Saturday, 23 February 2008

Portillo on Thatcher as a Tory pin-up

A BBC documentary reveals the extent of the Tories' love for Margaret Thatcher says David Aaronovitch...

One of Margaret Thatcher's celebrated recent invocations was, at the time, accounted the most disgraceful. It happened in June 2006 when the BBC presenter, Jonathan Ross, asked the new Conservative leader David Cameron whether, as a youth, he had used images of the iron lady as a means of non-ideological stimulation. Many people felt that this was not only a crude impertinence (which it was), but also that Ross was introducing extraneous emotion into an essentially intellectual area.

But, as anyone who watches Michael Portillo's new BBC Four programme The Lady's Not for Spurning on Monday, will soon realise, Ross was on to something. For what Portillo reveals is that many Tories, especially male Tories, were indeed deeply in love with Mrs Thatcher, and could not bear what was done to her - or what they had helped do to her - in the autumn of 1990. The Conservative Party itself, says Portillo, became - and may still be - the victim of their feelings of hatred and guilt.

"We thought she was brilliant," says Portillo, early in the piece. "I entered politics because she had inspired me." Being near her was "exhilarating," he goes on, and many like him felt "captivated". Readers hardly need me to point out that "captivated" is a magical love word, to be used alongside or instead of "beguiled" or "enchanted". So when it was time - just before the second ballot for the Conservative Party leadership in 1990 - to tell this captivating woman that she was about to lose to Michael Heseltine, it became, for Norman Lamont, "one of the most awful moments in my life", and for Michael Howard, "the most emotional discussion that I have ever taken part in." "I was gutted," says ultra-Thatcherite MP Gerald Howarth. "I have never seen so many grown men with tears in their eyes." And then Howarth tells Portillo, in language he may not have used about his own wife, "I am, I was and I will be, utterly devoted to her."

So well does Portillo create the image of the youthful, handsome Oxbridge student's infatuation with something new and blue, that when, in his words, "little clouds of doubt began to appear in our Thatcherite sky," and the music turns anxious, one is reminded of nothing so much as the TV adaptation of Brideshead Revisited. Charles Ryder starts to understand that Sebastian is a drunk, Lady Marchmain is a monster and the house itself is full of unhappiness; Michael Portillo senses that the poll tax may be disastrous and that Margaret treats some of her most important colleagues with a dangerous contempt, but love prevents action.



Of course, not all of this is easy for the non-Thatcherite to grasp. The Thatcherites' instinct was that if you weren't with them, you were against them, as David Mellor recalls. If you weren't in her camp - or if you were in any way opposed to her - if you thought Mandela was the hero and Pinochet the villain, rather than the other way round, then the experience was one of repulsion rather than attraction. Many of us can only be forced to allow that many of Thatcher's reforms may have been necessary through the most painfully gritted of teeth.

What, in the end, made it all so historically tolerable was the way in which Thatcher's character, and the love that her followers had for her, helped to destroy the intolerant, strident, illiberal Conservative Party, as she had also helped destroy our socialism. As Portillo suggests, the bitterness - both hers and her supporters - at her demise, divided Major's premiership, derailed Hague's leadership, promoted the disaster of Iain Duncan-Smith's election, inhibited Michael Howard's caretakership and, even today, haunts David Cameron. It would have been better, Chris Patten tells Portillo, in a quite remarkable change of mind, if she had been allowed to stay on and lose the 1992 election. The poison, he believes, would have been drained. Instead, says Portillo, "blinded by nostalgia", the Conservative Party became an entity with its "eyes off the future, hypnotised by its past."

Though Tony Blair (like Gordon Brown) admired Thatcher's toughness, his over-riding objective, when he considered his own departure, was that it should not be attended by the dreadful legacy of division she left behind. So determined was he to avoid stories about his attitude towards his successor, that he refused even to watch news reports of the formation of Brown's first cabinet, lest his body language be said to reveal something of his inner thoughts. No one has managed to pin a single critical quotation on Blair, about Brown or about any policy, since he departed in July last year. Such was certainly not Lady Thatcher's way. Her icy undermining of John Major and her sponsorship of Hague and Duncan-Smith spoke to a determination to live on after death. Her occasional emanations, as when - alongside Howarth and Lamont - she campaigned for former dictator Pinochet not to be extradited to Spain, were spectacularly unlikely to help change the image of her party.

Only now, 18 years after her departure, does the shadow seem to have lifted a little. If Cameron can somehow park the issue of Europe, then he will have transformed the outlook and profile of his party. But, of course, political life is rarely so straightforward, for it is precisely at this time that television and the movies seem to have decided that Thatcher is safe enough to be historicised and re-imagined - not as the divisive old bat of the last two decades, but as the conviction-Boadicea of our older erotic memories.

The BBC is said to be involved in two Thatcher dramas, The Long Walk to Finchley, about her gutsy fight against a male-dominated establishment to become an MP at the beginning of her career, and Margaret, about her gutsy fight against a male-dominated establishment to become leader and then stay on as PM at the end of her career. And then there is the Pathe drama-documentary on how gutsy Mrs Thatcher took on the Argentinians and won the Falklands war.

Mr Cameron must be hoping that all this Maggifying will see the creation of a Mrs Thatcher the historical figure, and not the reburnishing of Margaret, the Tory love object.

Portillo on Thatcher: The Lady's Not for Spurning, Mon, BBC Four, 9pm

Friday, 22 February 2008

From drag to Riches

Over the past 15 years, Caitlin Morgan has interviewed Eddie Izzard at several junctures in his career. And during that time, she observes, people's reactions have changed quite dramatically...

In the early Nineties, before Izzard had really taken off, those who had heard of him would clutch your knee with zeal. “Eddie Izzard!” they would say. “I genuinely think he's the future! Not since Richard Pryor has anyone owned a stage in that way. He kinds of falls to pieces on stage and then pulls it all back again! It's like watching the smoke visions from the Caterpillar's hookah in Alice in Wonderland!”

Two years later, when Izzard was huge - selling out a seven-week run at the Albery Theatre in London, and then doing a 56-date tour - reactions were even more fevered.

“Oh my God, Eddie Izzard!” they would say, clutching both your knees. “He's so hot. Look at him! He's a dyslexic transvestite with a mind like a gin-trap! He improvises half his show every night, manages himself, and does nine minutes of his show in French, in heels! I need to have sex with him, right now!”

These days though, it's a little different. Since the late Nineties, the double Emmy award-winning career of Channel 4's No3 in The 100 Greatest Comedians... Ever has been sidelined - in favour of acting in not terribly well-received roles in films such as Ocean's Twelve and Mystery Men. The current reaction to saying you're interviewing Eddie Izzard is more muted.

“I don't know why he keeps on doing those awful films instead of amazing stand-up,” they say, sulkily. “And he seems to have stopped wearing a dress. I bet the Americans made him do that.”

“Do you know why I think that is - why that reaction happens?” Izzard says, leaning across the table. We're in a café in Soho, at 10am on a Monday morning. Izzard is in a sharp suit and negotiating marmalade on toast and coffee.

“If you do comedy - if you make people laugh - it releases serotonin in your brain,” he says, taking a bite and then talking with his mouth full. “People get addicted to that. Comedians become dealers. Audiences become junkies.” He pauses. “It's like salivating before a meal - there's an expectation of a certain taste. When people see me, they are expecting that high.”

Spending more than ten years provoking a mild disappointment in his public suggests that, unlike most entertainers, Izzard isn't doing all this to make people like him. Your career isn't a convoluted way of saying “Love me, world, love me!”, is it?

“No, no - God no!” Izzard says, firmly. “You'd go crazy if you did that. You can't live your life to please people. You have to move to the beat of your own drum! Dance to the sound of your own disco in your mind!”

And it's not as if Izzard's preferred disco is a wholly unsuccessful one. After 14 years of multitasking political activism (he is an ardent supporter of the EU), multilingual comedy (he has done stand-up shows in English, French and German) and acting, Izzard finally has something that might be worth trading in that “third-best comedian of all time” for.

We're here to talk about the DVD release of Season One of The Riches, the show in which Izzard finally got his lead; and one of the best leads of the year, to boot. In The Riches, a critically acclaimed comedy/drama for the American channel FX, Izzard plays a traveller/conman in the American South.

“For years journalists had been asking me, what role are you looking for? And I never knew the answer. But I do now,” he says. “It was that one.”

