Postcard from America

My next-door neighbour tells me you had a terrible storm earlier last week that nearly washed you all into the North Sea. I’m sorry about that. 

Our farmhouse, which has so far survived 343 winters, simply shrugged and asked for another log to be put onto its roaring fires. Or so our housesitter told me, when I phoned her to see if it had blown away. 

“Yes, it was a bit windy this morning, but it was worse in Newcastle”. 

Worse, I understand, was a completely flooded Quayside. 

Well, if makes you feel any better, it’s been raining here as well. A real deluge battered homes, washed out drive-through hamburger joints, drenched the health food stores. 

It is strange to see Southern California in the rain. People don’t really have umbrellas or rain coats. They don’t even have gutters on the side of their houses – there’s no demand. They just drive their cars closer to the supermarkets and run for it in their white jeans and teeshirts.

It's a hot dog's life

As Murphy and I push open the metal gates of the dog park, a three-legged black labrador nearly wags itself off balance in excitement. 

Murphy waves his grey bushy tail in greeting and sets about his daily examination of the canine message boards. Murphy is half cocker, half English shepherd. He’s my brother-in-law’s mutt and the reason we turned our world upside down by buying our own English shepherd. 

We wanted a dog just like Murphy – friendly with a bushy tail. Unfortunately we miscalculated the relative contributions of spaniel and shepherd to the Murphy mix and ended up with a horse. 

Even on four legs, Boots now stands taller than Izzy. At least he’s stopped eating the chair legs. Now we fear for the ceiling.

Izzy's pretty house

Izzy is a little confused about the process of moving house. 

“Please can we take this house with us to Nana’s, but not the sky?” 

This took a little while to sink in. You want us to take the house to America? 

“Yes, because it’s so pretty and all my toys are in it.” 

“But why not the sky?” 

“Because the sky is nicer at Nana’s.”

After the holiday

Jo nudged me awake. “Are you awake?” she whispered. 

“I’ve been awake for the past five days,” I growled. Another hour of sleeplessness wasn’t going to make any difference. 

Next door we could hear Izzy singing. She makes up the lyrics as she goes along. She’s singing about mermaids on sunny beaches and Truffle our dog marrying Boots, the monkey from Dora the Explorer. 

It’s 4am. Five days after our return from Los Angeles, Izzy still has jetlag. As a result, so do we.

Letter from America

Happiness is a warm beach

As we drove over the hill, white smoke was billowing out to sea. Or rather ocean. 

Our American friends laugh when I describe the Pacific Ocean as the sea. They scoff when I mispronounce their streets: Sunset Boo-le-vard, rather than buller-vard. I even mispronounce their city: Los Angelees, to rhyme with peas. 

“It’s Los Angeliss, to rhyme with hiss,” says Jo.

Joining The Mickey Mouse Club

Izzy stabbed another chip into the ketchup, held it high in the air, then paused and frowned. Suddenly she exclaimed, in a voice so shrill the whole restaurant turned to look: “Mummy when are you going to speak proper English like me and Daddy?”

A moment’s silence, then an eruption of laughter. Izzy was surrounded by her American uncles, cousins and friends. Despite 7 years in the UK, any slight British twang in Mummy’s voice had been erased the moment we stepped off the plane in Los Angeles two weeks ago. 

Since then, Izzy, Jo and I have been filled with Californian hospitality. With a different set of friends and family to visit every day, and scores of much-missed restaurants to patronize, I managed to add 10 pounds to my already overpadded waistline in as many days. 

The problem with Southern California, our home from home, is that it’s all so perfect. People are complaining because petrol (“it’s not gas, silly Mummy”) has hit $4.50 a gallon (60 pence a litre); the supermarkets are packed with cheap, local produce; the temperature hovers between 75 and 85 degrees every sunny day; whales and dolphins swim past the beach restaurants; cheap and cheerful Mexicans are there for nasty jobs like cleaning homes and digging gardens.

The recession, for more people, hardly happened: the economy is growing again, the plants in the perfect gardens never stopped. Sure, the underbelly of America has problems as severe as the poorest parts of the UK, but you’d never notice it in California’s manicured, gated, comfortable life.

Not that I want to give the impression that I’ve been on holiday for the past couple of weeks. It was actually quite tough work. Twice I had to drag myself up at 3am to watch Newcastle United cruise towards Champions League glory in high definition; every night I had to endure a marathon wine-tasting from my very generous brother-in-law, determined to convince me that great California wine is as good as its French counterpart; and you wouldn’t believe how hard it is to remember to bring enough change for the valet parking.

One morning I felt so bloated and indolent that I donned a pair of swimming shorts (“Daddy’s wearing trainers, not sneakers, Mummy”) and set off to run my own London marathon round the block of neatly grassed front lawns.

I swear I got a cheer from the neighbours – or maybe it was a suppressed scream of horror.

My nephews cruelly photographed me and posted the result on Facebook: apparently I reminded them of Borat.

Izzy, meanwhile, found Paradise: she met Mickey Mouse at Disneyland.  Not the EuroDisney or Florida fakes, but the original rodent in his actual home.

