Please Let This Be The Last Emma Kennedy Post….

After a peaceful week and a lovely couple of days in Cardiff, I’d almost forgotten about the Emma Kennedy rubbish but I arrived home to a new email from her. I tried to keep the correspondence short and polite but she’s now gone on Twitter and posted up a storm accusing me of dragging her mother into it and apparently talking about my penis!

So, once again, so you can make your own mind up about it all, here is our correspondence.

Emma is in italics

Jon is in bold

Hello Jon

I’m sorry I have to email you again but I would appreciate it greatly if you would remove any mention of my mother from your blog.

I don’t see why you felt the need to mention her at all.
The person to whom she was referring was a man called ********* who stalked me for two years.
Thank you.
Emma Kennedy

Hi Emma,

I went back and looked at the blog, willing to make changes had I been unkind, but I can’t see anything there that could be considered offensive. I didn’t actually write about your mother, I just quoted you. The only reason I wrote those blog posts were to record and make available our correspondence since I felt you were embarking on a tactic of misrepresenting the nature of the conversation and my conduct.

For that reason I’ve decided to leave the complete correspondence up there un-edited.

I’m not doing so to be hurtful or spiteful, I just feel that you turned a debate into a public conflict and as such, it probably wouldn’t be wise to lower my defences. No offence was, or is, intended.

All the best,

Jon

Jon
The only person who turned this into a public debate was you.
The tweet where I quote my mother had nothing whatsoever to do with you or this ridiculous spat. Please remove it. I do not want my mother mentioned in any context on your site.
Thank you
Emma

I’m not going to edit the blog.

J

Right. So you’re happy to represent an elderly woman as making a personal jibe about your appearance and in so doing make her look like an arsehole when she wasn’t talking about you and is oblivious to your existence? Correct?
This just requires a yes or no answer Jon

No.

Thank you

So, as I sit at the computer to edit the blog, I then receive this…

Wow. I am told you are trying to sell your dvd off the back of my mother.
What an amazing man you are

Emma,

I’m not even going to dignify that with a response.
I see on Twitter you’re again trying to spread misrepresentative slander about me. I have no choice but to answer that by posting this latest batch of correspondence.

Let. It. Go.

Jon

Please do Jon. You come out of this very well

So that’s that.

 

**************UPDATED FRIDAY 20TH JANUARY 2012*************

Hi Emma,

I’m writing to you for the last time – to put an end to our correspondence.
i will not reply or respond to you on email or Twitter and I respectfully request that you cease to make any further reference to me in a public forum.  if you do persist with your commentary on me or this issue I shall have to seek further formal advice.

I think you’ll agree we’ve exhausted the subject.

This situation isn’t doing either of us any favours. So this is our handshake and let’s call it a day,

Best wishes,

Jon.

Another tedious post about Emma Kennedy.

Well, here we are again.

Please don’t feel obliged to read this post. I only feel obliged to post it because Emma just wrote a blog about me inferring that the reason I’d stopped posting about her was because I had something to hide or be ashamed of rather than that I was trying to let this just die.

For a woman who accused me of bombarding her with emails, she has sent me 13 in the last 24 hours, I’ve replied to half of them – politely but mainly trying to put the matter to rest.

I shall post the entire correspondence below.

The only points I’d like to address about her blog – which will be evident to anyone already following the thing – are that firstly, I didn’t know I was blocked by her. She didn’t inform me and I don’t know how one would even notice – so I was certainly never angry about it. At no point in this whole thing have I felt angry.  Also, I’ve never said that young writers should “EXPECT” not to be paid. As for the three ‘missing’ tweets I didn’t post in my original blog which apparently contextualise better – I actually thought they were less relevant. They relate to Danny Baker being offered an unpaid writing job. To me, there is a world of difference between companies asking Danny Baker to write for free and an unestablished young writer being asked to write for free. There is no value in a free job to Danny Baker as he doesn’t need experience or a platform to display his talents to generate further work.

Oh, and there’s one thing we both agree on in her blog, we definitely both agree that she’s been an arsehole, so that’s good.

As I said, don’t feel obliged to read these emails. I post them purely so, if you care, you can make up your own mind…..

Emma’s emails are in italics

Jon’s emails are in bold

Dear Jon

I’ve just read your open letter to me and I’m afraid I’ve greeted it with disbelief.

First thing I’m accused of is “dragging” (dragged in your blog but you get the gist) this matter into the public forum. Unless I’m very much mistaken, you and I had a spat on twitter between ourselves. At no point did I mention your username in my timeline. It was an argument I was having with you. Not you and all my followers.  Even today, after receiving an endless stream of personal and rude abuse from your followers, at no point did I do a general tweet mentioning your name to my followers. I could have done. But I didn’t.

And I’m not the person who wrote a blog about it and then published it to all and sundry. You did that. So in terms of dragging this matter beyond what it actually was – sorry – but that finger points firmly at you.

Yes. I do have a long history of men tweeting me to argue endlessly, then going apoplectic after I block them and then emailing me because they want to carry on arguing and then bleating about it on Twitter to carry that argument on further and involve people who weren’t involved in the first place. Yes. I do. That’s what you did. You can try and sweeten that up any which way you want. But that’s what you’ve done.

The tone of your email was far from conciliatory. You emailed me because you were angry I’d blocked you. Your second email was aggressive. I’d asked you to stop emailing me. But you didn’t. Last time I had a man I don’t know from twitter emailing me after I’d blocked him, he emailed me eighteen times. You can probably appreciate that I didn’t want 18 emails from you. I had to take legal advice after the last one. And I was told that if it ever happened again, I had to be very firm and quite clear that I didn’t want the person to contact me again. I did this with you twice. I was perfectly entitled to do so.

I am afraid I think your behaviour is harassment. The fact you have written a blog about it and an open letter to me is also harassment. Turning your followers onto me is harassment. This is harassment. Stop hounding me. Please.

I find it very strange that anyone who is blocked on Twitter would then find the email of the person who has blocked them and email them. I think that is peculiar behaviour. I am not going to apologise for saying that.

I have a lot of people contacting me on Twitter. I have many discussions on many topics. Every now and again, someone crops up who just goes on and on and on when we have established, in probably the first or second tweet that we are never going to agree. You fall into that category. I wasn’t going to block you until your snide “Oh hallowed writer” tweet. Also there was a tone to your tweets that I found aggressive. It’s up to me who I block. It’s my account. I don’t have to explain to anyone why I want to block them. Nobody does. I’ve been blocked plenty of times. I expect I annoyed the people who did it. Fair enough. It’s their account. What I didn’t then do is email them, blog about it and write an open letter to them.

If I blogged and wrote open letters to everyone who sent me abusive messages or sent me messages that upset me I would literally get nothing else done.

The tweets I think you should have included in your blog for balance were my tweet of Harlan Ellison’s video – pay the writer. That came from Danny Baker who had just tweeted that he had been offered a top flight job for BBC4 but had been told there was no fee. That’s where this all started. I RTed the link to the video. It was quite clear that it was about writing for a film company who have substantial pockets. I then tweeted that every time a writer agrees to do a job for nothing they are saying “I am worth nothing” Again, this was referring to film work. I think it wouldn’t take a rocket scientist to appreciate that this also referred to TV companies.  I then followed that up quite quickly with the tweet that you took issue with. The one in which I said that no writer should work for nothing.

Instead, you have represented on your website that I was advocating that writers should never write anything in any circumstance for anyone or anything. This is clearly nonsense. And if you had read my tweets to other people during our exchange you would have seen me saying that I was only talking about TV and papers – ie companies with funds who can and SHOULD pay.

When you say you didn’t send anyone my way to abuse me – what did you think was going to happen when you posted that blog and published our emails without putting up those first tweets that put it in context? If that isn’t someone screaming LOOK WHAT SHE DID TO ME I don’t know what is. I didn’t ask you to tweet me. I didn’t ask you to email me. I asked you to stop emailing me. You didn’t. And I think your emails were vile. They were very unpleasant to receive. Quite why you think it’s acceptable to email a woman you’ve never met to be abusive and then not expect me to want to defend myself is beyond belief.

I disagree with people all the time on Twitter. I disagreed with several of your friends today. Some were blocked. Some were not. It is very clear to me who should be blocked and who shouldn’t. Again, it is entirely my right to block who I wish. Someone simply disagreeing with me isn’t one of my blocking criteria.

I think you have blown this entirely out of proportion and you have created a whirlwind when there needed to be none. There is a vast difference between replying to your friends (which they were) and tweeting my followers. I replied to your friends who came to attack me. That was it. I am allowed to do so.

If I had the time I expect I could trawl through your feed and find some suitable shitty things about me. But I’m not going to. I don’t see what the point of that would be or what it would achieve.

I believe young writers should be paid. And that they should not be taught to EXPECT not to be paid. That is my position. And I’m sticking by it.

I suggest you take a long deep breath and walk away from your computer.

Yours sincerely

Emma Kennedy

This was followed swiftly by…

ps if you want to reply to that email please do, but I’ve got no interest in any further contact with you

I replied…

I’ll find those three tweets and add them to the blog. They weren’t purposefully omitted.

We clearly don’t see eye to eye about things and there’s no point raking over that mess any more. We also clearly have radically different views as to what constitutes bad conduct.

it’s a shame they happened to clash.
I find it extraordinary that you complain about raking over a mess after the the absolute tizzy whizz you’ve caused. I don’t wish you any ill Jon. I just completely disagreed with you. It was a row on Twitter. It’s not the end of days
And now, in the spirit of all things good and decent, let us shake hands and say no more about it
Emma

To which she correctly asserts in her blog that I did not reply. I was out. At a gig. A band called Hot Hooves – check them out: http://soundcloud.com/hothooves

By the time I got home, she had sent me another email, which I replied to incorporating whatever I would have replied to her previous one.

Just to help you understand the sort of day I’ve had after you put up your blog – here’s the latest tweet, from @chazzyb31 which I got about two minutes ago. I’ve been getting these all day Jon. An endless stream.
“I have no idea who @emmak67 is, but I think she’s an over-privileged, out of touch, nasty cunt”
Emma

Emma,

I’m one of the most sympathetic people you could hope to meet but, honestly, you had some faceless idiot call you a nasty cunt whilst I had a prominent broadcaster announce that I was a mentalist, stalking, sexual harassing shit teacher. I absolutely win in the shitty day stakes.

