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.

not on your telly

I noticed the other day that I had subconsciously restricted myself to only watching telly after 7pm, the way that some alcoholics control their drinking by only drinking after a certain time. Is watching the telly like an addiction? You start out only doing it for fun, watching only good programmes, enjoyably, but before you know it you've got hooked on the transport from dingy reality, and you're topping up on cheap supplies of dubious quality, before you end up telly on first thing, consumed with plotting ways to murder Jeremy Kyle.

Pushing the analogy a bit (who me?), there's also the same desire to up sticks and go and live in the country where your chosen drug is most abundant. As a youngster I daydreamed about going to stay in New York and just binging on their 358 channels all day. (This was in the days when we only had four, so by the time I actually got to New York, I'd got over that particular aegri somnia vana.) The only career direction I can remember having at school was a vague desire to be in a job that allowed me to watch the telly all day. And I managed to get a job like that quite soon after school, so it turns out that, despite appearances, my career is actually one of 100% achievement.

Nowadays I don't watch telly unless I'm feeling good about myself - which is rare - and so can withstand the combined assault of advertisers, airbrushes, arseholes ... In fact it's objectionable enough just giving your front room over to a parade of people with good jobs in telly, while I fester under my own cavalier approach to accomplishment. Drinking seems a much wiser choice.

Commentator commentry

When I was a kid I quite fancied being a football commentator. Like most idle fantasies of my childhood, I have no idea what the hell I was thinking, but my guess is that it was a way of being involved in the game long after it had become obvious I was never going to play the game. A those who can, do, those who can't, commentate, sort of thing. I at least never wanted to be a referee, which would be inexcusable, like wanting to be a policeman, a role for emotionally undernourished types. Having said that I once acted as the ref in a primary school game between my year and the year below and had a great time disallowing their goals for no legitimate reason whatsoever. Which, such was our collectively shaky understanding of the actual rules, they accepted without much fuss, .

At age about 9 my class made a book with all the rules of football in it. The offside rule was written up as "You are offside when you are in the other team's half", which even at that age most of us could see wasn't the whole picture. So it's not that boys are genetically programmed to understand the offside rule, it's just that we've generally been trying to get our heads around it for longer than girls, who in those days and at that age seemed to spend their whole time arranging coloured pens. Richard Keys and Andy Gray should probably remember that there was a time they didn't fully understand the rules of football - like for instance the rule about not chatting shit into an open mic - although alas they seem for the moment to have kept their places as the two smuggest men on the box.

Some people have been suggesting that as Ron Atkinson was sacked for being racist off-air, so these two leprechauns-of-culture should also take a long walk off a short plank. But Ron used the word 'nigger' and he's not a rapper, so he had to go. What will happen to Gray or Keys when they have to work with a female commentator? I'm hoping for spontaneous combustion.

How do you become a football commentator? Do you just become a commentator and then move up the ranks to football? Or do you somehow get into football and shuffle along the aisle until you get to commentating? Where are the jobs advertised? It's not as if you can study it at Loughborough. Where do they get new commentators from? Perhaps when you get dropped calls, or missed calls from strange numbers, it's the BBC, phoning round listening to people's answerphone messages and "hellos" in search of the perfect commentating voice.

Not that commentating is all it's cracked up to be. Can you really make a living as a commentator when there's not that many matches on anyway? Can a second tier commentator make enough money out of being on five minutes of MOTD highlights to be able to get by the rest of the week? What do they do the rest of the time? Bone up on football encyclopedias? Practice pronunciation skills and comment sprinting? And it must be quite tiring, the concentration of having to commentate, to be able to tell which player the ball's gone to in a blink of an eye, and with Colemanballs always on your shoulder. Myself, I think I'd prefer the commentator's mate's job, where you don't have to do much of the grunt work and only have to step in with football knowledge occasionally, most of which you can probably just make up.

Obviously recruitment is slow in the commentating business, what with there being not much staff turnover. Once you're in the commentary chair, you're set, it's the world's last ever job for life. But down the pecking order, you need to start thinking seriously about wacking some of your senior colleagues if you ever want to get the big games. Perhaps that's what the Graykeysgate leaker was thinking. Or, and this is my guess, they've both made such cunts of themselves over the years that everyone who works with them is gasping at the chance to turn them in.

