Haunted By You:Ghosts S2.

"Why is no-one ever alive when you need them" - The Captain

Series two of Ghosts (BBC1/iPlayer, originally screened throughout September and October of 2020 with a Xmas special in - you guessed it - December, and directed by Tom Kingsley) didn't hugely deviate from the format of the first series. In fact, it didn't deviate at all. It was more or less a continuation of that first series.

Nothing wrong with that. Again, while it was rarely laugh out loud funny it was well written, wryly humorous, and, perhaps more than anything, a gentle and sweet piece of television. Which you can't say for that many things in recent years.

The whole gang were back. Button House owners Alison (Charlotte Ritchie) and Mike (Kiell Smith-Bynoe) are still struggling to make ends meet and to get the house done up and the ghosts are still helping them and hindering them in equal measures.

The Captain (Ben Willbond), Kitty (Lolly Adefope), Julian Fawcett MP (Simon Farnaby), Thomas Thorne (Mathew Baynton), Robin (Laurence Rickard), Mary (Katy Wix), Pat (Jim Howick), and Fanny (Martha Howe-Douglas) haven't changed their essential character, or their clothes, at all. That's the thing with being dead. You don't change much.

Even the plague pit ghosts and Sir Humphrey Bone's head (Rickard again) are still around. They've been there, in some case, thousands of years so why would they not be? This series sees Alison and Mike advertising Button House as a wedding venue (even though work clearly needs to be done before it is ready), groups of ghost hunters attracted to the house after a 'photo' of Fanny at the window goes viral, burglars (including a cameo from Ladhood's Aqib Khan) trying to rob the house, and a wild party which results in both Alison and Mike waking up the next day with stinking hangovers.

All of these events are, of course, simply excuses to get the ghosts, and everyone else around, to be weird and silly. Witness romantic poet Thomas Thorne dancing to The Cure, a sledging vicar (not a euphemism), wine quite literally coming out of the ears of dandies, and the ghosts regularly meeting up to watch YouTube. Robin somehow manages to get suckered into conspiracy theories about Elvis's death and 'faked' moon landings and, at one point, the ghosts, start to have physical and romantic feelings. About each other and about the living.

Though Thomas's ardour for Alison remains undimmed throughout. Although they overdo the fanny jokes a bit ("a glimpse of Fanny", "Fanny pictures", and "Fanny's exposed" to name just three) it's never intolerably forced and there are plenty of other funny lines and scenarios. "What sort of moron believes in ghosts?" asks Julian, a ghost, at one point, the plague pit ghosts get into amusing squabbles, and Mary doesn't seem to understand the meaning of the term "sucked off".

I also liked some of the Captain's antiquated turns of phrase, "steady the bus" and "bally Hell", as well as his demand that the others put a stop to their "horseplay". We even get The Captain's, and Thomas Thorne's, back story and find out how they ended up dying in and around Button House. Revelations about Julian paint him in various shades (some better than others) and even Kitty is learning. By reading Lady Chatterley's Lover.

The reliably excellent Geoffrey McGivern is back, slightly underused, as Barclay Beg-Chetwynde, and the whole thing whizzes along breezily. With a few genuinely emotional moments like the time Mike overhears Alison talking about their wedding day and how she felt. Or, during the Xmas episode, Julian's speech about how Christmas with the family isn't supposed to be easy. That's what makes it special. I'd have enjoyed watching that over the festive period - and related to it as well. When that show ended with Alison playing piano and singing In The Bleak Midwinter, joined by a chorus of ghosts - ghosts we've all come to know and love, I welled up a bit. Nice is a word people say you shouldn't use much but Ghosts, more than anything else, is a nice television programme.

Harder Than You Think:Fight The Power:How Hip-Hop Changed The World.

"It was all like a pot of cultural get down"

Hip-Hop came from the South Bronx in the early seventies and it's gone on not just to become the most popular and powerful music in the world but to actually change the world. That's Chuck D from Public Enemy's not particularly contentious contention and it's the one he's made the show Fight The Power:How Hip-Hop Changed The World (BBC2/iPlayer) to illustrate.

