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Oscar-winners are like MPs - they're getting posher

25/2/2015

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Congratulations to Eddie Redmayne on his Best Actor Oscar. I haven’t yet seen The Theory of Everything, but I’m sure Eddie’s portrayal of the amazing physicist Stephen Hawking is excellent. He certainly did a good job of hero Stephen Wraysford in the TV mini-series of the First World War drama Birdsong. (Does he have a thing for characters called Stephen?)

But let’s face it, once he landed the part of Hawking he was always going to be a hot Oscar tip. The Academy of Motion Pictures does have a thing for characters gamely overcoming various illnesses or impairments.

Last year the same gong went to Matthew McConaughey for portraying a cowboy with Aids. Four years ago Colin Firth took it for playing a king with a speech impediment (royal and stuttering, sure-fire Oscar material). Memorable previous winners have included Geoffrey Rush as a pianist with mental problems (Shine), Nicolas Cage as a suicidal alcoholic (Leaving Las Vegas), Tom Hanks as the not-all-there Forrest Gump and before that as another Aids victim (Philadelphia). Who could forget Daniel Day-Lewis in what you might call the eponymous My Left Foot? Or Dustin Hoffman’s turn as the “idiot savant” Rain Man? And so it goes on. Julianne Moore as a woman battling Alzheimer’s is just the latest name on a similarly worthy list of Best Actresses.

But few people have ever overcome such visually and audibly striking impairment to such great effect as Professor Hawking.

Redmayne was not wrong in his acceptance speech when he described himself humbly as “a lucky, lucky man”. And – as I’m sure he is fully aware – his luck began a long time before he was picked for that particular role. Because young Eddie is top class in more ways than one.

That wonderful comedian Reginald D Hunter (more on him below) has a great line on the British class system. It is, he says, “a brilliant system” – much better than America’s crude racial segregation. Why? Because it’s “a way of discriminating against people even when they look just like you”.

Class is, of course, partly about money – money you’re born to, not money you earn. That’s why footballers can never be high class, though their children might. But it’s about other kinds of privilege and expectation too. It’s about how you think of yourself, how you speak, and who you know. And a lot of all that comes down simply to what school you go to.

Eddie Redmayne went to Eton.

As did his two immediate predecessors in the role of America’s favourite British actor, Hugh Laurie and Damian Lewis. Their nearest rival in those stakes, Benedict Cumberbatch, a nominee and presenter at this week’s Oscars, was at the other place – Harrow.

From choir-school boy Laurence Olivier and Westminster School alumnus John Gielgud on, the Yanks have always rather gone for posh Brits. Three-time Best Actor Oscar-winner Daniel Day-Lewis – whose father Cecil was Poet Laureate – was sent to Bedales, an ultra-posh establishment whose fees are topped only by Eton, Harrow and Westminster.

Of course, not every British actor who has “made it” over there is a toff. Think of Bob Hoskins, Michael Caine, Dudley Moore. Colin Firth is a kind of hybrid – a comprehensive school boy who excels at playing privileged types.

But the real privilege still runs deep. And it’s getting deeper again.

The present government is much the poshest we’ve had since 1964. Just seven per cent of the population went to fee-paying schools, but 54pc of Tory MPs did, as did 40pc of LibDems, 15pc of Labour, both UKIP MPs and the Green Party’s Caroline Lucas. Just one school provided 20 current MPs – 19 Tories and one LibDem. Eton, of course.

David Cameron is the 19th Old Etonian to be Prime Minister, but the first since Sir Alec Douglas-Home in 1964.

One in seven judges went to just five schools, including Eton, Westminster (Nick Clegg’s old school) and St Paul’s (George Osborne’s). In all, 71pc of those who sit in judgement on the rest of us went to private schools.

According to the Sutton Trust, the domination of the media by privately educated types is growing. Of the “top 100 media professionals”, it says 54 went to private schools.

And that can only get worse in a profession where it’s now almost essential to start out as an intern, working for free, if you want to get in at national level. I, like most people, could never have afforded to do that.




It’s nearly 20 years since my only brief visit to America’s Deep South but it’s so familiar from books, the movies – and especially music – that watching Reginald D Hunter’s Songs of the South felt almost nostalgic.

Nearly every song on his road trip was one I could sing along to – from the minstrel showstopper Old Folks at Home to the bluegrass Blue Moon of Kentucky, the Allman Brothers’ rocker Ramblin’ Man to the Glenn Miller swing of Chattanooga Choo-Choo.

That was just Kentucky and Tennessee – and he didn’t even drop in on Memphis. Probably because Saturday’s first episode was his venture into the White South. I look forward to him returning home to the Black South this weekend.

