William Howard: Bach, Schubert and Skempton, Kings Place review – piano is not my forte

Let’s try a little piano recital again. I thought I’d try and make use out of Kings Place, seeing as I’m there all the time, and they have concerts on four or five nights a week and there’s me, you know, trying to be cultural, or at least find things to do that aren’t Twitter. So, a piano recital it was, this one given by William Howard, playing some Schubert and Bach spliced between two modernist sets from the composer Howard Skempton. Howard the lads, as they say up north.

I wasn’t in a great mood when I got there, an hour early, and sitting in the art gallery reading about Kierkegaard didn’t really help, so my first impression of the crowd waiting outside the hall was a) Christ, everyone’s so old; old people should chop all their fucking hair off so they don’t look so fucking old; and b) Lord almighty everyone’s very, very posh. Horrendously posh. So posh it made me want to go and vote for Brexit.

But anyway. Once the music started, my alienation abated and I enjoyed the first Skempton piece, a set of sketches called Reflections. The first few were quite ambient, using the piano more for its sound-design qualities than its melodism, then it turned a little plinkyplonky, more like Philip Glass. All the pieces were very short, and would stop abruptly, as if someone had lifted the needle off a record.

It turned out that Skempton was in the audience and Howard got him up to take a bow, and they had a conversation that I read as Skempton saying: “Marvellous playing, William, magnificent.” I don't know what else he'd have been saying, unless they were arranging to buy drugs.

Following that he played Schumann’s Four Impromptus. Up to now, Schumann has only been associated in my mind with the moody pianist in Peanuts, but it turns out he’s a lovely romantic with impassioned, rolling, playful music that put me in mind of a cat toying with a ball of wool. Somewhere between Chopin and Debussy, I’d venture, if I was feeling cocky; the heart and emotion of Chopin with added impressionism. But I might retract that, when it inevitably turns out that Schumann was before Chopin, and way before Debussy. (Quick Wikipedia break: they were contemporaries.)

After the break it was three of Bach’s prelude and fugue pairs, which were, obviously, great. I can't really say anything about them; it would be like critiquing the psalms. And then on to the second Skempton set, a London premiere of his attempt at 24 preludes and fugues. Most of these came in at the 30-second mark, so we were back to the abrupt stopping. In fact, even more abrupt than with Reflections, where the pieces were at least able to get out the blocks before being ruthlessly cut down. These were more like listening to the radio on a very windy day. Just as you were beginning to get into the mood or texture of the piece, it vanished. I know that Satie was adamant you should never bore your audience, but this seemed extreme. I began to resent the fact that I knew when I gave my ears up to the pieces (which were all lovely) they would too soon be snatched away (the pieces, not my ears). It got to be like going on Tinder knowing that everyone you connect with will immediately ghost you; it becomes difficult to allow yourself the emotion. Furthermore, I wasn’t sure why they had to be cut. It wasn’t obvious to me what was so great about outlining a lovely melody or rhythm and then yanking it from under you. I’m sure there’s a very clever reason, but frankly that was part of the problem. Brexit again, you see.

There was an encore, after a pronounced bout of bowing (do they teach them that bowing at the conservatory, I wondered. It's very precise, and always exactly the same). He played another Skempton piece, some kind of song of the Highlands, which he introduced as "one of the most beautiful pieces I’ve ever played”. I mean, that's just setting it up for a fall, really – and it wasn't helped by the fact that he’d played more beautiful pieces that very evening. Especially by that Schumann. One to watch, him.

Jerry Sadowitz, the Betsey Trotwood review – extremely versa-bile

A thinly attended (he had apparently reservations for the whole place but without taking money, so only half the people turned up) warmup show from the patriarch of scabrous comedy, the progenitor of Frankie Boyle, Jimmy Carr and a heap of other hugely more famous close-to-the-knuckle comedians. An antihero of the alternative comedy scene – and also a world-renowned closeup magician – who made his name skewering the sacred politically correct cows of the 80s to audiences of right-on lefties. Sadowitz flirted with telly, flirted with some degree of success, but has in the end stayed true to his self-image as a chronically inadequate and underachieving figure, a better place from where to launch his rancid, bitter broadsides at literally all and sundry.

I had dimly wondered whether, in this so-called ‘woke’ era, at a time when fascism and the far right are on the march, when laughing at unfortunates has stopped being ironic and returned to a move of the powerful, Sadowitz’s comedy would still be funny or whether our new awareness of the victims of abuse – and perhaps of our increasingly perilious reality – would make the always unpalatable into the utterly unacceptable.

I suppose it is difficult to say, but from my perspective, Sadowitz, as energetic at nearly 60 as I can remember him, rolled back the years to when it was indeed acceptable to make jokes about pretty much every group in the world, from the most deserving to the least. Despite the fact that some of it could have found itself in the worst Richard Littlejohn columns (in fact, there was a riff on how Boris Johnson had stolen his line about Muslim women looking like letterboxes), somehow – and this was probably the most extraordinary magic trick that he performed – it (mostly) was, while despicable, extremely, outrageously funny.

I think it must be something to do with his unlikely charm, and perhaps the way that he performs it all from a place of extreme vulnerability, so none of it comes over as punching down. (Sadowitz himself claimed to have no truck with that distinction, saying that punching down is as acceptable as everything else; and there were bits that just didn’t land, although it was hard to tell whether he had overstepped a line or just not finessed the humour enough.) While he still looks like a Victorian scarecrow that has been Frankensteined into an imitation of life, he remains an extraordinary performer just to watch and I would have happily snapped photos throughout if I hadn’t thought he might smash my camera and boot me out.

Obviously I was bringing my privilege, as we say nowadays, but it was a refreshing experience to chuck all that neurosis out of the window and just watch someone unilaterally smearing the entire human race with bile. He made it, in his own words, a safe space for bigotry, but somehow the bigotry, being both universal and unconnected to any power, was joyous instead of vile.

It might be also the way that he point blank refused to admit the especial awfulness of our era, which while maybe nonsense, was at least a relief from the unrelenting rainfall of bad news. I guess your mileage may vary.

Outside, one of the few punters noted: “It’s not for everyone.”

In actual fact, it's not for anyone.

Star Wars: Rise of Skywalker review – death becomes them

The swirl of reviews and is up, opinions swooping and swarming, crashing into each other, firing their laser vigour out into the deepest galaxy of internet space; many keen to shout “It’s shit!” as loudly as possible, others to go “It’s fine, I don’t know what they’re on about,” none yet that I’ve seen to say, “Really great, necessary addition to the canon.” I don't know why I feel obliged to add my tuppence; I wouldn't really call it a review as much as to say I guess I've got observations and you, you lucky reader, are good to get em. Merry Christmas!

Put it this way: I might watch it again, but not so much for pleasure as to see whether my opinions hold over a second viewing. And I won’t be doing that for at least, oh I don’t know, maybe 40 years. No, maybe I will, but probably not, because the chief impression I had watching this was that they have sucked the franchise dry, sucked it completely dry, reanimated the corpse through some incredible film-making sorcery, and then sucked the whole fucking thing dry again.

I mean, Emperor Palpatine. Are you having a fucking laugh?

So yeah, the storyline was fucked. I mean how much emotion are you supposed to invest in the question of whether the heroes will kill the dude that was already fucking killed three films ago. Now, he’s being kept in a state of seemingly undead, on some sort of afterlife support system and it turns out he’s been propelling the bad guy (who’s not really a bad dude, just a bit upset) using his ability to psychically talk to anyone in the universe and see what’s going on, sort of like God then, and more than that, while in hiding he’s conjured, apparently out of his undead arsehole, a gigantic fleet of about a kajillion star destroyers that all zap planets like Death Stars. Like get the fuck out of here.

Meanwhile, we’re supposed to be worrying about whether our young, considerably-more-posh-than-I-remember hero Rey is going to be able to resist the entreaties of the bad dude and the undead bad dude who happens to be her grandad to become a superfucking real bad girl and let her friends die and all this jazz, storywise it fucking stinks no two ways about it.

(Seeing her as much posher all of a sudden might be something to do with a newspaper article I read about Daisy Ridley showing she understood fuck all about her class privileges, but it also might be the film-makers up-poshing her for her royal reveal, because it turns out that in 2018, they produced a book championing Rey as evidence that anybody could make it, no matter how humble their origins, in the Star Wars universe; only now it turns out, as before, that the whole thing is basically a spat among princes.)

