May 2003 Archives
Grade retention
When Texas governor George W Bush was running for president, we heard a lot about "compassionate conservatism," but rather less about what it actually meant. The one thing which did emerge from his handlers' interference, however, was that Bush was particularly committed to, and interested in, education policy. It was something he'd spent a lot of time on in Texas, and was also an area where open-minded liberals could be disappointed with the Democrats, who were generally more interested in doing whatever the teachers' unions told them to do (ie, nothing) than they were in coming up with innovative solutions to very difficult problems.
But as we all know, Texas governors are very weak in terms of what they're actually able to achieve. And the Bush administration has quite deliberately sidelined any issues except for wars and taxes, so it's hard to tell what the present education policy is. All the same, there is one Bush education policy which has just come into force: Florida's. The governor of Florida has a lot more power than the governor of Texas, and the present incumbent, who happens to be George W Bush's younger brother Jeb, has pushed through a major new reform. It's a complete and utter disaster.
If you only read one article about education policy this year, it has to be Michael Winerip's magisterial column from May 21 in the New York Times. I know I'm coming to this a bit late: I plead deadline pressures and then a wedding I had to go to in Germany. But really, it's not time-sensitive (unless or until the Times blocks access to it, of course). It's one of those columns which starts off with a human-interest hook but then gets deep into the real facts, and it more or less singlehandedly demolishes Florida Republicans' claims that their latest policy is a good idea.
The policy is simple. Every third-grader in Florida has to take a reading test at the end of the year. If the kid doesn't pass, he or she is held back, and takes third grade all over again. This year – the first year of the new scheme – a stunning 23% of third-graders failed the test. That's 43,000 children stigmatised in the service of a policy which almost everybody agrees doesn't work.
As a letter to the New York Times today attests, holding children back can damage them for life. And the evidence is far from simply anecdotal. As Winerip writes:
Hundreds of studies in the last two decades have concluded that holding children back has no long-term academic benefit, that within two years retained students once again lag behind classmates, and that retained students are more likely to drop out of high school.
Florida's own Department of Education issued a report in the early 1990's warning against retention: "Research on the subject is clear. Grade level retention does not work. Further, it would be difficult to find another educational practice on which the research findings are so unequivocally negative."
But the policy was pushed through by Republicans who dismiss scientific research as "gobbledegook," presumably on similar grounds as those used for denying global warming and/or evolution.
What's more, children who have been held back in the past at least were held back because of exceptional circumstances. It might not have worked for them, but at least the teachers in the school felt that those kids had failed to understand what they were meant to have learned in that grade, and needed to be taught it again. That's not the case in Florida: children with A grades in spelling or mathematics still get held back if they fail the reading test for whatever reason, including simply nerves on the day. And it's not a handful: the new third-grade class size will now be 23% bigger, thanks to this policy.
Holding a child back is a harsh punishment, especially when the kid concerned hasn't done anything wrong. The stigma never leaves: Winerip writes about one pair of twins, one of whom is now going to be two years behind the other at school. That difference will never go away: Cheyanne, who is now, according to her father, a better student than her twin, is going to know that all her friends think that she's the stupid one of the two.
If you visit the page on "3rd Grade Reading Promotion and Retention" on Florida's official website, it gives you lots of whats and hows, but nothing about the whys. This is one of those policies which simply doesn't make any sense: while decreasing student illiteracy is surely a good thing, there's absolutely no reason to believe that holding back 40,000 students a year is going to help in the slightest. Winerip again:
Of Lake Silver's 101 third graders, 23 failed. Stephen Leggett, the principal, said that long before the test results, all 23 had been identified as lagging in reading. All were getting extra help, with some seeing three specialists a week, he said. "That test told us nothing we didn't know," Mr. Leggett said.
Mr. Leggett, who has been principal for 21 years, and his five third-grade teachers believe none of the 23 should be held back. For reading, Lake Silver students are grouped by ability, with the slowest readers placed in the smallest group that gets the most individualized attention. Third graders are pushed to read the most challenging books they can; some read sixth-grade books, while others read second-grade books.
