I don’t know how you would best describe your own smell, but we all have one don’t we – a mashed up remix of centuries of hormones and chemicals that is uniquely ours and should lead our partner, blindfold in a room full of naked sex bombs, straight to us without stopping on the way for any pungent temptation.
If you want an exaggerated sense of what you smell like, then try this. Don’t wash for a few weeks, jump in the wash basket on a hot day, and inhale. Then imagine that you are trying to attract the opposite sex with this as your calling card. It’s amazing any of us ever find someone, isn’t it?
Anyway, this is the time of year when my usual smell is replaced by something much more macho and for the next four or five months I will not be making your eyes water with sweat, cologne or after shave, but you will still be sniffing the top notes, getting excited by the bottom notes and trying to tie down the fragrance to a particular plant, or cedar wood.
Well, to save you a lot of olfactory effort, the perfume I’ll be wearing is from the House of B&Q Superstore and it’s called Turps or, to give it the Parisian tortured artist slant, Paint Brush Cleaner. More Harry Lauder than Esteee Lauder, I’m sitting here the day after painting a balcony outside my house and the smell of the spirits is still in my nostrils and in my hair.
Whenever the sun is out I put on my old scruffy dungarees and get busy with the DIY which usually means painting something quickly and then spending hours trying to clean the brushes with stuff that seeps so far in to the lining of my nose that it enters my dreams. Last night it was The Joker throwing paint stripper on my face and laughing as I melted and became hideously deformed, turning in to Russell Crowe .
I’m also constantly worried and embarrassed at this time of year when sitting next to people on the train in case I smell like a down and out alcoholic who’s embraced the recession by moving on to the cheap stuff. I think of myself as a DIY enthusiast, eager to make the house look nice and anxious to get repairs done, but perhaps I simply come across as an old wino.
My wife says I’m just a cheapskate who won’t pay for a professional and she may well be right as I find it hard to really get in to the whole decorator’s multi tasking thing – ringing the bookies every few minutes while eating cold sausage rolls, having a fag and reading the Daily Sport all at the same. I admire it but I can’t do it, so perhaps my wife is right and I’m just playing at DIY to be mean.
And to back up her ideas on my meanness, I guess the real DIY that interests me is reading those tips that are supposed to take us back to some sort of war spirit of “make and mend”. I read the other day that if I drop my mobile ‘phone down the toilet or mistakenly take a call when I’m scuba diving or in the bath, then the way to save spending on a new ‘phone is to take the battery out and plunge the ‘phone in to a bowl of uncooked rice for a few days. The rice draws out the water from the ‘phone leaving it brand new.
It all sounds good to me but this tip has the disadvantage of being useful only in silly circumstances as I can’t imagine sitting on the loo chatting to my mum while going about my business. It’s obviously a disgusting waste of good reading time.
So I tend to polarise with my money saving tips, preferring the really good ones or the totally stupid. On the good side there’s the problem I constantly get of my computer keyboard sttttticking on the letttttter T now and again when I’m typing. In the past I threw the keyboards out and bought anew but I now know I can disconnect it and put it in the dishwasher then let it dry overnight and it’s back to normal. I also use WD40 for everything from protecting silver from tarnishing to removing tomato and lipstick stains from clothing.
Now I realise that I am probably coming across as Scrooge’s great grandson but there’s a recession on you know, tho’ I do admit it’s the daft money saving tips that really get me excited. They were started, as far as I can see, by Viz comic years ago and never fail to make me laugh. Typical of these would be “To save money on chewing gum simply take some rubber bands and cover them with a dab of toothpaste. Delicious!” Or how about one that suggests saving money on personalised number plates by simply changing your name to that of your licence plate? That was suggested by Mr KVS 734Y.
These tips then get downright cruel but they do lead to fun. “Buy a TV set like your neighbour’s and then annoy the hell out of him by standing at his window changing channels.” Or, “Jump on the roof of your garage and dangle a fish on a bit of string outside your kitchen window. Your wife will think the house is underwater.”
If you have any great tips then pass them on. I’m especially looking for ones on how to get the smell of turps and white spirit out my nose. Next time you sit next to me on a train, please let me know.
Tuesday, April 28, 2009
Tuesday, April 21, 2009
Tell Me Lies
If you had bumped in to me around twenty years ago, the chances are that after hearing my apology for knocking your shopping bags flying all over the escalator, you would have chatted as we picked up your Anne Summers lingerie, we may have shared a Creamola foam or two in a cafe and then, as we parted, you would have said something conciliatory like “That’s a nice sun tan. Where did you get it?”.
I would have replied with a smile saying “Tenerife”, and you would have left assuming that I had been with the hooped earrings brigade comparing tattoos and exchanging pills in the Canary Islands. Technically, I would have been telling you the truth but your conclusion about my tan would have been wrong.
Why? Well because I said I’d “technically” told you the truth. Of course it wasn’t the truth at all and my deception would have placed me half way across the river Humbug on the way to the darker side of the river reserved for politicians. All MPs get economical with the truth and, like a cat with a field mouse, play around with it until it dies of exhaustion.
Although Tenerife was the true answer to the origins of my sun tan back then, what was missing was my full explanation that it was the name above the door of a seedy tanning bed salon near Glasgow where you could peek over the partitions at whoever’s white bottom was burning next door. Technically I really had been to Tenerife to get the tan but I had got there by double decker bus. In political terms, though, I’d told the truth.
I reckon that anyone elected as a politician should be funded and provided with an attached voice over man, an unemployed theatrical luvvie perhaps, who follows them around all day like a shadow to avoid the “Tenerife” moments and translate what they’re saying in to the full truth. For example, the politician may say to the camera or voter “I’m going to tell you a true story” but voice over man would then boom “That’s as soon as I make one up”. Or when Clinton said “I did not have sex with Miss Lewinski”, voice over man would have completed the sentence with “on more than a few occasions”.
Telling the whole truth is a sign of maturity which is something that, sadly, doesn’t always come with age. When Damian McBride resigned as the Prime Minister’s adviser last week after making up stories about rival politicians having sex with the devil and liking Tesco Value fishcakes eaten off male belly dancers in Turkish take away shops, the Media rang around to get quotes. Thinking they had got hold of Derek Draper, the Labour sympathiser who was going to use the email for a web site dedicated to anti Conservative stories, ITN News recorded an interview with him in which he admitted to behaving appallingly in soliciting the lies, expressed the desire to apologise profusely, and then offered to consider his position by dangling the possibility of resignation.
This was broadcast to the nation before someone recognised that it wasn’t Draper’s voice going out at all but rather his opponent who ran a Conservative web site and had been rung in error. He had impersonated Draper, landing him right in it.
