The Mainland

I don't have much to say on the European elections. I'm unconvinced by the 'cataclysm in British politics' line - I'll wait until next year's general election before buying that. And there's clear irony not just in people voting for an anti-Europe party to represent them in Europe but also in a turnout of 30 odd percent when one of the common complaints is that European institutions are not representative of the people.

But the elections have made me consider my own relationship with Europe.

At heart I'm a fanatical pro-European. Looking to Europe takes us out of our little England mentality; it diverts our gaze from looking across the Atlantic for our lead; and I still believe in the core values of enlightenment thinking that were Europe's great gift to the world (we'll leave to one side their unpleasant bed-fellows of empire building, terror and genocide).

And yet I find my instinctive support for the EU eroding by the day. Unlike many this is not down to any objection to the bloated bureaucracy or the lack of democratic accountability. Both open the door to corruption and I don't doubt the EU is rife with it. But no more than most national governments - read the first couple of pages of Perry Anderson's recent LRB article on Italy for the full horror story - http://www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n10/perry-anderson/the-italian-disaster.

And democratic accountability is over-rated. It's all very well saying that the great strength of parliamentary democracy is our ability to vote our representatives out if they don't deliver but that's not much use when the only viable alternatives are exactly the same as the people we've just got shot of.

No, I'm quite relaxed about a group of unelected technocrats having an overarching remit to run the continent. Or I would be if they were working from those same enlightenment principles I mentioned earlier - what Slavoj Zizek calls freedom-in-equality. But this isn't what the EU is about now. It has abandoned those founding principles in favour of becoming nothing more than a giant free trade association, a supra-national cheerleader and facilitator for neo-liberal market-led economics.

So I find myself instinctively supporting the European project against those neanderthals who would turn their back on it while feeling deeply uncomfortable about the institutions I'm defending. Of course, there's further irony in the likes of Farage and the euro-sceptic wing of the Tory Party railing against an institution that by my analysis fulfills most of their economic wet dreams but I think I've had enough irony for one day.

Egging the Pudding

In a recent feature in the Sunday Times, Mark Gatiss - co-creator and writer of Sherlock - explained what he thought was the central appeal of the series:

“We discovered, quite early on, that what people loved the most is the interaction between the two characters,” adds Gatiss. “It is a bromance. You can’t deny it."

Series 3 of the programme, which has just finished, has come in for a fair amount of criticism: too jokey, insufficient detection, insufficient mystery. I didn't mind the change of tone and suspect the complexities and subtleties in all three episodes will benefit from a second viewing. But Sherlock has a more fundamental problem and it's one that has bedevilled detective series before.

Most of the great TV detectives are cut from similar cloth. A troubled or complicated personal life/back story rubbing alongside the solving of (usually) murder mysteries. It takes a delicate touch to egg the pudding of the detective story with just enough personality to lift the programme out of the mundane whodunnit and into interesting drama.

Gatiss is right to say that the interaction between Holmes and Watson is at the heart of what makes Sherlock so successful. But their relationship is so much more interesting when seen through the prism of a tightly plotted story than when the story becomes about the relationship.

This isn't unique to Sherlock. Inspector Morse was at its finest in its early series when the drinking, the thwarted passion, the essential loneliness of Morse underpinned rather than overwhelmed the plot. The later episodes were operatic and stylish and beautifully written but they were about Morse: the mystery was employed in the service of Morse's character when it should have been the other way round.

And so with Sherlock. In placing the relationship between Holmes and Watson at the centre of the programme the writers have lost the subtelty, the nuance that came from allowing the stories to shed light on the characters. Solving mysteries is the reason these characters are on the screen. Take that element away and Sherlock becomes a formulaic buddy movie and Morse an Alan Bennett-lite study of ageing and loneliness with John Thaw in the Thora Hird role.

As so often, the Danes have it right. For all the focus on Sarah Lund and her jumpers in The Killing, each series was driven by a relentless, old fashioned, edge-of-the-seat story. Lund's character was revealed through her reaction to events; she never became the story. And when, at the end of series 3, she did become the story, they simply stopped.

I hope Sherlock doesn't stop as there's a lot more to be done with a brilliantly realised idea. I just hope that what caused Gatiss and Moffat to fall in love with these characters in the first place - the stories of Conan Doyle - return to centre stage.

The Left Alternative

John O'Farrell, writer, humourist and Labour Party parliamentary candidate - whom I like a lot - has just posted on Twitter in response to a letter in today's Guardian calling for a new party on the left of British politics.

"Everything to left of Labour is about protest, not seeking power. Protest is important & Labour needs to be pulled leftwards.....but just don’t expect Labour to be happy with ideological pure but permanent opposition. That is what the Tories pray for."

