Oh No They Aren't

Perhaps this isn't the right time of year to be doing a piece on arrogance. But I think I've said everything I've got to say about Christmas over the past 34 years. Meanwhile a couple of remarks in today's Guardian caught my attention.

One was uttered by everyone's favourite history bore, David Starkey. Starkey has made a decent career out of sucking up to British monarchs, so it's surprising that he's started laying into our current one. The Queen is a poorly educated philistine, he claims. In a late challenge to the most tasteless insult of the year, he compares her attitude towards culture to that held by Goebbels. By way of evidence, he cites an occasion when he was showing her around an exhibition he had curated. Practically her only comment was to say she needed a drink. (Or at least, to complain her gin and Dubonnet was late arriving, but this is the Queen). Frankly I think it very likely that the Queen is a philistine. It's telling, however, that Starkey doesn't even consider the alternative. That his exhibition was shite and she was trying to avoid saying so. Appreciating culture, apparently, is synonymous with appreciating David Starkey.

The other comment came in a wonderful piece about Santa Claus impersonators. Most were struggling actors, of course, and not happy with what they are reduced to. One moaned "Father Christmas is only one step up from panto." Which surprised me because I though it was quite a few steps down from that. In fact, it's possibly on an entirely different staircase. Pantomimes don't have the greatest scripts but they offer lines a bit more demanding than "Ho ho ho, what's your name, little boy?" Former celebrities banished from television tend to end up in panto; your Bonnie Langfords, your Ronnie Corbetts, your Les Dennis' (or should that be Les Denni?) None, to my knowledge, have been reduced to putting on a beard and getting groped by children in BHS.

Personally, I don't knock those in pantomime. I've been in one myself, while in the Sixth Form. It wasn't easy. There was the experience of playing at Bootham Mental Hospital in front of an audience barely able to feed themselves, let alone know when to chant "He's behind you!" There was the morning after the Christmas party when a severe hangover left me barely able to stutter a single line. There was the performance when hi-larious backstage pranksters replaced the cardboard beanstalk with a giant penis. And they were just the gigs themselves. Getting the thing onto the stage involved daily battles between the fundamentalist Christian directors who objected to every single irreverent joke inserted by the atheist writers. A struggle which turned into an all-out religious war, culminating in the Great Death Song Controversy. It was a tough time.

So if every performance of Mother Goose or Cinderella is half as rocky, respect is due to all those involved. I understand the Father Christmas' looking down on somebody. We all need to sneer at those below us. And this lot need more comfort than most, with work experiences varying from being propositioned by amorous mothers to watching your Little Helpers get drunk and fall in the lake. But they've chosen the wrong targets here. There are still street mimes, after all. There are Sealed Knot Society foot soldiers. There are people who dress up as Romans and give out leaflets. Don't pick on the man in the wig and the 44D bra.

A Clue, My Dear Watson

So on Friday morning, I returned to my desk to find I had written 'Grey Owl' on a post-it note. Frowning, I studied the words carefully. The script was definitely mine; and there was nothing else on the note. Given that:

a) We have no suppliers, clients, employees, contacts or enemies whose name fully or partially contains these words;

b) It is extremely unlikely that on Thursday I had heard, saw, thought of, talked about, eaten or copulated with a grey owl;

and c) There isn't technically, or even descriptively, anything such as a grey owl to be found anywhere near where I work;

Well, given all that, the message perplexed me a little.

I threw the note away eventually. And I regret this now. Just in case I am found slumped lifeless over my keyboard early one morning. Then a Poirot-type detective might have found the note and spent weeks trying to tie the words back to my killer. Until he finally reached the conclusion that I did. It is a clue simply of a mind going slowly but inexorably insane.

Not Shaken Or Stirred

Watched The Spy Who Came In From The Cold yesterday. Not for the first time and hopefully not for the last. John le Carré novels always worked well on film, where his fine plots and characters aren't held back by his rather mediocre prose. It also helped that they featured some especially brilliant actors. The Spy Who Came In From The Cold starred Richard Burton, a man whose whisky-soaked charisma practically staggers out of the screen.. Later Alec Guinness would make spymaster George Smiley his own and infuse the role with his wonderful brand of sinister melancholy.

However, I also couldn't help thinking that le Carré must be in despair nowadays. His books seemed to be a concentrated attack on the glamorising of spies during the Cold War. A tendency epitomised by James Bond, of course, smirking around in his tux like an aristocrat, shooting or shagging everyone in sight. Le Carré created shabby, melancholic little men; and they knew the truth about their fellow operatives. "Drunks… hen-pecked husbands… civil servants playing Cowboys and Indians to brighten up their drab lives," Burton's character spits. He also sums up the level of morality involved: "Yesterday I wanted to kill Mundt because he was evil and my enemy," he says of a Communist double agent. "Today he's evil, and my friend." Le Carré's approach became popular for a while. Even a writer as mediocre as Len Deighton could put some balance and intelligence into his Cold War yarns.

And now? Spies are superheroes again and every bit as banal. James Bond is seemingly indestructible, each new film as inevitable and over-publicised as Christmas. In Jack Ryan, Tom Clancy somehow created a character even worst; morally impeccable, utterly lifeless. On TV, meanwhile, Spooks and 24 seem locked in a bitter contest to see who can be the most absurd. Cops, doctors and even, for that matter, superheroes, can be deeply flawed and barely functioning sociopaths. Spies have to be two dimensional.

It's unfortunate because a more balanced portrayal is needed right now. One of The Spy Who Came In From The Cold's central themes was that your methods cannot afford to be less wicked than your enemy's. Morality only plays a part in your ultimate goals. And this had grim consequences when the West was just fighting totalitarian regimes who shot individuals they suspected were guilty. How about now, when the enemy blows up groups without caring who is innocent? Have our tactics become more brutal to match? It would seem so, from the accounts which have seeped out from Guantanamo Bay and Iraq. But you'll be lucky to see any acknowledgement on screen.