Higher English

RUAE Booklet – Newspaper Articles

Ms McJennett

How Britain fell in love with breakfast

Breakfasts in the 70s were silent, tasteless and compulsory. And then we discovered good coffee

As the 10am queue winds out of the Breakfast Club in Shoreditch, a flurry of bright young things in blood-restricting trousers order pancakes, huevos rancheros and flat whites. Elsewhere in the country, Brits stand in kitchens fumbling with Nespresso cartridges, munching bespoke organic muesli with live yoghurt, blueberries and honey from chipper, ethically kept bees. "Can you do breakfast?" one's cockiest, most focused clients will suggest, before appearing at 8am with a smug post-Ashtanga glow and ordering Rooibos tea and an egg-white omelette.

Somehow, in defiance of centuries of dour social conditioning, we Brits let breakfast get sexy. It certainly wasn't always thus. My clearest childhood memories are of 70s breakfasts which were silent, tasteless and compulsory. "A car cannot move without fuel in the engine," I can hear my mother chuntering as I stare at a bowl of tepid Ready Brek ("Central Heating for Kids") or two slices of Mother's Pride toast with Co-op marge and a watery poached egg. Soggy Weetabix. Creamy tea with full-fat milk. Never ever coffee, which was a mystery to us, although a tin of Camp Chicory & Coffee Essence did live in the cupboard for more than a decade, with me and my brothers occasionally feeding each other spoonfuls for a dare.

Nearby, at my gran's house in Carlisle, breakfast was an even more serious, regimented matter. Gran set the table for the next day's breakfast at 9.30 every single evening of a 60-year marriage while she made my grandfather his pre-bed supper (two slices of cheddar and a buttered Jacob's cream cracker, if you're interested). Breakfast wasn't "eaten" it was "got across your chest", a fried culinary flak jacket of bacon, fried eggs, toast with butter, slices of black pudding, an abstemious blob of HP Sauce. My grandad would have all that down his gullet by 7.15am and would be up a ladder doing something perilous with guttering by 7.35. Foodwise, like most Brits back then, they glorified in non-adventure. Pasta, noodles, curry or pizza – all of which I'm guilty of breakfasting on – had never passed their lips. I'm not sure what grandad would make of my French-style patisserie breakfasts from Paul – croque monsieur with a double espresso and a bottle of Vitaminwater – but he would probably be bewildered, moving quickly to scathing. He was once hoodwinked into eating a mouthful of quiche Lorraine at a family party in the 80s, mistaking it for custard tart, an experience he seemed to find as traumatic as being shot at in the battle of Monte Cassino.

It was the rise of the package holiday in the late 80s and early 90s that made us Brits loosen up about breakfast. The Dents ventured to Estartit on the Costa Brava (20 hours on a coach, we didn't trust planes, nasty business). Our minds were collectively blown by the concept of yoghurt for breakfast, cold meats, breakfast doughnuts and orange juice poured willy-nilly (back home it doubled as a formal starter for a posh dinner). We discovered Nutella – actual spready chocolate to go on toast.

Other families must have had similar early morning epiphanies because they began tearing down portions of their sombre kitchens and hammering up American-style "breakfast bars", complete with portable tellies to watch Anne Diamond and Nick Owen on Good Morning Britain. My mother certainly dreamed of something similar and openly fantasised about which one of the children she could have adopted in order to make room for nine feet of MFI'd speckled faux-granite laminate and four tall stools, on which she could perch breakfasting on peach Ski yoghurt, drinking Mellow Bird's with Carnation evaporated milk and being, in a lot of ways like Heather Locklear from Dynasty, but living in Currock, Carlisle.

Although in the 80s we may have briefly turned our backs on the great British fried breakfast – claiming to prefer half a grapefruit and an aerobic crunch through the Arlene Phillips' Keep in Shape System – the full gut-buster remained close to our hearts. By the 90s, as well as lapping up Liam, Damon, Loaded lads and all other things beautifully British, we seemed to revisit the full English with a jingoistic fervour. Set

meal B with extra bubble and white toast became the final hoorah in any big night of debauchery. The Naked Chef taught us how to make pukka bacon sandwiches while propping up a Vespa scooter at the same time. In London, we saw the rise of the first mega-bucks English breakfasts and I fed my growing waistline with £20 plates of Cumberland sausage, organic goose eggs, homemade baked beans, hash browns, portobello mushrooms and endless granary toast with lightly salted butter, served with cafetieres of freshly brewed coffee.

Oh the coffee. Suddenly good coffee was everywhere, on every corner. Plentiful 7am supplies of latte, Americano, espresso, cappuccino. We took cheap flights to New York and came home demanding fancy coffee and bagels smothered with smoked salmon and cream cheese. Smoked salmon for breakfast? I can hear my grandfather spinning in his grave. He'd have been happy with humble kipper, perhaps on a very special occasion, or if a guesthouse landlady offered it during a trip to Blackpool. But smoked salmon on any old day breakfast? Unthinkable.

What I also loved about the 90s was how breakfast began to be a whole other social and working occasion. Previously, breakfast was a private, indoors time to be spent with the bed clad in a mixed-fibres dressing gown, while grunting in response to requests from your nearest and dearest to pass the jam. Suddenly, invites from your zippiest, most high-flying (translation: bloody annoying) colleagues and clients to "do breakfast" began appearing in your new-fangled "electronic mail in-box". You'd arrive at 8am in a cafe with a pillow-creased face and sleep snot eyes to find them primed like a tiger, still wearing their spinning class headband, souped up on a litre of Kenco, having already transferred their thoughts to Powerpoint and "actioned several blue sky targets". The approach was – and remains – to order eggs Benedict and let them twaddle on until their inevitable caffeine crash.

Yet there's a beauty in the new ways we British do breakfast. We've escaped from our kitchens and sofas and embraced breezy brunches and breakfast working meetings. I might laugh at the large tables of kids at the Breakfast Club with their plates of green eggs and ham or chorizo hash browns, updating their Tumblr sites and planning new directional haircuts, but deep down I'm thoroughly envious. This generation has never faced a tepid bowl of Scott's Porage Oats made with water, milk and salt while Radio 1's Dave Lee Travis burbled in the background. Nor have they known the pant-wetting excitement of a Kellogg's multipack (the same boring cereal, just smaller). No, it's 2012, they're just having a ball at breakfast time, laughing, carousing, flirting, working and feasting wantonly on foodstuffs from every corner of the world. I can't beat them so I join them. The great British breakfast will never stand still, as sure as eggs is eggs.

The X Factor: Grace Dent's TV OD

It's time … To face … The X Factor! But will a refreshed Louis and the new judges on the panel be enough

to keep us entertained until Christmas?

I think people's perception of me is about to change," promises Gary Barlow in The X Factor's opening

montage. It's one of those trademark screaming, strobing X Factor opening segments full of contestants

storming in or storming off, Louis weeping, Dermot dispensing cuddles, security guards jostling, makeup

room bickering, mams howling, and women with tremendous wobbly mottled arms doing overhead

clapping. A montage which induces mild anxiety, chest pains and dry mouth while communicating frankly

nothing.

