Spiral Notebook: Sign of the times

Giles Broadbent receives a non-partisan political broadcast from a hotel sign

Across the dock from where I live is a Novotel hotel. I know this because its neon sign fizzes its midnight blue message through my window.

(Living here, it's like being a hard-boiled '50s gumshoe - only without the mystery, or the danger, or the femme fatales, or the guns, or the long coats, or the smokes - although I do have shoes but they're made of leather as opposed to, you know, Hubba Bubba).

Anyway, I was watching some abject MP on TV trying to offload his snivelling offspring of an excuse on us over some expenses outrage and I noticed a curious anomaly.

If I shifted my line of view, I could place the cross hairs of the window frame to obliterate a letter in the Novotel sign. I closed an eye and removed an "L".

Novote, it shouted at me from across the water. Novote. Novote.

First time I had noticed that. Weird, huh?

Yesterday once more

• Flicking across the limited terrain of my Freeview box to escape the by rote ramblings of these elected hydras, I came the channel formerly known as the History channel, now known as Yesterday.

But, with Freeview, Yesterday doesn't run in the evening so there was an olive green screen and a message. "Yesterday begins again tomorrow at 6am."

Wow. Yesterday does what now?

My brain lurched like a cross-eyed kid in a dodgem car.

Just think if that were true. If we could do yesterday again. The fights we could sidestep, the harsh words we could unsay, the thoughtless gesture we could correct, the gifts we could buy, the peace we could forge, the bridges we could build.

So I started making a list.

If I had a chance to do yesterday all over again I would:

1) Definitely, definitely not use that tomato in my sandwich. It was, like, all bloated and squidgy and the skin was all yukky and wrinkled and it just ruined the whole edifice of the sandwich.

I couldn't think of anything else right there and then so I headed off to make a reward snack.

But, hey, I was pleased with the tomato thing. I mean, it was definitely, definitely not right.

– First published in The Wharf on May 28

Review: The Observer, Cottesloe, National Theatre

DRAMA
The Observer, National Theatre
4/5

IN A NUTSHELL
An election observer comes to a West African state to rubber-stamp a flawed ballot only to exceed her mandate in a naive quest for justice.

REVIEW

In another life, Fiona Russell would be a trooper on the fete committee. She would bake tirelessly. Cajole the vicar to run the tombola. Brook no opposition to the wet sponge stocks.

She would dig in. Dig deep. Not as chairwoman - she seeks no personal gain - but a solid sort, all the same.

But this Fiona Russell (Anna Chancellor) finds herself, not elbow-deep in candy sprinkles and egg whites, but in West Africa, an independent observer at the birth of a new democracy.

Fiercely bright, ramrod straight and able, she's the sort of chap whose liberal interventions in the Third World are both well-meaning and catastrophic.

Although she's been here before - 28 elections in 12 years - this time something's different. Overlooked for the top job but very much in charge on the ground, an unfettered Fiona sees that impartial means non-committal. Yet she yearns to dig her nails into the cracked ochre earth and jolly well make a difference.

Slowly, the certainty Fiona brought to her duties, she now invests in the undoing of them. When the race for president falls into confusion, she leaps into the void, signing up voters likely to be loyal to the opposition.

Now a clucking mother of electoral machinations, Fiona bristles with indignation as a panel of judges rejects her "flat pack democracy". Even her translator Daniel (a sinuous Chuk Iwuji) acts as a counterweight to her blinkered idealism. Initially enthralled at the prospect of a cross in a box, he begins to question whether Fiona has polluted the ballot.

"I have no power here," she insists, blind to her impact.

Meanwhile, Saunders (James Fleet, wonderfully self-effacing as usual) is the coyly sinister snoop from the FO. He watches on and reports back to London where unreconstructed grandees guard the greater good.

At the heart of Matt Charman's intelligent and authentic play lies the ethical divide, not between right and wrong but between right and a different kind of right. Is it post-colonial arrogance to demand an election that meets the standards of the West, or a necessary hallmark of genuine change?

Richard Eyre's fluid direction accentuates the pull of the story ahead of the politics and, in this, he is assisted by an excellent cast, notably Cyril Nri as boisterous barman Wink (among other full-throated roles) and Lloyd Hutchinson as cynical BBC man Declan who rails bitterly at Simpson and Huw and George.

