Right said Fred, how about a knighthood?

Amid the Palins and Twiggys, Pink Floyd's Nick Mason and TV's Chris Packham being gonged in the 2019 New Year's Honours list, there was one notable absentee who surely must be up for something sooner or later - the national treasure that is Bernard Cribbins, who turns 90 today.

For Britons of a certain age - particularly mine - Cribbins is the voice of The Wombles, or Mr Perks from The Railway Children, or an early member of the Carry On troupe, or Peter Sellers' sidekick in two of his best British comedies, Two-Way Stretch and The Wrong Arm Of The Law. More recent fans may have been acquired by Cribbins' portrayal of Wilf, Catherine Tate’s grandfather during David Tennant’s tenure as the Doctor in Doctor Who.

He is still as sharp as a button at 90 and more than willing and able to keep acting, something I'd love to see him do more of. A quick scan of his press coverage will see a recurring theme, that of everyone's favourite uncle, a persona not unsurprisingly cast while voicing The Wombles in the 1970s, and that of Great Uncle Bulgaria in particular. Like his contemporary Brian Cant narrating the Trumpton, Chigley and Camberwick Green triumvirate, Cribbins' warming voice became an integral part of childhood, but his visibility on everything from regular storytelling stints on Jackanory to the televisual parlour game that was Give Us A Clue served to cement his status as a loveable, avuncular figure. Some actors might bristle at the notion that, thanks to something they did 30, 40 or even 50 years ago they have been installed as a national treasure. but not Cribbins: "Yeah, yeah, why not?", he told The Times recently. "I mean, you as an adult may not have seen my latest whatever," he said to journalist Dominic Maxwell, "but you have a long-range memory of something pleasant. It's like remembering your first ice cream or your first banana. No, I’m happy with that."

One further abiding memory I have of Cribbins is his brief, unlikely but "delightful little interlude" as a pop star in the early 1960s, recording the novelty records The Hole In The Ground and Right Said Fred with Beatles producer George Martin. I'm, obviously too young to have heard these tunes first time around, but thanks to their regular plays on Ed 'Stewpot' Stewart's Junior Choice, I still own a copy, somewhere, of a Right Said Fred reissue from the '70s. Novelties though they may be, they are further evidence of just how loveable Cribbins was then, and still is now. No wonder he was asked to sing The Hole In The Ground at George Martin's memorial service, joke fully intended.

As fine an actor as he is - and his time in Doctor Who served as a timely reminder - I go back to the 60 episodes of The Wombles Cribbins voiced between 1973 and 1975 (and repeated long after). Cribbins breathed colourful, distinctive life into the wise old Great Uncle Bulgaria, the blunt Tobermory, lovably lazy Orinoco, Bungo, the fitness freak Tomsk, brainy Wellington, the oh-la-la Madame Cholet, and one of my favourites, the occasional visitor to Wimbledon Common, Cairngorn, the MacWomble the Terrible! Cribbins' dexterity was such that you could, believably, forget that you were watching Ivor Wood's stop-motion animation characters, and their before-their-time message about litter and recycling. "Kids love a story," he told The Times. "It can be adventure or funny or whatever, but you have got to give it 100 per cent. I've thought about characterisation, interpretation, whatever you want to call it. I’m in control."

In his recent autobiography, Bernard Who?, Cribbins wrote about his work on The Railway Children - for my money still one of the finest family films ever made - in which he plays stationmaster Albert Perks. "When I was a boy, in the early Thirties, me and my pals would run to the railway bridge near our homes and inhale the intoxicating smoke and steam as an engine whistled below. The thought still makes me smile. So when my friend Lionel Jeffries phoned me nearly 40 years later to ask me to play Albert Perks, a stationmaster, in a film he was making, he didn't have to ask twice. Cribbins had, of course, worked with Jeffries - another national treasure - in both Peter Sellers crime comedies, Two-Way Stretch and The Wrong Arm Of The Law, and knew it would be fun, even with the screen adaptation of Edith Nesbit's Victorian tale of three children and their adventures living alongside a Yorkshire railway line marking Jeffries' debut as a film director. And what a magnificent job he did of it, to the extent Cribbins still speaks fondly of the scene when Jenny Agutter's Bobbie meets her father (Iain Cuthbertson) on the station platform: "If you don't shed a tear when she shouts, 'Daddy, my daddy!' you're made of wood", Cribbins says.

Cribbins' own role in the 1970 film - of which he remains justly proud ("I’ve a lot of affection for Mr Perks, it was a lovely job and it’s had a lot of long-term applause.") probably did as much as The Wombles and Jackanory to seal his status as Britain's favourite uncle. His friend Lionel Jeffries had a particular knack for being able to reach and entertain children, and I'd argue that Cribbins - for all his acting range and parts in things for grown-ups - is the same. In an era when children are only supposed to respond to culture with 'an edge', Cribbins' mellifluous intonation, and the gentle, charming stories of both the Wimbledon Common clan as well as the cinematic adaptation of Nisbet's railway family, should be nailed to the national curriculum. Happy Birthday, Bernard. Let's hope your knighthood's in the post come the Queen's Birthday Honours in the spring.

The silencing of his master's voice

© HMV/James McCauley

What Ho!, viewers. It's been a while since I've blogged, but it's the Christmas holidays and, in a welcome break from work (coupled with food-induced imobility), I'm back in front of a steaming keyboard. What has coaxed me out of a lengthy absence from the blogosphere has been the troubling news today of HMV's second collapse in the space of six years, barely three days after gift cards (or "record tokens", in old money) would have been received by teenagers eager to get out and spend their newly acquired wealth on music, video games, DVDs (or, for the more resolution-sophisticated, a Blu-ray Disc) or any other of the home entertainment-related items HMV is still, evidently, selling via its bricks-and-mortar retail outfits. Except that they wouldn't have been. 

The HMV Group Plc, to give the chain its proper name, has become the first casualty of Christmas 2018 after poor sales and 'footfall' (i.e. the number of us walking through its doors) in the run up to the big day. Should the 97-year-old company disappear completely, it will not only wipe out 2,025 jobs but also it's status as the last remaining high street chain selling physical music and video products, unless you count Sainsbury's knocking out Ed Sheeran CDs and Davina McCall DVDs as a legitimate part of the media purchasing culture.

No one, frankly, should be surprised, as sad as this news is. HMV came close to collapse almost exactly six years ago, as the move towards online streaming led to sales diving by more than 10% and HMV calling in administrators. The company was eventually taken over be restructuring specialists Hilco who closed half the group's stores leaving 125 open, including the flagship shop on London's Oxford Street. The restructuring appeared, at least for a couple of years, to work, and in 2015 HMV even overtook Amazon as the UK's biggest phyisca-format music retailer (though that number also included HMV's online sales). Before that milestone, Hilco executive chairman Paul McGowan told The Telegraph in 2014 that the HMV business was now "very profitable" and did not have a single loss-making store left in the UK. Four years ago things did seem to be looking up: quarterly sales were improving by almost 10% and sales of albums over-the-counter were up by 12 per cent. 

The problem with this picture - and you'll understand me typing this through gritted teeth - is that while there have been improvements in the sale of vinyl records (and hats off to HMV for making vinyl gondolas the centrepieces of its stores), these have been somewhat niche sales by comparison to the relentless rise of online streaming services. Why go out and browse for new music or a DVD when it's there on your phone, iPad or PC at the click of a button? The culture I have enjoyed since my teens of curating music ownership and, later, my video library when VHS came along, has been eroded by the convenience of not having to get off the sofa to go and buy it.

I know there's not much point resisting this, Kanute-like. The inexorable growth of Netflix, Amazon Prime (even at the expense of Amazon's own retail operations), iTunes and all the rest has done for the home media library. Up to a point, of course. I can see the point of no longer buying DVDs and Blu-ray Discs: when you can rent (or 'own' them) in high, 4K quality without them taking up space in your living room shelving, it's a no-brainer. And it's not even an argument to say that there are films and box sets that you do watch again and again, because unless you are the most compulsive-obsessive about The Godfather or The Sopranos, you're not going to sit through either every day of the week.

