Danny Boyle addresses Chinese (and Western) journalists

The latest target of a Jose Mourinho tirade was something I have spent my fair share of time ranting and raving about – the Chinese media.

The Special One was particularly irked after Inter’s defeat to Lazio in the Italian Super Cup, which was played in Beijing last weekend, when a Chinese journalist challenged his claim that the loss was down to the temperature and poor pitch by asking why Lazio were not similarly affected. It seems like a good question, but hit a spot with Mourinho who angrily responded:

“I know why Chinese football is so rubbish and why China has won gold medals in so many sports but not football, it is because the journalists are so unprofessional.”

When later questioned further by a Xinhua journalist, he claimed that the Chinese media “do not understand a thing”.

Mourinho’s claims hold little weight, and were clearly triggered by his disappointment at losing the match. But however ill-considered his comments were they raise an interesting issue – how well equipped are Chinese journalists when it comes to interviewing western subjects? From what I’ve seen, there is still plenty of progress to be made.

The westerner (let alone the western celebrity) is still something of a novelty in China. Meanwhile the Chinese like nothing more than to be told by a foreigner how wonderful China is. These two factors invariably combine, and many interviews and press conferences involving western celebrities visiting China don’t progress far beyond the ‘What do you think of China stage?’

I attended the Chinese premiere of Slumdog Millionaire in Beijing a few months back and watched on as Danny Boyle was bombarded with inane questions from a room full of China’s most influential print, television, radio and internet media. Some repeated questions which had already been asked. Others asked what his favourite film was or if he liked China.

When a western journalist asked one of the few intelligent and relevant questions of the day – one relating to the issue of piracy and how many people in China had owned the film on DVD three months before it was being released in the cinema – the cameraman of one of the country’s preeminent media outlets stopped filming as he felt the question did not reflect well on China.

At the time of the premiere, rumours were abound that Boyle was being lined up to direct the new James Bond movie. Not one journalist raised the issue with him until I had a quiet word with him on the way out. I found it a little odd that not one of the other hundred plus journalists present had thought to ask him the same question.

The problems seem to be deep-seated. For one, Chinese journalists have never been encouraged to ask challenging questions to interviewees, whether they be Chinese or western. But the real issue seems to be that whenever any westerner of note is in China, the story is always: “Such and such is in China.” Rarely do we get far beyond that, and as such the chance for relevant content is missed.

China is clearly keen on increasing its influence on global media. Just a few months ago the government launched a second major English language daily newspaper with the intention of competing internationally. But until the country’s media can learn to treat visits by major western figures – whether they be football managers, film directors or politicians – as the norm rather than a novelty, China won’t be producing news that is of much interest to the rest of the world.

Full of characters part-sinister, part-laughing stock, Psychoville’s world – beneath the absurd facade  of one-armed clowns and delusional midwives – was remarkably well observed. It’s of little surprise. Creators Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton, half of The League of Gentlemen, have a long history of creating characters far enough from reality to be funny, but at the same time close enough to be scary. Take David Sowerbutts for example. One the one hand he is a caricature of an obsessive serial killer. One the other he is the victim of an overbearing mother, childhood trauma and a lack of social skills. Perhaps it is a triumph for the series that by the end we are feeling sympathy for him, but it’s also this ‘human’ dimension to his character which makes him that little bit more eerie.

The show had a theatrical grandeur about it, but combined this superbly with the more mundane. The ‘Clown Court’ scene was both dreamily hypnotic and utterly terrifying, and could easily be performed on stage. Episode four’s homage to Hitchcock’s Rope, was filmed with just one join. Throughout the episode stagehands frantically (and silently) maneuvered the set to allow the camera to pan and zoom without any indication there were people other than the principle characters in the room. But these vast undertakings were balanced with more conventional (and often just as effective) scenes. Just see David’s discussion with a volunteer in the Harringay Citizens Advice Bureau during last night’s conclusion. This is always a theme of Shearsmith’s and Pemberton’s work. Just as you are floating off to some deranged universe they’ve created, you’re smacked round the face by reality.

