Eurovision, Bowie and Homogeneity

It’s been so long since the last post I’ve taken inspiration from the chiller at the end of the aisle in my local Tesco and have produced three posts for the price of one.

Last Saturday night, primed after a few pints from the local pub, I joined the annual British tradition of watching the Eurovision Song Contest.

Nowadays this appears to be a ‘game of two halves’ affair. When the performers gamely take the stage, we indulge in the finest British tradition of thoroughly taking the piss, especially of the self-deluded countries that appear to take the competition seriously. But we’re often dumbstruck when some of the acts are so bizarre they rise above irony.

Among the general cheesiness this year was an apparent theme of giants — including a towering vampire giant from Romania — and a bizarre song from Greece called Alcohol is Free if true then then it sounds great place for a couple of weeks in the summer. (Perhaps it’s to try and convince the Germans of the merits of their economic model?)

The second half of the show is like a hangover. All our European friends get their own back on all our withering sarcasm by apparently voting in concerted geo-political alliances which have the ultimate aim of making sure the Royaume Uni comes last – although this year, reflecting Euro tensions maybe, the Germans received the same kicking.

Like most parties, it’s a good idea to leave well before the end.

And we’re not just limited to using our own sparkling wit to complement Graham Norton’s (who maintains the peculiarly British Eurovision tradition of having an Irishman to cheer-lead the devastating put-downs). In the age of social media we can exchange our banter real-time in cyberspace in real time in a national Twitter bitchathon. Some academic could probably establish a correlation between retweeting and favouriting and the flow of booze as the night wears on.

Once, like some of the newer European countries, we seemed take the Eurovision Song Contest seriously – or maybe it’s just that I was child (just about) when the likes of Bucks Fizz and, earlier, the Brotherhood of Man actually won the thing.

Could it be that the Tory party’s neurosis over Europe can be directly traced to when the foreign Johnnies spurned Cliff Richard’s Congratulations — and, even worse, when we gave them a chance of atonement when he tried again with Power to All Our Friends?

And suspicions over our continental cousins would have been kindled when they failed to be seduced by the charms of our own Olivia Newton John. So what if she actually came from Australia? Before her fall from grace as Sandy in Grease and her raunchy Physical phase Olivia was very much the kind of girl next door beloved by the swivel-eyed loon community, albeit from 10,000 miles away.

My Cheesy Olivia Newton John Collection
My Cheesy Olivia Newton John Collection

For a period its popularity seemed to be waning – you can’t imagine the Britpop types of the 90s giving Eurovision more than a post-ironic ‘f*** off’ – but Eurovision has undergone the same renaissance as many other re-invented guilty pleasures. Who’d have ever thought ELO would become über cool?

Is it because, to the annoyance of some, that we’re far more integrated into Europe and the British lifestyle has become more comfortably continental?

Or, does the Eurovision Song Contest, amongst the uncool crooners and ubiquitous camp dancing, offer rare nuggets of unbridled eccentricity and uninhibited spontaneity – exactly the type of entertainment that’s normally lacking from prime-time Saturday night schedules?

I don’t watch vast amounts of the likes of the X-Factor, The Voice or Britain’s Got Talent (the novel-writing takes care of that) but I’ve seen enough to know that ‘success’ (at least in the first two of those programmes) is dependent on conformance to rigid stereotypes.

Simon Cowell and his ilk have condensed the music market into reliably marketable categories: the soul diva; the guy next door with that twinkle in his eye; the sassy girl-power group or the boy band with cheeky/smouldering/six-packing members (clichéd descriptions, I know, but that’s the point).

While it’s true that most music is marketed using less overt but equally cynically derivative formula, these stereotypes are particularly fail-safe. The distinction between successive years’ talent show winners are often of a similar magnitude to the great technological innovations that are emblazoned on the packaging of toothpaste or dishwasher tablets – a load of powerballs.

Nor do The X-Factor’s less manufactured rivals provide a feast of musical originality. The likes of Emili Sandé or Adele produce very competent and well-crafted albums and the bands like Coldplay can work a stadium along with the best of them (who are probably still the ancient Rolling Stones). But none of their work is likely to confound the expectations of their fans.

(This isn’t to say I dislike any of these above artists as I’ve bought CDs by all of them – yes, CDs show I’m old-fashioned enough to actually still buy music).

What tends not to succeed with these formulae are the qualities of imagination, eccentricity inventiveness and experimentation, the lack of which may explain the phenomenal popularity of the current David Bowie Is exhibition at the V&A Museum. Bowie’s even on the cover of next week’s Radio Times. (There’s a programme about Bowie’s most significant five years on BBC2 tonight (25th May) – which I’ll probably watch after exchanging messages with my German friend Thomas about the all-German Champions League final at Wembley.)

 

Radio Times 25th May 2013
Radio Times 25th May 2013

I’m not a mega Bowie fan but I learned my lesson from failing to get a ticket to the V&A’s recent Hollywood exhibition so booked early (tickets went very quickly) and managed to spend a lunchtime there last month.

It wasn’t nearly long enough – it would be easy to spend an hour or so just watching the concert footage. I compensated by buying the big, heavy show catalogue – for which my groaning bookshelves won’t forgive me.

From the point of view of plugging away for years at my own creative endeavour, it was reassuring that the exhibition started with the efforts of Bowie and his record companies to persist in trying to breakthrough commercially in the late 60s – something often forgotten in career retrospectives.

Bowie spent around five years on the fringes of Swinging London (from the famous 1964 BBC Tonight long-hair interview) until Space Oddity established his reputation, commercially timed to coincide with the Apollo moon landings.  (Oddly, I didn’t see any references whatsoever to The Laughing Gnome throughout the exhibition.)

That so much of the material came from his personal archive also showed how assiduously Bowie has curated his own artistic legacy.

The V&A show displays many Bowie stage costumes. Viewed close up, some of the outfits look less like iconic images than home-made fancy dress costumes. But these were an essential part of Bowie’s distinctive appeal as he underwent style makeovers at a dizzying pace, especially in the early 70s, changing from Ziggy Stardust to Aladdin Sane and so on. That’s one era that I’m fortunately too young to remember properly, although I do recall my uncle, a student at the time, showing my dad the cover of Diamond Dogs – to which the response was something like ‘What the bloody hell is that?’

