John Cleese and the Politics Lesson

[Today's MORI poll in The Observer puts Labour just 6 points behind the Conservatives. Could this mean that neither party will have an overall majority after next year's General Election?]

The odds appear to have shortened on our parliament being hung after the next general election. While many of you may wish to add the words “drawn” and “quartered” to the above sentence, I’m not referring to the fate of our dishonourable MPs, but to the increasing possibility that the Conservatives may not get an overall majority in the forthcoming election.

As a wet and windy winter settles in, the price of fuel rises and our local Wine Racks go bust, morale couldn’t be worse. Yet, according to today’s MORI poll, the Tories only have a 6% lead over what is supposed to be a party with the least popular leader in history.

What happens if, miracle of miracles, we get a whiff of warm Spring air before May and Britain’s economy revives itself with the daffodils? Could the unthinkable happen and we end up with small parties holding the balance of power?

Quite why the Conservatives are doing so badly is a mystery. Some blame The Sun newspaper: its constant pillorying of Gordon may have helped him. Friends of mine, normally to the right of Genghis Khan, are openly feeling sorry for the poor man. Or maybe people are finally getting suspicious of the dough-faced Etonian and the appalling Osborne, reciting their menu of opportunistic platitudes devoid of real policy?

Yesterday’s poll, published in the leftie Observer, could have been just a blip, but could it signify uplift in national confidence and a feeling that, after all, the Labour devil you know is better than the Tory devil you suspect?

If the resurgence holds, would a hung parliament be so dreadful? People point to the walking wounded Labour governments of the 1970s, desperately struggling to survive with the help of the Liberals. Sure, everyone says that what the country needs to get out of the recession is strong government, but is a hung parliament necessarily a weak one? After all, it’s a natural consequence of all electoral systems that use proportional representation, or PR. Does PR lead to political impotence?

I know a little about the subject thanks to John Cleese. In 1987 he rang me out of the blue and asked if I would help him make a party political broadcast for the SDP-Liberal Alliance. In the previous election 28% voted Labour and were represented by 209 seats, whereas 26% had voted Liberal and were represented by just 23 seats. This was clearly unfair: would I agree to help him?

I could hardly say no to the opportunity of working with the comedy genius, even though I had no idea how we could make an amusing programme out of something so innately dull. I recall we started with Cleese asleep, bored by the fact that he already knew what he was about to say. Nearby a stagehand was snoring loudly. It was the first time a comedian had presented a political broadcast and it caused a furore. But the truths within it hold true today.

Britain is virtually the only civilised country in the world (apart from the United States) without PR. Strong economies like Germany, Holland, and all Scandinavia have successfully used it for decades. Over there, everyone with a vote has a voice. It seems iniquitous to me that in most British parliamentary constituencies a vote for anyone other than the incumbent is a waste of time. In our system, the only real democracy lies within marginal seats.

If the LibDems agreed to share power, it might be on condition that Britain finally adopts PR. I can imagine why both Brown and Cameron would hate the idea. It gives power to the people and encourages consensus rather than autocracy. It avoids extremism and swings of policy. It promotes cooperation and is both fair and democratic.

Now wouldn’t that be a great way to start the next decade?

Joanna Lumley is going to be our neighbour!

Estate agents in Northumberland must have been popping the Cava this week. In a gloriously luvvie moment, national treasure Joanna Lumley declared that she had so enjoyed opening Morpeth’s new shopping mall, she was going to buy a house in Northumberland and come and live here.

Property values in the Wansbeck valley immediately doubled, although the following morning my bank manager wasn’t entirely convinced by my suggestion of a loan secured on the possibility that Ms Lumley might have been serious. I suspect she uses the same speech for every shopping centre she opens, in which case she must own a lot of houses. Mind you, she can probably afford them: the owners of the new Sanderson Arcade must have paid for quite a few bottles of Bollinger to entice her up here.

I know I shall ruffle some feathers, but personally I’ve never found anything I actually want to buy in Morpeth. For me, every self-respecting town needs three essentials: a Waitrose, a well-stocked delicatessen and a fresh fish shop; Morpeth has none of these. So, nicely designed as it is, I don’t quite get the point of the new arcade. It has a Marks and Spencer for underwear and for people who can’t cook and a Laura Ashley for people who like to pretend they live in the 70s. There does appear to be a very nice homemade chocolate emporium, but I’m supposed to be on a diet.

