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Cameron vs Flashman

This article appeared in The Herald

The following is an extract from a circular email which was forwarded to me last week. Its author, one Tom Brown, was presumed to have died some time ago. Suffice to say he is well retired from public life and suffers from senility, but his observations on matters political may be of interest:

“Dear chums […] Those of you who still have faculties, nay a pulse, in working order, may well have noticed things are not as they were in our time. Those Eton chaps seem to have the whole business sown up, for starters. I mean to say, I can’t think of an Old Rugbeian in the Cabinet.

“You may well conceive of my surprise, then, on hearing the name ‘Harry Flashman’ come spitting out of the wireless on The World At One. By Jupiter, says I to myself, hasn’t old Flashy had enough misadventure? But then I remembered Flashy didn’t make it through the Great War – some say he died falling from the Mata Hari’s bedroom window – and as I listened on I was somewhat relieved to grasp that the late Brigadier was not in fact Her Majesty’s Prime Minister and had only been likened to him; or rather, vice versa.

“As I comprehend the facts, the leader of something called the Labour Party thinks itquite the barb to call the PM Flashman instead of Cameron, which is his proper name, although some people insist on calling him ‘Dave’. Well, I was intrigued to find out more about this Dave fellow, and it seems that not only is he frightfully young, mutatis mutandum he’s really nothing like our old tormentor at all. In fact, Flashy would have shrank from the comparison as though it were double Latin.

“Now, some of you may recall that Flashy and I had our differences, and in all honesty he made my schooldays deuced unpleasant. But as the saying goes a roasting maketh a full man, or something, and, well, Empire demanded men like Flashy. That men like Flashy lost the Empire is beside the point – old Harry never picked a fight with a tyrant unless he dashed well had to and he certainly didn’t gad about the world telling people we were responsible for its problems, not unless he was about to be killed.”

The email goes on to compare Cameron’s ability as a “swordsman” unfavourably with Flashman’s, but we’re keeping that bit to ourselves for legal reasons.


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Villas Boas – the new Sir Bobby

This article appeared in The Herald

Liverpool re-hiring Kenny Dalglish was described as a gamble. Rangers promoting Ally McCoist, their assistant these last four years, is explained in similar language. But few gambles in football seem on the face of matters as speculative as the punt taken on one Andre Villas Boas by Porto last summer.

His name was barely familiar even to his countrymen. He was 32, an age at which most players are still coming to terms with the idea that they are “experienced”. And, in fact, he had never actually been a footballer. For anyone.

There have been others who’ve been given their chance at managing big clubs without ever having played on any grand stage – Arsene Wenger is one who springs to mind – but usually there is a requirement to work one’s ticket in the lower divisions. Jorge Nuno Pinto da Costa, however, is a man who knows his own mind. The Porto president handed a spiky young Jose Mourinho his first major appointment and did not live to regret it; Villas Boas was, similarly, his personal choice to succeed Jesualdo Ferreira.

Once again he has been vindicated. Porto host Spartak Moscow in the first leg of a Europa League quarter-final tonight having eliminated CSKA in the last round and fresh from clinching the Liga Sagres title with a 2-1 win at Benfica on Sunday. Before they took that punt on Dalglish, Liverpool were sniffing around Villas Boas; more recently Roma were rebuffed. The Porto native – a supporter of the club as a boy – has made it clear he wants to guide them into the Champions League next season.

So far, so much a case of Mourinho Mark II. And Villas Boas’ relationship to the “Special One” seems almost umbilical. Before taking over at bottom-of-the-league Academica in October 2009 – from which position he led them to a safe 11th place – he spent years working under the current Real Madrid manager, first at Porto, then at Chelsea, and then at Inter Milan.

The younger man has been keen to downplay this relationship, however. Rumours that his split from Mourinho 18 months ago was an acrimonious one may or may not be well-founded, but he has at times seemed annoyed at attempts to paint him as some kind of De Niro to his master’s Brando. “I am not a clone of anyone,” he has said. “I want to leave my mark on this club. We do not have the same character and personality. We communicate and work differently.”

“He’s very insistent that he’s not the new Mourinho,” the editor of the Portugoal football website, Tom Kundert, told Herald Sport. “He was in fact originally taken on at Porto by Bobby Robson and he is quoted as saying that he sees himself more as Robson’s successor. He said ‘I have English ancestry (his late grandmother was from Manchester), a big nose and I like drinking wine.'”

The story of Villas Boas’ conscription by the late Robson might well be the stuff of a Hollywood yarn. As a teenager he lived in the same building as Robson – who coached Porto from 1994-96 – and harassed the latter into reading some of his meticulous scouting reports on the team’s next opponents. The former England manager was impressed enough to offer the precocious youngster a role within the club’s observation department.

At 17, he achieved his UEFA C coaching licence in Scotland before, aged 21, becoming head coach of the British Virgin Islands. When Pinto da Costa appointed Mourinho in 2002, the latter brought Villas Boas in as an assistant, and so began his higher education in the managerial arts.

It would not be accurate to suggest the new Porto coach has simply transplanted Mourinho’s template, however. Like Mourinho he is adept at motivating players and impeccably organised, but there are major tactical differences: like Pep Guardiola’s Barcelona, Villas Boas’ Porto play high pressure, passing football; his is a more fluid 4-3-3 than Mourinho’s was at Chelsea, with the wingers frequently becoming strikers.
“Where Mourinho is results driven and therefore traditionally quite defensive, Villas Boas gives his players a lot of licence,” says Kundert. “At the same time they lose very few goals. Tactically he has to be given credit.”

In the last four years, Porto have lost the likes of Bruno Alves and Raul Meireles, Lucho Gonzalez, Lisandro Lopez, Ricardo Quaresma, Jose Bosingwa, Pepe and Anderson. Benfica, meanwhile, looked a much stronger side than their domestic rivals this season: Luisao, Fabio Coentrao, Javi Garcia, Gaitan and Saviola would all walk into Villas Boas’ team.

In such circumstances, any manager who can put out a side as ruthless and tactically superior as the current Porto is bound to have Europe’s elite clubs taking note. He may not be able to keep him forever, but Pinto da Costa’s gamble has paid off. The risks for future suitors are beginning to seem negligible.


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Maybe Britain needs a First Amendment, too

This article was published at Spiked

Last week it emerged that the Metropolitan Police are investigating the Spectator magazine following complaints from a Muslim group about comments made on a blog entry on its website by the Daily Mail journalist Melanie Phillips. Writing about the massacre, in the West Bank, of a three-month-old Jewish girl, her two brothers and her parents as they slept in their beds, Phillips referred to the murderers as ‘savages’ and to the ‘moral depravity of the Arabs’.

Phillips is not generally noted for even-handedness when it comes to writing about the Middle East. She is often polemical, some might even say tendentious, in her support of Israel. She is certainly not everyone’s cup of tea, and perhaps you would include yourself in that. Perhaps you feel that she comes too close to smearing all Arabs. Perhaps you even think hers are the sort of views that should be investigated by the police. But then again, perhaps you don’t read her blogs and form your views of the rights and wrongs of faraway bloodshed from other sources. Perhaps you wonder what all the fuss is about.

There are echoes here of the case of another Daily Mail journalist, Jan Moir, who in 2009 upset a lot of people by appearing to attribute the death of the singer Stephen Gately to his lifestyle. Gately was gay. The Crown Prosecution Service eventually decided, about a year ago, not to prosecute Moir, but the whole episode conjured up bizarre images of crown officials poring over words and phrases in a newspaper opinion column for evidence of illegality.

