You forgot your long spoon, Andy, Fleet Street in a funk and Blair off the hook (more or less)

I’ve never really known when using a proverb or a saying shades off into using a cliché, so I shall leave it to my reader (how are you, by the way?) to decide whether the following is still a quaint precautionary saying or just a tawdry common or garden cliché: When you sup with the Devil, us a long spoon.

Whether or not it is a cliché or still a venerable piece of good advice is, however, pretty irrelevant in the case of Andy Gray, one-time Dundee United, Aston Villa, Wolves and Everton player as well as regularly turning out for Scotland (he was born in Glasgow), who then became the regular football pundit for Sky Sports when he retired. For Gray it is too late to do the wise thing and sit at the far end of the table when breaking bread with Lucifer. Yesterday, Sky sacked Gray over ‘sexist remarks’. Preparing for a touchline
interview at which one of the ‘assistant referees’, once known as linesman, was Sian Massey (right), Gray and made several ‘sexist’ comments about her. These were not broadcast publicly and would not have come to the undoubtedly profoundly horrified public’s attention if Sky had not decided to release the material on which these comments were made.

That was rather an odd thing for Sky to do, but I’ll get to that a little later. Sky then discovered two other instances when Gray made ‘sexist’ remarks – one to, Charlotte Jackson, a fellow sports presenter who was a woman – and decided that enough was enough and that Gray had to go. Pretty straightforward, you might think: man makes comments which, in 2011, are too off-colour, and his employer decides they cannot be tolerated.

The comments are, it must be said, rather low on the scale of what not to say, and I would be extremely surprised if Ms Jackson was in the slightest discomfited, although I shall be equally extremely surprised if the sisters who belong to our commentariat, many employed on Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour, don’t make a full and quite substantial meal of this issue. I don’t work in broadcasting and for all I know it is a very different environment, although I doubt it.

But here in the wacky world of our female colleagues are not only treated with respect professionally, but they also hear – and dish out in equal measure – appallingly sexist comments every day they turn up for work. (A few years ago, I and two or three colleagues were on our way across the road to The Greyhound (aka The Rottweiler) for a drink before 11pm closing time. I passed a female colleague who had not been there when a visit to the pub was suggested and asked her: ‘Do you fancy a quickie?’ She said she didn’t. So I then said: ‘Well, why don’t you come across to the Rottie with us, then?’ Quite appalling.)

Back to Gray and how this tale of outrage over sexism is a tad murkier than might at first seem. Sky is owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation which also owns News International which, in turn owns our very own News Of The Screws.

Now, the Screws is in the shit because the saintly Guardian discovered a year or two ago that its reporters had been hacking into the mobile phone message boxes of rather a large number of celebrities and politicians. At the time, a token reporter and private investigator were jailed for doing it, but the story didn’t go away. Surely, everyone asked, the practice was far more widespread among Screws staff? And surely, they asked, the then editor Andy Coulson knew what his reporters were getting up to? Coulson denied it – to universal disbelief and cries of ‘well, he wasn’t much of an editor, then, if, as he claims, he didn’t know’ – but the it all caught up with him this week when, by now chief spokesman to Prime Minister David Cameron, he decided to resign because the story ‘wouldn’t go away’.

Next, the heat is on Scotland Yard to reveal exactly what its investigation into the phone hacking revealed; and, more pertinently, rather a lot of celebs are suing News International for apparently allowing the Screws staff to do what they did or, at the very least, not putting an end to the practice. And among those suing News International is one former footballer and, until yesterday, star football pundit Andy Gray. This did not go down well with News Corp. But bear with me, as it might even be murkier than that, although being murky it is not too clear what is going on and just how it relates to Gray’s sacking.

News Corp wants to buy the shares in Sky (or Sky BSB as it officially is) it doesn’t yet own. It wants full control of the satellite television station. But as News Corp ultimately owns The Sun, The News Of The World, The Times and the Sunday Times as well as holding a majority share in Sky, many claim gaining full control of Sky would not be healthy for competition in the media industry and the Government has been asked to take a look at it all.