Mr. Leggett said next year, whether those 23 sit in a fourth-grade classroom or third-grade classroom, they would do the same reading work — the highest level they could. And they would get the same reading help in either case.
Maybe not all Florida's schools have the same system as Lake Silver: maybe some still force all fourth-graders to read exactly the same books at exactly the same time, with a devil-take-the-hindmost attitude to anybody who hasn't reached that level yet. Or maybe – and this is what I think happened in Florida – that's what Republican legislators think happens in the public schools, since that's the kind of rigid process which they feel comfortable with. Maybe even that's what they think should happen in public schools: taking a lesson from Asian educational practices, with vast numbers of kids reciting the lesson together. It's a nightmarish mindset, but it's the only one I can think of which would produce this destructive policy.
I think that the most interesting thing about this legislation is the way it assumes that all principals and teachers are liberal do-gooders who must be prevented by law from letting children who fail a reading test remain in the same class as their friends. The individuals who know these children best – even their parents – have no control at all over whether they're held back or not. This goes against the parent-centered rhetoric of the Republican party, but no one seems to have seen the contradiction here. The Florida legislature believes one thing; the scientific literature, the school principals, the third-grade teachers, and the third-grade parents all believe another. Yet the policy gets signed into law, and tens of thousands of lives are seriously damaged as a result. There's Bush's compassionate conservatism for you.
Posted by Felix at 11:35 EST | Comments (11)
New York as dysfunctional Latin American nation
When I'm not blogging, I spend quite a lot of time writing about Latin America. Latin Americans generally have political systems based on that of the USA: a powerful president with checks and balances provided by the legislature and the judiciary. But the system in most Latin American countries doesn't work very well. The legislature almost never cooperates with the president, and on the rare occasion that the president can get laws passed in Congress, those laws are frequently found unconstitutional by the Supreme Court.
What this means in practice is political paralysis, lots of presidential decrees, lots of pork and backroom dealings, lots of (often corrupt) judges handing down bizarre opinions, and lots of loud fights between politicians which generate much more heat than light. Oh, one other thing: so long as anybody, anywhere, will lend them money, these countries run huge and ultimately unsustainable budget deficits. In other words, far from becoming similar to the USA, these emerging democracies seem to be doing their utmost to emulate... New York.
Elizabeth Kolbert has an excellent piece in this week's New Yorker explaining that "to make sense of Albany, you have to turn everything on its head." Kolbert takes a wry look at state politics, pointing out that 210 of New York's 212 legislators "are, for all intents and purposes, superfluous." The more you read, the more that countries like Argentina or Venezuela come to mind:
Such are the ways of Albany that when things seem to be proceeding in an orderly, democratic fashion it is an almost sure bet that they are about to spin out of control. Thus, the first sign that the budget process had broken down last month came when it began to move forward...
A particularly neat illustration of how Albany has reinterpreted the rules of democracy is provided by the so-called message of necessity. As its name suggests, the measure is supposed to be invoked only in emergencies... Eighty per cent of the major bills that were approved in the past several years have been passed under messages of necessity. This spring, the state was facing a genuine fiscal emergency, so, by the logic of Albany, the Capitol had to revert to actually observing the constitution.
Many of the problems with New York politics right now can be laid squarely at the feet of our governor, George Pataki. (Pataki was re-elected, by the way, in a campaign against Carl McCall, who in turn won the Democratic primary by default, when his opponent pulled out at the last minute when he realised he wasn't going to win. Sound familiar?)
Pataki is a man facing record budget deficits but who simply refuses even to consider raising any taxes at all to help pay for government services. His friend Michael Bloomberg wants a commuter tax? Don't even think about it. The legislature wants to raise income taxes on individuals earning more than $100,000 a year? No way, José: that's "job destroying," that is. Rather, Pataki wants to borrow against future revenues which may or may not be coming New York's way from the 1998 tobacco settlement, and use the cash for routine operating expenses. Oh, and he also wants to put video poker machines inside New York's betting stores. Everything he does, on both the taxing and the spending sides of the budget, is fiscally disastrous: if Pataki were in charge of any Latin American country, the IMF would cut him off without a second thought.