It's a must watch and it covers a lot of ground. The talking heads that appear are impressive enough alone:- Ice T, LL Cool J, DMC, Eminem, B-Real, Will.I.Am, Warren G, Monie Love, Killer Mike, KRS-One, Melle Mel, Lupe Fiasco, and MC Lyte representing the hip-hop artists and elsewhere the likes of Al Sharpton and Nelson George as well as various authors, journalists, activists, street artists, members of The Last Poets, and associate professors of history at Ohio State University.

They're joined by archive footage that features an even more stellar line up:- Muhammad Ali, James Brown, Jesse Jackson, Dr Dre, 50 Cent, Madonna, Malcolm McLaren, Charlton Heston, Tupac Shakur, Afeni Shakur, Lil Wayne, Grandmaster Flash, John Kerry, Pharrell Williams, Queen Latifah, Stokeley Carmichael, and Louis Farrakhan. Oh - and almost every single US President from Richard Nixon onwards.

Quite a lot of those names listed, you will have observed, are not from the hip-hop world at all and many of them are politicians and that's because this, as you'd reasonably expect from Chuck D, is as much of a social history as it is a hip-hop history. In fact it's brilliant at telling the story of black America over the last few decades. The stories of William H. Parker, Daryl Gates, and Latasha Harlins are all, individually, fascinating (I knew nothing about any of them beforehand) but I won't be going into them here because, really, you need to watch this show.

The story begins in the sixties with the US, as now, undergoing a tumultuous period in its history. The assassinations of Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, John F Kennedy, and Robert Kennedy, the Vietnam war, and inner city riots. Black people started to get organised and the Black Power movement and the Nation of Islam began to gain notoriety and the newly formed Black Panther party not only became politically active but also used to serve lunches to poor kids in Manhattan.

The musical wing, if you like, of these movements came in the form of The Last Poets and Gil Scott-Heron. Inspired by the already politicised likes of Marvin Gaye, Curtis Mayfield, James Brown, Stevie Wonder, and The Isley Brothers, The Last Poets were social commentary set to music like never before. 

New York City was witnessing white flight and those moving out to the suburbs were being replaced in the city by black and Hispanic peoples. New York, pictures attest, was very run down at that time - and very dangerous. Those who lived there were advised not to walk the streets and not to take public transport which makes it sound like many became virtual prisoners in their own homes.

The Bronx, which had been cut in half by the Cross-Bronx Expressway - an idea of the renowned racist city planner Robert Moses who encouraged "municipal mayhem" and in doing so broke up neighbourhoods, was riven by gang violence, a terrifyingly high murder rate, and a heroin epidemic. The kids who lived there still wanted to make music but they had no instruments so they used the one thing in their house that created music:- the turntable.

While disco was the sound of Lower Manhattan, residents of the Bronx (as well as Harlem and Brooklyn) demanded a harder take and the first person to give them that was the teenage DJ Kool Herc who had been born Clive Campbell in Kingston, Jamaica and moved to the Bronx at the age of twelve.

Herc went to what he called "the yolk of the egg". He played the best bit of the record, the breakdown or the breakbeat, using two turntables over and over again and he did this, publicly, for the first time in 1973 when his sister asked him to play some records at a "back to school" jam. An unlikely celebration for such an influential music to be birthed at.

Soon others were copying his style. Parties were put on in parks, and on the streets of local blocks, that were mostly attended by kids who couldn't get into the clubs. They were either too young or they were seen as undesirable in other ways. Ways you can probably easily imagine.

Strangely enough Hatfield hard rock band Babe Ruth's tune The Mexican became an anthem at these parties and soon the MC became more a focal point than the DJ. The four pillars of the movement became the DJ, the MC, the breakdancing, and the graffiti. When all these four were aligned, Lovebug Starski named it hip-hop.

To give you an idea just how firmly Chuck D sticks to the political side of hip-hop there's no mention of the pioneering 1979 single Rapper's Delight by The Sugarhill Gang and we go straight to 1982's The Message by Grandmaster Flash And The Furious Five. A single that marked hip-hop growing up, becoming conscious, and becoming political.

