YAMMER

I’m recovering from two sleepless nights. Political junkie that I am I found myself waking up at some ungodly hour of the morning to hear the lead speeches from the Republican convention (I’d done the same last week for Obama).

Of course the trick is listening to what is being said between the lines, sometimes hard to do as in both cases the respective audiences have been whipped into such a state of frenzy they holler like an army of cheerleaders on adrenochrome, no doubt concerned that anything less than a rabid appreciation of their candidate will play badly on Prime Time.

The speeches naturally play up to the crowd, the rhetoric carefully orchestrated to whip up already trigger-haired emotions. But beyond the difference in party politics - big and small government, high and low taxes, pro-life, pro-choice, more war or jaw-jaw - something else struck me last night, or should I say the wee hours of the morning. It was the continued reference to America being the greatest country on earth.

This theme was hammered repeatedly. It was used to justify everything from foreign policy to the reason the candidates first became involved in politics itself. “Ask not what your country can do for you - ask what you can do for your country” has become the core idea beating at the heart of American politics.

America still sees itself as an idea as much as a nation. It was a country created rather than one that slowly evolved. And this sense of self-definition and self-justification is what drives it. Because at its centre, I believe, is a sense that somehow it is not a country in the way the rest of the countries of the world see themselves. America will forever be the new kid on the block, a nation of immigrants, rejects and runaways who stole a nation from indigenous people to create its own slice of heaven.

Hence this relentless self-assurance that such a dream was worth it... that the American people truly are living in the greatest country on Earth.

I considered this I lay in bed watching the first glimpses of dawn peek through the curtains. And I asked myself whether the people of my own country Britain thought of themselves the same way. The last time it seemed that we were asked to do so was way back in the 1940’s when Churchill exhorted the populace to remain both steadfast and loyal. But looking back at those wartime speeches it is salient to note that he never spoke of Britain in isolation. While professing an abiding love for this sceptred island he knew our future could only be secured with the aid and support of our friends and allies. We were always part of bigger picture, whether fighting the Nazis or later, Communist totalitarianism.

Even if we could have afforded it, Churchill knew we couldn’t go it alone. But more importantly, he wasn’t presenting a Great British way of life as a model for the whole world to follow or adhere to. He had travelled far and wide in his youth and was worldly enough to realise there were other nations who felt their own way of life was of equal worth and value.

This is an idea with which America seems to struggle.

The recent Olympics in Beijing proved a salutary reminder of how other people can also feel passionately that what their country represents is the strongest and most powerful model in the world. The Chinese after years of censorship and repression find it hard to acknowledge that what they have been told by their leaders about themselves might not always be the truth. Their table-topping medal count no doubt went a long way towards convincing them they are once more a major player on the World stage.

Russia too, smarting from its post Soviet break-up, while having to accept its lowlier position on the Olympic rostrums, now finds itself gripped by a fever of hero-worship as Putin re-awakens their sense of self-respect after twenty years of disillusion, confusion and loss by invading former Soviet territories, throwing America’s diplomatic arguments back in her face, installing its own army of ’peacekeepers’ and proving itself to be both a belligerent foe and a wily political animal, the likes of which haven’t been seen for half a generation.

As for us - Team GB - while revelling in our record medal haul - discovered on returning home that we are anything but a United Kingdom, instead increasingly seeing ourselves as four distinct countries.

While the English struggle to define their identity, media commentators spending thousands of words on the subject, at once self-mocking, self-hating, more often uncomfortable and bemused, our Celtic counterparts have no such qualms or confusion in knowing who they are. Welsh, Scottish, Irish first - British a very definite second. But for the English to declare the same is seen as a dark form of Nationalism and by proxy, racist. The Little Englander, the Middle Englander, Mondeo man, Colonel Blimp... is seen as a figure of embarrassment, of fun. The solid stock, the Yeoman of old, has disappeared, to be replaced by white collar workers in call centres, consultancies, sales-reps. We’ve become a nation of David Brents.

Nevertheless, when I hear American politicians barking on about their country being the greatest in the world it still leaves me perplexed. Do the Dutch feel the same? The Danes, the Swedes, the Norwegians? European states have long recognised that it was this way of thinking which nearly caused their annihilation half a century ago. There is no longer any appetite for such posturing. Only the French maintain a pretence, but they are so consumed with their own crisis of identity even they know it is only for domestic show. The Germans accept they are still not allowed such utterances and the Spanish and Italians recognise that for all their bluff and posturing no one will ever take them that seriously.

The most belligerent form of self-aggrandisement comes from The East. China, as I have already described, is finally waking from its own self-imposed nightmare. India, for so long tethered to the yoke of its own mumbo-jumbo and spiritual madness, also feels it is time for a share of the cake. Sadly if any nation is likely to kick off a nuclear conflagration it is them, its petty and adolescent relationship with Pakistan a continuing worry to the rest of the world. And let’s not even get into the bonkers posturing of the Middle East.

But as Westerners, we look to our closest allies for a sense of understanding and wisdom when it comes to the global picture. We need to feel that like us, America appreciates that such self-absorbed sabre-rattling and dick-swinging gets you nowhere. There is no right way to live. There is no blueprint. Democracy sure, freedom of speech, equal rights... then leave it for people to determine their own sense of personal values. As long as no one’s getting hurt - then live and let live.

John McCain seems to me something of a confused character. To a degree he’s an outsider, a leftward leaning Republican, and as such disliked by many in his party. Outside of his military leanings and his attitude towards tax & spend, much of what he says could easily fit beneath the Democratic umbrella. Perhaps those beatings he took in Hanoi made him take a right turn. His running mate Palin is a small town ignoramus. Unworldly and untravelled, she’s a woman whose understanding of the world reaches as far as the state line. And as such, she is similar to a vast number of her fellow Americans. She is also similar to vast number of Russians, Indians and Chinese, people who also see the world only in their own terms, through their own particular and reactionary prism.

This type of small-mindedness, to me at least, feels like the last thing the world needs right now. We don’t want nations governed by fear, but by hope. We need to find our commonalities, not our differences. We need to reach out to other, break down the prejudices, whether perpetuated by religious maniacs from all sides of the spectrum, or nationalistic leaders stirring emotions for their own political and power-hungry ends.

The old line, though over worn, still rings true today. Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel. And after the stupidity and chaos of last eight years, it should also be the last thing on the minds of either political party or the American people themselves.

Dear Boris,

I expect you must be getting quite a few of these letters right now... “2012 - Opening Ceremony - what the hell are we going to do?”

Fear not, or as the saying goes... “The only thing we have to fear is... Stephen Bayley or some other Design Guru getting his hands on it.” Of course it was Bayley who walked out on The Dome, the white elephant which for a generation will serve as a reminder of how we can get things spectacularly wrong when we let the focus groups, the PC brigade and the all-things-to-all-people fanny about with a ‘Grand Projet’.

It seems clear that these events only work if they are entrusted to one person to oversee them; one person with a theme, a vision, a through-line, a sense of purpose, scale and imagination. Moreover, someone with a sense of narrative, someone who knows the story that needs to be told.

And the story itself? It seems these days people have become unclear as to what Britain actually stands for, what she represents. Certainly Britain of Old, The Empire, hangs around my generation’s neck like a millstone. But there is much in our History of which should be rightly proud. Nevertheless, unlike the Chinese, I’m not sure that an Olympic ceremony should solely be about that... spacemen and Sarah Brightman notwithstanding.

Comment has already been made as to how much the Chinese had to whitewash from their past during their ceremony, and we would no doubt be accused of the same thing, especially from press naysayers keen to leap up and down like spoilsports from the touchlines. But what 2012 really provides us with is an opportunity to move forward. Too often Britain is seen as a Nation trading on its past. The National Heritage version of Britain seems to be defined by others, and greedy for their dollar, we forever play up to it. While I think there is no harm in referencing our proud History, we should treasure it rather than be bound by it.

