I hope you like the book. You have to be a Gogglebox fan to fully appreciate it, but if you are, there are delights both nostalgic and new within its covers, and the illustrations by Quinton Winter are phenomenal.
Here are the portraits, presented in the order in which they were taken.
What a rare and lovely month it was. I shall never forget it.
The little pic of me surrounded by Sandy and Sandra was taken by professional photographer Nicky Johnston for Radio Times.
because I don't watch Snog, Marry, Avoid.
because I don't really know what that is, or does.
because I mainly listen to Radio 4 and watch BBC Two and Wimbledon and Question Time.
and there was no one left to broadcast that fact in a trustworthy manner.
Will Avatar take Hollywood to the next dimension, or are those glasses making us blind?
Just before Christmas in 1952, United Artists released a functional African jungle adventure called Bwana Devil. The first feature to be exhibited in Natural Vision 3D, its publicity made the famous promise, "A lion in your lap!" Advertising standards would take a dim view of the flimsiness of this leonine proximity claim today, but desperate times – as the 1950s were for Hollywood during TV's first boom – called for desperate measures.
This is not meant as a facetious comparison, even though I have carefully written it as one. In actual fact, not that much has changed between the lion in the lap and the dandruff down the back, except that 21st century audiences are less gullible and more reticent to tear themselves away from small glowing boxes. Bwana Devil did well enough at the box office, as did the knock-on 3D flea circuses that propagated in its wake – House Of Wax, It Came From Outer Space, Robot Monster, The Creature From The Black Lagoon – at least until the sums stopped adding up. But none of them performed like Avatar, even if figures are adjusted for inflation, which they never are or else Gone With The Wind would always be number one and the all-time box office charts would cease to act as a team-building exercise for studio accountants.
The tin-hat difference between Bwana Devil and Avatar is that the former was conspicuous by its absence at the 25th Academy Awards – it was all 2D confections like High Noon and The Quiet Man that year – while the latter scored nine nominations at the 82nd. By the time you read this, you'll know whether or not it took home Best Picture. If not, having already shamed his last film Titanic into second place with a world-beating $2.3 billion take (at time of going to press), Cameron will be able to dry his eyes on hundred dollar bills and toss them into a waste paper basket woven from the eyelashes of angels.
Just as the success of Nirvana led to the signing of Tad, post-Avatar, film studios are literally sending completed blockbusters back to the menders and ordering up an extra dimension, from Clash Of The Titans to the final Harry Potter double-bill Deathly Hallows. The Times reported that LA's celluloid-to-digital conversion labs are fully booked ("We can turn an older film into 3-D in around 16 weeks," said the man at one such, Legend Films in San Diego), while super-geeks Peter Jackson and George Lucas are salivating at the prospect of running their respective sagas through the machine, just as Pixar have done with Toy Story. "2D or not 2D?" – that is not the question.
I wish it was a passing craze, like Sensurround™, Illusion-O™ and Vinnie Jones™, but with 3D tellys being rolled out, 3D Blu-Ray on the horizon and 3D football matches bringing new meaning to collecting up the glasses in pubs, it may be that the man from cinema chain USC was right when he told the Times, "It's no longer a gimmick, but an expectation." Not in my house. And I speak as someone who queued up to see Friday The 13th 3D as a teenager in order to experience a pitchfork handle in my face. Nick James is astute when he describes Avatar as "a film for 15-year-olds that grown-ups enjoy for its technological breakthroughs." I also worry that all this tech-fetishism makes gawping idiots of us all.
Hey, I'm all for the industry being saved – I really like films – but Avatar is not exactly a quick fix. It took years to make and cost $310 million, plus $150 to market. It would be cheaper to release an actual lion into every punter's lap.
Having said that, those wraparound 3D specs did create the dazzling illusion that Cameron's one-dimensional characters were two-dimensional.
