O ver the weekend I took part in the Free Thinking
Festival in Liverpool. As well as my own talk the organisers asked me to fill in for the French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy, who had cancelled at the last minute. This gave me an idea: just as you have musical tribute bands who perform faultless replicas of the music of otherwise unobtainable acts such Abba or the Rolling Stones, you could do the same with the work of famous philosophers as, after all, it is the ideas rather than the person which are important. The names of tribute bands are usually some clumsy wordplay on the title of the original, like Abba Dabba Doo or BlonDee, similarly with the philosopher tribute acts, they would perform in small pubs and church halls under such names as ‘Sartre for Sartre’s Sake’, ‘Hobbsnobs’ or ‘Kant Think? Won’t Think!’ Just recorded an edition of Never Mind the Buzzcocks. Don’t want to brag or anything but there can’t be many people who could fill in for Bernard-Henri Lévy one day, then do Buzzcocks the next. (Apart from Germaine Greer, who was on Buzzcocks last week.) Went to buy Season Five of the HBO series The Wire on DVD. I’d actually seen the show before on a download but still felt compelled to buy it as an act of solidarity with others in the entertainment business (though not until the price had dropped). For those of you who don’t know, The Wire was a US TV show which was hailed by absolutely everybody as probably the greatest television series ever made. They were right too. I was one of the earliest disciples of the show in this country as a friend of mine had worked with the producers David Simon and Ed Burns on their previous HBO project The Corner and tipped me off to what an amazing piece of work their new series was. Soon others followed. Somebody told me that only 12,000 people saw The Wire when it was first broadcast in the UK but every single one of them wrote an article for the Guardian about it. However, just to get me ahead of the game again, I’d like to start The Wire backlash, because oddly the fifth and final season is actually quite poor. It’s funny how many traps there are for writers, producers, directors: massive praise, even if it’s entirely justified, seems to have had a corrosive effect on the talent behind the show, so that Season Five feels lazy, self-satisfied and rushed. Luckily for me, the undermining effect of massive praise is not something I’ve ever had to worry about.
To the MTV European Music Awards at the Echo Arena in Liverpool. I’m sure a lot of you were there, grooving to the musical stylings of Pink, Duffy, The Killers and Kid Rock. I was invited because I’d made a film for the channel, to precede the awards, all about Liverpool’s illustrious musical history.
I must admit that when I went into MTV’s headquarters for post-production I was a little disappointed. Given that it is located in Hawley Crescent, Camden Town, the epicentre of drug-crazed musical madness, I thought there would certainly be an in-house tattoo parlour and nipple-piercing facility with a built-in vodka bar and I was convinced all the staff would be behaving like Amy Winehouse or Pete Doherty: constantly falling over or crying in corners with blood from self-harming wounds seeping through their clothes. On the contrary it all felt disturbingly tame. Partly this is because Terry Farrell’s iconic GMTV studio has not aged well. Back when it was built its bright colours and angular lines seemed to be the epitome of the frivolous and big-shouldered 1980s but now, perhaps due to the fact that its architectural features have been incorporated into the mainstream, the building has the atmosphere and appearance of a falling-to-bits PFI-funded comprehensive school from the late 1990s while the employees all seemed like young teachers who’d stayed behind after hours to catch up on a bit of marking. It wouldn’t have happened in my day.
So finally I’m dragging myself into the late 1990s by getting my very own website, actually written by me. I’ve been driven to do this by my increasingly large presence on the web — none of which I have anything to do with. However I’m being forced to use alexei sayle.me.uk because AlexeiSayle.com has been taken by a man who hates me; he also wrote a lot of my Wikipedia entry, to judge by the glowing references to him contained within it, compared with the lukewarm references to me.
Today I noticed people seemed to be making noises as they passed me in the street. An Oriental man went ‘Gaak’ as we passed by each other and another man appeared to say something like, ‘Greamy munfunu eek’. This is reassuring: previously I’d thought it was just me who did this sort of thing — shouting out nonsense in public or making weird hand gestures at the opera. I often look up in a railway carriage or on the bus to find everybody looking at me and an odd gargling noise fading away in the air. Now I don’t want to claim, Stephen Fry-like, that I have some sort of illness: I’m just odd is all.
I’ve been commissioned to write the first volume of my memoirs and I’m thinking of calling it ‘What’s He Doing Now?’ This is a remark my wife’s mother made when we were in the centre of Liverpool and she noticed that while I was holding her daughter’s hand I was also walking with the bandy-legged gait of a chimpanzee.
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