Worth the entrance fee alone, particularly as a piece of social history in the week when a gay marriage bill has gone through the Commons, is the hilariously caustic Bernard Falk film for BBC Nationwide which is played on a loop in the exhibition. Dating back to 1973 it spits studied disgust at Bowie’s androgynous gender role-play. It’s well worth clicking the link to watch it on YouTube.

‘David Bowie spends two hours before his show caressing his body with paint…a bizarre, self-constructed freak…it is a sign of our times that a man with a painted face and carefully adjusted lipstick should inspire adoration from an audience of girls aged between fourteen and twenty…he will earn around half-a-million pounds this year [so] he can afford a personal make-up artist to cover his nails in silver.’

Being too young to follow Bowie’s reinventions at the time and his withdrawal (literally from drugs — his cocaine spoon is in the exhibition) and renewal in his Low period and the Berlin years, I found this an interesting section of the exhibition, especially as I like the city myself.

The first Bowie record I bought was, I think, Ashes to Ashes (that video is very peculiar), followed by Catpeople (both versions are brilliant), the weird Baal EP and the commercial Let’s Dance (I love Nile Rogers’ work from the late 70s to the mid 80s).

The videos for some of Bowie’s greatest tracks can be viewed alongside the original costumes and his own handwritten lyrics. These fascinate me. It’s an amazing experience to read lines like ‘Sailors fighting on the dancefloor, Oh man, look at those cavemen go,’ in the writer’s own hand, hearing the words sung simultaneously. Maybe it’s because I have the mind-set of a writer but I venerate these pieces of handwriting like religious artefacts (as I did viewing handwritten drafts by the likes of Jane Austen, Hardy, Eliot and J.G. Ballard at the British Library last year).

Reading Bowie’s own handwriting I realised this was the first time I’d actually fully understood many of his lyrics – especially lines like ‘strung out on heaven’s high’.

The strange juxtapositions that are a feature of Bowie’s lyrics were partially explained by an exhibit about the ‘Verbasizer’: a computer program he commissioned to randomly assemble fragments of sentences that had been fed into it . Bowie trawled the output for interesting combinations that he could develop further – maybe a useful tool for a poet or fiction writer?

I can’t agree with those who say Bowie was the most significant popular musician of the late twentieth century. However, his creation of enough artefacts to sustain a show at the V&A demonstrates, perhaps, his approach of constant re-invention and challenging of the audience through playing with the persona of the pop star meant that he was uniquely pivotal in developing the interaction between popular music and visual art.

In doing so, he created some beautiful music – I always think the ending of Ashes to Ashes is one of the most exquisite passages of popular music. Bowie was also shrewd in working with some great collaborators. They contributed hugely to the sound of the Zeitgeist of the time– for example Rick Wakeman’s haunting piano on Life On Mars and the work of Mick Ronson (who worked as a council gardener in Hull immediately prior to being one of the Spiders from Mars), Iggy Pop, Tony Visconti and many others.

David Bowie Is Inside
David Bowie Is Inside

The contrast between the Bowie’s rip-it-up-and-start-again approach and the industrialisation of the X Factor wannabees is also perhaps applicable to the experience of the aspiring writer. The goal is similar – to impress the judges – agents, publishers, booksellers – who can metaphorically allow their work to proceed to the next round, etc.

While some are happy to write for themselves and a limited audience, the majority of writers seek their work to be read by as widely as possible. The motivation might be very similar, in a quiet bookish way, to the attention-seekers on TV talent shows – having your name on the cover of a book on sale in a shop must be immensely gratifying, even more so after the long, lonely slog of writing a novel. On a more personal level, I’m sure most writers get an ego buzz when someone says they’ve enjoyed reading their work – why workshopping writing can be stressful – will you get a high of approbation or a low of ‘this didn’t really work for me’?

It’s likely there are more people who aspire to be novelists than join the next One Direction. While it probably wouldn’t be very televisual to film a show with hopeful writers auditioning their prose, which would probably vary between execrable or surprisingly good, it would still be compelling, competitive drama.

In the meantime, there’s no shortage of writing competitions or other forums in which writers can offer up their work for the judgement of others (writing groups, creative writing courses, etc.). Having taken many writing courses and kept in touch with quite a wide network of writer friends, both physically and online, I’ve had plenty of experience of having my own writing critiqued. I’ve also critiqued a lot of other people’s writing in return.

I like to think that I try to offer feedback by suspending, as much as possible, my own preferences and to assess whether the writing achieves the objectives with which its author set out (as far as these can be discerned). But I had an experience last week that made me wonder if I’d been swallowed up by the great ‘rules of creative writing’ homogenising machine.

A new friend who’s a writer sent me the opening of a book she was working on. It was very compelling, although I’d annotated the manuscript with quite a few notes for feedback. She’d also read the work to a writers’ group she’d recently joined and had sought the opinions of other writing friends.

We met up for a chat and when I mentioned various points that had occurred to me about the writing – like the narrative arc, scene-setting/chronology, point-of-view, intertwining of detail and back story – she invariably said ‘That’s really useful as the writers’ group said that too’ or ‘That’s exactly what my friend said’.

This was quite reassuring for her – and in some ways for me – because if my suggestions were similar to those of other people I’ve never met then my comments weren’t the ramblings of a lone, self-opinionated eccentric.

It’s likely that these other reviewers were influenced by the same courses, books/magazines on writing, conferences, agent talks, blogs, Twitter, etc. And this means that our collective perspective probably largely coincides with the general views of the professional ‘judges’ of writing: agents, publishers, editors and so on.

But, to return to the previous musical comparisons, do these universal truths mean that following these collectively-held writing axioms is more likely to shape a literary Joe McElderry than a David Bowie?

While conscientiously workshopping one’s writing is likely to purge the equivalent of cheesy, lame Eurovision entries, the tendency for writing groups to search for consensus might also dismiss the mad, off-the-wall eccentricities that are comparable to what makes the song contest’s unique appeal.