But, lest you feel sympathy, Draper himself has had his own Tenerife moments, saying in his biography that he gained his degree “with an MA in clinical psychology, spending three years in Berkeley, California”. Of course Berkeley University is one of America’s most prestigious places of learning but he had, I fact, studied at the much more anonymous and unheard of Wright Institute in Berkeley, California. So he wasn’t telling a lie, just being creative, a bit like me saying I’ve been to Oxford but leaving out the bit about it being a daytrip on a coach with the church choir.
Making up stories is an old tradition, older even than JM Barrie making up the name Wendy and inventing Peter Pan and the lost boys, but when it’s done to score points rather than to entertain then you better not get caught.
To test how long it would take for a completely fabricated story to go around her place of work and then become repeated as fact, my wife Debbie once made up a rumour with a colleague on BBC’s Breakfast Time about another presenter. They decided together to tell as many people as possible that their colleague was, in fact, a test tube baby who had been adopted. People listened open mouthed and, three days later, someone in another department, on another floor, of TV Centre sat down for a coffee with Debbie and said something like “Guess what?”, and repeated the story as gospel truth.
She confessed to object of the story a few years later and he laughed as he knew she was not trying to score points or hurt anyone, just proving a point about gossip. So I’m left believing that made up stories are great fun and can be a source of entertainment, but they are too serious and precious to fall in to the wrong hands.
If politicians want to make up stories then let them work on tabloid newspapers. At least then I could laugh along while reading them in Tenerife, near Glasgow.
I would have replied with a smile saying “Tenerife”, and you would have left assuming that I had been with the hooped earrings brigade comparing tattoos and exchanging pills in the Canary Islands. Technically, I would have been telling you the truth but your conclusion about my tan would have been wrong.
Why? Well because I said I’d “technically” told you the truth. Of course it wasn’t the truth at all and my deception would have placed me half way across the river Humbug on the way to the darker side of the river reserved for politicians. All MPs get economical with the truth and, like a cat with a field mouse, play around with it until it dies of exhaustion.
Although Tenerife was the true answer to the origins of my sun tan back then, what was missing was my full explanation that it was the name above the door of a seedy tanning bed salon near Glasgow where you could peek over the partitions at whoever’s white bottom was burning next door. Technically I really had been to Tenerife to get the tan but I had got there by double decker bus. In political terms, though, I’d told the truth.
I reckon that anyone elected as a politician should be funded and provided with an attached voice over man, an unemployed theatrical luvvie perhaps, who follows them around all day like a shadow to avoid the “Tenerife” moments and translate what they’re saying in to the full truth. For example, the politician may say to the camera or voter “I’m going to tell you a true story” but voice over man would then boom “That’s as soon as I make one up”. Or when Clinton said “I did not have sex with Miss Lewinski”, voice over man would have completed the sentence with “on more than a few occasions”.
Telling the whole truth is a sign of maturity which is something that, sadly, doesn’t always come with age. When Damian McBride resigned as the Prime Minister’s adviser last week after making up stories about rival politicians having sex with the devil and liking Tesco Value fishcakes eaten off male belly dancers in Turkish take away shops, the Media rang around to get quotes. Thinking they had got hold of Derek Draper, the Labour sympathiser who was going to use the email for a web site dedicated to anti Conservative stories, ITN News recorded an interview with him in which he admitted to behaving appallingly in soliciting the lies, expressed the desire to apologise profusely, and then offered to consider his position by dangling the possibility of resignation.
This was broadcast to the nation before someone recognised that it wasn’t Draper’s voice going out at all but rather his opponent who ran a Conservative web site and had been rung in error. He had impersonated Draper, landing him right in it.
But, lest you feel sympathy, Draper himself has had his own Tenerife moments, saying in his biography that he gained his degree “with an MA in clinical psychology, spending three years in Berkeley, California”. Of course Berkeley University is one of America’s most prestigious places of learning but he had, I fact, studied at the much more anonymous and unheard of Wright Institute in Berkeley, California. So he wasn’t telling a lie, just being creative, a bit like me saying I’ve been to Oxford but leaving out the bit about it being a daytrip on a coach with the church choir.
Making up stories is an old tradition, older even than JM Barrie making up the name Wendy and inventing Peter Pan and the lost boys, but when it’s done to score points rather than to entertain then you better not get caught.
To test how long it would take for a completely fabricated story to go around her place of work and then become repeated as fact, my wife Debbie once made up a rumour with a colleague on BBC’s Breakfast Time about another presenter. They decided together to tell as many people as possible that their colleague was, in fact, a test tube baby who had been adopted. People listened open mouthed and, three days later, someone in another department, on another floor, of TV Centre sat down for a coffee with Debbie and said something like “Guess what?”, and repeated the story as gospel truth.
She confessed to object of the story a few years later and he laughed as he knew she was not trying to score points or hurt anyone, just proving a point about gossip. So I’m left believing that made up stories are great fun and can be a source of entertainment, but they are too serious and precious to fall in to the wrong hands.
If politicians want to make up stories then let them work on tabloid newspapers. At least then I could laugh along while reading them in Tenerife, near Glasgow.
Tuesday, April 14, 2009
Communication Breakdown
This week Fleetwood Mac’s singer Stevie Nicks gave an interview in which she said that she hates all modern day technology. The blonde confessed that she believes computers are as natural as her hair colour, she has never sent an email, abhors mobile ‘phones, wouldn’t know a text if it bit her on her ample bum, and blames all microchips and computer games for young people’s problems today.
Well, there goes my idea of a Fleetwood Mac image update with a name change. I thought Apple Mac had a certain ring to it.
Coincidentally, I recently interviewed Mick Jagger’s ex girlfriend Marianne Faithfull who said almost exactly the same as Ms Nicks. “I don’t have a computer or a mobile phone as I prefer writing letters”, she told me, “and I can’t stand the idea of this whole Twitter thing. It takes away your privacy”.
Setting aside the obvious expectations that ladies of a certain generation prefer “the good old days” where Gene Kelly rather than R Kelly had hits, High School Musicals involved Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney, and Twitter was something Tweety Pie did to annoy Sylvester, can they have a point?
Even Ms Nicks and Ms Faithfull would acknowledge that advances in science mean better medicine and longer life and robust health in many parts of the world, but could they actually be correct that doing without technology leads to a better lifestyle, or are they a bit like The Pope and sex, left outside so naturally taking against it? I decided to try the withdrawal method this week and put it to the test. On Monday morning, I started a week of technology deprivation.
But I quickly hit the first snag. My advanced setting of the hot water system had been ditched as it’s operated by a microchip, so I had to endure a cold shower which certainly woke me up but it shrivelled parts of me I can’t afford to see shrivel any more.