I’m happy for the new face of Morpeth to prove me wrong. In fact, on Saturday I decided to give it the benefit of the doubt and was about to set off with my M&S card when I bumped into some disappointed friends who had just returned from the town having failed to find a parking space. Now that’s British planning for you: build a brand new shopping precinct, but don’t worry about the parking. No wonder Tesco and Sainsbury see Morpeth as a prime target for out of town superstores. According to my friends, normally reserved residents were desperately screeching round Morrison’s car park, screaming at each other for precedence over the elusive spaces.

Britain doesn’t really get shopping malls. In most civilised countries they build them on top of big multi-storey car parks; Morpeth’s is built around a bus station (or, as it’s now called, a “transport interchange”). This is despite the fact that most people like to go shopping by car – it’s one of the few benefits of the modern age. Towns that want to be taken seriously as shopping destinations should take note, particularly Newcastle, which is soon to open its new improved Eldon Square shopping centre. Having had the vision to provide the region with some of the best transport infrastructure in the country complete with a nice fat motorway streaming right into the centre, Newcastle goes and spoils it by having some incompetent planner inventing “No Car” lanes and making parking as difficult as possible.

In London’s Shepherds Bush, the BBC is located right next to the best-designed shopping centre I’ve ever encountered. You enter the parking lot and follow the signs for the store you want; a series of red and greed lights guides you straight to an empty parking space. I was admiring it earlier this week while I there to pitch a new idea for a television series in which rocket scientists and other assorted geniuses try to solve society’s most irritating problems. Top of the list would be how to find a parking space in Morpeth. The BBC loved the idea.

Rather than hiring a genius, there’s probably a simpler solution for Morpeth. Persuade Joanna Lumley to stick to her word and become a resident. She sorted out the Gurkhas: I’m sure it would take her just a couple of hours to sort out the parking.

What's In A Name?

[In the week that Newcastle United consolidated its position at the top of the Championship with a 3-1 victory over Peterborough, club owner Mike Ashley announced he was renaming our historic venue "sportsdirect.com@stjamespark". It caused a seismic revolt on Tyneside]

The most dramatic moment during Newcastle United’s mauling of Peterborough on Saturday was when some fans produced a large banner proclaiming “notwanted@StJamesPark” and pointed it at the directors’ box. The cheers and laughter from the crowd soon turned to angry boos as an official was sent to confiscate the offending banner and remove the guilty from their seats.

His decision to offer up the revered name of St James’ Park for commercial sponsorship was unpopular enough: the announcement that for the time being he’s going to call it the “sportsdirect.com@StJamesPark Stadium” has brought the club into national ridicule. During the game radio commentators were heard reporting from the “Hereinthepouringrain@StJamesPark” Stadium.

Mind you, the banner incident did cheer up a dull second half. Unlike David Haye’s extraordinary victory over the Goliath Nikolay Valuev, the underdogs of Peterborough never stood a chance. At one point I thought they’d accidentally left their 8-year-old mascot on the pitch: it turns out they have a very small captain called Dean Keates.

A few days after Ashley dropped his bombshell, one of the richest clubs in the land announced that it would also be offering naming rights to its ground. Unlike Ashley, Chelsea’s chief executive handled the PR well, saying that “retaining Stamford Bridge’s heritage is paramount to considering such a move” and that any deal would have to be with “the right partner”.

Sponsorship isn’t just about money. In my own business of television, the sponsor’s credit at the front of the show has to fit in with the image of the programme, just as the sponsor uses the content of the show to enhance its own product. Newcastle United’s partnership with Northern Rock and before that with Scottish & Newcastle was totally appropriate. What happens if London Pride makes Ashley an offer he can’t refuse? Or if the fans at the Stadium of Light clubbed together to buy SunderlandFC-Are-A-League-Above-You@StJamesPark?

If he really wants to add a few bob to the bottom line, why doesn’t Ashley nurture his biggest asset, namely 40,000 captive consumers? While the entire leisure industry has hauled itself into the 21^st century, why are football grounds run as if they are still in the 1980s?

My season ticket is in a part of the ground with a facility grandly called the 1892 Bar. You mingle with all types in there, and most of us have paid up to £900 a year for the privilege. So why does the club assume that we only want to spend a couple of quid in the interval on a sausage roll or a steak pie of dubious provenance? Sure, for many people pies and football go together. But if there were a decent alternative, surely some of the bankers, lawyers and entrepreneurs in there would happily cough up?

