Inner demons we shouldn't covet

The month of August brought with it, during the comedic melee that is the Edinburgh Festival, the sad news that elsewhere on Planet Comedy, Thick of It star Chris Langham was on suicide watch after being convicted of child pornography charges. While comedy as an entity swept excitably north of the border to the Scottish capital, it seems to have abandoned the forlorn figure of Langham, who will remain in custody until his sentencing.

History is littered with examples of people in the public eye, especially comedians, who have a skeleton or two in the cupboard (or one in the swimming pool, in the case of Michael Barrymore, though to call him a comedian would probably bring legal action from the Guild). Michael Jackson, for instance, though never willingly a comedian, has entertained millions through his sheer lunacy and baby-dangling antics. And he's the man who brought us Thriller. Rumours abound about his juvenile bedfellows; this unfortunate consequence of his childishness may, nevertheless, have been the secret to his success- like Samson's hair, or Pete Doherty's tourniquet. While I have heard it whispered, muttered surreptitiously, that the man who brought us Thriller should be allowed as many kids as he likes, I stop short of advocating this course of action.

What does intrigue me is this tragic link between the distasteful (Doherty), or unforgivable (Jackson)- with performing in general. A comedian may use whatever material they can draw upon, all in order to make us, the fickle audience, laugh. Comedy itself is such a fickle mistress; look at TV comedy of the last couple of decades. Some lasts, some does not- the cult favourite Red Dwarf now, apart from the irregular lines of gold that keeps it popular, looks dated and the dialogue stilted; even old favourites like Blackadder have their weaker moments which just haven't stood up to the ravages of time. And few critics would argue that the current absurdist mess that makes up acts like the Mighty Boosh will have as short a shelf life as any of its predecessors; Little Britain would be a perfect example of the one-hit-wonder who should never have returned for a second, let alone a third, series.

Langham is a troubled man. Though he was cleared of sex offences against a young girl, the drawn, sunken-faced figure he cut while in the dock admitting to using child pornography (and spinning a scarcely-believable excuse that it was "research") was undoubtedly one of a shamed man; a hunched, embarrassed, flawed human being. Yet this is also the man who for the last few years has been the driving force behind The Thick of It, one of the most incisive and sharp comedies of the last decade. Reminiscent of Yes, Minister (one comedy so clever it will never suffer from the ravages of time) it showed us all the right way to look at politics. So prescient were some of the scenes that, well, it could have been real. And it was still hilarious, more to the point.

Langham shows us clearly that entertainers are not, and alot of the time can not, be role models. Amy Winehouse will continue to self-destruct because she is a self-destructive being; it is that very quality which, when shining through her unique voice, makes her so marketable and desirable. Chris Langham finds it easy to be funny in front of a camera; yet as an actor and a writer, we must now assume that his profession was an escape, a direction in which to point his troubled, restless mind- and one that brought him great success and many plaudits. As such, then, we must face the unhappy possibility that it is this turbulence of mind, the tortured nature of his spirit that forced him into the creative path he pursued so successfully. He admitted during the trial that he had been the victim of abuse in the past- he as a man, never mind as a performer, will never be the same after this admission, made in the full glare of the media spotlight.

Uncomfortably for many of us, we will never be as precocious or as talented as those we watch routinely on TV. Yet if that means we are free of the inner demons Chris Langham has suffered from all his life, we may all have reason to be thankful. We of course cannot go easy on him just because he is funny, nor can we realistically keep Neverland supplied with children in honour of Michael Jackson's glorious past. Perhaps we need to learn to be less envious; we never know what drives the creative minds we once admired.

A Tale of Two Departures

Politics is something we're, fortunately, becoming more and more desensitized to. We may approve of one of David Cameron's ties, or at a push, one of Gordon Brown's. Cameron's hair may look especially bouncy and voluminous. But we rarely feel compelled to invest anything in it, or rely upon it at all.

Yet this week, we are all forced to look to our leaders for something, anything, to reassure us that the senseless shooting of an eleven year-old boy is really the bottom of society's trajectory. That this, after all things, will be the one event that shakes us out of the malaise we find ourselves in.

It says much, and all of it horrendous, that a boy of eleven could be gunned down in a car park, by an assassin making his escape on a bike, weaving his way through the rat-run alleys of the estate he has spent his misspent childhood learning like the back of his hand for just this kind of occasion. Yet are we being foolish to imagine that this could be a turning point? We think back to Damilola Taylor, we think back to Kiyan Prince, and we think back to Sharlene Ellis and Leticia Shakespeare as examples of previous nadirs of our moth eaten social fabric.

Where the real problem lies is that one nadir seems to be quickly eclipsed by another event that we, in our naive blinkered way, can never imagine being outdone. But nothing is ever so quickly rectifiable; the vast estates which form the rat-runs dominated by gangs and their hangers-on will not be swept clean with any kind of political new broom.