J

I should also have added in my original email that you also omitted your initial tweets to me. So you’ve made it look as if I started that exchange. Given the level of abuse I am receiving and will continue to receive for weeks to come I would appreciate it greatly if you could rectify that. Thank you
Emma

I never said sexually harassing. I said harassing. Which I still maintain you were. But good to know you think it’s fine to whip up people so they call me names all day. At least you only had to deal with me thinking you were an idiot.
Please amend your blog
Thank you
Emma

And I should also point out you wouldn’t have had any of this if you’d left it. Your blogging about it has rattled this on. That’s your doing. I forgot about you days ago.
Now please, can we draw a line under this
Emma
You SAID harassing, you ALLEGED sexually harassing when you said “still I suppose some men have nothing better to do than harrass women on the internet” Come on. You know it had nothing to do with your gender. We both deal with young writers, it was ENTIRELY issue-based. You skewed it into a gender/harassment issue and everybody apart from you can see that and see through that.

I genuinely didn’t whip people up.

I know this is going to sound like point scoring or something but genuinely it isn’t. If you look back at the whole thing – it was just me disagreeing with you, that happens on Twitter all the time. I had no misogynistic agenda, no reason or desire to stalk you. I posted the blog because you threatened to report me for harassment. Do you understand how serious that is and why I urgently had to make all the information available?

I didn’t ask anyone to contact you and tried to hold back from interacting for the rest of the day.

The people who are giving you shit, I don’t know. Ross is a friend and Dom is an ex-student and I’m sure you’ve found them both reasonable – they’re lovely people.

The responses you’re getting are not because people disagree with your stance on writing, they’re because of your out-of-proportion manner of dealing with someone who simply didn’t deserve the level of hostility and reckless rhetoric you used.

I wrote the blog to protect myself from a nasty threat YOU made. You didn’t ‘forget about this days ago’ – I woke up to a threatening email from you 17 hours ago.

You caused this, you fanned the flames by making up reckless lies and allegations and you’re having to deal with the fallout from that.

I have no desire to argue with you at all. I never did!

I’ve apologised if I made you feel harassed, I’ve tried consistently to make peace.

I’m almost impressed by the epic lack of self-awareness you’re displaying. You’re now guilty of every single thing you’ve accused me of baselessly – gender agenda, bombarding with emails for hours on end, writing an email as long as an essay, being rude, being aggressive, being a shit teacher (did you notice how almost in the same tweet you went from saying how much you cared about young writers and how 85% of them were hopeless – HOPELESS!) – you’re behaving weird and that’s what’s whipped this all up.
I have no beef with you beyond the slanderous stuff you said today.

Just let it go. Don’t drag this into another day.

J

Jon

Spend one day in the shoes of a high profile woman on twitter and I think you will completely understand.

We are probably never going to agree on anything but I want you to consider one thing.

Let’s say you have a wife, or a girlfriend. You might, you might not. Let’s say that wife or girlfriend has an argument with someone on twitter. Happens all the time. No biggy. But let’s say there was something about the tone of the argument your wife or girlfriend didn’t like and so she blocked the person she had had the argument with.

And then that person emails her. Because he or she is angry about being blocked. And your wife or girlfriend asks them to stop. But they email her again. So this time she is quite firm. And then that person writes a blog about your wife or girlfriend. And then writes an open letter to your wife or girlfriend.

Would you think – oh what a great guy he sounds? Or would you think that’s a disproportionate response to what occurred and I’m not sure I like this guy?

As for you having to protect yourself all you had to do was not email me again. That was it. That was hardly the ask of the century. You were tweeting me in your capacity as a teacher. And you were tweeting someone who is regularly asked to mentor young writers. What you were doing was directly connected to your job. That’s how I read it. You will probably think entirely differently.

I think you need to calm down about all this. It was a spat on twitter. That was it. You have made a mountain out of a molehill.

Oh my god, you’re still going.

I don’t need to calm down about this because I don’t care – you’re the one bombarding me with emails, I expressly asked yesterday to not let this drag on to today. You’re making the mountain yourself – you’re the one making mountains. If you have experience of this stuff, why don’t you just ignore me? What are you hoping to get out of sending me so many emails?

I’ve genuinely considered the hypothetical situation you posited. And my answer is, if this happened to my wife or girlfriend, that I would have read the content of what the guy was writing and – had it been identical to the content I created – I’d have pointed out to her that there was clearly nothing sinister about any of it. I’d have told her not to threaten him with action over the non-inflammatory emails he sent, I’d have told her not to spend a whole day on Twitter slandering him despite his staying polite and I’d tell her to just walk away from it rather than sending endless follow-up emails.

I’ve actually had to hold some of the women in my life back from entering this matter. They, along with women on-line who have contacted me who I don’t know, are disgusted that you turned it into a gender issue. You sound ridiculous when you invoke the ‘angry threatening man’  defence. Even complete strangers can see that there was nothing in my words, tone, intent or actions that conform to a notion of misogyny and I’ve remained polite and calm.

Your version seems to hinge on me being angry about being blocked. As I’ve said before, I wasn’t even aware I’d been blocked. I emailed you – as it says in the first paragraph of that very email – to apologise and explain. How can you find anything in there with a threatening or stalkerish tone?

Obviously, I will never spend one day in the shoes of a ‘high profile woman on twitter’ but the simple truths are that you don’t HAVE to be on twitter and you chose to continuously (you’re still doing it!!!!!) exacerbate this situation.

So, once more, I apologise for any misunderstanding and suggest you don’t even reply to this email.

Let’s both do something more worthwhile and productive with our weekends.

All the best,

J

Yes. Good idea. Let’s never speak to each other again. Thank god for that
Emma

Finally, the capability to admit that someone else was right.
Goodbye.

There was a slight addendum to this which, hopefully, represents the end of the correspondence. I was alerted that to a tweet she’d made:

My mother the philosopher klaxon “Emma, beware the obese man with a tidy beard on his own with a laptop”

which seems a strange thing to post apropos of nothing but as this final correspondence shows when I – full of belly and tidy of beard – expressed disappointment she claims ignorance, so let’s give her the benefit of the doubt….

Honestly? You’re making fat jokes about me now?

Grow up.

Are you ever going to stop emailing me?
I have absolutely no idea to what you are referring. I haven’t got the first clue what you look like.
And by the way – I find it very interesting that you haven’t seen fit to publish my reply to your open letter. What a surprise.
Emma

Fine, I’ll publish everything.

I’d really hoped this was all over.

Can you explain what you meant about me making fat jokes about you please?

I’m referring to the quote you posted from your mother.

At this point, you’re harassing me. I don’t want to discuss it anymore. I don’t want you to email me  again. I’m asking you to draw a line under this and stop referring to me in any way online.

That’s got nothing to do with you. I am baffled as to why you would think it has? I will say it again, I have not the first clue what you look like. Why would I? I’ve never met you. Your avatar, if I remember correctly, is a normal sized man with a moustache.
Have you a God complex or something?

Please don’t ever email me again.

And with that, hopefully, we have an end to the matter forever.

Oh, and yes i did agree to post those other three tweets on the blog, but I can’t be bothered. You can find them in her timeline.

Thinking about it, to try to draw some kind of positive out of this whole thing – I’m happy to capitalise on the increased traffic and any goodwill you might have for me by telling you about the film I just made – an independent music doc, narrated by Stewart Lee, about and featuring interviews and never-before seen archival footage of Radiohead, Supergrass, Foals, Ride, Swervedriver, Talulah Gosh and more. Why not watch the trailer and then order the 2-disc DVD set from http://www.acpgthemovie.com if you put the word ‘emma’ in your order, I’ll throw in a free ACPG plectrum!

An Open Letter To Emma Kennedy.

Hi Emma,

I’m writing this as an open letter so as not to incur whatever retribution you promised should I email you again.

It’s been an odd day on Twitter and I’ve tried to avoid fanning the flames above directing people to my blog which I wrote because I wanted transparency in the situation. You were accusing me of harassment and rather than have my reputation completely unfairly sullied, I decided to make the whole thing public – having nothing to hide.

You’ve said in your subsequent tweets that you have a history of “men on twitter being rude, being blocked, going nuts, tracking me down, emailing and then whipping up a fricking storm” I’m sorry to hear this and didn’t know that I was in any way adding to a longstanding issue. It was never my intention. I’d hoped the tone of the initial email I sent was not ‘nuts’ but conciliatory. It was rewarded by hostility on your part but I guess I now understand where that came from and, again, I’m sorry if I made you felt harassed.

I wrote the blog about the situation to get it out in the open and be able to state my case clearly. you have 100 times more followers than me, so if you write something negative about me, it has an effect. I needed my response, my position, to be available.

I do think it’s obvious from my initial email that I still had respect for you and hoped to resolve and be done with the matter.

Today, you’ve dragged it into a strange public forum and have spent a lot of energy in saying untrue, unkind and recklessly libelous things about me.

These are the things that you have said which are UNTRUE:

@mr_clark he was HARRASSING me

 

@mr_clark Well, you weren’t at the receiving end of it for HOURS ON END. Still, good that you’re picking up the baton eh?

 

@mr_clark He tracked down my email after hours of hounding me. Do you think that’s acceptable?

 

@oneofthosefaces That and fact he’s quite deliberately omitted my three tweets that set that argument in proper context

 

@dombeno And after he tracked down my email like a mentalist. Yes

 

@dombeno Yes. I have read his blog that he wrote after not leaving me alone for hours on end. Yes

 

@rosslawhead Could you please ask your friend to stop sending people my way to chuck abuse at me. I’m getting sick of this

 

@hagenilda YOu should read his emails to me. They’re vile

 

 

 

1. I completely apologise if I made you feel harassed but I was not harassing you. I certainly wasn’t ‘HARASSING’ you. I think the emails illustrate that fine.

 

2. You were not at the receiving end of anything from me for ‘HOURS ON END’. You weren’t silent and bombarded. We tweeted to each other on the matter for a couple of hours. You were NOT on the ‘receiving’ end, it was an interaction where you gave not just as good as you got but with demonstrably greater aggression and nastiness.