As Wayne Molloy - a bullshitting, upbeat antihero with an American accent that Izzard just manages to pull off - he plays opposite Minnie Driver's Dahlia, a cough-medicine-addicted “hot plastic” expert who has just been released from jail. Having stolen a dead man's identity and moved themselves and their three children into the corpse's Louisiana mansion, their motto is “The American Dream - we're going to steal it”. Or, as it says on the DVD cover, “It's a Wonderful Lie”.

The whole Molloy family make a watchable, unusually clever show, but it's the chemistry between Driver and Izzard that's the most notable aspect. Like Homer and Marge before them, Driver and Izzard play heads of a supposedly dysfunctional family who are still crazy about each other, and there's a palpable on-screen sex-hiss between them.

“We're both ambitious - very ambitious,” Izzard says, nodding - as if to encompass just how fast two British actors playing Deep South gypsies would have had to hit the ground running. “You can't fake chemistry. There has to be a fire going on, doesn't there? The writers are very good at... writing out of us, if you know what I mean.”

Commissioned to make a second series, Izzard ideally sees The Riches running to seven seasons, and with average US viewing figures of 5.9 million and critical acclaim - Time had it as one of the Top Ten New Shows of 2007 - there's no reason why it shouldn't.

“Each episode, I get better. I learn,” Izzard says. “Like, you've got to keep [your actions] small, just in the eyes on the close-ups. But then you have to go big for a wide shot. Don't get the two confused, or you'll end up watching back the wide shot and going: ‘Why am I not doing anything here, except subtly blinking?'”

It has to be said here that Izzard is a complete, ocean-going acting nerd. He won't ever open up about his personal life - even an inquiry as general as “Where do you live in LA?” is met with a cagey: “In LA. In a bungalow”. And “What do you spend your money on?” elicits little more than “iPhones. And DVDs of Dancing with Wolves. I just fucking love that film.” But he will talk all night about acting. He is a thespian trainspotter. In the last two interviews that I've done with him, he has - in an informative and impassioned manner - instructed me on classic death scenes, how to take the ideal “intense” publicity shot, the “267 Golden Rules of Acting” and how, for “acting truth”, you have to “kill the funny”.

Today, his amusing mini-lectures are on the wardrobe anomalies in The Great Escape - “All the British actors escaping in the national costume of Switzerland, or wherever. But Steve McQueen's in chinos and a T-shirt. He's escaping into the Alps in the disguise of an American man” - and how best to just “fuck off” after telling one of your heroes that you admire them. At the Baftas, Izzard went up to the film director Ridley Scott and said: “I really admire you,” and then “just fucked the fuck away”.

This nerdiness feeds into one of Izzard's most notable traits - constant analysis. Unlike most creative people, Izzard is constantly analysing what he - as a pro-EU multilingual dyslexic transvestite and stand-up - means, what the world means, and how he can then play the former off the latter to continue a life where he keeps “widening it out, but keep my edge”.

And this penchant for analysis brings good news for those still pining for Izzard's return as the “third greatest comedian of all time”. While, as an actor, he feels around “seven out of ten successful”, he acknowledges that the period he felt “ten out of ten successful” was as a stand-up. “Around the time of the Definite Article show,” he says, “when all ten national newspapers were reviewing it and saying it was, you know...”

Izzard recently turned his mind to working out just why this was his comedic peak, and why subsequent shows, such as Sexie (2003) and Circle (2002), have met with distinctly lukewarm reviews.

“I think it's because at that time - Definite Article and Unrepeatable - I was in one place. They were residencies. So I'm doing an experiment now. I'm going to bed in somewhere for a bit.”

And indeed, having concluded that this is the scientifically proven thing to do, that's what Izzard is off to do - right now. For, in keeping with the ethos of a man who has always chosen the more challenging route, Izzard is using his writers' strike-enforced break from The Riches to do an improvised, stand-up residency. Starting tonight. In New York. On the other side of the Atlantic from this café where we are having breakfast.

“Oh, it'll be easy,” he says breezily, putting on his Second World War-style greatcoat and going off to find a cab to Heathrow. “Try gigging in both Helsinki and LA on the same day, though. Now that one was difficult.”

The Riches - Season One is released by 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment

Wednesday, 20 February 2008

After the strike...

With the writers' strike in the history books, networks are rushing to firm their spring schedules with a new crop of episodes to begin filming in late February and early March. Most shows will produce five to nine new installments, set to begin airing in March or April. Until then, expect plenty of repeats.

Some newer series will sit out until fall, and others remain contenders for next season, including Friday Night Lights and Las Vegas.

ABC's Lost is expected to save the last of six remaining episodes to air after a four-week break with five new ones starting in mid-April, moving the show to 10 pm ET starting April 24.

The alphabet net has also decided to go out with a bang on May 22, airing the season finales of Ugly Betty, Grey's Anatomy and Lost one day after the official end of the season.

The latest word on what's coming back, when, and how many new episodes are planned:

CBS

How I Met Your Mother (back March 17, 9 episodes planned)

The Big Bang Theory (March 17, 9 episodes planned)

Two And a Half Men (March 17, 9 episodes planned)

CSI: Miami (March 24, 8 episodes planned)

Cold Case(March 30, 5 episodes planned)

CSI: NY(April 2, 7 episodes planned)

CSI (April 3, 6 episodes planned)

Without a Trace (April 3, 6 episodes planned)

Ghost Whisperer (April 4, 6 episodes planned)

Numb3rs (April 4, 6 episodes planned)

NCIS (April 8, 7 episodes planned)

Moonlight (April 11, 4 episodes planned)

Rules of Engagement (April 14, 6 episodes planned)

Shark (TBA, 4 episodes planned)

NBC

My Name is Earl (April 3, 9 episodes planned)

30 Rock (April 10, 5 episodes planned)

The Office (April 10, 6 episodes planned)

ER (April 10, 6 episodes planned)

Scrubs (April 10, 5 episodes left)

Law & Order: SVU (April 15, 5 episodes planned)

Law & Order (April 23, 5 episodes planned)

Medium (keeps airing, 6 additional episodes planned)

Heroes (fall, 22 or more episodes planned)

Chuck (fall, 13 episodes planned)

Life (fall, 13 episodes planned)

Las Vegas (possibly fall)

ABC

Samantha Who? (April 7, 6 episodes planned)

Boston Legal (April 8, 6 episodes planned)

Desperate Housewives (April 13, 6 episodes planned including 2-hour finale)

Brothers & Sisters (April 20, 4 episodes planned)

Ugly Betty (April 24, 5 episodes planned)

Grey's Anatomy (April 24, 5 episodes planned)

Lost (keeps airing; April 24, 8 additional episodes planned at 10 ET/PT on Thursdays)

Private Practice (fall, 13 episodes planned)

Pushing Daisies (fall, 13 episodes planned)

Dirty Sexy Money (fall, 13 episodes planned)

Fox

Bones (April 14, 2 episodes left plus 4 additional episodes planned; moves to Mondays)

'Til Death (March 25, then 5 additional starting April 16 episodes planned)

Back to You (Feb. 26 and 27, then 5 additional starting April 16 episodes planned)

House (April 28, 4 new episodes episodes planned)

24 (January 2009, 24 episodes planned)

CW

The Game (March 2, 9 episodes planned)

Smallville (April 17, 5 episodes planned)

Gossip Girl (April 21, 5 episodes planned)

Reaper (Continuting, 8 episodes planned)

Supernatural (April 24, 4 episodes planned)

One Tree Hill (keeps airing, 9 episodes planned)

Everybody Hates Chris (March 2, 12 episodes left)

Aliens in America (March 2, 8 episodes left)

Sunday, 17 February 2008

Thatcher drama postponed

The Long Walk to Finchley, a drama about Margaret Thatcher’s struggle to get a parliamentary constituency to fight before landing Finchley in 1959, was to have been aired on BBC4 this month. But the transmission has been deferred until later this year because the BBC is worried that the larky portrayal of Thatcher, played by Andrea Riseborough, might upset her. Would dear old Maggie really have a problem with the drama’s budding politician getting her nomination by revealing a bit of leg and using a sexy voice? asks Richard Brooks, before concluding: I think she’d be chuffed.

Instead, BBC4 will wait until it can run programmes based on archive footage on either side of the drama to "put it into context". Perhaps the Beeb is also "frit" – a term Thatcher favoured – because, next week, BBC4 is running a documentary in which Michael Portillo argues that she had a negative effect on her party after its 1997 defeat. Too much for the old girl to take?

