The Breaker of Hearts (ENO Mini-Opera)

The Breaker of Hearts

The Chorus of Sleepers appear, shuffling, shambling, (un)dressed for sleep – sleepwalking. They could be all ages, all races, but they move as one, united in sleep. There is a low hum. When they sing, they are usually divided into either boys and girls, or men and women, depending on their ages.

GIRLS	Here he comes.
BOYS		Here he comes.
GIRLS	Here he comes.
BOYS		Hear his tread on the stair.
GIRLS	He comes.
BOYS		Smell his scent in the air.
GIRLS	He comes.
BOYS		Feel the twinge of despair.
GIRL	He comes.
BOYS		Know he is near.
GIRLS	Softly-slinky and grimly-gory.
BOYS		Heart-Breaker prowls in the witching hour looking out for joy to devour, never letting new hopes flower and turning every sweet dream sour.
GIRLS	Touting lies and the barely true he swigs a cup of witches' brew, takes a face you thought you knew and turns it into something new.
CHORUS	He comes – the Lurker of Dreams, the Breaker of Hearts. Closer and closer, rising up from Hell; The actor of the Id, he plays many parts and now you must fall for his spell.
GIRLS	He comes.
BOYS		He comes.
	Already, this Breaker of Hearts can be seen approaching
CHORUS	He comes. He'll bring your fear to you, it's a gift to you of his; it won't be anything new you know already what it is.
GIRLS	Hear him closer.
BOYS		He comes.
GIRLS	Getting closer.
BOYS		He comes.
GIRLS	Drawing closer.
BOYS		He comes.
CHORUS	Here he comes. He comes to play with your greatest fear; to hurl you from heights or drown you in ice, to scorch you, scald you, burn you. He'll chase you with dogs and with wolves, he'll chase you down flights, you'll get into fights; you'll murder, rape and maim. Here he comes. He'll show you the deaths of those you hold dear, make it your fault, make you feel the blame; it'll scar you, scare you, bleed you. He'll send his creatures to devour you, and takes a care to send your biggest scare - his snakes, his crows or his bugs. Here he comes.
GIRLS	He comes from the depths of deepest Hell.
BOYS			Nearer.
GIRLS	Even the angels fear his tread.
BOYS			And nearer.

CHORUS	He comes with: Legal writs and rich men's Wills, money bags and heart burn pills.
DREAMER 1	In my dream, my son is on trial for treason and starting a fire. I swear he's an innocent boy; and even the judge says I'm a liar.
	The shadowy Breaker of Hearts resembles a distant judge
CHORUS	He'll take your heart and he'll tear it.
DREAMER 1	I fall on my knees to beg for his life, 'He has a child just a few days old, please, won't you show him some mercy?' but the judge's smile is bloody and bold.
CHORUS	He'll take your fears and he'll make them real.
GIRLS	He comes.
BOYS		He comes.

CHORUS	He comes with: A dozen corpses, a deathly moan; a childhood terror, now re-grown.
DREAMER 2	In my dream I'm back in the camp, condemned once more to a lifetime of pain, back where the Jew should fear to be. And the Commandant is there again.
	The Breaker of Hearts appears to assume a military aspect
CHORUS	He'll take your memories and he won't spare you.
DREAMER 2	Every night he comes to take me back, back to Dachau where my people burned. Every day I must endure my life To which my people can never return.
CHORUS	There is no escape from the dread of sleep.
GIRLS	He comes.
BOYS		He comes.

CHORUS	He comes with: a diagnosis ready-made; his only hope is to get paid.
DREAMER 3	The doctor could have cured my sister. Now I see him every night, leaning over me in my dreams - I can't shake him from my sight.
	The Heart-Breaker now looks faintly medical
CHORUS	He'll take your trust and he'll snap it.
DREAMER 3	The operation was easy but not that cheap and we had no way to pay. Now she's cold and in the ground, and it's too late even to pray.
CHORUS	The Heart-Breaker grinds the bones of hope.

