Andrew Collins's Blog, page 63

It's the arts

Having scoured all the radio listings for the week ahead in the Saturday and Sunday papers, it seems clear that on Tuesday, a number of other programmes are being highlighted and chosen as picks of the day. But I would like to mention this one: 3D In Perspective, a half-hour documentary that's on Radio 4 on Tuesday at 11.30am and thereafter, more conveniently, on the iPlayer.

I don't get to make that make radio documentaries, but when I do, it always makes me wish I did more. In fact, a nice man at the FX Quiz on Wednesday approached me afterward to praise The G Word, the documentary I fronted for Radio 2, two years ago, about Goth. It was lovely to meet someone who'd heard it. I am careful not to absorb too much of the credit for these things: I may be the narrator, effectively, but all the work is going on beneath the surface. In the case of The G Word, it was a BBC producer called Helen.

In the case of 3D In Perspective, it was an independent producer called Tamsin. Sometimes, as with a documentary I presented for Radio 2 about Jaws, and one I presented for Radio 2 about tribute bands, you tweak and edit the script to suit your own style and sit in a booth and read it out. But I was a lot more heavily involved with the creation and making of this one, and this makes it all the more gratifying that I think it's come out so well. Tamsin had the impossible task of honing hours of material down to 30 minutes, and having heard the result, I think she's done an amazing job. All I can say is: I was fascinated by the subject, and by the insight of our many learned contributors

This is the official blurb for the programme:

Bringing together the science of 3D television with a wide-ranging history of art and entertainment, Andrew Collins examines our centuries-old fascination with representing the world that exists in three visual dimensions. In modern 3D entertainment, today's technologists are fighting the same battles with geometry, depth of field, light and texture as 15th Century painters. Award-winning visual effects supervisor, Paddy Eason discusses the debt that 3D imaging owes to its painterly predecessors.

At The National Gallery, art historian Professor David Ekserdjian explains how, from the changing shape of a canvas to the arrival of oil paint, the architects and artists of the Renaissance, challenged our notions of reality. Andrew enters a world of optical illusion, trawling piles of perspective pictures and stereo photographs at The Bill Douglas Centre for The History of Cinema and Popular Culture. Lecturer in Victorian Studies, John Plunkett explains, the appeal of 18th and 19th century optical or 'philosophical' toys, made possible by good lenses and mirrors. Often dismissed as novelty, they emerged from groundbreaking research on the physiology of vision.

The history of 3D is littered with failed technologies, including 3D films that predate cinema sound. Professor Neil Dodgson from The Computer Laboratory in Cambridge is a 3D expert. He outlines the obstacles, in particular the poorly paid projectionist and ultimately the limitations of human vision. Neuroscientist Dr Sue Barry, understands the visceral appeal of 3D. Aged fifty, she experienced her first thrilling sense of 3D immersion after years of being 'stereoblind' and suggests why we are so preoccupied with experiencing virtual 3D space.

It is, as they'll say at the end, a Testbed production for BBC Radio 4. If you seek it out, I hope you like it.

I could murder a Mexican Pt 2

One of the many hyperventilating press quotes that are daubed all over the posters for Monsters, an arresting low-budget sci-fi debut from British filmmaker Gareth Edwards, declares, "Believe the hype." Well, do and don't. If at all possible, avoid the hype. (It isn't possible.) This film cost the measly sum of $500,000 to make, using a crew of four, and a principal cast of two, and with the remarkable Edwards acting as writer, director, production designer, cinematographer and effects designer (his background lies in effects). That it is enjoying a pretty wide release and a big marketing spend is testament to his achievement. All of the shorthand thus far is correct: it's a bit like District 9 and Cloverfield, and it has compelling – and conscious – elements of Apocalypse Now and Jurassic Park and The Road in it. But it's not your average post-apocalyptic sci-fi alien-invasion monster movie whichever way you cut it, and in mostly confounding genre expectation (I said mostly), it scores a lot of points. It's also a 12A certificate – yes, that's a 12A, suitable for children over 12 and for children under 12 if accompanied by an adult.

Because it's been done on the hoof, and shot cheaply – with its sparing CGI work added in afterward – and because it's about a man and a woman, played naturalistically, in peril, it reminded me of Open Water, whose monsters were also unseen. But it's more ambitious than that, and other comparable no-budget sleeper hits. Basically, we are told that a NASA probe went up six years ago, found alien lifeforms, came back with some spores and crashed, in Mexico, which has since been designated the Infected Zone. A crumpled, roving photojournalist (Scott McNairy) is strong-armed into babysitting his proprietor's daughter (Whitney Able) and getting her out of Mexico's safe zone and back into the US. To do so, they are forced by a string of circumstances to cross the Infected Zone, illegally, which is how the film turns into a road movie. It's a simple but effective set-up, and although the two-antagonists-thrown-together trope is age-old, McNairy and Able shoulder the film well, and, as an actual couple in real life, bring a certain unbottlable chemistry to their development.

I know it was part-improvised – and by the way, the South American extras who get speaking parts, notably the corrupt ferryman, are well cast – but I'm afraid some of the dialogue is inane. Even though they know they're going through the Infected Zone, and public information films and constant rolling news about the aliens that occupy the Zone seem to be on a loop on TV, when our two heroes hear their first blood-curdling animal roar, he says, "What is that?" This duff line is repeated later on. "What is that?" It's one of the big aliens off of the news? What do you think it is?

As the film neared its conclusion, I was just starting to congratulate it for its restraint in terms of how much alien we have actually seen, which is not much, and all the more frightening and unsettling for it. But, just as in Cloverfield, which too made a virtue of this budgetary cloaking device, the director can't resist a "money shot." Again, on a shoestring, it's a technically proficient money shot, but it comes amid a sequence that I can only tell you conforms almost religiously to genre rules. That's all I'll say. (Peter Bradshaw was a bit free and easy with the spoilers in his rave, four-star Guardian review. I shall pull back here.)

