Andrew Collins's Blog, page 34

Mission not accomplished

Sometimes, you don’t need to annotate. This is a passage from a lengthy piece in a recent New Yorker (I’m behind; it has a smiling Obama on the cover after the Supreme Court ruling – that’s how behind I am), called After America by Dexter Filkins, looking ahead without optimism to the United States’ 2014 withdrawal from Afghanistan and comparing it to the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1989, which led to much of the trouble that caused America to go in, in 2001. Lesson: don’t invade Afghanistan.

After eleven years, nearly two thousand Americans killed, sixteen thousand Americans wounded, nearly four hundred billion dollars spent, and more than twelve thousand Afghan civilians dead since 2007, the war in Afghanistan has come to this: the United States is leaving, mission not accomplished. Objectives once deemed indispensable, such as nation-building and counterinsurgency, have been abandoned or downgraded, either because they haven’t worked or because there’s no longer enough time to achieve them. Even the education of girls, a signal achievement of the NATO presence in Afghanistan, is at risk. By the end of 2014, when the last Americans are due to stop fighting, the Taliban will not be defeated. A Western-style democracy will not be in place. The economy will not be self-sustaining. No senior Afghan official will likely be imprisoned for any crime, no matter how egregious. And it’s a good bet that, in some remote mountain valley, even Al Qaeda, which brought the United States to Afghanistan in the first place, will be carrying on.

I know. This excellent piece is available to read in its entirety – if, like me, you find war endlessly, grimly fascinating, but, unlike me, can be bothered to read thousands of words on a screen – in the New Yorker’s online archive.

I love this magazine.

Progress report: I now have four issues in circulation (by which I mean, in my shoulder bag, and sometimes carried around the house). The Obama-smiling issue is actually now satisfactorily read, and about to be passed on. I’m into a lengthy piece about the divided Sudan in the issue with the family on the beach on the cover, having already polished off the American drought, linguistic forensics, the Grimm brothers and Frank Ocean. Wish me luck.

Twitter and twisted

As I always say, Twitter can be used as a force for good, or a force for evil. In this respect it is like fire, water, religious faith and the combustion engine. Over the past couple of days, we have seen it once again at the centre of a number of fairly prominent news stories. Taken together, I think these stories help to describe Twitter to those who either willfully misunderstand it, or simply think it will go away.

With 500 million users, most of us who participate in Justin Bieber’s personal social networking service are only really sampling a tiny sliver of what’s being transmitted around the tiny globe (essentially, the bit without Justin Bieber fans in), and that’s as it should be. I won’t explain how it works in detail as the Sunday supplements are forced to do on a near weekly basis, nor will I tiresomely trot out recommendations of “who to follow” (there are algorithms for that – currently urging me to follow @matthewmulot and @XLRecordings), but for the uninitiated, you edit the roll-call of those whose Tweets continually scroll past in your “timeline” and thus have complete control over what enters your life.

Beyond the “Home” timeline, you can use the “Connect” timeline to see who, if anyone, is using your @Twittername; such Tweets are from anybody on Twitter and represent a lawless wild west where anything can happen, although it usually simply means that someone you don’t follow is posting you a message and, if you’re as vigilant as I am, the polite ones should be politely replied to. Here, a dialogue with someone you’ve maybe never met can ensue, and this is not necessarily unpleasant. Equally, it can be an idiot abusing this unique public address system, but they can be “blocked” with a simple click and reported for spam if they are not even a real person. Again, you are the editor.

I used to obstinately only follow 140 people (mostly people I know; a proportion I have never met but who have crossed my radar via 6 Music or the books or stand-up and whom I like), and if I added someone, someone else had to go. This borderline OCD approach was based upon a system not devised by me that adjudged 140 to be a manageable amount of followees – and because each Tweet is famously restricted to 140 characters, it seemed neat to follow 140 “characters”. Recently, I have loosened up a little, and, as of today, follow 214 “characters”. This expansion of material has, I have found, made clicking on “Home” that bit more surprising. It also means that I miss a lot more. But hey.

As frequently revealed, I do not have an iPhone, or indeed any kind of phone with 3G access, so I only play with Twitter when I’m at my laptop. This is fine by me. I have no wish at this stage to Tweet when I’m walking along, or on a train, or – quite the thing with Twitter – watching telly. (Indeed, refusenik that I am, I take pleasure in watching telly as a separate activity to playing on the computer. I often log onto Twitter after Question Time, for instance, and have a quick scroll back to see what the people I follow have been #bbcqt hashtagging about it. But I’m a bit of a uni-tasker at heart. I found the Opening Ceremony of the Olympics to be sensory overload enough, without having to join in a simultaneous conversation about it with my finger. Many digi-evangelists will think that I am missing out. I disagree.)

Anyway, this means that I feel I control it, and that it does not control me. I compartmentalise my life, and it suits me. Everyone is different. When I am working, online and at my laptop, I find Twitter a sometimes welcome distraction, a bit like sticking on the news (I follow a number of news alerts on Twitter, and a lot of the people I follow are the kind who post enlightening links and funny Twitpics). I still get my work done. If I didn’t, I’d start to worry. But the nagging urge to have a quick glance at what’s being Tweeted – just like checking your emails again – can be potentially irritating when you’re trying to concentrate. Again, that’s life in the modern world. We have never been more distracted as a species.

So, the Twitter stories of the past few days have been these.

The Twitter Joke Trial. As you probably know, a man called Paul Chambers Tweeted in frustration at flights being cancelled at South Yorkshire’s Robin Hood Airport during snowy weather in January 2010, “You’ve got a week and a bit to get your shit together otherwise I’m blowing the airport sky high!!” He was joking. He was arrested under anti-terrorism laws and charged for “sending a public electronic message that was grossly offensive or of an indecent, obscene or menacing character contrary to the Communications Act 2003.” This became a cause celebre (literally when Stephen Fry offered to pay Chambers’ legal bills), but took until a second high court appeal last week for the case to be quashed, despite protestations by the CPS. Al Murray, another celebrity supporter, stood alongside the acquitted Chambers, for this was surely a test case for freedom of speech, freedom of joke and freedom of Twitter.

Most right-thinking people think, rightly, that Chambers’ case was a waste of public time and money, and that he should never have even been charged in the first place. It doesn’t take a genius to spot that he was making a joke in the heat of the moment. But the moment, on Twitter, is logged. And that’s the tricky part. It feels like you’re scrawling something on a wall, or perhaps just muttering to yourself on a train platform. But the wall and thin air are now searchable.

However, where do the same right-thinking people stand on this more recent story?