The X Factor is back again from now until Christmas; same format, different judges. Gary seems to believe

it'll be a large public leap of faith to see him being authoritative and judgmental, clearly forgetting that

Robbie Williams has spent 17 years inferring heavily that he's a cross between Little Lord Fauntleroy and

The Hooded Claw.

The new judging panel spells out "dying throes of the format" to me. I like Barlow and wholly respect what

he's achieved, but let's be honest, you can stick as many catherine wheels and wind machines beside Kelly

Rowland's head as you like; it's still Kelly Rowland. I'd have been happier with Kevin Rowland. If Kelly

was so clever at manoeuvring the perilous entertainment world she'd still be in Destiny's Child, not perched

behind a trestle table in the O2 watching a Tina Turner impersonator from Hong Kong sprain her camel toe

doing drop-splits. Kelly went the same way as all the other Destiny's Children, flung off the pop-horse in

Beyoncé Knowles's giant game of girlband Buckaroo.

I have a soft spot for Tulisa from N-Dubz, another new face on the judging panel, although I wonder if that's

just a build up of sympathy for Tulisa's young adult years spent tied to Dappy, the Scrappy-Doo of urban

music, famed mainly for looming about bare-chested in a snow hat, whining about "haterz" at every

juncture. Louis Walsh told us in breathless soundbites last week that this new panel had "breathed new life

into him" which hopefully didn't mean he's planning to start thinking before he speaks ("You remind me of a

young Lenny Henry!").

In another slight change in proceedings, last week's audition rounds showed more actual singers and far less

emotionally adrift "local eccentrics" chivvied on to be heckled by 4,000 friends. One young idiot mooned

the stage to show seven girls' names tattooed on his bum, the keepsake of a holiday where he'd had a lot of

sex. No one had the heart to inform him that people getting pissed-up, then having sex on holiday was

invented many decades ago; he wasn't a sex pioneer.

Another very talented girl, Janet, with a rather mesmerising Laura Marling-type voice sang Your Song,

causing the audience to erupt and the judges to announce she had star quality. Obviously, the best thing

Janet could do now is work with someone who'd give her young self time to develop gradually as a modern

folk act, playing to her strengths, instead of being on ITV1 until Christmas and forced to sing Waterloo by

Abba on 70s week or appear in hotpants with a cartwheeling dance troupe, honking through Girlfriend by

Avril Lavigne, then being nagged for not dancing enough, then dispatched on the X Factor tour, fifth on the

bill under Mr "I had sex in Faliraki" Tattoo Arse. It's not too late Janet. Run.

Health and safety, eh? Eh? Health and safety!

Health! And! Safety! Eh?

What's the problem with it? A future filled with plastic firearms-on-demand doesn't sound too rosy to me

I haven't actually seen The Wright Way, Ben Elton's latest sitcom, but I've sensed the waves of negative

feedback it's generated, in much the same way Obi Wan Kenobi felt a great disturbance in the Force when

the Death Star destroyed the planet Alderaan, except rather than sensing a million voices crying out in terror,

I've merely seen it trend on Twitter accompanied by a swarm of Anti-LOLs.

Despite not having seen it, I can safely say it can't possibly be as harrowing as everyone's making out, unless

it consists of nothing but live footage of a kitten autopsy performed by a blindfolded drunk. Having co-

written The Young Ones, Filthy Rich and Catflap, and Blackadder, Ben Elton has been responsible for more

deep, gut-level guffaws than the vast majority of people on the planet, an achievement that will prove

ultimately snark-proof when they finally come to write his obituary.

One of the major criticisms of The Wright Way, apart from the title and scripting and performances and set

design and soundtrack and ambience and positioning of each individual pixel making up the overall image,

is the main character's chosen career: he's a bungling council health and safety officer. Satirising health and

safety is like moaning about the weather: as British as it is boring. And it's something I've never quite

grasped, because in my view, health and safety legislation doesn't go far enough. Everything is a threat.

Existence is hostile. To be alive on Planet Earth is to be pinned by an unseen gravitational force beyond your

control to the surface of an almighty bauble of death cluttered with sharp objects, death traps, diseases,

disasters and killers concocting new and exotic means of inflicting agony upon your person, all of it

revolving silently in an infinite and eternal vacuum, the sheer insensate vastness of which is simply too

ghastly for the human mind to contemplate. Printing "CAUTION: CONTENTS HOT" on the side of a

disposable coffee cup doesn't come close to mitigating the horror. But it's a start.

My mind prints warnings on everything. Shove any object into my eyeline and my mind immediately paints

a vivid triptych detailing all the ways it could possibly hurt me. I can't walk past, say, a loaded knife block

without the words "CAUTION: DEATH" hovering over it, like an annotation in Google Glass, and

I automatically imagine myself tripping up and skewering my eye on the knives, the blade piercing the

socket and stabbing my brain right in the pain-processing lab, even though the knives are safely stored

handle-side-out, the cutting edges shielded by an inch of wood.

Being a parent just makes it worse, because suddenly there's a miniature offshoot version of you that's

simply too stupid to be terrified of everything yet, crawling towards power sockets and choking hazards with

cartoon delight on its face. And those are just the obvious risks. There's a whole universe of neurotic horror

if you go looking for it. Did you know it's risky to feed honey to babies? Nor did I, till I stumbled across that

rib-tickling fact online. Something to do with infant guts and botulism. Honey. Killer honey. It shook me,

and I briefly lost sight of the fact that my offspring was human. Instead he was a mysterious, precious

machine the world wanted to destroy by any means necessary. I ran Google queries like "is bread deadly for

one-year-olds?" and "will sleet blind my child?" I want health and safety advice etched into every object in

the universe, thanks.

And not just objects that currently exist, but also things to come. For these we have to turn to the news: part

early-warning-system, part Argos catalogue of exciting new threats. I'm a fear hobbyist. An early adopter of

perils. Obviously I'm busily keeping one eye on the latest bird flu outbreaks in China, but my fear antennae

recently started twitching over reports about the world's first 3D printable gun, the CAD files for which have

been downloaded hundreds of thousands of times since being placed on open release last week. A future

filled with plastic firearms-on-demand doesn't sound too rosy to me, although on the plus side I guess the

next generation will be shit-hot at ducking. Not to mention wreath design. So it won't be all bad. And

besides, eventually all the 3D printers will be so busy churning out coffins, the print queue will stretch into

decades, thereby preventing the creation of more bullets. Incidentally, if I had a 3D printer, I'd mess with its

mind by commanding it to print out nothing but a series of precise replicas of a single sheet of paper. That'd

show it.

I'd like to think this paranoid fretting serves some evolutionary purpose. I'd like to think we easily alarmed

types are historically better at survival. But I suspect that's not true. There's no rhyme nor reason. It's

random. When a volcano goes off, it incinerates the carefree and cautious alike.

Don't know about you, but I hate the carefree for that. It's downright arrogant of them to die in disasters

without worrying first. Almost a waste. Almost.