As it is, it’s quite hard to spend any money at all in the ground. This week many of us who ordered their half-time drinks found they hadn’t been set out by the interval, so we angrily queued up to complain. Unless you leave your seat well before half time, there’s no way you can get a hotdog by the start of the second half because the café service is so poorly organised that the queue snakes on forever. Elsewhere in the ground, friends tell me there’s scarcely any service at all.

Surely just investing in one catering expert at let’snotbothertotrythefood@StJamesPark might pay for quite a few extra players. Indeed, if Ashley could persuade every spectator to spend just two pounds a week extra on improved services, he would immediately pocket the £2million he wants without wrecking the heritage of our stadium’s proud name.

Getting High

[This week the Government rejected the report of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, which concluded that marijuana is not as dangerous as Class B drugs, and should therefore remain as a Class C drug]

I rather envied my friends who smoked marijuana. Looking back at old photographs of myself at university, bearded with wild curly hair, I could easily have been taken for a pothead, sitting in a circle on a Flokati shagpile rug with Grateful Dead on the record player. Trouble was, when it came to the passing of the joint, I never knew quite what to do.

There was always some terrifying new-fangled way of smoking it: cupping it in your palm, up your nose, through a bong: every week a new gimmick. Petrified of being found out for the goody-two-shoes I was, at parties I dreaded this illicit game of Pass-The-Parcel and watched the thing approach with growing terror. In the end I turned round, put it in my mouth like a cigarette and took a surreptitious puff.

Then I waited for the euphoria, the relaxation, even a bit of cloud floating. Whilst my friends were giggling like maniacs, I went into the kitchen and unscrewed a bottle of Hirondelle. Half a glass of terrible red wine later, and I could really join the party.

Mind you, it wasn’t the smoking of the joint I found most scary so much as the thought that I might be asked to roll one. It looked straightforward enough: stick three Rizla cigarette papers together; fold up a bit of cardboard for a roach; mix some tobacco and marijuana toegether; then deftly roll the thing up with your thumbs. Like all my failed attempts at woodwork, I knew that if I tried the whole thing would go horribly wrong, disintegrate and set fire to the shagpile.

The truth is, I was the world’s worst hippy. Even when I spent my summer vacation in flower-powered California I never really felt part of the club, man. Maybe it was my terrible purple corduroys and striped brown polyester shirt; perhaps I had too many showers: I neither looked nor smelt the part. Frankly, I never saw what the fuss was about, for my brain stubbornly refused to intoxicate itself. Probably because, like Bill Clinton, I never learnt how to inhale.

Despite the accusations of drug-infused iniquity surrounding the television industry, I only ever once tried cocaine. That was on the night of my 40^th birthday when a very good friend of mine, who happens to be a fairly well-known comedian, decided that I really ought to give it a go.

It was 4am and after a very drunken party in a local restaurant about a dozen friends retired to my flat for a nightcap. After my glass coffee table was duly prepared, I did as I was told, snorted like a horse and ignored the assembled groans when I sneezed most of the remaining powder onto the floor. I waited: not a sausage. Until 9am, that is.

I had just crawled into bed when I had a strange, eery sensation that my entire bedroom was upside down. In a cold sweat I switched on the light.

It was real. The room was upside down. But it wasn’t the drug. The wardrobe, dressing table, armchairs and lamps had been upended – it was my comedian friend’s parting joke. That’s the closest I’ve ever got to a psychedelic high.

So I’m not the best person in the world to offer advice on the marijuana debate. However neither, I suspect, is Gordon Brown. I can’t imagine him rolling a “Saturday Night Special” when the Darlings pop round for supper. I guess that’s why the Government set up the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs to review the status of cannabis — because they wanted real experts to tell us the true story.

Now they have: marijuana is far less dangerous and addictive than cigarettes and alcohol. But we knew that before, didn’t we? So why aren’t fags and beer classified as Class B drugs? Ask the taxman. And why has yet another expert report been ignored? Ask Gordon Brown.

But What Happens Next (Question) Time?

[The biggest story in Britain this week was the appearance by ultra-right wing politician Nick Griffin of the British National Party (BNP) on the BBC's flagship debate show Question Time. It caused a nationwide uproar.]

In the mid nineties I bought the company that produced Question Time. In doing so my company Mentorn acquired bragging rights to one of the most revered brands on British television.

