Spectator Life

An increasing number of British companies are using personality tests to hire staff. Two of the more popular personality tests are the Big Five and the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI). There's just one problem and it's a rather big one: both of these tests are utterly scientifically useless. And Brits are being hired (or not hired) based on the results of these dubious tests. Personality tests are a type of zombie falsehood. Despite their lack of scientific validity and numerous papers displaying their many failings, they just won't die Of the two, the MBTI appears to be more popular. The assessment comprises 93 forced-choice questions.

You didn’t have to like football to feel some sort of affinity with Terry Venables. He had bags of East London charm, oodles of enthusiasm and glossy good looks (as long as you didn’t mind the gold medallion around his permanently tanned neck). As it happens, I like football very much – so it was an easy decision when, six years ago, El Tel’s wife, Yvette, invited me to stay in their Spanish hotel, La Escondida, in the Font Roja National Park, about 45 minutes inland from Alicante. The idea was that I would write about it in the Daily Mail. Sailing close to the wind was in Venables' DNA – one of the many reasons why footie fans loved him My wife came, too – and she hates football. Flamenco was the theme on the first night.

I don’t know about you, but I love a bit of topical reading when I go abroad. That’s why, in my last week of travelling between lush, green, untouched Cambodian islands, I’ve been immersed in apposite books like Julia Lovell’s Maoism: a Global History, and Frank Dikotter’s The Cultural Revolution. So far, I’ve been pleased with my choices. First, they are properly appropriate: one of the reasons Cambodia’s islands are so untainted by tourism, or even inhabitants, is because the ultra-Maoist, Chinese-funded Khmer Rouge evacuated all the occupants and forced them into deadly labour on the mainland. Also, the books are truly astonishing, perhaps in a consoling way.

Everyone has a guilty pleasure. Some have several. One of mine is David Cassidy who died six years ago from liver failure at the age of 67, an event that barely made more than a back-of-the-book page lead in many newspapers. Which is a shame. For at his peak, he had a fanbase on a par with Elvis and The Beatles, looks that sent young girls into delirium, a rich and textured voice that was tailor-made for the three-minute pop single and a charisma, not to mention a personal life, that in its prime gave showbiz reporters round the clock bylines.

The film director Ridley Scott says that those who worry about the historical inaccuracies in his new biopic of Napoleon should ‘get a life’. Or as the told The Sunday Times last week: ‘When I have issues with historians, I ask: “Excuse me, mate, were you there? No? Well, shut the fuck up, then.’ If you’re not careful you can end up changing history You don’t need to be Alan Bennett to cock an eyebrow at that. While I’ve not yet seen Napoleon – and I will because I’m sure it’ll be a cracker (it’s Ridley Scott, after all, and Joaquin Phoenix) – I have read about its various delusions, not least Scott’s decision to have Bony present at the execution of Marie Antoinette or ­his army firing their cannon at the Pyramids which they did not.

Since becoming a mother, I have come to dread weddings. Children are often no longer welcome at nuptials. My children have been banned from several already, and we have attended several others where they might as well have been, so inhospitable were they to young families. I find it indescribably depressing and utterly baffling that small children would be unwelcome at such a momentous family celebration. The concept seems to contradict the very purpose of a wedding – to bring two families together for the creation of another. Perhaps as a result of the decline of religion, weddings are no longer for families – they are essentially very, very expensive dance parties for the couple’s young social group.

The digital world, I’m realising, is a bit of a racket. Recently most of my iTunes library disappeared from my iPhone, and I just don’t know if I can be bothered to go through all the different hoops, portals, queueing systems and long forgotten passwords to get them back again. I’ve also had the repeated experience of trying to view a film I’ve downloaded on Amazon, only to get that little square in the middle of the screen telling me that the player’s having issues at the moment, and would I, could I try again later? Meanwhile, the CDs and DVDs reproach me from my shelves like an abandoned spouse. ‘We were once your rock,’ they remind me, ‘And you traded us for tech-tinsel, a piece of cyber-skirt. How are you feeling now?

