Category Archives: Thoughts on the World

I’m slowly working through, and very much enjoying the BBC series Icons. There’s been a lot of discussion about whether it makes any sense to have a "final" in which "iconic" sportsmen, politicians and scientists go head to head, but that’s not the real issue. The big problem is that the series has wholly the wrong name, and should be called not Icons, but Heroes.

To qualify as a 20th Century icon, a person should be:

• Instantly recognisable, to a large proportion of people,
• Representative of some characteristic of the 20th Century,
• Usable in the abstract, perhaps through a caricature or a single word, to stand in for others and key concepts.

The simplest and least controversial example is probably Albert Einstein. Everyone knows that smiling face and wild hair. Through a series of seminal papers in 1905 and the following years he established not only relativity theory but also key elements of quantum theory, the two major planks which ensured that 20th Century Physics diverted strongly from the Victorian version. I can use the single word "Einstein" or draw a very crude cartoon of a smiling face with spiky hair and a bow tie, and it immediately invokes a range of concepts in the beholder.

Einstein was also a hero. He completed his early work despite a number of personal and academic setbacks. A Jew, he escaped Nazi Germany and helped the allies to defeat the axis powers, but then became a strong proponent of denuclearisation and peace. He qualifies both ways.

At the other end of the scale, consider Ernest Shackleton. Shackleton is undeniably, absolutely a hero. The story of the Endurance voyage, and how his leadership bought them all back safely despite horrendous tribulations bears endless retelling. Shackleton is certainly a personal hero to me: I have read books about him, watched programs, travelled to exhibitions. I managed to track down a copy of the wonderful dramatisation by Kenneth Branagh and we re-watched it just a few weeks ago.

But is Shackleton a 20th Century icon? How many people would recognise a picture of him out of context? I might struggle myself. Also in many ways he represents not 20th Century exploration, but the end of the Victorian era: plucky white men opening up the dark areas on the world’s map. There is a case for considering the Endurance story as a precursor to Apollo 13, that other great 20th Century tale of explorers rescued, but it’s not a strong one.

If you want an iconic 20th Century explorer, you really have to focus on aeronautics or the space race. There are many heroes, but the best chance for an icon is probably Neil Armstrong. We may not all instantly recognise his face, but that picture of a man in a spacesuit standing next to the American flag, or those words announcing "a giant leap for mankind" are certainly iconic, and representative of a type of exploration which didn’t exist before, and no longer really exists now.

In the political space, Winston Churchill is certainly an icon. His name and face, even in caricature, immediately invoke concepts such as strong leadership, freedom fighting tyranny, a blend of conservative and liberal ideals sadly lacking today. He is a clear exemplar of one side of 20th Century politics. His qualification as a hero is more nuanced: his amazing talent for being in the wrong place at the right time, his determination to do the right thing, his dominant skill as a leader, orator and writer all support it. However I acknowledge that his position on issues like Ireland and India, and his errors such as over Gallipoli and Singapore do at least slightly offset his great successes elsewhere. His icon is also capable of being misused, for example by those who view him as a symbol of British independence, who carefully ignore his post-war advocacy of unifying international institutions such as the UN and EU.

However, if you accept Churchill as a 20th Century political icon, you also have to consider another: Adolf Hitler. As an icon he qualifies without question. We instantly recognise his name and image, even if it’s just a simple cartoon of the hairstyle and moustache. He also stands as a clear exemplar of the other side of mid-20th Century politics, and a clear warning of the risks of allowing the rise of his like again. Icons do not have to be heroes. They can be villains.

A basic qualification for iconic status is that someone, or something must be famous, or infamous. However the BBC series has been so determined to not just parade a series of middle-aged white men that they have made some odd choices with the candidates. I enjoyed the story of Tu Youyou, the Chinese lady who discovered an important antimalarial drug, but can you honestly propose as a "20th Century Icon" someone whose individual identity was carefully suppressed until well into the 21st?

