A colleague of my wife's is married to a bloke called Tim Storrie. Tim is a medium-sized bear of a man, affable, funny and clever. We generally meet at social events organised by our wives, and at one of these a year or so ago I made an enthusiastic comment about something or other.
Tim's response was, "Christ Nick, I've never heard you say you liked anything before now".
I was mortified. There are plenty of things I dislike - eggs, ballet, Simon Cowell - but also plenty of things I do. I don't know Tim Storrie that well - although sufficiently well to know that the world does not contain nearly enough people like him - and perhaps he just needs to sit next to me at meal-times a bit more often.
But in honour of his misjudgement I thought I would begin an occasional series of enthusiasms. This is number one, in honour of its inspiration. I would have called it the Tim Storrie Memorial Column, but Tim is alive, well and practising law.
Column number two coming shortly.
Friday 23 November 2012
Tony Hall and the age of austerity
As George Entwistle leaves the BBC and Tony Hall returns, I have been thinking about money.
Entwistle left with a full year's salary for his pains - £450,000. He also got, according the Mirror, £10,000 for legal advice and £10,000 for "communications support" (which seems to be a euphemism for bodyguards to protect him from the media scrum outside his home).
Interestingly, the Mirror also reports that in the last two years 10 senior BBC staff got compensation packages worth £280,000 or more. One of the failed applicants for the DG job, Caroline Thompson, left recently with a pay-off in excess of £650,000. I hope this sum will come as consolation for Ms Thompson, who otherwise might have been feeling quite miffed that Entwistle's successor has been appointed without the job being advertised again and without being given the chance to re-apply.
So what of Tony Hall? Well, Mr Hall has been Chief Exec at the Royal Opera House for the last 11 years. The ROH's 2010 accounts revealed that he was paid £390,000 for a job which still left him time to chair an Olympics commitee and do his bit in the House of Lords. The ROH is, you may remember, an institution that pays its MD Antonio Pappano nearly £700,000. Some of which is public money.
An environment in which two employees can get pay-offs totalling well over £1 million, all of which is public money, sounds as if it will suit Mr Hall down to the ground.
I have just paid the lady who cleans our house. She gets £8 per hour, well above the minimum wage. But probably not enough to cover bodyguards.
Entwistle left with a full year's salary for his pains - £450,000. He also got, according the Mirror, £10,000 for legal advice and £10,000 for "communications support" (which seems to be a euphemism for bodyguards to protect him from the media scrum outside his home).
Interestingly, the Mirror also reports that in the last two years 10 senior BBC staff got compensation packages worth £280,000 or more. One of the failed applicants for the DG job, Caroline Thompson, left recently with a pay-off in excess of £650,000. I hope this sum will come as consolation for Ms Thompson, who otherwise might have been feeling quite miffed that Entwistle's successor has been appointed without the job being advertised again and without being given the chance to re-apply.
So what of Tony Hall? Well, Mr Hall has been Chief Exec at the Royal Opera House for the last 11 years. The ROH's 2010 accounts revealed that he was paid £390,000 for a job which still left him time to chair an Olympics commitee and do his bit in the House of Lords. The ROH is, you may remember, an institution that pays its MD Antonio Pappano nearly £700,000. Some of which is public money.
An environment in which two employees can get pay-offs totalling well over £1 million, all of which is public money, sounds as if it will suit Mr Hall down to the ground.
I have just paid the lady who cleans our house. She gets £8 per hour, well above the minimum wage. But probably not enough to cover bodyguards.
Thursday 15 November 2012
Martin Kettle and the definition of poverty
I have long thought that Martin Kettle was the doyen of the Grauniad's salaried columnists, the one with the best understanding of the new reality post the 2008 crash. In today's paper, under the headline "Austerity is here to stay", he writes, "We may have come out of recession again, but the idea that Britain, let alone the countries of the eurozone, can expect to see any resumption of the kind of growth rates to which we have all been accustomed since the second world war, is increasingly fanciful. We are living through not a downturn but an epochal change, and we need to make a more consistent effort to understand what this implies."
