The 21st Century Model T Ford

Picture: Apple

The date when, arguably, face-to-face conversation ended was 9 January, 2007. It was the date when the television set, as the “electronic hearth” of collective family engagement, ground to a halt. It was when the morning commute (remember that?) became a head-hunched, spinal strain-inducing exercise in what we British islanders, in particular, do better than anyone else - social avoidance. Because that was the day Steve Jobs introduced, with customary understatement, “a revolutionary and magical product" that he claimed was "literally five years ahead" of any rival: the iPhone. 

Apple’s press release on the day said that it combined three products: the aforementioned phone plus “a widescreen iPod with touch controls, and a breakthrough Internet communications device with desktop-class email, Web browsing, searching and maps.” There was also an “entirely new user interface based on a large multi-touch display and pioneering new software, letting users control [it] with just their fingers,” adding that it ushered in “an era of software power and sophistication never before seen in a mobile device, which completely redefines what users can do on their mobile phones.”

This was peak dream-weaving Jobs. As Apple had done with the iMac in the previous decade and indeed the iPod in 2001, they’d taken an existing concept and made it desirable and cool. The iPhone was certainly not the first smartphone (anyone working in the corporate world would have already endured years of BlackBerry envy as they were provided to more anointed colleagues), nor was it the first touchscreen-enabled gadget. But, Jobs’ spin notwithstanding, for once, the tech marketing cliché “revolutionary” was broadly applicable. 

In addition to cellular connectivity and the music player, what really drove the revolution was the iPhone’s ability to carry a vast array of native software applications, a statement in itself, given how “app” has established itself in the common lexicon. In fact, those colourful app icons we tap on our smartphones are as significant as the expensive hardware they're downloaded onto. In old(ish) money, Uber or Deliveroo would be regarded as online destinations, but we all use them as physical services that just happen to be accessed through an app on our phones. 

Today, nearly 90% of British adults own a smartphone, with ownership in older demographics notably increasing during 2020, most likely because of lockdown necessitating connectivity. Despite their upfront cost - a full-specced iPhone 12, bought outright, will set you back just under £1000 - they have become indispensable, but they can, too, be easily be taken for granted. They are, despite their form factor, highly sophisticated computing devices equipped, invariably, with camera technology to rival that from the big names in photography. One common trope, however, is that the smartphone in your pocket is more powerful than the technology that landed Apollo 11 on the moon, which is a fallacious comparison, given that NASA was working with beyond-state of the art capabilities in 1969. But it’s not a bad way of looking at the sheer power today’s smartphones represent, and the - still - unprecedented functions they perform.

This forms the core of Always On: Hope And Fear In The Social Smartphone Era, a new book by Rory Cellan-Jones, the BBC’s technology editor, and someone who was there where it all began. In fact, when it began. Recalling that Jobs press event early in 2007, Rory went on to compare, on the BBC, the new Apple phone to the Model T Ford in terms of its potential impact. Viewers complained that he’d given a commercial launch too much prominence on the BBC’s ad-free airwaves, and even Rory himself was initially worried that he’d gone “over the top”. But on later reflection, he felt totally vindicated, writing on the tenth anniversary of the launch that it had truly been a “moment in history”, heralding “the key transformative technology of the last decade, putting powerful computers in the hands of more than two billion people and disrupting all sorts of industries.” Rory expounds on this shift in the book, discussing how Apple's effective invention of the smartphone founded entire industries and economic ecosystems. I was working at Philips at the time of the iPhone launch, and as its evolution began, it became apparent that it wouldn’t just eclipse the predominant handsets from Nokia, Motorola and others, but posed an existential threat to PC manufacturers and consumer electronics brands as well. Over time, the smartphone would become your TV set, your home cinema, you music system and its content library, and - crucially in its development, Rory points out - your camera (a moot point with me, given the forest of phones you have to peer through at gigs…). 

But, Always On also argues, the smartphone didn’t just become a replacement for a multitude of devices. It also turned “software” into “app”, the word even your granny is now familiar with. How many times a day do you interact with an app, or hear the word? Even freedom to travel might soon be facilitated by the NHS app, acting as a Covid passport. So, when you combine the hardware, the software, the functionality, the connectivity, the rise of social media and the innovation of app developers (even the term “swipe right” has entered popular convention thanks to Tinder), you can begin to appreciate the enormity of what that rectangular box in your pocket represents.

Always On delves deeply into the smartphone's social impact, not just focusing on the consolidation of consumer electronics into a single device, but on the global impact of digital engagement facilitated by it, as our “hyperconnected” society lives and breathes on social media, elects governments, supports economies, finds people jobs (and loses them through misuse…) and more. Rory even draws on the role the smartphone plays in healthcare, given how the NHS app was placed front-and-centre in the fight against COVID-19. My own company, Vodafone, helped develop an app called DreamLab, which enables Imperial College London to effectively crowd source the immense computing power of dormant smartphones at night to dramatically shorten the number of thousands of hours required by human research into developing therapies for cancer and the coronavirus. 

Rory Cellan-Jones

Rory, however, has an even more personal health connection with the smartphone: a couple of years ago, while doing a live demonstration of 5G technology on BBC Breakfast News, viewers noted a tremor in his right hand. Unbeknownst to all but a few friends and colleagues, he’d been diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease some months before. Shortly afterwards he revealed on Twitter what he’d been going through: “It was a vivid example of the positive side of what this book describes as the social smartphone era,” he writes. He says we’re now immersed in an era in which technology has become personal, in which these devices enable us to connect with “friends, strangers, celebrities and even Presidents and Prime Ministers via new networks which appeared to democratise communication.” There is, though, a negative side to this - an acute example being the recent football boycott of social media, the result of the repugnant racist, sexist and homophobic abuse that some players of both genders have had to endure - but Rory hopes that his book faithfully examines the positives of what smartphone technology has done for individuals and society in general, as much as its dark side.

To return, though, to my introduction to this post, there is still a residue of old farts who look upon the revolution that Jobs’ heralded as the start of a societal breakdown that will never be repaired. The response to such arguments is always ‘do you want to go back to how it was?’ (i.e. outdoor toilets, steam trains, ‘the wireless’, etc). “We have a slightly problematic nostalgia that romanticises the past,” Professor Daniel Miller, leader of a 16-month international anthropology study into smartphone use told The Times recently. “TV was way more passive,” he added. “Smartphones are far more interactive and far more social. So why is that a loss?”. Miller and his colleagues argue that the Internet has, rather than creating digital zombies, brought society together. The problem, they say, is that digital connectivity has also brought down divisions within individual households. We’ve all done it: we’ve all sat there as families, idly thumbing through our phones while half watching something on TV.

Rory Cellan-Jones’ original thesis that Steve Jobs produced a Model T Ford for the 21st century with the iPhone shouldn’t be in any doubt. But, says Miller, it comes at a social price. “At any point, whether over a meal, a meeting or other shared activity, a person we’re with can just disappear, having ‘gone home’ to their smartphone,” he said in The Times interview. It’s almost, he believes, as if the smartphone has become too ubiquitous. “We have become human snails carrying our home in our pockets,” Miller and his colleagues write in their study, going so far as saying that we spend more time ‘in’ our phones than in our own homes. Moreover, they contest, the smartphone now plays such a fundamental role in how we engage with our families, friends, colleagues, celebrities, politicians and anyone else we can just ping on WhatsApp, the technology has virtually become as basic a form of human communication as talking. That, though, is nothing new. Almost every form of technology communication is accused of supplanting something else.

Which is what makes Rory’s book so engrossing. As the BBC’s primary technology correspondent since January 2007, and indeed the week when Jobs strode the Moscone Center stage, replete in trademark polo neck, stonewashed Levi’s and New Balance trainers, he has reported on every gadget, trend, startup, collapse, innovation and outbreak of industry hyperbole since. And when you put it all into perspective, you’d struggle to disagree with the central belief that Always On entertainingly proffers, that most of those “breakthroughs” my peers in technology PR peddle don’t even come close to the smartphone. 

The telephone is generally regarded as one of humankind's greatest creations, after the printing press, the electric light and industrial manufacturing. I’d argue that, given that it is more than just a mobile phone, the smartphone might one day find itself up there in the same pantheon of achievement.

Always On: Hope And Fear In The Social Smartphone Era by Rory Cellan-Jones is published tomorrow,  13 May, by Bloomsbury

Brighton rock: Royal Blood’s Typhoons

If ever there was an example of FOMO, it was the Twitter post earlier this week by friends of mine moseying around ‘The Lanes’ of Brighton. Because not only has my recent unplanned hospital sojourn curtailed most aspects of normal life (coming on top of the curtailment we’ve all been through these last 14 months), it prevented me from doing exactly what my friends did, and walking through the front doors of shops and cafes in Brighton’s gentle Georgian backstreets. Actually, it was the sight of them browsing in one of southern England’s best record shops that set off my FOMO big time. 