I have just sneaked a look at the results, and I see that neither of my prime examples of unquestioned icons (Einstein and Churchill) got through to the final. That doesn’t matter: I also consider both Turing and Mandela among my heroes, and I will still enjoy the rest of the episodes. However even if it risked being confused with that series about people with imaginary physical super-powers, rather than just real mental ones, I think the series should have been called simply Heroes.

I was really looking forward to The Favourite. It had a lot going for it. The period – the reign of Queen Anne, the end of the Stuart dynasty and the wars with Louis XIV – is an important piece of British history but has rarely been tackled in modern popular culture. The core plot of battling rival Queen’s favourites was a good one, with great scope for a hilarious period romp. The three strong leading actresses, great costumes and the wonderful Hatfield House locations were all strong positives. And yet I came away feeling very disappointed, that I had just spent two hours watching a very average film, with a great film trying to get out.

The main problem is that the film seems to be suffering a major identity crisis. It can’t quite decide whether it’s a bawdy romp, a serious drama about interpersonal dynamics or a sombre historical portrayal. As a result it misses all three targets. I appreciate that Anne was quite a tragic figure, and there are some unavoidable poignancies, but a slightly lighter touch would have let the "bawdy romp" out to play, rather than keeping it somewhat repressed.

The music (I’m very tempted to write "the alleged music") really doesn’t help. It actually took me a while to realise that the incessant sawing on a couple of string instruments was actually meant to be incidental music, rather than just some weird background sound effect representing troublesome Stuart plumbing or the like. This gets to the point where you are listening to it rather than following the action and dialog, and then you suddenly get blasted by a full "Night at the Opera" fanfare on the organ, for even relatively minor twists in the plot. It reminded me of the ghastly alleged music in Dunkirk, but at least Christopher Nolan had the excuse that he was trying to tell three overlapping stories with time playing out at completely different rates, which isn’t the case here. Now I know that occasional twinkles on the virginal or the odd burst of something recognisable by Vivaldi are very traditional, but they would have worked here, whereas what was provided definitely did not.

The dialogue was unnecessarily crude. I have no problem with swearing, but it needs to be in the right context and period. If I watch something about 21st Century New Jersey gangsters (for example), and every other sentence has a f*** or c*** that’s fair enough. Take two incompetent hit men, stick them in an enforced holiday in a charming Belgian town, and you can even make that a hilarious core part of the work, as in the incomparable In Bruges. But in The Favourite it just feels out of time, and out of place. It’s also wholly unnecessary. 18th Century English was rich with frequently hilarious euphemisms for sex, body parts and so on, and a bit of effort could have sprinkled these into the dialogue to much greater effect. As Upstart Crow demonstrates so well, you don’t even have to bother with the detailed historical research: I have no idea whether Elizabethans actually used the term "cod-dangle", but we all get what it means, it sounds right, and it’s genuinely funny.

I did enjoy some bits of The Favourite, and I did laugh in many of the right places. It’s not The Revenant. But just as the central character in that film spends a grim time hiding from his protagonists in a horse’s corpse, The Favourite feels like a better film has been partially hidden by a layer of pretentiousness and crudity which it really didn’t need.

Banks constantly tell us to do more to protect our financial details against online fraud, but we live in a world where there is often no alternative to exposing important financial information to potential misuse. The frustration is that there are some relatively simple services the banks could provide to avoid this, but for some reason, probably just their inertia, these are currently unavailable to a lot of users.

Single Use Credit Card Details

Paying for stuff online frequently involves a big act of trust – when you type in your credit card details you are effectively handing the receiving party the keys to thousands of pounds of your money. You want to hold the merchant to a very high standard of behaviour with those details, which is probably justified for a big household name, but what about other cases? A smaller organisation may be perfectly honest, but may hold your card details in a form which could be vulnerable to an unrelated attack.

Worse, the payee might not have honourable intentions for your card details. You don’t have to be doing anything very nefarious to come across potential examples: the other day I was trying to track down a manual for a second-hand watch, and the only download sites wanted me to "register a credit card" before proceeding. Possibly innocent, quite possibly not.