This is a long way from the Graun's usual take on things, which you might summarise as "If only the bankers hadn't been so greedy everything would have been OK". And if you read the comments on Kettle's article on the Graun's website it's clear that it's a long way from the views of the readership. But actually the bankers were only trying to find new and more imaginative ways of enabling the West to carry on borrowing. That they were lining their pockets at the same time doesn't make them any more attractive, but we shouldn't lose sight of the activity which enabled them to do so. If anything, the bankers helped the consumer party to carry on longer than it would have done, and otherwise we would have been facing these problems somewhat sooner.
I'm not sure Kettle fully understands the consequences of perpetual austerity however. "Although the 20th century social democratic project may have stalled amid economic decline", he says, "the financial crisis has undoubtedly opened up a fresh opportunity to redefine the terms on which the rich and poor can coexist in times of greater scarcity". This may be true up to a point, but what might any new definition look like? The problem with the rich is that although they are conspicuous, there aren't many of them. If you tax them till the pips squeak you still won't raise a fraction of the sums needed to carry on paying Britain's welfare bills. Austerity has not so much opened up a fresh opportunity as driven a stake through the social democratic project's heart. For the project depended on huge amounts of government spending, and as Liam Byrne famously admitted, there's no money left.
Amidst th' encircling gloom I am heartened to see in the same edition of the Graun a story to the effect that Michael Gove is going to change the current official definition of poverty. Presently this utilises the median income as a benchmark. I have been railing against it for years, because it means that in a rich country like Monaco there are people with a BMW on the drive and a yacht down at the marina who are officially poor, and people in a poor country like Bangladesh existing on a dollar a day who aren't. What kind of definition is that?
Well, one which has been revealed in all its uselessness by the fall in the median income post 2008. As the most common salary level in Britain has fallen, thousands of people have been removed from offical poverty. You couldn't make it up. Fatuous, and the sooner the definition reflects absolute poverty the better.
This is a long way from the Graun's usual take on things, which you might summarise as "If only the bankers hadn't been so greedy everything would have been OK". And if you read the comments on Kettle's article on the Graun's website it's clear that it's a long way from the views of the readership. But actually the bankers were only trying to find new and more imaginative ways of enabling the West to carry on borrowing. That they were lining their pockets at the same time doesn't make them any more attractive, but we shouldn't lose sight of the activity which enabled them to do so. If anything, the bankers helped the consumer party to carry on longer than it would have done, and otherwise we would have been facing these problems somewhat sooner.
I'm not sure Kettle fully understands the consequences of perpetual austerity however. "Although the 20th century social democratic project may have stalled amid economic decline", he says, "the financial crisis has undoubtedly opened up a fresh opportunity to redefine the terms on which the rich and poor can coexist in times of greater scarcity". This may be true up to a point, but what might any new definition look like? The problem with the rich is that although they are conspicuous, there aren't many of them. If you tax them till the pips squeak you still won't raise a fraction of the sums needed to carry on paying Britain's welfare bills. Austerity has not so much opened up a fresh opportunity as driven a stake through the social democratic project's heart. For the project depended on huge amounts of government spending, and as Liam Byrne famously admitted, there's no money left.
Amidst th' encircling gloom I am heartened to see in the same edition of the Graun a story to the effect that Michael Gove is going to change the current official definition of poverty. Presently this utilises the median income as a benchmark. I have been railing against it for years, because it means that in a rich country like Monaco there are people with a BMW on the drive and a yacht down at the marina who are officially poor, and people in a poor country like Bangladesh existing on a dollar a day who aren't. What kind of definition is that?
Well, one which has been revealed in all its uselessness by the fall in the median income post 2008. As the most common salary level in Britain has fallen, thousands of people have been removed from offical poverty. You couldn't make it up. Fatuous, and the sooner the definition reflects absolute poverty the better.