The other notable departure this week, an almost polar opposite to the tragic murder of Rhys Jones, was veteran newspaper journalist and former Tory Cabinet member, Bill Deedes. Why I bring up this doyen of journalism now, is that, in 70 years of journalism, he had seen it all. And you can bet that he knew better than to look towards our politicians for real, on-the-ground help with societal evils that we can so scarcely comprehend. It is simply not enough, in this day and age, in our desensitized, apolitical society, to turn our gaze to Westminster and expect help when everything goes wrong. We whinge and we moan. We wax lyrical on the decay of moral fibre, the ease with which weapons can be come by, and the lack of conscience with which they can be used to brutal, savage effect. The problem is not with legislation imposed from the top- though perhaps the swathes of council estates built in the 50s, 60s and 70s, which started their decaying decline in the 1980s, have provided a breeding ground. Legislation and politics in general is a slow, reactionary process; to be proactive, people need to convince themselves of the necessity of change.

When Deedes visited South Wales, West Cumbria and Tyneside in the eighties, to compare these places with a previous visit decades earlier, he lamented that while jobs had gone, and new industries were slowly taking root with some hope for the future, the family bonds that had kept previous generations together were irreparably damaged. He also wrote, "our way out, our way to improve order in society, lies in a willingness to rethink attitudes and policies, and to admit that wherever each of us have has taken our stand on law and order, conceivably we have been wrong." We need neither strong bombastic leadership, nor aggressive militant Neighbourhood Watch zealots patrolling with pitch forks. Both of those approaches are too rigid; flexibility is what we, evidently, need. To persuade people that, for instance, a young black male from a single parent family in a London council estate is not a lost cause or an inevitable foot soldier of the future. Stereotypes help nobody. Arguably the most depressing thing is that Deedes wrote that in 1971. Here, in 2007, we are only just starting to see his sense.

Attitudes can change. People can stand up for their communities, once they are given the reassurance that they will have support from the police to do so. So what we need, as we inevitably and misguidedly look towards PM Brown for a thunderbolt of a quick-fix, is less debate, and more encouragement. More promises of support for initiatives that can change attitudes and futures. More support for police and communities to stand up and do what they can to protect their communities; hopefully some erosion of the gangs' power, and some viable alternatives for the next generation of 11 and 12 year olds being recruited, can be the first step in reversing a steep decline. Deedes spotted it.

Bottoms and breasts sag. MPs go on holiday.

This week, we were told that the bottom of the lads-mag market had fallen through (presumably a scantily-clad, pert and airbrushed bottom). Publications such as the popular 'Zoo' and 'Nuts', as well as their less famous sister publications "Tits!" and "Twat!", have seen their sales plummet and the once arrestingly buoyant cleavage that was their market share has become, alas, rather saggy.

There must, obviously, be reasons for this. One obvious candidate would be that as it is currently the Parliamentary summer recess, the grizzled old backbench MPs who I like to imagine religiously purchase such magazines in order to steal a cheap erection before a debate are temporarily out of the country. This would promise a swift upturn in the turgidity of the market once parliament reconvened; however sadly it can not be the cause. This downward trend has been too recent a discovery- Parliament has been gradually voting itself longer and longer holidays year on year, to the point where now by my calculations, the summer recess in fact lasts two thirds of the year ("But we work such long hours!", they cry. Well so would we all if our workplaces had as many bars as the Houses of Parliament do).

Elsewhere in the world, in much more trivial matters, a matter of several billion dollars (at current exchange rates, each billion dollars roughly equates to around eight pounds sterling) has been wiped off shares as markets crashed in the wake of a monumental crisis in the US mortgage sector. Greedy idiots lending money to poor idiots with bad credit ratings have been stung by the fact that, in the end, these folks couldn't pay the money back. Cue worldwide panic- every bank and lender is now in debt to every other one across the world, so they're all buggered. This, too, could be a cause for a slowdown in the market of lads-mags. But, let's be honest, even if Joe Pratt in his Transit van might be worried about a bit of a pinch on his mortgage, it shouldn't stop him shelling out his regular pound or so to buy Nuts or Tits.

No, the reason must be elsewhere and much more radical. Equivalent figures were unavailable for girls' magazines such as Heat and, err, the rest of them, but I have a hunch their sales will have climbed. The metrosexual influence of so many preening, prancing, ballet-dancing footballers getting 80% of the country's attractive women and roughly 95% of the nation's GDP has finally turned most of the men in this country functionally gay. If not fully, actively homosexual, men have, in their swathes, become desensitised to the sight of hundreds of different silicon-enhanced breasts spilling out of the page. Instead of now taking a sneaky look at their girlfriends' copy of whichever coffee-table magazine she may choose as her own favourite, I believe men are now buying their own copies. Just this morning I saw a lorry driver, unashamedly and almost indecently, purchasing a copy of Heat without claiming it to be for his other half. These impressionable men are buying partly to learn something about moisturising, effective shaving of the armpit and eyebrow-plucking. And also, I imagine, because they can look at some pictures of women with their clothes on.

This is no good to the MPs, of course. They will, I hope, provide a bit of extra buoyancy to the sinking ship of lads-mags. But, I fear, outside the corridors of power in the Houses of Parliament, that ship has sailed.