Anna Chancellor shifts Fiona's centre of gravity from head to heart with such guarded subtlety that the transformation, on completion, is as moving as it is stunning.

As she wades in too deep, she rails against those she feels have betrayed her. Yet she is blind to her truth: that she has been outmanoeuvred by the manipulations of her own desires.

The Observer is a play dense with humanity and argument. Amid its complexity, Charman and Eyre bring alive the potency and joy of the democratic process at a time when, over here, we're so weary of the whole darned thing we can't even be bothered to count our blessings.

– First published on wharf.co.uk on May 23

Spiral Notebook: You've been framed

Giles Broadbent considers a radical, punitive imposition on errant MPs

I make no apology for returning to the subject of MPs' expenses. I make no apology because it is fully within the rules as laid down in the Columnist's Green Book and it is the system that stinks, not I. Reform cannot come soon enough.

In pursuit of redress, and never one to decline the fruits of another man's labours, my thoughts turned to the Window Tax of 1696. We should reintroduce this much-maligned imposition forthwith.

The new Window Tax 2009 would stipulate that MPs must pay the price of all broken windows in any chamber, constituency residence, tavern or town hall even if they are not directly to blame for being flung through them in the first place.

(Incidentally, the Window Tax was not repealed until 1851 when it was replaced by the "House Duty", a form of words that whooshes straight over the heads of our elected embezzlers like a hungry wig hawk scouting for supper.)

In the doldrums

• I fear for the future. In years to come, all ambition will be spent. Look at the milestones passed in recent months - the first Speaker ousted since 1695; the deepest recession in a century; the first Lords kicked out of Parliament since Oliver Cromwell; the biggest constitutional crisis since the MP for Berwick on Tweed in 1745 knotted his brow with a reef rather than the more traditional Gordian knot.

What will we pitch for when all is said and done and stolen and claimed for and reimbursed and repaid in sorrow?

In 10 years' time - new government, settled house prices, recession ended - we'll be as dull and lifeless as the barnet of a slumdog crack addict.

We'll turn our faces to the skies in the hope that climate change will bring us, say, the worst hurricane, the biggest snowfall, the loss of Norfolk. Anything to lift us from our middle-ranking, unremarkable malaise of historical mediocrity.

I still thrill to the sound of a newsreader concluding her statistical analysis with "...since records began".

Dear Diary, I was there when that terrible thing happened. I witnessed history.

Come 2019 we'll be edging through Canary Wharf on Crossrail and the holographic figure of a stately Emily Maitless will echo from the depths of our iLatte™ "...and those are the worst figures..." and we'll perk up before she continues... "since the Great Superlatives Flood of 2009" and we'll sit back and sigh.

We're standing on the shoulders of pygmies, we'll think, secretly yearning for the return of City excesses, free fluffy dusters and a bent peer or two.

– First published in The Wharf, May 21

Spiral Notebook: Life of shame

Politicians have always had a rough time. We always knew many of their number were power-hungry hucksters who swayed in the breeze of opinion, dumping principles like so many stained mattresses in a woodland car park.

But we sorely misjudged them. We thought nothing could top their blinkered ambition. We were wrong. Turns out greed is the trump card.

They would lie, cheat, schmooze, dissemble to get more turf and a good Whitehall berth - then happily risk it all to blag some bootleg beans or underwrite a wide-screen or snaffle a pair of jaunty slacks.

If Parliament introduced a no-child allowance today, by tomorrow you'd see a zombie-wave of crumpled children drifting across Westminster bridge, each bearing a battered suitcase and a label on their duffel coats - Please Look After This Drain.

Meanwhile Daddy would be gorging on the porridge and truffles, his jowls wibble-wobbling with glee, his black pudding of a heart on a side plate, his conscience withered at his feet like a crumpled sock.

We now know that too many MPs cannot recognise the difference between rules and moral obligations. They cannot distinguish between "must not" and "should not". They have no shame.

So when they artlessly ask for your biometric details, your salary, your vote, your trust, a CCTV on your bedpost, the weight of your wheelie bin and a green tax for da lickle Polar Bears we can no longer say: what harm can come of this?

Because now we know. We know of their ways. Their snorting, venal, phlegm-flecked, elbows-out, Harrods-sale, clamber-over-the-bodies-of- the-dead rush for the gullet-stuffing foie gras of unrestrained engorgement.