And if there isn’t a brilliant soundtrack album to follow when the series is over, the BBC is seriously missing a trick.
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The biggest bang

18/2/2015

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What’s the loudest noise anyone has ever heard?
It certainly wasn’t the gunshot that killed Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo in 1914. That is often described as “the shot heard round the world”, and in a sense it was. The non-literal sense, that is, that it kicked off a world war.
The atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945 was many, many times louder – though there have been many much bigger nuclear explosions since, mostly in tests by the USA or USSR.
It’s arguable that it changed the world even more than the Sarajevo assassination. It could equally be argued that without the earlier event the bomb would never have happened.
In so many ways we are still living in the world created by Gavrilo Princip’s trigger finger.
Things have consequences – chains of event mostly unforeseen.
But the loudest thing was almost certainly a natural occurrence, not any bang made by man.
It’s often said to have been the volcanic eruption of Krakatoa. The Indonesian island blew up in 1883, causing shock waves that were literally recorded around the world. The tsunami it unleased killed a reported 36,000 people. It’s been estimated at about 13,000 times the force of the Hiroshima bomb, and four times the biggest nuclear device ever detonated. It was a big bang.
But it wasn’t the biggest. And it didn’t have the most devastating consequences.
Just under 200 years ago – on April 10, 1815 – another island in the same Indonesian chain erupted.
The British statesman Stamford Raffles (famous later for founding London Zoo and the city of Singapore) heard it.
He reported: “The sky was overcast at noon-day with clouds of ashes. Showers of ashes covered the houses, the streets, and the fields to the depth of several inches. And amid this darkness explosions were heard at intervals, like the report of artillery or the noise of distant thunder.”
And he was over 700 miles away in Java.
The Tambora eruption killed 12,000 people immediately. But that was only the beginning.
It’s now known that it blew 160 cubic kilometres of rock and ash into the air. That’s more than six times the size of Krakatoa – and more than 1,000 times the eruption of Eyjafjallajokull in Iceland that so disrupted air traffic in 2010.
The ash cloud released by Tambora didn’t just ground a few planes and make things dusty. It turned southern China’s summer to winter, wiping out the rice harvest and causing a massive famine.
By the time the weather returned to normal three years later, the economy of Yunnan province had switched from rice to poppies. Instead of feeding themselves directly, the farmers were now in the drugs trade. It was the start of China’s long association with opium.
Right across Europe and America 1816 was “the year without a summer”. Due, as no one at the time knew, to the Tambora eruption.
There were failed harvests and food riots. Famine from Ireland to Switzerland – whose closed-borders, “neutral” position in world affairs began then.
In India, the monsoon failed. The longest drought in the country’s history was eventually followed, in September 1816, by ruinous flooding. The devastation led in 1817 to the world’s worst cholera outbreak.
Genetic research now suggests that conditions in Bengal then enabled the mutation that led to the disease spreading around the world.
Among its further-flung results you could plot the great drive to western expansion in North America – and with it the near-annihilation of the Native Americans.
In Europe, cholera brought death and misery on a grand scale, especially in the big cities. In London it led eventually to the development of modern sewers and the building of the Thames embankments. And from that, you could argue, followed the creation of the underground railway.
A less obvious effect of Tambora’s disruption of global weather patterns occurred in the Arctic. The shifting of ocean currents melted the ice off western Canada, leading to the fabled hunt for the North-West Passage. A hunt doomed to failure because by 1818 the sea had re-frozen.
Climate-change deniers sometimes point to that temporary thaw as reason not to worry now about the melting ice-caps. “These things happen,” they say.
They might add that what humans foul up, nature can fix – or make worse.
But what is happening to the ice-cover now is on an altogether different scale from the 1816 thaw, on a different timespan, and for a different reason.
I’ve taken some of the details in this article from a book, Tambora: The Eruption that Changed the World, by Gillen D’Arcy Wood. Professor Wood concludes: “If a three-year climate change event in the early 1800s was capable of such destruction, then the future impacts of multi-decadal climate change must be truly off the charts.”
No one can say we haven’t been warned.
A recent cartoon by Pulitzer Prize-winner Matt Davies in New York’s Newsday refers to a different volcanic eruption. A much smaller one than Tambora, longer ago, but still much better known.
“Employing sophisticated X-ray scanning technology,” it says, “scientists decipher the ancient burnt scrolls of Pompeii.” And the scrolls say: “The volcano is potentially a threat, but taking evasive action might harm the economy.”
Ouch.

