Blog From The North

When an Irresistible Birthday meets an Immovable Waistline

2012-01-29T14:39:00.000-08:00

I do hope this wretched week crawls by. In fact, I’ll be quite happy if Thursday doesn’t bother turning up at all. I’d like it to be Wednesday 1st February for quite a few years – until my brain has caught up with my age, that is. For on Thursday I’m due to reach the terrible milestone that marks the beginning of my sixties.

Why on earth do we pretend to celebrate big birthdays? They take years off your life. On my 40th, I took over a Russian restaurant in Chelsea and about 100 friends and I sampled every one of the 76 vodkas in the bar. I don’t remember a lot about what followed. Apparently we all decamped to my flat at four in the morning. I woke up at midday to find that my friend Rowland Rivron had spilt black coffee all over the white shagpile carpet and upended every item of furniture, including the wardrobes and the grand piano. It took me a week to recover; the carpet never did.

My 50th was rather less wild but just as exhausting. Having discovered a talent for cooking, I decided to cater my own dinner party for 100 friends and family. It was a complicated four-course meal, so I spent most of the evening in the kitchen searing scallops. It was stressful beyond belief. Rowland was there again: but by now he was married with children, so he simply made a rude speech about how ancient I’d become. Time tempers the wildest spirit.

I read somewhere that having another child in your fifties makes you feel younger. Sure, I’ve rediscovered the joys of jigsaws, and I can recite whole episodes of Peppa Pig, but since Izzy arrived, I can’t say it’s been exactly rejuvenating. Constant toddler-carrying hasn’t removed my middle-aged spread, instead it’s given me a permanent twinge that feels suspiciously like a need for a hip replacement.

Two parcels arrived this morning and I groaned: people are already remembering the event I’m determined to ignore. The first was from my eldest daughter, with strict instructions not to open till “the big day”. Of course I immediately tore it open.

Inside was a book called The 4-Hour Work Week: How to Escape the 9-5 and Join the New Rich. It’s a best-seller, apparently – no wonder the author can enjoy a 4-Hour Work Week. I immediately resolved to write a book called Do No Work At All And Make A Million. Chapter One: Write book called Do No Work At All And Make A Million. Chapter Two: Wait for royalty cheques and put your feet up.

The second package turned out to be three small jars of pills, sent to me by a very nice chap I met on holiday. He’s a doctor: well he has a medical degree and he’s using the qualification to make himself a fortune. He’s invented some new diet that’s getting people excited in America. Of course, I offered to test it for him: if you’d seen me on the beach in St Lucia, you’ll know why. Talk about scaring the locals.

It’s called RealDose Weight Loss Formula No 1 and the label says it has ingredients clinically proven to “Accelerate fat burning, Reduce appetite, Increase energy and stamina and Enhance mood”. Now we’re talking.

In truth, there’s a tiny asterisk next to each claim that leads to some small print warning that “These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration.” Well, they’re about to be evaluated by me.

A couple of years ago I wrote a blog called “Bringing Me Down to Size” and lost 20 pounds in 64 days. I’m resurrecting this blog immediately to test out my new friend’s formula: you can follow my progress on www.bringingmedowntosize.com. I wonder if it can make me lose ten years by Thursday?

Stories from St Lucia: 1 - In The Footprints of Amy

2012-01-22T15:31:00.000-08:00

The last thing we expected to find in our Caribbean holiday resort was a celebrity ghost.

We chose this place because it’s laid back and not remotely starry, though remote it most certainly is, and in this most northerly bay of St Lucia, the stars are so bright in the ink-black night you could almost touch them. But Cotton Bay Village, where we’ve come to escape the January cold, is nothing like the spa-laden hotels on the other side of the island. They lie on the west coast, protected from the Atlantic’s roar and the screams of toddlers; ours faces east, where it’s cooler and less manicured, making it infinitely more child friendly.

Which makes it an unlikely venue for Amy Winehouse, enfant terrible and childlike genius, who chose it as her refuge from the pain of her troubled last years.

Amy's (Wine)house

The villa she rented stands opposite ours. Right now we use her housekeeper, eat in the same little beach bar, stroke the same stray dogs and ride the horses she rode along the unspoiled beach.

We've befriended some of her neighbours, who paint a picture of a lifestyle far removed from one we were fed by some of our tabloid newspapers.

This place has none of the opulent seclusion of a typical rock star retreat. Izzy toddles up to all the other three-year-olds with a bold “What’s Your Name?” and then noisily fills and empties buckets with them in the toddler pool, their screams echoing round the villas and apartments.

Quite why the tattooed singer chose here, I don’t know, but by all accounts she is greatly missed. She had been scheduled to return just a week or so after her untimely death: her house was prepared and the staff were looking forward to seeing her. There are pictures of her in the restaurant and fond memories flow from everyone you meet.

Locals say the image of a permanently intoxicated, incoherent diva was simply wrong. Sure, she would hang in the shade of the tiny bar along the beach, but the owner, Majorie, a fiercely strong woman whose family has owned the collection of wooden shacks for the last 22 years, tells me proudly she never let Amy get drunk on her premises. "I kept my promise to her Father. I always made her eat before she drank", she says. Amy called her "Momma".

Jo meets "Momma" Majorie

Majorie's Shrimps with "Ground Provisions"

And such good food: succulent curried prawns, saltfish cakes and spicy creole chicken.

“She was never any trouble”, say Amy’s next-door neighbours, a retired English couple who spend three months every year in this sun-kissed hideaway.

“She was sweet, and very quiet”, says Melissa, our cleaner, wiping away a tear. “She’d sit like a child for hours with crayons and paper just drawing, like Izzy does. She always had nice words for me, although sometimes, when she drank, she went cuckoo”, she added. “What happened then?” I asked. “A few things got broken – nothing serious”.

One day Amy brought in a basket of tiny puppies from the beach. I can understand why. It was all I could do to dissuade Jo from popping one of their cousins, a friendly mutt with the sweetest eyes, into her own suitcase. But six untrained puppies would be a bit too much for the most tolerant housekeeper. “The fleas went everywhere so we banned them”, said Melissa.

Amy’s generosity was legendary. In Majorie’s, a man with eyes as dark as the rum and coke in front of him, sits wearing headphones. When I ask him what he’s listening to, he pops them over my ears. “I wish I could sing no regrets and no emotional debts”, Amy was chanting.

"Amy Winehouse Saved My Life"

“She saved my life,” he says. “She paid for my hernia operation. She was a saint”. Behind him, the Atlantic rollers accompany the lyrics: “So we are history, the shadow covers me, The sky above, a blaze that only lovers see.”

Sure, Amy Winehouse may have faced her demons with alcohol: but I think I can now understand why her favourite drug was this charming, impoverished island. It’s simple but bewitching, and about as far removed from cold, dark reality as you could possibly get.

Oh dear, back to the real world next week.

Happy Holidays

2012-01-01T12:53:00.000-08:00

Nobody says Happy Christmas anymore in the United States. Instead they’ve cleverly swept up Christmas, Boxing Day, Hanukkah and New Year into a generic and optimistic “Happy Holidays”.

What a misnomer: how could this time of year ever be described as a holiday? The word holds the promise of chestnuts and roaring fires, Santa and smiles; it suggests rejuvenation and reconciliation, the comfort and happy familiarity of close family; it conjures up images of carol singers and giant reindeer and polar bears lit up on neighbours’ homes, the scent of mulled wine and free mince pies in large, welcoming department stores. “Holiday” means grannies will be smiling as giggling children tear open their beautifully wrapped presents and scream with delight at thoughtful wooden toys and hand-knitted jumpers. Holiday is a time without dissent, politics or strife.

They’ve obviously never spent Christmas in our household. This year my wife actually got things incredibly well organised, and did most of the Christmas shopping in October. Despite this, we still managed to spend an entire December week stuck in traffic jams in Newcastle’s absurd “no car” driving lanes, and queuing in even longer lines for department store checkouts, with Izzy screaming for attention and home.

In our final few days of panic-buying, we turned to the internet for help, and consequently spent hours waiting in for courier companies to honour guaranteed next-day delivery, then more hours driving through industrial estates looking for courier company warehouses after their drivers put “sorry you were out” cards through our neighbour’s door.

Fearing a champagne drought, we carefully emptied all the local supermarket’s shelves of its half-price bottles, yet today, New Year’s Day, our wine rack is completely empty, and we still have a houseful of people. I’ve been scrambling hangover-curing eggs at the rate of two-dozen a morning. That’s over 300 broken eggshells since Christmas Eve.

The best thing about American holidays is that they are mercifully short. People work on Christmas Eve, Santa arrives on time, and everyone is safely back in the office by Boxing Day. Our celebrations started on the 21st, my eldest daugher’s birthday (“Just a few close friends, Dad, and I’m sure they’ll all bring sleeping bags”), and we still have a houseful of cousins. For two weeks we haven’t seen our sitting room floor for the piles of wrapping paper, bows and discarded cardboard. Our nice new sofa has been introduced to various vintages of red wine.

We had turkey, brisket (my wife is Jewish, so we celebrate Hanukkah as well as Christmas), roast lamb for 14 and giant stews for 30, and I’ve personally consumed so much chocolate I swear I’ve turned completely spherical. So far no one has ended in casualty, though at 3am on Christmas morning Izzy woke up and announced she was about to be sick. Her prediction proved completely accurate, so, instead of a present-filled stocking, Santa had to bring her clean sheets and pyjamas. Three times.

I can’t wait for Wednesday and the excitement of sending emails from my nice quiet office. So what did you get for Christmas? my team will ask. I will proudly point to my new watch, a perfectly timed gift from my wife. I will tell of a lovely book about Northumbrian gardens, a most thoughtful offering from my Mum. I will mention various useful gadgets for my kitchen and my own garden, without which I can’t imagine how I’ve survived the last few years.

However, I will certainly not refer to the Borat mankini, given to me as a joke by my nieces. They have dared me to wear it next week and send them a photo. Even without the effects of the chocolate I wouldn’t be seen dead in it. For next week this spherical columnist will be on the other side of the world, basking on a sun-kissed beach. I’m taking a holiday to recover from the holidays. And, boy do I need it.

Happy New Year, everyone.

Hunt's Folly

2011-12-19T12:08:00.000-08:00

The entire audience was hushed: the play had reached its climax. Suddenly the silence was pierced by a lone shrill voice: “Daddy, I want a wee-wee”. Izzy was enjoying her first live theatre show.

Northern Stage’s slick, fun production of “Shhh…A Christmas Story” managed to hold an audience of toddlers spellbound for well over an hour. Izzy’s eyes lit up from the moment she saw the lights, moving scenery and jolly actors.

She sat transfixed, apart from one unscripted moment when, fascinated by some prop snowballs that had been flying around the stage, she ignored our pleas to sit down and strode onstage to retrieve one for herself. The actors merely paused, watched her walk round them, and then carried on. I’d love to have a video of that precious moment.

I guess that’s the sort of home video that will be the mainstay of Jeremy Hunt’s new local television plans. I can’t imagine what else we’ll be watching. Last week the Secretary of State announced that Newcastle had been chosen as one of the first “pioneer” cities to be awarded licences for local stations. Quite why he thinks there’s any demand for this in Newcastle is beyond me. None of the people who are capable of making local television work have agreed to get involved. Perhaps some wannabes have been seduced by the lure of showbusiness. They are about to get a rude awakening.

Jeremy Hunt’s plans are based on his mistaken belief that if cities like Birmingham, Alabama have their own thriving local television stations, then so should Birmingham, West Midlands. And Newcastle, Tyne and Wear. Evidently our Secretary of State doesn’t know how American television actually works. Over there all the successful local stations, which do have strong local news outputs, are owned by or affiliated to the main networks, which supply them with expensive and highly profitable primetime programming. Every big city has at least 5 local stations, carrying shows like Dancing With the Stars and the X-Factor. They transmit network daytime shows and high budget “syndicated” talk shows. They also carry local news in the morning, early evening and late night.

Sounds familiar? We’ve actually had that system in the UK since the 1950s. It’s called ITV. Until it was systematically ruined by Thatcher’s disastrous reforms, we had good local programmes through our own Tyne Tees Television, which also carried all the hits of the ITV network. Sure, it was regional, not local, but at least it gave our area a sense of identity, was independently owned, and supplied us with quality regional news.

In 2010 the Labour government tried to turn regional into local, by creating a local news pilot scheme. The concept was simple, and probably economically sound: give the ITV regional news to new local providers to create an integrated operation working on a regional, local and hyper-local level. In the North East, the licence was won by a consortium that included the daily newspaper I write a column for: The Journal. The newspaper’s newsroom would have become multi-media, enabling users to enjoy not only better regional news on ITV, but also enjoyed layers of information in print, on the web and on your mobile phone – you could even type your postcode into a computer and find information about your own community.

It was a 21st century solution that would also have been sustainable. As in America, network shows would have driven audiences to the regional output; just two commercial breaks around the regional news would have funded most of the cost and the service would have been built around a proven and profitable newsgathering operation. Good journalism requires investment, training, rigour and professionalism. You are reading the proof of this right now. Sadly, Jeremy Hunt stubbornly axed this bold experiment and replaced it with his own harebrained, old-fashioned plan for local stations.

I can’t imagine a single advertiser supporting an amateur station with cheap low-quality videos. Shots of Izzy running onstage to collect snowballs may be fun viewing for me, but it’s hardly going to compete with Strictly Come Dancing, is it? Without expertise, viewers or advertisers, Hunt’s Folly is bound to fail.

Visiting Santa

2011-12-12T02:51:00.000-08:00

Just as we were passing through Doncaster, Jo’s phone began to vibrate. “Oh no, it’s the child minder. Something terrible has happened” she winced. As she read the text on her mobile, the panic in her eyes dissolved. “She’s on the Metro and she loves it”.

The Metro? We both felt more than a tinge of jealousy. We’d never taken Izzy on a train, and here we were, speeding at 108 miles an hour (the East Coast internet tells you precisely how fast you’re travelling) to spend our first weekend without her in London. In truth, we’d rather have been with her on the Metro. Apparently she was loving the experience so much she steadfastly refused to get off at Haymarket and would have happily spent the whole afternoon going round the big circle to Tynemouth and back, loudly singing The Wheels on the Train Go Round and Round to all the passengers.

The purpose of our trip was a carol service at my youngest son’s school, but, thanks to East Coast’s amazing new frequent traveller scheme, our first class train tickets were absolutely free, so we decided to celebrate by making a weekend of it. However, as anyone with a wife (or, in my case, several ex-wives) will know, this is a false economy.

There is no such thing as a free weekend in London, particularly a fortnight before Christmas, with the stores offering 50% discounts in a desperate attempt to drum up custom. Shops were offering customers free mugs of hot chocolate with marshmallows and the streets were full of brass bands and Frank Sinatra lookalikes crooning White Christmas. I’d have quite happily spent a day wandering around looking at the Christmas lights and eating free mince pies – not so a credit-card bearing wife. That’s why I had rather sneakily booked an afternoon train: it severely restricts the spending hours. I’d forgotten about late night closing.

Our train had reached Peterborough by the time another text told us Izzy had been persuaded to leave the Metro for Fenwicks’ Toy Department. I groaned: we’d already bought her Christmas presents – what if she latches onto some new doll? We needn’t have worried: Michelle is the best surrogate mum any child could have: our daughter was firmly under control. By the time we reached King’s Cross, they had watched Fenwicks animated window display 14 times. Now they were off to see Father Christmas.

We did the same. Actually, you couldn’t avoid him. As we arrived at Oxford Circus, we walked straight into an army of Santas. More than a thousand of them had assembled in the centre of town, all determined to get blind drunk.

Santacon is an annual flash mob in Central London. They assemble at a secret destination that’s only advertised on the internet the afternoon before (in this case a pub at Victoria Station: sleigh parking free), and head to the centre of town singing carols and smiling at everyone. It’s really an extended pub crawl and the only rules are that you have to dress as Santa (apart from those who come as reindeer) and you mustn’t scare the tourists. A group of girls had come as lingerie Santas, shivering rather miserably in their bodices.

By mid-afternoon the sea of red, bearded drunks had vacated Trafalgar Square, where they’d been handing out Brussels sprouts to the Japanese, and congregated around Jo and me.

We were glad Izzy wasn’t with us: it had been hard enough trying to explain how Santa was going to get his fat tummy (“Just like Daddy’s,” Izzy had said disloyally) down the blocked off chimney in her bedroom, let alone justify a thousand of them, clutching pints of beer and singing strange new words to her beloved Jingle Bells.

Later on our taxi passed another assembly: scores of riot and mounted police were lined up, waiting to clear the streets of Christmas spirit. A final text arrived: Izzy was fast asleep, dreaming of Santa Claus. If only she could see him now.

Off With Their Heads

2011-12-05T02:16:00.000-08:00

[Jeremy Clarkson put his foot in it on BBC1's The One Show by calling for striking public sector workers to be taken outside and shot in front of their families]

If Jeremy Clarkson had called for strikers to be beheaded, rather than shot in front of their families, he would have provided a perfect link to my story of how I nearly decapitated him. During the first series of Robot Wars, an errant blade flew off a robot at hundreds of miles an hour and embedded itself in a concrete wall directly behind Clarkson’s enormous head. The slow motion replay showed it missed his scalp by inches.

Had my robot been a little more accurate, there would have been nothing for 21,000 people to complain about to the BBC last week. Nor would the massed ranks of ramblers, health and safety executives, lorry drivers, Mexicans, families of train suicides and other Clarkson targets have had to suffer his ill-considered outbursts over the years. So to them I sincerely apologise. Given another chance, I will try harder next time. And I’ll make sure his family is watching.

The argument over public service pensions has produced lots of misinformed rants. If I hear one more outraged private sector employee complaining that they resent paying for the gold-plated rewards of our nurses and teachers I shall scream. Most people in the private sector, which, statistically, is most people, don’t understand the issues, because the majority of them have never made a pension contribution in their life. They’ve paid their national insurance contributions, of course, but that isn’t the point. This is about saving for your retirement, which most people have never bothered to do. Now it’s catching up with them and they’re looking for a scapegoat.

Here are a few statistics to get your Weetabix spluttering. 29 million people make up Britain’s workforce. Of these, only 6 million work in the “public sector”. 87% of these have been doggedly paying some of their salary into a pension scheme. Their employer has been contributing too: it’s in their contract of employment. Now they’re being asked to pay more and get less. Their employer is reneging on the deal. So they’re cross. I would be too.

Why there’s such a fuss is because that employer is me and most of you, and all the public sector workers themselves: all of us are taxpayers.

Of the 23 million workers not in the public sector, just 3 million or so pay some of their wages into a pension scheme to which the employer also contributes. These are good employers that care about their staff, like the employers in the public sector. Most companies don’t bother anymore. They treat their workers as temporary residents in the business, generating wealth for the owners in good times, before being thrown onto the scrapheap of redundancy when times are tough or when they are too old to continue. It’s the way the world was in Victorian times and it’s become the norm in our 21st century.

6 million other people, including self-employed workers like Jeremy Clarkson, are building a safety net with a personal pension scheme. Anyone over the age of 21 would be mad not to contribute something to one, however little they earn, but very few do. My children refuse to, much to my frustration. In this consumerist world, saving for retirement is considered a pointless dilution of scarce funds. Most people would rather have an iPhone 4S now than worry about the electricity bill in their old age.

Well under half the people in the private sector have no pension at all, preferring to spend all their income now with no thought to the future. It is many of these who are now complaining about the nurses and teachers.

They’ll be the ones badgering for an increase in the old age pension when they’re 70. And, without consideration for those who’ll be paying tax on income from their private and public sector pensions till they die, some of these people will selfishly carry on living till they’re 110. Just imagine what Jeremy Clarkson will be saying about them then.

Missing The Ball

2011-11-28T06:30:00.000-08:00

“Once upon a time”, declaimed Izzy, “there was a little girl called Cinderella and she was very very sad.” She paused, thought hard, and then remembered: “So the fairy godmother said ‘You shall go to the football’.”

The three of us were sitting in a candlelit sitting room, Jo and I dressed rather ludicrously in black tie and finery. We should have been at a glamorous ball ourselves, but the wicked wind had other ideas. We’d been invited to a friend’s 40th birthday party, but an hour before we had been due to leave the storm, even wilder than predicted, had blown away all our power. I was in the bath when the lights went out.

I lay soaking in the darkness until I realised it was no short term outage, then stumbled out, stubbed my toe on the dresser and slowly dripped to the bedroom door. Outside in the corridor I heard Izzy’s voice, then saw a glimmer of candle. “We’re coming to rescue you, Daddy”, she squeaked with excitement.

We couldn’t have left the new babysitter alone with Izzy: the house is a barn of a place even in daylight, but in the pitch black, with just a few candles and a torch for company, she’d have been petrified. Anyway the baby monitor wasn’t working, so we paid the girl off, opened a bottle of good wine, and decided to live as they did in the olden days. No lights, central heating or telephones; and certainly no television.

“I want Peppa Pig”, said Izzy. Clearly it was time for her first science lesson. I don’t know if you’ve tried to teach the concept of electricity to a two-year-old: it’s well nigh impossible.

“Electricity makes the television and lights go on, and the wind has blown down the wire that brings it from the…” My voice trailed as her eyes glazed over. “It died”, suggested Jo. Still no response.

So I tried: “the TV and lights need new batteries” and Izzy’s face it up. “Silly Daddy, put some more in straight away”, she commanded, and pulled me towards the battery drawer. I love the simplicity of a child’s logic. “We haven’t any: the wind blew them all away” seemed to satisfy her. That and a chocolate biscuit.

For a short while Jo and I sipped wine and stared at the blank TV. In some distant land a group of wannabes were trying to win the X-Factor. Later on, there’d be Match of the Day, which I’d set to record on Sky Plus. But the room, shimmering with a dozen candles, looked enchanting. Our house is 350 years old, and for most of its life, this was how its residents must have spent every evening. I threw another log on the fire.

“Let’s sing,” suggested Jo. So we did. And we told stories. Cinderella went to the football more than a dozen times and we acted all the parts in Goldilocks. Finally Izzy put her dolly to bed, gently explaining why it was dark: “Silly old Daddy ran out of batteries, so you have to go to sleep with a torch”. Meanwhile Jo and I cracked open the Boggle.

We have never enjoyed an evening as much. We picnicked on sandwiches, wine and chocolate milk and laughed together as a family. After two hours the 21st century pinged back. “Hurray,” shouted Izzy, “new batteries”.

Jo and I looked at each other. Some vacuous fake blonde was screaching on the X-Factor and the bright light exposed the crumbs on the sofa. So I switched everything off again. “Much better”, said Jo.

There are times when it’s good to step back. We spend so much of our harassed lives rushing along with whatever new technology brings us; sometimes it’s calming to escape to the past with just our loved ones for company. I hope we have more storms this winter.

Mind you, I confess I did eventually go to the football. Well, I saw the highlights on Match of the Day, anyway. After all, it’s not every day Newcastle draws with Manchester United. I’m sure it was a fairy godmother dressed as a linesman who gifted us that penalty, but we all love a happy ending, don’t we?

The Royal Windbag and the White Elephants

2011-11-20T16:18:00.000-08:00

[The Duke of Edinburgh has made a fierce attack on wind farms, describing them as “absolutely useless” - Sunday Telegraph 20th November 2011]

I never thought I’d see the day. They say that you get more reactionary when you get older. But agreeing with Prince Philip? Everyone knows he has the views of a 140-year-old. I thought I’d be safe for at least another decade.

Yesterday we all found out that he’s been sounding off about the iniquity of onshore wind farms to a man that’s trying to build them all over the UK, Esbjorn Wilmar, of Infinergy. Apparently the Duke told Mr Wilmar that wind turbines were “absolutely useless”. Spot on, your royal brain. From now on I’ll take what you say more seriously.

Mr Wilmar is Dutch, of course. Two thirds of the country’s windfarm manufacturers are based overseas. You and I are paying them to put these white elephants into our prettiest landscapes. Last year about £90 of your annual electricity bill went off in big cheques to these and other generators of renewable energy.

Nobody asked us: we just watch our electricity bills rise because we’re giving people like Mr Wilmar our £90 cheques, and they don’t even say thank you. Instead they build these monstrous objects across our most serene scenery.

Mr Wilmar doesn’t have any hills in his own country – it’s flat and dull as a Dutch pancake. You could cover the place with turbines and no one would mind. Instead he’s doing it here. His company is Infinergy, which is owned by KDE Energy, whose holding company is called Koop Group, whose owner is a man called Henk Koop, who, together with his pal Mr Boonstra, is retiring this year. These two old Dutchmen are cashing in and have put their windfarm empire up for sale. Personally, I think we should all claim a stake, we’re investing so much into it.

In 2009 Infinergy applied for planning permission for 17 turbines in one of the most beautiful parts of Scotland (“the windiest country in Europe”, their website says; “a unique and unspoilt destination” says the landowner, the Cawdor Estate). Except that, lured by the huge windfall generated by our subsidies, the Cawdor Estate has conspired with Mr Wilmar’s company to bespoil a chunk of its own unspoilt destination.

The Highland Council quite sensibly turned them down flat. So, of course, they are appealing, and, as these things go, what with the government ultimately making the decision, it’ll probably go ahead. Europe says we have to build thousands of these things, so yet another bit of national heritage will be ruined forever.

Prince Philip is right: wind farms are “absolutely useless”. They contribute a pathetically tiny amount of power, they don’t work in winter (as we found out in 2010), they’re noisy, intrusive and worse than useless when the wind stops blowing (which in Northumberland is far more often than my Californian wife claims).

He also said that they’re a bad idea because they rely on subsidies. He’s right: without our cheques, Mr Wilmar would be out of a job. His machines wouldn’t make economic sense, for they’re expensive to build, costly to run, and don’t work at all for much of the year. In short, they’re useless and not a good idea at all.

The Duke could have added that they’re dangerous. There are some remarkable pieces of research coming to light about blades flying off and ending up in nearby walls and buildings. Ice throw is also a problem: great chunks of it flying hundreds of feet. Then there are the birds: in Germany 32 protected white tailed eagles were killed by turbines: our poor old golden eagles may as well give up.

Let’s be frank, we’re only doing this because the EEC is telling us to. Because we’re too timid to admit that the 2000 or so of these wind turbines we’ve already built at a cost of billions hasn’t matched a single Chinese coal-fired station. Too naïve to spot that the benefits aren’t remotely worth the outrageous subsidy. Too blind to see we could satisfy our energy needs by using other much more efficient green technology. Technology that would generate cleaner power, not royal rage.

The Big Girl Bed

2011-11-14T00:26:00.000-08:00

I have never seen my daughter’s face light up as it did on Saturday night. “I’ve a big girl bed,” she screamed, as she skipped round the house. She hugged the dogs till they winced, then wanted to ring Nana in America to tell her the news.

It’s a milestone. After two and a half years of imprisonment behind the bars of her cot, she is free. Izzy has grown up.