But if New York has an incredibly wasteful legislature and an unsustainable fiscal situation, at least it stands head and shoulders above Latin America in one respect: its universally-admired judiciary. The Southern District Court in New York is home to most important litigation in the financial world, and contracts written in countries from Belgium to Brunei specify that they're governed by New York law. There might be crazy shit going on in Albany, but New York City, at least, stands up to much more scrutiny.
Right? Er, wrong. State Supreme Court Justice Louis York showed himself today to be fully the equal of any of his counterparts in Ecuador or Peru, when he found the MTA's latest fare hike to be "in violation of lawful procedure and not rationally based". The last thing that New York needs right now is lower revenues, but the MTA says it stands to lose $1.2 million a day if this verdict is upheld and the fare hike – which went into effect on May 4 – is repealed.
Thankfully, there are some sensible judges in New York, and this verdict is probably going to be overturned. Even Pataki will not remain governor forever. (Heaven help us, everybody seems to think he's actually serious about running for president.) But the broader problems in this state are bigger than individuals like Pataki and York; they're systemic, and need to be tackled at the constitutional level. The chances of that happening, however, are roughly the same as the chances of all of Latin America moving to a prime ministerial system overnight. As Kolbert says:
Albany is a fantastically inefficient place in all ways except one. For the last nineteen years, the Legislature has not managed to pass the state budget on time even once, but during that same period ninety-nine per cent of incumbent lawmakers held on to their seats in general elections. Viewed in these terms, Albany does what it does all too well.
Posted by Felix at 18:13 EST | Comments (2)
Raising Victor Vargas
I usually feel a strong affinity for films which are set in my home cities – Mona Lisa, say, or anything by Woody Allen. New York has way, way more than its fair share of indy filmmakers, so a lot of low-budget films end up being set here. The wonderful Sunshine Cinema specialises in such films: it's where I saw 13 Conversations About One Thing, Roger Dodger, and Tadpole. Finally, last night, I got around to seeing Raising Victor Vargas there, as well.
Raising Victor Vargas is a world apart from the privileged life portrayed in Igby Goes Down etc. It's set in what all the film reviews insist on calling the Lower East Side, although nearly all of it takes place north of Houston Street. Still, the moniker is fair: what we're seeing is Loisaida Avenue, not Avenue C. (For those of you who don't live here, they're physically the same, but conceptually very different: the former is old-school Hispanic; the latter new-school yuppie.) The big divide in this (my) neck of the woods these days is not Houston Street so much as it is disposable income: there are many poor families living on welfare and clipping supermarket coupons, as well as bars with $2,000 bottles of champagne and a new hotel which will charge up to $2,500 a night.
But there are no yuppies in Raising Victor Vargas, there is no class war. Our eponymous hero lives in a cramped apartment in the projects, sharing his bedroom with his sister and his bed with his brother, but there's no resentment in this film, no indication that he's living on what is probably the richest island in the world. Victor's the kind of kid who rejoices at finding a quarter on the street, but he would never claim abject poverty the way that much better-off LES writers do.
The lack of drugs or guns or money issues in this film is entirely deliberate. In an interview with Peter Sollett, the director, Bill Chambers notes that "the milieu is all but incidental (Sollett picked the film's central location based on the Latino community's enthusiastic response to an open casting call)". It's a little bit weird to see a film which was entirely shot on location in Manhattan but which has no real New York feeling to it: the camera generally stays low to the ground, concentrating on the characters, who in turn never stray from their own small neighborhood. Even I, who have lived here for over six years, had difficulty pinpointing most of the locations. If it wasn't for the occasional rooftop shot with the Empire State Building in the background, most people would never know the film was shot here at all.