The humour is a product of this somewhat unexpected matrimony. There are plenty of laughs to be had by the sheer absurdity of it all, whether it be Lomax bidding vast sums of money for a toy crocodile, or the sitcom misunderstanding that leads to David’s killing spree. But the real laughs come when these utterly dysfunctional characters interact with people from the ‘real world’. Perhaps the highlight in this respect was the brilliantly scripted relationship between blind toy collector Lomax and his social services helper Michael, who he affectionately knows as Tealeaf. Tealeaf’s descent from incredulism at this crazy old man to genuine enthusiasm for his project adds depth to the ‘odd couple’ comedy formula. Perhaps this was over-used at times – Jelly handcuffing himself an elderly woman in a nursing home warranted a laugh, but probably not two episode’s worth. Regardless, Shearsmith and Pemberton have proved themselves absolute masters of combining the ridiculous with the very real.

Perhaps my only criticism of the show was it’s conclusion. Without giving anything away to those who haven’t yet watched the series, it seemed to me that a new ‘twist’ was shoehorned in, perhaps to open the possibility of a second series. It seemed a little lazy, as while the majority of loose ends were tied up in the final episode, this new strand was only introduced in the final moments. Perhaps I missed something, and it did seem a little out of character from two writers generally meticulous with their twisted plotlines. Did the desire to include even more twists and turns finally get the better of them? Maybe more will be revealed in the coming days on the numerous websites which have accompanied the series.

The DVD is out on Monday, so if you missed the series while it was on, I can’t reccommend it enough.

Many have argued England’s failure to reach Austria & Switzerland is due to this record low in domestic players, but there are certain facts that seem to be consistently omitted by those who further this point of view.

The story leads on the “big slide” (3.9%, or 21 players) in the number of Englishmen who played Premiership football last season compared to 2006-7 campaign. It is frankly ludicrous to suggest that these 21 fewer English players have had any baring on the fate of the national team, especially when you consider that Michael Tongue and Darren Ambrose were among their numbers.

Fabio Capello was sensible enough not to be drawn on the figures, and said: “But more important is quality – the level of the player. At the moment the total is 34% but the (quality) level is high.”

And of course this is true. The Premier League is streets ahead of any other division in the world at the moment. When the BBC talk about “just 34.1%” of players being English, we should perhaps be delighting in the fact that a third of the players which make up the most dominant league in the world hail from England. No other country gets close to that figure.

It is not as though English players are not getting opportunities. If you have any footballing ability in this country, it is likely you will be snapped up by a club and given some of the best training in the world. English players are not forced abroad to play on a bigger stage. Indeed, there is not one top quality English footballer plying their trade outside the Premier League (no, David Beckham does not count.) But at the end of the day, how many Premier League games you give Titus Bramble, he is not suddenly going to transform into a world class player. If anything, there are a disproportionate amount of English players playing at the top level.

Lets look at last week’s Champions League final. The game is undeniably the height of club football world wide and is the culmination of a tournament which arguably features a higher quality of football than even the World Cup. Now between the 22 starters last Wednesday, 10 (or 45%) were English. Not a single Brazilian or Italian started the game, and only one German and just three Frenchmen. Isn’t this an era of unparalleled English dominance in terms of the global footballing talent pool.

Many of the criticisms come from an atrociously run FA, jealous of the increasing power Richard Scudamore’s Premier League is gaining in world football. There is some hope for England, especially with Fabio Capello in charge, but one does still worry about how much damage to the national team Brian Barwick and co at Soho Square will do.

The reason England did not qualify for Euro 2008 is quite simple. They were abysmally managed by a man as incompetent as he was out of depth. Ultimate blame on the decision to appoint McClaren in the first place of course should have been passed on Barwick, but nevertheless he survived with his job in tact.

