Not All Fat Ladies Are Pregnant

I have a terrible confession about a major weakness of mine – a paranoia, even. I can spot a close acquaintance on the other side of the street and, mid-hail, will stop myself from saying his name – just in case I’ve confused him for someone else.

So, to avoid potential embarrassment, I utter a strangulated “Hi there” and wait for him to acknowledge me. Often confirmation of the person’s true identity takes several minutes. I can’t just say “How’s Dorothy?”, or “Are you still with the Gas Board?”, just in case my friend isn’t the friend I think he is, or isn’t married to the right person, or in the right job. So I tend to come out with phrases like “How are things?” and wait for a clue in his reply to reassure myself that I’m both talking to the correct person and that I really do know what he does, who he lives with and all the other essentials to ensure safe ongoing discourse.

This long established fear of awkwardness and humiliation would keep a psychotherapist in new couches for life, I’m sure. Something in my childhood, some terrible mortification long hidden behind a mask of uncertainty, will have prompted this terrible discomfort. My two years of therapy in California failed to grapple with it: I had bigger skeletons from my past to uncover.

In the 1980s I made the world’s worst talk show producer because I could never recognise any of the guests. I once told a well-known artist in the Groucho Club how much I liked his movies. He replied “I like Lindsay Anderson’s work too, but sadly I’m not him”. I was so distraught, he sketched a portrait of me which he gave me “to remind me who I am”.

So, as a result of this perverse obsession with identity, I’ve always been very careful about what I say to anyone. Most of all, I keep quiet about their appearance. I’ve even stopped saying how well people look since a former work colleague whom I did recognise (also in the Groucho Club) revealed, after receiving my congratulations on his slim physique, that he’d just been diagnosed with cancer. Sadly I read that he died last Sunday.

So imagine my surprise when three people in the last 24 hours have had the courage to come straight up to me and declare, bold as brass, how much weight I’ve lost. I’m full of admiration – for them, not me. I’d be too scared to say that to anyone for fear of the consequences. But why only three, and why in the last 24 hours, when I’ve been hovering around this weight for a week and a half? Maybe they are secret readers of this very blog?

Tomorrow I’m going to wear a big badge with “The Diet's Over – Yes, I’ve Lost Nearly 2 Stones - Congratulate Me!”. But first let's take the photographs: so I can carry the proof with me forever.

Fashion Victims

Like the discarded heroes of Toy Story 3, for years my Size 34 jeans had been lying neglected at the bottom of a dark drawer, underneath the unworn jogging shorts. Yesterday I yanked them into the sunlight.

It’s been almost two months since I started my diet. Shamed into action by a trip to Thin City – Los Angeles – I embarked on a weight loss programme by Dr Pierre Dukan (whom I call Dukant, because that seems to be his sole mantra).

My aim was to lose 22 pounds by next Saturday, when a photographer is coming to take a family portrait. This was a clever Father’s Day gift from my wife, who knows full well that I wouldn’t want my lardy lines immortalized forever in a photo.

So began the protein-only nightmare that I’ve been summarising in my other blog www.bringingmedowntosize.com. With less than a week to go, I can happily report that I am just a couple of fat-free yoghurts away from my target.

I’ve lost over 20 pounds in 7 weeks: I started at 15 stone 5 pounds, but I’m now exactly 14 stone. Compared to a premier league footballer I’m still more Lurpak than six-pack, but, apart from the evidence of my bathroom scales, the tangible proof is the four inches that have disappeared from my waistline. The result: nothing fits.

So this week I’ve been searching out the clothes I carefully stored away when I finally admitted defeat in the battle of the bulge. I didn’t officially graduate from size 34 until 2005, though I should have done so ten years before. Since then, the girls in the jeans shops have looked at me disbelievingly when I demanded 36. They were right: it’s amazing how tight you can pull a belt when your waistline hangs over the top. Forever in denial, I refused to dump the old ones, ever hopeful that they might come in useful. But then, I never throw anything away.

I’m an incorrigible hoarder. There’s a drawer in the kitchen with all manner of useful things. This morning’s inventory comprised:

4 packets of unpronounceable prescription drugs well past their sell-by date
2 dried-up tubes of glue
4 plastic napkin rings
3 tiny screwdrivers and a keyring – all from Christmas crackers
4 torches with dead batteries
20 new A4 batteries, mixed up with 20 old ones (I’ve no way of telling which is which)
3 ancient mobile phones, without chargers
1 brand new carbon monoxide alarm (bought in 2007)
5 sets of chopsticks from Chinese takeaways
31 keys from long-forgotten houses, cars, sheds and bicycles
1 half-empty packet of broad bean seeds, expiry 2009
8 packets of unopened cut flower food
1 Farrow and Ball paint chart
7 picture hooks without nails

They’ll all still be there a year from now.

That’s the contents of just one drawer. I have stashed useless junk all over the house; the garden shed is an embarrassment, my tool-box overflows with spare bits, and the bathroom has a cupboard piled with shampoo from every hotel room I’ve ever visited.

All this is based on the philosophy, doubtless learned from my mother, that nothing should ever be thrown away. Well, she was wrong. Because this morning I put on the jeans and strutted downstairs to show Jo.

“Look”, I proclaimed proudly, pointing down to where my stomach used to be. She looked horrified. “Take those off immediately”, adding darkly, “and never, ever, wear them again”.

I looked in the mirror: she was right. Tight thighs, flares: I must have bought them in the 80s.

I’ve put them back in the drawer, just in case 80’s Retro comes back or we get invited to a fancy dress party. They’ll lie there beside their size 36 cousins, who are convinced they won’t be there for ever. Rejected for now, as Jo and I go off to the mall to buy me a new wardrobe, they’ll be waiting smugly for the inches to go back on once this wretched diet fades into history. I just hope they’ll be completely out of fashion by the time that happens.

Saving The Film Industry

In 1993 I was invited to become chairman of PACT, the body that represents every film and television producer in the UK. Although my experience was limited to the small screen, I had to write to the membership setting out a strategy for helping both sides of the production spectrum.

TV was easy: as someone who’d left the north east after school and spent his entire career in London, I wanted to help my colleagues who’d remained in the regions. So we started a campaign that led directly to the BBC and Channel 4 quotas for programmes produced outside the M25: they exist to this day, and have resulted in thousands of hours of regional production.

Film policy was tougher to get my head around, because I knew nothing about the politics of the industry. I asked the chief executive of PACT, John Woodward, what British cinema needed most. He said simply, “More British films”. Apparently more than 95% of all films shown in UK cinemas were American. “What we need are tax incentives to bring money into UK film production”.

“Well, that’s easy”, I said naively, “all our MPs will find it appalling that we’re feeding our children a diet of American movies. It’s a cultural argument.”

John shook his head. It wasn’t as simple as it looked. The Conservatives had never looked kindly on film luvvies: many of our stars names were openly left of centre and frequently showed up at Labour fund-raising events. And the cultural argument was a non-starter: one only had to look at the isolationist French film industry, producing esoteric films at a huge cost in public subsidy. Nor could we use anti-American sentiment: our cinemas were controlled by the American distributors, so we had to carry Hollywood with us.

This needed to be a commercial, not cultural, argument. There were huge financial benefits to the economy from film production, and we had to convince the government that our industry was capable of making big profitable blockbusters as well as art house classics.

So one morning in 1994 John and I hosted a press conference in the Savoy Hotel, with Michael Winner on one side, Tim Bevan of Working Title on the other, and men in ties from Warner Brothers and Paramount nodding tacit approval; together we launched a campaign for tax breaks for British films.

It was the first time the entire film industry had come together with a united voice. But it took many years of lobbying and a change of government before the campaign succeeded. To persuade Gordon Brown, we produced a complex financial model that showed the economic benefits that would derive from a relatively modest tax concession.

We got our sums right. Since the breaks were brought in, the proportion of UK films shown in our cinemas has more than tripled to 17% and British films now contribute £4.3 billion a year to our economy.