I reckoned the job would take half an hour. “You can quickly convert this cotbed at a later stage into a junior bed” it said in the brochure. I’m sure you can, if, during the two and a half years it has been a cot, you haven’t lost the junior bed bits.

Just after breakfast on Saturday, with Izzy excitedly telling the dogs, the postman and anyone who phoned us “Daddy’s making me a big girl bed”, I’d emptied every cupboard in the house until I finally found the side panels, which had been hiding beneath a mountain of heavy boxes. At least the assembly would be easy.

I had a cup of tea, then gingerly disassembled the bars. When Izzy saw the pieces on the floor she burst into tears. “Daddy’s broke my bed”, she wailed.

“Don’t worry, Iz, I just have to screw the new side panels on and you’ll have a new bed.” She went off happily to tell Truffle and Mabel. The three of them sat and waited.

It was then that I found the holes: just one in each corner and a little over a quarter of an inch wide. Unfortunately all the other holes had been exactly one quarter of an inch: the "little over" meant these holes needed different screws. And these ones needed to come in at right angles: no screwdriver on earth would be able to cope with that. So I did what I always do in moments of crisis: I rang my neighbour.

By coincidence, at that very moment he was freeing his own two-year-olds. They’d been waiting for this day for seven long months. The gate of the field was unlocked and my neighbour’s tupps were now free to enjoy their ewes. They were literally having a field day.

Why today? “It’s so we can have all our lambs born on precisely Saturday April 8th”, he explained.

I mused that this was probably the only certainty left in life, despite the world enjoying all sorts of new freedoms. With Italy clear of Berlusconi, and Libya released from Gaddafi’s tyranny, who knows what state we’ll all be in by Christmas, let alone April? At least this release has a certain outcome: in exactly 147 days’ time there’ll be the sound of baby lambs outside our house. I wondered if I’d get Izzy’s bed sorted by then.

My neighbour scratched his head. “You need a special screw thingy”, he said helpfully, anxious to get back to supervising his flock’s carnal activities. So out came toolboxes, top and bottom drawers, old biscuit tins, filing cabinets. But after two hours, no thingy appeared.

Three abortive trips to the hardware stores later, I decided to improvise. I purchased a shiny new wood chisel and a huge wooden mallet, and set about attacking the side panels. Vainly trying to remember a single woodwork lesson I’d been taught at school, soon there were shavings all over the floor.

“Daddy made a mess”, Izzy announced loudly. This was no overstatement. Her bedroom resembled a wood store. There were screws, drills, packets of new drill bits (another trip to the hardware store) and three tubes of wood glue. Eventually, with my generous neighbour’s resolicited help, I triumphed and, shortly after nightfall, I ceremoniously led Izzy upstairs to try out her new bed.

They say freedom comes at a price. In our case, that price is sleep. Without bars, Izzy now sees no reason to go to bed at all. She is convinced the full moon means it’s morning, and can run freely into our room at 3, 4 and 5am to tell us.

I’m tempted to put the bars back on. But I know there’s no going back on freedom. And anyway, life’s too short to try and find the bits.

Britain's Crazy Transport System: A Solution

2011-11-07T02:31:00.000-08:00

[7 people died and over 50 injured in a 34 vehicle pile-up on the M5 on the 4th November. A firework display was taking place nearby.]

On hearing news of Friday night’s terrible car crash in Somerset, I felt a shudder down my spine. Whatever the cause – the distraction of an over-charged firework, an “I can see through fog” maniac, an over-tired driver – the government is right to use this accident as an excuse for a proper look at our roads policy. Yet I guarantee that whatever hot air is spouted in the Commons this week, nothing will be done about the terrible state of our long-neglected transport infrastructure.

Now I know the following rant won’t be universally accepted, but I guarantee it’ll be popular. Indeed, if I were standing for parliament right now I’d be swept in on a landslide. For what I’m about to say makes common sense: and that’s one thing that successive governments have lacked for the last sixty years when it comes to Britain’s transport policy. That’s why we have the worst infrastructure in Europe, our trains the most expensive, our roads such an embarrassment. And that’s why crashes like Saturday’s will become ever more frequent.

I know that stretch of the M5 well: I used to own a cottage in South Devon. When I bought the house in 1983, the road was a smart new highway and I used it every weekend. It took less than four hours to get down from London on a Friday night. By the nineties, the journey time had reached seven hours or more, so I sold the house. It had become a journey from hell.

Our entire motorway network is far too small. Three lane motorways should have been abolished in the 90s, but they’re still considered a luxury – and far too grand for the North East. Up here in Newcastle, we’re supposed to make do with the pathetic two-lane A1(M) – no wonder the M is in brackets.

Driving to London is a lottery. It’s less than 300 miles, so you’d think at 70 miles an hour it should take just 4½ hours. Those who’ve done the journey recently will scoff: allow six or seven and you might just see the edge of Luton.

So what? say the soggy environmentalists. You should take the train. With what? An East Coast “Anytime” standard return now costs 48 pence a mile. By comparison, the diesel in my car costs me 13 pence a mile: it’s a no-brainer.

But I don’t take the car, because I have no idea how long the journey will take. Instead I search the internet for a cheaper advance purchase train ticket, which means the railway dictates my schedule, rather than the other way round. The train will likely be packed, because Britain’s passenger volume has rocketed by 41% in the last ten years, but capacity has increased by just 17%. Meanwhile this government has cancelled plans for sufficient new carriages to cope with demand.

There’s a simple solution. It’s so blindingly obvious, only a politician or a Department of Transport civil servant could fail to spot it. It’s tried and tested. And it works.

Scrap car duty. Yes, get rid of this pointless tax completely. Instead, make every motorway in the country a smart, wide toll road. It worked in France: it would work here. Where a motorway passes a city, make the outside lane a car-sharing lane, only for vehicles carrying passengers.

Start building right now, and watch our unemployment rate fall. Private finance will happily fund it, so it won’t cost the taxpayer a penny. Private operators will bid for the franchise to run them, thereby raising enough cash to fund an increase in train rolling stock capacity. At the same time, set a ceiling on all standard rail fares at 20 pence per mile. That will bring our prices in line with the rest of Europe, and the ongoing cost will be met by a levy on profits from the toll roads.

Overnight, gas-guzzling cars will be discouraged, people in rural communities who need their cars will have extra money in their pockets, the motorways will be wide, clear and safe, and train trips to London will be easy, quick, and cheap.

Job done. Can I count on your vote, then?

How's About That Then!

2011-10-31T03:53:00.000-07:00

[Sir Jimmy Savile, eccentric, philanthropic British DJ and television presenter, died on Saturday. He would have been 85 years old today. He is best known for his Jim'll Fix It children's programme, which ran on Saturday afternoons on BBC1 for nearly 20 years. He was also the first, and last DJ on the BBC's chart show Top of the Pops.]

For years I’ve reckoned my childhood must have been either utterly deprived or privileged. You see, I can’t remember writing a single letter to Jimmy Savile.

I’ve always assumed it was either because my pocket money couldn’t stretch to a stamp, or because my life was so complete, that I never craved a Jim Fixed It For Me badge. I certainly didn’t want any of the things that other children begged him for: like riding in Doctor Who’s Tardis, singing in a studio with Abba, or having a meal on a rollercoaster. What could possibly have been wrong with me?

Then, after Sir Jimmy’s death on Saturday, I realised the problem: I’m just too old. The programme didn’t start till 1975, by which time I was already in my 20s. It was my daughter who wrote to Jim’ll Fix It asking if he could fix it for her to marry Mr Blobby. Yet I’ve always felt Jimmy Savile was an essential part of my childhood.

I might have been briefly exposed to his weirdness in 1960, through a music show on Tyne Tees Television called Young At Heart, though I clearly didn’t have the heart for it, as I can’t even remember the fact that he changed his hair colour every week. He certainly wasn’t the talk of Priory Junior Mixed.

Instead my memories of him begin in my teenage years: Savile was the lucky man who each week on Top Of The Pops introduced me to my ultimate boyhood fantasy, the dance troupe Pan’s People. I adored his unpredictable, mad banter and I was always disappointed when he was deputised by one of the other, blander DJs. Most of the time, I had no idea what he was talking about, but in a world of over-hyped mid-atlantic pretension, his eccentric Northern bluntness was reassuringly grounded.

So I can understand the outpouring of national nostalgia this weekend – you’d have thought the Queen had died. Jim’ll Fix It staggered on until 1994, which is an incredibly long run for a television series, so he must have touched the childhoods of swathes of the population, including the editors of the newspapers and news bulletins that gave his death such prominence. They all grew up, like my older kids, with the sight of that familiar big red chair, his shiny bling-bedecked shellsuits and the sound of his irritating voice; his “How’s about that, then?” catchphrase drummed into their brains every Saturday afternoon.

I met him a few times professionally, and actually found him rather haughty and grumpy. I think I’m in a minority here, and my view may have been clouded by the fact that I can’t bear the smell of cigar smoke. But he was selfless in his support of good causes and, in one way, I’m personally grateful to Sir Jim. For he directly influenced my own career path: I have no doubt that Jim’ll Fix It was the inspiration for Challenge Anneka.

Both shared the same underlying concept, that the power of television can be used for good, and both put ordinary people at their heart. It’s a formula I still believe in, and it’s sad that these days only cynical talent shows and shock reality docs offer an opportunity for members of the public to get onto our screens simply as themselves. Jim’ll Fix It was the archetypal feel-good show in a period of family entertainment that’s long deceased: these were the days of The Generation Game, It’s A Knockout and That’s Life. He and they will be much missed.

Jimmy Savile and I are also linked by music. A very good friend of mine is a composer called David Mindel, who wrote the iconic theme tunes of both Jim’ll Fix It and Challenge Anneka. David made a lot of money out of Saturday nights on BBC1. I greatly admire him for another achievement: not only did he write the most brilliant, catchy tunes, he achieved a teenage dream that even Jimmy Savile could never have fixed for me: he married one of Pan’s People. How’s about that, then?

Ding-Dong! The Witch Is Dead

2011-10-23T03:55:00.000-07:00

Holed up in the only brick house in town, the three little pigs could hear the wolf furiously huffing and puffing outside.

“Why is he still trying to kill us? Doesn’t he realise he’ll never blow it down?” squeaked the first little pig, still smarting from the loss of his nice straw bungalow.

“That wolf’s insane. He’s ruined our lives and deserves to die”, snarled the second little pig, clutching tightly the few remaining sticks from his own wrecked home.

Just then they heard the sound of growling on the roof. “Oh no, he’s coming down the chimney”, shrieked the first little pig: “Quick, open the cooking pot”. “Wait, we mustn’t kill him,” said the third little pig. “We need to call the RSPCA.”

“Don’t be an idiot”, said his brothers, “he’ll destroy everything. He’ll howl for his hateful wolf family and they’ll come for revenge”. And with that, they took the lid off and the wolf fell into the boiling cauldron.

Just then the phone rang. It was the United Nations. “We hear you’ve caught the big bad wolf. We’d like you to hand him over to the ICC so that he can be brought to justice. He’s a prisoner of war, after all.”

“Go away,” said the first little pig. “We’re having wolf stew for lunch.”

“I’ll handle this”, said the third little pig, picking up the phone, “It’s OK”, he said politely. “I swear by the hair on my chinny-chin-chin he was definitely caught in the crossfire.”

“Yes, he’s in the fire and very cross indeed”, chorused his brothers as they stirred the pot.

When you’re two-and-a-half, morality ought to be straightforward. After the hunter cuts open the wolf to rescue Little Red Riding Hood and her granny, I’m sure I never asked my Mum if they stitched the animal back up. Likewise I never questioned the fate of his pig-hunting cousin. But Izzy caught me out on the day they killed Gaddafi. I was reading her the Three Little Pigs at bedtime when she suddenly said: “Is the wolf still inside the cooking pot?” Then somehow in my head the stories got intertwined.

I could have answered, “I’m sure the wolf police came and got him out and took him to that animal reserve in Scotland where they’re trying to rehabilitate them back to the wild”, but she would only have snorted, “You’re silly, Daddy”. Instead I told the truth: “He was a very nasty, evil wolf, and deserved to die.” That seemed to satisfy her, though I’ve probably scarred her for life.

Just as the Munchkins sang “Ding-Dong! The Witch is Dead” at the demise of the Wicked Witch of the East, thereby validating the concept of a just execution for future generations of children, so the death of Muammar Gaddafi had the entire Libyan population celebrating, and probably most of the Western world too. Does it really matter whether the perpetrator was a miracle called Dorothy from a star named Kansas, a tornado that dropped a house on him, or an over-exuberant 20-year-old rebel who pulled a gun and shot him in the head? The Munchkins are saved and the world is a better place: until the Witch’s even more evil sister comes for revenge, that is.

In fact, the circumstances surrounding Gaddafi’s death ought to matter to us: we are, after all, supposed to be more civilized than pigs and more intelligent than Munchkins, but Gaddafi was so incontrovertibly evil that even the soggiest liberal finds it hard to care about international justice at this time. There are so many more important issues facing Libya right now.

This is a country without identity: it has no institutions, no infrastructure, no concept of democratic process, its wealth has been squandered, its human rights denied for the last forty years. Is it any surprise that the rights of the wolf that destroyed their homeland have been overlooked? Already, the factional rivalries he encouraged are threatening to strangle this new nation at its birth. Let’s hope they can be reconciled.

Libya’s witch may be dead: but there are many more villains huffing and puffing outside its newly painted front door.

A Campaign For Live Television

2011-10-16T12:51:00.000-07:00

For two weeks, Channel 4’s daytime gameshow Deal or No Deal is broadcasting live for the first time in its history. As a result, it’s audience has increased substantially.

I’m not surprised: viewers can really sense the tension and peril of live television. So much of what we watch these days is manufactured, edited and homogenized. From reality shows to talent competitions, producers do their best to artificially inject tension and jeopardy into the safely pre-recorded mix, but it’s rarely convincing. There’s something about the security of recording that saps suspense, and I’m sure our relentlessly vacuous daytime output really benefited from the thrill of potential disaster. Noel Edmonds, probably the best live entertainment presenter Britain has ever had, is the ideal host for the experiment.

As a producer, nothing quite matches the thrill of live TV. For the first dozen years of my career, I was a studio director, sitting in a darkened control room facing banks of monitors, calling the shots and trying to hold it all together. All too often the fragile bubble burst and the show descended into chaos.

That embarrassing episode of Panorama, where David Dimbleby sits alone in front of a solitary camera with nothing to say for 11 minutes because the film has broken down? That was me at the end of the telephone helpfully telling him to “just keep talking”. That live Nationwide episode when a lady judge keeled over in a dying faint and the presenter just stepped over her recumbent body? I was directing that night, too. Grace Jones hitting Russell Harty? It was my voice in his earpiece, foolishly telling him to ignore her.

Yet the more things go wrong, the more audiences seems to enjoy it. It makes the viewing experience somehow more real and the viewers more connected.

Nowadays viewers can turn even pre-recorded programmes into live viewing experiences by texting or tweeting their friends with comments about the content. I reckon that around 80% of all young people use phones or iPads while they are watching television, often to communicate with each other about what they’re watching. Channel 4 News positively encourages viewers to debate the issues on the programme using Twitter.

Next Wednesday I’ll be speaking at a conference in Leeds about “second screen technology”, where viewers will be able to have a live, parallel, two-way experience with a television programme, using their mobile phones. I guarantee it’s the next big thing for our industry, and I’m proud that our Newcastle-based company, ScreenReach, has developed world-beating technology to facilitate it.

The problem is, actual live television, what we in the trade call “event” television, still costs a great deal of money. Now that high definition cameras and cheap editing software are on sale in any high street electronics store, anyone can become a television producer. Yet it still takes guts and a very large outside broadcast unit to go live.

I do hope that, following the publication of its long-awaited strategy review “Delivering Quality First”, the BBC remembers to include plenty of live shows for the nation to enjoy. Most of its other recommendations seem pretty spot on.

I would say that, though, wouldn’t I? In January I gave a speech at a media conference where I proposed five key changes for the BBC. These were: move BBC Three to Salford; replace original daytime programming on BBC2 with repeats; transfer childrens programmes from BBC1 to CBBC; use BBC3 and BBC4 as experimental feeder networks for BBC1 and BBC2; and reduce the evening output of BBC local radio, which almost nobody listens to.

I’m pleased to say that all these suggestions are now BBC policy. I hasten to add that this is not because I had any influence whatsoever, but because they are blindingly obvious solutions to the BBC’s economic plight. I’m now regretting I didn’t add a request to preserve risk-taking through live programmes. As the darkest phase of this recession starts to bite, we need more laughs. And what better way achieve that than to encourage television producers, presenters and performers to make fools of themselves for us, live in our own living rooms.

Inside The World's Most Exclusive Club

2011-10-09T16:08:00.000-07:00

Last Wednesday I was invited to lunch at the most exclusive club in the world. It only has a few hundred members, yet it has enormous premises overlooking the Thames.

Quite how you join is unclear: they never advertise vacancies, yet I have a few friends who joined quite recently, and others who are there through family connections. There’s no enrolment fee (though some are said to have paid handsomely for the right to be there) nor is there an annual subscription. On the contrary, once you’re in the club, they actually pay you to visit, though you have to buy your own lunch, and your membership doesn’t expire till you drop down dead.

My friend had been given his membership card by an uncle; then, in 1999, the club took it away. It caused a huge row – it was in all the newspapers. He had to wait for somebody to die, and then they gave it back to him. I’m glad they did, because it gave me a chance to go behind the club’s impressive façade and try out its beef stew. I wore a tie.

The House of Lords is a bit like being back at school, except it has blue carpets instead of parquet flooring, the paneling is polished and nobody runs down the corridors. It also doesn’t smell of stale rugby shirts. Everyone has his own metal coathook with his name on it: I hung my briefcase on my friend’s, before we went down a long corridor to lunch. Like school lunches, the dining room starts serving at precisely 1pm. But unlike school, we waited in the bar: I had a gin and tonic. The chairs were covered in red leather.

Despite the club’s exclusivity, there’s clearly no Gordon Ramsay behind the scenes. The dishes are mostly roasts, stews and grills. Mine had a herb dumpling, and there was spotted dick for dessert. This was boarding school comfort food: not that I went to boarding school, of course, but I used to quite like the spotted dick at the RGS. Everyone was very polite and smiled at each other. At one point, the impressive shape of Lady Trumpington sailed across the room and barked “Good Day” to anyone who caught her eye.

After lunch, my noble friend (for so he is) invited me to see him work. We sat outside the “chamber” until precisely 3pm, presumably to allow the spotted dick to clear the noble oesophagi before proceedings could begin. Suddenly the doorman snapped us to attention and we all stood up. Like a sergeant major he marched in slow motion across the room until he faced a closed door, then turned on the spot and stamped his feet. A mini-procession then ambled in, consisting of a man with a large silver mace, another wearing breeches and a lady whom I took to be the Speaker. The door to the chamber swung open on some kind of hydraulic mechanism and they entered. The proceedings began with prayers – presumably a throwback to school assembly.

The House of Lords inhabits a curious constitutional time warp. The day (or, rather, afternoon) starts with questions. The Speaker sits on a large cushion, called the Woolsack: you’d think they might run to a chair, though while I was there she didn’t actually speak at all. Instead, it was first come first served. Without warning, arthritic hips leaped up and their owners start talking on top of each other. Eventually someone would give way and the winner had his moment in Hansard. Every seven-and-a-half minutes a clerk in a wig announced another question and after half an hour the four questions were dealt with and the chamber emptied as quickly as it had filled.

It’s an extraordinarily cumbersome way to run a modern democracy, but it kind of works, thanks largely to the passion and commitment of its ageing membership. The Lords is part anachronism, part essential check on the elected people housed what the Lords disparagingly call “the other place”. There they have green leather seats instead of red, but I hear the beef stew isn’t half as good.

Last of the Summer Whine

2011-10-03T01:10:00.000-07:00

I hope you’ve all remembered to fit your winter tyres. Having been cruelly teased with a glimpse of summer, there’s a rumour going about in weather circles that we’ll be under a foot of snow by the end of next week.

Nothing about our climate would surprise me. If the forecasters are right, then, it’s likely my winter tyres will be booked for their fitting precisely one day after the snows arrive, thereby consigning my car, like last year, to a three-month icy tomb.

I’ve always had a deep distrust of weather reports, stemming from my first job as a reporter on BBC local radio.

Every Friday all the journalists in the newsroom would descend on the local pub and spend the entire afternoon drunkenly playing away their wages on poker. As the most junior person, I was not only the designated driver, but also the mug that had to go back and read the 3 o’clock news and weather.

Quite often the official weather telex wouldn’t show up, so I’d just look out the window and make it up.

“It’ll be quite cloudy in about 20 minutes”, I’d say confidently, and it always was. The listeners must have marveled at the accuracy. If there were any viewers: the station was a bit short on feedback, which is presumably why nobody rang up to complain when I accidentally switched the station over to Radio 4 for a whole hour.

My wife, who’s from Los Angeles, where the average October temperature is 80 degrees Fahrenheit and the threat of forest fires lasts till November, agreed to relocate to Northumberland only because I took her to the Roman Wall during our previous warm spell in August 2006. Do you remember that week? There was a fire warning in Kielder Forest. We had ice cream and I wore shorts.

Ever since I’ve been pretending it’s just a bit of a cold snap. I fear that, after five years, this argument is wearing thin. It was so sweet to see Jo’s glowing face on Thursday as the sun warmed up our Californian sun loungers: since we brought them over they’ve been shivering unoccupied on the terrace.

However I know last week’s warmth spells only trouble. As the cold mist descended on our valley yesterday and the barbecue cover was put back on, the subject of furry boots and winter coats was top of Jo’s agenda.

Still, even though it’s just a meteorological blip, it was still nice to see brightness in the middle of the gloom. I only wish our business community could experience something similar. For them it’s been a perpetual perfect storm of uncontrollable turmoil.

So I was surprised to see, at the regional CBI’s annual dinner in Newcastle the other night, a room crammed with jolly, optimistic faces. There was, if not exactly confidence, certainly enough exuberance in the air and a gritty determination to see this recession through.

That’s what I love about the North East. When the rest of the country writes us off, and they always do (don’t you love the raised eyebrows in London when you say you’re from Newcastle?), when they scrap our development agency without consultation and replace it with a system no one wants and a fraction of the money we had before, run from London of course, when the state-run railway puts up the cost of an ordinary second class London return to £287, we just plough on. We know we’re part of a team that everyone thinks is destined for relegation, but we’re here for the long term.

Like our footballers (sorry, Sunderland supporters, this bit is not for you), we may not have too many star strikers, but when we pull together, and support each other, we simply can’t be beaten. Who needs Carroll, anyway? We wouldn’t have a Tevez if he was sent to us on a free transfer wrapped in Argentinian fillet steak. We know we’re on our own up here, just waiting for the growth to happen.

Come on, you coalition chaps talking hot air in your warm Manchester conference, send us some quickly, before we all freeze to death.

A Martian Spies on the Venusians at Play

2011-09-18T07:07:00.000-07:00

When Jo’s fourth girlfriend arrived, I knew I should have gone to the pub. I stayed because I was curious to find out what women do when they gaggle. Yes, I know it’s not really a verb, but it conjures a pretty good image of what women do when they get together for a night in.

It was the birthday of one of Jo’s closest friends, so they had arranged an evening of pampering. They’d booked a hairdresser, a manicurist and a pedicurist, or at least I think that’s what they call someone who cuts toenails for a living. To me, having your toenails clipped is an annual ritual to be performed quietly on your own, with one foot placed firmly on the edge of the bath. Sometimes I remember to retrieve errant cuttings from the soap dish. Mostly I don’t.

Forgetting to pick up nail clippings is on a par with leaving all the cupboard doors open, forgetting what I’m saying in the middle of sentences, littering the kitchen table with tools from half-completed tasks, or throwing my socks on the floor beside the bed every night and only retrieving them when the pile gets big enough to trip over. I am a man, and I am wired differently to half the world’s population. Men don’t notice stuff. But we can do speed shopping.

I can never understand why women get so excited about clothes. They started talking about them the moment they walked through the door. I can buy a year’s supply in just five minutes from a single shop. If I find a pair of jeans that vaguely fits I’ll buy six to save having to go back again: it saves on the washing, too. I have eight black shirts, one for every day of the week and an extra one in case there’s a power cut. I wear the same shoes every day till they fall apart, whereas Jo has a roomful, and knows when she’s worn every pair. Neither of us throws shoes away: my trainers have been loyal to me for at least 15 years, so I haven’t the heart to discard them. Jo says she can smell them from the end of the garden.

Though clothes shops leave me cold, I can’t walk past an Apple store without buying a new toy. It will eventually end up in a drawer stuffed full of wires, connectors and old mobile phones and electric shavers. If I suddenly woke up back in the eighties I'd be completely ready for a world of analogue technology. I even have a VHS machine somewhere, and a reel-to-reel tape recorder. If I could find them. I’ll ask Jo – she always knows where everything is. She has a cupboard full of nothing but carrier bags: she even has carrier bags inside the carrier bags. I always forget to take them to Waitrose and come back with another load.

By the time the manicurist had unpacked all her little coloured bottles, I realised that the ladies were now speaking a language that was completely foreign to me, so I retreated to the snug where football teams I don’t support were playing a match I didn’t much care about. Jo was happy to see me go, leaving them to intuit away and analyse each other’s emotions. I assume that’s what women do when they go to the loo together in restaurants. My friend Keith would look at me very strangely if I suggested joining him in the gents for a discussion about our feelings or the latest polo shirts in John Lewis.

So while the women put the world to rights, I watched the game, drank beer and replaced the batteries in Izzy’s baby monitor, thereby disproving the theory that men can’t multi-task. Later Jo found me fast asleep on the sofa. The batteries were on the floor.

Red Or Black?

2011-09-12T08:00:00.000-07:00

Yesterday a second woman-beating rat crawled out of the rotting timbers of the sinking ship called Red Or Black? Are we surprised?

Well I, for one, am amazed. Having produced television entertainment most of my professional life, I am finding it hard to believe that Simon Cowell’s company could break a cardinal rule of the gameshow: that all participants must be thoroughly checked. “Backgrounds, psychs and meds”, we call them.

Background checks are simple and cheap. For less than £50, you can find out if someone has a record with the Criminal Records Bureau. Producers automatically exclude those who do because they don’t want to traumatise their victims, or give the press a scandal that might damage the reputation of the show. As the revelations of the last few days demonstrate, the damage tarnishes not just the programme, but the network itself.

I’m astonished that Nathan Hageman, who was awarded £1million at the end of the first episode, wasn’t weeded out at the first hurdle. He had been jailed for five years for beating up his ex-girlfriend, and his criminal record sits in public view for life. For £50, the broadcaster would have known not to put him on the screen at all, let alone make him a millionaire.

