Great Britain

Weird country this, isn't it? When you put it all together, the bits, the attachments, what's next to them and what's inside them. Was never going to be simple, was always going to be trouble. 

I had a strange and unnerving thought recently ... I don't usually share any positions with extreme racists, and, let's be clear, that's not what I'm doing now, but all these far-right people lately saying "you can't be English unless your parents were born here, English is a cultural identity" ... now, as an adult, I think that's nonsense, of course, but, it is also, here's the thing, the basis for my lifelong cultural self-identity.

I've never considered myself English. Never wanted to. Even though I'm obviously English. But neither of my parents were born here, neither of them considered themselves English, my name is McGaughey, my big red face is not English. I've always baulked at "English". Can't really pin specifically what I am and in a way don't care, but anything but straightforward "English". Don't really like "British" either ... Anglo-Scots-Irish ... Celtic ... London Irish ... Ealingish ... 

so, yeah, funny country.

I was in Wales last week. What a place that is. Somehow or other, through work and holidays, holidays on which we have a base and then do our best to see a fair bit of the surrounding area, I've seen a lot of Wales. I mean, there are lots of parts of Wales from which you can see a long way, that's rather the point.

But I could draw dots and lines of all the parts of Wales I've been to, and there would not be that many parts of the map which were entirely untouched. Wales is a small country, after all.

It's also beautiful. I reckon in Wales you're never more than 10 miles from somewhere of preposterous beauty. If I was Welsh, I am quite sure I couldn't fail to be extremely proud of Wales. Look at our small and ridiculously beautiful country.

Scotland is bigger, and although I've spent much more total time in Scotland than in Wales, I haven't covered the whole of it quite so much, but the same truth holds, I reckon. Beautiful. Of course Scots are proud of it. Its two great cities are beautiful cities, for starters. Great waters, great mountains, feats of engineering, great stone.

Ireland is complicated. You've probably heard that already. People do say Ireland is a complicated place. I haven't seen enough of Ireland, though I did go on a couple of big tours as a kid. But my guess is it's also a beautiful place. In my memory, my family anecdote and book-fed imagination, it's wildly beautiful.

Ireland is Ireland. Ireland is Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. The Republic of Ireland is itself. Northern Ireland is itself. Northern Ireland & Wales & Scotland & England. The United Kingdom. Ireland & Wales & England & Wales (& Man etc ...) - The British Isles. Or the Home Nations. Europe, containing The British Isles. The European Union, once containing the UK and the Republic of Ireland, now just the Republic of Ireland. England, Wales and Scotland. Great Britain. Or just Britain. Wales, Scotland & Ireland, the Celtic nations. Wales, Scotland & Northern Ireland, the devolved nations. Ireland and Scotland, the Gaelic McNations. Often, for legal purposes, England & Wales. Just Scotland. Just Wales. And, finally, unless I've missed any other distinct units, just England.

England is maybe not so beautiful? Percentage-wise? Not so magnificent. More of it is just ok .... if we're being fair. There are some pretty great bits, but you can do plenty of journeys through England and be surrounded by reasonable okness for quite a long time. No disrespect. When it's good it is really good.

And, you know, London's London. Can't beat London. Ugly and beautiful and full of villages and massive. But a lot of England has decided to set itself against London. Mention London in Kent and there's a not inconsiderable chance you'll hear someone say something racist within a minute (yes, this is tested and true, sorry ...)

England's also, let's be fair, the oppressor. The bully. When people hate Britain, it's England they hate, mainly.

I somewhat hate England. I've always loathed patriotism and nationalism in general (and I never really buy into the attempts to completely separate the two, they're always pretty close) but I suspect I'd loathe it less if I hadn't grown up somewhat English/somewhat non-English in England. Jesus, these English. 

I took a picture recently in this town I live of a long road where every single lamppost has a tatty flag of St George on it and every single one of them was put up by a racist and no one has taken them down. England, this fucking England.

Though, still, I support the England football and cricket teams like my life depends on it, support the British Olympians, bridle and hiss when online Americans say the slightest negative thing about this fine country. During the World Cup when even more flags go up,  we'd be going through the town seeing all the flags and going "hmm, think that one's a non-racist one, that one's a racist one" etc...

Gosh, if the independence movements gather some real momentum, imagine that. I think, by now, I believe in a united Ireland, an independent Wales, and independent Scotland, but a) it's none of my business and b) I dread it.

So, yeah, glad, I've cleared up nothing. God save the flower of our fathers etc...