Music, however, is different. Yes, I can listen to a Beatles playlist on Spotify (as I did, perfectly happily while wrapping my Christmas presents last week) via my iPad, but that is not the same experience. Perverse - and somewhat fetishistic - as it may be, as long as I still get a thrill from buying something new from my local record shop, getting it home, unsleeving it and either putting it on the turntable or in the CD player, I will continue to be that middle-aged bloke who readily parts company with a stupid amount of hard-earned for a 'super deluxe edition' of rare and previously unreleased Tom Petty songs. Thus, I'm quite proud to be keeping my local independent record shop, Casbah Records in Greenwich, in turnover. And, before anyone asks, I'll only order something from Amazon if Graham, Casbah's always helpful co-owner, is unlikely or unable to get it in.

At the time Hilco was claiming that HMV was on the up again, Paul McGowan said that it had strategically focused on offering something that other retailers couldn't, like in-store live performances. That, however, might only have a limited appeal, especially in generating impulse purchases. McGowan was, obviously, correct when he said that clearly Amazon or Tesco couldn't and wouldn't compete with that. But here, however, is where independents do the fan experience better. Banquet Records in Kingston-upon-Thames, annexed its main retail space to create a dedicated performance room, and has also become involved in local promotional gigs by heavyweight acts like The 1975. In a high student catchment area like Kingston, that makes eminent sense and hard to imagine HMV matching.

In 2013 retail analyst Mark Saunders told The Guardian that HMV's business model had "simply become increasingly irrelevant and unsustainable". Then music and film downloads accounted for 73.4% of media purchases. Today that ratio is higher still as Netflix, Apple, Spotify and even YouTube have eaten further into what used to be regarded as "home entertainment", but is now available digitally across everything from mobile platforms to big-screen TVs as, simply, an app. Of course, evolving consumption habits isn't the only set of nails being hammered into HMV's coffin. The British high street is currently a turbulent place to be. Hilco's McGowan said, in a statement, that "Even an exceptionally well-run and much-loved business such as HMV cannot withstand the tsunami of challenges facing UK retailers over the last 12 months on top of such a dramatic change in consumer behaviour in the entertainment market," with the chain's collapse coming on top of retailers like Poundworld, Maplin and Toys R Us entering administration, with others like Superdry, Carpetright and Card Factory issuing ominous profit warnings.

HMV's travails, however, go beyond simply being another victim of high street pressures, even if high rents and low consumer confidence have had their impact. The simple fact is that people are now going no further than an app, a mouse click or a remote control button to acquire home entertainment, even if the industry body, the Entertainment Retailers Association maintains that physical music, video and games products still represent a £2 billion market, with the likes of Sheeran and films like The Greatest Showman contributing.

The question for me is, realistically, how long this market will remain. There is a generation of teenagers which, for the most part, doesn't actually own any music or video. And they're not even paying subscription services, either: YouTube does, it would appear, constitute a large proportion of entertainment consumption for digital-native teenagers and twentysomethings. Seeing my girlfriend's 17-year-old-daughter enjoy listening to music on vinyl is one of life's genuine pleasures, but even I know that she and her friends are following a latent fashion. I, for one, will continue to buy albums, but even I've stopped buying DVDs altogether. Mind you, I very rarely have the attention span these days longer than watching a Mock The Week repeat on Dave, so perhaps I'm losing the ability to do anything more than point a remote control at a set-top box. Maybe, even, I'm the cause of HMV's collapse? I hope not. Sad as it is to see a venerable and historic name go into administration for a second time, reluctantly I've got to accept that it's just the way it is, even if with the  chain's demise disappears the emotional enjoyment of endless Saturday afternoons browsing for new music that I couldn't wait to get home, unpack and play. Forget the arguments about sound and picture quality, it's that fetishistic, tactile experience that will die when the physical media experience finally pops its clogs. Today's news about HMV doesn't half feel like that is accelerating.

What do you have to do to get a game around here?

It's not often I sit at Stamford Bridge with a silly grin on my face. Not that it's a moribund place - far from it (along with the inherent wit and banter, right now under Maurizio Sarri, Chelsea are playing the kind of football that just makes you smile) - but I'm talking about one of those goofy, supercilious grins, the kind you sport when you're in love or watching a child just being a child.

The occasion was last night watching Ruben Loftus-Cheek scoring a hat-trick against the hapless Belarus champions BATE Borisov in the Europa League equivalent of a Harlem Globetrotters exhibition against the Washington Generals. Actually, it wasn't just the hat-trick (the first homegrown Chelsea player to score one since Clive Walker in 1982...), it was the way RLC used his height, his pace and towering physique to score three goals that Chelsea's recognised strikers, Álvaro Morata and Olivier Giroud, can currently only dream of netting. No wonder the Stamford Bridge faithful sang giddily: "One of our own, he's one of our own, Loftus-Cheek, he's one of our own".

Players who've come through the club's academy are always afforded extra love at Chelsea. Perhaps a tad blindly, we've offered unconditional support to such youngsters, even when their developed quality has been somewhere off the quality of players Chelsea have bought in from the European and South American meritocracy. You've got to learn somehow - the trouble is, Chelsea's first team is not the environment, even if the Chelsea Academy is.

Loftus-Cheek had more or less secured Chelsea's victory over BATE within the eight minutes he took to score his first two goals, but he didn't slacken off, even if it was obvious to the midfielder that Chelsea were playing, quite frankly, awful opposition. With Giroud, Willian and Pedro all on the pitch, it's amazing that the scoreline wasn't much higher (and the fact that BATE scored a consolation goal highlighted Chelsea's barely acknowledged defensive frailties). By the time RLC had knocked in his third past the wonderfully named goalkeeper Denis Scherbitski, it was obvious that this was now little more than a training game. But that didn't wipe the goofy grin off my face: indeed, it became even more fixed when 17-year-old Callum Hudson-Odoi came on for Pedro, setting off another bout of giddiness at the sight of an extraordinarily hot prospect within the Chelsea youth ranks. A shame, then, that such was the absence of proper opposition from the Belarus side that we didn't get to see much of what Hudson-Odoi can do (in brief appearances under Antonio Conte, he demonstrated delicious turns of speed and guile).

And so Chelsea will go to Burnley on Sunday with the 'regular' starting 11 restored. Some, like Eden Hazard (absent last night through back injury) and Sarri's former Napoli lieutenant Jorginho pick themselves. Others, like defenders César Azpilicueta and David Luiz appear to have made themselves indispensable, to the cost of Andreas Christensen and club captain Gary Cahill (who has always acquitted himself well when played, as he did last night). Serious questions will be asked about their futures come the opening of the January transfer window. Sarri's midfield queue is even harder to crack, and his options are envious. The worry is, however, that they are also the major obstacle blocking Loftus-Cheek's progress. "We have a tactical problem with the midfielders", Sarri told BT Sport after last night's game. "We have four midfielders and three of them have the same characteristics. They are offensive midfielders, only one has other characteristics - [N'Golo] Kante is a defensive midfielder. So it is very difficult to put in the starting eleven two midfielders with the same characteristics."

Loftus-Cheek was rightfully named Man Of The Match for his hat-trick performance last night, but that didn't stop Sarri being a permanent fixture in the 22-year-old's ear during the game, using every break in play to lecture the midfielder on his tactical positioning. However, one of the player's other qualities has been patience and a notable lack of whinging about his situation at Chelsea (after being selected by Gareth Southgate for the England World Cup squad, he didn't return for the recent internationals due to a lack of game time at his parent club), and even though he took Sarri's lecturing well, the Italian is clearly still not prepared to make him a regular fixture, with Jorginho, Mateo Kovacic, Kante and even Ross Barkley currently the favoured four in the middle. Even Cesc Fàbregas has been reduced to cameo appearances in cup games, like last night, though the 31-year-old's visibly slowing pace may have a lot to do with that.

Loftus-Cheek now has a dilemma - bide his time and eventually get more regular play as his relationship with Sarri grows ("At the beginning of the season he was a very good player," said Sarri last night, "and now he is a good player that is more suited to my style of football"), or cut his losses and push for a January move elsewhere, perhaps back to Crystal Palace where he was on loan last season. For his part, Loftus-Cheek has had the good grace to recognise his place: "Maurizio Sarri and I have a good relationship," he said last night. "I would be daft not to learn from a top manager. He is asking me to improve defensively and positionally. We are working on it every day in training and he is very demanding with the team. He is so demanding on shape, but also wants you to play freely as well, which I why we can play such free flowing football. It is really good work."

