Toby Young

For the past three months I have been reviewing films for the Times and it has been quite an eye-opener. Before embarking on the job, I subscribed to the general view that cinema is not what it used to be. With the exception of a brief renaissance in the early 1970s, the art form has been in a state of decline since its heyday in the 1930s and 1940s. But I had no idea just how bad things had become. Take The Spell, for instance. This low-budget British horror film, released a couple of weeks ago, was so bad that the critics started pouring out of the preview theatre within the first five minutes. By the end, there were only three people left.

Don’t be misled by their Bullingdon days: Boris and Dave are masters of re-invention Last night, More4 broadcast a 90-minute drama-doc called When Boris Met Dave that I helped to make. It documents their Eton and Oxford years and I hope they saw it — or, at least, recorded it on Sky Plus — because the impression given in the press is that it was a spiteful hatchet job designed to cause them maximum discomfort. In fact, it was nothing of the kind. On the contrary, when we handed the film in to Channel 4 I was worried they’d think it was a Party Political Broadcast on behalf of the Conservative party. The film was actually a fairly straightforward attempt to find out a bit more about the two most prominent Conservative politicians of our era.

I used to take abuse in print and dish it out, but now I’ve become more squeamish A few weeks ago I appeared on the Today programme opposite David Denby, the veteran American film critic. He is the author of a book called Snark in which he takes issue with the nasty, personal tone that characterises a lot of contemporary political discourse, and I had been wheeled out to defend the hacks and bloggers who trade in this tittle-tattle. I cannot complain about being cast in this role, not least because I wrote a very snarky review of Denby’s book for the Wall Street Journal, but I am beginning to think he may have a point. My change of heart occurred when I opened the Guardian on 27 August.

America’s superpower status is the flip side of its massive inferiority complex ‘You’re bringing a book?’ That was the reaction of Tom Colicchio, one of my fellow judges on an American reality show, when I clambered into the limousine taking us to the Emmys last Sunday. The programme in question, Top Chef, had been nominated for six of these awards and I had been flown to Los Angeles in case we won. My reason for taking a book is that I didn’t think I could muster enough interest in the ceremony to stave off boredom for its three-hour running time. In fact, the telecast turned out to be quite entertaining, mainly because the people presenting the awards kept making jokes about how awful it was. Is that a paradox?

I have often toyed with the idea of writing a book called What They Don’t Teach You at the Elephant and Castle Journalism School. Under such headings as ‘How to Fiddle Your Expenses’, it would contain the kind of information that is usually only available in the saloon bar of the White Swan, the legendary Daily Mirror pub known as the Stab in the Back. A whole chapter of the book would be devoted to the ticklish subject of how to extract fees from people who expect you to contribute your services for nothing. If you’re a relatively successful journalist, scarcely a day passes without you being asked to appear on the radio, or be on a panel, or give a ‘talk’.

What’s true of Hollywood is also true of fashion: no one knows anything As an ink-stained wretch living in New York in the Nineties, I was a little chippy about Anna Wintour. There I was, eking out a living as a general dogsbody at Vanity Fair, while she sat atop her throne as the editor of Vogue. I would often cross paths with her in the lobby of the Condé Nast building, scuttling along with my rucksack, while she glided past in her sunglasses. I was told that she didn’t like sharing the lift with anyone and if you ever found yourself standing beside her when one arrived, you were supposed to wait for the next one. I fantasised about barging past the queue of waiting sycophants, squeezing into the lift with her, and then pulling out a Big Mac.

With four children under six, flying anywhere for the annual summer holiday has become prohibitively expensive, so for the past five years we’ve been going to Cornwall. With four children under six, flying anywhere for the annual summer holiday has become prohibitively expensive, so for the past five years we’ve been going to Cornwall. The upshot is that I am now an expert when it comes to renting holiday cottages. I have rented big ones, small ones, cheap ones and expensive ones, and I’ve come to the following conclusion: wherever possible, go gay. I don’t mean that the owners of the cottage should be gay, though that probably helps. I mean the cottage should cater to homosexual couples.

For years I have been competing with my brother-in-law. He is married to my wife’s sister and each summer the four of us spend a week in Cornwall, along with all our children. For Johnny and me, this is a period of mutual accounting in which we forensically examine each other’s achievements over the last 12 months. Who’s earned more? Who’s advanced further up the career ladder? Who’s put on more weight? Not everyone’s idea of a relaxing holiday, perhaps, but if you’re an intensively competitive sort of person — as we both are — it’s quite fun. Or it used to be. Six months ago, Johnny’s medium-sized technology company, where he has laboured for eight years, was bought by a large American competitor.

One of the most remarkable things in Quentin Tarantino’s remarkable career is that he doesn’t appear to realise just how bad his most recent films are. ‘I have sibling rivalry with Orson Welles,’ he said recently on CBS Sunday Morning. ‘I don’t think he’s that good... all right? I have sibling rivalry with him and Stanley Kubrick.’ I can understand him saying this after picking up the Palme d’Or for Pulp Fiction in 1994, but does he really think that Inglourious Basterds, his latest offering about a group of irregulars operating behind enemy lines during World War Two, is up there with Citizen Kane? As someone who has sat through the film — all 153 minutes of it — I find this incomprehensible.

I have decided not to run as an independent at the next election. As readers of this column may know, I want to set up a grammar school in Acton and my plan was to run on this issue. However, most of my supporters would be people who would otherwise vote Conservative, thereby making it more likely that the Labour candidate would win. This is particularly true of my constituency, which is a three-way marginal. That seems downright crazy, particularly as the Conservative party’s education policy has so much going for it. The Tories may not be in favour of creating any new grammar schools, but they seem genuinely committed to making it easier for people like me to start ‘free schools’ — the so-called Swedish model.