The “psych” test costs more, but is essential for any programme offering a big cash prize. Contestants sit for a good hour with a psychologist, who is tasked with uncovering emotional and mental flaws. This not only reassures the producer that the player can cope with the pressures of winning or losing, but also protects other contestants and programme staff. What if an aggrieved loser were to attack Ant and Dec? Anyone with the slightest hint of aggression is automatically excluded, which makes Mr Hageman’s appearance even more extraordinary. In America, the mere threat of violence whispered off-camera by a reality contestant would lead to instant disqualification.

In physical game shows or reality series like Big Brother, many other contestants fall at the medical. When I produced America’s Paradise Hotel, around 40% of the applicants were rejected at the “med” stage, most for sexually transmitted diseases – a sad indictment of our youth.

Meanwhile, as Cowell’s show’s ratings declined as fast as his reputation, derision and hostility have been thrown from all sides of the critical spectrum, even from the normally pliant industry trade press. In this week’s Broadcast magazine, the editor Lisa Campbell writes a blistering editorial headlined “How Cowell ran out of luck”. She lambasts the show: “the premise should have set alarm bells ringing at ITV about Cowell’s understanding of, and aptitude for, gameshows… try as they might, no amount of sob stories, weepy phone calls or stirring strings are going to make a viewer invest anything in a bunch of strangers whose choices display an utter lack of skill, effort or reasoning.”

Campbell’s view is echoed across the industry, and it’s easy to see why. For the format of Red Or Black? breaks another gameshow rule: that winners must be “worthy”.

Whether it’s a talent contest, a quiz, or an action gameshow, the prize must always be deserved. Contestants can demonstrate “worthiness” in a number of ways: by answering difficult questions, or performing complex or dangerous tasks; by bravely risking what they’ve won so far to gain more; or by generating sympathy from the viewers who follow them on their perilous journey.

Red or Black? offered none of these. Supposedly based on the story of Ashley Revell, a professional gambler from Kent, who bet all his possessions, including his clothes, on a single spin of the roulette wheel, these contestants invested nothing to win their prize. It is simply a game of greed and chance, nothing more. Thankfully the programme’s viewers, who are a lot cleverer than producers sometimes give them credit, saw right through it.

The Day The World Changed

2011-09-05T01:55:00.000-07:00

The messenger’s bike was chained to a green lamppost. Red, white and blue plastic roses and an American flag stuck into the grey dust on its handlebars, it stood waiting patiently for its owner to return. He never did. The bike had become a symbol of the thousands of innocent lives thrown away. It’s my most haunting memory of 9/11. That and the stench, acrid and lingering, the smell of burning concrete, which still permeated downtown Manhattan a month after the horror.

Down in the hellhole behind the hoardings, the remains of the twin towers were piled like a huge smoking bonfire, many stories high. Out of them, two iconic metal structures, like the ruined facades of a huge cathedral, pointed towards the sky. How men worked in those scalding, foul conditions, I'll never know, but the searching never ceased: it would be another six months before all the debris, human and architectural, was removed.

On the streets of Lower Manhattan, there was the most haunting, sobering atmosphere. Locals, workers, visitors like me, everyone walked silently with shocked respect. The only sound was the relentless pounding and whirring of the machines and cranes down in the rubble below. Sometimes, all too infrequently, they too were muted – as another body, or part of a body, was released from its dust-covered tomb and firemen and workers stopped to pay their respects. We all knew the world had changed forever: this was the human side of the devastation.

St Paul’s Church, a few yards from the epicentre of the disaster, or “ground zero” as the news operations had called it, had become a place of refuge and recuperation.

Workers slept in the pews, food was sent it by local restaurants, pedicures and massages were offered for worn limbs or burnt feet.
I watched exhausted firemen queuing for coffee and comfort. By night, back in the clean luxury of my hotel room in Union Square, I looked across the 30 or so blocks to the floodlights where the twin towers had been, unable to get the terrible images of September 11th out of my mind.

It was one of those seminal moments, like the death of Princess Diana. Right now, television networks are full of recollections, repeats and re-enactments. Of course this is an event the world must never be allowed to forget, but we should beware lest overfamiliarity weakens the shock of those terrible images; the live television pictures that day were the most appalling the world has ever seen.

We watched the world change in high-definition clarity, thanks to a perfect blue sky over a smogless morning. Everyone remembers where they were: I was in my London office, on the phone to Jane Root, one of the BBC’s Controllers, when the second plane hit. A pause, and then “Oh my God”, we said in unison, and Jane added “I’d better go” as she rushed off to cancel her programme schedule. I remember the fear and the rumours in my office: would London be next?

I came to New York a month later because ABC had asked us to make a Christmas special for them. Challenge America, it was called, based on the British show. Erin Brockovitch became Anneka, but we needed a project. The problem was where to start: there was so much devastation, yet most workers in the city were still digging for bodies at Ground Zero.

So we restored a little theatre close by and threw a party for the children of the victims. It was the first building project in the city since the disaster, and Mayor Giuliani came to launch it. But it was just a tiny drop in the ocean, and seemed an inadequate response to the enormity of the problem. We mended their theatre, but the looks on the faces of the children showed that it would take so much more than a television programme to rebuild their lives, so cruelly destroyed on that horrible day.

The Visitor

2011-08-29T08:36:00.000-07:00

The small crowd waiting at Arrivals turned and stared as the voice boomed out: “Is this Tom?”

She was just 5 feet, slim and muscular, her tiny frame buried beneath an enormous rucksack, yet the voice was deep and rasping, like rusty hinges on a heavy door. She must have been well over 50, with lines of care etched into her sundried face, yet she wore the short leather skirt, boots and tight lacy top of a teenager. This was Maria from Venezuela, and she had come to stay.

It was an innocent enough comment in a Californian gym that brought her into our lives. She was a personal trainer, and the woman being trained was Jo’s distant cousin. Maria was planning a trip to Scotland: did she have any suggestions?

“Gee, you must go visit Tom and Jo – they live in Scotland.” A pardonable error: even friends in London think Newcastle is near Aberdeen. Innocuous emails were exchanged: Could we look after her dear friend who was such fun and wanted to see some Scottish countryside? Of course we could, but we’re not actually in Scotland. Never mind, she’ll come for two nights. Oh dear.

On the short drive from the airport, we had scarcely put the red gravel driveways of Ponteland behind us before she told me she was divorcing her husband, had just been through the menopause, and was going to seduce a Scottish landowner whose advances she had rejected in her 20s, but who was almost certainly still in love with her.

Her command of English was as rusty as her voice, but she substituted what she lacked in vocabulary with a rich mix of Anglo-Saxon expletives. She had flown all the way from Florida with some terrible two-year-old in the next seat, except she didn’t use the word “terrible”. She had wanted to shoot the child, and would have done so if she had brought her husband’s pistol -- she demonstrated by pointing an imaginary gun at my head. I hoped Izzy would be on best behaviour.

Safely home, she greeted Jo like her best friend, patted Izzy gingerly on the head and slumped into a chair. I offered her a glass of wine. She shook her head to say no, but her voice said “just a little”. I opened a bottle of Chilean sauvignon blanc to make her feel at home (I know, but it’s close – well, as close as Newcastle is to Aberdeen), and mouthed at Jo “What shall we do with her?”

Then we heard the sobbing. We turned to see Maria, wine glass already drained, with red-rimmed eyes. “It was so good then,” she wailed, and then recounted, in details so graphic that I can’t begin to describe them here, her entire sex life from puberty to a fling with a minor Hollywood actor. Strangely, although I’d only poured a single glass, the bottle was half empty. An hour later I was restocking the fridge.

Jo and I went to bed early and left her mumbling incoherently at the dogs. Then, at around 2am, we heard loud thumps and bathwater running in her bedroom. “Oh my God, she’ll drown – do something”, said Jo. “I can’t go and see her in the bath”, I protested, so Jo padded upstairs and I heard a muffled scream.

“She was dancing stark naked with the bath overflowing”, said Jo. “I dragged her into bed and she passed out”. I think in my sleep I asked if she had a good body, because I remember a pillow hitting me on the head.

I’m ashamed to admit a host of important meetings appeared in my diary overnight, so Jo looked like thunder when she realised she’d be taking Maria to the Roman Wall herself. Somehow we survived another night and I poured her onto the Edinburgh train with a bottle of good malt whisky as a gift for her landowner. I doubt it survived the journey. Good luck, Scotland.

Taking To The Skies

2011-08-23T08:48:00.000-07:00

There’s no messing with Lord Stevens. Well over 6 feet tall, back straight as a redwood tree, the former head of the Metropolitan Police has a no-nonsense tone in his voice that has inspired respect and loyalty in equal measure throughout his distinguished life. He has charmed prime ministers and presidents, sat in judgment of the British Army and the RUC, and advised the government on international security. Now he was sitting in our dining room, staring across a plate of my homegrown beetroot, and frowning at me.

“Nonsense”, he barked, and I felt myself wilt. All I said was that I wished I’d taken flying lessons when I was younger, but was now too old and fat. The conversation had moved on from rioting (who better to invite for lunch after a week of lawless disorder?) to his other specialist subject and greatest passion, apart from his wife Cynthia.

John Stevens was literally born into flying. His father Cyril was

The S stands for Stevens

the founder of BKS, the airline that pioneered commercial flying out of Newcastle airport, and John took his first flight in a cockpit at the age of 4. He is President of the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association, holds a commercial pilot licence and various stakes in planes that he flies to his numerous board meetings around the country.

Newcastle Airport when John Stevens was a lad: note the snow

“You’re never too old to fly,” he said. “You will come up with me this week: I promise you’ll be hooked.” The voice was insistent: not “can”, but “will”. “I have a fear of heights”, I protested in vain.

That much is true: Sam, my 13-year-old, knows not to try to get me onto Oblivion at Alton Towers, I’m nervous on a stepladder changing a lightbulb, and my neighbour takes pity on me when it’s time to trim the wisteria.

But I do have a boyhood fascination with airplanes, and Baron Stevens of Kirkwhelpington is very good company so, before head could engage with tongue, I heard myself say “I’ll be there”.

That’s why on Thursday I found myself in a cockpit with headphones and a steering yoke as John, sounding just like the pilot of a 747, was requesting permission to take off from Runway Seven Zero at Newcastle Airport. A black raincloud drifted towards us from the West. Although he flies regularly, he’d meticulously read out a list of pre-flight checks, inspected every inch of the single-engined plane (yikes, only one engine) and removed every last drop of condensation from the fuel tank.

We listened to air traffic control as a Thomson holiday jet in front of us lifted off for the sun. Then a moment of drama as the jet struck a bird and officials raced up the runway checking for debris. It was ten minutes before we could get airborne, but by then John had so calmed me down, we could have flown to the moon.

Immediately after takeoff he handed me the controls. “Let’s find your house”, he suggested, so I eased the yoke to the left and followed the Wansbeck. It was far more responsive and exciting than my car, like driving in 3D, and a few minutes later I spotted the garden below us. I was glad I’d mowed the lawn.

Izzy and Jo waved from a window as we circled overhead. “That’s Daddy in an airplane”, said Jo, and Izzy shouted “He’s going to Los Angeles”, that being the only point of a plane that she knew.

Later, John demonstrated something exhilarating called a touch and go, setting us down in a neighbouring meadow before zooming up again. We soared through the rain clouds to 7,000 feet, and then all Northumberland lay circling below us. There were no hills: all the ups and downs of life just seem to flatten out when you’re flying. I could have stayed up there forever.

Dreaming of blue skies

John was absolutely right: I’m hooked.

After The Riots: Time For An Educational Rethink

2011-08-14T14:54:00.000-07:00

Izzy is already proficient in Maths and English. Actually, that’s a slight exaggeration. To be precise, she can count to 16 (when climbing the stairs to bed) and, when asked her age, replies “I’m two…” before pausing and adding “and a half”.

Although that’s about the only evidence of her prodigy, Jo and I are, as you can imagine, typical proud parents, glowing happily when others say how bright she is.

Long may it last. In just four weeks, she will enter Britain’s educational system via the nursery class at our local state school. From then, we’ll be trusting teachers to help deliver her into adulthood both literate and numerate. If Carol Vorderman has her way, she will be learning numbers until she is 18. And, if I have my way, she will be writing her first novel at 12. And a half.

The events of the past week have turned the political spotlight onto how we bring up our children. 11-year-olds running amok on our streets, arms full of stolen trainers and iPhones; gangs of teenagers throwing missiles at unarmed policemen: where have we gone wrong?

It’s easy to blame parents and schools. I bet you a pair of Nike Air Prestos that most of the parents of the delinquents in the news wouldn’t understand the first concept of responsible parenting, because they themselves were denied it. What boiled over onto the streets of Hackney and Croydon is the product of mistakes by successive generations: not just politicians, educationalists but ourselves, for voting in governments that have done nothing to change the way our society rears its children.

Sadly, for the young people in the courts last week, it’s probably too late: we can beat sticks and apply sticking plasters to cover the mistakes of the past, but it’ll be a tough haul to transform the entire Big Brother/X-Factor/National Lottery generation, where fame and fortune come to the lucky and the loud (or to the dishonest), rather than to those who work hard and respect others.

But where to begin? I think we should start with Izzy’s age group and pressurize the government to add a new requirement to the National Curriculum for primary schools. In addition to numeracy, literacy and science, let’s ensure that our children are taught crucial life skills, like social responsibility, caring and sharing, strength of character, the importance of honesty and respect for other people’s culture and possessions. These are essential moral values that ultimately will underpin a new order in our society, values which can be passed down the generations. Of course, like most middle-class parents, these are things we already teach our kids, but not all children are so fortunate.

When I was 10, about a month before taking my 11+ exam, I was pretty confident. My parents had encouraged me, my primary school delivered, I was a high flyer. In my class there was an overweight boy with ginger hair and freckles called Paul. He was soft, kind and laughed a lot. He also cried when the bullies hit him. One day I found him in tears at the back of the classroom. When I asked what was wrong, he said that he knew that he was “thick” because everyone said so. He would fail his 11+, and he was scared of the big boys at the secondary modern school.

For a month I worked with him after school, trying to teach him things I had mastered at the age of 5. Despite my feeble efforts, he failed the exam, another piece of rejected flotsam on the outer edges of our educational process.

I always wondered what had happened to him. Many years later I found out he had served two years in prison after being wrongly convicted for the manslaughter of a six year old. “Mentally unstable”, they called him in the press. Another inevitable victim of the current system, I’d say.

Why Is Britain Treating Artists Like Criminals?

2011-08-08T00:52:00.000-07:00

A few months ago two young Argentinian tango dancers, Ismael Ludman and Maria Mondino, had a bad experience at Glasgow Airport. Now what I don’t know about tango would fill several libraries, but I’m told these folk are big in the dance world.

Argentinian tango isn’t like the flouncy stuff you see on Dancing With the Stars. It’s exotic and erotic, sinuous and sexy. With their upper bodies welded together, the dancers intertwine, their legs making graceful arcs around them. It’s fascinating and beautiful, and Ludman and Mondino are two of the best exponents. They travel the globe giving workshops and they’re quite well-known in Scotland, apparently, which is why they were invited to tour a few village halls and other small venues.

Sadly, the UK Border Agency had other ideas. The couple were held at the airport, refused entry and sent home. Just two casualties of a new immigration system that is making a mockery of Britain’s claim to be a magnet for international culture.

I only know about this because I was in Kirk Yetholm on Saturday night, where a public meeting, chaired by my daughter, was held to highlight the problem. There were artists, writers, musicians, gallery-owners and film-makers, even a true-blue-blooded member of the House of Lords, and they were all concerned about a system that is threatening to turn Britain into a cultural ghetto.

In 2008, our government introduced a new points-based visa system for non-EEC immigrants. It’s similar to the one that works successfully in Australia, except that in Australia there’s a special category that allows short-term visits by artists, writers and performers. Australians think it’s important that their country’s cultural diet is enriched by the work of significant international artists. Yet, despite Britain’s claims to be at the heart of cultural exchange, when they brought in our new immigration law, the government simply forgot about the arts.

Big festivals, like the Edinburgh International Festival, are given special status, but smaller events, like a book-signing by an award-winning American writer at your local Waterstones, or an appearance by a international director at a film festival in Hawick, requires a “licensed sponsor”. No sponsor, no entry, and the cost of each licence and visa runs to hundreds of pounds.

Sometimes the artist would have to travel hundreds of miles to get a biometric test – a ludicrous expense if you’re just performing for one night at a village hall where a few people like to tango.

The situation is now absurd: an international writer or a photographer on a tourist visa faces deportation if they so much as open a notebook or take a single snap; an established artist can’t even come to visit his own exhibition of paintings.

Musicians and poets from Africa, artists from Russia and China, and now Argentinian tango dancers, have fallen foul of the rules, and the world’s greatest living pianist, Grigory Sokolov, has simply deleted the UK from his touring itinerary. These are people of genius, whom we idolize for their extraordinary creative talent, and then we let the staff of the UK Border Agency treat them like illegal immigrants. They aren’t stealing employment from us, we invite them to our shores to enthrall us with their art.

According to the meeting in Yetholm, the government simply needs to create an “artists and entertainers visitor” route to solve the problem, and yet, despite a crescendo of complaints from every part of Britain’s cultural establishment, Theresa May’s Home Office remains oblivious and Jeremy Hunt’s Culture department is doing nothing to help.

The Argentinian tango dancers have got their revenge, however. There’s a magical YouTube video of them performing around their suitcases in the airport, a tribute to our pointless bureaucracy and the jobsworth mentality of the UKBA. Do take a look, before you write to your local MP.

The Perfect Holiday Hotel

2011-08-01T03:32:00.000-07:00

There’s nothing quite like an English country holiday, especially if, like us, you’re staying in a luxury establishment. The scent of the roses outside, crisp linen on firm, comfy beds, superb cooking, with vegetables plucked fresh from the chef’s garden: that’s my idea of a good time. An informal, relaxed home-from-home.

I’m writing from one of the most beautiful tourist areas in the UK. Although it’s well past 11am, Jo is deciding whether or not to order breakfast. There are beaches and hills close by, acres of wild heathland within strolling distance, the food is wonderful, there’s a playground for Izzy: in short, we’re having a ball.

We only made the decision last Friday to take a week off. Jo said that July was so gloomy, we should have a proper break, just the three of us. Somewhere remote, without internet or mobile phones, but fairly near the sea, with nice country air. And no more than a three-hour drive from home: Izzy and long car journeys don’t go together.

Jo first suggested a B&B. In America they’re like boutique hotels, with four-poster beds, luxury furnishings and bedlinen, and free wine and cheese at 5pm. Then I reminded her of our experience on Arran. The sheets were pink polyester, the tiny pine wardrobes could hardly contain our belongings, the bed was soft as a sponge and the landlady tut-tutted loudly outside our door if we were a minute late for breakfast. Porridge is punctual, she said. Never again.

Besides, we wanted to bring the dogs, so we opted for self-catering. Although we only needed one bedroom and a cot, as we were booking with just a day’s notice, we didn’t expect to be spoilt for choice. It says something about the recession that there were several options, mostly tiny converted farm cottages, or wooden chalets with balconies.

I used to own a holiday let. The furniture was 20 years old – when we bought a new sofa we’d send the old one to the rental property. The beds were solid and cheap, the linens, towels and saucepans a job lot from a discount store. According to the agent, it was top notch, well above the norm, clean as a whistle, and so it was booked almost every week of the year. The clients seemed perfectly happy with these facilities: they weren’t to know that the entire place was filled with rejects.

Jo and I reckoned we could put up with a pine kitchen and lino flooring, tiny shower room, saggy bed and threadbare sofas with throw-covers, because we were on holiday. After all, you only sleep, eat and play Scrabble in the place. Who cares about comfort? We’d enjoy the scenery and the seaside, Izzy would love it and all we had to do was try to keep the dogs from bringing sand onto the carpets. And it was only £700 for a whole week in a Scottish bothy with a sea view (from the attic window) and gas central heating (meter controlled).

Then we looked at the weather forecast: torrential rain on the West Coast. And we looked at our nice comfy house, and said, “Let’s pretend”.

That’s why, yesterday morning, Jo woke to a perfect cappuccino from room service. The chef prepared poached eggs and smoked salmon and then we headed off to an almost deserted, sun-drenched beach near a pub with the best fish-and-chips we’ve ever had. We met the nicest people on our trip, and have a different excursion planned for every day this week. In our exclusive hotel, the internet is switched off, and the restaurant offers a vast menu featuring only home-grown produce. The furnishings seem to mirror our own taste precisely, and, as we’re the only guests, the service is immaculate. Best of all, it’s entirely free.

Thank you, Northumberland: we’re having a great holiday at home.

Growing Up

2011-07-25T10:19:00.000-07:00

Izzy looked serious for a few moments, then gazed up at me beaming. “Daddy, I did it”, she squeaked. “You’re kidding,” I replied. “No, did it. I get off now.” And she did, and there it was: proof that my little girl was growing up.

“Yay – go Izzy”, I shouted, like an American at a baseball game, and our palms met in a triumphant “Hi-Five”. “I wee-weed in the potty”, she reminded first me, then everyone she met for the next hour. As she was spending the morning at my office, that was a lot of people to impress. A major milestone finally passed: nothing could signify more strongly the passing of her babyhood.

It’s exciting, yet seeing your child grow up is a bitter-sweet experience. As each tie of parental dependence severs, the more vulnerable she appears. How do little humans actually survive life without us? They’ll be reading next, then crossing the road, then having boyfriends. Before Jo and I know it, we’ll be discussing universities and, eventually, her moving out.

The truth is, humans are the only species in the animal kingdom where offspring are never truly allowed to quit the nest. I know that my Mum, 90, still worries desperately about me, 59, as much as I worry about Ben, 30 this week (another milestone), let alone tiny Izzy, 2, who’s head barely reaches my knees. The thought that anything might happen to any of my kids makes me physically wretch.

I remember the near misses: like Ben’s scooter accident in Barcelona. The call from his friend, whose voice failed to conceal the panic, the rush to the airport, the sight of his blood-covered face on the stretcher outside the operating theatre. Of course I’d warned of the dangers of bike-riding, and I’d always refused to buy him one. What else could a Dad have done? You know how headstrong youngsters are.

So I can’t begin to imagine the grief of Mitch and Janis Winehouse. They’ve watched helplessly as their beloved daughter self-destructed. In 2008 Mitch gave that sad, resigned television interview: “She won’t die of a drug overdose, that’s too quick. She would die from emphysema, if she didn’t check her behaviour, a slow, painful death, gasping for air.” How could they have saved their (in Stephen Fry’s words) “poor, unhappy creature”?

The fact is, no amount of parental vigilance can guarantee a child’s protection from cruel Fate. Over in Norway, 150 parents are in mourning, their children stolen from them by the madness of an evil fanatic.

It’s impossible to describe the excruciating, eternal agony of the loss of a child. I simply can't imagine the pain of one of my wife’s friends who, a few days ago, took her beautiful son, just nine months' old, to childcare. An hour later, she received a phone call that froze her blood: he’d stopped breathing. An only child, his tiny light was snuffed out without warning or explanation. For his poor parents, it’s the start of an unbearable, inconsolable torment. That’s why this weekend we’ve been hugging little Izzy even more than usual.

It’s a cliché to say that life is fragile, fraught with risk. But we’re treasuring every tiny moment as she grows up to face her own uncertain world.

Lunch With The Devil's Daughter

2011-07-18T06:39:00.000-07:00

All right, I have a confession: like Dave Cameron, I too have schmoozed with Murdoch.

I just thought I should put this on public record in case The Guardian exposes me. I don’t want this blog’s reputation to be tarnished by revelations of my former misdoings, so I’m coming clean. Murdoch had lunch at my house and I once had two glasses of rather nice Chablis chez Murdoch. Both events happened in 2002, when Rebekah Brooks was Editor of the News of the World, though I don’t think she knew about them – unless one of her hacks had violated my Palm Pilot.

There, I feel better now it’s out in the open. I hope you’ll forgive me and continue reading my blog. Please don’t call for me to be arrested, or avert your gaze if you spot me at the fish counter in Morrisons. It was a long time ago, after all. And the Murdoch in question wasn’t Rupert, but Lis: Elisabeth to the rest of you.

She’s the dark horse (well, blond, actually), who may be the key to the survival of the Murdoch regime. Named after her matriarchal grandmother, she earned the respect of independent television producers by resigning from her Dad’s empire to make her own way, launching Shine from a gloomy converted church in Notting Hill Gate.

Like the rest of us, she struggled for years to persuade broadcasters to throw her the odd commissioning crust. She found out the hard way just how tough it is to break through the walls of arrogance and risk-avoidance at places like the BBC and Channel 4. She did manage to sell some shows to Sky, thanks largely to a generous output deal (BSkyB owned 5% of her business, so it was obliged to give her some crumbs) – but she was determined to make it on her own, and later raised squillions to buy some major production companies to add to the business. I was absolutely delighted when earlier this year she persuaded her Dad to cough up around £300million to buy Shine, and his daughter, back into the News Corporation fold.

Right now, with politicians calling for the head of his son, he needs Elisabeth to help avoid the death of the dynasty. She’s tough, outspoken, connected, honest and fiercely independent. And she said she liked my cooking, which gets a big tick from me. I suspect she’ll come riding in like a white maiden and save the day for the old Aussie codger.

Despite the terrible mistakes of his newspaper underlings, I’ve always had a certain respect for her Dad. Anyone who takes on the establishment and wins, defying the crusty bigots on the way, gets my vote.

A couple of years ago I heard him speak at one of those turgid broadcasting conferences. We’d been dozing all day while young besuited things droned on about the future of media, and then in bounced this 80-year-old with more foresight than the rest of them put together. He’s a man of huge energy, who almost single-handedly transformed the world’s media landscape, bringing more creative diversity into the entertainment industry than any government-led initiatives over the last 50 years. He created a new network in America when people said it was impossible, and wiped out the official BSB satellite station with his upstart Sky, giving us multi-channel broadcasting as his legacy.

Without Sky, life with Izzy would be one long CBeebie, so we thank God for Rupert every day. Above all, he vigorously supported the loss-making Sky News, which has won more awards for its excellent, unbiased reporting than the vastly better-resourced BBC.

Frankly, I wouldn’t have a huge problem with him owning Sky and taking ITV into the bargain, but then, I’m not a politician. And my vote can’t count anymore as I’ve already supped with the devil. Well, lunched with his daughter anyway.

The Photographer In The Hedge

2011-07-11T06:32:00.000-07:00

He must have been hiding in the hedge. From the angle of the photograph, there was no doubt about it. I had only telephoned her an hour before, so how on earth did he know we’d be there? It’s a sunny afternoon, I’d said. Let’s have a glass of wine in the garden: it’s private, and we need to talk.

At the time I put it down to chance: maybe the photographer was prowling the streets of Chelsea and just spotted us – over a six-foot high garden fence. Of course I’ve no way of knowing for sure, but the revelations of the last few days have finally offered another explanation for that photograph many years ago.

It was during a most unhappy time of my life. I’d like to write it off as just a misspent youth, but I was old enough to know better. At the time I probably called it a mid-life crisis, a few months before my 40th birthday. Now I look back with shame.

