Four Eyes Only

A quick comment regarding 3D films. They're everywhere at the moment and, if the line up of summer blockbusters are anything to go by, there seems to be no end to this pandemic. I immensely enjoyed Tim Burton’s deranged yet wholesome take on Alice in Wonderland, although I must admit to growing increasingly weary of all the 3D effects which, if anything, causes more of a strain than a spectacle.

Is it just me? Avatar was excruciating, too, but largely due to being hideously long. Personally, I can’t imagine any film that would actually be improved by being in 3D. Alice would be just as enjoyable without having to don large horn rimmed geek specs, and, yes, it’s certainly better than the green and red frames that everyone used about 50 years ago, but let's be honest, this special effect doesn’t help to make films look any more real at all. So I hope this stops soon, and I haven't even started on the prices: at a 3D screening of Disney’s Up a few months ago in London, two tickets came to £24. I mean, honestly.


I’m a stickler for order and planning, but can occasionally do something quite spontaneously that surprises even myself.

Thursday saw the launch of this year’s Bradford International Film Festival, now in its 16th year, and by all accounts this one looks set to trump even the efforts of the recent Leeds International Film Festival last November. Big names are crucial at these things: there are retrospectives with Imelda Staunton and John Hurt, who, rumour has it, knows someone on the board and clearly wasn’t up to much at the weekend, not to mention evenings with Fernando Meirelles, Jenny Agutter and Chris Morris.

The movie chosen for the glitzy red carpet launch was Ian Fitzgibbon’s Perrier’s Bounty, a good natured Irish crime comedy of the Guy Ritchie variety which, at least, is better than anything Ritchie has ever done. The cast were absent along with the director, but the film‘s producer Stephen Woolley was there and he gave a polite introduction, explaining how he‘d "left his suit on the train", which seems now like an implausible excuse.

After the screening and with handfuls of cheap champagne and canapés (including miniature Yorkshire favourites like fish and chips and, bless, toad in the hole), we got talking to a slightly inebriated film scholar, who turned out to be the head of the National Film and Television School, Nik Powell. We smoked his menthol cigarettes before, low and behold, Stephen Woolley approaches us and we shake hands. Powell is staying with Woolley in Bradford for the night and asks if we fancy sharing a cab to grab drink in their bar. And feeling spontaneous: “yes, that would be lovely.”

It was a delightful evening full of wine and film talk, in which we discussed favourite movies growing up (The Princess Bride, of course), the merits of British cinema and why we haven’t made a decent British pub movie - but what about Shaun of the Dead, I proffered? Also in attendance was Steve Abbott, chair of Screen Yorkshire who is mostly famous for working with the Monty Python team, producing movies like A Fish Called Wanda and Brassed Off and was very close friends with, it turns out, George Harrison.

I should mention at this juncture that, like most journalists, I work better in the secure environment of procedure, and have been lucky enough to be involved in conversations with some quite prominent figures, from politicians to celebrities, but always with a trusty and dependable arsenal at my disposal: a Dictaphone, a notebook and, as is always the case, a scheduled allotted time. This is what I mean by order and planning: it’s about control, it’s about calling the shots, and it explains why journalists are usually pricks. Without these defences, and in certain social situations - the high pressure ones where you want to be both respected and slightly aloof but at the same time - sometimes the gravitas of the situation can take hold, you panic, and sit in the corner mumbling to nobody while the conversation passes you by. I’m no Winston Churchill and I certainly don’t profess to being a great wit or anything, but I’d like to think that I can hold my own while conversing with just about anyone, whether the talk is being recorded or not. (Although I could tell you a story about being quite embarrassingly stumped for words when meeting the beautiful Nell McAndrew who, I might add, was only wearing her pyjamas at the time, but, alas, that is for a completely different occasion.)

So when a rather awestruck journalist, himself a script writer in the process of pitching to Nicolas Roeg, asked me on the night, “you do realise who these people are, don‘t you?” I shrugged and said confidently, why yes, of course. But it’s worth clarifying these things. So I Google’ed Stephen Woolley when I got back into the office the next day, possibly still a bit drunk. And, for your information: Stephen Woolley worked with director Neil Jordan on Oscar nominated films like The Crying Game and Interview with the Vampire, he managed the Scala Theatre in north London, has directed his own features, most recently the Brian Jones biopic Stoned, as well as produced films like Fever Pitch, Mona Lisa, Michael Collins and many, many more. I attach a picture of him to this blog purely as a way of realising just who these people are.


The papers are already setting out their biased news agenda as we edge ever more closely to an election. Elections, more than decades, help to define eras. The contrast between Major and Blair couldn’t have been more apparent; the sleaze and loud shirts of the Tory 90s, and the slick media operation of Blair’s terrorised nu-millennia. Chances are David Cameron will win, if you believe the 'man on the street', but there are no clear cut winners and a judgement is still too early to call.

Traditionally, of course, the Tories shoot themselves in the foot in the run up to elections, like Amanda Platell’s ill-advised press campaign for William Hague which had a clearly intelligent politician look so much like a pre-pubescent lummox that there must have been calls of sabotage back at Tory HQ, thinking that maybe Platell was being slipped fivers from John Prescott to make Hague look like an even bigger tit.

But now we’re seeing the more personalised side of politics, clearly stolen, like most things, from America, which attempts to make celebrities out of our politicians, resulting in really hideous things, like Gordon Brown being interviewed by Piers Morgan, and their wives and children being paraded before the public to discuss how great they are at cleaning the kitchen and playing football. Why not be done with it and just stick Brown in a military style power jacket and have him dancing like Cheryl Cole on 'Sport Relief'?

If Cameron is the equivalent of Blair in this election, then surely Brown is Major - both are recession hit, both inheriting conflicts in the Middle East and both, although this is probably just speculation, tuck their shirt into their underpants. That was never proven, by the way, despite what some lobby journalists have since commented, but surely the image goes a long way to explaining how even minute details of a politician’s life can be skewed, interpreted, spun out of control and eventually cost elections.

So whoever wins, this clearly isn’t going to be a clean fight.