The foreign invasion on English football has arguably aided the quality of home grown players, and the English have caught up with their continental counterparts immeasurably in terms of technical ability in the last 15 years.

The fact of the matter is England has one of the best pools of talent in world football to select from. Ferdinand, Terry, Gerrard, Joe Cole, Rooney, Ashley Cole, Lampard, Carrick and Hargreaves are undoubtedly top quality players, who have consistently proved they CAN be world beaters, just not when playing for England. The focus needs to placed on getting the best out them, rather than xenophobic concerns about foreign imports.

I managed to make it down to Brighton on Saturday for the last day of a new music festival called The Great Escape.

The festival was similar to the Camden Crawl, in that a ticket gave you access to any of the several venues which had acts performing over the three days. Brighton’s compact city centre made this very convenient, and of the 25 or so venues which were taking part, the majority were within about ten minutes walk of each other.

The problem was that the popular venues tended fill up early in the evening, meaning if you wanted to see a band playing at 10pm, you would have to arrive at the venue at 8pm to sit through whatever else was on if you wanted to stand a chance of seeing the main act.

That said, I still managed to see two very good bands which I imagine will be big news in the coming months.

The first was Bon Iver, a three piece indie-folk band from Wisconsin whose first album For Emma, Forever Ago has been receiving universal acclaim from the music press.

The band is very much the vehicle of front man Justin Vernon, who wrote the album in a Wisconsin cabin retreat which he had planned to hibernate in for three months with no intention of producing an album.

They played in a temporary tent which has been erected next to the St Peter’s Church on the Old Steine for the duration of the Brighton Festival, which ran concurrently with the The Great Escape.

Although originally a solo project, (Vernon performed Skinny Love alone on Jools Holland last week,) the band worked best when drummer Mike Noyce and second guitarist Sean Carey added their vocals to tracks, and it was a bit of a disappointment when Vernon sent the other two away and closed the set by himself.

Afterwards I ankled over to a Brighton University theatre five minutes away, and following half an hour in the queue was admitted just in time to see Noah and the Whale perform. The band are probably best known for having Laura Marling as a backing singer, and sing upbeat folk ditties about love, zoos and James Dean.

The highlight of a short set was a rendition of ‘Five Years Time,’ (mp3 here) a song which will surely become a festival favourite this summer.

The show was notable as it was announced at the end that it would be Marling’s last with the band, as the teenage folk singer has already moved on to bigger (although arguably not better) things. She in fact played a solo set after Noah and the Whale, although I missed it queuing up for 45 minutes outside another venue in a futile attempt to see a different band.

Still, all in all an enjoyable evening, with two new bands that we are likely to hear a lot more of later in the year.

British Sea Power’s third LP, provocatively titled Do You Like Rock Music?, sees the debt repaid. Not only did the band travel to Canada to record several tracks, but even invited former Arcade Fire drummer Howard Bilerman to produce them

The results are unsurprising. Gone is much of the rueful whimsy of the first two albums, and in its place a theatrical grandeur that the band is almost too modest to pull off. Guitars are lost under a wall of orchestration. The organ and chanted vocals of opener All In It could easily have it mistaken for an Arcade Fire b-side. Suddenly British Sea Power becomes the impressed rather than the inspiration.

The album sounds unnecessarily bloated throughout, as though the band has suddenly decided to write songs that 80,000 fans can sing along to, but is unwilling to completely abandon all idiosyncrasies. A British Sea Power show still involves military regalia and a stage shrouded in foliage.

Lights Out for Darker Skies is as close to the autumnal simplicity of the band’s debut as DULRM? gets, but drags on for almost seven minutes until fading away in a whimper. Half of Down on the Ground is an elaborate crescendoed finale better suited to stage than record.