Tom Daley’s Twitter troll. Police arrested a 17-year-old Twitter “troll” in Weymouth yesterday. He had accused 18-year-old Team GB diver Tom Daley of letting down his late father after finishing fourth in the diving. The silly boy, @Rileyy_69, rashly Tweeted: “You let your dad down i hope you know that.” He also wished aquatic death upon him. Daley, understanding Twitter, re-Tweeted the abuse, adding: “After giving it my all…you get idiot’s sending me this…” (neither of them is good at spelling or punctuation, but that’s society’s fault). As often happens when an ordinary person tries to get a famous person’s attention via Twitter, Rileyy_69 quickly backed down: “I’m sorry mate i just wanted you to win cause its the olympics I’m just annoyed we didn’t win I’m sorry tom accept my apology.” This may have been true, but it points up just how dangerous Tweeting can be. I originally concluded that Rileyy_69 didn’t understand the power or reach of Twitter, even though he is a regular user, but scanning down his timeline since the incident, I think he actually might be damaged in some way, or perhaps even bipolar, so perhaps we should be slower to condemn.

Perhaps he never really expected his Tweet to be read by Tom Daley. But by using Daley’s @Twittername, he was seeking attention. He achieved this. (He re-Tweeted an ITV News story about him, which is worrying.)

I daresay Daley’s followers gave Rileyy_69 grief. I bet some of them wished death upon him. This is hypocritical in the circumstances, but again, tempers fray, and bad things can be typed in the heat of a moment. This was a moment.

So, should Rileyy_69 have been arrested? Remember, he’s 17. If some of the things I wrote when I was 17 had been read by the famous people they were written about, I might too have been arrested. I wasn’t very nice about the pop group Tight Fit in 1982 in my diary. Luckily it was in a book that Tight Fit never read, so the police were never called. (By the way, I don’t think a 17-year-old boy should get the knock at the door for insulting a diver. And nor, I bet, does the diver. Unless there really is more to this character, it seems to be getting out of hand. I bring the story up as a matter of record, but let’s all stand back shall we?)

Meanwhile, it’s not just ordinary members of the public who Tweet before they think.

Aidan Burley MP. This grown man, aged 33, elected by the people of Cannock Chase to represent them in Parliament, wasn’t much impressed by Danny Boyle’s magnificent opening ceremony at the Olympics on Friday night. He lives in a free country. Twitter is a free forum. He expressed his personal views and these were his views:

“The most leftie opening ceremony I have ever seen – more than Beijing, the capital of a communist state! Welfare tribute next? … Thank God the athletes have arrived! Now we can move on from leftie multicultural crap. Bring back red arrows, Shakespeare and the Stones.”

He has a cute way of spelling “leftie” but we’ll let that go. Fair enough. He’s a Tory. His views on what he thinks is “multiculturalism” (but which is actually just “life in British towns and cities”) are different to mine. He equates Boyle’s inclusion of all creeds and colours in what is a celebration of Great Britain (the clue’s in Team GB) as a “leftie” stance. It shouldn’t be, in an ideal world. But we do not live in an ideal world. Frankly, there’s no story here – other than one about David Cameron’s attempts to unify his party behind modernising jargon in order not to be voted right out again at the next election when the Lib Dems are no longer around to prop them up, and one rogue MP speaking for the hard right of the party and embarrassing him in public – but it shows just how quickly an MP known only for being sacked as Parliamentary Private Secretary in 2011 for attending a stag do where Nazi salutes were made can become a news story again. His card is marked. (Oh, and he’s backtracking for Britain now, which is fun to spectate.)

It seems like another case where an opinion muttered on a train platform has become concrete because of Twitter. I’m sure his political career has been curtailed as a result of it. But his Tweets are still up, or were the last time I looked, so it’s not as if he’s even been censored, or had his account suspended. He did not break any laws. He’s just a dick. Twitter has a lot of dicks.

But when does freedom of speech cross over into breaking the Twitter law?

The NBC shutdown. Yesterday, Twitter apologised. Under the heading Our approach to Trust & Safety and private information, it basically held its hands up over the story that NBC, official US broadcaster of the “leftie” Olympics opening ceremony (see how all these stories tie up?) and on this occasion a media partner with Twitter, used their corporate might to get an Independent journalist’s private Twitter account closed down.

“We want to take a moment to explain some of our general Trust and Safety policies and procedures, and address the specific case at hand that has unfolded over the past 48-hours … ” went the official edict. Basically, there is a “Trust and Safety team”, which polices reports from users wherein private information has been posted, against the user’s will, often an email address. The full story is here, but basically, Guy Adams Tweeted unfavourably about NBC’s handling of the ceremony and, perhaps rashly, perhaps in the heat of one of those moments, posted the corporate email address of Gary Zenkel, president of NBC Olympics. We originally heard that a complaint was filed by NBC, but it subsequently emerged that, counter to policy, Twitter brought it to NBC’s attention.

According to the apology, “the Trust and Safety team does not actively monitor users’ content … whether the user is the head of a major corporation, a celebrity, or a regular user … We do not proactively report or remove private information on behalf of other users, no matter who they are.”

Whether or not a corporate email address is private information is not really the argument here. The issue is that, as Twitter goofily put it in that campus-y way of such companies, “we messed up.” How? “The team working closely with NBC around our Olympics partnership did proactively identify a Tweet that was in violation of the Twitter Rules and encouraged them to file a support ticket.”

As a result, Guy Adams’ account has been “unsuspended”.

I often moan about targeted promotions on Twitter, and get shouted down by people who say that it’s a free service, which I use, and it has to be paid for somehow. (There are no banner ads or pop-up on the site, which, with 500 million users, is pretty amazing.) Part of me lives in constant fear of having my personal information shared or sold without my knowledge. Twitter only has my email address, because that’s all you need to set up an account. But it must have all of the 20,074 Tweets I have Tweeted somewhere, including the drunk ones that I deleted the next morning. I know I’ve never libeled or threatened anyone, nor published an email address, but it’s still weird to know that all that writing belongs to a company whose most valuable asset is its 500 million users.

Still, it’s a distraction, as I say. It’s also the number one media story, whatever happens here. A single sentence of less than 140 characters, typed in haste by a 17-year-old in Weymouth, can be a world news story within an hour of it being typed. That’s pretty astonishing. But we mustn’t let the discourse that constantly spreads and mutates here replace actual news – or actual discourse, come to that.

I’m off to check Twitter to see if anyone made a funny and to promote the repeats of Mr Blue Sky on Radio 4 and 4 Extra.

Mighty real

In 2011, Senna broke documentary history in the UK with a £375,000 opening weekend in June (it went on to take $11 million globally, having done brisk business in Brazil and Japan). It was a vintage year for long-form, theatrically released documentaries. I wrote about the subject for Word magazine at the time, but since the feature’s not online, I’ll repeat some of the salient points. Why? Mainly because yesterday, I saw three long-form, theatrically released documentaries, two brand new, one from last year. (The other one I’m going to mention is not yet out, but due in August.)

The first was Searching For Sugar Man. You’ll have heard plenty about this. Directed by Swedish newcomer Malik Bendjelloul, it is not strictly the story of “new Bob Dylan” Sixto Rodriguez, a seemingly gifted late-60s troubadour whose two albums, in 1970 and 1971, were flops in America, after which he moved from semi-obscurity to total obscurity; rather, it is the story of two wily South Africans, a record shop owner and a journalist, who set about finding Rodriguez after his songs took on a new life within the anti-Apartheid movement and he became “bigger than Elvis” in South Africa.