My Twitter friend, Pete Domican, makes some good points on his recent update to his blog entry about his decision to avoid buying from Amazon, which is well worth a read.

One of the points he makes in favour of using specialist bookshops is the serendipity of finding the unexpected: ‘I want to find books on a shelf that I’d have never discovered otherwise… I want to have conversations with writers who write ‘weird’ stuff…’

There’s so much advice aimed at making writers’ work stand out in the slush pile that its truisms are almost ubiquitous – and the focus is usually on trying to reduce the risk of making mistakes. It’s tempting to think that this might encourage a general shift towards the formulaic although there are certainly plenty of books published that don’t follow The Rules (probably by writers lucky enough to attract attention who have either avoided the traditional sources of advice (or deliberately contradicted them). And established writers potentially may feel freer to experiment.

Given last Saturday’s reaction from my ex-City university writing group friends to the latest section of my novel, I probably don’t have to worry too much about my own writing being over-homogenised. I was asked ‘Do you put these things in to deliberately get a reaction out of us?’ The answer is that I don’t (although I did slip in one line for that purpose in last week’s extract). It appears my novel is quite capable of setting off lively debates and reaction without any pre-meditated intervention – which I think is probably a good thing, on balance.

While I read a great deal and try to do more if possible, the necessity of grabbing bits of spare time to write my own novel means I don’t get time to get through nearly as many contemporary novels as I’d like – I’d love to get through a fraction of the number of new novels as does another Twitter writer friend, Isabel Costello.

Isabel’s blog, On the Literary Sofa, features many of her reviews of recent and forthcoming novels. The latest post lists her top ‘10’ summer reads (worth visiting, not least for the chance of winning one of the books).  I noted that the majority of the titles, which on first impression seem to sit around the ‘sweet spot’ between genre and literary fiction, were set overseas, particularly in North America and South Africa.

The interesting location of the novels reflects the importance of setting to a reader – using a novel to imagine oneself transported into another world is a fundamental attraction of fiction. What Isabel’s list doesn’t appear to feature heavily is the ‘high concept’ novel.

‘High concept’ is about trying to make a novel sound completely unique – particularly when reduced to a one or two sentence ‘elevator pitch’ – and according to a lot of advice I’ve read or heard, the more quirky or intriguing the concept the better – they often involve devices like memory loss, manipulation of time, improbable challenges and so on. But, paradoxically, when an increasing number of successful novels are evidently constructed around some kind of attention-grabbing concept then the need for a similar hook starts to become another essential item on the how-to-get-published checklist.

I’m currently reading a novel in which the prose is wonderful, the main character is sympathetic and credible and the author is adept at using difficult technical skills, such as dropping in backstory that anticipates readers’ questions that have been subtly raised. It’s also constructed around an obviously whimsical, quirky concept. While the concept works as a device in giving momentum to the narrative arc, I’m already becoming quite exasperated because it also seems to stretch the plot’s credibility past breaking point. It also requires the author to address otherwise unnecessary details that result from trying to sustain the central premise.

The book has clearly worked commercially and I’m sure I’m particularly curious about the techniques used to structure a narrative. However, I wondered if it had started as a ‘quiet’ book, concentrating on character-related development, and had the concept reverse-engineered into it. I may be completely wrong – the hook may have sprung into the writer’s mind before the rest of the novel but I it will be interesting to see the approach the author takes with her next book.

Like most such fashions, hopefully the primacy of high concept ideas will pass as, while it helps make a great pitch to a Waterstones buyer, ultimately the reader will suffer if writers of sympathetic and intelligent books feel the incorporation of some over-arching novelty is a pre-requisite for publication.

Having cited David Bowie as an example of rule-breaking and diversity, some might argue his approach to showmanship is in the spirit of high concept. In the case of Bowie as an individual artist, this is probably true. However, a truer analogy with writing advice would have resulted in every aspiring singer in the mid-70s to be told the way to success was to ape Bowie and re-invent elaborate personas for each album. To some extent this happened with prog-rock (remember Peter Gabriel dressed as a flower?) but what swiftly followed was a huge two-fingers being given to this prevailing orthodoxy: punk.

I recently read John Lanchester’s Capital, partly because it has some genre similarities with my own writing. I had high expectations for the novel. These weren’t wholly fulfilled but I admired the book’s ambition and the way it contradicted much of the received writing wisdom.

The ‘ultimate question’ asked in courses and workshops about a novel is usually ‘whose story is it?’. Capital can’t answer this – there are well over half-a-dozen characters who share equal prominence. And it’s not the story of Pepys Road (in south London, nominally where it’s set) either because there’s no real connection between the characters apart from vague demographics – some don’t even live there. There are also many sudden POV shifts, a large amount of exposition by ‘telling’ and there isn’t much of a narrative ‘chain of causality’.

Some of Capital’s characters work better than others but, as a reader, I’d rather Lanchester attempted the diversity of writing from the perspective of a female Zimbabwean parking attendant or a character innocently caught on the fringes of religious extremism than to stick with what seems the safer, more comedic territory of the disillusioned banker or football club fixer.

The book similarly varies in tone – ranging from terminal illness through the sexual motivation of Polish builders to the topical humour of an irredeemably consumerist banker’s wife. But I can imagine a writer being given advice on pitching a similar novel ‘but what is it – a romance, a comedy, social commentary’?

Like Eurovision and Bowie, Capital defies easy categorisation, and should be admired for that because if a ‘rules of the X-Factor’  approach is over-rigorously applied then we’re in danger of losing the serendipity and variety of the eccentric and individual that provide genuine surprise and delight.

Olympic Legacy?

The last few postings on this blog have been about the fast-fading memories of the 2012 Olympics and it might be asked what relevance  photos and discussions about the Olympics have for blog about writing a novel. Fair question — but I’d reply ‘everything’.

