I was at a party last night, getting my “drink on” (haha! As they say!) when I happened to see the critic and TV personality Giles Coren talking to a group of people. He was chatting away about something or other--I wasn’t really listening--when a young woman standing nearby said, very loudly and clearly to a group of her friends, "Columnists basing their opinions around their children. So yawn. Your column today was one step up from a Mumsnet blogpost, GILES COREN!”

I mean, fuck! Wow! Who does that? Even if you feel that way, you don’t yell it out in a crowded room like a dick! With the guy you’re talking about standing right there! Jesus!

What was odd about the statement was that not that it was SO rude (although it was, obviously...I mean! Jesus!) but the way she said his name. So clearly and loudly...it was almost as if she was cc-ing him in on the conversation, if you can imagine such a thing.

So, Coren heard this and, well, you know, I wish I could say he came up with something incredibly Wildean but instead his fists balled up at his sides, he went bright red and said "Go fuck yourself, you barren old hag."

I know. Awkward, to say the least.

As you can imagine the party sort of died down after that. A lot of people were very shocked at Coren's statement, as his voice seemed to carry when he said it, and so some people heard what he said before they learned of the circumstances leading up to it. Others simply didn’t like Coren and relished the chance to think worse of him.

My feelings on the matter are a little complicated, but I don’t think I’m going to lose anybody. In other words, not that complicated.

I wish Coren had come up with a better line because I really think she deserved it. I think her comment was obnoxious and unnecessary, delivered without class, and revealed someone who has a lot of growing up to do. She insulted his writing, and by extension his kids, and his life, in one piece of nastily dismissive pomposity.

“So yawn.” Really? Really?

Now, of course, the same can be said of Coren’s response. But that’s the point, it was a response. The way she voiced her “mild criticism”...can you imagine if that was the way we all talked to each other all the time? What do you think the world would be like? You’d hear a lot worse than “barren old hag”, and you’d hear it a lot. The atmosphere would become poisonous, and after a while, you wouldn’t want to come to the party at all.

YOU SEE!?! TWITTER IS LIKE THAT PARTY! DO YOU SEE WHAT I DID?!

NOTE: It occours to me that some background might be useful, just in case I read this back in ten years and think "What? What party?"

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This is in my notebook but I can't remember where it's from or who the subject is. Can anyone help?

"Terrified of bores, he devised various ways of avoiding them.When on a train carriage, he would put on a skull cap (?) and a pair of 'comical' glasses and entreat people to join him. Anyone foolhardy enough to do so would not last long as he would anally take his temperature every ten minutes."

(Gah! Thank you. It's Lord Berner from 'Brewer's Book of Rogues, Villains and Eccentrics' by William Donaldson (every home should have it))

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(Pic: John Gress, Reuters)

OK, so. The Today Programme issued a statement after my original post on the Ladykillers interview, which I characterised as an ‘ambush’ . "There was certainly no intention to 'ambush' Mr Linehan and we are sorry if he took it that way, but our producers felt they had clearly explained in advance how the discussion would play out."

Aha! Except, well, how can I put this delicately....that’s not the truth. Let’s rewind to the day before the interview, when I received the following email from one of the minions at team Ladykillers.

"Sorry to disturb on a Sunday. The Today prog, has rung to confirm tomorrow. With a slight twist. You will be having a discussion with Michael Billington theatre critic about the challenges and excitements of adapting a film for the stage. The idea of trying to capture all that was good about the old film and put that into a stage version that both presents something new and also doesn't disappoint fans of the original."

See anything in there that seems familiar? Neither do I.

I mean, that’s pretty clear, right? As a brief? Fairly unambiguous? Well, here again is the broadcast to remind you of how the interview played out.

