Dust clouds: two weeks in Kenya

“Write a positive story about us. You guys have such pity for us, but it’s embarrassing. We’ve got so much more about us, and we’re proud. So write a positive story.”

Do you believe in magic?

If not, why?

Think about it: When we’re sick, we can be cured. We fly in metal boxes across Earth. We talk to people wherever we are, whenever we want.

We’re relatively close to setting up human colonies in outer space – and becoming the first known species to outlive its own planet.

If this is possible... what else is possible?

We define ourselves by aiming higher, breaking barriers, reaching for the stars. And we’ve barely begun. You just know, with 100% certainty, that our greatest accomplishments are in front of us, not behind us. Because however slow and pathetic we may seem, and however many setbacks we have, we are progress.

We can, and will, do so much better than this. We’ve proved it throughout history.

This may seem a tenuous link to my time in Kenya. But from there I took home this incredible sense of possibility – along with a scarf for my mum, a banana I’d accidentally packed, and some incense sticks.

I spent a fortnight living with people across Nairobi, and on a camping safari in Masai Mara National Park.

Sure, parts of it were devastating. No amount of Comic Relief can prepare you for seeing children sleeping rough alone, women filling up barrels of dirty drinking water from open pipelines, and men pulling overloaded goods carts through smoky rush-hour traffic.

Then there’s the smell of sewage, the rivers of trash, the tin roofs and walls made of old newspaper. The dust clouds that rise violently over untarmacked roads... and lots of other pretty grim developing world problems.

I thought that was going to be the story I told you. It might have been called something like ‘My Live Aid Moment’.

But that would have been arrogant, insulting, and worst of all, it wouldn’t have been true.

Instead, what was and is true is the sense of hope I found there, which I’d never felt before.

Lingua Franca

Here’s a bit about that.

Titus, who lives in Nairobi’s troubled Eastlands area, shared a one-bedroom house with no running water, toilet or kitchen, with two other people.

He told me: “Negative thoughts attract negative events. Positive thoughts attract positive events. So when I really, really want something to happen, I think about how I will feel, and what I will tell my friends and family, when it does happen. I completely visualise it. Then sometimes, the universe makes it happen for me.”

I asked him what kind of positive events he’d wished for.

He said: “I wished for my mother to get better in hospital. I wished for my younger brother to pass his school exams. And I wished for Liverpool to win the Premier League.”

And did these things happen?

“All apart from Liverpool...”

By some twist of fate, later that day I ended up going back to someone’s mansion (“Oh, go on then...”) after a night out in leafy Westlands. He had about six bedrooms, a massive kitchen and – get this – a water feature in his living room. It was just obscene.

Like everywhere across the world, there’s a pretty big gap between the have-nots and the have-yachts in Nairobi.

It didn’t seem fair, because it isn’t. It demonstrably isn’t.

But Titus, in his humble home, told me he’d rather be rich in his mind: “because you can’t lose that, but you can lose money.”

With crippling guilt I thought about him as our Westlands host poured us his favourite French chardonnay.

Ying and Yang

The worst place I went was Nairobi’s Kibera area – the largest urban slum in the whole of Africa. It’s basically one huge market, where people earn their living haggling over baby clothes and mangoes, and then go home to pray. The ground is rocky, and it smells like burning trash.

I spent an afternoon there.

The guy who showed me around was called Peter. He was proud of Kibera. He’d lived there five years.

“This is the nice area,” he said, gesturing at the street ahead of us.

Without going into too much detail, it wasn’t. But the fact he thought it was made me both happy and sad. Ying and Yang.

Peter used to make a living in Kibera selling clothes, before starting a new job as a guard somewhere else in Nairobi.

“You know, I’d really like to improve my life,” he said. “But I’m happy everyone here knows me and I know them. They like me and I like them. It’s good!”

He later told me he wanted to get back to what he does best: selling, and talking to customers.

He wants to build his own business and, shilling by shilling, I really think he’ll make it happen. Because he has the Kenyan spirit.

Wherever I was in Nairobi, children tended to gawp at me, a rare sight of a white man. They’d come up to greet me, ask me questions, or try to hold my hand – their tiny palms gripping my fingers.

It was no different in Kibera. Peter and I stopped off for a soda on our way out of the area, when a young girl came up to me in the room we were sitting in.

She stared for a while, then hid behind a barrel and played peek-a-boo. Her name was Carolyn. I remember talking to her about why she should stay in school and work hard.

Then her dad came over.

He backed me up in the rhythms of Swahili, telling his daughter that eventually, she might be able to get a good education that would take her “to the UK, or America”, he said, too old to dream that for himself.

Who knows, maybe Carolyn will become something really big some day. A lawyer, a teacher, an entrepreneur... or just someone who makes Kibera a better place, one soul at a time.

Police corruption, tribal tension

Poverty isn’t the only issue in Nairobi.

The police aren’t paid enough, so many are corrupt. I was looking for somewhere that did currency exchange in Downtown, and got called over by a guy wrapped in a camouflage suit and an AK-47. He called me out for not carrying my passport, which is apparently an offence.

The passport was at my host’s place in Fedha, so the policeman said he was going to take me to the police station.

After a while I thought I’d managed to talk him around. Then he told me to follow him. We walked for about 20 minutes, and with every step I was more confused where I was being led. But what could I do?

We ended up at a casino, where I could exchange currency. He took a pretty hefty cut of my shillings, then left me alone. That actually happened on my first day in Nairobi.

There are 42 ethnic groups (or tribes) in Kenya. There’s sometimes tension and conflict between them – especially in election years, like 2017.

Kenya’s a multi-tribal jigsaw, and its politicians use the gaps in the pieces to divide and rule. It’s an approach they learned from us when we were the British Empire.

Even today we’re not much better, with our governments contributing largely to the fact that Africa has more weapons than any other continent – despite manufacturing none themselves.

The universe

But you know what? I had an awesome time in Kenya too. This was in no small part due to living in Nairobi’s creative community, chilling out with a fashion designer, photographer, the best singer I’ve ever heard, and their many friends.

We partied on their balcony, visited an art gallery, and spent a random night watching The Fantastic Mr Fox, featuring the voice of George Clooney.

And there was even more optimism. More energy. More life.

Sama was a painter who’d recently quit her job doing “corporate art” to make a living doing more creative projects.