So it’s not surprising there’s been such a universal outcry to the knee-jerk decision of the Culture Secretary, Jeremy Hunt, to axe the body set up to make the whole thing work: the UK Film Council. Run by the very same John Woodward who masterminded our original PACT campaign, the organisation was set up in 2000 as the cornerstone of the revitalised industry. Since then box office takings have increased by 60%, and, more importantly, over 8% of that revenue has been spent on British “indie” films. Currently 44,000 people are directly employed in film, with a further 95,000 working on ancillary services. It’s a multi-billion industry that’s the envy of the rest of the world.

Now, thanks to one ill-judged government announcement, the future of British film is in jeopardy. It’s no wonder that stars, technicians and film-lovers everywhere are up in arms.

No Saga Holidays For Me

[This week the government announced a change in the retirement age law. Companies will no longer be allowed to automatically retire people at the age of 65.]

So now I don’t have to retire when I’m 65? Phew, that’s a relief. I wasn’t looking forward to having that awkward conversation with myself in 7 years time when I’d have had to say apologetically that I wasn’t needed any more – not because my ideas had become old-fashioned or my brain too slow, but because the law said I could be sent out to pasture like an old horse. Like most people who run their own businesses, I have no concept of what retirement actually means.

On the day I joined the BBC in 1973 I expected it would be a job for life. The pension scheme promised you two-thirds of your final salary when you finally handed back your ID card at the age of 60. I kept mine as a souvenir (Staff Number 155658) when I quit to start my own business at 32. Technically I’m already a pensioner, because the BBC now pays me a pittance based on the final salary I was receiving back then. It would just about buy a subscription to Saga magazine.

Of the five trainees who joined on the same day as me, most stayed much longer and did amazingly well: one is even a Lord. I guess their BBC pensions are worth a lot more now.

Me? I’m back where I was in 1984: trying to earn a crust as an independent producer. The problem is that all the editors I pitch to are young; many are younger than my son. They’re commissioning programmes for their bosses the licence payers, half of whom are considerably older than me. Most viewers are over 50, so I think I have a right to carry on making programmes, if only for them. And my own life expectancy gives me another 23 years of potential production.

Besides, with maturity comes a better understanding of what life is about. I was so busy in the eighties and nineties that I raced through my children’s growth and my marriages, never stopping to take a breath. I lived in London, which is no place for a real human being. In those days I would no more have considered relocating back up north than the current BBC staff who are making such a fuss about moving to Salford.

Right now I’d like nothing more than to stop and savour a million things I’ve not made time for. I want to learn the names of all the plants and birds in my garden; I want to read all my unopened books and have one of my own join them; I want to cook more, learn to play jazz piano, and laugh and love through another lifetime of experiences with my wonderful wife. Above all, I want to enjoy every moment of Izzy’s childhood.

Retirement would give me the time, yet I know that none of these things are incompatible with holding down a full time job. It’s all a question of balance. Like the spokes on a bicycle wheel, all the elements of life – career, health, family, love, fun, community and spirituality – are equally essential. Sadly it takes a lot of mistakes to realise that.

My father couldn’t retire either. He was “let go” in his sixties (“Sorry, Bert, we simply can’t carry you any more”, ran the curt letter I discovered with horror one day in a drawer). Soon bored with his allotment, he became a part time bookkeeper. He clearly knew a great deal more about business than any of the people who were hiring him. One of his clients, a restaurant, was losing money and Dad quickly worked out why: the manager was squandering the profits. So they offered Dad the job instead. That’s why, when most people his age were mowing the lawn, he was a happily full-time restaurateur till the day he died.

Not A Dry Eye In The House

At least I’d been warned.

In New York hardened critics had sobbed uncontrollably; 50-year-olds kept their 3D glasses on in the street for fear of revealing red-rimmed evidence; meanwhile, their bemused children were wondering what all the fuss was about. Such, apparently, is the power of Toy Story 3 to make grown men cry.

So, fearing that this film might present my masculinity with a bit of a challenge, I came armed with a healthy dose of sarcasm. It’s worked in the past. I watched Titanic at a celebrity preview. At the climax (he dies), the entire audience laughed and cheered with relief that such a clunky, preposterous movie was finally ending.

In the 1970s I went with fellow students to see Love Story. At its climax (she dies), a single middle-aged woman about ten rows in front of us started to bawl hysterically. Her cries of distress prompted fits of giggles, which soon turned to guffaws around the theatre.

So on Saturday night I reckoned that, with a little cynicism, I could probably cope with some schmaltz about a few plastic toys. No soppy film could turn me to a blubbering wreck. Well, apart from Finding Nemo, Dr Zhivago, The Sound of Music, It’s A Wonderful Life and pretty much any movie with someone being reunited or separated in the final scene. Just in case, I popped a clean white handkerchief into my pocket. I told Jo it was for her.

It’s the last in the Toy Story trilogy (I guess it didn’t start out as a trilogy, but Hollywood does likes to cash in on a good thing). Andy, the little boy whose toys come to life when he’s not looking, has grown up and is off to college. He’s clearing out his bedroom to make way for his younger sister, and must decide what to do with the toys. Will they be taken with him, stored in the attic, donated to a day care centre, or dumped in the bin?

I’m not going to give the game away, but I guarantee that no man with children (let alone 5, of whom most have left home and one is only just discovering the joy of toys) will leave dry-eyed. I wept into my bucket of popcorn and had to sit right through the credits to calm down.

So what makes it strike such a chord? Most children in the cinema appeared to enjoy it, but none seemed overly upset as Andy goes off into the sunset.

Critics have suggested that it stirs memories of lost toys and leaving home, nostalgia for happier times past. Not in my case: I was quite chirpy about leaving for university, and dumped my toys at the jumble sale when I was 12.

No, I reckon it’s about the transient nature of life and how parents must feel about the inevitable departure of their own children. At 18 months, Izzy has already passed a major milestone on her road to independence. She now says things like “cat”, “dog”, “down” and “Daddy” and has lengthy private conversations of great intensity (although in complete gobbledygook) with her dolls. Almost overnight, she has become a tiny person, living in her own fantasy world, not ours.

We’ve only recently noticed the passing of her baby phase, now lost to us forever. “She’ll be leaving us soon”, said a red-eyed Jo, as we recovered from the movie with a bottle of strong wine. “At least the bank manager will be relieved”, I said. Jo threw me a dark look.

The fact is, in our child’s eyes we’re the toys, and, much as we love playing with her, sometime soon we’re going to have to give her up to the real world outside. And, as Woody and his toy friends found out, that’s possibly the saddest feeling any parent can have.

The Surprise

My brother-in-law sat meekly in the back of the car smothered with bright pink paper. With a gold bow stuck on top, Jo’s first surprise was complete.

Josh had flown halfway round the world to be with his sister for her birthday. Now exhausted with jetlag, he was sweating on the back seat of a hot car dressed as a parcel.

The problem was, Jo didn’t want her surprise. “It’s not my birthday till Tuesday: I’ll open it then”, she said, absorbed with Izzy in The Night Garden. “But it’s too big to hide – please go outside and open it”. She had sighed earlier as I’d said I was going to town to “collect something”.

Like all men, I normally only shop for presents at the eleventh hour, but she hoped I’d at least made an effort for her 40th. The one thing she really wanted was a pair of size 35 Christian Louboutin shoes, quite unobtainable in Newcastle, so, despite a few hints and a magazine left open at an appropriate advert, she guessed I’d ended up making the usual panic buy at Fenwick’s. She hoped I’d kept the receipt. “Just put it in the shed, I promise I won’t look”, she said. “It’s a bit bulky – give me a hand with the…dangly bits”. I’d nearly said “arms”.

Eventually I dragged her outside to look. She gasped when I opened the car door. I admit it did look a little alarming. Josh was holding himself perfectly still, arms strapped to his sides. You couldn’t see an inch of flesh and you’d never have guessed it was a body, were it not for the brightly coloured trainers sticking out the bottom. “Er, that’s just weird”, was the disappointed reaction. “Is it a Raoul Moat doll?”

She was serious. The murderer had been the only thing on our minds for the entire week. Now it crossed her mind that some shop in Newcastle might already be selling replicas. This was too eccentric, even for me. Or perhaps it was a real corpse?

Suddenly the cadaver coughed and Jo shrieked. “Open it before it suffocates”, I urged. She gingerly tore back the top, and there was her beloved brother, face now pink as the wrapping paper: “Surprise!”

