Appropriately for a LeCarre adaptation Tinker, Tailor has had a strange looking-glass existence. A wordy, slow paced, book adaptation packed with three generations of the UK’s finest acting talent it seemed perfectly placed to make-up for modest box office with an unending stream of awards. Whilst nothing exactly remarkable, its $62m gross must have been a very nice surprise, if perhaps not compensation enough for the comparative award drought that followed. Winning anything is always an achievement and I certainly wouldn’t complain about a pair of BAFTAs, yet after the film’s initial reaction even this victory felt oddly like defeat. Tinker, Tailor is a film which garnered the highest acclaim you could hope for, yet only six months down the line it already feels like not the real deal.

I remember some years ago being lucky enough to hear Tim Bevan discuss his then newly released film The Interpreter. He admitted that political thrillers have always been a genre close to his heart and something he always wanted Working Title to do more of. The idea of a thriller wrapped in the complexities of translation and diplomacy remains one of my favourites but there is a fundamental flaw to the movie that came from this concept. Somewhere along the line the decision was made to make the interpreter a speaker of an entirely fictional african language. The good reasons for this are legion, not least saving Nicole Kidman from having to learn how to speak Tado or Lingala. It also meant the film ran no risk of offending a real african nation. It was, in effect, a political thriller without any politics. This, once again, is what Working Title have achieved with Tinker, Tailor.

"I think he said 'UmBongo UmBongo they drink it in the Congo'..."

For cinema’s key demographic, the 16-20 year-old, the struggle between East and West isn’t even a childhood memory but it is a mistake to imagine that this leaves Tinker, Tailor simply as a museum piece. Told well, for instance when Radio Four recently ran all of Le Carre’s Smiley novels starring the magnificent Simon Russell-Beale, this story still has a powerful message about the way countries are run and the way ideology works.

There is a key scene in which George retells his only encounter with his opposite number in the Russian secret service, Karla. In the 1979 TV adaptation this role is taken by Patrick Stewart who glowers at Alec Guinness with a nerve jangling intensity. However Alfredson’s film at least equals this by refusing to flash-back to the encounter and instead keeping the scene entirely in the retelling. Karla is simply an empty chair, his brooding, over intelligent presence purely the creation of Gary Oldman who somehow conjures an Indian prison cell into a small dark room in London. It is a bravura moment yet it is also where the film falters.

The encounter ends with George apparently defeated yet, looking back, he is able to draw a vital lesson. In the novel and every other adaptation of it, that lesson is given as…

‘…Karla is not fireproof because he’s a fanatic. And one day, if I have anything to do with it, that lack of moderation will be his downfall.’

But the film has this as…

“…And that’s how I know he can be beaten. Because he’s a fanatic. And the fanatic is always concealing a secret doubt.”

It’s an astonishingly bad translation. For starters LeCarre’s version has a beautiful natural truth to it, history proves time and again that extremists do indeed bring on their own defeat. In many ways he not only summarised the failure of Fascism but predicted the failure of Communism, not bad for 8 words. The reworking is as ugly as it is wrong. It’s just wrong to say that a fanatic always conceals a doubt. It’s comforting but it’s not true. That doesn’t mean the fanatic is right, just that many are sadly fully capable of being wholeheartedly wrong and again history is proof of that.

More importantly the difference between the two statements is what robs the film of its political edge, what actually robs it of any real meaning. The point of the original is that Western Democracies were a mess but that this mess was better than the brutalised certainty of the Communist East. It is George Smiley who conceals a secret doubt, not Karla and the novel celebrates him for doing so. The film leaves us with George oddly triumphant, his enemies vanquished, his humiliations behind him, his questions answered. In yet another example of the mirrored nature of this film, it ends up offering us an entirely opposite version of the conclusion of the book. This turns the film simply into a rather long winded account of a how a retired civil servant got a promotion.

"Do you like my new office? I didn't chose the wall paper."