Dear Lord and Father of Mankind

This is the greatest hymn, I think. I heard it on the radio recently, and it took me back to the days of stone and certainty. Big, breathtaking music like this has opened many people's unsustainable path to eternity.

Dear Lord and Father of Mankind is a sledgehammer, but it's a sledgehammer with nuance.

It has both WORDS and MUSIC. The words are taken from a longer poem called The Brewing of Soma (ooh tasty!) by the American Quaker poet John Greenleaf Whittier.

And the happy accident that is the music that these words are commonly set to is a tune called Repton by Hubert Parry. A particular part of that happy accident is that Parry's tune needed the last line of Whittier's verse to be repeated. Hell yeah!

Hubert Parry also wrote the tune to Jerusalem. Wall to wall bangers! - I've always kind of hated Jerusalem because of its association with English patriotism, and I particularly hated the merging of patriotism with faith, so for me its undoubted grandeur really unsettled me. I had fewer misgivings about the grandeur of Dear Lord and Father of Mankind, though perhaps, on some occasions, I found its heady beauty a little frightening. 

The sound of Dear Lord and Father of Mankind being sung lustily (the only possible adverb) by 100+ young men of varying ability but shared commitment is one of the sounds, and I mean this quite honestly and fondly, that will stay with me forever. 

A lot of hymns are quite bad - the tunes are mundane and so are the words. There are a decent handful which are good, but I'm not sure there are others that take you so many places so quickly as Dear Lord and Father ... that build the emotions, then slow them down, then again, then in a different way, that really make use of pitch and volume quite so undeniably.

Anyway, there's more I could say, but I just thought of this well-known meme while I was writing and it sums it up pretty perfectly, so here it is ...

Quite pleased with that ...

Shipbuilding

Is it worth it?

I listened to this song a great deal when I was young, so when I played it a few days ago, I was taken straight back to my childhood bedroom, in a way that hasn't really happened with other songs I listened to a lot at that time, because I've also listened to them plenty since, so the memories are spread around.

But, Shipbuilding, in 95-96, I listened to as much as anything but Going Underground, but have not listened to it all that much since.

Why did I listen to it so much then? Well, it started, as so many things do for me, with a list (never thought it would come to this).

The Times ran lists around 94 and 95 of the 100 Greatest Songs and Albums of All Time, and they were probably the first such lists I'd ever come across outside the Capital Radio Hall of Fame, coming at the matter from a completely different angle, with Careless Whisper nowhere to be seen. I'd heard of most of the songs on the list, without necessarily having heard them, and they were mainly, I think, hits, but I remember Shipbuilding, which I'd not heard of and was not a hit, was incongruously high.

So I bought The Best of Elvis Costello. I'm not sure what I thought of Shipbuilding initially. It's such a non-pop song. I'm sure I liked Oliver's Army more. 

Coincidentally, there was a little course at school around that time about jazz (some kind of non-curriculum thing) and we watched a film about Chet Baker, so that was an added point of interest. And, what with Our Friends in the North etc, this was when I became interested in British and American recent political history, so the stars were aligned for Shipbuilding.

I heard the Costello version before the Robert Wyatt version and I still prefer it. Suede covered it for Warchild and that was decent, but it's still Costello's I prefer.

The brief, slightly odd, history of it, is that Clive Langer wrote the music, didn't like his own lyrics, gave it to Elvis, he wrote the lyrics, they gave it to Robert Wyatt, he had a small hit with it, Elvis, a year later, put out his own version. So there is not, in the usual sense, an "original" and a "cover".

I listened to it so much and so closely. I'm not sure Costello has ever sung better. He takes such care to do justice to the lyrics. I would come to learn that there are very few protest songs with such empathy and melancholy to them. I'd listen to it and/or sing along to its unusual phrasing, its series of memorable spaced but connected bon mots -  "is it worth it" "it's just a rumour that was spread around town" "well i ask you" "diving for dear life when we should be diving for pearls". I knew every note, every bar, every breath.

And yet I stopped listening to it. I guess there were a few steps. When I moved from cassette to CDs, I bought four Costello albums - My Aim is True, Imperial Bedroom, Blood and Chocolate and Painted from Memory, and definitely switched my close attention to I Want You, primarily, which would get the same note-for-note phrase-for-phrase treatment as Shipbuilding.