Saturday, 16 February 2008

A newspaper can't love you back

The new season of The Wire tackles the world of media, specifically The Baltimore Sun, generating a fire-storm of controversy around series creator David Simon. In this sneak peek at his essay from Esquire's March 2008 issue, Simon offers a tribute to the newsroom he once loved.

To this day, I can -- if I suffer to think on it -- stand apart from the moment, watching as I try to slip my own skin, to disappear myself.

I have hair and forty less pounds. I’d pressed my pants for the first time all semester, even worn a tie, though I took it off in the car, thinking it made me look presumptuous. Shit, I am in that newsroom looking like the college kid I am, a fifth-year senior anyway, surrounded by the battle-hardened professionals of a delicate, precise craft.

They know I am ridiculous.

They’ve read it, in fact.

At the four o’clock meeting in the conference room, there is revelry -- at my expense no doubt. From my perch on the metro desk, I hear Phelps, the state editor, say something, his words followed by a burst of laughter. Fuck, shit, fuck.

That week -- my first as a Baltimore Sun stringer -- I had done something remarkable. I had managed to declare that oral sex was no longer a crime in Maryland. I felt sure of this when I wrote such and had it published in my state’s largest newspaper. Having edited the campus daily the year previous, I was confident in The Diamondback’s reporting and comfortable using it as boilerplate for Sun articles I wrote about the university. And in covering a rape trial involving a student victim, I misinterpreted an appellate decision and single-handedly liberated the blowjob from the shackles of Old Line State tyranny.

The first phone call came from a member of a gay-rights group, and while I abhor stereotype as much as the next man, I confess he lisped at me in disgust: “Check your facts, mister. When I suck cock, it’s very much a crime in Maryland. . . .”

The second call, somewhat more restrained, came from John Bainbridge, The Sun’s man at the court of appeals and a lawyer in his own right: “Listen, I read your article today, and I’m not sure you’ve got the appeals decision correct. . . .”

So it’s my first correction -- an ugly one. And my secret, sacred, wafer-thin plan to write my way onto a major metropolitan daily had been rendered ridiculous in a solitary blow. All that remained was a Bushido-like end to it, a slow, ceremonial evisceration on the newsroom floor. Listening to my excuses, Phelps had been short and blunt: “Write the correction and call it in to rewrite.”

The rewrite man -- the legendary Jay Spry -- took the time to re-explain my obvious failings in the matter, all the while addressing me as Mr. Simon, as if decorum required the condemned be granted one last comic honorific. So journalism was out. And I was still about forty credits short of an academic degree. Options: I had been a busboy. I had played guitar in bad bar bands. I had edited my college newspaper, and now, given the chance to report for one of the great gray ladies of American newspapering, I was a fucking joke.

“What are you going to do?” my girlfriend asked.

“Tend bar, maybe.”

“How do you make a grasshopper?”

“Rum and coke?”

A day later and Phelps called again. Some kid had goose-stepped down the hall of a campus dormitory and fired a BB pellet into a coed’s leg a few months back. Seems he was going to be sentenced to community service in Upper Marlboro. I hung up the phone, wondrous that my shame had not been referenced, then drove to the circuit court the next morning.

And now, with about twenty-five inches filed and sent to the state desk, I have come to rest, waiting while editors in the four o’clock shape the next day’s local front. I am sweating profusely, unsure what to do with my hands, my face, my soul. A Styrofoam cup of water sits in front of me, untouched. More laughter from the conference room, and finally they emerge -- Phelps and the others.

He looks at me, pulls on his mustache, frowns.

Dead. I am dead to him.

And then Phelps turns and whispers something to the tall editor beside him, something about me, clearly, because the tall guy is heading my way. I rise and actually drop my eyes. It will be fast, I tell myself. It will be fast and then I can go.

“You’re Simon?”

“Yes.”

“Good story today.”

I wait.

“I like the way you held back some of what you had, the quote from the Anti-Defamation League guy at the end. Too many people write the top of the story and then have nowhere to go.”

He extends a hand.

“I’m Steve Luxenberg. The metro editor.”

“The correction,” I blurt.

“Yeah,” he nods, ready for it. “You can’t rely on other people for your boilerplate. You need to report everything.”

He pauses.

“But that’s a good story going tomorrow.”

He leaves and I stand there for a long moment, looking around the newsroom: Phelps at the state desk, twisting that god-awful mustache, editing. Spry and Ettlin on rewrite, catching dictation from Paris or Washington. Bainbridge, Banisky, and two dozen others I couldn’t yet name banging out copy at the deadline rush. An expanse of computer terminals and battered desks so vast that it can only belong to one of America’s great newspapers.

I have a story in The Baltimore Sun tomorrow. At five that morning, I drive to an all-night drugstore, buy six copies, return to bed wide-eyed, alert.

“Good?” my girlfriend asks.

“Local front. Stripped, with art.”

She gives a small sound, buries her face in a pillow.

“The metro editor knows my name.”

I had read my Mencken. I knew what he said about newspapering, what he claimed for the profession. “The life of kings,” he called it. And for an adolescent growing up in the mid-1970s, it appeared exactly that.

Emerging from childhood, I had seen Halberstam and Hersh take apart the fraudulent premises and practices of Vietnam, then followed daily as my hometown paper brought down Nixon for stealing an election and lying about it. My father, a public-relations man with latent ambitions as a newsman, took all the local papers and The New York Times on Sundays, as well as every newsmagazine. When I was twelve, he took me to Arena Stage for a Front Page revival. “Who the hell’s going to read the second paragraph?” wailed Walter Burns.

I laughed until I hurt and left the theater oversold. I would be a newspaperman. I would join the great gray line of ink-stained hacks, a character of the kind that my father knew and loved. From the Swopes to the Runyons, from Broun to Pegler to Mencken, then back again to Hecht and MacArthur, Homer Bigart and Meyer Berger.

I was an angry kid, by and large, with a cynic’s wariness of authority that was in harness with a good newspaperman’s contempt of cant and hyperbole. I loved a snide turn of phrase. I edited my high school paper, pissed off the faculty advisor, who thought about firing me, won some awards. I edited my college rag, pissed off the media-board chairman, who thought about firing me, won some awards.

I spent the fifth year of college pulling more than a hundred bylines in The Sun. They hired me to fill in for a reporter on leave, and when that reporter returned, Luxenberg gave me a permanent position. At twenty-three, I was the youngest reporter on staff, covering ghetto murders, drug raids, and four-car fatals. And while The Baltimore Sun might not be the greatest name in major dailies, it was a solid, serious enterprise, a second-tier paper with a national presence. It was carrying seven foreign bureaus, a twelve-reporter Washington bureau, a national desk with its own general-assignment staff. And here was the thing in 1983: The Sun was going to get better. Most all of America’s newspapers were going to improve, except maybe for those afternoon editions already being butchered on the altar of television news. There was some consolidation still to come, a shaking out of the weaker rags in multipaper markets, but on the whole, the big market dailies were monopolies, providing the only serious, consistent coverage of their cities.

Watergate and Vietnam had shown how essential a sophisticated newspaper could be, had proven that while the daily chase of sirens might belong to television, the examination of real issues would demand smarter, comprehensive coverage. Television would be the new tabloids, but newspapers would hire more and better writers and transform themselves into the new magazines. And magazines? Shit, they were going to be publishing masterworks if they wanted to compete with the best newspaper writing. Twenty-five years ago, newspapers -- the big ones at least, those controlling their markets -- were unrivaled in their relevance.

So The Sun would also rise. This much I knew.

I am sitting in a car on the 900 block of Baylis Street in southeast Baltimore, engine off, watching a door and waiting. Zorzi is beside me, checking his notes.

“Black family? On this street?” He shakes his head.

“Doesn’t seem right, does it?”

It didn’t. Baylis ran through Highlandtown, an all-white working-class neighborhood. But the address is all we have left on the string.

“You want to hit the door?”

“I don’t want to go up there cold,” I say. “Let’s wait and watch. See what’s up.”

And so we settle in. The address has come from the police computer, listed as the last location on a twenty-something black guy with a particular name. I got that much by convincing a plainclothesman to sign into the system and do a search for me.

The name itself? That came from an old court case, a file Zorzi dug from the courthouse basement. Not satisfied with the docket alone, he’d found the court reporter and had the full proceedings transcribed, and sure enough, a kid named Dontay Carter had used this name and D.O.B. as an alias, pretending to be someone else at his sentencing on a gun charge.