Knowing I couldn’t use my remotely operated garage doors I had left the car out all night on the pathway, so I came out in the dark to frost on the windscreen which set me back ten minutes or so before I left for work. I then encountered heavy traffic half way there and reached for my mobile phone to let my colleagues know I’d be late but, of course, I’d left the phone at home as part of my new experiment. I frustratedly sat for forty minutes watching the car clock tick round faster than my car’s wheels.
I diligently refused to use the remote controlled barrier for the car park at work and stopped, instead, on a meter which cost a small fortune, but at least I was staying true to my resolution. I had just started day one but surely the next six would get easier.
Throughout the day I didn’t use any computers or check any emails, and then to my horror my grandfather’s wristwatch which I’d worn for the day to get away from my crystal, radio controlled modern effort, died. Unlike me, it was not wound up and by the time I’d noticed I was now running late for a meeting.
On the way to that appointment, which was about an hour’s motorway drive away, as I couldn’t use my digital car radio I again missed the road traffic warnings and ended up in a long car jam of about six miles and then, without my GPS navigation system, I got lost. Only six and a half days to go and it wasn’t going well at all. At this rate I would soon be out of work.
All my notes were taken on paper that day with no electronic organiser in my pocket to place appointments or contact numbers and, arriving home late that night, I then had to spend time organising the day’s scribbles in to some form of order.
I then was reminded that I had missed my favourite TV shows as I had disdained all modern technology and so hadn’t set my Sky digibox recorder so I was now getting really annoyed. I went to bed early and sneaked a quick look at my mobile ‘phone’s texts to find a record company had been trying to get hold of me all day offering free tickets to see Lionel Richie in concert but they had now found someone else to take them. And there was a job offer which had also gone elsewhere because of my lack of response. I could have cried.
I decided there and then that my experiment was over. I had lasted just one day.
The problem was that no one else was doing the same so they had used technology to contact me and then had assumed I was being stuck up since I hadn’t replied. And that’s where I see a flaw in the rock stars’ arguments. Doing without is fine so long as everyone else is doing the same. Otherwise you are the charity case in the race who comes in last after everyone else has gone home.
Marianne Faithfull told me she couldn’t bear the idea of people knowing where they could get hold of her all day long and knowing her every bowel movement on Twitter. “I like to create an air of mystique”, she told me.
Which is fine for her. But I now know that mystique, to me, is happily not knowing whether your Blackberry battery will last the day.
Well, there goes my idea of a Fleetwood Mac image update with a name change. I thought Apple Mac had a certain ring to it.
Coincidentally, I recently interviewed Mick Jagger’s ex girlfriend Marianne Faithfull who said almost exactly the same as Ms Nicks. “I don’t have a computer or a mobile phone as I prefer writing letters”, she told me, “and I can’t stand the idea of this whole Twitter thing. It takes away your privacy”.
Setting aside the obvious expectations that ladies of a certain generation prefer “the good old days” where Gene Kelly rather than R Kelly had hits, High School Musicals involved Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney, and Twitter was something Tweety Pie did to annoy Sylvester, can they have a point?
Even Ms Nicks and Ms Faithfull would acknowledge that advances in science mean better medicine and longer life and robust health in many parts of the world, but could they actually be correct that doing without technology leads to a better lifestyle, or are they a bit like The Pope and sex, left outside so naturally taking against it? I decided to try the withdrawal method this week and put it to the test. On Monday morning, I started a week of technology deprivation.
But I quickly hit the first snag. My advanced setting of the hot water system had been ditched as it’s operated by a microchip, so I had to endure a cold shower which certainly woke me up but it shrivelled parts of me I can’t afford to see shrivel any more.
Knowing I couldn’t use my remotely operated garage doors I had left the car out all night on the pathway, so I came out in the dark to frost on the windscreen which set me back ten minutes or so before I left for work. I then encountered heavy traffic half way there and reached for my mobile phone to let my colleagues know I’d be late but, of course, I’d left the phone at home as part of my new experiment. I frustratedly sat for forty minutes watching the car clock tick round faster than my car’s wheels.
I diligently refused to use the remote controlled barrier for the car park at work and stopped, instead, on a meter which cost a small fortune, but at least I was staying true to my resolution. I had just started day one but surely the next six would get easier.
Throughout the day I didn’t use any computers or check any emails, and then to my horror my grandfather’s wristwatch which I’d worn for the day to get away from my crystal, radio controlled modern effort, died. Unlike me, it was not wound up and by the time I’d noticed I was now running late for a meeting.
On the way to that appointment, which was about an hour’s motorway drive away, as I couldn’t use my digital car radio I again missed the road traffic warnings and ended up in a long car jam of about six miles and then, without my GPS navigation system, I got lost. Only six and a half days to go and it wasn’t going well at all. At this rate I would soon be out of work.
All my notes were taken on paper that day with no electronic organiser in my pocket to place appointments or contact numbers and, arriving home late that night, I then had to spend time organising the day’s scribbles in to some form of order.
I then was reminded that I had missed my favourite TV shows as I had disdained all modern technology and so hadn’t set my Sky digibox recorder so I was now getting really annoyed. I went to bed early and sneaked a quick look at my mobile ‘phone’s texts to find a record company had been trying to get hold of me all day offering free tickets to see Lionel Richie in concert but they had now found someone else to take them. And there was a job offer which had also gone elsewhere because of my lack of response. I could have cried.
I decided there and then that my experiment was over. I had lasted just one day.
The problem was that no one else was doing the same so they had used technology to contact me and then had assumed I was being stuck up since I hadn’t replied. And that’s where I see a flaw in the rock stars’ arguments. Doing without is fine so long as everyone else is doing the same. Otherwise you are the charity case in the race who comes in last after everyone else has gone home.
Marianne Faithfull told me she couldn’t bear the idea of people knowing where they could get hold of her all day long and knowing her every bowel movement on Twitter. “I like to create an air of mystique”, she told me.
Which is fine for her. But I now know that mystique, to me, is happily not knowing whether your Blackberry battery will last the day.
Tuesday, April 7, 2009
Oh What A Circus
London has been a strange place to be over the past week.
I suppose that if you’ve visited the capital lately then calling London strange is an obvious thing to proclaim, up there with saying nudists like taking their kit off, Salman Rushdie is a smug, unlikeable, smarmy git, and Britain has a housing shortage because Labour politicians all seem to own four homes.
But London has been stranger than a politician’s expense form over the past few days and the reason is that we’ve had some gatecrashers invade our town, setting up camp like a band of travelling caravan people and leaving their rubbish behind for the rest of us to clear up.