Raising Victor Vargas, then, is not about Latino life on the Lower East Side, any more than The Wizard of Oz is about life on a Kansas farm. It's a much more universal film, which will appeal to anybody who's ever lived through the years between 11 and 18. School's out for the summer, and the New York heat is prompting the kids to start taking their clothes off. These aren't the funnysexysmartcocky kids of Hollywood teen comedies, either. They're real in a way which makes you realise just how fake most US films are when dealing with adolescents. The casual cruelties, the weight obsesssions, the nervous fumblings towards wanted-and-feared sex: this film makes you remember just what it was like when you were a kid.
Credit must go to Smollett, but not for his writing chops: rather, he simply took kids off the street, pointed a camera at them, and trusted them so much that they ended up giving him some amazing scenes. "Victor suggesting to Nino that the way they get the attention of a girl is by licking their lips in a sexy way or the argument over who broke the telephone – I mean, you can't write that stuff," he says in the interview. "You just sort of have to let them go at each other and try to cut it." Using untrained actors is a bold move, but trusting their acting abilities so much that you just let them improvise the scenes – that takes real daring, and paid off handsomely in this case.
What's most heartening is that this film, like Bend It Like Beckham, seems to be taking off. It's already grossed more than its budget, and has increased the number of screens it's showing on – along with its weekend gross – every week since its release at the end of March. We're entering the braindead summer zone now, with X2, Daddy Day Care and their ilk, so Raising Victor Vargas should have a chance of positioning itself as a good film for the over-25 set. It's funny, it's touching, it's immensely likeable, and it's even American, to boot. It's obviously a budget film: the titles and sountrack leave quite a lot to be desired, for instance. But Sollett managed to find the money to shoot on film, which makes it look professional – unlike most films which are shot on DV.
All the same, it does seem that the good films these days are all very short on ambition: Raising Victor Vargas, for instance, is a small-scale family drama which, if anything, is proud of the fact that it has no larger message. What I long to see is a smaller, intelligent film which aspires to greatness: something along the lines of Breaking the Waves, say. It seems to me that American independent filmmakers are a bit like British novelists, unable to think big. Why let Hollywood and pretentious Europeans have a monopoly on hubristic excess?
Posted by Felix at 15:01 EST | Comments (1)
Cirque du Soleil
I
saw my first ever Cirque du Soleil show last night. Imagine that – 31
years old, and somehow I'd managed to avoid it until now. Snob that I am, I
expected mass-market middlebrow entertainment, and went as much out of curiosity
as out of any particular desire to see what all the fuss was about. But I wasn't
about to pay $95 for a ticket. Fortunately, a Large European Bank provided me
with an invitation, as well as the all-important transportation to and from
Randall's Island.
Cirque du Soleil is even better than Andrew Lloyd Webber and Cameron Mackintosh when it comes to persuading vast swathes of the population to pay eye-popping prices to go see a show. Every day in Las Vegas, hundreds of people line up at the Bellagio hotel in an unsuccessful attempt to buy $110 tickets to that day's performance of O: it's been going for five years now, and still sells out 2,000 seats at each and every performance.
This is not a run-away-and-join-the-circus sort of show: it's very slick, very professional, and very focused on the most important thing, which is making money. The shops sell everything from $12 "souvenir programmes" (which take about a minute to read) to discarded items of clothing from previous productions on sale for thousands of dollars each. The circus's founder, already one of the richest men in Canada, says he expects to be a $1 billion-a-year business by 2007. And yet there's no mistaking the goodwill of the audience: people are really excited to see this show, and if anything the high prices only serve to heighten their expectations.
The sold-out crowd for Varekai, Cirque du Soleil's latest production, started arriving well over an hour before the performance began. I know this because I did, too, but at least I had the VIP tent to check out, complete with free-flowing Champagne and delicious canapés. Cirque du Soleil lays on a great VIP experience, with its own mini-performances, fabulous costumes, along with fully-decked-out circus objects like crazy mechanised heads and fluffy bugs crawling around on aerial wires. I have no idea what the non-VIPs did: queue up to buy popcorn, I suppose. Randall's Island is an unpreposessing place, a lump of nothing much stuck in the northern reaches of the East River, between Manhattan, the Bronx and Queens. But the circus itself is colourful enough, with a brightly-swirling yellow-and-blue big top, if no sideshows.