Oldman’s performance is sublime and I do hope he wins the Oscar for it but I’m a little glad that the film as a whole has finally started to sink. As you can probably tell I love the original book and this film struck me as a beautiful wasted chance. After all, we are still a nation less free than we like to protest yet much freer than our extremist enemies would wish. Faced with a certainty that self-detonates on the tube I would have thought LeCarre’s story in praise of doubt would have been timely.

All of which is really intended just to point up the falsehoods in the two favourite maxim’s of those who distrust words on the screen. The first is the easiest to dismiss. I have always hated the expression “a picture tells a thousand words”, it ranks alongside “the fanatic is always concealing a secret doubt” as a clever sounding piece of stupidity. I do know of pictures that are far more eloquent than bad prose, I also know a thousand pictures that could be more than adequately described without straining the limits of tweet.
The film of Tinker, Tailor is 2 hours and 7 minutes long. That means it’s made up of something like 190,500 pictures yet it means less than those 8 words that didn’t make the final draft.

The other favourite saying is not wrong itself but it is often badly misunderstood. It is easy to translate “show don’t tell” as “visualise don’t say” but that’s not actually what it means, it is not a commandment against dialogue. Surely it means “demonstrate don’t lecture”, and pictures can be as guilty of this as words. Tinker, Tailor is full of gorgeous images, images designed to tell me that this story is important and political and still relevant and powerful but none quite has the power to actually show us anything. I think because no one actually wanted to show us anything.

So when you watch it back and feel more cheated than you remember, don’t forget that it’s because “show don’t tell” is a far tougher commandment than it looks at first glance. It’s not the same as “say nothing” and it certainly offers no hiding place if you just have nothing to say.

The narrative is usually basically the same. “I’m a young unknown talent, here’s some visually arresting ideas, please help me put this onto a screen.” Well, in many ways that’s the same narrative behind Shooting People and the BFI’s current JustGiving campaign that hopes to get your cash to support a film called The Manxman. The only difference being that the film was shot in 1929 and the young talent who made it was the late great Alfred Hitchcock.

This trail contains material from all 9 of Hitchcock’s surviving silent films, all of which the BFI have been hoping to restore. As they say, “Film is a fragile medium” and these would not be the first early movies to be lost to history.

Shooting People have swung to the cause of the last of the 9, The Manxman, which was also his last silent movie. With The Artist full of BAFTAs and poised to devour the Oscars like a delicious pudding, there has never been a better time to put your money where your mouth isn’t. This is your chance to support a genuine silent classic and to save a film by one of British Cinema’s greatest ever auteurs. Surely a duty we all owe to world cinema?

Any sum can help so do what I did and donate via this link: www.justgiving.com/shootingpeople

First I should declare my bias. Following its triumphant night at the BAFTAs I wouldn’t be surprised if The Artist soon suffered something of a backlash. Certainly its Hollywood enemies have been desperately trying to engineer one for months. Side-stepping Kim Novak there’s still no escaping the fact that the film has been over hyped. If you go to see it in the wake of the BAFTA victories expecting some revelatory experience that enables you to see with fresh eyes your entire relationship with the art of cinema then you will be disappointed. It is, after all, just a jolly film about a fat man and a dog.

The real strength of The Artist though is that it never much tries to be anything other than this. It has moments of surprising depth, flashes of visual brilliance but none of these distract it from the task of being charming. It left me beaming and feeling delighted with the world and for this fact alone I hope it wins in every category because Hugo hit me as, without a doubt, one of the dullest, most poorly played and fundamentally disingenuous films I’ve ever bothered to sit through. So I’m not a fan.

Disingenuous is the key point. Both films seek to pay tribute to a past age of cinema, one does so by showing it still has a relevance, the other by smothering its subject in contemporary gloss. I have heard complaints that The Artist is inauthentic. Most convincingly a tailor I met was outraged by the George Valentin’s shirts, a period detail that I have to admit had passed me by. Amid all the adulation it is certainly worth remembering that the style and tone of The Artist owes a lot more to the more recent and more accessible movies of Fred Astaire than it truly does to the silent classics it appears to emulate. Cleverly Hazanavicius keeps the hokey melodrama of the silent film to short sections of movies within the movie and the real story told, albeit almost completely silent, is actually a homage to a far more modern style of old cinema.