He does, though, recognise the position he's in. "I have never doubted my ability. It's just hard sometimes to perform at your best when you are not playing regularly. So it is important to train well, keep your good habits - eat well and sleep well - so that when games like [last night's] come along you can be as close to your best physical shape as possible. I will keep trying to do that and it's all I can do right now."

It would be a tragedy, though, if he did follow the exits of other rising Chelsea Academy stars, like Nathaniel Chalobah and Dominic Salanke, as well as earlier examples like Josh McEachran, unable to get regular playing time in the senior side. We fans' adoration for homegrown talent may be irrational, but there surely must be a place in football for a little bit of Roy Of The Rovers romanticism? It was nice to have that stupid grin on my face last night: it just would be nice to wear it more often.

Deserting island discs

It used to be that you knew you were getting older when policemen appeared to be getting younger. Now it is technology which might still seem new but has aged incredibly quickly. Over my career in tech PR I've seen technologies rise, arc and disappear in what seems like the blink of an eye: as part of the Philips PR machine in the '90s and Noughties, I was involved in launching several consumer electronics formats, including the DVD, the recordable CD, the recordable DVD, the Digital Compact Cassette, Digital VHS, CD-i and, latterly, Blu-ray Disc. Most, it has to be said, have either been superseded or didn’t survive infancy, even though their patents - lucrative in some cases - have been absorbed into the revenue streams of the companies who created them.

Today, Philips no longer invests in consumer electronics, preferring to be a healthtech concern, presumably because the margins on capital equipment like CT scanners for hospitals far outstrip the meagre profits to be made on a TV (for such a major purchase, you'd be amazed how little the manufacturer makes on it...), although brand licensing has ensured the Philips name has remained in the home entertainment space. The reality, however, is that, 11 years after Apple introduced the iPhone, the smartphone has largely replaced TVs, video players and hifi systems amongst young consumers. Look at Apple’s marketing of its latest iPhone, even making a virtue of bigger screens and better speakers purely to appeal to those who prefer to watch movies on something barely bigger than an old fashioned cheque book.

Given that streaming via platforms like Netflix, Amazon and iTunes, plus broadcasters’ on-demand and catch-up services, has become as commonplace today as terrestrial TV and Blockbuster video rentals were 30 years ago, it’s not surprising to, this week, see news from the John Lewis department store chain that it is drawing the curtain down on the DVD player, having seen a 40% drop in player sales over the last year. While this isn’t necessarily a vital-signs indication of the health of DVD itself, the revelation - contained in the 2018 John Lewis & Partners Retail Report - is a sign that one piece of technology beneath the living room television is in decline. What this doesn’t say is that sales of Blu-ray Disc players - the ultra-high definition disc format that was developed (by a consortium of technology companies including ‘usual suspects’ like Philips and Sony) largely to succeed DVD - are still relatively healthy, even if, like most ‘high-volume electronics’ devices, price erosion has brought down the cost of a Blu-ray player from around £1000 in 2002 to as low as £70 for a basic box today.

DVD does now date back to what is a lifetime in technology: when I started working for Philips at the beginning of 1995 there was already, in the finest traditions of the consumer electronics industry, a battle raging between competing technologies to be considered the 'standard' for a CD-sized disc that could store entire films in one go. In the blue corner was Philips and Sony with its Multimedia Compact Disc (MMCD) format. In the red corner, a collection of tech companies like Toshiba, Matsushita, Hitachi, JVC, Pioneer and Thomson who, along with their Hollywood buddy Time Warner (i.e. Warner Bros) were backing Super Density Disc (SD). While industry observers and trade media hacks lofted their eyes skywards at the prospect of another Betamax-v-VHS battle, a round of the sort of shuttle diplomacy normally applied to preventing actual wars brought peace to the world of digital video and, at a press conference at the IFA trade fair in Berlin in August 1995, declared their eternal love for each other. DVD was born.

The news that John Lewis is now, 23 years on, dropping DVD players from its shelves is no more than a reflection of its own stocking strategy, says Gill Hind of Enders Analysis, who points out that it's as much about the retailer's desire to keep its shelves full of the latest innovations which carry higher sticker prices and better margins. Beyond the headlines, the DVD itself, on the other hand, soldiers on, just.

"I think the bigger surprise is just how resilient the format continues to be," says leading home entertainment journalist Steve May. "Sales data from the British Association for Screen Entertainment, covering the first six months of 2018, reveals that DVD accounted for 64.7 per cent of video sales. Digital formats trailed at 22.4 per cent, with Blu-ray Disc following behind with 12.9 per cent. Streaming services "may be picking up subscribers at a rate of knots" says Steve, but those who want the best in picture and sound quality are sticking with the physical format of Blu-ray Disc. And the innovation cycle in Blu-ray goes on: “Blu-ray players replaced dedicated DVD players in terms of value some time ago," he adds, "just as the latest Ultra High Definition Blu-ray Disc players are now ousting regular Blu-ray decks.”

While the higher-end quality of Blu-ray remains popular with videophiles, DVD is hanging on, probably due to the combination of convenience, good picture quality (when we demonstrated DVD versus VHS it was the difference between a clean and dirty window) and, above all, dirt-cheap prices. No surprise, then, that one in two DVDs are sold as point-of-sale impulse buys at supermarkets, while 10% of DVDs get snapped up at supposedly 'non-traditional' retailers, such as garden centres and petrol stations, according to the British Association for Screen Entertainment. While streaming has clearly become the dominant vehicle for watching movies at home (accounting for more than four-fifths of the £2.7 billion UK video market last year) Steve May maintains that “there is plenty of life still in physical media”. For example, Christopher Nolan's Dunkirk sold 640,000 copies on DVD and Blu-ray combined, while last year’s most popular film release - Disney's Beauty And The Beast - sold 1.5 million copies across both 'physical' and 'digital' formats.

Standalone DVD players may be going out of fashion but “backwards compatibility” in the Blu-ray hardware standard has meant that Blu-ray players can still play all those hundreds of DVDs currently piling up in living room cupboards probably only a few feet from the TV. Which means that disc libraries will remain for some time yet. The question is, what these ageing, dust-gathering DVDs will look like. Many in my own library were bought at the time when they were first-generation transfers. Home video companies have been very canny in re-releasing titles as formats have been updated (I actually own four different copies of Heat and have lost track of the versions of The Godfather in my collection...). At the same time, TV sets themselves have evolved. A year after the DVD was born, Philips introduced the very first flat TV, a 42-inch gas plasma number costing 30,000 deutschemarks, roughly £13,000 in today's money. Now, you can buy a 43-inch LCD TV for less than £370. It's not an entirely accurate comparison, however. That first flat TV was, frankly, rubbish from a picture quality point of view, but that didn't stop Philips selling every single one they made, often to achingly-cool advertising agencies (and one particular radio DJ...) wanting to be the first to own a TV set you could hang on the wall like a painting.

Television and video formats have often leapfrogged each other, much like Trigger's broom in Only Fools And Horses (17 new heads and 14 new handles in 20 years...), but today there is a narrowing of technologies. With broadcasters and streaming services offering premium content like football and film channels with 4K quality and, at some point in the not-too distant future, 8K resolution, it's arguable that the optical disc that has lingered on since the CD (or, even earlier, LaserDisc) will be discarded to museums. I'll admit, as I spend an increasing amount of time on planes, having a library of downloaded movies on my iPad, with its Retina screen and Bluetooth headphones, is a convenient way of catching up with films and TV box sets. But nothing can beat the experience of watching at home on a big screen TV (70-inch is now the new normal, according to John Lewis, compared to only 36-inch in 2010), and with Blu-ray continuing to set the standard, the spirit of the DVD lives on through its successor. And you still have to get out of your seat to put it in the player, but then that was always part of the fun, wasn't it?