Organising Jo’s 40th birthday was more complicated than any television programme.

The climax of the big day was to be a secret party at a friend’s house. For weeks emails had pinged across Northumberland as her girlfriends and I conspired. But with a week to go Jo had become increasingly gloomy. She muttered darkly about missing LA and her family; she wanted the beach and a plate of decent sushi.

Suddenly I twigged: when Jo had started dropping hints about her birthday, all her friends had made excuses because they didn’t want to blow the surprise – some said they were working, the rest were “out of town”. Her great friend Claire, in panic, said she was going to be “in Stockholm”.

Then gloom turned to suspicion: was something afoot? So we arranged decoys: a girly supper here, a lunch there, a beach picnic the following weekend (when Claire had returned from Stockholm).

The birthday dawned with breakfast in bed and a series of unexpected arrivals: a hairdresser, a masseuse, then a huge tray of fresh sashimi, made by the obliging chef at Yo Sushi. But best of all was her shock that night as we arrived at the party to the massed screams of “Surprise!” from all her friends. There was an enormous cake featuring a 40-Star Spangled Banner above an image of the present I’d given her just an hour before: the very pair of Louboutins she’d seen in the magazine.

Thank goodness it’s ten years till we have to do it all again.

Shadow Of A Gunman

[Raoul Moat, the gunman who wounded his ex-girlfriend and murdered her lover, then shot an unarmed policeman, was on the run for 7 days - just a few miles from our house. He shot himself after being surrounded by police in the early hours of yesterday morning]

It wasn’t until Saturday evening that we finally unbolted our front door. It had taken us a whole day to accept that Moat really was gone and that the threat was over.

From our house you can clearly see the ridge of Simonside, crouching like a dark brooding panther over Rothbury. We’re directly south of the town, just a few miles by crow, maybe an hour or two by slinking foot along the disused railway cutting that runs a few hundred yards from where Moat was eventually found, through the middle of the now infamous Wagtail Farm, towards our own innocent hamlet. Jo and I had studied the map: it would take him maybe twenty minutes along the back roads by stolen car, perhaps an hour by horseback – but if we were him, we’d use that old railway line. The tension blowing in the hot wind across the fields played tricks with our imagination. It was hard not to be scared: the poor dogs scarcely had one long walk all week.

Husbands worked from home, unwilling to leave wives and children alone even during the day. Some friends in isolated farmhouses moved out to stay with relatives in Morpeth. Our village shop was full of gossip and sightings: the national newspapers, which had ignored us for two hundred years, screamed headlines about the beauty of our neighbourhood and the beast that was our unwelcome guest.

Rumours reached us that Moat might have moved south and crossed into our own valley. On Thursday morning Jo saw a figure walking across the field outside the house and ran panicking to tell me. It was only the farmer, off to cut hay. His family had farmed this quiet land for 85 years and they’d never felt any threat to disturb their peaceful existence, but now even he felt concerned.

One friend lives just down the road from Pauperhaugh, where, he told us, a house had been broken into and clothing and food were stolen. According to the owner, police had taken fifteen minutes to arrive, unarmed and unwilling to enter, even though they could see movement behind an upstairs window. It took another fifteen minutes for gun-wielding colleagues to show up, by which time Moat had slipped back into the night.

Jo couldn’t understand why the police were unarmed. I explained that our police officers don’t carry guns. “How do they arrest the criminals, then?” It was a simple enough question, but I couldn’t really supply an answer. “They just politely ask them to accompany them to the police station, I guess.”

Jo laughed: America is a different world. It certainly is: though, in all the five years I lived there, I never felt touched by crime – it was only something we watched on the news.

That was what made the events of this last week so shocking. Jo and I had chosen this beautiful area largely because of its unspoilt tranquility, its remoteness, because it’s like living in a gentler, bygone era. We go to Rothbury for the market, for the rhododendrons at Cragside in June, for the butcher that sells, eccentrically, crocodile steaks along with the lamb from local farms. Like Raoul Moat, I would come here as a child, loving its isolation. As a teenager I would walk the hills above the Coquet alone, living my own world. It was a place where you could escape.

The night that Moat died, five people were injured in a shooting in Brixton. It scarcely made the inside pages, for this kind of violence is commonplace in most big cities. But for this part of rural Northumberland, the happenings of the last week will, I suspect, have brought the cold reality of the outside world just a little too close.

Losing It

About to jet off to that long-awaited sunshine holiday? Scared of dusting off the bikini and the Speedos in case you frighten the natives? Fear not: I have found the solution. Two weeks ago I was a near-obese 15 stone 5 pounds; yesterday I’d dropped to 14 stone 8 pounds.

See, it’s not only the England football team and Andy Murray who’ve lost a lot in the last fortnight – in my case, the loss is a triumph: 11 pounds and a whole two inches off the waistline. And you know how I feel? Absolutely dreadful.

In a previous post I wrote how I happened upon a French doctor called Pierre Dukan being interviewed on Woman’s Hour. Please don’t ask me why I was surreptitiously listening to a radio programme from which half the population is excluded, but the item has transformed me. I’ve already tightened my belt to the last hole, the black baggy shirts are packed away and I can look down and see parts of me that have been hidden for years, if you get my drift. Sadly I also know it’s only the first chapter of what is fast becoming a horror story.

The idea behind the Frenchman’s diet is that you eat only protein for five days. That sounds easy enough: as much lean meat, fish, egg whites as you can bear, together with the odd fat-free yoghurt. Then you can add vegetables every other day until, like a deflated hot air balloon, you gently land on your chosen new weight. Apparently this whole process takes a couple of months, and then there’s another period called “stabilisation”, which takes even longer.

Sadly this new diet fails to warn of some important drawbacks. In order to do it properly, you have to give up all social life, get divorced, and become the grouchiest, most unpleasantly gloomy individual on the planet, grumpier than even Gordon Brown at his worst. Oh, and your body and breath begin to smell like a decomposing bison.

I’ve been keeping a regular diary of my progress on a website called www.bringingmedowntosize.com. It’s not exactly light reading. Yesterday, sitting in our favourite pub, The Ox Inn, carefully pushing to the side Mark’s delicious roast and mashed potatoes, Yorkshire pudding, stuffing and five different vegetables and slowly chewing three lonely slices of roast beef, I asked myself if it’s worth it. As my 12 year old slurped through the best sticky toffee pudding in the county, I was reassured that it’s all going to be over on August 21st – just 144 joyless meals to go.

That’s the day a very talented local photographer called Pam Hordon takes our family portrait. It was my father’s day present from Izzy, who has no idea what chaos it has caused. I’m determined that this picture will, in thirty years’ time when I’m pushing up the daisies, remind her of a svelte, confident, sprightly father. Sure, it may also capture a grey-skinned old man with baggy eyes and a headache, who’s permanently falling asleep (four other side-effects of this ghastly diet) but at least he’ll be slim. Vanity, thy name is Gutteridge.

I’ve noticed a number of things since I started. First, how much junk food is on offer everywhere you go; second, how difficult it is to find anything on a restaurant menu that isn’t swimming in sauce; third, how many pot bellies there are on the streets of Newcastle; and finally, how seductive bacon smells first thing in the morning.

Last night my friend Keith came up with a brilliant solution, an idea of such blindingly obvious genius it could have saved me all this agony. Take the photograph now, and then airbrush out the fat. It works for supermodels, apparently. Maybe you could do it with your holiday snaps as well.

Germany 4 England 1

It’s tough enough playing a sport against the world’s finest; having an entire nation screaming at you must require the utmost mental discipline.

Sometimes I wonder if we ask too much of our young sportsmen. Nearly-fully grown men, whose only talent in life is to kick a ball in the right direction, find themselves the objects of derision and hate, or can be raised to god-like status, in the twinkling of a goal net.

My eldest son is becoming a film director. He’s training himself by making commercials. He’s young, fresh, and in demand and hopes to become the Rooney of his industry. Every now and then he pitches an idea to a client, competing against other directors at the very top of our advertising industry.

I try to think what his life would be like if, every time he writes a script, 10 million people were sitting in pubs watching him type, drunkenly criticizing every line.