Yet, whilst this is a subtle shift of the goal posts, the film’s overall achievement stands. Michel Hazanavicius shows it is still possible to make a popular, populist, slice of entertainment that nevertheless is shot in black and white, with next to no dialogue and few recognisable faces. The film never seems to set out to do anything other than that which it achieves – to put a large and delighted smile on your face.

This is where Hugo comes most unstuck, twice over. Firstly the authorial programme of praising the great Georges Méliès is always placed ahead of the demands of telling a story. Scenes in which characters recite chunks of his biography would have felt clunky had this been a children’s TV show. More importantly the plan of making a film which shows how magical early cinema was, is ruined by Scorsese’s inability to let the work stand on its own feet. If Méliès was able to tell such magical stories with dodgy back drops and low-fi effects then why did this film have to be swamped with such a lazy array of ugly computer work? Or is the clanging paucity of so much of the visual treatment a deliberate attempt to mimic Méliès’ own short comings? Is the hammy auto-queue reading performance style supposed to be aping the wide-eyed gurning of the silent performers in Méliès’ work? Or is it all at another level still? Is this film, with its nasty buzzing stereoscopy and cut-out CG background characters, supposed to make us long for the simple handicraft of pre-war cinema? Certainly when clips of the real work of Georges Méliès appear on the screen I was struck with a delight I’d thought my body had become incapable of feeling.

This is why The Artist would get my Academy vote had I a vote to give it, which luckily for Martin Scorsese, I don’t. Hazanavicius trusts the audience to follow a good story whatever the picture quality. Scorsese instead lectures us that the past was great but seems reluctant to trust us to pay attention to him unless the film is wrapped up in all the orange and teal gloss that modern cinema can offer, all the gloss that his subject clearly didn’t need.

Remind me again, which of these is a mechanical prop?

Large swathes of Hugo are set aside to holler about the “magic” of cinema. Méliès apparently called his studio the Dream Factory and Scorsese’s characters are forever looking skywards with misty eyes and talking in hushed tones about dreams. Yet there is no magic in Hugo. There’s no magic because everything happens on the screen, no thought is left unvisualised, no dream undisplayed. The digital tool kit open to a modern director is vast and full of potential but it is a mistake to imagine that seeing is always the key to believing.

There are just enough moments of real visual elan in The Artist to make me criticise it for not having enough. A sequence in which George Valentin pours drink onto a table and we see him reflected in the mess is as clever as it is beautiful and had it had a couple more I might have left feeling less like the film was too long. However my favourite sequence in the entire movie is when Peppy Miller sneaks into Valentin’s dressing room and, finding his suit and hat hanging up, slides her arm into his empty jacket sleeve so as to hug herself as if he were holding her. It’s a sublime moment, witty, delicate and sensuous.

Watching I was left unsure if the hand that comes out of the sleeve is Bejo’s or actually that of a Dujardin himself. Whether this trick is achieved through effects or performance is immaterial to the impression it leaves. I can smell what Bejo smells, I feel the love that she feels. This is where cinema’s third dimension truly lies, in the ability to create a sensation in the viewer which is more than the sum of its parts. That’s the magic.

In Hugo, Scorsese adopts the hectoring lecturing tone of a man dragging a child round a dusty museum, insisting that each exhibit is actually really impressive. In his passion for his subject he forgets not only the basic rule of “show don’t tell”, but the far subtler lesson taught by The Artist – magic doesn’t happen in front of your eyes, it happens in your imagination. Don’t show, imply.

I mentioned this ambition to my friend the filmmaker Lousia Mayman and she obligingly signed off a text message by describing our arrangement to meet up as “major”. Flattered though I was, I wanted to let her know that I am aware of the utter futility of my quest and was going to reply that I felt confident the expression would be in the script of Skins by the year 2030 but I found I couldn’t actually write this.