Well, the Government has done so and might well refer the matter to our Competitions Commission. But it has first asked News Corp to take another look at its holdings and perhaps consider getting rid of some. So there is talk the Sky News might be sold (which I think is pretty unlikely, but then I have absolutely no specialist knowledge in these matters) or that Murdoch (OK, News Corp if you want to be pedantic) might rid himself of The Times and the Sunday Times. That, I think, would make more sense, because the The Times makes a loss and circulation is falling, although I think the Sunday Times still turns a profit.

As I say, I can’t for the life of me imagine how the desired complete takeover of Sky by News Corp would fit in with the sacking of one of Sky Sports football pundits, so I offer the above as background. What is, however, rather clearer is that News Corp, which is wholly embarrassed by the continuing phone hacking saga, is none too pleased with having one of its star pundits suing another part of its empire for potential millions. So the next time Murdoch, or more realistically one of his underlings, turns up on your doorstep to join you for supper, do remember the long spoon you would be advised to use.

. . .

You can believe that it was just the one rogue Screws reporter in cahoots with a private investigator who hacked into mobile phones or you can assume, as I think most of us do, that the practice was more widespread. After all, if he got stories that way and didn’t keep it too himself (something which hacks are utterly incapable of doing – if you want to spread a rumour, tell a hack and tell him to keep it secret), every other hack who heard about it will have tried the same schtick. And that is what other newspapers are worried about. Because if not just one Screws hack, but several did it, you can bet your bottom dollar that hacks on the Mirror, the Sunday Mirror, The People and the Daily Star were up to the same.

I can’t speak for the Daily Express or the Daily Mail, although yesterday I asked the chap who was news editor at the time the practice was rife whether the Mail got up to it, and he told me, no it hadn’t. Well, as Ms Rice-Davies would have said, he would, wouldn’t he. And it is not at all impossible that the Daily Telegraph would have been tempted to do the same. And if they did, it will all come tumbling out.

Which is rather bad news, because any number of MPs still smarting from being discovered with their fingers in the expenses till – claiming for duck islands, antique bookshelves, second homes which turned out to be a kennel in Govan - who are very keen indeed to get their own back for the mauling Fleet Street’s finest handed out. In the long run, with everyone looking like a loser over this one, I should imagine it will be brushed under the carpet, the Guardian will huff and puff and search its cliché dictionary for suitable descriptions of what has happened, the dogs will bark and the caravan will move on.

. . .

Speaking of caravans moving on, that would seem to have been the salvation of Tony Blair, who might perhaps be rather relieved, if not a little peeved, that he is now yesterday’s man and the invasion of Iraq is now yesterday’s news. We have far more modern issues to anguish over.

In evidence to the Chilcot Inquiry, Lord Turnbull, one of his Cabinet Secretaries, more or less implied Blair was lying through his teeth when he claimed that at all times his Cabinet was kept fully informed of plans to invade Iraq. Not so, said Lord Turnbull, they knew very little about it until three days before the invasion when they were asked to rubber stamp it all.

But – apart from the friends and family of the estimated 100,000 Iraqis who have died in post-invasion violence and of the U.S. and British servicemen and women who have been killed – who cares. Most certainly not the public, who after the artificial prosperity of the Labour years now face having to pay the bill for the profligacy. Not being able to buy yet another 48in plasma TV for the kids’ bedroom? The shame of it!

