At least we now know how, if you are a comedian whose career is becalmed, you can make yourself the centre of attention. You deploy one of the new swearwords. “Spaz” and “retard” are favourites and, as this week has, shown, “mong” can do the trick pretty well, too.

There has, perhaps unsurprisingly, been scant sympathy for the professional jockeys who have objected to new rules and penalties for excessive use of the whip. The right of small men to hit sensitive animals for human profit and sport is hardly a case for the European Court of Human Rights.

And finally, here was an item of news to bring a smile to the nation’s lips after a succession of stories about falling incomes, rising costs of living, inflation and spiralling unemployment. Someone had just been awarded a huge unearned bonus of over £101 million. The word “bonus” was not, of course, used. Had the money been paid to a banker or chief executive, it would have been reported at the business end of the news, accomied by furrowed brows and disapproving soundbites.

Not for the first time, that great art offensive known as the Cultural Olympiad is giving cause for serious concern. The Olympics are essentially a marketing opportunity – once every half century or so, we have the chance to show the world why Britain is such a wonderfully dynamic, creative and amusing country. While the running, jumping and pedalling are happening elsewhere, various events will showcase our cultural life.

All that stuff about the environment, for example. It turns out we don’t have to take it seriously after all! Over the past year, ministers have been dutifully churning out the acceptable line – green this, sustainable that – but apparently their message was just an emission of hot air.

It was the debate around last-minute changes to the Prime Minister’s speech which cleared things up. Until this week, there had been a general feeling that there was too much waste and profligacy around. We had all become pampered, hooked on credit. It was bad for us, and bad for the planet. Now, it turns out, restraint is a bad thing. Spending is good, and over-spending is even better. The fuss over Cameron’s speech, combined with a small dip in supermarket profits, caused pundits to hurry into the TV studios to explain that the idea of reducing personal indebtedness was disastrous.

There were grim interviews. Shoppers revealed that they were only buying what they needed. Motorists were admitting that, such is the price of the petrol, they sometimes actually walked to their destination. Once these would have been good news items; today they are a cue for government concern.

Now that it is clear that ministers’ green talk was little more than political marketing, the reasons behind other policies become clear. Seen environmentally, the idea of encouraging a building bonanza across the countryside, rather than on brownfield sites, or the creation of large out-of-town shopping centres, seems reckless. But if the only criterion is to get money coursing through the system, then these policies are entirely logical. More roads will be needed, for more cars, using more petrol: it is all terrifically good news for the economy.

As for the green message, thanks are due to the Housing minister, Grant Shapps, for illustrating how that works. On The Politics Show he explained what “sustainable” means in the contest of “sustainable development”: “Sustainability is something best judged when you know the lay of the land and, guess what, the people who know the lay of the land live locally and understand how their particular communities operate, and sustainability will be judged at a local level.” In other words, it means pretty much what you want it to mean. It is a warm, fuzzy, meaningless word included to indicate a fake concern for the environment.

Completing, rather appropriately, a perfect circle of policy is Eric Pickles, that living symbol of belt-busting growth. In cheerful defiance of environmental thinking about waste, the Local Government minister proved that significant money can be found, even in an age of cuts. His great cause is the right of every English man and woman to have the remains of their takeaway chicken masala collected weekly. Recycling is for wimps, disposing of household rubbish responsibly at a municipal tip is something for which you should now pay – but the throwaway society can continue to produce millions of tons of landfill, thanks to public money and the generosity of Eric the binman.

No one can accuse the Government of inconsistency. The message from Cameron, Shapps, Pickles and others is as plain as it can be. Spending , expansion and profit are the only priorities now. Buy, develop, consume, throw away – and if anyone demurs, explain that you are doing it all “sustainably”.

Independent, 7 October 2011

Sometimes the wife refuses to play the game. Jane Clark was maddeningly philosophical while her husband, Alan, was in full rut. Others with straying husbands follow the Mary Archer/ Norma Major approach, and resolve their problems in the old-fashioned, private way. Increasingly, though, the wife in a marriage that has very publicly gone wrong obliges by speaking out. It is the 21st century, and she is damned if she is going to stand by as her husband skips off with his new squeeze, occasionally muttering the usual clichés of regret.

It is always a terrible mistake. By a cruel paradox, the more a deserted wife resists victim status by speaking her mind, the more of a victim she appears. As Margaret Cook once showed, and Vicky Pryce is now demonstrating, the brief moment of satisfaction of press coverage is nothing beside the lasting harm it does, publicly to reputation and privately to the process of emotional repair.