I suddenly realised that I had no workable concept of 2030. Written down it doesn’t even look like a date. If I told you something was going to happen in 2030 you’d expect it at half past eight tonight. Held transfixed on the edge of my train carriage, the high pitched door alarm squealing in my ears, I was suddenly aware that my mental image of the future extends no further than the year 2020. Anything beyond this date is utterly meaningless, cotton wool in my mind.

"Will Newt Gingrich's dream of a moon base by 2020 come true?"

I have always had a pretty clear mental map of the future. I suppose there is the exception of a brief period in my childhood when I was convinced that due to a quirk in our numbering the 90′s were never going to happen. I’m not sure where this came from, possibly from the French and their still dazzlingly bonkers refutation of logical progression once their numbers hit 80. Whatever the cause it took me until quite someway into the year 1990 before I was certain that the sequence wasn’t 1989, 1990, 2000 and that we would have to sit out the whole the decade before the millennium fell.

This episode aside I’ve always felt like I knew where I was in time. True I’ve never thought much beyond the year 2020, but until trying to send that text message I’d never felt I needed to. 2020 has been, for sometime, the limit of the near future. Of course science fiction is written about any date, often those picked at random, but generally speaking I’ve always felt a divide between people imagining the safe impossible space of the future like the year 3288 and those wishing to comment on contemporary culture by projecting forwards into the tangible nearly-now the early 2nd Millennium.

Imagine that! By 2020 all cars will look like mobility scooters! WOW!

Perhaps it is purely a result of paying less and less attention to bad science-fiction the older I get but my own sense of the distant present is fixed at a point which is rapidly because the actual present. With a mere 8 years until 2020 is the actual real date of the date and no longer the outer reach of our present culture I am struck by the realisation that I have no idea what 2021 might be like. I am also struck by the sliding doors of a train at Harringay station.

Lightly bruised in the freezing cold of the platform I watch the lights of the train pull away into the deep unknown future. Life is major, I think to myself, rubbing my arms.

Nah. It’ll never catch on.

Eastman Kodak Co. filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in New York early Thursday morning, after the struggling photography icon ran short on cash needed to fund a long-sputtering turnaround.

The storied former blue chip said it had secured $950 million in financing from Citigroup Inc. to help keep it afloat during bankruptcy proceedings. The company also named Dominic Di Napoli, a vice chairman at FTI Consulting Inc., as its chief restructuring officer to help steer the company through bankruptcy court.

via Kodak Files for Bankruptcy Protection – WSJ.com.

Whatever Fellowes’ may have hoped to achieve by proclaiming that public money needed to be spent on “more mainstream” projects, the report that he contributed to is decidedly closer in outlook to Ken Loache’s response that what we need is diversity or as the report has it “the broadest and richest range of British films”. So whilst Fellowes may well be Lord Golden of Globe, he clearly didn’t get much of a say in the final text of the report. Which is probably why its conclusions are not a bag of contrived gibberish couched in bizarrely melodramatic tones and lacking in any form of realism or historical accuracy.

The Smith Report is certainly not escapist Sunday evening fiction. There are no misty eyed plans to create a rain sodden British Hollywood, a Brolly-Wood set out to solve all our problems with the glamourous hammer of production. Rather, the main thrust of the document is clear from the title – “A Future For British Film: It begins with the audience.” The stance is clear, we tried “Built It And They Will Come” but they didn’t come because they couldn’t get there, so rather than the field of dreams let’s think about widening the road that leads up to it and perhaps maybe a bypass.

As a result we have a report which is unshowy, quietly pragmatic and broadly in line with the thoughts of everyone I’ve ever spoken both inside and outside the industry. For the most part it is dry and managerial which is no bad thing for a government report. It would, if implemented in full, be a massive boon to everyone making films in this country, and to everyone who loves cinema.

So there we go, Lord Smith gets my approval whether he wants it or not. There are things missing but at least what’s there is sensible, practical and would broadly achieve what it sets out to. The biggest omission from the text was any recommendation for the tax system. This is strange since the report does stress how essential the current tax break is in securing funding. Indeed here’s the report’s own chart which lists the tax credit as the third highest source of funding for British Film (in 2009).

