There is something horribly appropriate, during the week of the tensest and most fractious Labour conference in living memory, in Tony Blair making his latest and very surreal appearance on the public stage.
Once there was a time when a former party leader would consider actually turning up at conference, or just giving a timely, sober interview about the party’s current woes. Instead, Blair has appeared in a photo posted online by the Hollywood star Kate Hudson. She is lying horizontally, like a circus performer, and being held aloft by four guys – two half-naked acrobats, Sly Stallone and a grinning Tony himself, in a sharp suit and open-necked white shirt. In her caption, Hudson contrives a version of humblebrag I call the social-media bemusedbrag: “Don’t really know how this happened … but it did!”
Now that Tony is reportedly slashing his lucrative consultancies and dialling down his money-obsessed reputation, what he has left is the commodity he monetised in the first place – his colossal celebrity.
It was this that he took into the US marketplace when he withdrew from No 10. His is a public image that is now drained of ideology, or rather drenched with a different sort of ideology: the restless, aimless ideology of fame, status, memes, viral image-making. On the one hand there is John McDonnell and the national living wage; and on the other Tony, Sly, Kate and two circus acrobats – surreal, free-floating signifiers of nothing very much.
Now that he is divesting himself of dodgy dictators, what Blair has left are fame and celeb encounters, like a super-rich Christopher Biggins.
Department of the Damned
I have conceived a new TV obsession: Damned, the gripping new Channel 4 comedy written by Jo Brand and Morwenna Banks.
It is set in the children’s services department of a local authority, theoretically caring for young people who are vulnerable and at risk, but actually horribly chaotic and incompetent. The staff of Ricky Gervais’s Office dealt with paper: these people are dealing with children’s lives.
The sulphurous black comedy consists of great gags: a gloomy woman, on her way out of the office, announces that it is her last day as a woman: “Transitioning?” “Hysterectomy.” But it also depends on the continuous drizzle of transgression and taboo. Staff cross the line with colleagues, with superiors and with clients. The programme is a virtual drum-roll of little explosive moments of excruciating embarrassment.
And deprived children are its currency. Damned is the gentrified, public-sector end of Gin Lane.
Seinfeld’s turn-off
The comedian Jerry Seinfeld used to complain about the washroom handbasins in airports not having proper taps, but cumbersome push-button contraptions that will cease gushing after a few moments. He wondered: do the washroom authorities think that people will turn on ordinary taps and then rush gigglingly out, having caused water mayhem?
But it does happen. A Chinese man, Guo Bin – who is married to China’s Olympic table tennis gold medallist Wang Nan – has caused consternation by revealing that he pursues a personal anti-Japan vendetta when he stays in Japanese hotel rooms, turning the taps on full tilt just before checking out, so that they waste thousands of gallons of water.
If this form of protest catches on, every hotel in the world will install those nasty push-button taps that Seinfeld hates so much.
