Bamber Gascoigne (or Bambi as those of us who grew up with The Young Ones would forever know him) was a famous Richmond resident. I’ve lived in or very near Richmond for around half my life but only saw him twice. The second time was in recent years, merely passing him in the street – blink and you’d miss him, deep in thought, tall and spindly like some ginger wraith, white of shirt, delicately flapping in the breeze (both shirt and man). The first time meanwhile was more memorable. I was 17 or 18 and had a Saturday job in a photocopying shop. I spent half my time in there hating every minute of it and the other half cocking up the customers’ orders. The front desk was right in the shop window that caught the sun all morning. I was sweating, in multiple senses, by an industrial-sized photocopier when in drifted this bespectacled character, tall of face, somehow nondescript and charismatic at the same time, and of course instantly recognisable, even if my familiarity with University Challenge (which he had just stopped presenting after twenty-odd years) was at that time still sketchy. (I’ve long since become a dedicated fan.) Thin, pale fingers placed a weighty pile of papers on the desk, and he asked what we charged for copies up to a certain number of sheets. I told him the price, and I’ll always remember how he replied, in that legendary enunciation: “Yes, that’s interesting.” If I’d been in a different mood, I might have found it a bit patronising, but it really wasn’t; unlike most of his Eton compatriots since, he seemed sincere. He must have left the manuscript in the shop to collect his copies later, because I remember either reading or, shockingly, making a secret copy of a couple of sheets. I don’t remember the title but it was a reference work, a sort of “dictionary of phenomena” – British phenomena, I think. His preface set out the premise – the only quote I remember was something like “Entries are listed not in alphabetical order but grouped by ‘experience’, their placement decided according to the degree to which they are lodged in the public consciousness”. The only actual entry I remember was:

bumfreezer (type of jacket)

I don’t recall now thirty years later whether “bumfreezer” was grouped by “jackets” or “style” or “weather” or “posteriors” – and as for how entries might have been decided, I am even less clear. A browse on Amazon for books by Gascoigne doesn’t list any such work, suggesting it never made it beyond a few photocopies in an airless little shop in Richmond. This is surely a shame, yet maybe it just wasn’t workable as a static reference book: what he needed was hyperlinks, which were still ten years away. Even if University Challenge was just a tad elitist in its day it’s cool to think Bamber Gascoigne was a decade ahead of his time.

There’s lots of talk at the moment about people afraid of missing Christmas because of Omicron, or having to cancel other social events to save their Christmas. It just seems crazy to me that we can’t be more flexible about this. My solution: Choose your Christmas.

This year (and last) would have been a great opportunity to turn Christmas into a moveable feast. You would still get together with your loved ones, just not all in December or when the weather’s crap. Your family might wait til March for your Christmas, or go early in November. Whenever suits.

It’s not just because of Covid – pandemics don’t happen often thankfully, but Christmas has always been mad. It’s great, but there’s so much expense and chaos. I come from a family of retailers who get no time off and collapse exhausted on Christmas Eve, and then spend 10 months not doing much. Why do we stand for this?

If Christmas could be personal and happen anytime, I think everyone would be happier. Retailers would be a bit busier throughout the year, and they’d have no mad rush at the end. Likewise, the NHS wouldn’t be brought to its knees with so many people getting ill at the same time (this has happened for years before Covid with flu, norovirus and other grot), plus you’d have a greater chance of actually being treated, as half the doctors and nurses wouldn’t be off sick themselves.

Don’t misunderstand me – I get that it’s good in dreary northern Europe to have a Festival of Lights at the darkest time of year. But we could have that anyway – and extend it. Imagine having your lights up from November all the way through February, it’d be bloody lovely.

And I also know it’s good to have a Season of Goodwill. But we could have that any day. Or every day, even. Just think: every day someone, somewhere would be having their own Christmas. More chance of running into someone in a good mood. If Christmas happened more often people would find there was less opportunity to drop bombs on someone or yell at them or be horrible to them in other ways.

In other words, instead of everyone being slightly grumpy from January to November (because no Christmas) and then very grumpy, stressed and poor in December (because Christmas), the good vibes that Christmas IS ACTUALLY SUPPOSED TO BE ABOUT would be distributed through the year and nobody would be grumpy about it at all. Wild!

At a time when we can all choose what to watch on TV when we want to watch it, and in whatever order we want to watch it in, it doesn’t make sense for everyone to be forced to have the same stress, the same expense, the same brussels sprouts AT THE SAME TIME.

So how about it. Choose your Christmas. Families benefit. Society benefits. The economy benefits. Lethal respiratory viruses won’t go nuts and blow up the NHS. It’s a win-win.

The only problem I foresee is that the Queen would be a bit busier, doing a different little speech on TV every month, say, rather than once a year. But that might be nice. She might enjoy it, too. Has anyone ever asked her? I bet they haven’t.