 

3. It’s weird to paint it as me ‘tracking down your email’ after ‘hounding’ you – I simply clicked on the public ‘contact’ button of the public website you list in your public twitter profile. As much as it might strengthen your position to paint me as some kind of a stalker, I simply am not.

 

4. I genuinely don’t know which three tweets you’re suggesting I’ve deliberately omitted – show me them and I will gladly add them to the original blog post.

 

5. I didn’t send anyone your way to abuse you. I just posted that blog. Any responses you’ve had – from friends of mine or strangers – are people acting entirely on their own volition.

 

6. The fact that you LIED to hagenilda about me sending you ‘vile’ emails before you realised I’d actually posted our whole correspondence is shameful. Shameful.

 

I’m a person you don’t know who disagreed with something you posted online. When I tried to extend an olive branch, you accused me of harassment and have now spent the best part of a whole day writing libelous, slanderous bile on twitter about me.

 

You know nothing about me, yet you’re happy to create an image of me to 40,000 plus people that I’m the kind of person who hounds women for hours online before tracking down their email and harassing them with vile emails.

 

That is not me. Our correspondence clearly shows that that is not me.

 

The initial issue we disagreed over (which I still don’t think we actually do disagree about, you’re just unwilling to consider what I was actually saying) is no longer an issue to me. I really don’t care about your opinions or trying to change them at all.

 

I want you to stop posting unwarranted, malicious, slanderous, reckless things about me right now.

 

I’m sorry I don’t fit the profile of someone you would prefer to have disagreeing with you – some odious misogynistic stalker with an axe to grind against you and all other women.

 

I’m just someone who disagreed with a post you made.

 

I can’t fathom why you have responded in the manner you have. I totally apologise for having somehow exacerbated this situation, I’d like it done with and I would truly appreciate it if you’d re-read our correspondence and your responses and hopefully see that the right thing to do right now is to make it clear to your followers that I’ve been rather misrepresented by the things you have written today.

 

If they continue, I’ll explore legal options.

 

 

Jon

 

 

 

 

Emma Kennedy and The Case of The Unpaid Writers

This morning, I awoke to an email from an actress/broadcaster/author/journalist/twitter celebrity (this is all one person, by the way, it wasn’t a petition, these are all the strings to a single bow) which read:

If you contact me one more time I’m reporting you to your college.
Don’t think for one single second I won’t do that.
You are harassing me.

Sent from my iPhone

How did this happen? How did I go from being a mild-mannered chap minding his own business who people might describe as ‘quite nice’ to being a harasser of one actress/broadcaster/author/journalist/twitter celebrity? What follows is the story of my fall. A cautionary tale to all of those who think they’re just being normal but are, in fact, harassing.

In the interests of full disclosure, before I begin my tale of woe, I feel I must level with you, dear reader, and admit to three prior incidents which could easily be construed as celebrity harassment. They have no direct bearing on this case but lest they be resurrected out-of-context to form some kind of basis to firm up this accusation, I’d like for you to know the truth about them and to recognise that I was forthcoming in detailing them.

Incident 1. 1992. Oxford. Complainant: Timmy Mallett. Some friends and I saw Timmy Mallett in a queue at some event in a park. We laughed and mocked him from a point further back in the queue and then I shouted “Oi Timmy, Give us a WACAWAVE!” He turned around and fixed me with a haunted look of anxious disappointment which robbed my epithet of both humour and dignity.

Incident 2. 2011. The Internet. Complainant: Richard Herring. Richard Herring asked for recommendations for summer reading. I immediately replied “Don’t bother reading your own book. It’s quite disappointing” I regretted sending it quite quickly as it was more snide than jocular but it was, in my defence, rooted in a genuine disappointment at having paid £11.99 to read a man swing between dull self-indulgent regret at a life wasted and smug references to casual sexual encounters. Before I could delete the tweet, he had responded by comparing me to a woman’s genitals and blocked me – which is fair enough, really.

Incident 3. 1999. Marks & Spencer Food Hall, Oxford St, London. Complainant: Christopher Biggins. Whilst trying to navigate my way around the narrow labyrinthine overpopulated food basement, I found my path obstructed on three separate occasions by the same apparently owner-less trolley left lazily in the middle of the aisle at an angle. Three times I moved it to the side to clear the way. On the fourth occasion, grumpy and un-lunched, I shoved the trolley with all my might and watched it careen into a chiller unit at the end of the aisle. Proud of my work, I turned to find myself face-to-face with an outraged Christopher Biggins. “Why did you do THAT?” demanded the owl-faced off-hours panto dame who, in my memory, was clutching a bag of frozen peas.  I had no response. “You’re a very RUDE man!” he proclaimed before marching away towards his wronged trolley. “Fuck Off” I replied in a barely audible mumble as he left, not out of genuine malice but because I knew this was the chance to secure an anecdote entitled ‘The Time I Told Christopher Biggins To Fuck Off’

To these three people, I offer a belated apology, but I doubt they care. None of them accused me of harassment or threatened to report me to my college. I don’t actually have a college to be reported to, although I’m not sure that would have been a factor that concerned any of them.

No.

The self-proclaimed harrasee is a person called Emma Kennedy. I followed her on Twitter because she seemed to be having a funny discussion with the incredibly excellent Caitlin Moran and because I remembered her as a peripheral character from the Lee & Herring stuff which I always loved (despite having been mean to Herring that one time). At some point last year, she and I exchanged a couple of tweets about something. I have a feeling it was the Murdoch thing. I can’t remember the nature of the exchange or the subject but it left an apparent precedent that she was happy to engage with people on Twitter. If only I’d known then what I know now (tone of mock drama, there)

I should say, at this point, if you can’t be bothered to read a transcript of a Twitter argument, I don’t blame you. Tiresome and tedious, this whole matter. There’s a good chance I’ve peaked with the Biggins anecdote on this blog and, really, I’m only writing this one to publicly state my case having been accused of harassment. That said, what Emma and I disagreed on is an interesting issue (rendered pointless when reduced to statements of 140 characters) and – after the transcript – I’ll conclude this blog by talking intelligently about it and, possibly, making a corker of a joke at Emma’s expense.

So, here’s the conversation we had. You should be aware that it was happening ‘live’ so sometimes they go a bit out of order as we address points the other had raised several tweets previous, but you’ll get the idea….

So, that’s that.

That was our dialogue. When it was finished, I was a bit pissed off not just because I felt we’d both got needlessly aggressive but because I felt she maybe hadn’t actually understood what I was saying – it was a thick and fast dialogue (resisting the temptation here to add ‘she was thick, I was fast’, that would be immature) so I made what I now see to be a mistake by sending her an email. In the meantime, one of my students had sent her a single tweet, which she responded to in volume (as you can see, he didn’t engage with her at all beyond his single tweet):

I sent this email to try to clarify my position and straighten out any bad feelings:

There are a couple of things I regret about this email retrospectively. The first is what I wrote about The Huffington Post, I’ll elaborate on this in a bit. The second is that I said ‘I am indeed a shitty teacher, teaching at shitty establishments’ I phrased it that way to highlight her definition of shitty as wrong but, on second reading, it might have come across as just agreeing with her. I’m not a shitty teacher and the places I teach are far from shitty. It’s just that neither I nor they are world-renowned, which is usually a lazy person’s basis for assessing quality.

The exchange continued:

then:

which prompted:

to which I replied:

which ended finally with the aforementioned:

There’s a certain logic that says if someone feels harassed, then they are, I think it’s pretty clear that that was never my intention but, out of respect, I’ve not responded privately.

There are two points to be made following this discussion.

My first is my position on writers not getting paid. I think there is a notable division between unpaid work and exploitation. If a writer were being exploited, it would mean that whoever they were writing for was publishing their work without their knowledge or permission, uncredited and/or retaining the copyright on it. That would be exploitative. The publisher would be profiting from the actual work and the writer would get nothing in return.

Although it’s a disingenuous practice for profitable companies to publish a writer’s work unpaid, I don’t think it’s exploitative. Firstly, they have the writer’s express permission to use it. Secondly they are providing a platform for a writer’s talents to be spotted. Thirdly they are allowing these writers to cut their teeth and get valuable industry experience.  I don’t know Emma’s story and what her route to ‘success’ has been but, especially since the internet went huge, it’s almost impossible for a new writer’s voice to be heard. The internet is a quagmire of amateur journalism. Her assertion that ‘Talented writers don’t get ignored’ and ‘luck has nothing to do with it’ are painfully naive and her hostility to the sentiment that this industry rewards tenacity over talent smacks of either insecurity or ignorance.

I know a bunch of talented writers who go ignored – of course they go ignored – the competition is ridiculous. As I mentioned (and will continue to do so forevermore on this blog) I’ve spent the last 5 years making a film about precisely that and when you get members of Radiohead confirming that their career was thanks in no small part to luck and timing and commercial trends… well, I respect their views over hers.

The cream doesn’t always rise.

That may sound pessimistic, it may sound bitter, but it’s true.

I’ve always taught on the principle of honesty. I think a lot of adult education is actually motivational speaking – people like Robert McKee, Dov Siemens, these 2-day expensive workshops which seem to promise to prepare you for the industry. They’ll list glamorous ex-students in their literature but these guys tour the world to packed houses. Out of how ever many thousand people who take their courses, how many go on to success? My ethos is that if you want to learn to write, then you’re learning a craft and you’re learning how to express yourself. That’s almost incongruous to learning to make money from the skill. I teach people how to develop into good writers. That’s all I promise because that’s all I *CAN* promise. I grew up reading all of those books entitled ‘how to write screenplays that SELL’ – nobody can teach that.

All writing is competitive. If, unlike Emma, you don’t have an agent, a body of published work and a slew of rich, famous and influential friends, then you’re on your own in a sea of other amateurs. You have to do anything you can to get your name known. And that is currency you’re dealing in – not money. The money will come once you’re somewhat established. If anyone offers you a raft, a platform for your work you take it on the single proviso that your name will be on it. When you’re starting out, a by-line, a credit, anything you can put on your cv or will widen your audience is of at least equal value to a couple of quid. Work hard and be as tenacious as your personality will allow.

The stupidest thing to do would be to demand money if you’re an unproven, unknown talent. Ask if it’s possible by all means. But if you refuse to let people see your work for free at this point in your career… people won’t see your work because there is an endless queue of people behind you who will happily seize the chance to work for free to begin with.