Whatever | Festivals If blanket TV coverage of music festivals is to rival sport, where's its equivalent of Alan Hansen? Back in the studio after a lacklustre nil-nil draw in Group C between France and Romania, BBC pundit Alan Hansen looked set to bust out of his pressed white shirt as he declared, with a degree of overstatement, "That was the worst game I've ever seen in my life." Harbour a grudging respect for him or hate him, his assessment must have chimed with the thoughts of many Euro 2008 viewers at home. Punditry in motion. As it happened, three weeks of goalmouth incident, questionable pronunciations of Xavi and jibes about the astrology-based decisions of the French coach later, the Euro 2008 final coincided with blanket TV coverage of another heavily sponsored outdoor summer spectacle, Glastonbury. While BBC1 showed the entertaining clash between Germany and Spain in one field, over on BBC3 it was the Fratellis, Kings of Leon and Buddy Guy in another. The constant refrain of those committed enough to attend major sporting events and/or music festivals is, "You had to be there." But for the majority, television is our best chance of a ringside seat. Since I stopped going after Glastonbury '95, I have been the target armchair festivalgoer as the Beeb's coverage has expanded like cosmic insulation foam to fill all nooks of the digisphere. As with Wimbledon, you can even press the red button and select from a multi-screen menu which game, set or match you wish to view. In many ways – most of them logistical and hygienic – it really is better than being there. However, this comparison between sport and live music on TV throws up a problem. As one gradually morphs into the other – slick, branded, omnipresent, relentlessly cross-promoted and with saturation point never too far around the next corner – the big difference between the two becomes ever more apparent. There is one crucial element missing from festival TV. I'm talking about its total dereliction of critical judgement. Imagine if, during this year's fulsome Glastonbury coverage, Mark Radcliffe had swivelled round on his backstage hay bail and exclaimed to Jo Whiley, "Well, that was the worst set I've seen on the Pyramid Stage in my life." It's unthinkable. Alan Hansen can call the Polish defence "abysmal"; Radcliffe must describe Shakin' Stevens as "a trooper." This is not a criticism of Mark or Jo or any other presenter, whose job it is to talk everything up, in order to justify the vast sums invested in securing rights, setting up outside-broadcast shop in Pilton for a week and supplying content to BBC2, BBC3, BBC4, BBC News, Radio 1, 5 Live, 6 Music, 1 Xtra, BBC online and BBCi. But I can vouch for the fact that, once a broadcaster is onsite, the tendency is simply to cheerlead. "The atmosphere is amazing!" "It's shaping up to be a vintage Glastonbury!" "It's not just about the music." It'll be the same for T In The Park, Reading and Leeds, Cambridge … TV and radio coverage is less like editorial, more like advertorial. The irony in all this round-the-clock, welly-wearing Pollyannaism is that music fans are no strangers to music criticism. Whether old enough to have been raised on the sturm und drang of the weekly music press or new enough to be fluent in the snap judgements of blog and Facebook, the type of person who will actually sit down to watch Glastonbury on TV (and there are 1.9 million in peak-time, down to a respectable 500,000 after 11pm) is exactly the type who would welcome at least a heated debate on the merits of Jay-Z, rather than to hear the party line parroted (ie. that he "won the crowd over"). Sporting pundits are there to dissect a match; to marvel at the way Torres lifted Xavi's pass over the keeper's legs, but also to bemoan the ref's decision not to book Silva after that surreptitious headbutt on Podolski. Why are we not grown up enough to hear the same degree of expert critique from football's festival counterparts? In fairness, this won't come from DJs like Jo or Zane or Fearne, ambassadors for the Corporation with future guest bookings to protect, but can a substrata of critics not be arranged in a studio to offer something a little more incisive? "The atmosphere seems oddly corporate and stilted this year." "Is there a festival the Verve aren't playing?" "Is Beth Ditto still at it?" Actually, a couple of years ago, Jo Whiley did break ranks and offer a unique glimpse of editorial. After the Alison Goldfrapp set, she said, "It just goes to show that you can be thin and still have cellulite." Not even Hansen would be that incisive.
In the accompanying picture above (what would nowadays be called a "selfie", although these were invented long before the camera-phone), I am sitting in a hotel room in Aberystwyth in Ceredigion, West Wales. The hotel is the Belle Vue and it's right on the front. Here is the view from my window last night when we checked in at around 7.30pm after the five-hour, one-change train journey from London.
I love the sounds of waves crashing and seagulls cawing. Because I spent pretty much every summer holiday as a boy in North Wales, I feel very much at home in this country. I've spent more time in North and South Wales, though, and less in Mid-, and it's my very first time in Aberystwyth. If you've been following the story, you'll have probably guessed why I'm here. The groundbreaking Welsh/English detective noir Y Gwyll, or Hinterland, is set and shot in Aberystwyth. I am here, in a landscape you could not make up, in weather you'd usually have to put in afterwards, to effect what's known in the trade as a "set visit". That is, I've been invited to visit the set, which in this case, was an actual barn near a farm just outside Borth, where a temporary production base had been established under a gazebo.