I got into a slight Tarantino binge this week. Lots of little Pulp Fiction clips had been coming up on YouTube so even though I’d seen it about 10 times already I gave in and watched the whole thing on Prime Video. The platform said the film was “free with ads”. I thought: ads? This was new to me. Don’t I pay for Prime already? So why ads? I was doubtful, but I watched the movie. It’s as great as it ever was and still one of my top five favourite films of all time. It’s nostalgic, as it came out when I was in my mid-20s, but also hasn’t aged a bit (except, maybe, for the phones. Ah, phones which were just phones).

However. Twice, right in the middle of a scene, practically in the middle of some dialogue for chrissake, I suddenly got an “ad”. The first ad was for, er, Pulp Fiction on Prime Video. A weird little montage of famous clips from the film. (And they are practically all famous, which makes this even more redundant.) Having an ad for a famously postmodern film in the middle of watching the film itself was I suppose suitably meta, but hey, guys, I’m a captive audience, y’know? I can’t remember what the second ad was for, laundry detergent probably.

Next night I watched Kill Bill Vol 1 on Netflix. No ads, but also: no subtitles. It’d been so long since I’d seen the film (I first saw it in the West End at the time it was released) that when it came to all the Japanese sections I just assumed having no subtitles was deliberate, that you were supposed to just work out what was going on from the tone and the action. Bold, but fair. Revolutionary, in fact. But maybe I was giving Tarantino undue credit. It was only right at the end and the famous line “That really was a Hattori Hanzo sword” which I remembered reading on screen, because otherwise I would have had no idea of what was being said, that I remembered the original did show the captions and I realised I could just have turned on normal subtitles. My mistake, but still. Ridiculous. Why should I have had to?

Then last night I went back to Netflix and searched for Kill Bill Vol 2. They didn’t have it. That’s correct. Netflix have Kill Bill Vol 1 but not Kill Bill Vol 2. The literal second part of the film. The other half. The concluding episode. This goes a bit beyond a platform not having an inferior sequel (or, in Netflix’s case more often, having all the crappy sequels but not the original). Momentarily this was enough for me to hate the world. Luckily though it was on Prime Video… albeit, yes! With ads. The ads on this movie were much worse than on Pulp Fiction, cropping up about every 20 minutes practically mid-punch. You’re watching some stylish ultra-violence and it jump-cuts to a jolly commercial. I’m proud to say I can’t remember a single advertiser or product now I sit and write this the next morning, but in the moment this was no consolation. Tarantino himself would probably approve, to be fair, as the film is after all partly a pastiche of cheesy 70s TV kung fu shows. But at least those shows were made with ad breaks in mind – films aren’t, or where films have traditionally been shown with ads on network TV (remember that??) at least someone has actually sat down and bothered to work out appropriate points in the action for a commercial break. This doesn’t even need to make dramatic sense when done properly: I remember back in the late 80s Channel 4 once showed Paris, Texas late at night and they almost used the ad breaks as poetically as Wim Wenders did his camera. There’s a beautiful point in the action where the camera roves around over a cityscape at sunset and settles on the US flag, and Channel 4 chose the ad break right then, leaving you to focus on this moment, the way the flag reminds you of the film’s title, of the film you’re watching and where it’s set and its quietness and the vast landscapes it inhabits. Prime’s take on ads by contrast is about as poetic as a kung fu thump to your face. It’s just an algorithm, and it sucks.

YouTube, which prompted me to revisit the films in the first place, is just as bad – the same ads for the same two or three “food straight to your door in 10 seconds”-type services every time you watch anything, or, when you watch something longer than about 8 minutes, again, bang, an ad for a personal injury litigation firm. To add insult to (personal) injury, platforms treat consumers like children, forcing creators to pixellate female nipples on pain of account suspension, and suppressing our content which they use as a vehicle for their profiteering if we fail to latch on to their boring new features they’ve only created to give themselves more commercial potential.

How did we get to a point where we’ve allowed our audio-visual entertainment to be run by computers programmed by people who care only about money and not about cinema or any sort of user experience? It’s little more than legitimised spam. It’s bad enough having crappy political leadership in our lives, but this takes the biscuit. At least there’s some notion of “democracy” in government. It feels decreasingly true, but you can still just about vote those people out. By comparison you can’t decide how Netflix or Prime Video or YouTube or Instagram are run. You could stop using them, but you know you won’t, because they’re too massive. Nobody will see your great photo anywhere else. Blockbuster doesn’t exist anymore and you want to make a viewing decision from your sofa, so you don’t want to wait for the DVD to be delivered (by, er, Amazon).

This experience happened during a week in which Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram all went offline for hours because a) they’re all owned by the same people and b) someone thought it would be a good idea for them all to be linked by the same technology.

