Talk To Rex

So Charles Clarke has put his foot down. Positively no more immigrants – unless they have useful skills. Surely this is tantamount to saying that we’ll take advantage of other countries having better education systems than us? – a strange thing for a Home Secretary to say, and stranger still for one who was until recently Education Secretary.

Beardy beardy,
Oh so weirdly,
How does your country grow?
In Belmarsh jails,
While justice fails,
With bleeding hearts all in a row …
With bleeding hearts all in a row.

In spite of being presented by Jimmy Carr, Channel Four’s The Top 100 Greatest Pop Videos last night was well-worth watching because, unusually for one of these top 100 programmes, it was a pretty fine representation of some genuine masterpieces. For once, it seems that the general public actually knew what it was voting about – personally I’d have placed Peter Gabriel’s Sledgehammer video at number one above Michael Jackson’s Thriller, but essentially the right videos were in the right places.

Having said that, here are Five Pop Videos Which Should Have Made the Top 100…

The Wild Boys (Duran Duran) – Simon LeBon nearly drowned while they were making the video, the least he deserved was for it to hit the top 100. And it’s a wonderful 1980s attempt to film a bit of a book which is not only unfilmable but is also so twisted it shouldn’t really exist at all.

Better the Devil You Know (Kylie Minogue) – a landmark video. Before this, Kylie was always the girl-next-door character she played in Neighbours, perm and smile and skipping along like a bush kangeroo. In this video she surrounded herself by flames and devils, straightened her hair, took off a lot of clothes and paved the way for her now legendary status, upsetting my little sister in the process. A fine piece of work all round.

Jump They Say (David Bowie) – it’s a difficult one because there are so many to choose from, but this may be Bowie’s finest video. Multi-layered and disturbing, not to mention extreeeemely stylish.

Christmas Wrapping (Libera/Tony Robinson) – in 1990, annoying soft-pop boy choir Libera released a single with the once-great Tony Robinson (when he was still writing high quality comedy and not digging up bits of earth). It is officially the funniest pop video ever – more even than the Mr Bean single I Wanna Be Elected, though that gets a mention because it contains the line “Don’t be in-betweeny, vote for Mr Beany!”

When You Come Back to Me (Jason Donovan) – in my youth I thought this was an effortlessly cool video of Jason Donovan walking through an ever-changing London landscape; a recent viewing revealed to me that it is actually the most terrifying pop video ever. There are Victorian backing singers who grow bigger and bigger until they tower over Jason like ogres. And weird things flying through the sky, and chimney sweeps and stuff. It’s like Dickens meets Lewis Carroll set to music by Stock, Aitken and Waterman. It’s hard to imagine a more brilliantly horrific four-and-a-half minutes.

“We eat muffins when things are really bad,” the person in charge of the office I’m in just explained to me.

That’s all very well, but surely it’s a policy with a high risk of obesity? At least smoking when things are bad makes you lose weight.

Not that I’m condoning smoking – I think it’s a filthy habit and I would only do it if I was in a film or pretending to be in a film. But I can’t help feeling that if I applied the muffin-when-things-are-bad method to my own life I would need to smoke two or three packets of cigarettes a day to compensate.

People browsing our website in the hope of finding Hermione porn will be excited to learn that yesterday I visited the set of the forthcoming Harry Potter film. Although I didn’t actually see any Hermione porn, I did see Hermione. (I also saw a baby with Ralph Fiennes’ head.)

In fact, watching a little scene between Hermione and Harry being filmed, it was apparent that Emma Watson (who plays the plucky Miss Granger) may be one of the main reasons why the film is taking so long to make. Sure, there are all those long meetings to discuss what Ralph Fiennes’ nostrils should look like and the hours of special effects work needed to give Daniel Radcliffe realistic gills, but when it comes to filming a scene the last thing you need on the set is a method actor – and Emma Watson is a mini-method actor in the making.

If there is a question to be asked, she will ask it. “What can I see when I’m standing here?” “How do I see that if I’m facing this way?” “But am I distracted by both feet or just the one that’s wiggling?” “Wouldn’t it work better if I came down the stairs?” “What exactly is the wizard formula I’m trying to learn?”……etc. Tis but a short step to “but what is my motivation for doing that?”

If people are hoping to see her do porn, they had better be prepared to give her a jolly good reason for it, or it aint gonna happen.