The great thing about our country has been its ability to constantly re-invent itself. You of all people hardly need a lesson in History, but I do think this is a theme we should celebrate.

Over the years and during my travels, one thing I have become both aware of and delighted by when speaking to people from foreign lands is the main reason they give for coming to Britain. They come here to feel free. Not in a traditional political or economic sense but something more personal, more emotional. We live in a country that celebrates the eccentric, the idiosyncratic, the one-off. We are quick to assume but slow to judge. We can bluster and grump but at the end of the day if you’re an honest, kind man or woman who works hard and has a good sense of humour, more often than not we will take you to our hearts, wherever you originally hail from.

Young people travel to Britain from all over the world for precisely that reason; to escape the shackles of their family, their society, their religious or social upbringing. Here they can dress how they want, wear their hair how they want, play the music they want, and no one bats an eyelid. This sense of liberation we take for granted. For people from other lands, it’s a revelation.

This is the kind of spirit we need to celebrate in 2012... the uniquely British concept of the individual. We love the bawdy, the belligerent and the bold. We’re often crude, curmudgeonly, loud and obscene, but we’re also the country of manners, of understatement and the stiff upper lip. This contradiction and complexity should be extolled. It’s what makes us original. It’s what makes us who we are.

So... no sanitized version. No Morris Dancers and Maypoles (unless styled by Vivienne Westwood and Alexander McQueen). We have some of the greatest artists, designers, musicians, actors, dancers and singers in the world. We have have black, brown, yellow, straight, gay, and people somewhere in the middle... we have Radio 4 and Pirate Radio.

What we have is a big old rainy-day umbrella coming out of a Mary Poppins’ carpet bag, everything is in there and everything is sheltered by it.

This is the Britain we need to show off... with glee, with a tongue sticking out, with our bums in the air and with a firm but polite handshake.

We need to show off our Queen, our benign and benevolent Mum... always charming, always unruffled. And like Artful Dodgers, we need to show off ourselves.

By the time our show’s over in 2012 we should want everyone watching from all over the world to be thinking - “That looks like one hell of a place... when can we go?”

Until then...

A thunder-thighed Leona Lewis, a gurning Jimmy Page, a zonked David Beckham looking as if he'd crossed one time zone too many... doesn't portend well. And the Junior Showtime dancers? Hmmmmm....

I have to admit, I am still slightly appalled with myself for buying into the hype and dragging my butt to see this movie in the first place. But it was half-price Tuesdays at The Notting Hill Coronet and at least that way I’d avoid the screeching kids shuffling into the local Multiplex, or the low-slung teens sucking their teeth between elongated drool-spits onto the sticky purple-carpeted floor while burbling constantly into their mobile phones. 

The Coronet is a last throwback to another era of cinema-going. The seats are rickety cast-offs in red velvet which rock back and forth but at least they give leg room. The screen is too small for the film itself, a line of light spilling over the bottom lip, but the room has a balcony. Hey, it almost feels majestic.

So I settle back. The place is pretty busy for a Tuesday afternoon. Schools are out for the summer but there are as many young men in their twenties as there are kids. The picture begins with a sheet of rolling blue flame coming towards the camera. I have no idea why because within moments we’re in a blandly shot city, no doubt supposed to be New York. There’s a bank robbery taking place. The robbers are wearing scary clown masks. There’s no sense of who’s leading this gang but they shoot very noisy guns. The music is pounding. It’s violent, mindlessly violent. The type of violence where the shooter kills his victim without looking at his target... the death usually accompanied by a dry quip. The film has a 12A certificate.

Then the gang start killing each other. Greed is good. Less of you means more for me, industrial lay-offs in full effect. There’s bound to be one man left standing and sure enough it’s golden-boy Ledger, the main reason some people are saying the film has been treated with kid gloves by the critics and is doing such phenomenal business. Ledger looks good. A freak. White powder smeared over his face, black rings around his eyes, a slash of badly-applied red-lipstick around his mouth and some bubbly scar tissue on each cheek. He makes a good baddie. Until he starts acting.

Immediately you realise why actors love these kind of roles. The restraints are off. They can go for it. Fly. Indulge. Show-off. And being allowed to show-off is of course why they became actors in the first place. If only Mom and Pop had showed them just an ickle more love.

So Heath starts to act. He wobbles, he shakes, he licks, he pouts. He’s like Uncle Fester on steroids, juiced up like an athlete sneaking out of a hotel room, the prick of the needle still burning. 

We sit back and watch. Ledger’s messing with The Mob. He’s got Italians, Russians, Chinese and super-fly Niggas all spinning on his dick - the biggest bad guys in New York and looney tunes has them dancing.

So what’s he doing it for? Vengeance, pain, money? It’s unclear. He just wants to smash things up. He runs a massive and unending army of mask-wearing cohorts who must be getting paid but The Joker, as we now know him to be thanks to the playing cards he liberally tosses about the place, doesn’t seem to care much about money. Money can't buy him you know what.

What he really wants is The Batman. Reasons unclear. Guess he just doesn’t like the guy. And should he get his hands on The Caped Crusader he wants the dude to take off his mask... to reveal himself.  I wasn’t quite sure why this was so personally important but hey, everyone has to have an agenda.

Meanwhile, and you just knew there had to be a ‘meanwhile’, the District Attorney, blonde-looker Harvey Dent played by some artsy-fart actor who was once in a film about beating-up on a blind woman, is doing his best to clean up the streets of Gotham... which essentially means The Joker as Batman has put the fear of God into all the other suckers. Harvey is also balling some chick called Rachel, Maggie Gyllenhal, who permanently looks like she's been hit with a frying pan... hell, the D.A. is prettier than his girlfriend!... No matter, he’s in love.

Problem is, so is somebody else.

You got it... Batman. Rachel is his ex. She knows who he is and wants nothing to do with some introspective freak who spends his nights dressed in rubber.

So, Batman... rather, Bruce Wayne... what’s been going on with him since his last outing? 

Well he’s moved from Wayne Manor and is now living in some vast Condenast wankpad somewhere high above the streets of Manhattan. His company is debating whether to deal with some Chinese money-man based in Hong Kong - a man we have already seen is tied up with the Mobsters. Wayne himself is in an almighty grump. His outfits are beginning to suck and he keeps getting bitten by dogs. What's worse, his girl has left him for the D.A. although he comforts himself with a super-hot Russian ballerina and later three models tricked out like Christy, Helena and Linda in Versace knock-offs. Nevertheless, the strangely sexless Bale is tired of being a super-hero. Our leading man is mopey, broody, and, way ahead of the rest of us, wants out of this movie right from the start.

So there’s your set-up. What happens next is The Joker rampaging through the streets of Gotham, blowing up shit and whining about his Dad. He steals all the bad guys’ money - which the Chinese dude thought he was moving out of the country - and then sets fire to it. He kidnaps Harvey Dent and the ugly chick Rachel after a tediously protracted truck chase. He ties them to a bunch of oil cans and says who ever gets saved first, lives. He then dresses up as a nurse and blows up an empty Gotham Central Hospital clearly located somewhere deep in the suburbs. He also bribes cops whose mothers can't afford Medicare.

The main cop, Gary Oldman, sporting a Geraldo-moustache and retro specs, gets to Rachel. But Batman gets to Dent first. Or was it the other way round? For the life of me I can’t remember, it was so damn dark and confusing. Anyway the chick buys it. Dent’s face catches fire and, refusing skin grafts or surgery, he turns into another villain, this one called Two-Face, looking much like Damien Hirst’s ‘Hymn’, a lamer version of Chigurh from ’No Country for Old Men’ who decides everything on a toss of a coin, except in Two-Face’s world he just keeps tossing ‘til someone dies (which in some ways seems an apt metaphor for the movie).