This month’s crop of trivia includes a secret about the Tube map, the US state that’s named after Elizabeth I and something Jimi Hendrix had in common with Winston Churchill…  1 November 1947 – birth of Nick Owen. The television presenter and Luton Town fan has a lounge named after him at the club’s ground – to which he was once refused entry. ‘You can’t go in,’ said a steward. ‘It’s packed.’ Not being a ‘don’t you know who I am?’ type, Owen simply walked away. He heard someone say to the steward: ‘Don’t you know who that is?’ ‘Haven’t a clue,’ came the reply. ‘His name,’ the steward was told, ‘is in bloody great capitals above your head.’ 2 November 1889 – North and South Dakota are granted statehood in the US.

This isn’t easy for me. In fact, it is perhaps the most difficult public admission I’ve ever made. I’m worried about how people will react, how friends and colleagues might reconsider their opinion of me after reading this. But I can’t keep it locked up secretly inside me any longer. I have to admit it. I’m starting to quite like Phil Collins. This isn’t a fully fledged commitment – it’s not something I’d die on a hill for. But I’m unmistakably starting to warm to the chirpy, balding balladeer. This is particularly shocking because for at least a decade, from the early eighties to early nineties, he was, for me, the personification of everything that was wrong with the world.

Some see Bryan Johnson as a human guinea pig with the charisma of ChatGPT. Others, meanwhile, see him as a man on a very important mission. He’s not just in it for himself, they say, he’s in it for the betterment of humanity. For the uninitiated, Johnson is officially the world’s most measured human. As per the 46-year-old’s YouTube channel, which boasts 548,000 subscribers, ‘Johnson has achieved metabolic health equal to the top 1.5 per cent of 18 year olds, inflammation 66 per cent lower than the average 10 year old, and reduced his speed of aging by the equivalent of 31 years.’ Worth an estimated $400 million, Johnson is, by his own admission, an odd individual. Every morning, without fail, he rises at the ungodly hour of 4.30am.

Undressing. Getting one’s kit off, whether for the lads or the ladies, depending on one’s bent. Disrobing, divesting, denuding. Slipping into something more comfortable. Giving one an eyeful. Getting ‘em off. Once we put away childish things and cease frolicking as nature intended, stripping off becomes a whole new ballgame. In our newly found state of youthful beauty, we may discover that flashing a bit of what one’s momma gave one can evoke a level of interest in others which one’s callow utterances cannot quite manage. If big-bodied nobodies are stripping off for strangers, how could we expect entertainers to keep their kit on? But equally, it’s important to know when one has reached an age – or a weight – when one should put it away. Cover it up.

Matthew Perry, who died yesterday, was the funniest of the Friends – and the saddest. 'What must it be like to not be crippled by fear and self-loathing?' his character, Chandler Bing, asked. It seems Perry never quite figured out the answer. Chandler was a brilliant comic creation – and Perry, a melancholic clown, perfectly suited to the part. Perry stood out among his Friends castmates with his impeccable comic timing and the unique cadence with which he delivered his lines.  To most of the world, he will always be Chandler – the brilliant, charming, sad-funny clown But he was insecure and addictive. Perry once said that, when the live studio audience of Friends didn’t laugh at one of his jokes 'I felt like I was gonna die'.

In 1979, I was 11 years old, and I had a quite remarkable teacher. Don’t worry, though – this isn’t going to be one of those anodyne paeans to an inspirational educator that the Department for Education use in their ads to lure people into teaching. In fact, if the lady I’ll refer to here as Mrs G were somehow to be reincarnated and placed in front of a Year 6 classroom of today, Ofsted would have her frogmarched out after about 20 minutes.  She once sent me to the local parade of shops to buy a box of Tampax  Mrs G was a fearsome sight – in her late 40s, as broad as she was tall, squeezed into shirt and slacks, with closely shorn curls. I have no photographic evidence, so I’m relying on memory here. She seemed enormous, but then so does everything to a child.