Why we should kill all poor people and save the planet. And Piers Morgan stands in for God as the lad himself goes on extended leave

I’m a rather dull sort and subtlety tends to elude me. So you will understand why I am baffled that, on the one hand, the news this morning is that if population continues to grow at the rate it is, but we continue to waste food at the rate we do, we’re screwed. On the other hand, science (make that ‘science’) is finding ever cleverer ways of prolonging life and ensuring we all live well into our second century, so glory, glory be.
As for food, it seems that as we all grow ever more prosperous (another goal which is apparently sine qua non in the western ‘civilised world’), we can afford ever more arcane food from all corners of the world, which we ship in but don’t always eat. Then there’s our ‘concern’ for our carbon footprint which means we are looking for alternatives to fossil fuels, of which bio-fuels are one. The trouble is that to ensure we have enough bio-fuel in the western world so that we can reduce our ‘carbon footprint’, land so far used for growing food crops is now being increasingly used to grow bio crops to produce bio fuels. Why? Because they sell for more: the western world, concerned as it is to save the planet for future generations is willing to pay more for bio fuels than the poor of the world can afford to pay for food crops. Obvious, really, when you think about it.
Here in Britain (and in other parts of Europe) we have related tomfoolery. While scientists (make that ‘scientists’) beaver away to ensure we live longer, governments (I am inclined to write ‘governments’) are getting increasingly worried that there won’t be enough young working young people around who they can tax in order to pay for the care of an ever larger group of elderly. A short-term solution has been to ‘raise retirement age’, so that people carry on paying their own way for longer. All fine and dandy you would think, except that industry is rather less inclined to employ older folk because they can get away with paying young folk lower wages. Younger folk are also thought to be more adaptable to change.
All in all a fuck-up in the making. So what’s new?
Here’s my solution: kill off everyone over 75 irregardless of material status, and kill off as many ‘Third World’ poor people as we can decently get away with without raising too many eyebrows. It might sound like a drastic solution, but the imperative to ‘save the planet’ surely takes precedence over our somewhat sentimental regard for life.

. . .

There can now be few in the world who have never heard of Piers Morgan and the lad is now well on his way to world domination. From the factory dormitories of Xianxing to the call centres of South Shield the talk is of nothing but how the man’s talents, charisma and ambition have landed him the Top Job: standing in for Larry King on (I should imagine it’s called) The Larry King Show. If, on the other hand, you haven’t yet heard of Piers Morgan (aka the Honourable Piers Stefan Pughe-Morgan, 8th Baron Wapping when he’s in his birthday suit) you’re either a Trappist monk or dead.
It seems his first appearance in the hot seat was a complete triumph in which he managed to get one Oprah Winfrey to talk about herself and her new TV channel. Well! That shows
Piers poses with God
the doubters who said it was all stuff and nonsense when young Piers first announced he was in line for the position.
I’ve never met him, although when I worked subbing shifts on the Sun, he was editing the paper’s Bizarre column and he would be around the feature backbench every night, cutting what I always thought was a rather incongruous figure in a Tweed sports jacket. He is said to be insufferably Tiggerish, but to be fair I know three people who have worked with him and two of them speak quite highly off him. The third jointly presented a TV programme with him and she is rather less of a fan. The first two knew him, respectively at the Sun in the early Nineties and when he edited the Mirror (which might still in those days have been called the Daily Mirror).
His rather less enthusiastic acquaintance knew him several years later, after he had been sacked from the Miror, but by which time his ego had apparently grown rather large.
The guy who worked with him on the Sun (and was rather more senior than Piers, although in a different, tho’ related department) now works on the same desk as me, and he told me an anecdote about Piers from when he ran and wrote the Sun’s Bizzare column. In fact, he didn’t write quite large chunks of it — that would have been impossible — and had a deputy and staff writers, but everything appeared under the ‘Piers Morgan’ byline. That is not necessarily an indication of an outrageous ego, it’s just how many such columns operated and operate. At the Sun Piers’ deputy was a chap called Peter Willis, a rather pleasant unassuming chap, and, of course, everything he produced appeared under Piers Morgan’s byline. After few years, Rupert Murdoch, who owns News International, plucked Piers and made him the editor of the News Of The World, which was the lad’s first step to stardom. (From there he went on to edit the Mirror, although as the Mirror was the Sun’s arch-rival, the move across didn’t go down well with Murdoch. But that move came later.)
As editor of the News Of The Screws, Morgan hit pay-dirt and among his perks was a chauffeur-driven car. It seems that one dark and rainy night he was being driven home from the Wapping plant in whatever luxury limo he had been given when he spotted his old deputy Peter Willis leaving the building, his coat wrapped around him to keep out the cold. He had the chauffeur stop car and he offered Willis a lift, which his former deputy accepted gratefully. As the two of them were driving along in the back of the limo, Morgan asked Willis:
‘Peter, do you remember all those stories you found working on Bizarre which you then wrote up and which then appeared under my byline?’
‘Yes,’ said Willis.
‘Well,’ said Morgan, proudly indicating the interior of his plush limo and all its luxuries, ‘look where they got me.’

