Last Orders At The Bar Please? Saving Britain's Pubs With Tom Kerridge.

"Pub! It's where you go to drink. Pub! It's where you go think" - Pub, Six Blokes.

When BBC2 commissioned, and Tom Kerridge embarked upon, his four part series Saving Britain's Pubs With Tom Kerridge towards the end of 2019 neither the station, the man, or us the viewers could have had any idea just how dramatic the events of 2020 would turn out to be. By the time it aired a year later Covid-19 had wreaked havoc on the world, current global death toll - 1,452,608, current UK death toll - 58,030, we'd undergone a near three month national lockdown and we were just about emerging out of a second, slightly less strict and much less successful, lockdown into a tier system that nobody expects to do anything more than dent the escalating daily mortality rate.

People have been missing a lot of things. Primarily family and friends but also holidays, art galleries, restaurants, and perhaps more than those three, pubs. Some are still open for takeaway drinks but what we're missing is getting together in those pubs to see our friends, to drink, to eat, to listen to music, to join quiz nights, to laugh, and to feel alive.

I certainly am. But then I'm a fan of pubs and most of my friends are too. Many people are but with the advent of the Internet and working from home, even before the pandemic, cheap supermarket booze, and a general awareness of health concerns among younger generations pubs having been having a tough time of of it for the last couple of decades. 

Since the turn of the millennium, the UK has lost over fourteen thousand pubs, a quarter of its total. Michelin-starred chef, Saturday Kitchen guest, and owner of a proud Salisbury burr Tom Kerridge's aim, in this series, is to do his best to save four more pubs from joining them. The White Hart in Chilsworthy, Cornwall, The Prince Albert in Stroud, Gloucestershire, The Black Bull in Gartmore, between Stirling and Loch Lomond, and The Golden Anchor, in Nunhead, South East London - my manor.

Each of these pubs is very different but each of them has a very specific charm and it's a charm that's made more so by their loving owners and managers. In Chilsworthy, a non-coastal Cornish village between Bude and Okehampton, Amy is passionate, knowledgeable, hard-working, and very stressed. Her pub, The White Hart, "the only pub in the village", is something of a community resort that hosts potato contests, morris dances, and card games but with its commanding views across the beautiful green valleys of Cornwall it really could, and should, be attracting tourists, and their money, too.

Amy and her husband Ian (who also works as a gas engineer) only take £75 per week in wages for themselves which is not really a sustainable way of living so Kerridge (himself a landlord of three pubs in and around Marlow, Buckinghamshire - ventures he doesn't miss an opportunity to use the national broadcaster for to get free advertising) tasks himself with ways of making sure the pub starts running at a more handsome profit while not losing the essential character of the place.

It's a trick he aims to repeat in Nunhead, Gartmore, and Stroud. The White Hart serves good food but the restaurant area lacks character and Kerridge eats his meal alone while locals fill the nearby bar. You get the sense Kerridge is desperate not to be seen as a gentrifier, or a commodifier, of pubs and I don't think he is but his mind, his non-drinking mind - he's quit the booze, is so business focused he can't help but occasionally come across that way.

It's a delicate balance for sure. While The White Hart undergoes refurbishment ready for a St Piran's Day reopening at the start of March, Kerridge turns his attention to The Prince Albert in Strood. Owned by a 'pubco' (a pub company, think Wetherspoons, Hobgoblin, Greene King, Pitcher & Piano) but with a much better vibe than you'd associate with those 'tied houses'.

Overseen by the affable Lottie and Miles, The Royal Albert sits just outside of town (but with no car park) and it's big on live music. Regular folk gigs take place in front of adoring beardy and boozy fans. Lottie and Miles cook for the bands, provide them with free drinks, and even give them a cut of the 'wet sales' from the bar.

The one thing they don't do is take very much for themselves. Even when the regular mobile pizza chef is invited to ply his trade from the pub he doesn't have to pay for his pitch. The Royal Albert has a great atmosphere, it's a pub I know I'd feel at home in, but it's struggling financially. As is The Golden Anchor in Nunhead. Landlady Lana is so lovely I've made a pledge to myself to visit when I can. Kerridge announces, to my glee, that SE15 is now "a cool postcode to have" (I'm SE23 but a five minute walk takes me into SE15) but The Golden Anchor, to be fair, isn't the coolest pub in the postcode.

There's The Rye, The Prince of Peckham, and John the Unicorn in Peckham itself and even Nunhead has Ye Olde Nun's Head, The Man of Kent, and The Pyrotechnist's Arms to tempt you in before you find yourself at The Golden Anchor. A pub that acts as something of a community hub for the local West Indian population. The front bar echoes to the sound of pool balls and dominoes while locals nurse a bottle of beer or even a glass of water for hours. The back room hosts a dancehall that fills with DJs dropping reggae tunes (multiple rewinds) but only opens for four hours each week.