She said: “Have you ever been sat on a park bench and had the sudden urge to leave, for no reason? What is that? It’s something beyond our control. I think it’s the universe!”

Later:

“Love is something that’s real. We can’t explain it scientifically, but it’s powerful, and we feel it. Maybe it’s some evidence of a higher force we don’t understand but we know is real. And it feels right to trust it, doesn’t it?”

I still think about what she said, even now I’m back home and in my own bed.

Singing, dancing, celebrating, thrillseeking, hoping, praying, dreaming.

Maybe it was just these extraordinary people I met, but I’d like to think they are a decent sample of what Nairobi’s all about.

Mixed in the dust clouds there’s dignity, spirit and joy.

And then the animals

I stayed a few days in Masai Mara National Park, home to the ‘Big Five’ wild animals: lions, elephants, leopards, buffalo and rhino.

Me and my safari group didn’t see any rhino, but our jaws were open all day seeing everything else: cheetahs chasing wildebeest at full speed, giraffes munching on trees, lions just li-on around.

The celebrities of our zoos and Attenborough TV shows were just going about their business in their own stomping ground – and I was star-struck.

One day we raced across the park watching wild animals in a rickety Jeep type-thing, met and danced with a Masai tribe in a local village, and compared stories of extremes while watching the sun set.

We spent the night in our tents during a storm. It was pitch black, and every raindrop’s strike to the canvas seemed to swell somehow, as the distant thunder rumbled and the grasshoppers chirped.

It was a Wednesday, and the first and only day I’ve thought: Wow, this might just be the best day of my life so far.

It was kind of, I don’t know... magical.

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Why the sea around me is blue

You’ve lost faith in politics because no one in parliament represents you. Trade unions are things from the 1980s, and demonstrations achieve shit. Suddenly you’re given the chance to make a decision that will actually change something. You would take that chance.

Remember that referendum results map of Britain? I live on that island of gold in the middle of the north of England. I woke up at 5.30am last Friday morning and my first three words were “no, no, no”. I’ve been pretty pissed off all weekend but the last thing anyone on the internet wants to see is another Europhile’s ode to Brussels. So I’m making an effort to understand why the sea around me is blue.

What I do know is that our country is not 51.9% old and xenophobic. Sure you can take a look at the results data and see that more young people voted Remain, with the Baby Boomers voting to Leave, but look closer: 38% of 25 to 34-year-olds also voted Leave.

The people who got this over the line were the lost and frustrated working class. By that I don’t mean thick, aggressive bigots who if it weren’t for liking Will Smith would be fully fledged racists – I mean fun, humble, decent people who have been starved of hope for a generation.

In another era, they were represented by the Labour party. But while the parties in Westminster have grown closer over the past 20 years, social inequality has widened. Many voters in Labour’s traditional heartlands – in Wales and across the north and east of England – don’t have anyone speaking up for them anymore.

They know no one will ever make their homes more affordable, their wages more generous, or their jobs more secure. So they vote less, and politicians care less, election after election.

The Leave campaign was the first time they had been given a convincing case for something that could actually change their lives for the better, and “take back the country” they had in mind when they weren’t too old to dream. The referendum had given them hope for the first time. Everyone deserves hope.

Some of them knew Johnson, Hannan and Farage were talking bollocks on Friday – but threw their hats in the ring anyway. After all there was nothing to lose.

The sad thing is that there’s no obvious way that cutting important diplomatic and economic ties with our neighbours will improve anything. In fact it seems like a terrible, irreversible mistake. But I guess I would think that, as someone who has the privilege to understand our establishment and the opportunity to find his way in it – not someone who still needs so much more from their country.

This still hurts, but everyone needs to get over it, and try to make it work. Hopefully it will.

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VIDEO: BBC News interview about the Scottish independence referendum

After my piece about Scottish independence became one of my most successful online posts, BBC News asked if I would like to be interviewed on the night of the second Darling v Salmond TV debate. There were supposed to be three or four other York-based journalists giving their opinions along with me, but I was the only one to turn up. So I did the interview on my own.

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A Yorkshireman's thoughts on Scottish independence

During my four years in Glasgow, I had to tolerate my fair share of anti-English “banter”. And I completely understand why. If we English lived next to a country with a population ten times the size of ours, whose government had, over hundreds of years, used its strength in numbers to slowly erode our native culture and language, was largely ignorant of our needs, yet still made most of our decisions, was dominant, yet indifferent, over our affairs, was so socio-economically imbalanced that our liberal beliefs became defined against it – then we’d probably have a gentle jest with its citizens every once in a while. Especially when they had the cheek to cross over our border.

It’s not personal, it’s just banter, I was told. Which meant that I didn’t deserve it as an individual, but England, my country of birth, probably did – like it or not. From the Battle of Culloden, to the Poll Tax, England hasn’t been the friendliest of neighbours to Scotland over the centuries – and while that stuff’s got nothing to do with you or I, it’s all happened, and the collective memory remains pretty strong on the other side.

It’s where our countries find themselves as Scotland approaches its independence referendum.

On September 18, in what is no doubt a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, Scotland will vote to go it alone and become the country it has always seen itself as – or show its faith in an embittered union of more than three hundred years.

The Yes and No campaigns’ economic arguments involving North Sea oil and Sterling are far from conclusive. On a political level, though, there isn’t much debate to be had. In England, we pretty much always get the governments we vote for. But there are more giant pandas in Edinburgh Zoo (two) than Conservative MPs in the whole of Scotland (one), and somehow its parliament is still under the authority of a Tory-led UK Government. How is that fair?

An independent Scotland would improve Anglo-Scottish relations. Greater respect would exist between our separate countries, cooperating as international allies, not haggling and rutting as unequal cousins. (See, for example, our contrastingly fruitful diplomacy with Ireland, the US, or any of the 60 or so other countries that have declared independence from the United Kingdom, and the British Empire, over the course of history.)

An independent Scotland would also give the north of England greater bargaining power in Westminster. If Scotland can do it, why can’t we? There are political parties who want to win our regions more autonomy (and I might have voted for Yorkshire First in the European elections, had they not had vague links to UKIP). Imagine if the north of England went independent. Yorkshire, the Lakes, Manchester, the Pennines, Blackpool Tower, the Chuckle Brothers, chip spice… we’d have it all to ourselves, and it would be awesome.