Here's the problem with Monsters – which I saw at the Curzon last night, unable to attend the special Q&A screening, with Gareth Edwards, much to my chagrin – it's being over-praised, and the hype may let some audiences down with a bump. Its genesis and success (apparently it's already made its money back before being released!) gives the media a brilliant, heartwarming story, obviously, and it's a film that should be written about and promoted – it certainly shows up Avatar and the 3D like, which cost millions and make billions – but let's not get carried away. Horror aficionados will be disappointed by the lack of horror. Sci-fi fans will be disappointed by the lack of sci. Teens gore-immunised by the Saw movies will wonder why they are watching a love story. Indie iconoclasts will exhale deeply when it goes down more obvious roads. Mainstream audiences lured in by the poster and the quotes and the fact that it's showing at a cinema near them may even feel mugged. But if you go in with a clear head and realistic expectations, you will find much to admire and enough tension and tease to rank with films that cost literally 100 times as much to make.

Edwards is a massive talent – not only can he do special effects, he's an artist as tuned in to Edward Hopper as the people who make Mad Men, believe me. (Hint: look out for the gas station.) We should give thanks that he was able to get his debut made and a lot of us get to see it in cinemas. I'm already wondering what he'd do with even a few million dollars. (Nick Roddick in Sight & Sound reckons that, given a blockbuster budget, this is a filmmaker who'd still tend towards minimalism.) Low-budget indie crossover hits are difficult to follow up. I haven't seen Paranormal Activity 2, but I can't see how it can repeat what the first film did, because of the first film. Did anybody else have the misfortune to see The Blair Witch Project 2? Oh dear. Because that's what was missing from the first film: bright colours.

 

Now pay attention

On Wednesday night, I was delighted to be asked to host the FX Christmas Pub Quiz, an annual event staged by the FX channel, home – in this country, at one time or another – of The Wire, Generation Kill, True Blood, Sons Of Anarchy, Breaking Bad, Eastbound and Down, Nip/Tuck, Dexter and The Walking Dead. Teams from various publications – Guardian Guide, Shortlist, the Sun, Time Out, Sky magazine, What Satellite, Men's Health – competed against teams from TV.com, Walker Media and HBO. (The team from Nuts didn't turn up, sadly. Probably out masturbating somewhere.) It was a terrific night. Last year's host was Reginald D Hunter, whose natural cool was, we must imagine, slightly undermined by being perched on a stool all night, trying to shout above the general din of media folk drinking free beer and champagne and dipping free crispy duck wraps in plum dipping sauce. I have no such cool to undermine, and really enjoyed trying to keep order, and treating in good spirit those lively souls who felt it was their job to shout out stupid answers. ("Dildo!") Here are some of those media folk, including the team from the free magazine Shortlist, who won the quiz, for the third time, I believe, so well done to them. (In the spirit of their magazine, when the answer sheets were collected up at half time by FX adjudicators, Shortlist just left theirs lying around on the seats. Boom, boom!)

Anyway, I asked Chrystal from FX, who thanklessly compiled the quiz, if I could reproduce it here, just for fun. (The winning three teams got prizes and everything, but I am not FX.) It's all based on what happened this year. Thanks to FX for the gig, especially Marc who made the introductions, and to all the media whores who came up to me afterwards and said nice things. It was held at the Book Club in the area of London many know as Old Street. I liked the venue. And they served amazing food. And created a mind-blowing chain of about 30 Jagerbombs on the bar afterwards; Chrystal was asked to ceremonially push over the first alcohol domino in the chain, and all of the shot glasses of Jagermeister plopped into the tumblers of Red Bull, ready to be downed by people who should know better. I have never seen such a thing in my life. I wish somebody had filmed it. Perhaps somebody did.

The quiz appears below this sappy posed picture of me with the FX "branding."

The FX Christmas Pub Quiz 2010

1. Who replaced U2 at Glastonbury this year when Bono suffered a back injury?

2. The cast of Glee mostly dominated the UK charts with Don't Stop Believing, but who sings the original?

3. Name the number 1 album in the UK which caused a stir this year after the band used a family photo found in a charity shop as the cover art?

4. … and the 2010 Mercury prize goes to?

5. What is the full title of the third Twilight film?

6. A somewhat true account behind the creation of Facebook, who directed The Social Network?

7. In addition to the US, Sex and the City 2 was primarily set in which country?

8. Who directed the American remake of Tomas Alfredson's vampire story Let the Right One In?

9. It wasn't such a happy day when which actor died aged 83 October of this year?

10. On January 8, Elvis Presley celebrated which birthday?

11. Whose sex text affair with a backing dancer was exposed when their other half discovered a secret phone?

12. Which pop star finally ended years of speculation by coming out as a "proud" and "fortunate" homosexual earlier this year?

13. Starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman, the first episode of the three-part miniseries Sherlock was entitled what?

14. In January, who won the final ever series of Celebrity Big Brother?

15. Who stars alongside Matt Smith in the new Doctor Who series as his two companions Amy and Rory?

16. In chronological order which three TV channels aired Britain's live series of party leader debates with David Cameron, Gordon Brown and Nick Clegg?

17. How many American viewers tuned into the premiere of Sarah Palin's Alaska on the cable channel TLC?

18. The cast of which US sitcom performed two live performances to the East and West coasts as a one-off stunt?

19. Sarah Ferguson opened up on which US chat show following the hidden camera scandal that rocked Britain?

20. The Lost series finale aired simultaneously across 59 countries but what was the US's transmission date?

21. Where was the 2010 Super Bowl held?

22. Which driver is the Formula One 2010 World Champion?

23. What country did Holland beat to make it to the Final of the football World Cup in South Africa?

24. Who won their third Golf Masters title this year?

25. Name the female protagonist in the Steig Larsson Millennium Trilogy?

26. Released in November, the memoir Decision Points follows whose life?

27. Controversy surrounded which fiction novel when plans for a big screen adaption invoked industrial protests this year?