Hip-Hop found its way into downtown Manhattan and soon the punks and the likes of Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Keith Haring were showing an interest. When Run DMC exploded in 1983, with a rockier sound, the white kids started to become interested but this didn't mean New York had become a harmonious city to live in.

The police continued to kill black people, crack cocaine started to appear in black neighbourhoods, and the hip-hop group that spoke most eloquently and powerful about all of this was Chuck D's own outfit Public Enemy (though honourable mention must go to KRS-One and Boogie Down Productions). Public Enemy's Night Of The Living Baseheads was a powerful anti-drugs song but it was also a relatable one. 

In a way that the Just Say No campaign wasn't. As with the film director Spike Lee (particularly his classic Do The Right Thing), Public Enemy talked not just about discontent but also the source of that discontent:- a failing, racist, political landscape.

The gang problems were getting really bad in Los Angeles. Drug markets, 'colours', Bloods vs Crips. The situation was only made worse by wanton police violence and, sure enough, LA hip-hop became vehemently anti-police. An early example being Ice T's Six In The Morning. When the press started to call the style "gangsta rap", Ice T ran with it and so did another LA hip-hop crew, NWA!

NWA's Fuck Tha Police didn't pull its punches but, of course, the police violence against black Angelenos continued. Most famously, though very far from being the only example, in the case of Rodney King who was beaten mercilessly by four white policemen. All of whom, initially, were found not guilty despite the fact video evidence of the crime had been shown all over the world.

Predictably, perhaps understandably, riots broke out and Ice T rapped about that in We Had To Tear This Mothafucka Up. But the riots, in which sixty-three people died, were blind rage, often directed at people's own communities, and Chuck D, KRS-One, and even Ice T spoke out about them. Made it clear that change doesn't come from smashing up or setting fire to your own neighbourhood.

Hip-Hop just became more popular with white kids who saw that this music spoke for them more than the establishment did. There was some hope when Bill Clinton defeated George Bush Sr in the 1992 presidential election. Clinton, of course, is white but he played saxophone and appeared on Arsenio Hall. He was popular with black voters and they helped get him elected.

But, perhaps to show to white America that he wasn't beholden to the black vote, he took on activist and Public Enemy collaborator Sister Souljah who had said, regards riots, ""If black people kill black people every day, why not have a week and kill white people?". I don't actually blame him on this. While it's okay for activists, polemicists, and artists to make controversial statements, politicians (and especially Presidents) need to err on the side of caution and Clinton did this.

Over in California, a whole new hip-hop sound was coming through. On the East Coast, people travelled on the subway and the music they made reflected that:- rough, edgy, harsh, noisy. But in California, the car was, and is, king and West Coast hip-hop felt like music to listen to while driving. It was slowed down, chilled out, and often stoned. The first big release in this style came from ex-NWA member Dr Dre and his 1992 album The Chronic.

Appearing on that album was the rapper that best personified this new sound, Snoop Doggy Dogg. Despite the different sound, the same problems remained. Gang crime continued and in response more prisons were built and more cops were sent into the inner cities. Guns were banned.

Ha! Not really. Of course not. That option never seems to be on the table. Instead huge numbers of young black men were incarcerated. Some for a very long time. Many, on release, got into the hip-hop world and the artist that spoke most passionately and articulately about these experiences was Tupac Shakur. Or 2Pac.

But Tupac didn't just write piercing social commentary like Brenda's Got A Baby. He also wrote about gangster life to the point of glorification, he rapped about rivalries and beefs, and it all got so out of control that the political side of his work was buried behind everything else. Ultimately, it cost him his life in 1996. Aged just 25.

 

The next year, Tupac's rival The Notorious B.I.G (just 24) died in the same fashion. A drive by shooting. What a waste. Gangsta rap had gone from documenting life on the streets and now, in many cases, seemed to glorify drugs and violence while becoming ever more misogynistic. No less a person that Dionne Warwick considered Snoop's Doggystyle album from 1993 to be the absolute nadir of hip-hop misogyny. 