This is true also in the world of music and comedy, where you expect to do unpaid bottom-of-the-bill gigs to get experience and exposure. it’s true in design – all of the designers I’ve ever hired I found through admiring the work they’d done for free on gig posters and websites. It’s true for writing too – screenwriters and novelist friends of mine have all responded to this issue of the past few days by telling me how their first deals were spec deals – they had to do the work before the company decided whether it was worth publishing or commissioning and these deals are usually now actually back-end profit-splits. This is what you have to do to get started. And it’s worth doing.

I applaud Emma’s idealism. The notion that if all writers refused to work unpaid it would suddenly become a fair world for writers (FACT) but we’ll never know because that’ll never ever ever ever ever ever happen. It’s a competitive marketplace and you have to be in it to win it. Or you have to be very very very very lucky.

The other point I guess I want to make is a brief one about this horrible new concept of ‘Twitter celebrity’. Some people seem to think that just because people choose to follow them they are actually fans who agree to exist in some kind of state of devotion, deferral and awe. They aren’t. They are all human beings, many of equal or superior intelligence and integrity who simply don’t have the same public profile or platforms.

Oh yeah, I promised to end on a joke…

How many Emma Kennedys does it take to change a lightbulb?

None, she is incapable of affecting change and is naive to the landscape of artificial lighting.

Lex Gigeroff 1962 – 2011

Exactly 11 years ago, I went on a ridiculous adventure with my best friend Andy. I was a year and a bit out of film school, he’d just graduated that summer and we were going to become hugely successful comedy TV writers. We’d had meetings and were buoyant with misplaced confident in our talents – the kind of confidence which gets you places but doesn’t do you many favours once you’re there.

Just before Christmas 2000, the wonderful Allison Outhit had contacted us from Canada where she worked as show runner on a TV show called Lexx which I had never heard of. Andy’s parents had satellite TV, so he’d seen a few episodes and said it was pretty good. Allison wanted to know if we wanted to try out as writers on their new (and final) series. I ran out and bought a couple of videos from the first series and couldn’t see how we’d fit into the show but after 6 months working in web design, I was willing to give anything a go. Even if it meant flying all the way to Halifax, Nova Scotia in the dead of winter to do so. It was dark and colder than anything I’ve ever experienced anywhere else but it never once felt depressing as the Lexx family was a warm, intelligent and funny bunch. Allison was busy a lot and the show’s creator/producer Paul Donovan was an odd but welcoming chap. The cast were also welcoming but odd and busy. Andy and I instantly fell in with the show’s head writers – Jeff Hirschfield and Lex Gigeroff. For the time we were there and that time in our careers, they felt a bit like big brothers. They’d bust your balls and make fun of you but they were never less than supportive or encouraging.

The first time I met Lex, before even being introduced, he strode up to me, just in from walking through a blizzard and crunched my beard, which had frozen solid “Good beard, it’s got a good crunch to it!” were the words he introduced himself to me with.

This was our first professional job ever and we were thrown in the deep end. From day one, we were taken seriously and treated as professional TV writers despite only ever having written short films and spec scripts. The first meeting we had was a roundtable with the writers, creator and producers. This was to work out the story arcs for the first series and make sure we’d all be working from the same page. It was fun but terrifying. Not only were we not seasoned writers but we knew so little about this series specifically. We were in over our heads and I think we stayed a little quiet. Lex saw this in us and once the meeting was over invited us out for coffee the next morning.

When it was just the three of us, it was great. He was a sincere, sarcastic, encouraging bear of a man. He explained how the show worked, was patient with us and helped us get our episode pitches in order so that we could realistically get to write episodes which we were suited to. Throughout our time writing on that show, he stayed in contact and gave us insightful help and positive encouragement. He didn’t need to do that, it was a sink or swim environment but he gave us his time and experience and enthusiasm. I’d like to think that if I reflect the same virtues through my screenwriting teaching, that they were instilled in me by him.

He really didn’t need to be so nice to us. In a sense, we were taking food from his table. The previous three seasons had been written entirely by Jeff, Lex and Paul. The only reason they had brought us aboard was that to qualify for British funding and tax breaks, they had to have a certain percentage of the writing team as British. The fans were livid about outside talent being brought in (especially when I mentioned online that we knew nothing about the show) Lex could have justifiably been openly resentful and hostile but was the very opposite of that.

I can’t pretend to have known Lex well or to have kept up better than the occasional exchanged ‘what are you up to these days?’ Facebook messages but sometimes brief interactions with special people resonate through the rest of your life. His untimely passing this Christmas Day has really saddened me. The world has lost a good man. He was just 49.

I’ll always be grateful to Lex for the things he taught me and the encouragement and support he gave to a couple of newbies on their first pro job.

Bless you, mate and I hope that whatever’s out there is far less dark and twisted than you imagined it might be.

Eccentric-centric

Do you want to know the worst I ever behaved?

Everyone who knows me probably has some example they would hold up – my parents would probably be hard-pushed to choose just one crowning moment from the litany of choices I’ve provided them with, I’m sure my sister could produce a bratty gem, anyone who’s ever lived with me probably has a favourite story in which I act like a complete cock to somebody. Some of these things I regret, some I’m rather proud of and the vast majority I can justify and offer a full explanation as to why it was acceptable.

I can only really think of one example where I behaved horribly, had no excuse for it, and still feel ashamed of.

When I was 14 or 15, there was a kid at my school, we’ll call him Rory, who was the first real eccentric I ever met. I went to a string of state schools full of the spawn of every walk of life, so I wouldn’t say I was sheltered or the schools ethnically uniform – I knew lots of different people. But this guy was a real piece of work. He was comically tall with gangly legs and a pronounced limp. His hair was a shock of tufty brown wire, he wore a suit, carried a briefcase with his name written in huge white letters on the side, he was loud and cartoonish, he spoke with a posh accent which varied in town between an enraged high court judge and Margaret Thatcher at her most sickly sweet and quietly patronising. He’d clasp his hands together to show emotion and make large grotesque faces to amuse.

I didn’t like him.

The reason I didn’t like him was that the first time I met him, he strode into the classroom, did a ‘heil Hitler’ salute and sat down. All eyes and slack jaws turned to me as the only Jew in the school. I took him to task and was swiftly deposited in the head of year’s office. An irritable woman who, brilliantly for me, also had a pronounced limp and bellowed at me about surely being above bullying a disabled boy. I hadn’t even noticed his limp at this point. Being the teenager that I was, I got into deeper trouble for refusing to apologise and stuck to my guns right into detention. Which always seemed preferable to me than admitting culpability.

That night, Rory’s mum phoned my mum, who grabbed me as I walked past and sat me on the stairs to witness the conversation which was developing. I got the gist of it fairly quickly and was relieved to see that my mum was greatly amused by this woman who appeared to be every bit as mad as her offspring. At one point, Mrs Rory asked my mum if we were practicing Jews, to which mum replied ‘No, we’re perfect’ which I thought was brilliant. After the call, mum very reasonably put it to me that the family were clearly a bit odd and that I should just ignore him – engaging with it would only lead to more hassle for me. Apparently Rory’s excuse for the ‘heil Hitler’ was that he’d recently left a private school and on telling people the name of his new school was frequently told that the students there were a bunch of little Nazis. He’d taken it literally and was trying to fit in.

I backed off. I still didn’t like him, though. He quickly became a bit of a mascot for our year, popular through eccentricity. I think he was bullied quite a lot but I don’t think he realised he was being bullied. Maybe he did, maybe he internalized, but on the surface of it, he laughed along or played up to it and seemed to enjoy his role within, or without, the social order.

In time I began to warm to him. I didn’t particularly want to spend time with him but became as fascinated by his outlandish exploits as everybody else was. At some point, in our new found accord, he invited my friend and I to dinner at his house. We went because we thought it’d be a laugh. What a pair of dicks. And a laugh it was, there was plenty in his home for us to share raised eyebrows over behind his back, plenty to be dumbfounded and amused by. His mother had baked macaroni cheese with boiled eggs in it. Years later, I found out this was commonplace and an acceptable form of the recipe but to me and my pal it was MAD. We were in a mad house with a mad guy and his mad mum eating mad food and we got the giggles. The worst kind of giggles. The arrogant giggles where you barely try to suppress them. I know Rory laughed along at first but eventually petered out as he didn’t understand the joke. His mother must have seen the disdain we had for her son and home, which in retrospect is particularly ghastly as she must have been so pleased when he’d asked if he could have friends home to dinner.

I think about that night a couple of times a year and cringe and hate myself a bit. Just inexcusable rudeness, adding to a family’s sadness. His father had died when Rory was quite young. So I mocked a widow and her awkward son in their own home. Pretty fucking low.

This week, I caught two bits of popular TV shows that I never watch. The first was X-Factor, the second was Come Dine With Me. I’ve only ever been vaguely aware of the specifics of the Simon Cowell cuntfests. I get what they are and what they do and why (freakshows/humiliate/for profit) but I guess I wasn’t so familiar with the specifics. I’d always thought that the major freakshow parts of the series were contained within the first few episodes where the general public all audition at huge venues and we get to laugh at the mentally ill and un-educated people who are looking for an easy way out of poverty. The part of the show I caught this weekend had these people in the actual studio, in front of the live audience. In particular, I noticed a husband and wife, brought out one after the other who were both obviously had learning difficulties, if not actual mental health problems. They were invited to sing for the arena full of laughing, mocking nasty people before a well-paid celebrity panel took it in turns, in varying degrees of mock sincerity, to tell them they were shit.

I was struck by how fucked up this is. A TV show that big, with levels of directors, production team, producers, executives and network executives, not to mention venue staff and audience members, that not one person in the thousands of people involved and complicit between the auditions and this performance, not one person thought to say either to the producers ‘these people are clearly not of fully sound mind, it’s cruel to expose them to this’ or to the people themselves ‘this probably isn’t the right thing for you to do’ It was obvious to everybody that firstly they were intrinsically below the standard of competition and they were unaware of this and vulnerable to public mocking. But that’s acceptable on prime time television, apparently.