In our own lives, we know that life is complex, and that few if any marriages conform to the villain-and-victim model of Victorian melodramas, but in coverage of public marriages old attitudes live on. People like to have reassuring prejudices reinforced: the randy husband, the suffering, self-sacrificing wife, the scheming other woman, the happy home destroyed by selfishness and lust.

When the wife speaks out, the fairytale version of events endures. However hurt and angry Pryce feels about the way her marriage to Chris Huhne ended, allowing herself to play the media game merely makes it worse. Anyone who has been through the end of a long-term marriage will know that it is difficult, perhaps impossible, to keep the unhappiness to oneself. There comes a moment, though, when sharing the misery around does more harm than good.

There are always those who rather enjoy being part of the drama. In a Guardian interview this weekend, Pryce said: “I have friends who say if they were me they wouldn’t get up in the morning. And every morning, I think: ‘How am I going to get through the day?’” Could she not see that, like the “friends” who make her feel worse with their sympathy, an interviewer is an emotion-junkie. Pryce may have wanted to talk about her impressive career and plans, but the journalist is after the money-shot and, sure enough (“I am not sure her eyes are not filling”), she gets it.

Folk wisdom of the age dictates that expressed emotion brings relief, but the examples of Pryce and others tell a more awkward truth. Don’t share your pain. The best way to be strong and avoid being seen as a victim is to keep quiet, and get on with your life.

Big certainly, but is it art?

Those of us who find the conceptual art of Mark Wallinger, with its giant horses and gallery imitations of Brian Haw’s anti-Iraq display, just a touch gimmicky will probably not hurry out to buy a new study of his work, written by Martin Herbert. All the same, it includes reassuring news about some of the Wallinger projects which we have been spared.

A plan to put 10 huge white orbs around the Olympic Park was rejected, as was an “extraordinarily long” photograph of the Derby finish on the Heathrow Express. An artwork which involved dropping $15,000 into an American river was thought to be ecologically risky. The world’s tallest flagpole was not, after all, erected in South Shields. A vast heart-shaped balloon almost, but not quite, made it into the sky about Folkestone. The 50-metre high horse, planned for Ebbsfleet in Kent, has posed problems of structure and finance, its cost currently around £12m.

There is a pattern to this work. It is big, excessive, egocentric. Its scope is presumably intended to provide an ironic commentary on something or other, but there is also an arrogance at its centre: the artist wants to impose himself massively on everyday scenes. These monstrous installations undeniably sum up the mood of the moment – but not in a good way.

On the endless celebrity circuit

In his bizarre and compelling new book One on One, Craig Brown recounts 101 unlikely but true encounters of the famous, linking them together like a daisy-chain of celebrity meetings, beginning and ending with Adolf Hitler. So George Galloway meets Michael Barrymore who meets Diana, Princess of Wales, who meets Princess Grace of Monaco, and so on.

The effect of the book is to confirm the impression that the famous live in their own world in which differences of background and attitude are as nothing on the common ground of shared celebrity. To anyone reading the book, the news that Sir Salman Rushdie has recently been going out with Courtney Love, former lead singer of Hole, widow of Kurt Cobain and an impressively consistent bad girl in the worlds of rock and Hollywood, would seem only natural.

The question of who Courtney Love will next meet in the endless celebrity daisy-chain is trickier, particularly since she currently plans to take a business studies course at Oxford. Lord Sugar, perhaps, or Duncan Bannatyne.

Independent, 4 October 2011

*

After a while, experienced professional authors learn the importance of the calendar.  They learn that it is not so much which editor  to approach  with what project, as when to do it. Trying to get a publisher to take an interest in a project is as delicate a matter of timing as asking someone to go to bed with you  -   too soon and they find it presumptuous;  too late and their interest has shifted elsewhere.

When to make your move?  All that the Endpaper think-tank can do is to present the publishing calendar, with its seasonal ebbs and flows, so that authors have at least a chance of catching a brief of moment of milky sunlight before the storm clouds gather once more.

January. Nothing ever happens  in January. Everyone is too depressed about Christmas, which was without doubt the most disastrous in living memory.  Mention a future book idea to an editor at this moment, and all you will hear is incredulous laughter. The few books which are actually published in January disappear without trace. Their authors have been told that this is a good month to ‘catch the book token market’, one of publishing’s more hilarious lies.