Leave it mate, it ain't worth it

Despite José Mourinho being released from his employment as head coach at my football club almost three years ago, you could be forgiven for thinking that I have, in the Portuguese's own words, become a "voyeur", based on the number of times I've blogged about him since. This, you may recall, is a reference to one of his verbal spats with rival Arsène Wenger: "There are some guys who, when they are at home, have a big telescope to see what happens in other families. Wenger must be one of them – it is a sickness. He speaks, speaks, speaks about Chelsea."

Mourinho's regular mangling of the English language while projecting his reputation as football's great pantomime villain was tiresome then, and his antics continue to be tiresome now. If, then, for example, he is to be ired by Chelsea fans goading him on Saturday afternoon at the end of the entertainingly brusque 2-2 draw with Manchester United, then after more than a decade and a half in the English game he is clearly naive about the nature of football fans in this country (Rafa Benitez is still branded a "fat Spanish waiter" at Stamford Bridge, despite landing Chelsea a Europa League title...). Contrast, then, the standing ovation afforded United midfielder Juan Mata as he was substituted on Saturday. If you want respect, José, just look at that, even considering that the diminutive Spaniard had almost beheaded compatriot César Azpilicueta with a wayward tackle earlier in the game.

There's little shying away from the fact that Mourinho had a right to be a little peeved following Ross Barkley's injury time equaliser, when over-exuberant Chelsea technical coach Marco Ianni leapt from the dugout to celebrate, fist-pumping past the United coach once, then twice. Mourinho's reaction was, actually, quite funny: his eyes lighting up at the sight of Ianni coming back for a second bite of goading reminded me of Animal from the Muppets.

Mourinho's evacuation of his seat was equally impressive - he's four years older than me, and yet he was up and out of his chair and after Ianni like a coiled spring. It takes me a full five minutes just to get off the sofa. Ianni's behaviour was, though, out of order: you just can't do that sort of thing. He can expect sanction from both the FA and his club. Punishing Mourinho's reaction would be harsh. If any member of the Manchester United party should get a slap on the wrist for their involvement in the melee it's the combustible Ashley Young who sprinted a full 30 yards to get stuck into something that was none of his business. But, then, that's Young for you - he'd been spoiling for a fight of some kind all afternoon.

Like most outbreaks of handbags at a football match, it was all over as fast as it had begun. Someone had clearly said, probably in Portuguese, "leave it bruv, it ain't worth it", and Mourinho returned to his luxurious perch on the United bench. And that was then the mood turned really sour. "Fuck off Mourinho", sang the Matthew Harding Stand (two days before the 22nd anniversary of the Chelsea benefactor's untimely death in a helicopter crash), which inevitably goaded Mourinho further. At the final whistle, he strode purposely towards the United fans in the south-east corner of Stamford Bridge, stopping while still well in front of the East Stand, where he pranced back towards the tunnel waving three fingers in the air, occasionally stopping to point at the ground. Yes, José, we got the message, and we still don't care.

You don't 'command' respect from your former faithful. No one at Stamford Bridge needs a three-fingered reminder of the league titles Mourinho won for Chelsea, including the club's first in 50 years. Respect is something earned, not demanded. We loved Mourinho when he was at the club, and even forgave most of the eccentricities that wound up rival fans and governing bodies alike. Perhaps, though, our patience was tested too far by that 18-week period in 2015 when Chelsea went from reigning champions on the opening day of the season to one place above the relegation zone in mid-December. It was all rather baffling, how the champions could have found themselves in free-fall in the immediate next season. But, then, as we've seen, there's a Mourinho pattern. And given the theory that he'd always wanted to be the Manchester United manager - even when there wasn't a vacancy - there's still the lingering suspicion that in those final four months of 2015 it was Mourinho's plan to get himself fired, a challenge which seems more attainable at Chelsea than most others. Oddly, even in the aftermath of that period, Chelsea fans were reluctant to blame Mourinho. We were just baffled. So we cut him some slack and moved on. Mourinho, it would appear, hasn't. Even if the Harding end's chanting on Saturday was provocation on top of provocation, Mourinho's three fingers were just a demonstration of the thin skin that clads his body, and the petulance which makes him hard to like as a human being, let alone as the divisive manager of a football club.

Guilty as charged: Jeff Lynne’s ELO at the O2 Arena

Picture: Jeff Lynne/Carsten Windhorst

Being, obviously, a metropolitan elitist, I’ve never fully understood those cultish British provincial practices like line dancing. Quite what makes folk living in, say, Droitwich want to dress up as farming types from the great American frontier before driving home in a Vauxhall Astra is genuinely baffling. But, then, this is clearly a somewhat snobbish statement on, basically, people having fun. Same goes for those who dress - still - as teddy boys, mods, rockers, headbangers or any other sub-culture deemed uncool by tastemakers. They’re having fun, it’s harmless and most of these pastimes are, at heart, celebrations of music. I defy all but the most curmudgeonly to not go to a party and singalong to classic pop, to Hey Jude or Club Tropicana or, I don’t know, you name it, so these purveyors of guilty pleasures are entitled to knock themselves out to whatever is their thing.

If I was to be a little critical, the problem with patronising a music cult is that they are, for the most part, self-satisfying and comforting. You want to hear the hits that made the genre your own, you want to test your ageing memory by singing along (or, in that tradition of Dad participating, at least mumbling along to an approximation). Thus, the entire reason we were at the O2 Arena last night was for Jeff Lynne’s ELO to deliver an hour-and-a-half of the familiar. Nothing else. No “here’s a suite of thematically-linked songs from our new album”. No thank you. Such is our affinity with Lynne’s ELO work that I could have just posted the set list here and you'd get a pretty good idea of the evening. No shocks, no surprises, and not much experimentation, either. This was, as Lynne’s musical director/guitarist Mike Stevens explained during the band introductions, “a celebration of the man who wrote all the songs, Jeff Lynne”.

You will notice that this was “Jeff Lynne’s ELO”, not “Jeff Lynne” or “ELO”. Legalities, no doubt, have played a part here. The ‘classic’ ELO line-up of Lynne, Bev Bevan, Richard Tandy, Kelly Groucutt, Mik Kaminski and others is long gone. But, then, after Roy Wood left the band at its outset, it largely became Lynne’s own entity. Lynne himself has always been something of a musical brand in his own right, with his writing and production for ELO almost indistinguishable from his production work with the surviving Beatles or The Travelling Wilburys. This is underlined by the latter’s Handle With Care being seamlessly segwayed between ELO’s Livin’ Thing and Rockaria!, and Do Ya from Lynne and Roy Wood’s ELO predecessor The Move the sandwich filling between Showdown and When I Was A Boy.

For the most part, this was an extended version of the Glastonbury heritage slot, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. Even the snippiest of Glasto patrons have lapped up sets from Barry Gibb or Nile Rogers’ Chic, putting cynicism and even irony aside to just have a good old singalong. And so Lynne’s extraordinary history of hits kept coming: Evil Woman, All Over The World, Last Train To London (somewhat inappropriate yesterday if you’d been trying to get to Paddington…), a particularly rocky 10538 Overture (with that guitar riff shamelessly plundered by Paul Weller on Changingman), Shine A Little Love, Wild West Hero, Sweet Talkin' Woman, Telephone Line, Don't Bring Me Down, Turn To Stone… Of course, this was about nostalgia - these were songs from mid-70s albums like Eldorado, A New World Record, Out Of The Blue and Discovery that were part of my musical upbringing. ELO were, then, a band lumped in with prog giants of the time like Genesis, perhaps due to their conceptual album artwork but also because they were pretty unique. Even now, thinking about last night’s show, I can’t think of another rock band to combine orchestral instruments, 4/4 disco, Beatley melodies and rock and roll traditions and not come out like some awful end-of-pier novelty act. Perhaps that is, then the absolute definition of 'guilty pleasure'.

If there’s one ELO song that captures that phrase perfectly, it’s Mr. Blue Sky, the closest Lynne ever got to recreating Sgt. Pepper. Frankly, I would have paid to hear Mr. Blue Sky alone. I’m not ashamed. As it turned out, save for an apparently obligatory encore of Roll Over Beethoven (before which, much of the late-middle age audience had already started heading for the pre-drive home toilets), Lynne could have left it at that. This had been a perfect evening’s music, performed fastidiously by the 12-piece backing band. Even if muso types had hoped for a little variation, Lynne stuck to the script and delivered largely what, over the last 48 years, ELO had committed to record. Lynne himself is a slightly odd character: visually, he looks no different than he did in the 70s, with that shaggy mop of hair and the aviator sunglasses (I once came across a photograph of Lynne without those glasses - it was profoundly weird). Audience interaction was kept to a bare medium - no Phil Collins-style banter or Paloma Faith gobbiness. Just a jukebox evening of songs I now realise are hard wired into my consciousness. And all the more enjoyable for it.