I'm finding this impossible to disagree with but at the same time deeply disheartening.

Because what O'Farrell is really saying is that you can't win power in the UK with radical, progressive policies.The best you can hope for is to be less bad than the alternatives. Vote Labour - things will be a bit better than they would be under the Tories.

And they wonder why people are disengaging from politics?

Is it really impossible for a radical party of the left to win power? That is certainly now the received wisdom and it's an assumption that weighs me down as well. It's hard not to see the UK as a broadly conservative country, suspicious of radical alternatives. If you grew up, as I did, under Thatcher it's difficult to imagine the days of genuine ideological warfare between left and right that preceded her.

Has the centre-right simply won the argument? You might think so given the lack of alternative voices in mainstream politics and the media. In all the sound and fury surrounding the credit crunch and banking crisis the argument never moved from how to reform and regulate the current system to whether there might be an alternative to the system itself. And when you see the Labour Party scrabbling to catch the coat-tails of the latest coalition propaganda - strivers not shirkers, yesterday's sordid spectacle of Chris Bryant jumping on the anti-foreign workers bandwagon - it can feel like time to raise the white flag.

So O'Farrell is right that while the terms of the debate are so narrow the Labour Party has its hands tied. But the Labour Party has it in its hands to change the terms of the debate and if they jeopardise their chances of power in the short-term then that may be a price worth paying.

Fringe groups of the left are easy to dismiss and ignore. They have no effective voice in mainstream politics or media. The Labour Party has clout. It is the second biggest party in the country. It has significant representation in Parliament. Its voice is heard on the national stage. It shouldn't be following the agenda, it should be setting the agenda.

Yes, it will be a long and hard road, the spectre of 1983 and Michael Foot's strongly socialist manifesto leading to Labour electoral humiliation will always rear its head. But this isn't 1983 and after 30 years of free-market excess surely the time is now right for a powerful, mainstream alternative voice.

The most astonishing thing about the recent crisis in the financial markets is how little popular, public discontent there has been. Yes you get the vox pops on the news where people grumble about greedy bankers but there have been almost no political consequences which is both extraordinary and depressing when the actions of a few have directly affected the living standards of the many.

Is it that nobody really cares? Or is it that they feel powerless, unrepresented, without a voice or a forum to express their discontent? I suspect it's the latter. What an opportunity for the Labour Party to step up to the plate and do its job. If they're brave enough they may just find that there's a silent constituency ready and waiting to support a real alternative.

And it's not just the future of the Left that's at stake. It's the future of a vibrant political culture. A system built on a free market, centre-right political consensus, where parties scramble to occupy the same centre ground will breed two things: career politicians for whom the retention of power is all; and a total disengagement of the public from the political process.

Street Photography

I caught the BBC documentary on Vivian Maier a few weeks ago. For those who missed it, Maier was an American amateur street photographer, born in New York but raised in France. Her work was never published, she never intended it to be seen and it has only recently been (re)discovered.

It's a fine programme, probably long gone from iplayer given the time it's taken me to commit these thoughts to the blog, equally fascinating as a study of the woman as it is for the photographic content.

Given that I work in the picture industry I genuinely have very little interest in photography as an art form. I've always felt this was an advantage in my professional life as I've often worked for companies owned/run by photographers, most of whom have needed the balance a non-photographer brings to the business.

But I do enjoy street photography. I suspect the lapsed historian in me responds to the pictures as socio-historic documents rather than works of art. It's when the style begins to usurp the content that I start to lose interest.

There's a cocktail party statistic doing the rounds these days that runs along the lines of there have been more photographs created in the last year than in the whole of human history up to that point. Or something like that. Basically, a lot of pictures are currently being taken. But to what end?

I've always been baffled by people taking pictures at major public events - sporting occasions, concerts etc. There seems to be a modern imperative to capture the occasion in an image. But all you're actually capturing is the fact that you were there. If you want a photographic record of the event, get a print from one of the professionals who was there. All you're doing in raising your camera/phone/tablet to your eye is making yourself absent from the moment you're trying to record. Live the moment, don't photograph it.

Ceefax Lives!

It doesn't of course. It was put out of its misery several months ago. But I've recently found myself drifting back into that world where sport - it's always sport - is consumed via text.

There's a scene in a comedy programme, the name of which escapes me, when a woman expresses incredulity at her partner's liking for Sky's Soccer Saturday programme. This, for the uninitiated, is the Saturday afternoon show where all the goals from that day's fixtures are displayed while three ex-players comment on the day's biggest games which they're watching on monitors.

Reducing this scenario to its bare bones, the female character asks why he's watching other men watching football matches he can't see. There's no answer to that, it sounds ridiculous but makes for compulsive viewing.