Anyway, the crux of the debate in Scotland rests on emotion. It’s mostly indifference down here in England, typically, but north of the border, the pro-independence lobby cares more passionately about independence than the unionists do about the United Kingdom. Essentially everyone’s a ‘why?’ or a ‘why not?’ kind of person. Some people go out and take risks, others stay indoors. I’m not sure which type of person is going to win this referendum, but it’s going to be close.

If you ask me, the idea of a country is fundamentally ridiculous. But given these circumstances, and to ensure the best outcome for generations to come, Scotland has to vote Yes to independence on September 18.

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Theatre review: Brassed Off @ York Theatre Royal

Published by theartsdesk

VIDEO: Brassed Off trailer




Only a particularly hard heart would fail to be moved by the sheer scale of community fragmentation around the time of the Miners' Strike – for many, the single most devastating period in the north of England's social history. But maybe, just maybe, this Brassed Off  play is not quite as stirring as it should be.

Adapted by Paul Allen from the classic 1996 film, the story about a colliery and its brass band has been revived at York Theatre Royal to mark the strike's 30th anniversary year. Pulling the strings is Damian Cruden, an award-winning director of such vision and skill that his involvement in something even slightly by-the-numbers is kind of surprising.

The production retains all of the film's best lines and makes much of its rugged humour – and that's just as well, because Mark Herman's original screenplay largely spoke for itself. A theatrical spectacle, though, this unfortunately is not. Too often does the emotion feel lukewarm, the scenes one-dimensional, and the plot rushed. This is particularly evident when conductor Danny (John McArdle) steps up to deliver an acceptance speech when his brass band of brothers triumphs at the national championships, soon after losing their jobs at the mine.

"I thought music mattered. But does it? Bollocks! Not compared to how people matter," is such a powerful and definitive line, and everyone in this audience knows it. After all, we sit a mere 40-odd miles away from the former mining village of Grimethorpe, South Yorkshire, on which the fictional Grimley and its colliery band are based. We’re huge Brassed Off fans. However, McArdle's stoic delivery spoils it, compromising an otherwise solid performance by the former Brookside actor, and highlighting exactly how much of a difficult act to follow the late, great Pete Postlethwaite remains.

That said, there are some redeeming qualities in the rest of the cast. More remarkable are Clara Darcy's Gloria, James Robinson's Andy, Rebecca Clay's Sandra and Andrew Roberts-Palmer's Harry, while the dark horse of the show is Luke Adamson, whose role as Phil’s young son Shane – a fun-loving boy slowly grasping what is happening to his family’s livelihood in Grimley – is a key difference between play and film. Adamson featured prominently in last year's First World War outdoor epic Blood + Chocolate, and has the part of 'the honest lad' down to a tee.

Also noteworthy is Dawn Allsopp's evocative set design, and the large ensemble of local musicians, whose renditions of Rodrigo's Concierto de Aranjuez and other numbers are very strong – however undermined by the pop music bridging each scene.

Brassed Off  will always bring the house down. There’s no doubt about that. Given its true-story against-all-odds struggle for the notion of community, it completely deserves to. And yet, despite having all the sadness, anger, despair, desperation, love, laughter and joy to play with, somehow this production lacks emotional punch.

★★★

Brassed Off continues until March 1

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Inside the Bowels of The Jeremy Kyle Show

Published by Sabotage Times

He's a daytime TV institution and an ally of the disenfranchised, but he really likes it when people cheer for him...

What would you do if a middle-aged woman confided in you this: that she used to be a man who took to binge drinking to combat the frustrations of not being female, and that the hormonal confusions surrounding her subsequent sex change had led her to further alcohol abuse and to regularly fly off the handle in violent rages. Most of us would run a mile, but how's this for advice? “You were a binge drinking man – now you're an alcoholic woman.” Meet Jeremy Kyle, whose daytime programme on ITV reels in millions of us every day.

And here’s where it all begins. Huddled together down a damp, dark avenue outside Granada Studios in Manchester queue The Jeremy Kyle Show’s audience and I – waiting patiently to put our own problems at bay so we can be entertained by a talk show host exploiting other people's.

After bearing the rough edge of the rain for an hour, we are led inside and nudged into a seating area, where a woman holding a clipboard lectures us. She has the energy of a Butlins redcoat. “On today's episodes, we have DNA results!” she enthuses, to the giddy murmurings of this eager crowd. “And remember, you must all show your most extreme emotions together, because Jeremy likes it when you cheer for him.”

We practise in unison our gasps, cheers and boos, and I make a mental note of a group of five who seem to be taking this far too seriously as we make our ways into the studio itself. Chaos reigns for fifteen minutes as many of us are made to swap seats in the name of audience balance. Then, suddenly, the man himself emerges. “Ladies and gentlemen, Jeremy Kyle!” announces the floor manager. Everyone goes wild.

Kyle walks across the stage and takes a seat. Then he breaks into a stand-up routine. “My daughter came from school today, and she's started saying a new word – boys,” he says with a smirk. “Well I'm alright with that, because what boy in their right mind will ever want to go near JEREMY KYLE'S daughter?” The crowd cheers and applauds.

“You alright Will, you twat?” he asks the floor manager. “Listen everybody, Will needs a girlfriend. His last girlfriend was quite rough, so he’s after something a bit more classy.”

It continues like this, with Kyle picking people at random, telling them to “get a job!” or asking: “Are you pregnant? Who's the father!?” and revelling in the laughter of the audience. He seems to enjoy referring to himself in the third person for a while, before he finally gets on with the show.

“So let's bring out Kevin,” Kyle announces. In this episode, Kevin will discover whether he is the biological father of his ex-girlfriend Tasha's unborn child. Tasha, who admitted that she “might have slept with someone on New Year's Eve” while they were still together, is confident that Kevin is the father, and that they could still have a future together. Kevin, still in love with Tasha and willing to forgive her, is hoping that he is the father too. You know the drill.

“Kevin,” Kyle pauses as the audience prepare to go live on their gasp rehearsals, “is NOT the father.” Kevin punches the wall and storms off stage. Tasha begins to cry. Kyle offers some banal advice about “using protection in the future” before quickly cutting to an ad break, and Tasha is ushered quickly off stage.