The Come Dine With Me episode tonight was slightly less explicit but still chilling. I haven’t seen any of the other episodes of the week to contextualize it fully but, essentially from the handy ‘catch-up’ piece at the start of the episode, out of the five contestants cooking dinner parties for each other, one of them was an eccentric. A suit-wearing, monarchy-loving, port-passing eccentric who lived alone in a one bedroom flat in some crappy city. As eccentrics will, he’d peppered the other diners parties with shocking declarations and attention hogging and an unconvincing air of class. The other diners discussed with glee behind his back how they would sabotage his dinner party. And they did. the black tie dress code was ignored, mocked. As was his food, his home, his beliefs and his behaviour. And that was the entertaining thrust of the episode.

I’d say he was less visibly mentally ill than the X-Factor contestants, he was clearly a functioning eccentric.

As you grow out of your teenage and experience the world, you’re supposed to learn things. Understand things. There are very few natural, wonderful, joyous eccentrics. You learn that the behaviour of these people often stems out of forms of autism, abuse as children, terrible life experiences… any number of things, always somewhat tragic. Their eccentricity is often an exaggerated defence mechanism, a desperate attempt to curry favour and fit in or to just get some desperately craved attention.

When did mainstream television become so fucking vile. So bullying and mean and misdirected. Abuse and exploitation of the mentally ill has become the nation’s favoured entertainment. It’s the lowest form of entertainment there is. It’s what children do. They laugh at other people to feel better about themselves. They delight and unite in the ridicule of people weaker than themselves so they can feel stronger and more confident.

I don’t watch these shows because I’m an intelligent person who hasn’t given up on the pursuit of culture and education. If you watch them every week, and the other ones – I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here – any of those kinds of shows – you’ve given up, you’ve embraced lowest common denominator entertainment and you’re fuelling society’s decline away from education, entertainment and enlightenment into pure pure commercialism. These shows aren’t made from the passion of their creators or for the uplifting of the nation, they are exploiting the weak and the strong for profit. And you may be above that or just find it entertainment but by watching it, you encourage it and fuck you for that.

When I was a teenager, mainstream weekend night entertainment was Noel’s (shitty) House Party. Strike it Lucky. Blind Date. Surprise Surprise. Bland, inoffensive rubbish. And I, a well-raised, intelligent kid still managed to act like a dick to a defenceless guy who deserved my sympathy and help.

I can only begin to wonder what these shows are doing to the current generation of kids and what implications that will have to us as a society in the future.

You Can’t Go Home Again.

Do you know who I like?
I like David Lynch. I like him a lot.
I hate his films, though. Hate them. I hate his films a lot.
I liked The Elephant Man and The Straight Story, I guess, but those are the least ‘Lynchian’ films.
So, it’s fair to say I don’t like David Lynch’s films.
But I do like David Lynch.
I like him a lot.
I like him as an artist, I don’t like his art, but I like his career. And here’s what I like about it. I think he’s progressive. I think he grows as a filmmaker and I think he keeps a certain vitality. His films remain provocative, original and challenging. I really wish I liked them, to be honest. The other things his films always are is contemporary. He’s an artist who lives and works in the now. No two films of his are particularly similar and he never seems to look backwards or even sideways. He marches ever onward, making his films in the now and moving on to the next.

As a consumer, I’m not even as progressive as Lynch is as a filmmaker. My favourite films remain those of the late seventies to the early nineties. My tastes are pretty simple and probably in a rut. Like how you imagine Jeremy Clarkson could dismiss any music since ELO disbanded and probably considers Def Leppard’s Hysteria as best exemplifying modern British music, that’s kind of me and film. I don’t understand why anyone would need to see the latest Judd Apatow defecation if they’ve never seen The Odd Couple.

I love my 70′s/80′s/90′s films. I’m still in love with Spielberg, Joe Dante, Ridley Scott, John Landis, James Cameron, the popcorn directors of my day. Incredibly, they’re all still working. Depressingly, they’ve all been a bit naff for a while.

Spielberg was progressive for a while, he moved away from the child-like wonder of his early films to a harder, more thoughtful, historical drama era – Schindler’s List, The Colour Purple, Empire of the Sun, Amistad, and then got a bit ploppy. The Terminal, War of the Worlds, Minority Report, Catch Me if You Can. Work that was beneath him, very average, mediocre films.

Joe Dante dropped off the radar, Matinee, Loony Tunes back in action, lots of TV stuff.

Ridley Scott got less and less interesting, developed a baffling infatuation with Russell Crowe and has been making rotten, overblown tripe with that big horrible ham for more than a decade now.

John Landis just vanished, although last year’s Burke and Hare was kind of a surprising gem of a film.

James Cameron found he had a heart and went from being the world’s greatest intelligent tough guy director to creating insanely overblown mawkish crap a la Titanic and Avatar.

That’s all OK. I’m not against decline. I don’t think they should be held to account for this. The mighty fall. Robert De Niro has fallen very far. He’s probably only one more ‘Fockers’sequel (‘Motherfockers’?) away from the Earth’s core right now. But they have to make their livings, it’s fine. Let’s be thankful for what they have given us. The early stuff, at least. We’ll always have the early stuff.

Won’t we?

Maybe not.

It started in 1997 and it seemed like a good idea. George Lucas, remember him? Before we hated him? George Lucas released a ‘special edition’ of Star Wars and we were all damned excited about it. Until we saw it. It was special, alright. He fucked it. He took the film we loved and tweaked, changed and CGI’d it until it lost all of the charm it has possessed. He told us that this is what he’d always intended it to be. Which made us like him a little less. The slight but palpable betrayal we feel when a friend acts so out of character, we realise they might not be the friend we thought they were.

A year later, John Landis decided to make a sequel to The Blues Brothers. 18 years after the first. The only sequel that had appeared so long after the first before this had been Psycho 2 and it hadn’t been Hitchcock’s idea – he was safely tucked up in his grave. Psycho 2 was actually rather good, as other people’s takes on original source material sometimes can be. The Blues Brothers 2000 (released 1998) was not good. Rather than emulate or build on the spirit of the original, it clutched desperately to match it, to beat it, an exercise in pointless overcompensation. The irreplaceable John Belushi was replaced by THREE men, John Goodman (who trusted and left to his own devices might have been a wonderful alternative, never replacement), the bloke from Terminator 2 and that most insidious of things – a precocious child. There were ghosts, voodoo queens, they all got turned into zombies at some point. It was horrible, and although it didn’t ruin the first film – how could it? It stained it a little. It was official canon. For a while, if you wanted to buy the original on DVD, you had to accept it’s tawdry little brother for free and you couldn’t throw it away because they shared a box and cover artwork. John Landis had the decency to not direct another film for 12 years and came back sharper. God Bless him.

George Lucas didn’t go away. He dug his heels in, folded his arms and declared to his slightly miffed devotees ‘if you didn’t like that, get a load of this’ and spent a decade making a trilogy of Star Wars prequels which seemed almost designed to urinate over all of our childhoods. ‘You like the enigmatic menace of Darth Vader?’ he shouted at us from his big hill ‘here he is as a fucking child!’ ‘Please, stop!’ we begged ‘You’re ruining it! Why do you want to ruin it?’ ‘BECAUSE IT’S MINE!’ he shouted back ‘Meet Jar-Jar Binks! BOOM! Boba Fett as a child! BAM! The Force? It’s not a mystical force, it’s a…. BACTERIA! Fuck it! KA-BOOM!’ He shat over everything that had once been good and then, as VHS moved to DVD and then on to BLU-RAY, petulantly refused to remaster the original trilogy as we had grown up with it. Refused to even let us have what we had fallen in love with as children. Even for money. And if this wasn’t bad enough, he had opened the floodgates. It was now OK for film-makers, now in their autumn years and long off the boil, to revisit the films that had made their names and digitally remove the charm.

Spielberg made a special edition of ET. Replacing the Eponymous character in many shots with a rubbish computer graphic version who looked like a cartoon turd. Has any animatronic character ever been as beautiful and believable as ET? Why replace that with an obvious cartoon? Anyway, he did, and then he digitally removed the guns from the chase sequence. The reason that ET made the bikes fly. Just took them out, replaced them with walkie talkies. Guns apparently seemed harsh now. Were Hitchcock alive today, he’d probably have replaced the knife in the shower scene with a banana. Probably.

Then Spielberg and Lucas decided to work together on exhuming and corpse-fucking Indiana Jones. A film which was ultimately not entirely awful but certainly pointless. Definitely pointless. Ironically the one film of this shameful period where directors decided to needlessly pilfer their own pasts, which was intelligent and worthy came from the most unexpected place. Rocky Balboa. Sylvester Stallone, who had done nothing but fill video shop walls with mindless, inoffensive beefcake for the best part of a quarter of a century, suddenly delivered one of the most perfect cinematic musings on the passing of time. Rocky Balboa, whilst by no means a perfect film, is one of the most thoughtful, devastating, philosophical and uplifting films that has graced a multiplex for decades. But that was a blip in this train crash.

Ridley Scott, probably one of the greatest commercial film directors ever, has been rubbish for a while now. His last groundbreaking, brilliant film was Thelma and Louise 20 years ago. You know what he’s making right now? A prequel to Alien. And you know what he’s doing next? A sequel to Blade Runner.

Oh, you poor misguided old men. Life moves ever forward. You must move with it. Don’t look back. Stop looking back.

A very long time ago, Thomas Wolfe wrote a book called ‘You Can’t Go Home Again’ about a writer who writes a novel about his hometown, only to upset its residents as his memories of it bore little relation to the reality. At the end of the book, the main character declares:

“You can’t go back home to your family, back home to your childhood … back home to a young man’s dreams of glory and of fame … back home to places in the country, back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting but which are changing all the time — back home to the escapes of Time and Memory.”

The past should be left as is, there is a beauty in imperfection and a futility in trying to re-engage with the creative mind of so long ago. We change as people every day, so the markers, as dated and embarrassing as they may be, are important. Don’t fuck with them. I imagine George Lucas’s personal photo collection as being photoshopped to hell. CGI underpants covering his modesty in his bathtime baby photos, subtle muscle definition added to his gawky teenage frame, modern haircuts to replace his 1970′s shame. Maybe he’s just gone out, as a fully grown adult and reshot all of those photos, the originals consigned to the flames, never to be seen again.

You Can’t Go Home Again was actually published posthumously. Which is probably for the best, who knows what Wolfe might have done to it thirty years down the line.