“That’s a rubbish strapline; why on earth did he pull focus there; he should have cut to the girl three seconds earlier”. Imagine his mental state if he knew the newspaper hoardings would scream Ben’s Blunder when he fails, or Ben’s Blinder when he succeeds. When he goes onto a film set, perhaps the youngest and yet most senior member of a 50-man crew, what if his producer roared out instructions and obscenities from behind the camera, echoed by 60,000 cheering, jeering spectators? No 20-something could cope with that kind of pressure, so it’s no wonder our England players haven’t had the easiest of rides.

Despite being a Scot, Andy Murray must have been saying prayers for England to keep on winning. As long as they survived, he’s been playing his games in a sideshow, relegated to the back pages. This England defeat means, once the nation has sunk its gloom in alcohol and recrimination for a few days, the pressure will turn on him. We love sporting heroes. We have so few of them, sadly, that when an event comes around where we can get behind someone, we do it with such passion, we often forget that the object of our support is a real human being.

They say the most valuable item in a sportsman’s kit bag is the ability to overcome fear of failure. Being able to control that fear is as important as maximising skill. The moment fear begins to manipulate the mind, confidence folds, the service ball hits the net, the open goal becomes a fortress. And once the fear of failure leads to failure itself, something we became only too familiar with at St James Park just over a year ago, then losing becomes inevitable.

It’s one of the reasons I was never any good at any sport at school; that and arrant laziness. My father was a professional football referee and played cricket for Surrey. There’s no way I could kick a ball or pick up a bat without it becoming some sort of professional trial. I know I was a bitter disappointment to him and I can still recall my fear of his frustration. Today I still can’t throw, catch or kick a ball, but boy can I shout at our national team.

It’s a big ask, but we, the fans, can help. Our honour’s list of sporting heroes hides many tales of depression and mental illness. Their fear of letting people down; their fury at a body which, through injury or fatigue, fails to fulfil overblown expectations; their lack of support from the pundits whose only advice is “pull yourself together”, has often led to serious problems, particularly for young men trying to live up to headlines and hyperbole.

Come on Rooney, we shouted today over our beer bellies. But at the end of the day, he’s only human.

Bringing Me Down To Size

Tighten your belts. That’s the message from our Chancellor tomorrow. After decades of overindulgence, we’ve all got to pull them in by a couple of notches.

Well, I’ve got news for you, Mr Osborne. I’ve tried – oh how I’ve tried – and I simply can’t get mine any tighter. Not without asphyxiation. You see, I’ve so overconsumed during the last 20 years, I’m now plain obese.

It came to a head in LA. There I was, optimistically pitching a show for young people to the relentlessly trendy MTV, when it came to me that I wasn’t convincing anyone in my black shirt and Ferragamo loafers. To these bright young things I could only have looked like an old, grey, fatty.

To make it worse, my mother-in-law has published pictures of me and Izzy on Facebook. I used to be embarrassed by my own father, who was also a considerably overweight man in his fifties. Last week I found a picture of him proudly holding me when I was 18 months old. I was appalled to see that he undoubtedly weighed less than my current 15 stone 5 lbs.

So I’ve resorted to drastic measures. Woman’s Hour has offered me a solution. The other day they featured a Frenchman called Pierre Dukan who has a revolutionary weight loss programme claiming 1.5 million devotees, including Gisele Bündchen and Jennifer Lopez. Apparently they’re all enjoying the ultimate dream: eating whatever they like in a permanent state of slimness. Dukan’s diet offers permanent weight loss despite consuming limitless amounts of proper food. You start off with a few days of eating only protein, then add in some vegetables for a month or two, and, bingo, belts tightened forever. In fact, you have to buy a new, smaller belt, because you’ll never need the big one again.

Normally I’d pass this off as another fad, but the BBC, in their unrelenting quest for balance, felt they couldn’t just give Dukan a free puff and paired him against a killjoy from the British Dietetic Association. She burbled on about the dangers of a protein-only diet and how nothing was as good as controlling calories and exercise.

What utter tosh. We’ve all been trying that for years. Our trained dieticians refuse to accept that people like me will never have the gift of willpower. We’ve been putting on a pound a year since we were 25 and no amount of advice is going to change us: we need a long sharp shock. Her smugness made me so cross, I vowed to give Dukan a go – but not till I got back from LA. Nothing was going to stop me enjoying the French toast, barbecues and wonderful red wine at my brother-in-law’s house, with portions as big as a house.

I started the diet on Thursday. After three days, I can report that it’s absolute hell. I’ve had nothing but plain meat, fish, water and fat-free yoghurt. I endured our World Cup disaster down the pub with a diet Coke (do you know how disgusting it tastes?), eschewing, not chewing, the chef’s fantastic fish and chips. On Saturday night I watched a lot of happy people getting wondrously drunk and gorging themselves at a neighbour’s party. I’ve even started a new blog, http://bringingmedowntosize.blogspot.com, to record the whole ghastly experience. Dr Dukan says my ideal weight is 12 stone 13 pounds. The way I’m feeling right now, I’ll be dead long before that.

Fortunately my resolve was strengthened by my darling wife’s clever Father’s Day present: a gift certificate for a local photographer, who’s coming to the house to take family portraits. The sort of pictures you hang on the wall and enjoy for years to come. I’ve got three weeks to transform myself. And buy a new belt.

A Visit To The Dentist

It started wobbling last Friday afternoon. Like a child’s tooth awaiting the imminent arrival of the tooth fairy, I could easily wiggle it to and fro. I implored the fairy not to come too soon: the tooth was near the front and I was in the middle of a series of pitch meetings with important television executives.

It was during one of these when I first noticed the problem. I was trying to sell a show to a man with no hair but impossibly shiny molars, which appeared to fill his suntanned face every time he smiled at my idea. I think he must have liked the concept, because his smile kept flashing at me across the room. Suddenly I became aware of my tongue catching on the side of my tooth, and I distinctly felt movement. And the more animated I grew, trying to raise his excitement in my must-have project, the more the wretched thing quivered. My tooth appeared to be loosening with every sentence: I spent the rest of the meeting trying to speak without opening my mouth. I would have made a lousy ventriloquist.

I hadn’t really noticed quite how bad my teeth were, metal lined and yellowed from years of red wine and coffee, until ten years ago when a broken filling forced me to an emergency appointment with a Hollywood dentist. The chap starred into the abyss of my mouth and said with undisguised pity, “You British, you’re all the same. Where would you like me to start?”

In California, where every mouth is a gleaming array of neat white perfectly spaced porcelain, my teeth stand out like Stonehenge: grey, neolithic standing stones set at odd angles, fighting themselves for occupancy of the overdeveloped gum space. British teeth, magnificent examples of 50s neglect.

Apparently it would take him three months and tens of thousands of uninsured dollars to rectify my smile. Just fill the tooth, please: but it was too far gone to save. Instead he fitted a rather neat crown – so neat, in fact, that I completely forgot all about it until this week. How that crown-maker must have sighed when he saw the order form – less pearly white, more the colour of macadamia nut. But when it joined its new neighbours in my mouth, it blended in like a local. There it lay, undisturbed, for ten years, chomping happily away, until last Friday. Sure enough, when I looked in the mirror the Hollywood Crown was the source of my wobble.

I spent the weekend fretting. Do I leave it alone, and hope it lasts till I reach the safety of the National Health Service, or head off to a dentist first thing on Monday morning and have it glued back in? Having no medical insurance in the United States, my wallet was praying it would last. But the thought of it coming out in the middle of a meeting with the president of NBC was just too awful.

The decision was made for me. At a barbecue on Sunday, in front of a group of complete strangers, it suddenly made its break for freedom and popped into a glass of rather good red wine. Suddenly I looked like the victim of a mugging. The people at the barbecue, some very nice friends of my brother-in-law who’d invited us to watch the Lakers game – were very sympathetic. Our host provided me with a little plastic bag to hold the tooth in and everybody pretended not to stare, even when I laughed.

So it was that on Monday morning, my crown and I headed off to be reunited at the Thousand Oaks Dental Practice. For those of us accustomed to the British version, American dentistry takes a bit of getting used to. In Britain, you book an appointment with a dentist, he says hello, sticks your crown back in, hands you a bill and you’re on your way in about five minutes. The American process took nearly an hour and a half.