Rational debate: thy name does not appear to be James Delingpole. But Talbot Church gets my vote

It is fair to say that in the long run everything is balanced out, although I am obliged to add that, as John Maynard Keynes pointed out, ‘in the long run we are all dead’. In the short run and in politics, the left must put up with government by the right, but, don’t worry, for in time the right will give way and be obliged to put up with government by the left. Were British politics to be viewed over the past 200 years, it would be apparent that, more or less, the awful ‘progressives’ have had their hand on the tiller for about as long as the awful ‘reactionaries’ and neither has had a disproportionate time in office. (I should add, though, that as far as I am concerned both terms are next to meaningless: there are as many reactionaries who regard themselves as ‘progressive’ as there are innovators who are seen as ‘reactionary’.) Naturally, if the perspective is a lot narrower, the balance isn’t always too apparent. So someone born in the mid to late Nineties, such as my two children, will only have known Labour government (I won’t say ‘New Labour’ as that was just so much PR bullshit dreamed up by the essentially red-top mentality of one Alastair Campbell, he of Diana, ‘the people’s princess’.) They will now know that Labour isn’t the be all and end all of politics, by the time they get to be my age, they will also come to realise that politics is not the be all and end all of life.
When I was at college, the lefties all thought of me as a righty and the righties thought of me as a lefty. In fact, I was – and am – neither and have remained, overall, pretty much dead centre all my life. My father once accuse me of being ‘dangerously liberal’ which, at the time – I was still in my salad days – I thought of as being a contradiction in terms. Now I know it isn’t and I fully understand what he meant, but then from his 30s on he was always pretty much ‘on the right’.
I usually do my best to avoid political discussions because they are invariably horribly dull. Either both sides agree with each other completely, or the ‘discussion’ quickly degenerates into a slanging match. Very rarely indeed are both sides prepared to listen to what the other has to say, to consider it and to responded rationally.
All this occurred to me when I visited the Daily Telegraph website for a general mooch around and spotted the name James Delingpole. I’ve twice met him very briefly and on the second occasion decided to take against him when – he was still wearing his hair exceptionally long – he wrote off the band Steely Dan. Everyone is entitled to their opinions and own tastes, of course, but anyone who writes off Steely Dan wholesale, even if they don’t like their music, is either striking a pose or downright stupid. I now suspect that in Delingpole’s case it is the former, because he is now an established youngish journalist who makes his living writing for right-of-centre publications and producing pieces along the lines of ‘how awful the world is/is becoming/will be in the future’. That’s fine and dandy from some hack in his late
50s with a drink problem (I intend calling him George Rant), but Delingpole is not in his 50s (as you can see from the piccy) and, as far as I know, doesn’t have a drink problem (which the piccy cannot establish either way).
The piece I spotted in the Telegraph, which you can read here, is true to form. It is headlined ‘Why we still love Sarah Palin’ and to give you a taste of the kind of reasoned, intelligent polemic it sets out to be, contains the observation that ‘President Obama is a socialist and his administration a crazy house of eco-loons, crypto-Marxists, progressives, collectivists, surrender monkeys and anarcho-lesbian harpies’. I could live with the opinion that Obama ‘is a socialist’, but the rest of that sentence can be taken no more seriously than you would the rantings of your local bar bore. On the face of it, Delingpole does not strike me as the kind of chap who would contribute very much to a rational political debate.
For a taste of something a little more rewarding, I can recommend a distinguished writer and journalist called Talbot Church who is currently employed by The Independent ('The Inday'). You can find his latest piece (or, if you are reading this in the year 2015, a piece he wrote several years ago) here.

