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The ongoing collapse of the US automotive industry – or rather, their automotive royalty, the Detroit-based Big Three – is an incredible opportunity to move the US forward, which President-Elect Barack Obama won’t take. He should take the opportunity to shore up massive adult education programs, retraining the people who will, without question, lose their jobs at some point over this issue; and he should let the companies live or die on their own merits, cushioning the impact for their employees rather than injecting money – be it loans or direct investment – into an industry which has problems that started long before the current financial crisis, and while exacerbated by it are not rooted in the same issues facing the rest of the economy. By doing nothing for the companies, Obama might be letting the most obvious US car manufacturers perish, although that is unlikely (Chapter 11 of the bankruptcy code was created to provide a way out for companies without short-term viability but with longer-term prospects). However he would not be killing the US automotive industry, and the companies that survive – including Aptera and Tesla – would come out stronger and more able to compete in the long term.

The problem he has is that it doesn’t play well at home to let giants of industry, and mainstays of national culture, go under during the current climate. If the economy weren’t in the state it was, it wouldn’t be imperative to consider bailing out three companies that are losing to their foreign competition. But right now, Americans will clamor for their government to help domestic industries other than those on Wall Street, and Obama will not want to risk going into his Inauguration with a significantly lower approval rating than he has on the back of his election victory. Although at the moment his transition team (in the voice of Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel) seems to be recommending loans rather than a bailout, with the rhetoric coming out of the companies themselves and the automotive workers unions, it is difficult to see how the President-Elect will be able to stick this course as the situation continues to worsen for an industry which directly or indirectly employs up to 3% of America’s workforce.

The thing is, most industries are completely unlike the financial sector. If America’s banks had started folding up like used napkins then everyone would have felt it, in a major way: businesses and people depend on banks for capital, particularly in difficult times. And if savings and deposits had started disappearing, this would have further accelerated loan foreclosures, business foreclosures, personal bankruptcies: you name it. Other industries would have fallen, and so the US government (like others around the world) really had no choice but to step in and do something; the issue was always what, and what the taxpayer would get in return.

However if GM, Ford and Chrysler fold then the knock-on effects, while not small, won’t take down untold other industries; companies and individuals that buy or loan their products could switch to other manufacturers. In any case they won’t fold: they may enter Chapter 11, allowing them to restructure, prune and refocus; or they may be bought out by other auto manufacturers, which is what happened to the UK car industry, as Don Pittis points out in his argument against automotive bailout measures. Conceivably they could be bought by an investment group and broken up, although that would almost certainly be the worst outcome.

This isn’t to say that a major domestic manufacturer in severe financial troubles isn’t going to cause a lot of problems. People will lose their jobs; not just those directly employed, but people working for the supply chain companies. An estimated 3-5 million people depend on the Big Three both directly and indirectly, and government has a responsibility to them to help them continue to work, no matter what happens to their employers. That does not mean that there’s a responsibility to keep companies alive that cannot compete; it is saddening to let go a former giant, but sometimes it is the right thing to do. Providing the individuals currently dependent on those companies can be given other options, letting the market run its course would likely be the best option.

Put simply, bailing out the automotive industry in America is protectionism. This isn’t a failure of regulators causing a market crash; blame cannot believably be lain at the feet of government. This is a simple matter of companies being beaten by others with a competitive edge. Keeping them alive at this point with taxpayers’ money is possibly the worst way of spending that money to help those individuals, because it has to be funneled through companies that are – demonstrably, by their inability to continue competing – inefficient. (The reasons for those inefficiencies are complex, and not entirely of their own construction, but this doesn’t change the argument.)

Say there is no bailout. The Big Three downsize up to 30% of their workforce, and use the existing $25bn low-cost loans from the federal government to retool and focus on producing cars that are more fuel-efficient; this might require some weakening of the requirements for eligibility for those loans. Instead of the $10bn to $50bn bailout manufacturers were asking for on Friday (depending who you believe and how you count it), the government spends half that on retraining programs for up to 2 million employees who lose their jobs in the near term; that’s $5,000 – $25,000 per person, which should cover costs even at the low end. Five years down the line, one or more of GM, Ford and Chrysler may well still end up radically restructuring, out of business, or in the hands of other companies. However the focus will have been on taking care of the people who can no longer find work in the automotive industry, and so in the individual, pain will be much less.

