Love and Liberty

As we’re in Glasgow, the city where my Dad was born and to which Alex Salmond is so eager to make me an alien, I thought the First Minister deserved some rigorous intellectual analysis. What do his ‘Independence-Lite-Ambiguity-Heavy’ reassurances to a sceptical Scotland really mean?

‘So I want us to move out, and you’re nervous you won’t like the new place. But it’s OK! Putting Britain through a divorce they don’t want and stiffing them with the rent won’t change anything. We’ll still be able to shag them whenever we want and borrow all their stuff – just no strings! What do you mean, you’re not convinced? How could anyone resist my charms?’

You know, he sounds just like a load of other men I’ve heard boasting after their divorce.

Just not for very long after.

Labels: British Politics, Comedy, Nationalism, Scotland, SNP

Last time I blogged – a month ago, whoops, various uncomfortable reasons – I excoriated nasty Labour and Tory smears. This morning, I must apologise. In the interests of political balance, I regret that I omitted to mention any SNP smears. Fortunately, to celebrate Alex Salmond’s hijacking of a Scottish national holiday to announce his delusional plans for absolute power despite winning only a third of the vote (just like Labour at Westminster), Andrew Reeves brings news of an SNP hatchet man who, while being paid by the public, ran a vicious anonymous smear website (just like Labour’s Damian McBride).

I’m sorry, I must apologise again. It’s not quite true to say that the SNP is as bad as Labour.

The SNP, of course, are demanding to get everything absolutely their own way on slightly less than a third of the vote; Labour does the same on slightly more than a third of the vote (though, to be fair to Alex Salmond, at least he put himself before the Scottish people as potential First Minister in the election. Gordon Brown, of course, wasn’t the Leader of the Labour Party at the last General Election. And, er, the Labour Party didn’t get to vote for him either. Good job he’s turned out so well).

And I’m sorry, I must apologise yet again. It’s not quite true to say that the SNP is as bad as Labour over the smear, either.

Gordon Brown’s hatchet man Damien McBride was caught out before he managed to launch his anonymous smear website.

Alex Salmond’s hatchet man Mark MacLachlan has been running his anonymous smear, hate and bullying blog for two years, while paid by the Scottish taxpayer to run the office of Mike Russell… The senior SNP minister we’ve all seen in the news in the last week in charge of getting them absolute power. Trustworthy guy, eh?


Alex Salmond, of course, has not said sorry.

Labels: Blogs, British Politics, Scotland

Have you caught any of BBC Four’s “This is Scotland” season? Because some of it makes you think, ‘No, it really isn’t’. A rare showing of Culloden was impressive, only a few weeks after I praised it, but as for last weekend’s outing for Brigadoon… It’s a textbook example of a story which, when someone tells it to you in a few lines, really captures your imagination – but which, when you actually sit through it, makes a terrible movie. An enchanted old village appearing from the mist just once a century… What could possibly go wrong? Go on, guess.

Perhaps it’s that I lack patience with musical theatre – I know, dock my gay points – except in rare cases, and that though Almost Like Being In Love is a good tune, the rest of the songs here are syrupy and go on for ever. Perhaps it’s the distracting accents. Now, every American producer knows that there are only three ‘English’ accents: upper class (evil, which permits intelligence, or inbred and very dim); Cockerney (lovable, poor and stupid); and Scotch / Oirish, which are of course the same (rustic, poor, quaint and stupid). In this quaint little story set in the quaint little Scottish Highlands, this realistic range of accents is on full display – while the heroes are, of course, American (think of it like An American Werewolf In London, except that they start singing instead of getting bitten. It’s horrific).

Welcome To Brigadoon – You’ll Never Leave

My main problem with the film, though, is that a mythic return to the Eighteenth Century is very much more attractive as a dimly imagined myth, and that when you’re invited to step into the past, you’d much rather it stayed in the past. While the village is supposed to have made a deal with God, it seems more like hell on Earth.

It goes like this. Back in 1754 – two centuries to the day before the story is set – Brigadoon was put under attack by witches, and prayed for deliverance. So they were snatched out of time to escape destruction, and the village now drifts back into reality for just one day every hundred years. So far, so intriguing. Unfortunately, in the film producers’ quest to expand an intriguing one-line idea to as long and turgid a movie as possible, they then strip as much magic as possible out of the story: audiences will swallow an enchanted village that lives one day a century without batting an eyelid, they reckon, but we couldn’t possibly ask them to believe in witches.

But if the big threat in the movie isn’t the return of the witches in a new sorcerous assault, or if it’s implied God didn’t save Brigadoon from an attack by real witches at all, what could the God-fearing people of the village have yanked themselves out of history’s progress to save themselves from?

Ah.

Well, there’s a clue in tourist Jeff’s line on witches, “Oh, we have ’em; we just pronounce it differently,” but the village’s raison d’être is made quite explicit by the schoolteacher: “Oh, I know there’s no such thing,” he says of witches – just women they didn’t approve of. Yes, Brigadoon is social conservatism gone mad. The terrifying ‘attack’ and threat of ‘destruction’ was not physical but their unelected leaders’ view of moral, and the religious maniacs cried out in their surety that they couldn’t win by persuasion, ‘Stop the world – we want to get off!’

The biggest surprise to modern audiences, more even than the jawdropping misogyny and wandering accents, is that the tourists are American and the scary intolerant control freaks living in another century British. Nowadays, surely the film would have to have visitors from this side of the Atlantic discovering a mysterious village in some landlocked part of the United States that vanished from reality for fear the gays are getting married.

Clearly, some of the filmmakers realised that this was a monstrously scary form of social conservatism even for 1954, because it’s deeply schizophrenic about its sympathies. It’s a huge romance, with one of our modern American souls falling in love with the place and one of its people – and who couldn’t fall for Gene Kelly and Cyd Charisse dancing around each other, and hope that love conquers all?

Well, his friend Jeff, for one, who as played by Van Johnson is a breath of urban, cynical sanity, with lines like “I’m a strange man, and you’re a mighty strange woman,” and “Is it formal, or shall I wear my Napoleon hat?” And then you discover that – jerking against the chain of the romance, the script and the enchanted hellhole – some of the young people are desperate to escape (and no, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to have people forgetting / missing the outside world so much after two nights for them, but I’ll let that pass), and it turns out that no-one can ever leave, or the whole spell will collapse. You can’t even do an ‘exchange’. Gee, thanks. How much more repressive can this set-up get? I’m glad you asked, because of course one of the poor desperate prisoners makes a break for it, and there’s a hunt. Which, inevitably, requires a killing, even if it’s accidental (and again, I sense the scriptwriter who’s in love with this conservative utopia wresting the script back from the one who isn’t for a moment to stop the village dictators being so blatantly the villains by deliberate murder).