All of these are services that all of us use, not because we want to be sold something but because we have something to offer the world or share with people – social networking, remember? – and we have failed ourselves.

I had a random memory yesterday. Quite often as a kid my dad would take me on long walks around central London on Sunday afternoons. Invariably my mum would stay at home and do the housework (partly because she preferred to and partly, she later told me, because she thought it was a good opportunity for father/son bonding). On one of these occasions my dad and I were at Waterloo station on the way home and popped into WH Smith, one of my favourite shops, as you could get both books and stationery there, and Kenny Everett‘s new memoir The Custard Stops at Hatfield was on display. Everyone loved Kenny back then, he was massively popular, and I thought it was a hilarious title, although I never actually read it and could only guess at why the “custard” ended at an unremarkable new town 20 miles north of London. Later we got home. “We saw The Custard Stops at Hatfield!” I chirruped to my mum in the way that children do, a) with no sense of priority (we might have spent the day at the Tower of London or the Science Museum BUT I SAW A FUNNY BOOK) and b) fully expecting the targeted grown-up to be completely familiar with the topic at hand. She knew of Everett of course but hadn’t heard of the book. Puzzled, she repeated the sentence back, thinking I’d said that my dad and I had been through Hatfield and saw “custard stops”. What could these have been? Squidgy yellow train stations? Surreal art installations? Some unique local phenomena of flora or fauna? Why, indeed, were we even in, or passing through, Hatfield? Where even WAS Hatfield? None of us was sure but it seemed rather a long way from East Molesey. Finally my dad laughed and explained “It’s a book.” Yet, the questions remain 35 years later. I suppose I’ll just have to finally go and read the thing to find out (dirty job etc), but in the meantime, for all I know Everett did mean “stops” as in the noun, and at very least the title is a kind of crash blossom. But every so often I think of this incident and my mum’s expression trying to fathom what I was talking about, and the kid in me still hopes there are things called custard stops, whatever they may be, in small towns outside London.

Keith Chegwin brightened the dull Saturday mornings of my youth, of which there were many in the early 80s. I often spent Saturday morning alone in the flat above the shop my parents ran, with the gas fire up full, eating jam tarts and watching Swap-Shop on our rented TV. I sometimes felt alone, but the live format of the show and Cheggers’s’s indefatigable, almost unfeasible chirpiness helped things along. It was sad that he struggled with alcoholism later in life, but many people do, and I understand he recovered. I was jealous when he married Maggie Philbin. He always seemed to retain his sense of humour regardless of his situation. He was way cheesy but nobody cared. Unlike many others, I don’t even resent his nude game show episode, though I can’t say I’ve ever made a point of watching it. Some Tory MP stood up in the Commons and described the show as the most disgusting thing on TV. Why, because it had some naked people and one of them was a middle-aged, slightly overweight bloke? Good for him, if you ask me. A few years ago he was thrown in Twitter prison by the humorless for supposedly plagiarising jokes. He tweeted a gag once and I replied, “I refuse to laugh at that unless it’s original.” He sent me a direct message simply saying “LOL”.

In my way home from Christmas shoppping, I stopped to look in the window of a new local barber shop at an advert for a “man mask”, featuring a photo of a bearded 20-something guy having a mud-pack. I’d barely begun attempting to process this latest example of hipster insanity when a bloke of about the same age in some sort of stylised apron get-up darted out of the shop and accosted me with the most practised sales spiel I’ve heard in a long time. “Walk in anytime, no appointment needed” wasn’t necessarily revolutionary, but hey, we need all the reassurance we can get these days. More tantalising was the promise of a loyalty card and hot or cold drinks while you wait, which just makes absolute sense to me. Upon my request, he claimed that not only do they do styles, but “you give us a photo of the haircut, we put your face into it”. I think he probably meant this metaphorically, but I’m so old and out of touch that what do I know? Photoshop does incredible things these days, I’m told, including turning a frown into a smile (no joke actually), so who am I to say they can’t just cut and paste Morrissey’s Smiths-era quiff onto my own real-life fizzog? As he pressed a £5 off voucher for a £24 haircut into my still-querulous palm, I glanced up and even his colleague was stifling a titter at the guy’s brazenness. But, you gotta hand it to him. I normally pay about £12 for a haircut at the place I’ve been going to since (excepting my Midlands hiatus) 1988, but I fear I may have to try these guys if only for the sheer enthusiasm, sadly lacking at my current establishment: it’s as much as you can do to get them to grunt a “sorry” as they relieve you of your eyebrows, or even a “thank you” when, regardless, you tip them, in true British fashion. So, will it be a scissorial sensation or a follicular folly? I shall investigate and report back.