Unions will point out, and are certainly correct, that retraining is stressful and difficult; but this is the world we now live in, and we have to accept that there will always be someone else prepared to do our jobs for less. While it was still impractical due to distance or economic effects for them to compete, this didn’t matter; but this is no longer the case, certainly in car manufacture. To continue to compete you either have to be cheaper or better, and right now it seems that the US auto industry is neither. (The workforce, however, may be better than elsewhere; if so by enough margin, or if the other economic effects are right, foreign auto manufacturers will re-employ them. Toyota already has more than ten engineering and manufacturing plants in the US, for instance, and it wouldn’t be crazy for the new administration to consider an incentive package to encourage further growth for this and other companies.)

Say, however, that Obama caves, and out of the gate in the new administration (in fact earlier, since the companies may not last that long) we see a bailout of Detroit. Based on what happened with the banking industry, the manufacturers will likely get a better deal out of this than the taxpayer: the government is unlikely to force real change on the corporate beneficiaries by restructuring out existing shareholders and current board members, and although a surprise here would be a welcome dose of reality in how taxpayers’ money should be used, putting voting rights in the US government is unlikely to result in the enormous changes required to get the country’s major car manufacturers back on their feet; it would likely prove too contentious for the government to invest in a company and then push it through a restructuring that would result in significant job losses.

Barack Obama has said that he wants “to help the auto industry adjust, weather the financial crisis and succeed in producing fuel-efficient cars in the United States”. Without incentive or requirement to change, it is difficult to see how they would achieve that; sure, it’s possible, but let’s not forget that they’ve been optimistic before, and that the current problem goes back much further. In two or three years time, Detroit will be back in the same position, and we’ll have to go through all this again.

That’s not real change.

Let’s be clear: I didn’t laugh at the joke. But I also didn’t laugh when Jonathan Ross was suspended; when the BBC Trust decided it was at the beck and call of the Daily Mail and waded in to lay down the law; and by the time Leslie Douglas resigned I was into negative laughs: I was making other people miserable to deny the world of their laughter also.

I did laugh when Russell Brand issued his resignation with a photo of Joseph Stalin in the background.

This entire incident has reached levels of craziness that would never have happened were we not in the middle of a series of important ongoing stories that have become boring before they end. Without something new, the media jumped on a story, any story, that was different. If only the election had happened a week earlier; if only the financial system had collapsed slightly quicker and we’d been getting on with our lives by now; if only there’d been a major humanitarian disaster to divert our attention from two people paid by the BBC to be professional children.

Sure, some of the media, rather than jumping on the bandwagon of hate, calling for resignations and firing and the pulling down of the BBC while desperately digging through the archives for topless photos of Georgina Baillie, instead made their new front page story all about how everyone else was doing this. No matter: it’s still a media storm even if you’re merely talking about people talking about something.

But really this isn’t about the media. It’s about how the BBC is governed. And what we’ve had confirmed is that in the 21st Century the BBC is allowed to run according to its internal procedures – including investigating when they might have been broken – right up until the point where a newspaper with a large enough readership decide that they’re upset.

The current complaints tally is around 37000, some 0.6% of the population of the country, or one in 1600 or so. A few thousand complaints always sounds like a lot, but it’s really not. While not quite in the position of the famous Brass Eye Paedophilia Special, where 2000 complaints had to be weighed against 3000 calls of support, a Facebook supporting Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross has racked up over 29000 members (via The Guardian), and it is likely that more of those supporting actually listened to the show in the first place than those in opposition. Add in that it’s much rarer for people to officially register support of something contentious than to complain about it, and it’s clear that although passions are riding high on this issue, it’s complex enough that it should have been resolved calmly, rather than with pitchforks and torches.

Decency is not democratic: what you think is funny I think is horrific, and vice versa. We have rules and regulators which provide for professionals to determine what the current suitable limits are for broadcasters, and to enforce and sanction around the fringes. This is necessary because, no matter how much a passionate individual believes that something is a black and white issue, there will always be an opposing voice from somewhere. This country has produced Oswald Mosley, Richard Dawkins and Mary Whitehouse, and we should be proud of that, even if we agree with none of their positions.