28. Complete the title of this autobiography by Chris Evans: Memoirs of a _____

29. Who said: "I dabbled into witchcraft. I never joined a coven … I hung around people who were doing these things. I'm not making this stuff up."

30. Who said – or Tweeted:"You are the chosen one dun dun dun"

31. Who said: "I feel sorry for straight men."

32. Who said: "I'm no Tom Jones but I'm doing better than Nick Clegg."

33. What technology was highly promoted during the Consumer Electronic Show in Las Vegas this year?

34. True or false: fish shrink in harsh winters?

35. What is Apple's top selling app for the iPhone in 2010?

36. Facebook users in India were offered a chance to make themselves appear whiter online as part of a marketing campaign by which skincare company?

37. In which month was Haiti hit by the devastating Earthquake?

38. Nineteen people were killed in a stampede at which music festival this year?

39. What are the first five letters of the Icelandic volcano that brought Europe's air travel to a halt?

40. Thirty-three miners were trapped in a 500 square feet passage, in temperatures of 97 degrees Fahrenheit. But how many days were they underground for?

41. What CCTV moment sparked international outrage and resulted in a fine of just £265? (I'll accept the generally agreed name for the moment as it appears on YouTube, or the protagonist's name.)

42. Following a recent high court battle, who is the owner of Liverpool FC?

43. Which US state introduced a law that would allow police to stop anyone who they think is an illegal immigrant?

44. In America, Proposition 19 claims to control, regulate and tax what?

45. A Florida-based produce company is looking to titillate the eye and the taste buds by offering a new red-coloured what to give a colourful crunch to salads and dips?

46. What was the name of the now deceased psychic Octopus who correctly predicted the World Cup winners?

47. A flock of which animal gathered in Mexico to form a giant version of itself? (Unless the pic was photoshopped!)

48. The largest gathering of people dressed as characters from The Wizard of Oz was achieved in which country this year? (Bonus point if you can name the town.)

49. My name is not my name, I've taught and rode and slain. Vampires are not my game. Themes of life and death with me remain. Who am I?

50. What religion is Homer Simpson? (I'll accept either of two answers to this.)

I'll print the answers next week. Don't sent your answers to me, just have a go for your own amusement. Why not print the questions out, take them to a basement bar that is full of people shouting, and attempt them while drinking Tiger or champagne or Jagerbombs while staring at a giant picture of Dexter's face. Then it'll be just like you were there.

When do we want it? Like, whenever

I am truly heartened and inspired by the current wave of student protests, especially the occupations. For too long the student population has seemed depoliticised and anaesthetised – after all, if the people in their late teens and early twenties aren't full of ideals and hope and fury, what chance have the rest of us got? I found this column I wrote for Word magazine in April 2008, which paints a pretty gloomy picture. However, I am delighted to have been proven wrong! (Also, since my monthly Whatever column in Word magazine ended this month, after four happy and diverse years, and none of them were ever posted online anywhere, I feel it is my duty to occasionally post them here, even if time has overtaken them, as with this one.) For historical interest only …

WHATEVER by Andrew Collins [printed, Word magazine, April 2008]

Students today are stressed and skint – but unlike Paris in May 1968, I don't predict a riot

 

Last month, I risked feeling irretrievably old and returned to my old university in Northampton as a visiting lecturer. No, I didn't get paid as much as Martin Amis, but then seats of learning are not normally magnets for the mercenary. I suspect my vastly overpumped sense of "giving something back" stems from the guilt of having enjoyed a generous grant for the three years of my art degree – which I spent exclusively on magic markers and gouache – and supplementary benefit during the summer holidays. Under Thatcher! Giving a day over to some whey-faced undergrads and telling them how I got where I am today is, frankly, the least I can do.

They were, I figured, a partisan crowd: first-, second- and third-year graphic design and fine art students in the very hall where, in week one of my art foundation course in 1983, we were instructed to build a tent, sit in it and draw the "space" inside. I threw this bonding anecdote into my 90-minute talk, which covered my higher educational "journey" from Northampton to London, and the eventual dichotomy of having to squash the square peg of artistic self-expression into the round hole of commercial art. Nobody slept or crept out. Once I was done, the course tutor thanked me, threw open the discussion and asked for questions.

Nothing. Silence. A sea of blank and mildly embarrassed faces. I fielded not one single question from almost a hundred degree students in the prime of their life and presumably fizzing with creative carbonate. I was forced to conclude that nobody had anything they wanted to ask. I may as well have sent a hologram and saved the train fare. I've done far shorter speeches at Rotary Clubs and literary festivals and libraries and the questions have come thick and fast.

Could it be that all 2.3 million of the UK's traffic-cone-collecting demographic don't ask questions any more? I posed this question on my blog and a number of suggestions were put forward. Maybe today's students think they know all the answers? Thanks to the accessibility of the internet, there is no mystery or magic surrounding anything or any person now – want to know something? Tap it into Google. Art students, in particular, are getting less bohemian, more conservative, cowed by vocational fear of the real world. A student called Joe confirmed that questions rarely get asked in any kind of lecture environment. He puts it down to lack of confidence and fear of saying something, like, stupid in front of your, like, peers and shit.

I personally worry that students have been permanently constipated by New Labour education policy, with its emphasis on tests and targets. In an illuminating piece in the Education Guardian before Christmas, Fay Schlesinger asked why students have stopped protesting. She cited an NUS demo against top-up fees in London that drew only 3,500 from an expected 10,000 placard-brandishers. You'd think £3,000 a year would be enough to get them out of their beds, but no. God help us if there's an unpopular foreign war.