So on a hunch, my plainclothesman runs the alias, and we come up with a minor arrest eight years back on Greenmount Avenue and a request for a gun permit to work a security job. The permit request gives us this Baylis address.

And the Carter kid? He’d killed a guy, carjacked and abducted a couple others -- a salesman, a Hopkins physician, taxpayers, white people. For a week or so, he was a one-man crime wave until police finally ran him down and charged him, identifying him as simply Dontay Carter, of no fixed address.

And so this was journalism. A scavenger hunt -- from A to B to Z on a patchwork of known facts and guesses. It was not the most important story I’d report on, nor my best work. There were stories to be written that would argue for social change, stories that might challenge the institutional status quo, stories that might win prizes. Many of them would be legitimate and some would be manufactured, and, yes, there is stuff in my yellowed clip book that creeps into those categories. But when I think back on what I love about newspapers, I think of sitting in that car, waiting with Bill Zorzi.

For me, the religion was in the chase, the pursuit of accumulated fact and quote, the rush to deadline, and the arrogance of standing up like the village griot at the campfire and running down a story that hadn’t yet been heard. And then the next day, maybe, doing it again.

For that alone, I can have no regrets. Nah, son, fuck law school. And fuck the M.B.A. I’ll never have. And fuck all that Chaucer and Cervantes and Proust I might never get around to reading. On a given day, I learn something that you didn’t know and then, my authority drawn only from scrawl on pages of a pocket notebook, I write it up clean so the rest of you can get your hands filthy with ink, reading my righteous shit. In the less fevered lobes of my brain, it was as pure as that. I swear it was. Never mind the clouds on the horizon. Never mind that the paper was sold by the Abell family after a century and a half of local ownership. Besides, everyone in the newsroom is congratulating one another on having gone to the L. A. newspaper chain, rather than, say, Gannett. If you had to get bought, everyone says, Times Mirror was the way to go.

And yes, there’s talk of some buyouts, but the rumors were talking about no more than twenty or thirty positions across the newsroom. If that happened, it wouldn’t cut too deep.

And then there’s the new management coming in. Fresh faces with great reps and résumés -- John Carroll from Lexington, a Sun veteran, and Bill Marimow from Philadelphia. These guys were ascendant, their reputations preceding them. Would they be signing on in Baltimore if the future here is anything but bright?

When the first buyout offer was finally on the table -- a year’s salary to anyone who left the Sun voluntarily -- I interviewed with the Washington Post and was offered a job on their metro desk’s investigative unit. I turned it down before talking money with anyone, telling the Post M.E. I was staying in Baltimore.

“I actually resent the notion that everyone thinks there are eventually only going to be four papers worth reading.”

He was polite: “Let us know if you change your mind.”

And even after the first buyouts, there was still a lot of talent in the newsroom, a reservoir of beat knowledge and institutional memory and ethical ballast. Beside me in the car that night, Bill Zorzi is the most dogged, most wonderfully neurotic reporter I know. To work a story with him is to double your reach, and if there is a fact that needed to be known and could be known, he would eventually bring it back and lay the notebook page in front of you like a house cat offering up a murdered mouse.

And while we sit on Baylis Street, I know that Eileen Canzian -- having covered social services and poverty for years -- is quietly working sources, pulling Dontay Carter’s juvenile files and copying each relevant page.

If I needed mayoral quotes, I had Banisky, who owned City Hall. And Warmkessel is over at the city courts if we needed anything else from the clerk’s office there, just as Ettlin or Jane Smith is on rewrite if we need to throw last-minute calls.

And when it finally comes together and it’s time to write, it would be Rebecca Corbett moving it to the desk, and she will protect the copy. Shit, she’ll make it 20, 30 percent better -- graf by crafted graf.

We are good and we are still getting better. And good things come to the patient and faithful, to those who sit and wait. Like the black guy rolling down the street -- age, height, and weight to match the police-computer readout. Sure enough, he’s pulling on the screen door, using his key.

“Bill, I have an erection.”

“Me too.”

At the door minutes later, I use the guy’s name as if I’d known him my whole life, talking fast, leaving no spaces for him to argue or usher us out. Dontay Carter pretended to be you in court some years back, using your name and D.O.B. Why?

“I’m his half-brother.”

Of course you are.

“Do you happen to know where his mother lives?”

“No, but my mother might.”

“Can we call her? Right now?”

And after rushing across town and interviewing the stepmother, we learn more about the life of a violent young man but that, no, she has no idea where Dontay had been staying or where his birth mother can be found.

“I know she was in the hospital. She got burnt with lye.”

“Burnt?”

“Someone threw lye on her. Dontay said so.”

Rebecca is telling us that we have to start writing, that the piece needs to be early if it has any chance at the Sunday front. I go back to the newsroom, where a full take of Carter’s history in foster care, along with careful, annotated notes from Canzian, greets me. I leave Zorzi on the street, telling him we have to locate the mother, that the piece can’t run without quotes from the woman who brought Dontay Carter into the world. He calls every area hospital. He asks for a computer check on ambo runs for burn victims going back weeks. He checks with the patrolmen working the neighborhood where she’s last seen. Nothing.

Eventually, he remembers that the city fire department had started billing for ambulance runs. The communications unit has no record of ambo calls for service going back more than a few weeks, but did the billing unit, by chance, keep records for longer?

He pulls a name and an address on Lennox Street.

“How the hell did you find me?” asks the mother as Zorzi comes through her door, notepad and pen akimbo.

“We got the mother,” I tell Rebecca minutes later, doing my best to make it sound inevitable. We were Baltimore’s newspaper, and we were writing about a kid who had terrorized Baltimore. And that kid had a mother. In Baltimore. Of course we got her.

As I say, it was not an important story or the best story. It doesn’t much matter to anyone past the Sunday when it ran. But it sits in my mind today as the moment when I was, if not living the life of kings, then at least among the princes of my city.

I am at lunch with the new managing editor as I prepare to return to the newspaper after a second book leave. The first book, Homicide, had done well and been made into a television show.

I cowrote a script for the drama, won a screenwriting award, and was offered a television gig for more money than The Sun could ever pay. Instead, I returned to the newsroom and, employing everything I’d learned about crime, violence, and nonfiction narrative from the book project, managed to become a better reporter.

After two years, I’d gone back on leave to report a second book, a year in the life of a city drug corner. I now had an even better sense of the city, of the drug war and its frauds, and I was saving string to write a four-part series on what ailed the city police department.

It was complicated: The B.P.D. was caught in a crossfire of bad practices, bad policies, and simple circumstance. But complicated was what could make the series strong and fresh; complicated was the good part. I try to explain, but the M.E. wants to ask instead about newsroom morale.

“What are people saying?”

“About what?”

“About me.”

“About you? I guess they’re waiting to see where you go with it. The new hires certainly believe in you and John. You hired them. The veterans are waiting to see.” I take a breath, venture further: “You and John came in and said a lot of things publicly about the paper being weak, and naturally that’s taken to heart by the people who were here, working hard. There is some deadwood, I know. But there are people doing fine work, and I guess they’re worried that this isn’t acknowledged.”

“Who is saying this?”

I tell him that he’s asked me for a general sense of what was being said in his newsroom and I had provided such.

“Who is saying these things?” he asks again. “You can tell me, and I won’t reveal the source.”

“Bill,” I reply, “I’m not a snitch.”

We finish the meal in near silence. On the walk back to the newspaper, he asks me again, and I tell him that it is unfair of him to ask me to betray the confidence of coworkers.

“It’s not personal,” I add.

He cites Mario Puzo’s Godfather, the passage where Tom tells Michael that it’s business, it’s not personal. “Everything,” he assures me, “is personal.”

And for the most part, he will be proved right.

No, it won’t be personal when The Sun closes its evening edition and combines staffs, making it a one-newspaper town. And it isn’t going to be personal when Times Mirror puts together a couple more buyouts to reduce the number of reporters and editors on the paper that remained.

To most, the staffing reductions of the 1990s will seem inevitable, almost sensible given the loss of The Evening Sun. But in retrospect, this would be the moment when we finally gave up the pretense of being even a great regional entity, of transforming The Sun into a newspaper with enough resources and authority to truly address modern complexities.