Something similar is happening to me with live text commentary. The BBC do this regularly on their website; others may too. It was designed to provide live updates on fixtures that were either not available on BBC TV or were taking place during weekdays when many would be at work and unable to watch. A sensible and useful service.

But I'm finding myself consuming my sport through this medium even when it's available on the TV. I may have the pictures on but whereas previously the banal TV coomentary would send me to the mute button and the radio commentary, I'm now eschewing that for the text updates.

Why? Some of the journalists are very good, writing with wit and insight; most are OK; some are dreadful. They all suffer from having to include tweets and texts from members of the public - part of the BBC's desperately misguided attempt to be inclusive rather than leaving things to the professionals.

But let's face it, these guys are typing as they try to keep up with events, it's throwaway stuff.

All I can think is that their approach resonates with me, the armchair fan, because they're viewing the game from the same perspective. They're not in the stadium like the TV and radio commentators; they're sitting in a room somewhere with a TV and a laptop.

Much like I am now.

Love & Death

My Dad died recently. Nothing else to say here really but this is the eulogy I gave at the funeral:

Few of those gathered here today would have considered Cliff Lake, my Dad, to be a man much given to contemplating the big philosophical conundrums of our day. And yet the Lake household would regularly be gathered together to be informed that my Dad had found THE ANSWER. This was the answer to a question that had consumed him for most of his adult life. His search took him from his back garden to the windswept hills of Derbyshire and the wide horizons of Suffolk. He devoted hours to the study of books, videos and DVDs, building a body of research to rival Crick & Watson’s work on the structure of DNA.

The question? Why wouldn’t his golf ball go in the direction he bloody well wanted it to? Snap hooks, pulled irons, fluffed chips, overhit puts – the countless frustrations that blighted his relationship with this most infuriating of games.

He never did find the answer. The revelation of a Wednesday evening in the back garden would always turn to dust in the course of a Sunday morning fourball.

Perversely, if he had found the answer and turned into the player he wanted to be I think it would have caused him to fall out of love with the game. It was the struggle, the challenge, the love/hate relationship familiar to many golfers that sustained him.

He was never a man to shirk a challenge. Born in 1930 to a working class family of West Ham supporters he pursued his dream of flying with such single-minded determination that neither a disrupted war-time education nor his questionable choice of football team would stand in his way. Filling the academic gaps at night-school, he completed his social education by observing the behaviour of his “betters”, absorbing just enough to make him one of the chaps while retaining a healthy disregard for the fripperies of social convention.

A glittering career in the Royal Air Force gave way to a no less challenging role setting up and running the private aviation arm of JCB. Reporting to a bunch of hard-nosed businessmen with no background in aviation his time at JCB was a constant juggling act of short-notice trips, awkward passengers, last minute destination changes and the eternal challenge of keeping his job while informing the boss’s wife that boarding the aircraft with half a ton of personal shopping was not conducive to successful powered flight.

As with his choice of sport, so with his choice of career. Not for him the safe option, the easy option, the secure option. Not when there was something more interesting, something more challenging to do instead.

The full extent of his tussles with JCB came home to me quite recently when I was going through some boxes looking for material for my 7 year old son Ben’s school project. Asked to write something on a family member who had an interesting life Ben wisely bypassed his parents before settling on the man he, his brother and all his cousins called their ‘Grumps’.

In one of these boxes was a folder containing correspondence on the many battles he fought on behalf of his fellow pilots. They reveal a man who was stubborn, headstrong, principled, confident, with a clear sense of right and wrong and an even clearer sense that he was on the side that was right.

Dad was an admirer of Brian Clough, manager at both Derby County and Notts Forest during our time in the Midlands and one of Clough’s famous quotes comes to mind. When asked what happened when a player disagreed with him Clough replied:

“Well, I ask him which way he thinks it should be done….then we talk about it for twenty minutes and then we decide I was right.”

This sense of his own rectitude didn’t always make for harmonious family relations, not least due to the fact that all 3 of his children seem to have inherited his stubborn streak. His death has sadly denied me the opportunity of cross-examining him on his extraordinary decision to vote UKIP in the recent local elections.

He was never short of advice and his briefing notes were the stuff of legend. When his four oldest grandchildren – all of whom are here today – first learnt to drive he prepared notes for the straightforward journey from Ipswich to Ufford that resembled the battle plans for Operation Barbarossa.

But while we laughed at the excesses we all knew that behind the gruff exterior lay a deeply caring man. He wanted nothing more than for those he loved to be happy. He may have felt that the best way to contribute to our happiness was to persuade us not to make decisions that would make us unhappy – a thankless task much of the time – but he also brought great joy and a sense of almost childlike fun into the lives of those who knew him.