Government minister for students, Lord Triesman, blames "drinking and clubbing" for  the decline of student radicalism, but I was an art student, for heaven's sake – all we had to do for three years was draw some pictures, but even we found the wherewithal to march noisily from the Inner London Education Authority to Leicester Square to protest about the amalgamation of four art schools into one amorphous administrative body. And our placards looked pretty.

According to Schlesinger, a vote at City University in London for their NUS representatives in October last year saw a turnout of 2.6%. So, the studes are disengaged from politics. Who isn't? Some weeks I only read the radio review in the New Statesman. But being a student is more than just chanting things that rhyme with two-four-six-eight and occupying the refectory. It's about improving your mind, isn't it? Perhaps by, I don't know, asking questions.

The problem could be the culture. Young folk have more texting to do than their counterparts at the Sorbonne in 1968, so who can blame them for having reduced social skills and a disinclination to make Molotov cocktails? It seems that students are still active: a recent viral online campaign against HSBC's plans to drop interest-free overdrafts for postgraduates had the effect of reversing it. But I'm old-skool enough to take a dim view of such armchair activism. Writing stiff letters to the council is something you do when you get older and less mobile, not when you're 19 and brimming with naïve idealism and spare time.

I'm not sure the footage of the lone, white-shirted student in Tiananmen Square would have been beamed around the world had he started a Facebook page against the government tanks. Any questions?

I dedicate this piece to all the students out there who are currently either off their arses, making some noise, or indeed on their arses, in occupied student buildings. I had it very easy when I went to college, with fees paid, a grant and rent rebate, not to mention subsidised meals on top. Also, we had clear villains. Perhaps Tony Blair wasn't enough of a baddie, or enough of a human being, to unite anyone. David Cameron and Nick Clegg, it seems, are. Give them a good shouting to, kids, and do your best to avoid being kettled. But careful with that fire extinguisher now!

Join our club

I have been reading and reviewing the splendid new coffee table book BBC VFX by Mat Irvine and Mike Tucker (Aurum, £30), and found my old Airfix Modellers Club membership card (circa 1977) while doing so – the two things are inextricably linked, as I used to envy Irvine whenever he appeared on Swap Shop or Model World, showing how he'd made the Liberator for Blake's 7 using turrets and doors and other bits from Airfix kits. Anyway, during the same bout of research, I found the following piece which I wrote for the Times in February 2005 about clubs [including mention of the ELO Fan Club, circa 1978, pictured], and I reprint it here in case you are, or were, also an inveterate joiner. (Unless you are a Times subscriber you won't be able to access my review of BBC VFX when it appears on Saturday – needless to say, it's me telling you that I really like the book in 1,500 words.)

 

IT'S GREAT TO KNOW YOU BELONG by Andrew Collins

If I should ever drown, I'm convinced my life will flash before my eyes as a series of laminated membership cards, affiliation certificates and enamel badges. That's because I am an inveterate joiner. Quite unlike Groucho Marx, I'm happy to be a member of any club that will have me as a member.

Ever since boyhood I have had an urge to join. I can write my own autobiography in clubs and societies, each one pinpointing a different need and a distinct life-phase. First, there was the Tufty Club, founded by the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents in 1961, but with a membership of two million at its peak in 1973. Based around a stiffly-animated but sensible squirrel, I dimly remember watching some road safety films in a church hall and having a badge, but little else. I was under five, the club's target age.

More significantly came the Warlord Secret Agent Club, a covert society run from the pages of the boys' war comic (home of Union Jack Jackson and unreconstructed dialogue like "Take that, my slant-eyed friend!"). For a 20p postal order you got a wallet, badge and code-breaker. Ideal accessories for the combat games my brother and I played around the fields and building sites of suburban Northampton.

I simultaneously joined the school choir, getting in touch with my inner softy, and the Airfix Modellers Club (membership no. 106339). There was also the Dennis The Menace Fang Club, whose black plastic wallet contained top secret passwords D.I.N.G. and D.O.N.G. (which stood for Dennis Is Never Good and Dennis Owns Naughty Gnasher). In 1978, when I reached upper school, I flirted with the Weston Favell Bird-Watching Club and notched up just the one field trip before self-consciously letting my membership lapse. The shifting musical tastes of a teenager are mapped by the ELO Fan Club (a certificate and five bent Walkerprints, 1979) followed by the 999 International Information Service (late discovery of punk rock, 1981; a few Xeroxed newsletters).

My coming of age is marked by membership cards for the Nene College Film Society, the NUS and the AA, whose motto in 1984 was "It's great to know you belong." Then it's The Whale And Dolphin Conservation Society (waking up to environmental issues in the late 80s), The Labour Party (lapsed after general election defeat, 1992), the NUJ (first job in journalism, plus first strike), Canons Health Club (mid-90s, didn't we all?), the Soil Association (hardcore organic lifestyle badge of honour), RSPCA, PDSA (you get a Certificate Of Friendship), IFAW, WWF, CPL (once you're on one acronymic animal charity's mailing list …).

These days I belong to a whole portfolio of pointless online clubs which require no more effort than checking your email inbox. Even though I don't especially like her, last year I joined the Pat Benatar Fan Club. Why? Well, I was feeling insecure, having turned 39 and moved to Surrey. And the name caught my eye when I typed "fan club" into a search engine. I could have joined the Hans Zimmer Fan Club or Baseline, the Andre Agassi Fan Club. I chose Pat's because I could only name one of her hits, Love Is A Battlefield, and she seemed a very 80s person to have an ongoing fan club. I wanted to join and find out more.

On the same day I signed up for Benatar-News, "the Pat Benatar Fan Club News listserver"; the On The Buses Fan Club, whose first newsletter would inform me when the 70s sitcom was next repeated, provide the answer to a previous competition ("Mum used green stamps instead of money to buy her fun wig") and sign off with a heart-warming "Ding ding!"; and Jane's, the defence organisation, for free access to Jane's News Briefs, Sentinel Risk Pointers and Defence Glossary ("a database containing over 20,000 defence-related acronyms and abbreviations").

