Diary

Wednesday, 12th November 2008

Alexei Sayle opens his diary

Over the weekend I took part in the Free Thinking Festival in Liverpool. As well as my own talk the organisers asked me to fill in for the French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy, who had cancelled at the last minute. This gave me an idea: just as you have musical tribute bands who perform faultless replicas of the music of otherwise unobtainable acts such Abba or the Rolling Stones, you could do the same with the work of famous philosophers as, after all, it is the ideas rather than the person which are important. The names of tribute bands are usually some clumsy wordplay on the title of the original, like Abba Dabba Doo or BlonDee, similarly with the philosopher tribute acts, they would perform in small pubs and church halls under such names as ‘Sartre for Sartre’s Sake’, ‘Hobbsnobs’ or ‘Kant Think? Won’t Think!’

Just recorded an edition of Never Mind the Buzzcocks. Don’t want to brag or anything but there can’t be many people who could fill in for Bernard-Henri Lévy one day, then do Buzzcocks the next. (Apart from Germaine Greer, who was on Buzzcocks last week.)

Went to buy Season Five of the HBO series The Wire on DVD. I’d actually seen the show before on a download but still felt compelled to buy it as an act of solidarity with others in the entertainment business (though not until the price had dropped). For those of you who don’t know, The Wire was a US TV show which was hailed by absolutely everybody as probably the greatest television series ever made. They were right too. I was one of the earliest disciples of the show in this country as a friend of mine had worked with the producers David Simon and Ed Burns on their previous HBO project The Corner and tipped me off to what an amazing piece of work their new series was. Soon others followed. Somebody told me that only 12,000 people saw The Wire when it was first broadcast in the UK but every single one of them wrote an article for the Guardian about it. However, just to get me ahead of the game again, I’d like to start The Wire backlash, because oddly the fifth and final season is actually quite poor. It’s funny how many traps there are for writers, producers, directors: massive praise, even if it’s entirely justified, seems to have had a corrosive effect on the talent behind the show, so that Season Five feels lazy, self-satisfied and rushed. Luckily for me, the undermining effect of massive praise is not something I’ve ever had to worry about.

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