Can you honestly imagine Lenny Bruce or Bill Hicks submitting to the discipline of the Whips?

That was the Right Honourable MP for Ealing North, Stephen Pound, on this evening’s PM programme on Radio 4,  once again justifying his status as one of the only contemporary British politicians I’d happily buy a pint for.  Following the news that US satirist Al Franken had been elected as Minnesota Senator, Pound and comedy writer John O’Farrell were discussing whether its possible for a comedian or satirist to become a politician and remain funny.   Pound felt that it was unlikely, partly because a true satirist like Bruce or Hicks could never slavishly tow the party line.  He thought it was a shame, because “most MPs are so buttoned-down, they’re so tight, they’re so butt-clenchingly anxious not to give offense or do anything but pitch to the middle vote.”

Refreshing stuff.

To his credit, this isn’t the first time Stephen Pound has name-checked the mighty Bill Hicks.  According to his Wikipedia entry:

In February 2004 he initiated an early day motion mourning the 10th anniversary of the death of comedian Bill Hicks, calling him “unflinching and painfully honest” and his words “a bullet in the heart of consumerism, capitalism and the American Dream”.

I first heard of  Stephen Pound during Christmas 2003, when Radio 4’s Today Programme asked listeners to suggest laws that they’d like to see added to the statute books.  A shortlist was reached, listeners were invited to vote for their favourite and the Right Honourable MP for Ealing North agreed to provide political support to the winning law.  With the toe-curling predictability of an episode of Baywatch, the Great British public backed the most bloody-minded, vindictive, just-to-the-right-of-Genghis Khan option available.   Pound’s on-air reaction was priceless:  “Well, the people have spoken – the bastards.”

I’ve owed him a pint ever since.

Radio 4’s The Secret World is billed as a ‘comedy series that offers an insight into the private lives of the famous’, but don’t let that rather off-putting description put you off. Pitching its tent somewhere between Radio 4 classic Dead Ringers and Chris Morris’ sublime mongfest, Blue Jam, it’s anthracite dark funny stuff that I highly recommend.

On first impression the show might seem like an unofficial Dead Ringers spin-off, insofar as it features Jon Culshaw in a variety of roles and is produced by Bill Dare. Like Dead Ringers, it’s also full of Radio 4 in-jokes (in one sketch, we’re introduced to the seedy world of sectarian intimidation that goes on behind the scenes at Thought for the Day). Unlike Dead Ringers, however, the comforting cackle of the studio audience has been replaced with ambient music and the material is much darker in tone.

The highlight of last night’s episode, the second in a six-part series, was a sketch in which the venerated Britflick director Mike Leigh was depicted as cynical conman who hires out gullible actors to companies like Wal-Mart as cheap labour. Leigh pockets the wages while the likes of James Gandolfini and Keira Knightly, believing they are researching a role for Leigh, are happy to work for free.

The Secret World is on Radio 4 on Tuesday nights at 11pm. Last night’s episode is available on the BBC iPlayer between now and 28th April from here.

Former shadow home secretary David Davis was just on Radio 4’s Today programme. He was discussing the role of police crowd control following the G20 demonstrations. He said that policing in this country is in danger of becoming increasingly ‘pre-crime‘ based.

David Davis a PKD fan? Who’d a thought it…

There was a fascinating piece on this morning’s Today Programme about a historical curiosity I’d never heard of before. This dancing woman was soon joined by others – men, women and children – and by the end of August 1518 there was more than four hundred of them. This was no lavish, Busby Berkeley production number, however: these people were in the grip of some mad, uncontrollable compulsion. They danced all day and all night and they danced against their will. It was a sweltering summer, and it wasn’t long before some of them started to die…

Waller concluded:

Maybe so. Waller’s conclusion seemed to encourage us all to feel ever-so slightly smug and superior: those 16th Century eejits – with their crazy medieval theological hang-ups – might be susceptible to a terminal outbreak of the Martha and the Vandellas, but that sort of thing couldn’t happen here. Thanks to the Enlightenment, the Renaissance and Sky Plus we’re all way too smart to behave quite so stupidly.