Me and a television celebrity, caught in a hotel in Los Angeles. The media maelstrom that followed caused the disintegration of my first marriage and nearly destroyed my career. Was it in the public interest? Well the paper thought the public were interested, for they gave it plenty of coverage. But public interest? Hardly. I was just a producer, she a presenter. We had a summer location fling: it ought to have faded with the autumn leaves. But in the glare of the headlines, it felt like the end of the world.

I’ll never forget the feeling of impotence and vulnerability when the tabloids turned on the spotlight. Convinced I was being being followed 24 hours a day, I kept my curtains closed, scanned my rear view mirror for pursuing vehicles, and always used a mobile phone instead of the landline, for fear of phone tapping. Big mistake.

I guess all they wanted was a picture of us together. But we both felt we’d given our spouses and children enough pain without exposing them to that additional indignity. So we avoided the paparazzi and kept our heads down.

We’d escaped from Los Angeles by hiding in the back of a car and driving like the wind to the airport. A lovely British Airways official, who’d seen it all before, brought us in through the staff entrance. At Heathrow we sneaked into separate taxis with scarcely a goodbye.

A rabbit caught in the headlines, I checked into an anonymous apartment hotel. For almost two months I looked over my shoulder, scanning the horizon for lenses, avoiding eye-contact for fear of being recognized. It was an illogical, crazy existence. In reality, nobody cared but me. I should have gone home and faced the music, picked up the remnants of my life.

One day I bumped into Jeremy Paxman. “How are things?” he asked. “Terrible”, I replied, “what with all the tabloids and everything”. He had absolutely no idea what I was talking about. The man who knew everything about the news, who every night read out the newspaper headlines on Newsnight, had completely missed the end of my world.

That made me feel much better: my story was just old news. I moved into a flat, then one day rang her and we arranged to meet. Except the photographer came too. Hacked? Who knows. Invaded? Most certainly.

It wasn’t the News of the World that published the picture, by the way. I’ll wager there’ll be more redtops under the magnifying glass once the public gets its inquiry. I just hope that, in time, the tabloids begin to work out a new balance between their freedom to publish what really is in the public interest and the basic right of every individual to simply live in privacy.

Potty Training with Russell Harty

2011-07-05T01:21:00.000-07:00

"So what was your first impression of Russell Harty?"

It wasn’t a trick question, and I should have seen it coming – on Thursday, ITV brought me all the way to London for an interview about the late chatshow host. But it still caught me unprepared.

Amazing Grace Bashes Harty Shock

I’d carefully rehearsed in my head all my usual anecdotes about Diana Dors, Oliver Reed, Dirk Bogarde and the myriad other celebrities Russell had interviewed during the years I was his producer. I had a store of tales of encounters with Kenneth Williams, Frankie Howerd and other long-deceased comedians, or prickly meetings with Hollywood super-egos like Shirley McLaine. I’d rehearsed in my head what I would say about Russell’s national notoriety following the Grace Jones incident, about the rent boy story in the News Of The World, and his subsequent illness and death.

I wanted to talk about his humanity and humour, his vulnerability and honesty. But recalling an image of when we first met? I couldn’t even picture where it was. At the BBC? In a Notting Hill restaurant? In Russell’s basement flat with its bachelor-yellow walls and walnut grand piano? Memory plays such tricks with your brain, it’s hard to be precise about events of thirty years ago. That’s when the BBC summoned me back from a year’s sabbatical in India to become Russell’s producer.

At that time my first son Ben was barely an embryo: Russell later became his godfather. By the end of the third series of chatshows, he was talking in sentences and just about potty trained – Ben that is: Russell never used a sentence when a whole paragraph would do. Potty-training Ben was easier than producing the mercurial Mr Harty: though, sadly, I can’t recall any of that process either, to my wife’s frustration.

Izzy relaxes after a long session of potty-training

Right now, Izzy is talking fluently, saying American words like cookie, sneaker and diaper in a posh English accent. Especially the last, for now the time has come for her to cross the divide and cast away the Pampers. Yet I find I have absolutely no recollection of how to achieve this vitally important stage of parenthood.

I can clearly picture Ben’s white disposable nappies – no cartoon characters or triple layers in those days – but the fog of forgetfulness won’t let me recall how we banished them. As a result, I’m distracted from my writing by the sight of Izzy running across the lawn, shorts round her ankles and Jo in hot pursuit carrying a plastic pink Peppa Pig potty, urging her to sit down. She catches her, too late of course. The dogs witnessing this display appear to be laughing as much as I am: I just hope the image stays in my brain for long enough for me to be able to share it with Izzy’s first boyfriend.

Back in the ITV interview, I suppose I could have invented some neat anecdote. That’s what they do on talk shows. Nicely honed stories, told to the researcher beforehand, noted down on the question cards. “You’ve had some strange acquatic experiences haven’t you?” comes the host’s unsubtle prompt, and out pops a pat answer about scuba-diving with David Jason.

Russell hated all that. He liked to interview people, not names. Celebrity didn’t make people interesting, personality sometimes did. Which is one reason his interviewing technique was often criticised: he liked people, not reputations or press releases. At times that could sound curt, even rude, but his bluntness derived from interest, not sycophancy.

Russell Harty 1934-1988
(with faithful M&S pullover)

So instead, I descended into the blank of my memory, and pulled out Russell’s dark blue Marks & Spencer pullover and his blue-grey sensible shoes. He wore them every day, in the office, in restaurants, at home. Not at all the garb of a star. So I said he appeared to be, well, "unstarry". It sounded most inadequate, but it was absolutely true.

Chip Off The Old Block

2011-06-27T07:43:00.000-07:00

When my eldest son Ben was little, he became a magician.

He called himself Benjamin Bonkers and would entertain our friends’ younger children with toy rabbits and hats. Until, one day, he accidentally set fire to his sister’s hair and Mum banned him from further performances. So instead, Ben set his heart on becoming an actor.

We did all we could to dissuade him. As a producer and director, I know how difficult it is to scratch any sort of living on stage or in front of the cameras. Did he want to be unemployed for most of the rest of his life? The producers have the creative ideas and do the hiring, I told him, the players are mere employees at the bottom of the creative food chain. That’s not strictly true, of course – a good actor can be the making of a successful project – but his mother and I were getting desperate.

After enduring several years of interminable school plays, during which we failed to discern the slightest hint of latent stardom, we finally suggested he might consider following his Dad into a career behind the cameras. Ben snorted with derision at the suggestion. I produced popular down-market shows like Challenge Anneka and Star for a Night: fit only for BBC1 on Saturday nights. He was an artiste. Visits to television studios and location left him cold. We sighed and waited.

Sure enough, after A-Levels, the inevitable happened. He announced that he’d decided to study film and television at university. And, to my great relief, he shone. He has a cinematic eye I never quite developed, and he’s great with crew and actors. He’s directed commercials, won prizes for his short films, and he’s very good with comedy, perhaps the most difficult genre of all. He has a penchant for the surreal which more than matches my own, and this year he finally achieved his first major goal when he was asked to direct an hour-long network television drama. Sure, it was only BBC1 on Saturday night, but his episode of Casualty was a tour de force. It made me cry, and that was the programme, not just the sight of my son’s first onscreen credit.

Last week, en route to the Edinburgh Film Festival where he’s making contacts for his first feature film, he dropped off in Newcastle to give me my Father’s Day present. It was the ultimate gift: he directed one of my films.

It was just a short project (I say “just – in this recessed climate, any work is useful for a production company), but it was pretty ambitious. It involved all the things Ben is good at, like comedy, actors, and a surreal script. In the kitchen of a dingy basement restaurant in the city centre, with the cast caked in fake blood and sweat, I heard him shout “Action!” for the first time and I can’t begin to measure the pride. We were, for one day only, a father and son team.

It’s hard to express quite how that feels. Working together with your firstborn is something that transcends ordinary human endeavour. Now I think I understand the satisfaction that butchers and grocers must feel as they add “& Son” to their own name above the shopfront. As an old block, it was great to see my young chip bossing around the actors and crew just like his Dad. The weirdest feeling was that he now has my voice. In the edit a few days later, it was impossible to tell us apart.

"Best Leave It To The Expert, Dad..." [all photos by David Bridges]

The final result is as good as I could have hoped for. Viewing one particularly nice shot, I asked Ben, “How did you do that?” Quick as a flash came the response: “It’s not magic, Dad”. Quite.

My Worst Christmas

2011-06-17T08:22:00.000-07:00

FOR SALE

The BBC has announced the sale of one of Britain’s most iconic buildings: Television Centre. For me that vast circle of studios, like a giant question mark topped by glass-fronted offices, stirs up mixed emotions. Set in the wasteland of Shepherds Bush, within spitting distance of QPR’s football ground, it was the scene of the highest points of my BBC career, and also the lowest. For this was where, in 1971, I spent the most miserable Christmas of my life.

As a student desperate for any start in television, I’d secured a vacation job in the mailroom. They put me in a section called “Incoming Mail”. There were 15 middle-aged women and me. Our job was to open every letter sent to the BBC.

Quite why we had to do this, we weren’t sure. Nobody actually told us to look for anything – like evidence of communists, Payola, or ITV headhunters. We just opened the envelopes, stapled them to the contents, and put them in mailboxes to be delivered by men with trollies round long the circular corridors. This repetitive job turned out to be a perfect career springboard. For, by surreptitious reading of the mail, I soon identified all the key producers. All I had to do was meet them.

The head of the mail service, a man called Mr Beasley, with a voice of gravel and a heart of gold, took me under his wing and let me play the “lost post” game. If I spotted a letter to a person I wanted to meet, he let me hold it back from the mail run and go upstairs to deliver it myself. In this way I met the man who gave me my first proper job after university.

In the 1970s ‘TC’, as it was called to all who worked there, was the most exciting place in the world. The circle comprised 8 busy studios – 4 large, 3 small, and, at the bottom of the question mark, behind the familiar BBC Television Centre sign, the biggest studio in Europe, a cavernous space full of lights, cameras and memories called TC1. In my meal breaks I would rush upstairs to the observation galleries and watch the filming of Top of the Pops and Doctor Who. Sometimes friendly studio managers let me inside to see some of the most famous names on television performing their stuff: from Morecambe & Wise to The Two Ronnies.

10 years after I joined the mailroom, I became the director of the General Election, the largest programme ever produced from the building, which simultaneously utilised every studio except TC1. That had been reserved for an entertainment series called “The Hot Shoe Show”. I was the producer of that programme too.

This was undoubtedly the high point – the following year I handed in my resignation and started my own company. But, back in 1971, my enthusiasm for life in this incredible building was marred by an unfortunate incident involving, as happened all too often in my life, a beautiful woman.

At university I had fallen in unrequited lust for a blond first-year called Nicky. Having pointedly shunned my advances all term, one day she asked if we might share a flat in London over the holidays. As the only ‘flat’ we could afford was a single-roomed bedsit, I couldn’t believe my luck. I’d be sharing a room with the most beautiful girl in the world: it was the best Christmas ever.

Sadly, on the first night, my world disintegrated. Paul, tanned and Australian, lived in the room next door. It took him less than 20 minutes to seduce my Nicky. The walls were very thin. On New Year’s Eve they stayed in for a night of romance and I trudged, in freezing rain, to seek solace in the bar at Television Centre. It was shut.

By 2015 it will have closed forever: but the memories remain.

Cutting The Beeb Down To Size

2011-06-13T07:45:00.000-07:00

I recently found myself in a vast empty office building near Manchester, as one of the first guests of a new BBC empire. The signs weren’t up, painters were still glossing the skirting boards, men in overalls were wandering round with clipboards, and a few early staff arrivals were looking for the Costa Coffee shop. Everything smelt new and optimistic.

It’s an impressive development: towering glassfronted buildings and a fully equipped studio complex overlook the calming waters of Salford Quays. Several BBC departments are moving there, including Sport, Children’s, and a chunk of news output including Radio 5 Live and the BBC Breakfast programme. It’s a nice gesture by a London-centric organisation, although it probably won’t make much difference to us independent producers isolated in the North East.

The building was freezing, not just because it was in Manchester, but because noone had yet worked out how to turn down the air-conditioning. For the cluster of young, ambitious creatives it must be an exciting new world. Yet amongst the new arrivals I met there was talk of only one thing: the cuts. ‘Delivering Quality First’ is the catchphrase – how can the BBC maintain its programme quality whilst slashing 20% of its budget?

Nobody knows how this target will be achieved: advice has been solicited from all and sundry, and decisions are expected soon. Over the last few days, media pages have buzzed with rumour and yesterday the new Chairman of the BBC Trust, Lord Patten, hinted that some sports coverage and maybe a whole television channel might be at risk. We already know that over 1,000 jobs are vulnerable within News, so two Salford departments could be losing staff even before they’ve unpacked their suitcases.

According to Lord Patten, the World Service is safe. So that’s a relief then: people in India will still get their BBC programmes, even if we can’t watch Match of the Day.

The thing about Delivering Quality First is that it’s hard to define “quality”. Is it entertainment for millions of families to enjoy on a Saturday night? Or a concert on Radio Three, heard by just a couple of thousand? The influence and volubility of the Radio 3 audience is in inverse proportion to its size, so it would be a very brave executive that tries to cut so much as a single cello from a BBC orchestra.

The thing that I find strange is the way this exercise has been undertaken. Despite the cuts, the BBC has a guaranteed income of many billions for the next six years. With such a level of risk-free financial security, most business leaders would start with a blank sheet of paper and first work out what sort of service its customers would expect for the money, and then cost and deliver it. The current strategy is to ask how the existing BBC can deliver the best of what it already does, more cheaply.

Rather than “Should we be keeping BBC 4 as well as BBC 2”, wouldn’t it have made more sense to ask: “What is the public’s demand for factual programmes, and how best can we meet it?” I find it odd that we have daytime programmes with miniscule budgets on two separate channels, and yet thousands of great programmes lie unrepeated in the BBC Archive – I know which I’d rather watch on a wet afternoon. I also don’t understand why the BBC spends hundreds of millions on a separate channel for 16 to 24 year olds, most of whom don’t see the relevance of television in their tweeting, texting lives.

Consensus will be impossible. I just hope that, when the white smoke comes from White City, and the decisions are announced, the BBC remembers that it’s a broadcaster for the whole nation. Whatever cuts it makes, it must continue its commitment to the North: starting with that empty building in Salford.

Cheryl Cole and The X Factor: The Final (Geordie) Word

2011-06-05T06:06:00.000-07:00

I went to the wrong school. That’s my excuse when friends down South ask me why, despite an entire childhood on Tyneside, there’s scarcely a twang of Geordie in my speech.

Quite how I avoided the accent is a mystery: it was my background music for more than 20 years. I can tune in and understand every word perfectly: I can even communicate with Kevin, our house painter, when he’s in full flow. His accent is so strong it renders Jo utterly speechless with admiration and incomprehension. I’d be a brilliant Cheryl Cole interpreter.

In fact, my wife swears that my hidden Geordie dialect emerges after I’ve had a couple of pints of Tyneside Blonde down our local pub, but I know that it’s not very authentic. Sure, I may find “upaheight” a more economical use of language than “it’s up there on the top shelf”, or fret that my wife “blethors” or about the “clarts” which perpetually adorn Izzy’s wellingtons. I may conjure up an entire vocabulary of Geordie abuse when United are a goal down, but I can’t reproduce the fluent, passionate language of the Angles and the Venerable Bede, the delicious (but sadly endangered) burr of the people of Redesdale and the North Tyne, where I spent every teenage weekend, or the sharp, expressively precise language of Tyneside, my home until adulthood and ambition drew me south. No matter how many pints I consume, I still call a "short" a "shirt", and I probably always will.

Mind you, Jo’s from California, so she’s scarcely one to judge. Nor is Mike Darnell, the President of the Fox network. He lives in a nice house in the Los Angeles suburb of Calabasas, a permanently sunny, botoxed world as far removed from Newcastle as you could possibly imagine. According to some tabloids, he it was who decided to first axe and then reinstate our Cheryl Cole for the US version of The X Factor. Now they say the final decision has been made: Cheryl is out. And all because of her accent.

Personally, I don’t believe a word of it. Darnell’s a genius: he virtually invented reality television; he understands better than anyone how to create a popular hit; and he adores the English – he jumped when I brought him Amanda Byram for Paradise Hotel (OK, she’s Irish, but it all sounds the same in Calabasas). Did he really worry that Cheryl’s speech might be an impediment?

There’s something terribly fishy about this whole U.S. X-Factor Geordie-hating story. I wouldn’t be surprised if it turns out Paula Abdul was involved. Many thought American Idol improved when she finally departed. Quite why she’s back in Cowell’s good books I can’t imagine, but I doubt Paula would want to be upstaged by someone prettier and wittier. If Cheryl had returned and Paula stayed, you can bet fur would fly and tears flow. And I doubt Fox would have insisted that Cheryl had emergency elocution lessons: self-defence more like.

Perhaps she should have developed her own mid-Atlantic drawl. I find it almost impossible not to impersonate people when I’m with them: from Americans to Italians, Brummies to Belgians, my accent flows with the crowd. According to Jo, I’m particularly embarrassing when I’m abroad. In Italy I only have to step off the plane before I lapse into Italianglish, flinging my arms around and shouting loudly at waiters.

Jo claims I don’t speak a single word of actual Italian. She’s wrong: I speak fluent musical notation: “Andante Sostenuto, Affretando, Subito Pianissimo”, I cry with confidence once the Chianti takes hold.

Admittedly, these words aren’t much help when you’re trying to order squid or sea bass, but I’m sure they’d be pretty useful if I was asked to be a judge on the Italian version of the X-Factor. And I know I’d be perfectly understood, because I’d be speaking them without the slightest hint of a Geordie accent.

Geordie Shore

2011-05-29T11:41:00.000-07:00

"If you’re a Geordie, you need a tan: no true Geordie goes around looking like a ghost". That pearl of wisdom came from one of the cast of Geordie Shore. It was one of the few coherent sentences in the first episode.

For those who don’t normally watch MTV, here’s the plot: four pneumatic North East girls with fake tans are in a posh house with four bare-chested boys and a fridge full of booze. They get drunk, vomit, and have sex under duvets. That’s it.

It’s appalling. The cast generates no empathy, their characters portrayed as ignorant, unattractive and interested only in getting laid.

Putting a whole new spin on the slogan Passionate People, Passionate Places, this is possibly the worst kind of publicity for our region. It portrays Newcastle as home to loud, loose, shallow, orange-tanned morons.

This kind of reality television is far from new. In fact, I have a terrible confession: I kicked off the whole phenomenon in 2003 when I produced a show in the United States called Paradise Hotel. The concept was similar: put young people in luxury and they’ll soon drive each other mad. We shot it with multiple hidden cameras; there were relationships and tears. It was a ratings triumph.

There was a big difference, though: we didn’t use booze to generate the drama, instead relying on clever casting. A plain, rather overweight boy called Dave and a strange but gentle girl called Charla were set within a company of busty blondes and beach bums. For an entire summer the show was on everyone’s lips – people threw Paradise Hotel parties on elimination nights. When Charla ditched Dave in the final episode, it made the New York Times.

The following year MTV produced Laguna Beach, with spoilt kids from Orange County. It was about romance, unrequited love and rivalries, set against a backdrop of wealth. But in 2009 MTV decided to reinvent the concept as something more gritty. Their target was the working class Italian-American community of Jersey Shore: loud and uninhibited, without self-consciousness or shame. It broke ratings records and now they’re repeating the formula over here, with what they consider the ultimate dumb, drunk stereotype: the Geordie.

Our local media has buzzed with indignation. “Why Newcastle? They could have done it in Liverpool.” Well one reason is that the production company is based in Liverpool and they’d be drummed out of town if they did this to their own city. They also produce The Only Way Is Essex.

“This isn’t a true picture”, say the critics. Are they blind? Take a tour of the Bigg Market zoo any weekend evening. Jo and I often drive visitors there to see the animals: men and women naked, urinating openly in the street, unspeakable acts taking place in broad daylight.

So who is guilty? Not MTV, for sure. What is our elected council doing to protect the image of our city? Licensing countless clubs and bars to serve unlimited drinks at a pound a time? Turning a blind eye to the weekend debauchery? Well now we’re reaping the consequences. We’ve got our party city, and a reputation to match.

How can Newcastle limit the damage? The last thing it needs is an MP asking questions in the House of Commons. More publicity equals higher ratings.

Those really offended by Geordie Shore might learn a lesson from Paradise Hotel. It was the biggest hit of the summer, but wasn't renewed. The reason: just a few conservative people wrote to complain about the show to the network’s key advertisers who, fearing the association would damage their brands, pulled their commercials. Without ad revenue, the network was forced to cancel the second series.

One of the advertisers of Geordie Shore, on the web if not the TV series, is the health drink Lucozade. The company that makes it, GlaxoSmithKline, says it is “committed to improving the quality of human life by enabling people to do more, feel better and live longer”. I doubt that its chairman, Sir Christopher Gent, would think this aim was being furthered by a television programme that idolizes young people who get utterly intoxicated on cheap vodka and indulge in loveless sex with complete strangers.

Sir Christopher is in his 60s and has two young children. It's unlikely he knows that his adverts for Lucozade are helping to pay for Geordie Shore. Any real Geordies reading this might like to enlighten him.

Till Death Do Us Part

2011-05-22T11:21:00.000-07:00

You have to feel sorry for 60-year-old New Yorker Robert Fitzpatrick. After blowing his entire life savings on posters predicting the end of the world last night, he woke up this morning to find he was still amongst the heathen.

It must have been a bitter blow for him and thousands of American believers who’d been convinced by the California preacher Harold Camping that it was “Rapture Day”, when they’d all be transported up to heaven as huge earthquakes destroyed the rest of us left down here on Earth.

Robert had spent $140,000 putting up thousands of posters around the New York subway and bus system. I assume all believing bus drivers had considerately taken the day off work: after all, if any of them had been raptured off a moving vehicle, it would have caused no end of traffic chaos down Broadway.

Camping had worked out the date using a series of complex calculations based on the anniversary of Noah’s flood (7,000 years ago on Saturday) and various biblical passages. As a result, thousands of Americans sold their homes and valuables and quit their jobs, all clearly surplus to requirements in the afterlife, and handed over their money to Camping’s church. It’s reported that he raised tens of millions from believers over the last few months.

They weren’t put off by the fact that he got it completely wrong last time: he originally said that the Rapture would happen in September 1994. In fact, apart from the 5,000th performance of Cats on Broadway, there wasn’t a lot of seismic activity anywhere that month and, denied his Journey To The Heaviside Layer, the discredited minister went off to lick his paws and invent a new date.

This latest prediction has resulted in a roaring trade for poster manufacturers, end-of-the-world party organisers and also for a company in New Hampshire called External Earthbound Pets. For just $135, paid in advance, they agreed to collect and care for any furry friend left behind after its owner had been raptured away. No Armageddon, no refund.

The fact that Harold Camping’s absurd prediction gained such traction is a tribute to the extraordinary gullibility of the human mind. Is there nothing that people won’t believe, given a bit of hype? From fad diets to reality television, from conspiracy theories about Bin Laden to the journalism in the Daily Mail: people believe all sorts of nonsense as fact. It’s just as well – without fantasy, wouldn’t life be intolerably dull?

At precisely 6pm last night, just as the world wasn’t ending, Jo and I were at a wedding reception drinking a toast to the bride and groom. As they began their new life together, Jo and I were thinking about that daunting phrase “till death do us part”.

We agreed that, when you love someone so much that you can’t imagine life without them, the best way to go is probably to share some God-invoked end-of-the-world scenario. The mere thought of separation is more than either of us could bear, so it would be good to know we were victims in the same Armageddon. We’d have loads to gossip about as the conflagration hit: it’s always exciting to be a witness at a breaking news story.

But then we realised we’d have a problem: how to ensure we’d be together after the big event. You see, Jo is Jewish and I’m Church of England. As we can’t both be right, there’s a real risk that one of us ends up alone on the wrong side of the fence, looking after the pet-minding. Unless, that is, we’re both on the wrong side and we should have turned Buddhist. Still, as the Grateful Dead song goes: “I may be going to hell in a bucket, babe, at least I’m enjoyin’ the ride”.

Don't Scare The Turkey

2011-05-17T23:42:00.000-07:00

The hare is dead: frankly, it never looked very alive to me.

The news that BBC1 has decided to axe its infantile game show “Don’t Scare The Hare” after just three disastrous and expensive episodes must come as no surprise to anyone who has actually seen it: which isn’t many (the ratings have plumbed new depths for Saturday night viewing).

For those who haven’t, it’s a show with dubbed laughter, a strange and superfluous music track, a scary presenter with giant glasses and a cap hiding his baldness, and an animatronic hare which trundles around the studio like a dalek. Grownups play children’s games and if they fail, the hare runs off “scared”. Oh, and someone wins some money.

Wow: somebody actually sat in a darkened room and came up with this drivel, and the BBC paid them a couple of million quid to stage it. It looks like cheap Bulgarian children’s television. Suspecting that it was designed for two-year-olds, we tried it out on Izzy. She didn’t last twenty seconds, angrily demanding we switch to Peppa Pig. The BBC clearly cast the wrong animal in the lead – it should have been a turkey.

Mind you, all producers have made them: turkeys, that is. When Mark Thompson quit the BBC as director of programmes, at his leaving do he gave a speech about his career highs and lows. Robot Wars, which I produced when he was running BBC2, was a high; but the lowest of the lows was a Saturday night game show called Happy Families.

It seemed like a great idea at the time: Gladiators had just completed its first series on ITV, and arena shows seemed to be the in thing. So, rather than lycra-clad superheroes with false names like Jet and Wolf, I came up with a show that pitched extended families against each other. We staged it at the London Arena: a barn of a place so big we had to build giant games to fill it. In the middle were two metal cages in which the contestants imprisoned their grandmothers. The contestants had to “Hoist up their Grannies” a hundred feet to the top of the building. Yes, I was responsible for this nonsense.

The show opened in the roof, with a giant roller coaster made up of hand-powered bikes. One by one each family member pedalled furiously to link up with the others into one long hand-powered train, which began a terrifying descent to the ground, hitting more than 40 miles an hour on the bends with no safety net. I was scared that we might dump an entire family onto the heads of the audience. Sometimes the bikes got stuck and the contestants were suspended in mid-air: one woman broke her arm on the pedals. We also built absurd games like “Terrorball”, in which someone had to answer trivia questions about their family while being spun upside down. There was even a game for the family dog.

I was terrified one of the grannies would suffer a heart attack. In fact, the biggest problem was incontinence: you wouldn’t believe how many times they needed to go to the toilet during filming. Each time the wretched cage had to be slowly winched down so they could be released. We went wildly over schedule, frequently filming into the night, by which time the audience – all 5,000 of them, had drifted off home. So instead of a mass spectacle, we had to shoot everything in close-up and cut in shots of audience cheering from the afternoon.

Right now I feel the pain of Don’t Scare The Hare’s producer. After so much effort, realising you’ve created a turkey is no fun. But at least the hare won’t be lonely, as it lies buried in the Saturday night television graveyard: it will have two granny cages and a load of rusty hand-pedalled bikes for company.

