Comedy, crime, Russian porn and a street riot: one week in November

These are extracts from my diary in November 2002.

The Second Gulf War started in March 2003…

*****

Up The Creek comedy club in 2009

SUNDAY

I went to Up the Creek comedy club in Greenwich.

A very experienced foreign comic went down very badly.

“What do you guys do here in the summer?” he tried.

“We go abroad!” someone shouted out.

Later, starting a joke, he tried: “Anyone here in love?’

“My girlfriend!” another voice shouted out.

MONDAY

A friend sent me an e-mail circular about the situation in Iraq:

Subject: Do we want war?

War is NOT the Answer. Today we are at a point of imbalance in the world and are moving toward what may be the beginning of a THIRD WORLD WAR. If you are against this possibility, the UN is gathering signatures in an effort to avoid a tragic world event. War is NOT the Answer. 

My reply was:

Sadly, I think it is.

TUESDAY

I went to see Malcolm Hardee at his Wibbley Wobbley pub in Rotherhithe. He told me the fruit machines are rigged and hired from a man called Xxxxx. Each week, there are small payouts to players but Malcolm gets around £100 and Xxxxx takes around £100. Xxxxx has got some 80 machines in South London, each paying him about £100 per week. Xxxxx is a friend of gangster Charlie Richardson.

Xxxxx told Malcolm that Charlie Richardson recently lent him his own car for a few hours. Xxxxx looked in the boot and found a dead body. He returned it a few hours later without mentioning that he had looked in the boot. He said Charlie must have momentarily forgotten the body was in there.

WEDNESDAY

I had lunch with a friend in Covent Garden. She showed me the gas mask and small goggles she had bought in case of terrorist gas attack in the tube or elsewhere. She said the gas mask should protect her for about 20 minutes.

THURSDAY

I had lunch with comedian Nick Wilty at Kettner’s in Soho. In the 20 minutes before he arrived, I sat in the almost empty bar.

The only other people there were a well-known criminal I recognised and three men apparently talking about an armed robbery which had gone wrong and whether or not ‘the South African’ had double-crossed them. It seemed strange they were talking about it so openly.

When Nick Wilty arrived, he told me he had left the British Army after the Falklands War because it had become boring – doing the same thing day in and day out. He served around 1978-1982 but avoided Northern Ireland by (truthfully) saying he had lots of Irish mates and his sympathies tended towards Republicanism.

Nick told me that going onstage was like the first time he parachuted or bunji-jumped – fear in the pit of your stomach, then a sudden change to exhilaration when you were actually doing it.

FRIDAY

In the evening, I was in the Uxbridge Road in Shepherd’s Bush. For no visible reason, nearby were 15 police vans and countless policemen with visors and round plastic shields. I went into a strange internet cafe to check my e-mails.

There was a Cockney-type cafe selling food at the front; a pool room in middle populated by very dubious-looking Turks; and, at the back, a computer room with Russian porn. You had to click off all the myriad porn pop-up windows before you could penetrate (if that’s the word) the Internet Explorer browser layer.

When I came out, the Cockney cafe was full of Eastern Europeans and, going outside, I stumbled into a rugby riot on the Uxbridge Road with police and horses half-heartedly charging the drunken sports fans. I had only been inside the cafe for about ten minutes.

SATURDAY

I had lunch with a well-known comedian, who seemed shy or perhaps just warily reserved.

“I met Madonna and smelled Natalie Imbruglio’s bum,” he told me.

He had crashed a Green Room party and eventually looked Madonna in the eye for about three seconds.

“Hello,” he had said.

“Hello,” she replied. “Do I know you?”

“No.”

And that was it.

He had just come back from Canada where he had performed for a month in a 500-seater theatre in Toronto. One night the audience comprised three people.

The Daily Mail has its finger on the pulse of Britain – just like Margaret Thatcher did

I’ve had a good few reactions to yesterday’s blog about the Daily Mail – mostly in e-mails, a lot of them knee-jerk reactions, some vitriolic – which is good because, frankly, I had got bored with people occasionally agreeing with me. Admittedly, I did dash the blog off when I was overly-sleepy and a wee bit tetchy.

But I do think there’s an appalling knee-jerk reaction to the Daily Mail in which liberals hate – literally hate – what they perceive the paper says often without reading it or, in some cases, they do read what is written but then translate it into what they think is being said rather than what is actually being said.

One person pointed me to a particularly offensive Daily Mail headline about Muslims.

The complaint was specifically about the headline, which reads:

MUSLIM FANATIC PRISONERS TO BE ‘DE-PROGRAMMED’ USING CONTROVERSIAL TECHNIQUES TO ‘CURE’ THEM OF BELIEFS

Now – I could be wrong here but, to me – it seems impeccable straight reportage as a headline because the words ‘de-programmed’ and ‘cure’ are both in quotation marks. In Fleet Street Speak, this means a newspaper does not necessarily share or even believe what is quoted. The word ‘controversial’ is not in quotation marks. The news item which is being reported within the article might be questionable but the facts are well worth reporting.

Of course, the Daily Mail can also spout bollocks.

But I think knee-jerk liberal reaction to the Daily Mail is a bit like Gordon Brown’s reaction to Gillian Duffy, the 65 year-old Labour supporter whom he called “bigotted” during the 2010 General Election campaign when she brought up a widely-held worry about the level of Eastern European immigration into the UK. She was reflecting a widely-held concern about a genuine potential and sometimes actual problem.