And it's back to Kyle bathing in his own self-importance. “That was very good,” he says to himself. He doesn't need to be told. “Hey, Dom!” he shouts across the studio. A man fiddling with camera wires looks up. “Don't you feel like you owe your whole career to me?”

Kyle disappears for a few minutes, before re-emerging for two more episodes. A few more gasps, cheers and boos later, and the whole thing is finished. The TV crew pat Kyle on the back, and he grins.

If you've watched the show, you'll know that at the beginning, Kyle enters to a cheering, whooping, applauding audience and shakes a few hands. That must be his favourite part, because after all, “Jeremy likes it when you cheer for him.”

Just as the TV crew are about to let us leave, Kyle speaks up over everyone. “One more thing, guys,” he says with a smile, “can we just do the beginning bit again?”

Festival review: Latitude 2012

Published by theartsdesk

Thursday 12th – Sunday 15th July 2012
Henham Park, Suffolk, UK


As a giggling toddler posed for a photograph next to a pink sheep, a man in a Barbour jacket moaned about losing his garlic-crusher. On the lake, smitten newlyweds enjoyed a gondola ride, while, somewhere else, an elderly couple watched a show so moving it made them cry.

Yes, this could only have happened in one place – the leafy surroundings of Henham Park, near Southwold in Suffolk, at Latitude Festival.

The arts event has just enjoyed its seventh July, and retains a vibrant cultural miscellany. In fact, 750 music, theatre, art, comedy, cabaret, poetry, politics, dance, literature and everything-in-between acts appeared across more than a dozen stages this time around. ‘It’s like the Edinburgh Fringe, but in a field,’ some spectacled reveller enthused, gesturing with a rolled-up broadsheet, as if to further illustrate this point.

Talking of newspapers, this year’s controversy was undoubtedly the introduction of the i Arena (formerly the Sunrise Arena). The change was only in name, of course, affecting neither the general feel of this smaller, more intimate musical stage, nor the variety of bands performing on it. But symbolism is important to some Latitude purists, who bemoan further advances toward – dare I say it – the mainstream.

With no fewer than eight corporate sponsors, and now priced at £175 a weekend ticket, the festival continues to develop in spite of their tuts and sighs. Though, to be honest, I can think of far greater crimes committed that weekend (more on those later), and anyway, isn’t Latitude still ‘more than just a music festival’?

One of the first acts to answer that with a defiant ‘yes’ was Theatre503, which staged new play ‘Billy Chickens Is A Psychopath Superstar’ on Thursday evening. Visceral, satirical and exasperatingly physical, the story of the piece surrounded a charismatic but homicidally unstable cockney gobshite who somehow becomes the media’s flavour of the month.

'Billy Chickens Is A Psychopath Superstar' by Theatre503

The Theatre Arena now stands significantly taller and wider than its smaller, quainter predecessor, where you could relish the finest pleasure in the world – watching a piece of drama with the sound of rain pounding on the canvas above your head.

You might have said I got what I asked for when, that night, I returned to my tent and was forced to appreciate the sound of rain on canvas all night long. Indeed, Suffolk’s sky water inspired a survival-like mentality that was novel to us optimists – with apparently inadequate tenting that required an inner lining t-shirts, loo roll and newspaper to keep the water out – who used it as an opportunity to relive our days at scouts.

After suffering a lack of sleep because of these heroics that would have made Captain Scott proud, I felt a little hazy on Friday afternoon, and so decided to give my brain a workout by going to see an interview with Siri Hustvedt at the Literary Arena. Sure enough, watching the acclaimed novelist, essayist and poet shoot the breeze with Suzi Feay about art, humanity and psychology just about did the job. Bemusingly, though, the tent was only half-filled. I assumed that such academic, intellectual and existential discussions were the things most ‘Latte-tuders’ dreamed of – though perhaps this particular event had simply been overlooked by those who’d been distracted by the other 332 pages in the festival programme.

Another show in danger of getting lost in this bulky text was Battersea Arts Centre’s ingenious ‘Paper Cinema’s Odyssey’. In something of a first for myself and much of the audience, Homer’s cornerstone of literature was told in inventive fashion with a projector, a couple of puppeteers, four musicians and a bunch of paper cut-outs. It was a truly magical 60 minutes, after which I left my seat feeling rather uplifted.

'Paper Cinema's Odyssey' by Battersea Arts Centre

And some performances were not listed in the programme at all. These included many of the shenanigans in the Mess Tent – out in the Faraway Forest – the smallest venue on site. One of its acts was a corset-clad, loud-mouthed Aussie gal, who showed off some of her circus skills (or something) to a crowd of about 30. She called herself Lilikoi Kaos, and I’ll never forget those bawdy, brash but brilliant ten minutes we shared on Saturday evening.

Another equally memorable ten minutes occurred at midnight on the Writer’s Bridge. I say ten minutes – it could have been longer, or shorter, because time isn’t really of the essence when you’re watching a trapeze artist being carried majestically across the lake by a balloon that changes colour. You’re right, it sounds achingly pretentious when recounted, but did inspire true wonder at the time. ‘Is this really happening?’ expressions were worn by many who were simply incapacitated in bedazzlement as they witnessed – I’ll say it again – a trapeze artist being carried majestically across the lake by a balloon that changed colour. I had some strange dreams that night.

Saturday in the Obelisk Arena, and many would argue the entire festival, belonged to Elbow. Topping the bill on the main stage, these gentle alternative rockers with their soaring, anthemic songs, were the perfect star attraction. Everything an onlooker could want from a headliner was present in the set: stunning backdrops, constantly changing images of the performance, good-natured banter with the crowd and, above all, great songs spanning their impressive back catalogue.

If you’ve been visiting Latitude Festival for a number of years, one arresting observation that never escapes you is how busy it has become. For a third consecutive year, the capacity has remained at 35,000 – a reasonable level for a medium-sized festival, you might think, yet still three times what it was in 2006.

Many of the faces behind this statistic are young ones. Teenagers who, partying in their gaggles of 15 or 20, you’d expect to be attracted to somewhere a bit more lively – like Leeds/Reading Festival, maybe. Put another way, at Latitude, you’re now more likely to meet a red-eyed lad called Dekky spilling Tuborg over himself than you are a fortysomething chap called Oliver eating flafel – contrary to popular opinion of this ‘middle-class festival’.

