Sometimes the documents themselves are radically different; sometimes the differences consist of a few missing commas here and there. Disappointingly, it seems the disparity between the ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ drafts of Franzen’s book chiefly consists of minor typographical errors and typesetting changes. It’d be far more interesting if they’d accidentally printed a version in which, halfway through the nineteenth chapter, the whole thing ends abruptly with the words MORE BOOK TO GO HERE. But that didn’t happen.
Early drafts are rougher and baggier and less disciplined than the polished final product, but can be more entertaining as a result. For instance, the first draft of the children’s classic Mr Tickle is rumoured to climax with the hitherto cheery long-armed orange blobman horrifically molesting a cow from the other side of a duckpond, just because he can. Also, the original cut of Ridley Scott’s recent retelling of the Robin Hood legend contained a puzzling interlude during which Russell Crowe recited the URL for a pornographic website. The scene was dropped from the theatrical release at the last minute when it was discovered that a script supervisor had inadvertently pasted the contents of their clipboard into the script while trying to find the keyboard shortcut for ‘print’. Neither of these stories is true, incidentally, but that doesn’t necessarily make recounting them here any less worthwhile.
I’m assuming the Franzen error doesn’t affect readers who bought digital copies of the novel to read on Kindles and iPhones and eReaders and the like – but then again, even if it did, it should be possible to remotely and automatically update them all without anyone really noticing. In fact, the advent of digital books blurs the whole notion of ‘final drafts’ and ‘revised editions’ into a confusing futuristic smudge.
Freed from the physical limitations of a paper-and-ink edition, authors can continue tinkering with the text way beyond the date of publication, maybe even for ever. Perhaps before too long, you’ll be midway through an especially underwhelming paragraph, and it’ll start deleting itself before your very eyes, just like this one should have. Or your favourite character will die or reappear under an assumed name and have sex with themselves. Any notion of permanence will be a thing of the past. Even the individual letters will crawl around while you look at them, like agitated ants.
Worst of all, without the crushing finality of a concrete deadline looming over them, authors won’t be forced to make up their minds about anything any more, and before long all books will open like this: ‘James Bond strode into the casino. Actually, no he didn’t. He walked into a blazing warehouse. Except he wasn’t on foot. He was in a car. Or on a horse. Whatever. The important thing is, it was all really exciting.’
MORE COLUMN TO GO HERE.
Screen Burnt
15/10/2010
That’s it, I’m off. Kind of. After over a decade of scribbling weekly TV reviews for the Guardian’s Saturday supplement The Guide, I’m hanging up my hat – the hat with ‘Screen Burn’ stitched into it.
Since I started writing the column, back in August 2000, TV has changed beyond all recognition. Big Brother, The Wire, 24 and Friday Night With Jonathan Ross came and went. Doctor Who, Noel Edmonds and Battlestar Galactica returned. Celebrity humiliation became a national sport. Johnny Rotten fought an ostrich. Timmy Mallett drank a pint of liquidised kangaroo penis in front of Ant and Dec; Jade Goody received her cancer diagnosis in a Diary Room. Ambitious US drama serials with season-long story arcs enjoyed a renaissance. The Office, The Thick Of It and Peep Show popped up. Stewart Lee got a BBC2 series. The cast of The Inbetweeners sprouted sex organs. Glenn Beck occurred.
The way we watch changed, too: from peering at a cumbersome box in the corner of the room to basking in the unholy radiance of a fifty-two-inch plasma screen buzzing quietly on the wall. The images leapt from SD to HD and now 3D. Time itself began to collapse as YouTube, Sky+ and the BBC iPlayer slowly chewed the notion of ‘schedules’ to death.
At the start of the decade, I was receiving shows to review on clunky VHS tapes. By around 2005, roughly half the offerings arrived on DVD. Now online previewing is the norm. In five years’ time, most shows will probably come in the form of an inhalable gas which makes visions dance in your brain.
So why quit now? Well partly because I’m afraid of that future, but mostly because eleven years of essentially rewriting the phrase ‘X is an arsehole haw haw haw’ over and over until you hit the 650-word limit is enough for anyone.