This particular unwanted travelling circus was called the G20 Summit, and ringmaster Farmer Brown had invited them in to his field to have their picture taken, behave like clowns, and perform their daring acrobatics as they U turned like mad and performed magic tricks by lowering the average IQ of the city. We’ll probably find our house prices have likewise fallen too.
Some of the world’s best known political leaders, and Gordon Brown too, seemed to come together for lots of eating, lap dancing, nit combing, paintballing wars, flower arranging classes, cookie making and, in Sarkozy’s experience, walking on tip toe and getting cramp in your feet from trying to look taller for three days. Photo opportunities looked like a school outing with the boys ignoring the class frump, Merkel of the German language class, and fighting to sit near either the head teacher, Mrs Liz Windsor, or the good looking girls’ captain from Argentina.
What I don’t understand is just when these leaders had the time to sign any kind of deals on global recovery, or anything else important, as their every moment seemed to be filled with media opportunities to show off to their countrymen back home. The Italian leader, Silvio Berlusconi, even had his hair dyed specially for the event with “blackboard shade 10” and upset everyone by behaving like an Italian waiter who never shuts up and hassles you the whole way through your meal wanting to get your date up for a dance round the pizza oven.
Well, the leaders have now all left with their great holiday snaps and star packed home movies, and even now they’ll be handing their colleagues souvenir shirts from Oxford Street with My President Went To London And All I Got Was This Lousy T Shirt printed on the front. But what have we got out of it?
Well, in London, what we got was a couple of days of demonstrations, disrupted transport, closed roads, long, long delays getting home and the odd punch up as thousands dressed in black hoodies tried a spot of decorating of our city and themselves. Pouring fake blood over each other and smashing windows makes for a good day out in some quarters, but the London newspaper letter pages were full of readers who had obviously weighed up the pros and cons of the protest, ignored stereotypes, and were urging the police to use water cannon on the hoodies to give them a wash.
Comedian Russel Brand showed his fearless empathy with the anti capitalist movement, and his quiet, modest, support by joining in the demonstrations with a full camera crew and minders spending less time than it takes him to do his hair.
I walked behind some of the demonstrators to the tube station on Thursday evening as they chattered about how they had really taught the World a lesson in caring for others and saying No to greed. They were the politest, best spoken rebels I’ve ever heard and I would not have been surprised to see one take out a hip flask and pass it around while arranging to meet for a pheasant shoot in August.
As they all laughed over their adventures they ignored a woman who was sitting at Vauxhall station asking for change to feed herself, and they missed the irony in the fact that the only person who put money in her paper cup was a bloke in a pin striped suit.
This recession has brought out the worst and the best in people and I believe some who looked down their expensively white dusted noses before are now coming to terms with a new feeling of humility. But the recession also leads to a bit of humour. Watching TV and listening to radio I look forward, for the first time in my life, to advertising breaks as the media have to take ads now from people they may have overlooked before. My favourite is the jingle for a London clinic which performs cosmetic breast surgery. Over the backing singer yodelling about “My Life, My Breasts” a voice says customers will get to see a qualified surgeon from the British Association of Plastic Surgeons. For brevity the voice says those looking for new breasts will see “a qualified BAPS surgeon.”
But, back at the G20, much as I was annoyed at the delays in getting home I felt the demonstrators weren’t the worst at causing upset. The biggest upset for me was perpetrated by Michelle Obama.
The First lady of America visited a girls’ college and told the young ladies that they were the future and, even though she’d never met them before, she loved them all. As the carefully inserted emotional catch in the voice echoed around the news footage, the contents of our collective stomachs rose as one, suggesting a new advertising campaign which seemed to sum up the whole, ridiculous, event.
Throw Up? Yes We Can!
I suppose that if you’ve visited the capital lately then calling London strange is an obvious thing to proclaim, up there with saying nudists like taking their kit off, Salman Rushdie is a smug, unlikeable, smarmy git, and Britain has a housing shortage because Labour politicians all seem to own four homes.
But London has been stranger than a politician’s expense form over the past few days and the reason is that we’ve had some gatecrashers invade our town, setting up camp like a band of travelling caravan people and leaving their rubbish behind for the rest of us to clear up.
This particular unwanted travelling circus was called the G20 Summit, and ringmaster Farmer Brown had invited them in to his field to have their picture taken, behave like clowns, and perform their daring acrobatics as they U turned like mad and performed magic tricks by lowering the average IQ of the city. We’ll probably find our house prices have likewise fallen too.
Some of the world’s best known political leaders, and Gordon Brown too, seemed to come together for lots of eating, lap dancing, nit combing, paintballing wars, flower arranging classes, cookie making and, in Sarkozy’s experience, walking on tip toe and getting cramp in your feet from trying to look taller for three days. Photo opportunities looked like a school outing with the boys ignoring the class frump, Merkel of the German language class, and fighting to sit near either the head teacher, Mrs Liz Windsor, or the good looking girls’ captain from Argentina.
What I don’t understand is just when these leaders had the time to sign any kind of deals on global recovery, or anything else important, as their every moment seemed to be filled with media opportunities to show off to their countrymen back home. The Italian leader, Silvio Berlusconi, even had his hair dyed specially for the event with “blackboard shade 10” and upset everyone by behaving like an Italian waiter who never shuts up and hassles you the whole way through your meal wanting to get your date up for a dance round the pizza oven.
Well, the leaders have now all left with their great holiday snaps and star packed home movies, and even now they’ll be handing their colleagues souvenir shirts from Oxford Street with My President Went To London And All I Got Was This Lousy T Shirt printed on the front. But what have we got out of it?
Well, in London, what we got was a couple of days of demonstrations, disrupted transport, closed roads, long, long delays getting home and the odd punch up as thousands dressed in black hoodies tried a spot of decorating of our city and themselves. Pouring fake blood over each other and smashing windows makes for a good day out in some quarters, but the London newspaper letter pages were full of readers who had obviously weighed up the pros and cons of the protest, ignored stereotypes, and were urging the police to use water cannon on the hoodies to give them a wash.
Comedian Russel Brand showed his fearless empathy with the anti capitalist movement, and his quiet, modest, support by joining in the demonstrations with a full camera crew and minders spending less time than it takes him to do his hair.
I walked behind some of the demonstrators to the tube station on Thursday evening as they chattered about how they had really taught the World a lesson in caring for others and saying No to greed. They were the politest, best spoken rebels I’ve ever heard and I would not have been surprised to see one take out a hip flask and pass it around while arranging to meet for a pheasant shoot in August.
As they all laughed over their adventures they ignored a woman who was sitting at Vauxhall station asking for change to feed herself, and they missed the irony in the fact that the only person who put money in her paper cup was a bloke in a pin striped suit.