The idea at the heart of Brigadoon is a powerful one, borrowed from a German folk tale and borrowed by many other stories in turn, even a secret location protected by a “Brigadoon Circuit” in one of the finest Doctor Who novels – though in Robin of Sherwood’s Cromm Cruac and Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) : A Man of Substance, both splendid pieces of television, each village has more blatantly made a deal with a devil – but not only is the film dreadfully dull, its social and sexual politics are diabolical.


On the other hand, this is just the film you want to watch to make you appreciate the go-ahead, all mod cons, funky charms of Bournemouth, should anyone be heading there soon.

Labels: Bigotry, Film, Liberal Democrat Conferences, Music, Religion, Reviews, Robin Hood, Scotland, Utopia

The best of luck to Jo Swinson, the Liberal Democrat MP on tonight’s Question Time. She’s talented, intelligent, engaging, fiercely principled, and one of the few MPs to have been publishing her expenses online for many months. But, because she’s the youngest MP, and a woman, and good-looking – and, I suspect, because she’s a Liberal Democrat – the Daily Telegraph last week dumped a torrent of misogynist smears on her. With wealthy Tories claiming for servants’ quarters, moats and duck houses, and not-so-wealthy Labour MPs dodging taxes and claiming for non-existent mortgages, what did the Torygraph attack Jo for?

They plastered a full page and more on the outrageous slur that she wears make-up. Which she didn’t claim on expenses, and which even the Torygraph didn’t say she did – though the BBC and the Scotsman (clue to the sexual politics in the name there) did claim that even though, er, you can literally see at a glance that’s not true (she handed in a receipt with three items clearly marked as Parliamentary expenses; she explicitly asked only for those; she was only reimbursed for those; but on the same receipt were a few small make-up items she’d paid for with her own money and never asked the taxpayer to give her a penny for). Well smeared, Torygraph.

Why does the Tories’ house newspaper want to damage her with these obvious lies? Because she’s a superb MP. She’s dangerous. Just last week, another newspaper named her as Scotland’s hardest-working MP, and earlier this year the Torygraph themselves praised her for being the MP who led the opposition to the Labour Government’s attempt to exempt MPs and their expenses from freedom of information!

Two political memories spring to mind.

When I was just starting to notice politics, in the early ’80s – about the time that Jo was born – I noticed that all anyone ever said about Shirley Williams was that she was badly dressed, had her hair all over the place, looked a mess… In short, that she was a woman and didn’t look after her appearance, because that was apparently the only thing that mattered. I wondered why I never heard the same about all the men in their horrible ’80s suits that didn’t fit.

You can bet that if Jo dressed badly or didn’t wear make-up, the Torygraph would lead on that, too.

My other memory is first meeting Jo, about ten years ago, at a Lib Dem Youth and Students Conference. We were on different sides in a debate, and it got a bit heated. I had a lot more debating experience, and I won… But she listened, and decided that I’d got it right after all. She’s still grown-up enough to listen to people, but nowadays I suspect I’d lose any debate when she was on the other side. Because not only is she very bright, and usually right, but she’s very much more engaging than my ‘Mr Shouty’ persona.

I hope she wins tonight, as she often does, and sticks it to the Torygraph in the best way possible – by showing that she’s a brilliant MP, and they’re just jealous, sad old men.


Others have written at greater length and with far more detail, evidence and practical tips than I have. For a balanced view, I particularly recommend Caron and Caron again, Jennie, Costigan (on the Guardian jumping on the sexist bandwagon) and James, displaying the Torygraph’s disgusting coverage , and then James again, who makes me seem positively demure but provides an excellent example of his well-deserved reputation as the Lib Dem blogosphere’s tactical nuclear bastard.

Labels: Bigotry, British Politics, Liberal Democrats, Newspapers, Scotland, UKIP

Yesterday, Caron revealed the horror of Alex Salmond’s attempt a Scottish independent Eurovision entry. Tonight, instead, you can see the proper Scottish entry on BBC4 at 9pm (well, probably more like 9.25, as it’s the climax of the show). And unlike Andrew Lloyd-Webber’s postmodern ‘Please let me win’ song, Pif Paf Pof is a proper Eurovision song about shagging. The High Life was perhaps the Nineties’ finest sit-com, and tonight it’s Dug, one of the finest episodes – Alan Cumming shooting to stardom, Forbes Masson somehow not, Siobhan Redmond and Patrick Ryecart showing just how very funny they can be.

Alan Cumming is Air Scotia trolley dolly Sebastian Flight with Forbes Masson Steve, his partner in crime and Siobhan Redmond their ferocious chief stewardess, Shona Spurtle. They’re all brilliant, though for me the show’s persistently stolen by Patrick Ryecart as posh but probably still Sixties drug-addled pilot Captain Hilary Duff (no, really. You’ve no idea how difficult I find it to listen to the later one). Tonight mixes pop fame, giant dog costumes and Shona’s unhappy love life to spectacular effect. Being a sit-com, albeit a more than slightly off-the-wall one in which (for example) Captain Duff’s occasional Star Trek delusions give him the ability to teleport, of course everyone is unhappy in love. Shona, Steve, Captain Duff… But, in one of the few aspects that dates the series, not Sebastian. Yes, the flamboyant and blatantly gay lead character is said to be “celibate”. As if. Still, though he may sympathise with Steve’s doomed attempts at female companionship, we all know they’re shagging.

There are only two episodes to go in the BBC4 repeat season, so do yourself a favour and pick up the DVD to see Winch, the third of the six episodes made; probably my favourite, and probably the cheapest. With hardly any speaking cast barring the four regulars, it has the time to let them all let rip. There’s an obvious secret just waiting to explode; an unreliable narrator supplying a memorable version of Love Is the Drug; and Shona finally – she thinks – getting the ammunition to take Sebastian down:

“Themed breakfasts, my Auntie Arse. I will have you over a barrel!”

“You will have to chloroform me first.”

“Silence, you insolent toe-rag. You are a waster, Sebastian. You are a lying cheat. You are a fibster, a fabulist, an equivocating shim-shammer, a cozening card sharp, a pathological mythomaniac, a yarner, a poulterer – who perjures – a whited sepulchre, a cantering serpent, a rat!”

It’s so unfair, then, that the show’s stolen in the final seconds of the episode and the flight by Captain Duff emerging from the in-flight loo with his usual affable, slightly disorientated beneficence and the inspired closing line:

“Have we landed yet? [Pause] Oh bugger!”

There’s still the most surreal of the lot to come next week, as Molly Weir, Batman, an Avengers villain and delicious tablet combine in Dunk. Oh, dearie me! In the meantime, here is tonight’s main event – Pif Paf Pof…

Labels: Comedy, Music, Reviews, Scotland

It’s two days ’til Christmas and you’re in a panic over those presents you’ve not yet bought. So, in a last-minute attempt to help, I’ve been reading four thrilling books for this festive season: The Doctor Who Storybook 2009; Doctor Who – The Official Annual 2009; J.K. Rowling’s The Tales of Beedle the Bard; and The Tangerine Book, The Lib Dem Voice 2008 Annual (some mistake, surely). All of them are worth a read, though the least impressive is “The Official Doctor Who Annual”, which will neither take long nor be very satisfying. And all the others lack puzzle pages.