She even saw his gloves going round in his washing machine. 

Jo met him too: I was stabbed with jealousy as Jo threw herself into the arms of someone even older than me. Izzy just melted with excitement.

Sadly all that’s behind me now. This morning, I braved the icy rain to put my Californian beet seeds into the sodden ground of my Northumbrian vegetable garden; back at my mother-in-law’s house, the roses are in glorious full bloom. I turned up the central heating to full, just as I had the air-conditioner two days ago. I filled our cars with fuel in case the tanker drivers go on strike: for the same price I could have driven halfway across America.

Jo, who’s decided to stay over there with Izzy till the weather gets better, has just rung to say they are eating burgers and fries by the sea. I can’t blame them staying on: it is another world. But I’m making the best of it. Yesterday at St James Park I helped cheer Newcastle to victory – so much more exciting than watching them on television; I’ve filled the house with daffodils and tulips from the garden – there’s nothing like an English Spring, even a wet one; now I’m off to the pub with friends for lunch – roast beef and a pint of bitter is nicer than any burger.

Meanwhile, Izzy, please remember you are eating chips, not fries.

We Are Most Amused

Last weekend, as George W Bush and the leaders of most of the world’s economies scratched their heads to find a cure for the financial plague, as raging fires engulfed multi-million dollar homes in California and as England’s rugby players were devoured by the Australians, I could have sworn I heard Eric Idle singing “Always Look On The Bright Side Of Life”. Then I blinked and sure enough, there he was, emerging from a pile of dying swans on a stage in South London. In the midst of catastrophe and doom, Eric’s chirpy little face shone through. And sitting in the audience, laughing with his subjects, was the future King of England.

I don’t know if Prince Charles was looking forward to his 60th birthday: I’ve only four years to go before mine, and I’m certainly not planning any jamboree. Apart from the free buspass, it’s not the sort of milestone you usually want to celebrate. Charles has been hanging around all this time waiting for his first proper job, and there’s still no sign of it just as people his age should be thinking of retiring. His sons’ joke about them measuring up the stairs at Highgrove for a Stannah Chair Lift is probably a little too close to the mark.

So Saturday night’s ITV show “We Are Most Amused”, in aid of the Prince’s Trust, which brought together Idle, John Cleese, Robin Williams, Rowan Atkinson, and a host of great standups, must have cheered him up no end. Cleese has a home in Montecito, California that must be covered in burning ash right now, yet he seemed pretty cheerful; so was Andrew Sachs who, despite his encounter with Russell Brand, rolled back the years as Manuel. It was a glorious romp. But what I found odd about the show was the comedy. You’d have thought that bringing together some of the world’s best comedians and recording them during a week when the world is in turmoil would lead to some pretty cutting edge stuff. Not so. It was soft and safe. Not one recession joke, no jibes at Brown. Just the usual easy targets, like Bush and Obama. Comedy usually reacts quickly to big events, but these times are so serious, even the comics don’t know how to play them.

They say there’s nothing like a good laugh to raise the spirits. That and a letter telling me that my mortgage payments have just halved because of the falling bank rate. Prices are already tumbling at Tesco, the stock market is holding steady and my broker’s told me to buy shares again. The falling pound has made my business more competitive. I’ve had three offers of new credit cards in the last fortnight. Next week there’ll be tax cuts for all. But will I be off to the shops? I very much doubt it.

There’s the problem in a nutshell. The national mood is currently so black, we’ll be banking the lot, or more likely stuffing it under our mattresses. A friend of mine at a television network has told me that advertising spend is down by half. Millions of cars are sitting unsold in forecourts and yet, however much they drop the price or give us free credit, we’re not tempted. House prices have already fallen, but noone’s buying.

This recession is not a statistic, it’s a national state of mind. Right now an insidious fear has spread throughout the developed world. It started as a corporate collapse, now it’s a crisis of confidence. There’s a danger that all Brown’s tax breaks will simply fill Britain’s piggy banks. In my view there’s one solution to this: we need a right royal party. Or perhaps a coronation. Now that would lighten the mood.

Death In The Family

I’ve seen how I want to die. Swiftly, calmly, whilst eating some favourite tidbit. If only humans could ring up the vet when their time comes.

A few months ago I wrote that Muka, our faithful companion, had gone blind. Sadly, on Friday we said our final goodbyes.

With her big bat-like ears, she had the sweetest nature, especially with children. But as a rescue dog, brought up on the dog-gang warfare of Los Angeles, she just had to sense another dog in the area and she’d start snarling. She could only be walked on a lead.

Mind you, even if she’d been the most sociable animal, she’d still have had to be leashed. You can go hundreds of miles in California without finding a decent open space to exercise your dog. America, land of the free and supposedly a nation of animal-lovers, is in fact a Guantanamo of anti-dog restriction. They’re banned from beaches and parks, condemned to exercise on streets or tiny areas of bare earth called “dog parks”. It’s tragic to see beautiful specimens, bred for the fields, forced to trot on hot pavements chained to their jogging owners.

