Steve Coogan and Princess Diana - a discussion

The stats counter on this site tells me that there's nothing like putting a celebrity's name at the top of a page to attract readers, and my all-time most popular post thus far, in an admittedly uncompetitive field, has been Steve Coogan and the Mexicans, musings on the comedian's excoriation of Top Gear for racism in the light of his own contribution to Mexico's drug-addled woes.

So if there's water in the well, let's go there again.

Coogan was on Newsnight the other night laying into a hapless tabloid journalist over the News of the World phone-hacking saga. Emily Maitlis did her (incompetent) best from stopping Coogan talking over the hack, but there was no holding him. "Morally bankrupt", was the comedian's repeated cry, as if repetition trumped all argument.

Before I deal with get this, a digression in the direction of Princess Diana. Not being one of those stricken by the bizarre wailing and gnashing of teeth when the Princess died, I found it curious even then how the thousands lining the Mall and gushing out their feelings in the book of condolences did not see their own complicity in their idol's death. For Diana's car crashed because the paparazzi were chasing it; the paparazzi chased it because they knew that newspapers would pay handsomely for their photos; and the papers were prepared to pay because a large section of the public, the same by and large gripped by the Princess's death, were willing to buy newspapers with her picture in.

There is something here analogous with the Coogan situation. The press is interested in what Steve Coogan does because they know his fans will buy newspapers featuring stories about him; and this is the element missing when Coogan goes on Newsnight to shout at some tabloid cockroach. Coogan is rich and feted because people will pay to watch his work; because they like his work they want to read stories about him; because people want to read stories about people like Coogan, the tabloids seek stories out (or make them up) and print them. Just like Princess Diana, Coogan is in a tri-partite dance with the press and the public which pays his wages. Viewed from this angle, the press are not the simple villains Coogan thinks, merely the mediators between him and us.

Coogan ought to know by now that in showbiz you cannot have riches without fame, and you cannot have fame without public interest in your private life. When he goes on Newsnight and accuses the red tops of printing stories about him "just because it sells newspapers", he thinks he is making an accusation about the press; instead he is just stating the reality of his relationship with them and with the public.

He's entitled to try and manage this relationship to his own advantage (Diana did when it suited her), but he is not entitled to do as he did on Newsnight and accuse the hapless hack of "moral bankruptcy". Actually Coogan has elected to join a dance all of whose participants - celebs, press and public - are compromised.

My knowledge of what it's like to be famous is less than zero, but I imagine it helps if you don't cheat on your wife with a pair of hookers, or spend a fortnight in a hotel room with Courtney Love shoving ounces of Mexico's finest up your nose. Perhaps next time temptation calls, Steve, you could try staying in with a good book. See if the tabloids want to print that.

And when someone offers you a few million quid to appear in Night at the Museum Parts 1 and 2, you might read the name on the cheque first. Apparently the films were produced by Twentieth Century Fox (prop. one R Murdoch). But obviously you didn't know that when you agreed to appear in them. Because if you had known, you would have turned the money down, wouldn't you?

Full steam ahead, Captain Brown!

I discovered the other day that the Guardian archives blog posts on its CommentIsFree website. Now as someone who has spent an excessive amount of time bashing the qwerty keyboard on CommentIsFree, arguing the toss with three or four other wastrels, I was curious to revisit Time Wasting: The Early Days to see just how bilious was the colour of my bile way back in 2007. One post caught my eye. It was in response to a Guardian leader in February that year on the spending choices facing Gordon Brown's government, ending thus:

The chancellor can also take comfort from less-reported aspects of yesterday's report, which underlined just how impressive his record has been. The books are in better shape than they were in 1997 - an achievement that stands out for having been delivered in tandem with the extra resources for health, education and alleviating poverty. Mr Brown's credibility has suffered from his bending of the yardsticks by which his performance is measured. But the underlying purpose of these fiscal rules is to avoid things spinning out of control, and he continues to avoid that. Yesterday's report concludes that the track Mr Brown is following can be sustained economically - if not in terms of public services - without tax rates going up.

Yes, in the light of subsequent events it does read rather like an interim report from the Captain of a certain well-known ocean liner, just before the iceberg strikes. I am rather proud of my response, which read as follows:

So "The books are in better shape than they were in 1997" are they? I seem to remember the Tories delivered Brown a fairly hefty public account surplus when he arrived in office (this is actually wrong); and where are we now? A deficit of £35 billion or thereabouts, that's where. Only in cloud cuckoo land are the books in better shape.