GIRLS	He comes.
BOYS		He comes.

CHORUS	He comes with: a cross in his hand, and a rosary, pouring on guilt and misery.
DREAMER 4	Sins and sinner you find here, clutching feebly at a cross. Twenty Hail Marys twice a day, else he says that my soul is lost.
	The Heart-Breaker now bears a striking resemblance to a priest, and looms larger than ever before
CHORUS	He sees your sins, he knows your fears.
DREAMER 4	I've tried to do as I've been taught, but I've fallen into a snare. Well you know, oh my God, women's beauty is not fair.
CHORUS	He'll burn your guilt right into your soul.

GIRLS	He comes.
BOYS		He comes.
GIRLS/BOYS	Touting lies and the barely true he swigs a cup of witches' brew, takes a face you thought you knew and turns it into something new.	Heart-Breaker prowls in the witching hour looking out for joy to devour, never letting new hopes flower and turning every sweet dream sour.
CHORUS	He's come!
	Finally, the Breaker of Hearts comes into focus. The Chorus, in their sleep, are probably terrified of him, though strangely immobile.
HEART-BREAKER	Sleep no more!
	They all scream, briefly, as if awaking from a nightmare.

Book Review - A Gambling Man: Charles II and the Restoration, by Jenny Uglow

Charles II faced some hefty challenges when he officially become King in 1660. The country had just spent ten years ruled by parliament without any royal authority, the memory (and threat) of civil war was still fresh and Charles himself was returning from ten years of exile with a court keen for revenge and a restoration of their former lands and privilege.

After the execution of his father, King Charles I, in 1649, Charles II was more aware than most of our kings that ruling a nation is a balancing act between different parties. Push one of them too far, or refuse to give way enough, and the whole system can erupt in your face. Charles I found this to his cost, when parliament tried and executed him for crimes against his people. The idea of a king entering into a contract with his people, a two-way agreement, became current and much more accepted – there was currency in the idea that a king only ruled with the permission of his people, as represented by parliament, and after 1649 a king had increasingly limited power without his parliament.



This balancing act is explored by Jenny Uglow in her book covering the first decade of Charles II's reign (1660-1670), A Gambling Man: Charles II and the Restoration. The infamous Merry Monarch of folk legend is shown as a human being, made wary of others by his years traipsing around European courts. Uglow shows him as an expert poker player; inscrutable, calculating and forever keeping cards close to his chest despite his outward shows of merriment. It's a concept running through the book's design, with the six sections named The Deal, Clubs, Diamonds, Hearts, Spades and The Clearance.

It is this gambler's calculation that Uglow strives to bring to the fore, highlighting Charles' secret deals or risk-taking again and again. In this story, the court's habit of gambling vast sums begins to look like a symptom of following an easygoing, faintly irresponsible king, and not the other way around. For all of Uglow's striving, though, her Charles never quite comes across as a consummate gambler; it's an interpretation that is valuable, certainly, but seems to be missing something.

That's not to say that Uglow makes Charles look carefree; quite the opposite. His merry-making and pleasure-taking is merely a diversion from the many hours he puts into the work of state. Uglow's Merry Monarch is a man seriously engaged and concerned with the running of his country, a genuine public servant, aware of the new importance of the parliament – and constantly feeling its purse strings like a noose. But he can also enjoy his life and can be seen to enjoy it (special attention is paid to several of Charles' mistresses, and the eldest of his illegitimate children, the Duke of Monmouth). He works hard and plays hard, sometimes using his play as a means to arrange secret treaties and affairs of state.

Charles' method of rule – that balancing act – was in contrast with that of his cousin, Louis XIV, who, during the course of this book, manages to establish an absolute monarchy over France and becomes the dominant power in Europe. Louis acts as a weight in the grand scales of Europe, to be weighed against Holland (including the future William III) and England, but also as an example of what the people and parliament of England fear – a tyrant on the throne, with no representatives of popular opinion. It's what the people fear, but also a leadership style preferred by Charles I, and Charles II's struggles with parliament (mostly over funding his costly wars with the Dutch) indicate how attractive the concept must also have been to him.