Q: How do you spoil a five-year-old for ever? A:

Buy him a convertible

It's not psychologically healthy to develop a burning dislike of a small child. But last week …

I'm not in the habit of bearing grudges against five-year-old boys I don't even know, especially when I

haven't so much as spoken to them, but merely observed their behaviour from a distance of several metres. It

can't be psychologically healthy to develop a burning dislike of someone you could easily hurl over a small

building using just one arm if you were so inclined. Kids are blameless, albeit often annoying. But last week

– last week …

Last week there was a sudden burst of sunshine after weeks of sulking sky. We – and by "we" I mean my

wife and child, because I'm one segment of a family unit these days (yeah, like the Human Centipede) –

were visiting some friends whose kid is about 18 months older than ours, which means it can perform all

sorts of tricks our one-year-old hasn't mastered yet – incredible feats like walking and issuing verbal

demands.

The sunny weather prompted us to head for a park near their house, so we could put the kids on the swings

and look and point at them. Turned out every other parent in the postcode had had the same idea, and the

playground was packed, which meant the toddler and the one-year-old would have to wait their turn before

going on the swings. That's fine for a one-year-old, who doesn't even understand that he's going to get to go

on the swings at all until you physically put him on one, at which point he's surprised and delighted – but a

drag for a toddler who's in the process of learning basic concepts like sharing and fairness, which are

apparently sometimes useful in adult life.

Still, after a bit of waiting and turn-taking, all the kids in the vicinity got a fair turn on the swings and came

away satisfied. It looked like society might just be capable of holding itself together. Until a five-year-old

boy drove through the playground in an open-top Audi sports car.

I say "drove" because he wasn't pedaling; this was an electric car with a motor and working headlights and

everything. And I say "open-top Audi" because that's what it was. He was driving an open-top Audi through

a playground.

It didn't go very fast – you could overtake it dragging yourself along the ground with your teeth – but then it

didn't need velocity to get noticed. Everybody gawped like he'd ridden through the place on Rihanna's naked

back. And the effect was immediate.

"I want a go in the car," said the toddler.

You can't have a go in the car, said harsh reality.

"But I want a go in the car," repeated the toddler, already in tears.

And that was that. He was inconsolable. As the toddler's mum tried in vain to placate him, I looked around

the playground, and noticed lots of equally upset children. Moments earlier this was an environment filled

with adults patiently explaining to their children that if they just wait their turn, they'll all get a go on the fun

thing. And then Audi boy rolls through in the funnest thing of all, and it's all his, and not theirs, and

suddenly the swings and slides are a shitty shitty shitball and they learn, possibly for the very first time, that

life just isn't fair.

Audi boy, meanwhile, was exiting the playground and trundling down a path leading to another section of

park, where he could ruin some other kids' days with his mere presence. I watched Audi boy's parents as

they walked behind their careering shitbag son, carefully checking he wasn't crashing into strangers' ankles

but apparently oblivious to the trail of howling victims left in their wake. And I thought: "You are the worst

people in the world."

This was before all the recent terrorist outrages, you understand.

Naturally I confronted them about it, halting their child's progress with a foot on the front bumper, loudly

berating their crass behaviour while impressed pedestrians looked on, cheering and punching the air and

chanting my name until Audi boy's parents fell to the ground, clutching pitifully at my trouser-legs and

sobbing for forgiveness. In my head. Meanwhile in reality I did nothing.

Well, almost nothing. I did heroically Google the toy car when I got home, hoping to discover it cost £3,000

so I could hate them twice as hard. But no: it's about £400. Still an unjustifiable amount to blow on a

glorified pedal car, but not quite as financially revolting as I'd anticipated – which somehow makes it worse.

More attainable means more of these things trundling through more playgrounds, ruining more days and

poisoning more minds. Thousands more children growing up thinking it's perfectly normal to drive a

convertible to primary school. And eventually the price'll drop and absolutely everyone'll be forced to buy

one for their wailing offspring for Christmas, for fear of being sued years later for neglect and winding up

beaten to death in prison.

Only one thing for it. The government should seize every single one of these battery-powered bratwagons

and pay a man dressed up like Geoff Capes to smash them to pieces live on Saturday-morning television

with a wooden sledgehammer. It's the only sane response.

The mobile app challenge: getting it wrong can

seriously damage your brand

Remarkably, this week marks five years since the launch of Apple's App Store, and we've long since passed

the billionth app download. But while consumer appetite for apps has been insatiable, marketers have not

always achieved the full potential of their brand

It became clear early on that the most compelling route to success was to make an app with a clear function

and benefit to the user, and by 2010 Oakley's Surf Report and the North Face Trailhead, which tracks hikes,

were setting a standard. Others opted for a game extension of an existing campaign, such as Barclaycard's

Waterslide game or the Audi A4 Driving Challenge, and some extended an existing service into an app, such

as DirecTV in the US which offered a free weekly American football game.

While the best conceptual models for apps might now be established, the technical challenges are only

intensifying. The diversification of handsets is challenging developers to build for multiple mobile devices

and tablets across Apple's iOS, Google's Android, Windows RT and Blackberry. By mid-2012, Android

alone was powering 4,000 different devices.

The wrong strategy can be seriously damaging for a brand. Recent research by Harris Interactive found 90%

of Americans felt badly about brands with poorly performing apps. 75% described annoyance and 69%

frustration – typically caused by a slow or hard to navigate app – carried over into their perception of the

brand. Damning stuff.

For those charged with building apps, things don't look set to improve much in the near term. Even

Microsoft's former Windows lead Steven Sinofsky said this week that the trend towards closed mobile

operating systems will make it even harder for developers to build for multiple platforms.

"Some will undoubtedly call for standards or some homogenisation of platforms," wrote Sinofsky. "But is it

reasonable to expect vendors to pour billions into R&D to support an intentional strategy of

commoditisation or support for a committee design? Vendors believe we're just getting started in delivering

innovation and so slowing things down this way seems counter-intuitive at best."

Charity baking: is food the future of

philanthropy?

Amateur bakers are using their skills to help needy children. What motivates them, and is it more than a fad?

The charity bake sale, humble stalwart of the fundraising effort, has spread its wings. Bake-offs, tarts, dinner

parties, cups of coffee, unused kitchens and surplus groceries: food-based philanthropy appears to be

flourishing.

Free Cakes UK, a service that matches keen amateur bakers with families struggling to provide a child's

birthday cake, attests to the boom. The network has recently delivered its 1,000th cake to a needy child.

"The recession, combined with the growing popularity of baking has seen us grow very quickly," says the

organisation's Sophie Howes. "The overriding reason people come to us is poverty, although there are lots of

reasons – bereavement or disability for example. At the same time we have more volunteer bakers than

recipients for cakes – there's been a huge amount of interest."

Comic Relief confirms baking was among the most popular activities for Red Nose Day 2013. Actual

baking receipts weren't tallied but wannabe Mary Berrys downloaded 100,000 bake-off kits. No wonder so

many charities are hungry for a bite of the baking obsession pie. Organisers of Bake for Bumps, a fundraiser

for medical research charity Sparks, were "overwhelmed" by the response to this year's inaugural campaign,

which raised more than £27,000. "That's a huge amount for a charity our size," a spokeswoman says. "It also

gave us an opportunity to tap into a whole new market – 98% of people who signed up were new supporters

and mostly female. Traditionally, our supporters have been men." Other charities have enjoyed similarly

sweet success. Great Ormond Street Hospital's Bake It Better has raised more than £45,000 since 2009,

while Tarts for Troops hopes to raise £50,000 for blind veterans this year after a successful pilot in 2012.

