Wired UK, relaunched in April 2009 (Photo: Josh Russell)

Back in the 1990s, when Wired was published in the UK by Wired Ventures in association with Guardian Media, the focus was quite clearly on geekdom, the wonder of the interwebs and all that would bring. Today’s Wired, now owned by glossy magazine powerhouse Conde Nast, advises on shopping for laptops, espresso machines and folding bikes. That’s not the only Conde Nast touch. An extraordinary piece of hagiography on Paypal founder Elon Musk by an American GQ writer sticks its tongue so far up Musk’s arse you can see it waggling around behind his eyeballs. It took me a while to figure out what this reminded me of - the sort of reverent celebrity portrait you find in other Conde Nast magazines. Musk sounds like an interesting and decidedly odd figure that could form the subject of the sort of profile that Michael Lewis delivered of Netscape founder Jim Clark in ‘The New New Thing’ (Penguin, 2001) but you won’t find anything that gripping here.

The overwhelming impression given by the new Wired is of bite sized chunks of stuff on gadgetry and shopping, with a light sprinkling of teledildonics, street fashion and how to get the best from your camera phone. In other words, you might just as well save yourself for the Sunday Times In Gear supplement - all that’s missing is Jeremy Clarkson. In fact, there are some lengthy features - apart from the hymn of praise to Musk, there’s an interesting and bizarrely out of place piece on credit derivatives risk that seems to strayed in from the Economist, some gossip about the politics in the BBC behind the iPlayer launch and a hugely manly piece about shipping salvage (the hero of which has a “square jaw” and a “don’t-even-try-bullshitting-me-stare”). The only articles that in any sense fitted my memories of what I remember from my beloved original British Wired (avidly read, carefully stored, lost in a move) were the one page opinion pieces and Start section, which does on occasion mention the internet.

The strapline on the magazine’s cover is ‘the future as it happens’. I’m not sure how deconstruct that - back in the 1990s, did we really think that the far frontier of communications was folding bikes? Maybe it implies that the future is all so hopeless all we can do is shop for watches, jackets and knives (p86-88)? Maybe it’s something to do with the way the internet has allegedly killed our ability to concentrate for more than a few seconds or on anything that doesn’t come with a price tag.

Over in the latest US edition of Wired, there’s a lot less about shopping (although laptops still feature) and it’s kept to one section unlike in the UK edition where it pops up all over the place. There’s a lot less of everything, mind you, as the US edition runs to a recession conscious 128 pages compared to the UK’s 184. But it is the first edition - my money’s on it slimming down rapidly. The US features are more geek relevant too - social media, the brain, energy options. Even the boy’s own account of a diamond heist contains an impressive level of technical detail. Overall, the impression is of a magazine with its own mind rather than an inflated Sunday supplement or lads’ mag.

I’m probably on my own here - everyone else I’ve spoken to about the new UK Wired loved it and maybe I’d have loved it too, if it had had a different title. It’s an entertaining read - but it just isn’t Wired.

By Jane Adams

Photo by Jovike

It’s too easy to criticise The Apprentice. The show is pitched as the world’s toughest job interview, in which our brightest and best young business minds compete for a £100k job by demonstrating their superior managerial skills, financial acumen and commercial savvy. But despite the sombre music and dramatic shots of The City of London’s office blocks, the show isn’t really that much different from the benchmark of low-rent reality television, Big Brother.

Ultimately it’s a game-show in which a group of shrieking, self obsessed arses are thrown together and forced to compete for a cash prize; the rules of the game aren’t entirely clear and the criteria for victory is subjective, but it largely seems to involve the contestants shouting over each other and acting up in front of the cameras for most of the show. Only, in The Apprentice, they just happen to be wearing suits.

From the minute they open their shrill mouths, it’s clear that whatever strategic skills or management credentials they claim, every single one of them is the archetypal pushy salesman: “I deserve this, I’m ambitious, I’m driven, I don’t believe in failure, I always win.” They never talk about what they know, what they can do, what kind of expertise they have, just how motivated they are. And the depressing thing is that a generation of young people will grow up believing that this is what business is all about.

Very easy to criticise. But, ultimately, the show offers an ugly reflection of what Britain really is: a nation of salesmen, flogging empty promises with a sharp suit and a slick line in bullshit.

London’s financial district, which provides The Apprentice with so much of its imagery and character, is a perfect example. For decades we’ve been selling London as a centre of financial services expertise; The City’s reputation as a global banking powerhouse is one of the key pillars of both our national economy and our national identity.