A journalist once described ELO as “arguably the most uncool, even defiantly anti-cool, of the lot”, and if you had to examine that statement, he was probably right. But sometimes, what’s wrong with that? After all, one man’s Mr. Blue Sky is another’s Achy Breaky Heart.

The real birth of cool

Most things described as being “cool” are often - if not only - regarded as being so by those seemingly self-appointed to be arbiters of what is cool. Which isn’t cool. One of the reasons I stopped buying men’s fashion magazines wasn’t so much the photography of ridiculously priced clobber, but the assumption that those who wrote and produced such magazines were somehow above the rest of us who, by nature, are not cool. Oh, and I’m not cool to begin with.

However, there are some things that are so intrinsically cool they don’t even need highlighting. They just exude cool. The Amalfi Coast, for example. Bass Wejun loafers. Soho. James Bond. Fonzie. Perhaps each to their own, but these would, I’d hesitate to suggest, feature on an untouchable list of cool things all of their own. Along with two others: Steve McQueen and his unquestionably cool crime thriller Bullitt, which was came out this day, 50 years ago.

What makes Bullitt cool is both a sum of its parts as well as the whole. McQueen sits at the centre of this hypothesis. The actor was and - face facts, Brad Pitt, Bradley Cooper and any other pretender to the throne named Brad or Bradley - remains the coolest actor in Hollywood history. Not Newman, Redford, Pacino or any contemporary registers on the same level of cool. By the time McQueen strapped on Lieutenant Frank Bullitt's shoulder holster he’d already set the bar for cool in The Great Escape, appropriately as PoW Hilts “the Cooler king” (and, even earlier, in The Magnificent Seven). But his starring role as the monosyllabic San Francisco detective in Peter Yates’ 1968 thriller notched the cool factor up, quite considerably. The cool factor begins with McQueen's wardrobe - his Sunday attire (the day being a key part of the plot) comprising a perennially cool rollneck sweater and what were then known as “slacks”, topped off with a three-quarter length trenchcoat. Cool on top of cool on top of cool.

Then there’s that car, a 1968 Ford Mustang Fastback in Racing Green, which stars in the greatest - and coolest - car chase in cinema history*.  If you’ve never seen the film - and if not, why not? - it’s a frenetic, ten-minute sequence which covers a series of streets in San Francisco which, if you know the city at all won’t make any geographical sense, but thanks to some superb direction and editing, provides an exhilarating, tyre-squealing, rubber-burning tour, from its prowling start on Army Street before hill-bouncing its way out of North Beach towards a fiery conclusion for the baddies on the Guadalupe Canyon Parkway in San Bruno. When I lived in the Bay Area I occupied an idle Sunday afternoon by trying to recreate the chase route, albeit with greater regard for stop signs than McQueen’s character did. It was, not surprisingly, impossible to cover in the 10 minutes and 53 seconds of screen time the chase occupied in the film, but a lot of fun, especially while listening to the Bullitt's Lalo Schifrin soundtrack (itself, achingly cool). Proportionately it takes up a fraction of the film, but hats off to Yates for making it such a pinnacle of cinematic action. And to think he was the man who directed Cliff Richard in Summer Holiday…
*fact

Bullitt has become an iconic entry in every petrolhead's catalogue of must-see films, but it also provided the template for others to follow. William Friedkin was such a fan that he was he inspired by it for the car chases in both The French Connection and To Live And Die In LA. No wonder there is a plethora of websites devoted to mapping the course of that Mustang as McQueen chases the Mob hitmen across San Francisco in their Dodge Charger. The Ford Motor Company's marketing department hasn’t been shy about exploiting the Mustang's defining role in the film, building on the resurgent muscle car on American streets by introducing a special Bullitt edition of the car to coincide with the film's anniversary. Nice idea, but I very much doubt it will replicate the grunt of the original car driven by McQueen on screen.

Vehicular cool not withstanding, there is so much more of the frosty stuff to Bullitt than just a muscular ten minutes of extreme roadcraft. There is, for a start, a smart plot and its undercurrent of Mob retribution and political ambition (courtesy of the wonderful Robert Vaughn as the slimy Walter Chalmers in an utterly brilliant - and cool - performance. San Francisco itself must be recognised as another cool character in the film, though the Yates' choice of locations is never designed to act as a tourist promotion of a city regarded by many as their favourite in America for its laid-back nature (in spite of the threat of widespread tectonic devastation), dramatic topography, ornate architecture and a sky of a shade of blue all of its own (paler than elsewhere on the West Coast due, I’m told, to unique atmospherics above it).

Like that other embittered San Francisco cop of few words, Clint Eastwood's Harry Callaghan in Dirty Harry, released three years after Bullitt, McQueen's character is framed by his personal life, living on TV dinners bought from VJ Groceries across the road from his apartment at 1153-1157 Taylor Street. The grocery store even manages to provide one of the film's coolest moments - a single tracking shot which follows Bullitt out of the shop and across the road without even leaving the premises, watching the detective from behind its front window. It is details like this that make up the sum of the parts of why Bullitt is such a brilliant film and, of course, so cool.

Until his death in 1980 McQueen wouldn’t make another film as good, or play a character as cool as Frank Bullitt. And while actors tend to get judged on the body of their work, I could live with Bullitt being the only film McQueen made, not because he was a good or bad actor, but because it was such a singularly cool film. Some are like that (I can and do watch Heat whenever it appears in the television schedules, despite the fact I own it on multiple formats and have probably seen it more often than my own front door). Perhaps that is even the definition of cool, something that transcends everything else to stand out and stand up to repeat inspection. I know that I will never tire of watching Bullitt, enjoying its subtleties and its grand gestures in equal measure. But, if I think about it, mostly for Steve McQueen. Who was, in case you haven’t gathered by now, just bloody cool.

Sweet soul music

Finding a couple of pound coins behind the sofa cushions that have slipped, unawares, from shallow trouser pockets is one thing, but discovering an entire album's worth of recorded music is something else entirely.

So, when Primal Scream's Andrew Innes uncovered tape boxes in his basement marked “Ardent Studios” his curiosity led to the discovery of recordings the band had made in 1992 that never saw the light of day. That is to say, the album Give Out But Don't Give Up was released in 1994, but sessions recorded at Ardent in Memphis as well as the fabled Muscle Shoals studio in Alabama, overseen by legendary producer Tom Dowd, were never released. Quite why is a matter of regret by the band. On first glance, it might be easy to assume that the band, with their reputation for recreational substance enjoyment might simply have forgotten about working Otis Redding's producer, but the reality is somewhat more sober.

Give Out But Don’t Give Up was the follow-up to Screamadelica, that touchstone for the rave era with party classics like Movin’ On Up and the generation-defining Loaded. Although the Primals became associated with the hedonistic acid and E culture of the time, they were at heart a rock’n’roll band. Screamadelica had drawn on Let It Bleed-period Rolling Stones and the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds as influences. But its considerable success only created pressure for the Primals to follow it up with a hit of equal measure, and the band found themselves obliged to get back to the studio, even though they were not in the best condition following a heavy schedule of touring and promotion. “We were in a state,” singer Bobby Gillespie recently told The Times’ Will Hodgkinson. “Screamadelica left us in a weird place. Everything we dreamt of since the age of 16 had come true. What do you do after that? We had a blank future. We had been on a huge high, living the rock’n’roll dream, and then, boom, it ends.”

With those around the band fearing that they’d already reached the end of the road, their manager booked them into a London studio with former Stones producer, Jimmy Miller. However, with Miller in a less than healthy state himself, the band toiled without any output, adding more to the depressive state they were in following the euphoria of the previous album.