"Yesterday's report concludes that the track Mr Brown is following can be sustained economically - if not in terms of public services - without tax rates going up." But public services are the whole point, aren't they? It's a bit like saying "the Titanic is doing fine, except in terms of floating".

We have enjoyed a decade of economic good times built on both government and citizens spending money they did not have. We now learn that the government can't afford its spending plans without either raising taxes or cutting spending, both of which will reduce economic activity and risk recession. We may well find that the trad Keynesian way out of recession is unavailable because the Government borrowed too much during the good times. And let's not forget that current Government provision is looking inadequate in areas other than health and education - the armed forces, prisons and care for the elderly spring to mind.

The Brown Boom will end in tears.

You read it there first, 18 months before the credit crunch.

Or at least three or four of you did.

Fudging the Dilnot report

So Andrew Dilnot thinks that the elderly and incapable with assets of over £100,000 should pay £35,000 towards their long-term care. Speaking as someone with, at the moment anyway, a bit more than that in the way of assets, I suppose I should be pleased. If I had no more than £135,000 I'd be a bit hacked off - why, I'd be asking, should I be taxed at 25% when someone with more money would pay a lower rate?

Something strange is going on here. We all happily pay taxes so the NHS can provide cancer treatment that we may not need ourselves. I think we would all do the same to provide long term care for others, even though the clammy fingers of dementia and incontinence might never close around our own necks. But instead Dilnot has come up with a system, however much better than the disgraceful existing one, where the unlucky individual pays directly (unless of course he has been too feckless or unfortunate to build up any assets, in which case he pays nothing), and then when the limit is reached the state takes over. This has all the hallmarks of a compromise; and if it looks like a compromise and walks like a compromise, it's probably a fudge.

I'm with Dilnot in that we need a system that spreads the load widely across society, so everyone contributes according to their means. Fortunately we have just such a system in place already. It's called taxation. Funnily enough a report commissioned by Tony Blair over a decade ago came to just this conclusion. That Blair shelved the idea in a time of plenty (preferring to spend money instead on diversity co-ordinators, street football facilitators and the war in Iraq) should tell us a lot about the chances of this approach being adopted by the Cameron government today, and perhaps also about the process which informed the Dilnot approach: after all, why recommend the simple and logical solution that HMG has recently rejected when you can adopt a complex and untried one that costs the Government less, taking the money instead from people who were naive enough to acquire modest savings?

It seems to me that there are two things to infer from this, one obvious, the other not. The less obvious one is that we are now entering the debatable lands where public spending priorities, previously taken for granted, compete with each other for favour. And that existing commitments, however unappealing, are more likely to survive than new ones, however meritorious, are to be taken on.

The other point is that if you have built up an asset, the Government will come for you. In the end. If it doesn't happen after the Dilnot report, it will happen eventually. New Labour left Britain borderline broke, and if you've got some money, the Government will be looking for ways to take it off you.

BBC sees the Light

Just as Glastonbury is getting under way, the BBC is having a light music moment, the Light Fantastic, I think it's called, and on Saturday Radio 3 ran a discussion on the subject with Petroc Trelawney, Anne Dudley, the estimable John Wilson and one or two other worthies.

There is a poignant connection between these two phenomena.

I have to declare a lack of interest here, because light music is not my thing. On the other hand, since I started conducting amateur orchestras five or six years ago I've had to perform a fair bit of it, something I did with a certain sniffiness at first, then with a degree of grudging admiration and latterly almost with enthusiasm (I am trying to stop it going any further).

Often with discussions like this one the really interesting thing is not what's said, but what the broadcasters leave out. This was a rare occasion however where the issue you think they aren't going to touch on at all is not just included, but actually given a full five minutes of full-frontal, that issue here being the extent of the BBC's own involvement in light music's decline.

Now obviously there are many reasons for the decline, economics being one of them, technology being another, the rise of pop culture another still. But undoubtedly the BBC played its part, setting up Radios 2 and 3 without dealing adequately with how light music was going to be catered for. Light music was pushed into the margins on Radio 2, and in the Glock-era it was ridiculous to imagine that Radio 3 was going to be playing any Haydn Wood when it couldn't bring itself to love Robert Simpson. There are apparently numerous anguished memos written by a BBC bigwig to Radio 3 wondering why so little light music was getting played. One might as well ask why bears were defecating in the woods.

