Fight for the arts

Today's news was full of the age old debate about state school vs public school. Apparently a group of kids with exactly the same A-level grades have had their university application forms compared. In the most extreme case, someone from public school, who'd done work experience at the united Nations, was up against a state school kid who'd done waitressing. It's not fair and yet, in the present climate, it's not at all surprising.

As someone who is deeply proud to have been educated at the local comp, my line on this argument is always going to be that if State schools are ALLOWED to get it right, they will always give a child, not just a decent education, but a well-rounded sense of his or her own position within the world. Going to a good state school makes you realise how inherently lucky or indeed unlucky you are, and more crucially, gives you the tools to do something with this knowledge. 

The key word here is "allowed." The problem with the state system is that it's subjected to the whims of successive education ministers, who want to make their mark by changing things, usually to make schools appear more efficient and perform better in areas that can be more easily ranked. 

A most extreme version of this would appear to be the present Michael Gove, who seems to be banging a  very peculiar rhythm, despite the advice of teachers and even the civil servants who work for him. 

The most worrying of his policies, in my view, is the down-grading of subjects like music to a "soft" status, which means the state will not give support to schools who wish to teach it. My mate Debs is now teaching music GCSE as an after school club. If we allow this to happen, sooner or later, music in state schools will become the terrain of teachers of other subjects who happen to be musicians in their spare time. 

In my day, music in state schools was a right rather than an option.  If a child showed aptitude, he or she could learn an instrument for free, and for a small annual fee could enroll in the county music system. These were the golden days when music in schools was so good that the European Youth Orchestra had a 40% cap on British players. Imagine how many gold medals British musicians would have won in those days if these were the music Olympics!

My university form was chockablock with the opportunities I'd been given by playing music. I'd played the 'cello in Germany, Canada and on countless television programmes. I'd even been given a Blue Peter badge - a mark, of course, of pure genius!

But that was when things worked; when kids at State Schools could hold their heads up high because of what they'd achieved rather than what society had told them they should EXPECT to achieve. It's a subtle, but deeply important distinction. 

So how do we put a positive spin on this? Well, we lobby. We lobby schools to value the subjects like music, drama and art, which give kids (often less academic ones) the chance to shine, to explore, to travel, to interact, to build up a CV of skills and experiences, to find hobbies for life, and more crucially, perhaps, take a break from relentless exams and academia. 

We try to change perceptions of the arts. A taxi driver in Newcastle recently told me that his 9 year-old daughter was badgering him to go to dance classes and that he was horrified that she could even contemplate something that would take her away from her studies and give her a "false sense of hope for the future." I suggested that without something interactive like dance in her life, she might wake up one day and realise she only knew how to communicate virtually. I basked for a moment in a curious silence...

We lobby the government. We lobby our local authorities to keep their arts for all policies. We show them the export potential of art in a country which is still in recession. Think about Adele's tax bill, or what the producers of Skyfall will earn? Surely any government would relish an opportunity to have a bit of that? 

Above all, we look at how excited we all were by the Olympics, and how amazing it feels to be world leaders in a field. We excel in the arts and the arts must be allowed to be part of our Great Country's future... And that starts with education. 

Red sky in the morning

They say "red sky in the morning, shepherd's warning" and this morning, when I woke up, the sky was a glorious shade of crimson, which may explain why it's presently raining little darts of ice! 

I braced the icy winds and stood for a few moments, in my dressing gown, on the hotel balcony  staring out across the Tyne, lining the iconic Newcastle bridges up so they fitted together like pieces in a game of Jenga.

Snow came to Newcastle in force yesterday. It must have taken the weathermen by surprise because none of the roads had been gritted and Newcastle ended up in gridlock. 

I walked home along the quayside watching cars going into hopeless wheel-spins and excited children trying to make snowballs out of the centimetre of slush which had fallen and then frozen solid.

This morning the roads were even more treacherous. A bloke walking in front of me went down like a sack of spuds on a pedestrian crossing, and because he couldn't get up with ease, actually rolled himself back to the pavement like some kind of beetle. It was like something from Metamorphosis. 

We've spent the day in Byker editing 100 Faces, which is now looking absolutely stunning. We're in a good place. With a day to go, we've already started the process of finessing shots. Of course, with something like green-screening, there's always a million and one extra things you can do to make things look even better. A Hollywood movie would have a team of people working for weeks on this sort of thing alone. 