As with the other pubs, it won't be enough to save it forever. Lana talks of how she's got rid of the 'yardies' and 'gangsters' that made the pub an uncomfortable place to visit for other locals and Kerridge chats to Marcia in the kitchen who's cooking up a chicken soup before he ventures off into Brixton to learn about the history of West Indian run pubs in London at The Market House in Coldharbour Lane. Formerly The Coach and Horses which, in 1965, became the first British pub to have a Jamaican immigrant, George Berry, as a landlord.

Back in Peckham, he takes Lana into The Prince of Peckham to see how a black run British pub can thrive in modern London. With innovation, enthusiasm, good food, a good range of drinks, and a welcoming atmosphere. It's not exactly rocket science but it is dependent, and needs finessing, for the customers the pub hopes to attract.

What works in Peckham is not necessarily what's needed for a pub in a small village in the Trossachs. The Black Bull is entirely owned and run by its locals. It's both pub - and hub. They operate a minibus to drop refreshed patrons back home and Gartmore's only shop is part of the pub. Kerridge is so impressed he buys shares to become a 'Bull believer'.

After a brief detour into the world of tithed landlords, MROs (market rent only pubs), and how pubcos will fight tooth and nail to protect shareholders and creditors rather than protect landlords, managers, or pubs ("that's their model") we start to, finally, see the benefit of some of the enthusiasm, knowledge, and, in the case of The Black Bull, investment that Kerridge has put into these four pubs.

The White Hart is host to glorious and packed St Piran's celebrations as locals and visitors drink, eat, party, and "shout" on the 5th March this year but only a few days later a new visitor arrives on the British pub scene and Covid-19 isn't looking to buy drinks, watch bands, or eat pizza.

As the news greets our various managers, landlords, and landladies there are tears, there is existential angst, and there are, very soon, some very very empty pubs. As you'll recall Boris Johnson's initial approach was to tell people not to visits pubs and/or restaurants but to leave them open and this, of course, meant that different pubs and different pub owners took different approaches to the news.

With no government advice you can't blame them for not being sure if they should stay open or close their doors and when the government, lethally late, finally announced a full lockdown it was almost something of a relief. If not as big a relief as the one that arrived on 4th July this year when pubs, or at least some of them, reopened.

Cautiously, and with new safety measures, of course, The Prince Albert, The White Hart, and The Golden Anchor welcomed locals and guests again and, eleven days later - Scottish legislation being devolved on this matter, The Black Bull followed. 

People were happy. Not just pubgoers but those who own or run the pubs. Lana, particularly, was overjoyed. Lockdown, and the interventon of Tom Kerridge in her business, has given her a chance to reset, to rethink her priorities, and, most happily of all, rediscover herself. She claims she's fallen in love with not just her pub again but also with her life.

So happy was she, it was impossible not to beam with her but, as we all know, there's a very worrying coda to this series. After filming stopped Covid-19 infections, hospitalisations, and deaths all began to spike again. So worryingly that the government, late again - shamefully, ordered a second lockdown that was much less strict on schools, universities, and work places but remained draconian with regards to pubs and the hospitality sector.

As I write we're coming out of that second lockdown into a tiered system of restrictions which won't help either the pub business recover or the Covid-19 death toll fall as much as we'd all hope. December begins tomorrow, a hugely important month, for the pub business but, also, a hugely important month for stopping the likely festive spread of coronavirus.

Despite imminent vaccines, we're nowhere near out of the woods with Covid yet and pubs are just one factor of that. A lot of pubs won't survive these next few months but, more importantly, a lot of people won't survive these next few months. A sense of perspective is important at all times but one day I hope we can raise a glass together in a pub again. In the before times, when the last orders bell rang out, you'd often hear an overworked bartender's voice ring out "ain't you lot got homes to go". This year those homes are the places we've been spending almost all our of time. It'd be a shame if in the future we ain't got pubs to go.

Those Who Betray Their Homeland Must Die:Berlin 1945.

In the first days of 1945 a now long forgotten film was released called Berlin:Symphony of the World Capital in which the German city was shown to be a place where the sun always shines and life flourishes. There was no mention of World War II or concentration camps. But by the end of that year it had become impossible to airbrush these events out of history any more.

1945 was the year Berlin, and Nazi Germany, fell and Volker Heise's excellent three part documentary (available now on the BBC iPlayer) tells the story of how that happened through black and white archive footage and with historical narration provided by those that lived through it:- German civilians, Wehrmacht soldiers, combat commanders, auxiliary personnel of the Luftwaffe, SS officers, forced labourers, journalists, Jews in hiding, antifascist enemies of the Nazis, and even Hitler's dental nurse.

Voiced by others these testaments, and even those of Harry S. Truman and Joseph Goebbels, give us a feel of what it was like at the time which contrasts with the broader, retrospective, sweep of other acclaimed documentaries like Jeremy Isaacs' astonishing (everyone should watch it) The World at War. Last year BBC2's Rise of the Nazis showed us how Hitler and his gang were able to use hate speech, realpolitik, and blatant untruths to worm their way into power. Berlin 1945 shows us what always happens when such vile hate has been unleashed. It turns back in on its creators.