Unsurprisingly, I didn’t see a soul under 25 in the Film & Music Arena on Friday, where avant-pop violinist Hahn-Bin took to the stage to deliver a typically flamboyant and effortlessly perfect performance presented by the Royal Albert Hall.

He was followed by a trio of darkly comic gems from the London Short Film Festival. ‘Friend Request Pending’, the first, was about two elderly women with an alarming Facebook obsession. A psychotic London copper’s shift quickly descended into nightmarish mayhem after he mistakenly took a hard drug in ‘Disappoint You’, while ‘Long Distance Information’ – exploring familial fragmentation with a tale about a son who accidentally calls the wrong father, but still manages to communicate just as well as the pair fail to realise they aren’t related – completed the set.

'Disappoint You' short film

A good few clusters of little people, however, could be found linking arms as they weaved in and out of a full house in the Word Arena, where pop icon Lana Del Rey and a string quartet performed an set of epic singles on Friday. Wearing a white dress and taking delicate drags from a cigarette – at a guess, a Lucky Strike – in between songs, the bewitching singer-songwriter crooned her way through hits like Blue Jeans, Video Games and National Anthem. And yet she did nothing to suggest that she, and her music, isn't simply a beautiful, but somehow empty, nothing.

Even the performers at Latitude are getting younger. Who could forget Harry Baker, the 20-year-old rapper-turned-poet who had his audience in stitches with a dessert-themed reworking of Ed Sheeran’s single ‘The A Team’?

But there was absolutely no doubt as to who owned the Poetry Arena that weekend. Weaving impassioned stories and sound advice into jaw-dropping rhymes, Scroobius Pip appeared at home in front of the thousands who’d gathered to see him on Saturday night. People were spilling out of the tent, and into the neighbouring food queues, as the Essex wordsmith remarked: ‘This is the largest spoken word crowd I’ve ever seen.’

Carrying a healthy sense of humour outside of his melancholic verse, Pip joked about fans illegally downloading his self-released first album ‘No Commercial Breaks’, and how, aware of this, he had created a ‘guilt button’ on his website for them to pay up. Suddenly, the stage was showered with flying coins and notes, which, although disbelieving, he dutifully collected. ‘People shouldn’t throw money at me when I’m on stage, because it distracts me and then ruins the show for you guys,’ he said, bending down to pick up another quid.

'A Letter from God to Man' by Scroobius Pip

I think everyone would agree he was worth every penny, and his mesmerising set ended with a full two minutes of applause, before the awe-filled crowd reluctantly dispersed – hopeful of an encore.

If I hadn’t made a very late call on packing my wellies, and was stuck with my blue Converse all weekend, then I’d have missed this. Because I would have never left my tent. The campsite sludge squelched with every blasted step, and there was a perpetual need for woodchip – even when things finally brightened up on Sunday.

I think Lang Lang had something to do with the arrival of blue skies. They came at around the same time he headlined the Waterfront Stage, where crowds had gathered on both sides of the lake, and across the Writer’s Bridge, to catch a glimpse of the classical pianist. They witnessed a flawless performance, including pieces by Schubert and Chopin, that was every bit as elegant as Lang Lang’s entrance – via gondola.

So, those are my highlights – bar one. Thrash metal and anti-Conservative sentiments, anyone? Yes, #Torycore, in the Literary Salon, involved a woman screaming: ‘A HEALTHY AND FLEXIBLE ECONOMY’, and other short excerpts from George Osborne’s speeches as Chancellor, ironically of course, as some dude played power cords really, really loud. ‘And now,’ she said, very calmly, when that bit was over, ‘I’m going to read out a list of the Lords who voted for the Health and Social Care Bill, and their links to the private healthcare sector’. Then she erupted again.

After that ordeal, I rather conveniently concluded that the contrast between Lang Lang and #Torycore appeared to describe the sheer spectrum of cultural plurality that Latitude continues to represent. It remains remarkable, miraculous even, how arts followers of radically different persuasions are squeezing – and squeeze they did – through the same entrance gates to come to this place, year after year.

Latitude hasn’t become so inflated that it’s not still an artsy, lefty, intellectual event that continues to attract artists, lefties and intellectuals from across this fair land. But, as the swathes of sloshed young people demonstrated this year, not exclusively.

From Our Own Correspondent: A Critique of the BBC Radio 4 programme.

My review of the long-running Radio 4 programme as part of a BBC application.

As contemporary television and radio programmes serve a generation increasingly rushed and hurried, today’s peak-time news reports tend to be delivered in a similarly frenetic fashion. The need to trim a story’s fluffy bits to such an extent sadly means that we often have a distorted and over-simplified understanding of the world, based on ten second soundbites and quick-fire interviews. The light such bulletins actually shed on the world’s affairs is “narrow and harsh”, according to Kate Adie, while the fascinating detail remains in the shade.

Yet on a more positive note, she believes that “there is still very much a place for a trenchant and colourful look at life to complement these brief news bulletin dispatches.” The place is From Our Own Correspondent, a Radio 4 programme which the former reporter presents on Saturdays.

Correspondents give their personal reflections on events big and small, from locations far and wide. What’s more, they are passionate in doing so. After all, musing introspectively about particular developments based on the correspondents’ own observations must feel much more fulfilling than yelling brief responses to questions asked from London via a shaky satellite connection. There’s a whole context to explain, people and places to be described, experiences to be shared.

Yet far from being a programme invented by gluttonous journalists hungry for more air time, FOOC strikes an intimate chord with its listeners. The reports which I find most stimulating are not the high-profile events, but the small, inconsequential details which paint a vivid picture of everyday life. These sharp and sometimes witty descriptions of quirky characters, chance encounters and accidental discoveries are things than we, as people, can all relate to. They also make journalism memorable.

While the histories and immediate circumstances of the people behind the news are far more complex than journalists can often afford to convey, FOOC goes some way to meeting that challenge. The reports are still relatively short, around three or four minutes each, but they offer a unique outlet for such insight and provide fleeting images of the world as it truly is.

For as long as news programmes will continue to encourage reporting in a concise manner, FOOC, now broadcasting in its 55th year, will remain a crucial component of news coverage on the BBC.

On Dr Rowan Williams' visit to Glasgow...