I am already beginning to feel a sense of nostalgia. This has been such a special project, and I've so enjoyed being back in Newcastle again, surrounded by the wonderful people at the BBC up here. I am just not ready for the process to end. 

350 years ago, and London was still something of a Winter Wonderland. Pepys was very much enjoying the sight of various gardens and landmarks covered in snow and hard frost. 

His household, however, was in a state of flux. Their maid Sarah had been sacked, purely because Elizabeth Pepys didn't "like her attitude," and Pepys paid her off feeling incredibly guilty and angry about the situation. 

Welcomed into the household was Winnifred Gosnell. She wasn't a replacement for Sarah. Far from it. She was actually being  employed as Elizabeth's "companion", someone she could hang out with, play cards with, gossip and shop with and so forth. One assumes there were other slightly more subservient aspects to the role, but Pepys already fancied the pants off her, so she could expect to be well-looked-after.

Gosnell was actually destined to become a well-respected actress and sang beautifully, which excited Pepys to the extent that he spent much of the day hanging out with her and Elizabeth, until Elizabeth smelt a rat and sent him packing to the office! 

 

Too early

I was up a long time before the sun this morning. The sound of the alarm going off actually made me scream. I'm already part way to Newcastle and there's still no sign of the dawn.  There is, however, what seems to be heavy snow falling and settling around Stevenage. This could be another long journey...

I got to King's Cross, and was immediately put into a stinking mood by the silly people behind the counter at Upper Crust. 

Me: Have you stopped doing those lovely cheese and egg breakfast rolls?

Her: (laughing in a sort of inept, yet sinister way) Yes

Me: Okay. Well just a tea then. 

Her: A large one?

Me: No, small

Her: A medium tea coming up. Would you like a pastry with that? 

Me: No. I want a small one...

Her: A sandwich?

Me: No! Can I ask why it's policy here to assume your customers want a large version of a drink? It's a very cynical policy.

She looks at me and blinks a few times, before gesturing ineffectually  towards another person behind the counter, who obviously always deals with the tricky customers.

Him: It's because tea is good for you, Sir.

He delivers the words like some kind of punch line, a cheeky grin on his twatty face. The other staff members chortle gleefully. It's like the sound of canned laughter on a bad 1970s sit com.

Me: Not really funny is it?

I would have had a little rant, but concluded life was too short and one of those do-gooder, "I don't like conflict" type women was standing behind me in the queue.

Here are some interesting facts about East Coast Mainline's complaints procedure. 

1) It is based in Plymouth, which, I suspect, is the furthest town in the UK away from any station covered by the train route. One wonders if this is an attempt to avoid angry customer demonstrations?

2) In order to get compensation, you are obliged to fill in one of their official claim forms, which comes with a handy envelope in which to put your tickets. Unfortunately, said envelope doesn't come with a prepaid stamp, so anyone trying to gain compensation must factor in the cost of a stamp and the hassle of trying to find one 

3) If your ticket "wasn't validated" (eg stamped or clipped) you're expected to write and send in an extra letter which doesn't fit into their tiny official envelope unless you write it on a piece of paper the size of a train ticket. A more cynical man would wonder why, on the two occasions I was deeply delayed this week, the guard hid in his van, refusing to pass through the train. The result of his inactivity/fear of reprisals/ laziness? A train full of people without validated tickets who could well find themselves unable to claim for compensation without jumping through another fifty hoops.

Anyway. Dawn is breaking over Rutland, which is probably my cue to get some shut eye...

Existential!

So, former Coronation Street actor, Andrew Lancel, is the latest celebrity to be engulfed by the Jimmie Saville scandal's fall out. Lancel, we're told, more than 20 years ago, sexually assaulted "a child under 16." He is now 42 and married. This "misdemeanour" happened whilst he was at drama school with a girl who could only have been a couple of years his junior. 

Now, we can, of course, only guess at the details, but it strikes me that it will be very difficult for Lancel to shake off his newly acquired reputation. His  role in panto this year has already been thrown into doubt because there "are children in the show." 

What is the world coming to? I'm afraid, in cases like this, if the accused can be named and hounded and lose work before he's given a fair trial, then we should also be able to name the alleged victim. Whatever happened to innocent until proved guilty? 