Not, what value has this? But, what's in it for me?

You'll be duped, skimmed, flogged, sold to the highest bidder, stripped clean like lead on a church roof, used as collateral in a scam to Artex the privy of a long-dead auntie in a "second home".

You'll be sorted, sliced, cut with Ajax and palmed on the street corner to any hollow-eyed junkie with the readies.

It's like giving your Pin number to the bloke fixing your drive; or matches to a nine-year-old; or a razor to a toddler. It's not what they're going to do that terrifies you - because calamity is a given.

It's trying to fathom what they wouldn't do that foments a sweat in the dark of a godless night.

– First published in The Wharf on May 14

Review: Ordinary Dreams, Trafalgar Studios

STAGE
Ordinary Dreams, Trafalgar Studios 2
3/5

IN A NUTSHELL
The burden of London life gets too much for Dan in Marcus Markou's patchy but perky take on parental paranoia and middle class meltdown.

REVIEW
Life is tough. Just ask Miles. The Tube, the grind, the hoodies, the Cityboys. Miles will tell you. You break down the daily challenges into their constituent parts and - phewee - that's a lot for a man to take. Miles knows this.

He knows this better than anyone - least he thinks so - and... and not only that, Penny's contractions are - what are they now? - Penny's contractions are a minute apart and the louts are leaving broking glass on the pavements - broken glass! - and next-door's Barry White is bulging the walls... and Miles... well, Miles doesn't like his job, his location, location, location, his life or his lot and, most of all, he doesn't like the prospect of letting down his child.

Miles doesn't want to fail. But Miles is failing.

So life gets the better of Miles (James Lance). And put-upon partner Penny (Imogen Slaughter) now has two new burbling babies in the house and only one of them has any kind of future.

Miles repairs to a wheelchair, semi-catatonic, clad in a stab vest, grumbling and fuming like Alf Garnett leaving Penny to cope. She's a legend when it comes to coping, Penny. Coping with the baby, coping with her own demons, coping with her crumbling marriage and the amorous attentions of an AA cohort.

Miles hasn't got any real angst of course. He's more Mr Benn than Travis Bickle. Not like destructive uni pal Dan (Adrian Bower) who's also a recovering alcoholic with weird dreams of teeth and beetles and celery stalkers. But Dan has hippy chick Layla (Sia Berkeley) to feed him herbal teas so he's happy, right?

"I wish I were an alcoholic," moans Miles. "At least you know who your enemy is."

In director Adam Barnard's perky but patchy Ordinary Dreams, Marcus Markou's script gives the drifting Miles a means to work his way back to Penny and the baby - a fantasy which places the hobbling, jobless no-mark in the role of a Blair-esque aspirant, a people's champion promising a better future than the PM he bests on air.

Rancour

Here's where James Lance's performance comes alive. He's a smoothie by nature - his DNA is as flawless as a Wet'n'Wild spiral ride - so he's more comfortable in his skin as slick Miles than Meldrew Miles.

The production is much the same way. The script scrabbles to please - its focus fixed on the swiftest tack to the next one-liner - so it never entirely reconciles itself to the nerve-shredding rancour at its heart.

Dan Bower and Imogen Slaughter have more grit in their roles, so more traction. Slaughter finds in Penny a flicker of weary warmth, like a dying match in a freezer bag, while Bower finds a redolent lo-fi dryness that makes dissolute Dan the most endearing of the quartet. Siren Sia Berkeley is a dream, picking up the pieces of shattered lives, endlessly artless and optimistic.

Laughs; there are bundles - and hearty ones too. But the pat Ballardian satire can only misfire in a week when we've sunk to a new realm of moral collapse. If the writer had descended this deep to skewer the truth, his nose would have bled and his eardrums burst.

Fortunately, Ordinary Dreams never truly aims to unnerve. It intends to charm and entertain. So we take to the streets, not with grand revolution in our heads but with small change in our pockets.

- First published on wharf.co.uk

Spiral Notebook: What kind of flu have you?

Giles Broadbent offers his professional medical opinion

Swine flu. It's right there in the name. You are going to feel down with swine flu whatever the symptoms. You are going to be thinking muck and germs and snot with swine flu. The whole thing needs a rebrand.