Maybe she'd not heard Me So Horny by 2 Live Crew! It was a hypermasculine era of hip-hop but the likes of Roxanne Shante and Monie Love stood up and were counted. Later hip-hop saw such figures as Lauryn Hill, Missy Elliott, Megan The Stallion, Cardi B, and Doja Cat but, above them all, stood Queen Latifah whose track U.N.I.T.Y. called out the men who so casually referred to women as bitches.

Around the turn of the millennium, hip-hop seemed to offer up an aspirational and glamorous lifestyle. Beautiful women, sports cars, and lots of money. Not least for the likes of Puff Daddy. But the art behind hip-hop was in danger of disappearing. It was becoming formulaic, it was turning into pop music, and it was becoming more of a business than an art form.

Yet some resisted. When, in February 1999, the police shot and killed a 23 year old Guinean student Amadou Diallo in New York people were shocked. Diallo was completely innocent and it was a case of, supposedly, mistaken identity. Which still doesn't explain why the police shot him 41 times.

Rudy Giuliani, then Mayor of New York, defended the police who were eventually acquitted of any wrong doing.Some hip-hop acts, like Dead Prez - with Police State, reacted to what was happening with anger and disbelief.

Two years later another thing happened in New York. 9/11 saw the US receive sympathy from all over the world but when they decided to respond to the attacks by launching an invasion of a country completely unrelated to 9/11 (Iraq) that sympathy stopped. The invasion of Iraq did not make America or George W Bush popular.

Eminem spoke strongly against Dubya and Black Eyed Peas, in response to the escalation of hatred and violence, released Where Is The Love? When, in 2005, Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans (with just under 1,400 lives lost) it was Bush who managed to fuck up the response to that too. Lil Wayne wrote about it, Busta Rhymes and T.I. played shows to raise funds for disaster relief, and the likes of Jay-Z and Puff Daddy did more for New Orleans than the US government.

Many in the hip-hop community, and the wider black community, believed that only a black president could bring the change that was obviously needed and what do you know? Even now, after seeing Bush in action especially, Obama sounds passionate, articulate, capable, and full of hope. Something that once would have seemed impossible happened and Americans voted in their first black president. Not least when we hear stories of some white Americans who genuinely believed Obama would enslave all American whites.

It's sad now we realise just how far that pendulum would swing back but waching Obama's victory, even now, is emotional. Ice T goes as far as to call Obama "the first hip-hop president" and Young Jeezy's My President Is Black became a ubiquitous tune. But, of course, life under Obama wasn't perfect.

For some, far from it. There wasn't full equality. Hip-Hop's work was not done. In 2012, in Florida, 17 year old Trayvon Martin was shot dead by a "neighbourhood watch captain" and, in 2014, 18 year old Michael Brown Jr was shot and killed by a police offer in a suburb of St Louis. 

They were hardly solitary cases. The Black Lives Matter movement was formed and the tune that became their unofficial anthem was, unsurprisingly, a hip-hop one. Kendrick Lamar's Alright. Then in 2016 things got a lot worse. Donald Trump was elected president.

Back in the 1990s he'd been seen, by some, as something of a hip-hop icon. Obscenely wealthy with models for wives. Yet he was a full on, and unapologetic, racist who had called for innocent black men to receive the death penalty (when five black men were wrongly convicted of a gang rape in Central Park back in 1989).

It didn't take long for the racists to feel emboldened under Trump and in 2017 KKK members, neo-Nazis, and other unaffiliated racist groups were marching in Charlottesville, Virginia. Trump blamed the counter protestors. As the leading white rapper, Eminem knew some of his fan base supported Trump so he made sure it was on the record that he hated Trump.

Vehemently so. Towards the end of Trump's tenure the world was shocked by yet another racist murder. That of George Floyd in Minneapolis by the police officer Derek Chauvin. This time it was filmed. We've all heard Floyd repeat "I can't breathe" over and over again until eventually there's no life left in him to say it anymore.