Are hedge funds listening to the right Chinese whispers. And who exactly are the experts? And Blair is back in the limelight, the slimy little toad

Mention hedge funds to most people, and you could well have them spitting blood. The conventional – and ill-informed wisdom – is that those nasty hedge funds, in cahoots with the banks, more or less brought the western world to its knees. But that is all rather unfair on hedge funds.
Admittedly, they are, like the law and The Ritz, open to all – i.e. they are open to all who have several million to spare and can afford to take advantage of the expertise they offer, but in principle you and I can do what hedge funds do and if we get it right, we, too, would be quids in. That is, of course, a big if. For the fact is the hedge fund managers put in a hell of a lot of work to spot winners – and losers. And it is the profits they make on spotting the losers which seems to upset everyone.
That is odd, because no one objects to anyone identifying a stock it believes is undervalued and buying up that stock in the belief that in the future it will gain in price. It so happens that hedge funds often do the opposite: they identify stock which they believe is overvalued and then short-sell it. Moralists might claim that such action profits from failure, but I can’t see it at all.
I began to understand a little more of what hedge funds do when I heard an interesting piece on the radio by the guy who made a pile for his hedge fund by spotting that Enron was a wrong ’un.
In the course of his work, he was going through the published financial information of a variety of firms and something about what Enron had published didn’t add up. So he concentrated on Enron and decided – quite rightly as it turned out – that Enron was just another house of cards. So he bet that the house of cards would come tumbling down and that the stock would be worthless. It isn’t, of course, quite that simple, and a fair degree of luck is involved in the timing. But, broadly, that is what hedge funds do (and I suspect a large amount of the hostility towards them is based on the fact that we can’t get a piece of the action.

Naturally, not all hedge funds are a success and that is part of the risk taken by those who agree to lend to hedge funds. There was the famous case a few years ago (so famous, I can’t even remember the name of the fund) which had to be bailed out in order to ensure the whole system didn’t collapse, but I assume that was the exception which proved the rule.
I mention this because I came across and interesting piece in the Telegraph the other day about how a number of hedge funds have done their homework and expect China to come crashing down sooner rather than later. Naturally, there is any number of Cassandras who, some gleefully, predict doom and disaster several times a day at the drop of a hat, but what I feel is significant is that in this case – to use a phrase usually employed elsewhere – this isn’t personal, it’s business. Hedge funds who do think China is going to go tits up sooner rather than later and are prepared to act on their analyses are not interested in making a political point. They are neutral.
It is common knowledge that a massive price bubble exists in the housing market in China’s coastal cities and bubbles always – always, always, always – burst. Always. Every so often some idiot comes out and foolishly pronounces that ‘boom or bust’ has been beaten, and the announcement is always followed pretty soon by the very bust which was never again going to happen.
The problem with China is that it is not playing by the ‘rules’ (if, indeed, there are any rules in the capitalist game of beggar my neighbour.) So its factories are working flat out,
but because the value of the yuan is being kept artificially low, the goods they produce are cheap, cheap, cheap. We buy them cheap and feel prosperous, and China sells shedloads and feels successful (as, I’m sure, does the couple left). But it can’t go on forever.
I also read recently that China has built any number of ‘ghost cities’ just to keep its workforce occupied. They are called ‘ghost cities’ because no one is living in them. What compounds the problem is that with all the money it is making by selling cheap goods to the western world, China has been busy buying up whatever assets it can – from agricultural land in New Zealand to rare mineral mines in Africa and, most pertinently, sovereign debt in Europe. In the past few days, Portugal, which is deep in the shit and issued more government bonds to raise more money, got a pass because good old China came along and bought a great deal.
Of course, anyone – including China – who buys such bonds always runs the risk that the seller will eventually go bust and be unable to honour them, but that’s the name of the game.
But the hedge funds have done their homework and many of them believe the writing is on the wall for the present round of Chinese good times. They could well be right.
The real problem is that the west is banking on a prosperous Chinese middle class buying up the goods and services it produces to help us out of the current slump. If China does go to the wall, it won’t just be the Chinese middle class who suffer.