The email finished with a request to do a quick ‘research chat’ later that evening.
They asked me to call at 9.30pm, which kind of cut into my Sunday evening in an annoying way but what the hell, this was important. Six seasons into 'Larry Sanders', I know how useful these pre-show interviews can be to the host of a live programme. So I twiddled my thumbs till the appointed time and phoned the number I’d been given.
The researcher (producer?) on the other end of the line seemed surprised to be hearing from me. I told him why I was calling.
"Oh, well, we don't really need to do that."
Huh? “Really? I was told to call...”
"Hold on a second."
Pause. After a moment I heard the receiver being picked up again.
"No, I'll do it now..."
Great start! He then asked a few perfunctory questions (maybe three? Certainly not as many as five). My impression was that he humoring me, even though it was they who asked me to make the call. I can’t remember the precise details of our chat, but at no point did anything he say contradict the contents of the email I’d received. I would have remembered that.
This was his final question. “Have you seen the Tom Hanks version?”
“Er...yeah. It was...you know...it had its moments.”
“OK, I think that’s fine! Thank you!”
That was it. That was the research chat.
 So anyway, the show went how it went, the presenters had some fun at my expense after I left the studio and later that day Justin Webb started tweeting about me, calling me ‘Father Ted’ every time in an attempt to belittle me (not a big fan of the show, I guess).
Here, he accuses me of being evasive. The next day, he’s still annoyed at me for having the temerity to answer back. The next day again, he obviously reads my blog post but doesn’t try to speak to me directly (very easy on Twitter, Justin)... and finally, he runs afoul of BBC’s rules regarding social media (rules which were pointed out to him by some of my followers, I should add) and takes a final swing
It’s frustrating that I have to bother y’all with this silliness. But I need to write this down so I can forget about it, because as you can imagine, this stuff is sort of annoying to have to carry around. I would possibly have even let it all slide but their statement really rankles. “There was certainly no intention to 'ambush' Mr Linehan and we are sorry if he took it that way, but our producers felt they had clearly explained in advance how the discussion would play out”.
 As the above email proves, I was deliberately mis-briefed by The Today Programme and in their statement afterwards, they flat-out lied about it. It’s a show with a proud history, but at the present time, their default mode of bunfight journalism is lazy, poisonous to the national conversation and leading them down some ethical dark alleys. They should stop apologising for how I "took it" and start apologising for what they did.

****************************************

To finish up, a few links.
I added a comment to this excellent post. (Although while it’s kind of Stephen to say so, I wasn’t being brave, I was just taken by surprise.)
Thank you, David Hepworth .
A few notes from Twitter.
David Arnold is a film composer
A good point from Iain White, Director of CURE research centre.
I can well believe this from @eroticpuffin (sorry mate, don’t know your real name)

Gavin Martin told me about a similar incident, and Gideon Coe, who was his unwitting dance partner, joined in the conversation.

"Whatever your feeling about Today's combatative style and whether it is an effective method for political interviews, there's no reason why it should be assumed to be by default the best format for arts coverage." Nice piece in The Stage.

Thanks to all the people on Twitter and elsewhere who took my side in all this. You had nothing to go on but my word, and I hope this post  clears up any doubts you may have had. Thanks also to the Telegraph’s Christina Odone, who apparently had a pop at Graham Lineham (sic), a guy I have always hated.

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 On Monday, I was invited to go on the Today show to talk about my part in the upcoming production of The Ladykillers. I would be asked about the "problems in adapting a classic film for the stage", I was told, and critic Michael Billington would be there to "provide a wider context". As soon as Michael arrived in the green room, I realised that he had, in fact, prepared for something else entirely.

 Michael, somewhat embarrassed, told me that he was actually providing the opposing side in an argument about the wisdom of adapting the Ladykillers at all. So what I thought was going to be a discussion about the technical challenges afforded by turning a classic film into a worthwhile play, was actually going to be a typical Today program bunfight.

 Fine, if they were going to ambush me, I would ambush right back. I decided not to play. (Athough no-one appears to have told the guy who wrote this blurb.)

 Since we were changing briefs, I thought I'd introduce one of my own, and what a treat it was to to be able to complain directly to Today's pompous John Humphrys stand-in about the squabbling that passes for debate on that programme. Of course, they shut it down as quickly as they could, so let me finish my point here. The style of debate practised by the Today programme poisons discourse in this country. An arena where there are no positions possible except diametrically opposed ones, where nuance is not permitted, where politicians are forced into defensive positions of utter banality...none of it is any good for the national conversation.

And they wanted to impose this nonsense on me? Michael in the red corner, me in the blue! Ding! Defend yourself! Justify yourself!  What the host didn't realise is that because I'm not a politician, like the fellow I saw in the green room preparing his lines with an aide, I didn't have to be held hostage to their artificial, reductive, harmful format.