Louis XIV wouldn't have tolerated the scheming and factionalism that is rife in Charles II's court. But this courtly intrigue, and its overspill into the parliament, makes A Gambling Man that much more fascinating – not only is this a biography of a king's reign, it's an insight into the politics of a decade, delving into the birth of modern party politics and the gradual demise of individual royal authority.

Uglow's book colourfully illustrates the the first decade of Charles II's reign, balancing the risks taken by a monarch holding onto power with documenting the rise of parliamentary politics and the gradual transfer of power.

Hard Times: For These Hard Times - my Charles Dickens 12in12

Hard Times: For These Hard Times (1854), Charles Dickens

More commonly known simply as Hard Times, Charles Dickens' shortest novel, Hard Times: For These Hard Times (1854), seems an especially fitting novel for Britain in 2012. The themes and ideas of Dickens' most socially-aware work resonate with a nation in the grip of austerity measures and tough economic decisions, knowing that the times ahead are likely to be even harder.



If you've read or seen Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South (1855), you won't be surprised that both novels were published in weekly installments in Household Words – a serial edited by our own Charles Dickens – before being published in novel format. Hard Times came from earlier in the year (April to August), while Gaskell's story ran through the later months (September – January 1855). Both are set in fictional northern English towns; grime-smeared and smoke-obscured, heaving with the belches of industrial productivity, busy with the bustle of faceless hordes of generic workers. The one, Gaskell's Milton-Northern, probably based on Manchester; the other, Dickens' Coketown, most likely to be Preston – both with names indicating their lack of individual character, functional natures and industrial purposes.

Hard Times is very much about that functional nature and the effects of the Industrial Revolution upon working people. From the very opening, the reader is accosted with the educational system (you'd call it a 'life philosophy', except that sounds a bit too fluffy and friendly) of Thomas Gradgrind Snr. This is a system he applies to his own children's upbringing, and to the children attending the school he pays for – a system perfectly suited to a town whose every movement is geared toward industrial manufacture and commerce, where people are expected to buy for the lowest price and sell elsewhere at the highest. It's a society that knows the price of everything, but has lost sight of the value of anything (sound familiar?): Gradgrind is ever-ready to 'weigh and measure any parcel of human nature, and tell you exactly what it comes to'.

Gradgrind's 'system' relies on fact: 'In this life, we want nothing but Facts, sir; nothing but facts!', a schoolboy is told. Fancy, imagination, wonder and other 'nonsense' are to be excluded from thought. Hard Times charts the failure of this system in two of Gradgrind's children – I say 'children', to him they're 'models of his system', but to anyone else they're his eldest son and daughter: Tom (Jnr) and Louisa.

Bustling around these children, and equally deprived of imagination, wonder and fancy, are the workers of Coketown. In referring to these people as 'Hands', Dickens simply highlights both the way the workers are regarded by their masters and the idea that the workers have lost any sense of individuality. In losing fancy (the sworn enemy of fact) to join the horde of workers, forced to work in order to live and scraping by on a wage thought too generous by their wealthy masters, they have lost that which made them human.

In writing Hard Times, Dickens didn't try very hard to make his point subtle or well-hidden. The cry for social reform and better treatment of the poor calls from every page, and readers should be left in no doubt as to the sorry state of the working class of Coketown. This is Dickens' sledgehammer to the dehumanising rock face of industrialisation and capitalism. Unlike the poor, the wealthy are individuals and their seemingly unbreakable influence over events (and the lives of the poor) is similarly under attack in Hard Times.

That's not to say Hard Times is unrelentingly bleak or, er, hard. Many of the characters have become hardened by circumstances, but humanity is not without redemption. There is at least one Hand, Rachel, who shines as a beacon of compassion and love – along with Sissy, one of the children from Gradgrind's school, she serves as the impossibly good-natured and loving women in an otherwise harsh, masculine world.

