Just finished watching Andrew Marr’s “Britain from Above” documentary (which was visually good, if slightly less revealing / surprising than I’d hoped). Whilst doing so, I realised something; his “wobbly hands” demonstrative declamatory style of presenting is fairly annoying and slightly patronising. And he’s not the only one; even the normally-calm Sir David Attenborough’s work is increasingly being accompanied by over-dramatic music and wild gesticulatory abandon (e.g. the “Oooh! Look at the blue whale!” bit about two mins into this clip)

Now I know that a lot of these programmes also go out to an American audience, but other than that, why do documentary-makers feel the need to treat us as if we were children? Why are we talked down to all the time? Twenty years ago, we all thought that David Bellamy’s style made him look like a bit of a berk; what’s changed? Why do we have to be “storytold” our documentaries these days?

Two interesting comparisons and examples of how it should be done; Robert Hughes, who, in his utterly brilliant and riveting “Shock of the New”, was phlegmatic knowledge personnified, and Jonathan Meades (my all-time number one fave intellectual! Yay!) who, despite not being averse to the odd jokey directorial set-piece, never for one minute treats me as if I’m incapable of understanding a sentence with more than one concept in it.

Aaahhh…. that’s better. After last week’s tangential and lengthy - not to say interesting - foray into the world of philosophical debate, and a subsequent weekend immersion in the flea-bitten just-past-its-sell-by-date chav-tabulous world of London’s suburban boot fairs, I return refreshed, and ready for some altogether lighter and frothier subject matter.

Unfortunately for me, the first thing on the agenda is Evil. US readers may not know that ’70s pop star Gary Glitter (real name Paul Gadd) has recently returned to the UK from Vietnam, where he served a sentence for child abuse. He was also, in 1997, convicted in the UK of downloading child pornography. (Incidentally - he still makes approx. £50,000 p/a from back royalties, and has even said that he is considering making a comeback into the world of pop. So surely he must be able to afford advisors who could apprise him of the fact that the “Satan’s Grandad” look isn’t a great one for a convicted paedophile?)

Anyway, I digress. Glitter’s saga - plus all of Hotdog and Quidni’s high-concept Judaeo-Abrahamaio-Religio-Philosophical hoo-ha - have got me thinking; what’s the definition of pure evil? Or rather (since it’s easier to do a poll on) - who (outside prison) is the most evil person currently resident in the UK? I’ll give you some choices, but feel free to make your own nominations and I’ll add them (or not, depending on how evil I myself feel):

- Gary Glitter
- Gordon Brown (who, according to the Mail and sundry thickos, is responsible for everything from the Credit Crunch to this summer’s crappy weather to me falling over whilst playing squash last Friday and grazing my knee pretty bloody badly, actually. And yes, it does still hurt. Thanks, Gord.)
- Robert Kilroy-Silk (WHAT a tit)
- Jordan (WHAT a prick)
- A kind of “everyman” representative of the UK’s lazy, feckless attitude to life, taking what they have for granted and not working hard enough to achieve more, constantly whining and bitching about celebrities and people in power… me, for instance.

Over to you righteous and goodly folk (hopefully) for more thoughts and nominations.

Chastened by my righteous legal mauling (ahem) at the hands of Web Sherrif, I’ve scuttled back to my natural habitat of the 1980s for the latest installment of what everyone’s still calling TTOTDOWOHOHCBATCI.

The latest tune is “Forest Fire”, from Lloyd Cole and the Commotions’ 1984 debut “Rattlesnakes”. It’s a classic example of a fairly ordinary song elevated to greatness by clever production. Like the sylvan conflagration evoked in the title, it grows from humble beginnings, eventually swelling into a fantastically beefy guitar finale.

In fact, the whole album is absolutely brilliant; a connoisseur’s staple to this day. Full of hammond organs, accordions and twangy guitars, it’s populated with images of brief affairs with insouciant women wearing thick eyeliner and dragging on cigarettes, and it’s redolent of classic black and white film style in a way which was utterly foreign to the strident blare of Culture Club and Duran Duran during which it was released. It’s also got some fantastically misanthropic lyrics (eg “Must you tell me all your secrets when it’s hard enough to love you knowing nothing?”) Little did we know that the entire thing was penned by a chubby golf-lover from Derbyshire…

I first heard “Rattlesnakes” aged 13 at the house of my nominated French exchange  partner. He was a prick, but, despite being less handsome than me and covered in zits (*), he used to get all the girls. The fact that he’d already discovered albums like “Rattlesnakes” enabled me understand (in retrospect at least) why that was the case.

(* - OK, to be fair, I was as well…)

As some of you know, I’m a fan of Italian football; as such, I’m often on Channel 4’s “Football Italia” website checking the latest news. The site is run from the UK, but all their articles are contributed by individual journalists working on the ground in different Italian cities.