And then there was the case, less well-publicised, involving Douglas Murray, another journalist. He was investigated by the Press Complaints Commission and the police merely for suggesting that the prosecution of an English councillor for telling a joke about an Irishman being a bit dim was ludicrous. And last year, too, a Liberal Democrat councillor was convicted under the 2006 Public Order Act for using ‘threatening, abusive or insulting words, with intent to cause harassment, alarm or distress’. Shirley Brown, who is black, had called a female Asian councillor, Jay Jethwa, a ‘coconut’, a colloquial term used to denote a person who is ‘brown on the outside and white on the inside’ – someone who has, in other words, betrayed his or her cultural roots by pandering to ‘white’ opinion.

But it’s not merely in print and in the debating chamber that solecisms can have repercussions: cyberspace also has its victims. Think of Paul Chambers, who was fined £3,000 and lost his job for tweeting, in jest, words to the effect that he would blow up an airport if its closure due to bad weather disrupted his travel plans. Or of Gareth Compton, the Tory councillor who was arrested in November when – after hearing the Independent’s Yasmin Alibhai-Brown argue on a radio programme that the West had no moral authority to condemn the practice of stoning women in the Muslim world – he asked his Twitter followers ‘Can someone please stone [her] to death?’, adding ‘I shan’t tell Amnesty if you don’t. It would be a blessing, really.’

That some users of social media are discovering, to their detriment, that the online environment does not in fact mirror the domain of the private conversation down the pub was perhaps inevitable. But then, as the Sky Sports commentators Andy Gray and Richard Keys – who lost their jobs for making off-colour remarks when they thought they were not being recorded – recently found out, even private conversation is no longer safe from censure.

What is going on? How did we arrive at a situation where giving offence is automatically sackable or worse? Surely the freedom to disagree with a comment or to ignore it is enough. When it is suggested that certain points of view or ways of expressing them might be or should be illegal – or that intolerance should not be tolerated, to purloin the common malapropism – a notion that should chill anyone who holds the principles of liberal democracy dear is given life: the notion of thought crime. Freedom of speech was hard-won in the West; the freedom only to speak inoffensively is no freedom at all.

If UK prime minister David Cameron seemed to grasp this when he spoke of the merits of ‘muscular liberalism’ earlier this year, it is a pity that his government’s Protection of Freedoms Bill – an Act which has been making its way through parliament since last summer and which it is intended will extend freedom of information, turn back the tide of state intrusion into our lives and repeal unnecessary criminal laws – makes no attempt to return free speech to its rightful place at the altar of democracy.

The Lib-Con coalition government may well be less authoritarian than the Labour one that preceded it, but in a way we are still suffering the hangover from New Labour and the ideals it pressed into service when it ditched socialism: diversity, equality, respect. Among the 4,300 new offences put into statute under Labour were those governing ‘hate speech’, or the giving and taking of offence. First came legislation on racial and religious hatred; later, protection was extended to gay, transgender and disabled people. Doubtless heightened sensitivity about Islam in the wake of 9/11 played its part: the Religious Hatred Act of 2006, for instance, extended outdated blasphemy laws to afford people of all faiths, including Jedis, recourse against things they don’t like hearing said or seeing written.

One of the results has been a new culture of fastidious censoriousness in every public body, human-resource department and media organisation in the land. Furthermore, the giving of offence need not be intentional, nor the words (or cartoons) themselves possessed of the propensity to give it in order for it to be taken. Never mind the freedom to speak offensively: people have been invited to believe there is such a thing as the right not to be offended. Never mind that ‘incitement to hatred’ is a grey, disputable thing, and a different thing to incitement to violence, which was already a criminal offence. Never mind that most ideas are capable of giving offence, and that Socrates, Galileo and Darwin were all considered beyond the pale in their time. And never mind that in the marketplace of ideas, ‘hate speech’ can be challenged, debated or ignored. What we now have is moderated free speech at best.

That distinction between incitement to hatred and incitement to violence is a crucial one for Peter Tatchell, one of this country’s most tireless and principled human rights campaigners. When I spoke to him last year he had recently been in the news for defending the rights of Christian preachers hounded by the law over homophobic hate-speech crimes. One American Baptist evangelist, Shawn Holes, was fined £1,000 for telling shoppers in Glasgow city centre that homosexuals were bound for hell; Tatchell, who is gay himself and renowned for his campaigning on behalf of gay rights, called it ‘an attack on free speech and a heavy-handed, excessive response to homophobia’. He had also spoken up for the five Islamists convicted of showering abuse at British soldiers at a ‘homecoming’ march in Luton, but had elsewhere called for sanctions on extremists who incite violence – including Abu Usamah, who was shown in a Channel 4 undercover documentary advocating the killing of gays and Muslims who leave their faith. But there was no contradiction, he insisted. ‘If someone says “I want to encourage people to plant bombs in Princes Street in Edinburgh”, then that’s pretty clear incitement to violence’, he told me. ‘Saying “I sympathise with al-Qaeda” is not, on the other hand.’

While that view may not be likely to find favour with mainstream political opinion, muscular liberal or otherwise, it makes sense from a First Amendment perspective, if you’re talking American. Britain doesn’t have a First Amendment, of course, but it did produce John Stuart Mill, who wrote in 1859 that ‘there ought to exist the fullest liberty of professing and discussing, as a matter of ethical conviction, any doctrine, however immoral it may be considered’. The limits of such liberty should be defined by the ‘harm principle’, he said, not by social offence. In other words, dealing with offence is part of being a grown-up in a grown-up society.

Liberals nowadays seem to have lost the stomach for such principles, however. The word ‘liberal’ itself has come to denote a much narrower set of ideas: vaguely leftish, environmentalist, irreproachably PC, pro-European, pro-Palestine, pro-Yasmin Alibhai-Brown. Technology, meanwhile, may have helped to create a more informed and engaged citizenry, but it has also given a leg up to the power of mob rule. Online forums and message boards foster a culture of outrage, indignation and recrimination; they manufacture and mobilise offence.

The Lib-Cons’ Protection of Freedoms Act will flush away ID cards, biometric passports and the ContactPoint database of children in England. It includes provisions to restrict and regulate the use of surveillance powers, CCTV and the storage of internet and email records and it will restore rights to freedom of assembly, non-violent protest and trial by jury. It may prove to be a watershed moment for liberty in Britain. It could have been a much greater one. It is time to weigh again the value, as opposed to the price, of free speech.


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Poetry, war and bicycles

This article appeared in the magazine Metropolitan

It is the first Sunday in April, 2009, and my train has chuntered out of Brussels, bound for East Flanders. Ghent, famed for its immaculately-preserved medieval architecture, is less than an hour to the north, but my destination is the lesser-known hilly area to the south of the region – the Flemish Ardennes – home to the “hellingen” which provide the dramatic setting for the cobbled classic cycle races run in Flanders each Spring.

In professional cycling, cobbles are to these “Classics” what the high mountain passes of the Pyrenees and the Alps are to the Tour de France. It is on these sections of the course that the ambitions of the few are realised, the hopes of many are crushed and, in such short, steep climbs as the famous Koppenberg, near the town of Oudenaarde, that thousands fervently line the route to experience the thrill of the race as it hurtles past.

Where the colour, celebrity and scale of the Tour de France lend it a glorious, epic glamour, the grittiness of the so-called “northern” Classics has a fascination all of its own. The Paris-Roubaix race – run over an unrelenting series of punishing cobbled farm tracks in northern France – is considered the “Queen of the Classics”, but is preceded in late March and early April each year by the Vlaamse Wielerweek (Flemish cycling week).