Furthermore seeing as the bad dude is basically a god, and the story hinges entirely on whether Rey defeats him or not, why do all these other people have to die? The other films (not the prequels which don't count) seemed to find a better balance between the interfamilial drama plotline and the swarming armies of imperial and rebel fleets. This had just as much laser blasting, but it was never clear why any of it had to happen, seeing as Rey wanted to get to the emperor and he wanted her to come.

My feeling is that previously the story might have been hookum but the charm carried it over, but the charm has been clinically and expertly sucked the fuck out. They played around well in Eps 7 and 8 between the new characters and the old, especially keeping Luke back and seeing Han get appendectomied into the next life, plus there was just a huge sense of relief that someone who really loved the originals was in charge after the aforementioned unmentionable prequels, but here it’s just all too much, the nostalgia has worn off and seeing Luke’s family home, for example, or the Emperor’s Death Star throne room, or Billy Dee Williams, it’s like yeah we get it, past references, no one cares any more; and then you’re just left with a storyline that doesn’t engage you.

In place of an engaging story, they do a lot of heartstring tweaking. Here they have got something going on that might bear a second watch, because there were a lot of moving moments, especially to do with Carrie Fisher. I was uncomfortable about the CGI Carrie Fisher mainly because it strikes me as incredibly disrespectful that when one of your actors dies, instead of writing around it, you resurrect them and have them cavort about pretty much as if you were pushing the cadaver around the stage – and in a film where more or less the same thing has happened to literally the most evil character in the universe. I did not like it one bit, but at one point when Rey goes to leave Leia and they have a loving hug and you sense this is the last time they will meet – you kind of hope that maybe this is the last time you see Leia cos it’s so uncomfortable, but it wasn’t – and then there’s a moment when Billy Dee Williams says something along the lines of “Tell Leia how much I love her”, and you get it: they really did love Carrie Fisher and she died and they’re really fucking sad about that. I think, but maybe that's what they want us to think.

And for the first time ever, I was suddenly worried by the question: does Star Wars have a race problem? There’s been some chat about how Kelly Marie Tran had barely any lines in this episode; this after her bigger part in Last Jedi drew a load of internet grief from couchfucking types. But for me, it was something about the way they portrayed the gap yah posh white girl visiting the Indian-looking festival and getting a necklace off the friendly local that gave me the shivers; something about the way the rodent who tweaked C3PO’s brain seemed to be another jolly foreigner type. Both as if they were using aliens to get away with some pretty carefree orientalism. And then there was the way that Finn found his soulmate, another ex-stormtrooper who just happened to be played by a black girl from London, as if they were saying, don’t worry that he seems to fancy the royal big potatoes, he’s going to end up with someone suitable. I dunno, I’m no race theorist, but there was something off key going on there, even while there's progress that they did have some good roles for black people and they don’t even have to die.

The other interesting thing they seem to be getting at is that they keep saying to each other: “Stick together, if we stick together we’ll be able to beat this all-powerful enemy” and I couldn’t help imagining maybe they mean us. Maybe they mean if we stick together, remember our friends, try to work together, we can beat this fascist menace, this far-right monster growing in the black darkness, steadily getting stronger and more confident, coming on ready for its big reveal. Maybe they’re trying to indoctrinate the kids to believe that they can take this thing on. I hope that they did – and I hope that they do. That would be one good meaning of A New Hope, I suppose. But it seems just as likely that they are telling us that we the plebs can’t do anything about the fascist onslaught and have to hope a royal princess takes up the challenge.

It was a film seemingly very preoccupied with death. Lots of people died, lots of supposedly main characters as well, but for most it was time to die (plus they can all come back as fucking ghosts any time so it’s not much of a hindrance). And the truth is that for Star Wars, too, it is, I’m afraid, time to die.

Joker review – origins of specious

About half way through Joker I wondered what I would say if someone asked me what I thought of the film.

“It doesn’t matter what I think,” was what I considered my response would be.

Doesn’t bode well for a review, perhaps, but I think it stands up. It doesn’t mean I’m not going to burden you what I did think; only that, as there are as many Joker origin stories as people to invent them, nobody else’s is ever going to be on the button. The most important element of Todd Phillips’ Joker origin story is that he got it made. I haven’t got mine made; I haven’t even got one to get made, but I do have a clear idea of who the Joker is and most of us, when we are given an end point, can have a stab at getting there.

By which I suppose I mean that Joker is a kind of fan-fic; it’s hardly canon; it’s more a riff or two or three on what’s gone before. No one who comes along to reimagine the Joker or Gotham is going to feel beholden to this film, unless, I suppose, they make a sequel. Joker 2: After the Laughter, perhaps.

There’s a lot to like in Joker. Joaquin Phoenix’s dancing especially. The grit of a trash-strewn Gotham Bronx. Just the very idea of dragging the supernal Joker down into the dirt of having an origin story in the first place, especially one as scrawny and craggy as this one. The violence was satisfyingly authentic. The cinematography, the choreography, the acting were all great. Atlanta’s Paper Boi pitched up in a great scene. The plot twists were – sometimes – effective, while the fears of incel inspo and hand-wringing about Gary Glitter seem wide of the mark.

But there’s a lot not to like. It’s a very confused film. It’s confused about mental illness. It’s confused about protest movements. It’s confused about abuse victims. It’s confused about how old Joker even is (it implies he’s 30, but Phoenix is 44 and looks and acts it; in any case even if he was 30, could the Joker really be 20 years older than Batman?). It's confused about what happens when you suddenly stop taking seven different types of medication.

Its cake-and-eat-it attitude to psychosis, schizophrenia, hallucination, child abuse – that these real, actual real things that happen to actual real people can somehow be juggled in such a way as to give us a plausible origin for something as implausible as a fucking superhuman killer clown – was undignified. It had little or nothing to offer about the world as we find it today, when the killer clowns are running the fucking show. Even its take on Taxi Driver-era New York amounted to no more than saying funding cuts in mental health provision are bad. Not an awful message, but thin.

Of course it’s a comic book, so perhaps it’s too much to ask for more. But of course, it’s not a comic book at all; it’s real, real, realism, not even magic realism, and certainly not comic book. The crux of the film is that the Joker is brought down to earth, explicated in terms of what might happen to any of us; the unreal made real by the force of plot. And it fell well short of managing the lofty goal, although there was plenty of fun on the way.

And the less said about the strand with Bobby De Niro the better – in terms of script anyway, although the joke at the end was pretty good.

Visions in Meditation, Sarah Davachi, Philip Jeck, Darkstar, Union Chapel review

 

Philip Jeck

This happened in October, but I forgot to press go on this until today

It was a strange one at the Union Chapel, an odd Friday night. A screening of four films by Stan Brakhage – the programme had him as “a non-narrative film-maker, the most famous experimental film-maker of the 20^th century” – called Visions in Meditation. These were abstract footage of a journey through the US in the late 80s, filmed on 16mm, and set – with the exception of one film – to a soundtrack of silence. Interspersed between the showings was music – minimalist, experimental, electronic, ambient – commissioned specially for this show, to respond to the films. And that’s what I was there for.

All three pieces were performed by the composer seated at a desk, twiddling nobs on a synthesiser, accompanied by a string trio, two violins and a cello from the London Contemporary Orchestra. The first to go up was Sarah Davachi, a Canadian composer who specialises in “disclosing the delicate psychoacoustics of intimate aural spaces” – this means drones – and who has made some great albums that I’ve enjoyed listening to on YouTube.   

The wafting smoke, pentagram candle holders hanging from the ceiling and most especially the general ambience of grinding discondant drones gave the whole thing somewhat more of a Satanic ritual vibe than your average Friday night in Upper Street – unless you count the Slug and Lettuce, obviously. It would be harsh to call Davachi’s output “anti-music”, but being as it dispenses with rhythm, harmony and melody, it wouldn’t be unfair. In much the same way as in jazz you can play anything except the wrong notes, in this kind of music you can play anything as long as it’s not musical. But I’m a great fan, because by dispensing of all the usual techniques, you get music that is free of the manipulations, end-seeking and confinement typical of most performance*. 