It goes without saying that signing up online is too easy. What, no postal order? No agonising wait for your SAE, bulging with documentation, badge and perhaps money-off vouchers? All you get these days is a login and a password. Who would want to join a club that's so easy to join? At least when Groucho famously resigned from the exclusive Friar's Club in New York with the words, "I don't want to belong to any club that will accept me as a member," he did so by telegram.

Proper club-joining should involve some physical effort and a field trip. Hence my recent application to MENSA. "Do you want to meet like-minded people?" asked the brochure. "Are you looking for intellectual stimulation? Take the first step to membership – NOW!"

Anyone can take the MENSA Home Test. I did, and excitedly sent off my answers. I scored 143, putting me in the "top three percentile" and earning me the chance to do the Supervised IQ Test for £9.95 at University College London with 29 other hopefuls, all at least half my age, and one bright spark aged 10. "People in MENSA are a bit mad," said the bearded adjudicator. "Cleverness complicates rather than simplifies life."

I'll never know. I scored 138 and 106 on the two papers and was barred entry ("Under the rules of membership you are not allowed to retake this test for 12 months," wrote Ms H Oliver, Testing & Admissions Coordinator).

The Tony Hancock Appreciation Society (est. 1976) required no such aggravation, just a tenner. As well as The Missing Page magazine and access to the archive library, joining offered me the chance to attend my first annual Reunion Dinner, along with 86 like-minded members (mostly older chaps whose wives stayed at home) at the Quality Hotel, Bournemouth, where Hancock lived as a boy. We swapped memorabilia, entered a "fun quiz" (41 out of 45), watched episodes and queued halfway round the dining room to get our menu cards autographed by special guest June Whitfield. I returned to Surrey satisfied that it really is great to know you belong.

And there was a copy of The Teapot Times waiting for me on the mat. Worth joining the Clipper Tea Club too.

It all seems so long ago now – living in Surrey, being 39 – I was actually in the process of working up a new non-fiction book about clubs and joining when I signed up for Pat Benatar, Tony Hancock and took the MENSA test. But my publisher convinced me instead to write the third part of my memoirs, which I did. They were never very keen for me to do anything but write memoirs, which is why I am no longer with them. Still, at least I got a piece in the Times out of it,

Some product

Go Faster Stripe, the cottage DVD powerhouse, based in Cardiff, VAT-registered and run by Chris Evans (Not That One), is aptly named. Having recorded the second, exclusive Collings & Herrin CD, War and Peace, Crime and Punishment, just a few short weeks ago in the studio of Ty Cerdd within the magnificent Wales Millennium Centre with Chris, soundman Felix and work experience "boy" Isaac, it is already available to pre-order at the GFS website. Some people are already pre-ordering it.

I haven't seen it yet, but among the extras is a professional, multi-camera recording of our live podcast at Cardiff's Masonic Hall. So, you get four brand new, stereo podcasts on the Russian literary themes of the title, plus six of our teenage poems, and the podcast DVD. There are free clips, including one of the podcast, on the website.

I would say it's the perfect Christmas gift, but clearly, for most people, it would be an imperfect Christmas gift. However, having almost reached 200 podcasts (even though we're officially on Podcast 140, a man called Graham has added all the extracurricular ones to the running total, and provided us with his working, and it nearly makes 200), which is the equivalent of about eight days' worth of free bollocks, it would be nice if regular listeners supported this venture, as it effectively means we can carry on sitting in Richard's attic once a week and making something spontaneous and free, as if we were Steve Coogan and Rob Bryden without the money, or the restaurants, or the sumptuous northern English countryside, or the editing, or the freedom to only have to record six a year.

And here we are sharing a joke in the studio. Happy Christmas.

We're off to see the wizard

I am so glad that the Curzon shows blockbusters, as well as the more esoteric foreign and indie stuff. We all need a sugar hit every now and then. (Also, an arthouse chain like the Curzon must survive in a hostile market, and that means placing a few extra bums on its seats by running the latest Harry Potter, or Sex & The City, or Toy Story 3, or – judging from the trailers we saw last night – Tron Legacy and the latest Narnia – so be it. This also means I can see my blockbusters in greater comfort, with more leg-room, less people and, frankly, a better, if smaller, picture.) The latest Harry Potter, the penultimate, is Harry Potter & the Deathly Hallows Pt 1. Because, having come this far with the saga, I think the filmmakers feel they need to remain as faithful as possible to the bloated, self-indulgent last seventh and last book, so they have divided it into two parts, both around two and a half hours long. It's surely just a happy accident that they can make TWICE AS MUCH MONEY by doing it this way.

Part 2 is released, in 3D, to disguise the fact that it's just more of the same, in July 2011. But since pretty much everybody who's going to see it will have read the book, they're not actually going to the cinema to be surprised, merely to be reassured. I have never read any of the books because, frankly, fantasy literature never really grabbed me, I would never willingly pick up a book with twee names like Dumbledore, or Weasley, or Grubbly-Plank, or Peasegood in it, and I really don't have the hours in the day to read fiction aimed at children when there are so many non-fiction books aimed at adults beckoning me. That said, I've been more than happy to watch the films. In fact, as I've suggested elsewhere, I think I enjoy the films more than anybody else in the cinema, as I actually don't know what's going to happen.