Maybe, and maybe not. Sentiments like that may pander to the prejudices of certain types of Radio 4 listener, but I don’t quite buy into them. Our belief systems may have moved on a bit (although some times I wonder…), but I’m inclined to believe that our capacity for buggier-than-batshit crazy acts of mass hysteria remains the same.

As an Orson Welles fan, the reported incidents of widespread panic in the US following The Great Round One’s 1938 War of the Worlds radio play spring to mind. But there are plenty of other examples. Here are just a few:

The Taginyika Laughter Epidemic of 1962. This was a more recent variation of the dancing mania described above, except instead of doing it mid-80s, what-were-they-thinking, Jagger & Bowie-style this time it involved a particularly bad case of the giggles. This “Laughing Matter” took place in the vicinity of the village of Kashasha in what is now called Tanzania and according to its Wikipedia entry:

“The epidemic seems to have started within a small group of students in a boarding school, possibly triggered by a joke. Laughter, as is commonly known, is in some sense contagious, and for whatever reason in this case the laughter perpetuated itself, far transcending its original cause…

“The school from which the epidemic sprang was shut down; the children and parents transmitted it to the surrounding area. Other schools, Kashasha itself, and another village, comprising thousands of people, were all affected to some degree. Six to eighteen months after it started, the phenomenon died off.”

The Seattle Windshield Pitting Epidemic, 1954. Here’s another example, this time from CSI – the scourge of Robert Anton Wilson, the publishers of the Skeptical Inquirer and the artists formerly known as the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal:

“On March 23, 1954, reports appeared in Seattle newspapers of damaged automobile windshields in a city eighty miles to the north. While initially suspecting vandals, the number of cases spread, causing growing concern. In time, reports of damaged windshields moved closer to Seattle. According to a study by Nahum Medalia of the Georgia Institute of Technology and Otto Larsen of the University of Washington (1958), by nightfall on April 14, the mysterious pits first reached the city, and by the end of the next day, weary police had answered 242 phone calls from concerned residents, reporting tiny pit marks on over 3,000 vehicles. In some cases, whole parking lots were reportedly affected. The reports quickly declined and ceased. On April 16 police logged forty-six pitting claims, and ten the next day, after which no more reports were received.

“The most common damage report involved claims that tiny pit marks grew into dime-sized bubbles embedded within the glass, leading to a folk theory that sandflea eggs had somehow been deposited in the glass and later hatched. The sudden presence of the ‘pits’ created widespread anxiety as they were typically attributed to atomic fallout from hydrogen bomb tests that had been recently conducted in the Pacific and received saturation media publicity. At the height of the incident on the night of April 15, the Seattle mayor even sought emergency assistance from President Dwight Eisenhower.”

And here’s another:

The Monkey Man of New Delhi, 2001. Reports began to circulate in May 2001 of a strange, monkey-like creature that was scaring the blue bekrishna out of the good people of New Delhi. According to Wikipedia:

“Eyewitness accounts were often inconsistent, but tended to describe the creature as about four feet (120 cm) tall, covered in thick black hair, with a metal helmet, metal claws, glowing red eyes and three buttons on its chest.

“Theories on the nature of the Monkey Man ranged from an avatar of a Hindu god, to an Indian version of Bigfoot, to a cyborg that could be deactivated by throwing water on the motherboard concealed under fur on its chest.

“Many people reported being scratched, and two (by some reports, three) people even died when they leapt from the tops of buildings or fell down stairwells in a panic caused by what they thought was the attacker. At one point, exasperated police even issued artist’s impression drawings in an attempt to catch the creature. Many people today still believe this ‘monkey man’ continues to haunt the streets.”

Would you like to see a police artist’s impression of the Monkey Man? I’m sure you would:

I regret to say there were no sightings of accomplices, although I’d like to think that a fish, a pig and a foxy monk were somehow involved.

This all illustrates – to my mind at least – that really bloody odd acts of mass hysteria are not confined to some bygone age. Others may argue, of course, that these bizarro events may have taken place in modern times, but only in the strictly chronological sense of the term. They all occurred within cultures where the “supernaturalism of the medieval world” was still hard-wired into the local consensus reality. Over here its different. The sort of archaic mindsets that would cause a mass of people to act as an irrational whole is not part of our world.

