Tips from a domestic house-elf part I: how to rock your child’s party

I’m no domestic goddess, more a domestic house-elf – and, twisted Rowling fans, that does not mean I do my housework with no clothes on; rather, it means that I approach it as an unwilling, unattractive, laughable drudge, prone to bouts of intense self-reproach when, for example, the sponge cake fails to rise – for there’s nothing more depressing than taking a sad little pancake out of the oven.

Anyway, despite the fact that I’m a long way from being a regina della casa (queen of the home, Italian lady fans), never cook if I (or my family) can help it and clean up in a spirit of unwilling obligation (‘Better a floor unswept than a life unlived’ – but what if it’s not a choice and you're stuck with both?) – despite my domestic ineptitude, I thought I would offer up the pearls of wisdom I have gained by attending, nay even hosting, a small number of children’s parties.

1. Give your party guests a frisson by creating a sense of threat, preferably in the form of a white Rasta with an Alsatian called Spliff hanging out by the entrance of the community hall, or at least a couple of lurking hoodies. If you ain’t got security, it ain’t a proper party.
2. Alternatively, if entertaining at home, you could ensure that one member of the household has a large open facial wound, sustained while cycling in order to save the planet. At least one of the children present will hide upstairs and refuse to come down until said adult has gone far far away, to the nearest pub, for example. This will skew your adult-child ratios, adding to the sense of an immanent breakdown in the social order which is so vital to any successful gathering of infants.
3. You can also ratchet up the tension with, for example, a spotless mansion and a no-sugar policy. As you welcome everybody into your intimidatingly immaculate cupcake-coloured home, make it clear that little Charlotte never snacks on anything other than raw crudités. You’ve never compromised your vision in order to toady to lesser parents and you’re not about to start now.
4. You've stage-managed a memorable opening to your festivities. Now create - and maintain - an atmosphere. For example, if you are in a suitable venue and your clan is in attendance, make sure they sit at the table nearest the bar, which must of course be open. They should nurse extremely dour expressions and very large drinks. None of them should speak, either to each other or to anyone else. They don’t need to. Their presence is message enough.
5. Encourage the party guests to show off their moves, preferably to wholly age-innappropriate music. Forget the wheels on the bus. Something with lyrics about soljas or lapdancing is ideal. Remember, the dingle-dangle scarecrow is strictly for cissies.
6. Do not cave in and give the stroppy child a prize.
7. Make sure there are not enough layers in pass-the-parcel. This is an important life lesson. Sometimes there just isn’t enough to go round.
8. Finish with a twist. You could, for example, forego party bags and distribute small religious texts instead. Do not on any account give your own child a party bag. If tears result then it’s off to the next room for some enforced self-reflection about the moral deformity of greed. If you do distribute party bags, ensure they are loaded with sugar, particularly if the parents have all left their children in your tender care for the last two hours or so. You want to be sure to remind them what they’ve missed.

The beauty of bad language

So I’m now in Wire withdrawal, having just gorged on Season Four, which followed four teenage boys, all students at an inner-city school, as they came of age in ways that were sometimes funny, sometimes sad and sometimes shocking, but were always unpredictable. It’s a testament to the brilliant writing in this show that the four boys covered between them most of the familiar bases of disadvantage – their backgrounds included criminal, drug-addicted, neglectful and abusive parents – and yet they were real boys first and foremost. In the end just one of them appeared to have escaped the street corner spot he had initially seemed destined for, and you had the sense that he’d always hanker after it.

That was the only note of hope in the conclusion; otherwise it was pretty unrelievedly tragic. Ultimately, tragedy is what The Wire excels at – the complicated, quotidian tragedy of unfulfilled promise. Life is likely to be nasty, brutish and short; destiny – whether that boils down to character or environment, or the interaction of both – is inescapable; and then, possibly sooner rather than later, you die. It’s not all bad of course – the old-fashioned male virtues of honour and camaraderie might not save you, but they’ll ensure that you’ll be missed.

To be more precise, it’s like the Jacobean revenge tragedies in its darkness and humour, its compelling villains, its high body count and its interest in corruption. Also in the great death speeches it sometimes allows its characters before they go down, as if approaching the exit gave them a sudden boost of sagacity.

