…British film in competition at this year’s Cannes Film Festival is “Love You More”, a short film directed by the artist Sam Taylor-Wood, and adapted by Patrick Marber from the very sexually explicit story he wrote for “Speaking With The Angel”. We at TreeHouse (the school received all profits from the book) are very proud.
 
  I received two complaints about “Speaking With The Angel”, and the writers of both letters were unhappiest about “Love You More” and Irvine Welsh’s story. One of these outraged people wanted his money back. “Am I really that out of touch?” he asked plaintively. I told him that he was, and refused to give him his money back on the not unreasonable grounds that he’d clearly already read the book.  He then wrote back again, saying that he would send TreeHouse their portion of the cover price if I would send him back the rest. At this point, I’m afraid, I decided that the correspondence was over.
 
  Anyway, I am now going to ask Penguin to produce a movie tie-in edition of Patrick’s nine-page story, with a suitably shocking cover. It’s all in a good cause.

“I’ll tell you where it all went wrong for Arsene Wenger,” said a friend after the first leg of the Champions’ League quarter-final against Liverpool, a game that Arsenal were unlucky not to win.  “That two-all draw against Bolton, when we threw away a two-goal lead.” Like many Arsenal fans, I remember the game well – it was a decisive moment in the race for the Premier League, and those two dropped points meant that Arsenal would not win the title…in 2003. According to my friend, we have been on a sad, slow but steady decline ever since.
 “What about 2004? When we won the League without losing a match? You don’t think he temporarily stopped the rot that year?”
 “That was a disappointing season,” he said. (My italics.) “We should have won the Champions’ League, and he chucked the FA Cup away.”
 This is the mindset of a certain kind of football fan. Becoming champions of your country in an unbeaten season is no use if there aren’t a couple of cups to go with it; and the championship is not an end in itself, but only a stepping-stone that allows you to climb towards more championships and cups. This is the mindset, in other words, of a fan who will be disappointed every year. If he were a Manchester United fan, he might have allowed himself a brief smile at the end of the treble-winning ’99 season; but other than that, it’s hard to imagine where the joy of following a team might come from.
 All Arsenal fans are disappointed this week. A season that had begun to promise so much has ended in calamity and despair. If I were Arsene Wenger, though, I would console myself with the thought that, had Arsenal held on for five minutes at Anfield on Tuesday night, seen off Chelsea in the semi-finals, and trounced Manchester United or Barcelona in the final in Moscow, some fan somewhere would still be complaining about his failure to shore up the defence in the 2003 run-in. In other words – what’s the point of winning anything, ever? Unless, of course, you’re going to win every game, for all eternity.

…to Christian O’Connell’s morning show on Virgin this week, you have a chance of winning five grand - yes, five thousand English pounds - in a competition to create a soundtrack for Slam. You just have to submit five songs that you think would be appropriate for the story. There are clues in the book, of course, and as I’m judging the competition, anyone who shows any evidence of having flicked through it in a bookshop will be ahead of the game. I will be announcing the result on air at 6.45 am on Friday. 6.45 am is a quarter to seven in the morning, in old money. The lengths I’ll go to, to promote my own work! I usually sound pretty good then, though. Ask any of my kids.
 

When I began this blog, it was suggested to me that readers might be interested in what I was doing with my time, and I still haven’t found a good way of talking about that. Interruptions to my regular working pattern – the preparation for An Education, and now the filming, and the paperback and European publications of Slam – mean that I can’t start a book, so I’ve been talking about, and meddling with, projects that can be wedged into broken weeks and broken days. Some of these, inevitably, will come to nothing, but that doesn’t make them any less interesting to me, and it certainly doesn’t mean that they take up any less of my time; the only trouble is that when a project is posted in cyberspace, it stays there forever, and in ten years’ time a German journalist will ask me whether I’m still working on something that will probably be abandoned in a couple of weeks’ time. (I am still having trouble convincing people that the script I was writing with Emma Thompson was abandoned a couple of years ago.) But of course if I don’t talk about things that might come to nothing, then there’s nothing to talk about at all. So here’s a little list:

- In the last few weeks I’ve been meeting with some bright and talented people who are interested in making an animated film. I came up with a story – or a setting, at least, and a scrap of plot – and they’ve come up with some drawings, and if nothing else I’ve got some beautiful prints for the office wall.