But it's not just benevolent bakers donning their pinnies. Dinner4Good, aimed at Good Samaritans not quite

up to shaving their heads or running marathons, facilitates charitable dinner parties. The host stumps up the

cost of the meal and guests make an online donation direct to the designated charity. Founder Bryan

Sergeant says the average dinner raises £120 – although one soiree hauled in £1,000. "People feel it's a way

of getting their friends and acquaintances together for a fun evening and simultaneously helping a good

cause," he says. "It gives them an opportunity to talk about the cause so that others may also support it by

holding a dinner or other fundraising."

Stephen Hawkes, spokesman for FoodCycle, confirms a surge in people wanting to help the service, which

brings together volunteers, spare kitchens and surplus supermarket food to create meals for the hungry.

Since 2009, around 2,500 volunteers have made over 63,000 meals; Hawkes says publicity about food

poverty and food waste has helped drive interest. Some volunteers are motivated by altruism, while others

are keen to develop skills or just love cooking. Whatever their motives, the service needs more of them.

"We're currently working on our expansion model," Hawkes says. "There's a rising demand for our service

and we want to be there to meet it."

According to Ceri Edwards, director of policy and communications at the Institute of Fundraising, the trend

to whip out a whisk instead of a cheque book also reflects a growing desire by donors to be more involved in

a good cause rather than simply handing over cash. "All the current research shows that while giving is

generally static, people are looking for different ways to give," Edwards says. "It's that feeling of getting

involved rather than just setting up a direct debit." If you can go out for dinner and give to a good cause at

the same time then you're killing two birds with one stone."

Initiatives like suspended coffee, where a customer buys an extra hot drink to leave behind for someone in

need, have been criticised as a philanthropic fad and PR stunt by coffee chains. Further, one bake-off nay-

sayer tweeted during Comic Relief that a nation struggling with an obesity crisis would be better off doing

sponsored runs than cooking up calorific treats. But Edwards disagrees. "We think any form of fundraising

is good," he says.

In fact, historian and food writer Sara Emily Duff says the trend could be part of the food movement "trying

to justify itself by doing good" at a time when the recession is being felt through food. "Eating well won't

change the world on its own but food can be used helpfully to cross social divides," she says.

Are you baking a difference?

In defence of mumbling: there's a poetry in our

quietness

The BBC's Tony Hall has got it wrong. The world has got too loud, but I sense the whisper of a quiet

revolution

Everything seems loud these days. Ringtones, radios, car horns. Bus passengers bellowing into their mobile

phones; cinema surround sound, aeroplanes, Muzak. The persistent hum of refrigerators, air conditioners,

neon lights. The sudden blaring of the advertising break, and the continuity announcer whose voice whoops

and whirls past our ears. All this noise, all this racket, fighting to fill the air. Even the written word seems

more thundering now: across Facebook, Twitter, comment threads, blogs, comes the constant tumble of

voices.

And yet amid it all, some people have trouble hearing what is being said. In the latest edition of the Radio

Times the BBC director general, Tony Hall, fields questions from readers. "Are all your sound engineers

25?" asks one. "Have you got any 55-year-old ones who realise that it can be difficult to hear programmes

because of background music?" inquires another.

It isn't just music that is the problem. Hall seizes upon recent accusations that actors and presenters are

muttering and mumbling their way through scripts. Last year, Eddie Redmayne in particular was criticised

for mumbling in the BBC adaptation of Birdsong, and there were similar complaints about historical drama

Parade's End. "I don't want to sound like a grumpy old man, but I think muttering is something we could

have a look at," says Hall. "Actors muttering can be testing … you find you have missed a line." Indeed in

one review of Birdsong the critic noted how its actors "gave the impression of not so much delivering their

lines as quietly burying them".

I have spent my whole life being unheard, misheard, asked to speak louder. I'm not a mumbler or mutterer,

but I do speak softly. Often in my company people are moved to remind me of the episode of Seinfeld in

which Kramer finds a new girlfriend who speaks so quietly it leads to an elaborate misunderstanding. "She's

one of those low-talkers," notes Jerry. "You can't hear a word she's saying! You're always going 'excuse me,

what was that?'"

It frustrates me to be told to speak up. My instinctive response is to tell them to listen harder, or to clam up

entirely; very rarely I will explain that if I speak louder it not only feels forced and unnatural, but it also

hurts my own ears. Mostly I just wish for a quieter world, a world that would see fit to lean in a little closer.

I often wonder if one of the reasons I write for a living might be because throughout my life it has been the

only way to ensure that people can hear my words.

Reassuringly, for a while now I have felt the stirrings of a quiet revolution. There's been the rise of

mumblecore, a film genre known for its naturalistic dialogue. Susan Cain's book Quiet: the power of

introverts in a world that can't stop talking, which takes as its mantra Mahatma Gandhi's insistence that: "In

a gentle way, you can shake the world." Even the more muted delivery of dramas such as Birdsong has

given me hope that we might be grasping the idea that actors are communicating human experience in all its

variegated colours and textures and volumes.

Some time ago I read The Right to Speak by the legendary voice coach Patsy Rodenburg. I was struck by a

passage on quietness and silence. "Linked with the denial of grief," she wrote, " the 'lump in the throat' is the

habit of pushing down the voice. In order to block pain and contain it the voice feels literally clumped in the

throat like a mass which we neither swallow nor expel. Expression is obstructed."

I was reminded of Robert Frost's assertion that, "A poem begins with a lump in the throat, a home-sickness

or a love-sickness. It is a reaching-out towards expression; an effort to find fulfilment." And it led me to

recognise that for all the pushed-down, unswallowed muttering, there can be a poetry in our quietness; all of

us mumblers, soft-speakers, low-talkers are after all just reaching out, we are lifting up our voices as high,

and as beautifully as we are able. "O, but Everyone/ Was a bird;" wrote Sassoon, "and the song was

wordless; the singing will never be done."

Sharknado: the most terribly good movie of the

summer

What's not to love? The awful production values, the silly one-liners, and the great mockery of it all on the

internet

Sharknado, pundemic on Twitter, has restored the B-movie back to its rightful place in American life: cult

summer blockbuster and universal inside joke. To join in you don't need a TV or even to have seen the

movie. You only must appreciate absurdity (and tolerate portmanteaus.)

In case the title left anything to doubt, a quick summary of the film: a tornado spews sharks into Los

Angeles. One lands in Tara Reid's pool, another bounces off a barstool. Helicopters throw bombs at the

weather. A character named 'Fin', played by a Chippendales dancer, leaps into the open jaws of a projectile

Great White and chainsaws his way out of its rubber belly, screaming. The tagline reads: "Enough said".

SyFy only pulled 1.4 million viewers – below average for their original movies and over 6 million fewer

than watched The Big Bang Theory on CBS that night, yet as Vulture put it, "Sharknado won the Internet

Thursday", with over 5,000 tweets a minute at the height of the online frenzy. It has been made into gifs' The

B-movie production machine Asylum has their biggest hit yet. Everyone from Mashable to the Washington

Post has joined the comedy online, like lists of suggested titles, such as "Velocirapture" and "Piranhacane".