As with so many of the great feature documentaries of the 21st century – during which time the genre has boomed – Sugar Man has a story to tell that many people will not have heard before. Rodriguez remains obscure (or at least, he would have done if not for this documentary) outside of South Africa. He’s also big in Australia and New Zealand, although this inconvenient fact is left out of Searching For Sugar Man. Some have criticised it for editing the truth in this cavalier fashion, but it doesn’t worry me too much, as the fact remains: Rodriguez was a flop in America and was fascinatingly picked up in South Africa without anything to do with hype or marketing (and certainly unbeknown to his US record label, Sussex, which packed up in 1975 anyway). This is the essence of the story.

I won’t give any more detail about how that story unfolds, as the conclusion is all the more effective and dramatic if you remain in the dark. (Most reviews give it away.) I found myself with a smile on my face often during its modest 86-minute running time. It’s a good yarn, stranger than fiction, and says a lot about the way the record industry used to work in the pre-digital age. It also speaks of the Lottery-like nature of fame and fortune – Rodrigeuz’s songs take centre stage, always captioned, and they’re pretty good, not least Sugar Man, which was revived by David Holmes a few years back. Bendjelloul creates some very cinematic establishing footage of Cape Town, Detroit and other key locations – at one point morphing to photo-realist animation. Such bold filmmaking tricks are often used in documentary now, where the stakes have been raised, but they add to the experience of seeing it in a darkened cinema, as I did. Ultimately, though, it’s the story that will make or break.

Sometimes, as with Senna, say, or Touching The Void, or One Day In September, it’s not the outcome that matters, but the getting there. Docs built around news events, or a life story whose ending is on the statute books, are all about the organisation, or dramatisation, of information. I know next to nothing about Formula One motor racing, but I know that Ayrton Senna is dead; and such was the deft, economical skill of storytelling in Senna, I was as gripped and moved as if I had been watching fiction.

The non-fiction take is as old as film itself; indeed, the first moving pictures presented trains, factory workers and Arctic explorers: documents of real life. But though landmarks such as Triumph Of The Will in 1935 and Night Mail in 1936 enjoyed cinema exhibition in parallel with dramatic fiction, they were quickly ghettoised to the living room once television had established itself; they seemed more at home beside the news and weather.

In the 70s and 80s, theatrically released concert films like The Last Waltz and The Song Remains The Same – forefathers of Justin Bieber: Never Say Never – found a ready-cooked audience. But the true renaissance of documentary as a commercially viable cinematic form happened this century.

The epic high school basketball saga Hoop Dreams made $11 million in 1995, but in the same year only around ten documentaries even made the theatres. By 2003 – the year Michael Moore hit the polemical big time with Bowling For Columbine and James Cameron took us round the wreck of the Titanic in 3D with Ghosts Of The Abyss – the total was up to 45. A year later, try 85. Last year, 122 documentaries were released in the United States, around half of which found their way to UK cinemas.

The Imposter is out on August 24, so I will not add to the already-building hype and give too much away. I saw it last week, and interviewed its director Bart Layton for Radio Times, so I’m dying to talk about it, but can’t. Another true story that was documented at the time but is surely little known to most people, I actually remember reading a long (really?) New Yorker piece about the subject a few years ago, which turns out to have been among the triggers that turned Layton onto the idea of a possible documentary.

Like Sugar Man, the less you know the better. All I will say at this early stage is that it starts with a missing 13-year-old boy in a small town in Texas, who turns up a few years later in Spain and is reunited with his family. This all happened in the 90s – coincidentally when much of the pivotal action in Sugar Man takes place – but in gathering together all the principal players, Layton and his producers (about one of whom, more later) have created something very special. We’ll discuss it when it comes out, right?

Once again, it’s stranger than fiction. And, in many ways, not as neat. But its use of dramatic reconstruction is interesting, as my own deep aversion to the techniques of Crimewatch has completely dissipated over the past decade. I used to be a purist about this: if the archive doesn’t exist, tough. But the clever work by Kevin MacDonald in Touching The Void changed my mind. (Similarly, the reconstruction in Man On Wire, by James Marsh, was unobtrusive and subtle. This was an event, after all, that was not filmed. That said, I found the still, black-and-white photographs of Philippe Petit tightrope-walking between the Twin Towers as awe-inspiring as any newsreel.)

Perhaps the most interesting connection to make here is John Battsek. He worked as a producer or exec producer on Sugar Man, The Imposter, One Day In September and Project Nim, some of the milestone feature-length documentaries of the age, linking to key men Marsh and MacDonald (not to mention other notable docs, Restrepo, In The Shadow Of The Moon and The Age Of Stupid). Directors build the story and illustrate it using whatever techniques they feel do the best job, but producers are always the driving force, and in documentary seem to play a more hands-on role. If I’m wrong about that, tell me, but when I met him, Bart Layton put a lot of emphasis on his, including Battsek, MD of Passion Pictures, a company that’s proven itself a vital force for getting it done in the doc world.

I’ll be totally honest with you: I skipped Project Nim when it came out at the cinema last year in a blaze of publicity and marketing. The life story of Nim, a chimpanzee taken from its mother at a primate research institute and brought up “as a human” by a hippyish family in New York and paraded in the media as being able to “talk” (in fact, sign), I could see that this was a fascinating story. But it was clearly going to be rooted in cruelty to animals, and no amount of bucolic footage of long-haired Americans playing with a cute chimp in kids’ clothes was going to compensate for that. I’m afraid I gave it a wide berth. (I don’t even find animals in human clothes cute. Not even tiny hats.)

I’ve had it on DVD for months, and yesterday, because I don’t really care about the Olympics, I decided to get my act together. Directed by Man On Wire’s Marsh, it uses very little reconstruction, and then only flashes, as plenty of photos and footage were taken at the time, due to the scientific nature of the experiment. Like The Imposter, it relies heavily on talking heads, and it seems that everybody involved was happy to provide testimony. This testimony lights up the story. (If you’ve seen Errol Morris’s mesmerising The Fog Of War, based pretty much exclusively on interviews with one man, Robert McNamara, you’ll know how powerful the right talking head can be.)

The trailer hints that the experiment did not go to plan, and now I’ve seen the film, I realise how very badly wrong it went. This is a heartbreaking film, in which witnesses who seem to be the good guys turn out to be bad, and at least one bad guy turns out to be good. In this sense, over 93 minutes, you will experience a rollercoaster ride of emotion. People who are fascinated by animals also seem able to do unspeakably unnatural things to them. People who detect the chimpanzee’s closeness to humans also seem fine with putting the same primates in cages. A lawyer appalled by the abuse he felt was meted out upon Nim was also willing him to have him “perform” in a courtroom. It’s a truly unpredictable tale. I must admit, I found it well made and admirable throughout, despite my squeamishness. If anything, it’s an anti-vivisection polemic, but never feels hectoring or finger-wagging.