While all this is taking place, Morgan Freeman mooches about as a version of Q - making a new suit for the Bat guy - “Try and concentrate, Bond” - and a sonar phone - “You mean like Radar?” - which enables his employer to digitally see through walls. This causes Freeman to have a crisis of conscience - a stab at the invasiveness of Homeland Security - and he tenders his resignation. Not surprisingly he wants out of this franchise too.

Percolating this daft farrago of nonsense is Michael Caine as a member of the serving class dispensing cockney words of wisdom to his charge - “How’s yer Father, Apples and Pears, I hate the French” etc...

The story ends with Batman killing the D.A./Harvey Dent/Two-Face so that Gary Oldman can declare the same man a hero. (Oldman, now Commissioner Gordon, has already faked his own death, freaking out his wife and family in order to... protect them?)

My own personal favourite “How the hell did he do that?” is when The Joker - interrogated in an underground bunker at Police HQ by a nameless cop who keeps turning up and is played neither by a recognisable actor or one of any charm - somehow manages to escape from an electrically bolted interrogation room and make his way past the massed ranks of heavily-armed members of New York's finest wielding no more than a pocket-knife. Maybe they loved him for earlier killing their boss. They got a day off work for the guy's funeral after all.

Despite this barrage of illogical nonsense there is some fun to be had in watching the director Christopher Nolan take swipes at recent American history - from Batman standing amongst the rubble of Ground Zero, to prisoners being sprung from their cells as in Hurricane Katrina - it’s all in there if you're still awake to notice.

Some have said The Joker represents some Bin Laden figure - creating chaos for chaos's sake. But Bin laden has a clear goal, to re-establish a united Muslim state under a revived caliphate. The mad Mullah, however misguided, has a clear sense of purpose.

If anything it’s the movie itself which ends up most slavishly following the Joker’s raison d'etre. 

Personally I'm looking forward to finding out in the next one if Batman can get any grumpier? He's like his audience, teenage boys sulking in their rooms, and playing with their gadgets.

At least I hope he gets over his strep throat.

I just finished reading some Trollope this week - ‘The Way We Live Now’ - allegedly his masterpiece. Seven hundred and sixty seven pages... and let me tell you, getting through the last hundred was brutal. It wasn’t helped by the fact that the most interesting character, the villain Melmotte (a Robert Maxwell-type figure) around whom the entire story revolves, dies with a hundred and twenty pages to go. It reminded me of Jude Law in Minghella’s version of ‘The Talented Mr. Ripley’. Once he’s out of the picture the film dies. Same with the last Bond movie. Even though the bad guy ‘Le Chiffre’ isn’t much cop by Bond standards and his death bizarrely perfunctory, once he’s gone so is the movie, the tedious set-piece in Venice, Bond chasing another elusive figure in red, wearisome in the extreme.

It made me wonder about my attention span. Whether the modern world had indeed affected me to such a degree that I no longer had the capacity to stick with a story, to make that marathon commitment, to remain involved. In fact when I mentioned to friends I was reading Trollope they looked at me with a sense of admiration. As if I was willfully submitting myself to some sort of flagelletory self-betterment, something they felt that some day, long into the future, they might possibly consider doing themselves.

In Nicholas Carr’s recent piece in The Atlantic, ‘Is Google Making Us Stupid?’ he wrote of this phenomenon, wondering if all this browsing, this clicking on links, these animated box-ads begging us to stop looking at whatever it is we are looking at and go elsewhere, wasn’t having the culminative effect of re-programming our brains. People were making similar claims about MTV when it first pitched up on our screens, that the rapid editing style of its videos would create a world of rapacious young viewers ever-hungry for their next visual feast.

Publicist Mark Borkowski has just published a peculiar study on Fame. Decrying Warhol’s 15 minutes - the length I always considered of sexual intercourse between two overly-familiar partners - Borkowski has come up with a playfully absurd equation by which he believes he can measure the true length of a person’s celebrity-heat. It’s fifteen months, unless you happen to employ the services of a particularly slick publicist, amongst which I am sure he counts himself.

The more interesting point he makes concerns the inevitable declining shelf-life of a person’s interest to the outside world. Like a programme set to self-destruct, without careful manipulation, the narrative, in this case an individual’s celebrity, will fade from the public’s attention like the light from a fluorescent neck-band worn at a summer music festival. And without such manipulation the length of the narrative become exponentially shorter. 

Britain has just discovered ‘The Wire’ - at least its media journalists have. This seems logical for the UK as the show has just come to the end of its run in the US. Cancelled because of a lack of viewers, it has been pointed out that one of the reasons the show failed to hold an audience was because unlike the neatly-packaged story-lines of mainstream fare such as ‘Law & Order’, ‘CSI’ and ‘Without a Trace’, The Wire's narrative arc (how I loathe that term) stretched over each series’ thirteen episodes, and unlike a show like ’24’ the drama lacked a bona-fide clearly identified hero, something of which America seems forever in need.

So maybe it’s true. Maybe the public are indeed unable to focus on anything for any great length of time. Maybe the modern world has made it impossible for any of us to make a commitment - “Sure it looks interesting but - Tivo-less - I’m simply un-prepared to be in the same place at the same time for thirteen weeks anymore.”

Outside of the dwindling fascination for the freaks inhabiting ‘Big Brother’ and its ilk, the daily dose of emotional car-crash porn that is Britney, Amy and Lindsay (note how Britney’s own restorative arc is coming up to the 15-month time frame), or the PR-fed tales of female self-abuse - sex, weight, drugs and most strangely, pregnancy - the public does indeed seem to struggle to deal with the more complex through-lines both permeating and affecting their lives.

Hence their surprise at this sudden economic downturn. Never mind that economists had been predicting it for months, stating over and over again that the housing market was absurdly inflated and completely unsustainable. 

The public took the stance of believing what they wanted to believe. If a mortgage broker was offering them free money then hell, why shouldn’t they take it? And despite the myriad of tomes bemoaning the decline in the world's natural resources the public figured hell, they’re building those 4X4’s, why shouldn’t I get me one?

Given the choice of standing back for a moment, taking a breath, reading the small print... or clicking on a clip of Star Wars Boy or another cute kitten, we the public allowed ourselves to be distracted by the ephemeral, the immediate, the here and now. Like crack whores we simply yearned for another fix. And of course there were plenty of new entrepreneurs ready to sell us one. How much worse our lives would be if we couldn’t take pictures with our phones, Twitter each other to death, or blog to our hearts’ content.

Problem is, none of these methods of understanding the world have an extended narrative anymore, nor a narrator. Hence no overseeing point of view, no skillful hand at the wheel like a Dickens, an Austen, and yes even a Trollope. Nowadays we have to make up and define the tapestry of the big picture ourselves. And being not only inept, unsuited and woefully unprepared for such a complex task, it should come as no great surprise that from time to time we find ourselves completely unable to make sense of it all.

The remedy? It’s already being sold to us. Slow down, slow food, grow your own, make do and mend. There isn’t a war on... not one which is actually affecting us, but the current hysterical mood feels reminiscent of World War Two. 

They're telling us it’s time to batten down the hatches, to ride out the storm, reconnect with your loved ones... 

Then again, it might simply be time to read that really big book.

So they finally caught Karadzic this morning. Only thirteen years too late. He, for those of you not up your Balkan history, was the floppy-haired thug and former psycho-analyst working under Milosovic who supervised the massacre of innocent Muslim men and teenage boys in a programme of ethnic cleansing, so called to avoid the tag of genocide which would have impelled NATO to take decisive action to prevent it from happening. What use are semantics when you’re being lined up alongside your father and grandfather about to be shot?

