Cheltenham Festival 07

A round-up now of some of the bits and pieces I caught up with on Friday at the Cheltenham Lit Festival. First of all, I had a fun three days enjoying the various talks and interviews I saw, leaving Mark to get on the mic. It was my good fortune on Friday afternoon to see Terry Eagleton discuss what the meaning of life was. Not wishing to make too heavy a deal out of the question (especially just after lunch) or indulge in baiting Martin Amis, Eagleton delivered a witty talk on why philosophy ties itself in knots when trying to understand the meaning of life.

Eagleton revealed that he’d definitely come close to an answer for the ultimate question, but had removed ‘the meaning of life’ from the index of his new book, in order to deter browsers. Eagleton also demonstrated excellent wit when challenged on the idea that the rich were greater fantasists than the poor. An audience member began their question with the words “Like the Irish peasant searching for the proverbial crock of gold…” and the look on Eagleton’s face was priceless, especially when he revealed himself to come from a line of canny ‘Irish peasants’.

It’s become my belief now that all questions should be screened prior to letting an audience member ask one. This was especially needed in the case of TALKING MAN. He was at Eagleton’s lecture, he was at Oliver James, he was at General Sir Michael Rose, he was at Anton Gill’s discussion with Lord Steel – he was the same bloke each time. His questions weren’t questions as much as circular verbal perambulations. Why didn’t the staff stop him? He began every sentence with “the fact is”. Surely he was aware that people were asking questions shorter than his? You know who you are TALKING MAN, Fifth Estate’s got your number.

It was a little disappointing that TALKING MAN didn’t make it to Castaway’s Choice, my second event on Friday as watching Sue MacGregor cut him short would have been enormous fun. On this panel, MacGregor kept John Simpson, Alexander McCall Smith and Simon Hoggart in check while each discussed the book that they would take to a desert island with them. Hoggart, when not discussing the testicular wrinkliness of WH Auden (yes, really) chose Troubles by J.G. Farrell, the funny and moving story of a soldier looking for a bride in 1919 Ireland. Simpson, decided to go a little more comedic with The Life and Times of Tristram Shandy a book that Simpson delights in dipping-in to rather than reading from start to finish. McCall Smith chose the works of WH Auden, especially the earlier stuff while he was still based in the UK, before moving to America. Transatlantic correspondence formed the theme of MacGregor’s choice, 84 Charing Cross Road made even more personal by MacGregor actually having known the author Helene Hanff. Overall the talk was light, with some fun anecdotage and left you wondering what books you would take with you to a desert island. Knowing my luck I’d end up on that one out of Lost with all sorts of embarrassing moments from my past picked over in minute detail by means of relentless flashbacks that do nothing to further an already tedious plot. On the other hand, I choose 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne. That’s my favourite, but what’s yours?

Anton appeared at the festival to discuss Empire’s Children, a book and documentary series that follows six prominent Brits searching for their family roots across the Commonwealth.

CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THE PODCAST

Along with his earlier book in theWho Do You Think You Are series, Anton is swift becoming a household name amongst the rising tide of amateur genealogists. But in an intensely varied twenty year writing career he’s produced more than 15 books, ranging from contemporary history to crime fiction, and including The Journey Back from Hell: which recorded the personal stories of more than 100 survivors of the Nazi concentration camps.

We sat down in the Kandinsky Hotel to talk family trees, bare knuckle boxers and the Romanian secret police…
Click here to listen in.

Pint-sized explorer Bruce Parry bounced into Cheltenham on Thursday night, and a sell out crowd of eight hundred turned out to watch. The Tribe star’s discussion raced headlong through genetics, moral relativism and ‘conveyor belt capitalism’ and seemed to leave a somewhat startled audience simpering in admiration. “Have you a Special Message for Western Society?” asked one spectator, as if questioning the risen Messiah.

In fact, he claims one of Tribe’s aims is to search out the most ‘human’ aspects of each society. Translators on site go through every second of footage, searching for the casual, generally ‘off camera’ remarks that can reveal more about the real daily life of exotic tribes than Parry’s own questions.

Does he worry about the dangers: poisoned darts, tropical diseases and all the rest? “I’m more scared of embarrassment — being filmed naked, covered in poo and running around in a bunch of cows.”