These people obviously don’t read the financial pages.

I often find that discovering that somebody shares one of your passions can efficiently neutralise any misgivings or antipathy you previously held towards them. So it was this morning, as I listened to Alastair Campbell’s programme on Radio 4 about the legendary chanson singer Jacques Brel:

Former Labour strategist Alastair Campbell reveals his passion for the music of the late Belgian singer/songwriter Jacques Brel. At the peak of his career during the 50s and 60s, Brel’s music explored emotions darker and deeper than the conventional popular songs of the time, and his live performances were famed for their intensity and ferocity.

Contributors include Brel fanatic Mel Smith, impresario Jean Michel Boris, accordionist Jean Corti, journalist Olivier Todd and Brel’s daughter France.

Before the programme started I didn’t care too much care for Campbell; by the end of it, though, I wanted to invite him around for tea and macaroons. I assume there’s a snappy psychological term for this phenomena, but it does worry me. Would I feel compelled to soften my position on George W. Bush, Melanie Phillips & Jim Davidson if they suddenly developed a passion for Tom Waits’ music, Robert Anton Wilson’s books and Grant Morrison’s Invisibles comics?

Many of Brel’s songs have been translated into English over the years, but – as Campbell mentioned – many of these are far from faithful to the source material. Even his most frequently covered song, If You Go Away (Ne Me Quitte Pas), is no exception. As Brel’s Wiki entry states:

English translations of Brel’s songs, in particular also Ne me quitte pas translations, have been subject to criticism and are regarded by some as being stripped of their original brilliance and magical lyricism. For example, Brel’s Ne me quitte pas evocatively states, “Moi, je t’offrirai / Des perles de pluie / Venues de pays / Où il ne pleut pas” [As for me, I'll offer you pearls of rain that come from a country where rain never falls]. However, Rod McKuen’s English translation replaces that imagery with “But if you stay / I’ll make you a day / Like no day has been / or will be again.”

Sometimes the lyrical changes can be more substantial. One of his most famous songs, Jacky, has been covered by, amongst others, Scott Walker and Marc Almond:

While Messrs Walker and Almond stuck to translations that were reasonably faithful to Brel’s original vision, not everyone has been quite so honourable:

And if one day I should become
A spinner with a brutish tongue
The scourge of all those politicians

And I will tell them how it is
Those sorry gutless sacks of piss
Will be no match for my ambitions

My pal will be called Tonio
And I will stand there by his side
And if there’s one thing you should know
It’s that he’s Jekyll and I’m Hyde

You’ll see me get my every wish
The Fourth Estate will be my bitch
Just watch me beat them with a fish
And leave them wimpering in a ditch

And when they say things I don’t like
I’ll bash them senseless with a pike
Just ask The Guardian’s Michael White
And he will tell you Who’s the Daddy

If I could be for only an hour
If I could be for an hour every day
If I could be for just one little hour

Cute brute in a boot-yer-ass way

Next Week: Peter Mandelson plays the songs of Serge Gainsbourg

It was 8am and I was driving to work, listening to Radio 4’s Today Programme as John Humpreys served me a hearty breakfast of headlines. He told me that Republican Presidential candidate John McCain had promised to transform Washington and win back public trust. He said something about research indicating that some food prices had risen by as much as 40% this year. Finally, he reassured me that scientists working on CERN’s Large Hadron Collider had insisted that their research into the start of the universe will not create a black hole that will swallow the planet next Wednesday.

Thanks for the reassurance, John. Mind you, I might have felt a lot more optimistic about the future – and possibly more energised for work – if the Today Programme’s weather forecast took us up to next Thursday and beyond…

