Newsflash

Reportage

"David Mitchell, one of the stars of the Channel 4 sitcom Peep Show, references the tarnished BBC star [Jimmy Savile] in his memoir Back Story, just published but printed before the ITV documentary that accused Savile of sexual abuse was broadcast.

Writing about his own reputation as a "snooty swot" on TV panel game shows, Mitchell writes that you can't always judge people by appearances. "It's like Jimmy Savile and child molestation," he writes, "it rings true without being true. He in no way subverted people's stereotypical image of a child molester, any more than I do their vision of a snooty swot."

He goes on to "humorously" speculate that someone like the late actress and cosy Alan Bennett favourite Thora Hird would be more likely to get away with molesting children".

Sorry David, but the whole run of your book should have been pulped.

Wrong decision!

Says It All, Really

BBC1 Saturday 5:40 pm, Pointless Celebrities.

Featuring Cannon and Ball, Hale and Pace, Keith Harris and Orville, Bobby Davro and Kenny Lynch, with a special appearance by Paul Daniels.


Not sure if it's a schedule or a roll-call!

Strictly

Dirty cash

I'm thinking of trying to make a few extra quid.

The quickest way that I've come up with is to scribble a quick diary about me cleaning my flat, possibly add a couple of photos, and flesh it out with maybe a few clips from Wikipedia about the local area before publishing it.

Does that sound good?

Of course, it is all in the branding.

I thought I'd title the work "The Real Downton". That might shift a few copies.

And in the unlikely event of sales not peaking for Christmas, I thought I'd quickly produce a second version.

Called "Rolf's Real Downton".

That should pick up any undecideds.

On being knacky

Life is knacky.

Knacks (skills or talent, if you prefer) can take years to develop but any of us can attain a few of them. It doesn't have to be brain surgery, it can be for a card trick or getting your key in your front door at the first time of asking.

You develop these knacks, then perhaps you hope to sell them. You are skilled are what you do, it gives you confidence, it becomes a part small or large or, if you overshoot, perhaps even all, of your identity. That is your identity in the eyes of yourself, those around you and those whose respect you may crave.

But your knack may go out of date.

All that time, lost.

All that skill, redundant.

You, irrelevant.

And it's even worse than that. You may have adopted your knack to the exclusion of other things. Exercise you sure should have embarked on, that guitar you never picked up, those classics you never read.

Are you are okay with that?

Because if not, now is the time to say.

And your wondrous knacks give you such estate, such clarity, the confirmation that reality you are a cut above. A cut above the rank-and-file, the plebs, (as our current Conservative Chief Whip might volunteer). Their wonderful symmetry is a sign that all is well with the world.

But all is not well with the world.

Or haven't you noticed?

If you're the expert in a certain type of brain surgery that becomes redundant, what are you going to do? Throw yourself off the nearest bridge after your latest divorce because of your loss of identity, employability, hard cash?

Another conclusion I've made on my travels is whatever habits, tendencies, regular practices you do adopt, you might choose to examine them regularly. Clean out your cupboards! Cull, kill, be as ruthless as you like. 

Look at what the green-fingered folk do to roses in winter. Has a single one of them ever been arrested? Well they should be!

Trim, prune, recast your rod.

Even if you have a metaphor that you're happy with, mix it up with something nonsensical. You might discover a new idea.

Human beings are pattern machines.

We make them, but not as many as we'd like.

And we break them, but not as often as we should.

New tricks are good, our generation can no longer sit on our laurels.

Knacks take years to develop.

Best start now. 

Quotable - Not Me 4

Quotable - Not Me 2

Quotable - Not Me

Existentialism?

Don't even get me Sartred!

Spelling Bee

You know Enrique. the singer.
The son of that singer, Julio?
You know the one..

Well, I bet you spell his surname incorrectly.

In fact, I'll bet you even say it incorrectly..

Look it up..
You're welcome.

With a year of Spanish lessons you might have spotted it yourself.

Four Point Plan

Get inspired.
Get informed.
Get skilled.

And get started.

Private Letters

"Dear Bill Shatner

Well, this was the weekend I had been planning all year with fingers crossed and breath bated, hoping to fly down to Madrid, having “won” an auction for one of the golden tickets to dine with you last Saturday night.