At the very edge of being rendered irrelevant by the arrival of the Internet -- at the precise moment when their very product would be threatened by technology -- newspapers will not be intent on increasing and deepening their coverage of their cities, their nation, the world. They will be instead in the hands of out-of-town moneymen offering unfeeling and unequivocal fealty to stockholders and the share price. And when the Chicago Tribune Company buys Times Mirror and more buyouts follow, the tipping point will be reached. Instead of a news report so essential to the high-end readers that they might -- even amid the turmoil of the Internet -- still charge for their product online and off, American newspapers will soon be offering a shell of themselves in a market unwilling to pay for such and then, in desperation, giving the product away for free. The window will close; newspapers will not be getting better, stronger, more comprehensive. Not ever again.

In Baltimore, the response will be to drop beats, to abandon the pretense of actually covering the city in detail, to regard institutional memory and the need to look at the city’s problems systemically as, well, quaint. The newsroom culture will instead emphasize impact.

No longer would the journalism be rooted in the organic work of reporters sent into the streets to learn new things and then pull smart, balanced stories through the keyhole. Impact means prizes. Now you pick a target and, to the exclusion of all complexity, you hammer on that target, story after story. Most especially, you write additional accounts highlighting the “impact” that The Sun’s coverage has achieved -- covering your own coverage -- the better to show that the newspaper has effected change.

If the newspaper cares about something in December, it cares nothing about it in January; the prize cycle follows the calendar year. If you can source something to The Sun’s reporting -- to documents obtained by The Sun or The Sun has learned -- it reads better than to simply cite the facts, even if they are from the public record. If a politician fails to respond to your reporting by scheduling a hearing or issuing a position paper, you bang on him until he does so.

And worse still, in the newsroom where I grew up -- a semi-intellectual environment where everyone once seemed to be arguing about everything all the time without actually impairing their careers -- dissent will become problematic.

This is the personal part.

Because the new way of doing business apparently leaves no place in the newsroom for fundamental disagreements about content, about reportage, about the substance of what we are doing or not doing. Arguments over quotidian matters such as the slant of Mideast coverage, or an ethical debate over attribution, or the use and overuse of a stylistic device will soon bring transfers and demotions until, finally, an exodus begins. And it will not be the deadwood; those taking the buyouts or simply leaving outright will be the ones with options: Struck, Alvarez, Robinson, Zorzi, Thompson, Wooton, Lippman, among far too many others -- the departures will be the veteran voices of a good newsroom. When they come for Littwin -- our best columnist -- it will involve their anger at a Guild bulletin written during contract negotiations.

“Bill,” he tells the managing editor, “it’s not personal.”

And in response: “Have you ever read The Godfather?”

The divide between new hires who embrace the prize culture and the old guard, many of whom find it a little shameful, will be exacerbated. And old against new is senseless. For the paper to get better, it needs to retain the talent it has and add more. They won’t be chasing the weaker reporters; they’ll be alienating the core of the institution, leaching as much talent as they hire.

So I write a memo to the top editor, arguing this privately, urging him to reconsider this self-defeating mythology in which no one here knew a thing about newspapering until the new regime. Old and new together can build this paper into something greater than the sum of its parts; new set against old cannot.

No response, not a word, except the editor manages to spike my next story without explanation or comment. I go to see him.

“I was disappointed in that story,” he says.

“How so?”

“It was trying too hard not to be a newspaper article.”

“John, I happen to know the feature editor you brought in here to encourage narrative writing -- she read the story in the kill basket and then came in here and told you she couldn’t see why you spiked it. She told you that was the kind of story you brought her here to do.”

He says nothing to that, so I press him: “That’s some of my best work, John. If you spiked it because you were mad at my memo, we can talk about that. But if you spiked it and you’re telling me that kind of journalism has no place at The Sun, then I guess I have no place at The Sun.

“That,” he says, “may be the case.”

I get up to go, feeling as if I’d cut my right arm off with a butter knife. Before I leave, though, I do one last thing: I speak up for some people in the newsroom, honest players who had watched as standards had changed and who are too scared to complain openly. You’ve hired a lot of good new people, I tell the editor, and I’ve happily worked with many of them.

But there’s a fellow here who is cooking it. He’s trying too hard to write impact stories and he’s making it up and John, we’ve retracted a couple stories already. “You might win a Pulitzer with a guy like that. You might also have to give it back.”

“Who?” he asks.

I give him the name.

“Well,” he says, “one bad hire out of twenty-five is a pretty good record, don’t you think?”

I allow that it is. Then I go to see Rebecca, who is editing one of my last stories. It’s about a couple of homicide detectives -- smart, competent players -- who are working a last week before taking retirement.

Her cursor rolls down the screen and she highlights a quote from one: “My friends are all gone now and the place doesn’t seem the same to me. It’s just time.”

She moves on to some of my own verbiage: “. . . it isn’t the casework they plan on remembering; it’s the time spent doing that work -- the camaraderie, the banter, the strange things that a cop sees every time he goes out on the street . . .”

Rebecca Corbett gets it. She starts to cry and I am secretly delighted. It’s always good when you get your own editor.

“You wrote a goodbye,” she says. “Didn’t you?”

I tell her that I am, in my mind, a newspaperman still. I just don’t work for a newspaper anymore. I tell her that I will go to television on a lark, learn a new skill set, but I’ll eventually get back to what it is I’m supposed to be doing.

Four years later, I am in an editing suite in New York, working on an HBO miniseries. And I get a call from an old friend, a veteran of a newspaper that once lacked for impact but gave good weight to getting it right.

“He did it again.”

“Who?”

He gives me the name. And immediately I know.

This time, the newspaper had been required to apologize privately to the governor. A story -- part of a series of articles tailored for a prize campaign -- claimed that the governor visited with black ministers in Baltimore, solely in response to the power of The Sun’s coverage.

Except it hadn’t happened. Not any of it. The meeting was about something else entirely. The ministers -- one of whom was quoted at length about the righteous things he told the governor about The Sun’s Pulitzer-worthy issue -- had uttered nothing of the sort.

I am a free agent at that point, clear of any newsroom politics or careerist worries. Fuck it, I call the publisher and leave a message. But it’s the editor who returns the call.

“An honest mistake,” he explains.

“John, there’s nothing honest about it. This bullshit about having impact and winning prizes? It leads to shit like this. The guy’s making up meetings that never happened. There are quotes that no one ever said.”

“It was a misunderstanding.”

“It’s the third time you’ve retracted one of this guy’s stories. Not corrections -- I’m talking about the very premise of the story having to be retracted.”

“What were the other two?”

It took me a long moment to regroup.

“John,” I said finally, “if I was the editor of a major metropolitan daily and I had to retract three stories by the same reporter, I would remember it until the day I fucking died.”

I’m not prescient. At that moment, I can’t yet fathom all the still-to-come Tribune Company cost cutting at The Sun, the Kafkaesque reductions in staffing, the slow-motion demolition of the Washington bureau, the shuttering of the foreign bureaus.

And I am still as clueless as the captains of the newspaper industry when it comes to the Internet, still mistaking the Web as advertising for the product when, in fact, it is the product. I don’t yet envision the steep declines in circulation, the indifference of young readers to newsprint, the departure of display advertising to department-store consolidation and classified space to Craigslist.

Admittedly, I can’t even grasp all of the true and subtle costs of impact journalism and prize hunger. I don’t yet see it as a zero-sum game in which a serious newspaper would cover less and less of its city -- eliminating such fundamental responsibilities as a poverty beat, a labor beat, a courthouse beat in a city where rust-belt unemployment and crime devour whole neighborhoods -- and favor instead a handful of special select projects designed to catch the admiring gaze of a prize committee.

I have no way of knowing that for all of its claims to renewed greatness, The Sun will glean three Pulitzers in twelve years, as compared to, uh, three Pulitzers awarded to The Sun and its yet-to-be-shut-down evening edition during the twelve years prior -- a scorecard that matters only to a handful of résumés and means nothing to the thousands of readers soon asked to decide whether they need a newspaper that covers less of their world.

I can’t yet see that what ails The Baltimore Sun afflicts all newspapers, that few, if any, of the gray ladies are going to be better at what they do, that most will soon be staring at a lingering slide into mediocrity.

I only know, as I hang up the editing-suite phone, that I’ve lost my religion, that too much of what I genuinely loved is gone. I turn to David Mills, my coproducer on the HBO project. He’d worked with me on the college paper, then at The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Times, The Washington Post. But we wrote that first television script together, and when I returned to the metro desk, he went to Hollywood, never looking back.