Characters in The Wire sound sage more often than characters in any drama I’ve ever seen. It’s not all in the writing – much of it is in the delivery, and it’s inimitable. The writing works by being sparse and punchy and funny; the delivery gives the words their exact right weight. It’s the inverse of the fast-patter, ultra-verbal style of a show like, say, Studio 60.

And it really does elevate swearing to an art form. Who could forget the scene where Bunk and McNulty pace out a crime scene and figure out exactly how a murder was committed, their manoeuvres punctuated only by an exchange of astonished exhortations: ‘Fuck me.’ ‘Fuck me.’ ‘Fuck me!’

Back down in the hole

Back to The Wire, and the latest incarnation of the bluesy theme song, with its warning about how you’ve got to keep the devil down in the hole. Impossible task, that. This is a show about working life, and one of the things it makes you realise is just how crap being a drug dealer is; the boredom, the violence, the bullying bosses, the lack of legal protection, the risk of imprisonment, injury and death. An above-board office job may have its Bartleby moments, but you’re unlikely to end up assassinated by staple-gun and covered in quicklime.

The Wire also makes you realise – not that you doubted it, but you prefer not to think about it – how entrenched the drugs industry is, and that ending the prohibition on the end product, at least at a local level, might be the best way to limit its capacity for damage. The other thing it makes you think is: what a dump. The shittiness of the drugs districts is matched only by the inimitable gun-totin’ languor of the way the characters express themselves.

This was an expert introductory episode to season four, with plenty of deft humour: the piss-bomb vengeance attack that backfires, happy Jimmy McNulty nicking a spare folder to take home for the kids, sweaty Carcetti needing to keep a spare suit in the car and enduring the awfulness of being obliged to solicit funds for himself while shut up in a small room with sick yellow wallpaper, a titty-girl poster and a darts board.

There were also two great inappropriate training montages. Prez sat in a room full of teachers who were exhorted to think of themselves as lovable when they were about to face Armageddon. Meanwhile, Sydnor, McNulty et al were urged to be aware of soft targets for terrorists, and laughed at the counter-suggestion that the work of terrorists would probably pass unnoticed, and that the terrorists wouldn’t stand a chance anyway.

Probably most of the US population has no idea what it might be like in the inner cities where street corners are retail outlets to be fought over, and don’t want to know, any more than Daily Mail-reading Middle England really wants to have to think about Peckham, Brixton and other boroughs where people get stabbed or shot on a regular basis, other than to allocate blame and condemn the outcomes. This sort of moralising laissez-faire ensures that it’s business as usual; misery for the punters and pushers and vast, invisible profits for the untouchable few. Sounds familiar, don’t it? And nothing’s quite as dangerous as people who have nothing but their status to lose.

How The Sweeney gave birth to Katy Perry

Yesterday I consumed an assortment of festive meals and snacks that would have put The Hungry Caterpillar to shame, and sat in front of an equally unhealthy glut of televisual titbits. First up, The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, in which the girls screamed and hid in a tree while their big brother protected them; carried healing drops, a little vegetable knife and a couple of arrows instead of swords that might have actually enabled them to stand up for themselves; and cried, at length, over the apparently dead Aslan while the boys got girded up for war. (Later on, I seem to remember, Susan is disbarred from Narnia for getting interested in boys and lipstick.)

The only dame to be seen who was any good with a blade was, of course, a baddie. This female arch-villain, an ice queen who turned living things to rock, was the antithesis of the warm mother who turns her blood to milk to nourish her young. But why a wicked witch, when in every kingdom on earth masculine villainy has played the leading role down the ages? Tolkein has fewer female players – Arwen, Galadriel – but at least they’re properly heroic, and their magical powers are good rather than evil. (OK, he has Shelob, but she’s more spider than woman.)

It seems to me that C S Lewis was more hostile to the female than JRR, keener to keep it in its place. Maybe it was because JRR had lost his mother, or maybe it was his Catholicism; although there’s a popular myth that Catholicism creates two equally impossible categories for women to squeeze themselves into, the virgin Madonna and the whore, it seems to me that Catholicism is more inclusive of the female and the maternal than Protestantism; at least Mary cradling the baby is right in there, has her own chapels, occupies a crucial place in the general set-up...

Anyway, I’d rather a story concentrated on its male characters and let me identify with them rather than proffering some screechy females that I’d rather not imagine myself alongside. Peep Show’s Big Suze turned up in the last few minutes as, er, Susan, which at least gave me something to smile about.

