DIARY
ROGER ALTON The other day I took my daughter, who likes dancing, to see the film Billy Elliot, which is about dancing. My daughter is ten, the film is a certificate 15, so presumably I was committing some modest offence. The man selling the tickets asked how old she was. 'Fifteen,' I lied. An usherette, mean- while, raised her eyebrows theatrically at Hannah, who put her finger to her lips. The whole thing was preposterous. When even Chris Tookey, the Daily Mail's redoubtable film critic and no friend of anti-censorship tossers like myself, argues that it should be a 12, you can be fairly certain it's pretty family-friendly. There are in Billy Elliot a fair number of 'fucks', and a minor fight. Otherwise it is wildly more suitable for kids than most episodes of Brookie or East- Enders. It's all very well that the film cen- sorship board's episcopal Andreas Whittam Smith wants to punt sex shops for every City-centre, but it would be nice, too, if he tried to find a sensible policy on swearing, so that films like Billy Elliott can be seen by the people who will get most out of it. As we left, my daughter said, 'Why on earth was that a 15?' I couldn't agree more.
Poker, poker everywhere. You just can't move these days for Texas Hold'em, Seven- Card Stud and stories about the everyday life of Amarillo Slim. It's in newspapers, on late-night television, and in our own Observ- er sports monthly, where Victoria Coren Britain's top 'poker doll', according to that fine magazine Poker Europa — has a column (`Unmissable' – Ed.). Being of an age to have read Ian Fleming's Casino Royale when it first came out, 1 have always had distant fantasies of being a professional gambler. But the truth is I am a dismal player: I get asked to an occasional game where I am known, correctly, as the token Gentile, and after a great evening I end up about a hun- dred quid worse off. A couple of days after the last game, our host emailed me to say that she and her boyfriend were playing in a competition in a strip club in some sun- kissed tax haven. Her boyfriend had just won 15 grand's worth of Yamaha motorbike, and they were setting off into the desert. Somehow I feel that life is passing me by.
Faintly reassuring news recently for old media old-timers like me. A friend comes over to talk about editing the Observer's web- site. He tells me he wants out of the dotcom he's currently running at some vast salary because he is missing newspapers. Blimey. AnYway, he's troubled by the fact that he's working with half-a-dozen millionaires, but none of them can tell the difference between Mozart and Wagner. I don't know whether to believe him, but it is nice to think it's true. We journalists like to talk about our role in fairly high-minded terms — defend- ing democracy, lifting the stone on the secret state, questioning our rulers, telling the peo- ple what others don't want them to know. Sadly, however, the imperatives are often slightly more mundane. The problem on a Sunday newspaper is that bugger-all hap- pens on a Saturday. This means that we have to get tremendously angry about things . . . and then write about it. Just now I'm try- ing to get righteously indignant about Britain's transport shambles — our crowded airways and the preposterous plan to priva- tise Air Traffic Control, the meltdown on the railways, the gruesome conditions on the London Underground, the fact that every road is being dug up for no apparent reason, and so on. But last Monday morning I looked out from my office on infinitely empty blue skies, while down below traffic happily whizzed up and down Farringdon Road. It was very hard to get particularly cross, though I hope we'll manage by the weekend. Like many people who have to live and drive in London, I am obsessed by traffic. But now there is a report that the Tories are 'looking at a plan' to allow people to turn left on a red light to ease congestion, just as in right-hand-drive America you can turn right on a red light. Woody Allen once rather snootily remarked that it was Cali- fornia's only contribution to world civilisa- tion. But I think it's a brilliant plan and the first bit of sense the Conservatives have talked for years. If they shove it in their manifesto, they should cruise the election.
Idon't know if this is the experience of everyone who is daft enough to fork out vast sums for their children's education, but my main perception is the eye-watering amount of work you are expected to do as a parent. Currently we're in the final throes of The Project. This is when schools ask the kids to produce some lavishly illustrated, highly researched, beautifully produced tome, plus contents, bibliography and whatnot on some suitably arcane subject. They end up rather like a slimmer version of those lush picture books by Phaidon or Thames and Hudson, and, at the end of term when they're laid out, the class looks like the art room at Water- stone's. So far we have had to do 'The Life of Shakespeare', 'Endangered Marine Life', `The Secret History of Brixton', and we're currently polishing off 'Ancient Egyptian Jewellery and Fashion'. I mean, for heaven's sake, she is only ten. And, of course, no self- respecting ten-year-old is going to be able to find out all this stuff. As a result, it becomes a ferocious competition between adults who's got the best research? the best binder? the best state-of-the-art computer typogra- phy? It is a complete nightmare, and makes you yearn for two hours' brisk trigonometry.
Sadly, for hopeless skiing addicts the main message of those grim but spectacularly beautiful pictures of the Austrian avalanches is that the pre-season snow is superb, and a majestic season is in prospect. But skiing is no longer the solitary wilderness experience of fantasy. In fact, the slopes are often hideously crowded. And while it seems to be perfectly reasonable for people to kill them- selves in the mountains, should they so wish, they shouldn't be allowed to kill others. That's why it was cheering to see that a Col- orado court has jailed a young Vail hotshot who lost control and whacked, fatally, into a skier on the slopes. Perhaps an early assign- ment for Tony Blair's faintly comic Euro- pean rapid-reaction force might be to react rapidly and lift speeding skiers and boarders this winter.
Roger Alton is editor of the Observer.
Previous page