When everybody was seated, the show began, very, very, slowly. One costumed person came out and crawled around the stage in a vaguely bug-like manner, followed by a few more. This went on for a long while until an incomprehensible clown act marked segued, finally, into a beautiful aerial act by an Icarus figure, sans wings, rolling around in mid-air in a big net. After that, things speeded up a bit, and we had a series of impressive circus acts, including three amazing Chinese kids who did incredible things with lengths of rope.
Ultimately, however, a circus act is a circus act. Girls hanging off a trapeze, guys jumping over each other, people balancing in difficult positions: these are the bread-and-butter of any circus, and although Cirque du Soleil does them well, it doesn't shatter any boundaries. The only thing it's missing is a high-wire act, and apparently there's no shortage of those in other Cirque du Soleil productions. This is not Archaos, with its motorcycles and chainsaws; rather, it's an expensive and slightly new-agey show which gussies up an old-fashioned circus so much that it becomes entertainment for grown-ups rather than for children. (Soon, there'll be a genuinely adult show, Zumanity, although judging by its FAQ, Cirque du Soleil has gone overboard on both portentiousness and pretentiousness. Why not just do something sexy, seeing as how it's going to be permanently based in Las Vegas?)
The conversation during the intermission rarely got beyond the "which act was your favourite" phase: Varekai certainly isn't thought-provoking, or even something it's remotely easy to talk about in any way at all. Thankfully, Julia Roberts was seated a couple of rows in front of us, so the bond investors and bankers had a ready-made topic to gossip about. The show is all about present-time experience: schlubby Americans marvelling at the athleticism and stamina of some phenomenally talented performers. (To make things even more impressive, this show is put on ten times a week.) Once it's over, it's over.
This is something I've never been very good at: admiring art of any form just because it's physically difficult. That's one of the reasons I'm no great fan of dance, either classical or modern, and why virtuoso musical performances often leave me cold as well. Ultimately, that's what a circus is all about: seeing people and animals do things you never thought that a member of that species would be capable of doing. Cirque du Soleil, quite rightly, has never used animals, but the principle remains.
So should you splash out on tickets for Cirque du Soleil? Michelle says it's "a pretty good experience" and that you should go if you can make it and the tickets are free; I'm basically of the same view. If you love the circus, then rush to Randall's Island: this will be paradise for you. If you're generally indifferent to circuses, however, then it's unlikely Cirque du Soleil is going to change your mind.
Posted by Felix at 19:05 EST | Comments (15)
Woody Allen's Writer's Block
Woody Allen has directed his first play, and it's currently in previews at the Atlantic Theater Company in Chelsea. Actually, Writer's Block is two plays: the first an absurdist take on marital infidelity set on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, and the second an absurdist take on marital infidelity set in Old Saybrook, Connecticut.
Riverside Drive is the kind of play which lends itself naturally to student-theatre productions at small liberal-arts colleges: it can be put on with pretty much no scenery or props at all, and is essentially a two-person acting vehicle with some fantastic one-liners. Skipp Sudduth gets the best of them; he plays Fred Savage (imagine the polar opposite of that Fred Savage), a homicidal paranoid schizophrenic vagrant ex-copywriter. He's been stalking newly-successful screenwriter Jim (Paul Reiser) for weeks, convinced that Jim stole his idea – nay, his life – as the basis for his movie treatment.
Sudduth is an anti-Woody Allen: large, gruff, with a salt-and-pepper beard and nary a hint of nebbishness. He's the consummate scene-stealer, overpowering Reiser in size, volume, charisma, creativity and funniness. He shuffles around the stage like a demented bulldozer, emanating non sequiturs in much the same way as the Empire State Building emanates the messages (Burn down your advertising agency!) which only he can hear transmitted over his red vintage radio. Reiser, playing a conventionally-successful writer who's having an affair with a much younger blonde, is powerlessly drawn into this crazy man's orbit, and eventually ends up confessing his infidelities shortly before the arrival of his illicit lover.
