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And the Best Actor is . . .
Oscar was never better named.
He did it, no question, even if he did get a ‘Not proven’ verdict on the murder charge. He turned into a Quentin Tarantino character and started blazing away at a door knowing there was someone behind it. All through the trial I waited for the prosecution to hammer away at the key questions:
‘When you heard the noise, why did it not occur to you to check whether your girlfriend was still in bed beside you?’
‘When you heard the noise, why did it not occur to you to ask Reeva if she’d heard it too?’
‘When you got out your gun, why did it not occur to your to turn and say to Reeva, “Stay here while I investigate.”?’
Of all of it, that’s the part I don’t understand, and that’s where reasonable doubt must kick in.
In all the circumstances, five years for shooting and killing your girlfriend, most of it to be served under ‘house arrest’, seems like the deal of the day.
Age gap
I’m not a big Strictly fan . . . that is an understatement . . . but I happened to catch the end of the results programme last night. It featured, to my astonishment, the duetting Tony Bennett and Lady Gaga.
I like Lady G even less than I like Strictly, but Tony Bennett could make anyone sound good. The remarkable thing about the pairing is not that someone thought to put them together, but that when his partner, now 28, was born, Mr B was already sixty years old.
Black and white
Dipped into the unwatched BluRay pile last night, and pulled out ‘Nebraska’. Bruce Dern has been on most people’s ‘What ever happened to ….?’ list for years, but not any more. It’s the best thing he’s ever done; too bad it took him 55 years.
Gay swop
I have had a brainwave. How to turn The Apprentice from an unpleasant spectacle into a global chart-topper. Fire the bully that is Alan Sugar and replace him with Graham Norton.
Mixed media
Last night we finally got round to watching ‘The Dallas Buyers Club’, without any prior knowledge of the story. Absolutely brilliant, and a best actor Oscar well deserved.
Then I soured it by watching the first episode of ‘The Great Fire’, on ITV. Three more to go, apparently, but I don’t care if they never put it out.
STFU, please
Trying to work, with a building site next door on my right, and another two doors down on my left. Pain in the butt.
Sugar coated
I note that the BBC has invested my Broadcasting Tax money in yet another series of The Apprentice. Pushy and arrogant young people, confronted by an unpleasant and arrogant older man. Explain it to me, please.
Cant
Over the last couple of weeks I’ve tuned in to ‘Grantchester’ on ITV.
I knew of it in advance because my stepdaughter worked on a couple of the episodes, but it was only when it aired that I realised it’s based on short stories by one James Runcie, son of the late Archbishop of Canterbury.
Out of interest, I bought the first volume on Kindle. I am not given to criticising another author’s work but here I’ll make an exception. Leaving aside the very obvious Father Brown comparison, I found the prose laboured and the dialogue as stilted as any I’ve ever read. The works are labelled as mysteries, without a scrap of the mysterious about them.
Runcie Junior displays no obvious latent for crime fiction, and yet he is pulling in TV rights money, and no doubt spin-off royalties, on the back of his name alone. Worst of all, he has stolen part of his father’s life, in that he has portrayed his character Sidney Chambers as an active officer in WWII. The late Archbishop won the Military Cross, in the Scots Guards, like Chambers, and not for preaching good sermons. He was a tank commander and is reckoned to be the only holder of the Canterbury office to have killed another human being, as Sidney is shown doing in episode one.
What next, I ask myself? Can we expect the recently retired Archbishop Rowan Williams to unveil a Druid detective?
Fightback
Further to yesterday’s post, the fact is that BT is one of many UK companies to maintain unacceptable levels of customer service simply to maximise bottom line profits and therefore dividends. In other words, we are expected to accept shit service to put more money into the pockets of institutional shareholders.
So here’s a suggestion that might win a few votes, that Brussels should ban European companies from outsourcing customer service centres outside EU territory.
Intolerable
This morning I spent an hour an a half with a chap in India, after holding on for 45 minutes to get through to him. He was a very pleasant chap, but at the end of our conversation we failed to agree that the very sporadic service I have been receiving lately from BT Broadband was in any way his employer’s fault. It was mine, because I was requiring a wireless signal to travel 45 feet to my computer, most of it across open ground. The maximum range I could expect, he said, was 25 feet.
All the tests he ran were remote, and none of them were designed to explore the possibility that the machine might have had a sporadic transmission fault. I’m on line now, and my signal is crap. Yesterday it was fine. Tomorrow it will probably be fine, but it’s the days of uncertainty that do my head in. This is compounded by BT’s failure to offer anything that approximates to decent customer service.
But you know what? It is my fault. For a few years I had a very good ISP, a small firm called Zen, which operated no call centres at all and sorted any problems instantly. To my shame I left them, not because of their service but because BT lured me away with their flashy, misleading advertising and with the bribe of free BT Sport.
At the first opportunity, I’m going back.
Careful what you wish for
There is a poll out this weekend putting UKIP at 25%, a level that would give them 128 seats in Westminster next time around, putting themselves almost certainly in a coalition situation that would marginalise Scotland still further.
To those among the 55% who find that a scary proposition, all I can say is, you voted for it.
True
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Putin_khuilo!
Catchy tune, but not available, sadly, on Amazon. Hit teh play button on the page
Two days in the life of . . .
Anomaly?
Anyone involved in professional football is now banned from betting on games. So why is Harry Redknapp advertising an on-line bookie?
Hi-ho Silver
A crazy question popped into my mind yesterday and won’t go away. Is it coincidence that The Lone Ranger rides a white horse?