Published by Qmunicate

Taking a coffee break from the mammoth task of pasting together the largest split in the Anglican Church for centuries, Dr Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, delivered a free public question and answer session in Bute Hall last month.

The format of the evening also included an open discussion with British Muslim academic Mona Siddiqui, a Professor of Theology and Religious Issues at Glasgow University. The Archbishop confronted a range of topics, witnessed by 700-strong audience.

2008 has been a struggle for the Church of England and Williams himself – his comments on Sharia law in February created a prolonged media hysteria, and the historic Lambeth Conference was marred by a boycott by conservative bishops over the issue of homosexuality in June. “Anything I say here tonight isn’t just to the audience sitting in front of me,” he recognised.

In spite of this, Williams was composed during the whole event, and his input to the discussion was remarkably frank. He spoke candidly about sectarianism and secular politics, and a sense of realism washed over everything he said. Any form of sermonising was thankfully absent; the Archbishop certainly proved his worth as an intellectual with a broad understanding of modern life, as opposed to a one-dimensional religious zealot – leaving points of intrigue even for a militant atheist like me.

One notable point came when Williams admitted that, “religious language often seems hollow in the context of great human suffering,” and that, as any human being would, he questions his faith amid the worst of natural and political atrocities. However, he affirmed, “I’ve never thought of giving up, as I’ve never felt that nothing’s out there.”

The Archbishop even dared comment on Islam, despite the controversies in February, when provoked by Professor Siddiqui. “I think more Christians need to understand Jesus in the context of Islam. There are certainly many similarities.” Referring to Muslims and Jews as “our brothers and sisters”, Williams also stressed the importance of seeing his job as a pragmatic “listening process”.

Questions from the audience were mixed – one man wanted him to come up with a solution for religious divisions between Catholics and Anglicans, to which he responded by saying that he couldn’t do anything but to “hope to foresee a unity one day.” Another woman wanted to know if Williams be supporting Barack Obama or John McCain at the then-imminent Presidential Election. “I know better than to give you an answer to that,” he joked.

I left the room with a profound respect for the Archbishop. He demonstrated a deep theological and intellectual knowledge that made him appear more in touch with modern life than you’d probably expect. Yet, his affiliations with the ‘liberal wing’ of the church certainly don’t render him less religiously passionate as his conservative critics.

Swapping seats at The Jeremy Kyle Show

Published by Qmunicate

Qmunicate's cutting-edge columnist goes to the source of one of TV's most provocative talk shows.

What would you do if a middle-aged woman confided in you this: that she used to be a man who took to binge drinking to combat the frustrations of not being female, and that the hormonal confusions surrounding her subsequent sex change had led her to further alcohol abuse and to regularly fly off the handle in violent rages. Most of us would run a mile, but how's this for advice? “You were a binge drinking man – now you're an alcoholic woman.” Meet Jeremy Kyle, whose daytime show on ITV reels in 1.5 million of us every single day.

This is where it all begins. Huddled together down a damp, dark avenue outside Granada Studios in Manchester on a wet and windy evening, queue The Jeremy Kyle Show studio audience and I – waiting impatiently to put our own problems at bay so we can enjoy Jeremy exploiting other people's.

His guests, raked from the broken homes of Britain's working-class families, are wheeled out every day before him to have their wounds ripped open in public. Kyle's mantra dramatises the negative effects that drugs and alcohol abuse, parental neglect and unemployment have upon Britain's families, and particularly children. His show was this year publicly criticised by a court judge, who, in summing up a case of GBH on the set of Kyle's show, described Kyle's method of counselling as “human bear-baiting”.

I feel underdressed. Everybody around me is caked in make-up and dressed to kill – but why? Perhaps some of them are taking hope from the fact that Jeremy's wife, Carla Germaine, he met on one of his radio shows. Nevertheless, everyone is soaking wet, so it doesn't really matter.

After bearing the rough edge of the rain for half an hour, we are led inside and nudged politely into a seating area, where a clipboard-carrying woman lectures us about the show. She has the enthusiasm of a Butlins redcoat, but sadly one who is now prostituting her services to the daytime talkshow-watching demographic. “On today's show we have DNA results!” she enthuses, to the giddy murmurings of the eager crowd. “You must all show your most extreme emotions together,” she says, “because the other audiences today didn't cheer or gasp much, and Jeremy was very upset. Jeremy likes it when you cheer for him.”

I read my admission ticket – a yellow slip of paper choked with bullet points such as: 'Remember without you there wouldn't be a show. Use body language to help get your points across – it looks better on TV!' For a few minutes we practise in unison our gasps, cheers and boos, and I take a mental note of a group of five women who seem to be taking this far too seriously as we are led into the studio itself.

Does this man really need an introduction? Where Kyle once lurched in the long shadows of Springer, Kilroy and Trisha, he now marches triumphantly. His cut-the-crap attitude, together with his black-and-white understanding of human relationships, along with his ability to identify The Abuser and The Victim in almost every circumstance imaginable, strike a moral chord with the British public.

With all this in mind, I clutch my plastic seat anxiously as I see a black curtain quiver to the side of the stage, and the man himself emerge. “Ladies and Gentlemen, Jeremy Kyle!” The audience goes wild. Understandably so, as they've been waiting another half hour for this. Kyle doesn't blink, and walks slowly towards the familiar stage, sitting down on the chair he'll be yelling at in about ten minutes time.

“My daughter came from school today,” he smirks, “and she's started saying a new word: boys. Well I'm alright with that, because which boy in their right mind will ever want to go near JEREMY KYLE'S daughter?” The crowd cheers and applauds. He turns to the floor manager: “You alright Will, you twat?” Kyle slowly turns towards his audience again. “Listen everybody, Will needs a girlfriend. His last girlfriend was quite rough, so he wants someone a bit more classy.”

It continues like this for about five minutes, Kyle picking people at random, telling them to “Get a fucking job!” or asking them “Are you pregnant? Who's the father!?” and revelling in the laughter and applause. He seems to enjoy caricaturing himself and referring to himself in the third person for a while, before he suddenly goes off stage, and surrounds himself with a TV crew and a couple of make-up artists, preparing to shoot the promos they use for GMTV's ad breaks.

