nature studies

I had just rung for a cab one evening  when I glanced out of the window to see two pigeons having sex on a telephone wire, in a brief flurry of activity which constituted - so it might be said - the entire point of their existence. Afterwards, the female walked off along the wire, as though taking time to think things over; when she returned to the male, he had his back to her, staring off into the distance, it seemed furiously.

They remained like that for some time, then he flew off. She followed, but only after a few minutes had elapsed, possibly not wishing to appear too desperate.

One question still torments me: did they know I was watching? Animals must be self-concious these days, what with Chris Packham. Though perhaps it's him who should be watched. On TV the other night he was reminiscing about happy childhood days when he used to rub grass snakes over his skin - as what red-blooded boy hasn't? Other treasured memories include being licked in the face by a giraffe, after which he only pretended to his Mum that he'd washed the giraffe-saliva off. I have to say, fond of Nature as I am, that he made it all sound rather sordid.

UnReal Life

Mark Wright's Hollywood Nights is, I predict, the next big step in the evolution of the 'docu-soap', just as much of a culture-shock as TOWIE was back in the day. It's genuinely mind-numbing - in a good way, of course. It's more doc than soap (someone even emerges from behind the camera at one point to confirm that they are indeed 'shooting a documentary', in case anyone was confused about that), so you might expect it to contain more reality than soapier examples of the form.

Not so! It comes across as even more unreal than TOWIE. That's character-based, but this is event-based. And the events it depicts are transparently fake. This is certainly not about reality - unless, perhaps,  it's about a reality that has irretrievably broken down.

Superficially (and actually) it's about Mark Wright going to Hollywood with what he describes as his 'entourage', an idea that someone may just possibly have picked up from the TV show Entourage. The entourage here is a group of male friends, all of whom - I somehow felt - have been selected on the basis of their being less good-looking than Mark Wright himself. In Hollywood they end up in a seedy hotel where, out in the hotel corridor, they are 'alarmed' to hear some shouting and a shot. The gunshot is a plausible noise, but the words that precede it sounds like dialogue from a terrible movie - it could almost be coming from someone's TV, except that then it would have been more convincing.

An oddly glazed-looking policeman then turns up and 'has a word' with Wright's 20-year old cousin, who he believes has been drinking. The 20-year old cousin looks about 35. The shooting appears to have been forgotten. I get the feeling that Wright is deliberately undermining our sense of 'reality' here, deconstructing the stuff of our lives in the manner of the later work of Jean-Luc Godard. Either that, or this programme has driven me insane. But it comes to the same thing.

Earlier, Mark and his entourage had had trouble finding the hotel. In a conventional documentary this could have been covered  by a few lines from the voiceover - 'Mark has lost his way',  Dame Judi Dench (or whoever was available) would say, and then they could go on to the next thing. But Wright has taken the bold step of not using a narrator, so that even the tiniest, most irrelevant thing becomes a 'scene', which has to be acted out, by people who can't act. So we get Mark in a car park, ringing a friend who knows the area, arranging to meet the friend, going to meet the friend, and finally having a conversation in which he gets round to asking the friend - 'Right, see, well, the thing is, what I wanted to ask you is - ' - directions to the hotel. It's a brilliant stroke, confronting you over and over again with the peculiar banality of Mark's situation. It is as if the viewer were being repeatedly smashed in the face with a brick. Though not a real brick.

And then there's that title! How did they come up with that? Will there be further series, called things like Mark Wright Flies Kites, Mark Wright On The Isle Of Wight, and Mark Wright's Men In Tights? And will they finally be collected into a boxed set of DVDs entitled Mark Wright's Pile Of Shite?

drooping the colour

I don't love the Queen. I heard a lot of people over the Jubilee weekend unembarrassedly expressing this sentiment, but I shall restrict myself to saying that I have every sympathy for her, as I would for any zoo animal. I'm sure that somebody must have said this before, but the Royals are a bit like zoo animals - often on display, yet requiring 'experts' to decode their behaviour and thought processes for the layman.

Admittedly, it is a very well-maintained zoo.

I went into London on the Jubilee Sunday, with Justin and Bobs and Heidi. My cousin Janet and her husband Stuart live near Waterloo, so we based ourselves at theirs and went to witness the flotilla with them. Prior to this, we went on the London Eye. It wasn't the best day for it, with misty cloud and rain gobbling the tops of the taller buildings, but it was an experience - one that made me feel slightly seasick in fact. Raising the question of what would have happened if I had been - would a team of cleaners have been helicoptered in?

I tend to agree with Stuart, who thinks that the Eye is a disaster that hasn't happened yet, possibly because it hasn't quite decided on the most dramatically effective way in which to malfunction.