But, then, I just became less of a fan of Elvis Costello. I genuinely think it may have been his version of She on 2000's Notting Hill soundtrack, which is so hideous, and exposes all the negatives in his marmite voice. It's funny, I've stuck with Bob Dylan's late career vocal (though it wouldn't be true to say it didn't take several years before I was actually truly one of those weirdos that actually came to love late-Dylan-voice), but I just found Elvis's difficult to deal with. I did not like his duet with Jenny Lewis, 'Carpetbaggers' at all. I have listened to some of his late albums, but, again, never quite with the required enthusiasm.

It's strange. He could easily have been one of my all-time favourites, he's such a brilliant and consistent songwriter, but it just hasn't worked out like that. 

I wonder if it's galling to him that several of his top songs on streaming sites are covers. I also wonder if it bothers him that his biggest hit, his most radio-friendly pop smash, never gets played anymore (for obvious bad-word related reasons).

Anyway, Shipbuilding is still a great song, a singular masterpiece, really. Costello has several truly great songs, and many many excellent albums. In a way, he may well be the closest Britain's had to Dylan, and this is his ... Hurricane? Maybe?

TV shows

Did you see the New York Times' list of the 100 Best TV Shows of the 21st Century?

https://www.reddit.com/r/blankies/comments/1wq2x65/the_new_york_times_final_list_of_the_100_best_tv/

It's quite boring, as would be expected. I mean, what else are they going to say? Lots of prestige American dramas, culminating in the fair-enough decision not to include The Sopranos because it began in 1999.

I don't watch enough TV to have a very very strong counter-opinion. My favourite TV programme of the 21st century is SPORT! Nothings beats it for drama and comedy.

I have a few times tried to make a list of "greatest tv shows" or whatever, but I'm not really invested enough in the idea of "great TV" to take myself seriously enough for that.

In this NYT list, there are a reasonable number of British shows, though the obvious ones that Americans like, and not much from anywhere else in the world.

It's almost entirely scripted drama and comedy, which is tiresome. I think America has less of a culture than Britain of vast communal watching, where things like Big Brother, Traitors, Strictly etc are truly part of the national conversation, where shows like Match of the Day and Top of the Pops used to be weekly markers across the country.

There are no kids' shows, no news broadcasts.

Anyway, what does it matter?

I'll just offer a few shows which aren't on the list and are great.

Inside Number 9 - I genuinely think Inside Number 9 is one of the greatest TV feats of all time, no messing. 50+ distinct stories, wrapped up in half an hour, at times hilarious, at times deeply moving, at times genuinely frightening. Doing all that with their own distinct but limited acting pallette. I don't think any show has produced as many episodes of TV that live in my memory as Inside Number 9.

Treme - The Wire is Number 2, which is fine. Treme, David Simon's follow-up, was a very different thing. Drifting, almost drama-free, certainly short on bad guys, it was about a city and its people. The acting is universally superb, it makes you fall in love with New Orleans (though also be pretty scared of going there), it is about music, and community, and rebirth, corruption, fight. I once looked it up and it had stunningly low viewing figures, and would certainly have not got to four series if it hasn't been written by the guy that did The Wire, but I loved it as much as any other.

Bluey - I was pretty surprised Bluey wasn't on the list. That really did show up quite how limited the outlook of the voters was.

Colin from Accounts - also a beloved Australian dog show, the third series was just so good, it should have snuck in.

Partridge - I know AP's truly most iconic work is pre-2000, but still, if Americans can't recognise the greatest TV character of all time, that's their problem.

Extras - I'm not saying Extras was a masterpiece but now people hate Gervais, there's a tendency to say the only good thing he did was The Office, but Extras, though not as influential as The Office, was flat-out funnier more often, and did have a pretty interesting perspective, of what happens when a middle-aged unlikeable guy who is in and around famous successful people without being successful himself suddenly becomes famous and successful...

It's a Sin, Pointless, I could go on ... and finally, vinylly...

Vinyl - Vinyl is, I think, the worst TV show, pound for pound, of all time. Martin Scorsese? Mick Jagger? Starring Bobby Cannavale? About the music industry in the 70s? In New York? How can it possibly go wrong? So badly badly wrong ... people thing The Newsroom was a bad show from good stock but by comparison to this, The Newsroom was a masterpiece.

And to be a bit boring, of all the prestige American shows I watched, it's Mad Men that I remember the best, that nailed the ending, that feels like a complete, multi-layered, unfathomable and beautiful masterwork ... but what do i know ...

Mercury

 Next week they'll announce the winner of the 2026 Mercury Prize.