This focus on means rather than ends gives ambient, experimental music a refreshing, egoless and what I am going to call “dis-rational” character. The benefit of disrationality is that by offering nothing for the ego-mind to hold on to, it points to the reality beyond experience. But of course, when we dispense with rationality, it becomes difficult to say whether things are pointing to reality or just stealing a living. It’s one thing to listen to this on YouTube, but something else to pay actual money and spend your actual Friday night doing it in public. There was definitely an emperor’s new clothes/Arts Council funding/#WhitePeopleTwitter about the whole thing; as though at any moment, someone sensible might walk in, turn on the lights and go: “What the fuck are you lot doing?”

The second composer was Philip Jeck, an avuncular-looking figure with white hair, pate shining in the purple light, wearing a blazer. I did enjoy watching this grandfatherly character conjure some extremely dark horror soundtrack on his go. The third was Darkstar – or at least one of them – who played the most “musical” music of the three, which was actually a relief by this point, and gave the string trio some actual playing to do, which was nice. But I was never close to an insight in how the music was responding to the films. 

As for the films, the lack of narrative was challenging. I was struck by how much I craved some – any – narrative. I took to reading the programme by the light of my phone: Oh! He’s travelling across America. Oh! He’s the most famous experimental film-maker of the 20^th century. And these little titbits of narrative did in fact make the experience more compelling. I was left to wonder how much more I would have enjoyed them had I known more about the story of why he had made them, but that did seem as if it might defeat the point of non-narrative cinema.

In fact, I realised, my need of narrative was mostly to justify why I was watching them. If I could tell myself a story about why I was bothering, I’d happily sit there, even if I didn’t “enjoy” the experience. 

It seemed a form over content kind of thing. The films were of the American landscape, but whatever it was they were trying to say – their narrative, for want of a better word – seemed to be carried more by the arrangement of the shots than the shots themselves. There were moments in the films where the rhythm of the cuts and the repetition of shots did come together to offer something like a visual music, but those moments soon passed. Many of the shots were dark, dim or blurred. I was left feeling that if you are going to have no soundtrack and no narrative, the least you could do is have some decent pictures, but that is clearly something else I have to learn about.

A strange one, then. I would have liked to have asked someone who did enjoy it to explain what I was missing, but that’s probably cheating.

* Can you see I’m struggling to explain this bit?

Simon Armitage, Tabernacle review – not a review

This is not going to be a review. Nor am I, though it did briefly occur to me, going to do it in a Simon Armitage-like poem, thereby making my comments in the form of his form, a probably more interesting and insightful (I just spelled that 'inciteful') piece of work than what is hereby going to transpire. But, no.

I like Simon Armitage. I recommend you read his poems. His poems are fresh, live, lyrical, steeped in performance but also in the history of poetry. More accessible than many, he carries the faint hint of the frustrated indie musician about him, which is preferable to musicians carrying the hint of the frustrated poet, imho. He's interesting, down to earth, real, speaks with a lovely Leeds plaint, something like a streetwise Alan Bennett, or at least as streetwise as a professor of poetry gets. He's not Leedswise like, say, Mik Artistik, but he was a probation officer once, so you know, he's been about. Got insights from the other sides, if you know what I mean, although his life nowadays is mostly writing poetry, teaching students, making TV and theatre and doing readings for Guardian types, as this one was, on a tour to promote The Unaccompanied, his latest album, sorry, poetry collection. Doing a reading, then a chat with the Guardian books editor and then Qs from the audience.

So he read some poems. Lovely voice he's got, that soft Leeds burr, gentle and fey but not foolish; read some poems and my attention span being what it is, I drifted. Some kept me locked on: the first one, which was more or less a standup routine, worked well. Others, I drifted. I was thinking that the definition of an artist is that they're more interested in what's in their own head than what other people are doing, but maybe it's not the definition of an artist, but the definition of a narcissist; anyway, I had to battle really to focus at times – more Debussy than Chopin. I find a lot of poetry could learn from standup anyway, the thing about standup is you can't lose the audience, even for a moment, you have to keep them with you all the time, because you've got this feedback in standup that's unlike more or less anywhere else, you know when you're losing them because they stop laughing. You have to be tight. Of course if you're not going for laughs, it's not a helpful feedback mechanism, but it keeps you honest, and you can say a lot even while making people laugh, it's not like you can't say everything in the world.

So this is not a review. It wasn't really a show. The audience asked questions and at first they were shy, and then when they had stopped being shy, they asked weird questions. The public are an odd bunch, even at poetry readings, consumed with odd obsessions that come out in their weird questions. And Simon tried to answer them, really, he tried, but sometimes he just didn't, despite trying, because the question was just too bloody odd.

I wanted to ask a question but I was too shy. Well, shy's not the word, but I kind of thought I might just be asking a question that everybody else would already know the answer to and therefore it would be a waste. But never be shy, that's my top tip. Because other people will always be less shy than you, and have stupider questions.

Maurizio Pollini, RFH review

If you ever, as I once did, discover a love for Chopin's piano pieces, you will inevitably find yourself listening to Maurizio Pollini. Along with Arthur Rubinstein, Vladimir Ashkenazy and Martha Argerich, he'll turn up in your YouTube searches soon enough, although, it turns out, he ranges farther and wider in the classical realm than good old Fryderyk Franciszek.

Anyway, I was surprised to hear that he is still alive, and booked a ticket for a recital at the RFH, exactly my cup of tea, just a piano and an audience, and someone to play it, in a nice room. No microphones and all that modern jazz. Not modern jazz, modern ... stuff. But not modern jazz either. Chopin, my favourite.

Since I haven't, in the few weeks since the Daniil Trifonov concert, added anything to my threadbare understanding of classical music, my critical insights remain no better than mundane. This guy has the knowledge, if you're interested. But still, you know, I'm having a crack.

My friend, my resident classical music know-it-all, had warned me that Pollini was now too old and it was likely to be a bust, because who can really perform at 82 or whatever he is, and he'd seen him before and it had been terrible. But it turns out that Pollini is only 75 and, so far as my limited critical ability could tell, can still tickle those ivories in a roughly congruous manner. As I strolled up to the South Bank, feeling all cosmopolitan because for once I'm actually going out in London somewhere not the pub at the end of my road or some overpriced twat citadel in Hackney; as I walked up I was thinking, well, I know Chopin quite well, so it'll probably just be him playing Chopin and how transcendent can that be? I mean it'll be what it is. No surprises, I suppose, is what I was thinking.

And I was right, but also I was wrong, because there were surprises, and they weren't just related to having nowhere to sit in the bar beforehand, or how they made you buy a programme to find out what he was going to play, which you might have thought would be included in the price of the ticket, if you knew nothing about anything. No, the surprises were that despite listening to what I thought was quite a lot of Chopin, I didn't know Pollini's choices very well. So I got to enjoy fresh Chopin, while still enjoying Chopin, because Chopin is Chopin and whether nocturne, ballade or scherzo, operates in the same lilting, gorgeous register, streams of ethereal melodies and an endlessly interesting colour chords. Of all his choices, I most loved the Berceuse in D flat, a short, playful nursery-like dream that manages to combine meditative stillness with gobsmacking pianistic athleticism.

The thing with Chopin is that the tunes are so clear and well-articulated that it holds your (my) attention much more effectively than, say, the Debussy that Pollini played after the interval. It's possible to hear what's going on with Chopin, even as he illustrates and elaborates in all directions. With the Debussy – or some of the things Trifonov played – while it's all very nice, beautiful, spectacular, dripping with imaginations, whatever, I find I start to drift; the storyline is submerged, and my mind begins to wander. But with Chopin, I'm held, able to follow exactly his beautiful, lyrical, aching forays into romantic delirium. Towards the end of the Debussy, by contrast, I began aching for him to finish.