I find it hard to believe that once, Jeremy Kyle was not on television. His ned-bashing career began on radio, where he presented Jezza's Confessions on various frequencies, in the early noughties. A woman once called into his show and, rather shaken up, confessed to having at least two affairs because of her husband's drinking problem. How did Jezza sum up her problem sensitively? “You're a whore and your husband's a drunk. You need to stop sleeping around and your husband needs to stop drinking.” Exactly Jeremy. Fast forward a few years, and his show is a ratings-winner by miles during the day, as well as being repeated around the clock on three ITV channels.

The success of the show must be partly owed to the moral demise of the past kings and queens of daytime television. A gap in the talkshow market had opened up, and Kyle squeezed himself in. He is slightly more abrasive, “Are you a scumbag? YES OR NO?”, than even Kilroy was, yet he still provides more professional support than Trisha did with his much-referenced “backroom team” and of course “Graham”, the show's psychotherapist.

“So let's bring out Kevin,” Kyle announces. In this episode, Kevin is finding out if he is the father of his ex-girlfriend Tasha's unborn child. Tasha, who admitted that she “might have slept with someone on New Year's Eve” while they were still together, is confident that Kevin is the father, and that they could still have a future together. Kevin, still in love with Tasha and willing to forgive her, is hoping that he is the father too. Their future is printed in ink on one of Kyle's cards as he wanders calmly behind the filming cameras. “Kevin,” Kyle pauses as the audience prepare to go live on their gasp rehearsals, “is NOT the father.” Kevin storms off stage, punches the wall, and Tasha begins to cry. It turns out that Tasha had slept with six or seven people that night. Kyle offers some banal advice about “using protection in the future” before quickly cutting to an ad break, and Tasha is ushered quickly off stage.

Back to Kyle bathing in his own self-importance, again. “That was very good,” he says to himself. He doesn't need to be told. “Hey, Dom!” he shouts across the studio, and a man fiddling with camera wires looks up. “Don't you feel like you owe your whole career to me?” Kyle disappears for a few minutes, before re-emerging for two more episodes.

A few more gasps, cheers and boos later, and the whole thing is finished. The TV crew pat Kyle on the back, and he grins. That's a day's work for Kyle, so it's no wonder he has all the time in the world to spend with his kids. I suspect that the people he riles against, those who live in crumbling council estates in the poorest areas of Britain, those who face a glass ceiling when it comes to education and decent work, those who are merely 'bad parents' because they weren't brought up to be any better, those who live only fifteen minutes down the road from the Studios, where I was born, in Moss Side, Manchester, couldn't care less if an uppity talkshow host with a supermodel wife told them his opinions. But still, it makes great television.

If you've watched the show, you'll know that at the beginning, Kyle enters to a cheering, whooping, applauding audience and shakes a few hands. That must be Kyle's favourite part, because after all, “Jeremy likes it when you cheer for him.” Just as the TV crew are about to let us leave, Kyle speaks up over everyone. “One more thing, guys,” he says with a smile, “can we just do the beginning bit again?”

As we are finally led out of the studio, I see again the five women I remember from the beginning of the show. They are laughing, not at the absurdity of the man I have concluded, but at how lucky they all are in seeing Kyle in the flesh, and they were not alone that day. However, to my surprise, there are also those who seem disillusioned with him, perhaps because of his off-camera comments. We wander out into the rain again, and I begin to think about how in popular culture today lies an exclusive clique of celebrity, occupying a unique position in the public mind. Its members generate so much admiration, but also an equal measurement of loathing among the public, that it is impossible for anyone to have a completely neutral opinion of them. Thatcher is one. Pete Doherty is another. Jeremy Kyle is the latest member.

Facing the enemy - in my home town.

6th Magazine - 6 December 2005

I casually bulldozed through the human traffic that is carried by my town’s Monday market today. I passed the usual medley of men haggling over shoelaces and kids perusing fake Smarties, rounding the pungent smelling fish stall at the end. Except it wasn’t the end. There was newcomer to the usual market stallers – a group of men stood behind a small wooden table. On the table lay dozens of folded newspapers entitled ‘The Voice of Freedom’. Hmmm, I thought. I glanced at a copy of my dusty ‘Communist Manifesto’ that I planned to read on my imminent bus journey to York. But this looked like a worthy read – probably a fanzine or an ‘underground’ journal or something, or so I thought. “I’ll take one, please,” and handed over 50p to a young skinhead. “Better still if you join,” an older man snarled. The penny had dropped – I gazed down at the paper I’d just bought. The beaming red, white and blue of the BNP logo stared me in the face. A woman came from my right and thrusted a leaflet in my other palm. This one read ‘Islamic Terror Labour Failure – How right was Enoch Powell? How right is Nick Griffin?’ I’d had enough. I fled the scene before you could say ethnic cleansing and crammed the diseased trash in someone’s wheelie bin. I needed a fix; I read Marx from cover to cover as though I were a Communist junkie, all the way to York…

My struggle: Two years of double standards on the shop floor

Website - 7 November 2005

I’ve taken some time off from my meagre chores of replenishing the bacon section and slapping half price stickers on oranges to scribble some notes on the reverse side of some advertising for ‘Jumbo Salted Peanuts’. People around me are contently placing own-brand beans on shelves and mopping up wine spills while the 80s-biased radio is humming Nik Kershaw’s ‘Wouldn’t it be good’ for the thirteenth time over the Co-op airwaves. But if you don’t like new wave music, it gets much worse here.

I applied for a job at Co-op when it was a Safeway store just over two years ago. I over-eagerly wrote my details on an application form that bore the shiny, plastic grins of two ‘workers’, handed my form in and then waited. Within a fortnight I was jogging around with milk dollies in a pathetic effort to please my superiors, but within a few months, my enthusiasm was fading like the colour of my lime green uniform. I’d befriended a few other young people in my position – students who had been working just a few months. One of them jokingly remarked: “I’ve got amnesia. I can’t remember why I applied here.”

Working at my local supermarket has also completely reversed some of my economic views. In two years, I’ve gone from being a ‘free-market freak’ – babbling about efficiency and the importance of profit – to a soft Marxist. My political views have also been dragged over to the left and I now have a problem with authority.