The biggest risk, which as the outraged opinion pieces are dying down is starting to be discussed more seriously, is that the new, neutered BBC, will take significantly fewer risks in comedy. And you have to take risks with comedy: otherwise you’re just chasing the tails of anyone with more balls than you. There are very few things I’ve laughed out loud at that won’t upset someone, which is simply the nature of humour. Jim Davidson was once the funniest man on television, Graham Norton once raised eyebrows with his Mother Teresa drag act – and although opinion is divided over Brand and Ross’s actions in October, even the most stupid, ignorant and insular idiot who doesn’t read the Mail on Sunday can accept this means that some people find them incredibly funny.

So no, I didn’t laugh at the joke. But let’s be reasonable: they killed that night.

A while back I blogged about how I noticed one of my ideas on a bookshelf in Waterstones and a little part of me died. Last week I was in Foyles and I noticed another book on a shelf with the title I gave my own novel some years ago: Mere Anarchy, a collection of witty writings by Woody Allen. Needless to say, another little part of me died.

Mere Anarchy is a phrase lifted from Keats’ poem “The Second Coming”, though I doubt that Allen’s use of it is nearly as appropriate or clever as mine was. Because not only did it describe what happened in the novel pretty well (a very laid-back parochial approach to apocalyptic goings-on), but my book actually featured the second coming. Clever, see? In a wanky sort of way.

Although when The Friday Project got their hands on my book, the title was the subject of much debate; they didn’t see quite how clever Mere Anarchy was, they just thought it was a weird title for a comic novel (I guess you have to be Woody Allen to overrule your editor). After much lengthy and anguished discussion, it was ultimately decided that More Tea, Jesus? was more commercial, a title I learned to love in the end. It’s just as well, as somebody’s nicked my old one.

What happened then was that The Friday Project went into liquidation a couple of months before my book was due to hit the shelves and it was unceremoniously returned to the bottom of the long, long ladder that is Getting A Thing Published. My agent tells me that the credit crisis is taking its toll in the world of publishing and nobody is buying anything right now (unless you’re Woody Allen), and amidst the generally enthusiastic responses to my manuscript is the repeated complaint that it may be “a bit too quirky”. Maybe comic novels involving Jesus just don’t have a clear target audience, or maybe the Second Coming just aint commercial (unless you’re Keats). If anybody knows what IS commercial, please do tell, as that’s what I’ve been instructed to write.

In the meantime, More Tea, Jesus? can at least be seen online thanks to HarperCollins’ Authonomy website. This seems to have the slightly unwanted side effect of inviting criticism from people who may not be qualified to give it, and since my book has been rewritten, edited, rewritten some more, re-edited, rewritten and proofread, I’m sure as hell not rewriting it again for anybody except an actual publisher. But if you promise to be nice about it, you can start reading here.

Enemy of rational thought Richard Dawkins has been at it again, spouting off about how “religion is accustomed to getting a free ride – automatic tax breaks, unearned respect and the right not to be offended, the right to brainwash children”. And don’t get me wrong – he has a point about entrenchment of religion in society. However when he pledges money to a humanist group that wants to plaster buses with the slogan:

“There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life”

he’s just using the same unsophisticated brainwashing he’s accusing organised religion of sneaking upon us. It’s like one of those terrible Wikipedia jokes: needs references. Dawkins is supposed to be a scientist (I personally think he should have to hand his gown and fluffy hood back), and scientists are automatically suspicious of blanket statements like that. Probably no God? So you’ve run the figures on that, I take it? You’re not just foisting your beliefs on people who don’t know better? To use his own word, isn’t that brainwashing?