Berlin, the place where the sun always shines and life flourishes, would soon be in dust. A dust of its own making. December 1945 could hardly look more different to January 1945. Half of Europe had surrendered to the Reich and Berlin was basking in its success as the capital of this new fascist empire. Berliners wrote in their diaries of walks in the snow, stopping off for a beer, and taking a movie in. 

Casually mentioning that they'd paid their Nazi party subscription fees en route. The screams of tortured Ukrainian prisoners were blocked out by Berliners who simply closed their windows so they could no longer hear them. Soviet forced labourers speak of an unbearable homesickness and mourn a lost, or more accurately - stolen, youth.

On New Year's Day, Hitler gave a radio speech to his "fellow citizens" in which he talked about his people's "struggle" and their "destiny" in an attempt to raise spirits but by then, on the Eastern Front, from the Baltic to the Carpathians, the Soviet offensive was pushing the Germans back. Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels, of course, reported otherwise.

So in Berlin they were oblivious, still, to their inevitable fate. People visited the circus, schnapps flowed freely, and the Fuhrer's speech was rapturously received. Lies in Berlin could not stop truth in Szczecin as the Soviets crossed the Oder, reports said that when 'Stalin's boys' reached Berlin they would not go easy on the Nazis, nor could they alter the fact that British bombs were landing in Germany each night. Mornings would see the dead retrieved from the rubble.

Sometimes legs would fall off these corpses, sometimes the corpses would puke. Sometimes they would lay in the rubble for longer than need be because French, Polish, and Soviet forced labourers were forbidden to touch 'pure' German bodies - even dead ones. The corpses would have to wait for a German to bury them.

The forced labourers lived in a camp surrounded by an electric fence, patrolled by dogs, and fed a diet of soup made of potato skins that they recall as 'pigswill'.  Those that survived would be freed from this soon and so would those who survived the even greater horror of the concentration camps. Reports are received in London telling of 30,000 deaths in Belsen, of decayed bodies strewn along the side of the road.

Nervous Nazis began to burn paperwork pertaining to plans for the final solution in case of the fall of Berlin but pits full of emaciated corpses and truckloads of cadavers couldn't be hidden away so easily. It's a story repeated all over the Nazi empire and its magnitude is often too great to take in. Small stories of individuals often speak loudest in conveying the sheer horror. In one hut, amid the groans of the dying, rescuers find a small girl, barely more than a skeleton, reaching out to them and asking "English? English? Medicine? Medicine?".

Berlin:Symphony of the World Capital wasn't the only film released about the German city that year. 1945 also saw the release of Yuli Raizman's The Fall of Berlin which made use of footage taken by Ukrainian and Belorussian combatants, and captured German footage, to tell the tale of the fall of the city. You'll not be shocked to hear that writer and director Volker Heise takes his cues more from the latter than the former film.

In Berlin, life was going on as normal but there was an awareness of an approaching catastrophe as two and half million Red Army soldiers had gathered outside of the city. Liberation was imminent but it was far from, at that point, certain and Berlin men who had the audacity to complain about the Nazis were still being hung from trees, left for dead with signs hanging round their necks reading, in German, THOSE WHO BETRAY THEIR HOMELAND MUST DIE.

But it was the Nazis who had betrayed their homeland and, soon, for many of them, they would die by the sword they chose to live by. Red Army soldiers were keen to avenge their own losses and were already doing so in cities outside Berlin. 20th April marked Hitler's 56th, and final, birthday and yet, in Berlin, no Nazi flags were flown for the first time in over a decade.

Some Berliners were afraid, others felt Hitler would somehow manage to turn it round and when he emerged from his bunker to inspect a delegation and Goebbels made a radio speech announcing Hitler would be made the "man of the century" (true, perhaps, but not in the way it was intended) there was a brief glimmer of hope for the Nazis.

A hope that was dashed the very next day when Soviet troops entered Berlin. Defenders of the city were called on to stop the "mongol hordes", it's suggested that Berliners shout fight to their death to defend the city, and draconian laws are passed in a final, vein, attempt to prop up the war effort. A Berliner who used, or wasted, electricity for cooking would face the death penalty.

There were genuine fears among the German civilians that they would be kidnapped and taken to Russia, the penny hadn't yet dropped that they were the bad guys, but the most real fear, one that was even accepted by Hitler, was that if Berlin was to fall the war would be over, the Nazis would have lost.

Against this backdrop of fear, retribution, and misinformation the city saw about one hundred suicides and filicides, Nazis fearful of life under anyone but the Nazis killed their own children, and invading forces sadly dehumanise their enemies as surely as their enemies had dehumanised them and some go on rape sprees against German women.

The Reichstag fire of 1933, four weeks after Hitler had become Chancellor, was the pretext for the Nazi reign to get authoritarian and deadly. Twelve years later, the Reichstag was burning again - but this time it was the sign that the Nazi era was reaching its end. On 1st May, a national holiday of the German people, it was announced that Adolf Hitler, the Fuhrer, had 'fallen'.

He'd been killed in action. Or at least that was the story told to the German people. In fact he'd killed himself and when two badly burned bodies are later discovered near his bunker, one a man aged between fifty and sixty with glass splinters in his mouth and the other a younger woman, they are taken to be identified by Hitler's former dental nurse. All that was left of Hitler that was recognisable was his teeth. 

