Separate But Equal

Lying and Uprising, 2013: Whether dead or alive, in Pretoria, South Africa, Nelson Mandela is already lying in state. Meanwhile in Xingjiang province, indigenous Uighurs are rising up against state repression and the state-sponsored influx of incomers from metropolitan China – or that’s how it looks to the Uighur boys on motorbikes besieging the police station in Hotan; or was it that the police besieged their mosque and beat the biker boys as they tried to get away? In their ears, the name for China’s majority population – Han – rhymes readily with Afrikaan.

In Xingjiang, the two populations are so far apartheid they cannot agree what time it is: Han immigrants bring Beijing time with them; Uighurs maintain it’s two hours earlier than that.

‘One World One Dream’, 2008: The ‘official website of the 2008 Olympic Games’ explains that Beijing’s slogan ‘fully reflects the essence and the universal values of the Olympic spirit: Unity, Friendship, Progress, Harmony, Participation and Dream. It expresses the common wishes of people all over the world, inspired by the Olympic ideals, to strive for a bright future of Mankind, in spite of the differences in colours, languages and races.’

Officialese and florid philosophical formulations twirled and curled into sickly calligraphy; during Games Time, Beijing itself baked into eye candy. A whole army for keeping the city sweet, including platoons of imported labour, marched in to sugar it up when the streets have all but emptied out. The majority population defaults to man-attired-for-business-in-a-warm-humid-climate. But this is a different uniform; these are different faces; another ‘race’.

Games Over and it’s back to the Xingjiang Bantustan for you, bwoy.

Bingo

Your number’s up, duck. Not your lucky day, chuck. They look like they come from the Midlands, those ex-pat Brits arrested and fined for playing Bingo in an English pub on the Algarve. A little bit blotchy and pasty (how do they manage it with the sun shining down on them most of the year round?), cigarette frowns on elderly faces (even if they’ve given up now, lines are etched on foreheads from all those years of sucking in smoke), and clothes that shout TK-Max-10-years-ago. 

Not Essex nor even Estuary. Can’t have come from Newcastle or Glasgow: these careworn figures don’t have the measure of a metropolis; more like the crimplene half-town, pedestrianised half-city, nondescript half-truth that is Leicester or Coventry or Nottingham.

Photographed outside the courthouse in Albufeira, if they hadn’t been caught on the wrong side of Portugal’s strict gaming laws, you’d have said say they were auditioning for David Jason’s role in A Touch of Frost.

They make easy targets. It is laughable that the 70something winner of a packet of biscuits and a bar of chocolate (the only Bingo prizes given out on that fateful night), took the trouble to hide the bar of chocolate when undercover police stood up and shouted ‘it’s a raid.’ Except that he’s already chuckling at himself, duck. 

Easy to complain that these middle-of-the-road types have exported a life of mediocrity to the Iberian Peninsula, so that only the external colour scheme – white stucco against blue sky – differs from Birmingham beige (does their English pub still stock Brew XI – For the Men of the Midlands?). 

Except they had the pluck to come out here and make a go of it. They had the get-up to get out of all that drab, even if they brought a dose of it with them.

Brazil Nights

Eyes screwed shut behind her glasses. Her face, neck and shoulders are wet with pepper spray. Woman in a summer dress. Woman in the city on a warm night. Woman of a certain age. Old enough – sorry if this sounds rude – old enough to have grown a little fat; but no, our friend, the new friend we’ve never seen before, is growing thin and stringy instead. And this moment – with the pepper spray moist and prickly, condensing on her reddening skin – may be the moment that dries her out, thins and brittles her till the end of her days.

With so much frailty exposed, we can hardly fail to befriend her. She is to us like the tendons and muscles in anatomical drawings: raw and tenderised. Best not shake hands: hers might come away in ours.

Zap! Pow! A cartoon of vexatious particles aimed and fired at the woman of a certain age, the woman in a summer dress, in the city; streaming so neatly they could have been drawn on. Behind the thin straight line of pepper spray, a gloved hand holding the canister; and inside the glove, metal fingers? Or maybe no fingers at all: just the glove, and the padded sleeves, protective vest, over-trousers and over-sized helmet. Programmed from the outset but nothing inside except Robocop Till It Drops.

But look again at the narrow shoulders underneath the hard hat: you wouldn’t design Robocop to be so small. This is a case of Petite Police. A younger woman, perhaps; or a slim-hipped youth all booted up and set to go – who knows what human frailty that helmet is hiding?    

Scene From A Marriage

We are at the cinema. On screen, the restaurant scene in which a villainous Mr Saatchi is seen holding the curvaceous Ms Lawson by the throat. There are shades of noir; echoes of Ace In The Hole (1951, with Kirk Douglas in the Saatchi position and Jan Sterling feeling his fingers around her neck); Beware, My Lovely (1952, Robert Ryan and Ida Lupino); Angel Face (1953, Robert Mitchum and Jean Simmons) and The Big Knife (1955, Jack Palance and, again, Ida Lupino).