Maybe We Should All Become Scottish?

2011-05-09T10:13:00.000-07:00

McGutteridge of Blog

[The Scottish Nationalist Party had a landslide victory in the Scottish elections last week: we live only half an hour from the border]

I’ve started to collect Scottish £5 notes. They’re kept in a shortbread biscuit tin with a picture of Edinburgh Castle on the lid.

You see, once the divorce with England takes place, I’m assuming Scotland won’t want the Euro as its unit of currency, so I thought a few Scottish pounds might prove useful.

They’ll be hard to spend, though, as I predict the new currency will be divided into its original pre-1707 component parts of doyts, bodles, placks, bawbees and merks, which nobody will be able to understand without the calculator they’ll sell to immigrants and tourists at passport control.

But it looks like Scotland’s the place to be. Maybe we should relocate now? I’m sure Jo won’t mind moving to an even colder farmhouse. The weather’s not really that much worse, if you wear a warm enough overcoat in summer. And the food is, well, hearty.

I suspect she might have problems with the language, though. It’s taken her three years to be able to communicate with the locals here; we had a Scottish workman in the house the other week and her look of incomprehension was priceless: he was only asking the way to the toilet.

Nevertheless I’m sure there’ll be loads of advantages for us: Izzy will qualify for free everything for life, including university lectures, medical prescriptions and eye tests. Also, she won’t have to pay a penny for me to stay in my old people’s home in Peebles.

I hope they’ll grant us residency visas. Joseph Gillan, my great-great grandfather, was born in 1808 somewhere in Lanarkshire. That makes me one-sixteenth Scottish and Gillan is my middle name: surely it must count for something?

In fact, most of Jo’s American friends are convinced we live there already, and our London friends think we may as well, so remote is our Northumbrian farmhouse. They must all picture us in kilts.

That’s how we used to paint the SNP: all beards and sporrans. In fact, as the election results showed last week, most of Scotland’s population, across all parts of the social spectrum, now supports the SNP. There’s no other real option: all the other parties are irrelevant minority also-rans in Scottish politics. Whether these people will also support independence from England when the referendum is held in a couple of years is another matter. If the SNP continues to play the game so well, and Labour so badly, a vote for separation should be a tartan shoe-in.

You don’t have to be a political analyst to know that the consequences of Thursday’s vote will be far-reaching in England, and it’s nothing to do with independence, which is neither here nor there to most of us south of the border. Labour’s worst performance for 80 years saw its Scottish powerbase destroyed; even if this were partly reflected in a Westminster vote, they’d find it numerically impossible to be elected in London ever again, so reliant is the party on its Scottish MPs.

Already the rise of nationalism has affected my own industry. The BBC reserves a major chunk of its programme budget for what it calls “the nations”, and most of that goes to Scotland. It means that if I want to make an entertainment programme, the easiest way to get it commissioned is to say that I want to film it in Glasgow. It’s a lie, of course: I’d rather film almost anywhere else, but they’ve built an enormous state-of-the-art television centre there with our licence fees and they’re desperate to fill it.

Two of our last three prime ministers were Scottish and Cameron almost is: it’s clearly the fashion. Speaking of which, the editor of my newspaper, who comes from Aberdeen, wears a very fetching kilt at black-tie dinners. I must ask him where I can get one for my new Scottish persona, once I’ve saved up enough £5 notes.

Cats That Go Baa

2011-04-17T14:01:00.000-07:00

Izzy spotted them immediately. “Cats!” she shouted as the two fluffy black creatures stood quietly in the April sunshine. “No those are lambs, Izzy”, we corrected.

It was an easy mistake to make. Born just yesterday, our neighbour’s sheep are shaggy Ryelands. They are so tiny and fluffy, like baby yeti, they could just as easily have been moggies. Izzy shook her head at our stupidity: “No, cats”, she insisted. Sometimes it’s easier just to agree with a two-year-old. Pick your fights – save your persuasive powers for getting her to eat her lunch or not play with the carving knife.

“Why are all the lambs being born at the same time?” asked Sam, my 13-year-old. “Because all the ewes had sex with the ram the same week in November” I began confidently, eliciting an immediate and horrified “Dad, don’t”, as he put his fingers in his ears. Don’t they teach them anything about the birds and the bees in school?

Living on a farm in Northumberland has introduced me to several new discoveries. Not just the utter pointlessness of high street fashion – the mud covers the heels of any new shoe within seconds and even Jo admits designer clothes would look absurd down at the Ox Inn – but more important, fundamental things, like the natural cycle of life. Only now, after three years in the sticks, are we really beginning to appreciate the order that, with the man’s help, ensures that lambs are born after the winter snows and the tulips flower just as the daffodils begin to fade. To an outsider it’s like magic. I’ve not yet graduated to sheep farming, but I have been inspired to grow my own.

My former colleagues in L.A. would never believe this was the same me, dragging on ragged jeans and throwing myself into piles of manure. I’m learning by my mistakes. Like most townies, I abhor bare soil, so I tend to overstuff my vegetable beds to fill up space, not realising that peas and beans grow into vast overhanging forests, covering up anything you put next to them.

This year I’ve vowed to be more patient and have a goal: not to buy a single salad, vegetable or cut flower until the late autumn frosts. I’d be far too embarrassed to put my weedy little offerings into the local leek show – but I already understand just how easy and satisfying it is to eat with the seasons.

In the supermarket I eschew large but tasteless Spanish strawberries when my own bed is full of tiny flowers, waiting for June, and I positively cringe when I see someone pick up a packet of green beans from Chile. To me, “best before” is a meaningless concept: does it mean “unusable after”, “edible until”, or does it refer to its colour or taste? To me, “Best” is “still in the ground”.

So I was delighted by today’s reports that the government is thinking of scrapping “best before” and “sell by” labels on food, relying instead on the simple warning of “use by”, when food might actually be a danger to health. It would instantly cut down on the absurd waste of perfectly good food thrown away because of some printing on the label. Perhaps at last people will rediscover their senses of taste and smell to judge what to buy and when to use it.

Jo and I are determined that Izzy grows up to understand the importance of homegrown food. She’s already becoming a little gardener: armed with her toy spade, she insists on helping by heaping earth onto the heads of the dogs sitting patiently beside me as I dig. Mind you, I’m not looking forward to the moment, about six months from now, when I have to explain to her that the nice little “cats” in the next field have turned into lunch.

Sir Georg Solti and The Bum Note

2011-04-10T07:20:00.000-07:00

The famous conductor’s face winced with rage. In the middle of the best-known horn fanfare in music, the principal horn player fluffed his note: the triumphant opening of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony was ruined. In front of a packed Royal Albert Hall, it was being filmed for millions. Sir Georg Solti was the conductor and I was the director.

Filmed classical concerts got a mixed press last week. Next month British cinemas will be showing the Berlin Philharmonic in 3D. I heard one pundit, Norman Lebrecht, complain vociferously on Radio 4: “It’s a poor substitute for the real thing. When you go to a concert you sit for an hour, you don’t move, you don’t cough, you barely breathe and you become, as it were, one with the musicians. When you watch it in 3D on a screen, you can be popping popcorn, you can be whispering to your neighbour… there is none of the concentration of the real thing”.

Such arrogance. This film of one of the world’s great orchestras will be eagerly awaited by all music lovers, just as opera fans will fill the Tyneside Cinema in May to watch opera live from the Metropolitan Opera House in New York for just £22 a ticket. I guarantee there’ll be less coughing in the cinema than in the champagne-soaked corporate aisles of the Met.

Sure, nothing can beat the atmosphere of a concert hall, but film has two distinct advantages: the sound and the picture. Surround sound will place everyone in the centre of the auditorium, while the pictures will guarantee the best seat in the house. Sir Georg Solti taught me that.

A week before the concert I went to his house in Elsworthy Road in North London clutching my Beethoven pocket score. His charming wife, former children’s television presenter Valerie Pitts, brought us coffee and biscuits. Beethoven’s 5th held a special significance for Solti: he first heard it at the age of 14, conducted by the great Erich Kleiber, and immediately resolved to become a conductor. Now 72 and renowned for his fearsome passion and refusal to accept second best, what Solti didn’t know was that this was my first attempt at directing a classical concert.

“Pa-pa-pa-paaah” he began. And off he went, singing and humming his way through, dissecting it, telling me which instruments to feature and which to ignore. He particularly reminded me not to miss the solo horns in Bar 59. I tried to follow the score as he zoomed through the pages, but found it hard to take my eyes off his animated, passionate face: I was transfixed by his expressive personality and strength.

As an amateur musician, I realised how lucky I was: in concerts you only see the conductor’s back. So I asked Solti a question: would he mind if I put a camera on stage, right in the middle of the second violins, facing him. His big eyes opened wide: “Me? Why would you want to film me so close?” But his eyes were twinkling his agreement.

So we hid an unmanned camera directly under the conductor’s podium to enable the viewers to see what the audience never could, including the moment when Solti turned puce as the horn player destroyed Bar 59. He threw the offender a withering glance, then pulled the orchestra together, and furiously revved up a performance that’s still available on CD today.

Two weeks later, I went back to Elsworthy Road clutching the edited film. We sat in his sitting room and switched on the video. As we approached the offending bar, he closed his eyes and sighed. Then he opened them wide and burst into the biggest smile.

“How did you do that?” he asked. “The repeat,” I said, “I replaced the bad horns with the repeat”.

“Genius”, he said. Now we were both smiling.

It's A Dog's Life

2011-04-03T06:21:00.000-07:00

As Mabel stood sniffing at the strange room, Truffle stared up at me with disbelief. This was the forbidden land: no dog had ever crossed this portal. Was it a trick? No, instead of shouting at them to get out, I was beckoning them in.

For three years they’d been consigned to the cold tiles of our kitchen floor – now here was a thick pile carpet and a sofa they’d never seen before. It was soft to the paw and, even better, there was human food: a constant supply of tidbits dropping from Izzy’s chair. So this was life behind the white door, the Narnia where the humans went at night. What on earth had happened?

What happened was the builders. Like distant Australian cousins who drop in unannounced and outstay their welcome in the first afternoon, they’re now entering their second month of works. What started as a simple new door into the garden has turned into a major redevelopment. You know what it’s like: someone with a hammer walks in and you immediately find them something to knock down: in our case three-foot-wide walls, ceilings and floors. As a result, half our house is completely covered in rubble and dust, not even fit for dogs.

So, for the first time, the dogs have crossed the mud barrier. The very first thing we learnt, on moving here from Los Angeles, was that the principal crop of the Northumbrian countryside is mud. There are acres of it, waiting to be carried on boots, tummies, paws and tails. It’s bad enough on human shoes – it’s impossible to get from car to front door without bringing in a sample – but for the dogs, it’s a permanent appendage.

We bought Mabel as a golden working cocker spaniel, and, once a month, for a few brief moments following the visit of the Dial-A-Dog-Wash van, she reverts to her true colour. For the rest of the time she bears an underbelly of brown-caked muck. At least you know it’s there. Her sister Truffle is the colour of her name: you’ve no idea how dirty she is until she jumps up on your newly washed jeans. The fox poo is even deadlier: you can’t see it through the mud on their backs, but its sweet pungency can linger on a jumper for weeks.

That’s why we established a no fly zone for our dogs: an impenetrable border in the middle of the house, where kitchen ends and civilisation begins. To them it was a door to nowhere: we never showed them the other side because we thought they’d be upset to know what they were missing.

Of course, what they’re experiencing now is nothing like our normal existence. We aren’t usually crammed into one room that combines kitchen, sitting room, nursery, dining area and dog kennel. In one corner there’s a microwave and a micro fridge, a baby changing mat, three sets of cutlery and crockery, a lot of red wine and a big bag of dog food. It’s like camping: we’ve been living on ready meals and yoghurt. Dog heaven has been a month of hell for us.

But now they’re learning two major life lessons: be careful what you wish for, and be content with your lot. With all of us trapped in one room, and the garden out of bounds because of builders’ rubble, Izzy has found a new way to amuse herself, while the dogs have discovered that there’s no escape from a two-year-old.

Right now all three of them are sitting in the dog cage and Izzy is playing “This Little Piggy Went To Market” with their paws. I’ve never seen such miserable looking mutts. Their eyes are pleading with me to take them back through the white door to their nice dusty kitchen. Don’t worry girls, only another fortnight to go.

Sheep's Stomachs in Syria

2011-03-27T14:34:00.000-07:00

My first introduction to Syria was white and rubbery: a mound of sheep’s stomachs on a bed of rice.

We hadn’t wanted to be in the café at all: our trip to India, in the small campervan with blue curtains and photos of our parents on the walls, was supposed to take us on the old hippy trail through Iran. But two days before we were due to cross the Turkish border the Shah was overthrown and Iran was shut.

In desperation we turned right and headed for the deserts of Syria. We drove for half a day, then pulled over at the roadside café for a bottle of water.

Everything about the country seemed scary to naïve young Westerners. We knew it had one of the most repressive regimes in the world: an uncompromising elite had seized power nine years previously under Hafez al Assad. They were embroiled in civil war in Lebanon, just a few miles to the west and had failed to regain the Golan Heights during the Yom Kippur War. All dissent was stamped on: the day we arrived, the BBC reported that a demonstration against the regime had been brutally put down. It was 1979.

The men at the next table in the traditional didashah robes and red and white checked shemagh headscarves eyed us suspiciously as we sat down. We stared across at the mounds of white rubber on their plates. They caught our glance and I blushed. “It looks…very good”, I lied in that slow, condescending voice the British use with foreigners. Big mistake. The tallest of them, dressed in white, snapped his fingers and the café owner brought me a large plateful. My girlfriend declined – her mineral water had apparently made her full.

The sheep’s stomach stared up and taunted me. “Here, you must drink this”, said the tall man, handing me a large tumbler of ayran. The sour drink, made with strained yoghurt and salt, made me gag even more than the glutinous sheep. I closed my eyes and went for it. “It’s…extraordinary”, I ventured, smiling grimly through my misery. The man beamed: “You must come to my village”.

It wasn’t an invitation: more a command. All the houses in Kara had high white, spotless walls. Inside the man’s home there was a beautiful garden. They killed some chickens and threw a banquet, the men eating separately from the women.

We talked of London: the man frequently stayed at The Dorchester – he showed me his address book, listing phone numbers of his “good London friends”, all girls with names like Venus and Angel. “Do come and see us in Putney”, we said as we added our address to his list.

He told of his love for Johnny Walker whisky and in the morning he proudly showed us his mosque. As he washed my feet at the entrance, he taught us the principles of Moslem cleanliness.

His smiling face darkened only once, when he told of the people conspiring against the Ba’ath government. He spoke dismissively of the Palestinian refugees near the border and his hatred for the banned Muslim Brotherhood. He was uncompromising, for he genuinely felt the regime was right for Syria, the only way to hold together the divided sects and factions in the nation. It’s taken more than 30 years for his views, the official line of the ruling elite, to be openly challenged, and now the crisis appears to be spiralling out of control.

When we left Kara the whole village turned out to say farewell and I was given my own robe and headdress. I wore them once at a fancy dress party in Clapham.

Two years later I was out of the country when I received a panicky phone call from my girlfriend, by then my first wife. She was in our tiny terraced house, heavily pregnant with our first child, when the doorbell rang. Outside were four Arab women, dressed in black, clutching children and suitcases. They had come to stay.

Farmyard News Exclusive

2011-03-20T16:34:00.000-07:00

Peppa Pig and Fifi & the Flowertots are no match for cruise missiles. I don’t know who is more upset with the United Nations: Colonel Gaddafi or Izzy. Her beloved DVDs have been lying beside the television, ejected and rejected, and her demands for “Piggy-Pig” and “She-She” ignored as the drama from Libya unfolds. Our household is now hooked on 24-hour news.

It’s amazing to think that it was only nine weeks ago that Zine El Abidine Ben Ali was ejected from power in Tunisia. Remember Hosni Mubarak? Whatever happened to him after he went off to join the tourists by the Red Sea at Sharm-el-Sheikh? Is he still there, taking in a bit of snorkeling and wistfully gazing up at Mount Sinai? Who knows – the story has rolled on.

For the last few weeks, one whirlwind of earth-transforming events has followed another like tornado season in Kansas. It’s turned into the plot of a really bad action movie: “Dateline March 2011 – half of Christchurch has been destroyed; 10,000 people have been drowned in a Japanese Tsunami and the country is threatened with nuclear devastation; meanwhile the United Nations declares war on a deranged tyrant bent on killing his own people”. Not even Bruce Willis would risk his career on that one.

Every new event stretches audience credibility. Last night I dreamt that the supermoon, the biggest full moon for 18 years, was actually on an out-of-control trajectory and heading for a soft landing somewhere near Darlington. It’s almost as believable as some of the television output we’ve been watching over the last fortnight.

In the calm of our rural backwater, Jo and I have our own version of the news – we call it Farmyard News. I am chief reporter, political correspondent, newsreader and I also make the tea. Having worked for the first part of my career in BBC news and later on programmes like Nationwide and Panorama, I love a good breaking story. I think both BBC and Sky are doing a great job, but recently I’ve been running my own exclusive commentary alongside their official output.

It’s actually Jo’s fault. Like many Americans, she has an insatiable curiosity for information, particularly about British history. I, on the other hand, almost failed History O-Level. However, determined not to disappoint her, for the entire 7 years of our relationship I’ve been making stuff up. If we drive by a castle she demands to know who lives there, so I will invent an entire tragic dynasty, complete with wayward son who goes mad, marries a German milkmaid and strangles his parents. She will happily take all this in, but I know one day I’ll get caught out.

Convinced that my brain is a vast repository of useful information, Jo has a tendency to ask me questions during news bulletins. Because I’m too polite to say “Babe, this is the news: how could I possibly know why this man killed his wife?” I try not to let her down. Sometimes I strike lucky.

Like last week. Just after the explosion at the first Fukushima nuclear reactor, some pundit on Sky was worried about Tokyo. “Do you think people in Tokyo are safe?” asked Jo. “Absolutely”, said the Farmyard News anchor confidently, handing over to the weather reporter: “The smoke from the explosion is blowing to the left and the sea is behind: that means the wind is towards the north, so for now Tokyo is safe”. It took Sky News four hours to catch up with me on that one.

All week I’ve tried to be one step ahead of the headlines, but now I’ve given up. I don’t think there’s a pundit on earth who could predict the final act of this Libyan nightmare. I’m sure we’d all be far safer watching Peppa Pig.

Filming With Children and Animals

2011-03-14T08:59:00.000-07:00

Photos by David Bridges. All rights reserved.

It was a precarious dawn, the sun just managing an orange glow through its ominous shroud of black raincloud. The small child stood shivering out of view on the other side of the hill. Huddled in a thin red cape, the 9-year-old waited patiently for her cue as, in front of her, a herd of woolly sheep grazed silently.

“Perfect,”, shouted the director. “Standby and… Action! – oh no, the sheep are off again – fetch the herder”.

Never work with children or animals, goes the old maxim. Last week we had both. We also had hailstorms, torrential rain and intense blinding sunshine: this was Spring in Northumberland.

The owner of the sheep, armed with tasty ewe nuts, coaxed the animals back into shot. “We only have 5 more minutes with Maia”, warned the assistant. There are strict rules on filming with child actors. Every hour they need a 15-minute break. A crew member was desperately clinging on to the rest tent, which was trying to launch itself skywards in the gale force winds. It started to hail again: the sheep quietly munched through the chaos.

Meanwhile our motley gathering of extras, dressed in grey suits from Asda, sat bored in our house with their muddy shoes, slurping coffee and swapping anecdotes about famous people they’ve stood behind. Jo was going frantic. “Never again”, she wailed, as she put up large signs warning retribution on anyone bringing mud, food or drink onto our carpets.

This wasn’t Hollywood, but it could have been the set of a film anywhere in the world. Except this wasn’t a movie that you’ll see on television or in the cinema. It was a film with a message, commissioned by a global energy company.

I hadn’t expected to be in the corporate communications business. I’m just a television producer, but a few months ago I was asked by a delegate at a seminar I was addressing why corporate films and websites were generally so poor. I told her, quite honestly, that I had no experience of the genre.

“That’s the problem,” she said. “Real producers don’t do corporate”. She persuaded and cajoled, and eventually we made her a string of videos and a smart new website, which last week won two major awards for Best Online Production. The gongs look good on the mantlepiece, but our real prize was that the global energy company saw it, and commissioned us to make a corporate film for them.

The message we were asked to convey was simple: when building a large scale project, like an oil refinery or a power station, it’s vital to know the precise origin and specification of every single part, down to the smallest valve. Apart from benefits of cost and efficiency, it’s essential that, if something goes wrong, the operators can get instant access to that information, even many years after it’s built.

Our film was designed to encourage suppliers and contractors to utilize effective information management systems. A dry subject seemingly disconnected from reality. “Shouldn’t you bring all your information into one place, so you can easily get at it?” asks little Maia at the end of the film.

But when we woke up the morning after we finished filming to the first news of the terrible catastrophe in Japan, saw the burning oil refinery in Ichihara, and then, all weekend, the fear and confusion about nuclear meltdown, the message of our film, shot at home with a child and a few woolly sheep, took on a terrible relevance.

The world we live in needs modern technology for fuel and progress. But our very survival depends on careful and precise management of what we build. For nature has a terrible habit of testing to the limit the structures of technology that humanity has created. And Heaven help us if we get it wrong.

It's a Goal - Maybe!

2011-03-06T10:44:00.000-08:00

On a 22-acre estate near Winchester, there’s a research laboratory containing some of Britain’s most prodigious brains. It was set up in 1956, at the height of the Cold War, to invent new technology for the spooky world of electronic warfare.

Since then Roke Manor Research has been one of the world’s leading developers of communications devices for military and commercial use. They create systems that can track planes, missiles and people.

For all I know they may be responsible for some of the gadgets inside Gaddafi’s warplanes of popular destruction. But Roke Manor’s technology is potentially much more valuable than that. It could have been used to decide whether Arsenal should have won Saturday’s football match against Sunderland.

In 2000 the head of our sports division summoned us to a demonstration of something truly amazing: the product of our company’s collaboration with one of Roke Manor’s boffins, Paul Hawkins, who has a PhD in artificial intelligence. He’d adapted his tracking and positioning technology to the more mundane world of cricket.

By placing ultra high speed cameras all around the ground, fed into a sophisticated computer system, Dr. Hawkins could show not just where a cricket ball was but, more significantly, where it would have been if it hadn’t hit a batsman’s leg. In other words, he’d built a machine that solved the great cricketing conundrum of “leg before wicket”.

Solely for my American wife’s benefit, I should explain that if a ball is thrown towards the little wooden sticks at the end and the man in the white coat says it would have hit them, except the batsman’s leg got in the way, then the batsman is out. I know there was no point in writing that last sentence: Jo’s eyes would have already glazed over at the word “cricket”. Now, if Dr. Hawkins had invented a machine that could track bargains in a handbag store, she’d have demanded one for Christmas.

That year we launched Hawk-Eye (named after Hawkins, I guess) and the world of sport has never looked back. At first, only viewers benefited. Our sports company Sunset + Vine won numerous deserved plaudits for its 2001 Ashes coverage, not least because Hawk-Eye let the TV audience see what the umpires couldn’t. It took another six years before the game’s governing body allowed the system to be used to challenge an umpire’s decision. By then it had also been adopted by the game of tennis, even at Wimbledon, where bad line calls have been a thing of the past since 2007.

That was also the year that Hawk-Eye was declared fit and ready for football. They rigged a system in the goalmouth at Reading’s training ground and tested whether or not the ball passed over the line, a job currently done by a man who rushes sideways like a breathless crab for 55 yards up and down the pitch. The poor chap is rarely level with the goal-line when the ball goes over, and usually players are obstructing his line of sight, so it’s not surprising he can get it wrong.

Twenty times more precise than a television action replay, Hawk-Eye worked every time in the Reading tests; its analysis could be conveyed to the referee’s earpiece in less than half a second, so the game didn’t have to be stopped. The Premier League loved it; so did Arsene Wenger; but FIFA’s myopic President Sepp Blatter said no. And, amazingly, he still does. If FIFA had allowed goalmouth trials of Hawk-Eye in 2008, by now it could have sorted out dubious offside decisions as well.

Which is probably lucky for Sunderland and frustrating for Arsenal, who may miss the chance of winning the Premier League as a result of a wrong offside decision in Saturday's goalless draw.

Mind you, if they’d used Hawk-Eye in the 1966 World Cup final, then Geoff Hurst’s second goal would have been disallowed and we might not have beaten Germany. So perhaps Blatter’s got a point, after all.

Friends In Need

2011-02-27T08:15:00.000-08:00

Hayley Westenra has one of the purest voices on the planet. I’d never heard her sing until this morning, when a friend posted a recording on Facebook. Ten minutes later Izzy toddled into my office and found me blubbering over my computer screen: she had to lend me her precious Peppa Pig to calm me down.

The friend who posted the link is a New Zealander, and the song was Hine e Hine, a Maori lullaby recorded when Hayley was just 16: the CD became the fastest selling debut classical album of all time. She comes from Christchurch and, at the age of 12, was discovered by CTV, the local television station. It’s the same station which, right now, is just a huge pile of rubble concealing the bodies of scores of victims. Among them is Donna Manning, one of the station’s presenters and producers. The world’s front pages pictured her distraught husband and two teenage children as they waited for news beside the debris until the police came and told them there was no hope. It’s one of many tragic images of that terrible catastrophe.

One can’t begin to imagine New Zealand’s pain: one of the gentlest places on earth, caught by a disaster sudden, horrific and unfair.

It’s one of the few countries where I could happily live. A few years ago I was invited to the country to give a speech. Fearing chronic jetlag from the journey, and because I doubted I would ever return, I arrived a week or two early and planned to spend some time exploring South Island on my own. No words could adequately describe the scenery – I’ve seen nowhere on earth to match it – but it was the beauty of the people that overwhelmed me. After a 13-hour flight from Los Angeles I arrived at my hotel in Queenstown to find an unsigned note on the bedside table: “Welcome, Tom, please come to Joe’s Garage at 9am tomorrow morning.”

I went out of curiosity and found a coffee shop where, sitting at a long table with one spare seat, were eight or nine complete strangers. They were local producers, who had heard I was in their country and simply wanted to welcome me. Outside was a Land Rover to take me into the mountains to see the locations they’d used for Lord of the Rings. They’d arranged parties and dinners in their homes: and yet they didn’t know me from Adam. New Zealand is a country where, if you stop to ask a stranger for directions, he’ll invite you into his house for lunch and remain your friend for life.

Kiwis are rightly proud of their homeland and fiercely protective of its history and traditions. There is no class structure: people don’t have large houses, because wealth and social status means nothing to them. Hospitality and good health, friendship and loyalty, imagination and creativity are paramount. I spent the most relaxing week – the empty roads and simple charm of an old-fashioned lifestyle reminded me of the best of Northumberland. At one point I actually rang Jo and suggested we up sticks from Los Angeles and move there. Instead we relocated to the North East: it’s not as beautiful but just as friendly.