Reading about his capture made me realise something. Now that the war has been over these thirteen years, people seem a lot clearer as to who were the bad guys. When it was going on, Milosovic, Karadzic and even the brutish military commander Mladic, who is still being hidden up in the mountains by his former cohorts, were all treated with a degree of respect. They may have been the villains of the piece but they were never out-and-out demonised.

One had to negotiate with these monsters, so it was considered bad-form to bad-mouth them. I don’t remember the same approach being taken towards Hitler or Saddam Hussein, even though in the case of the latter we had happily done business with him for the first twenty-three years of his reign.

During the Balkan crisis, our own Doctor Death, MP David Owen, shuttled back and forth in an interminable round of push and shove where nothing much was achieved, a spade was rarely called a spade and if it was, neither NATO nor the UN had the balls to back it up.

In the meantime, a low-rent mobster such as Milosovic happily ran rings around the best diplomats Europe had to offer, knowing that without America’s support - Clinton at the time ridiculously embroiled in a petty farrago of his own making with intern Monica Lewinksy - NATO was both impotent and reduced to the immobile.

This fiasco of real-politik was brilliantly illuminated some years later in Peter Kominsky’s film ‘Warriors’, a savage indictment of the restrictions placed on the serving soldiers of UNPROFOR. I urge you to watch it.

Looking back at these events now, with the benefits of hindsight and clear of the so-called Fog of War, it seems utterly remarkable that villains such as Milosovic, Karadzic and Mladic were tolerated at all. One look at their wives should have been enough to know these were deeply disturbed men. Each spouse wore the look of a harridan lifted from a Tim Burton movie, their black, beehive hairdos set off by a mis-applied smear of garish red lipstick. These were women of your nightmares, not so much mothers of the nation as their ugly, weird relations.

Karadzic himself, a failed poet, in love with his own words, a vain egoist scarcely believing his own luck at finally being given an open mike, bestrode our screens nightly, his grey fringe continuously swept from his face as he gazed down from his gun-placements at the pock-marked ruins of buildings his men had been gleefully shelling, his henchman Mladic, forever impassive by his side, his demeanour that of a vicious night-club bouncer.

One thing united these three charlatans, they were all out-and-out bullies. Worse, all three of them had a deep understanding of the venality of human nature. Learnt from Hitler, a man Karadzic's own father fought against during the Second World War and whose methods of fear and control have been followed by every totalitarian leader since, they understood the idea that when the chips are down and you want to seize power, the best way to do it is to find someone the public can blame for all its ills.

This happened in Germany in the 1930’s and it happened again in Serbia in the 1990’s. After the Eastern Bloc fell, Yugoslavs had to find some group on whom to pin their economic woes - however illogical. What was bizarre was that unlike the Jews of the 30’s, who at least had a degree of social standing and were undeniably successful in various businesses, the Muslims of Bosnia had no such claim.

In no sense could it be suggested they were secretly turning the wheels of power. And less it should be thought that the Jews were doing the same back in Germany, let me state now, the success of a family trade should be celebrated rather than feared. There’s no reason on earth why Jews shouldn’t be allowed to pass their talents onto their sons and daughters just like everyone else. No conspiracy... merely expertise and knowledge.

The Muslims of Bosnia were simply used as a scapegoat. No logic. No economic justification. A bit of long-forgotten 400 year-old history dug up for the sake of it - the battle at Kosovo Polje - and that was it. Communities who had happily lived with each other for years, had worked together, had inter-married, were suddenly set against each other simply to foster the power-base of a small minority of deranged egomaniacs who, because of their own failings both socially and professionally, would stoop at nothing in order to claw their way up the social ladder.

And what did we do? We sent envoys, peace-keepers, an army of diplomats. We discussed, we negotiated, we hummed and we hawed. We tied ourselves in knots in hopeless attempts to come up with a ‘language’ which would satisfy all sides, while extricating us from the unholy quagmire of horror we had allowed a few psychopathic criminals to create.

How did it end? A good question. Did we “strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger”? Did we heck. A three-week bombing campaign by NATO forces finally forced talks to be held in Dayton Ohio in November 1995 where an agreement was signed allowing Milosovic to remain in power while formally separating the territories of Bosnia Herzogovina from Serbia.

Milosovic was finally brought down by his own people having led them into the fourth of his ill-considered wars, this time in Kosovo. Once again he only capitulated when NATO used limited air strikes against strategic Serbian targets in the spring of 1999. It took another two years before he was finally arrested and sent to the International Criminal Court in The Hague, where Karadzic himself will be headed soon.

What strikes me looking back at this ignominious fiasco of foreign policy, is how little we seem to have learnt from our errors.

Currents events in Darfur seem as opaque as those taking place in the Balkans a decade ago. The Sudanese territory is split into three separate states, North, West and South. The Janjaweed, a violent Arab Militia backed by the President Omar al-Bashir are presently decimating the population of the South using spurious claims that they are housing rebel forces. Breaking it down, it becomes clear that it is essentially a North versus South battle, Arab Nomads backed by the Government attacking rural farmers.

While the chief prosecutor of the International Court in Hague, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, last week formally filed a request for the arrest of Bashir on genocide charges, there seems little appetite amongst the International community to implement his wishes.

China in particular still invests heavily in Sudan (for investment read arms sales) needing its oil for its own rapidly-growing infrastructure... hell, something has to power those Olympic floodlights after all. And as happened with Burma, China is one superpower with whom we clearly don’t want to pick a fight.

So until those farmers in Southern Sudan have something we feel is worth fighting for, they’re pretty much on their own.

Milosovic, like so many tyrants before him, sowed the seeds of his own destruction. He never knew when to quit.

In the end his own people had simply had enough. Nevertheless, as long as he wasn’t bothering us, we’d have happily put up with him. After all, for eleven long years, we did.

As for Karazdic, why capture him now? It seems Serbia realises its economic prosperity lies at the heart of the European Union. You want something? You better give us a little in return.

Funny how money talks.

Question is... do you think we could bribe the Taliban? There's a certain fellow whose whereabouts they must surely know. Doesn't every man have his price?

As I lie here, leg raised due to snapped tendons in my right calf - an injury sustained by leaping a barrier in Hyde Park in a misguided attempt to avoid four lanes of traffic bearing towards me, four lanes of traffic I would have easily avoided if my Pavlovian instinct to follow an idiot friend who'd ignored my advice to cross at the lights hadn’t got the better of me - I find I have time to muse on a subject which has been troubling me for some time; the notion of rock and roll as a career move.

The pain I am currently dealing with is compounded by the fact that the reason I was anywhere near Hyde Park at all was to see Morrissey perform, a reason many would deem cause for minor injury in itself. The former Mancuinian was headlining one of the many festivals now littering the British summer months. This one in particular seemed more anodyne than most, a corporate affair sponsored by a telecommunications company.

As I stumbled around backstage I found myself struck by the absolute lack of atmosphere. This despite the fact that everywhere I looked someone seemed to be wielding a camera or microphone, no doubt in an eager attempt to fill their websites and channels with unquotable garbage muttered by the smatterings of anonymous popstars twisting awkwardly in their skinny-tight jeans. But however much they tried to whip up an atmosphere none of it actually meant anything. It was a litany of cliché, second hand quotes dressed up in third hand attitudes. I was standing in a crèche for trendy teenagers.