As for the flotilla, by the time we got there it was hard to see the river, except in wavering patches as people closer to the Embankment than us shifted around. We hadn't had the forethought, as some people had, to bring a stepladder. So the only one of us who got a good view of the passing Royals was Heidi, up on Justin's shoulders. At one point she reported seeing 'a very massive boat with gold bits on'. But, to be frank, she was no Jennie Bond.

There was a screen showing the BBC coverage. It looked sunny on there, and for a time it seemed that the boats might appear with the sun, as it were, in tow. In fact, it was closer to the reverse - with the rain setting in towards the end of the pageant, causing us to exchange the thrill of 'being there' for the luxury of watching it all on telly.

The BBC coverage has come in for some stick and I must admit I did worry when, on a trailer for the Jubilee concert, Jo Whiley promised that it would 'blow the roof off Buckingham Palace'. That hardly seemed to be what the Queen would want - surely she had enough of that in the war? But were ITV doing any better? I caught up with them on Tuesday. Here was Mark Austin hemmed in by crowds in the Mall and looking as if he'd rather be almost anywhere else. 'Scouts! That's all I need!', he complained as a troop of these descended upon him. One gave him his woggle, or I think it was his woggle - anyway, he wasn't very appreciative. Eventually he was reduced - 'reduced' was the impression he distinctly gave - to asking a little girl who her favourite performer in the Jubilee concert had been. 'Gary', she said. 'Gary', he repeated, clearly trying to place this person and probably thinking: 'Glitter? Surely not...'

Meanwhile, back in the studio, David Starkey had burst into tears. Everything was going splendidly.

The Saddest Horse In The World

On Facebook, one of my filmic interests has long been characterised as 'anything that's four hours long, black and white, Hungarian, and stars a dead whale' - at one point I even (inadvertently, in fact) set up a Facebook group under that name. The inspiration for this was a film by Hungarian director Bela Tarr called The Werckmeister Harmonies. Well, the exciting news is: he's got a new film out! It's called The Turin Horse, and I took the day off on Friday to go and see it.

However, a suicide at Ilford had the (presumably unintended) effect of forcing me to walk from Brentwood station to Shenfield station in the hope of getting a fast train, since there were no slow ones. I ran this scheme of mine past one of the guys in the Brentwood ticket office and he didn't seem to think it would work out, but still I set off. Overshadowed as it was by the suicide and also by the fact that it was, in all likelihood, doomed to failure, my trek under grey skies was like something out of a Bela Tarr film itself. Except it was in colour.

Oh, and it had a happy ending. Well, an ambiguous ending in that I did finally manage to see The Turin Horse, which - I have to say - tested even my capacity for perverse enjoyment. I was understandably excited by the trailer (an oil lamp going out), but I wasn't quite prepared for this.

The start of it set the tone for the whole thing. The stark credits appearing over a sort of rushing sound which I vaguely imagined to be some kind of avant-garde music - until a woman went down the front to turn off an air-conditioning device.

The film is based on a story about the philosopher Friedrich Nietschze who one day saw a horse being beaten, a sight which precipitated a nervous breakdown that left him 'gentle and demented' for the last ten years of his life. This is the story of the horse - about which, so the opening narration warns us, 'we know nothing'.  

The horse (played by 'Ricsi') is good, but it doesn't get enough screen time for my liking. Instead, we spend most of the film observing a father and daughter living in an isolated shack, speaking occasionally in a functional way, while a constant wind howls away outside (not always moving the trees, disappointingly). She dresses him, fetches water from the well, does the washing. Every day they sit down to eat a meal of potatoes, of which they have quite a number - always one large potato each, boiled, and eaten with their fingers. We see them do these things over and over again. About the fourth time they sat down to eat I had the wild notion that the daughter would suddenly produce a lobster bisque from the cooking pot ('I just fancied something different tonight!')

But no. It's the potatoes again.

There are occasional interruptions to their routine, but that's it for the most part. After a while I began to know how Nietschze felt when he took to his couch. Which I suppose, was the point.

This is Tarr's last film, always supposing that he doesn't make a Status Quo-style comeback. It does feel rather final: the nearby town has been blown away by the wind (we are told), the horse is off its food, the well's run dry and the oil lamp won't work. Darkness has fallen over the land. At the very least it's fair to say that they aren't going out of their way to set things up for a sequel.

Perhaps if I had known what to expect - or rather, what not to expect - I would have enjoyed the film more. To be honest, I don't know what I was expecting. It wasn't like I was imagining that the horse would have magic powers, and go off having adventures. Time Out calls The Turin Horse a masterpiece, which will 'drill into the core of your soul'. Maybe it did, and I didn't notice. It doesn't sound like an especially agreeable process. Makes a good quote for the poster, though: 'Drills into your very soul!'

On a more positive note, however, Ricsi (who would have been sausages by now if it hadn't been for this film, at least according to Tarr) is now pregnant!

And I'm sure I'll enjoy The Turin Horse more next time. Who's with me? Better hurry, it might not be on for long...