I am sick to the back teeth of all these stories coming out about famous people. Tell me just one thing. Has the Jimmy Saville case led to a rise in people who suddenly feel that they're able to report sexual crimes? People who were, perhaps too frightened to do so before? This can only be a good thing. My worry, however, is that the tendency for people to jump on the band wagon means that the only rise in people reporting these sorts of crimes concerns cases involving famous people. 

A very special lady came into the post office today with a brilliantly cheery Santa hat on her head. She was a tragic sort and looked a little like a gnome. She was the sort of person who would probably need to have specially designed chairs to fit her peculiar shape.

The poor woman was having terrible issues with her hearing aid. The whole queue could hear it shrieking and whistling. Heaven knows what was going on and what it must have sounded like in the poor woman's ears! The queue shouldn't have laughed... But it we did. Uncontrollably. 

I decided to come off Twitter today. Ironically, I haven't yet been able to deactivate my account and when I sent a tweet asking how to remove myself from the app, someone retweeted it! 

I guess I'm just not cut out for the Twitter world. It feels rather cheap and fake; like a horrible popularity contest, and I don't need anything else in my life which makes me feel insignificant.  There's actually another bloke on Twitter called Benjamin Till who has 4 times the number of followers as me, and I'm just not sure it suits me to be constantly thinking of witticisms, or trying to pretend that my life is a sparkling roller coaster just so that more people follow me. And for what purpose? I'm a composer. I write music, and if I can't use the app to publicise what I do for a living (24 days, and not a single sale of the requiem as a result), I don't really know why I'm there. 

I sort of feel the same about Facebook where there are some 600 people who describe themselves as my friend. This  irks me in a similar way because it means so little. I don't want group invitations sent at the flick of a button. I want to know I'm valuable enough in someone's life to receive a personal message. 

At the moment I feel as though one of my feet is no longer in the same world as the rest of my body. It's probably a sign of absolute mental and physical exhaustion and the constant flux in my life coupled with a deep fear about next year and the work that may or may not come in. I wake up in bed not knowing what city I'm in. I have pains in my chest. I am distant. I find it hard to focus. My mind wanders off into fantasy worlds. Parking in a car park which doubles up as the set of Holby City only enhances this slightly existential "nothing is entirely real" existence , and when I stare for hours at my iPhone, getting dragged into a succession of virtual worlds, I sometimes feel invisible. 

These thoughts will, of course, pass after a while. After a week's rest, healthy eating and exercise, I'll be right as rain again.

Anyway, I've been twiddling with this all day, and need to get back to my autocue. No rest for the wicked. Tomorrow I'm up at 5am!!

More delays

Eyes down. Here we go again. I’m at Newcastle train station on a stationary train, which is waiting for a guard and a driver. Apparently there’s been a fatality on the line somewhere near Peterborough. I can’t bear the thought of another journey like last Monday. In fact I’m wondering if I should rush down the aisles and offer to drive the silly thing myself.  All passengers heading to destinations as far as York have just been frog-marched off the train. Apparently there’s another train in the station which will get them where they want to be at greater speed, although I’m fairly sure they’ll be met by an East Coast firing squad designed to keep the lid on what could well be another PR catastrophe.

I’ve just been down to the buffet car to be told that it’s not working... for the second delayed train in a week running! When I started to complain to the three people standing behind the counter (apparently waiting for an urn), an aggressive Scottish woman slammed a big metal door in my face. Thing is, I know that none of these delays are actually being caused by East Coast, and furthermore that I’m an arsey bastard who likes to whinge, but East Coast staff are plainly demoralised and weary at the moment and they really shouldn’t take it out on passengers! Surely someone needs to teach them how to deal with angry, emotional or bored customers. Rule number one: open the buffet car. Rule number two: if you can’t open the buffet car, at least let people know so they can make other arrangements, or avoid making their way down the train like plonkers!

Despite a sensation of impending doom about this journey, I’m in a really good mood. It was day one of the 100 Faces edit today and we cut the film - in its entirety - in about five hours. I was very relieved that it cut together so speedily, because an enormous amount of time from hereon will need to be invested in post production work.  Everyone who features in the piece was filmed in front of green or blue screen, which means we need to spend a huge amount of time keying in different backdrops and making sure the people in the film a) don’t look like cardboard cut-outs, b) don’t look like they’re making an appeal for the MacMillan nurses c) don’t look like they’re acting in an in-house corporate film for HSBC and d) don’t get visually overwhelmed or upstaged by what’s going on behind them. This film, after all, is about one hundred Faces, and one hundred faces need to shine. At the same time, it’s important that physical numbers are seen regularly in the film to give the audience a sense of how old the people they’re looking at are. I suspect we’re going to be sitting on a very sharp knife-edge between subtlety and lily-guilding. The film needs a rawness to it; a realness.