Nim, for all its advance publicity and “from the director of the Oscar-winning Man On Wire” tagline, seems to have made around $400,000 in the US (I can’t find figures for it elsewhere), so I’m not sure if it was a hit or not. Certainly, anyone buying a ticket to see a cute chimp in kids’ clothing and “talking” was going to be in for a shock. In general, docs are far cheaper to make than fiction for self-evident reasons. No actors to pay. Relatively easy shoots. Available archive. As such, more are being made in the hope of striking gold. It’s not tricky to explain why Michael Jackson’s This Is It took £9.7 million in the UK in 2009, knocking Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 off the all-time top spot, nor why gallery-playing ringmasters like Moore, Nick Broomfield and Morgan Spurlock help sell to popcorn-munchers what are essentially elongated editions of Panorama. In addition, Moore’s tub-thumping Democrat polemics chime with a broader disaffection for neocon hegemony and rampant capitalism among the chattering classes.

But with a biography told as simply as Senna, or as traditionally as Living In The Material World, it is surely the truth itself that attracts us. The turn of the Millennium played tricks on the human psyche. Although it was just the date that changed, the end of one epoch and the regeneration into another seemed to grant us pause to reflect on mankind’s achievements and failures – and to arrange them into Top 20 lists. Cheap archive took on a new potency. The 1990s became absorbed into a broader, catalogued past quicker than any decade in post-industrial history. Everything was up for grabs.

As our shrinking world has simultaneously grown more complex and prone to biblical melodrama – wars raging, floods rising, banks failing, news rolling, despots deposed, cities aflame, old certainties rendered uncertain on a near-weekly basis – it seems that we are increasingly drawn to a cauterised, edited version of reality, packaged up for us by painstaking documentarians. Never mind TV’s “structured reality,” this is structured reality.

And so, finally, to Swandown, which I saw as an appetiser to Sugar Man yesterday in my Olympics-denying double bill at the Curzon (and your local arthouse, if you’re lucky enough to have one, is a godsend for doc-lovers). This is less a documentary, more a document. It present events that actually happened – filmmaker Andrew Kötting and psychogeographer Iain Sinclair traversing sections of waterway between Hastings and Stratford in a swan-shaped pedalo – but in an entirely subjective manner. It is a messy, fragmented film, made on the hoof, and yet its trajectory was clearly planned, and its through-line is so precise we are actually shown maps with lines drawn on them. The result, shot through with recitations from Beckett and Lear, and – although I didn’t recognise it – a recording of Werner Herzog (who now seems exclusively to make documentaries) talking about Fitzcarraldo, whose epic quest Swandown self-mockingly mimics, is eccentric and surprising and at times wholly chucklesome.

You get to see Stewart Lee and Alan Moore in the pedalo at one stage, too, and if that isn’t a pair of filmmakers knowing their audience, I don’t know what is. (The actor Dudley Sutton also makes an irascible appearance, which is a delight.) In fact, Swandown is a delight generally, especially if you’re a fan of Lee’s self-conscious postmodernism and Moore’s twangy, good-humoured cosmic philosophy. Due to shaky captioning, I thought Sinclair was Kötting, and Kötting Sinclair to begin with, but once I’d worked it out, it actually rebalanced the experience. So, if you’re thinking of catching Swandown, and you should if you feel you’re in the right mental demographic, Sinclair is the quiet one in a fleece, Kötting the noisy, Kentish one in an unsuitable suit. The latter is, of course, the driving force, the chief pedaller and peddler.

Documentary comes in many forms. I think I have seen all of them in the past 24 hours. As with my tastes in books, I now demand reality. Fiction just will not cut it.

Give ’em enough Pope

In order to “beat the Olympics” (you can’t beat the Olympics), we recorded this week’s Telly Addict a day early at the Guardian, where wondrous things were being prepared in an adjacent studio of which I cannot yet speak (keep your eye on the Guardian website when the Games begin), and it’s up early, too. In any case, my aim was to avoid the Olympics, which means an eye cast over last week’s Bank Of Dave on C4; Ruby Wax’s Mad Confessions, also on C4; the return of The Borgias to Sky Atlantic; and another indulgent moment from Mid Morning Matters With Alan Partridge, also on Sky Atlantic. I may just have a look at the opening ceremony and review that next week, as London 2012 is essentially a television event for most of us.

Gates open

People often ask me what it takes to write for TV. I’ll tell you: patience. Actually, patience and perseverance. It was in December 2009 that I was first approached by the exec producer of what would eventually become Gates, a sitcom put into development by Sky. (The series was actually commissioned, if I remember rightly, in April 2011.) Although the kernel of an idea was in place at that stage – a comedy about the comings and goings at the school gates, with particular emphasis on the parents, rather than the kids – the nuts and bolts were yet to be assembled. The producer, Laurence, gathered half a dozen writers from various quarters of the TV firmament and sat them around his kitchen table in February 2010. It’s OK to name us all now, as the show is finally ready to air, next month, on Sky Living – me, Abi Wilson (Jam & Jerusalem), Richard Preddy (Green Wing), Dan Sefton (Holby City) and stand-up Ava Vidal, with Jennifer Saunders at all of the development meetings and acting as script editor on the pilot. Perhaps you’d like to see the very first one-minute trailer? If so, it’s here.

At those early kitchen-table meetings, we grew the entire cast of characters from scratch and created a number of storylines for them. These were then honed into episodes. With the first script written, using a complicated system of farming out various scenes/characters to various writers having all pitched in on the structure in group sessions, we cast for a read-through and the first episode was performed to the bigwigs from Sky. Although very few of the actors survived from that first temporary casting, we were able to forge on with a full series of six once we had the green light, and the final cast were assembled in time for a summer shoot, on location in North London.

Among those cast were Tom Ellis, Joanna Page, Sue Johnston, Will Andrews (seen, incidentally, on Mid Morning Matters on Sky last week on an exercise bike), Nick Mohammed, Catherine Shepherd (seen only the other night on the final Twenty Twelve), Tony Gardner, Ella Kenyon and Adam Deacon. Casting is an inexact science, buffeted by availability and timing, but the cards did seem to fall very well for Gates. I would say that. But there you go.

The cast and crew attended a screening of the first couple of episodes at the end of last year, and then the waiting game began. We learned, to our initial chagrin, that Gates was being held back until the autumn and this felt like an eternity away at the time. But the wait is over. Sky Living is a more “female-friendly” version of Sky One, if I may roll out the virtual flipchart for a moment. As such, I can see why Gates has been chosen to premiere there, as it has a strong female voice, with a female producer (Izzy), female writers and a female script editor for the first episode. (It was commissioned by a female, too!) I’m happy to have played a male part in it. It was like a family. No, really. A family under siege, obviously.