Finally, some questions for the Today show producers. Is mis-briefing your guests ethical journalistic practise? In giving an accurate brief to one side of the discussion, am I to conclude that someone in the show had already made up their mind on the subject, and wanted to skew the debate to their liking? Are little bits of dishonesty like this the only way you guys feel you can maintain your little fight club?

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Only joking! It's actually Jacqui Smith, doomed to wander Soho in a ridiculous mac because her husband watched a couple of mucky videos in a hotel and the taxpayer was suddenly short ten quid. Today, promoting her new BBC program about porn (I think it's called 'My Ridiculous Penance For Something My Husband Did Anyway') she admitted that she was shocked by her recent discovery that there was porn on the Internet.

"I thought the attraction of porn was that it was illicit," she said in The Times today. "You go into a private shop to buy a DVD."

Yes, that's what men like about porn! The inconvenience! Can't wait for this documentary!

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I happened to meet a policeman this week, and I asked him whether he and his workmates were using social networking tools for crime prevention or detection. As an example, I was thinking about how useful something like Twitter would be in getting the word out about people who were wanted or missing. That sort of thing.

He said "Our problem is we don't have that kind of technology."

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Of course, that way, South Yorkshire Police wouldn't have been able to take Paul's laptop, iphone and hard drive and ignore repeated requests to return them. But maybe there's a workaround for that too.

(Thanks to @professoryard for the photoshop job!)

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...in case you're in a hurry. Here's the full thing if you're not.

And Scotland Yard had chosen to notify only a fraction of the hundreds of people whose messages may have been illegally accessed — effectively shielding News of the World from a barrage of civil lawsuits.

One former editor said Coulson talked freely with colleagues about the dark arts, including hacking. “I’ve been to dozens if not hundreds of meetings with Andy” when the subject came up, said the former editor, who spoke on condition of anonymity. The editor added that when Coulson would ask where a story came from, editors would reply, “We’ve pulled the phone records” or “I’ve listened to the phone messages.” Sean Hoare, a former reporter and onetime close friend of Coulson’s, also recalled discussing hacking. The two men first worked together at The Sun, where, Hoare said, he played tape recordings of hacked messages for Coulson. At News of the World, Hoare said he continued to inform Coulson of his pursuits. Coulson “actively encouraged me to do it,” Hoare said.

Reporters called one method of hacking “double screwing” because it required two simultaneous calls to the same number. The first would engage the phone line, forcing the second call into voice mail. A reporter then punched in the code to hear messages, often deleting them to prevent access by rival papers. A dozen former reporters said in interviews that hacking was pervasive at News of the World. “Everyone knew,” one longtime reporter said. “The office cat knew.”

Within days of the raids, several senior detectives said they began feeling internal pressure. One senior investigator said he was approached by Chris Webb, from the department’s press office, who was “waving his arms up in the air, saying, ‘Wait a minute — let’s talk about this.’ ” The investigator, who has since left Scotland Yard, added that Webb stressed the department’s “long-term relationship with News International.” The investigator recalled becoming furious at the suggestion, responding, “There’s illegality here, and we’ll pursue it like we do any other case.”

In addition to the royal household, Scotland Yard alerted five other victims whose names would appear in the indictment of Mulcaire. Of the remaining hundreds who potentially had their phones broken into, the police said they notified only select individuals with national-security concerns: members of the government, the police and the military.

Andy Hayman, who ran the case for Scotland Yard, has since retired. He declined to comment for this article. He is currently a columnist for The Times of London, where he has written in defense of the police investigation and maintained there were “perhaps a handful” of hacking victims. The paper is owned by News International.

BY THE SPRING of this year, News International’s papers had firmly switched their support from Labor to the Tories. An avalanche of unforgiving coverage culminated on April 8, one month before the general election, in a Sun story headlined “Brown’s a Clown.” Brown’s strategists assumed that Murdoch’s motives were not purely ideological. They drew up a campaign document conjuring Murdoch’s wish list should David Cameron become prime minister. Among the top items they identified was the weakening of the government-financed BBC, one of Murdoch’s biggest competitors and long a target of criticism from News International executives. On May 11, David Cameron officially assumed the position and elevated Coulson to the head of communications. Within the week, Rupert Murdoch arrived at 10 Downing Street for a private meeting with the new prime minister. Cameron’s administration criticized the BBC in July for “extraordinary and outrageous waste” during difficult financial times and proposed cutting its budget.

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Oh, wait, no, I guess that's tomorrow.

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