February.  The returns are back from Christmas. They are far worse than anyone feared. Even the celebrity books flopped, and it is widely agreed that the industry must return to publishing real books by real authors.  The sales department merely insists that authors of these real books should be  well known. Editors start hanging out at film premières and in TV chat-show audiences.

March. It was such a disastrous Christmas that publishers have had to ‘re-structure’, which is trade-speak for sacking a lot of people. February is a month of strategy meetings, at which words like ‘synergy’, ‘digital’ , ‘platform’ and ‘holistic’ fill the air. Occasionally, for light relief, the entire corporation goes to a hotel for a team-building weekend, from which staff will return hating each other  even more than before.  At the Bologna Book Fair, children’s publishers take their annual works outing.

April. Sexual yearning has publishing in its grip throughout the year but, for obvious reasons, it is particularly acute as Spring does its cruel work. Publishers meet at the London Book Fair and hungrily negotiate with one another, only occasionally mentioning books.  Only the bravest or most foolish of authors will attempt to interrupt these vernal  rituals.

May. We are now well into the year, and publishers suddenly discover that there is a hole in the autumn schedule where their Christmas bestseller should be. They decide that maybe they do need a ghosted celebrity book after all. Surely there must be a comedian or chef who has not been published. Editors are ordered to  stop reading manuscripts and to watch The X Factor and Celebrity Big Brother instead. The ghost-writing industry is now in overdrive; everyone else has stalled.

 June. Editors fly to America  for the big BookExpo conference,  and return gloomier than ever. They have discovered that the American book trade is in a far worse state than the British, or far better. Either way, it is depressing. In the UK bookshops, it  is quieter than in living memory. If you happen to have a book published this month, editors will look at you with a one-word message in their eyes: remainder. They are clearing their desks in preparation for holidays, and so no new project is welcome.

July.  They found their big Christmas book! A comedian who had written a couple of memoirs thinks he can dictate enough for a third if the price is right.  There are meetings about marketing and packaging the big book. Meanwhile, a  few new titles are dolefully released into the market under the pretence that they will be “picked up in reviewers’ holiday round-ups”,  another of publishing’s  hilarious lies.

August. Holidays. Nothing happens.  Editors, sitting by a swimming-pool, try to write the novel they have promised themselves. They return, three chapters done, in a foul mood.

September. It is the busiest time of the year. There is the post-holiday catch-up, the pre- Frankfurt Book Fair panic. Unless you are Stephen Fry, Alan Titchmarsh or Dawn French , it is pointless to publish a book now. The word in the trade is that this year’s celebrity books are better than last year’s. It is a bad time to talk to an editor about ideas; in the current climate, ideas are the last thing she needs.

October. There is anticipation, tension and clammy excitement in the air. Meetings, drinks, lunches and dinners are being organised  – time, place, items on the agenda. It is the Frankfurt Bok Fair, the event where by tradition the British book trade finds its annual sexual relief in desperate, doomed adulterous affairs, conducted in German hotels. Pre- or post-Frankfurt, it will be impossible to get any sense out of publishers. The code-word  for this mating frenzy is that ‘foreign publishers are in town’.

November. There were reports that Christmas came early, but they proved optimistic. The atmosphere in the trade is gloomier than it has been since June. The affair which your publisher started  at Frankfurt has ended, as it always does, in guilt, regret and self-loathing. The big celebrity book is piled high in the shops but the public seems to think that, because the comedian has written two bad memoirs before, a third one will be no better. At Christmas parties, resentment hangs in the air like stale farts. It is generally agreed that there is one cause for the current problem: authors like you.

December. It is the worst Christmas ever. No, seriously, if you thought last year was bad, you should see the disaster unfolding in the shops right now. Obviously, it would be absurd for publishers to consider your ideas now. Besides, they are about to take their holiday. When should you try? Maybe some time next year.

More invaluable insights into the literary and publishing life are to be found in my Writer’s Shed

The Author is the house magazine of the Society of Authors and appears four times a year.

They have never been short of opinions. In the 1960s, they started using stroppy imperatives – Make love, not war! Give peace a chance! Never trust anyone over 30! – and have continued to pronounce bossily about this and that ever since.

Some of them are still famous, and are letting off one last blast of opinion in their memoirs. Keith Richards looked back and concluded that “life is an experiment, and it’s just a matter of getting the alchemical or chemical combination right”. Jilly Cooper has revised a guide to love and marriage. Joanna Lumley has been laying down the law, too. It is just fine for an older woman to wear clothes designed for teenagers, she has said. As for the idea that she should have short hair after the age of 40, “bollocks to that! I want my hair long and I’m going to keep my long hair”.