This recession has brought out the worst and the best in people and I believe some who looked down their expensively white dusted noses before are now coming to terms with a new feeling of humility. But the recession also leads to a bit of humour. Watching TV and listening to radio I look forward, for the first time in my life, to advertising breaks as the media have to take ads now from people they may have overlooked before. My favourite is the jingle for a London clinic which performs cosmetic breast surgery. Over the backing singer yodelling about “My Life, My Breasts” a voice says customers will get to see a qualified surgeon from the British Association of Plastic Surgeons. For brevity the voice says those looking for new breasts will see “a qualified BAPS surgeon.”
But, back at the G20, much as I was annoyed at the delays in getting home I felt the demonstrators weren’t the worst at causing upset. The biggest upset for me was perpetrated by Michelle Obama.
The First lady of America visited a girls’ college and told the young ladies that they were the future and, even though she’d never met them before, she loved them all. As the carefully inserted emotional catch in the voice echoed around the news footage, the contents of our collective stomachs rose as one, suggesting a new advertising campaign which seemed to sum up the whole, ridiculous, event.
Throw Up? Yes We Can!
Tuesday, March 31, 2009
Mama Mia
Sorry about the missing blog last week but I’ve just got back from a week long trip with my bucket and spade to the seaside in Portugal. The weather there was magnificent; in fact I lay awake marvelling at the magnificent lightning, listening to the magnificent thunder and watching the magnificent, teeming, rain only this morning before I left.
Portugal, or more specifically The Algarve, seems to be where British golfers, with more money than sense, selflessly go to give their friends and partners a break. It’s a kind of care home for the terminally nylon waterproofed which gives their golf widows temporary respite from embarrassment and the chance to enjoy life back home.
Every Winter and Spring, the airport at Faro gets filled with middle aged men watching their golf clubs go round on carousels while discussing the merits of tartan socks and Pringle jumpers in neon colours. Here in the UK, sadly, they’d be laughed at but in the Algarve, a bit like lady boys in a Thailand dance club, they can all congregate for mutual support and to share stories.
I love sport, and I’ve played rugby, football and tennis with various degrees of failure and an extraordinary lack of success. But golf has escaped me and, after a lot of thought, I think I know why. It’s because it’s not really a sport, is it?
Fat men with shoes that resemble gangster’s spats left over from the Valentine’s Day Massacre perspire as they push themselves out of a seat on a motorised buggy, remove the woollen pom pom covers that were “hand” knitted by large machines in the Third World and bought as a Christmas present for their clubs, and then hack the fairway to death before jumping back aboard and repairing to the “Ninenteenth” hole for a lager shandy and discussion of their latest cholesterol level checks. It’s not quite up there with Sir Chris Hoy and his miles of cycling each day while dragging Ben Nevis behind for resistance work is it?
But, as a round of golf in the Algarve can cost around a hundred pounds, the locals stifle their laughter and welcome the thousands of Euros that these weekend walkers and wide waisted wastrels bring in hotel fees, refusing to sneer at the procession of pink sweatered dodgy salesmen showing their passports to the girls at check in and quipping “my ‘phone number’s on there too”. My how we all laughed in the Easyjet queue each time we heard it, over and over, and over.
This week, then, you won’t be surprised to learn I didn’t go to Portugal for the golf but, instead, I went for a holiday, to do some business, and also to take my mum and dad for a well earned break.
My mum is someone everyone should take on holiday because she guarantees a laugh in restaurants, or just about anywhere really. She’ll turn down the waiters’ offers of fresh fish as she doesn’t like the bones, shellfish is a non starter as she’s scared of food poisoning, steak is out as she says she can’t chew it if it’s tough, and spaghetti stays on the starting blocks as it makes a mess. “So, what would you like then?”, the waiters will say in exasperation. “Oh,” my Mum will reply with a smile, “I’m not fussy, I’ll eat anything”.
She has a habit of saying the wrong thing at the wrong time which surprised a very kind waiter this trip who said, in a broken accent, not to hesitate and to ask him anything at all as he’d lived in Britain for a while and was proud to say his English was very good. As he turned round my mum said, very loudly, “What did he say? I couldn’t understand a word.”
In fairness, this may have something to do with the fact she wears a hearing aid and it may also have something to do with the fact that she’d worn it in the shower before coming out. “It’s not working now”, she said. “Full of water”. I asked for a look and discovered the real reason. She had forgotten to turn it on.
Mum has an affinity with toilets and will always have a holiday adventure connected with porcelain. A few years ago, on a trip to Italy with my Dad, she disappeared for ages to the ladies’ toilet leaving him to get more and more anxious as the minutes ticked away. When he eventually set off in search of her, my mum was laughing her head off. She’d desperately gone to the loo and, after the initial relief, had panicked as she realised she’d rushed without checking if the lid was up. It wasn’t!
On this trip, as we settled in to a cosy café after a long walk, she disappeared to the toilets for some considerable time and, as my dad and I speculated on whether she’d repeated the Italian trick, she arrived back saying she’d had a shock. A man had come in to the ladies toilet. When we discovered that she’d gone to the gents by mistake, she admitted she thought it was a bit different from usual and had wondered about the large wash hand basin on the wall and why she couldn’t get the water to run. That, we explained, was a urinal.
Now it’s back to reality with a week’s worth of bills and other post piled up, including various holiday brochures and special offers. There’s even one advertising a golfing holiday to Spain. If you’re going on that one then don’t bother to ask if I’m free to join you. But my mum, on the other hand, is always up for a holiday.
Portugal, or more specifically The Algarve, seems to be where British golfers, with more money than sense, selflessly go to give their friends and partners a break. It’s a kind of care home for the terminally nylon waterproofed which gives their golf widows temporary respite from embarrassment and the chance to enjoy life back home.
Every Winter and Spring, the airport at Faro gets filled with middle aged men watching their golf clubs go round on carousels while discussing the merits of tartan socks and Pringle jumpers in neon colours. Here in the UK, sadly, they’d be laughed at but in the Algarve, a bit like lady boys in a Thailand dance club, they can all congregate for mutual support and to share stories.
I love sport, and I’ve played rugby, football and tennis with various degrees of failure and an extraordinary lack of success. But golf has escaped me and, after a lot of thought, I think I know why. It’s because it’s not really a sport, is it?
Fat men with shoes that resemble gangster’s spats left over from the Valentine’s Day Massacre perspire as they push themselves out of a seat on a motorised buggy, remove the woollen pom pom covers that were “hand” knitted by large machines in the Third World and bought as a Christmas present for their clubs, and then hack the fairway to death before jumping back aboard and repairing to the “Ninenteenth” hole for a lager shandy and discussion of their latest cholesterol level checks. It’s not quite up there with Sir Chris Hoy and his miles of cycling each day while dragging Ben Nevis behind for resistance work is it?