It’s a rather flushed crowd that exits the Town Hall an hour later. I’m glad my girlfriend wasn’t there.

Tonight I caught up with Sanjeev Bhaskar in the Writers Room at Cheltenham.

[audio:sanjeevbhaskar.mp3]

Sanjeev is best known as a writer and performer of the TV shows Goodness Gracious Me and The Kumars at No. 42, but this year has been on our screens in India, travelling back through one of the world’s fastest developing nations to find his father’s roots in Punjab.

We chatted half an hour before his appearance at the Literary Festival and talked India, festivals and why books are better than film…

It’s not all auditoriums and signing queues: on Wednesday night we hit the cider with Cheltenham’s performance poets, bringing live literature to local club Slak. We couldn’t work all the time…

CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THE PODCAST

The live lit events come courtesy of Voices Off, Cheltenham’s ‘fringe’ programme that aims to pull the festival out of the theatres and onto the town’s streets, pubs and clubs.

Fifth Estate caught up with Sarah-Jane Arbury, Voices Off Director, to get the lowdon – and after Sarah-Jane we’ve poems from Scott Tyrell, Marvin Cheeseman and Helen Thomas (in that order). Helen’s impressively titled chap book is pictured above.

Click to listen – what better way to spend the next four minutes?

Last night saw Cheltenham subjected to some base behaviour and debauched dalliances as the saucy side of Regency Britain was revealed.

In a show provocatively titled ‘Undressing Mr Darcy’ (in Cheltenham this is as provocative as it gets) the History Wardrobe, a group specialising in ‘costume in context’, demonstrated just exactly what it took to make a man in the early nineteenth century, when it came to clothing.

Over the course of an hour, Mr Darcy, who entered the Garden Theatre in the traditional Colin Firth style, had his clothing removed and examined by Gillian, an authority on regency clothing. We learned that men liked their hair to be styled on the statues of Roman emperors, that the type of green favoured in regency fashion was called ‘goose turd green’, that a man could cause a near-riot in Charing Cross by having a silk top hat and all this before he’d taken his great coat off. It was also interesting to learn that in an age where a shirt was considered underwear, a man would have a flesh coloured waistcoat in order to project the idea of ‘nakedness at a distance’. I thoroughly recommend the History Wardrobe talks even if you don’t have a keen eye for sartorial elegance, the number of facts and fancies you glean is worth it alone. Last night I learned the origin of the word ‘Quiz’ and what exactly false calves and a ‘Glasgow Stiffner’ was.

Earlier this week I threatened to catch up with the Jane Austen Dancers and sure enough there they were in the Festival Cafe performing the Quadrille and such like with members of the public. This was certainly a historic occasion and in the interests of posterity I decided to video it.

Oliver James, clinical psychologist, broadcaster and author last night gave a controversial and at times difficult lecture on the subject of his new book Affluenza, which examines the long-held belief that money won’t make you happy and that ‘keeping up with the Jones’s is detrimental to one’s mental health. James pushes his argument though one-step further citing political and economic reasons why people in English-speaking nations are twice as more likely to suffer from a mental illness than those who aren’t. James’s basic argument is this: We’re run by selfish capitalist governments that promote materialism, materialism makes us mentally ill – the main complaints being anxiety, depression and substance abuse (interestingly Keith Allen who arguably may have suffered from the latter also claimed that ‘materialism and MySpace’ was ruining our culture and society – single-handedly forgetting where his daughter’s fame came from).

James’s notion that pursuing money, wealth, celebrity and appearence was doing nothing for our state of mind, may seem obvious to many, especially when he described the life of a New York billionaire arsehole who had a magnificent apartment, was rude to people and paranoid and was also a sex addict sleeping with a different 18 year old each night (yeah, his life… sounds… terrible…). Instead we were asked to champion Chet a Nigerian immigrant who worked as a taxi driver and who was the pinaccle of happiness because he was effective in his workplace, he was meeting his ‘survival needs’ and he had an effective social network around him. James then went on to bemoan the fact that Chet’s children would grow-up to be ‘f*cked-up Americans’.