But we now know that, just like an Apprentice contestant, The City was never had anything to offer other than its own wild sense of self-belief. For all the sharp suits and impressive sounding financial jargon, the UK’s proud banking industry was largely predicated on the ‘bigger sucker’ principle; all of those clever, complex investments relied on nothing more than an ability to sell them on to a bigger sucker who would believe they had increased in value for no reason other than confidence.

The minute that confidence started to wobble, the whole thing came crashing down. And now the real City is unmasked, a bunch of salesmen with nothing left to sell.

It’s easy to sneer at the bankers (fun, too) but are the rest of us really any better? A year of falling property prices seems to have plunged the nation into a fit of anxiety, because being able to make money out of property is our birthright and suddenly it’s been taken away from us. Just a couple of years ago it seemed like everybody was somehow trying to get rich quick in the housing market, passing themselves off as property developers, investors, entrepreneurs, when in reality they were all just playing their own little versions of the bigger sucker game.

The fact that there’s no longer easy money to be made from houses seems like an affront to our national character; We deserve this, we’re ambitious, we’re driven, we don’t believe in failure, we always win… Except when there are no more suckers and nothing left for us to sell them.

Lance Concannon edits The Pamphleteer. This is the third year in a row he’s lied to everybody about not watching The Apprentice.

twitter.com/concannon

Photo by Whittlz

Indie-rock is dead. The future, apparently, is lady-led electro-pop - Lady Gaga, Little Boots et al - together they form an invincible forcefield constructed entirely of glitter and hotpants that will keep the hordes of guitar bands at bay.

Not that the twitching corpse of your average indie band has any right to complain. They’ve all collapsed under their own weight; a mountain of mostly mediocre bands, all talk and trousers and not much else. There will, no doubt, be undeserving casualties. For every Joe Lean, currently limping back to obscurity, there is probably another band full of talent who will surface for a brief moment only to be told “sorry, but it’s not your time”.

Still, while it might seem perverse to be delighted at the demise of the music you love, there are plenty of reasons to be cheerful. For a start, the world doesn’t need another Razorlight. But more importantly, true indie-rockers will have room to breathe once again at gigs without a load of haircuts getting in the way.

And as the tastemakers turn their cold, supercilious gaze elsewhere, alternative music will survive and flourish, as it has managed for the past quarter of a century.

Because for much of the past 25 years, indie music has been desperately, woefully unfashionable. (And by “indie” I mean guitar bands, but also folk, electronica, alt-country, psychedelia and rock). People who followed artists that could only be heard on the radio late at night or read about in the NME were viewed as being really quite tragic. It’s only occasionally that the wheels of fashion align with the cogs of the world of alternative music.

Until very recently, for example, telling people that you were spending your summer holidays flitting from one festival to the next was met with a wrinkled nose of distaste: people who went to festivals were patently Not Cool. And this certainly had some truth to it, take Reading for example. Festival goers were in two happily co-existing groups: the older die-hards in their ‘I was there’ t-shirts dating back to the early 80s, and the adolescents with their blue hair and Doc Marten’s.

Then, suddenly, the demographic changed.

In 2006 the site was crammed full of lanky lads with expensive haircuts and skinny jeans, and long-limbed girls in floaty tops and jewelled flip-flops. Glossy magazines started running fashion pages telling you what sort of super-expensive outfit you should be wearing to spend three days in a field. Glastonbury sold out in a second while smaller festivals with insipid line-ups and inadequate facilities cropped up all over the countryside like a disease.

A new breed of punter started appearing at regular gigs too, all tarted up in their Sunday best and braying loudly or looking bored throughout the bands’ actual sets. Teenagers who had previously sneered at their uncool gig-going friends overnight became fans of the Fratellis.

Then, over the past few months, it all ended.

What was the final straw? Was it the clear-eyed ambition of the Kooks, the unjustified swagger of Razorlight, or the countless watered-down facsimiles that followed in their wake? Or was it the fact that keeping up with the latest bands can be pretty exhausting if you don’t actually care that much? Gig venues have sticky floors, skanky toilets, and you’re unlikely to pull: being an ardent indie fan is not something your average fashionista is going to stand for too long.

Whatever the reason, after a brief moment in the sun for indie rock, it’s over. It will no doubt happen again in a decade’s time, but for the next few years at least, unreconstructed indie kids can breathe a sigh of relief that the chance of running into hordes of shrieking Peaches Geldolf-wannabees at a gig are now mercifully reduced.