See, I was never a proper critic. In my head, a ‘proper critic’ is an intellectually rigorous individual with an encyclopaedic knowledge of their specialist subject and an admirably nerdy compulsion to dissect, compare and analyse each fresh offering in the field – not in a bid to mindlessly entertain the reader, but to further humankind’s collective understanding of the arts. True critics are witty rather than abusive, smart rather than smart-arsed, contemplative rather than extrovert. I, on the other hand, was chiefly interested in making the reader laugh. And the quickest way to do this was to pen insults. Oh, I tried to make the odd point here and there, but the bulk of it – the stuff people actually remember – consists of playground, yah-boo stuff.
I was horrible. I fantasised about leaping into the screen and attacking a Big Brother contestant with a hammer; then, without a hint of irony, announced that Nicky Campbell exuded the menace of a serial killer. I also claimed Jeremy Kyle (who struck me as ‘a cross between Matthew Wright and a bored carpet salesman’) was the Prince of Darkness himself – almost (‘Look at his eyes: there’s a spine-chilling glint to them … Not that I’m saying Kyle himself is an agent of Satan, you understand. I’m just saying you could easily cast him as one. Especially if you wanted to save money on special effects.’).
The moment anyone appeared on screen, I struggled to find a nice way to describe their physical appearance. David Dickinson was ‘an ageing Thundercat’; Alan Titchmarsh resembled ‘something looming unexpectedly at a porthole in a Captain Nemo movie’; Nigel Lythgoe was ‘Eric Idle watching a dog drown’. I called Alan Sugar ‘Mrs Tiggywinkle’ and said he reminded me of ‘a water buffalo straining to shit in a lake’. What a bastard. And I’m no oil painting myself, unless the painting in question depicts a heartbroken carnival mask hurriedly moulded from surgically extracted stomach fat and stretched across a damaged, despondent hubcap. I think that constitutes some form of justification.
Looking back at the earlier columns I see that when I wasn’t preoccupied with looks, I was quite bafflingly angry. I’ve either mellowed since then, or simply grown a soul. For instance, these days – to pick a random example – Jamie Cullum strikes me as a harmless, twinkly-eyed, happy sort of chap. But back in 2004 the mere sight of him on an episode of Parkinson sent me into an apocalyptic tailspin.
‘Cullum should be sealed inside a barrel and kicked into the ocean’, I declared, before going on to label him ‘an oily, sickening worm-boy … if I ever have to see this gurning little maggot clicking into faux reverie mode again – rising from his seat to jazz-slap the top of his piano wearing a fake-groove expression on his piggish little face – if I have to witness that one more time I’m going to rise up and kill absolutely everybody in the world, starting with him and ending with me.’
Shortly after that article appeared I read a short Me And My Spoon-type interview with Cullum in London’s Metro newspaper in which he seemed cheerily bemused as to what he’d done to provoke such fury. And I felt bad. I’d like to say that I wasn’t nasty about women – but I’d be lying. I wrote that Ann Widdecombe had ‘a face like a haunted cave in Poland’, and that Cilla Black was ‘starting to resemble the result of an unholy union between Ronald McDonald and a blow-dried guinea pig’.
Neither of them warranted that abuse, although the poo-prodding food fascist Gillian McKeith probably did deserve to be called a ‘charmless, judgemental, hand-wringing harridan … incapable of smiling naturally on camera … the rictus grin in her official photo makes her look like she’s trying to shit out a pine cone, which g
iven her diet she probably is’.
People sometimes ask if I’ve ever bumped into any of the people I’ve been rude about. Yup. As soon as I started appearing on television myself, I began receiving invites to various industry functions and found myself too curious and big-headed not to attend. Suddenly you’re standing in a room full of people you’ve slagged off in print, and they’re not 2D screen-wraiths any more, but living, breathing, fallible humanoids, many of whom are clutching wine glasses which – should the mood turn sour – would make for fearsome improvised weapons. Once or twice I found myself in conversation with someone I’d been awful about in print, and discovered to my horror that the ruder I’d been, the warmer and more pleasant they appeared to be in the flesh. A black eel of guilt writhed in my skull. Why was I so nasty? These were TV presenters, not war criminals. Well, most of them.