And this is where James really seems to have a problem. To make sweeping generalisations about a country as vast as America is not useful especially when you’re also eager to point out how rosy everything is in a country as small as Denmark. Also James pointed out that those people with a strong religious faith were less likely to become mentally ill, yet at no point in the talk did he reconcile America’s huge and diverse collection of faiths against his findings in the country. Later into the talk the States became a greater political problem for James. As far as he is concerned we currently live in an evil neo-liberal society that favours possessions above all and that was created by means of a conspiracy between big businesses that ‘bought-off politicians, academics and other businesses’ at somepoint between 1979 and 1980. It gets worse – James claims there is no War on Terror, that a country as socially bankrupt as the United States had to invent a Muslim threat in the wake of the Cold War. He was one step away from claiming 9/11 to have been a fabrication. He couldn’t resist from referring to Tony Blair as “Blatcher”. Even other scientists weren’t immune from his ranting. Richard Dawkins was apparently a tool of the neo-liberal con because his book The Selfish Gene promoted self-serving capitalism. At one point James said “not to get too Dave Spart about this” and all I could think was “too bloody late, mate”.

At his best, James gave superb insight into why some countries and socities to appear to be happier than others and his worst he sounded like a drunk activist ready to pass out under his copy of the Socialist Worker.

Conversely General Sir Michael Rose was able to give superb insight into the current problems facing the USA in Iraq by virtue of studying the lessons learned from the War of Independence some 230 years ago. Rose’s new book examines the links between the two Georges – the III and Bush – and what lead them to fight unwinnable wars in locations they didn’t understand and how a further George (Washington) taught them a thing or two.*

Rose’s talk seemed at times relentless, ploughing on to reach his objective, but the basic argument, that people should read history and LEARN FROM IT was completely true and revealed a sad state of affairs in education, more so than in the deserts of Iraq. Rose certainly knows his stuff and once you get past his slightly plummy, Sandhurst-trained voice you have an entertaining and self-effacing character who can argue why America is in the mess it is by virtue of studying history and remind us of that.

On the subject of colonialism I was fortunate to see a great discussion between Anton Gill and Lord David Steel (who looks more and more like Ernie Wise each day). I’ll say little about this as Mark will have more to write on this subject tomorrow, only that Steel was a superb guest and whose unique upbringing certainly drew a great deal of interest from the audience about him and Gill’s book.

And if you’re wondering where Mark is now, apparently he’s just made it inside Bruce Parry… draw your own conclusions.

*The Three Georges, a new musical, will make its West End debut in Spring 2008, just as soon as I’ve finished writing it.

The LongPen was ‘invented’ by me in the summer of 2004. (I put ‘invented’ in quotation marks because of course I did not do the math or build the machine, being one of those people who doesn’t know what makes the light bulb light up when you turn it on.) It is the world’s first long-distance, real-time signing and handwriting device.

It has been a long and interesting roller-coaster ride, from agonizing melt-down moments to brilliant successes, with a certain amount of jeering and egg-throwing along the way — though I am told all this is par for the course when it comes to new inventions that strike people at first as a little crazy.

How does it work? The author (for instance, me) sits anywhere (for instance, Toronto) and interacts with people at the other end (for instance, the Cheltenham Book Festival) over a video conferencing system, and then signs or writes or draws pictures that get replicated on books or other objects (for instance, copies of The Door and Moral Disorder) at the distant location.

In other words, the LongPen is not an Autopen, which signs your name over and over without your presence being required. Instead, the LongPen does whatever you have just done at your end, including ‘Happy Birthday Marge’ and a picture of a pussycat — making whatever marks you have just made, in the order and with the pressure you have made them. (The signature is a legal one – which LongPen has just had reconfirmed by an expert in this field.)

The whole interaction can be recorded, and in the case of, for instance, book and music events, a fan can take the interaction away on a memory stick, plug it into his or her computer, and put it on his or her Facebook or other site.

And the LongPen is also very green – using it to sign things instead of flying to do so shrinks one’s carbon footprint enormously, in addition to saving a lot of time and money. On the LongPen website you can find a list of all those who have LongPenned so far, and the amount of tonnes of carbon they have saved.

The LongPen now has two models — the big one that can be used for events such as the Book Festival, and the small Business Model that can sit on a desk — and is now in the process of deploying itself. All this and much more can be learned from the website.