Josiah Bounderby - bully of humility and self-made man

On top of that, never let it be said that Dickens isn't funny. Hard Times has some wonderful moments of light and dry humour. Josiah Bounderby, the 'bully of humility', owner of banks and factories, is a case in point. He is the book's self-made man, a much-vaunted claim which Bounderby spends most of Hard Times vaunting, his pride at having improved himself from a situation far worse than that of the Hands is palpable and unbounded. It's also hilariously exposed as a lie, displaying and enhancing the disgraceful hypocrisy of the wealthy masters of industrialised Britain (and who says that ends in 1854?).

Hard Times is a plea for the human spirit, a warning against crushing the innate and vital spark of human existence. Even though it was written nearly 160 years ago, Hard Times: For These Hard Times is still pertinent, and has a perennial relevance to all post-Industrial Revolution societies.

The image of Josiah Bounderby comes from this site, which features a few comic extracts from Dickens' work.

The Chimes - my Charles Dickens 12in12

The Chimes (1844), Charles Dickens

You've probably heard of A Christmas Carol, by Charles Dickens; it's among his most famous works, and one of the most adapted. So even if you haven't read it, you probably know what happens. Just in case you don't, here's the basic story...in poor cartoon form.



This isn't a chance for me to write about A Christmas Carol – instead I'm going to write about Dickens' second Christmas story: the lesser-known The Chimes. Dickens wrote five short stories for the festive period, between 1843 and 1848, with A Christmas Carol being only the first. The Chimes is the second (1844), and although they aren't connected, it has some features in common with A Christmas Carol.

There are no ghosts, such a significant part of A Christmas Carol – and haven't ghosts always been an important part of Christmas? But even though it isn't the dead returning to life, The Chimes does involve some supernatural interference in the lives of mortals, and if that's not Christmas-y, I don't know what is. Rather like the earlier book, Dickens uses supernatural intervention to alter the attitudes of humans who've got the wrong idea about something. You can call it a cheap trick if you like, a failure to find sufficient psychological reason for his characters' actions, I'm saying nothing.

Our central character in The Chimes, Trotty Veck, unlike Carol's Scrooge, is poor and fairly sympathetic. He's a porter, who hangs around outside a church waiting for work carrying things – anything, really, but mostly boxes and messages. His two comforts while waiting and being bashed about by the wind are the friendly chimes of the bells and the thought that his daughter will be bringing his lunch later.

Already – nothing much has happened yet – Dickens has made his sympathies pretty clear. Here's a working-class, widower father struggling to claw together enough money for himself and his daughter, in contrast with the money-hoarding, bachelor Scrooge of Carol. What follows is hardly a hymn to the working classes, nor an outright attack on those wealthier than them, but instead something rather more subtle. More subtle and, of course, more supernatural.

The first two chapters (or Quarters, as Dickens names them) read as a satire of an upper-middle class that believes it knows both the working class and what is good for that class. The paternalistic (and, by modern standards, patronising) MP declares himself a 'Friend and Father of the Poor', while agreeing a harsh jail sentence for a poor man caught stealing bread for his infant daughter. The Alderman lists the things he is in favour of 'putting down', including the 'cant in vogue about Starvation'. He doesn't want to 'put down' starvation, of course, but the nonsense that the poor are anywhere near starving. These are powerful men, keen to show that they understand the sort of people they are dealing with, and have the power/ability to solve the problems of their lives. Alderman Cute is even at pains to appear to speak to the poor in their own language, or at least in a vernacular to which he has special access among the privileged classes. The MP (a baronet) criticises Trotty for owing a small sum at his local shop – it being bad form to owe debts into the New Year – while he goes about paying off his own rather larger debts. Both men make themselves increasingly ridiculous with their self-importance (accompanied by a failure to make a beneficial difference to any poor person's life).