Mark my words
I see another Tory MP has jumped ship and joined UKIP. Name of Reckless. Also by nature, I guess.
However, it is now time to be taking seriously the prospect of Scotland being dragged out of Europe against its will by right-wing Little Englanders. Another major issue for May 2015, for the 45 to consider.
Stop press!
Big news from Waterstone. Mathew’s Tale, my new stand-alone historical novel, has been selected as the chain’s Scottish Book of the Month for October.
To tie in with this, the publication date has been brought forward from October 23 to Wednesday, October 1. Look out for it in all bookshops from that date on, in hard back and trade paperback. Signed copies will be available as always, from http://www.campbellreadbooks.com and ebooks will be available also through the usual outlets.
Game-changer
Still they won’t let it go. A week after the referendum, Facebook and other social media are still stuffed with triumphal posts by ‘No’ voters.
But are they triumphal? Might they not be indicative of the fear which drove Better Together’s campaign? if that is so, it is not misplaced.
‘Yes’ scored 45%, rounded up, of the votes cast; that is not in dispute, for all the furore stirred in the Scottish press by Ruth Davidson’s apparent ignorance of electoral law. In a single question referendum, that equals defeat. However, in the General Election next May, 45% of the votes cast could well lead to an absolute majority of Scottish seats.
With SNP membership soaring, to the point that it is now the third biggest party in Britain, it is not fanciful to imagine that happening.
Right now, the referendum result has been accepted . . . if not respected, because of the way it was secured . . . and we move on to hear what the Three Stooges’ Daily Record ‘Vow’ actually means in practice. There are no demands for a re-run, nor will there be.
That said, should May 2015 lead to a clear Scottish majority for the SNP, that will be a completely new situation and all bets will be off.
Who?
I just saw a post on Facebook which led me to a surprising realisation. For the first time ever, I was unable to name my Westminster constituency MP. I can now; she is Fiona O’Donnell, but genuinely I had never heard of her before today. My ignorance may be, probably was, based on the fact that I never read what no longer passes for my local newspaper, but other than that, I’m reasonably well versed in and up to date with current affairs.
To me this indicates the irrelevance of Scottish constituency Westminster MPs to our daily lives. So why the hell, I’m asking myself, did we vote to keep them?
It’s not cricket
Just over an hour ago, the first matches in the Ryder Cup 2014 tee-ed off at Gleneagles.
Will I be there? No.
If someone called me in the next half hour and offered me the top hospitality package for Sunday’s singles, would I accept? No.
Somewhere along the line, I fell out of love with golf’s biennial transatlantic duel. Yes, the ‘Miracle at Medinah’ was compelling viewing, and the outcome was deeply satisfying. And yet there was something about it that I didn’t like, the triumphalism, the sometimes mindless behaviour of the crowds, the sometimes mindless behaviour of Bubba Watson encouraging the crowd to break one of the cardinal rules of golf etiquette by roaring him on as he hit his first tee shot. (He was not alone, as I recall; Ian Poulter saw fit to copy him. A friend of mine used to have a seat near Poults at the Emirates Stadium, so this did not surprise me.)
In 1973, the event was played at Muirfield. Arnold Palmer, Jack Nicklaus, Lee Trevino and Billy Casper led the American team: it was too far back for Tom Watson. In those pre-Seve days Europe was not invited; the side was Great Britain and Ireland and the result was almost inevitable.The crowds were smaller too, with far fewer American visitors for what was expected to be a walk-over, even with Tony Jacklin, Peter Oosterhuis, Neil Coles and a 48-year-old Christy O’Connor in the GB&I team.
In fact, they did better than expected, going into the final round of singles with a mathematical chance of victory, only to see the score-board turn red. There were two singles rounds in those days, eight matches each; under those rules it was possible to be selected for the Ryder Cup but never play a match. One English golfer was in the 1971 and 1973 teams yet played only once, in a four-ball. Brian Barnes, on the other hand, made his name by beating Jack Nicklaus twice in one day.
Television coverage was provided by the BBC. The admission charges were modest crowds, with the exception of one yob who had a down on Bernard Gallagher for some reason, were well-behaved. It was a dignified, enjoyable event, even in the preparation days, when Lee Trevino could be found doing his stand-up turn on the practice ground.
Forty-one years later, I doubt that Muirfield would welcome the event. It has been transformed into a circus with crowds paying through the nose, per day, to behaving like wrestling fans. Television coverage today is provided by Sky Television, led by the terminally platitudinous Ewen Murray. Sky being a jewel in the crown of the odious Murdoch Empire, all of his titles join in the hype, leaving the rest of the media no choice but to add its voice.
All this has been reflected in the attitude of the players. Nicklaus famously gave Tony Jacklin a putt for a half that resulted in a tied match. At the height of the notorious Battle of Brookline, Payne Stewart conceded his match to Colin Montgomerie to signal his disapproval of the crowd’s behaviour. That match may have been a nadir, but things have improved only superficially since then. Today the US has Keegan Bradley, and we have Poulter. Good examples to junior golfers? I think not.
Progress is progress, I suppose, but I can’t help but observe that the growth in interest in the Ryder Cup can be traced back to the years when the Americans, for the first time in the history of the event, started to lose more than they won. They reacted and our crowds have followed suit, until the spectacle is unedifying however the contest turns out.
The whole thing runs counter to the spirit of the game of golf.
Quintin Jardine's blog 