Helen Sloan is a journalist. She is thinking of starting a blog.

Photo by Chris Dessaigne

Homes and decorating magazines are the latest victims of the credit crunch. Circulation figures for Living etc, 25 Beautiful Homes and my personal favourite, the musty-bookshelved, gilt-gessoed World of Interiors, are all heading unceremoniously down the CP Hart marble-and-bronze toilet.

This is no doubt due to the fact that a lot of people are sick of looking at rich people’s wetrooms, and are yearning for a more innocent, less rapaciously capitalistic time, when a house was a house, wallpaper was woodchip, and an Arco lamp was something a welder used to build Royal Navy warships.

There’s one title, though, that seems to have escaped the maelstrom. Does Elle Decoration editor Michelle Ogundehin know something the others don’t? Has she discovered the secret to maintaining reader loyalty at a time when half the British population wouldn’t care a jot if they never saw another Le Corbusier ponyskin recliner?

A clue may lie in her editorial welcome in the current (March 2009) issue. Close analysis suggests that Elle Deco’s continued popularity may be due to Michelle’s gift for sensible and practical leadership at a time when many of us feel that we have lost our way.

Consider her opening volley:

There are a number of things that feel really right to me at the moment:

Yellow patent leather

Marks & Spencer’s machine-washable cashmere

Classical music

Flat shoes

‘Michelle,’ you might reasonably ask, ‘what the bloody hell are you on about? Don’t you know there’s a recession on? Millions of people are struggling to get by without so much as a weekly organic veg box, and here’s you bibbling about machine-washable cashmere and shiny yellow leather. What are you like?’

But aha, Michelle is cleverer than you. Behold her masterful use of the rhetorical device of erotema to anticipate and defuse your objection:

A random list? Well, actually no. These things feel right because as a group they embody optimism and pleasure, indulgence and practicality, comfort and informality.

Do you see now? Yellow patent leather is the embodiment of optimism and practicality. We would never have survived the Blitz if it hadn’t been for the WI knitting yellow patent leather tea cosies in the depths of Aldwych tube station. And now we’re in the midst of an economic Blitz, we must again look to yellow patent leather to help us through the dark days and nights ahead.

These are the keys to what’s next on the home front.

Michelle skilfully employs the rhetorical device of metaphor to reinforce the notion that our current situation is similar to the Second World War. We must fight the recession on the home front, she is saying, on the beaches and the landing grounds, in the fields and streets and hills, armed with nothing more than a CD of the Enigma Variations, a pair of Crocs and a drawerful of machine-washable cashmere.  And we must never surrender.

I suspect, like me, you’re getting fed up with the unrelenting speculation about an impending global apocalypse.

See how Michelle uses the rhetorical device of non sequitur to recapture the attention of the reader, who may otherwise have drifted into a pointless reverie about ration books and powdered egg.  This is no time for nostalgia - it’s time to face reality. And if anyone knows about reality, it’s Michelle:

Yes, we’re in the midst of an economic crisis of unprecedented severity, but we’ve accepted where we are, and we just want to get on with it as best we can.

Just the kind of pragmatic attitude we should expect from a woman who knows that as long as we have yellow patent leather, we can weather any financial storm. For is not a sou’wester made of yellow patent leather, or something very like it? And is not an oilskin jacket made of the same material? Michelle Ogundehin is truly the Grace Darling of her generation, battling through a roiling sea of household debt to rescue us from the shipwreck of our own greed.

Once she’s plucked us from the water and wrapped us in the machine-washable cashmere blanket of informal optimism, Michelle takes a moment to remind us how we got into this predicament in the first place:

Uniformity is dead. Gimmicks are over and the real, the solid and things we can trust are in.

Chastened, we solemnly promise never to buy nebulous, uniform and untrustworthy gimmicks again. But can Michelle succeed where Alistair Darling, Gordon Brown and Mervyn King have failed, and lead us out of this financial Charybdis to safety?

Need you even ask?

In the coming months, colour will be bold and brave - it’s the fast track to the dose of confidence we all need.

Simple as that. Surround ourselves with brightly coloured things, and renewed prosperity will follow. Today a yellow patent leather shower curtain, tomorrow the wherewithal to re-hire the gardener, send the kids back to Marlborough and hop on the first flight to Necker Island. No unpleasant bank nationalisations, or four-day weeks, or executive pay freezes. Just bold, vibrant colour.

It’s so simple, it might just work.

There’s a new mood coming and it’s good… watch this space.

Oh I will, Michelle, I will.