In fact, 'the poor' take a bit of a battering in The Chimes, with Trotty left bewildered and confused by fast-talking rich men, and persuaded (by them) of his and his class' inferiority. He spends most of the book being told off by somebody, poor bloke. Here's something that I suspect is going to crop up fairly often in this 12in12 project; Dickens' support for the working classes and social reform, using his writing as his most powerful weapon.

Dickens' final two chapters/Quarters begin with that Christmas supernatural intervention, when the spirits of the church bells appear to Trotty and also tell him off. Trotty's failing is that he's lost faith in humanity and questioned Nature (by wondering what the point was in life, if people were so hopeless as he has been led to believe).

The lesson he has learnt – a little different to Scrooge's 'I should enjoy Christmas' – is:

'I know that our inheritance is held in store for us by Time. I know there is a sea of Time to rise one day, before which all who wrong us or oppress us will be swept away like leaves. I see it, on the flow! I know we must trust and hope, and neither doubt ourselves, nor doubt the good in one another.'

I can't help finding this message problematic. As he says this, Trotty is seeing his daughter standing by the Thames, ready to throw herself and/or her infant child into the murky waters and end their suffering. Trotty has been forced to watch this by the Spirits of the Chimes, to teach him a lesson for questioning Nature. But the lesson he's learnt seems to be much the same as the message handed down by Alderman Cute and his set: listen to us, don't question us and do as we instruct you. The Chimes are giving Trotty an injunction to keep quiet and accept the difficulties life throws at him, to acquiesce in his own oppression. That they have forced him, an old man, to his knees, weeping, to say this while seeing the suffering of his daughter and granddaughter is far more brutal than anything Alderman Cute says or does.

It's the poor taking a battering again; Trotty is as guilty of these wrongs as Alderman Cute and his set – in fact, he only fell into them because of Alderman Cute in the first place. And it's no wonder Trotty is so easily swayed, when he comes up against Baronets telling him that they will do the thinking for him. By rights, the Spirits of the Chimes should be going after the Aldermen and MPs with their warnings to stop harkening back to a supposed Golden Age.

Perhaps this serves to show us the wickedness of human actions in the story – they aren't as bad as the spirits' actions, but they could still be modified. That's what the MPs, Baronets, judges and Aldermen should be taking from Dickens' writing: modify your actions, and be more forgiving of the poor among us.

But Dickens' world was a world favouring the wealthy, the influential, over the hard-pressed, ill-educated and underfed. Can we really say that the world two hundred years later is much better?

12in12 - My Charles Dickens Birthday Project

Charles Dickens' books have been adapted so often we don't need to read them any more. Discuss.

Next month, February 2012, is a big birthday for Charles Dickens. How big? Two hundred. Two centuries since the birth of Charles Dickens. He won't be around for it, of course; he's been dead for most of those two hundred years. So we'll have celebrate the day without him (again). It's February 7th, since you ask.



Dickens has spent nearly two hundred years as one of Britain's foremost writers, Well, one of the English-speaking world's foremost writers, certainly of those last two hundred years. That's quite an achievement, and he's left a wide-ranging legacy, second only really to Shakespeare in the English language. What makes it more impressive is that Dickens wrote in so many genres, not just the novels he's famous for: short stories, travel writing, journalism, plays, poetry and general non-fiction.

His work has been adapted and reworked over and over again, working its way into the collective consciousness of the English-speaking world, again rather like Shakespeare. Dickens' Christmas stories have come to define the Victorian Christmas for those of us too young to remember the reality, made the festive season the popular holiday it now is, and still strongly influences our modern perception of Christmas. Adaptations of A Christmas Carol abound toward the end of every year, and Scrooge has come to be a widely-recognised term for someone like Dickens' infamous character.

Even before the BBC started rummaging through the Dickensian back catalogue for their current season of work devoted to Charles (or Boz, as he sometimes preferred), he was frequently the subject of adaptations. Not only have Dickens' books been adapted, but he himself often appears for public readings (as the man himself did while still alive) – the most famous perhaps being Simon Callow's portrayal alongside Christopher Eccleston in the new Doctor Who.