What does remain in tact is the band’s lyrical eccentricity. First single ‘Waving Flags’ is an anthemic welcome to Britain’s Eastern European migrants, with Scott Wilkinson’s world-weary vocals proclaiming: “Are you of legal drinking age / on minimum wage / well welcome in.”

Elsewhere Canvey Island accounts a 1953 flood (On Canvey Island 1953 many lives were lost / with the records of a football team) and The Great Skua provides an instrumental homage a North Sea seabird.

But even the thoughtful regret that the band perfected in earlier offerings sounds forced. Canvey Island’s refrain (I can’t believe it’s happening / that it’s happening now / don’t you think it’s strange you know / the way things all work out) is formulaic and sounds out of place on an album which shuns emotion for the most part.

Unless British Sea Power rediscovers what made the band so different, it is in danger of becoming a cliché within a genre it helped define.

RCT is in south Wales. It is very Welsh, and covers an area of valleys, small towns and disused coal mines. Everyone votes Labour or Plaid. They have done so for as long as they can remember, and they don’t see any reason to change now. People aren’t ready to forgive the Tories for Thatcher quite yet.

My friend only found out he was standing a few weeks back. He had shown some interest in politics before but had done very little in terms of active participation. He had applied for some research jobs at the Welsh Conservatives, and someone suggested he stood in the elections. It would look good on a CV after all.

In the 75 wards of RCT, he was the only Conservative candidate. The Tories had never had a local councillor in RCT since it was formed in 1996, and not for many, many years in the area before that.

When the results were announced on Friday morning, he won.

Mike Smithson’s PoliticalBetting blog soon latched onto the result. One disbelieving pundit pointed out: “A Tory even got elected in the Rhondda!” while another wanted to know more: “does anyone know where I can find out which ward the Conservatives won in The Rhondda ?”

It was clearly a remarkable achievement, but what does it say about local politics?

Firstly, it is a clear indicator of the Tories’ strong showing across Britain, even in Wales where they are traditionally absent.

However, it also displays the importance of ‘hard graft’ in the lower political echelons. My friend knocked on practically every door in the ward in the couple weeks leading up to the election, whereas the incumbents, according to a comment on a BBC blog: “had become “invisible” bar the odd piece of junk mail landing on the welcome mat every now and then.”

After countless political debates with my flat mate over three years at university, I never really had him down as a Conservative. Indeed, he would often say that he is only, “conservative with a small c”. But perhaps on a local level, political parties are really not that important anymore. Interestingly the other victorious councillor in the ward was an independent.

When you can get elected with somewhere in the region of 500 votes, there is no substitute to making yourself known whoever you are standing for. Even in a region as politically set in its way as south Wales.

(Apologies for the Little Britain reference. It is a truly horrific programme.)

They say history is written by the winners, and certainly the past’s heroes and villains have almost unanimously been decided by those who have triumphed. But while Hitler, Stalin, Churchill et al have been pigeonholed with relative ease, some of time’s more interesting characters are far trickier to categorise.

I was watching an episode of Chucklevision a few months back, and was somewhat surprised when Barry and Paul’s slapstick nemesis proclaimed himself to be none other than Maximilien Robespierre.

Now, aside from the rather odd situation of a television programme aimed at pre-school kids featuring a relatively obscure historical figure, I was disheartened to see ‘The Incorruptible’ portrayed as the enemy.

Of course, popular culture has long villainised Robespierre. He is principal foe in The Scarlet Pimpernel. Wretched songstress Joni Mitchell sings: “Doctors’ pills give you brand new ills/ And the bills bury you like an avalanche/ And lawyers haven’t been this popular/ Since Robespierre slaughtered half of France!” in Sex Kills. (“Since Robespierre slaughtered one 9000th of France!” would be a more accurate lyric, but doesn’t quite roll off the tongue as well.) One extraordinary attack on former New York major Rudy Giuliani by US chat show host Keith Olbermann sees Olbermann challenge Giuliani to: “Do a Joe McCarthy, do a Lyndon Johnson, do a Robespierre.”