This festival of racing includes the Classic Ghent-Wevelgem, which features the ascent and terrifying descent of the famous Kemmelberg climb, and the “Three Days of De Panne” stage race in West Flanders. But the highlight, and the race which brings all of Flanders to a standstill, is the Ronde van Vlaanderen (Tour of Flanders).

“You can either ride the cobbles or you can’t”, says Barry Hoban, an Englishman whose successes in the 1960s and 70s endeared him to Flandrians to such an extent that he became known as The Gent of Ghent. “Some guys are terrified of them. You have to ride them hard and fast and take whatever the weather throws at you. I’ve ridden Paris-Roubaix in snowstorms and I’ve ridden it in a heatwave. And when it’s hot and dry it’s worse because the dust gets up and your eyes are red for about three days afterwards.”

As someone who “hit the north” as an outsider, Hoban – whose results included victory in Gent-Wevelgem, third in Paris-Roubaix and fifth in the Ronde – is well-placed to comment on what distinguishes the culture of cycling there. “As a young man, I left West Yorkshire – a hard-grafting, coal-mining area – and moved to northern France and lived among hard-grafting, coal-mining people there,” recalls the 71-year-old.

“The only difference was the language and the fact that they loved cycling, because the people were exactly the same. I lived first in Bethune (in France) and later in Ghent, and at that time there were very few English-speaking riders. But I didn’t feel out of place. I learned French and Flemish and just immersed myself in it. People took me to their hearts as one of their own.”

Hoban describes his Ghent-Wevelgem win in 1974 as being as special as his Tour de France stage wins. “In that race I beat everyone, all of the guys from that great generation of Belgian cyclists: Eddy Merckx was second, Roger de Vlaeminck was third. [Walter] Godefroot, Freddy Maertens were both there. I beat them all, I beat the hierarchy of Belgium. It was good.”

He also remembers losing out against Merckx, probably the greatest cyclist of all time, when they hit the “muur” together in the 1969 Ronde. Muur means “wall” in Dutch, and the Muur van Geraardsbergen, with its half-kilometre cobbled section, scaling upwards at a gradient of up to 20% to the iconic Chapel of Our Lady at its summit, often proves the decisive battleground at the head of the race. The latter half of the Ronde features more than a dozen similar hellingen, but because the Muur comes after 250km of racing – only 17km from the finish in Ninove – those not reaching the chapel with the leaders have no chance of contesting the win.

My train into Geraardsbergen – one of the oldest “cities” in Europe, but now a modestly-sized municipality – is not busy. Few, it seems, travel from metropolitan, cosmopolitan Brussels to watch this race. But as I reach the main street leading up to the town square, I realise the party is already in full swing. It is a bright, sunny day, warm for April, and old and young mingle together in the square’s packed bars and restaurants.

The race passes through the square and it is just before it that the Muur begins in earnest, albeit the cobbled section isn’t for another half kilometre. Past the square the road swings upwards and left, and several thousand fans are packed in along the wide boulevard.

The riders are still more than 40 minutes away, but already a decisive break has formed. The biggest name in Belgian cycling, and two-time winner of the race, Tom Boonen, has missed it, but last year’s winner, the Flandrian Stijn Devolder, is present. There are black and yellow Lion of Flanders flags everywhere.

I head further on up the hill. At the end of Oudebergstraate a cobbled lane narrows and steepens, making its way up through a wooded section and round a hairpin bend which kicks up again to the Chapel at the top. This is the heart of the Muur, where the toughest riders create the fractional gaps that can quickly lengthen into decisive ten or 20 second leads. All the way up, on both sides of the road, people are tucked into the embankment, holding on to the branches of trees to stop themselves falling on to the road. Some have been there for hours, waiting like snipers for a Boonen, Devolder or Lief Hoste to pass by inches in front of them. Waiting, I discover, to unleash their noise on the Ronde.

Among the crowd the orange of visiting Dutch fans is visible; a few English voices can be heard; and a fan club of Italians is vocalising its support for the young up-and-coming Italian rider Marco Bandiera. But though the appeal of the race is international, its identity is distinctly Flandrian: the majority of the spectators are behind the local riders and chants of “Sti -jn – Devolder” ring out.

“When you’re a kid and you take up cycling you dream of making it to the Muur van Geraardsbergen in first place,” is how Boonen, a native Flandrian, explains the passion and frenzy. “Belgians grow up with cycling in their hearts. It’s ingrained in our culture like football in Italy or skiing in Austria. [The Ronde] has always been part of my life, ever since I was a kid and would watch the race on television. It’s my country’s race and it’s where I had my first great victory in a Classic [in 2005]. It was an unforgettable moment. When I crossed the finish line in front of thousands of supporters screaming my name it was like living a dream.”

As I squeeze into a spot just below the chapel, the scene is a flurry of nervous activity. Some have radios pressed to their ears and I catch the names Devolder, Boonen, Gilbert and Chavanel at various intervals. A man, fuelled by strong beer and sensing a captive audience, decides to break the tension by performing a dance with his trousers at his ankles, much to the delight of his peers.

And then the television helicopter is sighted overhead. A new expectation fills the air: the race is near, the distant roar of crowds further down the road can be heard, and as the volume increases men, women, children, even dogs strain their eyes on the road. People know Devolder and the Frenchman Chavanel are up there, and they know that Boonen hasn’t made it. A flash of colour is sighted through a chicane in the road, and the crowd slowly recognises it is one rider on his own. It is Devolder.

An ecstasy fills the air. Men roar and women shriek as he rounds the bend at the top of the Muur in a flash, sweat glistening over his muscles in the sunlight, a grimace of pain etched on his face. And his effort is not in vain: he crests the summit with a gap of some ten seconds on his pursuers and by the time he reaches Ninove it is almost a minute.

I eventually make my way back to the square, where a full-scale celebration is underway. Assuming it to be a Flandrian beer, I order an Orval, and am chided for it by a local man, who explains to me that it is, in fact, from the French-speaking Walloonian south. And maybe he is right to chide: maybe the passion and parochiality of Vlaamse Wielerweek is what gives it its distinctiveness, its enduring appeal in a world in which sport is becoming ever-more globalised and commercialised. “It’s poetry and war at the same time,” Boonen tells me. “This sport is like religion to us.”


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Australian Open diary

These entries appeared in The Herald

Monday 17/01/11

JOURNEY time to Melbourne (owing to an almighty cock-up at Heathrow): almost two days. Luggage: lost. Weather on arrival: frankly Scottish. Poise regained with the help of a few drinks your diarist faced up to the facts – even if offered a late wild card for this year’s Australian Open a distinct lack of freshness would put accepting it out of the question.

MELBOURNE’S Herald Sun newspaper yesterday demanded of a cross-section of local people to know who is the hottest female tennis star. No doubt everyone has their own thoughts on this important matter, but certainly tennis fans will be pleased to learn that the press corps takes the subject seriously on their behalf. At Maria Sharapova’s press conference here the other day, a hairy-looking Kiwi fellow piped up with the question: “Do you and Anna Kournikova have a hot Russians club where you get together?” Her response: “You’re the guy from New Zealand, huh? Oh God, you’re stalking me.”

ANDY Murray has to contend with his own stalking horses. One hack was very interested on Saturday to know whether Murray had enjoyed watching the Ashes, whether he would be inspired by England’s plucky example on Australian soil, whether he would be popping over the road to the MCG to watch the lads play in the One Day International. And so on and so forth. To all of which he replied that for most of the duration of the Ashes series he was in Miami, where (I’m paraphrasing) it is widely known that there is no such thing as cricket. Not the platitudes the English scribblers were looking for, I suspect.