Hats off to the BBC for allowing these heretical views to be heard. My son, who was in the kitchen whilst I was listening to this self-flagellation, said, "You can't imagine Sky doing that".

Several other things stood out for me. One was the often-told story of Ernest Tomlinson, furious at the BBC proposing to clear out its light music library, an act of musical Stalinism if ever there was one, offering the use of a barn on his Lancashire farm in which the thousands of orchestral sets could be stored. Tomlinson, a very fine composer, set up a library of light music, still going today, which did much to preserve music which would otherwise have been lost. He is said to have come upon a skip full of parts outside the London Palladium and hired a van on the spot to save them from destruction. A friend tells me that MGM destroyed its sheet music library in Hollywood - to build a car park. Yes, a car park.

The other stand-out was Anne Dudley recounting her experience at Music College of finding the composition department dominated by the avant garde (as most music departments in most conservatoires were and still are), and being bemused to find Eric Coates regarded as a joke figure rather than a serious musician. This is an experience I had too, although I was lucky to have lessons with John Tavener, who stood firmly outside the mainstream, a place I have stood myself ever since.

The widespread assumption, shared by the programme, that light music is a different genre to classical music, or at best a sub-genre, isn't really accurate in my view. Lots of classical composers - Mozart, Elgar, Tchaikovsky, Sibelius and many others - have written light music (by which I mean music which sets out to entertain), and this should give us a clue that there is a bigger and broader question hanging in the air here, about the approachability of light music, and the extent to which it that quality has been lost from classical music generally in the last century.

To put the question the other way round, to what extent is it legitimate for a classical composer to set out not to entertain? Two things seem obvious to me. One, that all music (indeed perhaps all art) should be entertaining (I use that word in a very wide sense, as I'll explain in a minute). The other is that a lot of music is being written, indeed has been written in the last century or so, which has no intention of entertaining whatsoever. Indeed, if you ask its composers and performers, many would scorn the idea of doing anything so base as to give their audiences a good time. For me, entertaining means many things - stimulating, challenging yes, but also soothing and consoling. The point about art is that it is a mediation of human experience, not the experience itself (the most horrifying opera I've ever seen is Idomeneo, a terrible story mediated by music of unsurpassed luminosity and grace).

Ultimately it is easy to regret the decline of light music, because it is readily, though I think inaccurately, rendered as a separate genre whose exponents were once famous and who, amongst musicians at least, are still household names. What is much less easy, because it is harder to identify them, is to lament the obscurity of all the composers at the more serious end of the classical spectrum who did not disdain their audiences, and who wrote music that was approachable, that sought to entertain in the very broadest sense, and who were pushed into obscurity by the same institutional forces (the conservatoires, the universities, the broadcasters) that did for so-called light music.

Why is the fate of these individuals important? Because on the whole the public is not interested in avant-garde music, and, particularly in a time of austerity, the public subsidy which keeps the infrastructure of classical music going is harder to justify when so much of its output is devoted to pushing a kind of music which, statistically speaking, almost no-one likes. Less money for classical music does not just mean fewer performances of Boulez and Berio. It also means less Berlioz and Brahms.

Ultimately, those of us who love classical music have to find new repertoire which can enthuse the public. Otherwise classical music will become increasingly marginalised in schools, in the public imagination and in public spending priorities. At the moment it doesn't seem to me that anyone is trying to reverse this trend.

Traditionally the middle-class turn to classical music in middle-age. The weekend of the Light Fantastic however, many of my middle-class middle-aged friends have gone off to Glastonbury.

dos and don'ts for young soloists

I've been fortunate enough to do many concertos with student soloists, always an interesting experience. Here is the sum total of my wisdom in DO and DON'T form.

DO try and know your speeds beforehand. Most inexperienced soloists have spent much more time playing on their own or with a pianist than with an orchestra, and don’t realise that, even with the Classical repertoire, there is a great deal of subconscious tempo variation. In other words, you will play some passages quicker or slower than others without being aware of it. It helps enormously if you can tell the conductor which ones these are beforehand. This doesn’t just save time in rehearsal, it also gives the conductor time to work out how, for example, to get back into the main tempo when your more relaxed second subject has finished. It’s worth practising with a metronome, not because you are expected to play metronomically but because it enables you to judge where you want to push the speed on and where you want to relax.