"I can't breathe" became a slogan for BLM and BLM protests, quite rightly, took place all over the world. The Georgian rapper Killer Mike (of Run The Jewels and Dungeon Family) spoke with intense fervour, using well chosen words that conveyed both power and insight. Hip-hop, as ever, was the soundtrack to the struggle. As it has been now for over forty years. Fight The Power made a very good job of showing this.

 

God Gave Us Life:Half Man Half Biscuit @ The Electric Ballroom.

"There's a man with a mullet going mad with a mallet in Millets" - National Shite Day

 

Back in 1985 I bought Half Man Half Biscuit's debut album Back in the DHSS and rushed to my teenage bedroom to play it. Though very much from the same kind of post-punk milieu as my then favourites The Fall, New Order, and Echo and the Bunnymen there was something distinctly different about Half Man Half Biscuit.

They were funny. Not funny music. They weren't clowns. But the lyrics were wry, amusing, and caustic and seemed to reference subjects other bands, perhaps wisely, avoided. There were songs about snooker referees (The Len Ganley Stance), Benny Hill sidekicks (99% Of Gargoyles Look Like Bob Todd), and a certain Liver Birds actress (I Hate Nerys Hughes (From The Heart)). As well as a drug referencing cover of a song from the children's television show Chigley, Time Flies By (When You're The Driver Of A Train).

I never got to see the band in the first incarnation. I lined up for a gig at The Electric Ballroom in 1986 in hope to see them but they'd split up earlier that week. An acquaintance of mine took me to the Sir George Robey in Finsbury Park to see The Young Gods and a hot new band called My Bloody Valentine instead but that's a whole different story.

Since they reformed in 1990 though, I've seen them loads of times. About fifteen years back Shep and I would make an annual trip to a provincial town to check out one of their gigs, explore the town, and (usually) get drunk. We visited Bath, Blackpool, Derby, Norwich, Shrewsbury, and Wolverhampton and the gigs were always brilliant.

The combination of acerbic wit, industrial basslines, snarling Wirral accented vocals, and thrashy guitars couldn't fail to win me, and thousands of others, over. Those who know why Half Man Half Biscuit are so good just know. There's no debate. That's why people travel far and wide, often decked out in Dukla Prague away kits or, sometimes, in Joy Division oven gloves, to see them. They are, more or less, a cult.

A friendly cult and one I was looking forward to rejoining yesterday at, of all places, the Electric Ballroom. I'd finally get to see HMHB at that venue nearly thirty-seven years after queuing up for a band that had, briefly, ceased to exist.

The gig was not a disappointment. The band raced through new tracks, many already crowd favourites like Awkward Sean ("airwair boots, surgical gown, counter-majority views"), I'm Getting Buried In The Morning ("see you later undertaker, in a while necrophile), and Renfield's Afoot ("who the fuck are you trying to govern everybody's bat walks?) and mixed them with early tracks like Fuckin 'Ell It's Fred Titmus, Sealclubbing, and Trumpton Riots ("Windy Militant leads his Basque-like corn grinders to war").

 

There was so much else though. The Light At The End Of The Tunnel (Is The Light Of An Oncoming Train), Bob Wilson - Anchorman ("I've even been to look for Jim Rosenthal, found him on his knees at the Wailing Wall"), What Made Colombia Famous, Look Dad No Tunes, Tommy Walsh's Eco House ("back to back Cadfael, Ross Kemp on Watership Down"), and All I Want For Christmas Is A Dukla Prague Away Kit.

The only downside of the gig was that it was simply too packed. Possibly there were the usual amount of people but the expanding waistbands of middle aged men (and it was probably 80% male, 20% female split) made it feel even busier than it already was. That's known, I was told by a former Sounds journalist, as "Specials syndrome".

Also, because HMHB tend to attract a lot of pissheads with weak bladders (or at least that's the term I coined last night), it felt like wherever you stood there was either somebody pushing past you, sometimes spilling beer everywhere, to get to either the toilet, the bar, or, nearer the stage.