But, as a round of golf in the Algarve can cost around a hundred pounds, the locals stifle their laughter and welcome the thousands of Euros that these weekend walkers and wide waisted wastrels bring in hotel fees, refusing to sneer at the procession of pink sweatered dodgy salesmen showing their passports to the girls at check in and quipping “my ‘phone number’s on there too”. My how we all laughed in the Easyjet queue each time we heard it, over and over, and over.
This week, then, you won’t be surprised to learn I didn’t go to Portugal for the golf but, instead, I went for a holiday, to do some business, and also to take my mum and dad for a well earned break.
My mum is someone everyone should take on holiday because she guarantees a laugh in restaurants, or just about anywhere really. She’ll turn down the waiters’ offers of fresh fish as she doesn’t like the bones, shellfish is a non starter as she’s scared of food poisoning, steak is out as she says she can’t chew it if it’s tough, and spaghetti stays on the starting blocks as it makes a mess. “So, what would you like then?”, the waiters will say in exasperation. “Oh,” my Mum will reply with a smile, “I’m not fussy, I’ll eat anything”.
She has a habit of saying the wrong thing at the wrong time which surprised a very kind waiter this trip who said, in a broken accent, not to hesitate and to ask him anything at all as he’d lived in Britain for a while and was proud to say his English was very good. As he turned round my mum said, very loudly, “What did he say? I couldn’t understand a word.”
In fairness, this may have something to do with the fact she wears a hearing aid and it may also have something to do with the fact that she’d worn it in the shower before coming out. “It’s not working now”, she said. “Full of water”. I asked for a look and discovered the real reason. She had forgotten to turn it on.
Mum has an affinity with toilets and will always have a holiday adventure connected with porcelain. A few years ago, on a trip to Italy with my Dad, she disappeared for ages to the ladies’ toilet leaving him to get more and more anxious as the minutes ticked away. When he eventually set off in search of her, my mum was laughing her head off. She’d desperately gone to the loo and, after the initial relief, had panicked as she realised she’d rushed without checking if the lid was up. It wasn’t!
On this trip, as we settled in to a cosy café after a long walk, she disappeared to the toilets for some considerable time and, as my dad and I speculated on whether she’d repeated the Italian trick, she arrived back saying she’d had a shock. A man had come in to the ladies toilet. When we discovered that she’d gone to the gents by mistake, she admitted she thought it was a bit different from usual and had wondered about the large wash hand basin on the wall and why she couldn’t get the water to run. That, we explained, was a urinal.
Now it’s back to reality with a week’s worth of bills and other post piled up, including various holiday brochures and special offers. There’s even one advertising a golfing holiday to Spain. If you’re going on that one then don’t bother to ask if I’m free to join you. But my mum, on the other hand, is always up for a holiday.
Tuesday, March 17, 2009
My Kinda Life
www.paulcoia.com
I’m going to Portugal for a week’s holiday on Saturday and I want you all to say to yourself “that’s nice, Paul deserves a bit of a break”, because when I mentioned my vacation to a pal the other day he laughed and said “but your whole life’s a holiday”.
I guess I can’t complain about “my life” as I am indeed lucky, but a continual holiday? It’s hard work looking this good and being so popular, and you don’t want to know the frustrations I’ve had over past two weeks just going about my business. Actually, if you’re reading this blog, then perhaps you do.
I’ve interviewed a lot of celebrities over the past few weeks and I guess the knack is to make them feel appreciated and loved so that they relax and “give good interview”. The only way to do this, apart from my natural charm and charisma of course, is to show the interviewee respect by doing a lot of homework on them. There can be nothing more brain numbing than getting asked the same questions day after day.
The young actress Kristen Stewart, from the new mega successful movie Twilight, has said that she kept getting asked “What’s it like to kiss a vampire?” on the movie’s publicity tour, and it made her want to scream so much that when someone actually asked a novel or interesting question her brain had shut down and couldn’t cope.
A couple of weeks ago I interviewed Hugh Cornwell who wrote all the big hits for The Stranglers and now has a new album out. The last time I interviewed Hugh and the rest of the band I found them impossible to cope with and many swear words hit the airwaves of Glasgow, so much so that I was fired from presenting that particular show. This time, I studiously listened to the CD and did my research hoping to make amends, only to find as he arrived that I’d left all my hard worked questions at home. I rang my wife Debbie and asked her to email the notes but, as she makes Wilma Flintstone look at one with technology, I gave up and had to wing it. “I like the album’s diversity”, I started and soon cringed as Hugh came right back with “Really? Can you expand on that because I don’t think it’s diverse at all”.
I then interviewed singer Will Young for a network radio piece that was to be spread over five days, so you’d think his record company would appreciate the publicity and just let us get on with it. But no, they told me I had five minutes to do the whole thing. I was on the point of walking away when they relented, grudgingly, and upped our time to ten, constantly breaking in on my headphones to tell me to hurry up. Not at all relaxing.
The same happened with Mr T, my hero from The A Team, who I was asked to talk to last week. The PR people from Snickers had flown him over and said I could have five minutes. How kind. We started, only for them to interrupt as he and I discussed cancer, saying I was getting too personal. Credit Mr T who told them to shut up and promised they’d send me some Snicker bars for their bad manners. I’m still waiting.
Next day it was Michael Ball who is starring in Hairspray in the West End and has a new album out. I asked him to prove he really was partly Welsh and he sang their national anthem right through. Not being Welsh myself, it could have been Esperanto or Saturday Night Geordie he was singing, but the tune was right and the words seemed to scan.
Mick Taylor, the former Rolling Stones guitarist was next up but, despite all my homework, he appeared with someone I’d never heard of and I had to interview them together. As I staggered to the end, pretending I knew Mick’s friend, I was coincidentally forced to rush off to interview former Rolling Stones’ squeeze Marianne Faithfull, so Mick asked me to give her his love and say he’d been to a recent gig of hers in Holland. I later passed on his kisses and hugs to Ms Faithfull and told her he’d been to her gig. “What a lovely man he is, but why didn’t he come backstage and say hello?”, she asked. As she smiled, she then said in her husky, very upper crust, English accent, “what a c**t”.
Simply Red were on the agenda for interview the next day but, as Mick Hucknall’s in South America, the time difference meant me hanging around our studios till nine at night waiting for his call. I read all the papers, watched TV and wrote my autobiography in three volumes waiting for the call that never came. Mick had been given the wrong number and I went home empty handed.
I realise that detailing these banal frustrations of the past two weeks shows that I don’t have enough to worry about but I also hope it shows I’m not permanently on holiday. Every night while you are out clubbing or drinking champagne with super models, I’m at home researching for an interview and hoping not to put my foot in it. Along with all these interviews, throw in a daily radio show, my coaching of executives, flying off to record TV pilots in Sweden and waddling round the gym when I can get the time, and I hope you agree I really do need a wee holiday.