For Goebbels, life no longer had "value" so he and his wife Magda murdered their six children before taking their own lives. Those left leading the Nazis, that had not taken their own lives, surrendered to the allies and soon no amount of liquor would be enough to fuel the celebrations that followed the defeat of the Nazis.

Singing, dancing, feasting, and toasting went on in to the small hours. One punch created even took the happy name of 'Hitler's death' but though Hitler was dead and the Nazis had been defeated the mess they had created across Berlin, across Germany, across Europe, and across the world would take decades to clean up. In truth the damage done to the world by the Nazis has not yet been undone. It never will be.

In Berlin, dead horses lying in the street are carved up to feed the hungry survivors, an observer claims "Berlin has practically ceased to exist", and scenes of shops being looted and destroyed are described by one Berliner as "unbelievable". Which is a bit rich considering they'd presumably been okay with the holocaust.

With the Reichstag covered in Russian graffiti, Berlin's clocks moved two hours forward to Russian time, an antifascist (Arthur Werner) appointed mayor of Berlin, and sermons returning to the synagogues, Berlin had become a place uncomfortable for a Nazi or a Nazi apologist.

But all was still not well. The sermons in the synagogues revealed just how many would never return, rapes continued throughout the city, and STDs like gonorrhea ran riot. As food rations were announced, many fled to France or to be with the Americans who had liberated the western parts of Germany.

Those who remained in Berlin first saw the destruction of Nazi symbols and statues and then saw a plan announced to divide their city into four sectors:- a French one, a British one, an American one, and a Russian one. With the city still smelling of rotting corpses Richard Dimbleby filed the first BBC report from liberated Berlin.

At Potsdam, thirty-five miles south west of Berlin, Churchill met with Stalin and Truman to decide the city's future. There, Churchill told Stalin that the Russians would not need to enter the still ongoing war with Japan as the US would soon bring that to an end with their nuclear missiles. He added, also, that if Stalin had any plans to expand Russia elsewhere those same nuclear bombs could be just as easily used to wipe out Moscow, Stalingrad, Kiev, and Sebastopol. Then they all had dinner together.

However many Russian cities it took for Stalin to get the message. The Cold War begun before the fires of Berlin had even been put out. Before, even, World War II had ended. On August 6th when the Americans dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima (killing over 100,000 people), and then three days later on Nagasaki with a similar death toll, many at the time wondered just how much damage Hitler would have wrought if he had developed such lethal technology.

The final months of 1945 saw American soldiers in Berlin, despite orders not to fraternise with or even trust the German people, picking up local girls and having a high old time. German men would pick up cigarette butts lobbed to the ground by the Americans for something to smoke and with the economy in tatters, cigarettes became an alternative currency.

A tribunal was convened in Nuremberg for twenty-two of the men who had caused death and destruction on a scale the world had never seen before and has never seen since. Twelve of them, including Hermann Goring, Martin Bormann, and Joachim von Ribbentrop, were sentenced to death, others to life imprisonment but some were acquitted and many lower ranking SS functionaries were able to build successful careers and flourish in the post-war years.

If they carried their guilt and demons inside them for what they'd done or if they lived out the rest of their lives in denial it is not recorded. Their dreadful secrets have died with them but those who survived Auschwitz had to live with what had been done to them for the rest of their lives and the pain, as witnessed in an excellent recent documentary made by Robert Rinder of all people for BBC1, has been passed down through the generations.

Many who were sent to Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald, Madjanek, Dachau, Kaiserwald and other Nazi extermination camps didn't even get to live. In total the Nazis were responsible for over sixty one million deaths. 

When Christmas arrived in Berlin in 1945 there were no trees and no presents. Elsewhere in Europe millions of households had no tree and no presents because the entire family had been wiped out by Adolf Hitler and the Nazis. The children who should have been opening their presents were all dead. Killed by a sick and twisted idea of racial purity and poisoned by the hate that Hitler let loose on the world. Never again. 

 

Fleapit revisited:Small Axe - Lovers Rock.

"I've been wanting you for so long, it's a shame, oh baby. Every time I hear your name, oh, the pain. Boy, how it hurts me inside" - Silly Games, Janet Kay.

"For all lovers and rockers" ran the dedication at the end of Steve McQueen's Lovers Rock, the second instalment of his Small Axe series (BBC1/iPlayer), and so it should have done. Lovers Rock was a wonderful evocation and celebration of the joyous music and joyous dancing of the early eighties blues party era, when Britain's black youth - disenfranchised by, and sometimes disallowed entry to, the mainstream club scene - found their own way of partying.

Partying that was full of wonderful music, wonderful dancing, and moments so moving they bordered on the transcendent. From the preparation (getting a massive sound system into an upstairs room, filling the fridge with Red Stripe, cooking up goat curry) via the snogging up against flock wallpapered walls, blowbacks in the garden, and patois fuelled exchanges in the hallway, and on to the eventual end of the night when the partygoers either go home alone or together, Lovers Rock covered the arc of one such night out.