Minor quibbles in a gig which saw Nigel Blackwell musing sarcastically from the stage about air fryers, log burners, and Beth Tweddle and included a grinding, almost incandescent National Shite Day, a jaunty We Built This Village On A Trad Arr Tune ("yonder the deacon in misguided trousers"), and the insanely catchy Everything's AOR ("I can put a tennis racket up against my face and pretend that I'm Kendo Nagasaki").

 

Every song was cheered, smiled warmly at, and sang along to but perhaps the two best received were For What Is Chatteris (Nigel fucked up the first line but the crowd were on hand to remind him - cue shouts of "one way system") and, of course, Vatican Broadside which tells of a pontiff not being overly impressed by the 'singer' out of Slipknot. That must be the first song that HMHB write on every set list and there is something rather lovely about being in a room of a few hundred people shouting "who the fucking hell are Slipknot" at the top of their voices.

For an encore we got I Fought The Law (HMHB always chuck in at least one cover) and the urgent mosh pit anthem Joy Division Oven Gloves. I'd been tempted to take my own Joy Division oven gloves along but after some cad had stolen one of them at a previous Biscuit gig some years back, I decided against it. I actually use them as my oven gloves. I don't want to lose them.

What a great gig it had been. Thanks to Shep (who joined me for a walk along the canal and Regent's Park beforehand), Pam (for the snaps - as ever), and Stu (all four of us had a pint in The Spread Eagle and a vegan burger in Temple of Seitan (Nashville Hot for me) before and me, Pam, and Stu found ourselves in The Good Mixer afterwards and also it was lovely to bump into Ol at the gig too.

That's the thing with Half Man Half Biscuit. They put on bloody good gigs (and they don't play that many so they're always fresh and motivated) but they also provide the setting for what always turns out to be a good night out. What did Half Man Biscuit give us, Neil? Half Man Half Biscuit gave us life, Nigel. Sure did!

Position Vacant:Make Me Prime Minister.

Probably the most telling thing about the current dire state of the British government is that out of the twelve contestants on Channel 4's recent Make Me Prime Minister, I reckon at least ten of them would be far better at the job than Rishi Sunak, Liz Truss, or Boris Johnson.

But why would anyone want to do it? To improve the state of the country and the lives of the people who live in it, you'd think - and while that seems true of most of the contestants (and patently untrue when it comes to the current Tory administration) the makers of the show have also added a £25,000 prize for the winner as a further inducement.

Presented by Alastair Campbell and Sayeeda Warsi (I know she's a Baroness but I don't pay much attention to the corrupted system of honours in this country), I had fears, from the off, that the programme would be a bit too much like The Apprentice. Which it was. There's lots of footage, filmed from the sky, of Big Ben, Downing Street, Whitehall, and Westminster Bridge and the basic concept of splitting the group into two smaller groups and assigning them tasks before the supposed weakest contestant is eliminated is basically a straight rip-off from The Apprentice (though there is a Traitors style twist). A show so evil it helped Donald Trump become POTUS and made a celebrity of Katie Hopkins.

Despite that, I enjoyed it once I got into it. The contestants include the infamous Jackie Weaver (really making the most of her fifteen minutes of fame), Danny - a venue operator and son of the jungle pioneer Goldie, Connell - a cocksure paralegal with a penchant for swearing, Alice - a Brexiter and Margaret Thatcher fan who has posed with both Ann Widdicombe and Nigel Farage despite being only twenty years old, Natalie - a media communications director, and Darius, a British-Afghan refugee and Tory hopeful whose catchphrase of "creativity, creativity, and creativity" will remind those of a certain age of Tony Blair's "education, education, education".

Darius seems to have a complete and utter capacity for denial - which may be a handy tool in politics - or not. There's Adam, a marketing consultant who, along with Weaver, is a few decades older than most of the other contestants, Caroline - a hairdresser and XR activist, ex-footballer and sports agent Holly, seemingly arrogant restaurant supervisor Verity, self-proclaimed "black trans guy" and diversity consultant Rico, and, finally, Kelly. Who provides a pretty interesting CV. She's a former beauty queen turned member of the Scottish Youth Parliament with both ADHD and autism.