This was the second positive thing to come out of the delightful Sussex seaside town this week, the other being the release of Typhoons, the third album from the Brighton-based Royal Blood, and one which takes their formula into somewhat new territory without straying too far from the overdriven-bass funk-rock of their self-titled 2014 debut and its 2017 follow-up How Did We Get So Dark?. 

It’s a shift that sees Mike Kerr and Ben Thatcher switch on the glitterball and have a crack at applying their trademark sound to the dance floor. This isn’t, evidently, a continuation of last year’s pandemic-reaction mini disco revival by Kylie, Dua Lipa, Charli XCX and others, but in part the result of the duo wishing to give their music a bit more colour, and in part, Kerr getting giving up drink and recreational drugs. “My life had become unmanageable,” he said in a Facebook post, reflecting on two years of sobriety. “Had I not done this, this album would not exist along with lots of other things I dread to think about. I came out of the dark and into the light and this is exactly what this album represents. No matter how bad the storm, all things must pass.” 

Perhaps Typhoons’ exuberance can be put down to the moment of clarity Kerr reached, setting out with Thatcher to tapping their shared love of Goldfrapp and Daft Punk, making a “a very confident and joyous leap forwards” in the process. Nowhere is this more apparent than the single Boilermaker, co-produced by Josh Homme and Paul Epworth which, during pre-lockdown live previews proved to be an instant crowd pleaser. Actually, now I know the Homme connection, the more I recognise the familiarity with Queens Of The Stone Age’s groovier moments. Critics in search of a label with this album will probably have to go round the houses trying to find one. Opener (and the album’s first single) Trouble’s Coming sets the tone with something that could be likened to a heavier version of The Power Station, while Limbo - seemingly a confession by Kerr on wondering how he managed to wake up each morning after caning it the night before - takes some of the rock’n’boogie of Zeppelin’s Dancing Days in its dance floor swagger. 

If there was one valid criticism of Royal Blood’s first two albums it was that they remained fairly fixed in their formula. Like Ben Folds eschewing traditional rock guitar for heavily distorted piano, Kerr had done the same with the bass, cleverly reinventing the instrument (or, perhaps, showing a player like Flea what a bass guitar could really do) to drive the band’s sound, not as its rhythmic foundation but as its melodic heartbeat. Not that Typhoons is a single-track road: there are hints to pysch-rock, Motown string sections, the universal disco reference point of Chic and, yes, the aforementioned Daft Punk. And there is also the closing track, All We Have Is Now, which is more piano ballad than anything else, with the ivory-tinkling underscoring the most personal, reflective lyrics on the album: “If nothing lasts forever/And no one makes it out alive/I wanna spend our lives together/While we have the time”.

Typhoons might be mostly Kerr’s personal look back over his recent journey, but together with Thatcher they’ve produced an album that captures the mood we all should be feeling right now. I, if I wasn’t under medical instructions to remain immobile for a few weeks, would be cutting a rug to it. But, perhaps more importantly, it’s a statement of just how far the Brighton duo have moved on, continuing to reinvent the rock genre in the way that they were wowing festival crowds before The Great Plague came along, but also throwing off whatever baggage - intensely personal or creatively - that might have impeded them in the past.

Ticket to ride: The Coral return

It is the 5th of May. Spring has technically been with us since the end of March, but at the beginning of this week Britain experienced the coldest May Day bank holiday in a generation. Last night, the Etihad Stadium was coated in wintry hail. It still feels like the central heating needs to be on. 

Thoughts of a holiday somewhere more temperate continue to be dashed by that damn coronavirus and the convoluted rules restricting anyone from sensibly booking a holiday for fear of not being let back in. In fact, for the second year running, a holiday somewhere involving my dust-collecting passport seems as far away as ever. Couple all this with the fact that, post-foot surgery, I’m confined to the sofa, effectively still under lockdown, despite pubs, shops, swimming pools and all the rest being open again. I have never been in greater desperate need of escape.

Relief is at hand, thankfully, in the form of Coral Island, the bright, sparkling, nostalgia-laden trip back in time from The Coral. Drawing unashamedly from the same palette that decorated Crosby, Stills and Nash at their most whimsical (Our House), the Small Faces’ semi-psychedelic Ogdens’ Nut Gone Flake or even, at an aural squint, The Beatles’ Penny Lane, Coral Island takes a thematic trip to an imaginary seaside resort, replete with funfair rides and, generally speaking, a carefree, jolly day out for everyone. And it is utterly delightful. 

It is also highly ambitious, at 24 tracks long - an unashamed double concept album in old money, not that you’ll have much issue with the length, the ambition or the music. Ah, the concept album: while the likes of Pink Floyd’s The Wall or The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway by Genesis might be the examples cited by critics of the form, it shouldn’t be forgotten that many’s the record with a narrative thread running right through it. Pet Sounds, London Calling, The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars - the list of classics is endless, but the genre hasn’t been totally consigned to the heritage trail. So why now? ‘Why not?’, say The Coral, happy to challenge conventions by putting out a double-concept in the age of pic’n’mix streaming and audience attention spans apparently unwilling to commit to anything more than individual songs, rather than sustained album consumption, and certainly not a collection of almost an hour’s worth of material.

Radical as that might sound, there is some unwitting logic behind it. The audience is both captive right now but also desperate for escapism, and what better route out of COVID confinement than an album of such joyous sentimentality as Coral Island. Over its two discs, the album captures the two sides of a seaside resort: the boisterous summer months of excited children, organ music and ice cream, and then the downbeat winter period, with the fairground rides covered up and just the sound of seagulls piercing the tourist-free air. It’s theatre of the mind, to some extent, with the music driving the mood and frontman James Skelly’s 85-year-old grandfather providing spoken interludes in much the same manner as Stanley Unwin did on the aforementioned Small Faces opus.

So, what makes it such a pleasing excursion? Coral Island is gentle theatre, all acoustic guitars and blended harmonies, giving it a folky feel without descending into the faux street busking of the Mumford clan. More importantly, it’s the combination of the music and the lyrical scene-painting that makes it so enjoyable, whether the melancholia of Summertime reflecting on fairground arcades, or Mist On The River evoking teenage frustrations of summer love going unrequited. Old Photographs blatantly breaks out the Werther’s Originals for a sepia-tinged vignette of yesterday, while Autumn Has Come almost celebrates the end of the summer season that Take Me Back To The Summertime harks after.

I sincerely hope that I get a summer holiday this year and, in particular, get to see somewhere with azure seas and sandy beaches. That, you can safely conclude, is not going to be on these shores, not even Cornwall. But as over-privileged a statement as that is, you could do worse than to take a trip to Coral Island, to escape to a place that does still exist, and does still fulfil its purpose. The Coral may be tapping into childhoods lost (or, simply imagined), but after the year we’ve all had, they’ve delivered a delightful break from reality. 

Calm yourself fella - it's just telly!

There was a time when the man on the Clapham omnibus was the gauge of popular arbitration, but today that role is taken by Twitter. Which is why, barely minutes after last night’s Line Of Duty finale, the show was trending like a particularly virulent rash. 

To say the ending of Jed Mercurio’s police procedural met with a mixed response would be something of an understatement, but on reflection, it had been building to a denouement that could have gone in any direction. Even if TV logic is that the crowd must always be pleased, and any whodunnit ends with a big reveal and a belligerent “I would have got away with it if it wasn't for you meddling kids”, Mercurio's masterpiece has consistently defied convention and gone out of its way to baffle and, even, infuriate.

After seven, utterly compelling weeks, he ended our collective misery by somewhat resolving not only the sixth season, but the many spaghetti strands that had threaded unanswered through all six series of, arguably, the most addictive television series in a generation. Crucially, however, several ends were left open. In the process, there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth as the big reveal, the unmasking of the super villain supposedly orchestrating all the bad stuff for nine years turned out to be monumental dimwit Buckells. As Steve Arnott remarks when the so-called fourth “H” is finally identified, he'd been “hiding in plain sight”. “All the time we were sitting here thinking we were chasing a criminal mastermind, but no,” says Ted Hastings. “Your corruption was mistaken for incompetence.”