The Flag from the 1948 Olympics (and Possibly the 1936 Games) -- Wembley Stadium
The Flag from the 1948 Olympics (and Possibly the 1936 Games) — Wembley Stadium

One of the novel’s themes is identity — one of the two protagonists is non-British but sees herself as a Londoner. One source of conflict is how she deals with the difference between London and the rest of Britain — the cosmopolitan international city contrasted with the timeless English landscapes only forty miles away (and less than an hour and a half’s travelling time as I demonstrated with a nifty one train, two tube and car journey away from Blackfriars after coming into London on a Sunday for the women’s marathon).

It’s also been fascinating, from a writer’s perspective, to observe how the city has been

Three Modern Icons of London -- The Shard, the London Eye and Johnny Brownlee Getting Triathlon Bronze on the Big Screen
Three Modern Icons of London — The Shard, the London Eye and Johnny Brownlee Getting Triathlon Bronze on the Big Screen

transformed from the territory of sharp-elbowed suits into a uniquely welcoming environment. The streets and tubes have been full of people obviously enjoying themselves so much — not just international tourists but plenty of British visitors who’ve come to enjoy London. It’s wonderful to see the pleasure people take in being photographed next to Big Ben, Buckingham Palace or, bizarrely, some of the Wenlock and Mandeville figures that have been dotted around London on the Mayor of London’s strolls.

Perhaps my favourite aspect of the Olympic and Paralympic period has been the almost ubiquitous ‘games makers’. I’ve travelled to plenty of tourist cities (I used to work for British Airways) but I’ve never seen anything remotely like this small army of volunteers in stations, tourist sights and near Olympic venues whose sole objective is to welcome and help people to the city.

A Games Maker Points The Way -- Exhibition Road
A Games Maker Points The Way — Exhibition Road

And they’re still doing it. I was given a free copy of this week’s Time Out by a games maker in Covent Garden this week and the ‘Boris’ maps they’re handing out are brilliant.

Whenever I’ve seen the volunteers I’ve feel completely humbled — and grateful that they’re giving such a good impression of the country to visitors that are here. This parallels the incredibly positive image of London that’s been projected via the Olympic media coverage to people around the world.

I wondered how long the interest in London would last after the Olympics but they appear to have been so successful that London will retain its interest as a city for a very long time for people all over the world.

One of the most intriguing aspects of the Olympics is how much London 2012 would

Do You Have A Question? Outside the V&A
Do You Have A Question? Outside the V&A

represent the rest of the country – London being seen by the rest of the country already as something apart and privileged (albeit that the Olympic Park is situated in some of the poorest boroughs of the country on any measure). This could have been a valid criticism until the medals started coming in and that the importance of achievement on home soil was — and our first wasYorkshire’s Lizzie Armitstead’s silver on Sunday in the women’s cycle road race (of which I saw the start and almost finish – see photos on my Olympic photo page).

The athletes who ‘medalled’ (to use that jarring verb-noun mutation) have come from all parts of the country — from Jessica Ennis’s Sheffield to Andy Murray’s Dunblane to Ben Ainslie’s Cornwall to Greg Rutherford’s prosaic Milton Keynes.

It was weird for me to discover that Mo Farah comes from Feltham (where I worked for four years and used to drive past Farah’s school almost every night) and that he trained at St. Mary’s College in Strawberry Hill, Twickenham for ten years, while I was living just up the road.  My personal connections are tenuous at best but I guess millions of people are doing the same up and down the country — which hopefully proves a point about a sense of ownership.

Alistair Brownlee Running Towards His Gold in the Triathlon
Alistair Brownlee Running Towards His Gold in the Triathlon

The theme of identity — the question of ‘who are “we”‘ — might perhaps be the most lasting legacy of these Olympic games (and ‘we’ as the British appear to be extraordinarily unified, at least from the media coverage) — and that’s a big issue in my novel.

Setting is also important in the novel. I’m not sure why but I was on the Jubilee Line heading for Westminster to find a place to watch the women’s marathon and I decided to switch at Bond Street to the Central Line and head to St. Paul’s instead. Co-incidentally, I’ve been revising a part of the novel where my characters walk around St. Paul’s, which was a good move in terms of getting good places to watch the runners come past. The marathon route followed closely, if not identically, the route that my characters take around the Blackfriars/St. Paul’s area.

The Finish Line on the Mall
The Finish Line on the Mall

Sport is also drama in a very pure sense — with commentators and competitors using the same lexicon as writers do about constructing narrative — with expectations, twists and tuns, surprises, sub-plots, etc,.

The BBC are very good at creating montages of these sporting moments but, for me, there was one that transcended them all. It was when Gemma Gibbons, the Judo player from Charlton, exceeded her expectations by winning her semi-final bout with a single move. She started crying and looked upwards, mouthing ‘I love you, mum’. Her mother died of leukaemia eight years before, having pushed her daughter into starting her judo career. It was a candid moment that must have made anyone who’s ever lost a parent break sown in a similar way.

Some Very Lucky People Down There
Some Very Lucky People Down There

Then there’s the parallel of novel writing with sporting achievement. I was reading a conversation on Twitter today between some literary agents who were making the point to writers that novel writing is more like a marathon than any other event, which certainly seems true in my case.

There are plenty of parallels between these athletes training away in anti-social hours for four years and undiscovered writers who similarly toil with no guarantee of reward for their efforts — and also of the odds against achieving success. I’m not sure they stand up in detail but there are certainly morals of perseverance, determination and self-belief that can apply to writers as much as athletes.

The East End -- Then and Now
The East End — Then and Now (from the BT Observation Wheel, Victoria Park, Hackney)

But one thing Olympic athletes have that writers don’t is an organisation like Sport England — whose various programmes in identifying talent have given financial and coaching support to those they’ve identified as having promise. That’s the opposite of the literary world where writers invest in their own training and there’s comparatively tiny government funding to help nurture new talent.

Coming third in the medal table, perhaps the sporting approach works?