The LongPen is known in tech circles as a ‘disruptive technology’, which means – I’m told – that it came out of nowhere, was not anticipated, is not an enhancement of a pre-existing technology, and will radically change how things are done. Author signings are just a small part of the picture!

“Don’t rush it,” was Robert Harris’ advice to would-be writers at Cheltenham on Wednesday night, announcing that his latest book had been in the making for more than a decade. Harris told a crowd gathered in the Garden Theatre that he’d been jotting down ideas for The Ghost as early as 1994 — and he had the notebook in hand to prove it.

It’s no surprise that Harris was quick to play up his novel’s lengthy genesis – since publication the critics have delighted in picking out every aspect of The Ghosts very contemporary political satire. Harris’ narrator is a professional ghostwriter hired to record the memoirs of a former British Prime Minister, now exiled in an American holiday resort in fear that a return to the UK might lead to prosecution for war crimes. It presumably had the Random legal department choking on their contracts.

Harris seemed fatalistic, if disappointed, at this reception:

I had always said I would never write a contemporary political novel, because people would consider it a roman à clef, try to work out who this character is supposed to be, or that character — which is how it’s turned out.

He was keen to emphasise that his story is entirely his own, and particularly eager to deny that his protagonist’s tangled love lives might have any possible basis in reality. “It was just what the characters demanded. I didn’t realise what was going to happen until the second I wrote it.”

According to Harris, a lot of the best writing is done ‘in the subconscious’ — and in this respect The Ghost‘s twelve year gestation clearly paid off. In writing terms this is the quickest manuscript he’s ever completed, knocked out in a four month break from his Roman Imperium trilogy.

And while previous efforts Enigma and Pompeii had each demanded as much as two years research, the ground work for The Ghost was laid in a week-long US stay in well-to-do Martha’s Vineyard. The coastal town quickly proved the ideal setting for the drama: “There is nothing more evocative than a seaside resort out of season.”

The Q&A ranged widely, from film versions of his books (“Fatherland was a car-crash of an adaptation”); to the continuing trend for ghost written novels and misery memoirs (“deeply depressing”); even veering briefly to the book’s digital future. But despite the ease of writing in a familiar political world, Harris is clearly looking forward to returning to the Ancient Romans for his next thriller: “I’m heading back to the togas,” he finished, “Where no-one can sue…”

Following last night’s talk, here’s eleven things about actor, comedian and writer Keith Allen…

1. Appeared on stage last night and within four minutes called AA Gill a c***. This had the double effect of revealing to the audience the end of his book and securing a warm round of applause.

2. Has shagged both Janet Street-Porter and Dawn French. Not at the same time.

3. Got the Sheriff of Nottingham gig in Robin Hood after a certain actor famed for his serious and sitcom roles pulled out. Presumably his family wouldn’t let him. Also the Sheriff was supposed to die at the end of series one, if said actor had been employed (death by GBH one assumes).

4. Was paid five figure sum (that we can’t possibly reveal here) for his autobiography by Ebury that was ghost-written by Allen’s ex-partner.

5. Once impersonated a vicar while hitchhiking from London to Bristol. Near Chippenham he was picked up by a couple with a paraplegic daughter whom he was asked to pray for with the family.

6. Got a place at drama college after standing on a table pretending to be attacked by sea serpents.

7. Wrote World in Motion with New Order for England and the Italia 90 World Cup. His first version, inspired by Tony Wilson’s observation that football fans were turning to ecstasy instead of hooliganism in the late 80s, went thus:

E is for England
England begins with an E
We’ll all be smiling
When we’re in Italy.

The FA rejected it.

8. Allen’s money-making scheme at Glastonbury (back in 1979) was to charge £1 for a can of lager and a free hit of Amyl Nitrate. As the rain came and the festival turned to mud, Allen ventured down to the natural amphitheatre of the Pyramid Stage. Standing at the bottom, he saved the lager, charged £2 for a hit of Amyl Nitrate and got £5 back if you could make it up the slippery hill straight afterwards…

9. Incidentally, at the recording session for World in Motion, Gazza sank three bottles of champagne in two and a half hours and then drove back to the England training camp.

