Welcome to the jungle

A little while ago, I was standing out in someone’s back garden as the sun set. It was a lovely, crisp early evening – the kind when sophisticated minds turn to cricket on the village green, or leisurely strolls around the local park. Unfortunately, this was a decidedly insalubrious area, full of people who can be accused of many things but definitely not sophistication. On this particular evening, a group of heavily intoxicated neds staggered up one of those awful 1960s footpaths that run behind people’s garden fences, violently attacking every streetlight they passed until each was plunged into darkness. Mission accomplished, and with the lane now an unprepossessing mugger’s charter, they wove their way into the distance, shouting unrepeatable sectarian abuse at nobody in particular.

So far, so Broken Britain, you might think. However, five minutes later, something extraordinary happened. In the sequence in which they’d been extinguished, each streetlight began to flicker faintly, then more strongly, then came back on with a feeble light and gradually brightened until it had regained its full potency. So remarkable was this Lazarus-like comeback that I and my fellow lamp-watchers cheered loudly when the final one defiantly resumed the job of protecting local residents from feral youths.

We soon realised that this was no accident. We presume – and please post a comment below if you know better - that the lamp posts had been engineered to shut down in the event of being attacked, before coming back on a few minutes later when the danger had passed. Which begs a question: is it really necessary to ned-proof such mundane objects, and if so, what does that say about parts of the country we live in, when manufacturers have to integrate vandal-proof safety mechanisms into their street lighting?

In truth, the town where this incident occurred is the sort of place where self-repairing utilities make a lot of sense. Posting a letter after final collection used to be fraught with risk because people sometimes set fire to post boxes, thereby rendering their contents undeliverable. Having your car broken into or vandalised was commonplace (particularly if it was a certain colour), and muggings and assaults were daily occurences, as were crimes against property and what we generically describe as acts of anti-social behaviour. As a result, much of this town had been engineered to withstand assault, quite apart from those remarkable lampposts. Every shop had protective grills over its windows. The eminently breakable glass in traffic lights was replaced with shatterproof coloured plastic discs. People grew trees and bushes to prevent youths congregating along their boundary walls. Shop workers parked outside the police station rather than their stores, to deter thefts. Security lights and CCTV cameras were everywhere, sometimes encased in mesh boxes to prevent burglars disabling them. It seemed like a constant game of cat-and-mouse between engineers and the underclass, and the battle contiunes to this day.

I wonder sometimes whether this continual advancement of anti-crime techniques ever really achieves anything. The presence of CCTV encourages criminals to cover their faces. People barred from loitering outside one off-licence simply migrate to another. Installing spiked metal fencing along footpaths not only inspires burglars to find another point of entry, but it also looks bloody awful. And as Londoners discovered two summers ago, protective shop window screens may deter a well-aimed bottle, but they’re no match for a protracted assault from looters.

An IT guru once told me that every secure server or encrypted file can be hacked, and every password can be decoded. In much the same way, hardcore troublemakers will overcome great obstacles in their pursuit of making other people’s lives a misery. So are we really making ourselves more secure with all these solutions to (and preventions of) criminality, or are we simply comforting ourselves with the illusion of safety? I fear the latter, and I suspect it will require prevention rather than cures to make people sleep soundly in their beds at night - particularly in areas like the estate with the self-repairing street lamps.

Come out and play

The fairly dismal performances of the home nations in their recent World Cup qualifying campaigns has rightly brought the subject of domestic sporting talent to the forefront. For those of you who don’t follow football, last month went something like this: Scotland got gubbed by Serbia, England were lucky to draw against Montenegro (neighbours of Serbia), Wales lost to Croatia (also neighbours of Serbia) and Northern Ireland lost 2-0 to Israel, who aren’t anywhere near Serbia but aren’t exactly renowned for their footballing achievements either. Arguably, Israel shouldn’t even be in a European qualifying group - they’re allowed into Eurovision partly on the grounds that anyone idiotic enough to want to participate deserves the humiliation of getting no points from Norway. However, geographically, Israel is more Middle Eastern than Eastern Europe. The whole thing seems a bit unfair, especially for Northern Ireland’s away supporters, who will have to make an epic journey to Tel Aviv in October to watch their team lose the forthcoming away fixture.

Several conclusions can be drawn from this sorry affair. Firstly, we clearly aren’t very good at football any more. Secondly, the former Yugoslav states seem to be fantastic at it. Thirdly, Israel should bugger off and allow poor old Norn Eire to be crap closer to home. However, there is also an over-riding question about why our various home nations aren’t capable of producing a decent team of footballers between them. With regard to this latter point, I have a theory – we can blame our sedentary lifestyles, or specifically those of our offspring.

