Talk To Rex

Later today we will know who is taking over from David Tennant as the Doctor, but in the meantime bookmakers and journalists are enjoying all sorts of speculation which ranges from the too obvious to the completely barmy. So let’s just have a quick run-down of who’s being pipped for the post and, more importantly, why…

Paterson Joseph

Who?: David Mitchell’s boss in Peep Show.

Why?: because he’s black.

I say that with the greatest respect for his acting skills: even before the Presidential election it was fashionable to have a black candidate for everything, and it’s the reason he’s the favourite to win. But in much the same way as Christopher Eccleston being Northern didn’t massively refresh the character of the Doctor a few years ago, let’s hope Joseph isn’t simply going to be “the black Doctor”; when they ticked the “black assistant” box a few years ago they thought that it was enough that she was black so didn’t bother writing her a character. That was a mistake, that was.

David Morrissey

Who?: the star of Basic Instinct 2.

Why?: because in the Doctor Who Christmas special broadcast just days ago, he played a man who thought he was the Doctor. He wasn’t. Much as I can understand why nobody would put themselves through watching said Christmas special, the fact that he turned out not to be the Doctor suggests he’s going to turn out not to be the Doctor.

Russell Tovey

Who?: the least appealing character in The History Boys.

Why?: because Russell T Davies wants to sleep with him. This much he has admitted in so many words in his new book, in various interviews, and probably to himself every night before bed for the last year. It doesn’t necessarily mean Tovey would be a good person to play the Doctor. In fact I suggest it would be a hideous error of judgement, primarily because Russell T Davies is old enough to be his father.

Catherine Zeta Jones

Who?: that Welsh one.

Why?: because she’s a woman.

It has been virtually obligatory to jokingly suggest a woman for the role since 1981. At least, let’s hope this is a joke. Please please please please let it be a joke…

Billie Piper

Who?: singer of 1998 number one single “Because we want to” and Mrs Chris Evans.

Why?: this, I fear, is completely unanswerable.

I mean, what on earth is going on here? Billie Piper played the Doctor’s companion for two years, cropped up again in 2008 and was last seen snogging a clone of the Doctor on a beach in Norway in a particularly twisted story development where she basically got a fuck-buddy who looked the same as a different man she had lustful desires for; are the production team really going to take this a step further and suggest that the original Doctor, having seen himself playing tonsil tennis with his former companion, is suddenly overcome by a desire to look like her? That if he can’t get his hands on the real thing he’s going to follow her lead and make himself a copy, even if that copy is himself?

I mean, really? Is Billie Piper really a candidate? Has the whole world gone completely mad????

…and the possible final sentences for 2008 are as follows:

As one year of recession gives way to another, my heart is gladdened by the thought that we don’t need money and security when we have love and friendship.

As one year of recession gives way to another, my heart is gladdened by the thought that I have a fixed-term job with a house and fixed salary so maybe I don’t need love and friendship after all.

Boris beat Ken, Alexandra Burke’s “Hallelujah” got to number one instead of Jeff Buckley’s, and “Mamma Mia” became the highest-selling UK DVD of all time – as vintage years go, 2008 was a bit of a Sainsbury’s basics table red.

Spent the night at a party with boring adults taking horse tranquilliser in a room next door and felt superior in every way.

Woke up after midday and watched two “Legally Blonde” films whilst stuffing my face full of pretzels and felt my entire existence was unjustified.

What would it be like to be fat I wonder, fat or a monk, I’d love to know but I don’t think 2009 holds the answer.

This year I made more friends than ever before – but only on facebook.

I can only hope that in 2009 I’ll get a few more nights off pleasure.

Either due to lack of time or lack of discipline, my private journal has become increasingly sporadic over the years, but until 2005 I strove to keep a daily diary and this day of the year always had a feeling of ceremony about it. I suppose I wanted to leave readers either with a satisfying feeling of closure, or in more ambitious years on a bit of a cliffhanger so they’d want to come back for more of my thrilling life story. In the embarressing optimism of my early teens this often took the form of a mawkish summary; in 1997 I went for the ultimate season finale with half a sentence which I finished in the next diary. (A sweet idea which I have just noticed is completely ruined by an elementary grammatical error.)

But whilst I remember often putting a great deal of thought into wrapping up my year, flicking through my old diaries I have discovered that my favourite final sentences are actually masterpieces of anticlimax. A few of the best ones:

1994: Dad let me have 3 glasses of wine, 3% alcohol. (You absolute rebel, you 15-year-old James Lark.)