Once in their teams, they're asked, each episode, to come up with various policies and ideas. On how to reform primary school education, how to tackle the obesity epidemic, how to deal with a "crisis" (Undeclared War style), how to cut crime, and how to offer solution to climate change.

They have debates like real party leaders, they go out and knock doors, and they're even interviewed by the likes of Krishnan Guru-Murthy, Katy Balls, and Nick Ferrari while other, real, politicians appear either chatting to and observing the contestants (Jess Phillips, Johnny Mercer, Chris Bryant) or with video taped words of encouragement (Tony Blair and David Cameron - quite remarkably). Journalists from The Daily Mail, The Telegraph, The Sunday Times, and The Guardian (Zoe Williams) also weigh in with their opinions and even newspaper headlines are mocked up. They look quite realistic although they did remind me of the packets those crisps called Fish'n'Chips come in.

While Campbell and Warsi amicably bicker over their party affiliations - and Sue Perkins narrates (I like her a lot but the narration pool seems to be getting smaller and smaller - I'll do it next time, I need work), we see footage of real life politicians making twats of themselves. Looking awkward and stupid are Boris Johnson, Theresa May, Liz Truss, Michael Gove, and Matt Hancock and though the programme makers have thrown in some Labour or ex-Labour MPs for balance (Gordon Brown, Keir Starmer, and, of course, Jeremy Corbyn) it's instructive that none of their public gaffes are anywhere near as incriminating.

It's not as if the wannabe politicians on Make Me Prime Minister are afraid of making fools of themselves in public either. We see maypole dancing (!) and contestants dressed up as space people from the future while other fancy dress outfits include a strawberry and a box of French fries. On the subject of the 'French', it's interesting that whenever a supposed crisis is referenced the French are pretty much always the enemy. 

That's Brexit for you, right there. There's lots of arguing among team mates, an incredible overuse of the cliched term "car crash" to describe any PR failure, some weird submarine shit which seems to be inspired by Vigil, and, inevitably, there are tears. In another nod to The Apprentice, the contestants always hold their phones in front of their mouths (as if using some crappy old Amstrad kit) when they talk into them instead of to their ears like every single person you see does in real life.

Jackie Weaver soon becomes annoying. Overly authoritarian and high on her own viral infamy, she admonishes Connell because he swears too much and threatens to smack his legs. Like if he was a child. A child in the 1950s. Despite that, she seems fundamentally decent and so do all the rest of them.

Their policies are always well intended but often ill thought through (the complete opposite to the cruel and corrupt lot currently in charge) which is understandable as they're not given much time to come up with them. It's interesting that Nick Ferrari, of all people, admits that the contestants are far more credible than any current cabinet minister.

An assessment both Campbell and Warsi agree with. I don't do spoilers but I will say that the three final contestants were all brilliant but perhaps what's most interesting about the show, and says the most about the current state of UK politics, is when we witness the likes of Campbell, Warsi, and Mercer judging others for making bad mistakes. How rich does that feel? It's almost "gameshowwashing". My idea for the next show in this style:- Make Me A Doctor. Hosted by the ghosts of Harold Shipman and Josef Mengele.

The Hardest Button To Button:Ghosts S1.

"Haunting's hard innit?" - Pat Butcher

When series one of Ghosts first aired, on BBC1 back in April and May of 2019, it pretty much passed me by. But as the years have gone by, I've seen more and more people posting on social media about how much they I enjoy it so when I saw all four series were available on iPlayer I thought I'd delve in.

I'm glad I did. I enjoyed it. There's not that many laugh out loud moments but it's quietly, and gently, funny with some great lines and it's even rather sweet in places. The story begins with Alison (Charlotte Ritchie) and Mike Cooper (Kiell Smith-Bynoe) who have been struggling to find a suitable home on a limited budget when, out of the blue, they inherit a country mansion, Button House, from a distant relative.