When I were a lad, summer evenings were spent on the green outside my house, with freeform 20-a-side football matches where I never really knew who was on my team and who wasn’t. It didn’t matter. The winning wasn’t all that important – it was the taking part that felt good, even when I got put in goal and my total ineptitude was revealed for the inevitable gaggle of teenage girls to laugh at. At least I was trying, and when I decided to become an armchair football fan instead, my peers continued with their endless jumpers-for-goalposts games. But when was the last time you saw a group of children playing football in the park? Or in someone’s back garden? Or anywhere other than in front of their PS3s?

In a previous blog, I criticised schools for the apparent decline in standards of reading and writing, and the roulette wheel of blame has landed here again. I’m sorry, but who thought non-competitive sports days were a good idea? Surely preventing the weak and feeble from being branded losers is far more dangerous than preventing the strong and athletic from excelling at possibly the only thing they’re naturally talented at? Real life is hard, brutal and completely unfair, and bringing kids up to believe that they're all winners is setting them up for one hell of a shock when they start dating/applying for jobs/bidding on eBay/playing sports for real.

It’s also unsurprising that kids spend their morning breaks huddled over their BlackBerries when all the playing fields have been sold off to housebuilders. And then there's the please-don't-sue-us culture of excusals and exemptions. Back in my day, PE classes consisted of dangling pathetically from monkey bars and being yelled at for not attempting a flying angel over the vaulting horse with enough enthusiasm, whereas nowadays students can insist that their astigmatism excuses them from picking up a beanbag. I freely admit that I hated enforced exercise when I was a callow youth, but it instilled a degree of physical fitness that has endured to this day, allowing me to run for a train without wishing I was playing a train-catching app instead.

It appears that as each generation gets fatter, lazier and more inclined to order a Domino’s than make its own pizza dough, its spawn learns by example and does likewise. It’s a worrying development, which can only end in the scenario portrayed in the film WALL-E, where humans have become immobile spherical gannets. In the meantime, we’re going to get increasingly appalling at sport, including the national game of football, and that means the days of Souness, Dalgleish and Hansen will become as nostalgic and irrelevant as the days of Stock, Aitken and Waterman. We’re shit and we know we are. And I fear we’re going to get progressively worse, as every new generation of Facebook-addicted bedroom-dwelling teenagers tries to out-sloth its sofa-ridden parents downstairs.

This is my Hollywood

I’ve just finished reading the autobiography of David Mitchell. You know who he is – by his own admission, he’s become ubiquitous through constant panel show appearances, not to mention Peep Show, which finished its eighth series in fine style a couple of months ago. However, I bring this particular choice of reading material up because it discussed something I’ve often ruminated on – the nebulous concept of self-belief.

Throughout several years of relative anonymity and impoverishment, David Mitchell always knew he was going to make it. Even when his family began to doubt his chosen vocation, he stuck to his guns, self-confident and determined that a big break was going to come along eventually. And it did. But reading about his (literal and metaphorical) ramblings reminded me that I was once convinced I would also become a successful comedy writer. However, unlike the hiking hero of Back Story, my self-confidence and determination ultimately foundered on the big spiky rocks of reality.

Let me expand upon that statement, in an attempt to defuse any inferred assumption that I’m a younger (and more handsome, if I do say so myself) Mitchell brother-by-another-mother. I spent much of my free time as a teenager satirising Shakespeare plays, writing comedy scripts and tape- recording audio sketches where I played as many as six different characters simultaneously. As the years passed, these metamorphosed from avant-garde ramblings into refined, tightly-scripted programmes and screenplays – lovingly prepared manuscripts laid out across neat, double-spaced documents in a drawer.

And that is where they’re destined to stay for ever more. Not only did my film and television scripts fail to elicit a response from any scheduling controller or production company boss, I couldn’t even secure the time-honoured first-rung-on-the-ladder of agency representation. I wrote to every literary agent in the United Kingdom (sometimes more than once), concisely outlining the ideas I’d already penned, and enclosing an SAE so it wouldn’t even cost them to reply. As an impoverished youngster, this cost me a small fortune, and over a three-year period it achieved precisely nothing. I got a few generic “we’re not looking for clients like you”-type letters in response, and one agent did send my letter back with the words “NO THANKS!!!” scrawled in big red letters across it. Sadly, he forgot to include his name and address, so I can’t thank him in person.

Having subsequently carved out a successful career as a freelance writer, I’ve long since moved on from angsting about not being able to enter the nation’s living rooms on a Thursday evening. The only aspect of this tale that continues to trouble me is the realisation that when I die, comedy and drama programmes and films will die with me, forgotten and unmade. They’ll be consigned to a “never was” pile that nobody will even know exists – a personal cavalcade of Hollywood hits that will simply vanish without trace. And that makes me wonder. How many other people out there shared that indomitable sense of self-belief in their formative years, before finding themselves eternally on the wrong side of the screen? How many brilliant ideas, or characters, or novels, will die silently with their authors, when they could have brought laughter or entertainment into millions of people’s lives? And how much squandered talent is dotted around this green and emerald isle, vainly waiting for the day somebody takes a chance on it?

At least David Mitchell made it. And for that, at least, we should all be grateful.