On the face of it, the surgery was incredibly well organised. First I had to fill in my details online (“to save time registering”). Then when I arrived, the receptionist made me check the form I’d filled in. I sat in the waiting room for a while until a young woman dressed like a surgeon in a gown and a mask came to get me. She made me lie down on a couch and was about to set to work when, upon showing her the contents of my plastic bag, she paused and frowned. She had to consult Doctor K.

Five minutes later she returned, and took an X-Ray of my gap. In the old days you had to stick a piece of card in your mouth, which always hurt your gums, and then come back in a week to get the result. This was instant, and on a television screen in front of me. It caught two or three other teeth surrounding the gap where my crown had been – they had clearly been in a fierce battle for supremacy in my jaw as the roots had been pushed in all directions.

I was waiting for her to pop the crown back into the gap when she said I had to stand up and go to another room to see Doctor K. I guessed she was only the X-Ray taker. I think she was disappointed I didn’t need a full set.

In the next room she lay me down on another couch and left me for what seemed an age. I’d nicely nodded off when I was awakened with the jolly shout of “Hi, Tom”. Why is it that American doctors are so – friendly? None of the polite formality of the British dentist/customer relationship. Instead, it was like being in a sports bar with a rather loud basketball supporter.

“Let’s have a look at it then, Tom”, he went on brightly, looked at my gap and said something to the effect of “It’s a Goner”. He told me the roots were wasted away and that I needed a bridge or an implant. I had no idea what either were, but they sure sounded expensive and there was no way it could be done that afternoon. I asked him if he could do a temporary fix-up and he agreed, then promptly left the room again.

Five minutes later, a lady in a suit came in clutching a clipboard and sat down. She spoke like a divorce lawyer, quietly, sympathetically, but deeply serious and with perhaps an undertone of disapproval. She studied her notes. Your treatment will cost $90, she said. Did I have insurance? When I said no, she frowned. I thought she was going to ask me to leave. I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to negotiate, but $90 was actually far less than the $200 or so I’d expected it was going to cost, particularly as I’d already been there nearly an hour. “It’s OK, I’ll pay cash”, at which point she relaxed and left.

Another long pause, and this time I had completely fallen asleep, when in bounced Dr K with a loud “Right, Tom, let’s get this moving”. It took him just a couple of minutes to smear on the cement and pop in the tooth. Then he left again.

This was getting very tedious, and I sighed when Miss X-Ray came back in the room, unwrapping one of those spiky metal things. Why is that, in 2010, dentists still use instruments that look as though they were invented in Victorian times?

She scraped away, I tried not to bite her finger, and she unglamorously scraped pieces of stray cement off my tongue. Then she left again.

It was another ten minutes before Dr K bounced back in. It took him just ten seconds to finish the job – removing the last bits of cement, flossing the gap, and telling me, Tom, it was all over.

All in all, it was a curiously long-winded way to pop a crown back in. I guess Dr K had half a dozen clients on the go at the same time and that this was the most efficient way of handling them all. But I’m afraid conveyor belt dentistry is definitely not for me. Mind you, at least I can smile again till the next wobble.

Why Americans Don't Get Soccer

My friend Matt held his six-month old baby daughter proudly aloft. “Look Ella: that’s your national team. You’re watching England beating America, like they should have done in 1776”. The Americans in the room all jeered.

The baby stared blankly at the television. England players were hugging each other after Steven Gerrard’s goal. Ella may be half American – her mother Marla is my wife’s best friend – but to Matt, an ex-pat history teacher here in Los Angeles, there’s only one team she will ever support. Forty minutes later, Ella, still staring at the screen, silently changed her nationality back to American. Green’s goalkeeping gaffe was all too shocking. Even she could have held onto that ball.

It wasn’t our finest hour-and-a-half. Matt and I were the only English in a roomful of Yanks. We were still patiently trying to explain the offside rule to our ex-colonial friends, who were only really interested in talking about the Lakers game, when disaster struck. We spent the rest of the match shouting at our manager Capello.

How could we only tie with a country that doesn’t even understand the meaning of the word “draw”? Apparently real sports, like baseball, always have a winner. You just go on playing until there’s a result. In 1981 one minor league game went on for 33 innings. Mind you, they also don’t understand why Beckham can’t play for the USA (“But surely he plays for LA Galaxy?”) and they don’t get the concept of league tables at all. “So this means nobody won, right – so who goes through?” Oh, forget it. Matt and I glumly opened another bottle of Newcastle Brown.

During the game we worked out the fundamental difference between Americans and the rest of us. I reckon it’s all down to attention span. In America all sports have a series of repetitive events occurring roughly every thirty seconds. Baseball: Man throws baseball at bat, bat hits ball and Man runs; or not. Football: Lots of Men with padding get ball forwards by ten yards; or not. Basketball: Very Tall Man pops a ball through a hoop, then another Very Tall Man with a different tee-shirt takes a few steps and pops it into another hoop; or not.

You can join a game at any moment and there’ll always be someone about to succeed or fail. No wonder they find soccer boring. “So the aim is to get the ball in the back of the net, right? OK – I get that, so how come nobody’s doing it?” Americans are delightful, friendly, open, passionate, honest people, but when it comes to the big things in life, like football, they might as well be Martians. And now we can’t even beat them at our own game?

You'll gather I know nothing whatsoever about American sports. Tonight my friends are putting that right: I’ve promised to sit through their Lakers basketball game. They say they’ll convert me, but somehow I doubt I’ll have the patience for balls popping through hoops 150 times in one sitting. Not without a lot of Newcastle Brown, that is.

After the World Cup fiasco I was taken to see a phenomenon that could only happen in America. In a Hollywood recording studio hundreds of proud parents were craning their necks to see their children in fully-formed rock bands – with a stage, lighting, roadies, stamps on the wrist to get in, the lot.

The children had been coached by real live rockers with names like Muddy and Slick. They were actually rather good. Star of the night for me was 8-year-old Max in his band called The Rockaholix. As Mom beamed and Dad videoed from the wings, tiny Max, complete with dark glasses, peered over an enormous drum kit hammering away like Keith Moon. He was brilliant. I suspect it will make Izzy’s first school play – which I’m already excited about even though it’s still four years off – seem rather tame.

Lessons From a Screeching Child

Oh no, here it comes again. One deep breath and suddenly the Sunday lunchtime hubbub in the Ox Inn is cut to silence by a scream so blood-curdling, you’d swear someone had seen a ghost. Cutlery is dropped in shock, elderly women tut their disapproval. The sound is beyond loud: it’s earsplitting. Sheep four fields away stop their chewing and bleat in alarm. Izzy has dropped a carrot.

I’m not quite sure where she learnt this new technique. I don’t recall my first four children expressing themselves this way. At 16 months Izzy has discovered the voice of a diva, and boy does she like to show it off. The busier the restaurant, the louder she screams. Then, carrot replaced, she magically transforms herself back to an angel.

I guess advanced age has tempered my memories of child-rearing. My wrinkled brain will only recall images of quiet babies politely chewing their rusks as the grownups debate politics and football over long social lunches. Of course, it was probably never like that: I guess you just erase the bad recordings. Or maybe I was so engrossed in my obsession with career-building, I never really took enough notice of my children growing up.

The changes are arriving thick and fast now. This week I’m going to Los Angeles for some meetings with broadcasters about a new programme idea; I’m not looking forward to it, partly because I’ll have to watch England play the United States in the wrong country, but mostly because I’m scared I’ll miss some crucial new Izzy development.

Yesterday she had her feet measured for her first proper pair of shoes. She now runs as well as walks, but always in the opposite direction to where we need her to go. Our formerly open-plan living area is now a maze of child prevention barriers; coffee tables and low shelves lie empty, waiting patiently for the end of toddlerhood.

Izzy’s language is now so advanced she reels off whole paragraphs of gobbledygook. She’ll stumble up with a big grin on her face, stare at you with her big blue eyes and reel off a passionate lecture of totally coherent gabble. She’ll wait patiently for you to answer her, and then nod her head in approval before toddling off to tell her extraordinary story to someone else. But not a phrase of it uses any human word I recognise. It’s a wonderfully sophisticated private language known only to her, and my stubborn attempts at humanising it, by pointing at Truffle and endlessly repeating the word “dog”, have been completely ignored.