In fact, Dickens seems to have been adapted so often that it seems we don't really need to read his books any more. I've certainly seen A Christmas Carol on stage enough times that I know the story and characters as well as if I'd read it. And that's the curse of the writer of 'classics', of members of the canon of 'great' writers; people don't actually read their books any more. As Mark Twain quoted a Professor Winchester: a classic is something everybody wants to have read, but nobody wants to read. Mind you, I'm always wary of Mark Twain quotes; they're prone to being greatly exaggerated.

I thought I'd celebrate the two hundredth anniversary of Dickens' birth by actually reading some of these books that made his name and legacy. My birthday present to him will be to read twelve of Dickens' books in a year (I'm aiming for one in each month, of course). That's roughly eleven more Dickens books than I've managed to read in my life to date (1988-2011). For someone with an English Literature degree, I consider that a pretty poor effort.



To kick off my Dickensian effort (see what I mean? Dickens is sufficiently well-established that we have an adjective for him and his work which immediately conjours up a certain type of character and location, usually something Victorian and in London), I'll be starting with a Christmas short story: The Chimes.

So, welcome to my Dickensian sort-of extravaganza (can an extravaganza take place over twelve months? is that over doing it?). I call it 12in12, and I hope you stick around until the (bitter?) end.

So far I've covered:
January - The Chimes
February - Hard Times: For These Hard Times
March - Bleak House
April - The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club
May - American Notes for General Circulation(coming soon...)

Thanks to Will Clayton for the birthday cake image.

The other images depict Dickens at a reading of his own, and Fringe Festival stalwart Pip Utton playing Dickens.

Then we've got the cover of the Complete Dickens Kindle edition, 99p from Amazon.

Protesting the Proms: Israel's Philharmonic Orchestra and the Palestine Solidarity Campaign

London's Royal Albert Hall, home of the BBC Proms, scene of the protest

Last night, for the first time in its 117-year history, BBC Radio 3 stopped its Royal Albert Hall broadcast of a Proms concert because of a politically-motivated protest. Just like that. Mid-performance (Bruch's Violin Concerto, since you ask), taken off the air.

The broadcast started at 7:30pm, which is nothing unusual. Outside the Royal Albert Hall, pro-Palestinian protesters had been vying with pro-Israeli protesters in a shouting match for some hours. Meanwhile, inside, the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Zubin Mehta, was about to begin their performance. But every time their Indian-born conductor stood ready for a new movement of Bruch's work, the IPO found they couldn't start – protesters inside the hall were making too much noise. The BBC broadcast was taken off-air twice, and radio listeners didn't get to the end of the concert.

The BBC Proms are hardly the place you'd expect to get heckling and disruption so serious it causes an early end to radio broadcasting. This is supposed to be a civilised event, attended by civilised, cultured people. That makes the reasons behind this protest all the more worthy of examination.

A few years ago I was in Birmingham when the REP Theatre staged Behzti (Dishonour), a play featuring rape in a Sikh temple. Local Sikhs found this distressing, understandably, and a couple of hundred of them protested outside the theatre, eventually resulting in the play's run being cut short. But that – and several other disrupted performances that come to mind – had some pretty controversial subject matter, which is what protesters were complaining about. Bruch's Violin Concerto contains nothing especially objectionable; the issue this time was the orchestra itself.

The Israel Philharmonic Orchestra is proud of its status as one of the leading cultural ambassadors of the state of Israel, as well as happily recruiting non-Jews to its ranks. Before the 1967 Six-Day War (the one where Israel grabbed a whole load of land while fighting a range of Arab nations), that was fine; Israel was the under-dog surrounded by powerful adversaries, still a young nation defending its right to existence.

But since 1967 and the increasing Israeli expansion into its newly-occupied territories (the West Bank, Gaza), with Israel's reluctance to give up control of the contested Golan Heights, it's rather harder to sympathise with Israel. These days, they're the ones risking international condemnation through their treatment of different ethnic groups, as Palestinian Arabs did in the decades before Israel's declaration of independence in 1948. Since occupying regions such as the West Bank, Israel has been expanding its settlements (of, at best, dubious legal standing) and getting involved in conflicts that do nothing for stability in a troubled region (conflicts that aren't really about Israeli self-defence any more).

