The Thoughts of Captain Autumn

The time when it occurred to me to write about The X Factor is now long past - it was in the audition stage, the early weeks of the series. So take that into account when you read the below.

There are people in my house who like to watch The X Factor. While I'm not a fan of talent shows (although once in a while they'll throw up a Will Young, for the most part their insistence on getting them to sing a range of styles means they end up with people who are generically competent without being individual), I have no problem with them per se. But I have a big problem with The X Factor, which goes out of its way to mock and belittle people. Most of the time these people are just sadly deluded about the level of their talent, sometimes you can't help thinking that they actually have learning difficulties (which I believe is the current accepted terminology) and someone should be looking out for them. It is the exact modern equivalent of the freak show. This lambs to the slaughter element was bad enough in previous years, when you'd have these poor saps being cut down to size by Simon Cowell and his stooges in an audition room, but they upped it this year by holding the auditions in front of a live audience. So you have people preparing to perform, thinking they might be about to have their moment, then stepping out in front of thousands of people and getting booed and derided even before Cowell gets his say.

I stay out of the room when it's on, because it makes me angry, but inadvertently caught a couple of minutes a few weeks back. It was a duo of two cousins, he 16, she 17, who had called themselves Casyr, standing for care and support your relatives. There were about 20 members of their family there and you could tell before they started to sing that they would be terrible, which they duly were. I said that this was what I hated about it, that people like them were put through from earlier unseen auditions, had their hopes needlessly raised, specifically in order to humiliate themselves in front of an audience. I was told no, all the auditions were now done in front of an audience and the judges and they just showed the best and worst. In a way it's understandable that people believe that, because that's the way the programme portrays it, even though a fairly cursory bit of maths would make it obvious that there's no way Cowell could sit and see the tens of thousands of people who want to audition. Anyway, in order to prove my point I did a bit of digging and found this. It's not exactly a shocking expose, but it brings home the wretchedness of the whole miserable X Factor culture.

Hot Fuzz then. Sigh. Where to start?

About a month ago someone in my household suggested that I watch the film Hot Fuzz. She'd watched it a couple of weeks previously and said although it wasn't great, it was an enjoyable enough way to spend a couple of hours. I didn't really want to see it, partly because I suspected that the only great joke had been in the adverts on TV (the fence one), and partly because of what I'd read and heard about it. Mark Kermode on Five Live reviewed it when Simon Pegg was in the studio and you could hear him straining to find positive things to say about it. He said it had passed his six laugh rule for what constitutes a decent comedy - six laughs out loud. And I think what put me off was that several correspondents then wrote in and asked how he'd found six. That said - and this is important - I went in with an open mind. And even if I hadn't, I'm convinced it wouldn't have mattered. I've got plenty of examples of going into something expecting, indeed wanting, it to be one thing and finding it to be another. One of each - I wanted The Office to be useless because I so hated Ricky Gervais on The 11 O'Clock Show and his chat show, but it was brilliant and my antipathy counted for nought; and I was drooling when I went to the cinema for The Simpsons Movie, only for it to turn out to be a massive disappointment which made me laugh about three times.

Anyway, Hot Fuzz. I didn't laugh once. It's obvious from the above that I wasn't really expecting to, and maybe if I'd been drunk or just watched something hilarious I might have been predisposed to (actually I'd just watched David Mitchell on good form on Would I Lie To You, so scrub that), but I just didn't find any of it funny - apart from the fence which I'd seen a dozen times before. Even if you put to one side the old hat "country people are all weird inbreds who fear outsiders" element, which has surely been taken as far as it can by The League Of Gentlemen, the jokes just weren't good enough. And as it went on being not funny, I started to get annoyed at it. About 40 minutes in I had a "give me strength" moment at this exchange:

Nick Frost: "What made you want to become a policeman?"

Simon Pegg: "Officer"

Nick Frost: "What made you want to become a policeman officer?"

So at that point I thought OK, it's not going to be funny, I'll just run with the murder mystery side of it. But then that got a ludicrous resolution - which, again, wouldn't matter if it were funny, which I presume it was meant to be - which was itself then jettisoned to make way for the interminable Hollywood shoot out ending. By which point I was so bored I just started to wind through it.

The next day, to reassure myself that it's not just me and that the film has been whipped up by a partisan British press, I went to imdb.com to look at some of the comments. Inexplicably, it's rated 8.0 out of 10. The main featured review says "Hot Fuzz is crammed full of excellent characters, ranging from the eccentric to the diabolical, and every one gets at least one laugh during the course of the movie and most of them get many more. I don't mean to suggest that this film is wall to wall gags; in fact it is far from it, instead it is just very clever and often very subtle humour that runs continuously throughout the film." Very subtle humour? Very subtle humour?! "For me this film was every bit as good as Shaun of the Dead, and it's definitely one of the best comedies ever made." This last sentence may very well be the least accurate statement ever made about cinema.

Maybe it's just me. Maybe people pissing on the floor in pubs is comedy gold. Anyway, enough of this subject - it's getting as boring as the last half hour of Hot Fuzz.

So I dyed my hair.

This may not be an extravagant gesture for most people, but it was decidedly out of character for someone who last gave a damn about how they looked over 25 years ago. I can actually pinpoint the moment at which I decided not to care about my appearance - it was July 1982, when I wore a pair of leather trousers to a Police concert in Aylesbury and was openly mocked for it. If the people of that grim little market town are deriding you, it's time to give it up. So after that I went through an extended phase of anti-fashion Hawaiian shirt wearing and then, when they all went in a car that got stolen, just gave up altogether. I can't be bothered to tie up my shoelaces. I wear slippers in the office. I don't own a suit. You get the general idea.