“Brother,” I say, “we got out just in time.”

True enough. But the other day, I saw a column of black smoke due east of I-95 just above Eastern Avenue -- dark and thick enough that I drove there. It was a roadside car fire, no injuries. Nothing worth a call to the desk. Good thing, too, because Spry is long dead, and Ettlin retired last year. Who I was gonna call it in to, I have no clue.

Tuesday, 12 February 2008

Andrea Riseborough: No virgin

At Rada she always played virgins. But with upcoming roles as a ghost from Barnsley, an out-of-control Pole, and Margaret Thatcher, Andrea Riseborough is breaking free of typecasting. Liz Hoggard meets her...

There's a lovely moment in BBC3's new drama, Being Human, where Andrea Riseborough explains that she's not as other women. "I'm something else... a ghost," she tells her flatmate's girlfriend. Seeing the look of incomprehension on the girl's face, she adds, with wry, Northern wit: "I'm not a fan of the word."

With her heavy-lidded blue eyes and chalk-white complexion, there is an otherworldly quality to Riseborough. She is 26, but looks, as she puts it, "about 12", and spent much of her time at Rada playing virgins. But Riseborough – who grew up in working-class Newcastle and has a soft Geordie accent – is also a terrific character actress. She can do classical theatre and mainstream TV; she can do femme fatale and street urchin. And very often she's completely unrecognisable.

Last year she played a Croatian-Serb beautician (all leather trousers and politically incorrect views) in the Royal Court's coruscating The Pain and the Itch; a New Labour intern in BBC2's Party Animals; and the love interest in the Mitchell and Webb film Magicians. She was also cast as the young Margaret Thatcher in The Long Walk to Finchley, a BBC2 drama that will go out later in the year. No wonder everyone is queuing up to work with her, from Sir Peter Hall and Mike Leigh to the artist Sam Taylor-Wood.

Riseborough is very proud of Being Human, a one-off 60-minute drama that has the glossy production values of Torchwood and Spooks. Three twentysomething misfits – a werewolf, a vampire and a ghost – are thrown together by their dark secrets and set up house together. Riseborough's character, Annie, died in a tragic accident and can't move on. Dressed in sweatpants and slippers, making endless cups of tea, she is the antithesis of the tragic Victorian spirit. "She's just a really, really sweet ghost-next-door," says Riseborough. "I decided she might be from Barnsley, she might have done a degree in psychology at Loughborough – before the accident she was engaged and happy, her whole life ahead of her. For a long time she doesn't realise she's dead. She's ballsy but vulnerable."

Written by the playwright Toby Whithouse (who has also penned episodes of Torchwood, Doctor Who and Hotel Babylon), Being Human is full of black humour, but also subtly political. "Toby Whithouse writes for Martin Freeman," says Riseborough, "and so it has that feel of The Office, but there's also a deeper meaning." It's clearly fantasy, but it tackles loneliness, rejection and fear of sexuality. We feel genuine sympathy for George (Russell Tovey from The History Boys), who transforms into a werewolf every full moon, while vampire Mitchell (Guy Flanagan) is a loner doomed to ruin every relationship.

You could argue that each character's affliction is a metaphor for the difficulties of adolescence. As Riseborough sees it: "It's all about being 'other'. The vampire could be a smack addict, the werewolf someone who has contracted a horrible disease, the ghost an agoraphobic. Did you know that agoraphobia is fear of the market place? Agora means market place in Greek."

It's a typically thoughtful observation. Although she decided against university and left school at 17 – "I perhaps lost a Thesaurus through it and a couple of Tolstoy novels," she jokes – Riseborough is a demon researcher. She spent time in Croatia before playing her character in The Pain and the Itch, and read everything she could get her hands on about Thatcher. After school she spent three years waitressing, made short films, choreographed contemporary dance, started a greetings card company and began to learn rudimentary Cantonese.

No wonder she knows more about real life than many drama school graduates. She is touchingly positive about everyone she works with, but you sense an inner steel. Her father was a car dealer, her mother a secretary. A bookish child, she spent time writing, painting and drawing in her bedroom. When Riseborough was nine, her drama teacher recommended her for an audition at the People's Theatre (home of the RSC in Newcastle), and soon she was making her stage debut. She later joined the National Youth Theatre and won the 1999 Mike Figgis Award for her performance in Dog Days.

But, even when she won a place at Rada, she had to fight to avoid being stereotyped. "I remember at one point thinking: 'not another virgin, please, no.' And then I realised a way to break out of that: every virgin's different. We were all virgins once. So provided you make choices and create an entire person, your virgin might grow up in Florence or have a seriously bad relationship with her father. And I think my tutors realised I could be far more malleable as an actor." By the third year she had a top agent.

After Rada she was cast in A Brief History of Helen of Troy at the Soho Theatre, and nominated as Best Newcomer at the 2005 Theatregoers' Choice Awards. Next came a six-month stint at the National, playing in a trilogy of plays about young people, Burn, Chatroom and Citizenship. Hall then offered her two more killer virgins – the lead role in Miss Julie, and Isabella in Measure for Measure, which won her the 2006 Ian Charleson Award.

But you'll probably know her best from TV as the splendidly pushy Kirsty in Party Animals. She loved the fact that Kirsty's sexual bravado was born of loneliness and insecurity – but that finally her character began to develop a political conscience. And now she's playing another political animal. Riseborough's own politics couldn't be further from Thatcher's, but, filming The Long Walk to Finchley, she came to admire the Iron Lady. "That's my job, to be empathic, to be more than sympathetic. But I, as Andrea, did end up feeling great admiration for her struggle, for what she achieved – whether I agree with what she achieved or not."

The film covers Thatcher's early life, from her mid-twenties when she fought doggedly to be selected as a Conservative candidate, to the age of 34 when she became MP for Finchley. We won't get the full comedy Thatch persona in bouffant blond wig. Instead, Riseborough plays her as a slight, dark-haired woman. "We wanted Maggie to be unrecognisable at the beginning, so she's a young girl with an RP accent from Grantham, and then I gradually develop into her." The transformation is achieved with very little make-up, but Riseborough is a master of body language: "Maggie just knew she was right about everything, and she ended up craning her neck so bloody far forward that her handbag was leading her around up and down the street! Her little tiny frame just couldn't contain this drive."

Right now, she's in the middle of rehearsals for the Soho Theatre's A Couple of Poor, Polish-Speaking Romanians. Written by Dorota Maslowska, it's billed as a fast-paced road trip of the mind. Gina, Riseborough's character, and her fellow traveller are violent and amoral. They might be gangsters or they might just be soap opera actors on a weekend bender. We're never quite sure. But this is a generation that has been betrayed by consumer capitalism. "Gina's a child really, a child with a child. I'm playing her boyish and unavoidably rough."

She's not allowed to talk about her role in Leigh's next film, Happy-Go-Lucky, except to say that it was an extraordinary working experience. But words come pouring out about filming Taylor-Wood's short film Love You More. "Sam is such an uncompromising artist but she allows everyone else space to be their own artist. It was a godsend of a piece artistically, because we had Seamus McGarvey shooting it, who always does everything with Sam and shot Atonement. We had Patrick Marber as the writer and Anthony Minghella's company producing it."

The film is set in the summer of 1978 – "although we filmed in winter so we had to suck ice cubes before the shoot so we didn't have cold breath." Riseborough plays a 15-year-old punk brought together with a schoolboy (Harry Treadaway) on the day The Buzzcocks release the single of the title. "On set we really felt we were those kids falling in love when everything was exciting and new and crazy."

As for being hailed as one of the hot new faces of 2008, Riseborough remains level-headed. "I think: 'Don't be silly, stop thinking about it.' It's the greatest honour to do a job you love. Some days I wake up feeling shattered but mostly I'm ecstatic about what I do.'

Being Human starts at 9pm on 18 February on BBC3

Sunday, 10 February 2008

Attila the Hun, TV star

Attila the Hun, TV star? The historical novelist William Napier on why it’s a welcome debut, and Professor Peter Heather on what we really know about the Huns...