Becoming proficient in a so-called ‘easy’ language (for English speakers, French is relatively easy) often takes hundreds of hours; a difficult language (Mandarin anyone?) takes several thousand. That’s good for language teachers, but not so good for the learners.  Language teaching today is where medicine was in the 18th century Even after putting in all those hours of following an expensive course, many people never become proficient. How can so much time and effort amount to such little progress? Language learning happens inside the brain, making the processes involved difficult to observe and understand – that’s why language teaching today is where medicine was in the 18th century, and why, all too often, language lessons are associated with failure.

At 1.17 p.m. on 1 February 2019, a daytime bolide exploded over Vinales, Cuba, showering down meteorites on the local villagers. Seasoned meteor hunters flew the stones back to the Tuscon Gem Show in a now-defunct Inn Suites where, from my display room, I watched enviously as they broke the stones apart with a hammer and began to sell them for $100 per gram. The hunters staved off competition by inventing wild stories about how the army had taken over, confiscating the meteorites and jailing hunters trying to take meteorites out of Cuba. But a few days later, a Russian hunting team brought 50kg to the show, selling them at $10 per gram. Soon after that, the locals flooded the market, flying the meteorites from Cuba to Panama to Florida, selling 20kg lots for as cheap as $1 per gram.

Sir Ranulph Fiennes (a third cousin of Ralph, since you ask) has written a book about Lawrence of Arabia. He feels an affinity with him: he too has led Arabs in fighting, in Sir Ranulph’s case, for the Sultan of Oman. ‘I’d been in Arabia, leading Arabs against the Marxist rebels. In Lawrence’s day, the British were fighting the Germans and the Turks’.   ‘It’s my DNA. My ancestors did lots of travel in new places’ The circumstances differed. ‘Lawrence had camels and was dealing with a huge body of men; I had six open-topped Land Rovers with two machine guns and I led 30 men; a mixture of Belushis and Oman Arabs and Zanzibars. I felt about the men as a family.’ What does he make of Lawrence’s extraordinary career? ‘It mystified me’, he says.

‘Excuse me please, would you mind moving your bag so I can sit down?’ I asked. He took a slug from his can of lager, looked me in the eye and said no. Picture the scene: the London Underground, steaming hot, a crowded carriage, a long day spent in heels, and a spot of sciatica. Before me was a muscular, able-bodied man, probably in his twenties. I didn’t ask for his seat – I politely asked for his suitcase’s seat. I thought he was joking. But he looked at me, unsmiling. ‘What, really?’ I asked. ‘This is a priority seat for luggage,’ he told me. He was on a priority seat for inconsiderate oafs. ‘This is a priority seat for luggage,’ he told me. He was on a priority seat for inconsiderate oafs.

In the early 1980s, I was a young teenager being drawn into the small music scene of a provincial town. The moment was post-punk – bands like Joy Division, The Cure and Echo and the Bunnymen were driving my interest – but I was also fascinated by the punk movement that had immediately preceded it. One of the enduring origin-story legends of punk, frequently mentioned in the music press articles I was then devouring, was that it had been kickstarted when Lenny Kaye, later the guitarist in the Patti Smith Group, curated (as we’d say now) a compilation album of lo-fi 1960s American garage bands called Nuggets.

Happy Birthday, Disney. A hundred years ago today, Walt and his brother Roy formed the Disney Brothers’ Studio to produce a series of short films based on Alice in Wonderland, a successor to Walt’s original Laugh-O-Gram studio. It helped shape the American imagination and transformed the art of animation. If you meet anyone who actually saw the original Snow White in the cinema – as the late Stewart Steven told me – you’ll find they recall being scared out of their wits by the scene where Snow White runs through the forest with eyes and groping hands following her. Actually, there’s an awful lot to scare the viewer in Snow White. And no one has ever bettered ‘Hi Ho, Hi Ho’, as an animation melody.