Now, as I lounge on my sofa like a latter-day Jimmy Stewart in ‘Rear Window’ - though sadly without benefit of a Grace Kelly, (the girl I had hoped to be cast in the role failed to rise to the occasion) I find myself reading the sort of light material I normally only scan when killing time at my local library, specifically the autobiography of former pop-star turned cheese farmer, (note the marvellous circularity to the two terms) Blur’s Alex James. Ans as I plough through the book’s hastily cobbled-together paragraphs I find myself struck by a singular notion; how oddly familiar the trajectory of Mr. James’ and my life seem to have been.

Both from the English suburbs, although his slightly more picturesque, we found ourselves studying at Goldsmiths College, a refuge from the tedious Oxbridge brigade and their closeted world of codified codswallop and dull superiority. For a time we both lived in squats or squat-like dwellings, (I had the edge on Alex there, largely because by the time he had left home the law had been changed, probably because of people like me, and living in an illegal premises for any length of time had become considerably harder to do).

From college our paths took another similar turn when despite any plans we might have had when enrolling on our three year courses, both of us fell into the world of Pop.

Reading through Alex’s experiences, his gradually becoming far more successful than my own, what brought me up short was the repeated echoes even though my own Pop journey had taken place almost a decade earlier. The details mirrored each other to such a degree it felt almost spooky; the travel, the hotels, venues, road crews, fans, models, night-clubs... they seemed to be almost identical.

I began to wonder whether, if you were to speak to any band going through the same process you would find it the same. We think we’re all off on our own fabulous journeys but in fact we are following a pre-ordained route mapped out years earlier by a bunch of men wearing too-tight jeans and dodgy, satin tour jackets.

It made me once more consider the depressing notion that the well-worn fantasy of being a rock star is in fact no more than a myth, that in fact ‘Rock and Roll’ has become nothing but a predictable and well-worn career path. This is of course a large reason for its irrelevance today.

I first discussed this subject with Bill Drummond. Bill wrote the legendary book ‘The Manual’, a pocket-sized paperback now exchanging hands at £250 a throw. It explained in simple detail how one went about having a number one. People bought the book and tried it. For one pair of Austrian individuals the manual worked.

Bill asked me what was it that had made me want to become a singer. I flippantly replied, “I dunno, it just seemed a logical career choice for a middle-class boy.” While I was being semi-flippant at the time, it now seems my explanation was horribly prescient.

Back in 1983, when I got my first record deal, pop as a cold-hearted career option seemed quite a radical notion.

At the time I only expected the band to last for a couple of years. In the event it lasted even shorter than I had predicted, my partner in crime quitting two weeks before the first album was due to be released. I subsequently went solo and discovering the money was so good extended my tour of duty, (I have never been so well paid since).

However, and here’s the thing, I’m pretty sure my generation - post punk, D.I.Y - was the first group of teenagers to consider Pop Music in such terms. Before then the music business had, logically enough, (outside the pre-fab pin-ups of Larry Parnes) been the preserve of musicians. You learnt an instrument, you formed a band, you played your music. If you managed to secure some kind of professional contract out of it, that was a bonus... a big bonus.

Nowadays however ‘the music and the band’ part of the equation turns out for too many people to be something of a tedious pre-requisite one has to go through in order to get the contract. (The TV talent shows of course obviate such a task - you win the contest, you get a number one, shortly followed by oblivion, but hey...)

But for the music world without a deal, the process itself becomes meaningless. In their minds you play music to get paid, to become famous, there is no other reason. That’s why the airwaves, the venues, the web-sites, the festivals are clogged up with bog-standard bands who can’t really play, can’t really write songs, and who aren’t really stars. They’ve simply jumped on the musical band-wagon in the hope of carving out a career.

Up until recently the music business has been been bloated enough to accommodate such tedious practitioners. But times are a-changing as people are becoming all too aware. Deals, the like of which could once support you, are now thin on the ground. It won’t be too long, if the day hasn’t arrived already, when the point of being in a band will once again be merely to play music, to entertain a crowd on a Saturday night.

We’ll find ourselves returning to the days before vinyl, before CD’s, before the record industry was able to package music as a sellable commodity. Thanks to downloading those days are already gone. A generation is growing up believing music should be free. The live experience they’ll pay for but the raw material is simply out there to be heard.

This is no bad thing, if only for the fact that the slew of pug-ordinary bands who neither enlighten nor entertain might quickly fade away. There’ll be nothing in it for them, no audiences turning up to their gigs, no one downloading their tracks, no hope of a deal, no hope of a career.

If this turns out to be the case bring it on I say. And while you’re about it, why not roll out the Joanna and we can all gather round like the old days and have ourselves a right proper knees-up.

As for Alex James, he sussed it. Cheese, babies and Mars... what one might call a proper job.

So I’m at the Baftas, not the awards but the aftershow, the feeding of the three-thousand. I have no legitimate reason for being there but find myself sat at the table reserved for the producers of the hit show ‘Heroes’ which has just won Best International something-or-other. The woman to my left is the president of the local chapter of the corporation which licences said show to the BBC. She naturally asks me what I think of the programme. I, in my inimitable and possibly ungracious way, admit that I haven’t seen it and then add (somewhat unnecessarily) “I don’t get Sci-Fi” - thus annihilating any chance I might ever have had of obtaining a commission from aforementioned corporation. To the woman’s credit she didn’t see my comment as a slur (more likely she couldn’t give a fig and had only been making small talk). Instead she behaved as if relieved to be sitting next to the one person in the building with whom she wasn’t going to have to talk shop. However the following morning my untoward remark got me thinking.

Why didn’t I get Sci-Fi? It seems a whole lot of people most certainly do. In the world of Movies, Science Fiction and Horror are the two strands most likely to be funded, pretty much regardless of whether the script is any good. As this mountain of supernatural garbage cluttering up Popular Culture grows ever higher I felt it only proper I put my mind to the question.

Back in the 1950’s when Sci-Fi as we know it first came to the fore, it had a socio-political logic. The twin-presence of the A-Bomb and The Red Menace gave the citizens of the West plenty to be fearful about. These were two unfathomable entities constantly reminding them that all they had worked for, all they had built, all they had fought for, could be wiped out in a moment. This fear of The Other created a huge sense of powerlessness which Sci-Fiction perfectly tapped into.

Even H.G. Wells work in the earlier part of the century reflected a fear of the unknown, of machines not just taking over the World, but Time itself. But as the 50’s gave way to the 1960’s, Science Fiction gradually became seen, by the mainstream at least, as something rather fun, rather silly. It was there to be toyed with and slightly mocked (cf. ‘Barbarella’ and the space-age fashion of Pierre Cardin). And while the literature of the time, such as Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke, garnered a huge underground following, it was very much seen as Cult work rather than anything which might possibly crossover. Most people were too busy ingesting pharmaceuticals which took them inwards rather than exploring the outer reaches of the universe. If you wanted something more physical one could opt for NASA’s militaristic space programme even if their astronauts all sounded like Republicans and sported G.I haircuts, not a good look at the time. Kennedy tried his damnedest to make their missions sexy, but he was largely motivated by the fact that the Russians had beaten America in putting a man into space.

If people weren’t sitting around getting stoned they were having sex, at least so history keeps telling us. Only recently has a sense of revisionism been taking place. Not everyone in Society was Swinging. In fact many were living tediously humdrum lives out in the suburbs. But at the time these folks were ignored. Bedroom misfits were seen as uninteresting, uninspiring. This was an era for adventure and self-discovery. If you couldn’t make it out of your bedroom what use were you to anyone? The dynamos of Society were those who picked up a pen, a paintbrush, an electric guitar. They weren’t losing themselves in parallel universes, alien invasions or floating space-fleets (not unless they had a particularly good dealer).