Specially Affected

I was going to go to the cinema tonight but it seems like there is absolutely nothing I want to see on. Had you told teenage me that, when faced with the chance to go to a huge cinema and see either (or both of) Transformers 3 or The Green Lantern – both in 3D, I had merely sighed and decided to stay in and watch a Molly Dineen DVD, he would have choked on his bucket of popcorn.

But I reckon once I’d explained to him, as I shall for you, he’d have understood. He was very clever, you see. And handsome, erudite, charismatic…. I’ll stop now.

I think I always understood what films were. I grew up with my father’s super 8 cine camera always present and I think always got that they were works of artifice. I certainly remember being 5 years old and knowing for a fact that Chewbacca was a man called peter Mayhew in a costume, I’d seen a photo of him in the costume sans head with big black make-up panda eyes. But rather than spoiling the magic, that to me WAS the magic. Although I could suspend disbelief and enjoy a film quite happily, I was engaged with it in the same way I was engaged with be-wigged magic midget Paul Daniels – the fun wasn’t believing it was real so much as working out how they’d managed to fool me.

There was a wonderful library book which I borrowed over and over again which explained how forced perspective sets could change a landscape, make a man a giant or be used to make it look like a woman was being burned at the stake. How naval battles could be recreated with model boats if you slowed the camera to the correct speed and how with a bit of latex and make up, you could turn John Hurt into the Elephant Man.

From five years old, up to about 13, Special effects were absolutely all I cared about in films. The idea that you could just make anything you could imagine. It just blew my mind. It also looked like such fun. I wanted to be a creature operator as much as anything. I wanted to play with that stuff. I mean, that’s what it was, those guys were doing exactly the same as I was at home – they were making toys and playing with them. I didn’t understand why my dad would put on a suit and trudge off to sell linen everyday when he could have been playing with creatures and spaceships like those other grown-ups.

My hero became a guy called Rick Baker. All of the books and magazines I read on the subject singled him out as the king. And he was cool, he had a beard and long hair and he built the best of the best. He did the incredible make-up effects for An American Werewolf in London – they were so good, the academy CREATED an Oscar for him. Years later, he’d slam the academy for snubbing his work on Bigfoot and the Hendersons, which they claimed wasn’t technically make-up. They were wrong. He was right. And Righteous. I read that Baker got his start as a teenager, he’d been doing make-up as a hobby and had been roped into creating aliens for the cantina scene in Star Wars. I was a teenager! I had to get on this thing if I was ever going to be his peer.

The only animatronics company I was aware of in the UK was Jim Henson’s Creature Shop in London. So I wrote to them and told them I wanted to work with them, they didn’t have to pay me yet, but I would work hard. I had a fantasy of, at 13, packing my bags, saying goodbye to my parents and moving to London to make monsters. It should also be pointed out that at that exact time, Henson made a TV film called Monster Maker in which a 13 year old kid got to join an FX company and help build creatures. It seemed like my destiny. Then sent me back a very nice letter on Henson headed paper thanking me for my interest but politely asking me to go away. I wrote back, explaining they had made a mistake, they didn’t reply again. It gave me such a thrill 20-odd years later, when I was one day accompanying my girlfriend to her GP and she casually mentioned the health centre had been Henson’s creature shop! I finally got through the doors.

Anyway, my parents bought me a subscription for my birthday each year to a magazine called Cinefex, which is the FX industry publication. It’s still going strong. Each issue takes two or three major new films and, thanks to Cinefex’s total on-set access, took you through the entire film explaining (and illustrating with incredible photos that you never saw crop up anywhere else) how every single effect was conceived and executed. it was like having the keys to the sweet shop. I learned about the incredible artistry of matte paintings and optical compositing. About miniatures and the painstaking detail of stop-motion (Phil Tippett, my almost-Baker grade hero, went on to invent go-motion). My favourites were always Animatronics and Prosthetics, though. turning people into monsters and operating their faces with radio controls. Amazing.

I’d try to recreate Hollywood effects with my camcorder at home. The first time I was left at home completely alone for a couple of days, I damned near burned down the garage trying to film a matchbox car exploding (I filled it with match heads, doused it in white spirit and blasted it with the lit spray of a can of Denim deodorant.

At 15, everyone in my school year had to do work experience for a week. I assumed there were no special effects companies in Oxford so sat flicking idly through the Yellow Pages to see if any businesses at all seemed to be worth approaching and bearable for a week.On a whim, I decided to look up ‘animatronics’ and, to my utter amazement, there was a section and a company under it in Oxfordshire. I phoned them up and they said I was welcome to spend a week with them. It was one of the most exciting, magical and illuminating weeks of my life and in some ways I’m forever in their debt. The company was called Crawley Creatures.

Although it was in Oxfordshire, it was a really long way away. I had to take a couple of buses and then someone from the workshop would pick me up and drive me all the way out to their little industrial estate by the river. The place was run by a couple of guys – Nigel Trevessey and Jez Harris – who to this dazed 15 year old – were basically the coolest guys on the planet. Nigel had worked on Willow and The Never-Ending Story. Jez had worked on Return of the Jedi!!!! I don’t think he thought I believed him when he told me that, so the next day he brought in his Revenge of The Jedi sweatshirt to prove it. When I checked my ‘making of’ video – there he was – he built an operated Jabba The Hutt’s eyes! If all of this weren’t cool enough, they had both worked with Rick Baker, building the apes in Greystoke. They even had a couple of the Ape heads kicking around.

Their workshop was full of the most exotic bunch of people I’d ever seen, all working at their own schedules (I thought work was regimented like school, these people just swanned in when they felt like it, picked up tools and made cool things!) They all had stories too. One guy had just come off Alien 3 and he told me all the juicy gossip that only ever came out when the Quadrilogy DVD box set was released two decades later. He’d worked on the scene where the alien burst out of the ox but the whole scene had been scrapped while production was still ongoing. There was a girl who’d just come off Nightbreed, she had made Cabal’s teeth. I had a horrible crush on her. A frizzy haired guy called Mike, who really took me under his wing, made a point of explaining everything he was doing as he went along. These people were lovely and generous and funny and that was the first time in my life that I was ever treated like an adult. They never talked down to me or exerted authority, they were really inclusive and encouraging.

My first day there was horrible, they were building some enormous phone costumes for an advert. The way they did this was to initially sculpt them out of polystyrene. The way you do this is with firm brushes, you just take a huge block of polystyrene and brush it down until it’s the right shape. This means you create millions of static-energy charged little poly balls. My job was to bag those up. They didn’t have a hoover. I had to dump handfuls of those damn balls into black sacks, the second i’d let go, they’d all statically cling to my jumper or hair. It was horrible, but I worked hard and, I think, earned their respect and they never asked me to do it again. Mike taught me how to cast a mould. Starting by painting the inside of the mould with layers of ammonium-stinking liquid latex, setting each layer by blasting it with a hairdryer, then combining two liquid chemicals which, when poured together into the mould would quickly set into a firm spongey texture which could be pulled from the moulds complete with latex skin and then painted.

The main project they were working on at that time was a TV movie of The Lost World, so the place was filled with dinosaurs – some finished and playable with, others still being sculpted from clay, ready to be cast in moulds. They taught me how to build a wire armature, how to build up the clay and how to sculpt it. What they really taught me that week was that, as wonderful experience as it had been and as fantastic an environment as that workshop was, it wasn’t the job for me. I didn’t have the artistic skill to create and sculpt, I didn’t have the technical skill to build, wire and operate and i didn’t have the lung capacity for working with chemicals. Rather than disappointed, I came away from the experience super-charged and with steely resolve to write and direct films instead. I still want to make a monster movie one day.

Fast forward a few years and I cancelled my subscription to Cinefex. Why? Because it had ceased to be interesting. The photos of strange, exotic creatures had been replaced with photos of anemic-looking men sat at computer monitors. The rise of CGI had begun and I had no interest in it.

There’s no magic to cinema now, you see. Because the answer to every question is ‘they did it on a computer’. It’s impressive what can be done on computers, but then… it isn’t magic anymore. They haven’t fooled us, they haven’t created something. There’s no smoke or mirrors, no mystery, I’d even go so far as to say… no craft.

I rewatched Greystoke last week for the first time in ages. The apes in it are wonderful. Sure, it’s obvious they are actors in special suits but that means there is a real performance to it. Real pathos. Real magic. In the same week, I saw the new Planet of the Apes trailer – with all CGI apes. It looked like a cartoon.

I saw a clip from the new Transformers film a couple of days ago. A robot flies through the air, runs up a building with everything exploding around him and a skyscraper fell in half. It looked like I was expected to be impressed. But it was just a cartoon to me. There was no magic. Then I watched a film I had never seen before – Gorgo. A monster film from the 60′s in which a huge Godzilla rip-off stomps all over London. Go on – guess which impressed me more. Gorgo was a 60′s cheapo but there were moments which genuinely blew me away. Although I knew it was a man in a suit stomping over a model city, it was incredibly well done. The model effects were wonderful and epic. At one point, I let out a ‘WOW’ when they tranquilize the monster and drive him across Picadilly Circus on a huge flatbed truck – they had built a full-size monster and actually gone out there and filmed it. That was cool! and impressive! The sheer number of extras they had running around the streets int error amazed me. Cinema has been using CGI crowds since Forrest Gump but to see that many real people running screaming about the streets of London was genuinely impressive. As was a sequence where the hero escapes into the underground, only for Gorgo to smash through the tunnel after him. I still don’t know how they did some of those shots. That, to me, is magic.

And I miss it.

Toying with my affections.

So, I’m writing this blog as a request. My friend Allison has apparently married a ‘collector’ and she tells me there was a certain ‘unpleasantness’ when she suggested he throw out his collection of Simpsons cereal boxes. Now, Allison’s a chunk older than me, I don’t know how old her guy is but – seriously – Simpsons cereal boxes? What a loser. Of course, if some girl, or wife, whatever, suggested I get rid of my original 1978 C3PO’s Star Wars cereal box, that would be a different matter. That would be mean and cold. Simpsons, though? Jesus. What’s up with that guy?