He manages to make it worse by rounding off, “this campaign to put alternative slogans on London buses will make people think – and thinking is anathema to religion”. Really, Richard? Anathema, you say? Anathema is generally taken to mean someone or something detested. But religions have for millennia welcomed thinking people; is Dawkins arrogant enough to seriously think that (say) Thomas More, humanist (that word cuts both ways) scholar, statesman, and actual bloody saint was detested by the Catholic Church? Or perhaps that he wasn’t a thinker – that the word ‘utopia’ was stolen by him from a heretic boy in Southwark? One of the premises of Utopia is that a man without religion cannot be trusted by society, so I can understand why Dawkins might like to ignore More; I just can’t see how he can claim he wasn’t one of the most important thinkers of his day.

Honestly, it makes me embarrassed to be an atheist.

To all writers. This is how episodes will be structured:

1. Somebody does some magic. Doesn’t need to make sense.

2. Richard Wilson discovers that the magic thing is magic and expresses disbelief (note to writers: try to avoid using the phrase “I don’t believe it”).

3. Merlin makes a wild accusation about the magic. He gets in trouble.

4. At this point a CGI dragon with John Hurt’s voice may lecture Merlin about destiny, as long as he is unnecessarily enigmatic and mixes up his words like Yoda.

5. Arthur tries to defend Merlin’s actions and Anthony Stewart Head gives him a bollocking.

6. Arthur is forced to fight magic forces. With a sword.

7. Arthur defeats magic forces due to secret magic help from Merlin.

8. Arthur takes the credit for defeat of magic forces. Merlin grins knowingly.

9. All of the characters who for the duration of the episode have demonstrated only loathing for each other suddenly get all emotional and say nice things instead; important that these nice things are acknowledged with knowingly dismissive responses, e.g. “now get on with your work”, “eat your dinner and shut up”, “polish my armour”.

I have already waxed lyrical about The Sarah Jane Adventures so need not reiterate what classy children’s entertainment it continues to be. But I will point out three things that are really pissing me off:

1. The “sonic lipstick”. Perrrlease. If this had been a one-liner it might have been just about acceptable, but Woolworths has clearly been on the phone to the BBC and now Sarah Jane is walking around brandishing it like a glowing phallic revolver. She ought to be above that kind of thing.

2. The incidental music. Murray Gold is the compositional equivalent of a man holding up signs saying “laugh!”, “cry”, and “be afraid, be very afraid…” – and it’s bloody awful music.

3. Yes, WE GET IT: the universe is an amazing place. You can stop telling us. The last five minutes of today’s episode went something like this:

Sarah Jane: …and the more you live in it, the more you’ll realise what a surprising place the universe can be.

Luke: It’s surprising alright.

New girl: (with an enigmatic smile) Yes. It is surprising, isn’t it.

Clyde: (grinning) Oh, it’s more surprising that you realise!

They all laugh. The new girl’s parents turn up.

Parents: New girl! Where have you been?

New girl: I was just being, you know, surprised by the universe.

The others share a knowing smile.

Parents: Well come home, it’s dinner!

Clyde: Dinner? Wow! The universe really is surprising!

Luke: More than you can imagine!

They all walk away, leaving Sarah Jane the last word.

Sarah Jane: Yes. The universe really is surprising. Really surprising.

…which was all the more irritating after a scene between Sarah Jane and the new girl in the same episode in which they said EXACTLY THE SAME THING!!!

I just got an email with the heading “campaign to pardon England’s last convicted witch”.

Imagine my genuine disappointment to discover it was just another email trying to sell me viagra.

Thank God for The Sarah Jane Adventures; in spite of Russell T. Davies’ lazy style-over-substance Doctor Who stories and dismal spin-off series Torchwood, he has created something genuinely wonderful.

Leave aside the trademark Russell T. need to remind the viewer how amazing space is at the start of every other episode. Leave aside the slightly embarrassing merchandise. What you are left with is a well-constructed, well-written series, with more adult stories than most of its “adult” counterparts, and Elizabeth Sladen looking damn sexy and wearing fabulous costumes.