Pollini himself seemed in good health. He did look like an old man, with the beginnings of a stoop as he padded to the piano, and perhaps Trifonov's fingers were more emphatic, but there was nothing I could hear that suggested he wasn't up to it and he played more or less consistently well through two hours. He did take a lot of bows, for an old guy. Up after every piece finished and bowing round the great hall, which had added rows behind him on the stage. After the Debussy he padded off, then padded back on again to take more bows. He got a bit of a standing ovation at this point, but it was hard to tell if it was a real standing ovation or if people were just trying to get out ahead of the crush. Then he padded back off again, then back on again – possibly trying to get his Fitbit numbers up – and finally settled down to play an encore. He played three encores, each separated by a good deal of padding to and fro; by the third one the guy next to me was exasperated that he had to stay to listen to more music. But it was some more Chopin, so I was happy. And by the end, everyone joined in the standing ovation.

Daniil Trifonov, Barbican review

Away from the nascent fascism, rising global anxiety and a nice day out protesting against Trump, and to the Barbican, for a classical piano recital. I read about Daniil Trifonov, a 25-year-old wunderkind, in the New Yorker and, after watching a couple of YouTube clips and reckoning he looked the biz, saw he was in town and bought a ticket. Not even very expensive. And the cocktail bar outside is quite nice and not overpriced either.

Not really my usual haunt, though, and it showed. At the interval I tried to buy a cocktail, but the barman told me they don't serve them in the break. "Why?" I asked, witlessly. "Do people get too lairy?" "No," he deadpanned. "It just takes too long to make them." What he didn't say, and fair play to him, was: No, you cretin, this is the Barbican, not Croydon High Street. People who come to the Barbican to watch classical music don't get lairy on one too many cocktails.

Anyway, as this anecdote obliquely shows, I don't know a mouse's morsel about classical music, so if you're hoping for some kind of knowledgable review of proceedings, you are likely to be disappointed. The nuances of how good Trifonov really is, what choices he made on interpretation and so on – the kind of things you might want in a review – are not really available to me. (You can try two wildly different reviews here and here.) In the absence of intelligent things to note, I settled mainly for trying to come up with some good metaphors as I watched him – from up in the gods – wave his fingers in front of the keyboard, and, in the first half, coax the romantic airs of Schumann from the grand piano. And then, as the Schumann went on, moved from coaxing to a kind of conjuring.

At other points he crouched over the piano like a teenager on his computer, and I, tired from staring down, moved my gaze to the rafters and instead of listening to the piano, just listened to the room. In a way, a room like the Barbican hall, with its exceptional acoustics, becomes the instrument, or at least an extension of the unmic-ed piano. Being January, however, the acoustic melange included a fair amount of coughing, and I suffered a few minutes wrestling with my tickling throat. (An important lesson for classical newbies here: always take a bottle of water.) And when I gazed back down to the stage, it suddenly looked as if Trifonov and his Steinway were a tiny musical box sitting on an oak table.

After the interval the programme shifted to 20th-century Russia (I know this because I bought a programme at halftime) and some of Shostakovich's preludes. A friend who is familiar with such matters had told me that this part would be hard work, and – the extent of my critique – I did find myself drifting, although that might have been the interval G&T. Before the second half began, someone had taken a mic to tell us that Trifonov would play an extra prelude – this brought gasps of excitement from the people next to me, which seemed a bit excessive – and it was good that he did, because the final one seemed to bring a new power and dynamism out of him. Suddenly, instead of conjuring, he was writhing, almost birthing the music through some long, complicated and exhausting labour. With this, and the Stravinsky that followed, Trifonov became more of the classical classical pianist, a whirl of technical prowess and bombast, nicely contrasting with the subtle grace of the first half.

I wouldn't say it was exactly wasted on me, but it was definitely partly wasted on me. Couple of the metaphors were alright though.

Love & Friendship – film review

Kate Beckinsale shines as the devious, manipulative and indefatigable Lady Susan, in Walt Stillman's adaptation of the Jane Austen novella. Cast by circumstance on to the largesse of distant relatives, Susan remains ravishingly confident, in a succession of stunning dresses, as she cheats, tweaks and seduces whomever expedience demands. The story itself is amusing but slight, and co-star Chloë Sevigny, as Susan's American pal, is curiously absent; she barely inhabits her scenes and appears at times to be reading the script from a very long way away. The rest of the cast have great fun, as the English middle-class always do when called upon to play the gentry. And the film is only 90mins, so win-win. 

PS Searching for Sevigny on Google brings up this fantastic selection of her quotes 

On Thomas the Tank Engine and Tom Moss, his evil alter ego

My lad loves Thomas the Tank Engine. Loves it. Could watch it through the apocalypse, and may have to, the way things are going.

You might have found certain programmes that you enjoyed as a child that you later, as an adult, realise had ironic depths, hidden jokes that had kept the adults entertained while leaving your enjoyment undisturbed. 60s-era Batman, with its campestry, or 80s-era Danger Mouse, with its puns, is the sort of thing I mean. Thomas the Tank Engine is the complete opposite of that. Thomas has no hidden depths, or if it does they are all awful hidden depths, the sort of hidden depths that vote Ukip. The island of Sodor, where Thomas and his pals reside, is a joyless, quasi-fascist regime. Everyone knows their place, one man's word is law and the trains do, indeed, run on time.

OK, that's not quite fair. The original TV show had Ringo Starr narrating, evidence that the makers did in fact have a sense of humour. Moreover, the island of Sodor is not actually a fascist regime. Sodor is much more an idealised British land of deeply stratified class, in which all engines know their place and fascism isn't necessary because even the basics of class consciousness have yet to manifest. In fact, Sodor represents a sort of Victorian capitalist vision of religious utopia, in which the Fat Controller stands in for Our Good Lord, dispensing stern, all-seeing justice to the misbehaving toddler-engines who populate the railway.

You might ask why, as a member of free society, I don't just turn it off. But I don't live in a free society; I live in my very own fascist regime, run by my small child.

Lately, even he's got bored of politically suspect tedium, and begun to demand "Toy Thomas" videos. My initial reaction, as with most things, was to say no. These videos, made by "enthusiasts", are a sort of YouTube fanfic. They employ copious supplies of Thomas-branded toy railways, dubious editing skills and what it would be generous to describe as "rudimentary" animation techniques. All these achievements are marshalled to tell new Thomas stories, of which, as you probably now realise, the world has absolutely no need. Furthermore, the more successful of these enterprises have become vast advertorials for the toy firms, so while you're off getting five minutes peace at the kitchen sink, your child is absorbing about £500-worth of plastic-tat desire.

I held out for a while – constantly trying to switch over to "real" Thomas, as if that was any better – but, as with all things child-related, I eventually caved in. And I'm glad I did, because it turns out these Toy Thomas stories are infinitely better than the dud-handed official ones. My and my son's favourite features 12 tales of a renegade engine named Tom Moss the Prank Engine (you can see what they did there). Tom Moss skulks in the deep forest of Sodor, where the other trains are too scared to go, sporadically visiting the town centre to pull absurdist pranks on the sheeple-engines of the trad Thomas realm. What's more, Tom Moss always gets away with it, speeding off back to his forest lair after pulling his stunts, which seems to me to be a much healthier life lesson than the Fat-Controller-is-always-right turgitude of the original.

It's a great relief to see the pompous idyll shattered by a much-needed trickster visitation, to watch the squabbling suckups of Sodor get comprehensively gypped by a giggling reprobate with a penchant for exploding pumpkins and guerrilla helium attacks. Occasionally, the Minions and Peppa Pig turn up, for no apparent reason. My boy watches in enthralled silence. I find myself drifting into questions about Dave, the mysterious narrator of the Tom Moss offshoot.

I think he's called Dave – I seem to remember he mentions his name in a Brechtian moment at one point. As a professional journalist with keen research skills, I went as far as to peruse the YouTube channel whence these videos issue. This reveals that the moviettes are made by an Ian and Ali Phillips, along with their three boys, Chris, Dave and Mike. Dave sounds a bit old to be of the younger partners in a film-making dynasty, but, well, what do I know. Their channel has more than 1.5 million subscribers, and has notched up more than 2.5bn views. For reference, the official Thomas & Friends channel has 310,000 subscribers, with 464m views. Perhaps, as a professional journalist with keen research skills and lofty, broadsheet standards, I should phone up the Phillips family and ask what the inspiration was behind Tom Moss, and other questions a professional journalist with such skills and standards would ask. I give you one guess whether I'm going to do that. Besides, my boy wants the computer to watch Thomas.