Mad Men in the Serpentine
Mad Men in the Serpentine

The Foolish Joys of Spring

Here’s a photo of a sheep…

Newborn 166
Newborn 166

…and a lamb which must have been a day or two old. I took this about three minutes into a run earlier in the week. The land use around here is a varied mixture of livestock, lots of horses, sheep, cattle and a few goats and pigs and arable, mainly wheat but there’s an absolutely massive field — about 3/4 mile by 1/4 mile — very close which has been sown with oilseed rape this year and will soon be a block of bright yellow that I imagine will also waft a pungent smell for a couple of weeks.

It’s fascinating to observe the rhythm of the seasons in events like lambing and it’s something I want to do in the novel — both literally and metaphorically in terms of the plot — decay and rebirth and so on. It’s been re-assuring, after the persistent snow and extremely low temperatures in December — I calculated about -15C at least in my garden — that hibernating wildlife seems not to have been affected. I’ve seen plenty of bumblebees and loads of ladybirds.

I get BBC Countryfile magazine and the new issue comes with a ‘free CD of British birdsong’. I guess there’s a trainspotter aspect involved — learning the individual songs of each bird if you can really be that diligent — but I imagine that the people who will play it most are those who don’t get the benefit of natural birdsong. (Before Classic FM was launched the engineering test transmissions played birdsong, which proved very popular with listeners.)

Fortunately I haven’t dashed to play my CD as the birdsong in the garden is at its seasonal peak — with the birds busy pairing off and making nests. We’ve got a few resident blackbirds who sing most beautifully perched on the tops of trees, especially at dawn and dusk. It makes me realise one of the best investments I’ve made in a long time was a 16kg bag of bird seed which saw us through most of the winter and has meant the residency of countless sparrows, finches, blackbirds, robins, starlings has continued. But I’m not sure it’s delivered on the promise of the first species on the sack, I’ve not had the pleasure of seeing those in the garden in the winter, more’s the pity.

Great Tits
Did It Do Exactly What It Said On The Tin?

Another joy of spring in the non-natural world is the April Fool. I was a bit remiss myself as I’ve enjoyed doing a few spoofs myself in the past — all I could do is post a very unconvincing status update on Facebook at 11.55am. Maybe it’s because of the recession but there were a lot of amusing hoaxes this year — there’s a round up here.

Legoland Vandalism
Legoland Vandalism

The Guardian has done some good April Fools in the past and this year it tried to convince its readers that it had changed position to wholeheartedly support the royal wedding. If you accepted this unlikely reversal of its stance then there were some very amusing stories on a supposed live wedding blog. My favourite was the desecration of the Legoland model of Buckingham Palace — a suspected trial run in miniature for the big day (see photo below linked to Guardian website).

Best of all — and my favourite for a long time — was the spoof Ken Bruce show on Radio Two. Like all the best hoaxes, and the sort of humour I like in general, this was done with such a light touch that it might just possibly have been serious.

I turned on in the car mid-way through the show and thought ‘this isn’t Ken Bruce, I wonder who’s sitting in’. But the lightly-accented Scottish voice claimed he was Ken Bruce. I twigged fairly quickly, especially after ‘Ken’ completed a whole link by burbling gibberish, that this was an April Fool and tried to identify who was the impersonator. Many other people took it literally and complained that it was Ken Bruce himself having his own joke — or that he was even drunk (which isn’t too far fetched given the rumours about another recently departed Radio Two presenter).

I nailed it as Rob Brydon fairly quickly — although the fact he’s on just about everything anyway helped narrow down the odds. His impression of a lecherous, incoherent egotist was so spot on that I felt a bit sorry at the end when the real Ken came on as he’d been so thoroughly skewered. (From a personal note I used to work for someone with a very similar drawl to this ‘Ken Bruce’ and he was also an occasionally lecherous, alternate monstrous egomaniac and paranoid neurotic so I did particularly enjoy Rob Brydon’s creation).

I’ve listened to the first half hour on the iPlayer — and I’ll try and listen to the whole thing again as it’s so funny.  There was perhaps a bit too much smutty innuendo for my liking — not because I’m prudish about these things (as some blog postings will attest) but because remarks about knobs are a bit lazy, like shock swearing, for a comedian to resort to — thankfully I didn’t hear any puns about garden birds and female anatomy.

But there were some inspired moments — particularly when the other presenters were trying to be serious. Hearing ‘Ken’ saying that Jeremy Vine had come in to ‘bore us all to death’ was priceless but I think my James might have been shaking the radio in rage.

The British At Work

I’ve been enjoying Kirsty Young’s BBC2 documentary series — The British At Work — a complementary series to a similar social history last year on the family. The episode just shown tonight took in the period 1964 to 1980 — the second half of which becomes increasingly distinct in my own memory.

What I particularly enjoyed about the programme was the music. I often loathe extraneous music piled on to TV soundtracks — more or less any sport documentary attracts it and it seems sometimes that producers like to signal that they’ve got A Big Budget on programmes like Doctor Who or Wonders of the Universe by plastering some bombastic orchestral music over everything at any opportunity.

But The British At Work used a nice selection of contemporary music — some well known (and quite apt lyrically) like Pink Floyd’s Time, Al Stewart’s Year of the Cat and Jethro Tull’s Living in the Past and others I would never have identified had there not been a really handy track listing on the programme’s page on the BBC website. (I’m glad I discovered through this that it was Steve Miller who did the ethereal Fly Like An Eagle.)

I’m already looking forward to next week’s episode because it was trailed with the outro from the Associates’ Party Fears Two — one of the oddest tracks of the 80s.

We’ve had an ongoing debate in the MA workshops about quoting lyrics from pop songs in things like chapter introductions and so on. If a writer even quotes a couple of lines from a song then the song’s publishers are entitled to for royalties, which might be OK if the book is going to sell a lot (royalties like this are often flat-rate) but a significant proportion of income for more modest sellers. Titles are safer — they’re not copyrightable — and if a reader recognises a quoted lyric then these may well be brought into mind by a mention of just the song in itself .