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.

Hallo Vera! Get em in luv!

If any of you doubted the veracity of my Rosewater Ketamine account, or if any of you have ever read that far back, well doubt no longer, only nowadays it appears they import ketamine in bottles of Aloe Vera juice.

Ooops! Fuckin' Royal Mail!

Love the TV report. First the shopkeeper, saying "oh well it arrived here one day by accident so I just put it up for sale. What was I supposed to do? Send it back?" And then onto a description of ketamine: "Its effects are like a combination of cocaine, cannabis, opium, nitrous oxide and alcohol." Brilliant! Where do I get some? camera cuts to a vet Vet: Yeah, we've got loads. Yeah we snort it all day.

or you can just buy some Aloe Vera juice, I suppose.

Or maybe don't.

Louis Theroux: America's Medicated Children, BBC Two

Good old Louis, gonzo-bumbler, gauchely uncovering great scoops - like for instance that Max Clifford tells lies, or that Jimmy Saville is a fucking weirdo; Charming Louis, from a famous family: son of Paul Theroux, brother of Marcel Theroux (who I've never heard of), and also apparently brother of Jon Ronson (although that one isn't openly admitted); Posh old Louis, fag to Nick Clegg of all people at Westminster, who apparently lives in Harlesden; Yes, Louis is back, bumbling around some more, being nice to people and thereby getting them to let down their defences and tell him, nice Mr Louis, the TRUTH, not like those horrible journalists who crash in and get everyone's backs up.

What this amounts to this time is Louis staying over or just knocking around with three American families who have chosen to medicate their troublesome kids. We have 10-year-old Hugh, ratty, superior and friendless, prone to the occasional threat of suicide; 15-year-old Kaylee, whose brother had also been medicated but had grown out of it; and most shockingly of all, six-year-old Jack, a sweet-looking lad, who's been kicked out of school and spends his time in what we'd call a educational unit trying to make Tangram pictures without flipping the fuck out. Darling heart Louis, no matter how hard he tries to give everyone a fair shot (or at least enough rope to hang themselves) and not to let his prejudices shine through, spends an awful lot of the time saying things like: "Do you not think that perhaps he's just a normal kid, and you're just a shite, lazy parent?"

For what it's worth, that is what most people watching are thinking as well, and although Louis did quite well at not making people defensive, as well as showing he'd done more than cursory research into the kids' extensive diagnoses (OCD, ODD, ADHD, Asperger's, Bi-polar), there were times when you were glad that he did just come out and say: "Six years old is a little young for medication no?" Louis hung out with the kids and they seemed OK, although certainly troubled, but of course when he went back to the parents and pointed this out he was told: "Well you should have seen them without the pills" or in the case of the Jack: "No, that wasn't a freak out, but I can set him off for you if you'd like." Alas ethical reasons prevented that, so we ended up taking the mother's word.

And that was where the programme let the side down: It was fair enough for Louis to be absorbed in not overly challenging the families, but there was nobody else to put the case more concretely that the children maybe shouldn't be medicated, or at least not routinely. The parents certainly were aware of the controversy - in the case of the family who were all medicated, (even the dog, although not the daughter) the mother was highly educated and very articulate about the choices they'd made - but that didn't stop you from thinking that there was much, much more going on under the surface. The parents and also the doctors were well rehearsed in their pro-medication arguments, some more convincingly than others, but people who face the same questions over and over again often have their answers down pat, without it making their answers true.

So it was uneven telly, watchable, certainly, but it failed to really say very much, other than: this is what is happening (we know); there may be medicating going on to help parents control their kids or to avoid parents facing up to their own behaviours (this we know); there may well be medication for kids that is actually necessary (this we know although we may be sceptical to the point of not knowing it); we don't know if this is what is going on in any of these cases (this we um knew, or didnt know, well we're none the wiser). Certainly when you hear that one of the kids is diagnosed with the dystopian-sounding oppositional defiant disorder, you can't help but think: wait, are they medicating for opposition and defiance now? In interviews it seems that Louis was much more convinced by the possibility for medicating kids than it appears in the show, but the complete lack of alternative suggestions (as well as hardly any time given to the risks of medication) and the lack of footage of the unmedicated kids left at best half a story untold.