 As I exited the Today programme last week, my phone buzzed, indicating I had just received a text message. Which one of my friends was congratulating me on having just trounced another government minister? According to the LCD screen it was Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall! Hugh is an old Oxford contemporary whom I hadn’t heard from in years. What warm words did he have for me this morning? ‘You should have stayed in bed!’ This would not have been so galling if Hugh had not appeared on Desert Island Discs the week before. There is a scale of recognition in British public life — an unofficial honours system — and Desert Island Discs is undoubtedly near the top.

Like most middle-class parents, I feel duty-bound to take my children to the theatre occasionally. Why is this? I tell myself it is a way of broadening their horizons, but really it is all about class. It is the same reason I encourage them to play with wooden toys and eat broccoli and say ‘please’. I want to have nice, middle-class children so people will think I’m a nice, middle-class man. Judging from my trip to see Peter Pan last week with my son and daughter, the whole enterprise is doomed. ‘Will it be in 3D daddy?’ asked six-year-old Sasha as we strolled across Kensington Gardens. ‘Yes, of course it will. This is live theatre, remember? We’re not going to the cinema.’ ‘Will we have to wear those funny glasses?

‘Antichrist’ is the comic masterpiece of a con artist mocking fans of high culture Is Antichrist, the new film from Lars von Trier, a comedy? At first glance, that seems like a ludicrous suggestion. It contains some of the most disturbing images I’ve ever seen in the cinema, including a scene in which Charlotte Gainsbourg performs a clitoridectomy on herself. How could anyone describe such a film as a comedy? Certainly, von Trier has given no hint that Antichrist is intended to be funny. In the production notes he has written a ‘confession’ in which he claims to have produced the script as a form of therapy after a bout of depression. ‘Scenes were added for no reason,’ he says. ‘Images were composed free of logic or dramatic thinking.

My heart goes out to Hardeep Singh Kohli, the turban-wearing comed-ian and writer (and a contributing editor to this magazine). According to a BBC spokeswoman, he has been suspended from The One Show for six months following a complaint by a female colleague. ‘He was reprimanded and immediately apologised,’ she said. ‘He agreed to take some time away from the show to reflect on his behaviour.’ I wonder what appalling act of sexism Kohli committed to upset his co-worker? Asked for her phone number, perhaps? Invited her out to dinner? ‘I recognise I overstepped the mark and have apologised unreservedly,’ he has said. The whole episode is eerily reminiscent of the public shaming of a Chinese intellectual during the Cultural Revolution.

As funny as Bruno undoubtedly is, Baron-Cohen’s film is fundamentally dishonest One of the funniest scenes in Bruno is when Sacha Baron-Cohen, playing the gay Austrian television presenter, appears on a talk show in Texas called The Richard Bey Show. The African-American audience is none too impressed when he tells them he’s looking for a black male partner to help him raise his African baby — and is even more outraged when the baby is brought out wearing a ‘Gayby’ T-shirt. ‘He’s a real dick magnet,’ Bruno explains. The audience is then shown a picture of the child in a hot tub with four other men, two of whom are performing a sex act. ‘You’re going to burn in hell for that one,’ shouts a member of the audience.

‘Hyper-parenting’ may be bad — but look what happened when I tried the alternative A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a Father’s Day piece that described a typical Sunday in my life. Essentially, it involved being an indentured slave to my four young children. Several people pointed out that I was guilty of ‘helicopter parenting’ — an American term for supervising your children’s lives too closely — and recommended a book on the subject by Carl Honoré, a Canadian intellectual. I was a bit suspicious because Honoré is one of the leading advocates of the Slow Movement, but Under Pressure: Rescuing Our Children from the Culture of Hyper-Parenting is quite convincing.

By my epic standards, this was an extremely polite best man’s speech It never ceases to amaze me that I am still asked to speak in public. If I am not the worst orator of my generation, I must be a close second. The last time I performed an after-dinner speaking gig was in Bath and the organisation concerned was so appalled it asked for its money back. ‘My delegates are not prudes,’ wrote the booker to my agent, ‘but the use of the “C” word in polite company is to me unacceptable and to use it twice was just insult to injury.’ In my defence, both uses of ‘C’ word occurred in the course of telling a single anecdote about encountering Gordon Ramsay on a flight back from Los Angeles.

I would like to take this opportunity to apologise unreservedly to Twitter. Like many of my colleagues, I unfairly characterised it as a vacuous expression of our narcissistic age. In fact, it turns out to be the most effective tool for advancing freedom and democracy since the invention of the internet. In Iran, the anti-government protesters have been circumventing President Ahmadinejad’s efforts to stop them organising by communicating via Twitter. Not only that, but they have been using the social networking site to file pictures and news reports, documenting the government’s brutal attempt to suppress the protest. If President Ahmadinejad falls and Mousavi is installed in his place, this will surely come to be known as the Twitter Revolution.

For several weeks now I have been agonising about whether to run for Parliament as an independent at the next election. On the one hand, the current political crisis means that an independent has a higher-than-normal chance of being elected. But on the other, it is not clear what an MP who isn’t affiliated with any of the major political parties could achieve. What would be the point? As the father of four young children, the issue I care most about is education. In the constituency of Ealing Central and Acton where I live there are only two outstanding state secondary schools, one C of E, the other Catholic. The nearest secular school to us is Acton High where, according to the latest Ofsted report, only 31 per cent of pupils managed to get five or more GCSEs at grade C or above.