The programme was also interesting as it featured Charles Handy, who wrote some fascinating books in the 1990s on the future of work, such as The Age of Unreason and The Empty Raincoat — and I have a signed copy of his autobiography, having gone to an Association of MBAs function featuring him in Oxford. But I wish his prediction of the portfolio career would have become more widespread than it has so far, as it makes an awful lot of sense — and having writing as part of one’s portfolio might be the only practical way for all but the most best-selling writers to make a living (see this very interesting blog entry posted today by Martha Williams: http://wp.me/pMRZG-1Yg. )

The Documentary on Books I Really Didn’t Like To Watch

A week last Saturday there was a documentary on BBC2 that was ostensibly about the sorry state of the world of books (riven as it’s meant to be by factionalism between literary and genre) but I found that, ironically, the programme itself served as an example of the inherent problems of a whole genre of television documentaries.

I’ve been meaning to blog about the three documentaries about books that were broadcast to co-incide with World Book Night and the Sebastian Faulkes series on the novel on the preceding four Saturday nights. Unfortunately I’ve had three pieces of writing to send out for tutorials or workshops in the meantime and had to submit my 118-page MSc dissertation at the start of last week.

Even so, Sue Perkins’ s programme ‘The Books We Really Read‘  was responsible for a minor fire-storm of tweets and provoked enough subsequent comment that its memory has maybe not yet totally escaped away into the ether.

Creative writing courses and their alleged ‘writing-by-numbers’ approach to novel writing came in for a bit of stick both in the Perkins programme and the following documentary, which profiled 12 ‘important’ debut novelists. Curiously, it seemed to me that it was the misapplication of a key creative writing class concept — plot — to ‘The Books We Really Read’ that made it grate far more it probably intended to.

One of the basic plots found across all fiction and drama is the quest whereby the hero sets out to achieve something, overcoming fear and obstacles on the way and thereby changing by gaining some self-knowledge.

It’s an archetype that’s been applied recently to documentaries, particularly the celebrity-led. This person is sent on a ‘personal journey’ which, naturally, progresses in true classic narrative plot style, from wariness or cynicism to growing familiarity, experiences a few challenges along the way, and ends with something of an epiphany. The Jamie Oliver school dinner documentaries were much in this vein as are the ‘Who Do You Think You Are’ documentaries where invariably something unusual or emotional is uncovered in the subject’s past.

This concept has been broadened into subjects where there is less personal involvement by the presenter and the concept is that the celebrity mediates between the subject and the viewer — the viewer gets signals of how we’re meant to react. This risks being patronising but can come off is the presenter is aimiable and sympathetic enough — the Al Murray documentaries on Germany were structured something like this.

This style of documentary making seems to have been what the makers of ‘The Books We Really Read’ had in mind but they appeared to spectacularly misapply the formula. The logic seemed to have gone: let’s do a documentary about how some books are considered easy to read and some scarily hard but it would be too patronising to have a presenter who was scared of literary fiction and was ‘improved’, Educating Rita style, into eventually enjoying it. Why not do it the other way round and have a presenter who affects only to enjoy literary fiction and expresses almost a fear of popular fiction — and in the course of the journey we learn that genre fiction isn’t all bad. Ironic and post-modern, huh?

This probably seemed a cleverly subversive idea but it also subverts the basics of the classic plot device it tries to exploit to the point where it worked against the programme. For the quest plot to work the reader (or viewer) must accept that the quest is credible and the hero must engender some sympathy or identification.

So to compare ‘The Books We Really Read’ with a similar, recent quest documentary — the Comic Relief documentary about Helen Skelton’s high-wire walking, we had Skelton working towards overcoming the fear of walking 60 metres in the air on a rope slung between two of Battersea Power Station’s chimneys whereas Sue Perkins was forced to read thrillers, crime fiction and romances. It might actually have worked had they approached the subject the other way round and followed an ‘ordinary’ reader’s apprehensions about tackling Perkins’s favourite author, Dostoyevsky — but that wouldn’t have been very innovative.

It was also inevitable that starting from a position of ostensible ignorance about popular fiction would portray the presenter as unavoidably snobbish. So we learned very early on that  Sue Perkins read English Literature at university and, inevitably (though I don’t see why), she had never read the type of dross that people choose take on holiday with them (cue interviewing people in an airport) but she’d judged the Man Booker prize instead.

This was obviously meant to set out the starting position from which she would mellow and ‘learn’ by the end of the programme but it sent the message that she’d be metaphorically holding her nose until persuaded otherwise. This wasn’t the best way of gaining sympathy for the hero’s quest and raised the question of what audience the programme was made for — maybe just fellow Oxbridge English graduates and probably not even the majority of those. (I’m not sure whether she mentioned it was Cambridge where she read English — sadly the programme is no longer available on iPlayer — but  somehow that fact has lodged in my brain, as probably was the intention.)

This positioning of the presenter took up a good five or ten minutes at the start of the documentary and it was entirely irrelevant to the subject. It’s a shame as the underlying hypothesis is fascinating and topical– is there a meaningful distinction between the sort of literary fiction studied at Cambridge and the type of books sold by the yard at the local Asda?

Perhaps trying to analyse popular taste in the arts using a highly personalised approach is inevitably flawed — it seemed to be at the root of the unsatisfactory aspects of ‘Faulkes on Fiction’.

The programme wasn’t above using a few documentary makers’ tricks to advance its agenda. We saw many of Lee Child’s fans queuing for his signature in a bookshop and many were asked about how they pictured his thrillers’ hero, Jack Reacher, who’s a rugged type, not unlike how Child himself appears in person. The implication seemed to be that his readers were like the sort of soap opera fans who run up to an actor in the street to berate the character they play’s actions — ‘How could you swap the baby?’

As always, ‘ordinary’ people were shown jostling in the public space of a shop whereas ‘the experts’ always sit in a quiet room with a nice table lamp in the background — or on the solitude of a park bench.

Child made a feisty contribution, his revelling in the ‘us and them’ divide between his genre and literary fiction seemed to fit the documentary’s pseudo-narrative opening chapter. He made the inflammatory assertion that literary fiction writers are unable to write genre fiction and the snobbishness of the literary establishment is because they know that bestselling authors could write literary fiction as easily as dropping off a log.