Zero Waste Home by Bea Johnson; The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying by Marie Kondo review – waste knot

Bea Johnson and Marie Kondo

What do we do with all our rubbish? The waste of our lifestyles threatens to overwhelm us. As Andrew O'Hagan wrote in the LRB in 2007: "We grew up imagining that rubbish was taken away, only to find there is no such place as ‘away’." Rubbish tips overflow, the seas are awash with plastic trash and whole countries are turned into the dumping grounds of richer countries. OK, we recycle more, but recycling uses energy and often the thing made from the recycling is not itself recyclable, thus just kicking the can, bottle and packet one step down further the road before dumping it in landfill after all. Perhaps the answer is to produce less waste all together, recyclable or not.

Bea Johnson is described as the "priestess of waste-free living" on the cover of her curious book, first published in 2013 and now out in Penguin, which promotes the principle of zero-waste: putting nothing into landfill. The usual reduce, reuse and recycle mantra is here topped and tailed with refuse and rot. Of these refuse (verb not noun!) is the most pertinent, and the battle against accepting things into your home that will become rubbish is at the forefront.

The cover also includes the adage "Live Well, Consume Less, Feel Fabulous" on the back. Yes, this book is here to tell you waste-free living can make you happier, better off, your skin clearer, clear up your IBS, all while saving the world from swimming in its own filth. It's win-win, basically, and all you have to do is stop throwing stuff away, and you mainly do that by not accepting stuff that you will throw away in the first place. She's at war, essentially, with the disposability that we take for granted in modern life.

She is at pains to show that it's doable. She has come back from an extremist zero-waste lifestyle to a more manageable very-little-waste lifestyle, but has still got her waste-disposal needs down to one litre a year, which means if you throw out a two-pint bottle of milk, you've instantly out-wasted her.

It's an impressive feat, even if the entire book is shot through with a certain defensiveness whenever the terms "well-off, neurotic homemaker with too much time on her hands" hover above. Johnson is well-off, is a homemaker (housewife) and if she is neurotic, well, if only we could all channel our neurosis into internationally successful books. She's certainly thorough, although perhaps she's just enthusiastic.

I sort of liked it, even though I affect the same allergic reaction to lifestyle stuff that we all do. Johnson's style is all lifestyle, but the issue of waste is somewhat more pressing than the here-today-gone-tomorrow diets, exercise and skincare regimes that make up most of the lifestyle section. Waste is fascinating, to my mind: I seem to have a deep-seated, although largely unsatisfied, desire to feel that we and the things we use are in a ever-replenishing cycle, rather than on a one-way journey to the dump. 

Johnson does some wacky shit. Takes a plethora of containers to the bulk-buy supermarket in order to refuse any bags, boxes or packets that might imperil her one-litre-a-year habit. Makes her own cosmetics and deodorant. Mulches paper. Brushes her teeth with a twig. Refuses any and all freebies, even the shampoo packets in hotel bathrooms. The book itself is quite closely typeset, presumably an environmental choice to use less paper. Sometimes, following her thought processes can be nice, as she explains how she's ended up making this choice over that choice, or this compromise over that principle. But it can also be exhausting, although that could be from having to squint at the close-set type.

It's worth reading though, because even you don't subscribe to the whole zero-waste biz, the very fact that someone is bothering to consider the idea does begin to rub off on you. I started wondering whether I needed to take the wooden spoon with my takeaway cup of tea (let's not even get on to the takeaway cup itself), or the paper bag for my brownie. I became a bit more aware, a bit more conscious, of just exactly how much needless waste is generated in the course of a day, and, following Johnson's example, started to think that perhaps it is worth making even those microchanges, because after all, microchanges add up, eventually, to a macrochanges. Eventually.

So, I liked the book. It's absurd in parts, but not unbearable. She could have cut some of the liquid-soap recipes and instructions for building a dog-waste composter; it's not really a reference book, and those are the sort of things that are widely available on the web, but no matter. It's thorough and if a few of her ideas might sit well with you, we could, perhaps, eventually stop this world from turning entropically into a massive pile of slurried shite. 

At some points, Johnson mentions decluttering as a happy side effect of her zero-waste regime. In this she is very much stepping on the territory of Marie Kondo, the "queen of decluttering", who is currently having a moment and a half in the spotlight for her charmingly deranged method of de-stuffing our lives. Kondo's method is sort of the opposite of zero-waste – throwing things away is her jam. She tells you to go through all your possessions – in a very particular order – hold each one in your hand and decide if it "sparks joy" or not. If it doesn't, out it goes.

Kondo is very keen that we don't see throwing stuff away as shameful or wasteful. Fear of waste shouldn't mean we live our lives crammed with stuff we don't need and often don't even want or like. As a consultant, her clients have chucked away tonnes of stuff (she says, on average, 20-30 45-litre binbags, so 1,350 litres, or more than a millennium of Johnson's output), much of it straight into the garbage. 

It's not entirely clear to me how this method works once you move to the mundane items of daily life: can any of us truly say that our toothpaste "sparks joy"? Or our alarm clock. And if not, are we going to lob them out? "Sparking joy" here could perhaps mean having a positive reason to keep something, instead of negative reason for not getting rid of it. Kondo also goes in for a bit of animism: she wants you to think of your things as beings – something FWIW that my three-year-old is a dab hand at – and treat them with the respect they deserve – something that he is not so keen on. If you find something that you once loved but don't any more, you can thank it for its service and let it go, to the benefit of both you and it.

In contrast to Johnson's book, Kondo's The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying is quite widely typeset – uncluttered – which makes it a more enjoyable read than Zero Waste Home, although it does use more paper per sentence. And whether not you can envisage thanking your old T-shirts for their service, or folding your underwear the way she recommends (no balling your socks, because they can't get any rest tucked up like that – that's what the lady says), there's something beautiful in the thinking behind her ideas. 

To truly cherish the things that are important to you, you must first discard those that have outlived their purpose. To throw away what you no longer need is neither wasteful nor shameful. Can you truthfully say that you treasure something buried so deeply in a cupboard of drawer that you have forgotten its existence? If things had feelings, they would certainly not be happy. Free them from the prison to which you have relegated them. Help them to leave that deserted isle to which you have exiled them. Let them go, with gratitude. Not only you, but your things as well, will feel clear and refreshed when you are done tidying. 

One of the things Kondo gets across clearly is the waste of not throwing things away. We tend to see throwing things away as a loss, without recognising the cost of keeping them. But once she's painted a picture of a clutter-free lifestyle, where the things you have are things you've joyfully chosen, and, more importantly, where you can find them, because they're not surrounded by hundreds of other things you haven't, you'll consider swallowing your pride and wonder if you can't make time to follow her recommendations to energise your wardrobe.

Beyond a clear, tidy house, Kondo is aiming to train something more fundamental – the art of decision-making. By practising, first on clothes, then books, then papers, the miscellany, then sentimental items, you are honing your ability to use joy as a barometer for the things you want in your life. No prizes for guessing how this could leak out into the rest of your life. Moreover, she wants to help you see how your attachment to the past and anxiety to the future manifest in hoarding. It's tidying and psychoanalysis rolled into one. As long as no one tells her that when she throws all this stuff away, there is no away.

Star Wars The Force Awakens review – well, more a view than a review

Contains spoilers, I guess, but nothing too terrible. I wouldn't worry about it

To the cinema, then, just in time to see the great Force Awakens before everyone else has entirely forgotten about it. The last day of the Christmas holiday, after which we can stop looking back and start looking forward, to Episode 8 no doubt.

There's been a lot of kerfuffle and a whole lot of ker-ching over JJ Abrams' reboot, most of which I have entirely ignored in a vague attempt to A V O I D S P O I L E R S, that most 21st-century of afflictions (it didn't work, however: Twitter served up with several that did ruin the film, despite the fact they turned out not to be true). Thus I don't know where the general view has ascended to, beyond the obvious, which I shall now delineate to all our betterments.

