The Ministry is delighted to present its staff’s cultural reviews for 2007.
DOM DE PLUME
Written Word – A Tale Etched In Blood And Hard Black Pencil, by Christopher Brookmyre. It’s not a great book by any means – the plot and its resolution could be clearly seen in its entirety by even this unperceptive reader, like cowboys in a Sergio Leone western riding very slowly towards the camera from a distant hill – but the many passages which recall the indignities, humiliation, paranoia and uncertainty of attending school are truly unsettling. The horror made up for a dismally happy ending which was probably sufficiently predictable to ensure that ITV brings it to the small screen in two parts in 2008.
Television – The way in which Simon Anstell has revived Never Mind The Buzzcocks by reinstalling the tradition of being cruel to guests. My favourite show involved an unusually fresh dissection of the Jackson clan which eventually drove Jermaine Jackson into directing what may have been the most violent gesture of his life towards the presenter. Best single joke goes to his response to the suggestion that he might have upset Courtney Love – something like: “What’s she going to do? Kill me and make it look like suicide?”
Cinema/DVD – I think the only film I’ve seen all year is Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit. Cheesetastic.
Sport – New Zealand v France, Rugby Union World Cup quarter final, Millennium Stadium. After 30 minutes, I thought I was watching the death of my favourite sport. After 80 minutes, I felt like I had watched the triumph of good over evil. Also an honourable mention for the Martin Adams v Phill Nixon Lakeside World Championship darts final.
Music – Lack of time and colossal pretentiousness probably explains why I seem to be drawn to Queens of the Stone Age. Being at least two years behind everyone else, I finally got around to listening to Lullabies to Paralyze, and enjoyed it immensely. It is loud, codly threatening and pleasingly messy.
Stage – Watching Crowded House close their world tour a few days ago at the Royal Albert Hall was a real privilege. I have never seen a band take so many risks on stage, while delivering a rock-solid set of well-thumbed classics enriched with bags of spontaneity and experimentation.
Cultural Highlight – The growth of well-informed, provocative online content and comment, gloriously untroubled by this poll’s main categories.
Cultural Nadir – The growth of poorly-informed, insipid, lazy, fifth-hand, deadline-meeting, grammatically challenged, mediocrity obsessed online content, making it harder than it should be to locate Cultural Highlights.
THE MINISTER
Written Word - I was naturally delighted to receive a thank you credit in The Slot Car Handbook: The Definitive Guide to Setting-Up and Running Scalextric Style 1/32 Scale Ready-to-Race Slot Cars by Dave Chang.
However, my book of the year is You Can Live Forever, the first novel by Julie Maxwell. Reviewed as “dark”, “dry” and “disturbing”, the book is often compared to Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit but makes Winterson’s effort look anaemic in its portrayal of cultist zealotry and burgeoning sexuality. Populated by a series of wonderful grotesques – the protagonist’s parents, in particular, are delicious – the novel raises some questions about belief and education that this atheist child prodigy never previously considered. It also made me laugh out loud repeatedly. Most of all, though, it was a novel I didn’t want to put down – something that happens too rarely now. (The first three chapters can be downloaded for free from here.)
I have been meaning to read Richard Milward’s Apples for months and hope one day to achieve this goal.
TV - The only domestic programming I enjoyed unreservedly were the year’s two The Thick Of It specials – The Rise Of The Nutters in January and Spinners And Losers in June. Highlighting everything despicable about this country’s parliamentarians, this programme gets better and better and demonstrates that a Swearing Consultant should be compulsory for every series. Whether it can continue remains doubtful given off-screen events but even if it burnt all too briefly, its sulphurous glow will forever hold a dear place in my heart. I also enjoyed (though often disagreed with) Adam Curtis’s The Trap: What Happened to Our Dream of Freedom? documentary series, and Boy A a Channel 4 drama based on the release of a young man who had been imprisoned for murder as a child.
Otherwise, quality television starts and ends in the USA. HBO’s Entourage (whose Ari Gold is his own Swearing Consultant) and – in particular – Showtime’s Weeds are works that sometimes border on genius. The UK has only so far seen the first two series of Weeds but the joys of BitTorrent mean that 2007′s series three has already been broadcast in at least one British living room, often within 36 hours of being first shown in the States. I remain utterly devoted to the wonderful Mary-Louise Parker: we would by now be living happily ever after were it not for the restraining order.
