TV Listings

As originally published in Venue magazine:

The Smith & Jones Sketchbook
Friday, 9.30-10.00, BBC1

I blame Beyond The Fringe. Excruciating throwback to a time when BBC commissioning editors laboured under the appalling misapprehension that any comedy act in receipt of an Oxbridge education merited its own series. Younger readers may be alarmed to learn that contemporaneous critical judgement marked out Griff Rhys Jones as The Funny One. And, relatively speaking, he was, thanks in no small part to playing opposite a man whose sole comedic device was to raise his lower lip above the upper until taking on the appearance of a bulldog trapped in a car door.

The Culture Show
Saturday, 8.20-9.10, BBC2
This week the most presumptuously-titled programme on TV reports from the Cannes Film Festival, and includes Mark Kermode conducting a ‘major’ interview with Ken Loach on his new Palm d’Or contender, ‘The Wind That Shakes The Barley’. Exactly what would constitute a ‘minor’ interview is a matter for conjecture, though disaffected Beeb insiders deem the involvement of Davina McCall ‘more than likely’. Reviews of ‘United 93’ and ‘Poseidon’ also feature, as well as young Brit composer Daniel Hardy journeying to Vienna to bask in reflected glory on the 250th anniversary of the birth of Mozart.

Full Length & Fabulous: The Beckham’s World Cup Party
Sunday, 9.00-10.30, ITV1
The world’s second-most lucrative footballer and 7,855,449th most successful singer host 500 ‘lucky’ ‘stars’ in the grounds of their Hertfordshire mansion. Or, possibly, the Ninth Circle of Hell, as would befit a night compered by Chris ‘I’ve Got A Brand New T.A.R.D.I.S. And I’ll Give You The Key’ Evans, and including a rendition of ‘Angels’ by Robbie ‘Take That? Don’t Mind If I Do’ Williams. One can only hope that, as Sloshed passes round the Gordon Ramsey-prepared nibbles, nice Mr Beckham will offer some relief to the nanny.

The X:Factor Battle of the Stars
Monday, 9.00-11.00, ITV1
A host of people you’ve never heard of combine to sing covers of songs you wish you’d never heard in the first place. Kate Thornton hosts, presumably remembering to give stern warning of the poor soul who was forced to watch the whole of The X:Factor’s last series. According to a psychiatric report, he came away with the jaded, listless sexual appetite of a 60-year old colonel.

Tim Marlow On…
Tuesday, 7.15-8.00, C5
Poor Five is still trying to reconcile itself to a dual-personality, a purveyor of high and low culture with bugger all in between, and spent a fretful night of tossing and turning following yesterday evening’s tawdry little 'Private Parts: The Penis' episode . It resolves to see a priest. The priest is sympathetic, and suggests that atonement might come in the form of setting aside an evening devoted to art, specifically the Italian Baroque movement of the 17th century. Five isn’t quite convinced that such an overtly religious theme will play too well with the largely secular and hugely desirable A1/B1/C1 demographic, and instead plans to showcase highlights from the New Tate Modern, undergoing its first re-hang since opening six years ago. Warhol and Picasso might not necessarily be to the priest’s taste, but wouldn’t he find some empathy with the rigid self-discipline of a compulsive neurotic like the Dutch Neo-Plasticist painter, Mondrian? Satisfied, Five books a return visit to the priest, same time, same place, next week.

Can We Save Planet Earth?
Wednesday, 9.00-10.00, BBC1
For those moments when even a polite “How do you do?” won’t quite cut it. The estimable Attenborough has come a long way since placating knife-wielding tribesmen with good old fashioned manners, and tonight concludes his two-part study into how the planet might be saved from catastrophically rising temperatures and seas.

Five Disasters Waiting to Happen
Thursday, 9.00-10.00, BBC2
Environmental issues have been much to the fore of late, what with Bristol gaining its first Green councillor, Blair finally ceasing to swing both ways and coming out as a nuclear lover, and David Cameron inviting hordes of Fleet Street’s finest aboard an ozone-depleting plane to join him in staring forlornly, in a compassionate Conservative kind of way, at a melting Norwegian glacier. A prescient time, then, for Auntie to screen her Climate Chaos season. As the far-from-sensationalist Environment Agency raises the spectre of water levels rising above London’s lampposts, tonight’s programme reports on conflicting prognoses from around the world about just what can be done to help others avoid the fate of the blameless inhabitants of Tuvalu. A small island slowly being engulfed by the Pacific, its people are in flight, amongst the first to be tagged ‘environmental refugees’. Somehow, TV Listings doubts that even the Home Office’s finest could spin a send-them-back-to-where-they-came-from approach on this one.