DON’T watch the conductor too much. He will generally be beating slightly ahead of the orchestra, so if you try and keep up with him the music will get faster. As a rule the orchestra and conductor’s job is to keep up with you, not vice versa. It is sometimes the case that your passage-work is so fast that you have to follow the orchestra instead: one example is in the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto first movement just after the cadenza, where the soloist plays arpeggio semi-quavers over the recapitulated first subject: listen and play with them. There are many other examples in the standard repertoire.

DON’T be afraid to ask for things to be done differently. The orchestra is there to serve you. There are ways of doing this however. Don’t say to the orchestra directly, “Can you do it this way instead?” The conductor has probably spent some time with the orchestra, in good faith, getting the orchestra to do it the way you don’t like. Ask the conductor. “Would it be possible for the woodwind to ....." Nine times out of ten the conductor will be pleased to oblige. There may also be good reasons why the conductor has done it his way, reasons you aren’t aware of, and you don’t want to end up in a situation where the conductor is saying to the orchestra, “No, don’t do that. Do it the way I originally asked you”.

DON’T be nervous. You are probably the best player in the room, and the orchestra will think you are wonderful.

DON’T be arrogant either. The orchestra might not be as good at their instruments as you are at yours (although sometimes some of them will be), but the likelihood is that they will be vastly more experienced musicians who have seen young prodigies come and go. Send the conductor a card afterwards. Do you want another gig or don’t you?

DON’T play without the music unless you are 100% sure you can do it. You don’t want to ruin your opportunity for want of a music stand.

DON’T do things differently in the concert from the way you did them in rehearsal. As Beecham said, an orchestra is not a piece of elastic. It cannot instantly accommodate your interpretative whims.

DO enjoy it. It might not happen again often, for a while, at all. Make the most of it!

Ed Balls goes Greek

Amidst dramatic scenes across the country, riot police clash with protestors demonstrating against austerity measures. This is Greece of course, not the UK, and I am not going to give a hostage to fortune by claiming that where Greece leads, we will inexorably follow.

Here is a prediction however. It is that the EU bail-out, even if it goes ahead, will fail (I said this about the first bail-out, but that prediction was made in private and doesn't count; I do however feel emboldened to go public on this one). It will fail because the austerity measures necessary for it to work will be intolerable to the Greek people. Even if the country is far enough away from the centre of the whirlpool for the measures to work (and it may well not be), the Greeks themselves won't put up with them. They'll bring down the government, or force the government to default, wholly or in part.

It's interesting to consider how the EU got into this situation, and what that says about what kind of institution it is. For those countries signing up to monetary union, there was a cap on how much money it was permissible to borrow. Many countries breached it, but the EU did nothing, or at least nothing concrete - letters were written; knuckles were rapped. No mechanism existed for penalising countries for breaking the rules. It could scarcely have been otherwise, because no electorate would have permitted its government to sign up to a currency where control of its own borrowing (and therefore its economy) was effectively handed over to an unelected Central Bank in another country hundreds of miles away. Handing over control of interest rates was bad enough, but this would have been politically unsellable.

So enthusiasts for the Euro set in place a project that was bound to fail sooner or later, because one of its members was bound to borrow too much, and would be unable to escape from its position by devaluing its currency. That's now happened to Greece, with other countries sliding towards a similar position.

In other words, faced between setting up a system which would inevitably fail, or not setting up monetary union at all, Eurocrats opted for the former. I am not viscerally anti-EU, but this looks like madness. Ironically Britain too received strictures from the EU for its borrowing even though we were not in the Euro at all. For such institutions reality doesn't matter - it is the outward appearance that counts.

Which brings me to Ed Balls's latest suggestion, namely that the UK Government cuts VAT by 5% or so to kick-start the economy. I don't know how much this would cost in lost revenue, but it would be in the region of billions. Where would that money come from? The money markets. Yes, that's correct. Balls is suggesting that in order to get the deficit down, we put the deficit up.

Perhaps I am slow, but I do not understand how this can work. It seems particularly counterintuitive when you consider that the first thing that would happen is that our borrowing costs would go up; that is, we'd not only have to pay interest on the extra money we'd borrowed, but we'd have to pay more interest on money we were going to borrow anyway, because the gilt markets would be worried that we had changed our minds about getting the deficit down.