The third series of House (Fox) played more to Hugh Laurie’s comic strengths and was generally all the better for it. Unfortunately, the series finale suggested that sharks were in the process of being well and truly jumped and I fear for what series four may hold in store: the summary for an early episode begins “House is recruited by the CIA…”
Best new comedy is NBC’s 30 Rock, hidden away in the late Thursday night schedules of Channel 5 in the UK. Devised by, written by and starring Tina Fey, it has served up some of the funniest and most subversive lines ever to be broadcast on American terrestrial television. It has also unearthed hitherto unknown brilliant comic timing in Alec Baldwin. NBC deserves credit for persevering with a show that pulled in tiny viewing figures and it has been justly rewarded with Emmy and Golden Globe nominations.
Paradoxically, NBC should simultaneously be razed to the ground for pulling the plug on another show that drew larger viewing figures than 30 Rock, Studio 60 On The Sunset Strip. At times exceptional and almost never less than brilliant, this has been my TV show of the year. From the exquisite and breathless opening episode through to its penultimate episode (the final episode will be shown on More4 this week), this has been a tour de force in contemporary ensemble drama. Matthew Perry has been fantastic and has laid Chandler Bing to rest; Bradley Whitford has really just reprised Josh Lyman (albeit with a lighter hair tint) but I still want to be him.
On the negative side: Heroes. Seriously, how the fuck did that get past Quality Control?
Film/DVD – Movie of the year – Anton Corbijn’s biopic of Joy Division’s Ian Curtis, Control. A true labour of love (Corbijn himself financed half the film’s €4m budget), it is a surprisingly funny film. Sam Riley’s performance as Curtis was terrific while Tony Kebbell stole several scenes with his depiction of the band’s legendarily chaotic manager Rob Gretton. Can’t wait for the DVD.
Honourable mentions – Hot Fuzz (funny but not as funny as Shaun Of The Dead), The Simpsons Movie (funny but not as funny as the series at its best), The Painted Veil, Hairspray, The Lives Of Others and The Good Shepherd. Michael Moore’s Sicko sadly never made it to a cinema near me, so I must await the DVD.
The best DVDs I saw this year were Bobby (Emilio Estevez’s fictionalised account of the assassination of Robert Kennedy, studded with 2006′s best cast) and Babel (which I missed at the cinema last year and enjoyed much more than I expected).
I cried during 2006′s final episode of The West Wing, already grieving. I should not have feared: 2007 has seen The Minister’s Wife get the DVDs out more often than E4 shows Friends.
I was also fortunate enough (thanks to Domdeplume) to attend a 20th anniversary screening of Withnail & I at the BFI followed by the taping of a Radio 4 programme, The Reunion, afterwards with Bruce Robinson, Richard E. Grant, Paul McGann, Ralph Brown.
Sport – While I loathe boxing, I was pleased to see one of this country’s genuinely great sporting champions – Joe Calzaghe – voted BBC Sports Personality of the Year after the embarrassment of the 2006 award. Hard not to be moved by the England rugby team’s journey to the Rugby World Cup Final and, in particular, by the sad end to Jason Robinson’s career. (The best sporting broadcast of the year was Brian Alexander’s remarkable Radio 5 pre-tournament interview with Jonny Wilkinson, a very troubled soul.) Equally hard not to be moved by Frankie Dettori finally winning the Derby Stakes on Authorized. Just as hard not to be moved by Paula Radcliffe winning the New York Marathon.
Hard not to be disgusted by the relentlessly corrosive effect of drugs in too many sports – how Martina Hingis can claim to have ingested cocaine accidentally is beyond satire. Perhaps she should have followed Clinton’s example and not inhaled.
