Fleeced

8:47am

Intermezzo has a different perspective on the new season at the Royal Opera House:

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No atoning for me this week

3:07pm

I agree completely with Mr Editor about Knocked Up. But let me tell you that, in its own way, Superbad, which is opening in the UK soon, is even better. It's funnier, and its take on gender relations and teen angst is piercingly true. 

There was a very silly piece by Joe Queenan last week which argued that Judd Apatow's films are "offensive, misogynist nonsense": 

It's leading to a future so dark that women will look back on the decade that brought them The Runaway Bride, Notting Hill, My Best Friend's Wedding and My Big Fat Greek Wedding as a golden age. 

Rachel Cooke put the man in his place: 

Knocked Up is lots of things - too long, too light on laughs, self-indulgent and sentimental in places - but it is not misogynistic. If Queenan et al want to know what 21st-century movie misogyny looks like, they should catch Julian Gilbey's Essex gangster flick Rise of the Footsoldier, which is the kind of violent and disgusting film that it's worth getting angry about. This is not, however, to suggest that, beside it, Knocked Up is ignorable misogyny-lite.

For all its tit jokes, Apatow's film can accurately be acclaimed as feminist. When was the last time you saw a major Hollywood movie portray a woman's anxieties about her maternity leave? When did you last catch a big studio picture in which a woman tries to hide her pregnancy from her bosses because she fears she'll be sacked?

...I love this new universe, in which men are a bit dumb and muddled and women are clever and sorted; it might be unfair, it might be improbable, but, my God, for so long - too long - it was the other way round. 

Indeed. In Superbad, it's the girls who are sassy and in control, and the boys who are airheads and slow to grasp what counts. Sexist? Perhaps, but not in the way Queenan argues.

I have to dissent from Mr Editor, however, when he writes:

Cinema goers will all be planning to go to see Atonement this weekend...

Not me. I'd see it if there was nothing else on, but the clips I've seen look awful - typical English cinema, fey and portentous at the same time. As for Keira Knightley: hasn't anyone else noticed that she can't act. And the views of my esteemed colleague Mr Davis make me even less keen to see it.  

The game is given away by Mr Editor's reference to "the queues, which threaten to be of English Patient/Shakespeare in Love proportions". Two more overrated films you could not find. English Patient was simply awful - overblown tosh - and Shakespeare in Love was nothing more than an amiable diversion. 

I'll stick to watching the last season of The Sopranos, thanks very much. Atonement can wait for Yom Kippur.

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BBC - at it again

2:08pm

When I go into a supermarket I always like to sneak something home with me - I hide it under my sweater. Why shouldn't I? Everyone does it where I come from.

Nonsense, of course, but it's exactly the same argument used to defend the latest piece of BBC manipulation of the truth to emerge:

The BBC has admitted that Alan Yentob, the corporation's creative director, has performed "noddy shots" on interviews that he did not personally conduct for his arts series Imagine.

In the first instance of a senior BBC executive being drawn into the TV trust issue, a senior corporation source admitted to MediaGuardian.co.uk that Mr Yentob often does not conduct all the interviews on Imagine - even though he appears nodding or reacting to them.

...[I]t is understood that scenes featuring Mr Yentob reacting to some of the more peripheral figures and experts featured in his programmes were edited in even though he was not actually present. Editing work on the programme later gave the impression that he was present.

...A senior BBC source admitted that Mr Yentob had engaged in so-called "noddy" shots for interviews he did not conduct but declined to name which instances.

The source robustly defended the practice, insisting that Yentob was unable to attend every interview that appears on his show because of his workload.

"Everybody does it - it is a universal technique," he said. 

Now the BBC itself, one should make clear, hasn't reacted to this story, but one can reasonably assume that it defends the practice and agrees with this defence since the man exposed for faking his interviews is, after all, the BBC's Creative Director.

"Everybody does it" is simply a pathetic excuse. 

It's not that it really matters that Mr Yentob was off somewhere else while the interviews he purported to have conducted were being filmed by an underling. It's that it seems all too typical of an organisation for which facts and the truth are sometimes an inconvenient obstacle to progamme makers. 

On reflection, Mr Yentob's title of Creative Director is entirely appropriate.

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Cosmpolitanism

5:35pm

You really do see everything in London. I've just seen a woman dressed in a head to toe burka with a tiny eye slit walk out of...

Anne Summers.

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Brogan on politics

2:34pm

Ben Brogan's politics blog is now by far the best such site - an absolute must-read. I won't highlight any individual entry - just go over and have a read.

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Spending, spending, spending

11:50am

Tim Worstall has another example of the spread of the use of the word 'investment' when what is meant is tax spending:

Damn, the change in the meaning of the word "investment" has reached even the Telegraph now:

In 2006, £49.4 billion was invested in education, compared with £27 billion in 1996.

It's been a deliberate attempt to obfuscate since the 80s. Everyone is in favour of "investment" because we understand that if you invest now you get better returns in the future. But the word was recast to mean that any government spending was "investment". Thus an increase in government spending could be sold as an increase in investment.