So, I didn't know what was going to happen in The Deathly Hallows Pt 1, and in case there are one or two of you who have never read the books either, DO NOT READ THIS BIT EVEN THOUGH I'M NOT GOING TO REVEAL WHO, OR WHAT, IF ANYTHING OR ANYBODY, DIES, JUST SOME VAGUE BITS. This is basically what happens: Harry and Ron and Hermione go off on a quest to find three things, which have to be destroyed. They have an argument, and Ron goes off. They find one of the things but can't destroy it without another thing which is not one of the original three things, so they have to find that thing. Along the way, Harry almost gets off with Hermione, but doesn't really. I won't tell you if Ron comes back or not, as that provides some of the intrigue not provided by the finding of the things. Meanwhile, Voldemort tries to find Harry to kill him, but can't, or at least not until Part 2, I'm guessing. Because the saga is drawing to a close, JK Rowling has started killing off characters, but clearly I won't tell you which ones. All of the Potter films have been adapted by Steve Kloves. It seems he is doing a fairly faithful job of this. I can only imagine that the final book is a bit of a trudge, unless you have a great deal invested in the three main characters. I find this difficult because the three actors who play them are not especially good actors.

I wish all three of them well in whatever their future careers may be, and I hope they spend their fortunes well, and that it makes up for the potential disappointment of adult life after such a whizz-bang childhood since the age of 10 or 11. But I didn't like them as child actors, and I don't really like them very much more as young adult actors. This is a pity, as we don't get much else from Deathly Hallows Pt 1. The adults actors – literally, the cream of British acting talent – are mostly cameos. When the likes of Robbie Coltrane and Jason Isaacs and David Thewlis and Fiona Shaw and Helen McCrory are in a film that lasts two and a half hours but only get to deliver a couple of lines each, at most, you know you're in a parallel universe. (I don't think Helen McCrory spoke.) I'm sure I noticed Ralph Ineson – Finchy from The Office – sitting at a long table in the opening scene. I mean, you just see him out of the corner of your eye. Is that it for Ralph Ineson? Or does his character get a big scene in Part 2, which, by the way, was filmed back to back with this one, almost as if they only split it into two in order to MAXIMISE PROFITS. (He had a tiny part in Another Year as well – although it's well known that you have no idea how important your character is in a Mike Leigh film until you watch it at the cinema, so he'll have known what he was getting into and was presumably delighted to get the chance to be in a Mike Leigh film; who can blame him?)

Anyway, it's fine. A perfectly serviceable vehicle for a book. David Yates and cinematographer Eduardo Serra have used a very effective desaturated palette, to reflect the gloomy mood, and some of the landscapes (they hop about a lot) are stunning. Don't expect laughs, as there are none – and the only funny lines are delivered by bad ex-child actors. But it's too long, isn't it? I mean, they all have been, but at least the other six films came to a conclusion and ended. This one doesn't, by definition. And it's way too slow. I enjoyed the Ministry of Magic sequence, which is superbly designed and realised, but I think I enjoyed it more because the three leads aren't in it (they have disguised themselves as three much better actors, including the bloke who plays Dave on Gavin & Stacey). But by far the most intriguing and gripping sequence was an animated one. It was exquisitely done. It's a story Rhys Ifans is telling from the Beedle The Bard book.

Sorry if you think I am being ungrateful. But of the seven films so far it's the only one I found myself willing to end in the last half hour. Could they perhaps remake the films with just the adult actors? Something like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. It would be brilliant. The best actors in Britain in one place. Maybe an option as a DVD extra?

Hugo Dixon 1964-2010

I was sad to learn that Hugo Dixon died last week, aged just 46, after what seems to have been a reasonably short and unexpected illness. He was a ubiquitous figure in my life in the 1990s, particularly, when I worked at Q magazine, where he was one of its best-loved and most reliable photographers. I was in contact with him last summer when I approached him about a photograph I know he had of me with Blur, taken in Paris for Q in 1994, one of many happy trips we went on at the time. It was during that email correspondence that Hugo informed me that the picture agency he'd been with had gone "tits up." As a writer and commissioning editor at music magazines, I worked with tons of photographers. As a breed, they tended to be voluble, confident and larger-than-life personalities – you couldn't really be a shrinking violet and encourage major rock stars to pose for your camera, or indeed engage in tricky diplomatic negotiations with PRs and managers in order to secure the access and time you needed with their major rock star. Hugo was certainly one of the good guys – he went out there and brought the pictures back, and was never one to moan about the often tiresome and unglamorous nature of the sort of job he'd be sent on.

There were always photographers (or "smudgers" as we'd disparagingly call those with inflated egos) who'd get the glamour jobs, the studio work, the cover shots … and Hugo was not one of them. He was the guy you'd send out if you needed on-the-road shots, pictures taken on the hoof or, what became his stock in trade, black and white portraits for Who The Hell … ? He, along with Chris Taylor and Ken Sharp, was as close to an official Q photographer as they came during that era, always pressed into jovial service for awards ceremonies and staff photos. You're welcome to go and have a look at Hugo's portfolio, although it is, for me, tinged with sadness now that he's gone. You'll see some classic shots from Q's glory years in the 90s – the one of Michael Hutchence pointing that became a cover shot; Kurt Cobain; Bernard Manning – as well as more formal portraits of showbiz stars and comedians he did for Radio Times after he fell out of favour with subsequent editorial regimes at Q. (This is the lot of the freelance. You have to roll with the punches.) Hugo's big love outside of music was cars, and I know he also did a lot of work for motoring magazines, which he must have loved. There was a spell with FHM, too, but hey, you've got to eat. And Hugo did eat, and enjoyed a pint. He was a big lad, rugby-sized, full of life and laughter and inappropriate comments, and we used to love the fact that, as a petrolhead, he used a tiny orange Fiat to drive into Central London, for ease of parking: it was almost like a suit of armour that fitted snugly around him and had wheels.

I have to admit, when I became features editor of Q, and then editor, I engineered it so that Hugo would accompany me on sporadic writing jobs I did. He came with me to Colchester, to the offices of EMI and to the studios of Later to capture the "actuality" shots of my first Blur cover story in 1994, while the more glamorous Andy Earl got to do the studio cover shots, although you wouldn't hear Hugo complain. I think in many ways he preferred the free-form fun of the actuality gigs. When I went to Paris on the Eurostar to present a Q award to Blur around that time, I was quick to call Hugo up to do the honours. Again, not a massive job, but fun to do, and that was often enough for Hugo.