The point about the advice of those who had a busy and exciting time during the Sixties and Seventies is that it is liberating and sensible, and disproves the tired cliché, so beloved of politicians and rent-a-gob moralists in the press, that many of today’s ills were somehow germinated by the attitudes of 45 years ago. It is worth remembering how many of the slogans of those years have been proved true over time.

Let it all hang out. Surely only the dreariest killjoy can still argue against the all-hang-out option. Joanna Lumley with her hot pants and long hair, Ronnie Wood with his young girlfriend, Lulu skipping about on Strictly Come Dancing: each in their own way has proved that to put dignity before fun, to “act one’s age”, is a sort of death.

Take time to smell the flowers. Yes, Chris Grayling, Yvette Cooper, Danny Alexander – it’s you we’re talking to. Your glazed, ambitious eyes, your Whitehall pallor, your aversion to anything resembling a joke all tell the same story. It has been a long time since you lingered by the flower-bed. Attend to your careers, but remember this great truth. Life is what happens to you when you’re busy making other plans.

Stick it to The Man. For years, the old hippies have been warning you about The Man. And what happened in 2008? The Man did his thing and the world paid the price. “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss,” was the way the old warning went, but no one was listening. “Won’t get fooled again”? Some hope.

Up against the wall, redneck mother. This suggestion may have been a little crude in policy terms, but it showed an impassioned commitment to politics which subsequent generations have failed to match. With even more redneck mothers around today than ever, often wearing Armani suits and advising the Government, this cheery call to arms remains relevant.

If you can’t be with the one you love, love the one you’re with. One of the most useful legacies of the alternative generation was the blurring of boundaries between love for mankind and love for someone with whom you would like to have sex as soon as possible. When the two became confused, infidelity became an act of global altruism. There has been a lot of this kind of love over the past few decades, and very beautiful it was, too.

Kick out the jams. Nobody has ever discovered what the jams were, nor why it was so imperative to kick them out, but the message was repeated on virtually every radio show of the time. We should play safe and keep kicking them out. After all, the Sixties generation have been right about everything else.

Independent, 30 September 2011

The impulse behind the campaign is commendable enough. The British are world leaders when it comes to leaving behind them a trail of rubbish, and every year the littering habit becomes more grubbily ingrained. Schoolchildren, nagged in class about polar bears and rainforests, cheerfully blight their own environment. Adults do it, so why shouldn’t they? The right to litter seems part of British culture, without the slightest sense of guilt attached. In 2010, the cost to councils of cleaning the streets hit a new record, £858 million.

Yet there is something depressing about the talking rubbish bins. It is as if, like a child in early toilet training, we need a little treat when we go in the right place. Our reward for being very, very good is a special message from a famous person. It goes without saying that there is a big idea behind all this. The nudge theory, currently being examined by the “behavioural insights team” at the Cabinet Office, suggests that we require little prompts and prizes to encourage us to behave responsibly.

Infantilising people, though, is hardly likely to make them more adult. Rewarding an activity which should be automatic merely makes it seem unusual. There may even be an instinctive awareness that the whole thing is faintly bogus: a campaign against litter is itself littering open spaces with the chirpy voices of TV personalities.

The problem is a familiar one: there is no real sense of belonging. The idea that dropping stuff, or behaving badly in other ways, makes life less pleasant for everyone, including the dropper, is not part of the way many people think. There is a great “they” out there. “They” might disapprove of litter but “they”, also, will be around to clear it up.

Conservative thinking may support the general idea of personal responsibility but almost always the same solutions, based on profit and rewards, are offered. At the very time that small litterers are being encouraged to use bins, those trying to get rid of large rubbish responsibly at municipal tips are required to pay for the privilege.

Beyond litter and waste, this question of personal responsibility, of learning not to busk through life expecting binmen – or politicians – to clear up the mess, is becoming difficult to ignore. It is reported, for example, that the Government has realised that other environmental matters need to be addressed by individuals rather than much-hyped public policy. It is soon likely to be encouraging householders to plant trees, dig ponds and adapt their houses in order to counteract future changes in climate. The grand international initiatives designed to cut emissions are not going to be enough.