When they announced the shortlist, a couple of months ago, I noticed that I'd already listened to nearly all the albums, which is pretty unusual.

They are:

Artists for War Child – Help(2)

Dave – The Boy Who Played the Harp

Dove Ellis – Blizzard

Florence + The Machine – Everybody Scream

Jade – That's Showbiz Baby!

Knats – A Great Day in Newcastle

Kojey Radical – Don't Look Down

Nia Archives – Emotional Junglist

Olivia Dean – The Art of Loving

Paul McCartney – The Boys of Dungeon Lane

Raye – This Music May Contain Hope

Suede – Antidepressants

I don't have a particular dog in the race - I think, honestly, the one that gave me most pleasure was the Help album, and it would be quite fun to give it to a compilation for the first time, but that's not a strong feeling.

One of the two or three I hadn't listened to before the list came out was the album by Knats, which has a real pizzazz to it, and I think is probably the most striking and singular, so, though I probably won't listen to it much, that would be quite a fun winner too.

Apart from that, the truth is, there's not much anymore that distinguishes this list from what you might see at the Brits or any other mainstream awards, which is not necessarily terrible, and might be a necessary evil to keep the prize financially viable, but most of the artists here don't need much help. Ironically, I really like the Harry Styles album, which has not made the list.

The albums by Dave and Raye were, in my view, and that of quite a few critics, big swings that missed, large, personal albums with some great bits, but just a bit too self-indulgent and ultimately a bit boring. I don't think either of them should win.

I really like Nia Archives - I like this and her last album - if I was to try to describe her sound, there is really nothing better than the album title - Emotional Junglist.

I also think Olivia Dean winning would just be a bit pointless, though that is a very good album. 

There were some good albums that didn't make the list - but, who knows, not everyone enters. 

So, anyway, we'll see. Maybe the most fun choice would be first-time nominee Paul McCartney - get John Lennon spinning in his grave, if nothing else ...

90s films

Thinking long and hard about the films of the 2000s leads as day follows night follows day into thinking about films of the 1990s. Some are calling it the decade in which I went from 11 or 21. Well of course I have thoughts about it.

The 90s in film are less complicated for me than the 2000+s. For me it's mainly Hollywood. And for Hollywood it was mainly Hollywood too.

I know it's a generalisation and one can always choose specifics, but when I think of 80s films, I think of New York - Trading Places, Wall Street, Ghostbusters, Big, Cocktail, Working Girl, Tootsie, The Secret of My Success, even the likes of Raging Bull and After Hours.

The 90s was when I learnt what California, and more, specifically LA, looked like - from Pretty Woman to Terminator 2, Short Cuts, Speed, Swingers, Heat, Boyz n the Hood, Face/Off, Usual Suspects, LA Confidential, Magnolia, Boogie Nights, The Player, The Big Lebowski.

What are 90s films like? In the most general terms. They're slick, they're thrilling. They're non-franchise. Action films, thrillers, mainstream cult films, rapidly advancing technology.

As the decade moved on, I got more and more into films and had more and more access to films. To remember that time when a film's certificate really mattered! We didn't get a video player until 1992 or 93, so that opened up the world. I'd sometimes get my sisters to get things out for me, but mostly I played it safe and got 15s. There were brilliant films on TV all the time too - a recently released film having its first TV showing was a real event. There was Moviedrome and such like. I got into De Niro from a De Niro season on, I guess, Channel 4. I remember watching British films like Hear My Song, Truly Madly Deeply, Close My Eyes, Jack and Sarah in a TV film season.

I didn't go to the cinema much in the first half of the decade - Robin Hood, Batman Forever, a few things but not loads til I had the money and time and could watch what I wanted. The first 18 I saw in the cinema was, I think, Trainspotting, a few months before my 18th.

St Andrews only had one cinema, usually with only one screen in use, but it got good films and we went all the time - will never forget the group trip to Boogie Nights when half the group thought it was going to be a fun disco-themed fiesta. In 1st year, there was a film night in my hall of residence, and I remember watching loads of decent films then too. 

Even though I wasn't watching loads of films in the first half of the decade, I was paying attention - I'd read the reviews in Time Out, often of foreign films, and I paid attention to the Oscars from around 1990 - I think the British press took a real interest in them at that point because DDL, Jeremy Irons and Hopkins won Best Actor in successive years.

Who were the most 90s stars? Michael Douglas? Bruce Willis? Julia Roberts and Sharon Stone? 