There is some precedent for such a character: Gus Frings, Giancarlo Esposito’s character in Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, manages to be a mild-mannered fried chicken chain manager by day and an utterly ruthless methamphetamine kingpin by night. See also Keyser Söze in The Usual Suspects. Buckells, on the other hand, managed to be so incredibly stupid that it was hard to imagine how he’d risen through the ranks to become a superintendent without someone’s guiding hand. After all, you’d question whether his serial misspelling of “definately” would have escaped the notice of his performance reviewers. Even though, during his interrogation scene last night (Mercurio and director Jennie Darnell top-trolling us with with Buckells' long drawn-out arrival at AC-12 in which we only saw someone in a prison sweatshirt and handcuffs, and a lot of knowing glances as he approached the ‘glass box’), he went from nervous “no comment” responses to a more confident assertion: “You lot treat everyone like mugs. Who’s the mug now?”. Still, though, there was no sense that Buckells wasn’t anything more than a muppet being played by some higher authority. Just think of that scene in his prison cell when slimy lawyer Jimmy Lakewell was garrotted in front of him, to his clear distress. That was not the response of a ruthless, cat-stroking, hollowed out volcano-dwelling master villain.

Public Dimwit No.1 - Ian Buckells
Picture: BBC

And here’s where there is justification to the claims that Mercurio failed to resolve Line Of Duty in any meaningful way last night. If Buckells was the OCG's supremo, then we’ve all been wasting our time over multiple series. More aggravation was to come with absolutely no revelation about dodgy Chief Constable Philip Osborne, whose possible guilt had been alluded to from the outset of Season 6 with some of the pre-publicity, or indeed his wouldn’t-trust-them-as-far-as-you-could-throw-them underlings, Deputy Chief Constable Andrea Wise, or the insanely passive-aggressive Patricia Carmichael. But here, though, is where I strongly believe that Mercurio has been quite royally taking the piss. And it’s also why people shouldn’t be losing their sense of humour, either. Because if you take a somewhat perverse view of it, Line Of Duty has, simply, been ridiculous fun. Yes, it has, on final reflection, felt like something of a parable to contemporary events, with the undercurrent of murky goings on at the very top, but at the end of the day, it has always been a police procedural. Not since the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s has real police corruption been as institutionalised as Line Of Duty has portrayed (BBC2’s excellent series, Bent Coppers: Crossing The Line Of Duty, which ran concurrently, skillfully documented just how bad things once got within the Met), but then that wasn’t the point. This was Cluedo, Columbo and The Masked Singer on a different scale. Each week, Mercurio applied more twists and turns than the Nürburgring, throwing in red herrings and intricate plot combinations that related to a master story arc that has spanned all six seasons. He was, in many respects, just messing with us.

And still is. The absence of full resolution last night has enticingly left things open for a seventh series. No one - Mercurio, the cast, the BBC - is yet talking about one (The Sun today claims that Martin Compston is only halfway-through a new two-series contract for the show) - but with so many planted seeds left unflowered, you wouldn’t bet against ultimate resolution being addressed. Not only to see Osborne, Wise or Carmichael brought down, but the role of widow Steph Corbett made more clear, or the possibility of potentially iffy detective Chris Lomax unveiled as another OCG plant, or even more to be made of Jimmy Nesbitt’s bizarre photographic turn-only as corrupt ex-copper Marcus Thurwell. And what about junior detective Chloe Bishop? The AC-12 member who actually seemed to do most of the hard work, and yet so little is known of her, least of which whether she could still be the Chloe who was the eldest daughter of DCI Tony Gates, chief antagonist of Season 1.

There is a chance that Mercurio left things so infuriatingly up in the air deliberately. Why is obviously unknown. One theory (well, my theory) is that he simply wants us to make up our own minds. This is how David Chase ended The Sopranos: Tony, Carmela, Meadow and Anthony Jr. meeting in a diner, the door opens, Tony looks up and the scene fades to black, followed by Journey’s Don’t Stop Believin’. Pound-for-pound, television’s greatest series ended with television’s greatest ever scene. Line Of Duty appeared to conclude with somewhat similar ambiguity. A few minutes before the end, the mood changed. Steve and Kate met for a pint. And then the epilogue revealed Jo Davidson to be in witness protection with a new lover and a dog, living in a generously-proportioned chocolate box house in the wilds of somewhere. The cuckooed Terry Boyle was moved into to a home. The wronged Farida Jatri returned to duty at that notorious nest of vipers, Hillside Lane nick (yep, another “H”...). Darren Hunter was finally brought in for the racist murder of Lawrence Christopher. Closure, but not quite. Hastings took the down elevator to retirement, the guilt of causing John Corbett’s brutal murder unloaded onto Patricia Carmichael, now the empress of anti-corruption and yet with a lot of questions to answer about her own motivation. 

Most heinous of all, Osborne - the nasty piece of work from Season 1, who, as a Chief Inspector, had instructed his officers to lie over a mistaken police shooting - is still swanning about as top cop of Central Police. “I give you my personal assurance that any failings in the original inquiry will be thoroughly investigated,” he gloats to the TV cameras on the steps of police headquarters. “Lessons will be learned. Throughout my career, whenever I’ve encountered wrongdoing, I’ve acted. But let me be clear: these are the misdeeds of a few rotten apples. And to invoke institutionalised police corruption is an outrageous lie and an insult to my officers. The public don’t want police officers to be held to account for every little thing they’re meant to have done. They want us to get on with the job, and that’s what we will do.” As he says this, Hastings looks crestfallen. Even Carmichael looks conflicted. “Currently AC-12’s powers to curb wrongdoings in public office have never been weaker,” is the simple strapline running across the screen as the title music and end credits roll. Ambiguous with a capital A. “Currently”. Think about that.

Picture: BBC

If there is to be a seventh series, there would clearly be much to end it with. My view is that Mercurio has effectively left the BBC with no other option than to commission one more run, such are the number of open ends to be resolved to the public’s satisfaction, and to possibly avoid civil unrest. Trial by Twitter is a terrible thing, but whatever the opinion on last night’s finale, there’s no denying that Line Of Duty has got the nation talking. That’s no idle remark. Newspapers don’t devote acres of space to something if it’s not of public interest, so when you even get the broadsheets devoting copious column inches to writing about the show, you know that it has achieved maximum Zeitgeist. Even the curmudgeons moaning about everyone going on about the final episode can’t ignore the fact that…everyone is going on about the final episode. The BBC has a very unique property on his hands, and with audience numbers weekly reaching more than 50% of the viewership at 9pm on a Sunday night, even an underwhelming final episode has generated insane amounts of publicity that most other drama series can only dream of. It would do well to think carefully about its next move.

Line Of Duty began in 2012 on BBC2 as an obscure midweek drama. In its sixth series, whose production was interrupted by the pandemic, it has provided further escapist claustrophobia at a time when the nation is just starting to emerge from lockdown. It would be a bold claim to say that it has brought the country together, but there’s no denying that it has, over the past seven Sundays, elicited a mass conversation amongst families, friends, WhatsApp groups and strangers alike. Whatever your opinion of the finale, can you remember anything that has brought so many of us together in collective discourse, frothing over what was, at the end of the day, just a bit of Sunday night telly? Absurd when you think about it. But what a lot of fun it’s been.

Chaos theory

Picture: Jessica Taylor/Twitter/@Jess__Taylor__

I would normally run a country mile to stay out of politics, but having been confined to a hospital bed for the last 19 days, with only Sky News and reruns of Minder to occupy the mind, it’s been hard not to be absorbed by the maelstrom consuming Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson. His defensive line, and that of the ministerial stooges sent out to bat for him, has been that the rows over how the Downing Street flat redecoration was paid for, whether or not he'd allegedly said “let the bodies pile high in their thousands” to avoid another lockdown, the Dyson text affair and even the Greensill lobbying scandal, are all of little national consequence. Johnson and his acolytes, whenever pressed, have pushed the message that outside the Westminster bubble none of this political ‘rough and tumble’ counts, and that most people are more interested in their COVID jabs and getting a holiday abroad this year.

Westminster is, I’d agree, invariably an introspective pit of self-absorbtion. One of the most bizarre aspects of the government response to the pandemic has been the Downing Street press conferences, wherein Boris or the minister-du-jour gives a scripted speech, hands over to the experts for slides, then invites a couple of pre-recorded questions from Joe Public before facing scrutiny from the working media. Those with a mistrust of journalists have objected to the provocative questioning from heavyweight, if divisive, politicos like the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg or Sky’s Beth Rigby, regarding them as irrelevant when pitched after enquiries from regular folk about when they’ll be able to hug Granny again. But as self-serving as the media scrutiny can be, the chaos currently surrounding Boris underlines the fundamental importance of being able to hold politicians to account.