Bordered in the West by the snowy peaks of the Southern Alps, and on the east by the ocean, Christchurch is a proud and historic city: green and fresh, sophisticated and lush.

Friends I’d met out there have sent me videos of the devastation. There are chaotic scenes inside apartments as the earthquake struck; footage taken moments later of rescuers rummaging through bricks. But through it all, a strange calm. These lovely people simply didn’t deserve this.

Our news reports have already moved onto the next big headline, but we mustn’t leave the Kiwis on their own. They need our friendship now.

In Praise of Real People

2011-02-21T04:28:00.000-08:00

Despite living through nine whole decades of change, Mum actually resides in about 1956.

She’d still be using half-crowns if they’d accept them at the post office and her idea of recycling is to keep absolutely everything in case it comes in handy again. She likes her milk in glass bottles, refuses to use a food processor, won’t forgive the French for boycotting us during mad cow disease and berates the television for putting background music on art documentaries.

“Just let the paintings speak, and stop covering them with all that terrible noise”, she moans, adding: “These young producers today know nothing about art”. For a quiet life, you either accept what she says, or swiftly change the subject.

It was her 90th birthday this week. Jo and I threw her a surprise party, complete with magician. She arrived in a beautiful silk outfit, looking decades younger than her years, expecting to be taken out for pizza with her grandchildren, only to be greeted by half her village shouting “Surprise”. She was astonished that so many people liked her: in truth, she is universally admired, and deserves to be.

Mum’s a marvel. She helped develop aero engines for fighter planes in the war and, in the 1950s, when few women went to work at all, became general manager of a large food manufacturer. After moving to Tyneside she devoted her time to the public good, teaching disabled people and war veterans how to build and craft new lives, then later ran a national charity for teachers of the disabled. Through it all, she managed to bring up me.

She still loves to teach children craftwork, and paints excellent portraits. She is more deserving of an OBE than anyone I know; yet she’d be the first to admit that her worldly experience doesn’t equip her for 21st century technology. More than a year ago I gave her a smart new laptop, but techno-fear prevents her getting beyond the ‘on’ switch. “Oh, please show me again, dear”, she wails, convinced that if she presses one wrong button she’d fuse all the lights.

I think this rejection of the modern age has contributed to her longevity: she does everything for herself, and her brain is razor sharp. She grows her own vegetables, and can do mental arithmetic faster than I could at school, certainly quicker than I can use a calculator. She still drives herself to town and can spot a bargain at a thousand paces. She is, in short, a nonagenarian phenomenon.

She stubbornly refuses to use an ATM, believing you should always deal with a real person. The other week she was in town with my cousin and saw a big “Lloyds Bank” sign above one of those cashpoint-only facilities. She strode up to it and started pushing at the wall around the machines. “I can’t find the door”, she said, and then started to berate the machines themselves. “You’re supposed to be a bank: where are your people?” she shouted into a slot, then started bashing the wall with her walking stick until my cousin led her away for a calming cup of coffee.

She would like Tanzania: apparently they have real people inside their ATMs. On holiday there last month, my eldest son popped his card into a machine, which welcomed him to the facility, politely asked for his pin, and then made all the right whirring noises. Except that no money came out of the slot. After a few seconds he heard a deep voice calling from inside the machine: “I am sorry, Sir, I have run out of cash. I will promptly put the money back in your account.” Yeah, right.

“Silly boy,” said Mum, when he told his Granny the story. “I told you not to trust those stupid machines.” She was right, of course. Mum always is.

Why Men Are So Unromantic

2011-02-13T03:48:00.000-08:00

The problem with men is that they are always romantic on the wrong day. This sour wisdom stems not from me, but my wife.

Apparently women are happy to take our chocolates and flowers on Valentine’s Day, if that’s all that’s on offer, but these are scant substitutes for affection and attention on all the other 364 days of the year. Men (which means one man in particular – me) don’t have a clue how to pull off that trick.

Jo reckons my idea of romance is rushing round to Thorntons in a last-minute pre-Valentines panic to buy a chocolate-covered glow of self-satisfaction. She’s wrong, of course: you can order online now.

But hang on a minute: this isn’t fair. Don’t women realize how hard it is for men to be romantic? Everything we’ve been taught, from books to movies, is about how to get hold of love. We’ve never been told what to do with it when it’s in our hands.

In literature, love stories are never about two happily married people, unless one of them is dying or going mad. They tell of loves lost, sought, or unrequited. On the very last page, there might be a blissful union, but it’s the page after that which is missing: what happens when the wedding bells stop ringing?

Proust, a typically unromantic male, wrote: “we love only what we do not wholly possess”. We men are great at romance when we’re wooing. We’ll jump on planes in the middle of the night, ship truckloads of roses to your door and would gladly buy you a diamond mine just to make you smile. But the moment you reciprocate, and take away our insecurity and pain by actually falling in love with us and allowing us to spend our lives with you, then we’re lost. Nobody has issued us with the service guide to this part of the relationship. We assume that marriage comes with a lifetime guarantee; we even believe the claim that “love is forever”, when, actually, love is just the start.

Barbara Cartland, the Queen of Romance, was once a guest on a show I was producing. Her face hidden behind a mask of false eyelashes and crimson blusher, I recall her insistence on what she called her “special light”, a large white lightbulb on the studio floor whose function was to smooth out her wrinkles, a feat that no lamp invented could have achieved. She spoke about ideal love in her hundreds of formulaic novels, all with heroines searching for the perfect hero who knows how to be romantic for the rest of her life.

I’m convinced no such man has ever been born.

Ms Cartland gave me the idea for a television series called The Library Of Romance. We commissioned a load of wannabe romantic novelists to write us the most awful stories and filmed student actors camping up scenes laden with soft filters. Awash with slushy music, the ghastly concoction became an enormous hit with daytime viewers. I heard it was particularly popular with gay men and students. It had no connection with reality whatsoever, perhaps because it was produced by a team of unromantic men.

I’ve learned a few rules about married love so far. I know it’s about acceptance and trust; about sharing and even offloading your problems; it’s about not getting upset when she disagrees with you; and never cutting your toenails just before she takes a bath. Women are like puppy dogs: give them regular hugs and they’ll stay with you forever and lick you to death.

About one thing I’m absolutely certain: being loved by someone as incredibly special as my wife is a precious commodity, worth more than all the chocolates and diamonds in the world. It has to be continually earned and nurtured. I’m trying. Happy Valentine’s Day, darling.

Goodbye Tiger, Welcome Rabbit

2011-02-06T16:04:00.000-08:00

It’s all right: everything’s going to be nice and gentle now. The nightmare of the last few years, the rollercoaster ride of catastrophe, recession and chaos is over: life will be calmer.

Apparently the new age began last Thursday. A friend of mine, who is a respected professor of art, so really ought to know better than to spout this mumbo-jumbo, confidently assured me that the Chinese New Year has brought us the end of the tiger’s rage and replaced it with the peace of the rabbit.

I’m not convinced about that. Sure, just as Beijing was waking up to its new year, my company did finally receive a long-awaited order, which calmed down my bank manager no end. And the people of Egypt must feel they are entering a new, less turbulent time.

But on Saturday, as I sat in my seat at St James’ Park and watched my team being torn apart by the unsparing might of Arsenal, I decided it was all nonsense. Four goals down after half an hour, it was more ritual slaughter than football match. Year of the rabbit? – pah, I thought: without Carroll or Ameobi we’re on our way down the slippery path to relegation. Devastated, I couldn’t take any more, and left the stadium at half time.

Instead I went into John Lewis and bought my wife a calming candle: “Peace”, it said on the box. I planned to go home, light it and, with the scent of lime and tangerine all around me, watch a movie with my daughter on my lap and a large gin and tonic in my hand.

On my way out of the shopping centre, I heard the roar from the stadium. You could have heard it in Beijing. Newcastle had broken all records and squared the match. It was the game of the century, and I had missed it. Our team had, like the rabbits in my garden, bounced back.

Of course, I shouldn’t have been so intolerant or impetuous. But I can’t help myself because, according to my professor friend, I’m a dragon, and that’s what dragons are like. Never mind, she told me, next year is going to be all mine.

I’ve never been one to believe in astrology, Chinese or otherwise. But those who do are pretty convincing. “Think back over your life”, she said. “Next February you will be 60, and, because you are a dragon, whose year comes round every 12, 2012 will be your greatest”.

Yeah, right!, I thought, thinking of the chances of winning the lottery, global warming having some effect on the Northumbrian weather, or Mike Ashley spending a bob or two from his £35million windfall on a decent replacement for Andy Carroll.

But she insisted: “Think back to each of your past five dragon years”. So I did. 1964 was my best year at school. I was optimistic and innocent: I hadn’t yet been exposed to the perils of puberty and girls. 12 years on, in 1976, I became the youngest director in the BBC – I never felt so excited or confident in all my time there. 12 years later, in 1988, after quite a struggle to gain traction, my new production company got an enormous commission that raised us to the next level. It wasn’t a completely smooth ride after that but, exactly 12 years later I sold the company and paid off my mortgage.

That was in 2000. Professionally, the last few years have been, to say the least, tortuous, and frustrating. I’m grateful that the rabbit will bring us all tranquility. But, if my friend is correct, I can’t wait for it to be turned into a nice tasty pie and be replaced by the roar of the dragon. I have another mortgage to pay off now: roll on February 2012.

Entrance Of The Haggis

2011-01-30T12:46:00.000-08:00

The other evening I dined next to a jolly lady who told me that this year’s Christmas present from her husband had been two live ducks.

He’d wrapped them up in a big box with a bow, and she was absolutely delighted when they burst out of the wrapping paper and quacked around the sitting room, waddling through the piles of presents. She said the terrible mess they made on the carpet added to the Christmas atmosphere. When they started attacking the tinsel on the tree, she scooped them up and put them in the bath, where they lived happily for a week until the husband had chipped off enough ice in the garden to build them a pond.

I think this sort of British eccentricity should be lauded. During the awful winter, the long haul to the January pay cheque and the tax return deadline (midnight on Monday, in case you’d forgotten), any kind of levity is to be welcomed. That’s why Jo and I were delighted to receive the invitation to our local Burns Night supper – which is where we met duck lady and her equally delightful husband. He organises the local sheep racing.

“So what exactly are we celebrating?” asked Jo, puzzled by the mixture of tweeds and tartan. I think she regretted wearing her denim miniskirt. Being American, she had already confused the occasion with Guy Fawkes night – I guess it was the Burns in the title that made her assume it was something to do with bonfires. I told her it was to honour a Scottish poet called Rabbie – and, no, he wasn’t Jewish.

“But we’re in England,” she pointed out. “Why are we celebrating some deceased Scot whose poetry nobody can even understand?”

I took a deep breath. There was no better response than the truth: in these ghastly, straightened, freezing times we seize any excuse for a party. Just then the haggis arrived, and was ceremoniously piped, addressed and knifed to death. “You guys are all quite mad”, she said, laughing at the absurdity.

Garnished with neeps and tatties, the haggis reached our table. “This reminds me of something”, she said, warily sniffing at the grey mound on her plate. “Don’t even think about it”, I cautioned. “Just pour the whisky on top and think of hamburgers”. Finally she leant over and whispered: “I’ve got it. You know that tinned dog food we give Truffle and Mabel when they’ve been ill?” My wife has a wonderful sense of smell.

The ceilidh was a riot. We tried The Gay Gordons ("Gordon was Rabbi Burns’ effeminate brother", I lied), The Dashing White Sergeant ("Gordon’s special friend") and Strip The Willow ("an ancient fertility dance, often performed naked"). Jo knew I was winding her up, but she took it all in good spirit: once we’d overcome our initial reserve, we were swirling along with the rest of them.

There are three types of dancer: the expert, the petrified novice, and the haven’t-a-clue-but-let’s-go-for-it-anyway. The first group smile confidently as they swish from partner to partner; the beginners have brows creased with concentration and mouth the caller’s instructions as they desperately try to master the pattern before the music stops; and then there are the flying villagers: real weapons of mass destruction in a tiny hall. While duck lady hurled herself like a dervish round the dance floor, Jo and I did a stately promenade: “back-two-three-four, twirl-two – oops, no – under the arch. Sorry everyone!” We were truly terrible. But it was also the most glorious fun.

There were toasts to the Queen and speeches to the guests. A man in a bow tie told a very long joke about a parrot in a brothel. Or was it a duck? Who knows? By then we’d all had far too many drams to care.

The Forgetory - Part 2

2011-01-23T15:23:00.000-08:00

In my earlier post I staked my claim to the title of Britain’s Most Absent-Minded. As if to confirm my candidacy, driving back from delivering my speech to the media conference in Manchester, I managed to reach Gateshead before realising that I had left behind my briefcase, laptop, Blackberry, and wallet, which contained all my credit cards and cash.

Good old DHL: how would missing goods ever get back home without them? When I worked in London, there was a shelf kept at the Groucho Club for my lost items and my assistant used to pop in on her way to work to retrieve them. How I managed to produce primetime network series and run a multi-million pound business is beyond comprehension. I think it’s called having a good support system. And a wife.

On arriving home, I discovered that Jo had gone out and bought a new mattress for our bed. It's made of memory foam: perhaps she thinks it will somehow impregnate my brain.

And Now The Good News

2011-01-21T15:29:00.000-08:00

The conference in Salford, near Manchester, was about the future of regional broadcasting. An appropriately timed event, for on Wednesday our esteemed, if sometimes mispronounced, Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt announced his proposals for local TV. A new network, with a dozen or more stations located in major cities opting out for two hours a day: not quite the vision in the Conservative election manifesto, of 80 multi-media city stations, but it’s better than no local coverage at all. Or is it?

“News 3” should have gone on air a few days ago: supplying not only ITV’s regional news here in the North East, but England’s first totally integrated local news operation. The journalists on our regional daily newspapers, The Journal and the Evening Chronicle, would have worked alongside experienced television colleagues on an integrated, layered, truly local news operation in print, radio, television and online.

Sadly we’ll never know if our Independently Financed News Consortium, of which I was proud to have been part, would have been successful. It was a groundbreaking concept but, because it was subsidised by the BBC licence fee, Mr Hunt cancelled it.

Now he’s proposing Channel Six, a network dedicated to the provision of local news and content – and subsidised by the BBC licence fee. Independent companies based in a dozen regional cities, using a central hub of network programming, with a couple of hours of local opt-outs? Sounds familiar? Of course: it’s exactly what your local ITV station was set up to be.

I remember Tyne Tees Television when it launched on Channel 8, fifty two years ago this month: the medley of local folk songs which started the broadcasting day, from Bobby Shafto to the Blaydon Races; “Wacky Jacky” Haig in the One O’Clock Show; those terrible local shopping commercials; and Tom Coyne on the well resourced local news.

The first seeds of destruction of ITV as a regional provider were sown in 1991 by the Conservative government. Now that demolition is complete, how ironic it is that a Conservative minister is trying to resurrect a similar model. Will it work? Well there’s a big difference this time: there’s no money.

The teams of professional journalists will be supplemented, or supplanted, by enthusiastic amateurs – community producers, without training in scriptwriting skills, the basic principles of libel, or even the mystic art of how to entertain mass audiences. The cost of a libel writ, or defending a referral to Ofcom, is huge, yet the stations’ budgets will be minuscule: a fraction of what the broadcasters currently spend on their regional news. And they expect us to watch, or log in, simply because it’s local? I think not.

Britain is proud of quality journalism, and this takes training, resources and commitment. Quality is derived from the skills of many lifetimes of professional experience and that doesn’t come cheap. However local Channel 6 aims to be, it will fail unless it gets the proper funding our journalists and communities deserve.

The Forgetory

2011-01-17T00:55:00.000-08:00

This New Year my resolution lasted about an hour and a half. That’s not untypical of me, but this time I forgot it almost as soon as I made it.

You see, my avowed goal for 2011, in order to be more attentive to my darling wife, was to remember what she says and what I’m doing from one minute to the next. Far tougher than dieting, or giving up cigarettes, or any similar run-of-the-mill seasonal torture: this is well-nigh impossible.

Of course I could blame it on my ageing frame – don’t older people have trouble remembering their car keys and glasses? For me, it’s an art form. I don’t just walk round the entire house looking for something, then completely forget what it is I am searching for. I have raised the missing item game to a higher level.

By the time I’ve been scouring the house for ten minutes, I will be carrying an armful of other things that have distracted me en route. Eventually I sit down and wait. Jo, who remembers everything I forget, which is everything, will find me and say: “Izzy is still waiting for her shoes,” and I will gaze down at the assorted screwdrivers, lightbulbs, unopened bank statements and gardening magazines which have accumulated in my lap. Meanwhile I will have left cupboard doors ajar, fridges wide open, taps running, and gas burners smoking on the stove: I am a walking “forgetory” as my Mum used to call me.

And I know it’s not old age that’s at fault, for it’s happened since – oh, I can’t remember. Certainly since I realised, as a young director, that I possessed this gnat-like memory. It was something I hid from my colleagues.

I was known for my live directing skills. My BBC general election coverage was the biggest live show ever made: my control room had monitors fed with images from 250 separate cameras all over the country. I ran the show like a mad conductor – hair flying and screaming: coming to you, Oldham North, standby Mrs Thatcher, 2 minutes to Downing Street, and so on. That was easy: it was all happening in front of me, and the adrenalin helped me balance a thousand plates in the air. But if the plates had to land in a predetermined order, I was useless.

When I was directing dance programmes I realized I wasn’t really up to it. “5-6-7-8”: how could they always remember to jetée on the 5 and land on the 7? I sat next to the choreographer with reams of paper and little diagrams – tiny arrows showing where they went and when they jumped. I won all the international awards for my directing, but it was down to bravado and a good vision mixer: my brain was always one step behind.

But now it’s driving Jo mad. She calls it “selective memory”, combined with the selective hearing that afflicts all married men, of course. I deny it, and point to the fact that I am invited by large organisations to make long, witty after-dinner speeches and never seem to forget my lines. “So why did you forget to buy the yoghurt, then?”

On Tuesday (or is it Wednesday, I forget?) I have to speak to hundreds of delegates on the future of the BBC. I know exactly what I’m going to say: scrap the current channels and come up with a new blueprint; make the average age of commissioners reflect the average age of the country; and make the output come from the whole of Britain, not just London. It will last exactly fifteen minutes and I could recite every word. Yet there’ll be no script, just four key words written on the back of card the size of a train ticket.

I should be fine – if I’ve remembered to bring my glasses.

Travels with Izzy - Part Three: Home in Style

2011-01-10T00:50:00.000-08:00

I’m pleased that on Wednesday BBC2 launches a series that aims to improve the quality of service in Britain’s restaurants. It’s about time standards were raised, not only in catering, but throughout our leisure and travel industries. Isn’t it ironic, though, that the host of the imaginatively titled “Service”, Michel Roux Jnr, is a native of the country with the most aloof, indifferent, and unenthusiastic waiters in the world?

I’m sure the staff in Le Gavroche are terribly polite, can polish cutlery to a sparkle and open silver domes in perfect synchronicity, but there are only two places where I’ve consistently found people on the other side of the menu who genuinely care about their customers: Los Angeles and the north east of England.

Sure, with some exceptions, waiters in our part of the world have precious little training in the niceties of restaurant etiquette – many don’t know which side to set a wine glass – but at least you’ll be greeted with a genuine smile, nothing will be too much trouble and, even though you’ll be interrogated about your life story before you’ve been offered a bread roll, you’ll leave with a warm glow and an exhortation to have a nice day. In LA they do the same, but expect a 20 percent tip in return.

Happily, I divide most of my time between these two locations, so when I tell you that this week I experienced the ultimate in good service, I write with some authority. It happened not in a restaurant, but at the British Airways check-in desk at Los Angeles airport.

It started when Izzy dropped her dummy. It normally takes her about 45 seconds to progress from “uh-oh”, via a shriek of “Binky!”, to a full scale eruption. However, no sooner had the offending item – which we only use for emergencies like travelling in public – hit the terminal floor, than a wonderful institution called Philip Williams, who has run BA’s customer service operation there for more than thirty years, leapt across the baggage conveyor, snatched it up and rushed off to wash it in the staff restroom. We gazed at his departing form in shock: Philip has looked after every celebrity on the planet as they pass through his exclusive VIP lounge – now he was washing our child’s dummy.

“How old is Izzy?”, he enquired, having restored clean binky to grateful mouth. When we revealed that she turned two later that very night, he frowned and studied his computer. We had planned our itinerary carefully: we wanted to stay in the sun as long as possible – sorry, England, but this weather is beyond a joke – however children can only travel on their parents’ laps till their second birthday. So the cost of staying just one extra day would have been a first class ticket for her: more than $8,000. Oh, and before I’m accused of being a secret banker, you should know that our own flights were virtually free, courtesy of some soon-to-expire air miles. Fifty thousand dollars worth of tickets for the cost of one economy return. We had to use them or lose them, so we were going home in style.

“In English time, she’s already 2 years old”, Philip calculated, “so of course she must have her own seat”. With a few dexterous taps on the computer, he rearranged the first class cabin, moved the celebrities and businessmen to the back, and, free of charge, created a private nursery for us at the front of the plane. To be honest, I think Philip realised that the consequence of Izzy not having her own seat would have been far worse for the other passengers. Nobody would have got much sleep with Izzy trying to squirm her way off our laps for ten hours.

After a couple of hours playing on the floor, Izzy fell fast asleep in her first class bed, complete with goose down duvet and pillow, clutching her favourite toy Baa-Bo. It’s an absurdly cute sheep made by Cheeky Moo, a tiny family business in Boldon Colliery. Which, by coincidence, is just a few miles from Birtley: birthplace of the wonderful Philip Williams.

I mean, with service skills like his, where else could he have come from but the north east?

Finger Food

2011-01-02T09:06:00.000-08:00

It was the veal stock that started it: that and my hangover from the night before. In a bleary 6am haze the morning before Christmas, my finger got confused with the carrot I was trying to slice. Luckily veal and human blood taste pretty similar when they’ve been simmering together for a few hours.

Los Angeles brings out the chef in me, which is surprising, because most people here see little point in cooking. The choice of restaurants makes it a foodie paradise: from the heavenly In-N-Out burgers to the incredible range of steaks, sushi, Italian and Mexican. I guess that’s why many of our friends’ magnificent designer kitchens house brand new, unused utensils. Why bother to cook when you can sample the entire world’s cuisine just down the road?

Izzy's diet has now been enhanced with chocolate milk, green and pink yoghurt, pancakes with Oreos and an overwhelming range of what she calls "coo-keys".

However, for Christmas lunch I had to make an effort. And because Gelsons, America’s equivalent of Waitrose, sells veal bones, I had the chance to prepare something I can rarely serve back home: a proper jus to go with the roast duck a l'orange, made with fresh duck stock combined with that most important weapon in the cook's arsenal - rich, dark, almost glutenous veal stock.

I’ve never understood why in Northumberland, which otherwise has a fine selection of homegrown ingredients, it’s almost impossible to get hold of veal. Butchers look at me with disbelief when I request it, yet I defy anyone to make a rich reduction, exploding with meaty flavour, without home-made stock derived from roasting then simmering fresh veal knuckles for hours so that the marrowfat oozes out and the kitchen fills with meaty vapour. Don’t believe Marco Pierre White in those Knorr ads: his veal stock, which appears in most of his classic recipes, takes a whole 12 hours to make and the aroma is more penetrating than the rarest perfume.

Knorr chicken stock cubes (or "bouillon", as they call them over here) taste of what they are: salt mostly, then a nutritious addition of palm oil, monosodium glutamate, hydrolyzed corn protein, hydrogenated beef fat and soybean oil, a sprinkling of sugar and, hidden way down the ingredients list, a little cooked chicken "meat". That’s why I got up at dawn to start the vegetable chopping: but I hadn’t reckoned on the sharpness of the pristine knives in the kitchen drawer.

The queue for the emergency clinic stretched out the door. Holding my middle finger in the air, in case the wound should reopen and drip blood on the carpet, I felt like an imposter.

“Look”, I protested to Jo, “it says Urgent Care on the door. I just have a cut finger: let’s buy some more Band Aid and go home.”

“No way”, she said, “I’m fed up with mopping up blood all over the house.”

The emergency room was a bit like a British NHS Walk-In Centre – except there’s a hefty bill before you walk out again. I surveyed my fellow patients. One woman clutched a tissue tightly in her palm: that must be another cut hand, I thought to myself, secretly hoping my own cut was deeper. The man next to me was using a tissue to wipe a tear from his eyes: he must be in some pain, I surmised, though I couldn’t detect the source. Then a man in his sixties shuffled in, wearing open toed sandals.

“Write your previous ailments here,” instructed the receptionist, handing him a form. “Not enough room on the page,” he moaned, then coughed through a catalogue of illnesses that would fill a medical journal. I looked at my bandaged finger and felt a complete wuss. It wasn’t even bleeding anymore, so I gave it a little squeeze to restore the flow. I didn’t want the doctor to accuse me of time-wasting, even if his wasted time was paid for.

In fact, he seemed genuinely pleased to see me, called my cut a "laceration" and prescribed four stitches and a tetanus jab.

“I’m glad you’ve come”, he said, “You’re my first urgent case this morning.” What about the full waiting room?

“All colds and flu”, he said, “there’s nothing I can do for any of them, but, as they all have insurance, they can’t stay away. They think they’re dying, but we give them paracetamol and send them home. Now, about those stitches?”

With that he popped his needle directly into my open wound. I shot out of the chair.

“Sorry, that anaesthetic has taken a while to reach the tip”, he said. “Your fingers are as big as…”

“Carrots?” I suggested, through the pain.

[For those interested in real food, or who have more time than sense, here's my recipe for Christmas Duck for 8 people. Allow 2 days to make, and make sure you have loads of pans, including two stock pots, and adequate medical insurance]

Roast 5lbs veal bones in a little oil for an hour or so. In a separate roasting pan roast two chopped duck carcasses. They should brown but not burn. Pop them into two separate stockpots and cover with cold water. Bring to a simmer, skimming regularly with a skimmer. If you don't have one, go and buy one. Scum and stock don't go together.

Chop a pile of carrots (careful - they look like orange fingers), celery and onion. Soften them with oil in a pan (again, don't burn them, but make sure they are properly soft), then stir a big glug of tomato paste. Cook for a couple of minutes, then divide and pour into the simmering stockpots. Keep skimming.

In a fourth pan, put a huge pile of sliced button mushrooms and colour them with some oil. Then pour in a quarter of a bottle of Madeira and reduce fast till the mushrooms have reduced down to a delicious sticky pulp. Pour into the veal stockpot (not the duck one). Add 2 bayleaves and a sprig of fresh thyme to each pot.

At this point you need to make sure both stockpots are at a simmer, not boiling. Boiling makes the stock cloudy. Leave for at least 9 hours, preferably 12. Use this time to go to the emergency room if necessary.