Since he died – I can't quite believe this, yet – I have been in touch with his wife of many years, Jane, and actually discovered a bit more about what he's been doing these past few years. This is not an official obituary so I won't go into any more biographical detail, but I wanted to remember Hugo publicly, as he was a fantastic bloke, and one of the key figures in my happier memories of Q. My family will remember him too as he took my wedding photos, too. Who else?

I understood that it was when you reached your sixties that people around you started dying. It turns out it's your forties. Robert Sandall, whom I also knew well from my Q years, also died this year. It seems so cruel and unlikely that I will bump into neither he nor Hugo again.

 

I could murder a Mexican

Off to the Curzon for exactly the kind of film I'd go and see at a Curzon: a Mexican film about poverty and cannibalism. We Are What We Are, or Somos lo que hay, is the directorial debut of Jorge Michel Grau, whose interest is not in the gory mechanics of ritualistically killing and eating people (although there is plenty of that), but in the desperation of a family living below the breadline, without a breadwinner, in a city – Mexico City – that has gone so far off the rails, its corrupt, parallel, dog-eat-dog social caste system not only turns a blind eye to cannibalism, but almost condones it as an organic form of "social cleansing." If I've made it sound as fascinating, politically charged and unusual as, say, Peter Bradshaw did in the Guardian, or Paul Julian Smith in a lengthy lead review in Sight & Sound, or our own David Parkinson on the Radio Times website, I should add that it's also one of the more depressing and unpleasant experiences I've had at the cinema this year.

Grau is obviously a filmmaker to watch, and his film is hard to ignore, but it's also wilfully grim. A horror film? Yes, but that doesn't cover it. A thriller? It's certainly thrilling. A family drama? By definition, although it only really hints at what motivates the characters and what informs their borderline incestuous interrelationships, forcing us to accept that cannibalism is a fact of everyday life for them. It opens with the gut-wrenching death of the family's patriarch, brilliantly staged in an upmarket shopping mall. Shades of George Romero here, and dispatched with the kind of black humour I'd been looking forward to. When two sleazy cops visit a seemingly insanitary morgue and take away the human finger, with painted fingernail, that was found in the dead man's stomach, you could almost be watching a clever parody of a detective story, or something more horrific. We meet the bereaved family: a widow and three teenage kids, two boys and a girl, who have been scratching a living off a market stall selling and mending watches on borrowed time while Dad pissed the money up the wall on whores (their grotty home is full of sinisterly ticking clocks – a nice touch, but one that goes nowhere). Without Dad to bring home the bacon, as it were, the eldest son must reluctantly step up.

From here, it quickly spirals into something much darker, with the sons' incompetent attempts to find human food in the dark recesses of Mexico City's underbelly almost played for laughs, but you won't be laughing for too long. The mother (Carmen Beato), a domineering harridan who draws the line at a bound and gagged prostitute being brought home for dinner (or for "the ritual"), is a nasty piece of work, whose moral rulebook seems, at best, misplaced, when you consider what they are about to receive. The eldest son, played with depth by Francisco Barreiro, seems to carry the family's conscience, shaking with tears when, in a tender scene with his sister Sabina (Paulina Gaitan), he asks if this is what life is going to be like, post-Dad. Next thing you know, he's stalking a gay club for meat, either driven to do so, or having had doubt placed in his heart, by the beautiful singing of a busker on the train, who hands out handwritten fortunes to her fellow passengers – his reads, "You are alive." This might be the best scene in the film.

Unfortunately, all of this promise – not just for the writer-director Grau, but for the film itself – is subsumed by the often unbearably physical violence and evisceration. I knew I was going to see a cannibal film, but I foolishly allowed the 15 certificate to reassure me. It's pretty gruesome stuff, and most of the bad stuff takes place at home, in a basement, occasionally behind plastic sheeting, but with what is not graphic visually made graphic in terms of sound effects. I know, I know, it's about eating people, there was bound to be some eating people, but you will spend most of the film either unsettled by what might happen, or made ill by what is happening. Life, it seems to be saying, is cheap in Mexico City. This is a through-line worth pursuing, and why not through a horror genre? All I'm saying is, We Are What We Are – or, as the man in front of me at the box office brilliantly misnamed it, You Are What You Eat! – is a sometimes necessarily but occasionally unnecessarily uncomfortable watch.

I do tend to read a lot of reviews before I see a film at the cinema. (Clearly, less so if it's an advance screening.) I went into this latest import – distributed by Artificial Eye and part-funded by the National Lottery and BBC4 – with heightened expectations that it didn't quite live up to. I'm actually appreciating it more now, the next morning, than I did when trapped in the Curzon with it. Bear that in mind.

Print this out

Time to review a book. Yes, a book. The Shallows by Nicholas Carr has really had its hooks in me for the past couple of weeks. (If it wasn't in hardback, I'd have taken it out with me on the train and finished it sooner.) I was told it would scare me. It sort of did, although it tells universal truths which everyone who uses a computer, and especially the internet, already knows but would probably just rather not think about. Carr is an American business and technology writer, and former editor of the Harvard Business Review. He's clever. He's readable. What he's not is a Luddite. You should know that. The Shallows seems to have grown out of an essay he wrote for Atlantic magazine called Is Google Making Us Stupid? Let's proceed from that starting point.

Carr is roughly the same generation as me – a bit older, born in Cincinnati in 1959, but pretty excited when Star Wars came out and an early Apple adopter; at the beginning of the book, to set out his stall, he describes the way his own life has been gradually changed through an enthusiasm for computers and what used to be called the World Wide Web. He's as wired today as you probably are. You're reading this on a blog, probably on a laptop, or a home PC, or an iPad. Why not print it out, if you're hooked up to a printer, and read it on A4? After hearing the alarm bells set off by The Shallows, you may be tempted to do this more often, even though you won't. Who's got the time? Carr brilliantly described the internet, which we all understand, in ways we hadn't thought of: as a "cacophony of stimuli," as an "ecology of interruption technologies" … he even mines TS Eliot's Four Quartets for the phrase "distracted by distraction from distraction." You know he's right. You're probably distracted from reading this already.