Obvious fact #1: it's good

It's Star Wars. It looks the part. It fills the Star Wars-shaped gap in our grey matter. It does the job. The dialogue mostly makes sense. The characters are passable. There's a strict limit on the number of planetary systems with names made by sprinkling consonants into Egyptian words. There's whizz-bangs, lasers, lonely chaps in black masks, space ships, aliens, lightsabers, spiritual hokum, troubled families. Mostly, it looks the part. It's Star Wars. It's got the space junk thing. Everything looks battered and weathered, not slicked with a shiny veneer of CGI lotion. George Lucas's addiction to CGI was the tragedy that kept on giving, dragging the special editions and then the prequels out of the pock-marked, long time ago, far, far away galaxy and into a virtual-reality junket with no obvious boundary between the movie and the video game. 

Yadda yadda: It looks the part. It's got Han Solo and Chewie and the Millennium Falcon and X-wings and Tie fighters and stormtroopers and desert trading posts and ruined Imperial Destroyers lying in the sand, and sweet-beeping droids that are basically little dogs, and it's got cool, funky bars with wacky aliens playing cool, funky, wacky, alien reggae; it's got people picking things up from a long way away and telling other people to do things and them doing it; it's got the aforementioned bloke in black, only this time he takes off his mask and instead of a scarred Anakin Skywalker, it's some tortured teen who's stopped slapping on the Clearasil just long enough to act out his Oedipal issues.

It's got tree-lined vistas, sweeping desert-scapes, blowy snowy wastes, black galactic skies. It's got a planet that can blow up other planets – like last time, only much bigger and more powerful than that one, which you might remember was much bigger and more powerful than the one before that – and this planet has got a weak spot that the rebel ships can penetrate if only they get the shields down in time. It's Star Wars, basically, and Star Wars is good, so it's good. 

Obvious fact #2: you could complain

You could definitely complain. You could note that it's a bit tough to take the disjunction between where we left the story 33 years ago – the evil empire utterly vanquished, the furry ewoks dancing in the treetops, Darth Vader doing his best Uncle-Arthur-after-two-heart-attacks routine – and where we pick it up, with stormtroopers killing innocent villagers and the dark side back in the black. You could complain about any number of narrative nonsenses. You could complain about the lack of any relation to the world as it is now, our world, which has changed so much since 1977, a world in which small groups of dedicated fighters hiding out in desert enclaves while battling an apparently all-powerful enemy has acquired an entirely different meaning; also one where the hand dryers in the cinema toilets are now more advanced than half the ships in the original film. You could complain about the price of the tickets. You could complain that any boy who had Han Solo as his father would basically be the coolest kid in the universe, the one we'd all wanted to be, not Adrian Mole-goes-Isis. You could complain that a film supposedly about the battle of good and the light against the malign forces of the darkest sort of evil apparently includes a thank you to Darth Insidious himself, George Osborne, probably for giving the film-makers a huge tax break he had stolen from starving disabled children. 

But yeah, Star Wars, it was great. Two hours of intergalactic comic-strip cheeseburger and fries, an absorbing munch for the eyes, lacking key nutrients, sure, but pretty fuckin tasty. 

Daniel Kitson, The Hob

Daniel Kitson, the bearded bespectacled behemouth of British comedy, as close to a comic genius as we've got in this country, a real natural, a genuine funny-boned amusatron, is back in the room. He's been away for a couple of years, but now he's back, back with that effortless funny, you know, the kind that is just funny cos it's funny, it doesn't even have to be true, it could be untrue and it would still be funny, that's how funny it is. Funny.

He's back, he's been away, he says he got bored of comedy, he's started to hate it partly because it's like the new Carling or something, but mainly he says because it was too easy, it was as easy as taking a shit, he says, it just came out, so he veered off into theatre, and I don't want to just regurgitate his act so i'll just say that he says his theatre is like his comedy except slightly different but he says it in a joke. But right now he's doing £3 shows upstairs in a South London pub, trying out his stuff, working it out, for his big tour in the future, his big comeback, but the truth is he's not even really working it out really, because he already knows what out of his material is good and he's bored of it already. Instead what he's doing is he's just working out, getting into training, limbering up. He's not even doing the material he's going to do on the tour, he's just riffing. It's a bit of a comedy masterclass, a bit of one, he shows you the working out, the thought processes that go into the finished articles, and he's keeping it all as fresh as he can and if it starts to flag at any point he's got the comedy chops to draw it back up, at his leisure, so it's no risk, even for the crowd.

He's generous, our Daniel Kitson, to a fault. Two hours he does and by the end it's too much, who the hell wants to listen to someone for two hours? Seriously, no matter how funny, two hours listening to one person is straining at the limit, it wears you out, but you can't complain because it's only £3, so what if he does too much and you're gasping for a pint at the end.

Of course I couldn't help comparing him to Stewart Lee, obviously since he's also a generous comedian, and also because I saw him the other day, and I think I'm going to say that Daniel Kitson is funnier than Stewart Lee the way that, well, I was going to compare Daniel Kitson to Stevie Wonder in 1973, and Stewart Lee to maybe I dunno someone quite good, with a few hits under their belt, but not as accomplished, or perhaps not as natural as Stevie Wonder, um let's say the Commodores, but to be honest the comparison seems stupid now and I don't want to make it, but the truth is that I can't imagine Daniel Kitson ever doing some of the slightly laboured tactics that Stewart Lee was indulging in the other day, because Daniel Kitson could get comic material out of an empty bag of crisps and Stewart Lee, well maybe he can but he doesn't want to, that's what he'd have you believe, I suppose, that he's above the tragic business of making people laugh. Which I can understand. I can get that. Why would you want to make people laugh, just because you're a stand-up comic, sorry, just because you've been defined as a stand-up comic, actually that's just the capitalism talking, yeah right, that's just the fucking factory system putting us all into boxes, me into a sort of factory-worker box, office bunny box, you into a stand-up comic box but you're more than that, You're more than making people laugh, you're a visionary at the vanguard of making people laugh, You're pushing the boundaries of making people laugh and think and therefore you're fully prepared to come and do a let's call it a slow two hours, moaning about your life when actually you're taking home fucking loads of dosh for it.

Which is what Daniel Kitson, in his generous way, alluded to, the spectacular amounts of money that are getting earned by these comedians. Those people you think of as the pinnacle of overpaid, these comedians are up there with them. Even those not caning the TV panel show-arena-tour-DVD circuit, even if you're just doing 400 seaters for tenners, you're still taking home (according to the generous Daniel Kitson) three grand a night. Stewart Lee's tickets, just for the record, were £20. And he was doing 40 nights, in a 420 seater, so very plausibly, even at a conservative estimate he's taking home £5000 x 40, that makes fucking 200 grand for a couple of hours every couple of nights for a couple of months



And he don't even get accused of selling out.

The truth is he was flogging CDs in the booth after the show, so I suspect he's got some pretty heavy gambling debts or a smack habit or something. Well, if he has, maybe he should write a fucking joke about it.

Anyway, back to Daniel Kitson, he's a modern comedic marvel, he came on 15 minutes late, because he'd lost his comedy notebooks just an hour before in the West End and riffed on what had happened for about half-an-hour, you know funny as you fucking like about losing four months of notes, that is the definition of a modern comedic marvel, I mean that's what you're aiming at, really, you don't need material, you are just funny, and then anything you talk about is funny: that's the pinnacle, and Daniel Kitson's in that realm. Admittedly, he did lose me slightly after he'd explained how much money he's making, I guess because so much of stand-up comedy depends on the comedian being somehow a conduit for the crowd, somehow representing us, a funnier, more observant version of us perhaps, but a recognisable us. That's why it's helpful if the comedian's a bit flawed, a bit fat, or needing beer bottle glasses or got a stammer, because we're all like that, or at least we fear we are, and the comedian embodies that part of us, but the truth is once you're raking in £200,000 upwards, those kind of figures, you know, you're not really one of us, you're one of them. Which is what Daniel Kitson was saying.

But Daniel Kitson is a modern comedic marvel, and I know this because after I came out my head was zinging with ideas and stuff, things to say, I was dosed up on creative juice, partly maybe because after just sitting in the dark concentrating on someone else for that long your mind is like a wound-up jack in the box, ready to leap out in all directions the minute you can get a moment to yourself, but also because the best, most creative people in the world light up your brain circuits with their genius, they gift you their genius, and Daniel Kitson did that.

