It's a stream of feeble puns, older even than the outdated format of the show. The chairman didn't really get into his stride and three quarters of the panel trotted out the same material they've been overusing for half a century.
To summarise - in my honest opinion, the first episode of the new series of "I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue" was by some margin the best programme on TV or radio this year. An absolute delight, and I'm still smirking like am imbecile as I type this.
If you're new to the programme then you've missed fifty series of the best semi-improvised verbal playfulness the world has ever seen. There are running gags, scattergun punning and the groaningest end-of-the-pier innuendo known to man. There are fictional games and invisible sexy assistants. And now there's even Victoria Wood.
For just about all of the fifty previous series the chairman had been the great Humphrey Lyttleton, who brought a jazzman's sense of comic timing to the role. Stephen Fry was the chairman tonight, and although he is a formidable intellect and a considerable comedian, I was disappointed that he didn't really put across any kind of "voice" like he does when he's chairing "QI". On that programme he's geeky, unworldly Fry of Queen's College, Cambridge and it works well there. But it took 6 years of that show to get that voice right, so it is expecting a lot for him to shine on his first day in this job. And by the way, we're talking about a job that the last guy did for thirty years and I swear he was still improving right up to the end.
So why was it my favourite programme of this year when I am so critical of it?
It's simply because I feared the show was dead and that there would be no more of it. For me, this new series was like seeing an old friend in the street - one that I believed was dead. They might not seem quite themselves at the moment, but that doesn't stop you wanting to rush up and give them a huge hug and thank your choice of deity or muppet that they still live.
So, thanks be to Kermit; "Clue" is back ! It's a great comfort to know that I'm guaranteed at least a smile, a groan and a chuckle on Monday evenings.
Monday, June 15, 2009
Sunday, June 14, 2009
Weekend Magistrate
I volunteered for a weekend session of magistration recently. There's not much different - except that the lawyers are noticeably dressed-down and you only get the Friday overnight custody cases. By far the biggest difference though is that you sit as a bench of two Magistrates rather than three. I'm sure this has the potential for extra stress when you disagree, but it wasn't an issue this particular weekend.
I've always identified remand decisions as being the hardest part of the job, and we had a very tricky one this particular Saturday. Well, it was tricky at the time, but the more I go over the details, the more obvious it appears that we made the right decision and I can't for the life of me think why we found it so difficult.
The prosecution case concerned a married couple. The Mrs was alleged to have decided, for no apparent good reason, to start a fight in the street. She then got Hubby to finish the job, which he did by leaving the victim half dead on the pavement. She then pretended to be a witness and told the police that two other people had done the deed. Those two were arrested and it was a while before she admitted the truth.
Even leaving aside one count of perverting the course of justice, this was never going to be one for the Magistrates' Court, so we swiftly kicked it upstairs to the Crown Court and looked at whether we were going to keep either of both of them in custody pending their day before the judge.
For a young man, Hubby had compiled quite a list of previous offences - three or four a year since he was 13. A goodly number of these were marked with the asterisks that indicate that they were committed while on bail or when he was legally supposed to be on his best behaviour.
The thing about bail is that the starting point is that you are going to bail the person without conditions unless you've got reasons not to. A person with a history of violence and witness intimidation who has ignored bail conditions in the past would be an example of someone unsuitable for bail. So Hubby was going nowhere.
The lady was more difficult to assess. She didn't have much in the way of previous (or "antecedents" as they insist on calling it in court) and the Prosecution suggested that since she had two small children at home then bail with some conditions would be suitable.
However, she had been heard to say that she was going to "sort out" the prosecution witness, which was believable given that she was already pleading guilty to perverting the course of justice.
Did we think that she was a threat to the public and was capable of interfering with witnesses ? Well, yes we did, so we remanded her in custody, and her kids are staying with their grandparents for a while. Not something you do lightly, but it needed doing.
There's a rather cruel piece of theatre that goes on when the bail decision is announced. As you say "bail is not granted", the handcuffs are put onto the Accused with an audible click and they are led away. When this happened to the lady, she burst into tears, as did some of her supporters in the public gallery. Seems a little unnecessary to my way of thinking - they are after all in a glass block surrounded by trained security guards.
I've always identified remand decisions as being the hardest part of the job, and we had a very tricky one this particular Saturday. Well, it was tricky at the time, but the more I go over the details, the more obvious it appears that we made the right decision and I can't for the life of me think why we found it so difficult.
The prosecution case concerned a married couple. The Mrs was alleged to have decided, for no apparent good reason, to start a fight in the street. She then got Hubby to finish the job, which he did by leaving the victim half dead on the pavement. She then pretended to be a witness and told the police that two other people had done the deed. Those two were arrested and it was a while before she admitted the truth.
