Argo

I watched Argo yesterday. Then, later in the evening on a World Service culture programme, I heard someone saying "as long as we can carry on making adult films like Argo..." (by which the speaker meant, films that were not the popcorn juvenilia or action-paction idiocy that dominate Hollywood).

Unfortunately, Argo is really a kind of "Mission Impossible Five" dressed up as serious historical drama. If you had transferred the plot to a Tom Cruise vehicle, with the required Eastern Europeans as baddies, no-one would have called it anything but what it was, a good caper.

Fun to watch, but it's telling that the most memorable character -- Lester Siegel, brilliantly played by Alan Arkin -- was one of the few fictional characters in the film.

You still have to love some of the one-liners --

"if I'm going to make a fake movie, it's going to be a fake hit",

and

"don't you have a better bad idea?" "This is the best bad idea that we've got, sir."

I've now succumbed to beginning Breaking Bad, so that's the end of me until Christmas.

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It doesn't matter if you weren't that great a fan of David Frost (I wasn't), you can't deny that he was a journalist and businessman and entertainer who was a giant of his generation. As John Prescott, egoist to the end, stated, when Frost was interviewing, it was always the interview, not Frost. By this, of course, Prescott means that Frost permitted politicians to talk about themselves and, with luck, hang themselves (a technique that worked with Nixon). This was certainly preferable to the confrontational shite used by Humphreys and Paxman.

My antipathy to Frost is, I suppose, based on the feelings about him held by the "talented" of the early 1960s -- Moore and Cook, Bird and Fortune, Miller and Bennett. Frost was kind of the bloke who you let tag along.

But Frost was a facilitator. He got things done (and made money) while Miller and Bennett were busy being intelligent. I took a photo of him when I was young, outside 10 Downing Street. Frost was going in to interview Wilson after he lost the 1970 election. At the time, Frost would have been 32. He was already zipping back and forth across the Atlantic, making deals. And you were allowed into Downing Street in those days.

Frost knew everyone who mattered in the second half of the 20th century. I doubt that he expected to die before he reached 100. Frost was that kind of man.

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I went to Beaconsfield on Friday evening -- meeting Ron Fisher, Greg and Natasha Hawes. The Royal Standard of England is a bit of a home to the chattering classes of Bucks, but I guess I'm a member of the chattering classes myself, these days.

Lovely to see Ron and nice to hear that he had a thriving business again. Greg was a little perturbed that I put on FB that we were both at the RSoE. Greg's the kind of chap who has an FB account to keep tabs on other people, but isn't that keen on other people keeping tabs on him. A bit of a social faux-pas from me? I'm not sure. I reckon that if you are on FB, and a friend of someone, then if they "check in" they've got a right to say with whom they are at the pub (if that person is their FB friend). But I'm not absolutely comfortable with that stance. Perhaps it would be socially more acceptable to ask their permission.

Social media do make life more complicated when it comes to this kind of thing.

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