In those days Question Time had its own question mark hanging over it. After 15 years of Conservative government and with Labour still looking unelectable, politics and political programmes were dull as ditchwater. Ratings were at an all time low and the only reason for the programme’s existence seemed to be to provide a platform for MPs’ egos. There was even talk in BBC corridors of trying to kill off the dinosaur once and for all.

In 1995 we’d tried out a potential successor to the show. It was called You Decide, hosted first by Jeremy Paxman and then for its second season by John Humphrys. It was a radical format: 24 hours before the show went on air we posed a single question and asked viewers to vote. We chose hot topics like Should Handguns Be Banned? Then, whichever way the vote went, the programme presented the contrary view. In other words, on the grounds that there are two sides to every argument, we tested the viewers’ knee-jerk reaction to a sensitive subject and then put it to the test. With two opposing sets of experts lined up we only confirmed the guest list a couple of hours before the live show. Afterwards we took a second vote to see if viewers had been swayed by the counterarguments. They usually had.

The series demonstrated just how volatile public opinion can be and how, despite thousands of years of public education, prejudice still triumphs over perception. A fact that keeps some of our tabloids in business.

I doubt our format could have coped with some of the issues aired on this week’s Question Time. Would the BBC have dared to put questions of race and homosexuality to a public vote, and then spend an entire hour arguing the other way? You Decide ran for two years until New Labour arrived and saved Question Time’s bacon.

Now Nick Griffin of the BNP has given the old warhorse the biggest boost any television programme could desire. Eight million viewers tuned in to see Thursday’s car crash: few could have been disappointed. Even though I sold Mentorn some time ago, I still felt a glow of pride when I saw the credits at the end. It was skillfully produced, riveting entertainment. Rarely has a single television programme been so at the heart of current events. Celebration wine will have been flowing through the BBC hospitality room.

But what will be the fallout? The point most commentators seem to have overlooked is that wasn’t a one-off appearance. They were invited not by choice but by right, because of their success in the polls. Unless the public votes them off the guest list, the rules say that Griffin can return, in common with the other minority parties. That’s a huge problem for Mentorn’s producers and for the BBC executives who have ultimate editorial control. This week they legitimately made the BNP the subject of most of the debate because the press had already ensured that people were talking about little else. But they can’t do it twice. Griffin effectively neutered himself when he tried to justify his policies and his history. He was exposed as the nasty racist he really is and he almost certainly damaged his party’s cause. But what happens when he faces normal mainstream questioning?

I fear the odious man’s oily smile may begin to look a little more genuine to some when he’s allowed free rein to spread his disgusting doctrines amongst the rabble. And then it’ll be the responsibility of all of us to stand by with the counter arguments. And hope the nation listens before it decides.

Education, Education, Education

Izzy’s fourth tooth broke through today. It’s been signaling its arrival for weeks: red cheeks, roof-raising screams and diarrhea were clear warning of another milestone on the road from “baby” to “child”.

Elsewhere Izzy is determined to retain her baby status. At nine months she still stubbornly refuses to crawl: not even a bumshuffle. Jo and I find that rather a blessing – a moving target is less controllable – but certain elderly relatives have raised eyebrows in disapproval. You know the kind of thing: Little Johnny was walking at this age; Jenny was reciting Shakespeare by the time she could crawl.

Why are we so obsessed with accelerating our children's learning process? No sooner are babies ingesting solid food at one end than their parents start talking about potty training the other. Crawling, talking, walking, reading, writing: they’re all going to happen at some time. Why this compulsive boasting and one-upmanship, as if speeding through childhood were something desirable or useful? It’s not exactly a triumph of human progress to perform something every one of us is ultimately programmed to achieve.

As I write this Izzy is saying “Yadadaga”, clear as anything. Surely you can hear the “dada” in there, even though she’s looking at the dog?

Ben’s first real word was “duck”. He’s 28 now and has done many things in life to make me glow, but nothing quite matches the achievement of pointing at three flying Donald Ducks we had on the wall and saying “Duck!”. A word he then applied for the following two months to every flying thing: “No, darling, that’s an aeroplane – say “Concorde”. “Duck!”.

I’m teaching Izzy to say “dog” by holding our two spaniels and repeating the word incessantly. One day she’ll probably point at the television and say “Paxman”, but for now she just ignores the dogs and gives me a pitying smile. I know what she’s really thinking: Just give me a break, Dada, I’ll get to it in my own time. Thank God there are no SATs for one-year-olds.