I really shouldn’t have to expose powerful payment credentials in such a situation. My strong preference is to use a trusted intermediary like PayPal, but that’s not always an option. The best alternative solution is the concept of a "single use credit card" – a set of virtual card details used for one specific purpose, with a short lifetime and very low "credit limit".

However while this is a well-established concept, actually getting hold of such details turns out to be very difficult. As far as I can see, no mainstream UK bank offers this service. Several of the big American banks do, but not to UK customers. Capital One have such a service built into their online support tools, and I have one of their cards, but I couldn’t access those tools with my credentials.

There are a couple of third parties offering the service in the UK, but often only with an expensive subscription. The honourable exception appears to be EntroPay. It’s a bit fiddly getting set up so that you can load their cards from your regular credit card provider, and cost me a 20 minute call to my bank, but I now have a virtual credit card with a £5 credit limit and no other uses. Ideal, but harder than it should be.

This is not rocket science. The fact that several major US banks readily offer such services confirms that this is feasible. We pay substantial fees for access to banking, so why can’t UK banks follow suit?

Payment-Only Account Numbers

In the move from cash and cheque to direct bank transfers even for small personal payments we have also adopted another behaviour which is perilously close to leaving your keys on your front doorstep. This is the practice of sharing your bank account details with anyone who offers to send you some money. This is another practice which leaves me deeply uncomfortable.

Again there is a relatively simple solution. Your account should have a second "shadow" number which can only be used for paying in money, not for withdrawals or other actions (although it might be the visible account number on payments you make). This becomes a "public key" which you are comfortable sharing, while the real account number remains a private secret shared only by yourself and your bank. That then becomes a useful piece of two-way authentication, whereas at the moment someone who knows your account details could have got them from a discarded email or similar. If someone only has the "public" number, then neither your nor your bank should take any instruction from them.

The idea of public and private keys is well established in the electronic world, and ironically the banking system has used physical versions for years – think, for example, of the "hole in the wall" deposit machines for which many people have a key allowing deposit, but only the bank has a master key for collection. However, I’m not aware of any UK banks offering this simple service.

Payee Account Verification

The next is as much about error as fraud prevention, and may be specific to certain banks, but certainly in the Lloyd’s system if you are setting up a personal payment there is zero feedback on whether you have the right account number . The system doesn’t even require you to type in the number twice for confirmation.

Any party in the chain might have made an innocent error, and if the result is a valid account and sort code combination then the funds will be misdirected. If you received payment details via some insecure mechanism such as email, it is also not impossible that a fraudster could substitute their own details, and you would be none the wiser until the real recipient complains about the missing payment.

I suppose banks might argue that showing the account payee name could allow a certain level of account number "guessing", but that sounds specious to me. The simple solution is to combine this change with the payment-only shadow number concept above.

Payment Notice

Finally a simple prophylactic against the "your money is in danger, please put it in this account (of mine)" scam. Banks could insist on either two days’ notice or a personal phone call before any transaction which either largely empties an account, or exceeds a certain threshold. Notice could be provided via the banking application to cut down on administration. For most users, most of the time, this would be no problem, and it would require that any more significant transaction is either planned, or has a "cooling off" period in which fraud checks could be carried out. "Instant access" would still be possible, but only after a phone call or bank visit in which you could be asked "has someone told you to do this?".

Credit card companies do this all the time – mine insisted on an exchange of texts and a call to OK a payment of £5 to Entropay. Yet I know someone who emptied three accounts under a scammer’s instructions before a bank manager asked the key questions. There’s a bit of a mismatch there.

Conclusion

We all need to play our part in fraud prevention, but that goes double for the banks, and a few simple service enhancements along the lines above would make financial life much more secure for all.

Is the theatre its own worst enemy? Is it the engine of its own destruction?