Shark and chum puns and ideal endings (such a title card that reads 'Fin') abound. Everybody wins.

There is something universally heartwarming about flying sharks and the chaos they wreak. (Perhaps they're

drawn by the overpowering scent of ham coming off a certain subset of Hollywood.) And what's not to love?

The awful production values, the silly one-liners, the relentlessly straight-faced nonsense – the deliberate

badness of is charming, in its way. The cast and crew are in on the joke but aren't obnoxiously ironic about

it; they're having fun too. For a few hours, the rich and famous commented alongside the rest of the world.

Other than sporting events and political debates, how often can you get staff at Buzzfeed and the New

Yorker talking about the same thing?

Where The Lone Ranger and would-be blockbusters fail, Sharknado succeeds: it embraces its pulp absurdity

without trying to be clever about it. The best part of Johnny Depp's western-adventure-reboot, which

includes massacres and cannibalism, is a railroad chase at the end, the only part of the movie that has zero

pretensions of being anything other than a cartoon. Attempting to craft the blockbuster with everything, the

filmmakers ended up with nothing.

Sharknado, on the other hand, does nothing but create the raw, dumb material for an audience to make up

jokes. Too goofy and fake to merit any protest, it has no pretensions past absurdity. Anything – a sharktopus,

radioactive pandas, demonic koalas – is possible, and you can have exactly as much fun with the cuddly

monsters as you want. B-movies like Sharknado take movies out of the shushed theaters and into homes,

making them social events that are snarky yet without animus. All you need are some friends – enter

Twitter, which may have had its giddiest, least abrasive evening ever. When everyone's in on the joke, we're

laughing with each other, not at someone or something.

At New York magazine, Matt Zoller Seitz astutely compares watching a terrible-good movie with friends to

"a ritual sacrifice of sorts, one done with good humor and exuberance". Of course, SyFy planned this

strategy (if not in those words), but the movie itself is still unabashed silliness, and for that we love it (and

for the flying sharks, which basically exist).

After so many summers of moody superheroes and comedies dedicated to the arrested adolescence of grown

men, it's refreshing to see a movie that encourages viewers to let loose on their own terms. The #Sharknado

meme may run its course before SyFy can air Sharknado again on Thursday, but if Twitter turns into a

weekly viewing room for terrible movies, the world will be a better place. Nothing unifies like being in on a

joke together, and we should be glad that terrible movies are still American made.

THINK SIMILAR

We’ve had nouns being turned into verbs, and now there’s a rash of adjectives being used as nouns.

Robert Lane Greene has the diagnosis

From INTELLIGENT LIFE magazine, May/June 2013

"Winston tastes good, like a cigarette should." Advertisers love to push at the edges of taste in language. If

this slogan, from 1954, doesn't bother you, you're like most modern folks. But every educated Anglophone

knew, when this came out, that "like" couldn't be used as a conjunction, and that this should be "Tastes

good, as a cigarette should."

Playing with grammar is an easy way for advertising agencies to grab our attention. Rhetoricians call

switching a word from one part of speech to another "anthimeria". One particular way of doing it has caught

the copywriters' fancy. Virgin Atlantic is "flying in the face of ordinary". Sky television in Britain invites

you to "believe in better". An Asus computer is the answer if you're "in search of incredible". Bergdorf

Goodman, the luxury-goods store, is celebrating "111 years of extraordinary". Yes, welcome to quirky.

Welcome to edgy. Welcome to nounified.

Adjectives as nouns are, of course, nothing new. Every language has to have some way of moving words

from one part of speech to another. And for most of the history of English, the most common way of doing

this, and the biggest peeve of the grammar peevers, has been verbing nouns, not nouning adjectives. "To

impact" and "to author" bring out allergies in plenty of people. For some of them, even "to contact" is still a

Johnny-come-ungrammatical.

But verbing nouns has a long pedigree in English wordplay, as the greatest verber of all testifies.

Shakespeare nouned verbs as freely as Pele goaled footballs: "It out-Herods Herod": Hamlet. "Grace me no

grace, nor uncle me no uncle": Richard II. Clever and audacious at the time, these usages are still striking

and evocative today. But Shakespeare also verbed "dog", "channel" and "season", all now routine as verbs.

A well-verbified word soon becomes fashionable, then unexceptional.

Verbing is actually a pretty complicated process. Not everything can be considered do-able, suitable for

verbification. You sometimes hear it said that "art is a verb", meaning "art is something you do". But nobody

ever says "I arted for hours". Or if they did, they probably pretensioned after that.

But nounification is pretty easy. Shakespeare also played "fast and loose" (Antony and Cleopatra) with

adjectives. Your English teacher was lying if she told you that a noun is always a "person, place or thing".

Tell that to "reimbursement", "regret" or "reticence", none of which is a thing, really. A noun is simply a

word that behaves like a noun. By definition, it is any word that behaves as a noun should; it can be used as

a subject or an object in a sentence, for example. And English lets almost anything noun.

"Think different" was Apple’s slogan for the Mac computer, once upon a time. Many thought it

ungrammatical: "It's think differently." But Apple didn’t mean "think in a different way". It meant "think of

different-ness". When you buy a Mac, think of how much cleverer you are than those mindless masses

tapping away at Word on their PCs. As when someone wondering what to eat says "I'm thinking Thai", or an

interior designer points at your wall and says "I’m thinking warm and inviting here", Apple's slogan was

pressing "different" into service as a concept, and hence a noun, not a truncated adverb.

The problem with nouning adjectives isn't grammar. Anyone who tells you it is needs to read a bit more. It's

that the ad industry's rush to new and clever is so obvious. Nancy Friedman, a branding consultant in

California, collects scads of nouned adjectives in slogans: "Celebrate your extraordinary." "Go directly to

fabulous." "Give exceptional." "Generate positive." "Welcome to possible." Friedman is an acerbic critic of

herd-trends in branding and advertising. She also cites all those –ify names (Spotify, Storify, Zenify,

Themify). A trend goes from edgy to cliché faster than copywriters notice that they are behind the curve.

Any marketers thinking they are the first to noun adjectives are really the last word in overdone.

Grammar play is like free verse, splatter painting or low-fi music. The first to get to the idea grabs attention

just by virtue of daring. But the hordes who follow have to have something to say, some real content, not to

mention a real product to sell. Just playing around with the medium won’t do. It takes more than

unconventional to generate memorable.

TWILIGHT OF THE GULLIBLE

There used to be many reported sightings of UFOs, but modern life has not been kind to them.

Charles Nevin finds out why

From INTELLIGENT LIFE magazine, March/April 2013

AT THE UNIVERSITY of Worcester, a full conference room is studying a large screen displaying images

which will subsequently be revealed as Venus, floating binbags, fireballs, lighthouse beams, Chinese

lanterns and blurred birds. The link, as the speaker, Ian Ridpath, explains, PowerPoint by point, is that all

had been thought to be Unidentified Flying Objects.