Next up: World’s Strongest Man: 30 Years of Pain (‘I think I’m stronger than him, but he can really run’), followed by Bradley Walsh presenting The Sweeney – Must See (obviously John Simm would have cost too much). Yes, The Sweeney was one of the greatest police drama action series ever shown on ITV, and it was full of such jokes and fun, usually involving Regan and Carter eyeing up some bird’s boobs or bum, Don’t mind if I do! We’ll have to take you down the vet if you carry on like this! Oo-er missus, but I wouln’t do him, that bloke bending over next to the bird with the wind up her skirt, ooh no.

You could see how the daughters of the 1970s, reaching maturity in the 1990s, decided to draw the sting out of this kind of provocative sexual appraisal by joining in: No, I wouldn’t mind a bit of that either. And thus trysexuality was born; girls necked girls in queues for the loo, Carrie kissed Alanis Morrissette and a few years later along pranced Katy Perry cooing about the taste of her snogee’s cherry chapstick. Regan and Carter, just look what you went and started.

Then there were a bunch of Brit actors garnering, hopefully, fat pay cheques in Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest – well, you have to hope they were handsomely rewarded for their role in advertising, at length, what I’m sure is a very effective and successful theme park ride. The film was beautifully realised, and had some decorative actors, but oh! What a load of heartless tosh! Why do people talk about this franchise with such warmth, as if it’s a guaranteed go-to for a good time? I thought the first one was disappointing, and this one was even more silly and tedious. It’s the kind of film where a random, expendable crew member is reduced to a pair of feet stuck in a porthole before disappearing into the clutches of the lovingly CGI’d sea-monster, whereas if Keira Knightley gets nabbed you know someone’ll save her within minutes.

CGI does not a good story make; I’d rather watch Old Gregg talk about his mangina than Bill Nighy with a beard of genuinely wriggling sea-serpents. And as for Johnny Depp... yes, I know everybody raved about his comedy-pirate turn, and he did a convincing job of looking like he was enjoying himself, so much so that it almost felt rude (but still quite possible) not to join him.

Anyway, by the time I caught sight of Robert Downey Junior being startlingly assassinated in a very good Nazi-themed Richard III I’d thoroughly spoilt my appetite, and had to call it a day.

Also glimpsed in Richard III: Dominic West. Series four of The Wire arrived this morning. Yay! There’ll be no Jool’s Annual Hootenanny for us this New Year’s Eve.

Doctor Who and Madonna’s gusset

Doctor Who Christmas special: apart from David Morrissey, who I could happily see much more of, it was all a bit silly, really, lurching from one spectacle to another with tentative excuses, like a BBC version of a really bad Hollywood action movie. The first couple of series after the advent of Russell T Davies were worth making a TV date with, and David Tennant’s gawky charm is all very well, but the storytelling now is often flimsy, with honourable exceptions like the Blink episode. The fact that it’s for children is no excuse; it is emotionally manipulative, but without a consistent underlying intelligence, so when the music blares and you’re presented with a scene that is obviously meant to make you feel something, you just think, Did I miss something?

For the last few years Doctor Who has been suffering from a mild case of Madonna’s gusset; that is, when everybody tells you something’s worth watching, so you do, and then are disappointed. Madonna’s gusset syndrome was named after the nasty pink leotard she wore in a video for one of her entirely unmemorable songs. The definition of her buns was almost universally admired, at least in the kind of magazines I read, but that still didn’t make her look like someone you’d want to get sticky with. I just found myself wishing she’d put a skirt on it.

David Morrissey: mmm.... Those sorrowful dark blue-grey eyes, the sensitive mouth, the slight ruggedness... I remember him being great in The Deal, and a brilliant counterpoint to Michael Sheen’s impersonation of a brittle and weightless Tony Blair. Sheen’s perfectly equipped to play TB: when he acts there’s no core to him, he’s a perfectly observed, weightless exterior, whereas David M has a sympathetic gravitas. If only David M was playing the ghost in The Ghost, rather than blooming Ewan McGregor, who will wreck it, or rather, gently lay waste to it by being smug and uncompelling, as he has been in everything I’ve seen him in since Trainspotting, when he still had something to prove. With David Morrissey as the doomed writer The Ghost would be a much better film.