It was here that their record company in the US intervened, and brought them together with Dowd, who would immerse the band further into American music culture via sessions in Memphis and Muscle Shoals - Southern locations steeped in blues, soul and R’n’B (Ardent had recorded Sam & Dave, Led Zeppelin, Isaac Hayes, The Staples Singers, ZZ Top, R.E.M., George Thorogood, The Allman Brothers, Joe Walsh and Stevie Ray Vaughan, while Muscle Shoals Sound Studio had an equally illustrious reputation, having hosted included the Stones no less, plus Aretha Franklin, Wilson Pickett, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Joe Cocker, Levon Helm, Paul Simon and Rod Stewart, amongst many others). Working with top local session musicians like The Memphis Horns, drummer Roger Hawkins and bassist David Hood, Dowd teased out of the band a modern classic, a collection of Stones-like rockers and ballads, a hint of country here, a soulful vocal there.

However, the Give Out But Don’t Give Up that Primal Scream actually released, however, was somewhat different. Critics dismissed songs like Rocks as a poor Rolling Stones imitation, while the collection of sloppy remixes and what sounded like crude attempts to recreate Screamadelica’s dance rave vibe, met with dismissal. Significantly, any benefit of working in such historic studios with renown musicians appeared to have been removed or, at least, the band had allowed themselves to tinker and tamper with the work they'd done in Memphis and Muscle Shoals, losing the soulful beauty of what they’d committed to tape there. “I don’t know what we were thinking,” Gillespie, confessed to Hodgkinson. “We made a perfect album: three rockers, six ballads and a centrepiece. Then we replaced it with something patchy. We confused ourselves.” Innes was more forthright: “[the Memphis/Muscle Shoals work] was so slick, so nice, so well played that we panicked. It sounded too grown-up.” That’s one way of putting it. I would simply say 'authentic'. “For years, I felt bad about us going to Memphis and not doing what we set out to do,” Gillespie says in the release’s official publicity material. “Hearing these songs after all this time has made everything all right again. I feel redeemed.”

And so he should be. You can now hear for yourself how authentic the Dowd recordings are with the release of Give Out But Don't Give Up: The Original Memphis Recordings. Available as a single CD with the original nine-track running order, or a two-CD edition with multiple versions, takes and outtakes of the Ardent/Muscle Shoals sessions, it is - no exaggeration - like listening to a brand new album. I’d go further: despite being familiar with Rocks, Call On Me and Cry Myself Blind, the album reverses much of the criticism it received on its original release. Tracks that were slated for cloning the Rolling Stones actually sound as good, if not better, than some elements of Let It Bleed and Exile On Main Street. I’ll even go out on a limb and say this package is as good a ‘country-soul’ album as you’ll ever introduce to your ears, blending perfectly the work of Primal Scream’s late guitarist Robert Young and the Memphis rhythm players Dowd brought together. I’ll go even further out on a limb and say album this has probably cemented itself in my list of all time favourites. Listening to it the other day on a seven-hour flight to Dubai, I hadn’t realised that I’d listened to all 25 tracks in the deluxe package three times before taking a break. I think that says it all.

Here's one I made earlier

Twitter/Red Arrows

You'd have thought, as I approach my 51st year, that worn-in cynicism will have hardened the heart to the innocent pleasures of childhood. For the most part that's true. Life will do that to you. And then one day, quite by accident, you encounter something that makes you re-evaluate the things you think are important - mortgages, ageing relatives, job security, and so on - and simply enjoy it for what it is.

So, earlier this year I happened to be working from home one afternoon and, while idly flicking around the TV channels during an interminably dull conference call, came across something that enchanted me, almost to the point of putting a lump in my throat. Yes, that serious. Hitting the instant record button on the remote control, I later played back what had caught my eye: an edition of the venerable BBC children's show Blue Peter in which its 27-year-old presenter Lindsey Russell got to fly with the RAF Red Arrows display team. Inviting television presenters to sit in the back seat of one of the Arrows' Hawk jets has been a common piece of PR for the team, but Russell's report was one of such unbridled, infectious joy that you couldn't help joining in with her experience. Perhaps, now, it's hard to fully express in these words, but I did actually have a 'moment'. Partly it was down to the fact that whenever I see the Red Arrows I get a tiny bit emotional, perhaps inappropriately in a way I should with other more serious things with which I don't. But it was terrific television. Even knowing that Russell is, by background, an actress, it was genuine.

A lot of Blue Peter over the years hasn't always been so genuine. My first scoop as a journalist was tracking down the late John Noakes to a tiny theatre in Palmer's Green in London where he was appearing in panto. "You're not from the Daily Mail, are you?" he'd greeted me with, bitterly, the result of a particularly nasty hack job the newspaper had done on him some months before. In the end, the interview - for my first magazine, LM (resulting in my first ever cover story...) - was a shocking example of never meeting your heroes. Thanks to my dad, who had been a BBC cameraman, I often visited BBC Television Centre in Shepherd's Bush and saw shows like Blue Peter being recorded. In the run-up to Christmas, my dad would be involved in the All Star Record Breakers, a festive special of Roy Castle's show, in which all the then-stars of the BBC's children's output would feature in a big song-and-dance extravaganza. On these occasions, I'd been introduced to Blue Peter presenters of the time, like Lesley Judd and Peter Purves. Noakes - the show's scruffy-haired northerner during my childhood and its longest presenter - turned out to be a very different personality than that with which the Beeb had wanted Blue Peter presenters to be seen as being: "Oaahh - don't get me going about that bloody woman," was Noakes' response when I mentioned Biddy Baxter, Blue Peter's matriarchal editor from 1965 to 1988. Evidently, under her stewardship, Noakes had been sent on most of the dangerous stunts he'd done for the show - like climbing Nelson's Column and diving out of a plane with the Army's Red Devils parachute display team - without any form of insurance, only the goodwill of the BBC and the reputation of Blue Peter as the BBC's acclaimed, wholesome children's magazine to keep him safe.

As you can imagine, it shattered much of the decoration that had been built up around the show. To the 18-year-old me, it was a shocking first realisation that television and the media in general is, to a certain extent, a lot of make-believe. But, bringing it right up to date to the show's 60th anniversary, today, it's quite surprising that Russell got to go up in a Red Arrows jet in the first place. Because what relevance does a show conceived in the Reithian, Enid Blyton middle-classness of 1958 television still have in the age of kids being anything but characters out of The Famous Five?

It is, actually, quite reassuring that Blue Peter is still going, much as it's quite reassuring to discover that the Scout and Guide movements are actually thriving (noting that one former Chief Scout is ex-BP presenter Peter Duncan, and his latest successor is the adventurer Bear Grylls). Cleverly, it has been able to continue to engage children. Even in today's indifferent, too-cool-for-school digital age, the show received more than 100,000 letters last year - up from 40,000 in 2011. People still covet a Blue Peter badge, of which more than a million have been handed out over the show's lifetime, possibly to those desperate for free admission to tourist attractions. Celebrities who've received Blue Peter badges have included Hugh Jackman, Jessica Ennis-Hill, Madonna, Britney Spears, Justin Bieber and Morph. Yes, Tony Hart's plasticine character. Holders of the prestigious gold BP badge include the Queen, Prince William, David Beckham, Usain Bolt, David Attenborough, Tim Peake and Roald Dahl, though presumably none of them are that bothered by free entry to Madam Tussauds.

Over the 60 years there have been shared experiences amongst mine and subsequent generations: I still remember Valerie Singleton taking a lion cub from Chessington Zoo into a local newsagent in Malden Rushett in Surrey, and who can forget Lulu the elephant defecating all over the BP studio in muddy black and white, with Noakes, Purves and Singleton struggling to keep their composure. Animals have always been a BP staple. Yes, there was more than one Shep, Noakes' beloved collie, one of, officially, nine dogs, five tortoises, nine cats and two parrots. And there have been babies - the bizarre feature in which Blue Peter 'adopted' a baby, 14-week-old Daniel, in 1968 with the intention of showing viewers what it was like to have a baby brother or sister. Presenters Tina Heath and Liz Barker both had babies while working on the show, though thankfully not as a live feature, while presenter Janet Ellis would later become eclipsed by the fame of her daughter, Sophie Ellis-Bextor, who appeared on the show several times as a child.