THE police have announced they won’t be standing for any nonsense from fans bent on causing trouble at Melbourne Park this year. The last three Australian Opens have seen flares thrown, drunkenness and even mass brawls. Now Serb, Croat and Greek visitors are to be put under close surveillance. Which seems a bit rich, and somewhat akin to blaming Chelsea fans any time there’s trouble in the football grounds of Europe. After all, isn’t most of Australian sport predicated on violence anyway?

ON the subject of trouble and its making, I note that one Oksana Kalashnikova of Russia did not make it through qualifying.

Tuesday 18/01/11

IT is hard not to like Elena Baltacha. A set down to Jamie Hampton of the US and toiling slightly in the second yesterday she responded to a call in her favour – after several agin her – with a sarcastic “thank you” to the umpire. After which point she proceeded to break Hampton’s serve and close out the set, before rattling her way through the third to win. The Americans, as the saying goes, were not liking it up ’em.

VENUS Williams has taken to wearing “flesh-toned” underwear on-court. Maria Sharapova likes to talk about going to the shops. There is a large hairy man here at Melbourne Park, introduced to readers of this diary yesterday, who likes to make the stars of the WTA feel a bit uncomfortable in press conferences. Yes, indeed, the case of the Kiwi stalker continues. Attired somewhat in the manner of Jack Black in School of Rock, he was on hand after Sharapova’s match yesterday to ask whether she had had problems with stalkers before. “Not until you, no,” replied the Russian. “I don’t know why you’re here today. That shouldn’t have happened.”

THE poor fellow should perhaps seek lessons from Novak Djokovic. During the benefit match for victims of the Queensland floods on Sunday the Serbian “Djoker” at one stage hopped it into the photographers’ pit, grabbed himself a camera and set about snapping away at Caroline Wozniacki. “This is going to be in the English Sun,” he informed her, adding “I can see a lot more than you think.” Good grief.

THE toilets in the bowels of the Rod Laver Arena are equipped with boxes, apparently for the safe disposal of “used syringes”. I have yet to ascertain whether they are intended for tennis players or journalists.

IT is always good to see children put to good use. At the slightest hint of a drizzle at Melbourne Park, the ball boys and girls are sent out on court to dry off the surface. With towels. Generally once the task is completed there is cheering from the audience – but one is never sure whether it is the industry of the kiddies or the genius of Australian organisation that is being applauded.

Wednesday 19/01/11

NATURE abhors a vacuum. Just when you thought maybe a Grand Slam without Serena Williams might also be short on bragadaccio, epic self-regard and David Brent-style monologues, her sister returns from injury to try out for the part of sorority princess all on her own. Yesterday we heard rather a lot from Venus about the zipper on her dress, her book (the title of which, Come To Win: Business Leaders, Artists, Doctors and Other Visionaries on How Sports Can Help You Top Your Profession is probably long enough for me to have just single-handedly lost this sports section most of its readers for good), and how she wants to get into interior design and business development next. You just wonder what Serena will have up her sleeve when she returns from her sore foot. A cure for cancer?

NOVAK Djokovic claims Serb and Croat players are the very best of friends off court. The same cannot be said of Balkan ex-pats here in Melbourne. Past years have seen mass brawls between fans of Serb and Croat allegiance, with Aussie police weighing in with batons to separate them. Think West Ham v Millwall on centre court at Wimbledon and you’re getting close. When Djokovic faces Croatia’s Ivan Dodig today, your intrepid diarist may well decide he has a pressing engagement on one of the outside courts.

PEOPLE wishing to become Australian citizens are graded according to occupation. There hasn’t been an Australian winner in the women’s event at this Open for 33 years, so you’d imagine tennis players might be ranked up there alongside important vocations like medic, sandwich-maker and so on. Not so. Russian-born Arina Rodionova, sister of naturalised Australian Anastasia Rodionova and much-admired by tennis beaks here, has been denied citizenship. In fact, a letter from the immigration authorities informed her she was “not the same calibre as [her] sister.” Ouch.

JAMIE Murray, who recently married, has always been popular with the ladies, but it seems he also has his eye in for birds of the feathered variety. Apparently some poor winged blighter got itself in the way of a wayward Murray shot during practice the other day and paid the ultimate price. It is with no small degree of dramatic irony that the incident has been reported on Twitter.

Thursday 20/01/11

“OHHH la la. Mon dieu! Woweee, what kind of shot this is?! Heeheehee, oh my god!!!” One is never entirely sure when listening to the commentary of Henri Leconte for Channel 7, the Australian sports channel, whether the Frenchman has been shot, stuck in the posterior with a hot poker or merely shown a racy photo of Carla Bruni.

IT may not have escaped your notice that many women tennis players are similarly opprobrious to the ear. Now an Australian scientist has explained that they are justified in braying like jackals every time they hit the ball as this increases the force of their shot, or something. What’s more he is offering to give them opera training to make their shrieking and grunting even louder. In separate news, the cast of the hit musical Hairspray are to perform at next Saturday’s women’s final. Before protesting about all this bedlam, however, it is worth putting things in perspective: at least we will be spared Cliff Richards getting up for a warble.

ANDY RODDICK, ever a forthright sort of chap, yesterday summed up Tuesday night’s five-set slogging match between Lleyton Hewitt and David Nalbandian more eloquently than any of the world’s sports hacks could attain to in all their surging torrents of heady prose. His verdict: “I fell asleep during the third set.”

ASKED about what has changed on the men’s tour in recent years with the swing towards European dominance and simultaneous slump in American fortunes, Roddick also offered this nugget: “If there are more Italians and French people, they will be speaking more Italian and French.” Needless to say there is truth in this, but if one looks at the world rankings it is clear that while there are four Americans in the top 50, there is only one Italian: world No.48 Potito Starace. Go figure, as they never tire of saying in the US.

Friday 21/01/11

PEOPLE seem to have grown tired of the Maria Sharapova “stalker” saga. Not least the stalker himself, James McOnie, the TV reporter from New Zealand whose show The Crowd Goes Wild is, sources tell me, wacky, and who, you may recall from previous diary entries has been asking Miss Sharapova in press conferences about what she and Anna Kournikova get up to in their spare time, declaring his love for her, and so on. Conspiracy theorists among you may suspect FSB involvement, but the official word is that McOnie has gone home.

BILLY CONNOLLY, who is fond of toilet humour, was at Melbourne Park to watch the tennis yesterday. No doubt he is hardly able to control his mirth when players have to take toilet breaks, but for some they are no laughing matter. Britian’s Anne Keovathong was ahead by a set the other day when her opponent Andrea Petkovic took herself off for a little private meditation in the “dunnies”, as Australians term their lavatories. The Serbian then came back out and won 2-6 7-5 6-0. “I can’t control what my opponent does,” said Keovathong magnanimously, but surely it is not asking too much of people to go before they are due on court.

SPORTSWRITERS occasionally find themselves falling foul of the PR interests of powerful clubs or associations, not least in Scotland. Accusations of bias or inaccuracy are wont to plague journalists who go “off message”. But perhaps we should be thankful that not everyone is as litigious as Ron Gauci, CEO of Australian Rugby League club Melbourne Storm, who is currently threatening to sue a tram driver for defamation over comments he posted on a social networking website to the effect Gauci is a “puppet” for Rupert Murdoch’s News Ltd, Storm’s owner.

ROGER FEDERER claimed to enjoy being taken to five sets by Gilles Simon the other night. Of course, you’d never expect him to admit he was bricking himself at the prospect of a second-round exit, but one cannot but question his take on what is still a 2-1 head-to-head record in the Frenchman’s favour. “Well, the thing against Gilles, victory is in my racquet because I’m the aggressor,” he said. “[Against him] I’m in control if I’m going to win or lose.” Eh?