Sometimes they weren’t even presenters. The rise of reality shows led to a ceaseless parade of instant hate figures, plucked from obscurity and flung onscreen for us all to sneer and point at. And I fell for it, endlessly picking holes in fellow human beings simply because they happened to be on TV.
I reached my misanthropic peak during series six of Big Brother, during which the contestant Maxwell was labelled ‘a goon, a berk, a gurgling bore, a ham-eyed poltroon and a great big swaggering chump’, not to mention, ‘a Norf Lahnden bozo best described as the human equivalent of a clipping from Nuts magazine bobbing in a fetid urinal’. His girlfriend Saskia had ‘a face that could advertise war’, while eventual winner Anthony was ‘a man so profoundly thick you could sell him a pair of his own socks for £500, even if he was already wearing them’.
I met Saskia several years later, incidentally, when she had a cameo as a zombie in a horror serial I wrote. She was lovely, and I felt bad, yet again. The bad feeling reached a nadir when I reviewed a contrived Channel 4 reality show in which families road-tested servants. I proclaimed that the family in question were a bunch of shits: shits so shittily shitty they might as well actually be called ‘The Shits’. Given that they’d doubtless been edited to look bad, this wasn’t really a fair assessment. Worse than that, it wasn’t funny. The moment I saw it in black and white, I felt like a witless bully.
I realised that I’d fallen into the trap of writing from the point of view of an exaggerated cartoon persona, so from that point on I tried to pick my targets with more care and to moderate the overt abuse, which undoubtedly made the columns less vicious, more whimsical, and probably more boring, although hopefully this meant that when invective was still called for – as with a piece on the Aryan Brotherhood, or the rolling news coverage of the Raoul Moat standoff – it had more sting.
But now … now it’s time to stop. Like I said, I’m exhausted. And writing a TV column over the past few years has felt progressively weirder, as I’ve gradually, simultaneously, become one of ‘them’: one of the many faces that flit across your screen, gently spoiling your evening. Fortunately for fans of unpleasant similes, my successor Grace Dent is a singularly heartless individual who’ll have none of my wussy qualms about insulting people. That woman is pure hate.
Oh, and reader: I’ll be back later in the year with a new column, right here in these pages. I give it three weeks before I’m filling it with playground insults. You’re still not shot of me. Remember, reader: only one of us gets out of this relationship alive.
*
I never did start that new column. Another promise broken.
How to save the economy without really trying
17/10/2010
This week 23-year-old chancellor Gideon Osborne will rise on his hooves in the House of Commons and unleash the most brutal series of cuts since the shower scene in Psycho. So what will actually happen? Gloomy predictions abound, but almost everyone agrees the results will be as palatable as a wax-and-cat-hair sandwich. It’s frightening stuff. In fact, the preliminary coverage is filled with so much sadomasochistic language – ‘pain’, ‘agony’, ‘eye-watering measures’, ‘tightening of the belt’, and so on – that it sounds as if we really ought to establish a ‘safe word’ now, before Prince Gideon pulls his leather mask on and sets about his business.
The coalition has repeatedly promised that those with the broadest shoulders will bear the greatest load; unfortunately, the majority of people develop broad shoulders by doing underpaid manual work, not trading stocks from the comfort of a Herman Miller Aeron chair. (Or writing for publication: I have the upper-body-strength of a nine-year-old girl.)
But is such suffering really inevitable? What happened to good old British entrepreneurial pluck, as embodied by Lord Sugar or Howard Marks? Rather than slashing the deficit by forcing the nation’s ambulances to operate using one wheel as opposed to four, can’t we find more cunning means to raise funds? Yes we can. Here are a few suggestions. And if Giddyguts Osborne doesn’t use them, he is perhaps the least imaginative monster this country has ever seen.
The military
The problem: we’re always reading that our armed forces aren’t adequately equipped; that they’re forced to wear papier-mâché helmets and use rifles made of crayon. The cuts are only likely to make a bad situation worse, because military-grade arms are so preposterously expensive that even Waitrose won’t stock them.