This scheme of Balls', which incidentally he didn't think to clear with Ed Miliband first, reminds me somewhat of Milo Minderbender in Catch 22, buying eggs for 4 cents in one place and selling them at a profit for 2 cents somewhere else. It took me a while to realise that this was satire on Joseph Heller's part (I was young), and of course satire can't have been Balls' intention. I think his aim instead is to appeal to the vast majority of people in Britain who aren't interested in economics and don't have the faintest idea of how it works. His aim is to deceive.

I don't know what will happen to George Osborne's plan; no-one does. I've written previously on Osborne's gamble being, if anything a rather smaller gamble than the one proposed by Labour (just keep and borrowing and hope for the best). Interestingly, the gilt markets, gifted with no more clairvoyance than anyone else but at least removed utterly from the taint of political bias, seem to think Osborne is doing the right thing. We know this because the UK is paying very low rates on its borrowing. If the markets thought we were not going to get any growth, and the deficit never come down, we would be paying sky-high rates.

I sometimes think that with Osborne at the helm HMS Great Britain is sailing slowly in a fog, knowing that there are rocks somewhere but not knowing exactly where. Ed Balls, on the other hand, appears to know exactly where the rocks are. They are in the direction of Greece, and he is proposing that we sail that way full steam ahead.

slut-walking comes to Britain

When America sneezes, the UK catches a cold; and when young American women take to the streets in their scanties to protest against some ill-chosen words by a Canadian policeman, it's not going to be long before young Britons start doing it too. Cue slut-walking demonstrations the length and breadth of the nation.

Since my ruminations on this subject a few weeks ago, I've been musing not just on the practical aspect of the furore (why it should be so unreasonable to suggest, in a world in which they have never been totally safe and never will be, that women might want to take steps which will make them safer), but on why women might want to dress in a sexually provocative way in public at all.

For millenia, attractive young women have used male/female inequality of desire - the only inequality that works in their favour - to advance their cause personally and economically. I get that. But why flaunt it in public? At the very worst, provocatively dressed women risk attack. Further down the scale of seriousness, they risk harassment in the street. They risk harassment in clubs and bars from men tripping over their own tongues. They get attention of men who are only interested in them for sex, and they are treated less seriously at work by men who can't disengage their libidos. In fact, for every man they might want to attract, there will be 99 whose attentions they cannot possibly want (including mine). What is in it for women?

I have been married long enough to know that women often dress to impress other women rather than to attract men, and I'm aware that a single woman wants to look attractive, but it genuinely baffles me as to why anyone would want the inconvenience of teetering along the high-street in a microdress, risking hypothermia as well as the ills detailed above. I also find it rather annoying. A picture in the paper yesterday showed a woman in fishnets and heels carrying a sign saying, "You can't touch this". Fair enough, I know I can't touch it. In which case, I want to shout, why make me want to touch it?

Women, the slut-walkers say, only want the right to express their sexuality. Leaving aside their confusion as to the meaning of the word, why on earth would they want to express it? We all know that most women like men, and vice versa. Why go on about it? (Thank God we men don't find the need to express our sexuality. I shudder to think what a male slut-walking march would look like, but my suggested name for it - gut-walking - might be an unpleasant clue).

The most hilarious people in the slut-marches are the earnest looking young men hanging around in the back of the photos. For all their right-on beardiness you just know that part of them is thinking, "Phwooar! Look at the enbonpoint on that! You would wouldn't you? Eh? Eh?" Surely some of them are fifth columnists, perhaps police informers along the lines of the chaps who infiltrated the environmental movement; but I guarantee that every heterosexual one of them is enjoying the view immensely. There are probably men taking a Wedding Crashers approach, marching to see if any of the participants wishes to express their sexuality in private afterwards. It says a lot about naivety of the slut-walkers that they allow men anywhere near them.

If I were a slut-walker I'd be thinking to myself, "Hang on. How is it that my view of how I should behave is shared by Hugh Hefner, Paul Raymond, Richard Desmond and Jeremy Clarkson?" (a list to which, being as prone to provocation as the next man, they might have added Nick Simpson).

It seems to me a very poor sort of feminism whose definition of edifying female conduct involves dressing in a way which appeals to mens' most basic instincts. The best place for dressing provocatively is behind closed-doors.