Luckless Lupino – seemingly the girl most likely to find herself in a throat-hold – was really A Player in 1950s Hollywood, adding writer, director and producer credits to her acting roles. Ida’s position of strength is echoed today in Nigella’s show-making, deal-clinching status in foodie TV both for the BBC and now ABC (as seen in the new, piping hot show, The Taste). 

Meanwhile her husband, Charles Saatchi – the ex-adman-turned-art-collector who’s never alone because he always has a cigarette to hold hands with, is such a dyed-in the-wool smoker he too might be described as taking a leaf out of the noir pack.

Yet for all the smoke signals of the past, the mise en scene has moved on from the 1950s. No more chiaroscuro; instead of a monochrome contrast between light and dark, the current scene offers a full spectrum of colour and texture.

Partly decorative, partly a screen to make the protagonists’ faces more elusive, more alluring, the restaurant is woven with pistachio green plants set against the incandescent copper-and-glass tubing which serves to warm this Mayfair terrace on an unseasonably cold day in June.

The tubing is smooth; so too is the suede of the villain’s shoes, but in a different way – one hairless, the other furry. And, somewhere in between, his immaculate, clinically white shirt made of the softest cotton: material that says ‘touch me’ even though you know you’re only ever going to see it on someone you don't.

The consensus is that he shouldn’t have touched her like that. But the suburban ‘movie theater’ audiences who served as the test-bed for 1950s Hollywood product, would not have thought to demand a new ending in which Kirk and Robert or Robert and Jack had to be investigated by the police for having placed their hands around a woman’s neck. Only if he killed her afterwards; not if the two of them were back on speaking terms a few hours later.

Perhaps all those people who set so much store by this latest scene, who insist it says something so important that they themselves just have to say something too, should bear in mind that whatever they say matters no more than the guinea pigs of half-a-century-ago responding to Hollywood’s latest offering.

It’s a spectacle, right? And we’re all spectators now.

ERT RIP

Closedown  The presenter wraps up the item, closes the show. Dyed blonde hair, she has that day-glow, daytime TV look. The next programme team – Sobriety’s the name, two men in suits, a woman with minimal make-up – comes into the studio and there’s a whole palaver of microphone unclipping and clipping; technicians assisting as usual, but also an abnormal amount of handshaking and embracing. Somebody’s last handover? Got a new job, or going on pater/maternity leave, maybe.

Studio’s off air; on air there must be titles/theme music playing out the old show, playing in the new. By now the new team is seated…..and Action: short intro from minimal make-up woman; cut to a split screen of talking heads.

Heads are cut off, never get to talk. It all goes dark; not even fade to black. At the flick of a switch, what was On has now been taken Off.  

Was it ever that simple? The Greek government’s decision to pull the plug on its own state broadcaster prompted scenes reminiscent of Britain in the 1970s: mass mobilisations and long, lazy sit-ins; banners, beards and hours of waiting for something to happen.

During the day employees gathered inside ERT headquarters in Athens – a modernist, corporatist structure which looks like it belongs in Brussels. That afternoon – Athens in the middle of June – it rained. Clusters of TV people stood at the windows looking through raindrops at anti-government protesters getting soaked outside (among those inside and out, the relative absence of mobile phones adds to the impression of an earlier era). Some worked all-out to re-start and maintain programming on the Internet. Others paced the corridors or sat on the floor looking up at all those suspended ceiling tiles, all that strip lighting.

Were they waiting for Carl/Dustin Bernstein/Hoffman and Bob/Robert Woodward/Redford to walk in and get the real story? Nail it. Get to the bottom of it. Sort it out. Had they meant to keep the offices of the Greek state broadcaster looking like the Hollywood film set for All The President’s Men? Was it all a cunning plan to make the 1970s live forever? 

But 2013 is the end of the movie. That’s All, Folks. No, it won’t all happen at the flick of a switch. But the waiting, the hanging around, the sitting on the stairs, even the sound of a noisy demonstration outside – it ain’t going to swing it. Sorry this sounds harsh, but it don’t mean anything much.

The Queen, 1953 and 2013

Here is the news: you may listen to it; or scroll down to read it.

 



The Queen, 1953 and 2013   Hardly young at 27, yet a maid of honour charged with carrying the train of her heavily embroidered gown, remembers the Anointing of a ‘child queen’; recalls how she was disrobed, then the 70-year-old Marquess of Cholmondeley, Lord Great Chamberlain, pressing the studs – ‘his heavy fingers going down her spine’ – of the plain linen shift she was dressed in to receive the holy oil. 

Partly hidden by a portable canopy held over her by four Knights of the Garter, spiritually even more significant than placing the crown on her head, this was to be a moment of private austerity between God and the monarch and the slim-waisted yummy mummy with beautiful skin, now slipping into her regal role. Out of sight, in a ceremony steeped in a thousand years of Christian tradition, the Archbishop laid an oily finger on her hands, her head, her breast. Another 60 years – long to reign over us – before anyone would even think: child queen, behind a screen, shades of Jimmy Savile.