I’m very much enjoying the process of editing in Newcastle. I love the city and I love its people. I’m staying in a great hotel with a river view and a bath and we’re in a great edit suite run by a lovely bunch of people, with jelly babies and cups of tea aplenty. What more could I ask for? I’m also enjoying the thought that this entire piece, from orchestral sessions  through to the dotting of i’s and crossing of t’s, will have been shot, recorded, graded, promoted and mixed in the region (with a little help from the hills above Sheffield, of course!) Self-sufficiency certainly feels very appropriate. BBC Newcastle have always punched way above their weight in the field of television. They are now far and above my favourite BBC Region.

Pepys was out and about in a very cold London all day on this day 350 years ago. He went by water to Deptford and Limehouse to look at masts and newly built boats and to talk to various people about the Chatham Chest, a fund set up in the late 16^th century to pay pensions to disabled seamen. The aforementioned chest was probably the world’s first occupational pension scheme – not that anyone in my position would understand the meaning of a pension! (If I lose the ability to compose, just stick me in the nearest dustbin.) Pepys was forever worrying about the cold (and worse still, getting himself wet in cold conditions) so a trip on the Thames was his idea of hell. By the evening he had got himself into something of a tizzy, so went to bed with a posset. Now why on earth do we not have possets anymore?

Ranting

I watched the latest John Lewis advert last night; the one with the snowmen. It is, I declare rashly, one of the finest adverts I've seen; a very beautiful short, almost entirely lacking in branding, but utterly memorable. Exactly as adverts should be in my view and I'm plainly not the only one as the ad has garnered 2.5million hits on YouTube.

Remarkable, though this figure is, the film is still subject to the inane ramblings of the faceless, nameless imbeciles who always feel obliged to make insulting and nonsensical comments on these sorts of forums. 

"I don't get it," writes one emotionally crippled drongo, "it's just a film about a snowman walking for miles to buy his snowman girlfriend a pair of gloves." And in that one sentence, our friend succinctly sums up exactly why the advert touched me so deeply. 

Of course, after a while, these comment forums invariably descend into name-calling, mud-slinging and general illiteracy. You know there's a problem when someone misspells the word "shit."

It certainly makes me wonder what goes through the minds of people who obsessively watch films they don't like, seemingly just to think of terrible things to write about them, all the time, or course, hiding behind their pseudonym tag. 

I've suffered my fair share of these kind of inadequate musings over the years. They're usually attached to the more upbeat tongue-in-cheak musicals that I make for the BBC, and more often than not come from people who have entirely missed the point of a community musical whose primary aim is to bring people together and allow them to have a bit of fun doing something they've never done before. Process rather than end product. 

I've always argued that no-one objects to a well-considered, witty diss, so when Metro: The Musical was described as "the worst thing to happen to the North East since Thatcher," I laughed. Also, after the mayhem that Thatcher caused in the region, I'm relieved the writer feels that the North East has obviously had such an easy subsequent ride. 

I was also fairly amused at the comment about Coventry Market: the musical, which asked, "who wrote these lyrics? A gimp?" Although this particular remark is bordering on the, "your Mum smells of wee..." type of insult. In fact, very recently, someone wrote of Metro, "I once had a turd which sounded better than this..." Put this man on the stage! He's got a talented arse! 

I was less amused, however, to read the rumour that Metro had cost £200k to make, as it opens up the BBC, to yawnsome arguments about wasting license fee payers' money. I think the BBC waste my license fee every time they show the football, but keep quiet because I know that some people love it.

I think it's when things get uber personal that I begin to draw the line. 

One man sent many messages suggesting that anyone reading should email me to tell me how disgraceful it is that I make a living "making crap". I would add that this particular call to arms from Biglips88 was entirely ignored, by Biglips himself, as no one has so far emailed me. Come on Biglips, put your money where your mouth is! 