Much like any young person's experience of clubbing in that respect. As are the snazzy shirts (not least as sported by Franklyn (Michael Ward) who, along with Martha (Amarah-Jae St Aubyn), make up the couple at the centre of our story), and the dancing as a vertical expression as a horizontal desire. But there is telling period detail too, not least in the sight of huge beatboxes being carted around on original Routemaster buses.

Even an old fashioned ticket inspector makes a guest appearance. As does the legendary lovers rock producer, Matumbi member, and Linton Kwesi Johnson collaborator Dennis Bovell. But Lovers Rock is not really about the characters or the narrative as much as is it is about a feeling. A feeling of youth, a feeling of hope, a feeling of escapism, and a feeling of adventure.

A feeling, perhaps more than anything, of possibilities. The sort of possibilities rarely available to black youth in West London in 1980 when racist mobs are shown to still be loitering around Ladbroke Grove. Not that every partygoer behaves impeccably. There are confrontations, threats of violence, and even a sexual assault, but these incidents only go to underline the authenticity of McQueen's piece.

The music, of course, is impeccable. Dennis Brown's Money In My Pocket, Gregory Isaacs, Jah Stitch, and, I think I heard, Augustus Pablo's wonderful melodica sound later on when the dancing got rowdier and, quite noticeably, blokier and the overlap in the Venn Diagram between lovers and dub was blurred beyond distinction. There are even disco tunes. Even novelty disco tunes like Carl Douglas' deathless Kung Fu Fighting.

But no scene stands out more than the one in which everybody sings Silly Games unaccompanied except by the sound of their own shuffling feet. It's extraordinarily moving and illustrates music's ability to lift us out of ourselves and elevate us, for a beautiful and shared moment, to a higher level of humanity.

Janet Kay, famously, hit a legendarily high note in her recording of Silly Games, music regularly provides the high note of many of our lives, and, in Lovers Rock, Steve McQueen replicated both those high notes with such skill that the resonance with which they echoed was palpable and sublime. If it left you unmoved perhaps you just ain't a lover or a rocker.

This Is Hardcore:Adult Material.

"I've seen the storyline played out so many times before. Oh, that goes in there then that goes in there then that goes in there then that goes in there and then it's over. Oh, what a hell of a show" - This Is Hardcore, Pulp.

Imagine the cast of Shameless indulging in a loveless orgy with the production values of a third rate hip-hop video in a generic industrial unit in Park Royal watched over by a middle aged man vaping and displaying the crack of his arse like a builder bending over to pick up a brick. It's unlikely that that scenario will cause you to become aroused and in that I think Adult Material (Channel 4) has succeeded in its mission because Adult Material may be about pornography but it most definitely is not pornography.

The four part series tells the story of Jolene Dollar (Hayley Squires, so good in I, Daniel Blake back in 2016), a 30 (or 33, or maybe 35) year old adult actress and the trials and tribulations that befall her as she ages in the industry, deals with family issues, hits the bottle, undergoes a stressful court case, and looks back at her own life and wonders if she, somewhere along the line, has been used and abused.

She takes the younger Amy (Siena Kelly) under her wing as if to protect her from making the same mistakes she has but Amy, a dancer who claims "I love sex" and once performed as Scary in a Spice Girls tribute band, is ambiguous at best regarding this unsolicited offer of guardianship. Amy loves Jolene the porno star but she seems indifferent to Hayley, Jolene's real name as well as that of the woman who plays her, and her real life.

Jolene's/Hayley's marriage to everyman Rich (Joe Dempsie) is crumbling, sex without the cameras on doesn't seem to cut it for her, and her eldest daughter Phoebe (Alex Jarrett) is getting bullied at school. She has a sex toy replica of her mum's shaven pussy thrown at her and that mum's bright pink car has the legend SLAG sprayed on to it in large black letters.

Work's not going much better either. Jolene gets chlamydia in her eye and has to wear an eyepatch like Gabrielle or the maracas player in Dr Hook and the possibility of an anal scene with the American Tom Pain (Julian Ovenden) is obviously dredging up some very bad memories for Jolene as she wipes spunk off her face and makes notes of household chores while she's shagged from behind up against a washing machine.

Pain's the baddie of the piece. He's said to vomit in the mouths of women dressed up as eleven year olds, he doesn't 'do' MILFs but will make an exception for Jolene, and he's not happy about having to spend time in Britain as we witness in one exchange with Rupert Everett's utterly ludicrous porn baron Caroll Quinn:-

Tom:- "This is a backward fucking country"

Carroll:- "Yeah, sorry mate" 

Carroll's rarely seen out of his dressing gown or floating on an inflatable in his pool. His long grey hair give him the air of an LA mogul who's grown so powerful that nobody in his circle dare tell him he looks a prick but his accent and his manner are pure working class London. Phil Daniels' Dave, a director who works for Carroll, plays it as if he's in a Confessions film with Robin Askwith. He's the one with the vape and the builder's bum.