Saturday 22/01/11

THE man who ghosts Andy Murray’s column for The Australian newspaper is known to his friends as “The Cuddler”. He has also had a stinking cold all week. Should Murray succumb to the sniffles at some point at this Open, you’ll know who to blame, then.

PEOPLE with money to burn deserve it because they’re never done taking risks, or so the City of London would have you believe. But certainly there was an element of derring-do about the guy who stuck A$2.5m on Rafael Nadal to beat US qualifier Ryan Sweeting on Thurday. When Nadal fulfilled his end of the bargain, the generous punter donated his A$25,000 profit to the Queensland flood relief fund. All well and good, but some people are asking why he did not simply make the donation in the first instance. Which may be why he has A$2.5m to place on a bet and they do not. Had Rafa actually lost, though…

KIM Clijsters had a bone to pick with her on-court interviewer, the former Aussie tennis player Todd Woodbridge, after beating Spain’s Suarez Navarro the other night. The issue stemmed from a text message Woodbridge sent to the former world No.1 doubles player Rennae Stubbs during last week’s Sydney International. “It said you thought I was pregnant,” Clijsters announced, adding as Woodbridge went crimson, “You said ‘she looks grumpy and her boobs are bigger’.” Oo err missus.

AT six foot, four and a half inches, Australia’s Bernard Tomic is not what you would call a wee boy. But he is not even sure whether he has stopped growing, which, as everyone knows, can be a tiring business. In last year’s Australian Open the young tyro lost in five second round sets to Marin Cilic then complained about the match having gone on well past his bedtime. Now 18, he is through to the third round of this year’s tournament and faces Rafa Nadal in today’s evening session at Melbourne Park. But Tomic has again voiced misgivings about the assignment, revealing that he generally likes to get his head down before 10pm. One hesitates to encourage athletes to drink fizzy juice, but a bottle of Irn Bru would surely be the correct tonic in this instance.

Monday 24/01/11

FOLLOWING Jamie Murray’s Reaper-like scything down of an unsuspecting sparrow while practising his serve last week, Caroline Wozniacki announced yesterday that she had been attacked by a baby kangaroo in a Melbourne park on Saturday. Seeing the poor beast lying on the ground, the Dane approached it, she told concerned journalists, the friar of Assisi’s very spirit coursing through her veins. Whereupon it scratched her on the shin. “As I went over, it just started to be aggressive and it actually cut me,” she said. “I was going to be nice and try to help it. But I learned my lesson and I just started running away.”

WOZNIACKI’S distressing tale confirmed in me the view that human charity is all too often wasted on animals. Had she only found me lying down in a park, I told myself, her charms would not have been so cruelly resisted. But these reflections were about to prove premature: by and by the press conference was recalled, so that the world No.1 could tell us she had made the story up and felt bad for lying. She had, in fact, sustained the cut on her leg by walking into a treadmill. “I made it up because it sounded better than what actually happened,” she said. “I was like, okay, we’re in Australia, so a kangaroo scratched me.” If there is a lesson in all of this, I don’t know what it is. The New York Times has decided Wozniacki is “wacky”. Which makes the Williams sisters what, exactly?

THERE were frayed tempers in evidence on court here on Saturday, when the Indian doubles duo Mahesh Bupathi and Leander Paes put their hispanophone opponents, Feliciano Lopez of Spain and Argentina’s Juan Monaco to the sword. At the end, all four had to be separated at the net, with Paes claiming he had had a serve aimed at his head during the match. Seemingly Lopez in particular was annoyed at Paes’ repeated use of the Spanish phrase “vamos”, meaning “come on”. The more likely explanation is that Spaniards nowadays find it a strange and unnatural thing to lose.

ONE sometimes wonders what umpires think about, up there all on their own, during the quieter moments. Probably their tea, I think.

Tuesday 25/01/11

THERE was an eeyorish column in yesterday’s Melbourne Age, mainly about how life used to be better, but the sign-off, I think, captured the essence of everything that is civilising about tennis. “Give me a warm, still day, a few friends, no temper tantrums, no grunting, and a well-matched game of doubles,” demanded David Campbell. “That’s my idea of sporting heaven.”

WHO can stop Rafael Nadal? Maybe, just maybe, the International Tennis Federation. In a fascinating article in the magazine The Atlantic this month, Joshua S Speckman reports that scientists have finally been able to prove that the copolyester strings used by today’s players generate 20 per cent more spin that nylon string and 11 per cent more than natural gut. These differences explain how a muscular, top-spinning player like Nadal can generate twice as much spin as Andre Agassi did. Intriguingly, the only time the ITF has ever blocked a technological innovation in the sport was when, in 1978, it banned so-called “spaghetti strings”, which had produced a factor-of-two increase in spin. It is now believed copoly strings, in the hands of today’s players, can generate at least as much spin as spaghetti racquets.

THE Swiss are hard work sometimes. Where the Dane Caroline Wozniacki’s entertaining press conferences have stolen the show at this year’s Australian Open, at the other end of the scale is Stanislas Wawrinka. After beating Gael Monfils in the third round, he was asked to consider why Europeans were dominating the main draw. “I have no idea,” he replied. “Sorry. I have no idea why.” There were no follow-up questions.

ONE naturally sympathises with those who queued for up to three hours to spend $A7 per can of Heineken lager here at the weekend. In Scotland such duress would be enough to spark a riot, of course, but stiff penalties pertain to any and all instances of unruly or indeed drunken behaviour at this Grand Slam. How times have changed. Friends tell me that the old Melbourne Cricket Ground, just over the road from the tennis, used to sanction a Bring Your Own drink policy. At some point in the late 1980s, however, a new and Draconian ruling came into force – patrons were thenceforth restricted to a solitary crate of beer each.

Wednesday 26/01/11

ONE wishes Alexandr Dolgopolov well, wherever his career takes him from here. Like Boo Weekley in golf, the world No.49, who has taken this Australian Open by storm, admits he doesn’t really follow tennis when he’s not playing. “I don’t like to watch sports, I don’t even watch TV when I’m off the court,” he revealed the other day. “I just like to relax with my friends, drive my car [a Subaru, apparently].”

DOLGOPOLOV is so relaxed, indeed, that one day last week he was setting busily about a burger, chips and a can of Coke in the players’ canteen, when, as I understand it, he was beckoned over the Tannoy to report to Show Court Three for his match. He turned to his coach, Jack Reader, but seemingly the Australian hadn’t bothered to check the schedules either.

MAYBE sports nutrition is a load of old piffle after all. Usain Bolt lives on chicken nuggets, Wayne Rooney clearly exists on pies, now there is Dolgopolov and his hamburger lunch. And here, over the top, comes Andy Murray, toppling in a trice the whole corrupt edifice of hydration theory and a thousand pseudo-scientific dissertations with the war yodel: “I don’t drink much water any more. It’s not good for you.” It may be relevant to note that Murray is no longer sponsored by Highland Spring.

THERE are lots of characters on the ATP and WTA tours, sure there are. The Italian, Flavia Pennetta, for instance, who is like a swarthier Gordon Strachan. After losing to Petra Kvitova in the fourth round, she was addressed as follows: “You won the first set, what happened after that?” Pennetta: “She won the second and the third.”

YOU may or may not be aware that Show Court One at Melbourne Park is called Margaret Court Arena, after the former Australian world No.1, who in 1970 won all four grand slams in the same calendar year. So why not call it Margaret Court Court? When I put this probing line of inquiry to no less a personage than a Tennis Australia media officer, she looked at me as if I had just said something derogatory about Kylie Minogue’s bottom.