I’m really looking forward to Gates entering the public domain. We all put a lot of work into it, and to have been involved at the ground floor gives an enormous sense of satisfaction. Equally, it’s good for the ego to have worked in a team. No single episode belongs to a single writer – we all worked on all of them, to varying degrees. A lot of what I did was essentially editing, but that’s fine by me. It couldn’t be more different from working solo on Mr Blue Sky. It’s far easier to skulk individually away from a collaborative effort if people don’t like it, or it fails. I don’t anticipate this happening with Gates. As soon as I have the exact TX date, I’ll Tweet the arse out of it.

This is the blog entry I wrote during the shoot last summer, when we all believed that Gates would air in the New Year. There are some nice, esoteric location pics, and a bit more detail about the production, should you be on a course, or something. (I didn’t realised I’d used the same punning title.)

This just in: Episode 1 airs at 8.30 on Tuesday August 14.

Flanders’ field

Sometimes, no matter how jaded I get, work and pleasure cross over to such a degree, it’s hard to know where one ends and the other begins. I’m not claiming that filling in for Shaun Keaveny at Breakfast on 6 Music is the hardest job in the world, but it is a job. Yesterday, though, the “job” included talking to Harry Shearer for the best part of an hour and a quarter, interrupted only by records, news and music news. He was ostensibly in to promote his new album Can’t Take A Hint, his latest collection of satirical songs, which you can read about here. But Harry is a generous soul, and is more than happy to tangent off and talk about the other stuff from his long and illustrious career, which goes back to being a child actor in the 50s, and snakes from pioneering radio comedy music group The Credibility Gap through Saturday Night Live (which he hated), Spinal Tap and The Simpsons to the syndicated NPR radio show that is still running after almost 30 years, Le Show (which is really worth seeking out in podcast form via iTunes or other means – you can also stream from Harry’s website).

He’s been a fan and supporter of 6 Music since the very start, and, it transpires, used to listen to my Teatime show in the early days as his breakfast show in LA. (I must admit, I’m glad I didn’t know this at the time. Harry Shearer? Listening to my show? I would have had the vapours.) Anyway, I heard about this long after my show had ended, via Shaun, when Harry came on as a guest. After that bombshell, I was dying to shake his hand, so when he last came into the building – again, to talk to Shaun – I frankly loitered. On that occasion, he was in to promote his documentary about Hurricane Katrina, The Big Uneasy (Harry lives in New Orleans and has a special connection to the place). This is our first meeting:

Our second meeting was yesterday. Because of the Olympics, all cabs are being booked early, so Harry was delivered to 6 Music about an hour before he was required to speak for his supper. An easygoing fellow, he didn’t seem to mind. But you can’t have Harry Shearer sitting on the wrong side of the glass in the green room while you are live on air. This is not a time to stand on Breakfast ceremony (guests go on-air at approximately 09.10 and must be dispatched before the 09.30 news) – so we had Harry in at 08.45 and he stayed until the end of the show at 10.00, more than happy to keep yakkin’, and to add that all-important third voice to Matt Everitt’s music news bulletin. (Matt is on the left in the big photo above.)

Talking of voices, as an illustrious member of the Simpsons voice cast, Harry must dread hearing the words, “Do Mr Burns.” I was trying to think of a subtle, postmodern, ironic way of getting him to do Mr Burns, but I didn’t have to. He dropped into the voice, without prompting, to wish a listener a happy 41st birthday. I think he did it because I didn’t say, “Do Mr Burns.” Anyway, you can listen again to the entire show, including the Harry Shearer Hour, on iPlayer until next Tuesday. The podcast, which includes the best of Harry, is also available for a week. (Cough. It’s no longer a “podcast”, it’s a “download”, let’s get the Stalinist BBC terminology right.)

Oh, and he did a private Ned Flanders for our producer Claire. It’s a memory she will forever cherish. Harry Shearer: one of the good guys. And more than a one-man Burns unit.

Spoiler alert! 1) the legend ends 2) the dark knight rises

There will be no spoilers about The Dark Knight Rises here. Just the news that I really liked it, thought it was better than The Dark Knight and on a par with Batman Begins, and surely a four-star movie (not a three-star movie, according to many critics here, and certainly not a two-star movie, which the critics in the Mail and the Evening Standard seemed to think it is). So no plot details, just the really basic building blocks that are pretty much spelled out in the trailer: a man in a mask threatens Gotham; another man in a mask returns – or rises – to stop him. Two hours and 40 minutes pass while this happens, and there’s a nail-biter of a climax, with a couple of revelations that will surprise you if you haven’t read about them online, or in “long reviews”, as they are technically known. It’s a worthy end to the three-part saga.

I’m not one for revealing endings, or key plot points. In my weekly Telly Addict review for the Guardian, I try to make a point of taking clips from the beginnings of things, as I’m sensitive to those who might not yet have seen the episode I’m reviewing. (At the S2 climax of Game Of Thrones recently, I ran a clip in which Alfie Allen’s character Theon Greyjoy gave a speech to his men, and was knocked out by Ralph Ineson’s Dagmer. I think some people thought he had killed him, and thus cried spoiler. But he hadn’t, or else I wouldn’t have run the clip. You can see what a minefield it is.)

If you wish to avoid spoilers, whether to a film or an episode of a TV show, it surely goes without saying that you really have to tread carefully on the internet. Stuff gets out. It’s a long time since we enjoyed the luxury of seeing things without warning, preamble or carefully stage-managed hype. The one I always trot out is Blade Runner; I saw it at the cinema in 1983 with not a clue as to what I was about to receive. The poster, such as it was, gave little away, other than a futuristic setting and Harrison Ford. What unexpected delights it concealed. I loved it, and part of that was down to the surprises in store. These days, especially with sci-fi, I’d be hard pushed to get that much fresh pleasure from such a big movie. You have to bury your head to achieve that kind of consumer purity.

I understand the Guardian found itself at the centre of a spoiler row over The Dark Knight Rises – specifically Xan Brooks’ first-off-the-blocks overnight review. It’s a big below-the-line talking point, fuelled by a recurring allegation against the paper’s chief critic Peter Bradshaw of writing “spoilerific” lead reviews, where more words are spent and more plot is necessarily rolled out. Also, much more concretely it seems, David Letterman revealed the ending while interviewing Anne Hathaway on his chat show, the fool. This is far more of a crime: a vanilla promotional TV interview should be a spoiler safe-place! In print, and especially with lead reviews, you take your life into your own hands.

I am a disciple of Sight & Sound, renowned for providing detailed synopses along with its reviews, which are never short, and addressing key plot points with filmmakers when the films have only played at film festivals. But they always flag these up. And you’d have to be a masochist to read the synopses anyway. (I should know, I do this often.)

Anyway, the film is very good indeed; you should go and see it, if you haven’t already. I thoroughly enjoyed Batman Begins and approved of Nolan’s reboot. I wasn’t totally blown away by The Dark Knight: two films welded together that didn’t quite hang for me (but that’s just my opinion, which is worth re-stating when Nolan devotees are around), and felt a little indulgent. Begins was leaner, and had more work to do. Anyway, I risked the wrath of the disciples by awarding The Dark Knight three stars in Radio Times, a 150-word review so controversial it has since been upgraded to a four, and rewritten by one of my colleagues. I’m glad to have wrestled myself free. Rises is far better. Its self-indulgence is justified, for the most part. It’s operatic stuff, with only about two borderline witty lines to remind us that there was once camp hereabouts, since obliterated. But I find myself admiring Nolan’s cast-iron sincerity.