This claim could have been exploited better in a traditional documentary — by introducing counter arguments. Instead his arguments were apparently undermined simply by Perkins reading out passages of his prose in a silly voice. This is something she did for the work of several other authors.

Maybe Child’s arguments have already been discussed to death in various versions of the ‘is Dylan better than Keats’ debate on the likes of Newsnight Review?

But no doubt many of the readers of genre fiction agree with straightforward proposition that the writers who Perkins investigated have the talent to identify what the majority of readers want from a book and are rewarded by selling a lot of books and, presumably, making money whereas many literary fiction writers scrape by on Arts Council grants and the proceeds of prizes allocated by the literary establishment.

There’s always also a widespread suspicion of claims made about a work’s intellectual or aesthetic pedigree when the acclaim comes from a closed, elite group of arbiters. This is the classic ’emperor’s’ new clothes’ situation that applies even more to modern art, modern classical music and various other art forms where there’s a suspicion that reputations can be determined by a small number of influential critics who may be motivated by political or social factors.

The tone of the interviews followed the narrative arc of the programme — Child was confrontational, then Ian Rankin was emollient on crime fiction (conceding that armies of 70-year old detective spinsters stretched credibility). Sophie Kinsella, sitting agreeably in her pyjamas, was then able to make the assertion that allowed the self-knowledge aspect of the documentary’s ‘plot’ to reach its conclusion: Jane Austen wrote on subjects that are staples of modern chick-lit.

The logic of this argument was about the universality of human experience: one of the English language’s greatest novelists wrote about the difficulty for women of finding a good man — and so, for that matter, did Charlotte Brontë. This is very true but it’s also true that many of Shakespeare’s plays could be considered thrillers or fantasies and that, even, Austen’s Emma could be argued to be the first detective novel.

It’s not really an argument that equates a bit of Jilly Cooper with literary fiction but it seemed that the programme had come so far in its journey that it ended up arguing for the values of relativism that it had held in contempt at the outset.

The mention of the universal appeal of the basic romance story of the search for the perfect partner allowed the programme to reach its rather unconvincing — but inevitable conclusion — people liked bestsellers because they have a plot, which is something that, as everyone knows, literary fiction books don’t.

So in the end, the programme concluded that there were some good things about literary stuff — like the enjoyment of beautiful prose — and good things about thrillers, crime fiction and romances (well, perhaps, just one albeit the most important in any narrative work) and, actually, maybe they’re not too different after all and wouldn’t it be nice if they could, maybe, learn a bit from each other? Now that sounds like the basis for a programme I’d really like to watch.

Good Night on BBC2

A couple of novel-related programmes on BBC2 tonight.

The Great Outdoors is a short series that was on BBC4 last year. It’s about a group of ramblers enjoying the countryside and features Ruth Jones of Gavin and Stacey fame and who’s shortly to star as Hattie Jacques — who, in turn, I remember well from Sykes along with Derek ‘Corky’ Guyler and his washboard — if this means zilch to you then congratulations on being young — as well as the Carry On films.

I watched a few odd bits of when it was on BBC4 — mainly on the prompting of local newspaper The Bucks Herald which said it was written by local writers and was filmed largely on the Ridgeway locally around the Chilterns. While I’m not exactly sure where the embedded clip below was filmed, the beautiful landscape shots are very typical of the local area where The Angel is set and it’s quite  incredible to think these areas are within forty miles of the centre of London. The beauty of the countryside is one thing that Kim will fall in love with.

Earlier is Michel Roux’s Service. I caught the last half of the programme last night. It’s a series a bit like The Apprentice and Masterchef (without the cooking) whereby the eponymous restaurateur will train some young people (for whom the term ‘rough diamond’ may have been invented) into developing the service skills required for a Michelin starred restaurant. Needless to say, in the first episode they were hopeless in a pizza restaurant and we’re now promised they’ll go back to basics in a greasy spoon and curry house.

I’ll watch this quite carefully as my novel has a restaurant customer service angle — it won’t be the main focus but it will provide some incidental materials. I’m also quite intrigued by the systems that are used to manage restaurant service delivery. As with making a Christmas dinner at home, it seems simple because lots of people do it but it’s very difficult to get right.

I’ve not often eaten in Michelin starred restaurants but I did once have a wedding anniversary spectacular at Raymond Blanc’s Le Manoir Aux Quatre Saisonspushing the boat out with a surprise bouquet of roses waiting on the table after the champagne in the garden before we got started on the however many course meal it was. Of course it cost more than the monthly shopping budget but demonstrated how excellent customer service makes you think it’s all worth it — until the credit card bill turns up.

Lip Service

A fascinating aspect of reading fiction is that, sometimes despite the best efforts of the author, every reader must have a different mental image of each character — most likely a synthesis of their own experience and from triggers picked up from the text. Most ‘best-practice’ writing advice tends to suggest the author should leave as much detail to the reader’s imagination as possible — only providing concrete descriptions that are vital to quickly establish character or to provide information necessary to the plot.

When a novel is adapted for film or television this often leads to disappointment for readers of the original novel — an actor or actress may be physically dissimilar to how they imagined a character or, perhaps worse, behaves in an entirely different way. I read something recently in the Radio Times complaining about Stephen Tompkinson not being at all like the writer had imagined Peter Robinson’s Inspector Banks in ‘Aftermath’.

Stephen Tompkinson as Peter Robinson's DCI Banks
Stephen Tompkinson as Peter Robinson's DCI Banks

(Parts of the second episode of which were filmed on the moors very near where I grew up. Look at those intimidating pylons on the picture on the left. They loomed over me every day. ).

The converse of the reader’s mental image is that a writer must also have a picture of a character in mind when writing fiction. Again this must be a mixture of experience and imagination that rarely transfers directly into a reader’s imagination, although, like screenwriters, if a novelist is writing a series of books that has been featured on film or television then they may start writing for a specific actor. I seem to remember Colin Dexter saying this about John Thaw as Inspector Morse.