Neighbours will now begin to start coming round inviting themselves for lunch. The smell will have stretched at least two blocks. You're one day away from duck heaven.

Strain both stocks into separate pans. Reduce both by half. Cool and store overnight in a fridge. They'll keep for a few days if you want.

On Christmas morning warm the stocks up (they'll have congealed nicely in the fridge) and prepare the ducks. One duck serves only two people, so I used four for our Christmas lunch - we had some vegetarians too, so I compounded the mess by pan frying some Atlantic salmon steaks and popping them on a bed of sweet roasted peppers: they looked very festive with fresh homemade mayonnaise on top.

Salt and pepper the ducks inside and out and stuff them with orange and lemon wedges: tie them up with string. Put them in a low oven - around 250 degrees Fahrenheit for just 25 minutes. Then take them out and let them settle breast side down till you're ready to roast - about 2 hours before you want to eat (ducks take about one hour and a quarter at 350 degrees Fahrenheit, then they need to settle down for about 45 minutes - though you can keep them warm for a couple of hours if necessary - use the duck fat from the bottom of the pan to roast your potatoes).

As the ducks roast, you can finish your sauces:

Combine half the veal stock with all the duck stock and reduce down together. Take the remaining veal stock and measure it. Then, in another pan, pour in some red wine, preferably Shiraz, with some sliced shallot - you need one quarter of the volume of the remaining veal stock. Reduce the wine till it goes a bit syrupy - it will smell sweet - then strain, and pour into the veal stock. Reduce it down very slowly till it turns into a wonderful black faux-demi-glace jus. That's sauce number one finished - it goes round the edge of the plate and makes your guests cry with joy and admiration, and beautifully complements the orange sauce which you haven't finished yet.

Carry on reducing the duck/veal stock combination till there's about 450ml left - that's what you need for 8 people. Meanwhile, in yet another pan, make some orange zest confit: you make a syrup (sugar and water boiled together), then add strips of orange zest. Cook gently with the lid on till it all goes sticky, then cool and strain. This stuff keeps for ages in the fridge, but you'll be throwing it into the duck sauce at the last moment.

When the ducks are cooked, take them out of the roasting pan, pour all the oil into another pan for the roast potatoes (par-boil them for just a couple of minutes first, then fluff them up in a saucepan covered with a colander, add salt and pepper, and make sure they're coated with the duck fat, cook at 425 degrees till brown and caramelized all over), and finish the sauce.

Pour a large glass of Grand Marnier into the hot pan, and stir up all the sticky black duck stuff. Put the pan on the stove and boil up the Grand Marnier for a few seconds to remove the alcohol. Strain into the duck stock. You won't believe the flavour, but you haven't quite finished yet. The sauce will be glutenous meaty (that's the veal stock) and gamey (duck) and already taste like oranges, even though you only add orange juice, lemon juice and the confited orange zest at the last moment.

Pour over the carved duck and wait for wild applause.

I served mine with sprouts (as it was Christmas, but caramelized with butter and a few capers thrown in for interest), roast potatoes and mustard mash (Colmans, cream and butter!), crispy roast parsnips to remind me of my vegetable garden, and the best wine my brother-in-law could afford. Friends brought yummy homemade pies for dessert and the whole meal was rounded off with a sound sleep during the American Football.

Travels with Izzy - Part Two: Christmas Is Cancelled

2010-12-18T14:08:00.000-08:00

So that’s Izzy’s childhood fantasy blown. There’s no way she’ll ever dream of sleighbells and reindeer now – she’ll be hiding under the covers every Christmas Eve praying that Santa is just a bad dream.

It’s all the fault of an absurdly smart shopping mall we visited in Newport Beach, an hour south of Los Angeles. They have the tallest Christmas tree in America, a 100 foot giant with over 17,000 ornaments and lights. Beneath it lies Santa’s Village: in fact, it’s just a little Swiss mountain hut, but I guess to a two-year-old it could be a village and it was Izzy’s first chance to meet Santa.

There was no queue at all, quite astonishing for a large mall a week before Christmas. The recession has hit America hard: department stores were advertising sales, restaurants were half empty and bored assistants were chatting to boyfriends on cellphones. We walked up to the mountain hut and peeped inside. There, sitting silently in a huge cream wing chair, was Santa.

I know a 58-year-old isn’t supposed to believe in this stuff, but I’ve never seen a less fake Father Christmas. He had real white whiskers and his eyes twinkled as he stared at us. He didn’t speak or move. He was absolutely, overwhelmingly terrifying.

There were three other people in the room: a bedraggled mother was trying to coax her tearful daughter to have her picture taken by Santa’s official photographer, who had flown down specially from the North Pole with offers of a full Rudolph digital package for $47.95 or maybe just a Prancer ($17.95 for a couple of prints). The kid was having none of it. Older than Izzy by at least a year, the more her mother reasoned with her, bribing with cookies and promises of gifts to come, the less keen she became. Eventually Mom pointed at us: “Look, that little girl isn’t scared – watch her go sit on Santie’s lap”. We had to save the day.

I confidently prised Izzy from her comfy pushchair, sprinkled with chocolate brownie crumbs, and carried her towards the monster. It looked at us and raised one bushy eyebrow. “Good luck, mate,” I said to him jovially, then paused. Aren’t parents supposed to address Santa with more respect? Maybe I should have given a little bow? This was all too casual.

He didn’t react at all, grey eyes piercing through white eyebrows. No “Ho-Ho-Ho, and what do you want for Christmas, little girl?” The beard bore no sign of join or adhesive, and the round face attached to it looked a thousand years old. He looked like a man who’d been glued to his seat since Thanksgiving, despite repeated calls to his agent that he should be back on some nice Hollywood film set.

“Izzy, this is Santa”, I said more slowly, “ and you’re going to see quite a lot of him in your life.” Then I asked, “Should I put her on your lap?”

I stopped myself. Oh God, perhaps they aren’t allowed to do that anymore. I didn’t want to get Santa arrested for indecency. Santa’s right hand, resting on his giant thigh, twitched a weary finger towards his knee.

As I handed her over, Izzy’s eyes opened in surprise. Then she turned and looked at me as if I was completely mad.
The mouth opened, the eyes welled up, and five seconds later a scream blew the doors off Santa’s Village shattering several baubles on the giant Christmas tree. If looks could speak, it would have been “You’re Kidding Me – Get Me Off This Man Right Now!”

“Oh my goodness”, said the photographer through the din. “Told you so”, wailed the three-year-old to her Mom. “Maybe next year”, I apologized to Santa. “Maybe not”, I thought I heard him mutter through the beard.

Happy Christmas, everyone.

Travels with Izzy - Part One

2010-12-12T06:38:00.000-08:00

The flight attendant was trying to smile and chose her words very carefully: “She’s a very energetic child, isn’t she?”. British Airways staff are trained to be polite.

Izzy was giggling ecstatically as she ran up and down the aisles of the jumbo jet. We were 6 hours into the flight and only halfway to LA. We’d tried reasoning, remonstrating, restraining. Izzy, two years old next month, gave us an ultimatum: we could have either running or screaming. We opted for the running, even if it meant we had to dash behind her, grabbing the belt of her jeans when she threatened to leap on top of one of the slumbering geriatrics, gently snoring away their free champagne.

Sienna Miller was next door in First Class. As Izzy ran towards the curtain, I yanked her back to avoid a celebrity incident.

There are two types of air passengers: those who find an energetic two-year-old cute, and normal people. These were the ones who were looking out of the window, gazing down at the snows of Greenland and somehow wishing the annoying kid would end up with the reindeer 35,000 feet below.

Eventually Izzy discovered the stairs to the upper deck. On the 24th ascent the upper deck stewardess took pity on us. She took the child on a tour of the entire plane, so tiring her out that Izzy finally slept until the lights of Las Vegas signaled our descent.

I used to think I was experienced at international travel. As a high-flying executive, I was occasionally allowed to go first class. I once slept next to Prince Edward – we looked very sweet together, side by side in our blue British Airways pyjamas.

Although I crossed the Atlantic every two weeks, I could never disguise the thrill when they brought round the champagne: I’ve never been able to turn down a free meal. As a result I still say yes to everything: wine, chicken curry, raspberry mousse, the dainty sandwiches and the chocolate bars. Consequently I tend to fall sleep whenever I’m not eating or drinking. It infuriates Jo, who says she may as well be travelling alone.

Not so yesterday. There was scarcely time to butter a bread roll, let alone take a nap. Travelling with a child is the most exhausting experience. No wonder the seriously rich travel alone up front, dumping their offspring with nannies in the back.

I do want to say a personal thank you to two lovely people called Angela and James, who work for Swissport at Newcastle Airport. Without them, we wouldn’t be in 75 degree LA, but stuck in melting Northumberland. They avoided a potential disaster at check-in. I’d booked our tickets many months ago, long before we decided to legitimize Jo by changing her American passport into her married name. So Mrs Gutteridge arrived at the airport bearing Miss Pine’s ticket. Computer said no way, and meant it.

Normally it takes hours or days to organize a name change. The lovely Angela did it in a few fraught minutes and James organised for us to be transported straight to the gate just as it was closing. I can’t tell you how grateful the passengers on flight BA279 must have been that they succeeded in getting us there on time, thereby allowing Izzy to join them on their flight yesterday morning.

I also feel I should issue a dire warning to Sienna Miller, and any other celebrities who may have inadvertently booked themselves on the same plane as us back to London. Having amassed a load of soon-to-expire air miles, I’ve decided to blow the lot on first class tickets for our return. It’ll be a rare treat for us, but I suspect less pleasurable for anybody who’s forked out the full price of £7,000 per ticket. So, however famous you are, I advise you grit your teeth and downgrade to economy. That is, unless you enjoy listening to The Wheels On The Bus for eleven solid hours.

Snow Joke

2010-12-05T08:37:00.000-08:00

That’s quite enough, thank you; it’s beyond a joke now.

I originally thought this cold snap (what a misnomer – if a snap is what you find in a cracker, this is small nuclear explosion) was Mother Nature’s little taunt at Patrick, our producer. As if to tempt fate, he’d written these opening lines for a film we were supposed to be shooting this week: “A little girl wanders into a dark, mysterious wood. It’s the end of autumn and the trees are still sprinkled with brown leaves. Running through a deep leafy carpet, she tries to catch them as they float gently to the ground.”

We thought we’d timed it perfectly: not too soon, so there’d be plenty of leaves, yet not too late or we’d risk the January snows. We found an ideal location, booked the crew, cranes, dollies and location catering and cast a 12-year-old girl from scores of hopeful candidates. What could possibly go wrong?

I passed our chosen wood yesterday morning on my way to the airport. Not a leaf to be seen: they’re all mulched away under the snowdrifts. Instead of the dry brown carpet, it now has a shiny white floor like a television studio. You could expect Harry Hill to emerge from behind the trees with a broad grin, a couple of dancing girls and a cheeky Happy Christmas.

We’ve postponed, of course. Patrick has rewritten: “A teenage girl wanders into a wood, carpeted with daffodils.” Sadly it doesn’t have quite the same resonance.

If this weather has affected one film project, I can’t begin to imagine how disastrous it’s been to other industries in the region. On Saturday night I braved the black ice to visit my favourite Newcastle restaurant, Rasa. It was nearly empty: absolutely unheard of for a place that serves by far the best Indian food outside London. Save for a couple of frozen buskers and some semi-naked hens, the Quayside was virtually deserted. If the northeast had a mayor, he’d have declared a state of emergency.

Yet, despite the problems, I’m amazed by how calmly we’ve taken it. Despite the most unpleasant weather in memory, everything has kind of worked. There’ve been no food shortages or panic buying, all our main roads have been kept remarkably clear, trains and planes have got us in and out, and neighbourliness has smiled its way through the crisis. Rasa even managed to get its spectacular kingfish flown in from Kerala.

Sure, we’ve had no post – our icy farm track would have swallowed up the postman’s little red van – but when I eventually made it to the sorting office, our postman had it all organized. He came out with a broad smile and a large box containing the mail for our hamlet, which I then distributed like Santa to the grateful community. This weather brings out the best in northerners, and the worst in our southern compatriots.

Judging by the national headlines, you’d have thought the world had ended when a smidgeon of snow finally fell on the south earlier in the week. The Transport Secretary ordered an enquiry into travel disruption: apparently London was late to work. Yesterday I flew south to see for myself. The sun was warm, the snow completely gone. Almost everyone was wearing designer Ugg boots as they lumbered down de-iced designer streets. People spoke of Kent and Northumberland as distant heathen lands.

I drove comfortably into Berkshire and Wiltshire: there were crashed cars on the M4 every few miles, yet there wasn’t enough snow on the ground to ice a Frappuccino. The woods were amazing, sprinkled with brown leaves and golden carpets of… Hang on a minute: perhaps we should relocate our movie down there?

Snowvember

2010-11-25T11:31:00.000-08:00

On Thursday afternoon I received a cheery phone call from the Mercedes dealership in town. The winter tyres I’d ordered weeks ago, in a quite untypical moment of advance planning, have finally arrived. Unfortunately I now can’t drive my car through the snow to have them fitted, as it doesn’t have winter tyres.

I’m resigned to leaving the wretched vehicle incarcerated in its white overcoat, like last year, until the first thaws of spring.

Enduring Northumbrian winters is like having children. The first is exciting, surprising and unbelievably beautiful. The second is just as attractive but, thanks to the experience you’ve gained from the first, rather more manageable. The third is, to be frank, just a bore and far too exhausting to enjoy: you just want it to do its thing and get to the next season as soon as possible.

This particular infant is about a month premature yet, far from being a meagre little weakling, is a big, bouncing avalanche. I can't remember the last time we had snow this early, certainly not to such an extreme degree. 8 inches landed on our drive on Wednesday night. It began falling shortly after I'd asked Jo to remind me to order some road salt from the builders' merchant. I guess they will have run out by now.

At first Izzy couldn't believe her wonderful new surroundings. She rushed round the garden kicking up white clouds and screaming "no!. no!" – she’s not very good at consonants yet. Now she's not so sure - after another ten inches dumped themselves on us last night, the snow is up to her waist.

The dogs are still excited, though I spend hours prising iceballs out of their ears. I've also been trying unsuccessfully to hack a path out for the oil lorry – we’re in danger of running out of fuel.

Meanwhile my Facebook wall is full of entries from excited friends in London swapping snowflake sightings. Their kids can’t wait to clean off their rusty toboggans and build snowmen: I just want to be able to drive to Waitrose without having to be dug out of a ditch by a tractor.

Within minutes of the first flakes’ arrival I demonstrated the typical demeanour of any Brit facing the first snows of winter: panic. Having to be in London for two important meetings, I watched the weather forecast with sinking heart and decided to fly down the night before. I knew I’d be OK, because I’d driven by the airport a couple of times and the snow wasn’t that deep.

Newcastle Airport responded by doing what airports do: closing down unexpectedly and telling its passengers nothing. So, having been summoned to the departure gate at the appointed hour, with a British Airways plane conveniently parked at the end of the jetty, we all sat down and waited to board. After an age somebody spotted that the plane in front of us was already full of passengers – it was the previous flight that had been waiting two hours for the runway to open. Our plane had apparently been circling patiently over our heads, but eventually gave up and landed in Teesside – neither plane flew anywhere that night.

Quite why the runway was shut on Wednesday afternoon remains a mystery – the weathermen had given us days of warning. I guess they must have been the wrong sort of snowflakes. It wasn’t a very good few days for Newcastle Airport as the following night a plane nearly skidded off the end of the runway. Maybe like me they’d forgotten to order their road salt. I took the train.

I felt sorry for the BBC Breakfast reporter the following morning. Sent out to report on the chaos up north, he parked his satellite truck by a busy roundabout and waited for cars to start spinning out of control. Every time they cut to him, instead of the carnage his journalistic instincts demanded, you could sense his disappointment when he could only film an orderly line of cars confidently steering through the slush. I guess they must all have had their winter tyres on.

Old Rockers and the Rockaholix

2010-11-21T17:32:00.000-08:00

Muddy Stardust doesn’t look like a traditional music teacher. With his wild hair and enormous sunglasses, he towers over his tiny charges, who listen rapt as he regales them with stories of wild times and roadies.

These are the Rockaholix, the youngest rock band in Los Angeles. Max is only 9, and can barely see over the top of his full size drum kit; the others, two girls and a boy, are just 11. They all want to be rock and roll stars and their parents have hired Muddy, who has played with bands like Burning Tree and Lost Angels, to help mold them into real musicians.

The tiny rockers have already played in famous L.A. music venues like House of Blues and The Roxy, have been interviewed on national radio and are now being courted by television companies. That’s why I’m in Hollywood, shooting a taster tape for a reality series with the band. The Rockaholix are auditioning for a new lead singer, and I’m filming a succession of nervous wannabes, who’ve been dragged along by ambitious, camera-clutching parents.

“She’s borderline tone-deaf,” says lead guitarist Edan, describing one 8-year-old candidate. Tiny Max screams with laughter and holds up a picture he’s drawn of someone barfing into a toilet. Simon Cowell couldn’t be more cutting. They rush over to their instruments and launch into an improvised song called “You Stink”: after listening to more than 60 candidates the kids are getting stir crazy.

Then Muddy brings in a friend, Slim Jim Phantom, drummer of the legendary Stray Cats. He’s a real celebrity: the Stray Cats started the rockabilly revival in the 1980s. Slim survived 8 years of marriage to Britt Ekland, with whom he has a son who’s also a drummer, and he owns the Cat Club on Sunset Boulevard.

Slim Jim watches little Max, who's exactly half his height, hammering out “Don’t Stop Believing”: he can’t work out how the left-handed child is managing to play so well on a right-handed drum kit. “It takes professional drummers years to learn how to be ambidextrous like that,” he marvels. Slim is left-handed too.

At the age of nearly 50, he looks just as trim and youthful as when we first met some 25 years ago. That was a night neither of us will forget: it was on a television show I directed called Blue Suede Shoes: A Rockabilly Session, which is revered by rock aficionados to this day.

Carl Perkins, the godfather of rockabilly, had attracted a lineup that included George Harrison, Ringo Starr (playing with George for the first time since the Beatles’ split), Eric Clapton, Dave Edmunds, Roseanne Cash and Slim Jim with his fellow Stray Cat Lee Rocker. It ended with an extended jam session in which Slim and Ringo played tambourines on each other’s heads – the DVD of the show still gets 5 stars on Amazon. That was the first programme I made with my newly formed company Mentorn: it was 1985, and I'd been hired by an American producer called Stephanie Bennett. Now here I am with another new production company, filming baby rockers at the very start of their careers.

Muddy introduces another friend: Tracii Guns, who founded Guns N’ Roses with Axl Rose, and now has the band L.A. Guns. With a skinful of tattoos and far more than a lifetime’s experience on the road, Tracii gently and patiently gives The Rockaholix an hour-long masterclass that any professional musician would envy. With his quiet temperament and amazing depth of knowledge, the band visibly improves as he teaches them.

Afterwards, over a chinese takeaway, the wild goateed glam guitarist tells me he has finally been tamed by fatherhood. Like me, he has a two-year old child who’s now the epicentre of his life. “That’s why I keep touring,” he said, “I need the money.” I can relate to that.

As a result, Tracii is shredding his way to Europe and comes to Newcastle at the beginning of December, performing with his L.A. Guns in the tiniest of bars.

I promised Tracii I’d be there. But first I have to find some ripped jeans and a biker jacket. Offers anyone?

Don't Poke The Queen

2010-11-07T12:11:00.000-08:00

Tomorrow morning I was rather hoping to give The Queen a little poke, but apparently she won’t let me. She won’t even let me be her friend. I’m not sure Her Majesty gets the point of Facebook, but at 8am she launches her very own page.

Just a few years behind the times (Facebook has been around since 2004, and now has 500 million regular users – one fourteenth of the population of the entire planet), I guess the “British Monarchy” page will be full of interesting press releases about what the royal family is doing and where it’s going next. It could soon match The Times’ Court Circular for excitement. It will allow you to leave a message on its royal “Wall”, but not grafitti, though I doubt the royal face will actually peruse it.

In fact there are already some Queen pages on Facebook. One has 5,700,000 followers, but it is for the rock band. Another, called simply The Queen, has just 14,000 supporters and is an unofficial fan club for our monarch. It lists the Queen’s interests as “hunting, fishing and being god blessed”.

I love some of the comments. David helpfully informs Her Majesty that “we’ve got loads of queens in Manchester” and Kenny offers discount rates for royalty “if ever you need a taxi around the Wye Valley”. I particularly like the lady who enquires if she has “a spare room as my son is moving to London with his work”, or Steve Wall’s rather desperate supplication: “Any chance you could get my wife beheaded?”

One young girl describes the Queen as “mint”; another asks if she plays Farmville, the virtual game played by one tenth of all Facebook users, where you run your own farm, feeding livestock and growing crops. I suspect Her Majesty has enough real farms of her own, though if Farmville installs a pheasant shoot, perhaps she could be persuaded to bag a few virtual brace.

When Mark Zuckerberg set it up from his Harvard bedroom, Facebook was a sort of private networking club for rich college students and it quickly spread to other exclusive universities. The idea was that you could add “friends” to enhance your social status: it was effectively a posh dating club.

Since then its function has scarcely changed. I can’t actually fill in most of my “profile” because the questions don’t really fit me. It asks if I’m “interested in Men or Women”. Being happily married, I have naturally ticked neither box, although being quite interested in almost everyone I meet is a consequence of being a journalist.

It then demands to know “what I’m looking for: Friendship, Dating, A Relationship, or Networking”. Unfortunately that list doesn’t include The Meaning Of Life, How to Pay Off My Mortgage, My Spectacles and Car Keys or any of the other things I’m usually seeking. As a result I tend to use Facebook to find out what my children have been doing and whom they’ve befriended: that makes pretty terrifying reading.

On Facebook you’re either a friend, or not: there are no degrees of fraternity. So my social network includes heads of television networks, old school friends and 12-year-old nephews. As a result, I never know quite what tone to take. This weekend I’d like to tell all my real friends about a particularly nice beef fillet I cooked for a friend’s birthday party; or Izzy’s ability to say “toes”, “pizza” and “bellybutton”. I don’t think either comment would interest the majority of those on my list, so instead I tried, Obama-like, to persuade them all to vote for my son’s entry in a short film festival.

But I’ve got a plan. I’m going to start the world’s first antisocial networking site for the over fifties. I’m calling it “FaceliftBook”. I wonder if I can persuade Her Majesty to join?

Trick or Treat

2010-10-31T17:04:00.000-07:00

Pity the poor children’s entertainer coping with thirty little darlings at last Friday’s village Halloween party. Dressed in evil black, he was showing off his magic skills, pulling snakes and cats out of hats. One small child had other ideas.

Izzy, who had absolutely no intention of sitting politely in a circle, toddled to centre stage and began throwing streams of gobbledygook questions at the man. He was trying to saw a child in half – he must have thought he’d chosen the wrong one. There was no stopping my daughter.

“Make her sit down”, shouted all the 3 year olds, while parents tutted disapproval. Izzy, who’d come as a cat princess with ghost ears, turned, giggled at her audience, then went over to the magician’s bag and pulled out all his tricks, spilling their secrets onto the village hall floor. It brought the house down. Through tears of laughter, Jo apologised to the assembled parents. “What can you do, she’s half-American, and she wants to get into the Hallowe’en spirit”. She pronounced it Holloween.

I don’t remember celebrating Hallowe’en as a child: I certainly never trick-or-treated. Was it a deprived childhood or am I right in thinking that we only became aware of it when we saw E.T.? I know it’s supposed to be an ancient custom, dating back to when our Celtic ancestors wore masks to ward off the dark spirits of approaching winter, but it only became a retail jamboree a few years ago. I couldn’t believe how seriously the Americans took the festival till I saw the huge bags of sweets we had to buy to placate the hordes of children in our Los Angeles neighbourhood.

Our Americanisation shows no bounds. We didn’t have school proms when I was young, and yet now all our teenagers are going to them, clad in hugely expensive outfits. I went to a prom when I was 17, but it was at the Royal Albert Hall and they played Mahler. I bet Izzy won’t be content with a cat costume when she goes to her first in just 16 years time.

Sadly one English tradition never crossed the Atlantic the other way. This morning Jo asked me, in all seriousness, to explain “your George Burns night.” I looked at her mystified. I wasn’t aware the comedian had been given his own festival. Mind you, lines like “Happiness is having a large, loving, caring, close-knit family in another city” are probably worth remembering.

“You mean Robert Burns, the haggis man. That’s not till January.”

“No, it’s this Friday, your Burns night thing.”

Finally I twigged: Guy Fawkes. Jo couldn’t understand why we’d blow the cost of a decent handbag on some brightly coloured cardboard which we then incinerate. Only a Brit can appreciate the fun of standing in a damp garden trying to light a roman candle, or waiting for a catherine wheel to fall off its stick or a rocket to whimper into the air with a single pathetic star. All to celebrate the defeat of a catholic gunpowder plot to bring down the protestant king.

Apparently Guy Fawkes Night is in decline. It’s partly due to our elfin safety laws, but mostly because we haven’t worked out how to commercialise it properly. We still think of bonfire night as a homespun community activity. Even though the fireworks we watch from behind our safety barriers are getting more spectacular, there are no commercial products for our children to buy, now we’ve stopped them buying fireworks.

That’s why for the last fortnight our retailers have been forcing Hallowe’en masks, ghoulish costumes and latex skeletons into our shopping baskets, and we’ve readily succumbed.

This Friday Izzy, probably still wearing her ghost ears, will go “weee!” at her first firework display. Sadly, it could well be one of her last.

Journey to Oblivion

2010-10-24T05:24:00.000-07:00

The car park of the Splash Landings Hotel at Alton Towers is a miserable place at 5am, especially if you’re in pyjamas and bare feet. A fire alarm is a great leveller. I was once evacuated from a conference hotel with the entire senior management of the BBC. You can tell a man’s character by his pyjamas: Greg Dyke’s were very colourful, I recall.

At Alton Towers we all shivered in the darkness, vainly scouring the hotel for signs of smoke that might justify our discomfort. There were hungover parents wearily herding children, peroxide Cheshire blondes cruelly exposed without their makeup, bulbous couples who’d evidently only come for the eat-all-you-can buffet, and me, doing paternal duty with my soon-to-be-13-year-old and his two friends. This was Sam’s birthday treat: two days of rollercoaster heaven.

Jo escaped the trip by claiming Izzy was too young. I know the real reason: that ghastly night we spent in Disneyland a few years back.

In fact, Alton Towers is much more parent-friendly. Sure, they play the theme from Captain Pugwash in the lift, which made me smile the first few times, then drove me to the stairs, but the bar, which looks like the tropical set from ZingZillas, serves a decent marghuerita, and the food is varied and edible.

But this wasn’t my treat: the real test was my son’s reaction. So, for anyone stuck for a plan this half-term, here is Sam’s unexpurgated, no-holds (but firmly strapped in, particularly when you’re going upside down) verdict. From what I can gather, he had a pretty good time.