Let me explain what I mean. We love the cinema. We go most weeks, and most weeks we come away feeling well entertained, even inspired. We have a pretty high hit rate: I keep a note of the films we see and score them out of 10 – this year we have awarded several 9s and a couple of 10s. The last film to score less than 5 was Guy Ritchie’s execrable King Arthur over a year ago. (Admittedly, that was so bad we had to rush home and watch the Antoine Fuqua / Clive Owen version just to remind ourselves what good looks like, but failing once a year at a cost of about £25 I can accept.)

Going to the cinema can even be an "event". In the Spring we caught the first showing of Avengers, Infinity War in Barbados. With the assembled "Marvel fans of Barbados" this was not unlike a good Panto – applause for the heroes and cameos, boos for the villains, mass cheers and gasps in all the right places. Hilarious. We also went to the Dambusters 75th Anniversary event, with a great introduction broadcast live from the Royal Albert Hall, followed by a beautifully cleaned up restoration of the film. Again, wonderful.

But surely, it must be even more magical seeing great actors in person on the stage? Maybe, but our practical experience varies. For a start, you don’t always get to see the names you expect. Benedict Cumberbatch, Tom Hollander, John Lithgow and Keeley Hawes are just some famous actors we paid to see on stage, and didn’t due to last-minute cast changes. We did get to see F Murray Abraham in The Mentor. He was fine, but the play was only about an hour long, and a load of introspective b*****s. We came away feeling somewhat short-changed.

Even more disappointing: Robert Powell and Lisa Goddard in Sherlock Holmes – The Final Curtain. Now we saw Robert Powell play Sherlock Holmes once before, in the hilarious Sherlock Holmes The Musical, so we had a not unreasonable expectation of being entertained again in like style. Sadly not. The new play is a dark, grim, rambling, soul searching piece with neither action nor humour. The plot, as much as there is one, centres around Mary Morstan/Watson turning out to be Moriarty’s sister, which raises a question, not well answered, about why she waits 30 years to attempt to have her revenge. It runs for about 40 minutes each act, which is a relief given the poor writing, but poor value for money in any event. To add injury to insult this was our first visit to the Rose Theatre in Kingston, which is cramped, dark, poorly ventilated and with a poor view from about 20% of the seats. There’s a reason why round Tudor theatres were replaced by square or horse-shoe shaped ones…

Now we really enjoy the theatre, with the right content. There are some stalwarts: the local pantomimes, and musicals with high production values. (For example the current West End revival of Chess is absolutely superb, but good seats, travel and a meal beforehand are going to cost around £200 a head.) It’s also perfectly possible for theatre, even with a budget production, to hit all the spots. A few months ago we saw David Haig’s Pressure, a delightful play about both the mechanics and the personal dynamics of the D Day weather forecasts. It was educational, telling an important true story which deserves exposure, enthralling (we know the final score, but not how close it came), and entertaining – laugh out loud funny in the right places.

The trouble is that while we seem to be seeing more we enjoy on both the small and silver screens, it seems to be more and more difficult to find genuine entertainment on stage. The tendency towards a focus on grim introspection seems to be catching. For years one of our favourite theatres, The Orange Tree in Richmond, mixed into its programme both unusual subjects (the story of Gerald Bull and the Iraqi Super Gun) and innovative entertainment (French farces in the round, with sound effects instead of the usual multiple doors). However for the last couple of seasons the fayre has been endless relationship dramas, and nothing has appealed.

It’s generally a challenge, and discouraging when the cost of a night at the theatre is so expensive. Disappointment might be better managed if theatres were obliged to be more truthful in describing their repertoire: obliged to use words like "grim", "gloomy" and "introspective" where appropriate, and forbidden to use the word "comedy" unless it’s actually funny. However I suspect a challenge under the Trades Descriptions Act might be tricky…

This leaves us going less and less frequently to the theatre, and seeking other forms of entertainment instead. I know we’re far from alone – very few of our friends go even as often as we do. Oh well, there’s always the flicks.