When you take a step back from the micro dramas swirling around Johnson, a picture emerges of a character whose leadership appears pinned to charisma alone, rather than any discernible management skill. For as long as he's been in public office, his blathering, Eton-educated P.G.Wodehouse persona depicted in his hapless guest hosting experience of Have I Got News For You? has projected a form of eccentricity that has masked whatever strength he might actually bring to the party. Moreover, it has certainly exposed his myriad weaknesses. But something got him into power; something has appealed to voters, repeatedly, to get him elected, first as an MP, then mayor of London, and latterly prime minister. Even factoring in the Brexit pledge that was central to his 2019 general election victory, you have to conclude that the public is either enamoured by Johnson’s appeal or brazenly immune to his deficiencies.

Picture: Jessica Taylor/Twitter/@Jess_Taylor_

Read any profile of Boris and the image of a bumbling but slightly endearing prat has been his perennial schtick. I encountered him myself in Copenhagen a few years ago when I was attending the COP17 climate change conference, and he was there as London mayor. Unlike the pomp and ceremony that accompanied Barrack Obama (who flew in on Air Force One with the usual presidential entourage and city-wide security lockdown), or even Prince Charles, who turned up with a vast supporting army including his own film crew, I ran into Boris shuffling about on his own, anorak and copious backpack making him look more like a misplaced tourist at Kings Cross station. There are stories aplenty of his financial woes and frugality, though this seems more about disorganisation rather than any fundamental regard for economy. As editor of The Spectator, Johnson reportedly asked interns to fetch him vending machine coffees without paying for them. Another story, concerning a dinner for former Daily Telegraph editor Bill Deedes, saw Boris allegedly welch on the £40 everyone had been asked to cough up to cover the bill. Such fiscal absent mindedness is matched by the dysfunction in Johnson’s private life, what with claims of serial womanising - inside and outside of marriage - and questions about how many children he has actually fathered. Again, this can be regarded as tittle-tattle, irrelevant to professional performance, but without taking a moralising tone, you start to accumulate a picture of someone singularly incapable of running a bath, let alone the country.

Hypothetically, transplant Boris out of public life and into the private sector: if he was the CEO of a quoted company it would be hard to imagine any board of directors having much stomach for the drip-drip-drip of reputation-damaging antics. Some CEOs sort of get away with apparent zaniness - Richard Branson and Ryanair’s Michael O’Leary spring instantly to mind - but while the photo ops might be good for PR, reputation matters. Attritional reputational damage can, over time, erode a brand, impacting both investor and consumer sentiment (viz. G. Ratner). I’ve worked professionally in this area a long time, and have been embroiled in various exercises in damage-limitation, though thankfully, nothing along the same lines that 10 Downing Street and Conservative Central Office will be enduring right now. My experience has been mostly confined to addressing media speculation about M&A gossip and the occasional executive slip-up. If done right, corporate communications functions are well prepared. Own goals can mostly be avoided, even if that means putting up executives who have been media trained to within an inch of their lives. Authenticity does count, as does honesty. In a crisis the advice is always to get your arms around the problem quickly, and to communicate 'little and often'. That does not seem to be the approach being applied by Boris. The chaos that has, for as long as he’s been in the public eye, surrounded him like the dust cloud around Pig-Pen in the Peanuts cartoons, has been allowed to develop. Perhaps deliberately, as if to project some sort of flawed genius, but we’re now at a point where all these streams of dysfunction are meeting at the same delta. We’ve gone from ‘wacky Boris’, dangling from a zipwire in a publicity stunt for the 2012 Olympics, to own goals that seriously question his integrity, and which are not being resolved by obfuscation and the defensive line that no-one outside Westminster cares about it all.

Richard Nixon was ultimately undone by Watergate. The very real prospect of Boris being undone by the relative triviality of new wallpaper is ridiculous. It is now being seen, on top of the ‘bodies’ story and the Greensill claims, as being the worst of his offences and, now the Electoral Commission has stepped in, even raising the prospect of criminal charges if it is found that Johnson has breached rules of disclosure. No one can deny a prime minister the right to customise their home above the shop (and everyone entering the office gets a £30,000 grant to do so), but without knowing who commissioned what, to be undone by claims of “illegal” donations for having the flat tarted up is farcical self-injury. But, then, it does fit in to another pattern of behaviour - Boris’s love of vanity projects. As London mayor he spaffed millions on the failed ‘garden bridge’ project and plans for the ‘Boris Island’ airport in the Thames Estuary. As prime minister, he’s spent £2.5 million on a new press conference suite in Downing Street in the middle of the COVID-induced financial crisis, while there are strong rumours that he wants to commission a replacement for the royal yacht Britannia as a platform for driving international trade. Then there was the expensive repainting of one of the RAF’s Voyager tanker-cum-transport aircraft so that it flies the flag, Air Force One-style, when shipping VIPs abroad (meaning that when the plane is on military refuelling duties, it’s bright white colour scheme with red-white-and-blue tail fin is in stark contrast to the standard grey paint for the RAF’s combat aircraft). All PR stunts, to some extent.

Picture: Jessica Taylor/Twitter/@Jess_Taylor_

Are all these items erroneous? Not necessarily, but they still point to a Boris Johnson more concerned with trivialities than more important matters of state. And the fact that some of them harm or at least bruise his reputation goes hand in hand with other weaknesses in his leadership, not the least of which being the assembly of a Cabinet populated by lightweights like Priti Patel, Gavin Williamson, Grant Shapps and Liz Truss, plus the walking anachronism that is Jacob Rees-Mogg. All were seemingly appointed in reward for their Brexit loyalty rather than any notable administrative quality. And, then, there was the appointment and staunch endorsement of Dominic Cummings, even through the Barnard Castle debacle seriously undermined Johnson’s own “Stay home. Protect the NHS. Save lives” slogan.

Again, to make the corporate analogy, there’s not a company in the world that could endure such constant aggravation, even in the most unexpected of business crises. Shit happens in any life, private or public, but character and leadership are the most important aspects of ensuring your stakeholders are on board with you. Perhaps Boris likes to see himself as a maverick (along with the much-discussed notion that he is Winston Churchill-incarnate). Perhaps he is a maverick. There is sometimes a borderline between these states of being. You can never tell whether a Liam Gallagher or John Lydon are deliberately awkward, revelling saying “Boo!” (or worse) aggressively, or whether it’s a just a confected image. You could ask the same of Boris: is the dishevelled hair and the hopeless bobble hat-and-shorts jogging combo concocted to endear himself, or is that just a what-you-see-is-what-you-get statement? Maybe. But like it or not, image does count. And the hair and saggy suits merely add to the apparent cavalier attitude Boris consistently applies across most other aspects of his life. 

Little of this is, to my knowledge or, for that matter, anyone else’s, of real consequence. No one - even Her Majesty’s Opposition - believes that Boris is a bad person per se. Even if the Electoral Commission finds that offences have been committed over the Lulu Lytle wallpaper, it’s hardly worthy of carting him off to Belmarsh. But add it all up - the petty misdemeanours, gaffes, dysfunction, chaos and, yes, a propensity for dishonesty - and you have to objectively question whether Boris Johnson is fit to serve. He might be a colourful figurehead, but he's also governing the world’s fifth largest economy, a G7 member and one of five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council. If he can’t organise the redecoration of his grace-and-favour flat within the correct transparency protocols, how is he expected to have his finger on the nuclear button? I’ll just leave that there.

Postcard from the cuckoo's nest

Picture: Philips

In the midst of all this brouhaha over leaks and flat refurbishments, it's been easy to forget little Matt Hancock, the eager-to-please Secretary of State for Health & Social Care. In the last week or so he's been pushed out of the limelight by the psychodrama surrounding his boss, but that doesn’t mean the erstwhile minister has lost his boyishly obsequious zeal for saying - at any opportunity and usually when a camera is near - how NHS staff are the most amazing people on the planet.

In truth it’s one of the few areas that Hancock and I agree on. Actually, it’s one of the few things that I’ve had much cause for alignment on with any politician, especially over this last year, not being a great fan of the breed. It is, though, the common bond that had us all on our doorsteps, clapping on a Thursday night for those months of spring and summer last year until the custom fizzled out. We did it partly out of community solidarity, but it was more than an empty gesture. Some of us needed to feel good about the rapidly unravelling situation, as COVID-19 took hold, but it was also the realisation that it was carers and NHS workers in particular who were thrust onto the extremely attritional front line of the coronavirus. And while we may have felt ever so slightly smug, clapping with our neighbours, just as Boris Johnson was doing on the front step of 10 Downing Street, or Sir Keir Starmer was doing outside his Camden abode, it was also good PR for an institution that deserved it. 