Headstrong doesn’t begin to describe my daughter. “And where do you think she gets that from?” asks my wife.

Watching a child grow is like tending a Northumbrian garden. Every day brings a new wonder and, because our seasons are so short, you can’t bear to miss a single flower. You want to freeze in time each new scene, but sadly there’s no still-frame facility. For the last thirty years, my timetable of life was dictated by projects and paydays; now there’s something immensely satisfying about sitting back and watching the natural order of life unfold.

After all, if there’s one thing that the appalling news from Cumbria this week will have taught us, it’s just how fragile and transitory human life can be. If simple, innocent lives can be taken away so easily and unexpectedly, if the security of the safest, happiest community can be destroyed by one hour of madness, the least we should do is to taste and treasure every single moment we have left.

Inside the Gates of Hell

In the gas chamber we stood in silence, taking in the horror.

A camera flash broke the moment, but no photograph could possibly reproduce the sick feeling in my spine: the disbelief that anyone could design with such evil efficiency the death of a fellow human being.

With clothes removed for fumigation in smaller gas chambers, the selected prisoners, told that they were being cleansed and de-loused, would be led into a room with the optimistic sign Brausebad – Showerbath – over the door.

Sure, there were showerheads in the ceiling, but none attached to a water supply. The door was locked and the pellets of Zyklon B, pushed through a small hatch in the wall, would do their work in fifteen minutes of wretching agony. A tiny peep-hole in the wall enabled a guard to check the killing was complete; then the bodies would be heaved out onto the pile waiting for the ovens next door, cremating all evidence of life to dust.

According to the tourist guides, Dachau’s gas chamber was never used for mass extermination. It wasn’t needed. Dachau was its own killing machine: tens of thousands died from the appalling conditions and treatment inside the camp itself. By the time of the liberation, typhus was claiming those the SS hadn’t worked to death or murdered, and hundreds of bodies were piled against the crematorium door.


Joanna’s parents have been staying with us for the last couple of weeks and while visiting friends in Munich, we all decided we needed to see Dachau. Jo’s family lost many loved ones in the holocaust and I have always regretted not witnessing for myself evidence of this darkest moment in our history.

The words Dachau and death are synonymous. It opened in 1933 just a few weeks after Hitler was brought to power by the unholy alliance of right-wing and wealthy. Originally designed to house political prisoners – the socialists, communists and political representatives of nearly half the German population who had voted against the Nazis – in a few years its function grew more sinister.

Following the institutionalisation of racial discrimination, concentration camps were constructed all over Germany; Dachau, rebuilt to house 6,000, was the model. Jews, gypsies, Soviet prisoners of war, German criminals, priests, dissidents, anyone the regime considered inconvenient, all went through the same dehumanizing process. Stripped of clothes, photographs, letters and any link with their loved ones, they also lost their rights, hope and humanity. They became non-people, so the SS treated them like animals.

The Dachau experience is worse than any horror film. In her pushchair Izzy happily burbled and munched dried apple flakes through the reconstructed dormitories where the emaciated, beaten men, crammed nine to a bed, would cherish the top bunks so as not to face the drip of human excrement from their colleagues who had died in the night. I vowed to her grandfather that I would take Izzy back one day, when she could understand.

Outside the perimeter fence, three bells started tolling. A gate opened into a Carmelite convent, and I stepped inside. A dozen or so nuns were singing prayers, as they do every day, for forgiveness for deeds of the past. I added my own.

Back in Munich, I bought a copy of The Guardian. The front page was about the rise of some British racist thugs calling themselves the English Defence League. Seeking to incite Islamophobia through violence, they are just one reason why we need to look closely at how history can too easily repeat itself.

Dachau isn’t just about the Nazis, or the past. It’s a stark reminder of what happens when mankind looks the other way and ignores the seeds of extremism and hatred that lie in the underbelly of every democracy. It’s a lesson our children must learn and never forget.

Knight On A Train

East Coast trains, Easyjet, British Airways – they’re each as dull as the other. Short haul? Long drag, I’d say. Last week I tried them all as I trekked to and from London for numerous meetings with broadcasters.

So it was a welcome relief on Thursday afternoon, when, as I was meandering up the train to find my seat, I heard a familiar voice boom out “Tom!”. It was Sir George Martin.

I’ve known George for 25 years. Considered by many to be our greatest record producer, he’s also one of the world’s nicest, most charming men. George is a towering presence: quite literally, for he stands well over six foot tall with the straight back and posh voice of a former Fleet Air Arm pilot. He had a copy of Aeroplane magazine on the table as I sat down to join him.

Now 84, he is still going strong. He and his son Giles produced the award-winning soundtrack for Love, the Cirque du Soleil spectacular based on Beatles music, now in its fourth Las Vegas year. In the last few months he’s written a seven-part oratorio, The Mission Chorales, which has just had its premiere in Santa Barbara. Meanwhile he’s filming a multi-episodic documentary on the history of recorded music for a US network. That’s why he was on the train: he’d been up to London to interview Sir Paul McCartney. I felt a surge of jealousy: I’d love to have been a fly on a wall in that room.

In fact, it was a documentary series that first brought us together. George had wanted to share his vision of popular music, so he asked me to direct and co-write a 13-part epic for Channel 4 to be called “All You Need Is Ears”. An ironic title, for George confided to me then that his most valuable assets were already beginning to deteriorate because of the relentless pounding he’d given them during his long career. In fact, on our journey last week I had to sit by his good ear, and we raised our voices over the rumble of the train, recalling the fun we’d had during the summer of 85.

We made a taster film and George persuaded some famous friends to contribute: we filmed Clapton and Knopfler showing us how to play the guitar (in Abbey Road, no less), and Phil Collins gave us a drumming masterclass. When we finished filming, Phil asked us what we were doing the following day. I told him George was getting out some of the Beatles’ original 4-track recordings to analyse how they were put together. The following morning George and I were sitting in Air Studios with Sgt. Pepper on the machine, and he faded up each track in turn, spotting mistakes. After undoubtedly the most fascinating filming session of my life, I turned round, and there was Phil Collins sitting quietly on the sofa behind us. He said he wouldn’t have missed it for the world.

The public were denied “All You Need Is Ears” because an ignorant and shortsighted commissioning editor decided George Martin was “too old and grey” in 1985. George is still sparkling today – though at one stage he opened the buttons of his shirt and made me feel his new pacemaker through his skin. Extraordinary, he said, how it keeps time at exactly 65 beats per minute. Better than Ringo, I thought but didn’t say.

An American In Confusion

So the Tories both won and lost then? Jo scratched her head in confusion. My wife has been loyally trying to share my excitement for the drama of the last few days; however, explaining to an American how the party with the most votes doesn’t automatically become the government is like reasoning with Izzy, our one-year-old, about why she can’t play with the remote control. To her it’s just unfair.

“But if the Tories can’t form a government without Nick Clegg, and Labour got fewer votes than the Tories, why didn’t the Queen just tell Gordon Brown to start packing?”

As I take a deep breath and prepare for a dissertation on the role of the monarchy I warm the teapot – another peculiar English custom with no apparent purpose.

This week we celebrated our fifth anniversary since Jo joined me on an Italian cookery course and never went home. Since then we’ve acquired two dogs, a house, a baby and a marriage. And every day she discovers something about British life to amaze and confuse her.

Roundabouts, Radio Four, rugby: there’s a never-ending list of extraordinary British traditions she’s come to accept. One of the things I most enjoy about living with her is that she questions all sorts of things I’ve always taken for granted. Like George, the postman.

Every morning he drives his van 20 miles from the sorting office to our house to deliver our bills. An hour later I drive to the village to put a pile of envelopes into a postbox which someone then takes out, puts into a van and takes back to George’s sorting office. “So why doesn’t George simply pick up our post when he comes round in the morning?” In fact, George does exactly this if we ask him - he's the best postman I've ever had in the UK - but it's only as a favour because I know it isn't common Royal Mail policy: if Britain adopted this system, which is standard throughout the United States, it would save the country a fortune and make all our lives easier. Over there every home has a mailbox outside with a little flag which you put up if you have any outgoing mail. Simples.