Thursday 27/01/11

YOU can travel just about anywhere in North America and find people who will tell you they are Scottish. There are, of course, many ties to the old sod in Australia as well, but generally Australians are busy enough feeling pleased about being Australian to bother much about that kind of thing. And so there is a degree of ambivalence towards Andy Murray here. One woman told me she thought he had a bit of an “attitude” and preferred “classier” players. But he also has his backers, some of them now even prepared to empty their wallets on him becoming champion. “All he needs to do is throw the ball up and think of England,” another local said. Hmm, well, whatever it takes.

AND then there was Rafael Nadal, genius, whom everyone loved, especially the women. Oh how they cooed at him when he spoke in his broken English or removed his shirt, happy to overlook his constant bottom-scratching. Which, in fact, calls to mind a story about James Joyce. When asked by a female admirer if she could shake the hand that wrote Ulysees, the old devil declined the request, explaining that it had done other things as well.

WHY is Nadal’s mother never seen at tournaments? Perhaps she is too embarrassing. “Ugly parent syndrome” as the Australians are calling it, has reared its head in Melbourne this year, with the WTA banning the father of French player Aravane Rezai from all future events pending an investigation into an alleged “incident” last week. Monsieur Rezai has previous form: in 2006 he was investigated after headbutting the father of another player and accidentally smacking his own daughter in the face with a racquet at Roland Garros.

ANOTHER man in the bad chair in Melbourne is the former Rangers defender Kevin Muscat. The blazers at the A-League are currently mulling over an appropriate sanction for the Melbourne Victory player in the wake of his season-ending tackle on Adrian Zahra of Melbourne Heart at the weekend. Even the Aussies are branding it thuggish, and they play something called Aussie Rules. At 37, his own playing career seems to be winding down in any case. Perhaps M. Rezai requires a henchman.

Friday 28/01/11

SO it’s college jocks (the Bryan brothers) v Indians (Leander Paes and Mahesh Bupathi) in the final of the men’s doubles. There is something nostalgic about Mike and Bob Bryan, their chest-bumping and their exceptional teeth and their 18 Grand Slam titles (together and in mixed doubles) recalling an era of American dominance and John McEnroe and Ronald Reagan. But they’re 32 now, the Bryans, so what will they do when the day comes to retire from tennis? Bob has a plan: he will send the wife out to work. “I’ll kick her in the butt and be a house husband,” he said yesterday.

IT is for their sensibility and great sense of humour that Americans are loved throughout the world. But one wonders if they mightn’t try a bit harder with the Australians, who are, after all, a proud bunch. What with it being Australia Day on Wednesday, ESPN commentator Brad Gilbert was made to try Vegemite on his sandwich. His reaction? “That’s god awful. There’s nothing good about that. That is horrific. I got to get some water – that is rough.”

WHO does Shane Warne think he is? Well, okay, he did take a total of 708 test wickets in a long cricketing career, but after his chat show was recently voted Australia’s worst TV programme (and that is an achievement in itself), the spin-bowling beefcake, whose giant face is currently pictured biting into a Big Mac on advertising hoardings all over the country, is now in a monumental huff with the Herald Sun newspaper, for whom he writes a column. On Tuesday the rag reported that he had turned up to the tennis on Monday night demanding VIP treatment for 14 of his poker buddies. Which vicious lies sent Warnie into a Tweeting fury. “Followers if you agree with me that the herald sun has lost reporting – fact and what the public wants to read then write or call them,” he posted yesterday. No doubt the paper’s mailbags are bulging with petitions of support as I write.

I HAVE a theory about why Sam Stosur was so rubbish at the Australian Open and it as follows: on one of her many TV commercials we learn that she dines on Healthy Choice frozen meals. Can they really be enough to sustain a top-level athlete?

Saturday 29/01/11

BEST answer to a stupid question of the fortnight comes from women’s finalist Li Na. Journalist: “Is it true you’re not a typical Chinese in the sense that you’re more extrovert? You like to have fun, make jokes, you’re not shy. I mean, many Chinese don’t talk that much.” Li Na: “Oh, yeah, maybe they couldn’t speak English so they didn’t know how to talk. Yeah, if you guys can’t speak Chinese, of course they can’t make a lot of jokes.”

ANDY Murray is known to punish himself for underperforming by wearing pink tops in training. However, that is as nothing to the depredations suffered by a young David Ferrer, his opponent in Melbourne last night. Javier Piles, who has coached Ferrer man and boy, revealed through the week how he took a firm line on indiscipline when his charge was a teenager. “When he didn’t want to work I would lock him up in a dark room of two-by-two metres,” Piles claims. “It was the room where we would store the tennis balls. I would tell him that his working schedule was from nine to 12 and that if he didn’t want to work he would remain there, punished. I would give him a piece of bread and a bottle of water through the bars of a small window.” I seem to think the NSPCC would have something to say about this kind of thing if it happened on our shores. Maybe we’ve gone soft.

WHAT do you say to a tennis player when you’ve run out of other questions? One American journalist here is obsessed with finding out how they may or may not have invested their prize money. I’m not sure if this is how Americans normally decide what to do with their money, but if so it might help to explain how their economy went so spectacularly loony.

THE Swiss, on the other hand, may be a tad dull, but they are not daft. Roger Federer admitted to Jim Courier the other night that he likes the Australian Open towels so much he took four of them away with him after each of his matches. In the Open shop they cost $A55 each. Four towels x five matches x $A55 = $A1,100. A tidy sum on top of the $A420,000 he got for reaching the semi-finals.

Monday 31/01/11

“A WHOLE new career could open up if he wins”, wrote Boris Becker before Andy Murray lost yesterday’s Aussie Open final. But what can he have meant? After he won the US Open in 2008, Novak Djokovic was apparently approached by Serbian television to play the part of King Aleksandar Karadjordjevic, Yugoslavia’s first monarch, in a A$4m ten-part series. Djokovic declined, but one wonders which parts might be suitable for Murray. I can’t see him doing stirring oratory, so William Wallace might be out of the question, but he might make for a decent Hamlet. Being Danish, his new best friend, Caroline Wozniacki, could play the love interest and his mother, well she could be what’s ‘er name, his mother.

AS for Becker himself, he has several interests, including a deal with Vodafone that requires him to answer selected text messages from fans. Seemingly he has promoted the service at various events throughout Europe, including one in Airdrie. But beaten finalist or not surely Murray cannot be expected to go there.

AS noted previously in these dispatches, Billy Connolly – a comedian noted for talking a lot about “jobby” – was a fixture in the crowd at this year’s Australian Open. Another face around the place was that of Mark Philippousis, who is fondly known to his fans as the “Poo”. The former Australian world No.8 tennis player (never, sadly, No.2) was often described, without irony, as “a dangerous floater”. It would be nice to think the two men got together, perhaps with a view to writing a sitcom. No doubt BBC Scotland would find the money to commission it.

DO British sports administrators lie awake at night thinking of new ways to thwart Australian sportsmen and women? Judging from the rhetoric in the Australian press, it may be time they were less complacent. Apparently a “war chest” of A$2.5m has been assembled to help Australian athletes take medals from their British “enemies” in next year’s Olympic Games. “Every medal we take from them is worth two, because we gain one and they lose one,” reasons Craig Phillips of the Australian Olympic Committee secretary-general. Incoming fire! How are those defences coming along, chaps?