Attila the Hun used to boast that where his horse had trod, the grass never grew again. Curiously enough, this closely echoes a comment by Lemmy, when he formed Motörhead. “We’re the kind of band that, if we moved in next door, your lawn would die.” However, while Lemmy and his leather-clad cohorts no doubt left a certain amount of untidiness behind them in hotel bedrooms on their various European tours – unmade beds, brimming ashtrays, empty cans of Special Brew and so forth – it could hardly compare with that of Attila, Scourge of God. Even 16 centuries later, his name continues to haunt the western imagination. Have you heard of Aquileia? In Roman times, it was one of the greatest cities in Italy. After Attila’s visit, you would barely know where it had stood – no more than a heap of stones, a terrible testament to his awesome destructiveness. Would he have treated Rome the same way, had he captured it? The consequences for western civilisation are barely imaginable. It might simply have come to an end.

As it was, much of the world was well and truly pitched into the Dark Ages: the only time in our history, so far, when history itself seems to have juddered to a halt, then collapsed backwards into myth. One moment, circa AD400, you have vast cities populated by elegant women and fussy bureaucrats, with street lighting, mains drainage, traffic regulations. By AD500, at least in Britain, the slate is wiped so clean, we hardly know what was going on. Mead halls in dark forests, horned warriors in bearskins, sorcery and sacrifice, Arthur and Beowulf, legends and ghosts – who knows? History is mute, and the irresponsible imagination rushes in to fill the gaps.

So many grand historical stories lose their lustre on closer examination. Agincourt was just a big mud wrestle between about 25 men, Wellington won his victory at Waterloo using mostly Dutch and Germans, Catherine the Great didn’t really die having sex with a horse, and so on. All very dry and disappointing. With Attila, however, the history lives up to the myth. This truly was an apocalyptic period that decided the fate of the world, populated by characters of Shakespearian ambition, passion, hubris and vengefulness.

There was the icy and commanding Galla Placidia, daughter, wife, sister and mother of emperors, and power behind the imperial throne for 30 years. She needed to be. Emperors in those last days seemed to compete with each other for feeble-mindedness. Honorius, her brother, spent most of his time tending his pet chickens, while, as a chronicler wrote, “the fragile frame of the world” was collapsing around him. Meanwhile, her daughter Honoria was so generous with her favours that she became pregnant by her chamberlain, Eugenius, then tried to assassinate her brother, the emperor Valentinian, and have Eugenius crowned instead. And there was Master General Aëtius, at one time a Hun hostage, “last of the Romans”, loyal to a world already gone, the only commander courageous enough to face Attila. The analogies with our own times are startling, if you want to find them: a monolithic western empire threatened by a rising power in the east, alien and barely comprehensible...

With such richness to draw on, the surprise isn’t that there is a new television movie, but that there haven’t been far more. Hollywood’s last stab was Sign of the Pagan, back in 1954, with Jack Palance – Slavic high cheekbones, sardonic smile, biceps of steel – not at all bad as Attila. In Gareth Edwards’s version for the BBC, Rory McCann has a beefy presence in the title role, but ideally he should look Turkish-Mongolian. Tommy Lee Jones (Anglo-Cherokee) would be okay, if 20 years younger, or Charles Bronson (Lithuanian-Tatar), if still alive. But Edwards’s mini-film obviously didn’t have the budget of a Gladiator or a Lord of the Rings, and it’s an ingenious effort on a shoestring.

The history is solidly reliable, and the epic geographical scale of the story, from the limitless steppes of Scythia (Ukraine, more or less) to the high passes of the Carpathians, the mighty land walls of Constantinople to the “vasty fields of France”, are conjured credibly enough using only bits of Bulgaria, some of whose stunning but little-known scenery looks like “Monument Valley in a forest”, Edwards says. He added some techno-wizardry, working mostly in his bedroom. “My desk is right next to my bed. That was the cheapest bit to do.”

Compressing an entire century into an hour of screen time – and the most eventfully apocalyptic of all centuries, too, the 20th notwithstanding – obviously means leaving stuff out. CGI can work miracles with battle scenes, less so with plot and characterisation. The movie also rather underplays culture and religion, pressed for time as it is, and perhaps mindful of a modern audience. Yet when Attila and Aëtius finally faced each other at the titanic battle of the Catalaunian Fields, in eastern Gaul, AD451, with every nation from the Volga to the Atlantic under arms, what really took place was a battle between classical, Christian civilisation and its permanent obliteration. And, in the final act of this tragedy, both sides lost – mutually assured destruction. Attila’s furious assault on the West was brought to a bloody halt. He briefly invaded Italy the following year, visiting his vindictiveness on Aquileia and going slightly mad in the Palace of the Caesars, in Milan, but his power was broken. For the Romans, too, this was the last battle. After that, the western legions are heard of no more, wiped out to a man. Rome never fought again.

Yet out of the carnage were born the Christian kingdoms of medieval Europe. Rome was the mother who died in childbirth, you might say; and, like it or not, we are all her children. No civilisation is perfect, and Rome certainly wasn’t. But the alternative – the triumph of Attila – would have been so much worse. As it was, in AD476, the last emperor, a curly-haired boy called Romulus Augustulus (the irony of that name), was quietly deposed by the Gothic warlord Odoacer, who then declared himself king of Italy. The empire was at an end. Ancient prophecy had said Rome would endure 12 centuries plus six lustra, or 30 years. And Rome was founded in 753BC.

Never again would the emperor stand beneath his yellow parasol on the steps of the Capitoline to greet the legions returning south in triumph down the Flaminian Way. Never again would the sunlight dance on the bronze helmets of the cavalry as their horses champed on the Field of Mars, nor senators gossip and plot in the vast Baths of Caracalla, lounging over the chessboard or strolling among the shops and libraries and sculpture gardens of that 33-acre palace of water. Never again would the great grain ships ply their way from Libya and Egypt, nor the harbour at Ostia resound with the cries of merchants and traders from halfway around the world, bringing copper and tin from Britain, glass and leather from the Levant, gems and spices from Ceylon. Never again would a quarter of a million Romans roar in the Circus Maximus as the chariots raced and swerved around the spina. Rome’s astonishing apartment blocks, such as the Insula of Felicula, supposedly towering 16 storeys high beside the Pantheon, fell into rubble again, and Europe was once more a landscape of log cabins, overgrown roads and passing war bands playing crude games with handfuls of coloured mosaic in the ruins of fallen villas.

The barbarians, and Attila supreme among them, had done their work. But, as it turned out, Rome was a world that was both lost and won. Any visitor to Washington will know how overwhelmingly Roman it feels at times. The city they boastfully hailed with “ Ave, Roma Immortalis!” turned out to be just that: immortal. Of the Huns – their language, their gods, even the meaning of the name Attila – hardly a shred remains.

Attila the Hun is on BBC1 on Wednesday at 9pm;

Monday, 21 January 2008

Something is burning

"Something’s burning," said one reporter to another, absently staring out the window at angry, thick black smoke rising over the city of Baltimore. In a scene from the first episode of the fifth season of HBO's The Wire, the city editor, Gus Haynes, played by Clark Johnson, walks up to the two, dumbfounded by their indifference. "What kind of people stand around watching a fire?" he asked.

David Simon, the man who created The Wire, is not one to stand by and watch a fire. A police reporter who ran after sirens for years, he left the newspaper business in 1995 after 12 years at The Baltimore Sun. In the final season of The Wire, he has created something that feels like he might have written it in his previous life — a riveting five-part series that most newspapers can’t afford to do any more. In this case, however, it’s the newspapers themselves under investigation.

In his article in the New York Times, David Carr concludes that Mr. Simon and his co-author, William F. Zorzi, also a Sun alumnus, have written a scabrous love letter to their old profession that suggests the editors, publishers and corporate overseers are doing little more than heaping bodies on the pyre. There are gorgeous, loving grace notes in The Wire (reporting, for instance, is exalted as "the life of kings"), he notes, but the newspaper business is depicted as the playground of the venal, the inept and the cynical.

In a show of support for the writers guild, on strike in Los Angeles and New York, Mr. Simon said he would not do interviews for The Wire. But he did offer a general observation about the future and past of newspapers, including the one where he used to work. "In The Wire, we have tried to write what we know with regard to every institution in Baltimore and write about what about our experience has been," he said. "The depiction of The Baltimore Sun encompasses all of the problems that are confronting journalism at a time of great stress. The story also captures everything that Bill Zorzi and I love about newspapers."

They get the love right, but do they get all the problems? Television, like all journalism for that matter, is a blunt instrument that often slides over the caveats, the nuances, the subtext. In the search for the killers of daily journalism, The Wire nails some of the details but follows a few false leads.