Dive-bombing a meeting of top JCB executives in the company jet – breaking an entire rule book of aviation regulations in the process – before strafing them with toilet rolls wedged under the aircraft’s flaps was one memorable moment; watching from an upstairs window as he crept commando style through the neighbours garden on Xmas Eve to cover their TV aerial in tin foil, his presence marked only by his festive paper crown bobbing up over the hedge, another.

When I was about 13 I was wearing out a new patch of lawn as I pretended that the back wall of the house was an implacable opponent standing between me and my inevitable triumph at Wimbledon or Lords or Wembley when an ambulance went past, sirens wailing. Dad asked me what this made me think of. It was a rather clumsy attempt to get me to appreciate how lucky I was by contrasting my health and happiness with the unfortunate soul being rushed to hospital - a sentiment that died on the stony ground of a 13 year old boy’s total indifference. But at the time all I could think of saying was ‘the doplar effect’ – the change in frequency of a sound wave for an observer moving relative to its source that causes the strange audio effect when a siren passes by at speed. His face registered a mixture of irritation that I’d not got the more important point he was trying to make and astonishment that something he’d explained to me years ago – and which I’d clearly shown no interest in – had lodged in my brain.

And that was the thing about Dad. The constant barrage of friendly advice could sometimes make those of us on the receiving end a tad defensive. We’d shrug and look bored. But we always listened. And we always learned.

His knowledge, wisdom, kindness and love are no longer there for us. But I find great solace and hope in the fact that those qualities live on in those who had the privilege of knowing him.

I started by saying that my Dad was rarely associated with the big philosophical questions of our time. But he did have one overriding principle that will be familiar to many of us here. And that was the sense that life worked according to a set of odds and that those odds, for him, were 6-4 against. So in any given situation there was a greater chance of things going wrong than going right. Looking back over his life during the writing of this piece I’m forced to disagree with the old man one final time. 3 children, 6 grandchildren and in Peggy a wife, mother and grandmother whose love and support never wavered. This was a life that by anyone’s standards was 6-4 on.

Pale Green Ghosts

In Andy McCluskey's contribution to the BBC programme Synth-Britannia there's a section when he muses on the much-celebrated (at the time) return of guitar bands in the early 90s. He's not happy. McCluskey, as co-founder of OMD with Paul Humphreys, was part of a generation of musicians who combined the experimentalism of 70s electronic pioneers like Kraftwerk with art school pretensions and an ear for a pop tune. Along with the Human League, Ultravox and (yes) Gary Numan they had fought against an assumption that synthesisers were cold, emotionless, somehow anti-music. Chart success eventually blunted those attacks but the return of 'real' bands playing 'real' music suggested a battle had been won rather than the war.

I love OMD. Did you know they were indirectly responsible for The Smiths? Or at least the naming of The Smiths. Morrissey was no fan of pretentious art-house band names, and fingered OMD as the worst, so determined to take his nomenclature in another, more kitchen-sink direction.

But to me their name sums up all that is good about OMD. They wore their pretensions on their sleeves. They were creating Art and didn't care who knew it. The fact that their Art also came with enough pop hooks to see them established in the nation's top 5 was a happy accident. And if the cynical amongst you have heard that line once too often, consider 'Dazzle Ships': a self-indulgent, avant-garde, conceptual work filled with obscure samples that makes 'Kid A' sound like 'Thriller'. And this to follow 'Architecture and Morality', their breakthrough commercial album.

It's that combination of the avant-garde and the popular that makes OMD such a great band and it's a formula that can also be applied to much of the music I'd take to my desert island. Take Ride. They attack you with extremes: volume, feedback, a hail of guitar noise that is clearly inspired by My Bloody Valentine. But, try as they might, they can't keep the pop out. The early EPs have an almost punk edge and energy; later this is replaced by lyricism and melody. And then, unaccountably, they tried to become the Small Faces, but we'll draw a veil over that.

John Grant grew up with electronic music. For those raising an eyebrow at the electronic leanings of 'Pale Green Ghosts', it's the lush arrangements of 'Queen of Denmark' that will come to be seen as the anomalies. He has come home - via Iceland - to his natural sound.

And although I've never heard Grant name-check OMD - he's more a Cabaret Voltaire/Devo man - this new album stands squarely behind the McCluskey world view. There's no finer example than'It Doesn't Matter to Him' - a heart-rending, timeless melody leading into the most synthesiser-sounding synthesiser you're ever likely to hear, a sound both alien and elemental, expressing emotion far beyond the reach of a gurning guitarist - http://youtu.be/JvM3D4XE9qM