As is made clear here, 75% of this spending is in fact on salaries: that isn't investment, that's current spending. As is also made clear here we've not received a return on that "investment".

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Beyond words

11:33am

Awesome. Simply awesome.

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Desperate comparisons

11:14am

I'm not sure I've ever read a more ridiculous article than this piece of drivel in the New Statesman:

In 2001 shocking reports surfaced from Gaza of summer schools being organised by Islamic Jihad, which were teaching Palestinian adolescents to become suicide bombers. The Israeli government denounced the camps as evidence that a new generation was being brought up to hate and to kill.

What went unreported was that at a purpose-built barracks in the Negev desert, every summer hundreds of Jewish teenagers from Europe, Mexico and America pay to spend nine weeks saluting, marching, firing guns and otherwise pretending to be soldiers.

Don't bother reading the rest. It's dire stuff, attempting to make out there's some sort of comparison between the two. The Israel-haters really are desperate. As one of the commenters puts it:

Let's see - Holehouse is comparing a camp run for 12-15 year olds, that teach that dying for Allah while killing Jews is the ultimate goal, with a camp run for adults that teaches the importance of peace while preparing for war

What a scoop!

And judging from what a friend who has been on one of them told me, this is spot on:

Haha... this article is so off the mark it's hilarious! Marva and Gadna are nothing more than holidays that people go on for a bit of fun and a physical challenge. They are characterised by girls crying because they've broken nails and boys trying to look cool holding a gun that couldn't be fired even if they had been given any bullets to fire from it.

To suggest that any of these people are actually being trained to fight for Israel is laughable (and rather worrying if you're an Israeli!).

To try to draw an equivalence between Marva and a camp "organised by Islamic Jihad, which were teaching Palestinian adolescents to become suicide bombers" is actually quite sick and highly irresponsible.

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Surprise, surprise

9:37am

Here's a huge surprise: a Marxist calls for compulsory DNA registration. 

The only surprise is that the Marxist just happens now to be a Lord Justice of Appeal.

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Athletics - the game is up

8:59am

Some of the commenters on my post on Christine Ohuruogu's shameful win have demanded that I apologise for criticising the fact that she was allowed to compete and for calling her a cheat. As if! In my book someone who knowingly breaks the rules is a cheat, whether it's a footballer who dives in the area or an athlete who misses three drugs tests.

Her win, and more particularly the cheers with which it was greeted by some, represent everything wrong with athletics and why, as a sport, it no longer has the public attention of old. In short, it's no longer viewed as clean.

Martin Samuel, by quite a long way the best sports writer around, has a superb piece today on just this point:

When Ferdinand missed a drugs test at Manchester United’s training ground in 2003, he was dropped from England’s squad for a European Championship qualifier with Turkey and subsequently banned for eight months. The most self-serving rewriting of history that has followed Ohuruogu’s gold medal in Osaka is that Ferdinand received an easy ride and a hero’s welcome on his return, while poor little Christine is pilloried. Wrong. The mood around the England camp at that time was that of a war zone and when Sven-Göran Eriksson’s players threatened to strike over Ferdinand’s absence, the arguments grew lastingly ferocious.

Some football writers lost good friends in the game over their hardline stance and being a nice guy or a silly old scatterbrain – the preposterous mitigation advanced on Ohuruogu’s behalf – counted for nothing in Rio’s case. Just to be sure that memory served, I checked what I wrote about Ferdinand that week. Here is a taste: “Nobody will ever prove whether Ferdinand was being absent-minded, ignorant or cunning when he didn’t turn up. Nobody will ever know what a drugs test on that day would have shown. Ferdinand may be an innocent man who is paying a heavy price for a mental off day. He may be a guilty one who will receive a far lighter punishment than he deserves because he knew how to play the system. We will never know and we shouldn’t care. There has been a very dangerous presumption in the last 24 hours that Ferdinand’s only possible crime is forgetfulness. It would appear to be beyond the imagination of many that there could be a nefarious reason a footballer might wish to delay giving a urine sample for two days.”

And that is exactly how I feel about Ohuruogu. I would never say she was at it; but I wouldn’t say that she was not. I don’t know. This uncertainty is what sets the hated sceptics apart from the cheerleaders of the athletics community, toadying to the UK Athletics chief executive, Nils de Vos, on Radio 5 Live and cluttering up the airwaves with their priggish outrage when anyone dare suggest a gold medal-winning athlete that missed not one, not two, but three drugs tests, and is now recording personal-best times after a year out of the sport, is a long way short of a cause for celebration. They want to establish as fact a statement that cannot possibly be verified. Christine Ohuruogu would not have tested positive on any of the days on which she missed a test.

Really? Prove it. It is unfortunate for Ohuruogu that her story has become the battleground for the wider issue of whether athletics can continue with its flag-waving culture and remain a credible sport in the eyes of the public. Some would say the battle is already lost. 

Some would. And the more Ohuruogu's win is celebrated, the more that will be.

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