• 09.45 Emerge from sleeping bag.
• 10.20 Emerge from tent.
• 10.30 Make way from camping area to catch 12 .30pm recording of legendary Radio 4 panel game ‘Just a Minute‘.
• 10.45 Arrive at arena. Wake up.
• 10.50 Discover the Just a Minute queue is already about sixty-three miles long. The irony is not lost on me.
• 10.52 Reluctantly join queue. Have never seen so many Radio 4 listeners in one place. Am reminded about those movie legends about The Wizard of Oz: during filming, the Munchkin actors were said to be so overwhelmed by the unprecedented availability of like-sized people they lost all inhibitions and indulged in lust-fuelled, gin-soaked orgies and “dwarf sex parties”. Remind myself that these are Radio 4 listeners: if they lose their inhibitions they’ll probably indulge themselves in a slightly-loopy, slightly-tipsy, letter-writing binge and hit the coconut macaroons like there’s no tomorrow.
• 10.52 Remind myself that I, too, am a Radio 4 listener.
• 11.00 Starting to get restless. I didn’t come all the way to Suffolk to queue in a field. Maybe I should contact You and Yours?
• 11.05 Clare, Brother Younger and Chris arrive. They can’t believe I’ve come all the way to Suffolk to queue in a field. so I can watch a radio show. I can’t believe I’m trying to justify myself.
• 11.15 Chris finds out that all the Just a Minute tickets have gone. Understandably enough, the queue is heard to grumble. This is done without repetition, deviation or hesitation.

“Yet more than all this, the really lethal thing about the whole language of business – is that it is so brainlessly upbeat. All the celebrating, the reaching out, the sharing, and the championing in fact grind one down. Several decades too late, it is as if business has caught up with the linguistic spirit of 1968. The hippies got over it, but businessmen are holding tight.”

That’s from Lucy Kellaway on Radio 4’s A Point of View, which I found myself listening to whilst driving to work on Sunday morning. It made me smile and that doesn’t often happen as I drive to work, particularly on a Sunday morning. She delivered a witty, articulate and ever-so-Radio 4-ish rant about meaningless corporate jargon, and seemed to reserve a generous portion of her polite hump of hate for that particularly odious and pernicious phrase, ‘going forward’:

“When someone says ‘going forward’ it assaults the ears just as, when a colleague starts slurping French onion soup at a neighbouring desk, it assaults the nose.”

That sentiment alone made me cackle so hard my tyres scraped a kerb. I imagine it had a similar affect on others unlucky enough to be driving to work on a Sunday morning. It definitely had a similar affect on that that peculiar demographic subset who were not only driving to work on a Sunday morning but were also once inmates at Cannon House. I should explain myself. For the best part of a decade I worked at a stockbroking firm in Birmingham (although to quote Marty DiBergi from This Is Spinal Tap: “Don’t look for it; it’s not there anymore.”). Despite being a bit of a compassionate Leftie with Socialist tendencies (look it up), I became very fond of the place and met some terrific people. But even before the dot-com bubble finally burst – when the company, my department and my job were eventually downsized – there was a sinister downside.

The firm was infected with meaningless corporate jargon.

In episodes of Star Trek you’ll often hear talk of temporal and spatial anomalies. Or so I’ve been told. In any case, somewhere deep within the bowels of Cannon House there was a fully functional semantic anomaly. Within the walls of that building otherwise decent, law-abiding people would find it impossible to construct a meaningful sentence with out shoehorning-in phrases like “thinking outside the envelope”, “blue sky thinking” and “shoehorning-in phrases”.

The most prolific and pernicious by far, though, was that bizspeak couplet that so annoyed Lucy Kellaway, namely: “going forward.”

In her piece, Kellaway said:

“A man from the National Farmers’ Union was talking about matters down on the farm and he uttered three ‘going forwards’ in 28 seconds.

“The previous radio record, by my reckoning, was held by Robert Peston, the BBC’s business editor. He managed three ‘going forwards’ in four minutes on the Today programme…”

Lightweights, I say. If only she’d eavesdropped in on one of my old firm’s management meetings her going forwards-ometer would have gone off the scale.

Back then, every time I heard that phrase a part of me died. It wasn’t so much the words themselves, but it was the fact that bizspeak etiquette dictated that – for full impact – they should be incongruously bolted on to the end of a statement. I could just about handle: “Going forward, we predict an exponential increase in assets in account.” Instead, what I had to endure was: “We predict an exponential increase in assets on account, going forward.”