But as the 60’s dream began to disintegrate a sense of alienation set in. Films like ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ and ‘Silent Running’ portrayed men cast adrift with only computers or robots for company. This drew a parallel with the sudden sense of emptiness consuming Mankind, the Woodstock years succumbing to a post-Altamont Armageddon, the drugs becoming harder and empty hedonism losing itself in escapist retro. People partied as if their lives depended on it as the economy, which had once promised so much, hit by a war-inspired Oil Crisis, headed rapidly into depression (sound familiar?). A film like Bob Rafelson’s ‘Five Easy Pieces’ captured this sense of bewilderment at a world no longer making sense. In it, Jack Nicholson plays a young man attempting to turn his back on his family, his talent and his class, while being forced to accept that despite his efforts to rebel he is not only defined by these elements but trapped by them. His only escape is a life of solitude with no connections to anyone or anything.

This was pretty dark stuff. No wonder it was too much for some people to take. Those who couldn’t had been biding their time in the aforementioned bedrooms. Now was their time to strike back.

Much has been written about the ‘Revenge of the Nerds’, the nerds in question being Lucas and Spielberg. And while I have little time for the former, Spielberg's triptych of ‘Jaws’, ‘Close Encounters’ and ‘E.T.’ are undeniably terrific films. While Spielberg celebrates the dysfunction of suburbia along with its absent fathers and their private obsessions (Richard Dreyfus’ front room mountain of mash its apogee), Lucas merely disappears into a world of cod-mythology and Wild West retreads, just the sort of fantasy-nonsense all teenage boys come up with until they get their hands on some Kerouac or Camus and actually mature.

‘Star Wars’ is a model-makers world, a facsimile of the real thing. Tales abound of avid collectors, now in their 40’s, buying two of every item of merchandise connected with the saga, one to ’play with’, the other forever un-boxed in order to retain its sell-on value.

Don’t get me wrong, I have no problem with nine-year old boys playing with spaceships and light-sabres. It's just that I find it disheartening to see people old enough to have their own nine-year olds doing the same, whether hand-held or via a computer screen.

Once upon a time Star Wars Addicts, Trekkies and their ilk were there to be sneered at, derided for their home-made and half-baked world of fancy-dress. Their bonkers devotion to the cause, while essentially harmless, nevertheless spoke volumes for their sense of social inadequacy, as does any form of regular self-immersion in a time other than the one we are actually living in (come on down you weekend Roundheads and Cavaliers). But recently it seems these soft-headed misfits have been given the keys to the asylum.

There is of course a cold-hearted commercial logic to why this has happened. In an increasingly disloyal world, one exacerbated by increasing consumer choice, the one demographic which can be counted on to stay true to the cause are Sci-Fi freaks. Received wisdom is that they’ll turn up to see anything, particularly on opening week. This is as much down to a sense of completism (back to the model-figurines) as any inquisitiveness. Rooted in a mixture of adolescent competitiveness and a fear of being left out, the need to have clocked something, annotated it, whether to praise or dismiss, is fundamental to their experience.

In music their closest counterparts are fans of Heavy Metal, and its not surprising that the two worlds often collide. But one would never consider allowing Heavy Metal to dominate prime-time, so why is Sci-Fi given so much space? Both sub-cultures deal in fantasy, dressing-up, strange codes of behaviour, and when comes to matters of taste, the fans of both feel they are entering a private world outside of the mainstream. Yet it’s only Sci-Fi that the mainstream has to put up with.

I can’t turn on the TV or sit through Film Previews without having some wretched form of comic-book escapism being foisted on me as if it was genuinely worth a millisecond of my time. This upcoming summer we have Iron Man, Batman, The Hulk (again), Hellboy, The Happening, Wall E and on and on... On TV we have Tin Man, Heroes, Battlestar Galactica, all manner of Star Trek spin-offs, Flash Gordon (yes he’s back too), a remake of Blakes Seven (spare us) while suffering round-the-clock re-runs of the quintessentially unfunny ‘Red Dwarf’. Last but not least of course is the BBC’s jewel in the crown, ‘Doctor Who’.

Once upon a time, a mercifully long time ago, ‘Doctor Who’ used to be quite a good kids show. Troughton, Pertwee, Baker et al camped about on cruddy sets accompanied by vaguely attractive female assistants. The monsters were sometimes scary, if you were six years old. Any older and hiding behind the proverbial sofa might have proved somewhat tricky. I remember watching it fondly, alongside 'The Tomorrow People' and 'Joe 90'. It didn’t define my life and like the other programmes mentioned, it didn’t define the Broadcasters who made it.

Times have changed. Now, in bringing back 'Doctor Who' you’d have thought the BBC had re-invented the wheel. The coverage borders on saturation. And while I understand it’s a big investment for the corporation (ie. us), the level of regard with which the programme is treated often borders on the rabid. No more so than in the ‘Making of Doctor Who’ slots regularly shown on BBC 3. Here the toilers behind the series portentously babble on about the philosophical dilemmas of the characters as if they are deconstructing Nietzsche. It’s a children’s television programme for heavens sake, not ‘Cathy Come Home’. I’m sure the writer Russell T. Davies, while reassuring himself he was slipping in all sorts of non-conformist messages amongst the Daleks and Slitheen, finally realised that if he really wanted to shake things up he had to stop kidding himself he was being subversive by drip-dripping from the inside and return to ramming the barricades as he did with ‘Queer as Folk’... (hence his diplomatic exit from the show last week).

Personally I wouldn’t mind so much if the show was seen for what it is, a bit of escapist fluff at Saturday tea-time. But it’s even held up as a method of social repair; this is a programme which will bring families together, something parents can sit down with their kids and all enjoy. Get a grip. The parents are probably passed out from dragging their mewling offspring around Lakeside shopping centres, while the children are heads-down text-messaging on their mobiles while arguing who’s next on the computer.

The over-riding problem with Sci-Fi is that it convinces itself, nay prides itself, that beyond all the scary monsters, the nanobots and toxic goo, it’s dealing in Big Human Issues and that on closer examination we can find sophisticated parallels with everything going on in our everyday lives.

But why bother with parallels? We’ve got all that we need right outside our front door. You want scary, try Josef Fritzl. You want disasters, try earthquakes and cyclones. You want a dystopian state, try the inside of Gordon Brown's head. It’s all out there. You don’t even have to search very hard.

That, fundamentally, is the problem with Sci-Fi aficionados. They’re too scared to look. They can handle the great ideas of humanity but only as they pertain to some far-off planet made out of turtles. They can grapple with complex political theories but only as spoken by a man with a walnut welded to his cranium. They can even examine the deepest emotions expressed between a man and a woman, as long as the man is Captain Kirk and the woman he’s wooing is dressed in a one-legged diaphanous pant-suit and comes from the planet Scalos.

So I say to them, grow up... re-engage. The whole of life is out there waiting for you, so much beauty, power and intrigue to fall in love with. Put down your phasers, hang up your helmets, put away your sonic-screwdrivers and join us here in Reality...

Try boldly going where none of you diddums have ever gone before.

I recently spent a week trying to seduce a twenty-eight year old girl. She insisted on thinking of herself as a 'girl' despite my attempts to encourage her otherwise. Even as I tried I knew my efforts would be fruitless, that they would lead nowhere... to nothing. And a week on I have been proved completely correct. During the time we spent together much talking took place, or should I say much listening on my part (aside from the occasional interjection of, “Your bum is not fat, there’s nothing wrong with your nose...”) And in attempting to fathom why I was prepared to put up with her continuous monologue I couldn’t help but come to the depressing conclusion that now, at the age of forty-six, I had suddenly, and somewhat disconcertingly, found myself playing the role of The Older Man.