I loved the first series and am delighted by its return, which is immediately on form. After the disastrous finale to Doctor Who this year and indeed its disastrous handling of the Sontarans, it’s great to see them handled properly – and given a proper cliffhanger! And a dodgy model of a satelite dish – just like real Doctor Who! And even a Hitchhikers’ in joke! And some of those kids could teach Catherine Tate a thing or two about subtlety…

One of my bugbears has long been bad improvised comedy – and this is where having a shared blog comes into its own, because James Senior certainly has all the same opinions as me on this subject. We were both treated to an expensive display of tedious dicking around on stage in Edinburgh this year, also known as Paul Merton’s Impro Chums, which is exactly the kind of thing that makes discerning artists think improv is basically shit. Yeah, Merton said some funny things, but his chums were mostly there for him to walk over for comic effect, and the only chum with any of the give and take needed to create genuinely good improvised sketches was Richard Vranch (sadly, due to his generosity as a performer he was on stage rather less than the others).

It is apodeictic that the programme which hammered the last nails into the coffin of improvised comedy (from which Merton and chums had somehow managed to escape) was the infamous Whose Line is it Anyway? – but equally, I remember that as far back as my school days people would talk reverently about “the early days” before it got a bit rubbish. It ran for ten series, after all, it must have been good once, surely?

Thanks to 4oD (that’s Channel 4’s on-demand service for lay people) you can now go and check those glory days out, and episode 3 of the first series is particularly exciting because it has the line-up of Stephen Fry, Peter Cooke, John Sessions and Josie Lawrence, all of them extremely talented men. Apart from Josie Lawrence who is not a man and is of questionable talent from what I’ve seen (though do prove me wrong if she’s been especially brilliant in something at any time).

The episode is a revelation: it’s dismal. I mean, the whole programme is obviously about as ill-concieved as it could be – the way the performers lounge on conference seats at the back of the stage and saunter forward for each skit in a kind of apathetic, mock-reluctant way… or the way Clive Anderson really seems to have no idea what is going on and certainly has failed to explain the games to the actors before and during the show… or the games themselves, in many cases – but leaving that aside, surely the brilliance of Cooke, Fry and Sessions combined can only be heart-stoppingly hilarious?

Uh-uh. Watch it if you don’t believe me. Fry comes out with the occasional prepared jokes (“my name’s Richard, but I’m more of a Dick”), when Cooke is left alone to talk in character there is more than a shadow of his early greatness in evidence, and Sessions, as always, gives virtuosic displays of verbal dexterity. Even Josie Lawrence comes up with a funny costume. But this is not a Stephen Fry monologue, or Peter Cooke sitting on a bench extemporising, or the John Sessions show (though he clearly thinks it is): the performers are given situations to act, stories to tell, things to achieve, and they singularly fail every time, as if doing a funny voice and remembering the scene you’re in are totally incompossible. They take long pauses while they try to think of something funny to say; when they think of something funny to say that fits neither the scene or the character they are playing they go ahead and say it anyway; they fail to end sketches, talking long after Clive Anderson’s impotent buzzer has heralded the end of what they’re doing (usually way too early or way too late). Similarly they talk over each other like it’s a big upstaging contest, and don’t listen to what else has been said in each scene as if they’re all acting in individual soundproof boxes.

Put succinctly, all they’re doing is lazily showing off, and whilst it yields the occasional chuckle when somebody does say something funny, the rest of it is car-crash television of the worst order. Indeed, it even redeems Paul Merton and his chums a little, because with one notable exception (that’s you, Andy Smart) they did at least seem to know what they were doing and attempt to hold scenes together a bit. (Nor did they broadcast it on national television, though they did charge me fifteen quid for it.)

There are plenty of books written about good improvisation – obviously it’s a bit late to push any of them towards the Whose Line team, but in any case it’s not rocket science – did nobody think to explain the games to the actors, or to practice them a bit? Is teamwork such a bizarre concept for someone who likes to ad-lib?

Before anybody accuses me of being a snob about my own “field of performance” (as the UK comedy guide Chortle once did) – damn right I’m a snob about it, and that’s not even remotely to suggest that any of the shows I have been involved in have neared the kind of brilliance I believe is possible in improv, it’s just to say that there’s no excuse for lazy, shoddy improvisation, especially the kind that costs £15. A student of mine was showing an interest in the subject the other day and I showed him one of the brief video clips on the Uncertainty Division website; again, far from perfect, but he thought it was scripted. It’s hard to imagine somebody making the same mistake about the antics of Messrs Fry, Cooke, Sessions and the other one.