive way self-deprecation shades into self-hatred. Notice too the utter irrelevance of our weather and home-baking habits to the In/Out argument. This air-headed nonsense is a pretty good indicator of which way the Luvvies are going to go. Where Emma leads, others will surely follow.
All well and good, but Simpson's Law now faces perhaps its sternest test. For those of us looking for a steer, what are we to make of those on the Brexit side?
Here the form looks if anything even less appealing. Douglas Carswell. Nigel Farage. George Galloway. Ian Duncan Smith. Who wants to ally themselves with such a dismal roster? Matthew Parris wrote a great piece on this in the Spectator last week in which he compared those making the case for leaving the EU with those who argued for Rhodesian UDI in the 1960s. "Their argument was shot though with anger, resentment and bitter nostalgia", Parris wrote of Ian Smith and his friends, floating the idea that to some extent the side we take in an argument is a product of our personalities. Perhaps, Parris wrote, "arguments choose their protagonists, rather than the other way round". Perhaps to yield to the Out side is to acknowledge the bitterness which lurks within us all.
Over the weekend however the Leave campaign acquired two genuine figures of substance. Michael Gove did it for reasons of principle, I think, and Boris Johnson I'm pretty sure for reasons of personal interest. After all even if Remain wins, Cameron's successor is not going to be chosen by the electorate at large but by disaffected Tories. George Osborne and Theresa May could just have handed Johnson the leadership.
Two other protagonists to weigh up. Frank Field wants us to go. I have always loved Frank Field. He wrote, "The Government has failed to secure the key renegotiation requirement, namely that we should regain control of our borders".
On the Remain side, Goldman Sachs apparently want us to stay.
That's worth a new paragraph. Yes, Goldman Sachs. And Emma Thompson.
Wealthy entertainers live in a world where reality is viewed through a distant and self-serving gauze, often from the heights of Hampstead or Primrose Hill. Out of touch? Moi? Simpson's Law has subsequently proved a helpful guide through many a complex thicket.
But what's this? An EU referendum looms. Where do the Luvvies line up? Ms Thompson helpfully gets the ball rolling. It would be "madness" for Britain to leave, she intoned at a press conference in Berlin. Britain is "a tiny little cloud-bolted, rainy corner of sort-of Europe . . . A cake-filled, misery-laden, grey old island". Notice the unattractive way self-deprecation shades into self-hatred. Notice too the utter irrelevance of our weather and home-baking habits to the In/Out argument. This air-headed nonsense is a pretty good indicator of which way the Luvvies are going to go. Where Emma leads, others will surely follow.
All well and good, but Simpson's Law now faces perhaps its sternest test. For those of us looking for a steer, what are we to make of those on the Brexit side?
Here the form looks if anything even less appealing. Douglas Carswell. Nigel Farage. George Galloway. Ian Duncan Smith. Who wants to ally themselves with such a dismal roster? Matthew Parris wrote a great piece on this in the Spectator last week in which he compared those making the case for leaving the EU with those who argued for Rhodesian UDI in the 1960s. "Their argument was shot though with anger, resentment and bitter nostalgia", Parris wrote of Ian Smith and his friends, floating the idea that to some extent the side we take in an argument is a product of our personalities. Perhaps, Parris wrote, "arguments choose their protagonists, rather than the other way round". Perhaps to yield to the Out side is to acknowledge the bitterness which lurks within us all.
Over the weekend however the Leave campaign acquired two genuine figures of substance. Michael Gove did it for reasons of principle, I think, and Boris Johnson I'm pretty sure for reasons of personal interest. After all even if Remain wins, Cameron's successor is not going to be chosen by the electorate at large but by disaffected Tories. George Osborne and Theresa May could just have handed Johnson the leadership.
Two other protagonists to weigh up. Frank Field wants us to go. I have always loved Frank Field. He wrote, "The Government has failed to secure the key renegotiation requirement, namely that we should regain control of our borders".
On the Remain side, Goldman Sachs apparently want us to stay.
That's worth a new paragraph. Yes, Goldman Sachs. And Emma Thompson.
Thursday 11 February 2016
Jeremy Hunt, Junior Doctors and a slightly smaller prize
I have been observing the Junior Doctors' industrial dispute with the Government with interest. I am not expert on the detail, and cannot tell you what is the issue on which talks have foundered today (so seriously that Jeremy Hunt, the health secretary, has now decided to impose a new contract). But I do know rather a lot of doctors socially - probably more than a dozen, if I stretched it - and here are a few things I've observed, or my friends have told me.
- "Junior doctors are absolutely no use". Thus spake an anaesthetist I know. "They just get in the way".
- "Junior doctors don't know anything. When I was training we basically lived in the hospital. That's how you learn. Now they're always wanting to get off home. No wonder they don't know anything". That one was from a consultant neurologist.
- A GP friend said to me, "The Blair Government made a big mistake with contracts. They told us we had to do things which we were doing anyway, and they offered to pay us extra if we did them. So we said OK, and they paid us a lot more for doing what we'd been doing already. We'd been struggling financially until then". This person, a good friend, put three children through public school and has a holiday house in the country.
- Ever Doctor that I know lives in a big house, with a big car outside (actually, most of them have two big cars outside).