We remember Anthea Turner doing a "make" of Thunderbirds' Tracy Island, prompting a meltdown as thousands of viewers wrote in for the instruction leaflet, which featured such BBC-friendly generic materials as a "grocery carton", "cereal pack cardboard" and the obligatory washing up liquid bottle. Such "makes" were first conceived in 1962 by a lady called Margaret Parnell, who'd sent in an idea and ended up spending the next 40 years coming up with 700 more, turning the phrase "sticky-backed plastic" into a household staple. Has anyone of my age not made a Blue Peter Advent Crown - a couple of wire coat hangers lashed together with "sticky tape", wrapped in tinsel and with a selection of highly flammable candles at each point to dangle worryingly over the family household insurance policy?

Over 60 years Blue Peter has, actually, done much to support the Reith vision of a "window on the world". Today, in an age when every panel show comedian has done at least one documentary in an exotic location, Blue Peter has the distinction of having brought the world to millions of British children via its annual "summer expeditions", which visited such exotica as Morocco and "Ceylon" as it was still known before Sri Lanka, and now-questionable states like Brunei and Zimbabwe. And where else would you have seen Tonga on national television, unless someone was following a member of the royal family there (let's face it, the only time you hear about Tonga is when a minor royal is on tour). Except for 1986 ("due to budget cuts") and 2011 ("due to the move to Salford"), Blue Peter has provided immeasurable education on the world over its lifetime, of a kind that t'Internet just can't replicate. Which is why I was so pleasantly surprised to see Russell - the show's 36th presenter - getting to fly with the Arrows. 60 years on, it was so perfectly Blue Peter. "The fact that I get to go lambing one week and literally flying with the Red Arrows the week after makes it the best job in the world," Russell recently enthused. But spare her giddiness - it's the fact that she takes children with her on these adventures that makes it the best job on telly.

Haters gonna hate

There are people I know who will never abide Phil Collins. Like, really hate the man. I've never been entirely sure what he’s done to deserve it, personally or otherwise. After all, he’s a perfectly affable bloke (though three wives - including the last, with whom he’s back again - might disagree...). But, the fact that Phil Collins is one of only three artists to have had sold more than 100 million albums as both band member and solo artist (the other two being Paul McCartney and Michael Jackson) would suggest, by definition, some degree of popularity. However, there are those who'll just never get along with him. Haters clearly are gonna hate. And this post just ain’t for them.

Collins himself readily accepts that he’s not to everyone's liking. Always a king of self-depreciation, he acknowledges in his highly entertaining - and characteristically frank - 2016 autobiography, Not Dead Yet that his ubiquity in the 1980s and '90s clearly led to familiarity breeding contempt. And he was everywhere: his own solo career taking off in 1981; fronting Genesis as it became a MTV-friendly, Van Halen-rivalling pop-rock monster in sharp contrast to their prog rock origins; singing, drumming and producing collaborations with the post-Led Zeppelin Robert Plant, ABBA's Frida, Paul McCartney, Adam Ant (yes, really), his great friend John Martyn, Earth Wind & Fire's Philip Bailey and many, many more. He even managed to play Live Aid twice, including a drumming set with Zeppelin that, in hindsight, appeared to have not been a great idea.

By the early 1990s Collins was as much a symbol of the age as bankers in red braces had been in the decade before. No coincidence, perhaps, that Patrick Bateman, the psychopath protagonist of Bret Easton Ellis' American Psycho is a fan, pontificating at length on Collins' career in the 1980s ("I thought it was quite funny," Collins has said of the book's film adaptation, "although I don’t know if it was meant to be. I don’t think [Bateman] being a psychopath and liking my music is linked – my music was just omnipresent in that era."). In some respects, Collins was the 1980s, or at least the musical embodiment of the decade. It began in January 1981 with a hissing drum machine and a simple, three-chord hum from a Prophet 5 keyboard. In The Air Tonight was and remains a remarkable song, on a par as an era keynote with Ultravox's Vienna, which was released on the same day. Both songs have mood and gloom (as well as a shared use of the Roland CR-78 drum machine), with one capturing the irreparable collapse of a marriage, the other, a fleeting affair. Only one, however, has that epic drum fill. It appears almost three-quarters of the way in (Collins' US record company had insisted that 'live' drums were added from the outset of the American single release) and, with its legendary 'gated reverb', set the tone for drums on pop records for the decade. Even today, In The Air Tonight is referenced to and even sampled by hip-hop artists. And how much more 1980s can you get than the song appearing in the first ever episode of Miami Vice (in a key scene in which Sonny Crockett's black Ferrari cruises down, appropriately, Miami's Collins Avenue)? The singer himself even landed a starring role in a later episode, playing the crooked game show host 'Phil The Shill'. The '80s, then, belonged to Phil Collins, but it wasn't just his music that became omnipresent, he did too, hobnobbing with Hollywood, picking up Emmy after Grammy after Oscar, and seemingly serving as Eric Clapton’s wingman, all slicked back hair and Versace shirts.

Success can be a strange mistress. Collins' fanbase, up until In The Air Tonight and the Face Value album it was recorded for, had hitherto been constructed exclusively of followers of Genesis who, until they'd had a hit with Follow You, Follow Me in 1978, had largely been long-haired men in army surplus greatcoats listening intensely. A hit attracted women to their concerts, as well as a wider American audience they'd previously only skimmed. With the album Duke and its short, punchy singles Turn It On Again and the Collins-written Misunderstanding (itself a nod to Toto's Hold The Line), the band's trajectory elevated. This ascent had not been without its cost - Collins' first marriage collapsed in the wake of relentless touring, although this led to the catharsis of bedroom-recorded demos that would later become the album Face Value, launching the solo career, launching Brand Collins.

The arc of this career is charted by Plays Well With Others, a four-disc box set which runs from his earliest recording, as a member of Flaming Youth, a constructed boy band that produced the one concept album Ark II in 1969, through side projects like the brilliant jazz-fusion band Brand X, work with Rod Argent and being loaned out by Genesis to work on Brian Eno's Another Green World (reciprocity for Eno contributing noises to the band's The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway album), and then the period when you couldn't turn on the radio without hearing something Collins had been involved in. One common thread throughout the last 40 years has been Collins' friendship with the late John Martyn, a relationship forged in the dissolving of their respective first marriages, writing together at Collins' cottage on the Surrey/Sussex borders, occasionally breaking off for bitter phone calls with estranged partners, before returning to work...or drink. For me, the various collaborations with Martyn are amongst the most enduring on Plays Well With Others: from Sweet Little Mystery from Martyn's Grace And Danger album to Could've Been Me and Suzanne from the trip-hop influenced And, and the posthumous Can't Turn Back The Years from the big man's final recording, Willing To Work. There was a genuine warmth to their relationship that comes across like no other in this collection.

Elsewhere, there are inclusions that might come as a surprise if you'd missed them first time around, such as Adam Ant's Puss 'N' Boots, Howard Jones' No One Is To Blame and Tears For Fears' Woman In Chains, on which all Collins provides his precise, melodic drumming, a signature feature to Band Aid's Do They Know It's Christmas?, also included. There is also the inclusion of Peter Gabriel's Intruder, a dark song about home invasion made darker by its thumping, cymbal-less drumming (Gabriel had instructed Collins to play without the punctuation of cymbals) in which that gated reverb made its debut, thanks to some experimentation by Collins and engineer Hugh Padgham. Consider this the source of the Nile.

Change can sit uncomfortably with music fans. Just look at how people reacted to Dylan when he went electric. Those who'd followed Genesis from the Gabriel-fronted era of epic, complicated songs like The Return Of The Giant Hogweed and the 23-minute Supper's Ready, struggled with both Collins' commercial success as a solo artist, as well as the nature of his solo music. When Genesis included Earth Wind & Fire's Phenix Horns brass section on the Abacab album, die hards were up in arms, and continued to blame Collins as the band increasingly went down the pop route (despite Mike Rutherford and Tony Banks being equally compliant in the direction). Collins' own argument has always been that people change: "You don't read the same books or wear the same clothes you did years ago," he would say, "so why should I expected to do the same music as I did back then [in his early Genesis era]. Here, though, is where my loyalty began to be tested. His solo albums, up until 1990's But Seriously were mostly brilliant, if - as in the case of No Jacket Required - of their time. But beyond that, not so much for me. Too much repetition, even the impression of a lack of effort (an unfair comment, but perceptions and all that). Collins' soundtrack to Disney's Tarzan, was a high point, if you like that sort of thing (and, again, you don't have to) which, like Elton John's The Lion King work, was perfect for the Disney genre. But, by this point, a duality emerged, two Phil Collins: the gifted, inventive drummer, and the Hollywood star.