Fiona Campbell-Howes blogs at: Quinquireme

Something has gone badly wrong with video games. Once the exclusive domain of geeky boys, gaming has become not just socially acceptable but, well, actually quite popular with normal people.

This sad state of affairs is the unfortunate consequence of a long-running de-nerdification of the video games industry:

• 1947 - The first ever video game, entitled Cathode Ray Tube Amusement Device, is invented by Thomas T. Goldsmith, Ph.D. Due to the high cost of the experimental equipment required, the game can only be played by a handful of top-level government scientists.

• 1961 - At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology a group of students create a game they call Spacewar! Unlike its predecessor, the game does not require a laboratory oscilloscope to play, and can be enjoyed by any expert level programmer with access to a $120,000 mainframe computer.

• 1977 - Home computers become popular with an entire generation of bright but socially dysfunctional young men. Since the primitive graphics of these systems are as yet incapable of displaying pornography, the young men largely use these computers to program video games instead.

• 1981 - Rumours of a woman sighted playing video games are widely dismissed as a hoax.

• 1985 - Companies like Nintendo and SEGA release commercial consoles designed specifically for the purpose of playing video games. A pivotal point in video gaming history, players are now able to enjoy games without any significant programming skills at all.

• 1994 - Sony launches the original PlayStation games console, which achieves mainstream popularity across the 13-25 year old male demographic. This signals the beginning of the end for gaming as an exclusively geeky past-time, as even socially popular, well-adjusted young men become interested in video games.

• 2006 - With the release of its Wii console, Nintendo achieves something entirely unexpected and which many thought impossible: women are suddenly interested in playing video games. The market is transformed, and a nerdy sub-culture with a proud (albeit socially awkward) history is finally destroyed as video-gaming becomes a mainstream entertainment medium.

The transformation has been rapid and profound. If, just five years ago, you were at a polite house party full of mingling thirty-somethings, and somebody said “Hey, who wants to play video games?” they would have been expected to put down their class of Chablis immediately and leave in shame. But now it seems that no social gathering is complete without a roomful of people crooning along with Singstar, murdering a song on Guitar Hero, or flailing wildly around to Dance Dance Revolution.

You might think it makes perfect sense: singing, dancing and playing music have always been perfectly acceptable at parties, so what’s the big deal? The point is that none of that would have happened unless gaming somehow crossed over from being a geeky boy hobby to something enjoyed by the mainstream - and that, crucially, required women to learn to love video games.

At a family get-together this Christmas my partner’s 60 year old mother was introduced to the Nintendo Wii for the first time. A few rounds of Wii Golf later she was hooked and filled with glee at finally beating her husband after years of failing to do so on real golf courses. A couple of days later she phoned to tell us that they had bought a Wii of their own.

How did this happen? Games manufacturers have spent decades trying to open up the female market with nothing but dismal failure to reward their efforts. How did Nintendo manage to turn that situation on its head almost overnight?

The Boring Bit

Since the mid-eighties, manufacturers of video game consoles have been engaged in an arms race to produce ever more powerful machines that are capable of playing increasingly complex and visually impressive games. Like all arms races, it has become incredibly expensive, with the industry leaders investing vast sums of money on research and development so that every three years or so they can produce a new machine that can claim to be the most powerful on the market.

The PlayStation 3, arguably the most powerful of the current crop of consoles, packs so much processing punch that academic institutions have discovered they can build a passable supercomputer by plugging a handful of them together, at a fraction of the cost of buying or (more commonly) renting a genuine supercomputer.

A struggling Nintendo simply couldn’t match that kind of technology, so it went off in a different and unexpected direction. In doing so it changed the video games industry forever.

The actual technical guts of the Nintendo Wii are almost a generation out of date compared to machines such as the PlayStation 3 and Microsoft’s Xbox 360. The real change was simply in the way people control their games on the Wii: instead of mashing a complex selection of buttons with their fingers and thumbs, players could now control their on-screen characters by mimicking the desired movements whilst holding a motion-sensing controller. In a golf game, you swing the controller like a club; in a boxing game you hold a controller in each fist and make shadow boxing motions; you can use it as a sword, drumstick, steering wheel or almost any other accessory.

The change was revolutionary. Before, video games often required players to climb a steep learning curve just to master the controls before they could start having fun, but thanks to Wii’s simple control system, games suddenly became intuitive. You could start having fun instantly. You could even teach a grandmother to play in a matter of minutes.