Muka seemed happy enough with her lot. For a time she and Joanna lived in a tiny apartment in West Hollywood. Olivia de Havilland lived in the same building and liked to stroke Muka’s ears when they met in the lift. Later, when Poncho the cat joined the family, the two animals became inseparable. Poncho used to bat Muka’s ears with her paws, and they slept in the same bed.

When Jo and I moved to London, the pets came with us. My house overlooks dog heaven, Hampstead Heath. I feared the worst: Muka’s aggression would have us drummed out of town. Worse, I already had a spaniel, a breed Muka vehemently detested. So on arrival at Heathrow we drove straight to Dr Roger Mugford, the animal behaviourist.

Roger has a magic device that harmlessly blows air in a dog’s face every time it misbehaves. Ten minutes, two puffs, and Muka had accepted the spaniel. But the massed wagging tails of Hampstead were another matter. A week later we stood on top of the Heath, with Muka, magic device on collar, looking down at the lush acres below. Slowly we unbuckled the lead. Her big brown eyes stared at us with disbelief. “Go on, then”, I said. And off she went, running in huge joyous circles, a big doggy grin on her face. At the age of 15, her first proper run. And from that day, on or off the lead, she never growled at another dog.

Last year the Northumbrian winter brought on arthritis, so the runs grew slower. But her ears still pricked up every time she saw us, especially when we offered her favourite “treatie”, a thin tube of rawhide that her jaws could demolish in seconds.

After she went blind she bumped into doors and fell down stairs, but gradually her sense of smell restored a decent enough life. That was her downfall. One day she sniffed out a sealed tub of liver training treats. The maximum daily dose was 4 grams. By the time we found her she’d munched through half a kilo. Muka’s liver never recovered. The smell in the house was appalling, but we kept her going for a month on a diet of rice. She was wasting away.

When I took her to the vet I think she knew it was time. In the waiting room I produced one last rawhide treatie. She held it in her mouth like a lollipop, too tired to chew. As the vet shaved the hair on her leg for the injection, she gently sucked on the rawhide. As the blue poison went into her bloodstream she looked at me, then slowly sank to the table, lollipop still in her mouth. I could swear she was smiling.

The Hard Sell

Warning. Those of you prone to jealousy should turn away. As I write, I’m trying to stay cool as the California sun beats down on my computer. Remember warm air? We last experienced it in Northumberland in April 2007. For an hour or two.

I’m over here talking to broadcasters about one of the ideas we’ve been developing in our Byker office over the last few months. I’m pleased to say it’s getting a pretty good reception. When I say “good”, it means that they’ve politely sat through the DVD I’ve played them, rather than brusquely cutting me off with “Not for us, Tom. Anything else?” It means they quite like it, not that I can go out and buy a mansion in Beverly Hills. There’s a long, precarious path from pitching to production, about as arduous as the route to the pitching stage from the first glimmer of an idea.

At least this week’s experience is going more smoothly than my first terrifying pitch in the US years ago. Gerry Anderson (yes, Mr Thunderbird) and I wanted to make a sci-fi drama series called Space Precinct. Trouble was, it was going to cost around $36 million dollars and we didn’t have any money. So when a man rang me and asked if I’d like to go to New Orleans to take part in a “pitching seminar” at a convention of broadcasters I leapt at the chance of exciting a few buyers with our idea. As I walked towards the conference theatre, I heard a low roar not unlike a hundred thousand Romans preparing for the entry of the gladiators. The vast room was packed. What I hadn’t appreciated was that this was a pitching contest, a sport akin to bear baiting.

Four of us were given five minutes each to present our ideas, and then we were to be cross-examined, X-Factor style, by a group of judges each of whom made Simon Cowell look like a pussy cat. I was last to go. The previous entrant, a sweet French documentary producer called Natalie with a perfectly decent if rather Gallic idea, was already in tears. The other two sat red-faced and depressed, head in hands, two years’ development work torn apart in just ten minutes.

Chief inquisitor was Greg “Mr Nasty” Dyke, who was then head of London Weekend Television. Now Greg and I have a bit of a history. We were at university together and, I’m pleased to say, we are still quite good friends. But our relationship had hit a bit of a rocky patch after I’d competed against his company for the London television licence. Even though he won the bid, it took him years to forgive me. So that day he decided to take sweet revenge.

I played the showreel, which had cost months of preparation and not a little cash. Greg went straight for the jugular. “I can’t think of a network in Europe that would take it”. The other judges took his lead. My show was dead in the water.

Just then, an extraordinary thing happened. From the middle of the audience a man in an expensive suit stood up. “My name is Kloiber. I represent RTL 2”. It was Germany’s most important buyer.

“I would like to buy this series”.

There was a stunned silence. Then laughter. Surely he was joking? But with a wonderful Germanic wave of the hand, Herr Kloiber continued. “I would like to offer $100,000 per episode for a seven year licence”. Then wild applause, and a man from Tokyo stood up and made an offer for Japan. Within five minutes I had raised enough money to get the show into production.

Ah, such sweet memories, I think the sun has gone to my head. That’s the sort of thing that can happen in America. But for a show conceived in Byker?

Well, let’s see.