Tuesday 13 November 2012
Abu Qatada and burning the poppy
Just when you thought it was safe to go and walk the streets of Britain again, it turns out that Abu Qatada has been let out on bail - with a 16 hour curfew - by a senior immigration judge. Cue much frothing of the mouth in the Torygraph, which reports that it is going to cost the UK £5 million a year to monitor his activities.
I have no time for Mr Qatada and his ridiculous views - he reminds me of an Islamic (and more sinister) version of Sir Roderick Spode, P.G. Wodehouse's fabled leader of the Blackshorts - and clearly this country would be better off without him. The sooner he is on a plane the safer we will all be.
But there is one snag, namely the rule of law. If you believe in the rule of law, you have to accept that it protects people you don't like as well as those you do. It grates that Mr Qatada, who doesn't believe in democracy or the rights of the individual, should take advantage of liberties the kind of society he wants to construct would not extend to you and me; but that's the rule of law for you. It doesn't discriminate between one person's value and another; in fact it recognises that discriminating will always be subjective. And subjectivity reduces the law to a whim.
Actually we should be grateful for good laws which protect the likes of Qatada, because it is becoming increasingly clear that there are some very bad ones which don't. In Kent yesterday some idiot has been arrested for posting a picture of a burning poppy online, with the caption "How about that you squadey (sic) ****s". This is the latest in a long line of incidents where the police have arrested and sometimes tried individuals under the Malicious Communications Act 1988 for posting messages or images which are "grossly offensive".
The MCA started life as a worthy piece of legislation intended to deal with threatening or poison pen letters, but it was amended by Labour in 2001 to cover electronic communications, and here's where the trouble originates. I read somewhere that just about any idea worth stating will at some point have been grossly offensive to someone - it's not hard to see that if Darwin had published The Origin of Species online he could have been prosecuted under the MCA. Actually there will be people somewhere in Britain today who find Darwin's theory grossly offensive, and that is rather the point.
The MCA as amended assumes that people have a right not to be grossly offended. They don't; or at least they shouldn't have. Because if they do, it forces us to decide what is grossly offensive and what isn't. And that is a matter of opinion, of the police in the first instance and ultimately of judges and juries. As soon as you make opinion the foundation of law you have chucked away freedom. As I said, subjectivity reduces the law to a whim.
So much bad jurisprudence arises out of failure to apply existing laws sensibly. John Terry and Anton Ferdinand should both have been prosecuted under the Public Order Act. The POA, a statute that has been around in one form or another for over a century, makes it an offence to use threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour likely to cause violence. If the young toe-rag had burned a poppy at a Remembrance Day parade, the POA could have been used against him. Online, the State needs to grow up and amend the MCA.
I have no time for Mr Qatada and his ridiculous views - he reminds me of an Islamic (and more sinister) version of Sir Roderick Spode, P.G. Wodehouse's fabled leader of the Blackshorts - and clearly this country would be better off without him. The sooner he is on a plane the safer we will all be.
But there is one snag, namely the rule of law. If you believe in the rule of law, you have to accept that it protects people you don't like as well as those you do. It grates that Mr Qatada, who doesn't believe in democracy or the rights of the individual, should take advantage of liberties the kind of society he wants to construct would not extend to you and me; but that's the rule of law for you. It doesn't discriminate between one person's value and another; in fact it recognises that discriminating will always be subjective. And subjectivity reduces the law to a whim.
Actually we should be grateful for good laws which protect the likes of Qatada, because it is becoming increasingly clear that there are some very bad ones which don't. In Kent yesterday some idiot has been arrested for posting a picture of a burning poppy online, with the caption "How about that you squadey (sic) ****s". This is the latest in a long line of incidents where the police have arrested and sometimes tried individuals under the Malicious Communications Act 1988 for posting messages or images which are "grossly offensive".
The MCA started life as a worthy piece of legislation intended to deal with threatening or poison pen letters, but it was amended by Labour in 2001 to cover electronic communications, and here's where the trouble originates. I read somewhere that just about any idea worth stating will at some point have been grossly offensive to someone - it's not hard to see that if Darwin had published The Origin of Species online he could have been prosecuted under the MCA. Actually there will be people somewhere in Britain today who find Darwin's theory grossly offensive, and that is rather the point.