In a statement on their website, the Palestine Solidarity Campaign – responsible for the protests outside last night's Proms – argue that the IPO has 'lent itself to the official Israeli propaganda campaign titled Brand Israel, which aims to divert attention from Israel's violations of international law and Palestinian rights to its artistic and scientific achievements'. I'm all for promoting the scientific and artistic achievements of Israel (or any other group of people, for that matter), but the IPO's alignment with the Israeli Defence Force is a worrying example of artists getting (perhaps too?) closely involved in politics. I grant you, art and politics can't and shouldn't be entirely separated, but artists lose their ability (maybe even their right) to comment on politics when they get too closely involved. The IPO is quite right to promote Israel's artistic achievements internationally, but performing morale-boosting concerts for the troops (as the IPO has been doing since 1942) implies a condoning of the actions of those troops. Much as I'd like to keep this performance of Bruch's Violin Concerto separate from Israel's encroachment of the West Bank, the IPO itself has made that difficult with their IDF concerts. The Palestinian protest last night has at least been successful in bringing the connection between the two to light.

When I say the Proms is an event for cultured, civilised people, it's worth pointing out that those protesting against the performance aren't themselves uncultured. Far from it; their in-hall protest included what one audience member described as 'singing to the tune of Beethoven's Ode to Joy' – Beethoven's Ninth Symphony features the words of Schiller's poem, To Joy, in its fourth movement. While I can't help thinking that disrupting a classical music concert inside the hall itself runs the risk of making your protest look churlish (dare I say philistine?), using Beethoven's Ninth – with its overarching theme of brotherly love and the constant struggle to improve the human condition – redeems that cause immeasurably.

Thanks to Boeke, for the image of the Royal Albert Hall on Flickr.

Some advice for journalists in the post-News of the World world

Some advice to journalists in the post-News of the World world; To Hack or not to Hack

Dear Journalists,

so, phone-hacking, eh? News of the World, huh? Well, that all blew up in their faces a bit. Or someone's faces anyway, I gather the actual culprits had already left (of course they had, of course). But, look, there are lessons to be learned here – just listen to Ed Miliband bang on about the lessons for everyone to learn when he was on Newsnight on Friday. And if Miliband Jnr's spotted them...

Where journalists went wrong here was in their choice of target (aside from the phone-hacking thing being illegal at the best of times). I mean, we hardly cared about an actor or Deputy Prime Minister getting hacked, but you go for a missing schoolgirl's phone and the nation's up in arms. It may be a cliché, but we do seem to love an underdog in this country. Target the powerful and we'll let you off. Target the vulnerable and we'll bite your hand off...or at least write strongly worded letters to rival newspapers.

Thing is, there are three types of people whose stories sell newspapers (and yep, because newspapers – especially tabloids – are driven by what we'll pay to read, it's kind of the public's fault too, a bit). I turn to our old friend William Shakespeare to explain them.

“Some are born to publicity. Some achieve publicity, and some have publicity thrust upon them.”

To take that one at a time...

“Some are born to publicity”
For example, the Royal Family. It's not their fault (honest) and they can't help it (really); if your mum is the head of state, your every move will be of interest to someone. These people have no choice about the public spotlight, and we can only hope that through a lifetime's exposure to it, they'll learn to handle it (there's still time for Prince Philip, fingers crossed).
These people probably have stories worth telling, so go ahead and get them (legally), but tread carefully; they are influential and know powerful people...not for nothing has that family been 'in charge' for centuries.