Johnson, you could say, had more reason than most, especially as he was visibly in the first throes of COVID when he first took part in the Thursday clap. By the time the prime minister emerged from a very serious encounter with the virus, his appreciation for the NHS should have been enhanced beyond all recognition. That, of course, remains to be seen, given the derisory pay round that has been offered NHS staff. I, on the other hand, have gained my own renewed respect for the NHS frontline. As I write, I’m into my third week in a hospital as a patient. Three Saturdays ago, I had a podiatrist look at what I’d thought was just a stubborn-to-heal foot blister. Thankfully, she knew precisely what she was looking at, and promptly sent me off to A&E at Kingston Hospital, where I’ve been ever since. Evidently the blister had ulcerated and become seriously infected (a perennial risk for people with diabetes like me). The infection was so aggressive and invasive that it had entered the metatarsal, the so-called ‘Beckham Bone’. Three days later I was taken into surgery, where the formidable orthopaedic surgeon (one of the UK’s best, I’m told) worked on the problem at one end with sharp metal, while I relaxed to Coldplay at the other. Post-surgery, I was prepared for what would become a long, steady recovery process, one that has kept me in hospital (albeit in my own room, which is a touch) receiving round-the-clock antibiotics. The wound left by the surgery - a complex procedure to remove a nasty infection that had found its way into the cavities and micro pockets of the foot - is still healing. I’ll spare you the gorier aspects, but the surgery left me with a lot of dead tissue which needed removing to ensure healthy healing overall. At first, this was addressed by wearing a clever ‘vac’ device which, plumbed into the wound, sucked out the dead tissue and gaseous remnants of the infection. It was my ball and chain, requiring 24-hour use and minimal movement, with only a brief disconnection to take a daily shower. However, its progress was slow, which led to an uptick in treatment, and a therapy that is, quite frankly, remarkable: maggots.

There be maggots in there

While you regain your composure at the notion (I know, I had to at first), the premise is incredible: the wound is packed with a ‘tea bag’ containing around 200 larvae - 100 of each gender - who get to work on eating up all the waste. It sounds gruesome, and probably is if I had to watch it, but it’s painless (in fact, it’s completely unnoticeable, save for some discharge - I suppose they’ve got to get rid of ‘stuff’ just as we do). 

According to Swansea University, which cultivates the maggots for this purpose in South Wales, the technique has been used to treat wounds in various indigenous cultures for centuries. During World War One, soldiers’ wounds in the trenches were seen to heal much faster when maggots that had resulted from flies laying their eggs in open injuries got to work. Within the NHS it’s only been in use for the last ten years, but is now sworn by, with clinical trials demonstrating that the maggots are more effective than other treatments to remove wound debris, cleverly cleaning out troublesome hidden microbes that even the best surgeon’s knife can’t reach, and antibiotics can’t kill off.

I won’t dwell too much more on what’s going down there as, tediously but necessarily, it’s continuing for the time being, and I’m still mostly confined to bed, with the extent of travel limited to the toilet and the shower. My view is also somewhat restricted to an imperious sweep of Kingston-upon-Thames out of my 7th floor window (if I sit up and squint I can just about see the very occasional plane taking off from Heathrow). I live a 40-minute walk from here, but I may as well be on Mars with the Ingenuity mission, such is the slow “direction of travel” my stay has required. But I can’t complain, even if the boredom is mind-sapping. 

This has only been my second inpatient experience in 53 years on this planet. Some go their whole lives without seeing the inside of a hospital, save perhaps for the maternity unit where they entered the world. My stay, however, has been truly profound. Who knows what would have happened had I not been admitted to A&E three Saturdays ago, but I’m assuming it would have ended with losing a foot, or worse. That’s not a gloomy self-assessment, but a reflection of the grave tone the surgeon took in the days after she’d performed her magic. But, from the moment my girlfriend dropped me off at the front door, I entered an incredible system, a complex and dynamic clinical care machine that has had me surrounded, from the get-go, by a vast pit crew of doctors, nurses, surgeons, caterers, porters, cleaners and many more that I've never been exposed to. 

Throughout each day I've had fresh drugs plumbed in, my blood pressure, blood sugar and temperature checked at various times of day, my bloods extracted for analysis of infection markers, injections for blood thinners, tablets for this, tablets for that. When you add it all up, I have been the beneficiary of an enormous clinical and service resource. I’d hate to think what it has all cost. I can’t begin to imagine what the bill would have been if I’d been in the American healthcare system. I am living proof of what a burden Type 2 diabetes is on the health service. All of this because of a foot blister, ironically caused by a new pair of trainers bought to further enable the exercise regime that has been key to managing my condition. Of course, this has been a wake-up call: just as I’d thought that I had everything under control, with the three-monthly HbA1C checks showing excellent blood sugar management, the critical arbiter of maintaining my health. And, yet. I’ve had to drain an almighty resource, adding to the estimated £8 billion diabetes costs the NHS every year.

Picture: Philips

It’s not, though, just the cost that’s giving me a form of survivor’s guilt. It’s the people looking after me. And looking after me they are. Over the course of two weeks you become familiar with everyone, even with ever-changing 12-hour shifts of day teams and night teams. One even joked this morning “You still here?!”, which despite its relative inappropriateness, was the kind of levity I appreciate (especially as my now-tired joke with anyone who’ll listen is that if I remain here any longer I’m going to redecorate). Each and every one who has been looking after me has been a hero. God knows what they must think of my folly, after the year they’ve had. 

We all know how these people have been, literally, on the frontline of the pandemic. The roll call of casualties, drawn across the spectrum of NHS functions has been nothing short of appalling. In January, the Mirror newspaper reported that some 52,000 NHS staff were off sick with the coronavirus and that 850 healthcare workers in the UK were thought to have died from COVID-19 between March and December last year. The attrition rate was horrendous. Just as a war cemetery depicts a given battle, with captains and corporals lying alongside each other in the date order in which they were felled, the rollcall of NHS staff of every rank makes the organisation look like unwitting cannon fodder as the virus raged through corridors unabated. While the health service didn’t completely collapse under the strain of admissions at the pandemic’s peak - the feared premise for lockdown to begin with - it was close. What the people who’ve been looking after me have been through, I can't begin to imagine. Wards normally devoted to routine conditions were effectively turned into field hospitals. Staff were redeployed to cope, regardless of their area of specialist expertise. Doctors, surgeons and nurses of every level of experience and capability were retasked with working the wards just to cope. It’s almost hard to fully understand just how a health system that was struggling before COVID-19 has coped under it. 

So why did they allow themselves to succumb? Simple: dedication. The same dedication that has been treating me. There’s nothing altruistic about this. To a worker, the nurses and doctors have clocked on for their shifts because there’s been a job to do that they’ve been highly trained for. While my foot was under the knife, I had an enjoyable chat with the young doctor monitoring my vital signs. He told me how at the peak of battle, he was put on general clinical duties within the hospital, and rather than finding it a chore - even though it was - actually found it quite rewarding. He said that while he might have specialised in orthopaedic surgery, he was still a doctor, he still had invested in an education that could be reapplied. He wasn't alone: no matter what your area of expertise was, if you had a medical degree you were put to good use triaging the COVID-sick as they came in. 

My admiration was undimmed before, but having been in the NHS's midst now for a while my admiration has only been emboldened. The NHS must never be a political football. It must never be treated as a matter of convenient doctrine. It’s birth, on 5th July 1948, almost three years into the austerity of post-war Britain, instigated an institution like no other in the world. Yes, it may be flawed; yes, there will be inefficiencies as there will be in any public body of its size and scale. But what it delivers, the innovations that it relentlessly applies, and the supreme dedication that its chronically underpaid and, invariably, under-appreciated staff deliver is something to truly behold. 

When I’m eventually discharged I will continue for a while as an outpatient. At a time when there is much to gripe about in our country - our economy, our politicians, choose your target - we should never take for granted, nor fail to appreciate what the National Health Service represents: one of the best, if not the best things about Britain. 

Grotesque doesn’t even cover it

The other evening I happened across an episode of Dad’s Army, 'Is There Honey For Tea?', in which the Walmington-on-Sea Home Guard rally around Private Godfrey and his sisters Dolly and Cissy when their idyllic Cherry Tree Cottage comes under threat of demolition. The house is a perfect rose-decorated slice of bucolic English perfection which, Sergeant Wilson wistfully remarks is “just what we are fighting for”. Britain was a different place in 1975, when the episode first went out, beset by grey skies, strikes and British Leyland cars, an altogether different era to the somewhat confected view of tradition which, even as the set-up for comedy, that episode of Dad’s Army set out to convey. But it brought home a point. Tradition does count.