And what's the defining film? I reckon it's Pulp Fiction, which really felt like the start of things. It was a film I knew inside out before I'd even seen it.

If I was to pick 10 defining American films of the decade, I'd go with ...

Pretty Woman

Sleepless in Seattle

The Silence of the Lambs

Terminator 2

Jurassic Park

Basic Instinct

Pulp Fiction

Toy Story

Titanic

The Blair Witch Project

... something like that, though there are plenty of other options.

And five British? Maybe

Four Weddings

The Full Monty

Trainspotting

Howards End

Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. 

The Coen Brothers' decade is basically faultless - Miller's Crossing, Barton Fink, The Hudsucker Proxy, Fargo, The Big Lebowski, O Brother Where Art Thou in 2000. Many of the main acclaimed 2000s directors are just get started - Tarantino, Wes and PT Anderson, Nolan, Linklater, Fincher, Todd Haynes and Alexander Payne.

I don't know if it goes down as one of the great decades of film, but it has a lot going for it - there are many many very enjoyable films with their own character, rather than tied to an IP. Many of the most massive films don't have a sequel - that would be unthinkable now.

Going back to De Niro, who I first paid attention to in around 94 - I was led to believe throughout the 90s that he was broadly past his prime, and not making the classics he had back in the day. But, though there are more mediocre films, more films full stop, you've still got GoodFellas, Awakenings, Backdraft, Cape Fear, This Boy's Life, A Bronx Tale, Casino, Heat, Cop Land, Jackie Brown, Wag the Dog, Ronin, Analyze This, Meet the Parents in 2000. Here are several very enjoyable films and a fair few classics. Once you get past 2000, there's barely anything that wasn 't panned or ignored for over a decade. It's pretty extraordinary.

And my favourites ... The Big Lebowki, The Commitments, Grosse Pointe Blank, Short Cuts, Dazed and Confused ... maybe? Something like that ....

But I guess the main point is that "90s film" feels like an actual thing, a somewhat coherent cultural thing in the same way as 70s film but probably not 21st century film.

It is perhaps a noteworthy thing that 13 of the Top 30 in imdb's 250 Top Films of all Time are from the 90s. The most beloved decade of a certain kind of film lover. 

All the films

Making a list of my 100 favourite 21st century films made me think about all the 21st century films I'd seen, and I was able to list around 750, including feature-length documentaries. I counted anything I'd seen all or most of i.e watched to the end, even if I'd picked it up on TV a few minutes in, but didn't include those I'd started but hadn't got through.

I don't know how many more, in total, there are that I can't recall - let's guess 100ish, especially if you include all those music docs I watched late at night. Might be more, might be less.

So my number's going to be good but not staggering, not compared to a real film fiend, who's watching a couple of new films a week, if not more.

Although I tend to only try to watch films I think will be good, it was actually quite gratifying, going through my memories, how many bad or mediocre films I'd found myself watching.

I won't do a big list, but I'd say my least favourite film of the millennium is:

Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl - and that's the first one, the one that is meant to be good. But, lured in by the widespread repots that it was a good family fun and that Johnny Depp was doing a great bit, I went to see it at the cinema - at a time when I really was into mainly "quality" dialogue-driven films -  and it was just a whole different form; the dialogue was so bad, the cues were so often missed, the heart was so absent, it probably put me off good clean fun family films for a decade. Johnny Depp's bit is not good, ir's creepy and empoty, and the cast is conspicuously replete with performers who need good co-stars and sympathetic directors, and here they do not have those.

A few other terrible films: The Wedding Date, Pompeii, The Iron Lady, Russell Crowe's Robin Hood. The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug. In fact, maybe that is the worst film. Just, how dare they call it a film ...

And my least favourite acclaimed film ... probably The Revenant.

Which is a similar accolade, but different from, worst Best Picture winner, which was CODA, but I don't think it was particularly acclaimed, just a pretty random choice.

I also just watched Anora, and did not actually think it was good at all. In its way, even less realistic than Pretty Woman. And much less fun.

Predictable I know, but my favourite director of the century, and yes, indeed, this doesn't include their 20th century stuff, is The Coens, even though yes this includes Intolerable Cruelty and Ladykillers, which I'm not even sure I sat through. Hats off to Scorsese too for keeping on trying to do something different. And, you know, lots of other good directors.

Anyway, have watched a few films in the last few days, so hopefully will get my numbers up to 1000 soonish.