Doctor Who – The Official Annual 2009 and…

When I was a boy, The Doctor Who Annual was a regular Christmas fixture. I loved them, though they tended to be a bit bonkers and have very little to do with the TV series, either in the bizarre, abbreviated stories or in the pictures, which varied wildly in quality but usually had in common that they’d paid only for the Doctor’s image and so the other series regulars would look nothing like the way they were meant to. These days the rights of the old ones have reverted to the BBC, so they’ve started including them in pdf form on some of the DVDs: you can find The Dr Who Annual 1977 on The Hand of Fear, and I recently re-read it as a control sample to this year’s two competing new Annuals. It was the first I was ever given as a child, and while the stories are, I have to face it, terrible, the brilliantly surreal artwork still grabs me, especially on the dark, intense, absurd comic strips. But the fascination doesn’t just come in goggling at the art or wondering how the writers got paid, but in puzzling out the brainteasers – old Annuals tended to have off-the-shelf but incomprehensible things with matches that you were either really proud of finally working out or looked at the answers and tried it on other people to make sure they couldn’t get it either, though this one’s less copyable optical illusions – and reading the masses of educational articles about then-modern-day rocketry and the occasional feature on Greek mythology. Thinking Doctor Who was a mix of outer space and ancient myths seemed a slightly odd mix at the time, but it managed to anticipate the approach taken on screen by script editor Anthony Read by about a year…

So how do this year’s Annuals match up? And why are there two of them? Well, the Annual made a comeback in 2005 with the return of the TV series, with that summer seeing publication of The Doctor Who Annual 2006 from Panini, publishers of Doctor Who Magazine. It was fun and much in the style of the old Annuals, with thrilling adventures in time and space both in comic strip and text form joined by puzzles and informative features (including an outrageously fannish extrapolation of the canon from one Russell T Davies), though – unlike the way they used to work – this one had lots of pictures from the proper series and was largely accurate, which was forgivable if not quite in the spirit of the thing. This clearly sold so well that the following year the BBC decided to produce the Annual themselves, while raking in more cash by still licensing Panini to produce their Annual-format Storybook. I remain prejudiced against the BBC’s in-house Annuals for splashing the word “Official” about, as if Panini’s was some unofficial knock-off instead of something from which the BBC were getting a great deal of money. Reading the two for 2009, just as in 2008 and 2007, the BBC version will remain the season’s top seller, but it’s not a patch on the one put together with more thought and effort.

Take a glance at The Official Annual. Pictures of the Doctor and the Red Christmas Dalek slapped on it in shiny silver and pink – it looks more like the wrapping paper than a present. You immediately notice that there’s far more from the TV series than there was in 1977: it looks almost like an official publicity pack, full of photos and summaries of the stories. But there’s far less in the way of imagination, with a comparatively tiny amount of artwork and much larger type. I miss the factual features shoehorned in with little relevance to the TV series, though I suspect most kids won’t, and it really could do with a more challenging brainteaser than a maze with bees seeded through it to show you the way. So, my initial feeling was that it was talking down to kids to a far greater extent than the old Annuals.

Being an assiduous reviewer, though, I settled down to read it properly rather than just flick through and sniff at it, and I have to admit it drew me in. This year’s Annual has upped the fiction content rather than just the publicity pack-style slapdashery, and it’s all the better for it. There are even a couple of text stories, with Most Beautiful Music quite sober and reflective, and very Whoish. I can’t say I care for the artwork on them – and very simplified style that I can just about put up with on the comic strips – but at least there is some. The three comic strips, too, are all rather fun, and this year I’ve not read Doctor Who Adventures comic frequently enough to tell if they’re reprints again, so I’ll charitably assume not. The artwork style rather works for The Time Sickness, becoming stylised rather than merely simple, while Death Disco has an entertaining script and a great solution from Donna. The Greatest Mall in the Universe, though… Well, aside from being the weakest story, there used to be a time-honoured Doctor Who traditional of the ‘doubles’ story, in which the Doctor or his companion would land somewhere and either just bump into someone who looked exactly like them or their evil enemies would build a killer identical robot. And, of course, there would frequently be hilarious shots of the actor and their stunt double together as two versions that no-one on screen could tell apart but which viewers could see looked nothing like each other. Nowadays there are just biological metacrisises, which frankly do nothing for me, and parallel-Earth Mickeys, which are a bit too sensible for a good old-fashioned bonkers ‘doubles’ story, and each used far better camera trickery and CGI face-replacement to ensure no embarrassing ‘identical’ characters that are far taller or shorter, have completely different wigs or, on rare occasions, turn blatantly different faces full-on to camera. The only thing that made up for the lack of fun was that both actors got their shirts off, really. But, though if you want to see Catherine Tate topless you’ll have to go to the West End, The Official Annual 2009 has, at last, a return to the utterly bonkers and random ‘doubles’ story and, as a special bonus, though the two ‘Donnas’ look like each other, the artist’s exceptionally bland, waiflike, apparently teenage depiction of the character has the satisfying crapness that neither double looks anything like Donna.

Though the games and puzzles are exceptionally unchallenging – the blank page encouraging you to draw a picture of yourself with a sonic screwdriver is breathtaking – I very much enjoyed the six-page mini-Sarah Jane Adventures Annual nestling within, and the tips on making an Ood T-shirt were tempting. Some of the fact file bits are quite jolly, as are the old Doctor Who Weekly-inspired Know Your Enemy pages (the Adipose is so cute… Same with the Partners In Crime ‘poster’ page) and, particularly, the Intergalactic Guide To Planets and Places, which is at times slyly amusing if you know the stories. If you don’t know the stories, there are in-depth descriptions of what happened in about half of this year’s TV adventures, with the last three interlinked episodes slightly confusingly given backwards. The feature that made me laugh aloud and get Richard to play a guessing game, though, was the Alien A-Z, which has a number of characters that aren’t actually aliens, and is forced to use some unexpected letters (you wouldn’t expect to find the Mighty Jagrafess of the Holy Hadrojassic Maxarodenfoe under E for “Editor-in-Chief”) and then in the second half of the alphabet dive into the original series for inspiration. Any A-Z for kids today that omits Cybermen and includes Quarks gets my vote, even if Mr Bowdler wrote the entry on the Ood. So, not bad, but something lacking: for undemanding children.

The Doctor Who Storybook 2009

The Doctor Who Storybook 2009 has had far more care and creativity poured into it, and is all new material, though I feel the absence of articles on extinct pantheons, speculation on the future of airships and suggestions on what to do with matches all the more keenly for how enjoyable the rest of it is. Rather than variety of content, it boasts variety of contributors, with seven text stories and one comic strip, each written by a different author and each lavishly illustrated by a different artist – yes, there’s only one ordinary photo in the whole thing. Although slightly slimmer than the Annual, this has far more in it, too, with a much smaller type size that’s actually much easier to read than the Annual’s: not only is the text broken up by huge illustrations, but it’s in two columns, which is far easier on the eye than one big splodge.