- SLAM has been optioned by DNA Films, the people who made 28 DAYS LATER. I’m going to be adapting it myself, something I haven’t done since I wrote the UK version of Fever Pitch more than ten years ago. I passed the last four books on to somebody else because I wasn’t entirely sure how to turn them into screenplays, and because I’d had enough of them. But SLAM, it seems to me, would be a more straightforward adaptation, especially since I “borrowed” a couple of key elements of the book from cinema anyway.

- I’ve been co-writing what may or may not become a radio comedy series with a friend. After reading Graham McCann’s ‘Spike & Co’ I have decided a) that collaboration is missing from my life and b) I would like to be living – working, anyway – in the early 1950s. Bring back steam radio, and audience figures of millions!

- This too Graham McCann is responsible for, indirectly: I have been asked by Steve Van Zandt’s Rock’n’Roll Forever Foundation (www.rockandrollforever.org) to contribute an essay to a text-book for schools that the organisation is putting together. It was suggested that I write about John Osborne’s play ‘Look Back In Anger’ and its influence on the 1960s in the UK; I decided I wanted to write about ‘The Goon Show’, John Lennon’s favourite comedy series. Comedy, it seems to me, was more important to the vast majority of young Britons during the 1950s than rock’n’roll. Or theatre.

And then there are the Believer columns, and the rewrites that have to be done on an almost daily basis for the film…There’s plenty going on. Only time will tell whether any of it was worth doing.

In his review of the new Elbow album, the Guardian’s Alexis Petridis wonders which was the worst-ever year for pop music. He suggests that 1960 and 2000 must be front-runners, while referring to the late Tony Wilson’s belief that 1975 was the pits. 1960 and 1975 make complete narrative sense: 1975 was the year before punk, which, we like to believe, came as a response to something. And 1960 is seen as a low point between Elvis’s heyday and the birth of the Beatles.

And yet a little research shows that what makes complete narrative sense doesn’t take much account of the facts. Quite a few of the greatest albums ever made were released in 1975: Patti Smith’s ‘Horses’, ‘Born To Run’, ‘Blood On the Tracks’ AND ‘The Basement Tapes’, ‘Physical Graffiti’, ‘The Hissing Of Summer Lawns’, Curtis Mayfield’s ‘There’s No Place Like America Today’, ‘Al Green Is Love’, ‘Bob Marley Live At The Lyceum’ AND ‘Natty Dread’, ‘Young Americans’… I would include the first Kate and Anna McGarrigle album and Emmylou Harris’s ‘Elite Hotel’, both of which have retained their charm for me over the last thirty-odd years. ‘An Education’, which begins filming on Sunday, is set in 1962, and while trying to find some tracks that demonstrated just how awful a period this was, I was disappointed to discover that you could, if you so wished, put together a pretty great soundtrack. I would have agreed with Alexis Petridis about that period, but the truth is that in 1960 you could have heard Barrett Strong’s ‘Money’, ‘Cathy’s Clown’ by the Everly Brothers, ‘Shop Around’ by Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, ‘Crazy’ by Patsy Cline, ‘Wonderful World’ by Sam Cooke, ‘Spoonful’ by Howlin’ Wolf, ‘Baby What You Want Me To Do’ by Jimmy Reed, ‘Shoppin’ for Clothes’ by the Coasters and ‘Only the Lonely’ by Roy Orbison… The idea of the album was still in its infancy, but ‘Sketches Of Spain’ came out that year, too. My suspicion is that every year is a great year for music, if you look hard enough (although 2000 was certainly one of my least favourites.) In ‘An Education’, we’re sticking to the narrative, and ignoring the facts – or rather, we’re working with the idea that England hadn’t even begun to think about swinging yet.

Orlando Bloom, by the way, is no longer a part of the cast of ‘An Education’. There was – ahem – a misunderstanding. It’s best not to say any more than that. He’s been replaced by the excellent Dominic Cooper. Earlier this week, there was a readthrough of the script, and as Alfred Molina wasn’t able to make it, I read the part of Jack. It was more fun than I am prepared to own up to. And though it’s not for me to say how good I was, some of the professional actors looked pretty intimidated by the end.

…chat show last week, Lily Allen told a story so hauntingly repellent that I feel compelled to share it. At a fashion show with a friend, she remarked on the pervasive and unpleasant smell around the catwalk. “Oh, that,” said her friend, who was clearly more used to it. “It’s the sick on the models’ breath.” The women’s magazine that came free with my Sunday newspaper a couple of weeks ago promised on its cover to reveal  “The fifty questions you should be asking yourself about fashion right now.”  Fifty! I’d say that if you ask yourself more than three questions about fashion in an entire lifetime then you’re an idiot, but maybe this should be one of them: “Why does this horrible industry destroy the bodies of so many beautiful young women?”