Daniel Radcliffe, on the other hand, asks no questions and just gets on with it. “Sit like this,” the director says, to which young Potter replies “yeah okay” and does it. This, I understand, is much closer to the approach used by Alan Rickman when he’s filming his scenes.

And sometimes, when her moods were so many and so contradictory of one another that I was puzzled what to say or do, Miss Havisham would embrace her with lavish fondness, murmuring something in her ear that sounded like, “Break their hearts my pride and hope, break their hearts and have no mercy!”

Thus in Dickens’ Great Expectations does Miss Havisham breed the beautiful Estella to break men’s hearts. But that is just a story.

In real life, there is a Miss Havisham (though that may not be her name) who has bred hundreds of people and has murmured into their ears “Break James Lark’s heart and have no mercy.” Hundreds of them. Not sure why.

Jimmy Carr was on Top Gear last night, in conversation with Jeremy Clarkson.

A comedy partnership made in heaven, methinks.

Their show could be called The Two JCs (“Neither of us is John Cleese but we both think we’re Jesus Christ!”)

“The Friday Night Project”, starring the execrable non-human Jimmy Carr, also features Lucy Montgomery of Population:3. Unfortunately, much as I like Lucy and her work, nothing will bring me to deliberately watch the smug bastard. Not unless he’s being burnt at the stake as a witch, a witch, an evil witch, let him burn in hell for eternity while devils play Abu Ghraib soldiers-and-inmates games on his flabby body. And even then, not on a Friday night when there are frankly much better things to be doing than watching TV in the first place.

There was a scene in Neighbours last night where a girl called Carmella taunted that nice Irish one by pretending to be talking to a boyfriend on her telephone in front of him. The scene’s punchline was the revelation that she had actually only phoned the speaking clock.

What a stupid girl she must be. Everyone knows you don’t actually have to phone somebody to pretend to be talking to a boyfriend on your mobile. And having a long imaginary conversation with the speaking clock is one way to ensure that your phone bill rockets.

The incident took place in Daphne’s coffee shop, only it hasn’t been called that for a while, and I can’t help feeling that Des would be upset. (Des was Daphne‘s husband, before she copped it in a harrowing car crash. My little sister used to call him Desk.)

I don’t regularly watch the programme now that it isn’t the 1980s, but from what I can make out it seems to have recently embraced storylines involving incest, lesbianism and sex-obsessed Italian film stars. Funny to think that the most controversial thing it contained in the good old days was Kylie Minogue wearing dungarees…

They have such great conversations. Years ago, a revue I co-wrote had an entire subplot based on a fragment of a conversation between two Americans that we’d overhead: “I don’t give a damn who he is – unless, of course, he’s Howard”.

Just now, walking to work, I overhead an American loudly proclaim into his mobile: “This is coming straight from the source, okay?”. I wonder what that will inspire me to …

I don’t know why everyone is so shocked at the pictures of British soldiers apparently abusing Iraqi detainees – about which some idiot on C5 last night said “[the British army] knew that people would call it ‘the British Abu Ghraib'” – which we probably wouldn’t have done if he hadn’t mentioned it.

Vapid verbal posturing aside, there’s a deep problem with the media’s coverage of this. Did we learn nothing from the Stamford experiment? We shouldn’t be surprised that people do these things, and we certainly shouldn’t be appalled by human behaviour. Oh, hang on – that’s just more posturing. We aren’t ignorant of our natures, we aren’t ignorant of what we, as human beings, are capable of, of our desires, our bestiality. Morality isn’t innate – if it was, we wouldn’t need books or gurus or the police force, or to talk about it. If morality were innate, we wouldn’t have the Daily Mail.

Everyone has felt the urge to do real violence at some point; many of us have given in to it. Our surprise at the latest photos of wartime abuse, then, is either feigned or – perhaps more worryingly – an indication of our unwillingness to accept ourselves. Humanity, clothed in red.

Which isn’t to say that people should do this sort of thing – or even that they shouldn’t avoid doing it, although that’s a more complex issue. If nothing else, it’s probably unwise for soldiers sent to pacify a region in order to reduce terrorism to use terror tactics on anyone in the region, be they terrorists, insurgents or whatever. But let’s not blame those on the ground for mimicking their seniors – it is, after all, the sincerest form of flattery.

Although, for the record, I prefer chocolate. I get the feeling that General Sir Mike Jackson would have, too.