I’m just back – goodie bag gripped greedily in paw – from this morning’s launch of the 64th Edinburgh International Film Festival, which runs in the Scottish capital from 16-27 June.
“Are you looking forward to Christmas?” was always going to be a difficult question. Anthony looked forward to spending it with his daughter and grandchild – as long as he kept taking the medication that allowed him to stay out of hospital. Andrew should have had a happy gathering lined up, except his latest bout of mania had seen him leave the family home. Richard was wrapping presents. A whisk for his mum, because she’d stopped eating; some liqueur chocolates for his gran, the only way to get a drop of alcohol into the old girl.
“The Eighties – where do you bloody well start?” Geoffrey Palmer’s lugubrious voiceover seemed even more world-weary than usual as this hour-long special on the decade everyone loves to hate began. And I felt for him, I really did. Because I am, appropriately enough, the grumpy old hack who's not at all happy to be assigned the task of revisiting this decade in which, it has to said, just about everything was shite. But let’s get one thing clear. I hated this decade at the time, unlike most of the minor-celebrity talking heads hired to give their 10 pence worth on this show.
The last time Jack Cardiff went to Cannes, nobody recognised him; wearing his trademark trilby, he'd tell curious autograph hunters he used to be a stand-in for Frank Sinatra. In fact Cardiff's claim to fame was somewhat greater: his was the eye behind some of the most achingly beautiful images in all of cinema. Handsome, charismatic and sharp as a tack, with a bottomless fund of funny and revealing anecdotes, he's also a dream subject for a documentarian. Naturally no television company was prepared to fund a film about him.
One can only speculate about why More4 would want to broadcast a documentary about bare-faced electoral fraud in the week before the climax of our own unimpeachably democratic process. However, this rather long film about 2009's Afghan presidential election gradually marshalled its arguments into a pointed critique of how the “democracy” which the West has unloaded over Afghanistan like a badly aimed air strike is anything but. Of course, this may not strike many people as front page news.
Bearing in mind this had been cobbled together in the two weeks since Malcolm McLaren’s death, and was fronted by the ubiquitous Alan Yentob, it could have been a dog’s breakfast of a programme. But it did manage to pinpoint various elements about Malcolm rather accurately, for those of us lucky enough to know him. One aspect which came through was his rather child-like quality. Probably the best story about him that his assistant for many years Sarah Bolton told me at a dinner after his funeral last week was how Malcolm was a huge fan of The Sooty Show – whenever it came on, work would stop and they would quite often find themselves rolling on the floor in hysterics.
Bearing in mind this had been cobbled together in the two weeks since Malcolm McLaren’s death, and was fronted by the ubiquitous Alan Yentob, it could have been a dog’s breakfast of a programme. But it did manage to pinpoint various elements about Malcolm rather accurately, for those of us lucky enough to know him. One aspect which came through was his rather child-like quality. Probably the best story about him that his assistant for many years Sarah Bolton told me at a dinner after his funeral last week was how Malcolm was a huge fan of The Sooty Show – whenever it came on, work would stop and they would quite often find themselves rolling on the floor in hysterics.