The Unloved, Channel 4

Samantha Morton, the British Oscar-nominated actress famously reticent in interviews about her chaotic Nottingham upbringing, which included spells in a care home and with foster parents - and who is also, incidentally, the mother of my mate's daughter - turns to directing to tell a small part of her story in the semi-autobiographical The Unloved, a script co-written with Tony Grisoni. Eleven-year-old Lucy is taken into care away from her violent father (played by Robert Carlyle), a inadequate bully, who beats her with a belt while asking her "why are you making me do this?". "Can I live with my mummy?" she asks social workers a few times, without receiving much of a reply, although when she skips off and visits her mum she gives her the bus fare back to the home, without much more explanation.

For the most part Lucy is a quiet witness to the normally dimly lit world of kids in care. And while Morton shines a light into it, there is no sense of overdramatic inflammatory or sensationalist; it is a dark world we are near, but Lucy only skirts it, so the film skilfully avoids dropping into ghetto glamourisation. So while Lucy witnesses her room-mate, the mouthy 16-year-old Lauren, going shoplifting, sniffing Butane, getting abused by one of the carehome staff, and then finally going on the game, it is all abstracted, as if only revealed as what a quiet, shy 11-year-old girl can understand. Morton herself has said that the film is a diluted version of her experience.

It is a testament to Morton's film-making discipline that the whole film is underplayed to such good effect. Rather than striving to shock, it almost strives in the opposite direction, to downplay the reality. This helps make the film inherently believable. Nothing is never played for shock value. Instead the film is centred by - as well as centred on - the quiet, calm, withdrawn prescence of Lucy; the camera constantly refers back to her: Lauren is subdued by the police - cut to Lucy - Lauren sniffs on butane - cut to Lucy in her bed - Lauren is abused in her bed by Ben, one of the care home staff - cut to Lucy running away from the home - the other care home staff attack the "nonce", suspicious but without proof of his wrongdoing - cut to Lucy, who we know knows, and who always tells the truth when asked, looking on. This scene is one of the most satisfying of the film and illustrates precisely the disciplined, tight, unexcitable style Morton has gone for. Instead of Ben getting his comeuppance, we only see beginnings of his comeupance, in the same way that we only see the beginning of Lauren's slide into the abyss. Morton has said that one of the early seeds for the film was her realisation that a prostitute murdered in Nottingham had been in a care home with her.

The centring of the film of Lucy gave it a meditative quality that was amply reflected in the superb cinematography. The framing, the choice and the sequences of shots were all fantastic. Perhaps this is because there was little of the quick cutting which has become so ubiquitous, perhaps it was because of the director's choice to underplay the drama in order to get at the heart of the child's experience, perhaps it was just the choice of director and cinematographer. The Telegraph may somewhat disparagingly call it "Baftaland" but it is the first time for a long, long time I can remember being so moved by the pictures on screen, and again becoming aware of the potential for beauty in film. The final shot, with Lucy sitting on a bus on her way back from her mother's, while the sun plays across her face as the bus moves through the streets and a song that maybe Spiritualized's The Ballad Of Richie Lee plays in its entirety, was straight out of the Kubrick canon, and all the better for it.

A lot of comments I've read by people on the internet today have just complained that nothing happened, or it was over-long, or the story didn't move anything on. Which is depressing, but all the more reason to be grateful that Morton stuck to her vision, rather than letting someone else direct it for bangs and whizzes.

Choice caring quote: “Film-makers go into kids’ lives, stay for six months, give them lovely catering every day, make life a dream, it’s all cameras and da-di-da — and then they disappear, leaving a gaping hole. If I was going to make a Ken Loach-style film, maybe I might have needed the raw material, but I’m the raw material here.”

Three Men in Another Boat

More up-to-date reviewing for you here, as I stumbled on this programme about a year late, repeated last night at midnight. Griff Rhys Jones takes Dara O'Brien and Rory McGrath on a trip in his beautifully appointed racing yacht around the Kent coast, for amusement value. Jones is a bit of a sailor and knows what everything is called. He bosses the other two lugs around in a slightly embarrassed way, quite at odds with the "I need anger therapy" series that he is doing right now.