Even leaving aside one count of perverting the course of justice, this was never going to be one for the Magistrates' Court, so we swiftly kicked it upstairs to the Crown Court and looked at whether we were going to keep either of both of them in custody pending their day before the judge.
For a young man, Hubby had compiled quite a list of previous offences - three or four a year since he was 13. A goodly number of these were marked with the asterisks that indicate that they were committed while on bail or when he was legally supposed to be on his best behaviour.
The thing about bail is that the starting point is that you are going to bail the person without conditions unless you've got reasons not to. A person with a history of violence and witness intimidation who has ignored bail conditions in the past would be an example of someone unsuitable for bail. So Hubby was going nowhere.
The lady was more difficult to assess. She didn't have much in the way of previous (or "antecedents" as they insist on calling it in court) and the Prosecution suggested that since she had two small children at home then bail with some conditions would be suitable.
However, she had been heard to say that she was going to "sort out" the prosecution witness, which was believable given that she was already pleading guilty to perverting the course of justice.
Did we think that she was a threat to the public and was capable of interfering with witnesses ? Well, yes we did, so we remanded her in custody, and her kids are staying with their grandparents for a while. Not something you do lightly, but it needed doing.
There's a rather cruel piece of theatre that goes on when the bail decision is announced. As you say "bail is not granted", the handcuffs are put onto the Accused with an audible click and they are led away. When this happened to the lady, she burst into tears, as did some of her supporters in the public gallery. Seems a little unnecessary to my way of thinking - they are after all in a glass block surrounded by trained security guards.
Tuesday, June 09, 2009
Safety Song
Seat belts, air bags and ABS are all useful safety gadgets, but if we're really serious about car safety then all cars should have Fairground Attraction's music installed as standard.
The M4 was jammed this morning and it was raining. There was a lot of traffic coming off at my junction, and nobody seemed to grasp the basic physics of using a roundabout. I sighed and put on some music.
CD1 failed,either because it's a scratchy charity shop CD or because my CD player is failing. Blood pressure up.
CD2 was Portishead's excellent but downbeat third album. Not now.
CD3 was a best of Fairground Attraction and Eddi Reader compilation.
Suddenly I felt I was a spectator, watching amused as drivers repeatedly cut me up, randomly swapping lanes without indication, permission or apology. Usually I'd be trying to keep a lid on the introverted road rage in my head, but instead I was singing along to "Perfect" and "Claire" as I watched the ballet of stressed 4x4s in the rain in front of me.
Such joyful music makes you well-disposed to your fellow man - you wave people in front you, you keep your distance, you forgive bad drivers. Oh, if only everyone listened to this in the car.
Although you'd have to watch when "Ay Fond Kiss" comes on - there would be queues of traffic waiting to pull into lay-bys for a good weep.
Sunday, June 07, 2009
Paradise Downloaded
My car these days is powered by supermarket diesel, Radio 4 and poetry. This later power source arrives courtesy of the nice people at Librivox, a network of volunteers who record themselves reading out-of-copyright books and make the recordings available for free on their website.
I found them when I failed to find an audiobook of "Paradise Lost". I had been inspired to read it by Armando Iannucci's passionate and accessible programme "Milton's Heaven and Hell".
It's not as distracting as I thought to have different untrained voices reading each section of the book - the quality of the reading is high, as you would expect from willing volunteers reading a text that obviously means a lot to them. Not sure which profesional actor I'd chose to read "Paradise Lost" with Richard Burton being dead. Anthony Hopkins would probably have to suffice.
Anyway, the book.
Wow.
Like.
You know ?
Just .. er ...
Big.
Mighty.
Towering.
The reason I like Carol Ann Duffy's work is the way that she uses simple language to describe the human experience of eternal issues such Love and Hate and lots of other stuff just begging for Capital Letters.
Milton by contrast deploys a formidable arsenal of vocabulary and attempts to actually explain those eternal issues, or as he has it "... to explain the ways of God to Man".
It's as though Carol Ann is describing how it feels to watch an exciting football match, but Milton actually tries to get across how it feels to have your shirt tugged as your goalie boots over a last minute hopeful Hail Mary freekick into the box and a dozen heads rise hoping against hope for a miracle.
My instinctive religio-phobia has kept me away from this book for so long, and that's a pity. Like so many cultures through history, Milton uses The Gods as metaphors for human emotions and experiences. I'm sure many devout Christians would dislike some of this book. This atheist absolutely loved it though. I didn't get all the classical and biblical allusions, but at those points you just let the pure music of words wash over you.
But not to the extent that you forget you're responsible for steering a ton and a half of metal doing 69.5 mph on the M6.
I found them when I failed to find an audiobook of "Paradise Lost". I had been inspired to read it by Armando Iannucci's passionate and accessible programme "Milton's Heaven and Hell".