This apathy extends beyond clothing to personal grooming. I haven't combed or brushed my hair since I was a teenager. I shave a couple of times a week tops. I'm not a handsome man, and I see little point in wasting time and effort trying to make the best of a bad job.

But a couple of months back, I decided to dye my hair. I don't know why. It was easy to attribute it (and many people did) to the cliched midlife crisis, but it didn't feel like that. I've had periods in the last decade when I've felt like time is racing away from me, but this summer hasn't been one of them. I have no great desire to remain youthful. I wasn't especially happy when I was young, so there really isn't much to recapture. My only real achievement of any merit is fathering some children, and that's an ongoing task. So it was difficult to pin down exactly what the rationale behind the decision was. In the end, I put it down mostly to boredom. Every day the same chores, the same job, the same place, the same routine, and no realistic way to change any of it. So if I couldn't alter any of that, I could alter myself.

Here's where it got weird though. For something I did just for the hell of it, just for something to do, it made me feel good. I don't imagine I look any better, but I look different, and that's been oddly positive. There was a fair bit of mockery, which was to be anticipated, but some highly unexpected positive feedback as well. Amongst other comments, a woman at work told me it was sexy (she's heavily pregnant, it wasn't a come on, calm down). Sexy is not an adjective that has ever been used of me before, certainly not by anybody to whom I'm not married. In fact sexy is not a word anybody in full possession of their faculties would ever remotely consider using of me. But someone did. After nearly 30 years of consciously avoiding mirrors, I suddenly find myself not minding if I chance to see myself in one. I feel OK about how I look. This is a sentiment to which I can not accustom myself.

All of which made me remember that, however much we kid ourselves we're the finished article, we never are. As we stagger and stumble through life, each backward glance makes us smirk at the fool we've left behind and smile smugly at the self-knowledge that we now know ourselves and are fully grown. And it's nonsense. We're never done, we're a permanent work in progress.

One of the curiosities about supporting a football team is the misplaced sense it gives you of the prestige of a particular town or city. So it is with Gateshead, whose team is relatively minor (it has a very fragmented history and has only this season achieved the dizzy heights of the Conference), resulting in my indolently foisting upon the town, about which I know nothing, the same vague sense of irrelevance and mediocrity.

This, of course, is stupid and unjust. So as a belated continuation of my gazetteer of places Oxford have played for the first time as part of their non-league odyssey, I give you Gateshead, Tyne & Wear. It has a rich, varied history - the first recorded mention dates from 623, in the writings of the Venerable Bede, and mining in the town dates back to 1344. The first cable laid between Dover and Calais was manufactured in Gateshead, as was half of the first one across the Atlantic (presumably the half that started here and stopped when it met the American half). It is also home to the MetroCentre, which is the largest shopping centre in the European Union. That sounds a bit grim, doesn't it?

If you believe JB Priestley, it wasn't much to behold 75 years ago. Writing in "An English Journey", he said that "no true civilisation could have produced such a town", adding that it appeared to have been designed "by an enemy of the human race". And that was long before the Trinity Centre car park.

But you can't say they haven't tried to redress the balance, with the wonderful Millennium Bridge, and the extraordinary Sage.

And of course, you'll already have an opinion about this. Mine is that it is a stunning, audacious statement of civic pride and if I didn't already live in one of the most beautiful cities in England I'd be a bit jealous.

As I get older, I find religion increasingly odd. I'm a bit bemused that people don't, as they experience life and all the arbitrariness and misery it has to offer, conclude that surely it can't all be part of some grand plan or omniscient construct. I realise that my bemusement is down to my failure to understand the concept of faith, which by definition requires you to accept that there is a rationale for the seemingly irrational, but my mystification increases all the same.

Which brings me to Saint Therese. Her bones (or some of them at least) have been touring the country, and people have turned out in their thousands to see them. I'm almost lost for words at how bewildering this is to me. These are the bones of a woman who, while undeniably good and worthy, was still just an ordinary person. She lived a simple life, which apparently is what made her special. She didn't have any visions or similarly ethereal experiences. Why on earth are people bothered about seeing her bones? Which in fact you can't even see, given that they're contained in a big silver container. Which in itself is inside a perspex box. The bones are said to promote healing, and although I imagine that's the motivation of some particularly superstitious visitors I refuse to believe that tens of thousands of people are turning out for that reason. What the blazes is going on here?

Here's what I find oddest about it though. If I were religious, I'd be a lot more interested in what was happening on the spiritual plane than the corporeal one. The whole business of religious relics seems to be missing the point to me. The advantage religious people have over the rest of us (or disadvantage, depending on your perspective) is that they have a spiritual dimension which we do not. Why sully that purity of vision by worrying about bones and shrouds and miscellaneous other bric-a-brac? If God is going to be within you, surely he's going to make a direct trip. He's not going to find a route in via a heavily guarded femur.

I notice from my statistics that it is a whopping 56 days since I wrote anything. This is a long time for the as many as two people who sporadically read this weblog to wait, so here is a list of subjects about which I have considered posting recently. The first person to reply by ranking them in order will get the article of their choice forthwith:

Hot Fuzz
Saint Therese
Gateshead
Crawley
The X Factor
Dying my hair