At one point, perhaps because nothing much is going on at sea, the other two get a boat agent to value the yacht behind Jones' back. Their eyes widen significantly at the price he puts on it, and this is after they've already seen boats going for £300,000. So it's a lot. According to wikipedia Jones and Mel Smith sold Talkback for £62 million, so, well, who knew.

Yes, its rich people playing around being rich. The idea of taking three comedians and making them do something slightly unlikely, well it is a winner really. And both the poverty of the concept and the way that it does actually work are on display here. Nothing really happens, the trio are not particularly funny, they mingle with other people who have far too much money as well, what could be right about it? But despite none of them saying anything witty, they are all far too well schooled in arts of funny bones for them not to raise a smile from time to time. Maybe I'm going soft. I could have watched this for hours. It was warm and comfortable like a nice cardy. Telly for the Telegraph types. Middle-class. That's it for me, I'm afraid. I've fallen into the abyss.

The British Working Class, Channel 4

Michael Collins’ adaptation of his own polemic makes interesting, but frustrating, viewing. Following roughly the same course as the book, Collins aims to expose a new era of derision towards the white working class, exemplified by the rise of the ‘chav’, that social outcast providing the tabloids with so much of their fodder. Websites such as chavscum detail this particular sub-group with relish and Collins traces it back to the MacPherson inquiry into the Lawrence murder and the opprobrium heaped on the five accused, white working-class boys.

Beyond that, Collins investigates his family's life in Elephant and Castle in the last 150 years and turns up pretty much your average "gor blimey guvnor me rosy-tin'id specs are on and no mistake" view of the pre-sixties working-class.

Collins has a point, it does seem as though racism and prejudice sometimes becomes acceptable as long as its about the poor, white natives; its true that the working-class have always been down-trodden and remain ever more so, despite the best intentions of the do-gooders, city planners, demagogues, Thatcherites and whoever else has taken an interest. The demonisation of ‘chavs’ does make me uncomfortable. When I first came across the phrase, it was out of the mouths of people who were scared of youths I thought they should have smacked around a bit. But as the chavscum webmaster points out, the people most up in arms about ‘chavs’ are the people who have to live among them, ie. the ‘respectable’ working-class.

But in so many ways Collins wants to have his cake and eat it. For example the white working classes are both entitled to protest against enforced multiculturalism (and march for Enoch) and yet are the best racially integrated of all social strata. That these might be different people seems to have completely escaped him. And this sort of example shows precisely where Collins goes wrong, in his lazy and gratuitous lumping together of countless different types of people under essentially two banners – the salt-of-the-earth, misunderstood and downtrodden working-class and the pretentious, interfering, prejudiced and privileged middle-class.

Which raises a slightly ad hominem point - which of the two groups does a working-class born and bred yet now successful journalist and film-maker fit into? Much praise for this book from the likes of Julie Burchill, who's made much of her working-class roots despite never clocking on for work in her life.

Others have produced far better dissections of Collins’ book than me. Andrew Anthony, Mike Phillips and particularly Ed Barrett offer thorough and interesting rebuttals of the weak-points of his arguments while all agreeing that there is something to his complaint.

18 Stones of Idiot, Channel 4

aka 60 Minutes of Shite.

Johnny Vegas' new show, a Chris Evans-produced rehash of "Don't Forget Your Toothbrush" (other possible names may have included "Don't Forget Why You Left TV") is hopeful but suffers on too many levels. Although sporadically funny, Johnny's new found TV confidence finds him in hectoring, arrogant mood - but if I wanted to see 18 Stones of Yelling Alcoholic I could pop down to any number of pubs. It strikes me that a morbidly obese Northerner, no matter how quick-witted, is always going to have a problem cast as an obnoxious cunt, but Johnny perseveres, casting off his previous sympathetic, somewhat downtrodden persona for a character modelled roughly on a cross between Julie Burchill and Vyvian out the Young Ones' with a massive pile of cocaine. At this point I'd tend to seek solace in the Bible, where I'm sure it says "let he who is without man-tits cast the first stone", but the trendy young do-as-they're-told audience lap it up. In fact, considering the diabolical stste of TV nowadays, the show was more than passable. Ray Winstone made a fairly uninspiring guest and getting some doofus off the shopping channel to act as foil for JV's rapier spittle was also uninspiring - so much so that I couldnt think of another word. "Celebrity Lock-in", where 80's b-list slebs - Rusty Lee (!), Roland out of Grange Hill - sat in 90s-uber-pub the Good Mixer showed that TV is the best at parodying itself, but also failed to live up even to its own half-arsed joke. And letting Neil Hamilton on was just cruel.