And so to the BBC. After a commemorative service at Westminster Abbey on Tuesday of this week (‘O Lord, make thy servant Elizabeth our Queen to rejoice in thy strength; give her her heart’s desire, and deny not the request of her lips; but present her with thine everlasting blessing, and give her a long life, even for ever and ever. Amen.’), on Friday the Queen went to Oxford Circus to re-open Broadcasting House, the BBC’s home of Radio, newly refurbished and extended to accommodate TV, too.

It was the TV broadcast of her coronation 60 years ago which first established television in the eyes of the British nation. More than 20 million viewers in the UK; a million televisions purchased in the run-up to the big day. In the Abbey unsightly cameras were boxed in, with slits for the camera-eye to look through, like machine guns poking out of Second World War pillar boxes. ‘We will crown you on the beaches,’ Sir Winston never said.

Banned from taking close-ups by the Duke of Norfolk, the master of ceremonial himself, as the newly crowned monarch processed down the aisle the BBC’s director of broadcast snapped on a telephoto lens and got away with the first intimation of Queen Elizabeth II.

Yes, a right royal young woman. But there’s the slightest stoop of her shoulders, perhaps brought on by the weight of the coronation gowns (since the Anointing she has been dressed and dressed again in crimson and purple surcoats and latterly the Imperial Robe of purple velvet). Minutes into her reign, her lips look chastened. Her mouth is mutating: setting by the second into lifelong duty.

This Friday, with David Dimbleby in tow – his father Richard lived briefly on a barge on the Thames in order to lead the team of commentators on Coronation Day, welcomed by a new director general – the previous BBC D-G was obliged to resign because of the Savile scandal, shoulders bowed down – now with age, in little-old-lady steps the Queen proceeds to the news floor of Broadcasting House. Assembled journalists applaud her entrance. She walks around the perimeter of the fishbowl TV studio. Inside the glass, live on air, two presenters turn their backs to camera in order to show their faces to Her Majesty.

When she makes her way towards the exit, the journalists remain in train, fanning out behind her like the twenty-one feet of embroidery which six maids of honour carried into Westminster Abbey 60 years ago.

The Modern Woman

She is a handsome woman. Her strong chin is a boon to cartoonists. She’s not as chic as IMF chief exec Christine Lagarde. But on the face of it – also on account of the cut of her clothes (the black dress, the black trouser suit), also because of the way she moves in them, also on the basis of the raspiness not waspishness of her nicotine-stained voice, this is the French woman that wives of English retirees – all those Mrs Peter Mayleses – would really quite like to be.

This is Marine Le Pen (44), second president of the ‘far right’ Front National (the party’s first president and founding father was Marine’s own father, Jean-Marie), who previously made headlines in the British press when she came third in the 2012 French presidential elections, polling 18 per cent of the popular vote.

Now Le Pen Jnr is featured again, this time because the legal affairs committee of the European parliament has voted to waive her immunity from prosecution. If MEPs follow their committee’s recommendation at a full parliamentary sitting in mid-June, Le Pen will soon face prosecution in France for the following statement about Muslims spilling out from mosques and blocking the city streets with their Friday prayers, made in Lyon in December 2010 when campaigning to become president of her party: 

‘For those who want to talk a lot about World War II, if it's about occupation, then we could also talk about it because that is occupation of territory. It is an occupation of sections of the territory, of districts in which religious laws apply. It's an occupation. There are of course no tanks, there are no soldiers, but it is nevertheless an occupation and it weighs heavily on local residents.’

Occupation, occupation, occupation, occupation, occupation – at the count of five, there’s no doubt that the Muslim presence in France was occupying Marine’s mind at the time; hence the thinly veiled reference to the occupation of France by Nazi Germany between 1940 and 1944.

Two-and-a-half years after she made this statement, it is set to become the preoccupation of European politics, even though the French political elite has been trying to marginalise Marine for years. For example, in the run-up to the 2012 presidential elections, Le Pen struggled to find the requisite number of elected officials (500) to endorse her candidacy. The woman who went on to claim almost 20 percent of the vote, nearly did not get to stand at all. Few civic dignitaries wanted anything to do with her; her agent finally managed to scrape together enough signatures, but only by travelling the length and breadth of France in the days before nominations closed.

To voters alienated from established politics, Le Pen’s estrangement from the political establishment only makes her more attractive. Yet she herself stands on territory previously occupied by the French establishment. For secularism against communal religion (recalling the days of Clochmerle when State was pitted against Church); for national cohesion rather than local identity (Durkheim’s daughter almost as much as Jean-Marie’s). Marine even demands sacrifice, as leaders of the French Republic were previously inclined to do, when she insists that immigrants and their offspring should sacrifice some of their own, particular culture in order to be assimilated into the body politic.

For Marine Le Pen, modernity is an unfinished project. She wants to hear ‘a shout in the street’ which is not ‘the call to prayer’.  She keeps faith with a cultural tradition stretching all the way back to Baudelaire’s black suit. She is the bourgeois woman we thought we wanted to see in French films we got bored with half-way through.

So has it come to this, that only the leader of a ‘far right’ party retains any sense of what it means to be bourgeois? Or is that the modern is now so much a travesty of itself – so far distant from how we need to rethink ourselves, that hers is the only company it can keep?