Christmas crunchiness for all

Last night, in Screenwipe’s round-up of the year, Charlie Brooker noted various sillinesses about Survivors, mostly either relating to the onset of the initial plague or to the acting tics of the lead characters; Max Beesley’s eye-narrowing, Abby’s smug insistence on banging on about a son we’ve never met and therefore aren’t fussed about, etc. He was spot on, as usual. But I still like it more than anything else that the BBC’s produced for a very long time. At least it doesn’t have any bonnets in it.
I also realised how much terrible nonsense I’ve happily managed to avoid negating my existence by watching. Noel Edmonds! John Barrowman! Luridly coloured quiz shows with a vague political agenda? What hideousness was this? If you sat through too much of this stuff, you’d morph into a pink flashing buzzer with an inane grin plastered across the void where your brain used to be.
One thing I like about Survivors is that for a homegrown production it’s relatively un-crunchy; crunchiness being when a show looks a bit rubbish, like it was conceived and shot by the work experience. The nativity show, however, is an art form that’s wonderful precisely because of its crunchiness. I watched one yesterday. The same three kings costumes come out of storage every year, and are always inhabited with regal dignity, whatever the misbehaving three-year-old at the foot of the stage does to break through the fourth wall. At the end the children were allowed onto the stage to greet Baby Jesus, a real newborn who actually let them stroke him without crying.
In the Christmas issue of The Spectator Rod Liddle is all hot under the collar about some woman who withdrew her child from RE lessons, then protested when he was excluded from the Christmas party: ‘But Christmas is nothing to do with Jesus!’ she allegedly protested.
Actually, she had a point, given that the Christians co-opted the Roman midwinter festival of Saturnalia, just as they adapted the horns of the pagan fertility god for the iconography of the Devil. When you’re establishing a new power base, if you’ve got any sense, you don’t attempt to sweep away what was there before entirely, you seek to employ and control it; and people need a knees-up when it’s cold and dark, and would, then as now, be most upset if it was disallowed.
Now it seems that the pagans have co-opted Christmas back again, or, to be more precise, Commerce, the upstart god of the age, known in infancy as Mammon, has made it his own. (Gluttony and Debauch also get a good look-in.) Or so it may appear, but actually the midwinter feast, celebrated for and by children, their families and tribes, retains its magic regardless of who’s meant to be in charge. The annual ritual of the nativity play, acted out on school stages and in churches the length and breadth of the land, has a gentle power that is succoured by something quieter and more enduring than the incessant tinkle of Christmas musak, something older even than Saturnalia; something that doesn’t need to advertise and couldn’t if it tried.

Post-apocalyptic pastoral: eat, shoot, leave

Oooh! The final, cliffhanger episode of season one of Survivors brought me out in a sweat. I have a very low resistance to suspense. It really was very good – genuinely gripping, chilling and thought-provoking. The thoughts it provoked, for me at least, went something like this:

• What on earth would I do in this situation? I have no useful practical survival skills. I don’t know how to trap and skin a rabbit, fix up an engine or use a gun.
• Oh yes... that’s exactly the kind of shitty behaviour people would probably indulge in if the social order fell apart. That irritating prick who’s enjoying shoving a rifle into people’s faces and throwing his weight around – yup, that’s what you’d have to put up with if you made it through to the grim new world. I’m not sure any of our current ministers or politicians would actually really end up wielding any authority over their fellow men when the chips were down, though. Our generals, maybe. Or maybe any surviving politicians would be in their element, conniving and bullying their way back to the top. Just one unpleasant possibility among many.
• ...Yes! Yessss! Shoot him! He’s an irritating prick! (The post-apocalyptic scenario does away with one’s willingness to give people the benefit of the doubt and deal with threat in a peaceful and diplomatic fashion.)

Guns are crucial in the post-apocalyptic world. So are old-fashioned huntin’, shootin’ and fishin’ countryman-type skills. Perhaps you’d end up with a sort of peculiar civil war with urban guerrillas and well-armed yokels fighting it out over who gets to be lord of the manor.

One thing’s for sure, the manor’s the place to head for. Cities always turn nasty very quickly when the social order goes into meltdown in the aftermath of plague. The whole post-apocalyse genre is a sort of perverse pastoral in which there’s no option but to go back to the mean old serfdom of tilling the soil, probably with a bunch of thugs and enforcers living off the fat of your labour and deploying you to fight turf wars with the neighbouring badass...

Anyway, roll on season two. Next up: season four of The Wire, which has just become cheap enough to be eligible for purchase. Happy Christmas Eve!