Robespierre’s bad press has tended to be a result of misrepresentation. The Terror, a 15 month period of mass execution aimed at enemies of the Revolution, has been the area most focused upon by his detractors. Few will deny that hideous crimes were committed during this period. One list of victims notes an 18-year-old tailor by the name of Jean Baptiste Henry, who was: “convicted of sawing down a tree of liberty,” and swiftly guillotined.

Of the 40,000 or so men and women who were killed (3000 during the latter period of Robespierre’s ascendancy) the majority were untried. However, this bloodshed has more often than not been framed in the context of Robespierre’s ruthless rise to become dictator of France. J. L. Talmon’s 1952 book The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy went some way to creating this image of Robespierre as a tyrant. The book attacks Robespierre’s hero and role-model, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and argues that elected governments which keep their citizens at arms length can be as dangerous as dictatorships. Robespierre is accordingly framed as a pre-cursor to Hitler, a man people often forget achieved power in Germany through democratic election.

Ruth Scarr’s excellent biography of ‘The Incorruptible’ – Fatal Purity – has gone some way to redressing the balance. Robespierre is portrayed as a man obsessed by virtue, utterly dedicated the cause of the people, and with little selfish interest whatsoever – let alone a desire to rule France. There is much to back up this argument. He lived in a modest house for his entire stay in Paris, was never embroiled in a public scandal like the majority of the Revolution’s other major figures, and in fact held very few positions of actual power during his life. Indeed his influence lay more in the intense loyalty much of Paris (what Edmund Burke described as ‘the swinish multitude’) felt towards him.

Robespierre was without doubt politically ruthless. His betrayal of Danton, a man to whom he wrote: “I love you more than ever, I love you until death. At this moment I am you,” just months before sending him to the guillotine is legendary, but not a move motivated by personal ambition. Instead his utter conviction in the will and virtue of the people of France was always more important than any friendship. Whether or not you agree with Robespierre beliefs, it is ludicrous to suggest his actions were anything other than selfless, albeit perhaps misguided at times.

He was always a very suspicious man, paranoid even, but still it was a paranoia born out of an absolute determination to ensure that the Revolution stuck. And of course there was every chance that it wouldn’t during the 1790s, with Europe’s royalty plotting an invasion of France to restore Louis to the throne. (Robespierre spoke passionately for the execution of Louis for this reason, and it eventually happened in 1793.)

But despite the countless unnecessary deaths of revolutionaries, such as Danton, who still had France’s best interest in their hearts, the Terror did serve a purpose. There were plenty of impostors during this period as well. Mirabeau, an early leader of the Revolution and ironically one of the few Robespierre trusted until his death, was in negotiations with Louis as late as 1791 for a restoration.

But come 1794 the situation had become faintly ridiculous. “You aren’t revolutionary enough’ one-upmanship was sending good men to the guillotine, simply for calling for a degree of moderation, and eventually Robespierre was felled by the Thermidorian Reaction which purged the Jacobins, sent ‘The Incorruptible’ to the guillotine and began a series of infighting which eventually would lead to the emergence of Napoleon.

The importance of Robespierre should not be underestimated. Despite any of his wrongdoings, he always had (at least what he considered to be) the best interests of France’s poor at the top of his agenda. He was determined not to allow the work of the 1789 to go to waste, and grasped the importance of violence during a time of the utmost instability.

Zhou Enlai, one of the senior figures of Chairman Mao’s ruling Communist Party, was asked in the 1970s for his assessment of the French Revolution. His response? “It is too early to say.” Witty quips aside, he makes a very valid point, and whilst the verdict has long been delivered on most of history’s major happenings, the jury is still out not only on the French Revolution, but also its most intriguing participant.

(And if history really does decide Robespierre is one of its primary villains, we at least have the prospect of a bumbling Hitler being outwitted by two endearing simpletons on children’s television in 200 years time.)