Their plans to turn it into a hotel, however, are severely  hampered and not just because it's in a severe state of disrepair. But also because it's home to an alarmingly large number of ghosts. There are a group of helpful and friendly ghosts who live in a former plague pit in the basement and there is even a ghost pigeon but the main group of ghosts consist of a motley assortment of well meaning buffoons who had the misfortune to die either in Button House or its grounds and are compelled to spend all eternity there.

There's the Captain (Ben Willbond), a stuffy World War II officer who believes himself to be the leader of the ghosts and arranges everything as if a military operation. There's Julian Fawcett MP (Simon Farnaby), a disgraced Tory MP who died in a sex scandal in 1993 and is doomed to spend his death trouserless. He does however, unlike the other ghosts, have the power, to enter the corporeal world. But only to the extent of pushing a cup off a table or pressing a button on a keyboard down.

All of the ghosts experience pain should a human pass through them. Including Lady Stephanie 'Fanny' Button (Martha Howe-Douglas), an overbearing Edwardian 'lady' who was pushed out of the window of Button House by her adulterous husband and re-enacts that event each night. She's also very critical of the way Alison dresses and deports herself.

Thomas Thorne (Mathew Baynton) is an overdramatic Romantic poet who was shot dead in a duel. He's prone to falling in love easily so, of course, he falls for Alison which results in one of the series' best lines:- "you're married, I'm dead. It could never work". Kitty (Lolly Adefope) also courts Alison's attention but only in the form of friendship. She's an excitable Georgian woman of the nobility who is so innocent as to believe babies are made when people touch ears.

Patrick 'Pat' Butcher (Jim Howick) is some kind of scout group leader who was shot in the neck during an archery session and so is always dressed in a scout-ish uniform with an arrow still through his neck. Katy Wix plays Mary, a witch trial victim who was burned at the stake, and Laurence Rickard is Robin, the oldest of all the ghosts. A caveman who's obsessed with bears and whose very funny impersonation of one reminded me of Sir Rowley Birkin QC from The Fast Show.

Rickard also plays a more occasional ghost. Sir Humphrey Bone is a high society Tudor who was decapitated. Rather amusingly, his head and body don't work well together and sometimes don't even get on. As an aside Rickard was, along with - take a deep breath - Farnaby, Baynton, Howe-Douglas, Willbond, and Howick, created the concept behind the show with Tom Kingsley on directing duties for this first series.

When Alison and Mike first arrive in Button House, the ghosts don't want them there but Alison and Mike can't see or hear the ghosts until Julian somehow manages to push Alison out of a window. After she recovers from her coma she realises she can now both see and hear the ghosts as well as they can all living people but it's quite a job to convince Mike of this.

He eventually comes round but the ghosts still want rid of what they see as intruders. But how to get rid of them? They came up with a very unusual plan. To haunt the place. The living and dead enter a war of attrition which gets nobody anywhere so eventually they decide to live side by side but that, of course, is not the end of their silly adventures.

Money for restoration work becomes extremely tight so Alison and Mike allow a film crew to film a Regency Drama, Life of Byron, to be shot at Button House. Much to the annoyance of Thomas Thorne who considered Byron his mortal foe.

Elsewhere the ghosts are introduced to Friends (which they all enjoy while not quite understanding it), Alison and Mike narrowly avoid being swindled by hotel developer Fiona (Rosie Cavaliero), and have a run in with their neighbours, Barclay (Geoffrey McGivern, it's always a good sign when he makes a cameo) and Bunny Beg-Chetwynde (Sophie Thompson), and struggle to enjoy even time in bed together because Kitty keeps jumping in with them.

Not everything works. There's a weak joke when Mike mistakes pot-pourri for food and tries to eat it and there's a couple of other slapstick moments that would probably work better in the Horrible Histories that this team previously made.

But, mostly, it's a small joy. There's a "who you gonna call?" joke, Thomas reciting I Should Be So Lucky as if it's a romantic poem, and when Alison visits a doctor and he reveals himself to already be dead it's played out brilliantly. I particularly enjoyed Julian Fawcett MP describing sexual practices with names like 'Norwegian campsite' and 'Himalayan picnic'. Most of all I just liked the sweet and silly nature of Ghosts. I'll watch series two soon.