It's not as distracting as I thought to have different untrained voices reading each section of the book - the quality of the reading is high, as you would expect from willing volunteers reading a text that obviously means a lot to them. Not sure which profesional actor I'd chose to read "Paradise Lost" with Richard Burton being dead. Anthony Hopkins would probably have to suffice.
Anyway, the book.
Wow.
Like.
You know ?
Just .. er ...
Big.
Mighty.
Towering.
The reason I like Carol Ann Duffy's work is the way that she uses simple language to describe the human experience of eternal issues such Love and Hate and lots of other stuff just begging for Capital Letters.
Milton by contrast deploys a formidable arsenal of vocabulary and attempts to actually explain those eternal issues, or as he has it "... to explain the ways of God to Man".
It's as though Carol Ann is describing how it feels to watch an exciting football match, but Milton actually tries to get across how it feels to have your shirt tugged as your goalie boots over a last minute hopeful Hail Mary freekick into the box and a dozen heads rise hoping against hope for a miracle.
My instinctive religio-phobia has kept me away from this book for so long, and that's a pity. Like so many cultures through history, Milton uses The Gods as metaphors for human emotions and experiences. I'm sure many devout Christians would dislike some of this book. This atheist absolutely loved it though. I didn't get all the classical and biblical allusions, but at those points you just let the pure music of words wash over you.
But not to the extent that you forget you're responsible for steering a ton and a half of metal doing 69.5 mph on the M6.
Friday, June 05, 2009
Competence
Update : Contrary to what you may read below, it's not impossible that Defence and Prosecution would agree that a remand was not required and then for the Magistrates to ignore both and lock up the Accused pending trial.
Guess what happened on my very next sitting ...
I'll leave the original text intact.
** UPDATE ENDS **
I was going to write that for me, the worst part of being a new Magistrate is that you have to fill in some really rather inscrutable Monitoring and Evaluation forms.
I love having a mentor - he's been an enormous help and support and he's even forgiven me for disagreeing with him twice in three sittings. However, you can't just have a mentor - he comes with a set of forms that need to be filled in after every mentored sitting, with questions like :-
I find it hard to list "skills/knowledge in which I am competent". How would I know I was competent ? Surely only a competent person can tell me that. All the incompetent people I have worked with were convinced of their competence, and not a few brilliant people had irrational doubts.
Anyway, I somehow managed to say something in the forms about my first three mentored sittings and some of the words have ended up in my mentor's interim report on me. The pressure will nowbe on to find something different to say in the forms for my next three sittings with my mentor.
The thing is, I have plenty to say to my mentor when I talk about my experiences and my thoughts and my plans, but it's just that none of it fits on the form, which is too busy getting me to answer closed questions with lists of the areas in which I have delusions of adequacy.
Like I said at the beginning, I was going to say that this was the worst thing about being a magistrate, but then I read about the Sonnex case and later witnessed a large slice of the media (and the Justice Secretary) apportion some of the blame for this mess to the Magitrates who released Sonnex on unconditional bail for another matter before he killed those students.
This seems a bit harsh considering
Guess what happened on my very next sitting ...
I'll leave the original text intact.
** UPDATE ENDS **
I was going to write that for me, the worst part of being a new Magistrate is that you have to fill in some really rather inscrutable Monitoring and Evaluation forms.
I love having a mentor - he's been an enormous help and support and he's even forgiven me for disagreeing with him twice in three sittings. However, you can't just have a mentor - he comes with a set of forms that need to be filled in after every mentored sitting, with questions like :-
- Did you prepare yourself for your role in the judicial process?
I find it hard to list "skills/knowledge in which I am competent". How would I know I was competent ? Surely only a competent person can tell me that. All the incompetent people I have worked with were convinced of their competence, and not a few brilliant people had irrational doubts.
Anyway, I somehow managed to say something in the forms about my first three mentored sittings and some of the words have ended up in my mentor's interim report on me. The pressure will nowbe on to find something different to say in the forms for my next three sittings with my mentor.
The thing is, I have plenty to say to my mentor when I talk about my experiences and my thoughts and my plans, but it's just that none of it fits on the form, which is too busy getting me to answer closed questions with lists of the areas in which I have delusions of adequacy.
Like I said at the beginning, I was going to say that this was the worst thing about being a magistrate, but then I read about the Sonnex case and later witnessed a large slice of the media (and the Justice Secretary) apportion some of the blame for this mess to the Magitrates who released Sonnex on unconditional bail for another matter before he killed those students.
This seems a bit harsh considering
- According to Law, everyone has an automatic right to bail unless there are certain specified good reasons for the State to hang onto them. No such reasons were stated in court
- In fact, The Prosecution didn't even oppose bail
- According to the information provided to the Magistrates, the Accused was anyway going directly back to prison on another matter, so the bail was intended as a "technical bail".
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