Even harder not to be revolted by the shabby behaviour of the board of directors of Tottenham Hotspur plc, in their dealings with the media (banning the Evening Standard from White Hart Lane) and repeatedly constructively dismissing the club’s former manager Martin Jol before events reached a farcical conclusion on national television: news of his dismissal was leaked by the club at half-time during a match being broadcast live; 30,000 people sang Jol’s name repeatedly throughout the second half and left those watching with no doubts as to what they thought of the antics of Daniel Levy, Paul Kelmsley, Damien Comolli and Donna Cullen. The sooner that shower crawl back beneath the rock from which they emerged, the better for football.
Music - My album of the year is Songs For The Road by David Ford. A songwriter who lyrics match (and often better) his music, singing about the aspects of love that James Blunt bottles, politics and the absurdity of creationism. Every soul would benefit from exposure to Ford’s Waitsian ditties.
Best of the rest – The Reminder by Feist, Rilo Kiley‘s Under The Blacklight, Neon Bible by Arcade Fire, Amos Lee‘s Supply And Demand, Love by The Beatles (which bodes well for the remastered back catalogue confirmed by McCartney for 2008) and the re-issue of Catherine Feeny‘s Hurricane Glass.
Stage – In New York in the second week of 2007 I saw David Hare‘s play The Vertical Hour, starring Bill Nighy and Julianne Moore. It was so bad I refused to set foot in a theatre for the rest of the year.
Cultural Highlight – Despite the individual rays of light mentioned above, I fear popular culture is dangerously stagnant. 1957 – rock’n'roll; 1967 – the Summer of Love; 1977 – punk; 1987 – acid house; 1997 – er…; 2007 – what was the question again?
The integration of environmentalism into the political, cultural and commercial mainstream. The Bali Roadmap is an embarrassment but once the incumbent pinhead leaves 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, we might actually start getting somewhere.
Cultural Nadir – Where to start? The Daily Express… Nicky Fucking Campbell… Heather Mills… Pete Doherty… Tony Blair‘s apparently serious appointment as a “peace envoy” to the Middle East… The continuing attack on British civil liberties and freedom of speech… The iPhone… Almost everything about the Labour Party involving money…
The increasing irrelevance and infantilism of the BBC’s news and current affairs output is too depressing to think about: any broadcaster that employs the preposterous Mihir Bose as its Sports Editor deserves everything it gets.
However, after long consideration my cultural nadir can be summed up in two sad words: Madeleine McCann.
JULESALLEN (whose excellent idea this is)
Written Word: Will Self‘s How The Dead Live and My Idea of Fun. Will Self’s books are like heroin: pleasurable, meaningless and wrong. But I can’t stop going back to them.
TV: Rather than pick out highlights which you have all done so eloquently, I’d just like to nominate the following for setting in motion, between them, a sequence of events which will change the way all of us watch television forever:
a) YouTube.com
b) Sky +/Freeview+, and
c) Studio Gigi
Cinema/DVD: Shane Meadows’ This is England. This is Cinema. Honourable mentions: David Fincher’s Zodiac, Olivier Meyrou’s Au Dela de la Haine (Beyond Hatred), David Lynch’s Inland Empire.
Sport: Cardiff in October. France v New Zealand, the Rugby World Cup quarter final. I was there and can relate that it was a game of great beauty and an occasion of everlasting joy. Honourable mention goes to the look that Sergio Garcia gave Padraig Harrington as he walked up the 17th a shot behind the Irishman, having seen Harrington burn his drive on 18 (and not realising he was about to burn his third shot as well) at golf’s 147th Open Championship at Carnoustie. All of sport’s drama was encapsulated in that closing hour and a half.
Music: Kanye West, David Guetta, The Feeling. I shall now get my coat and leave it to those who know of what they speak. I’ll only say in parting that The Good the Bad and the Queen was clearly drivel and a holocaustal waste of talent. According to a friend I was supposed to listen to it 3 times, but I can’t because my version’s already landfill, I’m afraid.
Stage: Patrick Marber‘s Dealer’s Choice at the Menier Chocolate Factory.
Cultural Highlight: The Thick of It: The Rise of the Nutters – Armando Iannucci’s political satire on BBC2.
Cultural Nadir: The joyous resurgence and legitimisation of the sport of Boxing in the UK.
BEARDED BABY
In the immortal words of Betty Boo, “Where are you, Baby?” We miss you.