Would you honestly be laid low with leopard flu, peacock flu, dolphin flu, penguin flu? We should have a system, like naming hurricanes to keep us jolly in a crisis.

As a servant of the public health here is a checklist of the kind of flu you may have caught based on symptoms:

Ikea Flu: You just fall to pieces.

Itinerant flu: You're down in the dumps, morning, noon and night.

Beach flu: Comes and goes in waves.

Helium flu: You can't keep anything down.

Russell Brand flu: You work up a night sweat then feel nauseous.

New Labour flu: You are mired in a cesspool of your own corruption and turpitude.

Susan Boyle flu: You look pretty bad at first but you surprise everyone with a startling recovery.

Prescott flu: Nil by mouth.

Ricky Hatton flu: You're not likely to be at full strength any time soon.

Eurovision flu: Despite positive signs, you're completely out of it.

The Charlton flu: You're going down and there's nothing anyone can do.

Hong Kong Flu-ey: A mild-mannered version with a surprising kick.

• Some famous flus of the past:

Thin flan flu: Caught from eating emaciated quiches.

Fin fan flu: Caught from watching too many shark documentaries.

Fun fang flu: Caught from sharing plastic Dracula teeth.

Flue phew flu: Caught from a sense of relief that your chimney is clean.

Flume fume flu: Caught from noxious odours trapped in swimming pool tubes.

Flea fly flu: Spread by the blood of an Englishman, be he alive or be he dead.

Tutu Frou frou flu: Caught from showing off your flouncy designer clothes.

Fling flung rue flu: Caught from the regrets of a failed affair.

Wii, why mii too flu? Caught from engaging in a philosophical discussion with your games console.

Do rah me fah so la tee flu: Caught from fleeing nuns dressed in curtains.

Voodoo Lulu who flew through flu: Caught from a wee Scottish chanteuse-turned-witch doctor as she transfers flights without stopping to go through customs.

– First published in The Wharf on May 7, 2009

Spiral Notebook: Family fun

Giles Broadbent is killing time

When I'm feeling down and pointless - but not quite down enough to warrant something reckless like booze or self-harm - I play a little game to pitch me back across the five-bar gloom gate.

I call it the "Obitz" and the aim is to make a tally of your life's worth. Fun for all the family.

This is how it goes. Grab a paper. I choose The Times. Check out the obituaries. Then rewrite the published caption exchanging the published name for your own so you can accurately measure the distance between someone else's achievements and your own inadequacies.

You get 20 points for having done the thing (or its modern equivalent); four for having the potential to do it; one point for having the potential to do it but not the will or commitment; and minus five for something hopelessly beyond your physical and mental faculties.

Here's last week's caption rundown. "Giles Broadbent talking to one of his gardeners"; "Giles Broadbent was musical director of the first pop music show Six-Five Special"; "Broadbent just beaten by Gunder Hagg on July 1, 1943, in Gothenburg"; "Broadbent leaning in to his Schemp-Hirth Nimbus 4 high performance glider".

"Broadbent: he believed that certain dilemmas could never be resolved in a manner which would satisfy everyone"; "Broadbent: he was wounded in the D-Day landings but recovered to fight in Italy"; "Broadbent described himself as driven by a sense of inner compulsion"; "Giles Broadbent: A Gallup poll found that most people regarded him as more powerful than the prime minister."

Yeah, OK so that was a bad week, points-wise.

The after-game party (the "Inquest") is just as revelatory.

You get lairy, then truculent, then dismissive ("yeah, but that was back then when things were easier"), then weary, then furious again, then you make a list of things you need to achieve a positive score, then you sign up for a class, then you buy something improving from Amazon, then throw out all carbs from the fridge because it's your slow metabolism that makes you fatigued and defeatist.

Then you go to bed.

– Published on wharf.co.uk

Review: Hanging Hooke

Hanging Hooke, Greenwich Theatre
4/5

"Chris Barnes took us on a journey of energy and intrigue. He showed us light and gloom; diverting particles and heliocentric heresies; vacuum pumps and broken hearts (which, I suppose, are the same thing, metaphorically speaking)"

- Oh, he was a real piece of work, Isaac Newton. That apple thing. What a farce. What a dismal betrayal of the truth.

Newton never discovered gravity. What happened was this: Newton was unpopular. With people generally and with Mother Nature in particular. She did not like her infinite wonders subject to the slide rule.