‘An Education’, the script I have been working on for a while now, adapted from Lynn Barber’s autobiographical essay, is finally set to become an actual film.  We are fully funded, and shooting starts in a couple of weeks, with Lone Scherfig directing. And we have a really amazing cast: Carey Mulligan, Peter Sarsgaard, Alfred Molina, Olivia Williams, Rosamund Pike, Orlando Bloom, Emma Thompson…This, I think, is as good as it could possibly be, and gives the film an excellent shot at being something that people might want to see. And after all the frustrations of the last year or so, the apparently never-ending work on the script feels worthwhile.

…Martin Kettle’s impassioned article in the Guardian almost persuaded me to listen to a Beethoven piano sonata….until he began with the bullying, as cultural absolutists are wont to do. He tells us that some opinions are “wrong”, that “some things are just better than others, full stop”, that the best music is capable of “ennobling” us, and that “musical taste and public values need improving”. (I’m not sure how public values got slipped in there. Nor am I sure what they are, or why on earth he would think that those of us who don’t listen to Beethoven wish to see them remain at their current level. For the record: I’m all for improving anything. Why not?) At one point, he even seems to be arguing that Beethoven himself is an elite: “It’s not the audience that is an elite for liking the music. It is Beethoven for writing it in the first place.”  What is interesting in these sorts of diatribes is that frequently the language used to express them breaks down altogether. How can one man be an elite? How can an opinion be wrong? And if  “some things are just better than others, full stop”, then surely all cultural criticism is redundant? Just give us the league tables – the facts, as Mr Gradgrind would say - and be done with it. Whatever else Beethoven is good for, he doesn’t seem to do much for cogency.

 I am prepared to accept that Martin Kettle is a nobler person than me – it wouldn’t be hard. But if Beethoven is capable of ennobling us, then it stands to reason that the noblest people in the world must be classical critics and classical musicians, given that they are exposed to his music more than any of us.  We are therefore long overdue an official scientific study comparing the nobility of Beethoven aficionados with that of people who only listen to, say, African music. And how much nobility do they need, these people? After twenty years or so, shouldn’t they be taken out of the Royal Festival Hall and put to the public good? They’re wasted where they are. Anyone that noble should be running a public service, maybe even the UN.

 It’s always the Nazis who put the mockers on this sort of stuff; Goebbels and Hitler loved Beethoven, and it seems uncontroversial to claim that whatever power Beethoven’s music has to improve us as human beings somehow didn’t work on them. I would like to propose a counter argument: that nobody who owns a bootleg copy of Bruce Springsteen’s show at the Main Point, Bryn Mawr in 1975 has ever ordered the bombing of a country.  If this turns out to be true, then I have more evidence for the ameliorating effects of early live Springsteen on the soul than Martin Kettle can ever muster on Beethoven’s behalf.

 “Public values” would be improved, apparently, if “the BBC was willing to put classical music or theatre” – it apparently doesn’t matter which, so  this clearly isn’t just about  Beethoven -  “on its main channels. …But those days are gone, sadly.” One thing I never understand: why do self-confessed elitists like Kettle want everyone to join their elite?  Because then it wouldn’t be an elite any more, and they’d have to find something else.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/feb/16/classicalmusic.guardiancolumnists

…advice you will ever read about writing is to be found in Graham McCann’s terrific book ‘Spike And Co’, about the brilliant British comedy writers of the ’50s and ’60s - Johnny Speight, Galton and Simpson, Spike Milligan et al.  Milligan’s working method, according to McCann, was as follows:  “Once he had started work on a script he disliked ever having to stop; he wrote as he thought, and if he came to a place where the right line failed to emerge, he would just jab a finger at one of the keys, type ‘FUCK IT’ or ‘BOLLOCKS’, and then carry on regardless. The first draft would feature plenty of such expletives, but then, with each successive version, the expletives grew fewer and fewer, until by about the tenth draft, he had a complete, expletive-free script…”

 This probably won’t work for everyone – Sister Wendy Beckett, for example, might want to try a different trick. But one of the things that frequently trips me up during the working day is the absence of one line, sometimes even a simple way of conjoining two scenes or ideas; the subsequent interruption of the flow (in my case, a thin trickle at the best of times) is when I check emails, or the BBC news, or go for a swim or a spot of book-browsing, or take a month off. Much better, then, to type an obscenity and carry on. Spike Milligan has just, you know, doubled my… BOLLOCKS.