The timing of the episode going out was prescient. Tradition is under attack again from the announcement that England’s so-called ‘Big Six’ league clubs - Manchester United, Liverpool, Arsenal, Chelsea, Tottenham Hotspur and Manchester City - are to join a new and exclusive European Super League along with Real Madrid, Barcelona, Atlético Madrid, AC Milan, Internazionale and Juventus (notably, none of the likes of Bayern Munich, Ajax or PSG are involved). It’s been some time coming: the clubs are believed to have been in talks for some time about creating their own rival to the Champions League, but formal confirmation of the consortium has brought the morality of it all into acute focus.

Football supporters, commentators, the domestic leagues and politicians have all, quite rightly, condemned the plan. There have been murmurings of points deductions, international player bans and other sanctions for those clubs who take part. Overall, the move has been roasted, demonstrating the grotesque arrogance of football clubs in failing to understand the ethos of what supporting football is all about, and why fans are prepared to dip into their hard-earned to follow clubs at every level for sometimes perverse and random reasons. 

I make no secret of my patronage of Chelsea, one of the clubs who’ve signed up for this folly. And it’s not out of arriviste glory-hunting, either: I started visiting Stamford Bridge as a child, when the club was near bankrupt, flirting with the old Third Division, and crowds of just 7,000 were turning up to see warhorses like Micky Droy and Ron Harris kick lumps out of opponents. Liverpool were then the dominant English side - even Ipswich were in the ascendancy - and the sort of riches that surround Chelsea today weren’t even dancing on the wildest stages of our imagination. That’s not why went to the Bridge. It was our club, just as whichever berth you call your home club is yours. It is, of course, an added bonus if you have superstars to watch. Even better if your club gets to play the European elite - nothing gets the hackles up quite like watching a load of cynical Spaniards falling over a lot in front of you on a Wednesday evening. But to some extent, this is mere confection, fairy dust sprinkled on the more prosaic form that is the Beautiful Game.

"We have all spoken forever about the importance of the ‘pyramid’ - the dream, the aspiration of clubs developing, they fall, they get promoted,” former  Football Association and Manchester City chairman David Bernstein told Sky News this morning. “Clubs like Manchester City who, 20 years ago, were in the first division and playing Gillingham in a play-off final at Wembley, become what they are now. Leicester City now have punched above their weight. "So I think you are moving all that dream, that aspiration, and I think that's sad and very dangerous."

Football fans have expressed similar sentiment, especially supporters associations of the clubs embroiled in the breakaway. The Chelsea Supporters' Trust branded it “the ultimate betrayal" and a decision made “with no consideration for the loyal supporters, our history, our future or the future of football in this." One Liverpool group accused the club’s US-based owner, Fenway Sports Group, of appropriating a property that is "ours not theirs”, while another said it was withdrawing support to a club “which puts financial greed above integrity of the game.” The Manchester United Supporters Group posted a picture of the Grim Reaper kicking a football on its website, along with a statement opining that the new league “has no sporting merit and would seem to be motivated by greed,” adding that it had been created without any input from the grass roots of the club’s support. "These owners, irrespective of where they come from, seem to think football belongs to them; it doesn't it belongs to us - the supporters - irrespective of which team we support."

I’m not saying that Doncaster Rovers are any closer to playing Real Madrid in the Champions League, but why can’t they aspire to the Premier League and therefore a shot at a top four place? Unlikely that they would, but who is to decree that they can’t, simply because a self-appointed elite has elected to create a closed shop into which only they can play. And for those fans of clubs in this super league - do we really want to play the same 11 teams all the time, including six we meet at least twice a season in our home league? There’s no dodging the fact that competition for the Premier League title and for the Champions League itself is dominated by the same clubs season in, season out, but there’s still enough margin for variety that we can, for example, see West Ham challenging for a Top Four league finish this season, and thus a shot at the European elite next season at the expense of one of the so-called big six.

Tradition, of course, doesn’t even enter the equation. It’s all about cold hard cash. Larceny, actually. The big clubs and their owners have shown their true colours and a patent absence of any understanding of what they’re custodians of. By reducing European club competition to, essentially, an exhibition tournament, they are effectively turning the 12 teams into football’s version of the Harlem Globetrotters. I’m sure we’ll see all the tricks in the book, but it will soon get pretty boring watching them play the Washington Generals every time. European nights haven’t been made by predictability, but by the complete reverse. We still talk now of José Mourinho leading Porto to the Champions League title in 2004, or even further back, Brian Clough doing the same with Nottingham Forest, twice. 

What I bridle with the most is that these clubs believe, to begin with, themselves to be a self-appointed elite. Even thinking about my own club, Chelsea are where they are today thanks to Roman Abramovich's largesse. Do Arsenal or Tottenham have any right to see themselves as elite on their form this season? No, and frankly that statement extends back even further. Elsewhere, neither Liverpool or Manchester United have been exactly polished this term, ditto Barcelona and Real Madrid. The only thing that distinguishes these clubs is the wealth behind them.

What the proprietors have declared, in forming the super league, is their disdain for everyone else, and that frankly is the ugliest aspect of all this. I’m not going to pretend that football is a purely altruistic sport, where hard work and endeavour is the only measure of progress. Because clearly when you’re able to spend £70 million on a single player, whereas other clubs in your same domain struggle to spend that on a squad refresh, you’ve got a performance advantage (even if the litany of expensive flops proves that all that glitters isn’t always gold). Essentially, the breakaway clubs have given a massive ‘up yours’ to the rest of football. They have even doubled down on this by taking pre-emptive “protective steps” to legally prevent football authorities from taking sanctions out against the clubs, with measures talked of including players being banned from playing for their countries, one of the ultimate objectives they strive for.

Let me return to this thing about tradition. It’s a thorny subject. A procession of interviewees today have referred constantly to the role all football clubs, even the big ‘corporate’ behemoths, historically play in their communities, and that the big six are showing this contempt. They will all dispute that, going to great lengths to demonstrate their community programmes, from grass roots support to dispatching their first team to children’s wards at Christmas. But you can’t ignore that even the most historic clubs now looking to join the super league are living a world away from the traditions they come from. 

“He’s more machine than man,” Obi-Wan Kenobe tells Luke Skywalker about his former protege, Anakin in the 'first' Star Wars film. You could say that about the clubs involved in this venture.  “They pretend ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’, the people’s club, the fans’ club,” railed Gary Neville yesterday about Liverpool. And he had this for the club he played for: “Manchester United, 100 years, born out of workers. And they are breaking away into a league without competition, that they can’t be relegated from? It is an absolute disgrace. We have to wrestle back power in this country from the clubs at the top of this league, and that includes my club.” His former manager Sir Alex Ferguson - who remains a director at the club - told Reuters: “Talk of a Super League is a move away from 70 years of European club football.”

You could take a step back, breathe, and conclude that football is in constant flux. That progress should be embraced. Even Private Godfrey concluded that if his cottage had to be destroyed for the war effort, so be it. We can easily descend into romanticism, but I think that risks missing the point. We support the clubs we follow - regardless of their status - because of something else, something intangible. Even we Chelsea fans, contrary to the jibes, are not glory hunters. We’ve endured bad times and frustrations. We even appreciate the good fortune we find ourselves in, to follow extravagantly financed teams staffed by exciting talent. But that doesn’t entitle the custodians of our clubs’ histories to ride roughshod over them and our patronage. 

You could even take the harder view that football has been a divided kingdom for a long time, of an elite and all the rest. In the grand scheme of things, does anything fundamentally change with this super league? Yes, pretty much the same clubs who vie each season for the knockout stages of the Champions League are involved in it, but there’s a fundamental here: there’s no reason why other clubs can’t also be in the mix, working their way up the pyramid. And that’s what we scream and shout for. Not some glorified showcase, a friendly tournament in all but name, and one designed purely to line the pockets of the proprietors, and do nothing for the humble supporter, many of whom will be now questioning where they put their disposable income when it comes to football.

Spoiler alert: I don’t want spoilers, thanks

Picture: BBC/World Productions

We have reached Hump Day, the figurative midpoint of the week. Once this would be the point of reflection that just two more working days remained before the weekend, but Wednesdays are now beset by another anxiety: it’s four days until the next instalment of Line Of Duty.