Sam Shepard, who died the other day, was best known for being one of America’s great playwrights, and not a half bad film actor. To be fair the only work of his I’m really familiar with (judging from his obituary, I have a hell of a lot of catching up to do) is his screenplay for the great Wim Wenders movie Paris, Texas – a beautifully understated short screen story about identity, separation, fathers and sons, and America. I first saw it back in the 80s late at night on Channel 4, not long after it came out, and as a young guitarist was mostly attracted by Ry Cooder’s evocative, sparse score. Anyway, when I saw he’d died, the only other thing I knew for sure about Sam Shepard was that he collaborated with Bob Dylan (another musical hero of mine) a couple of times. The first was on Dylan’s legendary Rolling Thunder Revue tour of 1975-76, for which he had a credit on the ensuing surreal movie Renaldo and Clara and about which he wrote The Rolling Thunder Logbook, which I used to have but stupidly gave away in one of my house moves. The second collaboration was when they wrote a fantastic song together, the 11-minute 1986 epic Brownsville Girl, and this – to finally get to the point – is what first came into my mind when I heard about Shepard’s passing. The song is up there with any of Dylan’s best – it’s a weird, fragmented short story, it’s funny, heartbreaking and full of imagery. It’s supposedly about a Gregory Peck western (but is a tad more meta than that – “I still remember the day you came to me on a painted desert … I can’t remember why I was in that film or which part I was supposed to play”), and listening to it is like watching a film, or more specifically like sitting up late one night when you’re alone and a movie you’ve never heard of comes on Channel 4 and you’re transported by it to places you hadn’t expected. (I don’t even know if that happens anymore incidentally, what with the general decline in quality of network TV and films, and the culture now of proactively subscribing to channels and shows rather than idly surfing and stumbling across things.) If you’ve never heard it, whatever you think of Dylan or westerns, have a listen below. His delivery and the arrangement – very 80s in style, with lots of reverb, big sax breaks and ethereal backing singers, who break character to make knowing interventions in the main lyric – are an essential part of what makes the song great, but if you really can’t stand Dylan’s voice or feel 11 minutes is too long then you can get a life and read another blog read the lyrics for a feel of the story. (Oddly, Dylan’s own site that I link to there doesn’t credit Shepard.) Or indeed you can read along to the lyrics while you listen to the song. Dylan half-speaks the words, so they are pretty clear, but when I first heard it in the late 80s there was no internet or published version of the lyrics, so I had to stop-start the tape of the song that a friend gave me and transcribe it as best I could; being British, I had no idea what a “swap meet” was so for years I thought it was “swamp meet”. By the way, if it turns out you love the song, I probably wouldn’t recommend buying the whole original album Knocked Out Loaded, as it was (in keeping with Dylan’s legendary inconsistency) not one of his best. But then maybe why not? It’s Dylan. Enjoy, and RIP Sam.

THE SPEAKER: Order, order. Jeremy Corbyn.

A LABOUR FRONTBENCHER: Hooray!

JEREMY CORBYN: Will the Prime Minister please take this question about the dire state of something that really matters to ordinary people and completely ignore it in favour of making an embarrassing joke that makes her look nastier than Cruella de Vil and causes the members opposite to laugh hysterically and press their tongues firmly against her buttocks in a transparent display of ingratiation?

THERESA MAY: My Right Honorable Friend has a beard! Look at it! It’s like this really silly beard! Just like Fidel Castro, that other well-known communist!

TORY MEMBERS: [collapse in hysterics]

JEREMY CORBYN: Will the Prime Minister confirm that Brexit does, in fact, mean Fuxit?

THERESA MAY: My friend opposite has a beard! [winks knowingly at the clean-shaven David Davis]

JEREMY CORBYN: Will the Prime Minister confirm that this country is turning into a right shithole under the Conservative government?

THE SPEAKER: Ordure, ordure.

THERESA MAY: My Right Honorable Friend can run down this magnificent country of ours as much as he likes, but he has – wait for it – a fucking beard!

TORY MEMBERS: [die laughing]

JEREMY CORBYN: Has the Prime Minister seen “I, Daniel Blake”?

THERESA MAY: No, does he have a beard?

TORY MEMBERS: [start bombing the food banks]

JEREMY CORBYN: Will the Prime Minister stop talking about my beard please and answer my questions?

THERESA MAY: [puts on Jeremy Corbyn Fake Beard bought earlier from Poundland]

TORY MEMBERS: [all put on fake Corbyn beards and laugh themselves sick]

JEREMY CORBYN: What does it take to have any questions actually answered or any legitimate concerns taken seriously around here?

THERESA MAY: [lighting Cuban cigar off £50 note] Oh fucking cheer up you beardy twat.

TORY MEMBERS: [orgasm]

LABOUR FRONTBENCHER: Nice one, Jezza.

LABOUR BACKBENCHERS: Corbyn out!

MSM PAPERS: Corbyn is a beardy twat – it’s official!