The MCA as amended assumes that people have a right not to be grossly offended. They don't; or at least they shouldn't have. Because if they do, it forces us to decide what is grossly offensive and what isn't. And that is a matter of opinion, of the police in the first instance and ultimately of judges and juries. As soon as you make opinion the foundation of law you have chucked away freedom. As I said, subjectivity reduces the law to a whim.
So much bad jurisprudence arises out of failure to apply existing laws sensibly. John Terry and Anton Ferdinand should both have been prosecuted under the Public Order Act. The POA, a statute that has been around in one form or another for over a century, makes it an offence to use threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour likely to cause violence. If the young toe-rag had burned a poppy at a Remembrance Day parade, the POA could have been used against him. Online, the State needs to grow up and amend the MCA.
Monday 12 November 2012
George Entwhistle's Dutch Uncle
The Dutch have a nice saying. In its slightly sanitised version, it goes, "If my Aunty had a beard, she'd be my Uncle". I have been reminded of this in the wake of the surprise resignation of BBC Director General George Entwhistle.
Amongst everyone else, his mother, and Uncle Tom Cobley, veteran presenter David Dimbleby has been putting himself about in the media on the subject of the Entwhistle resignation, appearing on the Today programme this morning and writing an article in the Torygraph. I always thought of Dimbleby as an archetypal paternalistic Corporation Man, but apparently not. "The trouble is", he writes, "that the BBC in recent years has throttled itself with its own bureaucracy . . . It is over managed and badly managed so that no one knows how or where decisions are taken . . . George was a product of that bureaucracy - had risen speaking its language - and that language was his downfall".
It's that last point which rings a bell. If you have an organisation which dedicates itself to management speak, to becoming a blue-skies-thinking producer-choice best-practice human-resources kind of organisation, inevitably the people who rise to its top are the kind of people who thrive in that environment. They must be willing not just to go along with all the balderdash - that's not enough - they must believe in it. Entwhistle evidently believed, and that's one of the reasons why he got to be D-G.
But almost by definition someone who believes can't really lead, because leadership is often the antithesis of this touchy-feely let's-have-a-brainstorming-session-in-a-country-house-hotel way of management; and that's why, at the first sign of trouble, Entwhistle has been found out.
As Dimbleby says, Entwhistle shouldn't have resigned. He should have pointed out that he didn't make the Newsnight programme, or put in place the regime under which it was made. He should have pointed out that Newsnight staff were simply guilty of bad journalism. He should have got the culprits into his office, locked the door, banged their heads together, given them the hairdryer and sent them out a quarter of an hour later mute and shattered with a boot up the backside. Told to do better or else.
Had Entwhistle been this kind of person of course, he wouldn't have got the D-G's job. "If my Aunty had a beard, she'd be my Uncle". And there's the rub. People who adhere to the Alex Ferguson school of management do not, I suspect, prosper at the BBC. And of course had he actually done what I've suggested, the programme makers would have filed a complaint against him, resigned, sued for constructive dismissal and then been compensated handsomely.
And funnily enough, that's exactly what has happened to Entwhistle. He has been given a year's salary - £450,000 - to cheer him on his way.
Just think of the programmes you could make with that.
Amongst everyone else, his mother, and Uncle Tom Cobley, veteran presenter David Dimbleby has been putting himself about in the media on the subject of the Entwhistle resignation, appearing on the Today programme this morning and writing an article in the Torygraph. I always thought of Dimbleby as an archetypal paternalistic Corporation Man, but apparently not. "The trouble is", he writes, "that the BBC in recent years has throttled itself with its own bureaucracy . . . It is over managed and badly managed so that no one knows how or where decisions are taken . . . George was a product of that bureaucracy - had risen speaking its language - and that language was his downfall".