The baddy, Bane (Tom Hardy), is proper bad. With his face scrunched into breathing apparatus that might have been designed by HR Giger, he is not camp. Although I did like Hardy’s – and Nolan’s – brave decision for him to speak, through the Vader voicebox, as if he was in an Ealing comedy. At times, it felt like the apocalypse was being threatened upon Gotham by Rowley Birkin QC. Quite, quite sinister.

Bale, Caine, Oldman, Freeman, all present and correct; Hans Zimmer’s portentous score seemingly “on” the whole time; Anne Hathaway gave convincingly corm to Catwoman; hardware spectacular. Can’t discuss the politics – essentially conservative, in lines with most blockbusters – without giving away act-two plot points, so I’ll refrain. Go and see it. We’ll discuss it when the fuss has died down.

Horrible business, that shooting in Denver, but the film’s worldwide box office will not be harmed by this terrible, depressing association. It’s big. It’s an event picture that actually provides an event onscreen, and not just in among its own hype. Perhaps best of all, with it, Christopher Nolan strikes an important blow against

the commercial orthodoxy of 3D. This film doesn’t need a technological mask to breathe through. It has dimension enough already.

It’s better than The Amazing Spider-Man, because it is actually amazing in places. And the song-and-dance number at the end is a masterstroke.

Clear eyes, full hearts etc.

More sport on this week’s Telly Addict, except it’s American high school football, as we mark the finale of Season One of Friday Night Lights on Sky Atlantic with a heartwarming clip; plus, the surprisingly  worthwhile Gordon Behind Bars on C4; the actually unmissable Mid Morning Matters With Alan Partridge, also on Sky Atlantic except they’re also unmissable for free on the internet; and an all-too-rare chance to see my old Edinburgh 2010 flatmate Tom Wrigglesworth on television, co-hosting a tech-head version of Inside Nature’s Giants on BBC2, Engineering Giants.

Eclectic children

This useless summer is apparently driving people into cinemas, so it’s not all bad. Here’s what the crannies of the arthouse circuit – and one DVD – lined up over what was a cinematically satisfying and geographically various weekend. I’ve been slow in reviewing films this year, due to workload and a sudden need to exorcise my political demons in words. So let’s log five … (all are illustrated in chronological order above)

A Royal Affair (aka En kongelig affære) is the Danish historical drama produced by Lars Von Trier and yet about as far from his own work as could be, within the realm of gloomy Danish cinema at any rate. It’s the true story, possibly well known to Danes but not to me, of the Enlightenment-driven town doctor who became the trusted adviser to “mad” King Christian VII and manipulated him into passing enlightened laws, all the while, power-hungry, having an affair with the Queen. It’s torrid, cape-and-dagger stuff, well told by director Nikolaj Arcel, and a cracking yarn for the uninitiated. (My grasp of Danish history is poor, considering how highly I rate the country’s cinema and TV, and this film filled a gap.)

Full marks to Mads Mikkelsen, who is best known to foreign audiences for playing the baddie in Casino Royale and perhaps for tough-guy roles in some CGI sword-and-sorcery epics. He imbues Dr Struensee with just the right amount of everyman charm and radical fervour. Silver Bear-winning Mikkel Boe Følsgaard manages to make the sniggering, weak-willed young monarch three-dimensional and when, under Struensee’s Svengali-like spell, he almost becomes his own man, the transformation is credible. (Great news for fans of Scandi-drama: Søren Malling aka Jan Meyer in The Killing and Torben Friis in Borgen, pops up as a sympathetic courtier.)

Nostalgia For The Light (aka Nostalgia de la Luz) couldn’t have been more different: a Chilean documentary about, ostensibly, astronomy, which turned out to be more of a poetic meditation on the “disappeared”. Filmmaker Patricio Guzmán, now 70, is not someone whose earlier work I’ve ever seen, but he’s been making films since the 60s and if there’s a thread to his work it’s Chile’s shameful recent past, specifically the horrors committed under Augusto Pinochet. (I now need to see his classic trilogy of films about the 1973 coup, The Battle Of Chile – this is an aspect of history I know a lot about already, but I’ve missed these films.)

Here, he starts with the magnificent but incongruous telescopes built in the Atacama desert, where there is no humidity and thus makes stargazing just about perfect under its thin, clear skies. Having met an astronomer, who articulates why he is devoted to exploring space, and walked the Mars-like red, dusty surface of the unyielding desert and seen its fossils and Indian drawings, etched into rock, we suddenly hit the Pinochet coup, and learn that the thousands of Chileans killed were buried in the desert. Now the link is made.

A survivor of Pinochet’s concentration camps, explains that astronomy lessons were banned because the authorities feared prisoners would use the constellations to escape. I must admit, I thrive on connections like this. And Guzmán mines these links with poetic ease. The reviewer in Sight & Sound praised the film’s beauty and structure, but felt it was “moribund” as a piece of theory. I disagree. To link astronomers searching the skies, archaeologists searching the rocks, and a few devoted widows and bereaved mothers picking through the dust in search of bone fragments of lost loved ones, almost 40 years later, strikes me as deeply profound. When a cosmic-terrestrial link was made between stardust and the calcium in all our bones, I was sold. This is a lovely film, whose disturbing subject matter and accent on grief and the political power of memory is always offset by visual splendour.

The Giants (aka Les Géants) is a Belgian coming-of-age drama directed and co-written by actor-writer-director Bouli Lanners that has drawn comparisons with Stand By Me, but it’s a whole lot darker than that. All credit, first of all, to Zacharie Chasseriaud, Martin Nissen and Paul Bartel, who play Zak, his older brother Seth and their slightly tougher friend Danny, three boys who find themselves against the world, having been abandoned in the Belgian forest for the summer. (Danny’s parents seem to be dead; Zak and Seth’s – apparently diplomats? – have dumped them at their deceased grandfather’s summer house, with their mother’s voice heard occasionally on a mobile.) Naturally, their fun and games – dope-smoking, hot-wiring, canoeing – take a more dangerous turn when their money runs out and the only solution to make some more involves a truly unpleasant drug dealer.

Although the boys’ travails far outweigh Stand By Me‘s leeches, junkyard dog and railway bridge for threat and peril, there are parallels. Adults are largely absent, and those that we do meet – the dealer, his doped-up girlfriend, Danny’s psycho older brother – are caricatured to such a grotesque extent that, against the naturalism of the kids, you wonder if perhaps we aren’t seeing the grown-ups through young eyes. It’s not an over-stylised film otherwise, and indeed it drinks in the verdant forest and millpond, green-coated water, the natural beauty serving to point up the ugliness of the houses we go into.