- Every Doctor I know, notwithstanding recent changes, is sitting on a notional pension pot worth hundreds of thousands of pounds. To put it in context, if a Doctor retires on a pension of £48k (and that's the average) a pot of nearly £1,500,000 would be needed to fund it in the private sector. The average private sector pension pot? Rather under £40,000. The Doctor's pension pot doesn't in fact exist. The pension will be funded by working taxpayers.
- Every Doctor I know (and yes, they're mostly in their forties and fifties), is rather fond of expensive wine and goes on expensive holidays. I'll be going to a dinner tonight where the two doctors I'll be sitting with have recently gone skiing and ice climbing in Italy.
- Two of my neighbours, both Junior Doctors, are hoping to move to a house round the corner. The asking price? £750,000.
- Since 2010 public spending has been cut amongst many government departments, but the NHS has been ringfenced, and its budgets have actually been increased in real terms.
- A disproportionately large number of the BMA leadership are supporters of Jeremy Corbyn's Labour party (if you doubt me, Google is always there for you).
Now for all I know Junior Doctors may be entirely deserving of more money and shorter working hours. It may be that if the Tories don't give them these things they will all decamp to New Zealand (and a doctor I met recently was doing just that). But on the face of it the facts would appear to be as follows:
- Junior Doctors of my friends' generation worked harder without complaint.
- Attempts to quantify what Doctors should do have to some degree had the effect of de-professionalising the profession. Junior Doctors used to work until the job was done because that devotion to duty meant that they learned more and they were more likely to get promoted. That may no longer be true to the same extent.
- Doctors have always struggled and suffered when they were young, and the reward was ease, status, promotion prospects, job security, affluence in middle age and a fantastic pension when you retired.
- The rewards for Doctors are way beyond the reach of the overwhelming majority of the ordinary people who pay for them.
- Every other corner of public service has suffered as, since 2010, the government has sought to get a grip on public expenditure. If it's right that the NHS should be exempt from those pressures as far as possible, it doesn't seem unreasonable for HMG to seek to make the service better and more efficient. Should Doctors be exempt from attempts to make the service better, and better value for money?
I make these observations aware that the plural of anecdote is not data, and raise these questions without knowing the answers. But when I look at the bright, shiny faces of the protesting Junior Doctors I don't see poor and downtrodden workers. They look to me instead like people who won a fairly substantial prize in the lottery of life, and who would rather see operations cancelled than that prize get even just slightly smaller.
- "Junior doctors are absolutely no use". Thus spake an anaesthetist I know. "They just get in the way".
- "Junior doctors don't know anything. When I was training we basically lived in the hospital. That's how you learn. Now they're always wanting to get off home. No wonder they don't know anything". That one was from a consultant neurologist.
- A GP friend said to me, "The Blair Government made a big mistake with contracts. They told us we had to do things which we were doing anyway, and they offered to pay us extra if we did them. So we said OK, and they paid us a lot more for doing what we'd been doing already. We'd been struggling financially until then". This person, a good friend, put three children through public school and has a holiday house in the country.
- Ever Doctor that I know lives in a big house, with a big car outside (actually, most of them have two big cars outside).
- Every Doctor I know, notwithstanding recent changes, is sitting on a notional pension pot worth hundreds of thousands of pounds. To put it in context, if a Doctor retires on a pension of £48k (and that's the average) a pot of nearly £1,500,000 would be needed to fund it in the private sector. The average private sector pension pot? Rather under £40,000. The Doctor's pension pot doesn't in fact exist. The pension will be funded by working taxpayers.
- Every Doctor I know (and yes, they're mostly in their forties and fifties), is rather fond of expensive wine and goes on expensive holidays. I'll be going to a dinner tonight where the two doctors I'll be sitting with have recently gone skiing and ice climbing in Italy.
- Two of my neighbours, both Junior Doctors, are hoping to move to a house round the corner. The asking price? £750,000.
- Since 2010 public spending has been cut amongst many government departments, but the NHS has been ringfenced, and its budgets have actually been increased in real terms.
- A disproportionately large number of the BMA leadership are supporters of Jeremy Corbyn's Labour party (if you doubt me, Google is always there for you).
Now for all I know Junior Doctors may be entirely deserving of more money and shorter working hours. It may be that if the Tories don't give them these things they will all decamp to New Zealand (and a doctor I met recently was doing just that). But on the face of it the facts would appear to be as follows:
- Junior Doctors of my friends' generation worked harder without complaint.
- Attempts to quantify what Doctors should do have to some degree had the effect of de-professionalising the profession. Junior Doctors used to work until the job was done because that devotion to duty meant that they learned more and they were more likely to get promoted. That may no longer be true to the same extent.
- Doctors have always struggled and suffered when they were young, and the reward was ease, status, promotion prospects, job security, affluence in middle age and a fantastic pension when you retired.
- The rewards for Doctors are way beyond the reach of the overwhelming majority of the ordinary people who pay for them.
- Every other corner of public service has suffered as, since 2010, the government has sought to get a grip on public expenditure. If it's right that the NHS should be exempt from those pressures as far as possible, it doesn't seem unreasonable for HMG to seek to make the service better and more efficient. Should Doctors be exempt from attempts to make the service better, and better value for money?
I make these observations aware that the plural of anecdote is not data, and raise these questions without knowing the answers. But when I look at the bright, shiny faces of the protesting Junior Doctors I don't see poor and downtrodden workers. They look to me instead like people who won a fairly substantial prize in the lottery of life, and who would rather see operations cancelled than that prize get even just slightly smaller.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)