So, Allison asked me to explain the ‘geek collector mind’, not even a week ago, my significant other asked me to do exactly the same thing. And I think it is worth exploring, the only thing which holds me back, honestly, is the danger of changing whatever perception you, dear reader, might have of me. I feel the rather cowardly need, going into this, to stress that I’m not proud of my collector side. I’m proud of my collection and it brings me a lot of kind of happiness and satisfaction but I really don’t define myself by it. Maybe it defines me, somewhat. And I’m OK with that. But I don’t consider myself a collector as such. In fact there is no rhyme or reason to my collection, it’s just a bunch of stuff I like to have around. It’s just stuff. But I like it. I guess what I’m trying to say is that it’s just a side of me. So, here’s the deal, I’ll be completely honest and open with you about it and you’ll accept that it’s a mere strand of my personality and you’ll agree to define me by my more intelligent and erudite blog posts? OK? OK.

So, where to start…

We went for a family lunch for my Dad’s birthday last year and my sister and brother-in-law gave me my belated birthday present – the recently released action figure of Sylvester McCoy as the seventh incarnation of Doctor Who (eighth, if you include the 60′s movie version played by Peter Cushing but, I’m told by those geekier than myself, we don’t.)

I was excited about this. I had asked for him, as he would complete my collection of Doctor Whos (Doctor Who’s? Doctor Whose?) who stand together happily around their TARDIS on the bookcase in my study. As we were discussing the final figure I need to finish the set (I know I just said the collection was now complete with the addition of McCoy, but there is the contentious issue of Doctor ’8′ as played in a single, lamentable, American TV movie by Paul McGann), I glanced over to my girlfriend and struggled to read her expression.

In the car on the way home, she asked me to explain the Doctor Who toy thing. I told her it wasn’t a ‘thing’, I just liked the idea of having the Doctors all stood there around the TARDIS. You know, in my study. I became immediately defensive and pointed out that Gary – my brother-in-law – had ALL of the figures including every variation of Dalek and every variation of the Doctor’s costumes for each actor  and that I was only collecting one each of the Doctors. And Gary isn’t even weird, so me just having the Doctors is nowhere even approaching weird. It’s not obsessive. She hadn’t said that it was obsessive. Or weird. So I was rambling and justifying like a… weird obsessive. Which I’m not. Anymore.

‘It’s just.. I was in your spare room the other day… and it was….’ She’d never really had reason to go in the spare room before. I tend to visit her in London rather than her make the voyage out to the sticks and, when she did, I have to admit that I’d always made a subconscious point of keeping the door shut, but on a quest for socks I had inadvertently lead her into what she knows as the spare room, I pompously call the study (fuck you, there’s a desk in there) and, to the select few I deem worthy of the guided tour, is known as… The Den of Geek.

The Den of Geek felt like a necessity when I bought this house. It’s a ‘character property’ meaning it’s really old and kind of ‘charming’ Well, the front half is, in the 60′s they extended the back so once you’re past the living room threshold, you could be in any suburban semi in the country. But the living room and bedroom are kind of olde worlde and I knew off the bat that filling them with the plastic pop culture detritis that I have amassed since childhood would be kind of tasteless and, now in my thirties, I kind of don’t want to be surrounded by that stuff so much now. I’d moved from a 60s build townhouse which looked amazing draped in kitschery, but I felt I’d got that out of my system and felt no need to fill the cottage with crap. By containing my filthy secret to one small room at the back of the house, I could give the outward appearance to visitors of maturity but also be able to hang out in a room filled exclusively with stuff I really dig.

There’s one of those big cubey Ikea shelving units against the back wall, rammed with books and work stuff. On top of that, I display my favourite geekery. Rocky Balboa and Clubber Lang slug it out once more in six-inch chunky plastic. just beneath them, the Muppets hang out backstage on the Muppet Theatre Playset (which despite only being a few years old is, according to ebay, worth a shit ton now) beside the Muppets congregate the forementioned Doctor Who’s and beside them stand the Ghostbusters in their freshly imported 12′, highly detailed glory and, towering above the lot of them is the AT-AT.

Oh. the AT-AT. The AT-AT is, I reckon, at the crux of this whole thing for me. If you don’t know what an AT-AT is, you can google it. Back now? Pretty cool, right? When I was a kid, all I wanted was an AT-AT. I don’t remember if I pestered my parents for one (my mother seems to haunt my comments section so she will, no doubt, tell you in due course) but I knew I wouldn’t get one. I don’t think my folks had much money and although I had quite a few Star Wars figures and might have fantasised about owning the ships and playsets, I think even I saw them as a bit of an extravagance. The thing my mum did tell me was that the kids who got loads of toys were given to them by their parents in lieu of time, attention or care. This is the woman who gave her 5 year old son on his first day of school the brilliant insight that ‘if anyone tries to bully you, it just means their mummy and daddy don’t love them and you should just feel sorry for them’. It was true then and it’s true now, right?

Anyway, she was right, and although I didn’t get an AT-AT through my childhood, my dad once spent a whole day building one with me in the garden out of cardboard and it was HUGE. And he built LEGO with me and taught me how to programme our 48k Sinclair Spectrum and he got me into films. Mum, although not into toys and such distractions, would always be happy to discuss things, was always interested in my opinions and had a wonderful rule which was ‘you can always have books’, any book my sister or I wanted (as long as it as passed a basic merit test) we got. So, I got the love and attention and care and all the good stuff. And I don’t want it to sound like I didn’t have toys, I had plenty. But I didn’t have that kind of expensive 70′s/80′s cool crap. I didn’t have Bigtrak or Omnibot, I didn’t have Castle Grayskull, I didn’t have the Millenium Falcon and I didn’t have an AT-AT.

I guess I have the kind of personality where if I want something, I try to make it happen for myself and maybe that means that there is still a list I’m crossing off. And I’m not alone because that AT-AT is not a vintage one, it was released last year for the adult collector market. That doesn’t mean it is in any way pornographic, it means it’s huge (over twice as big as the original release and more in scale with the action figures) and it’s far far more expensive than any kid could afford. Or really any parent would or should spend. But there’s a market for it.

When I think about it, most guys I know are a collector of some sort.There’s Gary with his full collection of Doctor Who toys and DVDs, there’s Ben – he collects Laserdiscs and Tim Burton stuff, Hank collects first edition Moomin books, Ross and Brian collect comics, other Ben collects vintage camera gear, Tim collects NASA related stuff, Edu’s legendary collection of records, James’s rare VHS collection. Even my less obsessive friends tend to have an awful lot of CDs or books. Guys like ‘stuff’.

One of the best exhibition’s I’ve ever seen was in London a couple of years ago when Mick Jones of The Clash literally moved the contents of his storage unit into a gallery. It was incredible. Like crawling into his head. Amongst the guitars and tour clothes were Carry On memorabilia, toy soldiers, tea cards, novelty cans of ‘London Fog’, huge piles of magazines, records and books. It was the sum of his parts. A man’s influences and obsessions deconstructed. It reassured me that one of my heroes was an amplified version of me in that respect.

I’m a film geek, so my stuff is generally film stuff. But why? There’s a great quote from Billy Connolly which I can neither remember,find or paraphrase well but he essentially said that all men need to make them happy are the things which made them happy as a boy. This makes perfect sense to me. There’s purity to childhood obsessions. Be it watching films, going to football matches, listening to music, obsessing over sports cars, fishing, reading comics or building model airplanes. I think it’s at the core of us and I think it never leaves us and serves as a mainline to restore equilibrium and feel some joy and security. I think it’s a good thing to have that kind of connection to the very core of what made you who you are.

What I think is less healthy is for these touchstones and enjoyable past-times to be used to define yourself as an adult. It’s OK to love Star Trek, but if you’re in your thirties and dressing up as a Klingon on a regular basis, that’s not good. It’s OK to love football but if you’re wearing the strip and getting into fights with rival fans as a middle-aged man, you’re a total fanny. If you spend all of your spare time fishing rather than with your family. That kind of thing.

So, I’ll go in my den of geek a couple of times a day and I’ll sit and read in there, do some work in there, that kind of thing. It gives me a buzz to be surrounded by my stuff. But I’m glad my whole house isn’t full of it. And I’m glad to be a little ashamed of it. Mainly I’m glad to know that I have passion and interests and that I have the capacity to take joy in these quirky little things. I have quite a geeky kitchen too and I smile every time I walk into it and notice certain things.

So, for those who were interested, that’s my overall explanation of the geeky collecting thing. And although I understand the much banded-about biblical quote;

“When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things”

I’ve always appreciated C.S. Lewis’s addendum to that;

“When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.”

There now follows a brief glimpse of a few items from the Collection….

I think Sendak’s ‘Where The Wild Things Are’ was the first ‘thing’ I ever fell in love with. I’ve never stopped digging his work.

In the 80′s they advertised Weetabix with a gang of Weetabix skinheads. White t-shirts, braces and bovver boots. I loved them then and have retained a fascination for them. In the kitchen, I have their fan club membership pack and one of the original animation cels on display.

Original box fronts of film tie-in cereals from the 80′s. I’m always on the lookout for the Ghostbusters and Mr T ones too.

V was an American TV series in 1984. Dad used to tape every episode for me. It was written by the brilliant Kenneth Johnson and was a big allegory for fascism. I used to get Starlog magazine each month and in one issue there was a full page advert for this amazing V doll. This I did beg my parents for and I think they did try to help out but back then there was no paypal and stuff, it wasn’t possible to mail order it over from the US. Imagine my joy the day I found this on ebay. Love it.

Plectrums caught at various Cheap Trick gigs. You have to know where to stand. As long as you’re nearish Rick Neilsen when they perform Dream Police, you’ll catch one, he lobs handfuls of them out in the middle 8. I’ve never managed to catch the KISS album they chuck out whilst performing Surrender. To my eternal shame.

I think I’ve blogged about it before but The Incredible Hulk remains my favourite TV show of all time. Meeting Lou Ferrigno was an incredibly underwhelming experience but Bill Bixby was always the better part.

They used to show Jacques Cousteau films on TV in the school holidays and I still love them. The combination of clearly-staged human drama and gorgeous underwater photography is completely unique to him. This is a 70′s model kit of his boat Calypso. I do not possess the skill to assemble it.

Yep, it’s a Flux Capacitor. It’s also signed by Christopher Lloyd on the side.