(‘Death is the beginning of immortality’ was a line from Robespierre’s last speech to the National Convention before his execution.)

Swedish football has long exported top players and managers to the rest of Europe, but there are signs that the trend is beginning to reverse.

This season Sweden’s top flight boasts more foreign players than ever before, all hoping to become stars in a new country just as the likes of Freddie Ljungberg and Zlatan Ibrahimović have across Europe.

Just one of the many foreign imports is James Keene, an English striker who was only 19 when he made the switch from Premier League Portsmouth to the Allsvenskran.

“It all happened really quickly,” Keene recalls, “I was playing at Portsmouth and had made a few appearances

when the assistant manager Jim Smith asked me if I would be interested in moving to Sweden for a year to get some experience.”

Smith had received a call from Roland Nilsson, then manager of GAIS and a coach he had worked with at Coventry in 2002. The two had kept in touch and when Nilsson asked if Portsmouth had any players

available for loan, Smith was happy to recommend Keene.

“Jim came to me and told me about the opportunity to get some first team experience. I didn’t find it to hard to adapt, and my now-wife moved with me too which made things easier. The biggest difference was the game. It is far less physical than back home in England. I remember getting booked in my first match.”

Keene finished his first year at GAIS as the club’s top scorer, catching the attention of some of Sweden’s bigger teams before completing a move to reigning champions IF Elfsborg. Despite emerging as one of the league’s best strikers, he still dreams of a return to the Premiership one day.

“I was hard to break through at Portsmouth. You look at them now and sometimes they only play one or two English players, but then that’s why they have done so well.

“Of course it’s everyone’s goal to play at the top level, and at the moment that is the Premier League, but I am happy where I am for the time being.

Despite this new wave of footballing immigrants, the Allsvenskan is still struggling. It places 28^th in UEFA’s ranking of Europe’s top divisions, behind leagues in Cyprus, Slovakia and Israel. No Swedish team has reached the group stages of the Champions League since Helsingborg during the 2000/01 season.

The league is still considered by most as a stepping stone to the Premiership, or one of Europe’s other major leagues. Although both Ljungberg and Ibrahimović began their careers in Sweden, it was not long until they had signed lucrative contracts at Arsenal and Ajax respectively.

“A lot are looking to move to England or France,” Keene notes, “but the Swedish league is getting better all the time. More foreign players are arriving and more money is being invested. Perhaps it is going the way or the Premiership but then Sweden are at the European Championships and England aren’t.”

The influx of foreign players was helped last December with a ruling which saw the Swedish Football Federation (SFF) remove its cap on non-European players. Previously clubs were only permitted to field three players from non-European countries.

At the time Helsingborg director Bo Nilsson, a team renowned for its foreign contingent, heralded the decision as a “victory” for his club. Malmo and Liberia defender Jimmy Dixon claimed it would, “Give more opportunities to African footballers in Sweden.”

But some are concerned that it will stunt the development of young Swedish players. Former Sweden captain Glenn Hysén fears that Swedish clubs are signing too many mediocre foreign players.

“It is great if you can bring in a player from Brazil who is really good, like Alfonso Alves was, as it is someone the youngsters can look up to. The problem is we are bringing in players who are not good enough.

“The young Swedish players are not coming up as they don’t get a chance. It won’t be a problem right away but in the long run it will harm us. What happened in England could happen to Sweden. I think England did not qualify for the European Championships because the best players at each club are not English.”

Still, if Keene’s example is anything to go by, some of the Allsvenskan’s new talent is more interested in helping, rather than hindering, Sweden’s international prospects.

“It would be a great honour to play for any country. I have been here two years now and I think it takes five before you are eligible for the national side. I would love to play for Sweden, and if the opportunity came along I would definitely take it,” Keene says.

Perhaps Sweden’s football immigrants could prove a hit for both their clubs and the national team.