It will take more than a nudge, or witty words from a celebrity in a rubbish bin, to change behaviour. If the next generation is to do any better than their parents and grandparents are doing, a campaign of education and public information is needed. It would convey a simple, important message: in spite of the greedy, consumerist messages sent out by the advertisers and retailers of the throwaway society, waste matters.

Chris Langham should be forgiven

The next few weeks will reveal whether that awkward process, the professional rehabilitation of Chris Langham, is going to work or not. The actor, who was jailed in 2007 for downloading 15 videos of child pornography, is to star in a low-budget British film Black Pond. His performance, according to the Guardian’s Decca Aitkenhead, is “like the best of Alan Rickman and Steve Coogan fused into one”.

At his trial, Langham was adjudged not to be a sexual predator, but the wider world has been pitiless since his release. In spite of the usual warm words, there has been no work. The BBC were so embarrassed by its association with him that the first two series of The Thick of It, in which he starred, rarely if ever appear in compilation programmes or repeats.

The British film and TV business now faces a test. The fear that even commissioning work from Langham somehow excuses paedophilia is essentially a tabloid smear. It is time for the industry, and for audiences, to show that they are more forgiving and adult than the worst of our press would have us believe.

Our native talent for bad parenting

Coming bottom in international surveys, particularly those of happiness and sexual competence, is part of being British.

All the same, there are moments when the consistent level of our badness at everything becomes difficult to accept.

According to a new book, Too Much, Too Soon?, parenting skills in the United Kingdom are among the worst in the developed world. Up to half of the five-year-olds in one study were not yet ready for school because of their “sedentary lifestyles”.

A widespread inability to sit still caused particular concern. British parents now “live in an age of almost seemingly ever-mounting anxiety”, a concerned academic has explained. I wonder where that anxiety comes from.

Independent, 27 September 2011

The excuses of would-be autobiographers vary. Mick Jagger, who was once commissioned to write an autobiography but who ended up returning the publisher’s advance, said on one occasion that his story was too boring and on another, almost as unconvincingly, that he was unable to remember what had happened in his life. Billy Joel, who pulled the plug on his book at the last moment, claimed that writing it had reminded him that he was no longer interested in the past. Others have said the process was simply too painful or exposing.

Julian Assange, the interesting and peculiar super-hacker, has come up with a weightier explanation for changing his mind about authorising his autobiography. “All memoir is prostitution,” he told the publishers. There is a problem with this somewhat prim pronouncement. Assange had been paid a large sum of money. He had worked for 50 hours on it with Andrew O’Hagan, a classy ghost-writer by any standard. Most prostitutes, having charged a punter before pulling out of the deal, would at least hand back the money before complaining. Unsurprisingly, the publishers decided to press ahead with publication without the author’s blessing.

Assange has made an interesting point about memoirs all the same. Writing autobiographically, like prostitution, involves impersonation. The person who emerges on the page is inevitably a variation on the real thing – more (or less) well-behaved, less (or more) chaotic and confused. To turn the muddle of a life into a story which can be understood by someone else requires editing, tidying-up, streamlining. The result will often leave the writer feeling reduced in some way. Real life is strange and subtle in a way non-fiction rarely reflects, however well-written. The memoirist, like the prostitute, is putting on a show in which tricks and fakery are involved.

When that show consists of memories and experiences, the effect of revelation can be upsetting. Looking back to present one’s story to the world, whether in an online blog or in a book for publication, is almost always unhealthy. Public regret or guilt about things that have gone wrong is pointless; public satisfaction over a job well done can seem smug. Neither impinge helpfully on the present, and until someone is truly in his or her dotage, it is surely in the present and the future that happiness resides.

The unlikely line-up of reluctant memoirists – Jagger, Billy Joel and Julian Assange – are in agreement about one thing above all: they would prefer to concentrate on what they are doing now than what has happened in the past.

An autobiography, however good, echoes to the sound of a door being slammed shut forever. Before his great book Life appeared, there was something interestingly incomplete about Keith Richards. He was a wonderful, shambolic work in progress, and it was impossible to tell how that work would end up. Now we know. The book has been published, the tale told. In some strange way, it put a full stop to his life. The normal things that evolve and change – careers, relationships, personalities – are immobilised by the act of memoir. Richards is slightly less interesting now that he has told his story.

The same process takes place when eminent authors – Kingsley Amis, Anthony Burgess, Doris Lessing – write their autobiographies. By looking back and closing the door, they are admitting that what is most interesting and important about them has already happened.

Independent, 23 September 2011