According to Carr, Mr. Simon’s thesis seems to be that newspapers left the public behind before the public left newspapers. In the first four episodes, less-is-more corporate greedheads denude their papers of vitality and means, creating an opening for a young gunner who cuts every corner he walks by. It’s not the dollars, it’s the dumbing down that is killing the newspaper. "Isn’t the news itself still valuable to anyone?” Mr. Simon wrote in an article published on Sunday in The Washington Post. “In any format, through any medium — isn’t an understanding of the events of the day still a salable commodity? Or were we kidding ourselves? Was a newspaper a viable entity only so long as it had classifieds, comics and the latest sports scores?"

The response has been mixed. The Wire has been a darling of the media, often seeming to survive on critical love. The Web is full of vitriol both for and against Mr. Simon’s portrait of a newspaper turning on itself. Ratings are down for this season (suggesting once again that journalists are more fascinated by their business than the public is).

In The Wire’s middle-management aesthetic — the show has previously taken on police departments, city governments and school bureaucracies — the bosses are corrupt and a lot of the workers are mopes. In order for the white-hat city editor to be ennobled, he has to be surrounded by bad guys. In the case of The Baltimore Sun, it becomes necessary for his editor, James C. Whiting III (played by Sam Freed), to be a craven ax wielder, with the added implication that he allowed journalistic malfeasance on his watch. Mr. Simon has always written what he knows, but this one might be a little close to home. Whiting is a doppelgänger for John S. Carroll, the former editor of The Sun. In real life, however, Mr. Carroll had a long, well-documented history of newsroom leadership and of making each place he ran a better one: he left his last newsroom job at The Los Angeles Times rather than carry out grievous cuts of the news staff. In The Wire, he is rendered as a cartoon, a tool of the bean counters.

It is a reflex of almost all journalists to rail against the powerful, including, and often especially, the ones they work for. And Mr. Simon, who has had success with two brilliant non-fiction books (Homicide and The Corner) made into television shows, is still a journalist above all. His production company is called Blown Deadline Productions, and he has that chip on the shoulder that makes real reporters so painful to deal with and such a pleasure to read.

But there are other villains in the story of the daily newspaper that do not lend themselves as well to television. A secular shift in consumer habits and a corresponding outflow of advertising has put many papers back on their heels. Mr. Simon and The Wire flick at those broader challenges, but the series mostly shows an institution collapsing from within.

The life of an editor now is no longer a matter of just following the story. It’s trying to follow the story while fighting against YouTube and the blogs for readers’ attention, fighting for enough ink and paper after Craigslist and Google have taken their bites out of the budget, and fighting to keep the best reporters who can make better money elsewhere (like television).

Mr. Simon is right: Something is burning. But that doesn’t mean it was an inside job

Friday, 4 January 2008

Bittersweet work of wrapping The Wire


Clark Johnson, who plays a crusading newspaper editor in the fifth and last season of The Wire, beginning Sunday night on HBO, likes telling autobiographical stories. In one favorite he is a dramatic 5-year-old from a politically involved, biracial family, visiting North Carolina from Philadelphia. In the train station he spies water fountains labeled "Colored" and "White." He gleefully dashes to the colored one. "Mom, this water is not colored," he wails as the water bubbles up, a line that makes the other passengers erupt in laughter.

Mr. Johnson’s story — illustrating a bent toward great expectations that has come in handy in the elbows-out world of show business — was told recently as he sipped coffee in Doma, a cafe in Greenwich Village. He began his career at 9 in theatre (he was Jerome in South Pacific), and nowadays, on The Wire, he is the slightly weary but always cool and dedicated Gus Haynes, the city editor of a fictional newspaper called The Baltimore Sun (not to be confused with the real Baltimore Sun). He also directed the last episode of the series, a fitting bit of closure after directing its first episode in 2002.

"It was bittersweet," Mr. Johnson said of directing that last show. "It took forever. Not for any technical reasons, but because when someone’s character ended, we’d give them an ovation. It’s so rare for us, our little tribe of actors, to be part of something so critically acclaimed. For a lot of us it’ll define our careers." Tall, 50ish, with a low, unhurried voice, Mr. Johnson is perhaps best known for portraying Detective Meldrick Lewis in Homicide: Life on the Street. His directing credits include episodes of that series and The Wire as well as The Shield, Sleeper Cell, The West Wing and others. He also directed Boycott, the widely lauded 2001 film on HBO about the life of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

The Wire, created by David Simon, a former reporter for The Baltimore Sun who was a producer and writer for Homicide, has been a critical darling too. Each season the series has picked apart some looming national problem — the failed war on drugs, the deterioration of working-class life, dysfunctional political leadership, overwhelmed urban schools — as it affects a sprawling group of characters that has included cops, drug dealers, politicians, teachers, longshoremen and other (often tawdry) Baltimoreans.

This season the newspaper industry is in the spotlight. Because of cuts by its owner, the fictional Sun’s city editor and his staff are buffeted by buyouts, closed foreign bureaus and less space for news, all of which have afflicted the real Sun and many other newspapers around the country. "Your piece took a bad bite there," Gus Haynes tells a young reporter in one episode. Her 35-inch article about three murders was cut to 12 inches and buried inside the paper. "There’s no explaining it," he tells the reporter when she asks why. "Advertising’s down. We’ve got a smaller news hole." A black reporter, though, tells her that her story has the "wrong zip code," explaining that had the murder victims been white and affluent, the article would have landed on Page 1.

The Wire has not attracted viewers and awards the way other critically lauded HBO series like The Sopranos and Sex and the City did. Mr. Johnson said he was hopeful that the new season would change that. "I really hope people who haven’t tapped into the show will tap into it," he said. "Maybe they don’t care about gangbangers, but they care about newspapers and how information is transmitted." A self-professed news junkie," Mr. Johnson hung out at the real Baltimore Sun to learn the language and the rhythms of a newspaper for his role. He was impressed by the fact checking and the speed of reporters, not to mention the great piles of junk on their desks.

The trick to directing a show in which you are also acting can be summed up by "preparation," Mr. Johnson said. "I was in the family," he said. "I didn’t just go into somebody’s kitchen. I knew every role intimately." He also directed the series finale of The Shield, scheduled to be broadcast on FX sometime this spring. Nina Noble, the executive producer of The Wire, said: "There’s an incredible poetry in Clark directing the last episode. He’s the bookend of the show, in terms of directing. There were 30 original crew members with the show at the end, and everyone knows everyone well, and Clark is probably our most beloved director. On the surface he’s a laid-back, casual kind of guy," she said. "Inside, he’s so passionate about what he does."

Timothy A. Franklin, editor of the real Baltimore Sun, said he found Mr. Johnson "impressive" as the city editor. Based on the few new episodes he had seen, Mr. Franklin was less keen on how The Wire depicted Baltimore and the newspaper business and dismissed a coming story about a fabricating journalist as a cliché. "I think the suggestion that this paper doesn’t cover urban affairs, or the texture of urban life the way it used to, is ludicrous on its face," he said.

Mr. Simon has made no secret of his unhappiness with The Sun, which has gone through two changes of ownership in the last eight years. Mr. Johnson said he found Mr. Simon’s views fairly congruent with reality. Mr. Johnson recalled that Mr. Simon told him that he was writing the part of Haynes for him, although he had spent several years only directing. "It was a chance to get back and just be an actor," Mr. Johnson said, "and not deal with all the problems of directing." As both an actor and director, Mr. Johnson said, police shows seem to find him. "I like the yin-yang of a cop’s life, where he’s part fascist and part saint," he said. "That’s where the good dramas are."

His next directing project is a film called Chinese Wall, about the politics of oil in Nigeria. Politics are in his blood. His father, an African-American, grew up tagging along with his mother as she cleaned homes on the Main Line outside Philadelphia. Mr. Johnson’s mother came from a wealthy white family and grew up on Park Avenue. They married, had four kids, worked in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in Philadelphia and eventually settled in Canada.

"My mom set up relief programs in third world countries," Mr. Johnson said. "We would do things like go to Bogotá with her instead of summer camp." These days Mr. Johnson, the father of two college-age daughters, keeps a home in Toronto and an apartment in Chelsea in Manhattan. And he still shares his parent’s sensibilities. "Film is the only language I speak," he said, "and I have been lucky to be involved in some great stories. You don’t want to preach to people, but you want them to think about why things are the way they are, the history that is there as well as the possibilities."

 

Copyright 2007 ID Media Inc, All Right Reserved. Crafted by Nurudin Jauhari