Ridpath, a science writer and UFO sceptic, was opening a conference organised by the Association for the

Scientific Study of Anomalous Phenomena (ASSAP), an agnostic body which has reported a sharp drop in

sightings of UFOs, together with a significant fall in the popularity of groups dedicated to studying the

proposition that we are regularly being visited by inquisitive aliens. Could it be, we are asked to suppose,

that the truth isn’t actually, after all, Out There?

Ridpath gave an assured performance, received with applause. He stressed that there had been no classic

UFO sightings since the advent of the new generation of technology, and, especially, the mobile-phone

camera, whose ubiquity, it might have been thought, should almost have guaranteed convincing

photographic evidence of the inquisitive green men and their conveyances. This leads to a further, hopeful,

thought: could it be that the advance of technology and information-sharing is finally, after several thousand

years, making us less gullible and credulous?

Support for such inspiring progress is provided by another reason for the UFO crisis, advanced by the

chairman of ASSAP, Dave Wood: the rise of the modern Skeptical movement, led by thinkers in various

disciplines such as Richard Dawkins, evolutionist and atheist, James Randi, magician and paranormal

debunker, and the late, contrarily inclined polemicist Christopher Hitchens. Their robust challenging has

been taken up by the twin propellers of online social networks and Skeptic meetings. These take different

forms around the world, including Skeptics in the Pub (lectures, discussions, beer), started by an Australian

academic in London in 1999, and now taking place in pubs in around 40 towns and cities in Britain and

more in the United States under the slogan, "Drinking Skeptically".

The modern Skeptic is, with some truth, classified as mostly male and obsessed with technology, part of the

Geek movement widely advertised as taking over the world from cyberspace (Gates, Zuckerberg et al). An

earlier generation was up for stimulation from almost any source, and quite likely to cite the theories of

Erich von Däniken (Was God an astronaut?) or Carlos Casteneda allegedly channelling the life coaching of

an old Yaqui Indian with the aid of root-based hallucinogens. But today the emphasis is on wryness and

rigour rather than wow and chill.

Further evidence that we might be faced by a major movement comes in Britain’s 2011 national census,

which shows a 12% drop in the numbers professing Christianity since 2001, and a 10% increase in those

declaring they had no religion. You might have noticed, too, that, despite much discussion, the world did not

end last December. Thus, then, the Tottering of Belief, the Fading of Credulity and the Twilight of the

Gullible, defeated by the evolving power of our modern inventions to confer universal knowledge. Perhaps

Chesterton’s much-repeated saw, that when people stop believing in God they will believe in anything, is

wrong, after all; perhaps, when people stop believing in God, they start accepting only the verifiable.

GIVE ME A "W"

The Mission: Will Smith tries cheerleading and finds that it's not all about pompoms...

From INTELLIGENT LIFE magazine, March/April 2012

The day before I am due to rehearse with the London Revolution cheerleading squad, their coach, Emily

Moss, texts to say they are making me a uniform. She adds a partially reassuring postscript, saying that there

are already male cheerleaders in the group, but I still wonder if I should be photographed. I’m not sure I can

carry off a tight top or a rah-rah skirt. As it turns out, my uniform is unexceptional—a black T-shirt with the

squad’s name in yellow. But just as I begin to relax, I’m given the bad news: cheerleading is not as focused

on waving pompoms, chanting and bitching as film and television would suggest. This is a shame, as these

activities are well within my skill-set.

Instead I am told that cheerleading is a combination of athletics, gymnastics and weightlifting. These

activities are as outside my skill-set as fiscal competence and sexual decorum are to Silvio Berlusconi’s.

This becomes apparent in the warm-up exercises when I am asked to sit with my legs splayed and my chest

pressed to the floor. I can only manage a slight lean. Luckily everyone else has their face in a mat, so my

inadequacy goes unremarked.

The plan is to take me through the main elements of a routine, starting with tumbling. Emily demonstrates a

somersault that she rolls out of into a standing position. I can launch myself into a somersault, just as I can

probably launch myself off a ski jump, but in both instances the landing will be unorthodox. I sense I will

end stuck on my back like a scrabbling beetle. No one needs to see that. For reasons of pure vanity, I hear

myself suggesting that a somersault is “a little basic”, and that I’d like to try something “more challenging”.

I haven’t thought this through.

Angel, a male cheerleader and instructor with ten years’ experience, steps forward to perform the Toe

Touch. In as long as it takes me to blink, he leaps skywards, flings his legs up until they’re level with his

ears, reaches for his feet with his hands, then lands with the grace of a (very lithe) cat. “Wow,” I say,

“you’re an incredible gymnast”—applauding excessively loudly, so I can pretend not to hear him say it’s my

turn. The second wave of vanity has rolled in and I’m having fevered flashbacks to forced participation in

school activities I had no aptitude for: over-arm bowling, rugby tackling, speaking to girls.

I can’t touch my toes in a standing position, so it’s unlikely to happen when I’m levitating. A climb-down is

necessary. I invent a hamstring injury to garner sympathy. As Emily steps in to show me the less demanding

Pencil, I feel old and fraudulent. The Pencil is essentially a pogo, but with both arms outstretched during the

jump to make a high V-shape. All around me people half my age and with twice my flexibility are

stretching, bending and flipping. I am determined not to slink out of here.

So I volunteer for a Prep, where a “Flyer” is lifted in a standing position by a “Back” and two “Bases”. I am

asked if I want to fly. Fearful of looking like I fold quicker than a Greek austerity programme, I acquiesce.

Getting up is easy; with Angel as my Back, I spring on to the hands of the Bases—and suddenly I’m up

high. Because I’m being supported under my feet and steadied by the ankles, I have to lock my knees to

remain upright. This is frighteningly counter-intuitive, but if I bend to steady myself I risk crashing down

like a statue of an Arab dictator.

I’m encouraged to extend my arms up into another V-shape. Terrified of looking down and having a panic

attack, I fix my gaze straight ahead. Unfortunately I’m opposite a wall of mirrors and so have to stare at my

own horror-struck face as I slowly raise my arms. The squad clamour for a “cheesy facial!” And then a

miracle. Slowly, a smile of euphoric, adrenalised joy spreads over my face. For a moment, I have poise,

elegance and power. I may have even yelled “Go, Will!”

After a clumsy dismount I’ll draw a veil—or a pompom—over, we do another Prep, this time with me as a

Back and the most petite member of the squad as Flyer. I stand behind the Flyer, grab her by the hips and, as

she springs up, lift her onto the hands of the bases, who raise her up to their shoulder height. I hold her

ankles to steady her, before she dismounts by sitting back in my hands. I begin to understand the appeal of

male cheerleading—it’s summed up by a slogan on Angel’s website. “Why lift weights when you can lift

girls?

THE RISE OF "AWESOME"

Once it had to do with awe. Now it just means "great". How did "awesome" conquer the world?

Robert Lane Greene explains (and reminisces) ...

From INTELLIGENT LIFE magazine, September/October 2011

In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was awesome.

If this sounds like an irreverent approach to the famous first lines of the gospel of John, I can assure you it’s

not. “The word was God,” according to the original. But repeatedly in the Bible, God is “awesome”.