1998: If. (A pretentious year, then.)

2001: Tsk – I’ve become a stereotype. (A moment of terrible self-realisation.)

2002: Walked home in nasty rain with grumpy sister. (This one is my favourite for its beautifully grim sense of realism.)

2005: 2006 will be better. (A sad one this, especially as I have a feeling it didn’t turn out to be true.)

There will be no sense of ceremony about writing my journal tonight, probably because I will fall asleep before I get around to doing it, but I am pondering what kind of final sentence I might have applied to 2008. In fact, for the lack of a final page to put it on, I might as well blog whatever options I come up with. I’ll get back to you…

It’s no wonder the York Railway Museum shifts so many poster prints…

I’m not a fan of inter-denominational church politics and as a rule am more than happy to take the pure and simple label “Christian” to describe my religious inclinations. But I have never felt closer to nailing my colours to the C of E mast than at the end of a week in which the Archbishop of Canterbury talked complete sense about the credit crisis whilst the Bishop of Rome took a subtle but nasty swipe at sexual minorities.

What he said has, predictably, been exaggerated and misreported; the Pope certainly never mentioned homosexuals and neither did he mention transsexuals; but given the Vatican’s recent attitude towards both (the Vatican has just announced its opposition to a United Nations proposal to protect gays from being criminalised and punished by governments for their orientation) it’s not difficult to see what the Pope meant when he said “the Church speaks of the human being as man and woman, and asks that this order is respected”.

I actually find it all the more sinister that his Holiness chose to disguise this as an environmental message (“rainforests deserve yes, our protection, but the human being as a creature which contains a message that is not in contradiction with his freedom, but is the condition of his freedom, does not deserve it less”) – he has taken an issue which concerns everyone and tried to wrap his own prejudiced views into it, which is no less than what Norman Tebbit did when he managed to turn a discussion about child obesity into a rant about sodomy.

Firstly, this shows a huge lack of perspective, a problem which is not unfamiliar to the church but which one hoped the Holy Father might not suffer from. Yet he suggests that as plants and animals are forced from their habitats and a million species face possible extinction over the next 50 years, God is equally ticked off when a man takes an expensive holiday to Australia and comes back as a woman. Whatever your beliefs about changing genders and the related issues of sexuality, is the latter really in the same league of awfulness? What the Pope said, in his sneaky Papal way, is that they’re just as bad as each other – and his obsession with “correct sex” (i.e. not bumming) shows just how preoccupied his leadership is with the minor issue (there, I’ve said it, it’s a minor issue) of sex and sexuality. Did his Christmas speech mention human rights abuses, perhaps name-check Mugabe or point out that people are still being tortured – sorry, interrogated – at Guantanamo bay? Nope. It’s just the trannies and, if you take his thoughts to their logical conclusion (most reporters have), queers who get the Papal wrath this year. Frohe Weihnachten.

What I wonder then, is this: has the Supreme Pontiff of the Universal Church forgotten the true meaning of Christmas?

It is, after all, a celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ, who practiced and preached absolute acceptance of all human beings, who showed love to outcasts and sexual deviants and who did not have divisions of class, race or gender in his ministry. He never actually mentioned homosexuality (maybe he also thought it was a minor issue), but if there had been transsexuals in Judea at the time I can’t help feeling he’d probably have taken the time to chew the fat with them.

The inclusiveness of Jesus’ teaching is beautifully summed up by the apostle Paul, which is ironic because religious conservatives usually count on him being on their side. “There is neither Greek nor Jew, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Jesus Christ.”

It’s up to you, of course, but that’s the Christmas message I’m paying attention to this year.

Has anybody else noticed the deluge of panettone in England this Christmas? Every shop I go in seems to have top shelves bursting with panettone of different shapes and varieties, be they food shops, clothes shops or shops selling car parts. Indeed, I have gone past WHOLE shops devoted to the stuff – panettone up to the top of every shop window, balanced on top of every counter, being worn as hats by the staff.

I don’t remember this happening last year, and I’m sure than when I was young we managed to get through the whole Christmas season without the slightest hint of dry, tasteless Italian cakey stuff.

Which leads me to two possible conclusions:

1. It’s Bedford.
2. It’s the credit crisis.

The first would make sense as Bedford is full of mafioso, but doesn’t hold true as the panettone invasion has also affected parts of London and Cambridge I have visited in recent weeks.

So what about the second alternative? Dry and tasteless it may be, but panettone is at least cheap, unlike fruitcake topped with marzipan and icing. Is the stuff being marketed to thrifty Christmas shoppers, looking for something to eat after they’ve had their turkey twizzler main course?