After a rather fine cover painting of the Doctor and, er, a Donna with glowing teeth, you’ll see a flippant ‘letter from the Doctor’ in the style of the old Doctor Who Weekly, with new lead writer Steven Moffat appropriately taking over from Russell T Davies. You’ll be astounded to know that, in an innovative turn from his usual writing style, it’s all disjointed timey-wimey self-referentialism, but quite amusing. Similarly, Paul Magrs’ Hello, Children, Everywhere strikes out in the bold new direction of pastiching others’ fiction (this time the hot new up-to-the-minute targets of Enid Blyton and Walt Disney) – points added for Aunty Winnie’s appearance, but docked for the saccharine ending. I rather enjoyed both the James Moran’s story Grand Theft Planet! and the artwork by Daryl Joyce, which perfectly captures a grinning David Tennant. Mark Gatiss’ Cold interweaves The Ice Warriors and The War of the Worlds, with very striking art from Ben Willsher that repays several looks. Jonathan Morris’ comic strip The Immortal Emperor is all right rather than his best, but I enjoyed the art; Rob Davis clearly grew up admiring Ian Gibson’s work on 2000AD, and I liked the Count Scarlioni-esque prefiguring of the monster through his dress.

Possibly the best of the tales is Bing Bong, from the familiar pens of Gareth Roberts and Clayton Hickman (who also edits the Storybook), with crossovers to Sarah Jane and a central conceit that will have fuming commuters nodding in agreement. Daniel McDaid’s scrappy illustrations aren’t technically the best, but he has great energy, particularly for a great moment at the TARDIS console. The appropriately-named Keith Temple warmed me immensely with the old-Annual-feel Island of the Sirens, in which the Doctor (“Skinnyman”) and Donna (“Red”) mix and indeed flirt with Greek heroes, accompanied by strikingly stylised art from Adrian Salmon, probably the most gorgeous use of colour in the book. Nicholas Pegg’s story proves that inside a Dalek is an old softy, though (despite the book’s least interesting pictures) as it features a boy called Alex who loves history, I have a soft spot for it too. Finally, there’s Gary Russell’s The Puplet, another endearing story of children but with a deft mix of fairy-tale innocence, real world worries and humour (the sweepstake made me smile), illustrated by Andy Walker’s rather fine David Tennants. A collection to recommend, then – none of the stories quite made me go “Wow!” but, beautifully crafted, I really felt I’d got my money’s worth.

The Tales of Beedle the Bard

The smallest of today’s books, and the only one that’s no sort of annual, is J.K. Rowling’s book of Harry Potter-world fairy tales, The Tales of Beedle the Bard. Though it’s pocket-sized, I suspect it’s had a massive weight of expectations put upon it. I’m sure many will be disappointed that this isn’t another brick of the adventures of Harry and friends, nor even vignettes from their lives (notwithstanding text notes from Albus Dumbledore). I’m not disappointed at all – I’ve always loved fairy stories, and these match up rather well, despite one of them putting a Bruce Springsteen song in my head. My bookshelves have several books of fairy tales I loved when a child or an adult or both: Irish ones; Arthur Rackham ones; Aesop’s Fables; gay ones; Grimm ones… Anything but Hans Very Much Too Christian Anderson, and I get the feeling Ms Rowling has similar tastes. And, of course, some of it goes to charity.

This little book has endearingly hand-inked illustrations and features five stories, all Fifteenth-Century tales from a world where magic is real, with an introduction setting out just what sort of differences that would made to the tales themselves from our own fairy stories. One, The Tale of the Three Brothers, will be familiar to readers of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (and, to an extent, Chaucer), so I’m not sure I’d have placed it as the finale; the others, though, manage an air of familiarity that makes them fit in with older fairy tales (and, in one case, conjure up a feeling of The Wizard of Oz, with its message that the point of the quest is the quest).

The opening story, The Wizard and the Hopping Pot, probably isn’t the best of them on its own, but captures most deftly the feel not only of a fairy tale that you’ve read before in the distant past, but of one from the non-Muggle world. It also boasts the most enjoyable of Dumbledore’s notes (I always hear Mr Stephen Fry reading them), ranging in thoroughly postmodern fashion across how people change fairy tales to make them more socially conservative or simply Bowdlerise them to the point where they become nauseating. It also boasts one of the book’s two most memorable images, the Hopping Pot itself, and I enjoyed the slipper. Despite all that, there’s something about it that didn’t entirely endear itself to me – perhaps because the moral of social responsibility comes at the price of an overprescriptive father-figure who’s something of a git. Gosh, you don’t think the author gives money to Gordon Brown, do you?

The Fountain of Fair Fortune is probably the most predictable of the stories, but might well be one of the most popular; with its team of four friends, witch and Muggle, all helping each other out on a miniature quest, it’s the one that most resembles the shape of a Harry Potter book (if about 2 kilos lighter). Babbitty Rabbitty and her Cackling Stump wins the prize for strongly resembling a particularly famous fairy tale (one of the much better ones from an author that doesn’t do a lot for me), and for having the name most likely to have been coined by Monty Python. The Tale of the Three Brothers is also familiar from many sources, not least Harry Potter itself, but is nonetheless satisfying – it has the dark feel of several people coming to grief before good wins out over greed and glory. My favourite, though, has to be The Warlock’s Hairy Heart, which goes into definite Grimm territory and uses a variation on one of my favourite creepy magical elements, used in many mythologies and fantasy books and being in a different form a key part of the later Harry Potter books, too. I’m trying not to spoil this, but adults will find an irresistible message from both the text and the illustration that if you try to deny your heart, you’ll only be governed by your testicles.

The Tangerine Book – The Lib Dem Voice 2008 Annual

For the last of today’s books, I should declare that I know several of the authors rather well, and indeed that I have a tiny snippet in there myself. It’s an anthology of the best articles published on the collaborative website Liberal Democrat Voice throughout 2008 – well, technically from December 2007 to November 2008. If you read the site, you’ll have seen approximately 723 plugs for it already this month, but don’t let that put you off.

I’m glad, however, that it’s not been called an anthology, or an almanac, or any such improving title. “Annual” sounds much more fun, and in places it’s definitely fun to read, though if you give it to your kids to read as a reward for delivering their thousandth festive FOCUS leaflet they may feel very slightly disgruntled. A bar chart, a ripped-off Bird of Liberty (set in slightly the wrong place) and a – sorry, Will – rather inadequate drawing of a bus are no substitute for the Policy Unit Puzzle Pages, Join-The-Dots Lembit Öpik, Lynne Featherstone’s Cryptic Crossword, Colour-Me-In Nick Clegg pin-up and Make Your Own Vince Cable that I hope to see in next year’s edition. To say nothing of it being paperback and only half the size of any self-respecting annual, despite having the highest page count of today’s recommendations, and – most damningly – not having got the idea of an annual, which is that it should have next year’s date on it so as not to sound out of date a week after it’s been given as a present. The two Doctor Who Annuals above, published in the Summer, full of exciting stories with poor Donna, who’s shockingly now had her brain fried and won’t be travelling with the Doctor next year? “2009,” both of them.