The solution: encourage soldiers to create their own improvised weapons. A garden fork with barbed wire wrapped round each spike? Nice one, Private Titchmarsh. A catapult and a blood-filled syringe? Liking your style, Captain Doherty. Not only would it make wars more interesting and medieval, it’d leave existing stocks of bullets going spare for Gideon and his friends to shoot grouse or foxes or dairymaids on their weekends off.
Education
The problem: making kids clever is way too expensive. But failing to educate them at all will eventually lead to the entire nation resembling a giant chimps’ tea party. Which it absolutely doesn’t at the moment.
The solution: sell bespoke classroom time-slots to corporations. Your child’s new timetable: 9 a.m. Geography; 10 a.m. French; 11.30 a.m. Yakult Studies; 12 p.m. Lunchtime sponsored by Cheestrings; 1 p.m. The Story of Rolos; 2 p.m. Just Do It! (formerly PE); 3 p.m. English Literature; 3.05 p.m. GlaxoSmithKline Sing-a-Long Zone; 4 p.m. Hometime (sponsored by Renault).
The police
The problem: truncheon costs have soared and since ITV’s cancellation of The Bill there are fewer secondhand uniforms to go round.
The solution: fit officers with live helmet-cams and stream the content to a subscription-based satellite TV channel. Watch live drug busts! Enjoy grisly crime scenes! See relatives sob on their doorsteps as a PC delivers tragic news! Interactive features are available for an additional fee: just £5.99 a month lets you text or tweet in your own questions during an interrogation.
The benefits system
The problem: millions of needy people obstinately refusing to function without access to food and shelter.
The solution: mandatory twenty-four-hour nudity for the unemployed. A sudden influx of millions of naked people on Britain’s streets might take some getting used to, but would provide a sharp incentive for the long-term unemployed to seek work, especially during the winter months. Most importantly, it would boost tourism. Overseas visitors currently enjoy posing alongside pigeons in Trafalgar Square, and would doubtless flock to take amusing iPhone snaps of themselves pointing and laughing at our shivering public nudes. Come see the blue bums of Britain! The more deprived the area, the greater the tourist appeal. Also, we could sell footage from the UK’s many CCTV cameras to pornographic websites.
Housing
The problem: affordable housing has to be subsidised, if the ‘affordable’ bit of the phrase is going to work.
The solution: replace every wall, ceiling and floor with a gigantic plasma screen and charge for advertising space. The affordable living room of tomorrow is a futuristic cube with a perpetually looping Go Compare commercial in place of carpets and wallpaper. In the event of traumatised residents atte
mpting to remain outdoors for as long as humanly possible, obligatory curfew hours could be enforced using a remotely operated lock-in system. And should the inhabitants kill themselves by smashing one of the screens and desperately hacking at their necks with shards of glass, the remaining plasma screens will prove easier to clean than regular carpets and walls.
Heritage
The problem: galleries and museums are costly, and there’s only so much you can claw back by flogging Pre-Raphaelite colouring books and Make-Your-Own-Dinosaur kits in the gift shop. Factor in thousands of decaying landmarks, castles and stately homes and it all adds up to a gigantic looming number made of coins and money.
The solution: time for a nationwide jumble sale. Gather up everything we don’t need and flog it to the Chinese, the Germans, the Mexicans … anyone. The Angel of the North would look great in Kim Jong-Il’s garden. The Americans have form, shelling out $2.5m for London Bridge in 1967: maybe this time we could interest them in the whole of Plymouth (we hardly use it, but for them it has sentimental value, being the origin of the Mayflower). Also: once the 2012 Olympics are over, let’s cut the stadium into tiny cubes, mount them in little souvenir boxes and flog them at Gatwick to departing athletes and dignitaries.
There. That’s the economy saved, in theory at least. Your turn, Gideon.
Clegging on
24/10/2010
In these uncertain, unsettling times, with unpopular policies being implemented by a patchwork coalition of the damned, Nick Clegg is proving to be perhaps the most useful tool in the government’s shed. Not because he says or does anything particularly inspiring, but because he functions as a universal disappointment sponge for disenchanted voters. You stare at Nick Clegg and feel infinitely unhappy, scarcely noticing Cameron and Co. hiding behind him.
I can make you hate Page 18