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An interview with Alan Cumming

This article appeared in the magazine Metropolitan

It’s earlyish in the day, but Alan Cumming seems to be in one of his more sombre moods. The Scottish actor, now a joint American and British citizen, is refusing to entertain tittle tattle, certainly. Even his own. “That’s just trashy gossip stuff”, he groans when I bring up his purported desire to see Barack Obama naked.

Regarding the man whose election campaign he endorsed (he was vetted by Team Obama and would have been an “official” supporter but for his citizenship not being approved in time), Cumming said last year: “Great leaders, charismatic leaders […] usually have big penises.” But this morning he’s less declamatory about the US president. “I’m still really, really amazed that he’s president and also really glad,” he says, “but I wish he would act on some of his policies sooner.”

The source of his anguish is gay rights, and in particular the admission of openly gay men and women to the US military, a policy he believes the Obama administration has dragged its heels over: “They’ve made gay people feel like the train is coming, but they’ve not delivered.”

Bisexual himself, though now espoused to his partner of some five years, the graphic artist Grant Shaffer, Cumming is not entirely what you might expect if you had seen him in, say, the National Theatre of Scotland’s production of the Bacchae, as Dionsyus, or in Cabaret, as the Emcee, on Broadway, or indeed in his own cabaret show I Bought a Blue Car Today. Or if you consider that he plays a gender-bending doorman in the movie Burlesque, out this month, and a transvestite in swinging 1960s Soho in The Runaway, a six-part drama that will screen on Sky next year; or that he once launched a fragrance called Scent of Cumming. Sure, he’s camp and occasionally vampy, and he may even indulge in scabrous talk about the presidential appendage, but he’s also strikingly normal, in the down-to-earth sense, considered and pensive; even, at 45, a little shy and boyish at times.

There is, in short, something endearingly straightforward about Cumming and the way he ponders his own experiences and complexities. He is who he is: talented, an actor, a celebrity, Scottish (he retains a pronounced Highland intonation), driven to work, stage or screen, sometimes in “straight” roles, sometimes in roles which are rather less so.

He has, moreover, been doing that work for more than 20 years. After training at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama, performing as a stand-up comedian and gaining exposure in the Scottish TV soap Take the High Road, he went on to work with the Royal Shakespeare Company and the Royal National Theatre. Before moving into film he was an award-winning Hamlet. On the big screen he has alternated between roles in blockbusters (Goldeneye, X-Men 2, the Spy Kids trilogy) and smaller, independent movies, including Titus (opposite Anthony Hopkins and Jessica Lange), Sweet Land (for which he won an Independent Spirit award as a producer), and last year’s Boogie Woogie and Dare. He has also found the time to co-host his own talk show, with his dogs, moonlight on Broadway, model Lee Jeans and write a Sunday Times best-selling novel, Tommy’s Tale, about the life of a bisexual Londoner having an early mid-life crisis.

And all of that merely scratches the surface of a vast output. Of late, he has been a regular cast member in the CBS legal drama The Good Wife, which has screened on Channel Four in the UK. It’s a fairly straight role – he plays Eli Gold, a smooth, well-tailored political advisor brought in to help a former State’s Attorney relaunch his political career following a corruption scandal – but there is a certain waggishness about the character that suggests there may be more to him than meets the eye. “You get to learn a bit more about him as the current season progresses – a bit about his personal life, his past life, chinks in his armour, that kind of thing,” says Cumming.

Intrigue of a more personal nature gripped him in the summer, however, when he agreed to look into his own family history for BBC One’s Who Do You Think You Are? series. His grandfather, who won a medal for bravery in the British Army’s retreat from France in 1940, and was wounded in battle in Burma later in the war, was an enigma even to his own daughter, Cumming’s mother Mary, who was a child when he died, in 1951, in colonial Malaya. As Cumming was to discover, the circumstances of Tommy Darling’s death were considered so shocking that they were even kept from his wife back home in Scotland: he had shot himself in the head during a game of Russian Roulette.

“Clearly he had been affected mentally by his experiences in the war and they stayed with him and he couldn’t just go back to normal life, which is half the reason he ended up in Malaya,” says Cumming. “The thing I found most galling was that the army just didn’t take combat stress at all seriously. And I think it’s shocking that, even today, in certain circumstances where there is a death that doesn’t involve combat, families aren’t paid compensation.

“It was a pretty devastating thing to discover and my mother found it quite hard to deal with. I think for anyone to find out such a shocking thing about a parent would be hard, but also finding that out and knowing that millions of other people are going to know too, because it’s on television, is a lot to deal with.”

That comes with the territory for her son, of course, but Cumming proclaims an ambivalence towards fame and celebrity that suggests he finds it all a little strange. “There’s a level of self-consciousness that you have to live with,” he says. “You don’t want to draw attention to yourself when you take the dog out for a walk, but it’s there. I’ve learnt that kindness is always the way to respond, but I don’t particularly want to have my photo taken on the street at two in the morning on someone’s camera phone.” He pauses. “At the same time I don’t want to live in a box away from the rest of humanity.”

The tabloids in Britain – Cumming lived in London for many years – tend to be much more invasive than their American equivalents, he says, although Americans obsess more, on the whole, about celebrity. “But it’s getting more like that in Britain as well – the whole thing of people who’ll do anything to be on television seems to be getting more prevalent.”

“I like it when people don’t know who I am,” he adds. “It’s an academic question: if I want to keep doing my job, what do I do? I could go away and hide in the woods, but…”

Doth he protest too much? Maybe, but then on the evidence of his work he is not overly-consumed, as an actor, by his own ratings. “I do feel that I just do what I like,” he says. “Even the things that pay the bills are quite idiosyncratic. I feel I’m on a nice plateau: I get to do interesting work, I get a certain level of access to things because of what I’ve done. I’m content to carry on this way, I’m not on an upward curve of domination.”

If you were being unkind, you might describe the cabaret show he brought to Edinburgh and London in the summer as an ego trip, but he insists it was in fact his most daunting project to date. “I wanted to run away the first time I did it,” he says. “It was terrifying. I’d never stood up before and said ‘this is me, I’m Alan and I’m going to sing a song’. Ask any actor and they would be horrified at the notion.”

The Runaway appealed to him, he says, because of its unconventionality: it’s gangland stuff, but his own character, the transvestite club owner Desree, “is the strongest, the most rational and the kindest person in it.” He has also voiced characters in a spate of animated films this year, including that of “a tranny Hitler” in Jackboots on Whitehall, and appears as Sebastian, alongside the “fantastic” Helen Mirren and a star-studded ensemble cast in a new film version, out this month, of the Tempest. “It’s nice to do Shakespeare for the screen, saying those lines for the camera instead of having to be all bombastic in a theatre.”

Earlier this year the RSC had young actors enact a bizarre six-week-long dramatisation of Romeo and Juliet via Twitter. It would not, alas, have been Cumming’s cup of tea. “I’m not a Tweeter,” he says. “I really don’t think it’s a good thing that people should be sitting commenting on the present at the expense of experiencing the present.” For his own edification he hopes to find the time to write longer dispatches. “I’d like to write a book about things that have happened to me and where I’m from and my life’s course. Not ‘I was born and brought up, blah blah blah’, more short stories about experiences I’ve had.” For this restless, boyish man, the experience, it seems, is all.


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Wojtek the soldier bear

This article appeared in The Times

THE common wisdom about bears is that they are best left alone, unless they are Gentle Ben or of the stuffed variety. That policy was disregarded, to propitious effect, however, in the case of a Syrian brown bear befriended by Polish soldiers in 1942, and about whose remarkable life there is currently an exhibition running at London’s Sikorski Polish Institute.