Still, despite suggesting a little more work to get the annual format spot-on, I’m not going to start picking out posts that should have been there but aren’t. The Tangerine Book (pretty cover, by the way) has, I make it, 153 pages with 79 articles by 34 contributors, though writers on the Lib Dem Voice team crop up for a very high percentage of the content; turn to the Index and you’ll see that, for example, Stephen Tall’s entry is much longer than anyone else’s. That’s a fair amount to read through at Christmas, particularly without pictures, but still I’m told only about 4% of just over 2,000 articles made the cut. Goodness. I can’t think of any particular favourites I missed, though I have to admit there are at least a handful which really don’t seem to justify inclusion (thin month, was it?). Interestingly, the two most-represented months – twice the page count of any of the others – are July and September, suggesting a flurry of high-quality and guest articles. That’ll be, oh, Lib Dem Conference, and… Would it be cynical to suggest, the start of the blog awards season?

There’s much to recommend here, and a very wide range of topics – tips for campaigning, criticism of other parties, criticism of our own party, philosophy, policy debate, coverage of debates, awards results (though not, oddly, for the Blogger of the Year; I didn’t win, readers, so perhaps it’s just as well I don’t get a mention in the index for the shortlist), election entrails, the odd piece or speech from an MP, addresses from aspirants to party office, and quite a bit from well outside the Liberal Democrats and Britain. You can order it cheaply at £2.11 an e-Book, and though that’s the only way to get this one of the books for Christmas (as opposed to rushing into the queues tomorrow for the others), I have to say, what’s the point in that? A pdf’s not all that much different to just reading the original blog pieces, and they have added value. No, what you want is the published paperback for the New Year, £5.99 from Lulu (plus postage, but if you buy a second copy or any of their other books, the postage is fixed at one total). And it’s a different and more relaxing experience to sit back and turn the pages when you like. For people who’d not normally look at a computer, it might draw them in; for people looking for snippets of politics on their commute; and, for people like me if there are such things, the ability to read articles at one remove without feeling the rising need to compose and post an angry comment online. Though each has a url supplied, I’ve managed to resist the temptation, though I’ve tried a couple to see if they worked (they did).

It’s difficult to pick out a favourite from such variety, though I remember enjoying Will Howells’ Something For the Weekend: The Wheels On the Bus Go Round and Round at the time, and did so again in printed form (despite the absence of some of the more animated content). Stephen Tall’s liveblog of the Make It Happen debate was one of the most interesting reads; I’m an only moderately active blogger, and many of the articles featured here reminded me of articles I’d meant to write, but never quite got round to it. This time, I blogged the same debate in more detail but over a few more hours, and so could compare Stephen’s views (much less partisan than mine, but slipping through on occasion and in agreement, for example, on Tim Farron), odd mistakes (Simon Hughes being chair of the Federal Policy Committee – heaven help us!) and splendid turns of phrase (“The Hall simultaneously orgasms”). The first article, Stephen’s “Now’s your chance, Nick,” impressively challenges then new Leader Nick Clegg, and provides a few of the choicer entries in the extensive Index, which for once repays some reading: it provides much of the additional value to the tome, through leading or silly but always justified categories such as “BBC – poor election coverage,” “Clegg, Nick – springy hair,” (all right, that’s just one of nineteen for him), “dreary archipelago,” “curtain-twitching busybody,” “freakish oddities” and “Hughes, Simon – punctuality”. And you can look up “Malta” for yourself.

We get Tavish Scott’s pitch for Scottish Leader and Ros Scott’s for Federal President; I have to admit, though I can see the value of printing what the winner said they’d do, I’d have liked to measure it against their opponents, too, to give a better perspective on why the results were as they were (with a Scott already in Scotland, incidentally, do you think our new President was accidentally allocated the wrong name? Should she actually be Ros Lochall-Activiste?). Kirsty Williams’ victory in Wales came too late for inclusion, so expect that next year. Fortunately, there are selected and annotated excerpts from two of Nick Clegg’s more interesting speeches, as the only contribution appearing under his name in The Tangerine Book is surely one of the least interesting and most vacuous things he’s ever written – a clarion call to support the Bones Commission as the answer to all the party’s problems, without a single word as to why it might be so (just like Simon Radford’s piece on vouchers, which similarly advocates a panacea without any indication of why, how or where it would work). Chris Bones’ detailed follow-up piece from two months later should be much better, but spends too much of its time ticking people off for asking impertinent questions before they were ready, and telling us that the only possible way forward for the party is to swallow his recommendations whole, because we spend too much time discussing things. I can’t help feeling that this wasn’t the best-managed announcement in the world.

In case you missed the Blogger of the Year Awards, dear reader, the splendid Alix Mortimer was the very well-deserved winner from those shortlisted, and she contributes several excellent articles: you might want to turn to her entertaining and informative Diary of a Conference Virgin, which has a fascinating snippet from a focus group as well as gossip (and there’s more in that series online), or her sober and extremely practical After Baby P: what can be done? Richard Huzzey and Hywel Morgan show what being a Liberal site means in mounting strong defences of the rights of, respectively, Icelanders and BNP members. The lovely Alex Foster reminds us just how thoroughtly crap Labour is on gay rights when nobody’s looking and they’ve not been forced into equal opportunities by the courts; Sal Brinton gives the details of a Tory candidate’s appalling criminal hate campaign; and Mark Pack burrows away to discover all sorts of QI-style factlets, if QI were a Lib Dem broadcast, usually with tongue ever-so-slightly in cheek. Oh, and I get a couple of paragraphs in amongst a selection of summer reading; that Stephen Tall runs off with that entry, too, as he’s the only one who thought to include a tantalising quotation from his books. Hey! I usually do that in my reviews, and I’ve forgotten to here. Oh, well, too late now. I want to get this published by four in the vain hope that it’ll influence you rushing out to the shops.

A qualified hit, then. What, putting aside my Annualish predilections for a moment, could be done to improve it? Well, undoubtedly the biggest failing is the absence of any of the comments; it wouldn’t be terribly readable to produce great screeds of them, but it would be nice to have a taster, particularly when some pertinently shoot down the articles published. The next one could do with a few fewer articles by the editorial team, and more by women (and yes, the answer to that is to write for them. Whoops, I was asked again the other week and…). There’s also something much less forgiving about certain types of mistake in print on your shelf, rather than feeling more ephemeral on your screen. Typos, misused apostrophes, punctuation moving onto the line after a sentence (particularly annoying in a heading – stand up, Hashtag taxonomies: the last word in Tweeting
?) and, in a couple of the less-well-written articles, repeated words or phrases evidently not there for effect but suggesting a clumsy vocabulary… A little polish from a copy-editor would be much kinder. I’d also slip in a blank line above and below the large quotation passages, to make the pages look less cramped.