Both of them ooze sleaze. But despite these ludicrous caricatures, some jarring visuals (a shunga image of octopus cunnilingus, anyone?), and an utterly dreadful cover version of The Bee Gee's Stayin' Alive being used on the soundtrack, Adult Material does, eventually, develop into quite a compelling drama and the points it makes regarding the pros and cons of pornography are not as one sided as they may first appear.

Written by Lucy Kirkwood and directed by Dawn Shadforth (who's made music videos for Bjork, Kylie Minogue, Primal Scream, The Streets, Tinie Tempah, and Charli XCX and it shows in Adult Material which often feels like one long and noisy pop music video), it'd be foolhardy to make claims that this series is anything like as incisive or groundbreaking as Michaela Coel's recent I May Destroy You but alongside jokes about an awards ceremony called the SHAFTAs and Carroll's declaration that Amy is "mad as a spoon" an idea is laid bare that porn, ultimately, desexualises the sexual experience. 

It renders sex transactional, turns it into a product and leaves many of its viewers, and participants, feeling unsatisfied, unwholesome, and unreal. A most unedifying feeling and, perhaps, one that should be fully expected and fully deserved if you enter into a sexual relationship looking for anything more than love, compassion, comfort, or even simple cheap thrills.

Adult Material has its cake and eats it. Alongside serious issues regarding consent, alcoholism (the wine that Jolene regularly consumes at all hours is very much the Chekhov's gun of this story), and the story of a woman whose life is collapsing around her, who realises she's made mistakes in her life and is determined to put them right on her own and not other's terms, there are jokes about sagging tits and Botox and Ovenden's Tom Pain gets to deliver two lines I don't think I've ever heard said before:-

"You saved my life, you crazy cunt"

"All I want is a double espresso and to eat your pussy"

This changing of tack from serious drama to borderline comedy is indelicately handled but doesn't detract too much from the show when you get used to how unorthodox it is. The soundtrack, limp Bee Gees cover aside, is great. Alongside Laura Branigan's Gloria, Bow Wow Wow's I Want Candy, Baccara's Yes Sir, I Can Boogie, and Thelma Houston's Don't Leave Me This Way we get to hear Sinead O'Connor covering Nirvana's All Apologies, Ann Peebles' Breaking Up Somebody's Home, and, best of all, Why'd Ya Do It? from Marianne Faithful's 1979 LP Broken English. 

A song Lee Savage used to play to me as he drove me round Tadley in his Austin Maxi and includes lines about a woman with "cobwebs up her fanny", fellatio, and a "barbed wire pussy". It seemed apt for Adult Material. Kerry Godliman (Ricky Gervais' deceased wife in After Life) has a great role as Stella Maitland, an MP and anti-porn campaigner who debates the ethics of pornography with Jolene and guest star Joan Bakewell (the real one) on a chat show and is later discovered to have downloaded a huge stash of porn herself:- "vanilla stuff, lesbians with tattoos and little tits".

Stella and Jolene form a love-hate relationship which seems to echo almost every other relationship in Jolene's life, those with her children, her partner, Amy, Carroll, and even Tom Pain - and it was a love hate relationship I developed with Adult Material. I enjoyed watching it but, afterwards, I felt a bit dirty. Now what does that remind you of?

Kakistocracy IV:Friends With Benefits.

"I've got more friends than I've had hot dinners. Some of them were losers but the rest of them are winners" - I Dig Everything, David Bowie.

Friends with benefits! Two friends who get on well, trust each other, and occasionally have sex without ever becoming an official couple. This situation usually continues until one party desires something more from the arrangement and the other does not or until one person develops a relationship with someone else. It works for some and not for others.

But in Toryworld, where all sex, all intimacy, is transactional, friends with benefits has developed a whole new meaning. It means your friends, already always in high places, will receive financial benefits for being your friends and you too will benefit from that. Most likely there's still sex involved but the important thing is that it's the country that is getting fucked and it's the government of Boris Johnson emptying their balls all over it and walking off with a self-satisfied smirk, probably sniffing their fingers.

Kate Bingham, the managing director of the private equity firm SV Health Investors, was, in May, appointed chair of the government's vaccine task force and handed a £670,000 budget. Kate Bingham is married to Conservative MP (for Hereford and South Herefordshire) Jesse Norman who attended Eton with Boris Johnson.

Bingham's not the only to have found favour in this Johnsonian chumocracy. Dido Harding, the head of the NHS test and trace operation and an old 'favourite' of these Kakistocracy blogs, is also married to a Tory MP, John Penrose (Weston-super-Mare), as well as sitting in the House of Lords on the Conservative side after being awarded a peerage by her close friend David Cameron, another Etonian.

Harding is, famously, a member of the Jockey Club. An establishment that gave Newmarket MP and current Health Secretary Matt Hancock membership when he entered parliament in 2010. Hancock handed out a £133,000,000 (recently expanded to £347,000,000) contract to the Northern Ireland healthcare company Randox Laboratories to produce Covid testing kits. Randox Laboratories, the sponsor of the Grand National, is the official healthcare partner of the Jockey Club and the Tory MP Owen Paterson (North Shropshire) works for them as a 'consultant' where he is paid £520 per hour.