MUSIC: Can't we all just get a bong? In conversation with Michael Franti

“For your security and safety,” says the plane’s steward, “we do a spiral descent from 15,000 ft above the airfield. We do this because it’s 100% effective against surface-to-air missiles, and extremely effective at avoiding small arms fire.” Welcome to Baghdad.
So begins ‘I Know I’m Not Alone’, Michael Franti’s award-winning musical travelogue of his visit to Iraq, Israel and Palestine. “I was tired of watching generals and politicians every night explaining the economic and political cost of war, the hardware and machinery of war, and never mentioning the human cost,” he says of his reasons for making the trip. “There were these hi-tech graphics of buildings that they were bombing and I was like ‘Where are the people?’” He was also inspired by William F. Pepper’s ‘An Act Of State: The Execution of Martin Luther King’, the book by the Vietnam war photographer whose work led King to say: “I have to speak out against the war. I can’t see these photos and remain passive.”
Still, honourable intentions aside, was there ever a moment in that plane when he was thinking ‘Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea’? “There was a point before that, actually, when we were waiting to get onboard. I have a song where the lyrics say ‘We can bomb the world to pieces but we can’t bomb the world to peace’. I had a 100 sheets with the lyrics translated into Arabic, but at the top of the page the song title was still in English: ‘Bomb The World’ followed by all these Arabic lyrics…” Black-humoured What Of It? dissolves into laughter. To no little relief, Franti follows suit. “We’re in the airport and I’m thinking ‘Oh fuck, man, I’m going to fucking Baghdad with these!’ We sat frantically trying to tear off the top of every page. So, yes, I had fear going into this war zone. Part of my fear was about Muslim extremists who’d maybe want to kidnap me, but also thinking maybe there were some Americans who wouldn’t want me sniffing around with my camera.”
The ensuing footage boasts a memorable cast. The Palestinian family who go into debt to feed him, unable to access food from their farm because of the recently erected wall that divides their land. The Black Scorpions, a metal band in a Baghdad basement who strip phone cable to string their instruments. Robi Damelin, an Israeli, and Nadwa Sarandah, a Palestinian, speak together about the Parents Circle Families Forum, a group comprising people from both sides of the conflict, united in bereavement. There are also Israeli soldiers patrolling their border, US soldiers stationed in Baghdad, citizens of that city who suffered under Saddam just as they’re suffering under occupation. And many others. A neutral editorial tone runs throughout. “When you go into a situation where there’s a military occupying a civilian population,” says Franti, “there’s an automatic imbalance of power that’s hard to not address. But I really believe that the way we’re going to get to lasting peace is when we recognise the suffering of all people. From the sideline it’s easy to kibitz about war, to say ‘well, gosh, if Hamas would just stop suicide bombing then there would be some moral high ground for the Palestinians’ or ‘if Israel would give some of the land back, then, y’know…’ But as soon as you start getting into those things and not addressing what all people feel on a physical, as well as moral and psychological, level, well… War doesn’t leave anybody out. The lesson that has to be understood is that violence begets more violence. What I hoped to do with this film was not necessarily try to change people’s minds, but try to open them.”
In many ways, the project marks a logical step for Franti. An innately political musician, he first came to prominence with the brilliant Disposable Heroes Of Hiphoprisy and, specifically, overtly picking up the mantle of righteous funker from Gil Scott-Heron with the song ‘Television…’ (‘Television! The drug of the nation, breeding ignorance and feeding radiation’). His later – and current - outfit, Spearhead, are generally a rootsier proposition, though lacking none of the broad appeal, authority-questioning stance that saw his earlier band tour with both Public Enemy and Nirvana.