. . .

A few years ago, the Economist did an experiment: it choose a number of shares in three different ways. First it asked acknowledged ‘stock pickers’ (the kind of guys who choose which stock your investment fund should invest in) to make their choice. Then it simply picked stocks which tracked the FTSE. Finally, it took a pin and, with whoever was wielding the pin suitably blindfolded, stocks were chosen at random. A year later it looked at how those stocks had performed.
Well, you know exactly where this is going: the stocks picked at random did better than those picked by the professional stock pickers, which did more or less as well (or badly) as those which tracked the FTSE. Well, it’s a good anecdote and one which should be taken seriously, but it has to be said that there are several variables here which make the tale rather less shocking than it might seem. (OK, ‘shocking’ is laying it on a little too thick, but you know what I mean.)
First, there is the element of luck, which simply cannot be quantified. Then there is the ‘expertise’ of the stock pickers, which on the face of it rather undermines what I have written above. But still, it does rather put all that hi’falutin City stuff in its place.

. . .

Make a note in your diary: this Friday (January 21), a certain Anthony Charles Lynton Blair has a second date with our very own Chilcot Inquiry, which is looking at why Britain under Blair decided to invade a sovereign country without UN authorisation of any kind and got away with it. It will be his second appearance, and it seems he has been
recalled because of discrepancies in the evidence he gave the first time. This morning’s papers carry report that in previously classified evidence Blair’s Attorney General Peter Goldsmith admitted to the inquiry that he had been ‘uncomfortable’ with Blair’s interpretation of his legal advice on the legality of invading Iraq. Given that we in Britain have made polite euphemism a way of life, for ‘uncomfortable’ read ‘after what I told him, I didn’t know what the bloody hell he was playing at’.
For the record I think, and have always thought (though I admit that is a very easy thing to say now, but – honest, guv’ – it’s true) that Blair was a nine-bob note (a nine dollar bill or a nine euro note – you get the drift). I have also thought that he was and is a sandwich short of a picnic, although quite in what way I couldn’t tell you. No doubt he will try his usual trick of stating the obvious at length and with great authority, thus seeming to say something while, in fact, saying nothing whatsoever. And, of course, the real irony is that even if things were to do against him drastically, it wouldn’t matter. The moment has gone. He is yesterday’s man and of no importance anymore, so what would be the point of pursuing him, as some want to do, in the International Court?
For the record and according to the website Iraqbodycount between 99,374 and 108,492 Iraqi men, women and children have been killed since the invasion in 1983, rather more than were dying when Saddam Hussein was in charge. Blair and others would perhaps claim that they wanted to rid the world of a dictator and bring democracy to Iraq. To which I say, why just this one dictator and just how patronising, not to say neo-imperialistic, to insist that the rest of the world should do as we in the west say and adopt our way of governing. (I like to think in terms of self-determination rather than ‘democracy’ – ‘democratic’ Belgium has been without a government for ten months; and if the majority in a country are in favour of, say, a theocracy, who are we in the west to object?)

Euro: a slow-motion car crash. And are Nicolas Cage and his senses going their separate ways? Quick, more holy water!