For the former, Plays Well With Others offers plenty of examples of the gift, even on the all-star live charity performances, such as backing George Harrison, Clapton et al on the live version of While My Guitar Gently Weeps, singing and Ringo-drumming on Golden Slumbers, and the ultimate Beatle collaboration, drumming on Paul McCartney's Angry. However, the selection of charity gig supergroup work also includes The Bee Gees' You Win Again and, at The Party At The Palace, Annie Lennox's Why, Bryan Adams' Everything You Do and Joe Cocker's With A Little Help From My Friends, all of which seem little more than namedropping, even if they're simply examples of Collins fulfilling his teenage ambition to become just a jobbing drummer. More curious is There'll Be Some Changes Made with Tony Bennett, and Stormy Weather with Quincy Jones, examples of Collins' switch to big band jazz in the late 1990s, which included an acclaimed set at the Montreux Jazz Festival. There, just a few kilometres down the shore of Lake Geneva from his then-home, Collins did at least appear to drumming for fun, and the inclusion on Plays Well With Others of the staple Pick Up The Pieces and the Brand X track And So To F demonstrates what he did best before various physical ailments robbed him of his considerable ability on the skins.

Thus it's somewhat difficult to conclude who Plays Well With Others is aimed at or what it is trying to achieve, beyond providing a chronology of a near-50 year recording and performing career. There are curiosities that fans of one persuasion might find intriguing, such as Savannah Woman by the late Tommy Bolin or Al Di Meola's fusion-lite Island Dreamer; and there are somewhat stubborn attempts at proving Collins' unrecognised hipness, such as Lil' Kim's In The Air Tonight cover and a disappointing version of If Leaving Me Is Easy by The Isley Brothers.

As this post will hopefully convey, I've been an unashamed Collins fan for the last 40 years, when I bought the Genesis album ...And Then There Were Three, which opened up their back catalogue as well as his associations as a drummer and singer. Through him I became a huge fan of John Martyn - probably my favourite solo artist of all time (not hindered by the fact he was born in the same town as me), and cultivated curiosity in other artists and, even, genres. There's no doubting that Collins became a force majeure in the '80s and '90s and while his output was mostly impressive, Plays Well With Others highlights where quality control could have been applied on both the who and the what. To say Plays Well With Others is a mixed bag is an understatement but, going back to the Not Dead Yet book, it's very clear that the selection of tracks - good and bad - is a very personal statement. Perhaps he's demanding credibility, perhaps he's highlighting authenticity (which he has no need to do, to be honest). Perhaps he's reminding us that, before he 'went Hollywood', he was just a Chiswick schoolboy, child actor and fan of soul, R'n'B and beat music.

Ultimately, perhaps, this 59-track compilation serves as a settlement to the arguments some put forward about Phil Collins: clearly a good bloke, often under-appreciated as a truly talented drummer (up there with Moon and Bonham, both of whom he came close to posthumously replacing), and undoubtedly heartfelt as a songwriter and a singer, but whose work ethic led to overexposure, which in turn bred the kind of vitriol flung at him even now. You can't turn back the years, as he sung with John Martyn, but there are times when even I as a fan would have preferred Collins to have said no, rather than yes. At least, then, Plays Well With Others provides the argumentation for that dialogue. Perhaps that was its intent.

Still loving the alien...just

There was a Damascene moment in the lifetime of this blog's predecessor when I realised that What Would David Bowie Do?, as it was called, hadn't done much on David Bowie himself. By the time that realisation had been fully met, it was too late. Bowie was dead.

Two and a half years after his death, there is no lessening of Bowie activities to report on, thankfully. On 30 November, Glastonbury 2000 will be released, for the first time presenting - as a double CD, triple vinyl or DVD - The Dame's legendary headline set at Worthy Farm in 2000, a performance regarded by many as one of the festival's finest-ever Sunday night closing shows, and a virtual greatest hits performance (see also the Reality Tour album and DVD - easily Bowie at his most carefree). On top of this, the BBC has just announced David Bowie: The First Five Years, the final part in a trilogy of posthumous documentaries and one that will explore the formative years before David Robert Jones from Bromley became David Bowie. BBC2 will broadcast the film next year, coinciding with the 50th anniversary of Space Oddity.

For now, however, we have David Bowie - Loving The Alien (1983-1988). Released yesterday, it's the fourth in a series of box sets chronologically reissuing Bowie's albums (the others so far being Five Years (1969-1973), Who Can I Be Now? (1974-1976), and A New Career In A New Town (1977-1982) ), throwing additional exclusive material into the mix. Of course, these box sets are for the completist - any self-regarding Bowie fan would already own these albums - but in the case of this latest package, covering easily Bowie's weakest output (or, put it another way, his most commercial), affords the opportunity for some revisionism.

Let's Dance, the Nile Rogers-produced, does-what-it-says-on-the-tin boogiefest leads off the box set, but it is the following Serious Moonlight live album that will be the most enticing from that 1983-84 period. Less so, possibly by a considerable margin, will be Tonight. Produced by Hugh Padgham, then in vogue for his work with The Police, Phil Collins and Genesis, it remains a somewhat soapy album. The single Blue Jean will never be regarded in the same breath as classic Bowie hits, while Loving The Alien does have a lugubrious charm. However, as Bowie himself testified, Tonight was an unhappy experience all round, and it showed.

Things didn't really improve in 1987 with Never Let Me Down, an ironic title if ever there was one. "My nadir," Bowie described it in 1995, adding "It was such an awful album." Critics agreed, but there is fresh interest with a "brand new production"of the album included in the box set and featuring new new instrumentation by the likes of guitarist Reeves Gabrels (who joined Bowie in Tin Machine) and bassist Tim Lefebvre, who was part of the New York jazz collective to play on Blackstar. If nothing else, the reworking will address a once-expressed desire by Bowie himself, "Oh, to redo the rest of that album". Of mixed emotion for me will be the live album from the 'Glass Spider Tour' that promoted Never Let Me Down. I went to see the messy, over-complicated Glass Spider show at Wembley Stadium. Being Wembley in the British summer, I took an oversized golf umbrella. When it started to rain, as it usually did, a couple of girls asked if they could share the covering. Unbeknownst to me, one of the girls - with whom I'd hoped to have been on a promise - had been drinking and promptly threw up copiously over my box-fresh All-Stars, thus ensuring a 10-yard exclusion zone for the rest of the afternoon. I may need to skip this entry in the new package.

As with the previous Bowie boxes there are a couple of discs featuring alternative versions of singles and album tracks, as well as music from the film projects Bowie was involved in during the mid-80s, Labrynth, Absolute Beginners and the Raymond Briggs nuclear holocaust tale, When The Wind Blows. As is obligatory, there's a luxurious booklet with both the CD and vinyl packages, featuring
previously unpublished photos by Denis O’Regan, Greg Gorman, Herb Ritts and others, as well as  technical notes about the albums from their producers including Rodgers, Padgham, Mario McNulty and Justin Shirley-Smith.

At £99 for the CD package, Loving The Alien is just about justifiable, but probably only for...well, me, essentially. It's hard, really, to see how the period covered truly adds to the Bowie oeuvre. The '70s output, from Hunky Dory through to the Berlin trilogy, really delivered the Bowie legend, of experiment, of swagger, of rock'n'roll as high art. And, like many of Bowie's contemporaries (Elton John comes to mind), the rate of output during this period was extraordinary, especially when you consider that Let's Dance came out only 14 years after Space Oddity. It was, though, an unashamed pop album, blessed with hits like the title track and China Girl, but could easily be viewed as the star taking his foot off the creative pedal. It would take the purgatorial diversion of Tin Machine to see Bowie start to reapply the invention that made him in the first place, with the mid/late-90s output of Outside, Earthling, Hours and, into the new Millennium, Heathen and Reality, surely enticements for the next Bowie box set to come.