It's that last point which rings a bell. If you have an organisation which dedicates itself to management speak, to becoming a blue-skies-thinking producer-choice best-practice human-resources kind of organisation, inevitably the people who rise to its top are the kind of people who thrive in that environment. They must be willing not just to go along with all the balderdash - that's not enough - they must believe in it. Entwhistle evidently believed, and that's one of the reasons why he got to be D-G.
But almost by definition someone who believes can't really lead, because leadership is often the antithesis of this touchy-feely let's-have-a-brainstorming-session-in-a-country-house-hotel way of management; and that's why, at the first sign of trouble, Entwhistle has been found out.
As Dimbleby says, Entwhistle shouldn't have resigned. He should have pointed out that he didn't make the Newsnight programme, or put in place the regime under which it was made. He should have pointed out that Newsnight staff were simply guilty of bad journalism. He should have got the culprits into his office, locked the door, banged their heads together, given them the hairdryer and sent them out a quarter of an hour later mute and shattered with a boot up the backside. Told to do better or else.
Had Entwhistle been this kind of person of course, he wouldn't have got the D-G's job. "If my Aunty had a beard, she'd be my Uncle". And there's the rub. People who adhere to the Alex Ferguson school of management do not, I suspect, prosper at the BBC. And of course had he actually done what I've suggested, the programme makers would have filed a complaint against him, resigned, sued for constructive dismissal and then been compensated handsomely.
And funnily enough, that's exactly what has happened to Entwhistle. He has been given a year's salary - £450,000 - to cheer him on his way.
Just think of the programmes you could make with that.
Wednesday 7 November 2012
Clive Dunn - meet Elliott Carter
Following the recent news that Elliott Carter has died aged 103, it's sad to hear Dad's Army actor Clive Dunn has today joined the composer beyond the Pearly Gates.
It won't surprise followers of this blog, if any, that I am not a fan of Carter's music. Too much of it just sounded like a big racket to me, though I once heard Nicholas Daniel playing his Oboe Concerto, a late work which I thought was just about the best that high modernism could possibly be considering that it managed without triadic harmony, regular rhythm or recognisable repetition. You couldn't hum it, but it was the best argument I've ever heard for the proposition that it was possible to write listenable squeaky gate music. It made Boulez sound like an amateur.
The Guardian's obituarist noted that in mid-career Carter "made use of a highly systematised harmonic system, involving tables of all possible permutations of a given set of intervals. Manipulating these systems involved immense labour and copious sheaves of preliminary sketches (well over a thousand pages for A Symphony of Three Orchestras)".
Reader, I must confess that I too once wasted time and trees in the same fashion.
"But from the 80s", the obit continues, "Carter increasingly composed free-style, by ear".
Hence the Oboe Concerto. For me the moment of revelation came when I actually succeeded in getting one of my laboriously composed behemoths performed by a professional orchestra. I returned from the first rehearsal devastated. The small part of me which feared the result might be unlistenable was thumpingly vindicated. Not long after when I began to write my first symphony I simply sat down at the piano and forced myself to write whatever came into my head. I have never looked back.
To turn to another popular entertainer, Clive Dunn was made famous by his role as Corporal Jones in Dad's Army. I can't think of any programme which has introduced more catch-phrases into the English language. "Stupid boy Pike" was Captain Mainwaring, of course, and "We're all doomed" Private Frazer. But "Don't panic!", "They don't like it up 'em!" and "Permission to speak" were all Corporal Jones. Just thinking about them makes me laugh.
Clive Dunn also had a sideline as a singer. If he and Elliott Carter should meet Upstairs, I like to think that Dunn will treat the composer to a rendition of his 1970 hit "Grandad". Now that would be an event almost worth dying to witness.
It won't surprise followers of this blog, if any, that I am not a fan of Carter's music. Too much of it just sounded like a big racket to me, though I once heard Nicholas Daniel playing his Oboe Concerto, a late work which I thought was just about the best that high modernism could possibly be considering that it managed without triadic harmony, regular rhythm or recognisable repetition. You couldn't hum it, but it was the best argument I've ever heard for the proposition that it was possible to write listenable squeaky gate music. It made Boulez sound like an amateur.