A rite of passage is guaranteed, of course, but if this were a Hollywood movie, it would be far more conventionally plotted. Aside from that one mobile phone, it’s a film that journeys away from “civilisation”, and takes these would-be savages back to the mud and the elements. What drives them on is – deal with it – friendship, loyalty and laughter. When Marthe Keller turns up as a benevolent adult, she is almost saintlike, and again, you wonder if this is all in the minds of these abandoned, and thus frankly abused, youngsters. The adults are “les geants“, and they are not wholly big and friendly.

I loved The Giants. I hope you can find it. After The Kid With A Bike, I’m beginning to see the appeal of Belgian filmmaking.

Electrick Children rounded off a fantastically varied weekend at various Curzons. Hey, it was English-language! A token gesture towards my native tongue. The directorial debut of Rebecca Thomas, about whom I know very little, it mined a peculiarly American seam, in which a Mormon teen (Julia Garner, last seen in the thematically similar Martha Marcy May Marlene) escapes the strictures of an Amish-like community in modern-day Utah and drives to Las Vegas. Are you thinking fish? Are you thinking water? Yes, it’s a worn trope, but something about this beguiling and single-minded film sidesteps obvious clichés. In her pinafore dress, this 15-year-old girl, pregnant by immaculate conception, or so she claims, and in awe of the technology of a simple cassette player, rocks up in America’s most garish town in search of the singer of a rock song on a tape she has illicitly heard and become obsessed by. Her brother (Liam Aiken), has stowed away in the truck, and wishes to take her back. But she falls immediately in with Rory Culkin’s rock band pals and goes on an odyssey.

You expect peril. None is forthcoming. Although she knows not of dope or rock gigs or clubs or cursing, Rachel is keen to adapt. You expect some kind of social embarrassment. None is forthcoming. She accepts her new friends and they accept her. Her relationship with Culkin’s Clyde (also a runaway, except from well-to-do suburban parents) is touching and warm. If I’m making the film sound airy or fairy, it isn’t, but it’s magical-realist rather than realist.

I was charmed by it. Thomas’s dialogue is original, and if the storytelling hinges on one too many coincidences, you won’t care, as it’s so breezy and uplifting to watch. She elicits are real, unabashed youthful energy from her main cast, and – as with The Giants – the adults are cast as remote, usually adversarial figures, lacking in empathy for those at a more difficult age. Billy Zane works well as the righteous preacher who drives Rachel away, and Bill Sage makes a good guardian angel as the hippy driver of a red Mustang, itself imbued with sexual subtext thanks to an earlier sequence.

I must say I’m constantly in awe of first features. The aforementioned Martha Marcy May promised much of writer-director Sean Durkin, as did, last year, Animal Kingdom of David Michôd, and Another Earth of Mike Cahill. There’s something bracing and tantalising about seeing a debut that’s as good as Monsters by Gareth Edwards, or Margin Call by JC Chandor, or District 9 by Neill Blomkamp, to pluck a couple of recent examples, which have yet to be followed up. Imagine starting so high. Electrick Children tells us to watch out for Rebecca Thomas …

21 Jump Street saw us back in the living room with a new DVD that could have gone either way, in that it’s a mainstream Hollywood comedy aimed at teenage boys rather than being about them, and – desperately – based on an 80s TV series that we never got over here anyway. With expectations at knee-height, it turned out to be a pleasant surprise (and not least because the knowing screenplay, by Scott Pilgrim‘s Mike Bacall, acknowledged the anorexic nature of the source).

I like Jonah Hill, and have enjoyed seeing him graduate from stoner comedies to more substantial acting parts in Moneyball and Cyrus, so this might have been a backward step, but – having co-written it – his easy, off-the-cuff style helped 21 Jump Street along, and, under the direction of How I Met Your Mother‘s Phil Lord and Chris Miller (never seen it, by the way, but I know it has made their joint career), the usually plastic Channing Tatum also found his inner comedian.

It’s two rookies who go back to high school, undercover, and the humour is often subtler than the obligatory gross-out/swearing-match moments suggest, with some wry digs at how the traditional high school caste system has changed in a short number of years from jocks and nerds to something more subtle and less extreme. (Basically, Tatum’s jock becomes a science nerd, and Hill’s nerd becomes a sort of … something else; I’m not pitching well.)

Hey, it’s an “action comedy” so you get the also-obligatory funny car chases and funny, if blood-spurting, shoot-outs, and while the drug-bust plot is merely a line upon which to hang gags, it adds a degree of momentum. At the end of the day, if you’re smiling or laughing at the antics of those onscreen – essentially Hill, Tatum and a potty-mouthed Ice Cube as their boss, with extra juice from Rob Riggle – that’s all that’s required.

Films. It takes all sorts to make a weekend.

Prolocaust

Got your attention? Good. After my open letter to Ed Miliband last week, although the majority who frequent this blog and follow me on Twitter were in broad agreement with my sentiments, I was also accused of holding “sixth form” views. Not exactly high-level trolling, this was still intended to be an insult. But I’ve decided to take it as a compliment.

I’ve accepted that as I get older, if anything, I become more of an idealist; that my views polarise and become more black-and-white. Corporate greed offends me more acutely. Capitalism seems less like a system we can fix. We are “Us” and they are “Them.” The ills of the world seem ever more vividly connected with the dastardly doings of a tiny minority. (The “99%” concept behind various offshoots of Occupy has really fired my imagination, as simplistic as it must seem to more nuanced political thinkers than I.)

Maybe my thinking has regressed to “sixth form” level, but isn’t there something inspiring and direct about the views we form before responsibility and mortgages and family bring the compromises of practicality to bear upon our ideals? Anyway, with this in mind, I intend to forge on, and stay in the sixth form.

I am inspired to write today by the conflation of reading the increasingly depressing stories about G4S and catching up with a little-seen film over the weekend called The Whistleblower, a German-Canadian thriller based on real events that might have been released in 2011 if anybody had been interested in releasing it. (It came out on DVD in January, so keep an eye out for it; unless you attended the handful of festivals it played at in late 2010, early 2011, or live in Germany, Brazil, Hong Kong or a few other territories where it reached cinemas, it will have passed you by, as it did me.)

The Whistleblower tells the story of Kathryn Bolkovac, a former police officer from Nebraska who worked as a UN International Police Force monitor in Bosnia in 1999, hired by private security firm fictionalised in the film as Democra. She blew the whistle on an appalling human trafficking ring, whereby young girls from Eastern Europe were shipped in to work as prostitutes in postwar Bosnia, often servicing security and UN ground and diplomatic staff, some of whom were actively involved in what was a trade in “white slaves”. (The film, starring Rachel Weisz, is unflinching in its portrayal of the violence and abuse visited upon the girls, and as such, despite its conventional thriller tactics, was probably deemed a bit “heavy” for wide distribution. It’s a tough sell, but worth watching.)

