For anyone who appears on television, there’s nothing so mortifying as an AP, or Accidental Partridge, named after Steve Coogan’s legendary broadcaster and narcissist Alan Partridge. Some TV star will stumble into AP territory with a statement redolent of adorably non-PC Partridgean wisdom and common sense. News of BBC salaries has given us some choice APs. Casualty star Tom Chambers got his honorary Alan jumper for explaining men’s higher salaries thus,: “Many men’s salaries aren’t just for them; it’s for their wife and children too.” He says his remarks were taken out of context, but I fear the Golden Partridge goes to Andrew Marr for patiently explaining that he gets more money than female presenters because of his objectively greater experience as an older man, and that a female “Audrey Marr” version of himself would have been turfed out.
Erm, well, yes – women are complaining about precisely that, and the fact that inexperienced male presenters get more because their employers are effectively investing in what will be a long and distinguished career. Marr does disapprove of this state of affairs, but perhaps Coogan’s creation himself could not have invoked “Alana Partridge” with a more musingly sorrowful sense of how flawed it all is – for women. Meanwhile, all UK firms with 250 or more employees must publish their gender pay gaps by April 2018. We can look forward to thousands of Partridge moments in every workplace in the country.
The world at our feet
Is sitting down the new smoking? Is standing up the new wellness? Ernest Hemingway, Vladimir Nabokov and Lewis Carroll all wrote standing up. So does Philip Roth. The Queen has meetings with privy councillors standing up, so that business can be concluded with efficiency and despatch. I recently went to a wonderful prom at London’s Royal Albert Hall: the Aurora orchestra playing Richard Strauss’s Metamorphosen and Beethoven’s Eroica symphony. The Aurora doesn’t just play from memory, without sheet music, but it also plays standing up. No chairs. Of course, rock musicians play standing up. Choirs, of course. But I’d never seen an entire orchestra standing up; it gave its entire musical body language a new dynamism; the musicians seemed to focus in on the conductor and audience more intently. And when conductor Nicholas Collon and Radio 3 presenter Tom Service gave an onstage talk with live excerpts, Aurora orchestra members nimbly skipped out to play illustrative passages and then glided back, with effortless choreography. It was brilliant and so were they. Perhaps the time has come for me to write standing up, or watch films standing up at the back of the auditorium.
Cash out of hand
“What’s money, after all?” asked Paul Dombey in Charles Dickens’s Dombey and Son. Or, to put it another way: what is bitcoin, after all? Bitcoin is one of those things that I find myself airily talking about – oh yes, of course, bitcoin, drug dealers take it as payment on the, um, dark web. Bitcoin, dark web? Things of which I have zero experience in real life and zero idea how to find out about. But bitcoin is apparently yesterday’s news anyway. The hot new online currency is ethereum, which is apparently similar to bitcoin in that it’s an open-software platform based on blockchain technology, so that obviously clears up any questions you or I might have. There was an interview in the Sunday Times with supercool tech entrepreneur and racecar mogul Josh Cartu in which he says that ethereum was his best investment although he’s “probably going to cash out soon”. Wow. “Cashing out” of ethereum. It looks like I may have missed the ethereum bull market without ever understanding what it was all about.
