Quality | 2009.08.20
Hugh Muir's Diary
He\'s a fighter. From a family of fighters. No, not Mandy. The all-new Mr Speaker
In typically pugnacious fashion, John Bercow seems to have ridden out a storm over the £20,000 refurbishment of his new lodgings as sleaze-busting Commons Speaker. His repayment of nearly £8,000 in expenses has also faded in the memory. It will all be different next session. You\'ll see. So it\'s unfortunate that the National Archives should choose this moment to reveal he is not the first family member to suffer embarrassment at the hands of the authorities. Naturalisation papers for his grandfather, Jack Bercowich, a furrier who hailed from Romania, include a police report on a burglary at his home in east London, in 1917. Sgt Ralph Kitchener had "serious doubts" about whether the break-in happened, and Lloyds refused to pay out on the claim for £185 (equivalent to £8,000 today), but settled for £75. An unidentified Home Office official noted: "It is not a very attractive case but I think on the whole he should have his certificate." He got it. He thrived. The rest is history.
While MPs are away, the hope is to use this breathing space to fashion a higher politics. Tom Watson , MP for West Bromwich East, blogger, tweeter, Gordon adviser, is leading the way. "Pardon my French, but Cameron is so tight if you stuck a lump of coal up his ass, in two weeks you\'d have a diamond," he tweeted last week. It\'s a quote from the film Ferris Bueller\'s Day Off, directed by John Hughes. Doesn\'t make it wrong.
More pressure on BBC execs following fresh revelations about top bods and their relatives making a tidy living thanks to the licence fee. The feistiest defence thus far has come from Alan Yentob, who was criticised for claiming £27,300 in expenses, including £16,830 for "entertainment" between 2005 and 2008. The £340,000-a year boss now says he finds it difficult to say BBC expenses are intemperate, but admits: "It doesn\'t look good, and we\'re aware of it." A line to the crisis that might have been devised in the Wolseley Grand Cafe in London\'s Piccadilly, where he was spied last week being very entertaining with a party of four over drinks. The Slug and Lettuce – what\'s that?
Though the Baltimore Sun may know its way around the darker corners of the city, as evidenced in The Wire , the Stage newspaper notes its grasp of UK geography needs some help. "Headed to England? Here are 5 London theater shows you don\'t want to miss," it says. Duet for One at the Vaudeville; Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, at the Palace Theatre; Phèdre, at the National Theatre; and, of course, The Grimm Brothers\' Circus, at the Egg Theatre, Bath. And the Winter\'s Tale in Stratford-upon-Avon.
How to explain the mess that is the Quentin Tarantino film Inglourious Basterds? The critics have not been kind. "An armour-plated turkey," was about as kind as our man Peter Bradshaw could be, having viewed the "cod-WW2 shlocker" at Cannes earlier this year. "It isn\'t funny; it isn\'t exciting; it isn\'t a realistic war movie, yet neither is it an entertaining genre spoof or a clever counterfactual wartime yarn," he said. And "Brad Pitt gives the worst performance of his life". Maybe it\'s the process. Talking about his modus operandi in ShortList magazine, Tarantino says he always wrote the first drafts by pen. Typing them out later helped him make adjustments for quality. "I stopped doing that in the case of Jackie Brown and Kill Bill and gave it to a typist, but on Inglourious Basterds I realised I was wrong – so I went back to the old format. Part of the reason I write with a pen is to freeflow and vomit – just do it, do it, do it – and you tend to overwrite. But trust me, when you\'re typing it up with one finger, if this shit ain\'t Shakespeare, man, out it goes." Something went wrong, for this shit isn\'t Shakespeare. Or Marlowe. By all accounts, it isn\'t much of anything. Perhaps the abandoned typist should have written it instead.
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/aug/11/hugh-muir-diary