10. Advice he gave Lily – “Stay off the Ketamine.”

11. Oh alright, he told us so… Ebury offered £75k, Allen and ex got it up to £90k. She received £30k, he got the other £60k.

Microphone? Check! Camera? Check! Irony? Fully developed…

Day two of our Cheltenham trip opens onto a crisp sunny morning: up tonight, General Sir Michael Rose talks about the politics of war, Tribe star Bruce Parry speaks to a sell out crowd in the cavernous Town Hall, and Margaret Atwood appears from Canada with her rather special LongPEN signing machine.

Plus we’ll be posting more on yesterday’s highlights, including talks from Keith Allen, Robert Harris and some great audio from our night out with Cheltenham’s performance poets. Come back soon…

According to the press, it is the Day of the Magpie. Alistair Darling’s eyebrows, at odds with the settings of the contrast on the rest of his face stared darkly at me from the front cover of each paper. I turned my attentions back to the countryside that whizzed past me as I made my way to Cheltenham.

I was delighted to see on my arrival that the Festival team had laid a car on for me, only to discover that this was in fact for a guest and that the attendant in question could only “take people who’re speaking”. I nodded politely and decided I’d have to walk in to town, my slab of a laptop trundling behind me like a sulky dog.

Upon arrival I was genuinely surprised at the size of the festival space. The town hall itself is big enough, a huge hall filled with chairs, bordered by corridors and function rooms. The marquee structure docks on the back of the hall by means of a covered walkway, a little bit like the plastic tunnels attached to the back of Eliot’s house in E.T.

Having got my press credentials I decided to kick off with Mark Cocker getting into a flap about crows. Crow Country is Cocker’s unique take of moving his family to a new house and discovering a ‘flat landscape’. Cocker is engaging enough as a speaker and writes with an eloquence that pays tribute to his love of poetry and that poets are ‘true naturalists’.

Cocker’s passion goes beyond his own words however as he demonstrated on stage. On commenting on a question from the audience and stating that the landscape belonged not only to us but also the flora and fauna, Cocker became choked and appeared to be holding back tears. As well as being a passionate man on and off the page, Cocker was also able to teach me a thing or two. A rookery is where rooks go to breed, it is the equivalent of that holiday hotel where your parents stayed, had too much sangria and nine months later you’ve got a little brother. A roost is where rooks will go from June through to February/March gathering every night before moving in their thousands to sleep. A sight which, very probably, also moved Mark to tears.

Witnesses to some of the most extraordinary events of the twentieth century were the Mitford sisters. The subject of Charlotte Mosley’s new book, the Mitford sisters were prolific letter writers whose diverse and extreme lives have filled up prolific column inches. With a family divided by ideological differences and social lives that encountered Winston Churchill, John F. Kennedy and even Adolf Hitler, the Mitfords are woven into the fabric of the previous century with such vibrancy that their story often seems incredible and unbelievable.

Mosley’s presentation did a fantastic job of condensing six extraordinary lives into fifty minutes and it was a delightful surprise for the audience to have Deborah the Dowager Duchess of Devonshire answer questions on stage. The best revelation though concerned Adolf Hitler’s bathroom towels which the Duchess recalled were monogrammed ‘A. H.’ after she spent an afternoon taking tea with him and her Nazi sympathiser sister Diana. The Duchess herself though came across as extremely likeable, an Elvis fan, that has kept chickens her whole life. Apparently this has kept her feet firmly on the ground, rather like the chickens themselves then.

When I suggested to Kate and Mark that we should perhaps take Fifth Estate on tour the response was extremely positive. So much so, I went home, immediately cleaned the mud off my wellies, resurrected my tent from the dead and grabbed my glow-sticks. A quick recce online revealed that the Cheltenham Lit Festival was unlikely to cater to the aging raver and would only be throwing my hands in the air if I needed to hail a taxi back to the hotel.