Watching these two first-rate actors playing off each other is a true joy, and the jokes – Allen at his funniest – come thick and fast. This is not the Woody of films: rather, it is the Woody of short stories or stand-up comedy. The action is very far from realistic, and the improbabilities and absurdities are simply played, for exaggerated comic effect. The weirdest thing is listening to Woody Allen's inimitable monologues coming out of the mouth of someone like Sudduth: it's a bit like watching a familiar movie dubbed into a foreign language.
Once the girlfriend arrives (unlike Godot, she does actually appear), the sparks do stop flying a little. Kate Blumberg does very well with her small role, but she's not on stage long enough for any kind of individuality to emerge. Her arrival marks the end of the conversation and the beginning of the plot; she then departs, prompting another funny conversation, reappears, and departs once again. The plot is thin, and I shan't summarise it here, and ends with a brave and unsuccessful attempt at injecting some meaning and/or emotion into the material. When the house lights go up, we're a little confused: after all of the laughs, are we meant to be feeling something now? Is there a moral to this comic tale?
The audience ponders such questions for 15 minutes, ten of which are taken up by some horrendous banging and crashing on the other side of the curtain. The sets for the two plays are both very elaborate, and they're both completely different, to the point of Bebe Neuwirth and Jay Thomas having to stay very still doing nothing when the curtain rises on Old Saybrook, to allow the audience some applause at the transformation. And none of the cast from the first play reappears in the second: there's been no cost-cutting here.
The titles of the two plays, incidentally, are projected white-on-black onto the curtain, in Woody Allen's trademark style, just as if they were film titles. It's been a year, now, since Hollywood Ending was released, and Anything Else isn't going to come out until September, so it's good to see those projected on something, at least.
It's also great seeing Bebe Neuwirth on stage, looking radiant under lots of makeup, if that's possible. Probably the single best moment of the whole evening is when she's sitting on a sofa admiring a birdhouse on the other side of the fourth wall, which, she's just been told, was "modelled on the Guggenheim". Her face runs through a series of emotions from puzzlement to surprise, sending the audience into hysterics.
Neuwirth plays the wife of an orthodontist, who is hosting her sister and golf-mad plastic surgeon brother-in-law at her grand suburban house in Connecticut. The arrival of a couple who once owned the building marks the beginning of an old-fashioned English sex farce, written with verve and cunning. The cast is excellent, from the obnoxious intruder (Christopher Evan Welch) to the sex-kitten sister (Heather Burns), but the humour becomes increasingly strained as the writerly conceits start piling atop each other. It's all very well Woody Allen going all Pirandello on us three-quarters of the way through, but even that doesn't excuse an ending – complete with violins – in which Allen either tips his hat to Adaptation or else simply throws in the towel. (There's not a lot of difference between the two: if you don't know where to take a film/play, simply announcing very loudly that you don't know how to end it does not an ending make.)
Despite their endings, however, both plays in Writer's Block are very funny, and you'll not regret going to see them. Don't go expecting masterpieces of the comic form: instead, just go to enjoy yourself and get your jollies as they arrive. Think of this as an extended version of the Shouts & Murmurs columns which Allen now writes for the New Yorker: great in parts, even if you feel he could do better. After all, Woody Allen's second best is still better than most comedy on Broadway these days.
Posted by Felix at 18:51 EST | Comments (4)
Topic [A] With Tina Brown
Magazine editors are behind-the-scenes people, rather like central bank presidents. They should appear in public as little as possible, and, when they do, keep their mouths shut. Anna Wintour, of Vogue, has the right idea: only appear behind dark glasses, and preserve a mystique. Graydon Carter, of Vanity Fair, rarely says anything in public, and when he does (remember when he said "irony is dead" after September 11?) he would have been best advised not to. Graydon knows this, too: he hates Toby Young's book about him not because of how he's portrayed, but because he's a central character. A good editor never lets his personality overshadow that of his magazine. When that happens, a good proprietor (Felix Dennis) will kick his editor (Greg Gutfeld) out. Gutfeld had a much stronger personality than Stuff ever did, which is obviously the wrong way round.