This national obsession with standards and milestones is the underlying theme of the Cambridge Primary Review, the report that took some of our country’s top education experts three years to write and our education minister precisely 45 seconds to reject, presumably because it’s the most damning criticism of government education policy yet articulated. “The apparatus of targets, testing, performance tables, national strategies and inspection (distorts) children’s primary schooling for questionable returns”, it concludes. It criticizes the “disenfranchising of local voice; the ‘empty rituals’ of consultation; the authoritarian mindset”: in short, it utterly rejects the policies of this and the previous (Tory) government.

In most other civilised countries where formal teaching starts at six, universal educational standards are higher than in the UK. How can this be? Sure, numeracy and literacy (what you and I would call Maths and Reading) are important, but so too are knowledge and skills. And here, tragically, our country’s standards have fallen through the floor.

Middle England’s kneejerk reaction to the report is that children should read and write as soon as possible. Not so. An appallingly high proportion of five year olds are turned off school and simply never recover. The majority are from disadvantaged backgrounds and the feeling of inferiority can last a lifetime.

Meanwhile, there’s no indication that those unfortunate children pushed by middle-class parents through hoops of early learning end up happier than their peers. On the contrary, last Friday I went to my old school reunion, where many of the brightest “fliers” seem to have led the dullest lives. By contrast, those of us whose reports always warned they “could do better” ended up having a ball.

So Izzy, just take your time. Apart from the potty training.

Why I bought Chris Evans a car

According to Chris Evans, I once bought him a car. It was a 1956 MGA Roadster in old English white with red leather interior. He thanks me for it in his autobiography, which he’s been touting all week and which I picked up for half price in WH Smith.

Chris writes that he bought the car with £10,000 that I gave him for doing nothing except agreeing to have his name on a piece of paper. He adds, “Out of all my experience with the media and money thus far, this was the craziest I’d encountered to date.”

It was in 1992. My company Mentorn was competing for the breakfast franchise on Channel Four. We’d been supplying part of the Channel Four Daily for a number of years, which was pretty lucrative for us even though almost nobody watched it. When the network announced they wanted a completely new show they invited us to pitch. Our team came up with a long list of ideas: I felt none of them clicked with the brief for something revolutionary to wake the nation.

Then I heard about Chris Evans from a friend called Nik Powell, who’d started Virgin Records with Richard Branson and was the personification of cool by being married to Sandie Shaw (she of the bare feet and Puppet On A String). Chris had hosted a pop video programme on Nik’s ill-fated satellite Power Station and was currently presenting a weekend show on BBC local radio.

I listened: Evans was awesome. His freshness, irreverence and unpredictability seemed perfect for a Channel Four audience. We met in my office in Wardour Street. I couldn’t believe this ginger geek with the terrible glasses, who looked and sounded about 15 years old, could transform into the charismatic bundle of energy I heard on the radio. Yet I somehow sensed he could become huge on television so, against the better judgment of some of my colleagues, I ditched all our conventional programme ideas and hung the entire bid on a wild, anarchic breakfast “zoo” radio show called Good Morning Chris Evans.

Then I found out that another consortium led by Bob Geldof was also trying to woo him, so I offered Chris £10,000 to sign with us exclusively. I didn’t know that he went out and bought a car – or (until I read Chris’s book) that Geldof’s bid still included his name.

You can imagine that I was more than a little miffed when I discovered that not only had our bid been rejected but that instead Channel Four had chosen The Big Breakfast, hosted by Chris Evans.

I checked our contract. I didn’t want to get in the way of a man and his career and there was no doubt the Geldof consortium’s idea of setting the show inside a real house was inspired, but our exclusivity deal was watertight. So I simply asked for my money back. When Chris’s agent refused I called in the lawyers. I duly got the cheque, not from Chris but from Geldof’s company. Chris evidently kept the car.

My view of Chris has always been slightly tainted by this experience, though we’ve been perfectly friendly to each other ever since. In the 90s he was the most influential and inspired onscreen talent in the UK. When, in 1998, my new series Robot Wars was scheduled against his megahit TFI Friday, my heart sank: nothing could take on that battleship. But when, within the first six episodes we’d matched them and by the end of the second season we’d knocked them off the air, I felt just a little avenged.

I’m sure Chris hardly noticed, because, as frequently happened in his rollercoaster career, he’d already moved on to bigger things.

I sincerely wish him luck with the Wogan slot. Doubtless the fee will buy him a fleet of cars.