“Some achieve publicity”
For example, actors or politicians. It is very much their fault that they're in the limelight; they've sought it. They're either performers (of some kind or another) who've actively pursued public interest for the sake of their careers, or they're politicians who've gone out of their way to get noticed and elected to public office. Once in public office or on stage/screen/radio/print, they are of course interesting to the public.
Reporting stories about those in public may well serve the public good, and those should be encouraged. If you've a story about a celebrity, great, go for it, they'll probably help you out because they think any publicity is good publicity (unless they try to gag you, in which case you know you're into something).

“Some have publicity thrust upon them”
For example, people caught up in national tragedies, disasters or victims of crime. These are people like the families bereaved after the July 7th terror attacks. They've got a story, certainly, but if they don't want to tell it you, tough. They haven't gone looking for publicity, it's come to find them (along with something horrible in their lives), and the last thing they need is some journalist poking around their inboxes.
Stories about these people are fair enough, but don't be insensitive about them.

Thing is, the British public – as journalists can't have failed to notice over the last few years – always need a hate figure, some group of people to target all our latent anger and aggression at. Maybe it's because we're so reserved and/or apathetic most of the time and we need to vent a bit. Not so long ago, it was bankers for screwing up the economy. Before that it was MPs for...well, various things – cash for honours, fiddling their expenses, generally getting things wrong etc etc.

This week, it's your turn. Take it on the chin. Have a look at Shakespeare's contribution above, then go and dig some dirt on people worth doing it over. Or find another hate figure...we'll lap up a good hate figure.

Tour de France 2011 Stage Eight

2011 Tour De France Stage Seven

Incendies [film review]

There are two stories running through Denis Villeneuve's award-winning French-Canadian film, Incendies. But, as is pointed out in a slightly strained mathematical analogy, one plus one sometimes equals one.

Based on a earlier play, Scorched by Wajdi Mouawad, Incendies takes its central characters, twins Jeanne and Simon Marwan (Mélissa Désormaeux-Poulin and Maxim Gaudette), from Canada to Lebanon, following a quest set by their mother's Will in 2009. She, Nawal Marwan (Lubna Azabal - also seen in the BBC's Occupation) has insisted her grave remains unmarked until they find the father and brother whose existence they've only just discovered.

Meanwhile – as it were – the young Nawal, in 1970s Lebanon, is living through the upheaval and religious warfare rampant in the Middle East. Her brother kills her lover, before her newborn son is taken away for adoption. Azabal gives us a spirited heroine, contrasting with the shellshocked woman we've already seen her become in contemporary Canada at the shattering moment when those two stories collide. It's a powerful and moving story of ugly actions across a divided nation. Seriously, this is a period of history well worth reading up on in light of Incendies.

The twins uncover more and more of their mother's story, and inevitably discover more about their own origins than they're comfortable with. There's a human drive for knowledge, a curiosity in the face of a conundrum which keeps pushing the twins inexorably onwards. They don't know it, but it's a quest for self-knowledge as much as it is a quest for their father and brother. The tight plotting and human thirst for knowledge in Incendies wouldn't be out of place in a Greek tragedy, and here it lends Incendies a throbbing ache in its heart; humans can be so curious they'll find things they don't want to know.

In fact, there's definitely something Oedipal about that missing brother, taken as he is just after having his ankle tattooed. The tattoo is one marker allowing us to follow his life in snapshots through the same war that his mother survives. It's a war that hardens him, and Incendies doesn't shy away from the acts of brutality committed, though always leaving just enough unseen and unsaid for the blanks to be filled in. That said, the order of events is masterfully handled in a way to make Greek tragedians spin in their graves, but to deliver a full-on shock to the modern audience.

A film that starts as powerfully as Incendies could build to something angry, something bereft of hope. The first five minutes leave the viewer fixed firmly in the gaze of a young boy (with a tattooed ankle) whose hair is being shaved by soldiers conscripting an orphanage. His eyes appeal for outside help even while defiance shines from them – how like his mother, later imprisoned and raped by the militia.


But what finally comes out of Incendies is forgiveness and the unbreakable love of family. Incendies teaches us that humanity can somehow overcome the ugliness it creates. Or at least that a family may do so.