When I was 8, Manimal was my favourite TV show. It was cancelled after one season. The reason for its cancellation, I discovered many years later upon securing a bootleg of a few episodes, was that it was shit. But I still treasure the annual I got that year.

Various old action figures.

The geek holy grail? Signed by the director (who died last year) and the producer. Maybe one day I’ll get Lucas’s autograph on there and can die a pathetic uber-geek loser.

That’s all you get to see.

Half Cut.

last week, I had a very long debate on my Facebook wall with my mate Giles Borg. Giles is a film-maker too and a damn good one at that. If you like indie music and indie films and you haven’t seen his directorial feature debut 1234, then you’ve really missed a trick. Giles is one of my favourite people, he acted as a mentor through the editing of my film. Every time I had a new cut of it, he’d take the time to sit down with me, watch it and help me shape into something effective. He’s very smart and very sharp.

But we disagreed.

And what we disagreed about was the BBFC’s decision to reject the film ‘The Human Centipede 2′ for classification. I don’t want to put words in Giles’ mouth or paraphrase but essentially his point was that censorship is bad and my point was that the BBFC do a good job. This summation does the whole debate no favours and I can’t be arsed to cut and paste it, but that doesn’t matter. This post is not about that debate. But it is what got me thinking about what this blog is actually about.

I’m not a huge fan of modern TV. My TV isn’t even connected to the aerial, I just watch DVDs on it. I always take a look at iplayer and 4od and manage to catch anything I think I would have liked but I could never be one of those people who has the TV on all the time and watches anything indiscriminately. As arrogant and high highfaluting as it might make me sound, a lot of what’s on actually genuinely depresses me. Endless new BBC sitcoms starring Will Mellor, Channel 4′s general switch in its approach to documentary to cover mainly people with physical deformity, talent shows, almost 24 hour coverage of people taking things from their homes to provincial auction houses. It’s all a waste of money, time and a great medium.

Anyway, I work mainly from home and do like to watch a programme whilst having my lunch. Yesterday, I was flicking through iplayer and nothing really took my fancy, so I settled on watching ten minutes of something random. I ended up with a show called ‘Young, Rich and House Hunting’. It’s a curious piece of television. As with all piece-of-shit TV shows made for idiots, it essentially starts with a trailer of things you are about to see in the show itself. A montage of moments including a posh girl singing ‘I want to live here’, a Lamborghini (it might have been a Ferrari, Lotus or Porsche for all I know – one of those cars absolute wankers own, anyway) screeching away from traffic lights, a posh young man in a helicopter, another posh lad playing golf, various posh house interior and exterior shots, two toffs looking at a house joshing ‘this is where the mistress would live’, a posh buffoon waving about a copy of ‘how to be a property millionaire’, posh girls in posh streets and posh spas, posh boys in off-road vehicles and Segways, two drunk poshos scoffing at the average age average people can afford to buy their first homes, shots of poor people on the street followed by shots of poshos popping bottles of champagne, posh girls shrieking ‘and there’s a walk-in wardrobe!’ and general shots of hideous, ostentatious affluence. You get the picture.

This is all accompanied by an estuary-accented voiceover telling us in well-spoken barra-boy that while ‘the nation’s youth is becoming seriously in danger of becoming a generation who will not own their own houses’ we’ll be following the ‘super-rich teens and twenty-somethings’ who will be spending their trust funds and parents’ money on new pads and furnishings. This struck me as fuzzy logic and intrigued me. I always tell my screenwriting students to understand the point of what they’re presenting, to be clear on their motivation. Every show has an agenda, but I couldn’t pin down this one’s. What followed was a really strange show. It followed three ‘super rich’ subjects, all looking for their first homes.

The first pair was two girls, best friends, one a successful model, the other a successful businesswoman who were clubbing together to buy an £800,000 flat in a luxury block. The next pair were a young couple buying a flat for £500,000 in Camden. The final one was a 21 year old daughter of a millionaire hotel magnate who was helping her buy her first investment property to rent out.

Each of these three subjects were presented in a subtly damning manner. The two girls introductory piece of dialogue is a shared joke ‘next year we’ll be in the penthouse!’. The Camden couple, we are informed by Estuary Eddie are ‘buying their first home for half a million… after only seeing it once!’ and the rich daughter is shown telling her estate agent ‘the whole street seems a bit, um, how can I put it? A bit chavvy’

These are our introductions. This is the initial information we are given about these people. In turn, a pair of offensive luvvies, a couple of idiots with more money than sense and a hoity-toity girl who looks down her nose at the average person.

I was suspicious. The show’s makers, although working with these people, clearly had the guns out for them. It was defining them by these three characteristics.

When I was a teenager, I had a brief tango with the notion of poetry. It was very brief. And very bad. My parents sent me on a summer school to try to drag my academic achievements up and possibly pass an A-Level. It was me and a bunch of the poshest kids I had ever been around. I hated them on principle… and also because they were hugely detestable people. I was listening to a lot of The Clash and The Levellers back then and no doubt channeling my burgeoning middle class guilt into the mix and acting out some kind of mad class war in my head. I wrote a clutch of hateful poetry about these people and it didn’t take me long to realise that it said far more about me than it did about them. When I went to university, I finally got to meet actual real rich people and make friends with some of them. One in particular actually shattered my prejudices about people born into wealth. Because, we’re all born into *something* and we all have our advantages and disadvantages, talents and failings. The grass is always greener. I’ve met some real rich assholes but it wasn’t the money that made them that way. I’ve met just as many poor assholes and it wasn’t the lack of money that made them that way. There are cool people and there are dicks and being predisposed to hate someone for their privilege is as dumb as being predisposed for hating anyone for what they are rather than who they are.

So, I guess unlike many of the target audience for this show, I wasn’t going into this despising the subjects for their wealth. They were going to have to work to make me actually hate them and they’re opening gambits didn’t fool me.

For a start, my sister and her husband bought a house after only having seen it once. At least, they got their offer in immediately. I believe they made the offer when they stepped through the door. That’s what happens in a competitive marketplace. Houses sell fast, there isn’t time to dither. I’ll add that my sis and her husband aren’t rich, they’re normal people like us who work and don’t come from rich families. They’re actually not ‘normal’, they’re fucking awesome, but you get my point. When I was house hunting myself, estate agents would tell me ‘you’ll want to get an offer in today if you like it’ whilst I was booking the appointment over the phone.

Then there’s the girl who’s looking to invest. When the narrator mentions her father, he calls him ‘Daddy’. It’s quite a subtle linguistic thing but the difference between being told ‘financial assistance from her parents’ and ‘daddy’s help’ is pretty huge. ‘Look at that spoiled cow!’ we think ‘Daddy’s little girl, getting anything she wants!’ Well, that’s actually what happens in a lot of cases. I couldn’t have got my mortgage without my parents’ help (some months I can’t even PAY it without a little parental grace loan). They got their first house with some parental help. Most of my friends who own their homes had to get their parents to at least guarantee the loan. When I have kids, you’re damn right I hope I’ll be in a position financially to help them out. Oh, and as for her declaring the street as being ‘a bit chavvy’. How many of us hunting for houses haven’t said or thought exactly the same thing?

The penthouse girlies, despite being painted as vacuous poshos, clearly work quite hard to pull down the kind of dollar they’re rocking. No, not in factories or bars, but it’s obvious they’re careerist and I have no issue with that. What I took issue with was the jaunty music playing in the background of their segment. you know how these shows usually aren’t too subtle with their choice of backing music, right? Selecting a pop staple which thematically ties in to what’s going on screen. For a while there, you couldn’t see a daytime TV with multiple dogs in it which didn’t use the track ‘Who let the dogs out?’ Or someone walking on a sunny day to ‘I’m walking on sunshine’ – you understand what I mean, a very literal approach to music licensing. Well, the track the makers chose for these two was used a bit more subtly, it didn’t have a vocal track on it but was bouncy and dynamic and then the penny dropped. It was the Cee-Lo Green track ‘Fuck You’. How’s that for subliminal, eh?

And so the show continued, pretending to be an enjoyable show about house hunting but actually being a hatchet job better called ‘rich cunts buy houses you couldn’t even dream of setting foot in’, the reasonable-sounding narrator constantly dropping in reasonable-sounding facts about how rich or insane the people are like Iago whispering in the audience’s ears. At no point does the show focus on the actual houses – there are very few decent interior style shots, two things became very clear to me, very quickly. Firstly, this is a show designed to whip the audience up into a frenzy of hatred for the wealthy and secondly, there was no way in hell the production team told the people participating in it what the show was called or focused on. A complete, wicked hatchet job.

Today with my lunch I watched ‘You’re Fired’, the companion show to The Apprentice. I have a huge soft spot for The Apprentice. I know it’s just a Simon Cowell rip-off for a more refined audience but isn’t it fun, eh? The companion show, if you haven’t seen it, takes the person who got fired on this week’s show and offers them a bit of a requiem. As every week, you find yourself going ‘Oh, he seems alright, actually’. Even last series, where we spent so long detesting the evil STUART ‘THE BRAND’ BAGGS, when he finally appeared on You’re Fired, all was forgiven and we ended up going, as ever ‘Oh, he seems alright actually’. The reason that they ‘seem alright’ is because it’s a different format. It’s a live-style show. Is it actually broadcast live? I don’t know, anyway, it gives the contestants a chance to actually talk and answer questions. And they seem alright because they’re not being edited to look the opposite.

The Apprentice is a master case study of editing. I think you have to have made films to really understand how editing works. But essentially, if you film someone for a whole day and are cutting a film only a few minutes long, you choose carefully what you will show of them and why. So, in any one day, we might be funny, grumpy, lazy, spiteful, generous – any one of Snow White’s mates at any one time but we go through the whole spectrum because we are human beings and humanity is a bit like that. But that does not make for compulsive viewing. So, we’re shown only the highlights – all we see of Susan is her whining, all we see of Jim is his bullying, all we see of Zoe is her laziness, and so it goes. To the degree that when we hear them talking openly at the end of it, we’re amazed they’re not the utter wanker we had been geared to expect. Every confused glance, moment of thumb twiddling and shake of the head is weaved together and presented to us with a direct and cynical agenda.

TV is rife with this.

I don’t think it’s censorship we have to worry about so much as the agenda of manipulation in what we DO get to see.