By dipping in and out of research conducted largely on humans, he is able to make academic what we already suspect: that constant, daily use of the internet, and search engines, and hyperlinks, is rewiring our brains, and not necessarily for the greater good. Carr understands why computer evangelists over the last couple of decades have worked themselves up into an apparently Utopian lather about how much cleverer we are since PCs became ubiquitous, and how much more efficient our lives are, particularly in terms of sourcing information at the click of a mouse or keypad. But he questions the 1980s orthodoxy that the hyperlink represents "the technology of liberation." (In fact, experiments conducted in the early 90s disproved this, showing that hypertext readers could often "not remember what they had and had not read".) Each click or glance is "a small interruption of thought, a momentary redeployment of of mental resources." The way information is presented on the net is "a concentration-fragmenting mishmash"; it is "an interruption system, a machine geared for dividing attention." (By the way, while typing that paragraph, even though it is 07.48am, I checked my emails.)

Carr also reminds us that it is in Google's "economic interest" that we click as often as possible. "The last thing [Google] wants is to encourage leisurely reading or slow, concentrated thought. Google is, quite literally, in the business of distraction." Carr presents a number of compelling images, few more compelling, and depressing, than this one: the internet, he says, "provides a high-speed system for delivering responses and rewards – 'positive reinforcements' in psychological terms – which encourage the repetition of both physical and mental actions … It turns us into lab rats constantly pressing levers to get tiny pellets of social or intellectual nourishment"

In case we think any of this is new, Carr provides useful potted histories of the advent of the clock (monks, it turns out, divided the day up into units of time and built the first mechanical timekeepers, so that they could follow their regimented regimes of prayer) and of printed books, which caused a moral panic far greater than the one caused by Google; a man called Robert Burton wrote a book in 1628 called An Anatomy Of Melancholy, in which he described, with alarm, "the vast chaos and confusion of books". This was a century after the Gutenberg press made the printed book a reality. "We are oppressed with them," he wrote. "Our eyes ache with reading, our fingers with turning." Books, you see, were destroying the centuries-old oral tradition.

Unsurprisingly, Carr is a fan of the book. His sentiments echo those I expressed in a recent Word column in which I denounced the Kindle. Here's Carr:

As a device for reading, the book retains some compelling advantages over the computer: you can take a book to the beach without worrying about getting sand in its works; you can take it to bed without being nervous about it falling to the floor should you nod off; you can spill coffee on it; you can sit on it; you can put it down on a table, open to the page you're reading, and when you pick it up a few days later, it will still be exactly as you left it. You never have to be concerned about plugging a book into an outlet or having its battery die.

Once transferred from page to screen, as so much of the printed word is in the process of being, from academic paper to novel, the "linearity of the book" is, he says, "shattered, along with the calm attentiveness it encourages in the reader." He gives this example: try doing a crossword puzzle while reading a novel. Can't be usefully done. (Actually, I find it hard enough to do a crossword puzzle while doing a crossword puzzle, but that's another blog entry.)

There's a lot of fairly dense stuff towards the end of The Shallows about how the brain works, which I found hard to follow not because I was doing a crossword at the same time, but because I'm not a medical man. However, in brief, short term memories only become long term memories after a delicate process, one that can be interrupted by, as Carr puts it, "a jab to the head or a simple distraction". Forgive me, scientists, if I have picked this up incorrectly, but the hippocampus seems to be the ancient part of the brain that acts as our "navigational centre", a taxi driver's mental maps are stored there; it also forms and manages our memories. Our brains are not like computers, as sexy as that sounds to people who work on buzzing campuses in Palo Alto and go around on scooters, even though both have capacity for memory storage: "Biological memory is alive. Computer memory is not."

It's a scary book, because I know for a fact that my neural pathways have been, and are being, altered by constant attention to the internet. Most of my working day involves sitting at this MacBook, with wi-fi on, writing; and that requires research, which is all done with clicking, even though some days I am working in a library full of books. Anyone else see an irony in that? Google is a lot quicker and more efficient than the British Library, at least in an instant where I want to look up the exact date of the Gutenberg press on Wikipedia, which I just did.

While writing The Shallows, Carr moved to the wilds of Colorado where he had no cellphone signal and only "a poky DSL connection"; he packed in Twitter and Facebook, cancelled RSS feeds and set hs email programme to check for new emails every hour, not every minute. He sort of hated it, but it helped him get his book written more quickly. He's back on the drip now, incidentally, because, as I said, he's not a Luddite, he's as wired up to the electronic teat as you and me. But his book makes you think. And it requires "deep reading", as he puts it – that skill which is being eroded. The very fact that I read it in book form makes me feel smug. You might, too. I'm lucky, I was raised and educated in a world of books and comics and magazines; I even began my writing career in a world of newspaper cuttings services and typed on a typewriter – I at least appreciate both worlds and what they have to offer, and can toggle between the two; what chance does the generation whose schooling involved doing homework with Google have? None.

I'll leave you with this erudite but apocalyptic passage from Carr. If there was a loom nearby, you sense he might have kicked the shit out of it. "Those who celebrate the 'outsourcing' of memory to the Web have been misled by a metaphor … What gives real memory its richness and its character, not to mention its mystery and fragility, is it contingency. It exists in time, changing as the body changes." Culture, he says, "is more than the aggregate of what Google describes as 'the world's information.' It's more than can be reduced to binary code and uploaded. To remain vital, culture must be renewed in the minds of the members of every generation. Outsource memory, and culture withers."

Inspired? I was.