My simplest suggestion, though, for The Lib Dem Voice Annual 2010 (as next year’s publication should be subtitled), would be for it to end with a single December entry – “10 Key Lib Dem Questions for 2010”. This one started with questions for 2008, salutary to re-read at the end of the year, but has none for 2009. And while looking back at what we got wrong is always entertaining / depressing, wouldn’t it focus minds more to look forward, too?


Christmas Eve Update: Millennium Dome, Elephant offers a Christmas present to Lib Dem Voice in the form of a Puzzle Page, ready for insertion to late editions of The Tangerine Book. Can YOU help the plucky pachyderm escape the tortured complexity that is the maze of Conservative policy? Uncannily, it looks exactly like it could fit into The Dr Who Annual 1977, too.

Labels: Blogs, Books, Comics, David Tennant, Doctor Who, Harry Potter, Liberal Democrat Conferences, Liberal Democrats, Nick Clegg, Obscure Doctor Who Jokes, Sarah Jane Smith, Scotland, Stephen Fry

In the bizarre dictionaries of those centralising, micro-managing, decision-grabbing, purse-string-pulling, power-hungry, choice-stealing control freak twins, the SNP and the Tories. And when both are reacting against the bossiest centralised Westminster Government since the Second World War, that’s quite an achievement. No-one likes the Council Tax; it was cobbled together in a hurry to get the Tories out of their great big Poll Tax pit, sweetened by a great big wodge of central money, and bears little relation to ability to pay or even to house prices… But dictating ‘local’ decisions from Holyrood or Westminster isn’t the way to fix it.

How the Council Tax Started

I’m old enough to remember when the Tories devised the Council Tax; it felt like a hasty bodge-up then to get them to the next election, an unfair, unlovely hybrid staggered in whopping great bands based on decades-old valuations, and was clearly never meant to last – it’s just that, after the Tories’ brilliant idea of the Poll Tax, neither they nor Labour have dared touch local taxation (except to tell elected local councils what to do with it). There are only two reasons the Council Tax worked at all to begin with. First, it wasn’t the Poll Tax, so everyone was bound to breathe a sigh of relief. And second, it was subsidised by a massive injection of central government money to keep the bills artificially low, thanks to that great (if only by comparison to George Osborne) Conservative Chancellor Norman ‘Yoghurt Pot’ Lamont.

The immediately obvious problem with this at the time was that it was paid for by raising VAT – I remember it well, as the effect was to send the standard price of a video (locked for years at the psychologically important rate of £9.99) through the £10 barrier, after which prices pretty much kept going up. Gee, thanks, Norman. The problem with it that still bedevils local government nearly two decades later is that that meant a huge shift of the local government tax base from locally decided and raised money to centrally decided and raised money. Incredibly, only about a quarter of the money spent by local government across the UK is raised locally. That means that central government has huge power to decide which local councils get what money, with both Conservatives and Labour at Westminster funnelling cash to their own areas so that Labour and Tory councils respectively – and, of course, all those many areas that vote Liberal Democrat and get stiffed for the bill both ways – have to raise Council Tax disproportionately or cut services. And, of course, because the vast majority of what local authorities spend is dictated by central government grant, any extra spending by local councils decided by local people in local elections needs a heavily disproportionate tax increase to make much difference. So local decision-making has been made increasingly meaningless.

What Are the Different Parties’ Answers?

The Labour Government, of course, have capped the amount councils can raise taxes – while raising taxes uncountable times nationally, of course, but why behave yourself when you can boss someone else around to look prudent instead – and increasingly made the ‘local’ decisions nationally by dictating exactly what money must be spent where.

On the opposite end of the liberal-authoritarian scale, equally predictably, the Liberal Democrats have a better answer. We’ve long said that we would scrap the council tax in favour of a local income tax, based on ability to pay; return the setting of local business taxation to local councils from central government; and, in the long term, alter the balance further so that local government raises more of its own money and less comes at the whim of Westminster (but that bit’s a little scary, so we don’t talk about it much).

So, that’s the party you’d expect to boss everyone around and have every bit of power prised from their cold dead hands sorted, and the one that you’d expect to be in favour of decentralisation and of decisions actually (imagine!) being made by the people they affect.

The SNP Answer: Abolish Local Government

The other two parties with a significant say on local taxation are more interesting. No, that’s a bit of a euphemism; they’ve both been all over the place, but both – after using the rhetoric of decentralisation – have come down heavily in favour of even more central control than Labour. The SNP Government at Holyrood have a plan that, on the face of it, sounds like a good thing: scrapping the Council Tax in favour of a local income tax of 3p in the pound. Gosh, isn’t that what the Liberal Democrats have been saying? And, hurrah, the unfair Council Tax scrapped in favour of a local tax based on ability to pay (all sorts of odd people have seen the light on that one). But, hang on… There’s something a bit strange, there. How does the central Scottish government know what rate the local councils are going to choose?

Oh.

The SNP Government at Holyrood is going to decide the ‘local’ rate for the whole of Scotland. So they’re combating the Tories’ and Labour’s authoritarian, centralised, local government-neutering approach where local government decides a mere 25% or so of its own money by enforcing a system where local people vote to decide a much-improved 0%. Er, some mistake, surely?

“Sentence first – verdict afterwards.”

Alex’s Adventures in Wonderland

With the SNP not having a majority in the Scottish Parliament, they’ve apparently been in negotiations with the Scottish Liberal Democrats for support over the policy. Unsurprisingly, we like the ‘ability to pay’ part, but aren’t too keen on the ‘local government losing its last measly remaining power to decide anything at all’ part. I’ve not heard how this is going for a wee while, but I hope it’s the SNP that are giving ground, and not us; if ever there was a better example of the truism that not everything that’s given the same name necessarily has the same effect, it’s when a “local” income tax is decided in its entirety by Alex Salmond’s central government.

“When I use a word,” Alex Numpty said in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.”
“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you CAN make words mean so many different things.”
“The question is,” said Alex Numpty, “which is to be master – that’s all.”

Alex Through the Looking Glass

Come on, Tavish – don’t start your Leadership by laying a wreath of tax forms on Scottish local decision-making!

The Tory Answer: Um… Er… Um… Do As I Say, Not As I Do

That leaves the Tories, who invented the Council Tax and were the most centralising government in living memory (until Labour came along), but who since they lost power at Westminster have taken to saying that the answer to the Labour Government’s removal of power from local government is greater decentralisation. At least, that was what they were saying until – as Joe points out – a week ago. Now, as they become increasingly smug at the idea of getting their hands on all that lovely power again, they strangely no longer feel like letting anyone else have a say. In the good news, they’re less extreme authoritarians than the SNP. In the bad news, George Osborne’s idea of fiscal probity by central government is to… Tell local government it needs to tighten its belt.