Whether any newspaper is creating or reflecting a public view is a nice argument but it can certainly be argued that the Daily Mail reflects widespread public opinion on a variety of topics.

Whenever I read the Daily Mail, I’m amazed by how downmarket it is. Basically, it is as much of a tacky red-top as the Sun or the Daily Star. It’s designed to look like a quality newspaper, but it’s full of OK magazine style stories.

However, it does have and keeps its finger on the pulse of what ordinary people think to an extraordinary extent.

I remember years ago, the ‘Madam Cyn’ case in which Cynthia Payne was being prosecuted for running a brothel. I was working at Anglia TV in Norwich at the time  and, every morning, all the national papers would arrive in our office.

The other tabloids totally missed the point of the Madam Cyn case. They covered the court case as a sex story.

But the Daily Mail covered it as a quirky, near-comic tale of retired majors with gammy legs, people using luncheon vouchers to buy sex and sheer British eccentricity. And that was what, at heart, the story was. It was not a sex case, it was a Victoria Wood / Alan Bennett / Michael Palin style British comedy.

Indeed, the two 1987 movies loosely based on Cynthia Payne’s life Wish You Were Here and Personal Services were both light British social comedies and the second was directed by Terry Jones of Monty Python’s Flying Circus.

Cynthia Payne’s is the perfect Daily Mail story. It is more saucy than sexy and is decidedly tabloid but with a veneer that makes it seem almost genteel to Middle England. It titillated without being, in Mail terms, dirty.

Around 2004, someone I know had to have her photo taken for an interview to be published in the Daily Mail. She was told not to wear trousers for the photo-shoot as the Daily Mail “doesn’t take photos of women wearing trousers because its readers didn’t like it.”

This mightily impressed me then and it mightily impresses me now. It shows an absolutely brilliant understanding of the Daily Mail’s readership at the time (and perhaps today too).

Female Daily Mail readers probably wore trousers a lot of the time for practical reasons, but their image of womanhood was probably that ‘feminine’ women did not wear trousers and they wanted to see in the Daily Mail what they perceived as feminine women.

It would never have entered my head to be wary of photographing women in trousers (largely because the thought is politically incorrect) but it is a superb piece of commercial psychology.

In the mid-1980s, I worked on two top-rating peak-time Saturday evening ITV series: Game For a Laugh and Surprise! Surprise! There was a rule of thumb on those show. It was not a 100% rule. But it was a strong rule-of-thumb.

It was that we should not have appearing on the shows people with tattoos.

Remember this was the mid-1980s before tattoos were common.

The reason for this non-tattoo rule (as I say, it was not a ban, just a rule-of-thumb to bear in mind) was that viewers felt threatened by people who had tattoos. The mainstream, mass of peak-time viewers felt people with tattoos were down-market, aggressive and ‘different’. A tattoo said ‘prison’ and ‘crime’ to the viewers. And, though it felt a bit odd, it was I think absolutely spot-on in understanding the mass market audience for the ‘real people’ shows we were screening in which ordinary people were the stars.

Ordinary people were watching themselves on TV and they did not (at that time) see themselves as being the sort of people who would wear tattoos.

I should maybe point out that we were encouraged to actively seek out non-white participants to try to prevent the shows being filled with totally white faces.

If you want to hit the mass market, you have to know your audience.

Associated Newspapers – owners of the Daily Mail – have a near-perfect touch – they have pitched not just the Mail but Metro at exactly the right mass readership in exactly the right way. They know exactly what the people who comprise mainstream Middle England want and think. The fact that the Mail does not have big sales in Scotland is interesting.

In both those respects – they have massive appeal in Middle England but none in Scotland – they are like Margaret Thatcher. Her ‘audience appreciation index’ in England always interested me.

The backward-looking view of her is that, somehow, she was disliked by the vast majority of people at the time. That is both true and completely false.

Whenever personal popularity was measured in opinion polls, she usually came out badly. But, when she went to the electorate in a General Election, the Conservative Party got in with large majorities. I think the reason was that people felt, “Ye Gods! She is scary but, if WE feel she’s scary and is bullying us, then she’s going to scare the bejesus shit out of the French and tear the throats out of them and anyone else who might be anti-British.”

People didn’t like her. But, in large numbers, they liked her policies.

Maggie Thatcher initially won power because she read the Daily Mail and Sun and understood what their readers wanted – what Essex Man wanted – like buying their own council houses and buying shares. In later years, she lost her touch because – as she admitted in interviews – she stopped reading the tabloids in case they ‘swayed’ her from what she knew was ‘right’. So she went for the Poll Tax which (though perfectly correct logically) was not something Essex Man wanted. Even then, though, another War win and I reckon she would have romped home.

Her downfall, at the end, was that the Conservative Party got spooked and ousted her because of Poll Tax riots and bad opinion poll results. They ousted her during the first Gulf War. The irony is that, if they had not ousted her, she would probably have bullied George Bush into finishing the first Gulf War decisively by taking Baghdad and ousting Saddam Hussein. An inevitable consequence, I reckon, would have been another massive General Election win for the Conservative Party, changing the next 20+ years of British and world history.

Margaret Thatcher had and the Daily Mail – or, more correctly, its owners Associated Newspapers – have their fingers on the pulse of Britain.

Some, of course, might say “the throat”.