Nehemiah, Deuteronomy and the Psalms refer to “the great and awesome God”, “mighty and awesome”, and

ask worshippers to praise his “great and awesome name”. How did this once-awe-inspiring word become a

nearly meaningless bit of verbiage referring to anything even mildly good?

The first time “awesome” appeared in the Oxford English Dictionary, in 1598, it was a description for

someone feeling awe, rather than someone inspiring it. But it wasn’t too long before the now-traditional

meaning made its first recorded appearance: “A sight of his cross”, wrote a Scottish Presbyterian sermoniser

in 1664, “is more awsom than the weight of it.”

The King James Bible, published in 1611, does not use “awesome”: God is “terrible” in the passages above.

This makes sense, since as Proverbs tells us, “fear of the lord is the beginning of wisdom,” and in those days

“terrible” still had a strong connection to “terror”. But over the centuries, “terrible” picked up its now-

common meaning, first of “shockingly bad”, and by the early 20th century, just plain “bad”. In modern

translations of the Bible, it wouldn’t do to have God described that way. So “awesome” stepped in.

But around the same time, a different change was happening to “awesome”. It was defined in 1980 in the

“Official Preppy Handbook”, a bestselling semi-satirical look at well-heeled American youth: “Awesome:

terrific, great.” It had a bit of California surfer-dude and Valley Girl, too. By 1982, the Guardian was

mocking the West Coast with “It’s so awesome, I mean, fer shurr, toadly, toe-dully!”

Soon the word needed no definition. “Awesome” became the default descriptor for anything good. In 1982, I

was seven and I swallowed it whole. It stayed with me for decades. In 2005, I remember meeting a girl when

I had just seen “Batman Begins”, the moody psychological picture that reinvigorated a tired franchise. “It’s

awesome,” I told her. “Awesome. Just awesome.” She wondered, she later said, what kind of journalist had

just one adjective in his vocabulary. Somehow, she married me all the same.

“Awesome” has been with my generation in America so long that it now has a whiff of retro. There is a

Tumblr blog entitled “My Parents Were Awesome”, which features pictures, mostly from the 1960s and

1970s, of the writers’ parents looking young and cool. It generated a spin-off book that included nostalgic

essays by some of the children. And “awesome” caught on not only with my age group, but with anyone

young enough to be considered young or youngish when “awesome” became awesome. Barack Obama, a

college student in Los Angeles when the “Official Preppy Handbook” came out, turned it into a joke on the

campaign trail in 2008. When asked what was his biggest weakness, he would say: “It’s possible I’m a little

too awesome.”

Britons have a love-hate relationship with linguistic innovations from America. In 2008 a Daily Telegraph

correspondent, Toby Harnden, devoted a blog post to the “Top 10 Most Annoying Americanisms”,

something that would scarcely occur to an American columnist to do with Britishisms. But he didn’t include

“awesome”. And well he might not, because it now looms as large in Britain as it once did in America. It has

even grabbed a chunk of market share from the great British word for “great”—“brilliant”. The Guardian,

the paper that mocked “awesome” in 1982, had used it in 6,457 articles by July 2011, with one or two being

added each day. It is no longer just God or jaw-dropping natural wonders: a catch by a cricketer, a mashed-

potato dish and savings in a council budget have all gone down as “awesome”.

In June the Guardian asked writers to name worn-out phrases, and Sampurna Chattarji chose “awesome”,

noting that it had made it to India (“with an American accent”), while scorning it as meaningless. She’s

right, but words are shifting—together, as part of a system—all the time. “Terrible” begins to mean “bad”,

so “awesome” must replace “terrible”. Then “awesome” becomes “excellent”, so “awe-inspiring” has to fill

the space left behind. Then teenagers hear their parents saying “awesome”, and it becomes the last thing

they want to say. So new words are roped in: “sick” meaning “great” is big in America, while in Britain

“safe” shows signs of becoming the new “awesome”. If you have kids and want them to stop using either of

these words, just adopt it yourself.

Simon Pegg has very earnest views on Scotland

SIMON Pegg can be a hard man to keep up with. “On the last Star Trek, I arrived on set and the director JJ

Abrams said to me: ‘Simon, do you think you could run the length of the set.’”

Pegg starts to smile at the memory. “We were in this massive hangar, but I said I’d give it a go. So they

started filming and I gave it all I had. I hadn’t run that fast since I was a kid. The crew applauded when I

finished, and I felt like I’d won the Olympics. And JJ said: ‘That was amazing, Simon, can you do it

again?’” Pegg mimes helpless acquiescence.

“I said: ‘Yeah okay, give me a minute. So I got my breath back, and did it again. I was quite proud of

myself, because I’m the oldest actor in the Starship crew, and I’d had quite a big lunch.

“And then he said: ‘Can you do it one more time?’ And I couldn’t say no, so I did one more time. And I was

still going so fast the camera had to work to keep up, and as soon as I possibly could, I excused myself from

the set, went to my trailer and threw up.”

Pegg is the kind of person who tries to pack as much into a moment as possible. When he wasn’t sprinting

across Sony’s biggest film set, his days off were spent in a Los Angeles office writing The World’s End with

Edgar Wright. When playing one of the Thompson Twins in Tintin, he badgered Steven Spielberg about

Close Encounters and ET between takes. And when he found out he was going to play James Montgomery

Scott in a reboot of Star Trek: “I went to live in Scotland for five years and studied as an engineer.”

He’s joking, but although Pegg paints himself as an everybloke who cannot quite believe his luck in landing

roles in Mission: Impossibles and Star Treks, he has worked hard to get there. A mutual friend says he’s

well-liked on film sets because “he’s very driven, very enthusiastic and very attentive. Directors love that”.

I was reminded of this when Pegg arrived at our London hotel towards the end of a long day promoting his

new film The World’s End. He is schlumpy with fatigue when he enters the room, but the moment he spots

me, he visibly pulls himself together by straightening his spine and shoulders, and producing a wide smile.

Audiences like Pegg. When he played slacker Tim in Channel 4’s sitcom Spaced, he opened up a

conversation with a generation of closet geeks about the joy of simulated shootouts, and the betrayal felt by

the second set of Star Wars. When he landed a villainous role in Doctor Who, he gave exultant interviews

about joining the Who pantheon. More recently, when we first talked about his part in the rebooted Star

Trek, he was at pains to assure Trekkers that James Doohan remained the one true Scotty – but he had been

working with his Scottish wife and in-laws to ensure that this time the accent was a little closer to

Linlithgow, and a little more distant from Ireland. He is justifiably proud of getting “Haud on there, wee

man” into the second adventure.

He also startled the press earlier this year by announcing that Scotty supported Scottish independence. Given

that even Andy Murray wouldn’t go near the subject post-Wimbledon, announcing that Scotty was in favour

of boldly going alone could have been a reckless move. “Well, half of my family is Scottish and I have a

deep affection and loyalty to Scotland,” he says now. “Personally, I think Scotland is deprived of a voice

sometimes because of the way the voting system works. Scotland has to endure a government that was

chosen for them, which I don’t think is intrinsically fair. You just have to look at the Andy Murray win to

see how much the English were pleased for our Scottish boy to do well, despite the rivalry and fun taking

the piss that goes on. So personally I would hate for that link to be severed, but I would like to see Scotland

feel it’s being represented.”