If you fancy taking over while I’m away then let me know, but don’t get too comfortable. When I return I want my job back because, the truth is, despite smelly old PR people and record company jobsworths, I’m having a ball.
I’m going to Portugal for a week’s holiday on Saturday and I want you all to say to yourself “that’s nice, Paul deserves a bit of a break”, because when I mentioned my vacation to a pal the other day he laughed and said “but your whole life’s a holiday”.
I guess I can’t complain about “my life” as I am indeed lucky, but a continual holiday? It’s hard work looking this good and being so popular, and you don’t want to know the frustrations I’ve had over past two weeks just going about my business. Actually, if you’re reading this blog, then perhaps you do.
I’ve interviewed a lot of celebrities over the past few weeks and I guess the knack is to make them feel appreciated and loved so that they relax and “give good interview”. The only way to do this, apart from my natural charm and charisma of course, is to show the interviewee respect by doing a lot of homework on them. There can be nothing more brain numbing than getting asked the same questions day after day.
The young actress Kristen Stewart, from the new mega successful movie Twilight, has said that she kept getting asked “What’s it like to kiss a vampire?” on the movie’s publicity tour, and it made her want to scream so much that when someone actually asked a novel or interesting question her brain had shut down and couldn’t cope.
A couple of weeks ago I interviewed Hugh Cornwell who wrote all the big hits for The Stranglers and now has a new album out. The last time I interviewed Hugh and the rest of the band I found them impossible to cope with and many swear words hit the airwaves of Glasgow, so much so that I was fired from presenting that particular show. This time, I studiously listened to the CD and did my research hoping to make amends, only to find as he arrived that I’d left all my hard worked questions at home. I rang my wife Debbie and asked her to email the notes but, as she makes Wilma Flintstone look at one with technology, I gave up and had to wing it. “I like the album’s diversity”, I started and soon cringed as Hugh came right back with “Really? Can you expand on that because I don’t think it’s diverse at all”.
I then interviewed singer Will Young for a network radio piece that was to be spread over five days, so you’d think his record company would appreciate the publicity and just let us get on with it. But no, they told me I had five minutes to do the whole thing. I was on the point of walking away when they relented, grudgingly, and upped our time to ten, constantly breaking in on my headphones to tell me to hurry up. Not at all relaxing.
The same happened with Mr T, my hero from The A Team, who I was asked to talk to last week. The PR people from Snickers had flown him over and said I could have five minutes. How kind. We started, only for them to interrupt as he and I discussed cancer, saying I was getting too personal. Credit Mr T who told them to shut up and promised they’d send me some Snicker bars for their bad manners. I’m still waiting.
Next day it was Michael Ball who is starring in Hairspray in the West End and has a new album out. I asked him to prove he really was partly Welsh and he sang their national anthem right through. Not being Welsh myself, it could have been Esperanto or Saturday Night Geordie he was singing, but the tune was right and the words seemed to scan.
Mick Taylor, the former Rolling Stones guitarist was next up but, despite all my homework, he appeared with someone I’d never heard of and I had to interview them together. As I staggered to the end, pretending I knew Mick’s friend, I was coincidentally forced to rush off to interview former Rolling Stones’ squeeze Marianne Faithfull, so Mick asked me to give her his love and say he’d been to a recent gig of hers in Holland. I later passed on his kisses and hugs to Ms Faithfull and told her he’d been to her gig. “What a lovely man he is, but why didn’t he come backstage and say hello?”, she asked. As she smiled, she then said in her husky, very upper crust, English accent, “what a c**t”.
Simply Red were on the agenda for interview the next day but, as Mick Hucknall’s in South America, the time difference meant me hanging around our studios till nine at night waiting for his call. I read all the papers, watched TV and wrote my autobiography in three volumes waiting for the call that never came. Mick had been given the wrong number and I went home empty handed.
I realise that detailing these banal frustrations of the past two weeks shows that I don’t have enough to worry about but I also hope it shows I’m not permanently on holiday. Every night while you are out clubbing or drinking champagne with super models, I’m at home researching for an interview and hoping not to put my foot in it. Along with all these interviews, throw in a daily radio show, my coaching of executives, flying off to record TV pilots in Sweden and waddling round the gym when I can get the time, and I hope you agree I really do need a wee holiday.
If you fancy taking over while I’m away then let me know, but don’t get too comfortable. When I return I want my job back because, the truth is, despite smelly old PR people and record company jobsworths, I’m having a ball.
Tuesday, March 10, 2009
War
www.paulcoia.com
Last weekend I flew to place I love. Stockholm is the home of snow and thermal underwear at this time of year and my pampered, hot blooded, body was dragged shivering over there to record a TV show.
The week before I arrived the temperatures had dropped to minus fifteen degrees, so you can see why The Swedes have to be ever more inventive in keeping themselves amused over winter and trying to keep up their spirits. When the killjoys banned smoking in public spaces, for example, the Scandinavians quickly found a way round this inconvenience and they can now get their nicotine fix without anyone knowing about it. And it’s all thanks to tea bags.
In Sweden, men and women carry small round tin cans in their pockets filled with little, rectangular tea bags which are stuffed with tobacco. They don’t boil them up with a kettle full of hot water however but, instead, stuff them whole and entire in their mouths and lay them over the top gum so that the area below their nose bulges out like a bad day at the dentist. They all look like they have a hair lip.
I can’t tell you how surprising it is the first time to see men taking out their used, saliva filled old tea bags while talking to you and stuffing a new one in there without breaking their conversational flow. Perhaps “surprising” isn’t the right word, but I’m trying to be polite here.
Anyway, brown teeth, cancerous gums and breath like the remnants of a trawlerman’s pipe doesn’t stop the Swedes from being very nice and kind and I looked forward to meeting many of them at dinner on Saturday evening. But, as we drove to the restaurant, the streets of Stockholm were deserted, almost as if the population knew I was coming and had decided to hide.
You may think I’m exaggerating but I promise you that the roads looked as if they’d been closed by a film company who were shooting Armageddon 2, all the bars were empty and the restaurants seemed filled with only echoing footsteps. Sweden had stayed at home on Saturday night and it was very eerie.
I later found out that the reason the capital was emptier than Paris Hilton’s head was because of a TV show. Everyone was at home watching A Song For Europe.
In the UK we find that completely unbelievable, but it’s true. Now I realise that for those of you reading this outside Europe the joys of A Song For Europe are a land of ecstasy and passion yet to be explored, so let me explain. And please don’t snigger.