Sadly, it seems like the organisers were pretty clueless so I have found myself with a few days off so I thought I'd write you a letter. Oh God, a bloody fan letter! (Sorry, you don't have to read it!)

I had the opportunity to be in the same room as you once before – in the Royal Albert Hall in 1996. I remember you being asked a question that went something like this.... ‘In Star Trek 5 what did you mean when you said “I need my pain”?’

Sitting in the audience, I felt as though I knew the answer to this question, but still my skin cringed and my nerves jangled for you (or was it the other way around?). What an unfairly complex question to be asked to articulate an answer to ... cold, as it were! But what flowed from your mouth in the next ten minutes has stayed with me. I can't remember a word of it! But it was the perfect mix of poetic philosophy and life lessons. It seemed to touch on every sweeping human concept from Sartre to well, I don't know, some more recent seer that neither of us has ever heard of.

I am older now. I suppose within your craft this would be called improvisational skill. And in truth, I think you knew the answer so well because you had spent time thinking about it, probably in preparation for the line to be delivered on film. But although, I don't talk often of gifts, expressing the poetic grace of life in a way that touches an auditorium of strangers is the finest of skills.

So I am really writing to thank you for your contribution to my life with your many varied performances and to say how much I admire your work rate, your risk-taking and your sense of humour. To me these are the things that define you the most, and I find each of them inspirational.

A few weeks ago, I download an episode of Rookie Blue. I had never heard of this TV series but the listings magazine pointed it out because... well, you were guest-starring.  Your performance blew me away. I wasn't surprised but you elevated what looked like a fairly mediocre TV programme by transmitting a depth of feeling in such a short window of time. In watching this, your performance so quickly connected and affected. Except it is not watching any more is it? In elevating the artform, you make us partake.

I think I feel the emotion more as I get older. I think you do. Our life experiences dig big holes in us. Is it not the challenge is to fill these holes with ever deeper quantities of happiness? Or if happiness is too ethereal a concept, then at least to fill them with challenge and newness. That'll do nicely.

As a boy I bought an early autobiography of yours called Shatner: Where No Man. I still haven't read it (I am a shamefully poor reader) but I still have it. On the back was a quote, purportedly from you, which said “Anything done supremely well is an act of sex”. A little cheeky, I thought at the time (and frankly I'm still not sure about it). But what I can say, if you'll forgive the overfamiliar term of address, is thank you very much for having sex with us all, Bill.

Admittedly it is sex without dinner! But I hope you will continue to silver service us for many years to come."

Judgement Day

Does it matter what anybody thinks of you after you're dead?

They call it legacy, don't they?

If you get away with it and live the life you lead until you the day you die, then, unless you have supernatural beliefs, that's it isn't it? Your race is run. History records you in first place.

Do you think any billionaire businessman cares about the people he stepped on along the way  as long as he keeps the mansions and the yachts through the hard times? I don't think so.

Do you think he cares about the people who hate him?
No. There's too much free-flowing champagne to worry about such things.

And integrity is such a tedious, painfully honest, horribly worthy pursuit. Surely we've assigned that to the dustbin of history, where boys went up chimneys, girls showed an ankle and Queensbury ruled.
Has integrity counted for anything since Harry Enfield's Loadsamoney in the 80s?
Or even since Jane Eyre.
There are entire nations totally unfamiliar with the concept. (Why not try and name a few?)
If it sells at all it does so in bargain basement snippets on reality television shows, before the contestants are thrown into the arena tour and eaten.
No, integrity is an entertainment that rich people sell for the masses. It's a quirk. A nonsense.

I chatted with Jimmy Savile on the QE2, but today he's a sex abuser. He is a Jonathan King. He's a Gary Glitter.
But he had the ear of royalty, and he lived life he wanted. At least that's what it appears.
We can't live life without trying to work out some measures of success. Some benchmark.
If death isn't that, what on earth is it?

Jimmy doesn't appear to have suffered too much for what seems to be his decision-making, and now, so late, the jury of ravens circle.

But if you don't get caught before death, surely you've won.
Even if you gassed millions in the Holocaust, you've still won the war.

Haven't you?