Combined with the fact that Nintendo games have always tended to be simpler, more accessible and more family friendly than the complex, violent and, essentially male-focused games found on other consoles, plus the growing popularity of social games like Singstar and Dance Dance Revolution, this created enough force to push video gaming into the mainstream.

This is all well and good: now that video games are fluffy and inclusive maybe the Daily Mail will stop screaming for them to be banned,  and maybe some of us old-school gamers might finally be able to shake off the ‘anti-social dork’ stigma. But for all that, it does kind of feel like the grown-ups have crashed our party. Just like your favourite band selling out and going mainstream, now that the industry has found a much wider audience it seems inevitable that games will never be quite as cool as they were in the early days and mass-market appeal will take priority over the edgy creativity that made it all so much fun to begin with.

Lance Concannon is the editor of The Pamphleteer

twitter.com/concannon

Brown and Obama

It must have come as a great relief to ‘special relationship’ watchers in the UK that Barack Obama chose Gordon Brown as the first European leader to ring when he assumed office (albeit well after his calls to leaders on other continents). The news that Obama’s Kenyan grandfather had been tortured by the British during the Kenyan Mau Mau uprising during the 1950s had sent them into paroxysms of worry that the US might dump Britain as its special European friend, in favour of the less loaded embrace of France or Germany.

Yet the vast majority of Americans feel no special connection to Britain at all, something that can come as a bit of a shock to us Brits on our first visit to the US. Far from viewing us as long lost relatives, most of them have no idea where Britain is or what the difference is between Britain and England and some even fail to make the connection between ‘England’ and ‘English’. “Your English is almost perfect,” one friendly San Franciscan told me. “What language do you speak back home?” Others think that language is the only thing that connects the two countries.

For a start most Americans aren’t descended from Britons – Ireland, Poland, Germany, Mexico – name pretty much any other country in fact. Many don’t have English as their first language. According to the US Census Bureau, Spanish was the first language of 34 million Americans, roughly 11% of the US population in 2008.

Culturally the countries differ in many ways too. Leaving aside the Americans’ egregious refusal to use boiling water to make tea, one of the most shocking differences to NHS-coddled Brits is their individualism. Because the United States is theoretically at least an equal opportunity country, many feel that because they’ve done OK, it’s right to leave people who haven’t and who don’t have healthcare, can’t afford food or can’t pay for heating to die/starve/freeze because it must be their own fault. “I don’t want my taxes to pay for someone else’s healthcare,” is a common refrain.

So when Americans do think about the British, what image do they have? Austin Powers has a lot to answer for – we’re really just a bit of a joke. For special think ‘special needs’ rather than ‘extra good’. We are a nation of small people in a period setting, with bad teeth (every single person I asked mentioned bad teeth as a British characteristic), drinking bad beer, eating bad food and worshiping the monarchy. Laying aside the question of whether there is a British beer that’s worse than Budweiser, we appear to have some special public image problems. “You’re bad vacationers because you drink too much and you don’t sample local culture,” says Kim from Massachusetts. “Oh and you drink too much.”

“I’ve never, ever seen people put away the beer and wine like the English,” agrees Nancy from Massachusetts.

We’re snobs too. “My impression is that the vast majority of Yanks like the British overall,” says PJ from Minnesota, whose heritage is Irish. “However, if you’re snobby or sit around and talk about how everything in America sucks (my sister-in-law is English and does this) people will really take a hating to you fast!”

“You guys are pretentious,” adds Dana from Delaware.

“I don’t feel any connection other than we speak the same language,” says Allie from Florida. Kim on the other hand says there is a special relationship, “mainly because US and Britain share cultural heritage and language.”

The term ‘special relationship’ originally was used by Winston Churchill in 1946 to describe military co-operation between the two countries and it still describes the primary and currently most controversial link. Within days of taking office Obama asked Britain to supply an extra 4,000 troops for a planned American surge in Afghanistan. Britain already has approximately 8,600 troops in Afghanistan, according to the Daily Telegraph. Tony Blair’s support for George W. Bush’s adventure in Iraq contributed greatly to his unpopularity in the UK.

So you’d think the Americans would at least be grateful for that. Not a bit of it. For many, nothing Britain can do will pay back the debt they feel we owe them for joining our side in World War 2. For others, our support is plain ridiculous. Nancy says, “I do think we have a special relationship in that the British Government seems to generally have a crush on the US Government. To use a harsh word - I think of them as our lapdog.”