The job of Chancellor of the Exchequer is really quite a big and complicated one, but it has its limits. It’s in charge of the Treasury for the UK Government, and controls central government spending in particular across England, following devolution. You’d have thought that was quite enough to do, and Mr Osborne’s never come across as conspicuously competent to do it. Well, we’re all in the middle of a massive economic crisis, and he had to come up with something to establish himself as both daring and statesmanlike (blimey).

At the Liberal Democrat Conference a fortnight ago, the answer was that out of the six hundred billion pounds the Labour Government spends each year, at the very least a tiny fraction could be spent better, so central government should cut some of the spending it’s rubbish at and either spend it more wisely itself or give it back to ordinary people in tax cuts so they can spend it as they think wisely. Central government, then, shouldn’t tell anyone what to do with their money on top of what it’s already demanding, and should get its own house in order instead.

The Tories have a very different approach.

Conservative Shadow Chancellor George Osborne has looked at the six hundred billion pounds he’ll be personally responsible for… And can’t cope. It might not be enough, he says. He’s announced he won’t rule out tax rises by central government, because, you know, sums are hard and power is fun. So, crikey, what can he say to sound like he wants to keep taxes down (which he won’t guarantee) and sound like he’s being careful with our money (which he’s not very good at)? Ah – of course. Announce that he’s getting someone else to do it!

Yesterday, Mr Osborne didn’t think that central government, once he gets his sticky fingers on it, could be run any better than the Labour Government. He might run it worse, and have to put up taxes. But local government – pressured for efficiency targets for decades by Tory and Labour Governments that have never once applied such strictures to themselves – oh, that’s an easy bottomless target for savings, isn’t it? So, if local councils can keep their Council Tax increases to 2.5% - no easy job when inflation’s running to 5% - he’s said he’ll give a 2.5% subsidy from central government to freeze Council Tax at no rise at all.

Let’s see what’s wrong with this proposal. First of all, it’s that Mr Osborne wants one of the biggest, most difficult, most responsible jobs in British public service, but is afraid of it because it’s too big for him and wants to pass the difficult responsibilities onto someone else. If a Chancellor wanted to freeze taxes, they could say they’d freeze the central government’s tax take. But Mr Osborne thinks that would be much too hard and, besides, it would mean he couldn’t have the power to raise all that lovely money. So he tells someone else to do it instead. As Vince Cable said yesterday, this is just “passing the buck to local councils,” and it’ll mean the councils that can’t cut their budgets enough – either because they’ve already been very efficient, and now need to raise their spending with inflation, or because they’re in poorer areas where more of their spending is vital, or because they don’t get as much central government grant as other councils – will end up with continuing Council Tax rises, while other councils that need extra money less will be given, er, extra money… Which means that, for those councils, even less of the money they spend will be raised locally, leaving local people with even less meaningful decision-making and local government even more under the control of central government. Council Tax was a regressive tax that didn’t reflect your ability to pay when the Tories invented it; under Mr Osborne’s plans, the Tories want to keep it that way, but (just as they did when they invented it) they want to throw a fat subsidy at it for a couple of years to sweeten the pill and get local government further under their thumb.

And of course Mr Osborne’s headline-grabbing promise that “Tories pledge council tax freeze” is one that he can’t deliver on, but which he can blame someone else for not delivering – as opposed to making a promise from within the six hundred billion pounds (or more) that he wants to control and would be personally held to account on. Because making a promise about the job he wants to do, making himself fit the standards he wants to order everyone else to obey… That would just be too hard.

Here’s a thought, Mr Osborne – if being Chancellor seems like it’d be too hard for you, have you ever considered that you might not be up to the job?

Labels: British Politics, Conservatives, Labour, Liberal Democrats, Scotland, Stupid Ideas, Tax, The Golden Dozen

Opinion has been divided on Wendy Alexander’s performance as Scottish Labour Leader – is it worse that her funding scandals brought politics into disrepute, or that her hopelessly ineffective leadership of the opposition (regularly outshone at First Minister’s Questions by Nicol Stephen) means she’s just terrible at her job? Struggling today to claw back the initiative for the first time in a year, she’s adopted the tone of a bellicose pub drunk to say ‘Referendum? Go on then! Come and have a go if you think you’re hard enough.’ But there’s more to this than mere desperation for a headline.

I’ve just been listening to her on PM, and like other interviewers Eddie Mair decided that the main issue of interest to listeners concerning whether their country was about to be split apart was… Getting the gossip on whether and when she’d talked to Gordon Brown. Sigh. Of course Mr Brown doesn’t like the idea of holding a referendum on Scottish independence, and of course that’s why his spin doctors have been giving ‘hostile briefings’ about Ms Alexander all day. And, yes, there’s some interest in any Labour figure breaking free at last from Mr Brown’s sulky centralisation, even if in theory devolution means they make their own decisions (not while the big clunking fist’s Leader, they don’t). But if an interviewer can’t be bothered to talk about the issue of whether Scotland splitting off from the rest of the UK, they could at least think a bit more intelligently than ‘Ooh! You’re going to cop it from the boss!’

Surely the timing of this and Mr Brown’s multi-leaked fury has a simple explanation. When the Conservatives – the blue Conservatives, oh, you must remember, they centralised power and took away civil liberties and cosied up to absurdly right-wing warmongering US Republican Presidents and taxed the poor more to fund income tax cuts… No, it is difficult to remember the difference, isn’t it – when the other Conservatives were in power, they punished Scotland for not voting for Mrs Thatcher by turning it into a giant lab for the most barking mad Thatcherite policies, most famously the poll tax. And the political results of this included near-annihilation for the (blue) Conservatives north of the border and growing support for the SNP, which Labour thought until last year they’d defused through devolution.

The legacy of the ’80s and ’90s, coupled with last year’s election putting the SNP ahead, is that Scottish Labour are petrified that if the Tories ever get back in at Westminster, the Scottish public will be so disgusted that the SNP will have all their Christmases come at once.

So what could cause Wendy Alexander – who’s spent a year being a glove puppet that would be a ventriloquist’s dummy for Mr Brown if she ever actually said anything – to finally discover her own voice? It’s simple. The Leader of the Scottish Labour Party has taken one look at the London elections and the local elections across England and Wales and thought what Labour Members of the Westminster Parliament daren’t say: the Tories are going to win the next General Election. And she’s petrified herself into a U-turn.

The Scottish Labour Party are scared stiff of a referendum on independence at any time – just as Labour are always petrified of letting go the tiniest sniff of power – but they’ve discovered something that they’re even more scared of than a referendum in theory. They’ve discovered that they think the Tories are going to get back in at the next UK General Election, and that as the SNP are bound to try and fix any referendum date for their maximum political advantage, the one thing that would be worse for them than an independence referendum under an unpopular Labour Government that’s virtually indistinguishable from the Tories would be an independence referendum under the actual Tories.