Stewart Lee, to be fair to the fat, sell out jokeless cunt, did also light up my circuits, after I came out of his show I wrote a joke that I later put on twitter and it got one retweet and I mean that in a good way. In actual fact I thought of another gag that was about Stewart Lee not liking people insulting him on twitter (which it turns out they don't do, or at least not nearly as much as they go "wow Stewart Lee's fucking brilliant I love him", but he doesn't read out those quotes because he's not big-headed) and it was to do with if I saw him in Stoke Newington, where he explained in the show that he mopes about a lot, miserable about how much money he's making doing something that he supposedly loves; so if I saw Stewart Lee in Stoke Newington I'd run up to him and say “Oi, Stewart Lee, you fat, miserable jokeless fucking sell out cunt, do you prefer it now with me yelling in your ear in the street, you know, like we used to do in the 1980s, or would you prefer that I went and squeezed my bile into 140 characters that you could quote in your show, would that be better?” And that was my material about Stewart Lee.

But this review is not about Stewart Lee, who I like, I think he's funny, which is why I'm nicking his schtick, this review is about Daniel Kitson, who also earns too much money, footballer money, and he's fucking a very funny fucking guy, you know, like Stewart Lee is, but funnier, and he has the added bonus of actually writing material, because he sort of thinks, at a guess, that that's what it is to be a stand-up comedian, which is what he sees himself doing.

Maybe I'm bitter, I mean I'm not above saying I'm bitter, you know I write this shit, I mean let's be frank, less fewer people are going to read this than could fit into the toilet of the upstairs of the pub where Daniel Kitson did his set tonight, you know, and why's that, because it's bitter ramblings or because as Daniel Kitson generously said, it's mostly down to luck (and making an effort, which I haven't done), and also possibly writing sentences that start and finish on roughly the same topic. You know the sort of thing: selling out. Which brings me to one last question, why isn't it called selling in, there's two kinds of selling out, being a sell out and having a sell out, and one of those two should be called selling in, I don't care which, but one of them, because selling out so often follows selling out that it's hard to know which comes first or, as it happens, what I'm on about.

Stewart Lee, Leicester Square Theatre

Everyone's a critic. This has been true for a long time. Probably the phrase originates, like everything else, with the Ancient Greeks; Sophocles or Euripides cursing on their way home after yet another bad night at the Dionysus Odeon. Certainly it stretches back a long way. But it has never been more true (if a true thing can become more true, I don't know, but assuming it can) than these days, with the combination of the internet providing instant gratifying exposure for every one of everyone's faultless and well-considered opinions and a marginally improved literacy among the general population, which means more people than ever have the capacity to etch their thoughts into posterity.

Stewart Lee knows a lot about how everyone is a critic. He's seen it at work (literally). He spends a fair portion of his generous show reading out, in his stately manner, stately or possibly just very slow manner, a string of comments garnered by googling his name. None, it is fair to say, are anything less than critical. Some, you might consider, seem to be verging more on the personal, but still they remain pretty much critical. Such is the effect of hearing the myriad complaints within these mini-critiques that I began to doubt if I should attempt a criticism of Mr Lee's show myself. It appears that all the angles have been covered. I, who hate more than anything the thought that I might be like someone else, feel obliged to not criticise Mr Lee at all. Which is perhaps what he was aiming at, in taking ownership of the comments (And actually I'd note that if you look him up on twitter, the vast majority of comments are complimentary). But, I'll go further, because I'll not criticise Mr Lee with negative criticism or with positive criticism. 

You see there are two kinds of critical. Most people seem to be under the impression (an interesting concept, to be under an impression; the way an ink pad is when you reink a rubber stamp) that there is only one kind: negative criticism. But of course there are two kinds: negative and positive criticism. But I am so concerned with not being like anybody else, I'm willing to forgo the whole god damn caboodle of criticism altogether; to throw the baby out with the bathwater, to avoid the possibility that I might come across like some of the people Mr Lee quoted. Not because they were stupid, however. No, it was the fact that they were so literate that terrified me. Because they had well-constructed sentences, that they obviously thought were clever and this reminded me of myself, and I made a vow never again to write a sentence that I thought was clever, for fear that it should end up being quoted by a scowling Mr Lee as evidence in his general case that the world is a complete load of cunt.

On the other hand, the temptation is to construct a such a perfect reduction of Mr Lee that on a future googling mission (because he collects criticisms, or rather negative criticisms, and quotes them often in his shows, and on his books, like someone used to in the 1980s, I forget who, I think Douglas Adams probably, and it's no irony, because so much of what Stewart Lee does comes straight from the 1980s) he might uncover it and use it in a future show, my internet nom de plume attached. Hero status! What joy could that bring!

Mr Lee does a two hour show. Generous. It's a rare comedian that offers a two-hour show, and then sits in the concession stand afterwards signing DVDs and books, probably trying to scrape the bus fare home, but Mr Lee does it. Two hours! Most comedians do an hour and maybe a bit more. No more than you can fit onto one side of a CD. OK, so he had a break, but still, two hours! Doug Stanhope, who I saw at the same theatre a year or two ago, did two hours, with a break, but in the break they kicked you out and brought in another load of punters for the second half, so my guess is it was exactly the same as the first half. Stewart Lee does two hours! Admittedly, however, if Stewart Lee was to subtract from those two hours his commentary on and deconstruction of his show as it unfolds, if he was to lose that, and possibly also lose the refrain about how he hasn't got any material because all he does is comedy gigs and look after a small child, if he lost all of that, his show could probably have fitted onto one side of a C90 tape; but that's who Stewart Lee is, isn't it. That is Stewart Lee, so that would be like saying if you took all the motherfuckers out of Richard Pryor's act. Which would be a stupid thing to do, and also, truth be told, wouldn't save you very much time anyway.

So Stewart Lee does two hours, a large portion of which is deconstructing his own act as he goes along. Now, Stewart Lee was today in the paper, the Irish Times to be exact (and it's a funny concept, isn't it, being in the paper, you know, as if there's a land far away called the paper and you can be in it once in a blue moon, where was he? Oh he was in the paper, oh yeah, did he have a good time? I went once, oh yeah did you see the great columns? it's a funny concept especially nowadays when almost no-one reads 'the paper' so being in 'the paper' really means I read it on the internet, but then saying Stewart Lee was on the internet this morning doesn't make much sense, unless you were talking about him googling himself in preparation for his show) anyway where was I, oh yes, so Stewart Lee was in the paper today, the Irish Times, saying how all these young comedians are stealing his schtick. He wants to be able to retire, or at least work another 20 years, off his schtick, but all these pesky kids are stealing his schtick and making it seem trite. So he's abandoned his schtick, but all he's got to replace it is this deconstructionism. But here's a problem: deconstructionism is just another gag.

That's the first problem. What's wrong with a gag? Well, gags are considered a low form of comedy nowadays. It used to just be puns that were beneath the pale for the sophisticated comedian, but if we're really truthful the whole idea of gags is a wretched business. The best comedians don't use gags: Richard Pryor never told a gag. Doug Stanhope doesn't tell gags. Louis CK doesn't tell gags. Nor Seinfeld. You might notice all these comedians are American. So did I. I think not telling gags is a more American thing. And the main problem with gags is that they're nickable. You can half-inch a gag. But you can't half-inch Richard Pryor's schtick. Because it would be ridiculous. Eddie Murphy tried, and even he sounded ridiculous. So the first thing is, if people are nicking your schtick, it means it's not really your schtick, it's just a gag, of some kind or another.

So deconstructionism is a gag. Even I, on the few occasions I've tried stand-up, have done it; a bit of self-reflection, commenting on how I'm doing, Brechtian analysis, if you want to be flash, mainly when a joke falls flat, or just generally to make up for the fact that even on a good day my material is whisper thin. Am I to be accused of stealing Mr Lee's deconstructionism schtick? I never did your honour. I hadn't realised that Mr Lee had invented deconstructionism, if it was anybody I thought it was Derrida, but no, apparently it was Mr Lee, because Mr Lee never copies anybody, everything he does is completely original in all things, and he doesn't tell gags either, because he's above that sort of thing.