So the apples took a vote. One of their number volunteered to donk the boffin on the bonce in an effort to recreate the weight of opprobrium Mother Nature wished to heap upon him.

The apple did the deed but Newton survived - and the spin master, thief and revisionist turned the humiliation into a presentational triumph.

Newton never recorded the scene accurately. Around him, the evidence of other failed attempts to do away with him. To his left, an anvil trapped in the Lincolnshire sod. To his right, an Acme rocket, its fuse wire still fizzing, nose cone similarly buried.

Grrr. That Isaac Newton. He was a real piece of work. Even now he's stealing the limelight.

This production by Take The Spacedidn't mention any of that stuff. The play wasn't even about Isaac Newton. Not directly anyway. It was about Robert Hooke - the genius erased from history.

The man who discovered gravity before Newton; saw biological evolution before Darwin; designed St Paul's and the Monument alongside Christopher Wren. The galumphing innocent with the hump and the limp and the undimmed passion for knowledge who figured out how springs sprung, who gave us the biological term "cell", who was the midwife of the Royal Society and the father of microscopy.

Do have a sash window? Who came up with that doozie? That's right. Robert Hooke. Without the Hookester, there'd be no fresh air for anyone till the invention of the Expelair DX100 extractor fan hundreds of years later.

And have you heard of him? Did he get his beaky physog on a five pound note? Did Apple call its first hand-held digital device "the Hooke"? (Yeah, I know, that would have been a marketing nightmare).

No. Because Isaac Newton stole Hooke's work, smashed his portrait, plotted to burn his papers and expunge him from history. Hooke was wronged by the jackanape and coxcombe Newton who spoke fondly of his tender years watching the world in a rockpool - even though he grew up in land-locked Grantham.

I mean, come on! Figure it out, people! It was Robert Hooke who grew up on the Isle of Wight. He was the one who delighted in shells and crabs while Newton swotted like a swot and lied like a liar. The swot. The liar. Grrrr. That Newton. I'd like to have five minutes in a room alone with him.

Anyway, that was the essence of Hanging Hooke.

The telling of Hooke's story at last - 300 years later - in the form of an Olympian one-man show with the precise and charismatic Chris Barnes playing, first, Jack Hoskins, the turncoat friend of the lop-sided polymath, and then the genius himself, spider-limbed and blessed with youthful vigour initially and later, bent with bitterness and paranoia.

Was Robert Hooke our English Leonardo Da Vinci? asks the play. More pertinently, was he our Giordino Bruno?

("Who's he?" you cry. "Ex-actly!" I shout, thumping the table, as you fall into my cunning trap.)

This story by Siobhan Nicholas takes us from a 2006 Bonhams sale where Robert Hooke's vindication - his rediscovered 500-page Folio - was put up for sale, back to the genesis of a feud that threatened to erase this treasure trove of original thinking.

The story had it all - a Salieri/Mozart bonfire of the vanities, a Da Vinci Code style plot to alter history and overturn conventional assumptions. Secret societies and unyielding fidelities and rancid betrayals brought alive with a tour de force display of Barnes-storming physical and verbal gymnastics that was as breathless and seamless as the force of gravity itself.

Chris Barnes took us on a journey of energy and intrigue. He showed us light and gloom; diverting particles and heliocentric heresies; vacuum pumps and broken hearts (which, I suppose, are the same thing, metaphorically speaking).

He got us onside, did Mr Barnes. So much so that we, the audience became fired up with indignation. Railing at the injustice of this forgotten man. Ready to storm Parliament, to erect a statue made from ice cream tubs, to rally a tiny army of Joanna Lumleys, programmes held high and fashioned in the manner of a khukuri, demanding recompense for Robert the robbed.

Of course the truth may be different. Hooke may not have been spritely of demeanour and generous of spirit as the playwright and her actor would have us believe.

As I discovered later, the history books dwell on his dark side. His squabbling, his fractiousness, his anger, his bombast and... (like you didn't see this coming)... his gravity.

The writer may have stretched the truth. But the truth is elastic. Indeed, the extension of a truth is in direct proportion with the load added to it as long as this load does not exceed the elastic limit.

(Which, as all physicists know, is Hooke's Law.)

– First published on wharf.co.uk