Randox Laboratories, as with many companies being handed out Covid contracts under the Johnson kakistocracy, were not required to submit a tender for their contract. The policy consultancy firm Public First are another organisation who have benefited from their friendship with high ranking Tories. The company's owners James Frayne and Rachel Wolf, a husband and wife team, have been tasked with researching public opinion about the government's Covid messaging as well as managing public perceptions of the exams debacle this summer.

Frayne is a long time friend of the now departed Dominic Cummings and they worked together, in the past, at the Eurosceptic campaign group Business for Sterling and a right wing think tank given the chillingly Orwellian name of the New Frontiers Foundation,. When Michael Gove became education secretary in 2010, Frayne became his director of communications. Wolf, meanwhile, is a former advisor to Gove and was partly responsible for writing the Conservative manifesto for last year's general election.

Paul Stephenson is another Cummings associate who's having his palms greased by the government. The director of communications for the Vote Leave campaign is also the co-founder of a firm called Hanbury Strategy who have received £648,000 to research public attitudes and behaviours to the pandemic. Like Randox Laboratories, Hanbury Strategy were not required to submit a tender.

It doesn't end there, Tory corruption under Boris Johnson runs very very deep and a report this week by the National Audit Office found that, during the pandemic so far, a total of £17.3 billion of our, taxpayer's, money has been doled out in 'direct awards' to companies who did not submit a competitive tender. Not all of them were close personal friends of Boris Johnson, Michael Gove, and Dominic Cummings but enough were for it to be far from a coincidence.

The NAO report highlights not just a huge waste of money (£155,000,000 on unusable face masks, £37,000,000 to Gabriel Gonzalez-Andersson, a Miami based middleman who helped broker a deal for PPE with a jewellery company, Saiger, in Florida) but also a huge bias in where that money ended up. The report confirmed the existence of high priority, or VIP, lanes in the procurement process where any company sufficiently well connected enough to get a recommendation from an MP, peer, or advisor were ten times more likely to win a contract than the suckers in the cheap seats.

A company named Faculty has received nearly a million pounds in government contracts over the last eighteen months and Conservative life peer Theodore Agnew, Baron Agnew of Oulton, surely coincidentally, has a £90,000 shareholding in that company. Agnew was given his peerage by Theresa May but a cursory look at some of the people Johnson has put in to the Lords gives us a measure of the man.

There's Evgeny Lebedev, the Russian born billionaire owner of The Evening Standard, Veronica Wadley who edited that paper and supported Johnson's mayoral campaign in London, Michael Spencer of NEX Group - a Tory donor, agricultural mogul Aamer Sarfraz - a Tory donor and former Tory treasurer, the former Brexit Party MEP Claire Fox who has expressed support for the IRA and defended Gary Glitter's right to download child pornography, three of the only Labour MPs that supported Johnson's Brexit vanity project (Kate Hoey, Gisela Stuart, and Frank Field), and, just to keep it in the family, his own brother Jo.

Friends OF the government simply can't fail but neither, as we've seen this week in the case of Priti Patel - Westminster's own Gripper Stebson, can friends IN the government. Patel received the lightest of slaps on the wrist for the 'accidental' and 'unintentional' bullying of her staff. A situation so obviously bent that the Prime Minister's independent advisor on ministerial standards, Alex Allan, walked out of his job in disgust at it. 

Accidental bullying! Have you ever accidentally bullied someone? Did Peter Sutcliffe accidentally murder thirteen women? Did Hitler accidentally invade Poland, gas the Jews, and start World War II - the deadliest military conflict in history. Perhaps they should claim it had all been an accident and history would be kinder to them. Accidents, as Elvis Costello said back in 1979, will happen but when Boris Johnson is driving his clown car through the heart of government they seem to happen an awful lot. It's like the fucking dodgems out there.

Earlier this year, when talking about how she'd happily report her neighbours for gathering in groups larger than six in their gardens, Patel said "it's all about us taking personal responsibility" but, it seems, that personal responsibility of which she and her colleagues are so keen to impose on us does not extend to them. The rule setters, not for the first time this year - fans of Barnard Castle eye tests will recall, don't have to adhere to the rules themselves.

The former Treasury permanent secretary Nick MacPherson is on record as saying that "things have to be very bad indeed for a Cabinet Office inquiry to find fault in a minister – the system is rigged to conclude the contrary" suggesting the scale of Patel's bullying, unintentional or not, was huge. She's done wrong, she knows she's done wrong, she knows we know she's done wrong but she also knows she will suffer no consequences for it whatsoever and if she wasn't in one of the most important jobs in the country already she would be probably be promoted, rather than disciplined or sacked, for her bullying.

No wonder she's always smirking. Is there a single person in the country who believes Patel's bullying was accidental and was there a single person in the country who expected Boris Johnson to take decisive action or to boot her out over her behaviour? I seriously doubt it. Boris Johnson rewards fealty above all else and history has shown him to be a huge admirer of bullies, from his father to Donald Trump, so Patel is a perfect fit for the upper echelons of the Johnson cabinet. She could kick a dog, stick a firework up a cat's arse, and mug Captain Tom and she'd still be sitting pretty. To quote John Crace, priti vacant. To quote myself, Priti the cunt.