The series has been slow to get off the ground, a deliberate ploy by Jed Mercurio to hook viewers into a longer, seven-episode run, but in last Sunday’s fourth episode of Series 6, we had a proper LoD corker. In-prison murders, bent coppers everywhere, a set-piece gun battle that matched the bank heist in Heat for loudness, and a boo-the-villain moment between shadier-than-shady Deputy Chief Constable Andrea Wise and Ted Hastings. Here you can’t help weighing up whether Wise will be uncovered as a so-called ‘H’, or even if she’s bent at all. Given the number of corrupt senior officers in this constabulary, it feels like most executive ranks are working for the OCG. But for now we’ll have to make do with the figurative moustache-twirling from Wise as she makes knowing glances at a clearly exasperated Ted.                                                                                                                                                                   

Thankfully, now we know that Hastings isn’t the elusive fourth H. Actor Adrian Dunbar confirmed to Elizabeth Day's How To Fail podcast that it's definitely not him, to his relief. “I spent all this time playing this character and I always thought Ted had a sense of duty and a moral core," he explained, revealing that Jed Mercurio had told him that he wasn’t the show’s arch villain. Dunbar says that he’d have found it hard to accept Ted was a baddie: “Jed is aware of our audience and they know Ted has a sense of moral fortitude,” he told the podcast. “I am glad he came out of it with flying colours."

As Sunday’s viewers will have seen, nasty Wise is pensioning Hastings off and, in a beautiful play on corporate politics, merging AC-12 with two of the force’s other anti-corruption units. Given how much the OCG has got its fingers into City Police, you wonder if all these units are doing any good at all. This, then, coincides with the BBC’s latest tease, news that Episode 5 will feature hard-faced AC-3 boss Patricia Carmichael, who appeared to put herself in the frame to be an H in Series 5 when she was brought in to investigate Ted. She is another wonderful panto villain, and given that she presided over an interrogation infiltrated by a murdering junior, not entirely beyond suspicion, either.

Picture: Instagram/Line Of Duty

Twitter and all the rest is beside itself with speculation since the latest episode, which ended with one of Hastings’ trademark “Mother of God!” exclamations as he read a report DNA-linking Series 6 chief baddie DCI Jo Davidson with someone already known to him. Brilliantly, Mercurio left the identity hanging. A BBC website accidentally posted a picture of a big name to come into the cast this weekend, before quickly taking it down, sending the Internet into meltdown in speculation as to who it was. I don’t want to know. I don’t want spoilers, thank you. I want to play the game at home each Sunday night, knowing that it’ll be another seven days before more is revealed, and not until. This is the kind of suspense-generation you used to get with Doctor Who in the old days. Except here, the production values are in another league entirely. 

Crucially, it’s got the nation talking, when not frantically trying to book haircuts and pub garden tables. Mercurio is just an almighty tease, but the way he plays with the audience is almost psychotic. Conventional set-up would have the villain revealed in Episode 1 and the procedural performed before the big reveal at the end. But not with this show. Villains are suggested, rather than confirmed, OCG sleepers could lurk at every turn. The suspicious looks half the cast spend each episode giving each other are nothing compared with what we viewers are dishing out. Such is Mercurio’s mind that none of the cast are without doubts. For all the clear baddies (such as former teenage delinquent-turned rookie copper - inexplicably, given vetting techniques - Ryan Pilkington) you just know others are hiding in plain sight. The guessing game is half the fun, though not good for blood pressure, as you weigh up all the possibilities. Given how many senior officers in this force are at the very least suspect, Line Of Duty is very adept at recycling supporting characters that turn up like bad pennies in elevated positions. Thus you’ve had the inexplicably over-promoted div Ian Buckells, plus Arnott’s dodgy boss from Series 1 who is now the chief constable, and a number of ad hoc promotions from sergeants to inspectors. Clearly, City Police is where you can see your career advance. Makes you wonder why...

That, then, cruelly, is how it is. Mercurio might reveal more in Episode 5, or he may hold it back until 7. Such is his thinking, he won’t follow convention at all. Columbo was always predictable, in that you knew the dishevelled detective would crack the case in the final minutes with his “Oh, just one more thing...” disarmament of the chief suspect. Line Of Duty won’t do that. While it’s unlikely that Mercurio won’t abandon the moral core of the show that Dunbar talked of, and its more than likely that Steve Arnott and Kate Fleming will solve the whole thing and, possibly come to Ted’s rescue (because even Line Of Duty should uphold some conventions of television), there really is no guarantee that they will. Brilliant television by any stretch.

Unto the promised land...possibly

© Simon Poulter 2021

As day trips go, last Thursday's wasn't the most scenic. Nor was it the most productive. But it was liberating beyond all measure. The occasion was the briefest of visits to my official place of work, for the first time since I was actually employed to work there, exactly 12 months ago today. The reason for visiting was to finally collect my security badge, allowing me - when needs require it - to go into the office and work there. 

You see, I have a tactical need, every couple of weeks, to work somewhere other than the increasingly knackered sofa that has been my workplace exclusively for the last year. Day after day, e-mail after e-mail, Teams meeting after Teams meeting, I have sat on that sofa like some condemned breakfast TV presenter, with a make-do arrangement enhanced only by the acquisition of a hybrid coffee table with a pop-up desk element. It’s hardly been an adequate solution, and God knows what attrition has been caused to my spine, let alone to my general health (itself a topic of lengthier consideration another time). But it has worked. In fact, it has all worked.

In these last 12 months, I’ve contributed to my company’s quarterly financial results, two product launches, an advertising campaign launch and even an IPO. And all from that dilapidated settee (which, I swear, has sunk by a good inch from having my carcass weighing it down for the entire working week). It would be false, though, to pretend that liberation is fully in sight. A return to five-days-a-week office working may never happen. My company, wisely, has adopted a policy of continued work-from-home for most, and is certainly not encouraging a resumption of full occupation on the floors of its HQ. Generally, the mood music is clearly a discouragement of office working for now, sensibly, given that we’re not out of the woods yet. 

In his press conference yesterday, Boris Johnson was typically chipper, looking forward to supping a pint in a pub which, for some, is the sum total of their liberation ambition. For others, it’s hugging an elderly relative again, or even seeing a relative for the first time in months. I’m up for all of that, with the added goal of getting into the swimming pool again next Monday for the first time since December. But beyond that, I’m strangely covetous of anyone who’s been able to continue going to work during the lockdown. Indeed, it’s got to the point where I can’t watch Line Of Duty's Steve Arnott in the AC-12 office without thinking what a lucky git he is (even if the BBC's production team has notably socially distanced everyone). 

Picture: BBC

Last week’s briefest of excursions into Central London, visiting a place of work I’d only previously been in the once (and that was for my job interview), felt like a tantalising experience of freedom. I know we all eventually get to loathe the daily commute - and I know I probably will, once some semblance of full normality comes back - but my somewhat humdrum train journey last Thursday, with a short walk to the company's building, made me feel like Neil Armstrong stepping out of the Apollo 11 lander. More liberation was to come as, after collecting my badge, I bought lunch from the nearby Pret A Manger and sat in the mild midday sunshine, like every other office worker would do, before heading back to the Underground station for the journey home. I was only out of the house for a matter of four hours, but it left me near-giddy with satisfaction. 

Entire sitcoms, films even, have been made about commuting and office life, but on this one Thursday it had become an unrivalled and welcome novelty. I shouldn’t, though, get my hopes up too high. “This virus is going to be with us for the foreseeable future,” Professor Chris Whitty said, cheeringly, during yesterday’s Downing Street presser. And he’s right. The ‘direction of travel’ for some time has been that we may be wearing masks and socially distancing for a long time to come. The vaccine rollout has been remarkable - I’m looking forward to my second jab next Saturday - but for all the upbeat talk of economic life reopening again, we’re still a long way off 100% vaccinations, and other aspects of normality, like foreign travel. Boris, yesterday, defiantly maintained faith in his “roadmap”, adding that he saw nothing in the the present data that made the government think it would deviate from it. But that's not without gloomy predictions from SAGE experts which have cast doubt on any return to full normality by 21 June, with further evidence suggesting that any premature relaxation of the lockdown rules could spark a fourth wave of the virus.

Business has been mixed on where it stands on the return to normality and, in particular, office working. In February, Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon called working from a home “an aberration” and vowed to correct it “as quickly as possible.” Others in the finance sector have echoed this sentiment, citing the need for collaboration that can only be achieved by sitting side by side in an office. Accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers is going in a hybrid direction, adopting a flexible approach that would enable its 22,000 staff in the UK to divide their time between office and home working once restrictions are lifted. Employees will also have better flexibility in choosing how their working days are structured, with the ability to choose start and end times, and even work more hours from Monday to Thursday so that they can knock off early on a Friday. Such revolution reflects the fact that many companies and their leaders have come to realise, over the course of this last year, just how much working culture resembled battery farming at times. For every CEO who wants to see staff back at their desks, there are plenty who see it fraught with risk, resigning themselves to the fact that the sight of desk-bound employees, sitting cheek-by-jowl has long expired.

