Was Kenneth in Wallanderland worth a BAFTA?

I was quite surprised to see the BBC’s Wallander win last night's BAFTA award for ‘Best drama series’.

Having spent quite a lot of time in Sweden (and having watched scores of TV detective programmes), I thought it was an over-laboured attempt to depict an exaggeratedly stereotypal view of the country, its people and its cars.

I mention cars because the series featured one of those awful continuity distractions like open-mouthed acting that, once noticed, continues to irritate for however long you keep on watching the show. As far as I could see, every car that anyone drove in Wallanderland was a Volvo. But anyone who’s ever been to Sweden knows perfectly well that real live Swedes do actually drive other makes of car as well.

One thing that put me off was Kenneth Branagh’s dour and scruffy impersonation of the tight-lipped Ron Knee, Private Eye’s mythical football manager – though he wasn’t so much tight-lipped as sans-lips.

Another was that, unlike the best detective series, there were no laughs at all. In fact, Wallanderland was so completely devoid of humour that, by the time each one finished, you felt at least as depressed as Mr Branagh’s over-stated depiction of a stereotypical Swede who's quite likely to have committed suicide before the next episode.

Unfortunately, he didn't and I fear that the BBC will now use the BAFTA as an excuse to make more of the same.

A Labour leader with no interest in spin!

Regular visitors will know that I don’t much like the way media coverage of politics shows us fewer and fewer excerpts from speeches and more and more boring interviews with politicians who’ve been trained how to evade giving answers to tricky questions (e.g. see HERE, HERE and HERE).

As I’m planning to write more on this, I started looking through my collection of videos and came across this wonderful example of a Labour leader (Clement Attlee) showing as little interest in answering any questions as he does in taking the opportunity to do a bit of pre-election spinning.

David Cameron's attack on the Budget used some well-crafted rhetoric

Having used the neat alliterative phrase ‘decade of debt’ early in his reply to Mr Darling’s Budget speech on Wednesday, David Cameron returned to it in the second part of a contrast as he began to wind up his reply.

He then followed it up with another contrast between the last Labour government and this one, a repetitively constructed three-part list and a question – technically* pretty faultless, and hardly surprising that he was rewarded with a good deal of positive media coverage.

CAMERON:
[A] The last Labour government gave us the Winter of Discontent.
[B] This Labour Government has given us the Decade of Debt.

[A] The last Labour Government left the dead unburied.
[B] This one leaves the debts unpaid.

[1] They sit there, running out of money,
[2] running out of moral authority,
[3] running out of time.

[Q] And you have to ask yourself what on earth is the point of another fourteen months of this Government of the living dead?

(* More on these rhetorical techniques and how to use them can be found in my books Lend Me Your Ears and Speech-making and Presentation Made Easy).

Gordon Brown seems to agree that Labour is ‘savage’ and ‘inhuman’

Unless nodding your head has come to mean something other than expressing agreement with the person you’re listening to, there was an extraordinary sequence in David Cameron’s reply to the Budget speech on Wednesday in which the Gordon Brown was to be seen to nodding quite cheerfully on being told his government is ‘savage’ and ‘inhuman’:

Poems for St George's Day

A few years ago, we had a St George's Day supper in the village pub, where part of the evening's entertainment involved giving people the first line of a limerick for them to complete.

The results included the following:

A bard from Stratford called Will
Never had enough strength in his quill.
He asked for Viagra,
But never could find her.
Forsooth Will, it's only a pill.

A bard from Stratford called Will

Drank some whiskey that made him quite ill.

Those three Scottish witches

Made him sick to the breeches.

Now he drinks Gin from a good English still.

Upon the road to Priddy Fair,

I met a maid with golden hair.

We argued all night

As to who had the right

To do what with whom and where.

There once was an English rose

With a large and roseate nose.

But it wasn't much fun

When the cold made it run,

And the drips that fell from it froze.

When Henry fought at Agincourt,

He found himself ten archers short.

"I must have the barrows

With plenty of arrows,

Or this battle will all come to nought."

P.S. Since posting these I've had an email with a rather more topical post-Budget theme:

A Scotsman called Gordon McBrown
Made the English grimace and frown
By taxing their wealth
With cunning and stealth.
But they noticed and voted him down.

Inspiring banking imagery for Budget day from Martin Luther King

I’m currently preparing for a trip to the University of Michigan next month, where I’ll be running a course for Genome scientists and giving a lecture in the Political Science Department.

So, quite by chance, I’ve spent most of Budget day rummaging through video clips to take with me and came across one of my all time favorites, namely Martin Luther King’s extraordinary use of what, on the face of it, might seem like a rather unpromising source of imagery during the early part of his ‘I have a dream’ speech.

When working with clients in the banking and finance sector, I sometimes find it quite difficult to convince them that they too could be making effective use of imagery to get their business points across.

Yet here we have someone developing an image drawn from banking to get a powerful political message across extremely effectively.

So, if you weren’t too inspired by Mr Darling’s speech earlier today, here’s something completely different: read, watch and enjoy.

MARTIN LUTHER KING:
In a sense we have come to our nation's capital to cash a check.

When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir.

This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned.

Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked "insufficient funds."

But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt.

We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation.

So we have come to cash this check — a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice.

Budget speech boredom and television news tedium

It’s now thirty years since I first started recording political speeches during the 1979 general election – but I still don’t have a single budget speech in my collection.

They tend to be so long, boring and full of statistical detail and exaggerated claims about the wonderful things in store for us that there’s seldom much of interest to a speech anorak like me.

I did once manage to listen to the whole of a Gordon Brown budget speech, but the only reason I didn’t turn it off was that I was redecorating a room and didn’t want to mess up the radio with emulsion paint.

But we now have to suffer something that’s no less tedious than the budget speech itself, namely the way television news programmes report it to us.

If there’s one thing we can be sure of today, it is that scores of television news techies will have spent countless hours cooking up yet more awful slideshows to enable the likes of Messrs. Peston, Pym and Robinson to confuse us even more about what the Chancellor’s proposals really mean.