There was, of course, also Burtisitart, a frustrated artist, who even recorded his own film telling me to get out of Yorkshire before making A Symphony for Yorkshire. I wouldn't have minded, but he went on a six month crusade on every chat forum known to man to try to encourage people that only a Yorkshire-based composer should be able to write an anthem to Yorkshire, holding up Ilkley Moor Bar t'at as a shining example of how things should be done.  Sadly, it turns out that this particular piece was written by a shoemaker from Canterbury, and A Symphony For Yorkshire sold an unprecedented number of DVDs for Children In Need.  Poor Burtisitart! Maybe he'll think of his own idea one day instead of wasting time feeling angry with others. 

But you know, every time I read a comment which describes someone in the film as looking like a "boiled egg"  or a "fat pig", or read a remark like "come on, thumbs down... We've nearly overtaken the 342 people who starred in this feeble cack," a little part of me dies, and I wonder if these people would be able to say something like this to my face, or any of the people in the films, and, if they did, whether they'd celebrate the sadness they'd created. 

There's even a comment from one of the Coventry performers who says she regrets taking part in the film, but did it "whilst she got her singing career off the ground," adding "God, why did my dad let me do it. Prick." Nice one Lottie Tottie. I'm sure you're a deeply credible artist these days and that your father would be delighted to  be called a prick! 

Of course, ultimately, all publicity is good publicity, and every time my films get another YouTube hit, I get a small PRS payment, so, you know, he who laughs last and all that...

One day, however, I'd love to meet BigLips, Burt and Lottie. I'd like to know what sort of lives they live, and whether they're happy. And if any of them are reading this, how about you come out for a drink with me? We could talk about the John Lewis advert and there's one or two other things I'd like to say... But to your faces!

Skating

Nathan and I are in Thaxted, celebrating our first communal day off for what seems like years. 

We had a lie-in and then spent the rest of the day doing washing, posting letters, printing photos and (in Nathan's case) knitting. In essence, we did very little. I even sat down to watch an episode of Columbo from 1972, which was set in London, but very plainly filmed in California. I have seldom seen a less convincing depiction of the UK!

The post office in Highgate closes at noon on a Saturday, so I rushed there for about 11.30, and was horrified to find the place literally fit-to-burst. It's only a tiny little shop, and I was 39th in the queue, so the place resembled Harrods on the first day of the winter sales. Someone kept farting. Someone else was coughing like they had pertussis. It was 12.15 before I got out of the place, feeling like I'd caught all manner of terrible diseases.

We've spent the last hour or so sitting in front of an open fire in my parents' sitting room, talking about my Great Grandparents' house on the Isle of Wight which my Mum practically lived in as a child.  It sounds like heaven; an enormous, ramshackle mansion house with an 8 acre garden stretching down to its own beach. 

My Mum used to lie in bed at night watching the beam of light from the iconic lighthouse at St Catherine's Point passing through her bedroom. I always loved that story. It always seemed so romantic. She used to stare out of the window and watch the moon's reflection drifting across the sea. 

There's a lot to be said for simpler times. The other day I sat in a pub with a group of people and realised we were all staring at our iPhones instead of talking to one another. How will we ever regain a sense of community if we can only communicate virtually?! I genuinely feel we've all become a little complacent. I'm also losing the ability to write!

The joy about visiting Thaxted on December 1st was being able to drive past The Christmas House, which has been part of Christmases for me, for the last 20 years. Somewhere on the road between Stansted and Thaxted is a house which lights up like a Christmas tree throughout December. Hundreds upon thousands of little tiny lights adorn its rafters. Enormous snow men and reindeer skip across its roof. Music plays: the sound of angels singing. The courtyard is open to the public and often filled with excited children. And who could blame them? When the house lights up, Christmas is here! 

Pepys spent the morning 350  years ago with the Duke of York, the future James II of England. Pepys had recently become obsessed with administration, and had collected together all invoices pertaining to ship masts, which everyone seemed delighted with. 

He went from Whitehall Palace to St James' Park, and saw, for the first time in his life, people "sliding on skates." I'm actually wondering if the practice originated, like so many Restoration fashions, from mainland Europe. After all, one tends to associate skating with the dykes of Holland, and Charles II brought much Dutch culture with him when he returned to London. It may also have been that the hot winters of the last few years had made skating impossible, and that, prior to this, skating had been frowned on by Cromwell and his cronies. Those puritans sure knew how to be boring!