You could even say that more forward-thinking executives have seen the light, concluding that WFH has worked for a year, and many employees have said that a commute that constitutes little more than bedroom-to-kitchen-to-home-office has been a boon to wellbeing, especially for people previously juggling their work travel with things like the school run. Not surprisingly, technology leaders have been most open to the continuation of remote working, despite being the most likely to preside over working cultures that benefit the most from face-to-face collaboration. Some, like Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, have even started talking up the possibilities of using virtual and augmented reality technologies. This, though, is reflective of the somewhat idealistic thinking in Silicon Valley. 

The reality, I suspect, is going to be somewhere between these poles: the liberation has only just begun, and even then, only slightly. What you and I might remember of going to work from before the pandemic may, yet, remain a distant memory. On the other hand, as organisations like mine discover that projects we’re working on might benefit from being able to shout across a desk at someone, we might start increasingly find ourselves swiping in and out of a formal workplace, sitting on an actual chair at an actual desk. From this end of the last 12 months, I know what I’m looking forward to.

A little bit more than a ’ot dog

I've put money in all your pockets. 

I've treated you well, even when you was out of order, right?! 

One lunchtime, not so long ago (actually, quite some time ago, in the days when there were things called offices) and when I had a job near London’s Tower Bridge, I left my desk to go for a stroll around the historic backstreets of Wapping. What began as a cathartic midday plod in the late summer sunshine soon became a literal walk down Memory Lane, as I mooched about streets I hadn’t visited in 30 years, not since the days when I had to visit the offices of The Sun and Sunday Times while working for Sky TV. 

Rupert Murdoch had, not long before I joined Sky, decamped his newspapers from Fleet Street to ‘Fortress Wapping’, a divisive move that changed British newspaper publishing forever, as the tycoon belligerently took on the print unions in an acrimonious and, at times, violent period of media history. Like much of Wapping, the area around News International’s site at the junction of Virginia and Pennington streets had once been staunch working class, populated by dockers and their families. Today, Murdoch's presence is long gone, with the newspaper industry undergoing further schism in the online age (with News International losing, along the way, the News Of The World, a victim of its own dubious practice).

Walking back to St. Katherine’s Dock, which my then-office overlooked, I ambled close to the river on Wapping High Street. Making a turn, I found myself in Scandrett Street, where I was confronted by a typical canyon of newish brick buildings, designed to resemble the warehouses that once lined the area, and now a testament to rampant gentrification. It was then that it struck me that this was precisely the vision that fictional mobster Harold Shand had had at the end of the 1970s when he had the idea to do something about the dilapidated streets of E1. 

This, then, is the basis of The Long Good Friday, one of the finest British films ever made, and which was released 40 years ago this week. “This is the decade in which London will become Europe's capital, having cleared away the out-dated,” Shand pronounces on the deck of his gleaming yacht, moored in front of the Tower of London, as he tries to convince an American mafia delegation to come in on his project to regenerate the East End. “We've got mile after mile or acre after acre of land for our future prosperity,” he continues. “No other city in the world has got, right at its centre, such an opportunity for profitable progress.” He was incredibly prophetic. After decades of post-war wrangling about what to do with the area, in the same year that The Long Good Friday was released, Michael Heseltine created the London Docklands Development Corporation. By the end of the 80s and the start of the 90s, Docklands itself was transformed. Post-Big Bang, the banks and their bankers moved east. Canary Wharf was built on the Isle of Dogs, and continues to grow to this day, with gleaming spire after gleaming spire springing up like cocktail sticks planted on a Cream Cracker. Today it might be quieter due to the lack of office workers, but it is no less a powerful symbol of the economic aspiration that stretches out of several boroughs spreading east down the Thames from Tower Bridge.

But back to Scandrett Street, which plays a notorious role in The Long Good Friday: as I stood there, staring at faux history clad in modernity, I felt a shiver of familiarity, despite having never been in that place before. Opposite the new developments was a wrought iron fence surrounding the garden of St. John’s Church. For East End authenticity, it could have been Albert Square itself, but something told me that I had seen that fence in some other context. Sometime later, reading up on the production of The Long Good Friday, I discovered what had been there before - at the end of that street (and now long gone, the result of modernistic development) was The Lion & Unicorn pub, the East End boozer blown up by - at the outset of the film - hoodlums on Good Friday.

The John Mackenzie-directed thriller remains one of the greatest British films ever made, but its use of London locations, in particular, made it so rich. It was also uncompromising. Appearing a year or so after the comedic Minder arrived on British TV screens, itself a distant descendent from The Sweeney, and around the same time that Only Fools And Horses made its debut, The Long Good Friday was an equally colourful depiction of shady London life, but with an infinitely deeper agenda. Barrie Keefe’s bristling story combined IRA terrorism, a mafia plot, a prototype yuppie (in Shand) before the term had ever been used, and was populated with a cast of cracking British talent. 

Bob Hoskins remains throughout a mesmerising, Napoleonic figure, with his boxer’s nose and street-smart belligerence, trying to understand who and why anyone would be trying to derail his grand vision, unaware that one of his gang has become embroiled in a dodgy deal with terrorists in Belfast, who exact their revenge on Shand’s empire in startling form. Shand’s quotes throughout the film are legend, especially the “I’ve put money in all your pockets!” near-soliloquy at the top of this post, but also his admonishment of the American mafiosi as they renege on their agreement inside The Savoy hotel: “What I’m looking for is someone who can contribute to what England has given to the world: culture, sophistication, genius. A little bit more than a ’ot dog, know what I mean?” he quips, with tongue not entirely in cheek. “I’m glad I found out in time just what a partnership with a pair of wankers like you would’ve been,” he thunders on, probably not grasping the fact that Americans wouldn’t know what sort of an insult that was.

Critics have tried to analyse The Long Good Friday, even attempting to make parallels to The Godfather, given both films’ levels of brutality and their central figures of gangsters trying to change their business models. Like Mario Puzo’s somewhat Shakespearian tragedy, quintessentially a New York tale, The Long Good Friday is pure London, as the list of filming locations pertains. Nothing has come close since, not Guy Ritchie’s geezerfests or anything in Danny Dyer’s canon. It works because London’s Docklands were bleak at the beginning of the 1980s and, even now, if you look closely, still are. It’s just that the converted warehouses that line the river, housing London’s new urban elite, have given it a respectable polish, the kind of aspiration that Shand himself had envisioned. Paul Barber (who played ‘Errol the Ponce’, mutilated in his kitchen by Shand henchman 'Razors'), this week likened Hoskins’ character to the principle character in Only Fools And Horses, in which he also appeared: “The thing that got me was Harold’s speech on the boat [at St. Katherine’s Dock],” Barber told The Guardian this week. “Think about it now: it has all happened. It was the Thatcher era and he was like the young Del Boy.”

“Nobody had done a movie like that as far as I can recollect,” Helen Mirren, who played Shand’s moll-like wife Victoria, also told The Guardian. “It broke ground,” she said, saying that she was blown away from the outset by Keefe’s script. “It was like a piece of literature, and movie scripts don’t tend to be like that. This one you read like a novel. With the exception that my female character was terrible – she was very, very dull.” That may have been the case - and I’m sure Mirren wouldn’t deny that Victoria serves as little more than window dressing to the piece - but the film is certainly novel-like, as Shand questions why things are going increasingly wrong with his grand plan. And, of course, it ends so brilliantly without conclusion: as Shand exits The Savoy for a rendezvous with Victoria, he jumps into his chauffeur-driven ride, only to see his wife being hauled off in the opposite direction under duress. As he realises the unfolding situation, a figure - Pierce Brosnan in his film debut - pops up in the front seat wielding a silenced pistol. Much like the final scene of The Sopranos, it’s up to you to decide what happens next. But whereas Tony Soprano’s fate is subtly ambiguous, the elongated closing sequence of The Long Good Friday, set to Francis Monkman’s driving score, sees Shand gazing out of the Jag’s window, seemingly accepting his fate.

It was, without doubt, the film that planted Hoskins in our consciousness. He’d made his breakthrough a couple of years before in the BBC’s adaptation of Dennis Potter's Pennies From Heaven, and he would sort of return to the Shand character five years later in Mona Lisa. In The Long Good Friday, Hoskins is the focal point of a fascinating essay about Britain at the beginning of the 1980s. Keefe has appeared to shy away from casting it as a great sociological snapshot, with director Mackenzie calling it just “a damned good gangster movie”. But 40 years on, as we address many contemporary issues about morality, race and even patriotism, The Long Good Friday holds up on so many levels, not the least being that it’s British film making at its very best.