Unfortunately for those who think we’d be better concentrating on European relationships, the election of Obama, possibly currently the most popular man in the Western world, is unlikely to change that. While Gordon Brown is unlikely to exactly emulate Blair who was known as Bush’s poodle, the Obamas are still reportedly looking for a dog for the White House and what could be more special than a nearly blind, bad tempered Scotty dog called Gordon?

By Jane Adams

Peter Ustinov with Michael Parkinson in 1971

One of the big cultural fibs going around today is that this, uniquely, is the Age of the Celebrity; a time that is defined by our fascination with people who are famous, but we’re not entirely sure what for.

There’s actually a long tradition of this, but the difference with the old-style celebs is that we could never define why Peter Ustinov (for example) was famous, because he did so many things, not so few. Apart from the proper jobs (writer, director, actor, artist and so on) he was also good at non-specific stuff that people really don’t do any more. He was always “Peter Ustinov the raconteur”, which meant you could drop him in front of Michael Parkinson with 10 minutes’ notice, no script, nothing to plug and Parky would say “What’s it like working with Kirk Douglas?” and Ustinov would. . . well, he’d racont, I suppose, with perfect timing, all the funny voices and weird digressions that never went too far off-piste, and then when the next guest came on, he’d sit there politely, and only interject occasionally, but when he did it was brilliant.

I’m not sure Paris Hilton could do that.

Ustinov comes to mind because he represents a tradition that, sadly, seems to have been propping up the obituary columns in recent years. Its representatives were usually born between 1920 and 1940, so they remembered World War Two, either as combatants or as grubby-kneed schoolboys cowering in shelters. They were usually a bit posh, and usually a bit left-wing, although the ones that weren’t proper posh (like Alan Coren and Ned Sherrin) were also the least leftie. They were all fearsomely intelligent and well read and articulate, although not all had excelled academically.

But above all, it was usually very difficult to point at them and say: “That is Humphrey Lyttelton, the _______.” The what? Trumpeter? Cartoonist? Bloke who made eye-wateringly foul jokes about cunnilingus on Radio 4 and gets away with it? It’s the same with John Mortimer, the most recent to peg it. Bit of barristering, bit of writing, bit of showing up on panel shows and being gently subversive. Any more of that Chateau Lafite, luvvy? These people were brilliant amateurs, in the best sense of the word, the sense that Andrew Keen doesn’t understand because he’s a witless cock who wouldn’t know genius if it asked him to write another book but do it properly this time because his first one was embarrassing shit.

Even when they had a particular, definable, defining skill (I’m thinking of Oliver Postgate and Tony Hart), you knew they had plenty of other interests, other strings to their bows, a sort of cultural and emotional hinterland that meant that if Parky or Wogan or Mavis Nicholson had a gap in the schedule, they could just be parachuted in, given a G&T and allowed to do their stuff for 10 minutes, very nice, here’s your cheque, shall I get you a cab?

Back to Paris Hilton. Or, I dunno, Calum Best. Nah, don’t see it myself, do you? Although, to be fair, with Parky retired to the golf course, there are fewer opportunities these days for someone like Calum Best to demonstrate that he is, contrary to received opinions, a wit, a raconteur, a calligrapher, a bassoonist, a balloonist, a. . . something?

Of course, we do have Stephen Fry. But the very fact that 95% of you will also have thought “of course, we do have Stephen Fry” demonstrates the immense pressure upon the great man, and how thinly he has to spread himself. To the extent – and I don’t say this lightly, because I know it may end it ordure through my letterbox as a punishment for my temerity – that every now and then I get a bit tired of Stephen Fry, because I know what he’s going to say next, and the archly self-deprecating way he’s going to say it. He does give good Twitter, though.

(I’ve just flipped through this and realised that all the people I’ve identified are men, which is surely rather remiss of me. So I’ll add Germaine Greer, another one I’m glad is still around. I know she’s a bit mental and picks fights on subjects she knows nothing about, just to be annoying, but she’s always good value, and funny, and she’s got a filthy laugh. And she’s the only one who’s started a porn mag.)

I don’t believe in heaven, but for the purposes of this article, I’d like to imagine a version of Big Brother up on a cloud somewhere, with Ustinov and Sherrin and Coren and Lyttelton and Mortimer and Postgate and Hart all sitting in comfy armchairs drinking agreeable, nicely-chilled Sancerre, and Big Brother asking them to do something, and Lyttelton telling Big Brother to fuck off, but in a terribly clever way that is at once monstrously rude and deeply charming, and then they all go back to raconting.

Tim Footman blogs at: Cultural Snow