Consider one of the greatest editors in UK newspaper history, Harold Evans. He ran the Sunday Times at the absolute height of its power and influence, and it's hard to find anyone (except Toby Young, of course) who'll say a bad word about him. But even though he's very well known, he's basically a kind of eminence grise, writing impossibly grand books on impossibly grand subjects.
And then... and then, consider his wife. Tina Brown is the exception to all these rules. She loves the limelight, always has a quote for anyone who asks, and after moving to New York, quickly became one of this city's brightest celebrities. She turned both Vanity Fair and the New Yorker into bibles of buzz, which were even bigger than she was. But her third US magazine, Talk, was her comeuppance. For a while, it was going to be called Tina, and in most peoples' minds, Tina it remained. It never developed much of a readership, it was losing vast amounts of money at a time when the bubble was bursting, and it eventually imploded in January 2002.
The lesson of Talk was essentially that Tina Brown's name alone, plus $3.49, will buy you tall decaf latté at Starbucks. She's a star, to be sure, and New Yorkers love to gossip about her, but none of that is the kind of thing which can be monetized. A flashy and fabulous launch party at the Statue of Liberty? That she can do. A successful media venture whose main selling point is, um, Tina Brown? That won't work.
But history repeats itself, and if Talk was tragedy, then Topic [A] With Tina Brown, her new talk show on CNBC, is farce. It's a quarterly show, which means it appears too infrequently to build up any kind of momentum or following. It's done on the cheap from the CNBC studios in New Jersey, where 20-year-old production assistants chop up the interviews into incoherent concatenations of meaningless soundbites. It's presided over by a nervously giggling Tina, who, having brought on her friends (Lord Black is "Conrad" to her), sucks up to them shamelessly and then asks them silly questions in her bizarre transatlantic accent.
The first episode featured Tina's pet writers from the New Yorker (Simon Schama and Malcom Gladwell – the latter dressed for a radio interview opposite the ever-dapper Barry Diller) as well as one writer whom she'd optioned when she was running Talk Miramax Books (Queen Noor of Jordan, who, unlike "Conrad" and "Barry", remained ever "Your Majesty"). We also had Howard Stringer, of Sony America, rambling on pointlessly about the Dixie Chicks. Between the half-dozen studio guests plus Tina herself, not one of them managed to say anything intelligent or interesting, mainly because all responses were cut down to no more than a few seconds. The level of debate reached its apotheosis when Gladwell was asked to describe Diller in one word, and managed to come up with "well-dressed".
The only compelling piece of television came when Tina introduced Bill O'Reilly. Tina brought up Fox News and its success quite a few times during the course of the programme, and is obviously interested in whether the right-wing politics is an integral part of that success. But her flibbertigibbet questioning only served to reveal the huge gulf in professionalism between the two news hosts, with O'Reilly bulldozing his way over his newest rival yet remaining infinitely more relaxed than Tina will ever be.
Bill O'Reilly is at home on TV, in a way that, maybe, Greg Gutfeld could be as well. He has an outsize personality, is compelling to watch, and is at ease in the medium. Tina, on the other hand, seems flighty and lightweight, and isn't helped by her effusiveness over her guests. She's so nice to them all that you have no idea what her own opinions are – and in fact, received wisdom in New York media circles is that she doesn't actually have any opinions at all. She'll fawn over Henry Kissinger or Bill Clinton alike, and Topic [A] becomes a mutual admiration society, with nothing to grab on to. The guests are paired off, but not because they can strike sparks off each other, so much as to give the editors someone else to cut to when one person speaks for more than two sentences.
Topic [A] got managed to attract 74,000 people on Wednesday night: about 3.5% of the audience for Hannity & Colmes that same evening over on Fox. Most of those 74,000, I should imagine, were viewers curious about what Tina might come up with: they're not going to stick around for the second show. But at least Tina's not going to have to worry about the sales assistant in the fruit shop in Pimlico telling her that the show sucked: that's the advantage of presenting a show that no one watches.
Posted by Felix at 19:08 EST | Comments (9)
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