Wendy Alexander wants the referendum now, because scared as she is she knows that most Scots are sick of the Labour Party but have no fervour for cutting the rest of the country off to spite Gordon’s face. But a referendum in 2010, after several years of getting used to the SNP not frightening the horses – even though that’s mainly because they don’t have the power to – and with the Labour Party at Westminster and Holyrood almost certainly still looking tired, fractious and unpleasant, and most of all on the back of another Conservative Government at Westminster that Alex Salmond can say ‘Look, you didn’t vote for them and Labour failed to protect you from them…’ That’s the nightmare going through Ms Alexander’s head, with the thought that under those circumstances the Scottish public might just decide to tell the rest of Britain to sod off.

And that’s why Ms Alexander’s declared finally independence of her own, and why Mr Brown’s so shocked: after last week, she thinks he’s a loser, and she’s cut him adrift.

Labels: British Politics, Devolution, Labour, Scotland

The last couple of weeks have been something of an emotional rollercoaster. It would take a heart of stone not to laugh at the downfall of the Republican Party and the departure of Donald Rumsfeld; I’ve had a birthday and Richard and I have celebrated our twelfth anniversary. But I’ve been paying more attention to much sadder news. Readers who know my family will be saddened to hear that my Grandad, Walter Wilcock, died last week. Other readers may be more familiar with the work of Nigel Kneale, Peter Barkworth and William Franklyn, who have all also recently passed away.

While the damage to my arm means I can type little at the moment (still a fortnight to my hospital appointment), and with trips up north to see my family also meaning I’ve frequently been away from Internet access, it’s also true that even without these barriers I’ve not been feeling very sociable. So, plenty of blog pieces remain part-drafted inside my head, and apologies to the many people whose e-mails I’ve not answered in the last few weeks. With Grandad’s funeral tomorrow, Richard and I are about to leave for another few days in Stockport, so this will be my only blog piece this week, too.

Grandad had pretty much 95 years of conspicuous hale-ness, but his health declined sharply in the last year. Until then, he’d been proudly independent, usually tanned and busy in his garden when I’d go to see him in South Oxhey. He’d moved there on getting a job in London when my Dad was just 8, leaving his native Glasgow (well, almost native; though most of his side of the family were Scots, he had his first few months in Harrogate). He had very forthright views and we enjoyed debating – at least both of us heaping scorn on the Labour Party – and though I suspect that I was the only Liberal Democrat he’d ever have considered voting for, he took joy and pride in my political activity and I always appreciated his support. I think he pretty much had the life he wanted, though he was sadly deprived of my Nana, Wilna, for his last two decades after she died suddenly in 1985. It was only around this time last year that his age suddenly seemed to start catching up with him, with increasing periods of hospitalisation and a stroke that left his right arm too weak to use and meant he had to move to Stockport, where my parents were in easy reach. He was diagnosed with cancer a couple of months ago, but bore it stoically. Despite the decline of his body, his mind remained sharp right to the end, though he was at most barely conscious in his last three days. Richard and I drove up last Tuesday and so were with him and the rest of the family in his final hours.

This is my Dad’s piece for tomorrow’s Service of Thanksgiving, which will be conducted by Father Brendan Kelly and the Revd Philip Winn. You can probably see where I get my taste for punctuation from…

Walter Vernon Wilcock, 1910-2006

Throughout his life, Dad was a man of steadfast reliability: a rock for his family. Especially living with Mum, who was excitable, emotional and overgenerous, he felt that he had to ensure calm and control. He was careful (a Yorkshire Scotsman), exhibiting self-control and an amazing resistance to indulgence – we have only just finished his Easter eggs and Thornton chocs! He only partook of a noggin if he had company; whereas, with shopping, Mum thought that denial was a river in Egypt!

Dad’s passions were for home, garden and family – great generosity to us all! …For jazz – a rare indulgence to build up a record collection… And for golf: which he introduced me to after Mum had died – Mum didn’t like being a grass widow, so Dad only played golf when a friend visited from Scotland. Thereafter, he remained true to her memory, but joined the Fairways Golf Club and played until his 93rd year.

He greatly loved his grandchildren and their families, and determined that they should receive as much material support as he could manage. He was an independent and contented man, but cheerfully adapted in the last year to being more dependent on others. Dad left his home to visit us, as usual, at Easter, had a stroke and never saw it again. Yet he adapted to and enjoyed his flat and the company at Clifford Court, and was content for the last weeks at the Meadows, with his family visiting daily.

We give thanks for his life.

Love from all the family.

Nigel Kneale and…

The day after my Grandad’s death, a friend got in touch to tell me about Nigel Kneale. A huge influence of a very different kind on my life, if ever the history of British television in the second half of the Twentieth Century is written – really, the first half-century of creative British TV – he deserves to be one of the half-dozen writers at the very top. Brilliant, influential, ground-breaking and prolific, he might be largely pigeon-holed as a science fiction writer, but I suspect that’s mainly by people who want to sneer at both him and the genre. He was massively inventive, and deserves statues across the country for virtually inventing original drama on BBC TV and dragging TV production away from just staid stage plays on the visual wireless. All lovers of good television owe him a huge debt. I wrote in the summer about his most famous work, the Quatermass serials, with Quatermass and the Pit still a strong contender for the best TV drama ever made. Read author and actor Mark Gatiss’ lovely eulogy to him, and pick up a copy of The Quatermass Collection DVD set. It’s superb.

Usually I’d distract myself from one piece of sad tidings by concentrating on another area of my life, but losing my Grandad and hearing about Nigel Kneale rather hit me for six on both a personal and an intellectual level. I’d spent October worrying about my Grandad, and on hearing of the death of Peter Barkworth – an actor who I remember impressing me with his quiet charisma in Telford’s Change when I was a boy, long before I got to see his splendid 1960s performances in Doctor Who and The Avengers, and a famous son of Stockport – I couldn’t help thinking of Grandad, though I didn’t realise that I’d be rushing to his side just a couple of days later. I found that it’s the unexpected things that made grief the most sharply painful; when I thought I’d prepared for it, the little things I couldn’t prepare for have been hitting me. Steeling myself to read through the papers last Wednesday in search of Nigel Kneale’s obituaries, for example, it was a shock to see that smooth, gorgeous-voiced actor William Franklyn had died too – on an ordinary day, I’d have felt a little sad at the passing of the man who said “Sshh,”, the final voice of The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and the Avengers villain I’d written about just the previous week, but on that day, it felt like everyone was dying. Or a couple of days ago, taking pleasure in looking through an old photo album and pictures of Grandad, I was suddenly upset to see photos of a schoolfriend and I, aged nine and ten, knowing that he’d died appallingly early just a few years ago.

I wish I’d met Nigel Kneale, and had the chance to tell him how fantastic he was. But more importantly, I’m glad I knew my Grandad for so much of my life and so much of his, and that I told him I loved him. Most of it was a very happy time, and a bit of me will always think of Watford as my second home. A much larger part of me will always miss him.

Labels: BBC, Obituary, Personal, Quatermass, Scotland