Including Cheltenham I’ve visited about eight festivals this year. Glastonbury was by far the biggest and the muddiest. The Great British Beer Festival at Earl’s Court was the drunkest. The Regent Street festival was the oddest, with a few carefully spaced out stages and every food outlet branded the same. Suddenly the ‘authentic Indian cuisine’ wasn’t as appetising – not that I’ve anything against brands (Russell Brand maybe) it’s just that both eateries were packed, there was a huge queue and I was hungry. Ah, queuing. Only the English could ruin a festival with queuing. Festivals are traditionally tied in with notions of celebration for religious or social reasons, usually fixed in the calendar. These days the word is used to describe any kind of event showcasing performances, opportunities to sell you goods and services or an excuse to gather lots of people together. There’s a Stop the War Festival going on in Trafalgar Square right now. Festivals are supposed to be infused with the spirit of Carnival, an opportunity to feast, drink, make merry, where social status is forgotten, hierarchies are subverted, people become other people, mischief is abroad.

Nowhere does it say anything about queuing.

See that? That’s Lovebox, Groove Armada’s two day festival for Londoners to visit without having to do any of that nasty mucking about with tent pegs or pretending to have a mystical episode with somebody you’ve just met. Except instead of being able to indulge oneself in a hedonistic party with some amazing music, it’s just a big queue. Dutifully we stood there, shuffling forward, heads down, sighing, like something out of communist Russia or the world’s worst conga.

This is the Bristol Community Festival. Unbeknown to the festival goers, staff or organisers it is the final day of the Festival ever. In around 11 hours time a downpour will begin that seals the fate of the event. With a waterlogged site and little drainage (unlike Glastonbury, which employed 6000 TONNES OF HARDCORE instead of topsoil to prevent ankle-twisting conditions and coat the festival in an inch of sludge) the Bristol Community Festival cannot go on. The event is declared unsafe for Sunday and shut. Thousands of pounds is lost in ticket sales, the Festival is now dead. So on this final day we should be celebrating, sending the festival off with a bang, raising one more plastic glass of cider. But… once again we’re stood in line waiting to be let in.

Now usually this sort of thing would be dispiriting to say the least, this year Glastonbury almost totally wiped out my enthusiasm for festivals. It was beaten to near-death sometime just before the Klaxons came on stage, a victim of a relentless attack of wind, rain and mud. Festival Fatigue, or so I thought, was kicking in. However thanks to Lovebox and the Bristol Community Festival (despite the standing about) I got back into the swing of things. I’m therefore delighted to be attending the Cheltenham Literature Festival and seeing the many and varied delights that it has to offer. However, to make sure Festival Fatigue doesn’t set in too quickly, I’ve drawn up a quick Survival guide. Think about it like a handheld Ray Mears that doesn’t stop to gurn at the camera once its taken a poo in the Arctic or eaten a grub that it claims is delicious.

1. Always take provisions.

Matt here’s already forgotten rule 1 by drinking all his cider prior to getting into the festival.

2. Bring an umbrella

See? Dead useful! UNLESS YOU’RE STOOD BEHIND THEM AND YOU CAN’T SEE THE BLOODY STAGE. Incidentally, that’s Sly and the Family Stone you can’t see.

3. Maintain communications

Especially when wrecked on ‘Badger Ale’.

4. Welcome the guests in the traditional manner

A rare pic of Mark E Smith standing up. We’ll be doing the same when Alexander McCall Smith comes on.

5. Be sure to have a great time.

After all, it’s a festival! Now, which way did the Jane Austen Dancers go?

Frankfurt? Where’s Frankfurt? While publishing’s hardest bargainers jet over to Germany for the book trade’s annual deal-athon, Fifth Estate is heading to the Cheltenham Festival for a week of the finest literary loafing – and we’d like you to join us.

From Wednesday until Sunday Fifth Estate will be posting articles, photos and podcasts from one of the foremost literary events in Britain. We’ll also be handing out the 5th Estate Daily, a special print edition of the blog that will carry all the news from each day’s events – and a digest of the best still to come.

All the stories will be collected together on our Cheltenham page for the easiest reading, and we’ll also be uploading our photos to the Fifth Estate Flickr set, which you can find here. If you’re versed in the joys of RSS, now might be a good time to subscribe for regular updates; and if you’re not, what better time to learn?

Over ten days some 400 authors are descending upon Gloucestershire, from Max Hastings to Margaret Atwood; Ian McEwan to Iain Banks. Stick with us, and as always, please do join in the debate. It’s got to be better than a cold night in Hesse…