The spooky girl in the advert looked like something from The Exorcist as she whispered “Thirteen!” - that’s what made me want my birthday weekend at Alton Towers.

The park is miles from the train station, and the signposts, pointing us in the opposite direction to our satnav, added an extra 20 minutes to the journey time (we tested it on the way back). Yet, aside from the patronizing Pirate Pete voice on the park’s monorail, Alton Towers is a 13-year-old’s dream.

Towering, spinning, looping structures erupt in the middle of a picturesque landscape of trees and a gothic 19th century house. So even for Dad it was mildly exciting as he got to talk to Alton Tower’s gardeners about orchids. He said it nearly justified the cost of the hotel rooms.

First, my two friends and I raced to Oblivion. Our hearts were pounding as we were hauled up the chain lift. At the top, there was a terrifying pause as we overlooked our fate, then we plunged 180 feet underground at 70 mph. Seven goes later we decided to try the other rides.

Air, a steel flying coaster, was more comfortable than thrilling, although the “flying” experience was one-of-a-kind. Nemesis, which practically had more G-force than a space shuttle launch, wasn’t particularly special; Rita Queen of Speed is a launch rollercoaster and although not as fast as Stealth, has a sharp, eye-popping bend at the beginning and unique soaring turns.

Eventually we reached the most disappointing attraction in the whole park - the new ride ‘Thirteen’. We needn’t have bothered. It was horribly slow and depressing. Sure, the horizontal drop was a first, yet it only felt about two feet. It was as though they had spent so much money on the little drop, that they forgot the rest of the ride, which consisted of a few turns and bunny hops.

We felt let down, but it didn’t spoil our day and we fell asleep as soon as we hit the pillow in our “starfish” room, only to be woken at 5 because someone set off the fire alarm. The next day our faces were a picture. Dad looked like he had a massive hangover. We still had a brilliant time and I definitely recommend it.

The Old Boys' Dinner

2010-10-17T17:20:00.000-07:00

The old boys, some in their eighties, nearly choked on their chocolate cake. 17-year-old school prefects, invited by their headmaster to last week’s annual reunion of old and ancient pupils, gasped in disbelief. Meanwhile the rest of us stroked our black ties and stared down at our wineglasses in embarrassment. Could this man get any worse?

The former pupil turned entrepreneur, who had built an empire out of repairing the nation’s drains and plumbing, was crowning an after-dinner speech of relentless arrogance with a story of such breathtaking vulgarity, I couldn’t begin to hint at its substance, other than it involved an act of intimacy and a girl in a wheelchair. It was so horrendously inappropriate that one group of distinguished north east professionals, all hardened men of the world, stormed out in disgust. It was all quite scandalous and unprecedented, but at least it gave us plenty to gossip about over coffee. There’s an art to giving after dinner speeches and clearly a knowledge of emergency plumbing, even if it buys you your own helicopter, isn’t a much of a qualification.

School reunions generate mixed emotions. I went to my first a full 30 years after I’d left the institution and still found it daunting to push open the big oak doors of the main entrance – a gateway that had always been strictly reserved for teachers and governors. Inside, the massive pillared school hall, with its towering organ pipes and creaking pews where we’d crushed together during morning assembly, the smell of the wooden floors and the tall lockers around the walls, had stimulated feelings of both nostalgia and fear. The lockers from where the plumbing entrepreneur boasted he’d started his career by converting one into a sweet shop and sold overpriced Mars bars to fellow pupils bored with school meals, stood beneath an engraved roll of honour that ran the length of the hall. This was a list of boys who had achieved the only goal the school deemed worthy of honouring: a scholarship to Oxford or Cambridge. They were the elite prizewinners in a nearsighted educational system that believed that only Oxbridge mattered, and anywhere else was merely second-class.

Neither the entrepreneur nor I were on that list - we both went to York. But nowadays the function and status of universities have changed beyond recognition, and so too must the focus of our secondary schools. At last week’s dinner, there was a senior prefect at my table who told me he was hoping to go to Oxford to read English Literature. Very commendable: and after that? He wanted a job in television.

I felt bad about putting him straight, but felt obliged to tell him that, despite the prospect of joining the elite band of heroes around the school hall (if indeed they are still carving names in the wood), and possibly learning the art of after-dinner speaking, if he really wanted a career in media, he should instead head off to Bournemouth, which has a first rate media school. Even an Oxford degree would be poor competition against the smart showreels of graduates who will have already have acquired the skills of editing, shooting and scriptwriting that our demanding industry requires. We like people who arrive ready equipped to offer cheap, trained labour. The days of extended training courses on the job are long gone.

In our day a university degree was merely the next rung above A Levels before we were thrown out into the real world to choose a career. Sure, there's a lot to be said for the contacts and bonhomie to be derived from a few years at our finest academic institutions, but nowadays there's a more important consideration: employment. And now, thanks to student loans, the choice of university course is something all our children must consider much earlier, particularly as they, not us, are being asked to pay for it. As the customer, not pupil, they’ll demand value for money in the form of a guaranteed job, not a piece of paper with a grade or a fond memory of the student bar. This week’s cuts in subsidy signal a turning point not just for universities but for our entire education system. The old school will never be the same again.

Happiness is a New Pair of Ears

2010-10-10T12:49:00.000-07:00

Most of rural Northumberland isn’t on the map. While the rest of the UK is marked green or dark blue, where I live is just a white void. Perhaps nobody round here has an iPhone, or maybe we’re just too happy to care, but so far my part of the world has yet to appear on Mappiness, the latest online phenomenon.

It’s a project being run by two jolly academics from the London School of Economics with (judging by the profiles on their website) rather irritatingly smiley faces. They look like happy-clappy christian converts, the kind that you want to argue with just to wipe a frown across their annoyingly self-righteous foreheads. Their mission is to find out how happy we all are.

They’re measuring the nation’s mood swings on something they call a hedonimeter. They expected 3,000 people to sign up, but there must be so many iPhone addicts bored with life, 20,000 downloaded the “app” in the first three weeks. Once you’re happily apped up, your phone beeps two or three times a day and asks you how you’re feeling, what you’re doing and whom you’re with. You’re then invited to upload a photo of where you are.

So far, it seems people in Dorset and Arbroath are the happiest, City bankers are miserable, and people in Northumberland don’t exist. It pops your information into its database, and draws you a flowchart of just how miserable you have been since you joined.

In the last 24 hours, I found just five people from Tyneside on the map, all of whom had proclaimed themselves very happy indeed by uploading blurry photographs of half empty beerglasses in garishly lit bars. So I guess Saturday night was a success, then. There was also a single photo of a public loo in Gosforth with the caption “extremely happy” – I guess this euphoria was caused by relief at finding one open at 3am after a night in the Bigg Market (not that people in the Bigg Market normally bother with such niceties).

Mappiness was set up to monitor how people’s feelings are affected by their environment. Are people less happy when they’re surrounded by pollution, loud noise and bad body odour? Not the sort of question you might think you’d need a research grant to answer, but I suppose universities have to justify the impending hike in tuition fees.

Already this vital scientific investigation has discovered that, shock horror, people are happier at the weekends (apparently Sunday lunchtime is quite a happy moment, presumably just after the hair of the dog that lifts you out of your hangover and before the miserable realisation that it’ll be Monday tomorrow), whereas Tuesday is the pits (because there’s so much of the working week still to go, I would hazard – but then I’m not an academic, so we must await publication of the official findings in a couple of years’ time).

I reckon my own personal happiness has nothing to do with my environment and everything to do with the mood of people who may or may not want to buy my television programme ideas. Right now there’s a bloke in Los Angeles called Simon who’s trying to decide whether or not to give me a series. I’d love to have a hedonimeter on him, so that I could judge exactly when to make my final pitch. Catch him in a bad mood, or on a Tuesday, and we’re sunk. Get him just after lunch on Sunday and I reckon we’re in.

In the meantime, my wife does have an iPhone, which I’ve just borrowed to take photographs of Izzy giggling hysterically while wearing some absurd comedy ears she found in a drawer.

Now I don’t need an academic with a hedonimeter to tell me that these are pictures of true happiness.

And The Winner Is...

2010-10-03T07:13:00.000-07:00

The result was too close to call: an entire nation held its breath. By now just two were in contention, and it could have gone either way. As the winner was announced, the audience erupted and the finalists embraced, one triumphant, the other smiling in carefully rehearsed generosity.

The victor gave a noble speech, complimenting the opponent, who, despite the fixed grin, could not conceal a look of disappointment across the eyes. Then there was a pause. “Oh my God, I don’t know what to say right now. I’m feeling a bit sick about this.”

Not half as sick as the production company making Australia’s Next Top Model must have felt this week: they had announced the wrong winner. Not only had they brought global ridicule upon the network and created an instant Youtube hit, but they had also embarrassed their presenter by feeding her the wrong information, and she just happened to be daughter-in-law of the most powerful man in media, Rupert Murdoch. And it wasn’t an Australian embarrassment either, because the production company was our very own Granada, part of ITV. “This is what happens when you have live TV, folks, this is insane,” said Sarah Murdoch, as she ploughed on through the audience’s jeers.

You can say that again. I’ve produced all sorts of live awards programmes, from talent shows like Star For A Night to theatre awards and the Booker Prize. There’s always that moment of impotence as your presenter reads out the winner’s name. What if they misread it, or the autocue pulls up wrong page or, worst of all, you’ve put the wrong name in the envelope? Quite often only the producer knows the result and I used to check and recheck the gold envelopes myself just to be sure.

I was on the original Camelot team that won the National Lottery contract and my biggest fear was that the “voice of the balls” might mistake a 6 for an upside down 9 during the live show: we drew up a detailed contingency plan for getting out of that one. When I was responsible for the BBC’s General Election coverage, I made everyone rehearse the nightmare scenario that a returning officer might read out the wrong result.

On the other side of the cameras, nominees at results ceremonies have a different problem. You hardly ever see an honest reaction, from either winner or loser. The former profess amazement that they could have been chosen over their more worthy rivals, whereas losers can never show how dead they feel in their stomachs. At the BAFTAs, where I’ve had to smile sweetly in defeat so many times, a handheld camera swings under your chin five minutes before the result, with a closeup of your tear glands. So when your defeat is announced, there’s a protocol that you can only put on a “jolly well done, I don’t really hate you at all” expression. Why can’t we be honest?

Like country music singer Faith Hill, who threw her arms in the air and raged “What?!” when American Idol winner Carrie Underwood beat her. Or like, most famous of all, American rapper Kanye West, who stormed the stage after losing at the MTV Europe Music Video Awards and interrupted the winner’s speech, ranting that his video should have won because “it cost a million dollars, had Pam Anderson in it and had me jumping across canyons”.

How great it would have been to have a camera inside David Miliband’s brain when he found out he’d been beaten by his younger brother. I guess we’ll never find out what he really felt at that moment, even in his autobiography.

The two Australians, Kelsey, Next Top Model for just one minute, and the real winner Amanda, were vacuously magnanimous in both defeat and victory. But I’m sure we all know what they were really thinking.

Life's A Bitch

2010-09-30T08:08:00.000-07:00

Disaster. Jo’s just rung me to say that Poppy is getting worse. Our new Jack Russell, saved from Battersea Dogs Home, may have the cutest ears in the world and a butter-wouldn’t-melt-in-my-dogbowl expression, but the chemistry just isn’t working with poor Mabel.

This all-female experiment is failing. The three dogs are happy to sleep together in the same bed at night, and pad after each other round the house. Every morning we take the three of them out and they madly dash round our 14 acre hayfield, searching out rabbits and fox poo (which Poppy is always the first to roll in – her white coat now smells of Timotei as she's already exhausted our supply of doggy shampoo).

However, after a couple of days of reasonably cheerful team bonding, we noticed that Mabel and Poppy were starting to argue about who was allowed to run the fastest, and Truffle, as self-appointed leader of the pack, would come snarling in to separate them. Poppy is sweet and funny and quite loveable, and she’s wonderful with Izzy, but she clearly wants to be the dominant dog and Mabel was determined to fight her ground.

Yesterday morning, while I was in London, Jo rang in a panic to say that on the walk Poppy had seized one of Mabel’s ears and started shaking it, in much the way Jack Russells like to kill rats. Mabel was shaken but unhurt, and life resumed. But this morning Poppy went for Mabel again, teeth bared and growling. Mabel had enough, shrieked and ran home alone. So now Jo and I are admitting defeat.

It’s a bitch too far: Poppy needs a new home.

Challenge Delhi

2010-09-26T06:38:00.000-07:00

Challenge Anneka, that’s what Delhi needs right now. A lycra-clad superwoman rushing around the city in a buggy with just a mobile phone and a television network for help. She’d have the job done as soon as you could say “product placement”.

“Gosh – we need 1,500 plumbers, 1,000 electricians and 7,000 mattresses to replace the ones the wild dogs walked over, and our athletes are arriving by teatime” she’d gush to her trusty soundman, and in a trice an army of volunteers would appear. Seeking no greater recompense than a smile from their heroine and a plug for their employers’ companies, the workers would set to and, just before the opening ceremony, the last paintbrush would be put down, the lights switched on and everyone would cheer.

I have a terrible feeling it isn’t going to end that way. As I write this, the Indian army has been summoned and it looks as though some poor athletes are just going to have to grin and slum it.

When I wrote the first Radio Times blurb for Challenge Anneka (“Making the impossible possible through the power of television”), I already knew it wasn’t going to be easy. Our first challenge was a disaster, largely because I naively thought you could restore the White Horse of Weymouth in an afternoon. You could if you had the Indian army and a thousand tons of Portland stone waiting in a layby. We only managed to muster a few boy scouts and 7 volunteers from the local Rotary Club, and just about completed the horse’s head by the end of the show.

We took no chances with the rest of the series. Three highly efficient television producers called Julia, Janine and Beverley planned it all like a military campaign. Could we build a footbridge over a Cornish river in just a weekend? Of course not. It took three months to persuade British Steel to give us the materials, and a contractor to turn it into struts, and a transport firm to loan us a lorry to carry it. The whole thing was planned down to the last rivet and Anneka’s first call merely triggered a tightly controlled chain reaction. 20 years later our bridge still hasn’t fallen down, unlike the one in Delhi.

The person I feel most sorry for is Lalit Bhanot, hapless secretary general of the Commonwealth Games organising committee. Not only has he brought the wrath of a proud nation on his shoulders by his committee’s inability to organise a poppadom in a curry house, he compounded it by saying Western standards of hygiene are different to India’s.

I spent a whole year living in India and found it perfectly comfortable, even in 1980. That’s possibly because I slept in a campervan, which my girlfriend and I had driven over from England. Occasionally craving a shower, we would drive into a remote village and imperiously demand of a crowd of excited children, “Where’s the Inspection Bungalow?” We’d then be led to the only stone building in town, built for the travelling magistrate in the days of the Raj. An ancient retainer would emerge from behind its dusty doors and, assuming that the British had finally returned, make up the four-poster bed, cook us a meal and boil water for the rusty showers – all for around 50 pence.

In Delhi itself we stayed at the very grand Imperial Hotel, but only in the car park, where the manager allowed us to camp and use the showers. It was very comfortable and I recommend it to any athlete stuck for a roof over his head. Although if the building work isn’t finished in time, I doubt even Anneka would be able to rustle up a spare camper van to help out with Delhi’s accommodation crisis over the next few days.

The Family Grows Again

2010-09-19T08:03:00.000-07:00

As soon as I heard the question, I knew I was in trouble.

“Babe, please can I ask a huge favour?”

Normally my wife doesn’t ask, she tells. But now she was ringing me at the office for a huge favour? I clearly wasn’t going to like this.

“Well, there’s this Jack Russell…”

“No”, I cut her off. “No more dogs”.

“But our friend is moving to London on Friday so Poppy’s being sent to Battersea Dogs Home, and…”

I firmly put my foot down. “She? Poppy? Absolutely, definitively no way.” We already had two female dogs, one female cat and a one-year-old daughter. That was already more women than any house could handle.

“But she has great big ears like Muka”.

This was below the belt. Muka was the dog that died. I’d taken her to the vet and held her as they injected the blue poison. Her big bat ears were outstretched as she collapsed in my arms. I’d cried so much I had to stop the car on the way home. Jo knows my weakness for dogs with cute ears. I felt my foot, only just put so firmly on the floor, begin to raise itself. Perhaps we might discuss it tonight.

Then I heard a familiar pause. Men can always detect the sound of a guilty woman’s brain. There’s a distinct gap between thought and word while they’re putting together a sentence explaining how the shoes were half price in the sale and the last ones in the shop, or how it was only a little dent in the bumper, or how it had been quite impossible not to invite her mother to stay for six weeks. Then the pause was broken by an unfamiliar bark.

“Oh no, you’ve done it already – she’s there, isn’t she?”

“Kind of.”

I am the only man in a house of needy females. Apart from Jo, who’s actually rather lower maintenance than her Los Angeles background might suggest (thank God there are no decent designer clothes shops in Newcastle), there’s Truffle and Mabel, the most neurotic spaniels in Northumberland, Poncho, the cat who terrorises both, and Izzy.

“Daddeeeee” she screamed as I opened the front door, and watched her runnning the length of the kitchen into my arms, all wild hair and giggles.

“Daw”, she laughed excitedly, pointing at the new arrival. Yes, there was the daw, lying on a clean blanket in front of the Aga, tail wagging in greeting. I tried to ignore her, but Izzy wanted to tell me all about her.

Izzy’s language is incredibly advanced. She speaks in long flowing sentences of great intensity. If you look away, she pulls your face towards her and forces you to look into her bright blue eyes while she gabbles. I really should capture her language on film and send it to a codebreaker, for the only words I understood were “daw” and “Mama”. Yes, Mama had got a new daw, and Daddy wasn’t very happy about it.

If I was uncertain about Poppy, Truffle and Mabel were devastated. Poppy was clearly used to being top dog. Truffle soon put her straight, but poor, sweet Mabel, was very confused, slinking unhappily round the room.

Then Poppy saw the cat, and went wild. It was just the get-out we needed. Jo and the cat had been inseparable for thirteen years. “You’re right, Poppy must go”, she said. I made us a coffee, opened a packet of biscuits, and began to plan her eviction.

A few minutes later we heard a wimper and turned round. All three dogs were sitting together, staring at the plate of biscuits. Poppy, head on one side, with a large ear sticking out and the other flopped over, slowly raised her paw in supplication.

Jo and I sighed in unison. Welcome to your new home, Poppy.

Who Is Michael Smith?

2010-09-17T08:22:00.000-07:00

Having been silently fuming all week about a BBC4 documentary about Newcastle at the weekend called Michael Smith's Deep North, I was delighted to read Keith Hann's withering comments, published in The Journal on Tuesday and reiterated with even more venom in his blog, where he wrote:

Then I switched channels to BBC4 and also felt compelled to cram in some abuse for “Michael Smith’s Deep North: the novelist returns to his native city of Newcastle upon Tyne.”

First thought: if this bloke is a novelist, how come an eager reader of the literary supplements like myself has never heard of him? Second thought: if he is Geordie, how come he sounds nothing like one? It could be argued that I don’t sound much like one myself, it is true, but this bloke did have some sort of accent, just distinctly not a Newcastle one. He first outed himself as coming from “a small town about 30 miles away” and later apparently confessed that it was Hartlepool. (I had lost interest by that point and was only half-watching the programme, as I indulged in a vigorous debate on Facebook about where this wanker came from and how on earth he had got the gig). I am profoundly sorry that space did not permit me to get the popular description “monkey hanger” into the paper.

(Note for overseas readers: Hartlepool is a port in County Durham famous for capturing and interrogating a monkey that had escaped from the wreck of a French ship during the Napoleonic wars, and hanging it as a spy. Even more bizarrely, the mascot of the local football team, who paraded around in a monkey suit under the name of H’Angus, stood for election as mayor AS A JOKE in 2002, under the slogan “free bananas for schoolchildren” and was not only elected then, but has been re-elected on two subsequent occasions. I know London also has a joke mayor in the shape of Boris Johnson, but surely this must be uniquely absurd in all the annals of representative democracy? And, yes, I do know about the English Democrats in Doncaster.)

Third and final (for now) thought about Michael Smith: if the BBC wanted to make a programme about Newcastle, why couldn’t they have got a genuine Geordie to do it? One with some original ideas, who would not stumble over his lines? I am open to offers. And, failing that, there are undoubtedly several thousand other people on Tyneside who could also have done what Sir John Major would almost certainly describe as a not inconsiderably better job.

Well written, Mr Hann. I gather Michael Smith is some sort of pundit, the sort of chap periodically wheeled out by arts programmes and BBC4 when they need someone with northern roots and a regional accent. I'm sending the BBC a map of our region, so they can see that Hartlepool has no more connection to Newcastle, culturally or geographically, than Southend has to Chelsea. Apparently Michael Smith went to Tynemouth on his holidays: I spent every day of my childhood there.

At least the BBC will have added a few thousand extra shots of the Tyne Bridge to its library (perhaps they could use them again in their coverage of the Great North Run on Sunday), but there wasn't a single image of the real Newcastle. Perhaps that was because the film was made by a London production company?

Dressing For Dinner

2010-09-12T06:21:00.000-07:00

On Friday I received an evening to a formal dinner with the stipulation: “Black Tie or Lounge Suit”.

What an appalling choice. Wear the former, and I could be the only penguin in the room; people might hail me and ask for bottles of mineral water. Yet if I opt for the latter I’ll be sure to be the only one who hasn’t been to Moss Bros. Women have it so much easier these days. They want to look different; men just need to look the same.

That’s why in the old days men wore uniform from school to the grave. Short trousers till 12, caps till the Sixth Form, black tie for dinner: life was regimented and stable. This deregulation is utterly stressful for males like me who are incapable of dressing themselves – or so my wife claims.

At least going out to a nice restaurant just meant putting on a jacket and tie. No longer, apparently. According to a report I read yesterday, none of Britain’s top 100 restaurants now require men to wear jackets and ties. Our region only has two restaurants in that heady echelon (as defined by the 2009 National Restaurant Awards): Secco and Café 21. Thankfully both seem perfectly happy to feed me despite my jeans and loafers.

Years ago I was taken for dinner to the Savoy Hotel and, sitting in the bar, was accosted by the head waiter who firmly but politely hissed in my ear, “Will Sir be dining with us tonight?”

As I was clutching his menu, I should have thought the answer was fairly obvious, but I bit my tongue and replied “I rather hope so”. “Does Sir have a tie?”

No, Sir certainly did not: he had a designer shirt and a bespoke suit, but no tie. Sir was not to worry: the cloakroom attendant could sort him out. So, like a naughty five year old, I was sent to the toilet.

Surrounded by bottles of aftershave, ivory-backed clothes brushes and clean white towels, the man produced a battered wooden box from under the counter. Inside was a collection of the scruffiest ties I had ever seen. There were gravy-stained mementos of old boys’ associations, rugby clubs, and the sort of pink and blue things that signify the uniform of solicitors, accountants and estate agents: all quite horrendous. I don’t know how the Savoy had accumulated these monstrosities over the years, but I could see why their owners no longer missed them.

Trying to appear nonchalant, I selected the least grim affair, a stripy gold and grey object, too broad to be modern, but passable with my blue shirt. “A popular choice,” said the old man, as he pocketed my pound coin tip. “Do you get many people without ties, then?” I asked. “A few – mostly actors”, he said dismissively. “We had an artist in here last week. Hockney, his name was. He chose that same tie you’re wearing”. I swaggered into dinner.

Until last year I belonged to one of London’s oldest clubs, The Athenaeum. I finally resigned when the membership voted, for the umpteenth time, against modernising its dress code. The club only admitted women a couple of years ago, and then only after fierce debate within its crusty membership. I only used it once a year when I needed to impress my bank manager. It was also the only day I ever wore a tie. Now I take the manager to Grouchos and intimidate him with tie-less celebrities.

The fact is, places that make you dress up normally manage to combine boring food with dull clientele. The best restaurant in the world, Heston Blumenthal’s Fat Duck, has no dress code: the owner says to wear whatever makes you comfortable.

But that’s the problem: why do I still only feel comfortable wearing the same as everyone else?

The Biggest Arse in British Politics - R.I.P.

2010-09-05T13:02:00.000-07:00

Cyril Smith’s enormous backside completely filled the television screen. The Liberal MP was bending down to put a diminutive stuffed chicken into the oven behind him and the cameraman had zoomed in just a little too close for comfort.

“There should be a law against that,” said comedian Willie Rushton, who was attempting to put together a toad-in-the-hole. The audience in the majestic ballroom of London’s Savoy Hotel was helpless with laughter. That one shot – in effect a blank screen – was held for about ten seconds and became a defining moment in my television career. At the age of thirty I was moving from news and current affairs into the dizzy world of entertainment.

Those were the days when the people who ran the television channels trusted their producers. I remember the call from Brian Wenham, the Controller of BBC2: “Tom, we need to do some literature. You did English at university, didn’t you? I don’t really care what you produce, just make a bit of a splash”.

So I put together ten separate programmes about books, all of which were broadcast in a single week. One was about crime writing, which we set on board the Orient Express. We hired the train for the day and drove it to Bognor Regis and back, filming a murder on the way. That show was presented, I recall, by James Burke and Shaw (“Keep ‘em peeled”) Taylor from Police 5. It was terrible: a true crime against quality television.

Ned Sherrin presented something aptly entitled I, Me, Myself, which was supposed to be about autobiographies, but ended up as a lot of anecdotes about Sherrin’s friends in musical theatre. There was a live Booker Prize ceremony, hosted by Russell Harty, and also a number of fairly decent documentaries. But the highlight of the week, and by far the most popular, was Cookshow, presented by Esther Rantzen.

It was the world’s first celebrity cooking show. Willie and Cyril, together with Gerald Harper, Jane Asher and the singer Suzi Quatro, had to prepare recipes from five cookery writers, including Delia Smith and Prue Leith. Of the five, Cyril Smith and Jane Asher were the only really capable cooks. Jane was already baking cakes for her young family, and Cyril used to cook for his mother, with whom he lived in Rochdale. At 29 stones or more, and 6 foot 2 inches tall, he was the size of a small terraced house. He towered over the tiny Quatro, whom I deliberately put beside him in the cook-off.

Smith loved publicity, and throughout the 80’s you could always rely on him to show up as a token figure of fun. He would have been the perfect Celebrity Big Brother house guest. British politics hasn’t been nearly as colourful since he retired, and his death earlier this week was a loss.

His famous statement that Parliament was the longest-running farce in the West End now seems way ahead of its time. I can’t imagine what he thought of the current Lib-Tory coalition – he was utterly against the Lib-Lab pact in 1977, and railed against the SDP-Liberal alliance when it was first formed. He was one of those men who always said what he thought (well, to be honest, he often said things before he’d thought about them). He never changed his politics, though he changed his political party several times during his career, and once tried to form a new one.

Beneath his jolly fat man exterior was a politician of steel and, although I detested some of his views, particularly on abortion and capital punishment, I had to admire his resolve. And his roast chicken.