It'd be a tragedy to be governed by such people even in the best of times but with each new day seeing over five hundred Covid deaths (and the total UK Covid death toll standing now at 54,286 - still the highest in Europe), a Brexit deadline looming into view amid confusion and anger, and rumours of Boris Johnson becoming bored of the job and quitting in the new year to be replaced by either Michael Gove or Rishi Sunak it's worse than a tragedy

It's certainly a strange time to announce a £16 billion increase in defence spending. Hardly anybody's visiting other countries at the moment let alone invading them. Johnson's done this because he knows it plays well to his base. Or at least I hope he has. The only alternative could be that he has knowledge of, or is planning, a war in the foreseeable future. It'd be one way to detract from his many grievous failings.

It saddens me to the pit of my soul that people I love and care about, and who I believe love and care about me, have voted for, and defend this venal excuse of a government, stuffed to the gunnels with corruption, fuelled by dirty money and blatant lies, and kept in check by a cabal of ignorant, incurious, and uncultured bullies like Patel.

It saddens me deeply but it doesn't ruin my life. This second lockdown (the lockdown in name only, a lockdown that only affects things that bring you joy, a true Tory spirited lockdown) is not as much fun as the first one. First time round people were keeping each other's spirits up, talking about getting back to normal, saying "when this is all over", promising to build a better future, and it happened in spring with the sun shining and the flowers were blooming.

For many it was, of course, terrible but for the rest of us we had hope, our friends and family had our backs, and nature, sunshine, music, Kahoot quizzes, and long walks kept our spirits high. Some of this is happening now but not all of it and not with quite so much hope attached to it. The Tory party took some stick for its catastrophic handling of the first wave of the pandemic and though, in terms of the death toll, they've been caught out again with the second wave they've, this time, been very quick to distract us with culture wars, defence spending announcements, and other far less important things than our health.

They don't care how many people die but they do care if any of the blame sticks to them and they will do whatever they can to make sure as few people as possible hold them responsible - which, if you think about it, is a complete refusal to do their actual job. Doing my job feels like all I have been doing of late but I have been fortunate that I have a longer three day weekend and I've spent that watching some great television (Small Axe, Pepe the Frog:Feels Good Man, The Night Notre-Dame Burned), listening to some great music (Huey, Craig Charles Funk and Soul Show, Stuart Maconie's Freak Zone, and Nemone on Six Music, Late Junction on Radio Three, and Dan Whaley's Out of Limits show on Burgess Hill Radio), and writing lots of blogs.

I've also been chatting to friends. This morning I had a long call with my friend Simon in which we spoke about politics but also talked about our great holidays in America (adventures in Atlanta, Savannah, Mobile, and New Orleans were all touched on) and even made vague plans to hopefully visit again next year. A train journey from Chicago to San Francisco has been mooted and I would hope, should we make California, we'd be able to hook up with our friends Owen and Annasivia on our arrival. 

That's all dependent on Covid, Trump not starting a Civil War, and our own personal situations but it was good to be making plans again. I wish I'd been able to meet Simon for a few beers this afternoon and shoot the shit with him. He's such good company that time with him, as with many other friends, flies by and makes me feel so much better it almost counts as therapy. He can make me laugh so hard tears roll down my cheeks.

This weekend also marks the birthday of my friend Michelle's daughter Evie. Evie will be five on Monday and she, and her mum, are two more people who fill my life with joy. Last year I was up in Wales, in beautiful Llangollen, to celebrate Evie's 4th birthday with dinosaurs, bouncy castles, and a cake. When the candles were blown out and all the little kids sang happy birthday (penblwydd hapus) to Evie it was so touching I nearly cried.  

It's a disappointment I can't be up there for what will be some very different celebrations this year and it's a disappointment I can't meet up with Simon in The Southwark Tavern in Borough or The Crown and Cushion near Waterloo so that I can feel like I'm living rather than just existing. But, with news now of three potential Covid vaccines, I feel hopeful that in the spring we may be coming out of this dark period of history. 

At least regarding coronavirus. With the removal of Trump from high office I also have hope we will eventually rid our country of our own cruel, negligent, corrupt, uncaring, self-serving, and bullying government and that that too will make life feel worth living again but in the meantime let's not forget that Boris Johnson, his cabinet of cronies, and his extended chumocracy of friends with benefits have profited handsomely from our sacrifices, our sadness, and our misery this year. Normally when Boris Johnson fucks one of his mistresses he's long gone by the time she has to clean up the mess. Now he's fucked the entire country it doesn't matter if he stays to help clean it up or not. The mess, this time, is too big. The way people call him Boris suggests they think of him as a friend, it's a trick he's played on us all, but this particular friend, I'm afraid, has no benefit whatsoever.

*Thanks to the journalists Jonathan Freedland, David Conn, Marina Hyde, John Crace, David Pegg, Rob Evans (not that one), Juliette Garside, Martin Fletcher, and Felicity Lawrence for compiling and collating information on the chumocracy and other Tory misadventures which have been used in this piece.