I did take some pictures of the filming of a scene involving Richard Harrington as DCI Tom Mathias, Mali Harries as DI Mared Rhys and another actor as a farmer, but these may be embargoed, as series two of Y Gwyll won't be airing on S4C (in Welsh) and then BBC Wales (in English and Welsh) until autumn 2015. There's a one-off special on S4C on New Year's Day, which is intended to sate fans of the show in the interim. (If you haven't seen it – and you really should – it's a case-of-the-week crime-solver that has its own broader arc about Mathias's past, so you can dip in and it will still work.) I'm sure you're aware that the show's trick – which it didn't invent, but is rare – is to film every scene with dialogue twice, once in Welsh, once in English (and some Welsh, where applicable), thereby literally doubling the work of the cast and crew, but in the process doubling its marketability in an international TV market, something that's clearly working for them, having sold it to Denmark, Holland, Belgium, the US and Canada (on Netflix) and countless others. Not bad for a show set in Aberystwyth.
On our windswept arrival last night, Tash from the PR company (in charge of delivering me to my destination) and I repaired to a bar and cafe – highly recommended locally – called Baravin. While the cast and crew are filming, some based in Aber, others in Borth, many of them far away from hearth and home, this magnificently sited venue seems to be a magnet. It faces out onto the seafront and serves artisan pizzas, draught beer and something called an "espresso Martini", which sounded like a terrible idea at the beginning of the evening, but a good one at the end of it.
At Baravin, we met Richard Harrington, Mali Harries (both of whom I appear to have known for years, or at least that's the impression I got from the warm way they greeted me) and producers the voluble Ed Thomas and more quietly spoken Gethin Scourfield. We had a tremendous evening with all four. I didn't take my dictaphone out, but we chatted about the show, and the way it's produced, and it's all "colour" for the feature I will write to coincide with transmission of series two in about ten months' time. Our hosts provided plenty. Richard is dark and authoritative onscreen (if you've not seen Y Gwyll, you may remember him from Spooks), but in real life, he feels hewn from the same rock as his namesake Burton. An elemental figure, I of course blame him for talking me into an espresso Martini.
It being Wales, where the stars are visible in the sky, and a promenade, where the sea puts you to sleep, I slumbered hard, woken only once at 4am when two young women who had gone after-hours sang a modern pop song under my window from the pavement below. I could only admire them.
Tempted out for a pre-breakfast walk along the front to the pier this morning, I felt blessed to witness the murmuration of starlings, who shot out from under the Royal Pier and filled the sky. I don't think my non-iPhone really captured the glory, but you can't blame me for trying, presented with that. This may be a writer's blog, but I'm painting a lot of this with pictures.
One full English/Welsh inside me, and we were off to the set. This is me, pretending to be a vital cog in the Y Gwyll machine, sitting on a plastic chair under the gazebo, watching a monitor and wearing some headphones so that I can hear the Welsh and English words being said by the actors into the microphones. I am well wrapped up against the cold. It would have been pathetic of me to even admit to myself that I was feeling the cold, as I was only on set for half a day, and these dedicated professionals do it for twice that long, every day, for weeks on end.
This photo depicts me and S4C Drama Commissioner Gwawr Martha Lloyd, whom I have met before, showing our frozen appreciation for the arrival of on-set catering in polystyrene boxes wrapped in tin foil and cling film. (For the record, I am holding two portions of main course and dessert, only one of which is for me.) After about five hours of being among the elements, it was the thought of getting into a warm car and being driven to a warm train station where a warm train awaited that was keeping me alive.
Ten hours on the train there and back, but 20 hours spent in the salty, reed-filled embrace of Aberystwyth and Borth, getting a boyhood Proustian rush from the Welsh signs, the stern, symmetrical, chapel-like Welsh houses and the sight of endless sheep. Ceredigion really is "Hinterland Country" now. If you know the first series, you will literally spot houses and bridges and garages you've seen on telly in real life. This is a show that, unlike so much geographically faked TV fiction, lives and breathes its authentic, living, breathing environments. Gethin and director Julian Jones let us accompany them on a location scouting trip to Borth where we trod infinite dunes and were almost literally run off private farmland after a wrong turn.
An unusual day in a writer's life, and a rewarding one, whose printed fruits exist only in the future.