The Guardian's obituarist noted that in mid-career Carter "made use of a highly systematised harmonic system, involving tables of all possible permutations of a given set of intervals. Manipulating these systems involved immense labour and copious sheaves of preliminary sketches (well over a thousand pages for A Symphony of Three Orchestras)".
Reader, I must confess that I too once wasted time and trees in the same fashion.
"But from the 80s", the obit continues, "Carter increasingly composed free-style, by ear".
Hence the Oboe Concerto. For me the moment of revelation came when I actually succeeded in getting one of my laboriously composed behemoths performed by a professional orchestra. I returned from the first rehearsal devastated. The small part of me which feared the result might be unlistenable was thumpingly vindicated. Not long after when I began to write my first symphony I simply sat down at the piano and forced myself to write whatever came into my head. I have never looked back.
To turn to another popular entertainer, Clive Dunn was made famous by his role as Corporal Jones in Dad's Army. I can't think of any programme which has introduced more catch-phrases into the English language. "Stupid boy Pike" was Captain Mainwaring, of course, and "We're all doomed" Private Frazer. But "Don't panic!", "They don't like it up 'em!" and "Permission to speak" were all Corporal Jones. Just thinking about them makes me laugh.
Clive Dunn also had a sideline as a singer. If he and Elliott Carter should meet Upstairs, I like to think that Dunn will treat the composer to a rendition of his 1970 hit "Grandad". Now that would be an event almost worth dying to witness.
Monday 22 October 2012
Jimmy Savile and the BBC - believe in better
I feel slightly sorry for the BBC over all the shenanigans over Jimmy Savile. After all, plenty of other organisations - hospitals, charities - fell for the cigar-toting kiddy-fiddler and facilitated his sordid gropings on their premises; but they aren't being lacerated in the public prints in quite the same way.
Having said that there is a case to answer, and whilst it may be true that nothing was known for certain about Savile's various exploitations, there was an easy way to make sure they didn't carry on - stop employing him. It would have been good if that obvious way out had been taken, and that might end up being the BBC's biggest mistake.
It's hard to imagine any commercial organisation beating its breast via the hair shirt as the BBC is doing now. Credit to it. I suppose you could argue that the Corporation has an obligation to try and do the right thing that Sky, for example, wouldn't have, because we, the licence-fee payers, don't have any choice but to carry on funding it, paedophile employees or no, whereas if Murdoch and his men had done something similar we could always take our subs elsewhere.
Which brings me to the thing which must humiliate the BBC the most. Of all the indignities forced on staff, there can be few more galling than the appointment to the chair of one of its Savile inquiries than a former head of Sky News. It's come to something when someone who used to work for one of Rupert Murdoch's organisations is regarded as more trustworthy than one of the Corporation's own.
Believe in better? Believe in bitter.
Having said that there is a case to answer, and whilst it may be true that nothing was known for certain about Savile's various exploitations, there was an easy way to make sure they didn't carry on - stop employing him. It would have been good if that obvious way out had been taken, and that might end up being the BBC's biggest mistake.
It's hard to imagine any commercial organisation beating its breast via the hair shirt as the BBC is doing now. Credit to it. I suppose you could argue that the Corporation has an obligation to try and do the right thing that Sky, for example, wouldn't have, because we, the licence-fee payers, don't have any choice but to carry on funding it, paedophile employees or no, whereas if Murdoch and his men had done something similar we could always take our subs elsewhere.
Which brings me to the thing which must humiliate the BBC the most. Of all the indignities forced on staff, there can be few more galling than the appointment to the chair of one of its Savile inquiries than a former head of Sky News. It's come to something when someone who used to work for one of Rupert Murdoch's organisations is regarded as more trustworthy than one of the Corporation's own.
Believe in better? Believe in bitter.
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