Faultlessly thoughtful and seemingly unquenchable of spirit he might be, but every politico needs the occasional confirmation that they’re getting through. For Franti it came with the incantation of a single word: Habibi, or ‘my beloved’. Every time you sang that, I tell him, in the streets or people’s homes, to young or old, all faces lit-up. How did that feel? “It was great, you know, it really restored my faith in the goddess of music. As conscious as I like to think I am, I’m still part of this ‘record industry’. I go to marketing meetings, I sit in on discussions on where we’re gonna tour and all these things, and it’s easy to forget that music was given to us to be something that we did together. And it wasn’t just my music, but witnessing how people in Iraqi cafes would be sharing music with one another.”
And Iraqi basements, too, where he met those cable strippers, Black Scorpions. “It was amazing to see that commitment. We were gonna go to their rehearsal, and they were like ‘Do you think you can give us a few dollars?’ I was thinking ‘these guys are trying to hustle us because we want an interview with them’. But that wasn’t it: there was no electricity and they needed money to buy gas for the generator. That’s what we don’t see when we give our tacit approval to go to war: the day-to-day lack of human security. How do people get to school? How do people find food? When they turn on the tap and give a glass of water to their kid, is it gonna be full of microbes that could be the death of their children? We don’t think about that. We think let’s go into Iraq, or into Haiti, or southern Lebanon, or wherever ongoing war against poor people exists.”
Unsurprisingly, Franti holds “many” abiding memories from the trip. “Some were really spiritual and deep things like sitting down with Robi and Nadwa, discussing the death of their family members and children and saying ‘We want their deaths to be a call for peace, not for more killing’. That really, really moved me. And then there were funny moments, like the morning I arrived in Baghdad and said ‘I want a traditional Baghdad breakfast’. You know, when I go to Paris I want a croissant. But their very special breakfast is goat’s head soup. And I’m vegetarian. That was a pretty big reach for me…”
Upon return home, Franti began work on both the film and the soundtrack album, ‘Yell Fire!’, that he comes to Bristol to promote. “I had my editing studio upstairs and recording studio downstairs, so I would watch footage and emotions would come up that I didn’t feel when I was there. Going through the process of editing and then writing a song was really a catharsis for me. When I was on the street there, people would say to me ‘We don’t wanna hear songs about war. We wanna hear songs that make us feel happy, make us feel up. Why not make us cry, or make us feel something tender? We wanna hear songs about connection to people’. So that’s when I decided to go to Jamaica: ‘Let me get my head out of this. Let’s hook up with Sly and Robbie and make the most joyous record that we can make’.”
Joyous indeed, but also musically ‘lighter’ than much of his previous work. Did he want the words to stand alone? “First of all, I didn’t want to make a ‘protest’ album: 14 songs saying ‘war sucks’. I didn’t feel it would be listenable. The other thing is, I want the music to reach beyond the choir.”
So, on the September 11 anniversary, Franti flew in Robi and Nadwa to address the annual Power to the Peaceful festival in San Francisco. He’s also been to Northern Ireland. “I visited people that talked about the troubles and the desire to seek some form of reconciliation. I feel that seeds of lasting peace in the world are held within the hearts of the people of Northern Island, of South Africa, of Israel and Palestine, Darfur – places where there’s been incredible conflict. I film wherever I go. Meet people, talk to people, play music in the street. It’s kind of an ongoing journey.”