Or has Gordon Brown entered into some kind of sinister deal with Silvio Berlusconi? Is Italy currently undergoing a similar deluge of mince pies or some other quintessentially English Christmas dessert (in which case they definitely got the better end of the deal)?

Or it is simply Italy’s way of dealing with the credit crisis? They’re hoping to solve their financial problems by selling the only thing they have left to ship out in their millions?

Let me be clear, this is not a complaint – the iPhone is the single most beautiful object I have ever had the pleasure to feel the sleek, streamlined weight of against my leg. Yes, I find it a bit erotic.

So maybe it’s no coincidence that when I sign a text message “xx” (as I am prone to doing to indicate anything from extreme fondness to lust to indifference), the predictive text messaging predicter automatically changes it to read “fx”.

A number of people have already leapt to the wrong conclusion.

…if you’re in the wrong place at the wrong time, surely at least that means the right time is still free for you to be at the right place?

A made-up person called Esh Acly just spammed me with an email headed “Night off pleasure”.

Yes, it’s possible that Esh Acly has made a rather basic albeit vital spelling mistake here. But I’m rather enjoying the idea that somebody thinks I’m getting so many nights of pleasure that I’ll be extremely tempted by the offer of one night’s respite.

For what possible reason does the BBC’s latest update on the Somali pirates-and-Saudi tanker situation have the title ‘Experts’ lead Saudi tanker talks? Why not Experts lead Saudi tanker talks? Is there anything in the article that suggests they aren’t experts, that they are (in one of the more hideous and over-used expressions in modern parlance) ‘so-called experts’? Not that I can see, although I do note that there’s almost no actual news in the story, just rumour being peddled by ‘correspondents’ (that means other journalists), and a lot of weasely sentences that are true no matter what the reality of the situation is.

Of course there’s no way of knowing, but this feels like authority figure fear (or “threatening man in the sky effect”, which is what I’d like everyone to call it from now on). Ben Goldacre, both in his excellent book ‘Bad Science’ (I couldn’t bring myself to read his blog, because it updates all the bloody time: I waited for the novelisation, on the basis that a film probably isn’t forthcoming) and elsewhere (I can’t bring myself to subscribe to Guardian feeds either), has been talking about this in the context of science: scientists are seen as authority figures, unfathomable beings issuing pronouncements from on high. I’m sure this view would have shocked Richard Feynman, who would work through important theories himself rather than rely on the authority of other scientists (the story is The 7 Percent Solution, in “Surely You’re Joking Mr Feynman!”), but it does seem to be the way many people – or at least much of the media – think.

Right now, for instance, a Google News search for ‘scientists’ turns up the following headlines:

• Scientists take a step closer to an elixir of youth
• Scientists find way to calculate people’s real age
• Scientists test effects of high heels on the body
• Scientists find ‘cure’ for ‘werewolf boy’

I’m sure at least some of them rail against these authority figures for bothering to look at trivia such as high heels and absolute age, or will in editorials once they’ve had a chance to think about it. But I don’t think it’s just scientists, and I’m not entirely convinced that the media is responsible for replacing science in the public consciousness with a parody of itself. I think people are simultaneously comforted by the idea that there are experts out there – in whatever field, be it politics or science or entertainment or whatever – and threatened by the same thing.

The thing is, most people are venal, suspicious, selfish and foolish, just like everyone on 24, which I was watching last night and hoping represents in no way whatsoever the reality of the Department of Homeland Security. Or, for that matter, everyone on Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, including the robots, which I’m watching as I write this and hoping represents in no way whatsoever the reality of what happens when we accidentally invent a conscious computing network and discover time travel. I don’t want to live in those worlds – but maybe a lot of other people do.

Which is a problem, frankly, because although people may be blind to logic and science, current evidence suggests that the universe isn’t. This means that people are deliberately putting themselves at a disadvantage by denying themselves the tools to better understand and think about what they have to deal with out in the real world. Of course, they don’t think of it like that – maybe they think they can delegate all that ‘hard stuff’ to authority figures, or maybe they suspect that really it’s all smoke and mirrors, and the scientific method can’t tell them anything. Or maybe they think that invisible dinosaurs rule the earth, or that physics is just like in JJ Abrams‘ head, or that actually all our actions are ruled by evil thoughts from before time began. In which case there’s probably not much we can do for them.

But, seriously. Even the robots are stupid. Who wants to live in a world like that?