But he does a lot of deconstructionism, because he hasn't got any material, but that's ok, because he says that! That's the great deconstruction gag, that you haven't got any material but that's ok because you come right out and say it. Leaving aside why you feel the need to do a 40-night run at the Leicester Square Theatre when you haven't got any material (and it can't be for the money, because Mr Lee spends a fair portion of his stage time, in fact some of the best bits in the show are when he curses other, lesser comedians, who prostitute their 'skills' in the low art of making TV shows, for money, the way that Mr Lee wouldn't ever do), leaving aside that point, let's just ask whether the deconstructionism gag is so hilarious and original (obviously original, or Mr Lee would never use it) that it requires to be drawn out at great length, well of course it is and does.

The problem for Mr Lee seems to be that kids have stolen his act, but he's too old and worn out and a dad now to think of anything new, and yet time marches on so he keeps going, and tries to sort of brazen it out by saying: "Look I've got nothing, I'm not lying to you, I'm not pretending" hoping perhaps that something will come to him that will raise this 40-night run out of the philosophical manger in which it was born. Because when he says the show's not really about nothing it's about "idealised notions of society and the idea of how do you get ideas for a show when you don’t have any experiences", what he really means is, I'm hoping a better idea comes along in the course of the show. Well he's over 20 nights in, and it hasn't yet.

On reflection, maybe if he brought in the stuff about the kids stealing his act, the really true stuff, not the pretend true stuff about how he hasn't got any material ("No, no, I really don't") when he secretly he thinks he might do ("idealised notions of society... ok, ok, I really haven't") then it might have brought a touch more freshness in the room. Although a 40-night run could wilt the most blooming of sets. But I'm not here to criticise Mr Lee. I certainly don't hate Mr Lee, like those other people seem to. I like him. He's funny. I'm a bit worried he's running out of material though.

Anyway, dragging this long and slow and tedious essay to its sad, unloved conclusion, it only remains for me to come clean. Because being as I'm called criticalbill, you know I couldn't renounce criticism, not really. Not truly. I'd rather renounce my name, as the Chinese say, when they are really not going to do something. But the reason I forwent criticism of Mr Lee is because of a story he alluded to from his childhood. Mr Lee mentions briefly that he was an orphan, who was then adopted and the reason I won't be horrible about him is because I happen to know that under the tubby, depressive, Morrissey/Phil Jupitus/Terry Christian/Gordon Brown-looking exterior, Stewart is as hard and mean and well-honed as his biological father, Bruce.

Wilderness Road

Back when I were a lad, in yon misty days of 1986, on, as I remember it, a dreary summer holiday somewhere in Dorset with my mum and dad and little sister, there were sitcom on t'telly called Wilderness Road. I didn't remember the title, I only found it out after trawling through the names of 1980s sitcoms looking for possible matches, during a very dull day at work. Written by Bob Goody, who didn't have anything to do with The Goodies, the show had two main characters, called Cage and Moon, a slovenly pair who spent their time between a dilapidated flat and a dilapidated boozer. I liked those names so much I stole the name Cage for a character in my as yet unwritten masterpiece, which I began not writing in 1989 and still think of fondly. The main thing I remember about Wilderness Road is that one of Cage or Moon was reading Joyce's Ulysses, the big black Penguin edition, which he used in order to get to sleep at night. "Before I've read a page, I've dropped off," he said, or words to that effect. I must have liked the show, since I think I modelled my habit of being a complete loser on the two protagonists, and I've also never read more than a page of Joyce's Ulysses. It clearly made an impression on me anyway.  Despite my patronage, however, Wilderness Road was somewhat of a flop. It never got past the first series, was never repeated and has never been released on DVD or shown on UKGold. No clips are up on youtube. No wikipedia page delineates every scene and plot-twist. Thanks to the internet's passion for nostalgia, I've relived almost every notable televisual moment of my youth, to limited benefit. This one, however, has escaped the net: Wilderness Road remains in the wilderness.

True Stories Told Live

It's a nice little idea, in an upstairs room of a pub, five people get up and each get 10 minutes to tell a true story to a bunch of strangers. Anyone can have a go, although the storytellers are all vetted by the organisers beforehand, and the monthly event in Chapel Market is already so popular you have to apply for your free ticket weeks in advance. Created by David Hepworth (who launched such magazines as Just Seventeen, Q, Empire, Heat) and hosted by Canadian actor Kerry Shale, the night can't help but lean towards the mediaocracy, despite being ostensibly an egalitarian affair. Mr Shale twice referenced a previous storyteller who'd been in the army in Iraq as evidence that this wasn't just another chance for Islington media folk to yawn at each other, but the show I saw included two novelists, an Australian stand-up and the agony aunt from Cosmo, so they've got more work to be doing on that front. They are apparently hoping for a wider range of storytellers, but in any case everyone was good, the crowd were keen and it was a nice way to spend the evening.

The agony aunt was Irma Kurtz, who had told me beforehand in that quite unabashed way of Americans that she was incredibly nervous, and then got up and was slick as anything. She told a well-crafted tale from her childhood that ended with the line "and ten years later I looked at the signature on the piece of paper she'd given me and it said: Mae West!" Author Anthony McGowan told a nicely grim tale from his Leeds upbringing about shooting a dog with a crossbow, and ending by saying that he always puts dogs in his stories, and now you know why. Last up was author and journalist Alex Preston, an Oxbridge type who got the crowd onside by being self-depreciating and then told a gap yah story that was even more privileged than I'd have pinned on him at my most prejudiced, but which abruptly ended on a close shave with death that was quite poignant, for a posh boy. And we reckon his brother was Preston out of Big Brother. So a real celeb, after all.

I signed up for it at the end of the night. Of course I did, I couldn't resist a crowd that size being forced to listen to me. But whereas at the start of the night I'd have happily got up and spieled it, after watching the show the shadow of "wanting to be good" started to rear its ugly head. I tried out a tale on my cycle home and found that after 15 minutes I still hadn't got to the event at the heart of the story, so, alas, I might have to practise after all.

Zen, BBC 1

Zen is a police drama set in Rome, starring Rufus Sewell as a suave police inspector, famous for his integrity. We know this because everyone he meets says "ah! you are famous for your integrity!" Based on the best-known of British crime writer Michael Dibdin's books, the show has two main gimmicks. The first is that Zen is the honest cop's name ‒ Aurelio Zen, in fact, and though you might think that was almost, I don't know, a Japanese name, Signor Zen tells everyone who asks that it's Venetian. Or possibly Phoenician, my ears are a bit suspect. The second gimmick is that, despite being set in Italy, everybody talks in English accents, and peculiar, geographically unanchored English accents to boot. This makes everything very strange for the first 20 minutes of each episode as your brain tries to reconcile the gorgeous sunshine and Roman architecture with the cadences of Midsomer Murders. But once you've got used to it ‒ I do it by imagining that I'm watching a show set in very southern England ‒ or at least forgotten about it, well then there's a creditable if slightly silly cop drama to enjoy filled with swish cars, swarthy crooks and Italian coffee.

Interestingly, the women actors are Italians, not British, which, according to this review, is because Andy Harries, the show's producer, thinks that "there's something distinctive about the Italian female form". I'll say there is. And don't we get to revel in it when one lady strips three times in the course of a two-minute interview with our hero, while he does the old Napoleon Solo avert-your-eyes routine. My girlfriend thinks the woman actors are Italian so that they remain exotic and other, while we identify with good old English Aurelio. Or Andy, to his mates. But by making Sewell, who remains pretty much in swoon-on mode the whole time, a divorcee who lives with his mum ‒ because he's Italian, not because he's a loser ‒ they aren't exactly alienating the Milfs in the crowd either.

The main advantage of setting the stories in Italy, apart from the women, is of course Italy's gargantuan corruption, which constantly threatens to derail Zen as he swans about, with impeccable integrity, solving things. This provides most of the sub-plots as the viewer tries to estimate which of the dodgy-looking types are corrupt and which are just plain criminal. The other advantages are that it's mostly sunny, something not to be sniffed at when making January telly, and that everyone gets to wear expensive suits and dine in fancy-looking gaffs and generally inhabit a fantasy exotic land that the viewer is less likely to spoil by knowing much about. It's called having your panecotta and eating it. With its fetish for Italiana, both real and imagined, Zen is essentially the TV equivalent of Waitrose. But I quite like Waitrose, on occasion. And I quite like Zen, although I'm not hoping for any great enlightenment from it.