HUMOUR: On truth

An example of my column writing:

My grandmother died a couple of months ago. She was too young to go, and her passing was marked by massive public demonstrations of apathy and general disinterest. Never the most popular of women (she was a staunch Methodist with a side-order of Jehovah’s Witness, meaning that she’d go door-to-door smashing up people’s drinks cabinets), Gran was nevertheless my closest blood relative and therefore worth a nice bit of grieving. She was also the only person to whom I could address questions about my past, though because she always swore she’d never tell me the whole story until my fortieth birthday I guess now I’ll never know.
As far as I am aware, I was born in a commune on the outskirts of Grimsby in 1972. My birth certificate indicates that it was called ‘The Rainbow Collective House Of Free Love And Inexpensive Gonorrhoea’, and apparently I was left outside its gates with the empty milk bottles three days after my birth, a sign around my neck reading simply: ‘Karmic Discharge’.
Is that true? Until I started primary school I was convinced that it was, but then the sheer otherworldliness of my life, its absolute lack of commonality with that of my peers, began to convince me that mine was a fairytale existence. Grimm.
More to the point, does it matter whether or not it’s true? It’s my truth, and I’m happy to live by it. For truth – real, genuine, sun-sets-in-the-west truth - is a dangerous thing. The FBI knew that. At the dawning of the Cold War, with McCarthyite paranoia in full swing, they filed a report detailing a series of experiments entitled ‘Reality Understood Now!’ (RUN!), including several remarking on the development of a truth drug. Early tests proved successful, as the report - recently released under the 50 year rule - testifies. The following is an extract taken from an interview with a fan of the hit TV show ‘I Love Lucy’.
FBI Agent Henson: “Is ‘I Love Lucy’ funny?”
John Doe: “Yes.”
Henson: “Is the show funny?”
Doe: “Yes.”
[Henson administers truth drug]
Henson: “Is ‘I Love Lucy’ funny?”
Doe: “Well, no, but it provides a comforting façade of moral certainty and low-level sexual titillation at a time when growing socio-economic tension and continued racial inequality will likely expose the American Dream for the bunch of bullshit that it is.”
Henson: “Good. Very good. Agent Sanders, we have ourselves a truth drug. Oh, and arrest this man.”
Recognising the catastrophic potential for social implosion should the drug fall into enemy hands, successive administrations banned all further research into its capabilities, though each for varying reasons: Marilyn Monroe, some rather awkward tape recordings and a 1977 personal health report headed ‘Diagnosis: Dementia’ to name but three.
Only President Clinton demanded a continuation of the trials, telling his wife “I may just be a country boy from the backwoods of Little Rock, but my grandmammy always used to say ‘the man who fishes on the east of the river will always come home to apple pie and cookies’. No, I don’t know what she meant either, but whatever, truth is good and lies are bad. Hey, you look hot.”
Concerned FBI officials persuaded the President to ingest the drug and record a second take of his infamous videotaped testimony to the Starr Report, and a solemn faced Clinton announced to an unseeing public the following: “Today, your President, the man to whom you have entrusted your very future, is on trial. So I want you to listen to what I am about to say, and I want you to listen well. I did have sexual relations with that woman. And boys, I gotta tell ya [Clinton leans back in chair, folds arms behind his head], I took her over the desk in the Oval Office and pumped her ass like she was a jammed pinball machine. God bless America.”
The drug slipped back into obscurity, but in late 2000 came word that blueprints for its manufacture had been smuggled out of the country. With the Presidential election in full swing, the oft-denied ‘shadow government’ demanded that both main candidates immediately be given covert tests. The results for Al Gore were alarming.
“Save the planet? Hell, why not? Chloroform? Sure, I'll try anything once."
George W. Bush followed. “Hell, I wouldn’t know who Vladimir Putin was if he jumped up and bit me on the ass,” chuckled the Republican candidate, winningly. “Or is that elbow?” he added.
The assembled agents breathed a collective sigh of relief and headed off for a hastily arranged vacation in Florida.
We’d be mistaken if we only considered the truth to be a bad thing in politics, however. In a lie-free world, great swathes of the everyday conversation we have come to cherish would be lost forever. Example.
“Was it good for you?”
“Good? Well, if by ‘good’ you mean was it over blessedly quickly and I’m not so sore that I can’t go and meet Simon, my lithe young fitness instructor then, yes, it was good.”
And do we really know what truth is? I think it was Camus who said “One man’s truth is another man’s let-off.” Which may well be the case, but shouldn’t such a singular concept be in receipt of a singular definition? Of course it should, and yet any account professing to have unveiled the truth is veiled by thick sheets of subjectivity and, often, ambiguity. Consider this extract from the soon-to-be-published Woody Allen Diaries.

July 14, 1982: The truth finally dawned today. Or at least it seemed like the truth – it may just have been indigestion. Afterall, what is truth anyway? Is it simply a felicitous extemporisation on the very nature of our being, or can I put it in my pocket? And, if the latter, what price can I get for it down the market?

To return to my original point, does the truth really matter? All pontification aside, the one immutable fact regarding the subject is that the truth hurts. In the meantime, to paraphrase Disraeli, there are lies, damned lies, and damned good lies that hold together relationships, keep us in work and allow us to toss aside thoughts about the bleak, endless, unbroken tedium that is life with the words “mustn’t grumble.” It’s been a pleasure talking to you.