Bolkovac was hounded out of her job and her investigation shut down, but she sued “Democra”, registered in the UK, for unfair dismissal, and won, and her findings came to light. Some employees of Democra were forced to resign their jobs, but no criminal charges were brought. So, it’s another cautionary tale about the private sector doing public sector work. Which is why it dovetails into G4S and the Olympics farrago.

Democra had a $15m contract to hire and train police officers for duty. An even larger private security firm, G4S, has a £284m contract to provide 10,400 security staff for the London 2012 Games. The company boasted to its investors that by relying on “temporary managers” on fixed-term contracts, it could keep costs down. Its bid for the contract was apparently way cheaper than the others; unsurprisingly, it got the gig. Its other key money-saving/corner-cutting wheeze was to hire ground staff as close as possible to the date on which they were needed to turn up to work, again to reduce wage bills. Brilliant. This is why, just two weeks before the Games, G4S went cap-in-hand to the Government to ask for 3,500 Army personnel to help plug the gap in its security force. Many of these soldiers have had their annual leave cancelled, with no right to complain, even if they’ve just come back from Afghanistan as many of them have. Their mission, which they are in no position not to accept: to help out a private company.

You may have read about students’ experiences of applying to become Olympic security staff at the same private company, which came to light via the Student Room forum – in essence, G4S basically showed them a couple of instructional videos and handed them a high-viz jacket. I’m glad I’m not going anywhere near the Olympic venues, if these students’ experiences are anything to go by: “I passed the interview. No experience in security or anything and they signed me up for X-ray scanner … My interviewer told me I failed but I was still successful in gaining a place … The instructors made sure everyone passed … All the interviewers are barely 25, really nice and sympathetic … You don’t do much, LOL. You get registered, listen to an introduction about the Games, and then information on the role you will be doing. They try to make it fun so you won’t get too bored. There were a few who fell asleep … G4S is a disorganized, pathetic excuse for a company.”

LOL, indeed. Little wonder we’ve had to live the cliche and send in the Army. (More recent comments from students on the forum are about the sheer confusion of not knowing when their shifts are, not being able to get an answer out of G4S or discovering that they have to report for work at 5am or 6am and simply not being able to get there by train for that time. Why, if the company really wished to pay peanuts, did it not simply employ monkeys?)

G4S have argued that the use of “temporary managers” (yes, those 25-year-old interviewers who signed off all the studes) is “a common industry model”. Well, that’s OK, then. Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt, according to today’s papers, is reluctant to criticise the useless G4S – presumably because the hiring of the company reflects very badly on the Home Office, who accepted their cheapo bid in the first place. He went so far as to say that G4S had acted “honourably” by admitting to the Government that it couldn’t fulfill its brief. We now know that the Home Office was warned about potential problems with G4S as long as 10 months ago. He also said: “I don’t think this is a moment for getting into the blame game … It is completely normal that you are going to find some contractors on a project of this size who are not going to be able to deliver.” That’s reassuring.

OK, so G4S’s shares have tumbled this morning, and they are due to lose about £50m after the fiasco, while cocky CEO Nick Buckles may yet have to fall on his sword. But, as is always the way, he stands to walk out with a package of up to £21m. (That comprises his £830,000 salary, shares worth £5.7m, an £8.7m pension pot and, according to the Telegraph, “up to £5.7m shares vesting under a long-term incentive plan.”)

This is how the private sector works. It’s all about the bottom line, asset stripping, buying and selling, reducing outlay, increasing profit. But when the private sector is an employee of the public sector, the spotlight shines upon them. G4S is not a company most of us had heard of until the Olympics mess, just as we’d never heard of the similarly named training company 4Ae (who, you will recall, were coining it from the government but not actually getting people back into employment as per their brief, and accused of “multiple fraud” after multiple whistles were blown).

G4S is a big player; it is the third-largest private sector employer in the world after Wal-Mart and the Taiwanese electronics multinational Foxconn (yes, the one whose factories in China were described in a report in 2010 as “labour camps” and where workers were committing suicide). It already has its fingers in our prisons and our airports, and this is only one of 125 countries it operates in.

Unfortunately, the bigger a corporation is – and this is an objective fact – the greater likelihood that certain practices might go on unchecked in its furthest outposts. (I’m starting to wonder if perhaps amnesiac chief execs like Murdoch and Diamond are actually telling the truth when they claim not to know about what goes on in their own companies. Maybe this is how corporations work, and how they protect themselves? I’ve never run one, so I can only guess.)

While the public sector is decimated by cuts, which includes slashing numbers within the police (6,000 by 2015) and the armed services (20,000), when the private sector fails, who has to take up the slack? Nobody at the Met will be going on holiday in July and August, and now thousands in the Army will be denied theirs too. This government is cutting entire regiments from the services and at the same time telling them that they are vital. Mixed signals.

This is a government who has nothing but contempt for what used to be called – by sixth formers – the “proletariat.” I’m glad that the phrase “working class” is now being replaced in common parlance by “working people”, as you don’t need to work in a mine or a factory to qualify for the stratum of society least cared for by the government, and it’s nothing to do with class any more. What they’re pulling off here is something underhand and insidious, whose subtleties of method are gradually wearing away. This is the Prolocaust.

I saw a moving documentary called Nostalgia For The Light over the weekend, by Chilean filmmaker Patricio Guzmán, who now devotes his work to the subject of the “disappeared” ie. the thousands massacred by Margaret Thatcher’s great friend General Pinochet after the 1973 coup. In it, women who lost husbands and sons all those years ago are seen sifting through the Atacama Desert for bone fragments where they suspect the bodies to have been buried in mass graves. It made me think. In some ways it’s more honest for regimes to simply murder those who are inconvenient and not required. Just erase them, in whatever numbers they please. Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pinochet … they may not have exactly advertised the genocide they perpetrated at the time, but they got on with anyway. (Due to the nature of their dictatorships, we could not call them before a polite select committee and ask them if they knew about their individual holocausts, but if we had been able to, maybe they’d have done what Murdoch and Diamond did, and claimed to have had no idea what was being done in their name.)

To disenfranchise thousands is just a more humane and legal way of committing genocide.

Here’s how I picture the increasingly self-parodic Tory government (which is what they are, for all the good their “coalition partners” the Lib Dems are doing): they are the family at Downton Abbey. The lords and ladies and dowagers who live “upstairs”, whose loyal staff scurry about “downstairs.” The lords and ladies are currently in the active process of reducing the wages and employment rights of their staff, but at the same time expecting them to continue to serve dinner, and launder, and tidy, and polish, and keep the fires burning, and brush the horses, and chauffeur the car, and iron the daily copy of the Times. The family know nothing of the lives of their staff, neither do they care to. As long as breakfast is served, everything must be fine.

But everything is not fine. And one morning, which may come sooner than they think, the family at Downton will come down to breakfast, and no orange juice will await them. In fact, nobody will have woken them from their slumber and offer to dress them. “Downstairs” will be silent. And what will the family do? Certainly not make breakfast themselves. They will call in the Army to come and make it for them.