Wojtek – the handle he was given by the Polish Second Corps, an army formed by Poles newly released from Soviet internment camps in Siberia and Kazakhstan after Hitler declared war on Stalin – was an orphaned cub when he was acquired from a boy in Hamadan, Iran, in exchange for a few tins of meat.

His only comrades being human, he grew to be the most human of bears: he was adopted by Artillery Supply Command as the Poles joined British forces fighting Rommel in the desert, lived with the other men in their tents and was taught to salute when greeted. By 1944 he had an official rank and number, and in Italy, at Monte Cassino, he carried live shells and artillery from truck to gun emplacement unfazed by the explosions going on around his fuzzy ears. He was even given rations – honey, cigarettes and beer. Of the latter, he drank two bottles daily, while his party trick involved swallowing lit cigarettes and exhaling the smoke.

The Sikorski exhibition has been curated by Krystyna Ivell. Her father, an officer, was shot by the Soviets at Katyn in 1939. Her mother would spend the latter part of the war working for the Polish government-in-exile’s Secret Bureau, alongside Menachem Begin, but when she and her daughter were released from a Siberian camp in 1941, they crossed the Caspian Sea and found themselves well within the compass of the Wojtek legend.

“I never met him but I followed him as a child,” says Ivell, who has told Wojtek’s story with archive film footage, stills and cuttings. “The exhibition is for my own satisfaction. For Poles under Communism, they weren’t allowed to know this history, so it’s an accessible route through Wojtek to a bit of history – the film we have made has children glued to it.”

She adds: “Wojtek is not a cuddly toy or a cartoon character. He was essential to the soldiers; he kept their sanity in a way. They gave him their love and attention and he returned it in spades.”

By the end of the war, Wojtek and his company were living on a farm in Berwickshire. When the soldiers were demobbed in 1947, he was taken in by Edinburgh Zoo, where he died in 1963. When his old mates visited they would frequently climb over the fence and hug him, much to the consternation of the zookeepers. Now, Edinburgh City Council plans to erect a statue of him. Whether he’ll be smoking remains to be seen.

This article appeared in The Times


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A king for our times

This article appeared in The Herald

There is always pressure to say something rude about Prince Charles. Just as mocking George Bush still guarantees the most witless of comics a captive audience, it is the surest way for journalists to get a readership on their side. But aside from the fact that our future monarch is a very opinionated man and therefore capable of antagonising the majority of his merciful subjects on some matter or other, it must be allowed that he does possess that distinctly royal ability to lead by example.

It would seem that the era of obscenely cheap clothing is currently threatened. Sure, there may yet be vast armies of the malnourished lining up to work an 80-hour week for the kind of money you or I might grudgingly give a work-mate for running the marathon, all so that people in wealthier countries can go to a discount store and buy a pair of jeans for three quid. However, increases in VAT and shipping costs, coupled with a weaker pound, mean that clothing and footwear prices have started rising for the first time in 18 years. And with “fair trade” clothes gaining in popularity, the worm may be turning.

This is where old Chas comes in. Not only has he taken a moment from muttering on about Gaia to tell readers of American Vogue that they should go back to wearing wool and eschew the kind of throwaway garments which invariably end up in landfill sites, he has even donated some of his own corduroy trousers to Oxfam.

Happy the man who alights on said trousers. Charles was named World’s Best Dressed Man by Esquire magazine earlier this year, and not without good reason. Here is a man who cares not a jot for fads – his double-breasted suits, his dandyish waistcoats, his fogeyish Oxford lace-ups, all are “investment” pieces, which can be worn for decades on end and repaired as and when necessary. Charles’ attire has never been out of fashion, because it was never really in fashion.

Admittedly it is women who have driven this mania for more and more clothes, gripped as many of them appear to be by the mistaken belief that owning as many pairs of shoes, regardless of quality, as Carrie from Sex and the City will make them more desirable.

But one cannot expect the Prince to make this point. His mother and 50% of his future subjects are women, and he has martyred himself enough.


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The crying game

This article appeared in The Herald

There was, apparently, more crying on The X Factor this week. Quite a spectacle: Cheryl Cole, a former winner on the programme, and a young woman named Cher Lloyd – who has “got through” – keening away together like a pair of infant marmoset monkeys. In other news, there will be tax hikes due at some point.

Crying is like a form of punctuation on television nowadays. People cry if they win something, or if they don’t, or if they come last. They cry if they like the fuchsia the makeover team has done their living room up in, or if they hate it. They cry for no rhyme or reason, and to show that they are capable of it.

It is the same in sport. You may very well have seen the Spanish goalkeeper crying when his team scored during the World Cup final and satisfied yourself with the explanation that he is Latin. But the fact is our own athletes currently in Delhi for the Commonwealth Games will have put the drainage system there under considerable duress before they leave.

Tears are, in short, all the rage. It may be that the death of Princess Diana started everyone off by divorcing embarrassment from emotional incontinence, but the New Labour years were marinated in the latter, as is evident in the torrent of memoirs they spawned. Even as early as 2000, Andrew Rawnsley, in one of his many books, was telling us about a Downing Street weepathon after Peter Mandelson’s first resignation: “[Alastair] Campbell, himself blubbing, gave Mandelson a hug.”

No doubt it can be argued that tears are a sign of one’s emotional intelligence, or that the old stiff upper lip approach lacks a certain humanity. But there is a difference between real tears of sorrow and tears at some check to one’s ambitions, which are merely childish.

Churchill, it is said, frequently shed tears in public but, then, a combination of war war and strong drink is perhaps likely to have that effect. I have otherwise always held it to be an article of faith that, whatever their other failings, Conservatives do not cry at trifles. When others around her snivel and sob, therefore, I would expect Ann Widdecombe, who is currently appearing on television’s Strictly Come Dancing, to maintain her sangfroid and simply look bewildered. But we shall see. Perhaps she will agree to serve one of Ken Clarke’s community sentences if she fails.


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Pictures of Italy

This article appeared in The Herald

Of all the reasons to like Italian films from the early 1960s, good as any, I think, is that they are so very cool. Dapper-looking chaps are all-too-often framed through a lens of suspicion in Anglo-Saxon films of the post-war era, but the characters portrayed by Marcello Mastroianni and Alain Delon (okay, he’s French, but he was in Michelangelo Antonioni’s l’Eclisse in 1962) seem almost the pitch-perfect existential response to our own era of media saturation, civic disillusionment and cultural tedium: bored, detached, intellectual, they occasionally act disgracefully, but at least they know how to wear a suit.

Before you dismiss my analysis as entirely superficial, however, let me tell you about the women. Claudio Cardinale, Monica Vitti, Jeanne Moreau (French, again): all are visions of classical Italianate beauty. But their foibles are those of modern, bourgeois women. And this leads me to my point – Antonioni and Federico Fellini broke with the conservatism of both right and left in Italy by daring to depict female sexuality per se. Fellini’s La Dolce Vita was branded immoral and the Vatican tried to have it banned, while both men were hammered by leftist critics, who thought films ought only to show women being doughty.

These filmmakers deal with the lives of an affluent middle class, whose Italy, born of the post-war economic boom, is consumerist and glamour-obsessed. If capitalism is the enemy in, say, La Notte (Antonioni, 1961), the malaise is not material but spiritual. Individuals drift, unfulfilled, in and out of the action, aimless voyeurs.

Mastroianni, in La Notte, plays a writer who attends a party thrown by a tycoon and almost cheats on his wife with the host’s daughter. In 8 ½ (Fellini, 1963), he is a filmmaker with “director’s block”. Along the way there is all manner of ennui and moral ambiguity to contend with. But man’s alienation in the modern world was never so appealing.