There is apparently an equation to consider. To determine the perfect age for your partner you halve your age and add ten. Who came up with this formula I have no idea. And it only works for men. For women there is a different sequence of numbers, though what they might be I neither know nor care as there’s little I can do about the outcome either way. Suffice to say that the optimum age for me at the moment is thirty-three. This meant the girl I had spent the last seven days patiently listening to was well under the limit. To be honest I could have deduced that without the use of mathematics. But more importantly, what this brief interlude brought into relief - and how - was the sheer one-sidedness of such arrangements. They work in one way and one way only. The old fart (me) gets to ogle ripe pulchritude (her), these days more commonly expressed by a firm set of limbs. Meanwhile Missy can burble on to her heart’s content about all or more usually nothing, knowing that at any moment she can threaten to withdraw her well-wrapped treasures, leaving the leery-eyed onlooker (me again) grasping for air and madly backtracking. This of itself is no great revelation. It has been ruin of man since time immemorial, certainly since the days of Humbert Humbert. What does amaze me is that despite the sterility and exploitative nature of the set-up, it seems to have a greater hold than ever not only on me but Society as a whole.

This sweet prize of youth is still presented to us as an indisputable thing of desire and the girl/woman continues to hold the power to destabilise, fascinate and disturb. From a semi-clad Miley Cyrus in Vanity Fair to Elizabeth Fritzl, the girl kept in cellar for 24 years and the mother of seven of her father’s children, the child/woman for some reason is at the forefront of discussion like never before. The commercial sexualisation of our children is of course a familiar trope; ‘Daddy’s Girl’ T-shirts for the under-nines, thongs for the under-eights, mothers buying breast implants for their daughters’ sixteenth birthdays... Such post-modern ironies we’ve learnt to take in our stride, or at least enjoy vicariously thanks to the documentary strands of BBC3 and Channel Five. More disturbing are the legal websites where girls as young as twelve pose in lingerie and swimsuits, sites run by the models’ own parents.

A colleague of mine working in Hollywood, while discussing its citizens’ ravenous need for validation - and he wasn’t referring to underground parking - made the absurd if amusing claim that one way or another, if only metaphorically speaking, most actors and actresses have probably been 'diddled by their parents', and if not their parents, an uncle, a sibling or family friend. Hence their unnatural need for love and attention. And though on the surface he may have been exaggerating slightly, there is an element of truth to his proposition... only nowadays the catchment is wider. Far beyond the boundaries of Tinseltown a more pervasive form of cultural diddling is going on.

We’re living in a world where only recently post-pubescent girls, rather than celebrating their burgeoning womanhood - and lets leave the 'girl-as-boy' fashion debate to one side for a moment - are finding themselves infantalised by men (cf. Britney’s schoolgirl, the unbreakable Hayden Panettiere from ‘Heroes’ - “Bend me, shape me, anyway you want me...” - and of course, the strangely malleable Kylie Doll). But while Tweenies are encouraged to see these girls as role models, their older sisters are rapidly leaving such notions of Barbiedom behind, attacking life with a Breezer in each hand while terrifying not only Society but its men who can’t handle them.

This of course was the reason Josef Fritzl buried his daughter for a quarter of a century, to ‘protect her’, to prevent her from going off the rails. "She did not obey any rules, she hung around in bars all night, drank, smoked." And if certain sections of the UK Media are to be believed, we should be constructing a network of bunkers for our womenfolk as we speak and the likes of Lily, Peaches and Daisy (fragrant one and all) regularly pictured drunk, preggers, or out of it, should be keeping one bleary eye over their shoulder at all times.

It seems ironic to me that as soon as Britney began to assert herself, misbehaving, changing her hair-do, putting on weight... in essence returning to her roots and living a life not dissimilar to so many of the girls she originally grew up with in Kentwood Louisiana, she was vilified and traduced. She was no longer the moppet, no longer did as she was told, no longer the cash-cow. And she was hounded for it 24/7.

The template for these girls was of course Marilyn Monroe, a woman who allowed herself to be completely defined by men. With her coochie-coo mutterings and explosively corsetted form, she both worked and was worked over. Yet no matter the quantity of barbiturates she downed to help her sleep at night, she was never perceived as a victim during her lifetime. A mess, a conundrum, a pain-in-the-ass maybe, but no one considered helping her (Arthur Miller posthumously claimed it impossible) until it was too late.

Of course while these mixed messages of womanhood - supplicant Pussycat or out-of-control Valkyrie - are confusing enough to the young women trying to de-code them, what seems even more worrying are the excuses they’re giving the growing number of men unable to countenance a world they feel they are no longer able to control.

As a young man I fell out of love with the Theatre. At a time of Punk Rock, the explosive movies of Scorcese, Coppola and early De Palma, the television of Bochco, Bleasdale and Jimmy McGovern, a night spent amongst the self-congratulatory middle-classes watching some left-leaning production by Bond, Brenton or Hare felt not only as dull as wholemeal bread but an evening wasted. Surely the real protest was out in the streets, in the clubs, living the lifestyle. Surely the proper way of changing the world was by doing something about it, whether that meant a Rock Against Racism gig, taking the piss out of Hippies or making your own records... not just writing about it.

Well times haven’t changed. Last night I went to the first night of the new Howard Brenton play ‘Never So Good’, a play about the life of former British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, a man who presided over the last days of Empire, an Edwardian figure, scarred by his experiences during the First World War who had to live with the ignominy of his wife carrying on with one of his political colleagues, Lord Boothby, an individual who himself came unstuck after too many nights spent fraternizing with the brothers Kray.

And while the production was both well staged and well written, my overriding feeling about the evening was one of missed opportunity. The most significant event in Macmillan’s political life, the moment which finally handed him the reins of power, was the imbecilic catastrophe of Suez, Britain’s last attempt to effect World Order. The Americans having bailed us out of World War Two were in no mind to allow us such status and pulled the rug from under our feet once our boys had reached Port Said, threatening to sell off the Pound which would have bankrupted Britain in less than three days.

Suez of course was largely about Oil, and much in the way Paul Thomas Anderson’s bizarrely vacuous film ‘There Will Be Blood’ implied far more than it actually delivered, so Brenton’s play also suffered, going as far - in the only really cack-handed moment of the evening - as having the invading Tommies of 1953 dressed in contemporary Iraq-styled battle-gear and run around yelling the word ‘fuck’.

This half-baked bit of agit-prop didn’t bother me unduly, there has to be some reason for going to see a play about a largely forgotten Prime Minister after all, and the more obvious the dramatist can make his contemporary parallels the more likely he’ll receive a commission. And of course, for Brenton’s generation of writers, the gang currently at the top of the heap - your Pinter brigade - the 50’s was their coming of age, the time when they got their first break, their launch into public and professional life. The decade means something more to them than it does the rest of us and therefore they’re going to do their upmost to remind us of its importance. It’s notable that in the world of television - the world of the Baby Boomers - you never see list-shows of the 1950’s. They all begin ten years later. That’s not because footage doesn’t exist. It’s because the programme makers don’t give a damn about a crusty, repressed and somewhat confused era, when homosexuality was illegal, divorces were frowned upon and sex before marriage, amongst the middle and upper classes at least, was still a reason for social exclusion.

Sitting in the Lyttleton Theatre - its lobby manifesting all the ambience of a secondary airport - I found myself surrounded by members of that same 50’s generation, all looking a little tired, grey and weather-beaten, shuffling to their seats rheumy-eyed, the Aldermaston March obviously having finally caught up with them. As as they knowingly chuckled along to the material, proudly spotting the references and in-jokes - Peter Cook, Christine Keeler, Churchill’s ‘Black Dog’ - I found myself thinking, why the loving analysis of men and women who are now dead? Why the examination of a time gone by? It is so easy to nod sagely at the errors of judgement made by ghosts from the past, the psychological flaws, their bizarre predilections, their manner of doing things we wouldn’t do now. What about the errors of today? What about the buffoons, the egotists, the sly little monsters running Britain right now?