Jo would make a great prime minister. In just five minutes she would have sorted out not only the mail service (the word “post” would be redundant, as we’d no longer actually post anything), but also restored hygiene to our cities with weekly collections from bins large enough to hold all our rubbish, insisted that pubs offer more options than just roast dead animal for Sunday lunch (fine once a month, but every week?), and, top of her policy agenda, revolutionised the beauty salon.

Why can’t they do a manicure and a pedicure at the same time? Here it takes two hours and costs a fortune. In LA I can get both done in 20 minutes. And don’t get me onto shopping malls. How dare they charge you for parking when you’re only there to buy stuff from them?

Next week her parents fly in for a holiday. Jo asked me to make sure there are plenty of flowers in the garden. I tried patiently explaining how in Southern California you just ring up some Mexican gardeners and they come bearing instant blooms. Over here we have seasons and the herbaceous border has a mind of its own. What with this cold spell and the long winter, we’ll be lucky to have a bedful by October. She’s not impressed.

Northumberland be warned: there’ll be three Americans in the county next week, questioning our way of life. I’ve thought of hiring a local travel guide to help me with the more difficult comments. “Why do you call this little road A1 when there’s only one lane?” they’ll ask when we head up the coast towards Holy Island. “Why do your tea shops close at 4.30pm – isn’t that tea time?”

But the most important question my father-in-law will want answered, as we sit round the roaring fire in late May, will be: how on earth could a nice Democrat like Clegg ever believe he should share power with an arch Republican like Cameron? He’ll find that one completely incomprehensible.

When Did You Cry Last?

When did you cry last? It’s such a simple question, but it clearly disorientated Nick Clegg. Eddie Mair threw him this curved ball on Radio 4’s PM programme. The electorate had begun to take Clegg seriously, so Mair invited him to reveal a little of his true self. It was good timing: earlier that day, Gordon Brown had shown us his real character in the back of a car in Rochdale, speeding away from “just a bigoted woman”.

Gosh, when did I cry last? When did I cry last? You could hear the cogs churning in Clegg’s brain – this wasn’t on his list of carefully spun answers. Finally he offered: the last time he cried “was to some particularly moving music”.

Mair was having none of that. Which piece exactly? At which point Clegg clammed up: “Oh, I’m afraid a lot of music moves me so if I started giving you a list we’d be here all day”. And with that he sailed back into the safer waters of liberal policy.

Now if I were a politician (God help the country, I hear you say), I reckoned this was one question I could answer truthfully without hesitation. I’m such a romantic old softie, I could cry at a poster of Four Weddings And A Funeral. As the interview droned off into political predictability, my mind drifted to which tearstained event in my life might win the most votes.

There was the death of our dog Muka. Seventeen years ancient, I can still see her big bat ears opening with surprise as the vet injected the deadly blue liquid putting her to sleep forever. On the drive home without her, the image released such huge waves of sobbing, I had to stop the car in a layby to dry off the seats. That ought to win over the animal lobby, but perhaps it sounded too wimpy?

I couldn’t break a single tear at my father’s funeral because I was too overcome by the suddenness and scale of the event. I was 20, and it wasn’t until I was in my thirties that I went back to North Shields cemetery. There, despite thousands of additions to the vast maze of near-identical plots, I was drawn straight to his gravestone. At the sight of his name, years of pent up grief unleashed themselves. Too intrusive, perhaps? Would Mair have dared to pose that same question to Cameron and Brown, knowing that they have such raw memories close to home?

So after all perhaps Clegg chose well: music is a safe enough bet for a politician. Despite my love of opera, I’ve never dared go to a performance of Turandot, partly because I don’t want to spoil the images the music has conjured in my head, but mostly because I know I would embarrass myself hopelessly if I heard Puccini’s themes anywhere but in the privacy of my own sitting room. Like I did at an open-air Art Garfunkel concert on Hampstead Heath amongst 10,000 people picnicking on white wine and sausage rolls. Joanna loves to tease me about how everyone around us broke into fits of giggles at the sight of my face flooded with tears at the first bars of Bridge Over Troubled Water. Ah, that fatal combination of music, nostalgia and white wine.

At the North East Business Awards last week I tried out Mair’s question on some true professionals. A leading public relations expert immediately replied, “I cried buckets at my 5 year old daughter’s school play”. And one of the region’s top political movers and shakers, well used to being doorstepped by the press, said “every time I think of Madeleine McCann”. And as if to prove it, she immediately welled up right in front of me.

Two perfect sound bites: they should offer their services to the Liberal Democrats.

Cleggstacy

Nick Clegg and my one-year-old daughter Izzy have something in common. Last week they both took their first grownup steps. The two events had equally devastating consequences. Jo and I have had to raise everything in the sitting room above child height: and, having found that their opponent is a baby no more, Labour and the Tories are belatedly rushing around trying to raise their game.

I missed Clegg’s first performance because the volcano had caused me to get stuck in France. Thanks to a surprisingly luxurious ferry (I know that sounds like a contradiction, but a huge cabin with a kingsize bed, private bathroom and breakfast-in-bed hands Brittany Ferries my vote for Most Stylish Cross-Channel Ferry), I arrived back in time to miss the wedding of my old friend, Christopher Graham.

Chris has one of the most powerful jobs in Britain: he’s our Information Commissioner. Appointed by the Crown, his job is to promote openness by public bodies and protect the privacy of our data. He’s the chap who decides what we should know about our elected representatives and what the government should know about us. In short, he’s our country’s Head of Fairness and Openness, the bloke you go to if you want to find out what our MPs and public corporations are doing or spending.

We met in the early 1970s when we were both BBC news trainees. Chris had been interested in politics all his life: he was a Liverpool city councillor at the age of 21 and he tried in vain to become an MP in the 1980s. It was Chris who first drew my attention to the plight of the Liberals.

He and I had volunteered to work on the results programme on the February 1974 election. Chris was very excited because the Libs, or Soggies as we unkindly called them, were on the verge of a breakthrough. If they achieved over 21% of the popular vote, they’d end up with maybe fifty MPs, compared to the six they currently had. At long last there would be a third force in British politics.

In fact, the Libs succeeded in doubling their vote to 6 million, more than half the support of either big party, but won only 14 seats. Statistically that meant (as Chris would recite endlessly to anyone who would listen) it took just 39,000 votes to elect a Labour MP, but 433,000 votes to elect a Liberal. That’s simply not fair, said Chris. And it still isn’t.

Even if Clegg gets 30% of the vote, he’ll only get around 100 seats – compared to the 200 he deserves. And that’s plain wrong: our cockeyed version of democracy means that if one party is supported by around 39%, that party can pretty well ignore the views of the 61% who voted against them.

After the 1974 election, Ted Heath desperately tried to keep power by seeking a coalition with the Liberals. But Jeremy Thorpe’s condition – electoral reform – was a dealbreaker. This time, the winner will be the party that offers voting reform first. Irrespective of which party gets the most votes on May 6th, unless Clegg falls flat on his face in this Thursday’s debate we’re likely to have coalition politics in Britain forever. That means Lib Dems in government for the foreseeable future.

And that, of course, is perfectly fair. If the Lib Dem vote sticks at around 30%, the British public isn’t going to tolerate Labour, with fewer votes, getting substantially more seats and possibly even forming a government.

Nick Clegg’s newfound popularity has exposed the obsolescence of the British voting system, which will have a serious crisis of legitimacy unless the established parties offer complete reform. The baby is walking – there’s no going back now.

Under A Cloud

They’re piloting a new game show this week. It’s called ‘The Cloud’ and the idea is that you send half a million people to a foreign country of their own choosing and then deny them any possible chance of getting home. They have to use their initiative to beg, borrow or steal a passage back home to their loved ones. I’ve no idea if will make good television, but they’re certainly talking about nothing else here in the South of France.

Yes, I’m still here. There were around 10,000 television executives stuck down in Cannes on Thursday morning. I’ve no idea how many have made it back so far. I’ve made it as far as Toulouse (yes, I know Toulouse is actually further away than Cannes, but I thought going west would give me a better chance of escaping The Cloud, which is supposed to be the object of this gameshow).