Each year the countries that make up the continent of Europe recognise that there hasn’t been a Europe wide war since the nineteen forties so, like weekend warriors who dress up and recreate battles of the past, they remind themselves of the good old days by trying to beat the living daylights out of other countries by hurling unsettling and dangerous songs at each other.
The battlefield is usually a concert venue somewhere in Yugoslavia or Scandinavia and the event is hosted by two borderline local care in the community presenters who watch as each country’s songs explode on stage, the collateral damage inflicted on our ears leading to casualties on a massive scale, and you can almost hear shouts of “Incoming, Incoming” as one dreadful sheep herder after another takes to the stage to sing songs about the glories of cheese or inter marrying, with a chorus along the lines of “Fa, la la, la la, la lee”, while his partner plays a solo on the accordion.
In case you think I’m looking down on the whole event let me state clearly that, in this annual war, Britain bravely conjures up the Churchill spirit and gallantly loses every time. And we lose big. We can’t even win a song contest where being bad is good. We’re so bad, we’re just bad.
Our entry this year has been written by Andrew Lloyd Webber who has put together some off cuts from Cats or Phantom of the Opera and given these to Diane Warren, an American who has written more hit songs for Celine Dion and others than I have acne scars. She’s a star and should be above all this, but I can only assume Webber has threatened to kill her cats as she’s flown over to the UK and has had to adapt to the musical trench warfare. Webber and Warren have both now given us a song that is so bad it would have been removed by the publishers from a “My First Piano Book”, and I can promise you that kids would turn their noses up at any kindergarten recital and refuse to bang their tambourine and xylophones to this one.
Last year we came last, as we did in 2003, but at least we’re not political losers. Georgia has selected as its entry this year a disco band called 3G who echo the sentiments of their whole country by taking a swipe at the event’s hosts this year. Quite what Russia’s head Vladimir Putin will make of their song We Don’t Want A Put In, where they manage to rhyme Put In with Shoot ‘em, is anyone’s guess.
Countries vote tactically for other, friendly, countries and so Norway’s entry, a band called Wig Wam who look like Seventies glam rockers led by a transsexual fat lady with big sunglasses, came to Stockholm to beg for votes, saying the Swedish entry has no chance.
And this is just the start. The contest isn’t until May but before then, if I’m exposed to much more of this Eurovision stuff, I’ll have to take up smoking to calm my nerves. Or chewing tea bags.
Last weekend I flew to place I love. Stockholm is the home of snow and thermal underwear at this time of year and my pampered, hot blooded, body was dragged shivering over there to record a TV show.
The week before I arrived the temperatures had dropped to minus fifteen degrees, so you can see why The Swedes have to be ever more inventive in keeping themselves amused over winter and trying to keep up their spirits. When the killjoys banned smoking in public spaces, for example, the Scandinavians quickly found a way round this inconvenience and they can now get their nicotine fix without anyone knowing about it. And it’s all thanks to tea bags.
In Sweden, men and women carry small round tin cans in their pockets filled with little, rectangular tea bags which are stuffed with tobacco. They don’t boil them up with a kettle full of hot water however but, instead, stuff them whole and entire in their mouths and lay them over the top gum so that the area below their nose bulges out like a bad day at the dentist. They all look like they have a hair lip.
I can’t tell you how surprising it is the first time to see men taking out their used, saliva filled old tea bags while talking to you and stuffing a new one in there without breaking their conversational flow. Perhaps “surprising” isn’t the right word, but I’m trying to be polite here.
Anyway, brown teeth, cancerous gums and breath like the remnants of a trawlerman’s pipe doesn’t stop the Swedes from being very nice and kind and I looked forward to meeting many of them at dinner on Saturday evening. But, as we drove to the restaurant, the streets of Stockholm were deserted, almost as if the population knew I was coming and had decided to hide.
You may think I’m exaggerating but I promise you that the roads looked as if they’d been closed by a film company who were shooting Armageddon 2, all the bars were empty and the restaurants seemed filled with only echoing footsteps. Sweden had stayed at home on Saturday night and it was very eerie.
I later found out that the reason the capital was emptier than Paris Hilton’s head was because of a TV show. Everyone was at home watching A Song For Europe.
In the UK we find that completely unbelievable, but it’s true. Now I realise that for those of you reading this outside Europe the joys of A Song For Europe are a land of ecstasy and passion yet to be explored, so let me explain. And please don’t snigger.
Each year the countries that make up the continent of Europe recognise that there hasn’t been a Europe wide war since the nineteen forties so, like weekend warriors who dress up and recreate battles of the past, they remind themselves of the good old days by trying to beat the living daylights out of other countries by hurling unsettling and dangerous songs at each other.
The battlefield is usually a concert venue somewhere in Yugoslavia or Scandinavia and the event is hosted by two borderline local care in the community presenters who watch as each country’s songs explode on stage, the collateral damage inflicted on our ears leading to casualties on a massive scale, and you can almost hear shouts of “Incoming, Incoming” as one dreadful sheep herder after another takes to the stage to sing songs about the glories of cheese or inter marrying, with a chorus along the lines of “Fa, la la, la la, la lee”, while his partner plays a solo on the accordion.
In case you think I’m looking down on the whole event let me state clearly that, in this annual war, Britain bravely conjures up the Churchill spirit and gallantly loses every time. And we lose big. We can’t even win a song contest where being bad is good. We’re so bad, we’re just bad.
Our entry this year has been written by Andrew Lloyd Webber who has put together some off cuts from Cats or Phantom of the Opera and given these to Diane Warren, an American who has written more hit songs for Celine Dion and others than I have acne scars. She’s a star and should be above all this, but I can only assume Webber has threatened to kill her cats as she’s flown over to the UK and has had to adapt to the musical trench warfare. Webber and Warren have both now given us a song that is so bad it would have been removed by the publishers from a “My First Piano Book”, and I can promise you that kids would turn their noses up at any kindergarten recital and refuse to bang their tambourine and xylophones to this one.
Last year we came last, as we did in 2003, but at least we’re not political losers. Georgia has selected as its entry this year a disco band called 3G who echo the sentiments of their whole country by taking a swipe at the event’s hosts this year. Quite what Russia’s head Vladimir Putin will make of their song We Don’t Want A Put In, where they manage to rhyme Put In with Shoot ‘em, is anyone’s guess.
Countries vote tactically for other, friendly, countries and so Norway’s entry, a band called Wig Wam who look like Seventies glam rockers led by a transsexual fat lady with big sunglasses, came to Stockholm to beg for votes, saying the Swedish entry has no chance.
And this is just the start. The contest isn’t until May but before then, if I’m exposed to much more of this Eurovision stuff, I’ll have to take up smoking to calm my nerves. Or chewing tea bags.
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