Overall, 50/50. Meaning I wouldn't turn it on, but I wouldn't turn it off.

Ou Dede and his Daughters, Channel 4

A terribly sad film from the beautiful and dramatic hills of rural China as a folk musician tries in vain to balance his ancestral obligations with modern realities which, if not clearly evident in their poor country lives, cast an ever-lengthening shadow. Dede is required to teach his instrument, the daria, a rudimentary guitar, and his songs, which his family have compiled over many generations, to his son and not a stranger. Unfortunately he has three daughters. Already fined for his zealous procreation, he begs the junior village elder to allow him to try again for a son but the elder wants him to teach the daria to outsiders, as part of their Nu culture. It is the 21st century, the elder tells him, he needs to modernise.

Meanwhile his youngest daughter loses a goat out on the hills which then eats his neighbour’s crops. They arrive to exact recompense and when a belligerent Dede refuses they brandish machetes at him before taking one of his goats and beheading it outside his front door. The cameraman observes this before re-entering Dede’s hut where he sits in the near darkness with his family, as the daughters cry. Dede warns them that if this happens again the men will force him to let them marry his daughters.

In the absence of a son, Dede finally decides to teach a daughter and he lights upon his youngest. She refuses, however, because she wants to go to school. When the teacher asks her why she refused, she coldly points out that the daria has barely brought her father any success. The teacher admonishes her, however, advising her to learn it, in addition to her book studies. The school is a hut and the class consists of the girl, about 12, and two boys, one about 4 and one about 6. After a foreshortened lesson, since the textbooks haven’t arrived, they sing a song.

Dede is now singing his songs on his porch. In a scene reminiscent of a blues singer, he bemoans his fate, pointing out in song that nobody is listening to him, that only the Gods can hear him. The villagers despise him, he declares, because he will not modernise.

The middle daughter is fuming that Dede will not teach her the daria, instead teaching the youngest who says she doesn’t want to learn. She is convinced that he prefers the youngest, despite both her mother and her elder sister assuring her that it is not so. This comes to a head at a special family dinner at which they are eating pork. In his speech before they eat Dede outrages the middle daughter by seeming to say he does indeed favour the youngest and the youngest then tells her she is illiterate. A massive row ensues, first bowls smashed and fighting and finally Dede himself kicks over the table on which the pots are sat.

In desperation he goes to see his father’s grave and in a terrible, terrible scene, weeps and blows his constantly running nose as he begs his ancestors for advice. He complains about these new fangled ideas of teaching Nu culture ‘I don’t even know what the hell culture is’ he says bitterly. Finally, after losing patience with the unforthcoming spirits, he smashes the daria on the rocks.

The overall impression was of a man being driven to destruction. It was horribly poignant perhaps partly because for all that Dede brought it on himself, his instinct was to preserve his tradition. Perhaps the romantic in me couldn’t resist the poverty and simplicity of their life but in a few years none of this will be left at all. They were so poor it seemed as though he wouldn’t even be able to afford another daria at all, let alone one passed down through generations.

This was of course to ignore completely the film crew, whose presence at some moments was determinedly peculiar. Many of the scenes had a certain staged feel to them, although substantively they were convincing, and if Dede was acting in his final scene the man should be given a Oscar by special delivery. Presumably the film crew will have given him some money, but the problems he faced have no easy solution. Dede gave the uncomfortable impression of a man who was soon to find too much solace in a sake bottle, as everything collapsed around him. Modernisation is like a virus which consumes everything in its path and this film neatly illustrated the costs and subtle losses we endure to feed its rapacious appetite. It was unbearably poignant and I would never have written this if I thought I could easily see it again. As it is at least this will keep a memory.