I’m holed up (a rather apt phrase, I’m afraid) in an airport hotel. One of those boxy places you would only ever stay in when your flight gets cancelled. They do very good steak and chips in the bar. Unfortunately that’s all they do, and I’ve been here three nights already. I think I’ve begun to moo in my sleep.

Luckily I’ve kept my hire car. They’re like gold dust. Who knows where I may have to drive to in order to get home. One chap was quoted 600 Euros for hiring one to take him to Barcelona, which is only down the road. Barcelona and Madrid are spoken of with hushed reverence over breakfast. Like Switzerland must have sounded during the war.

There’s a motley collection of refugees in the hotel. An American couple is trying to fly home to North Carolina; a farmer is trying to get back to his fields in Norfolk; several primary school teachers begin a new term tomorrow; all the children are hoping they’ll never get back.

One businessman flew down for a lunch meeting. That was on Thursday. He’s supposed to be in Houston tomorrow. No amount of gold cards are going to get him there.

Several people work for the company that builds the Airbus. They have hundreds of brand new models, just a few hundred yards from this hotel. As we have a couple of pilots, several air hostesses, and an airplane maintenance engineer staying here with us, I suggested in the bar last night, only half in jest, that we might slip through the security fence and help ourselves to the new A380 which is sitting in the big aircraft hangar opposite. Then we could see what it’s like cruising at 5000 feet all the way across the Channel.

But now there’s news. Two English women, travelling with their young sons, have just come into the breakfast lounge announcing that Brittany Ferries have some space on tonight’s crossing from Cherbourg. A murmur of excitement immediately goes round the room; the Australian bursts into tears again. I’ve gone to my laptop (putting this article on hold) and checked Brittany’s French website as the British site is too overloaded. Sure enough, they can take me, and give me a “luxury” cabin, if I can make it to the coast by 11pm. I check the map. It’s ten hours non-stop: just about enough time.

I’ve never been on an overnight ferry before. Watch out Portsmouth: by the time you’re reading this I should be with you. Who knows, by tomorrow I may even be out of this wretched game show.

Lonely in Cannes

Izzy’s high chair is empty; her little cot hasn’t been slept in. I’m sitting on a balcony overlooking a cloud-blanketed Mediterranean. The forecast was sunny, but this dull weather has pretty much caught my mood.

It started as a good plan. Every April and October for the last 20 years I’ve come down to the Cannes television festival, where people buy and sell programme ideas. That’s 40 weeks of my children’s growing up missed because of late night schmoozing. This time, I thought, as Izzy is so young, why not make it a family do? I had visions of tiny toes touching waves for the first time, of sandcastles and waiters in the restaurants succumbing to her big eyes and love of pasta. So we booked a few extra days before the festival began and rented an apartment with a sea view. We didn’t reckon on the bug.

It hit Jo’s tummy on Tuesday and promptly collided with a fearful respiratory infection. Poor Jo has been confined to bed all week: Saturday’s flight was out of the question. She hasn’t eaten a thing for days, something that her stomach doesn’t seem to have noticed: it still decides it wants to vomit every few hours. Nice one.

As a husband, I’ve learnt a few things not to say this week. Like “Well at least your tummy’s flatter” or “I’m making a nice piece of tuna, would you like some?”, or “I did so want to see Izzy in the sea”. I don’t think they went down very well as each time the large paperback hit my head in roughly the same spot.

I wish I could have stayed to offer more help and support (though I’m not sure how welcome it would have been) but the market beckons. One good sale could keep our company going for a year: it’s an event we can’t afford to miss.

I so wish Easyjet flew to Nice every day so I could have delayed my flight till the festival starts. I’m stuck here like a sad out of season tourist.

The trip down was greatly enhanced by a rather mature purser, or Senior Cabin Crew, as his badge called him, with a strong West Country burr. A stand-in from Bristol depot or office or whatever airlines have, he confided to me that he couldn’t understand a single word his Newcastle-based colleagues were saying.

He was very jolly, and clearly Easyjet had introduced some sort of incentivisation scheme for the onboard catering. “Good choice, sir, you’ll definitely enjoy that”, he said rather too loudly as I ordered a ham and cheese melt. “Oh, the Starbucks coffee too, that’s a great decision. It’s an excellent blend.” I wondered if he was an exile from British Airways first class. Then he made a tannoy announcement extolling the virtues of the “absolutely delicious” egg sandwiches, which he highly recommended as they were made from the airline’s own Easylay eggs. There was a hen party on board: I think they already had Easylay written on their foreheads, if you know what I mean.

When I arrived I decided to get the taste of Easysandwich out of my mouth, so I wandered down to a seafront restaurant and ordered bouillabaisse piled high with fish, mussels and prawns. I never remember whether you’re allowed to eat crustacea with or without an r in the month, but hey, I have the stomach of an ox. By the time I finished I never wanted to see another fish again.

The seafood had other ideas. Two hours later, I began to see them all again. I’ve been up all night and I know exactly how Jo feels. She says she’s given me something to remember her by. She also promises she won’t mention tuna, but is very much looking forward to seeing my flatter stomach when I get home.

The Naked Truth

Lynda Bellingham told me Michael wasn’t the slightest concerned about seeing his Mum naked on stage, but having to touch Gemma Atkinson’s buns sent him into a right tizz. “You should have seen his eyes light up at the dress rehearsal”, she laughed.

We were chatting over a pre-theatre supper before The Calendar Girls, the play of the film of the true story of the WI ladies who posed in various stages of undress for a fund-raising calendar and subsequently became an international sensation.

Lynda, who starred in the original West End adaptation, is in Newcastle for a two-week sellout run and Michael, one of two sons from her second marriage, plays the nervous young photographer.

What I didn’t tell Lynda over supper was that generally I detest stage adaptations. They can’t hope to match the pace or sharpness of the original, and the film, starring Helen Mirren and Julie Walters, is a favourite of mine. But I wanted to show willing, particularly as Lynda was treating me and my Mum, who had been a close friend of her own Mum and Dad.

In fact we absolutely loved it. If you're in the North East, do bribe someone for a ticket before it closes this Saturday. It’s moving and real and very funny, with pace and pathos and terrific performances from a great cast. Sure, I couldn’t quite see Ms Atkinson fitting the traditional WI image, but that was probably the point: this was a cast of rebels who broke the mold and Tim Firth’s tightly woven script guarantees an uplifting evening in which Lynda Bellingham is a real comedy star.

Over supper Lynda, Mum and I chatted about old times and family matters. Well, in fact we mostly talked about illegitimacy, adoption, drinking and divorce – four of the topics that comprise a large part of Lynda’s life story. She’s just gone public about it in an honest, and, apart from the statutory mention of Christopher Biggins, relatively unshowbizzy autobiography.

I doubt the lovely Lynda has any warts – try as I might I couldn’t spot any from my seat in the Theatre Royal – but if she had, they’d certainly be in this book. Her adoption at four months, the drinking and toxic marriages, the quest for her birth mother: the book lays bare her rollercoaster life. Now, sipping mineral water with the new Michael in her life, her third and final husband, she looks radiant, happy and fulfilled. She’s at the top of her game, professionally and personally, and loving her new career as a best-selling author. She’s even writing a novel. I told her she should call it ‘Illegitimacy’, as it’s a theme that has preoccupied much of her adult life.

As the father of an adopted daughter, who’s now 21, I’m interested in how Lynda’s life has been influenced by the knowledge of her adopted status. I’ve always believed in openness and honesty with my children, as had Lynda’s adoptive parents, but, despite our reassurances of “we chose you, you’re special”, I wondered if her awareness of this mysterious other mother had created a neediness in her, a craving for acceptance engendered by an understandable fear of rejection?

I suspect the answer is yes, both in Lynda’s case and my own daughter’s; but the alternative, a childhood of deception, of hiding the skeleton in the cupboard till it emerges accidentally in adulthood, would have been far more traumatic. “When I eventually met Marjorie (her real mother, a committed Baptist) in my forties, she asked me to call her Mother,” Lynda told me. “I simply couldn’t - Ruth and Don Bellingham will always be Mum and Dad”. A delightful, generous warm couple, they gave Lynda the best childhood anyone could hope for. And finally, as Lynda says in her book, nurture ultimately wins over nature.