Now, I’m not as big an idiot as I sometimes make myself out to be. Whenever I hear a phrase like this my first though is always: “Jesus Christ on a Rubber Cross – NLP has a lot to answer for.”

Even if the people who said the phrase in the first place don’t realize it.

It’s a bit late in the day, but I can’t talk about The Pogues without at least mentioning the recent brouhaha over the re-release of their classic seasonal hit Fairytale of New York (AKA The Greatest Goddamn Christmas Song Ever).

In case you missed it, BBC Radio 1 hit the headlines exactly a week before Christmas Day when they announced that they would censor the song for broadcast. The offending lyrics were embedded in the song’s penultimate verse, in which Shane MacGowan memorably exchanged a barrage of earthy insults with the late Kirsty MacColl:

You’re a bum
You’re a punk
You’re an old slut on junk
Lying there almost dead on a drip in that bed
You scumbag, you maggot
You cheap lousy faggot
Happy Christmas your arse
I pray God it’s our last

Radio 1 announced they would dub out the words “faggot” and “slut” and told the BBC News website: “We are playing an edited version because some members of the audience might find it offensive.” According to BBC News, a Radio 1 spokeswoman said the station’s management met on 18th December, discussed the issue and ‘”had made their decision’ and would not be backing down.”

Later that day – and with almost textbook comic timing – the BBC News website announced: “Radio 1 backs down in Pogues row.”

It made me laugh; things like that always do. But it didn’t make everybody laugh. Veteran gay rights activist Peter Tatchell said: “The word ‘faggot’ is being sung as an insult, alongside ’scumbag’ and ‘maggot’. In this abusive context it is unacceptable.” There was even a lively debate on the rehabilitation of the term “slut” BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour. The Pogues, of course, got their name from a quaint Irish expression. Someone should explain to these people what “pogue mahone” means.

The news media seems to have overlooked the fact that a variation of this non-story has happened before. Some years ago former Boyzone frontman (frontboy?) Ronan Keating recorded a cover of the song and changed one of the offending lines to “you scumbag, you maggot you’re cheap and you’re haggard.” I saw him in an interview on a Pogues documentary last year and he claimed that he was pressurised into doing this and – apparently – still feels bad about it. Now, I don’t think it will come as a surprise to anyone that I’m not exactly a fan of Ronan Keating and his oeuvre, but when the former front man of a boy band – a class of performer not renowned for their fierce artistic integrity – expresses guilt over an act of cultural vandalism you know it must be pretty serious.

I don’t have the time or the inclination to write a lengthy essay on Neo Puritanism so I won’t. Let’s just say that it seems to me that if we were to delete from every song, movie or book every word, phrase or pejorative term that somebody somewhere finds deeply offensive we’d live in a world with a lot of dead air. The only safe option for artists would be instrumental-only tracks, silent movies and Bowdlerisation. I don’t think I want to live in that world. I’d probably get a rash.

There’s plenty of things in this world I find deeply offensive and the list seems to grow every day. Most of what I hear on Radio 1 nowadays offends my sensibilities, but that’s just me being an old fart and having an atavistic hatred for bland, production-line pop and charisma-free DJs. Peter Tatchell often offends my sensibilities, not because of his gay rights activism – I’ve no problem with that – but because I get the impression he’s a pinch-faced, self-righteous, humourless churl. I am rather fond of Woman’s Hour, however, but that’s because I’m an unrepentant Radio 4 junkie.

But while there are plenty of things that offend me, I wouldn’t want them to be censored. On a more personal note, as an Irishman I don’t much care for the term “mick”. I’m sure Shane MacGowan doesn’t like it, either. It’s a racial slur, and I don’t like racial slurs. But I don’t let the use of it in one of my favourite films – Withnail & I – interfere with my enjoyment of the film. And I certainly wouldn’t want it to be dubbed out or exchanged for something more benign. That would be dumb as rocks.

A spokesman for The Pogues said that the band “found it amusing” that Fairytale of New York “should suddenly have been deemed offensive.” I find it all a bit amusing, too. Still, I can’t help but wonder whether which other twenty year-old songs would upset the Neo Puritans.

Would Duran Duran’s ‘Hungry Like The Wolf’ be condemned for encouraging binge eating?

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