As Iraq continues to burn, the economy veers like an unattached weather balloon, feckless mothers and fathers - as if reliving some sort of Dickensian tale - find their children stolen or murdered, I see little purchase in consoling our intellect by making the parallels between Now versus Then, when it’s clearly Now we should be worrying about. We’ve just watched a Pope-driven lawyer sidle away from the nation’s centre-stage like some latter day Pontius Pilate, not even bothering to dry his hands before picking up 'jobs from the boys' left, right and centre. The man he has left behind is a charmless obsessive who chews his nails to to the bone and shuffles about like a bear with a head on. I can’t see much of a play being written about Gordon Brown 50 years from now. The rest of the Cabinet is made up of middle-management types, starry-eyed policy wonks and mini-bots - come on down Miliband and Blears. Is this really the best our country has to offer? No wonder we’re in a cultural mess. The opposition if anything is worse. Made up of ‘characters’, though for character read privileged toffs, some of whom find it quite alright to sleep with other women behind their wife’s back - all a bit of a Mayoral laugh. In that sense at least little has changed since Macmillan’s day. Truly, Cameron and Boris are the New Edwardians.

I suppose we get the Government we deserve. Always have, always will. But as these chubby-cheeked minnows flap and holler across the despatch box we are left to look on in weary despair. Britons abroad mean less and less by the year. A rump of an Army the rest of Nato neglects, the odd freak of a performer smacked-up and cracked, a football league made up of multi-millionaire foreigners, a capital city now a refuge for gangsters - both blue and white collar - a tabloid culture spiteful and petty, a young population washing itself in booze for underlying reasons no one seems to want to address for fear that the revenue might be lost if habits were irrevocably changed. Suicides up, divorces up, unwanted pregnancies up, violent crime between people who know each other up... we're a happy breed indeed.

So while we sit humming and hawing about a world left behind, picking through its carcass for those elements we miss - order, respect, a proper cup of tea - we might take a moment to ponder or even dissect the second-rate salesman currently running the show. Fifty-years from now, it’ll might well be too late.

This week has seen the debut in the UK of the television series ‘Madmen’. It has been fan-fared and feted to an equal degree so I felt it only my duty to check it out. Especially as it had been described as the best thing on TV since ‘The Sopranos’, a show which, despite its plaudits by the end of its run had been shunted around so relentlessly - ending up in a graveyard slot some time past 11pm - that most people I knew ended up watching it on DVD.

Indeed the opening episode of ‘Madmen’ was well written, well performed (by its ensemble of largely unknowns), well filmed - all hard surfaces, pencil skirts and sharp suits - that it was a pleasure to watch. But a guilty pleasure - the guilt coming from obtaining such a vicarious thrill at watching a drama set at a time when smoking wasn’t a capital crime (socially speaking at least), when non-PC attitudes - which most of all still have but never express unless we’re with very close friends - are given full and unbridled rein.

But by the end all I was left with was the sense that I was watching nothing more than the beginning of slightly superior Soap. So why such respect and critical admiration?

A conversation I had last week with a friend, far wiser and more knowledgeable about these things than I, may hold a clue. He was decrying the state of British Culture - primarily artistic, although I’m sure if we’d had time he’d have moved on to all things including football, politics and garden design. He was speaking from a position of some experience, sitting as he does on various boards, both governmental and independent, tasked to debate and discuss such issues.

He had come to the conclusion that British Culture was moribund, in a terminal funk. It had enjoyed 50 years of growth and success since the Second World War but was now so far up its own fundament, populated almost exclusively by people who saw Art/Music/Film etc. as a way to get paid, rather than anything truly burning within their very fibre that it was dead on its legs. The ‘counter culture’ particularly - in his opinion - was over.

What we are left with is karaoke singers trained at The Brit School, technically adept at appropriating Soul without the experience. Film makers enslaved to the Hollywood Dream, while the domestic audience shows little or no interest in stories centred around their own world. Meanwhile Prime Time TV chooses to eat itself, resorting to creating dramas based on reality shows. It’s like watching a dog chasing its own tail.

Why has this happened? Because we have become a market-led society. It’s all about giving the audience what they want. Not giving them stuff they don’t know about, showing them something new, beyond their previous realm of understanding, thus perhaps in some small way changing their vision of the world. No, much better off regurgitating something they’re already familiar with. Whether that’s ‘Doctor Who’, Ant & Dec’s nostalgic game-show extravaganzas, the plethora of talent shows, whether celebrity-based like ‘Strictly Come Dancing’, or the more gladiatorial arenas of ‘Britain’s Got Talent’ (thumbs down I’d say). This is pablum for the masses made by money-grabbing cynics.

And who are these cynics? Well, they are us. The ex-punks of ‘77. My generation was the first to glamorise and fall in love with the Art of the Sell (thanks Malcolm). From D.I.Y to ‘Frankie Says’ and the multitude of unnecessary 12” re-packages and re-mixes, it was my generation who truly embraced the concept of a market-driven society. Gordon Gekko was coining the catch-phrases while Maggie was stoking the kilns.
Any notion that we might have been behaving irresponsibly, that we might be due a reality check was sub-sumed in the verbiage of knowing post-modernism where everything could be wittily de-constructed. You were either in or the joke or a dumb relic from the drab days of the working class, strike-bound 70’s.

The world of selling became a world of glamour. As Britain moved away from manufacturing, its economy changed to one based on service industries, nice clean jobs where no one got their hands dirty. This new economy heralded the arrival of consultants, PR’S, branding companies, people who told you who you should be, to consider yourself a product in an intensely competitive market. Your profile - your image - had to be perfect in order to maximise your potential. It was all about perception. It was all about New Labour.
It was all about convincing people they needed something they didn’t.

After 35 years of this onslaught folks in The West are beginning to wonder if maybe, just maybe, they might have been sold a pup. Luckily there are the emerging markets of The Far East to come to the multi-nationals’ rescue. Even if we are beginning to fall out of love with decades of unfettered Consumerism, thank heaven’s the burgeoning Third World will be around to pick up the slack, no matter if if they happen to incinerate the planet in doing so.

Meanwhile on this side of the world, as we stumble around watching prices go up and the value of everything we own go down, we find refuge in nostalgia - Austerity Britain, slow cooking, make do and mend. Books like Richard Mabey’s ‘Nature Cure’, detailing his forensic pleasure in all around us, become word-of-mouth best-sellers. Jamie delights in showing off his organic garden and we delight in the idea, just the idea mind, that we too could grow tomatoes out of a re-cyclable plastic bag.

And as dinner party conversations rage about what is and isn’t ‘really important in life’ now that even the drugs don’t work (seroxat and prozac) or in contrast, work too much (skunk and crack) the war in Iraq rages on too, now costing an unimaginable $3 trillion (... twelve noughts). The US economy is now officially in recession despite Bush’s desperate claims to the contrary, causing people’s last-resort nest eggs - their homes - to lose value and jobs to disappear.

So who’s to blame? Where did it it all go wrong? Who the hell can we pin this on?

Of course we blame not ourselves but the messengers, the sly devils who convinced all of us this stuff would work. The hucksters, the shysters, the snake-oil salesmen who promised that just by buying into whatever it was they had to offer, a product, a policy, a design for life, happiness, power, respect and success, could all be easily and instantly achieved.

It was the Madmen.

And that, my friends, in the same way that Misery Porn or the films of Richard Curtis have been such a success, is the answer as to why the show in question has found such a willing, complicit, fascinated and self-flagellating audience.