It looks like the site administrator might have been a little inattentive when lining up this morning’s headline stories…

If there were an Olympics for grammar, sports commentators would surely come last. Or should that just be “would surely last”? No-one can have failed to notice Beijing’s trend for noun-to-verb mass conversion here satirised by Harry Pearson of the Guardian:

“And word coming out of the US camp is that D’Ladedah Tubbs, who all-comered when semi-finalling in the 400 metres, has positived. Until Wada have B-sampled we can’t start scandaling but I’m hearing some of the media in America have already furore-ed and I’m sure we can expect some real controversying in the next 24 hours.”

But the worst example of all is the new verb “to medal”. “I’m confident that I’ll be able to medal…”, and even, heard just now on Radio 5, “Michael Phelps is now the most medalled athlete of all time”. The only thing that’s really getting a meddling is our beloved language…

Technical Organ Grinder was recently in Hong Kong, and, whilst there, took the time to indulge his passion for photography. Inspired by godfather of Far-Eastern image-making, and after several days of fruitlessly searching the former colony, he finally came up with what he and I both think is the perfect pictorial representation of the Pearl of the Orient:

(Sorry, I know that I’ve used that pun in a previous incarnation, but it’s by far the best I can come up with, by dint of the fact that it’s the only one I could come up with.)

So, amid a smorgasbord of indifference, air pollution and fireworks, the Olympics are under way. Like the footie World Cup in 2002, it’s over in some country where they haven’t got their time differences sorted out, meaning that if you want to watch any of the events, you have to get up at 2am. But why would you want to watch archery, sailing or diving anyway? It’s a weird concept - once every four years, everybody gets really excited about a bunch of sports which, for the rest of the time, nobody gives a flying puck about. Or rather, the BBC are trying to make out that everybody’s getting really excited. I’m sure they are - the entire corporation appears to be on a 3-week jolly in Beijing at MY expense. Results so far? I haven’t been paying much attention, but Russia seems to be winning the shooting…

And RIP Isaac Hayes, a true giant of soul. As well as the theme from “Shaft”, which everyone knows, he co-wrote absolute classics in the 60s for Stax Records (inc. “Hold On, I’m Comin’” and “Soul Man) before going bankrupt in the mid ’70s and forfeiting commercial rights to everything he’d done up to that point. An Indian summer arrived in the shape of the part of Chef in “South Park”, but Scientology got its tentacles into him, and he left the show on bad terms. Let’s remember him for the good stuff.

(Web Sherrif - here’s hoping you don’t represent Matt Stone and Trey Parker and / or Scientology…)

(No, he’s not dead; I’ve just dodgily copied one of his tracks).

Looking back at the TTOTDOWOHOHCBATCIts which I’ve posted thus far, I’ve realised that they’ve ALL been from the ’80s (!) - so time to delve back into the older, gruffer, more curmudgeonly epoch of my CD collection, in the shape of George Ivan Morrison. Van Morrison is one of my favourite artists, and one of only two or three acts whose every album I’ll continue to buy in perpetuity. You know EXACTLY what you’re getting with Van; often described as “Celtic Soul”, it’s direct, uncomplicated home-truth or story-in-song lyrics set over a folk / jazz / soul groove, sprinkled with liberal doses of distinctive Van the Man wisdom, be it religious, mystical or personal. (Historically, he never seemed able to decide whether he was into Jesus and William Blake, but both work in the context of the music).

This track is the first from his classic “Moondance” set; it’s a brilliant “two mates mucking about in the countryside” job which will always remind me of long, untroubled early 20s summer halcyon days spent with my closest university buddy on boozy camping trips in the Cotswolds or the Lake District…. (Tafkass drifts off slowly into a superannuated “a la recherche du temps perdu”-style doze, probably dribbling as he does so….)

The song also contains the second-worst example of an “oh shit I can’t make this line scan” tautology in the history of lyric-writing: “Almost let a pick-up truck nearly pass us by”. The worst ever is obviously Wings’s legendary effort from “Live and Let Die” - “But in this ever-changing world in which we live in”.

Whilst listening to England’s tamer-than-tame I’m-going-to-roll-over-and-you-can -tickle-my-tummy-you-big-South-African-hunk capitulation in the cricket yesterday, I swore I heard BBC correspondent Jonathan “Aggers” (where do they get the nicknames from?) Agnew telling me that there were “8000 volleyball supporters in the main stand”.

I wandered about the living room in a state of confusion for a while. Volleyball supporters at a cricket match? Was it some kind of Olympics-related cross-sporting venture? Had they set up some kind of giant sandpit for bikini-clad babes to hurl themselves into for the edification of the other 22,000 fans during quiet moments in play?

I penned a suitably laconic e-mail to the BBC asking what “Aggers” was on about; luckily, before hitting “send”, I realised that he’d actually said “voluble”.