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America's top doc backs evidence-based policy

14/2/2015

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Some interesting appointments have been made in America lately, and not all of them are bad.
Take Dr Vivek Murthy, who was sworn in just before Christmas as Surgeon General. Or, as the US media like to put it, “America’s top doc”.
For a start, he’s only 37, which seems very young for the holder of such a key post. Even if, in that weird way Americans have of organising things, he is technically an officer in the military.
Then there’s the fact that, like me, he was born in Huddersfield, which seems an unlikely start to such a career. But then he moved to Miami at age three, got a biomedical degree from Harvard and trained as a doctor at Yale, so you could say he’s pretty well schooled in the American way.
And he looks awfully smart, in an American way, in his sharp, pristine, gold-braided naval uniform.
The pro-gun lobby, who in the USA are used to getting their way, opposed his appointment. He’s not as keen as they are on people carrying firearms around – which seems a reasonable point of view for a top doc, if not necessarily for a top military man.
He did say he wouldn’t use the Surgeon Generalship as a “bully pulpit” from which to preach gun control. Which seems like unnecessary restraint, as well as an interesting form of words.
The fact that he found it necessary to say is in itself a shocking comment on the American addiction to weaponry.
And speaking of addiction…
Dr Murthy also has interesting views on cannabis. A substance which is arguably less addictive than gun-toting, and certainly a lot less lethal.
His latest pronouncement on the matter has predictably produced a chorus of cheers on one side and boos on the other.
He says the drug “can be helpful” for some medical conditions. Which is a simple truth that ought not to be controversial (see below).
While 23 states have already legalised cannabis for medical use – and four now allow recreational use – it remains classified at the highest level under US federal law. Up there with heroin and LSD and above cocaine and crystal meth, which are much more dangerous.
But the really interesting part of Dr Murthy’s statement could apply just as well to everything else the government – any government – takes a position on.
It was this: “I think we have to use data to drive policymaking”.
In other words, he thinks politicians should take notice of expert opinion.
That policy should be based on verifiable research, not gut feelings. On facts, not instant media approval ratings. On tested science, not vested interests.
What sort of fantasy world is the man living in?
The cynic in me says: “He’ll learn”. But how much better it would be if the politicians learned from him, rather than the other way around.
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The real dope on memory loss

13/2/2015

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Health stories in the national press should always be taken with a generous pinch of salt.
Especially, it seems, those related to red wine – a reported killer one week, a lifesaver the next. (The salt’s also good for cleaning it off the carpet.)
The latest bulletin says a nice glass of red may help improve your memory. And that reminds me…
Did I really see a headline somewhere last week suggesting that “moderate” cannabis use when young can stave off memory loss when older?
Was that just wishful thinking? Or a raddled, ageing memory playing tricks on me?
No, here it is. Not just one headline, but a whole Google screenful of them.
Research published last year in the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease “strongly suggests” that marijuana, “could be a potential therapeutic treatment option”.
Alzheimer’s, the report says, “is thought to result from a lifetime of brain inflammation”. And marijuana, it adds, is “one of the most safe anti-inflammatories in medicine”.
That’ll be some of that data Surgeon General Vivek Murthy was talking about, then.
Now, I’m not recommending that you dash out to score a spliff in the hope of recovering your lost memory.
For one thing, the very fact that cannabis is illegal raises its own problems. Your back-street dealer may not be too hot on quality control, clinical testing or dosage advice.
On the other hand, perhaps I can stop worrying that my moderately wasted youth is behind my growing tendency to forget things like people’s names – and last week’s headlines.
Of course, the red wine may be another matter.
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What are friends for?

13/2/2015

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A friend of mine posted this on his Facebook wall: “When I was 11, I had two friends. They lived three fields away. I would play with them in the woods. My 11-year-old daughter tells me she has 483 friends, most of whom she has never met.
“I’m not saying one way is better than the other, but the difference is striking.”
It really is, isn’t it?
But there’s this. When I was 11 I moved up to a school 20 miles from home. I pretty soon more or less lost touch with the friends I’d played in the woods with.
I made new friends, of course – but none near enough for us to pop round each others’ houses. Or play in the woods. I got pretty good at kicking a football against a wall on my own.
I’m not sure most kids these days do much “popping round”. But it seems that while they’re awake they’re in pretty much constant contact with each other.
Which may be a good thing – or it may mean there’s just no escape.
If, like me, you regret the demise of kids playing out, you can’t blame the internet. The damage was well under way before the age of the personal computer.
In fact, you could say the net has opened up the world again, broadened horizons in a new way.
And there’s this. That friend whose remark prompted these musings – I’ve never actually met him in person.
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