So why did things change? Let me explain. Three people call the shots at my work – the managers. Just below them in the hierarchy are the supervisors – the people in charge of particular departments. Finally, there’s me and the rest of the proletariat, or “the bottom of the barrel” as we are described by the Human Resources Manager. We unload the goods that are delivered from the depot, fill shelves with it and then go home, with a few added menial tasks sandwiched in between. The next day we do the same, starting as early as 7am, finishing as late as midnight. If we finish the job before the end of our shift, we do someone else’s job until we are scheduled to finish. We are granted three (unpaid) breaks per day for a nine-hour shift, and I earn around £170 for a 37-hour week.

And the unwritten rules… we cannot chat – to neither workmates nor friends; we are picked up on things like “working with one hand”; people from the same department cannot take simultaneous breaks; we cannot take more than our allotted breaks; we cannot use mobile phones on the shop floor; we cannot chew on gum; we cannot work together – to name a few.

And here’s the day of a manager: they turn up to work no earlier than 9 o’clock, hold a meeting with supervisors, tally up their profits and costs (incidentally as a store we do quite well). They have no allotted breaks – but this works to their advantage as they are not deducted pay from the breaks they do take (as their breaks are unrecorded). One of my workmates spotted one manager take eighteen breaks in one morning. At around 2pm, they begin filling shelves like the rest of us. They always work in twos (what rule book?) whilst they chomp on Wrigleys (rule book…) and check their mobiles. The manager is paid a fixed wage of £3,000 per month and works less than I do.

For people like me, it is easy to spot inequality, double standards and hypocrisy – we are earning disposable income, not a living. But for people who have made a career out of stacking cheese, it is a lot easier to ignore the issue. A woman I work with has been working here for fourteen years – whenever I raise a conversation about this she ponders me for a moment, before shrugging and sighing “I know…” she continues to open boxes of tomato juice while the managers pocket the receipts upstairs.

The people whose careers are made from this place divide into two groups. In group one are the people who ignore these issues and simply want to earn their living, when in group two are those who view the inequality as something they can skew to their own advantage. Patronage has been an active hobby among the staff at Co-op – one woman who supervises her workers on the Delicatessen is given huge amounts of time off work (to share with the managers) in return for her maintenance of the double standards. Other manager cronies call their customer friends over to have a chat, but are quick to separate us from a casual chat, which we are not entitled to.

In a very real sense, they are stamping out the very things that make mundane jobs bearable. A chat with a colleague, a sneaky fag break – they’re fast becoming rights confined to the dustbin of history. And so now we are faced with the very cold ambiance of the smoking room – the break which a workmate and I share with a couple of managers. “No one talks. There is no morale here. To them we are just human resources, not people,” my friend comments as the two managers vacate the scene, chuckling.

Recently, I found myself voicing these concerns to someone above my level for the very first time. I’d been taking a break, defiantly, with a friend (who was a member of a different department) – we were heading back to work when two managers (the only two working that day) objected to us being on our breaks at the same time. I was about to utter “practice what you preach” but instead, like on so many occasions, I spoke to someone else. My Human Resource Manager listened closely. The essence of his argument was based around maintaining and increasing profits, and the basis of mine was the concept of morale, and how it would improve productivity if we gain more respect. At the end of my “rant” he said: “Why have you not told any of the managers about this?” I replied, “I’m a coward and I want to keep my job.” “Well they definitely think it’s a case of you versus them. Do you want me to mention it?” he said. “That would be nice,” I replied.

But why on earth would they listen? In December last year, I wrote a letter that highlighted my concerns with the large amounts of good food we throw away – I was motivated by the terrible scenes of starvation in the Boxing Day tsunami aftermath. I proposed that we try to distribute the food over there somehow, or at least to the British homeless, rather than have it burnt like we currently do. Indeed, one manager did speak to me about this – only to tell me “it’s more efficient this way” before shredding my letter.

I’ve since found comfort by attempting to organise a workers’ revolution, or a coup. The idea is very much pretend – my workmates and I joke about using trolleys as makeshift trenches and pork pies as weapons. But, if I’m honest, I’d love to fly the red flag over this place.

A letter to my work amidst the Tsunami of December 2004

30 December 2004

Dear Sir/Madam,

As you read this letter, countless more drowned, crushed and starved bodies are being discovered across the worst-hit parts of Indonesia, India, Sri Lanka, the Maldives and Thailand as a result of the Boxing Day earthquake tsunami. The total death toll is predicted to rise to at least 120,000 and more than a million people will be without shelter and food.

I am a sixth form student who has a part-time job at my local Safeway/Morrisons store, and every single day, vast amounts of bread and other goods are thrown away in a skip, which are collected by bin men and eventually burnt.

We are a small Safeway Compact store, but today (December 30th) we threw away five large bags full of bread and also two six foot high stacks of it, plus three bags full of yoghurts, drinks and snack foods. I understand that the food is thrown away because it has reached its expiry date and is deemed no longer fit to eat, but surely it is common knowledge that food is still perfectly safe at least for a few days after its expiry date.

This systematic destroying of perfectly decent food makes me so frustrated as it shows blatant ignorance and inconsideration towards people in awful situations, not just in the places affected by the earthquake tsunami, but also in Ethiopia and other parts of Africa where starvation has become a way of life. It makes absolutely no sense to be burning food, which costs nothing, accumulates nothing and achieves nothing, when distributing food to the starving also costs nothing, accumulates nothing BUT achieves the saving of lives on a mass scale whilst promoting the good will of British business and retail.

I talked to a Human Resources assistant at my store today, and he told me that the food has to be burnt, because if it is distributed, eaten and causes illness, the store would be in trouble. Surely starving people would appreciate countless loaves of bread and other goods, regardless of their expiry dates, and would rather have their lives saved and have a stomach bug than starve to death.

I think that if this part of store management is reformed as soon as possible, thousands upon thousands of lives would be saved in the aforementioned nations who have, in a single day, become third world countries. I also think it would promote the Safeway/Morrisons public image if that is the sort of advantage you are interested in. A lot of the staff at my store feel the same way.

The terrible events of the past few days have inspired me to write this letter. One of my friends got caught up in the tsunami in Sri Lanka, but she luckily survived where so many others did not.

I sincerely hope this proposal is considered and adopted as soon as possible. I do not think there can be any possible reason to justify this process when there is so much need in the world at this time. Thank you.

Yours faithfully,
Steve Clarkson