Come to that, does he feel that the wishes of English voters have been fairly represented? After all, no-one

voted for the Lib-Con coalition either. “That’s true,” he concedes, “but I have to go along with democracy,

and we were outvoted down here. It just feels a little unfair when you see all the little red squares up there in

Scotland. There has to be a fairer way to choose, that’s all I was saying. I’m not advocating separatism, just

fairness.” He grins before throwing out the clincher: “Also my wife’s aunty Shirley is as red as they come. I

just wanted to do it for her.”

The politics in Pegg’s film also tend to be personal rather than along party lines, and the reason we’re in

sitting in hotel room plushness on a sweltering summer’s day is because Pegg, his director Wright and co-

star Nick Frost have gathered for one last lick at their three-flavoured Cornetto trilogy, a series of movies

penned by Pegg and Wright which combine commentaries on record collections, dysfunctional relationships,

and irresponsibility, with the rise of zombie hordes, or sinister pagan cults. In the final part, The World’s

End, the external threat is robot bodysnatchers and the chief observation that growing older may also

involve growing apart.

Pegg plays a 40-something whose finest hour was when he led five friends on an end-of-term pub crawl.

Twenty years on, he wants to re-enact that night but Andy (Nick Frost), Oliver (Martin Freeman), Steve

(Paddy Considine) and Peter (Eddie Marsan) are resistant. Unlike Pegg’s character, they have all grown up,

and acquired jobs, marriages, divorces and children.

In real life, Pegg is one of the grown-ups. The son of a civil servant and a musician, he started acting at 15,

had a hit series with Spaced by the age of 29, and at 35 married his Scots PR girlfriend Maureen in Partick

Cross. On a slightly less everybloke note, guests included Gwyneth Paltrow and Chris Martin. The Peggs

now live in the countryside of Herefordshire with their four-year-old daughter Matilda. On his Twitter

account, Pegg paints a bucolic life of visits to Legoland and Mr Tumble; they don’t go out on the razzle

much now, partly because of the recognition factor, and partly because when Tilly was born, he took the

decision to give up alcohol. “I thought: ‘What if I had a drink after she went to bed, and then she woke up

with a temperature of 104?’” he says, but later admits he had been toying with the idea of going teetotal for

while.

“When I was working away from home, or if I had jet lag, I would have a drink ‘to take the edge off’. That

gets dangerous, and you end up asking yourself, what are you trying to get away from? Am I depressed, am

I unhappy? And also, ‘Do I want to wake up in the morning feeling shit?’

“Now I feel that I’ve relaxed a bit. I can drive around at night after a party, I don’t have to worry how I’m

going to get home if I can’t find a taxi. There’s no scrabbling around for a designated driver. I do sometimes

miss a glass of good wine, because it tastes nice, but the bottom line is that we drink alcohol to get drunk.

The comedian Ed Byrne has a great line: ‘I love tea, but I don’t feel the need to drink 12 pints of it.’” Pegg’s

father-in-law was unconvinced by the decision to take the pledge. “When I told him, he said: ‘But you’ll

drink beer, right?’ and I said, ‘No, no.’ And he said: ‘But you’ll have a glass of wine with a meal? Or do

shots?’”

Pegg laughs because there’s an irony to this conversation. Most of The World’s End is a pub crawl; in fact

all three of the Wright-Pegg films circle around pub culture. A decade ago, Pegg led his friends to sit out the

zombie apocalypse in the Winchester pub in Shaun Of The Dead. In Hot Fuzz, the hub for after-hours police

work was The Crown. But in The World’s End, there’s a growing ambivalence about the benefits of booze.

When Pegg and his friends revisit their old watering holes, the pubs have been corporatised, their pints

homogenised. Frost’s character even tries to do the pub crawl on tap water – at first – because he hasn’t had

a drink since what the others in the group call “The Accident”.

“Pubs are such an important part of our make-up in Britain. A pub is about strength in numbers, it’s a drug,

but because there’s enough of us doing it, it’s socially acceptable. Really it’s just a mass poisoning.” So

should we follow north European countries like Sweden, and make drinking more expensive? Pegg thinks

the culture is too different.

Another theme of The World’s End is the difficulty of outgrowing old friends. “Nick Frost and I have been

friends for 20 years,” says Pegg. “But it helps that we work in the same business. The same goes for Edgar –

and even then, we don’t see each other all the time. We have wives and lives and other work.” But is it risky

writing and making movies with friends? “Not at all. We argue, but I think it’s better to collaborate. When I

met George Lucas, he told me not to end up making the same film you did 30 years ago, and to me part of

the problem with the prequels was that when he made the original films, he was forced to collaborate. By the

time of Phantom Menace, he was a super-rich walking studio who didn’t have to defer to anyone. And that’s

where it went wrong. You need your friends to say: ‘Wait a minute, that’s bad!’”

Pegg says there will be other projects that will reunite him with Wright and Frost, but they won’t be similar

to their “ice-cream” series. “It might not be in the UK for a start,” says Pegg. Another problem is finding

gaps in each other’s schedules. Frost and Wright both have other projects under way, Pegg has another

Mission: Impossible under discussion, with star Tom Cruise keen to make it happen. There’s also a second

Tintin from Peter Jackson in preproduction. Pegg would love to be involved in JJ Abrams’ reboot of Star

Wars too, but says that is unlikely – although he deliberately misled a journalist about Benedict

Cumberbatch’s appearance in Star Trek Into Darkness.

Pegg has no regrets about that, and rails against film news sites which try to peddle plot spoilers to up their

hit rate. It’s getting harder and harder for film fans to come into a movie without knowing half the story, he

says. “People were going to find out eventually, so I thought if I flatly deny, it would throw people off the

scent. If I’d said, ‘I’m sorry but I can’t say anything,’ that would just have been interpreted as a yes.”

Indeed.

Right now actress Felicity Jones’ uncomfortable wriggle on a blogger’s video is being taken as a clue to a

plot detail in the new Spider-Man. “Exactly!” he cries. “And I lied because I was sick of people thinking that

this was a guessing game. People are so keen to sell advertising on their websites, and people are fond of

spoilers because they like to be anaesthetised sometimes. If you know what’s coming, you can go into a film

and relax. Well, they shouldn’t be able to relax. You should be upset, challenged and scared. That’s what art

is for, it helps you rehearse those feelings you might not rehearse in real life. The trouble is that these days

it’s hard to keep secrets. But to have those feelings taken away before you see the film defeats the object. No

matter how frivolous the film is, the joy of discovery has to be protected.”

Pegg says he had his resolve tested when he worked with Cumberbatch, fresh off his Sherlock Holmes

cliffhanger, where Holmes appears to have jumped off a building with no hope of survival. “I had Benedict

sitting next to me most days, so I could have asked him and he would have told me, but I just didn’t want to

figure it out.” He pauses, then confesses: “Well, I did have my own theories about how he manages to live.

So there were times where I was like, ‘OK, don’t react in any way, but here is what I think happened…’