Occasionally, however, writers must have the image of a character in mind and see some sort of very close likeness in the visual representation of a person — a photograph or picture or something on film or television. I recently had that sort of revelation in connection with the new BBC3 drama series, ‘Lip Service‘. It was the publicity photos for the series on the front of, I think, the Guardian’s Saturday Review section that made me take notice: the actress Ruta Gedmintas, pictured as her character Frankie in the series is a very close fit for how I see my character Kim — at least Kim at the start of the novel.

It’s partly the urban-arty clothing (Frankie’s meant to be a photographer) and her gaunt physical appearance — and she has short-ish blonde hair and a nose piercing, even green eyes. I don’t know whether Frankie is meant to portray a particular lesbian style of dressing. Kim in my novel isn’t gay (I think Frankie is actually meant to be bisexual) but Kim certainly comes from a arty-edgy culture in Shoreditch and Hackney where she will mix with and be influenced by a lot of gay people.  (And similarly in my writing experience I have and have had plenty of contact with gay writers and have workshopped gay fiction.)

Ruta Gedmintas as Frankie on the cover of Guardian Guide 9th Oct (Linked to Guardian Website)
Ruta Gedmintas as Frankie on the cover of Guardian Guide 9th Oct

Frankie is, of course, different to Kim in many ways but, the character, as played by Ruta Gedmintas, captures a startlingly arresting attitude. She has a very interesting, expressive face that varies between a the kind of ‘fuck you’ arrogance of an urban artist and a very genuine smile that shows flashes of concealed vulnerability — two contrasting character facets I’m trying to work on bringing out with Kim. Ruta Gedmintas is probably prettier than I imagine Kim to be but that may be because in my novel, Kim deliberately makes herself look confrontational to start with but she will have the sort of understated beauty that becomes increasingly attractive to James.

I was a bit intrigued by having stumbled over such an uncanny resemblance to a character I’ve had living in my head for around a year. I found from a couple of interviews online that Ruta Gedmintas comes from a Lithuanian family (hence the unusual name) — so perhaps her appearance has an Eastern European aspect, which may have made me think of German Kim — but the actress was brought up in Buckinghamshire which, co-incidentally, is where the bulk of my novel is set — in the Chilterns. (This, perhaps, explains why Frankie curiously speaks with an accent that’s pure Home Counties — or maybe her lack of the Scots brogue might be explained in later episodes with further revelations from her mysterious past?)

In the imaginary sequence of events whereby my published novel gets adapted for film or TV and then (possibly the most unlikely of this chain of possibilities) the original novel writer got asked for opinions on who should play the female lead then I think I’ve now found a perfect recommendation — so long as she can do a Hochdeutsch accent.

‘Lip Service’ has attracted controversy as it’s a series about the lives of lesbians in Glasgow. Apparently it’s the first British-made series specifically about gay women (as opposed to men) and the programme makers have to address a dilemma in that they want, on the one hand, to portray the women’s lives as being as ‘normal’ as possible (i.e. not contingent on their sexuality). But on the other hand if they’ve created a unique platform for the portrayal of intimate scenes between gay women characters then obviously they feel it’s something that they ought not to shy away from using — and, in my opinion, this is achieved very successfully — frankly (or, perhaps I should say, Frankily) but not salaciously.

I’ve watched the first couple of episodes and it strikes me as it’s quite like a gritty Glaswegian ‘Cold Feet’ with added sex (sex is something I always thought ‘Cold Feet’ could have explored more) — a comparison I mean as a compliment as I liked ‘Cold Feet’, especially the first few series — and it had some great actors in it. Like ‘Lip Service’, ‘Cold Feet’ also uses music effectively — and quite a lot of my writing throws in references to music (the latest extract I workshopped mentioned ‘Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One Before’ by The Smiths and ‘Big Love’ by Fleetwood Mac — the latter in a slyly filthy context).

I’m interested in that ‘Cold Feet’ genre — tangled relationships between people who are starting to deal with the responsibilities of adulthood — and think that my writing is probably pitched at the same kind of audience. The success of David Nicholls’ ‘One Day’ that I read recently and learned quite a lot from (Nicholls wrote some of the scripts for ‘Cold Feet’). The book gets fervent reviews  on Amazon from the many people who say it’s their favourite ever demonstrates that this is also a commercial genre. I have to say too that David Nicholls is a nice chap as he replied very quickly and politely to an e-mail I sent him about the clever playlist feature he did have on the book’s website — which now seems to have disappeared unfortunately in favour of some of the book’s film adaptation promo material.

BBC News Has Point of View Problems

The BBC’s reporting on the British Airways industrial dispute with Unite has been fascinating in terms of the nuances of meaning that can easily be interpreted to favour one side over another and also how the juxtaposition of human interest stories (‘how do you feel about your honeymoon being cancelled?’) with reporting of arcane negotiation details can influence the message of the report — there’s a lot of subtlety, whether deliberate or through lazy reporting — and the subject is interesting in a wider writing context.

One particular example was heard on Five Live’s bulletins on Saturday night. The newsreader stated that BA had said more Unite cabin staff had turned up to work ‘than expected’ and consequently the airline had ‘re-instated’ previously cancelled flights.

The number of staff ‘expected’ in this report was  entirely BA’s own subjective figure, which as it had previously not been published could not be verified. This tactic was obviously BA PR spin designed to give an impression that the strike was weakening and the BBC reported this clear inference despite this assertion having no independently verified basis.

More rigorous journalism would have attributed to whom the verb ‘expected’ was related — e.g. ‘A BA spokesperson said more staff had turned up than BA’s management had expected’. By missing out the vital attribution of who expected the turnout, any listener is invited to infer that it is the reporter or the supposedly impartial BBC who has made the judgement about whether the strike is being well observed or not.

Unattributable quantitative judgements like ‘higher than expected’ play with the reader or listener’s expectations and relate very much to the point-of-view discussions that we’ve had in the classes at City. Whose expectations are these that are being reported? It’s vitally important. Obvious authorial interventions, as in the BBC report, imply an omniscient narrative voice that, in BBC News Bulletins, should be impartial. Fictionally such leading assertions belong more rightfully placing red herrings in a detective novel (where even then they’d be rather too obvious).