The wise old Economist (which I think of as a magazine, but which insists on calling itself a ‘newspaper’) the week leads: The euro crisis: time for Plan B. What I think is so significant is that as a rule the Economist makes Pollyanna look like a manic-depressive. Optimism and looking on the bright side is its stock in trade. I always imagine that the week after Armageddon, some bright spark writing the first leader will begin: ‘Well, the worst is over. What lessons can be learnt.’ So when the Economist, the cheerful Economist, is gloomy about the prognosis for the Eurozone, you just know things are bad.
It writes that all the bailing out hasn’t really worked. The strategy was intended to demonstrate to the money markets (remember them?) that they could huff and puff for all their worth, the Eurozone would stick together and see each and every member through. Well, the huffing and puffing has carried on (with a short break for Christmas, of course, we
can’t begrudge the money markets a break after all that frantic activity), and it seems the strategy isn’t going to work. Which brings the usually cheerful Economist to Plan B: restructuring of sovereign debt, for which read all the countries up to their neck in debt should get in touch with their creditors and work out an easier timetable for repaying all the moollah they borrowed during the eternal summer of the early days of the euro. Doing that a few months ago, the Economist argued, would have caused panic and precipitated a crisis, but things are now so bad that the sooner the ‘restructuring’ is done, the better. Delay will only make the pain worse. This, I should repeat, from the every-so-optimistic Economist for whom the glass is always half full. So, is that it?
What should be remembered is that before the euro was introduced with a glorious fanfare and promises of prosperity for all (and naked contempt for all the siren voices disinclined to join in the jubilation), countries going bust usually went down alone. And they didn’t always go down. They had the opportunity to devalue their currency and put up with a few years of being condescended to by their more frugal neighbours. Now, in the glorious brotherhood that is the Eurozone, they are all in danger of tumbling down together. What might have been, in global terms, a local crisis will not, if it does develop, be a supra-regional crisis, and for that very reason even those who don’t belong to the Eurozone will suffer. And all this was predicted by those very siren voices decried by all the euro fans.
Given that things are already tough in Ireland and Greece and look like getting tough in Portugal, it would be more than unkind to say ‘we told you so’. After all, it is always – always – the ‘little man’, the ‘man in the street’ who suffers, never the fuckwits who caused the mess in the first place. But you do hope that, for once, the decision-makers will heed that line from the Economist and learn a few lessons. Or to put it another way, you do hope that finally pigs will learn to fly.

. . .

It’s the little things which can add those moments of pleasure to life, and one such little thing came my way earlier this morning when I was reading some film reviews online. One review was of the new film Season Of The Witch, which stars Nicolas Cage as a murderous crusaders with an impeccable American accent. Historically, it seems, the film is several miles adrift of what we know of medieval times in that it details the outbreak of the bubonic plague which is said to have claimed the lives of one-third of the population of Europe. That outbreak is blamed on Satanism and witches and Cage the crusader is tasked with escorting the chief satanic culprit to her trial before a church court. It did not bother the producers that the last Crusade had ended 70 years before the plague broke out, nor that the latest scientific research indicates pretty conclusively that the plague was spread by rats carrying infected fleas, not witches casting evil spells. But it wasn’t Hollywood getting up to its inaccurate best which amused me.
The review I read describes Cage’s performance as low-key to non-existent and remarks that he seem very subdued, even depressed throughout the film. It seems he had good
reason to: a castle near Bath he had bought and had renovated has been repossessed as have two homes he owned in New Orleans. His money troubles might also explain why he felt obliged to take the part in Crusader Of The Witch which by all accounts was a pretty low-budget production. (The reviewer remarks that ‘The armour seems made out of cardboard. The swords look ¬plastic. The backdrops resemble stage scenery’ and was none to impressed with the dialogue – characters are reduced to this: ‘Let’s get the hell outa here!’, ‘We’re gonna need more holy water’ and ‘I’ve saved your ass’.)
This is all bad enough – for us all, not just Cage, the actor decidedly on his uppers – but in his review, the writer also added the strange detail that Cage will now only eat flesh from animals who have ‘dignified sex lives’. That’s got to be a wind-up, I thought, that really is a case of an actor turning the tables on the press and sending them up for a change. But apparently it isn’t. Cage announced it in a serious interview with the New York Daily News, but even as I was reading it, I thought the joke was on the paper. Not a bit of it. Mr Cage, it seems, might well already be a sandwich short of a picnic.