It is great that finally voices that carry authority are calling for the action needed to grow the UK audience and strengthen the reach to our domestic market. I agree that if it is possible to shake the general public from their narrow convictions about what British film is then we will effectively be cleaning the green house windows and letting in the sunlight. But what of the seeds currently in the soil?

Once this process of audience building has taken hold the financing of film will get smoother as it becomes easier to demonstrate how a film would make a mid-term rather than long term profit. As an aside I also admire the report’s calls for stronger links between producers and distributors, an attempt to end the war of attrition which sees both sides finding ways to guard their income stream rather than necessarily maximising the film’s. Similarly I applaud the suggested changes that would enable producers to keep more of the revenue brought by a successful film and the gentle pushing back of the BFI’s need to reclaim it’s Lottery Fund. This would mark an easing of the need for the Lottery distributor to act both as an instrument of state intervention and as a hard nosed market beast – a schizophrenia which the UKFC struggled to cope with for many years.

However there’s still an obvious dip in this positive cycle where audiences are enticed towards British films yet producers are left with little hard evidence to calm their investor’s nerves. Unless this happened to coincide with a general economic uplift then we run the risk of ruining all the hard work done. Improving the tax credit available, even as an explicitly short term measure, would have been a good step to avoid this.

Herein lies my second doubt about the document. There is a lot of talk of film clubs and communities sharing our amazing cinematic heritage. A prospective “British Film Week” is sketched out with that whiff of bunting and street parties that all politicians love to invoke. There is nothing wrong with these proposals and everything right about trumpeting the brilliant films already exist, films that certainly inspired me to enter the industry. However it is very easy to create a “A Future For British Film” which hinges around the cakey nostalgia of old films. It is too easy to do this. If a mission to “connect the widest possible range of audiences throughout the UK with the broadest and richest range of British films” and the “developing and launching [of] a British film ‘brand’” turns into little more than an annual screening of both Kes and The Lady Killers, then we will simultaneously delight our audience, who always enjoy what they already know they like, and cripple our future.

This is not a stick with which to beat Lord Smith or his well tempered report. However the real caveat I have about Monday’s celebrations is that this is only a report. The good sense contained within it has no legislative weight. Indeed a lot of the time it seems to actively wish not to, usually preferring to “call upon” or “urge” the key participants and only really putting on the tough talk when it comes to piracy. Ed Vaizey our Culture Minister says he looks “forward to examining what the report recommends…” which is a timely if gentle reminder that this is 111 pages of advice. In one crucial sense the “Future Of British Film” doesn’t begin with the audience… it begins with Ed.

When most British talent moves almost directly to Hollywood (from Edgar Wright and Duncan Jones, to Sam Mendes and more) we should be asking ourselves what we can do to keep commercially and artistically successful filmmakers working in and making films about Britain.

It is a commonplace complaint that the failures of the UK industry force our brightest hopes to emigrate to LA like rare butterflies dancing just above the foam of the Atlantic. Though it is true that most English speaking filmmakers who find success will at some point work on a Hollywood picture, the fact that this is so often seen as some sort of failure tells us a lot about why we see our domestic cinema in such gloomy terms and why we therefore take such buffoonish steps to try and look after it.

What does this migration of brilliance actually mean? That we lose our brightest stars or just that we loan them? Those who actually abandon these shores for good are surprisingly few. Most of the actually successful names you care to throw around, Danny Boyle, Guy Ritchie, Tom Hooper, Sam Mendes, Edgar Wright, Simon Pegg, Duncan Jones still count the UK as their home. Indeed, unless my twitter feed is deceiving me, Jones has just directed a TV advert for one a British bank. Even the Scott Brothers (who for all I know now live in a base on the moon) still keep their company firmly straddling both the US and UK.

In purely economic these people are little different from migrant workers from Eastern Europe sending cash home across the channel. In more creative terms their impact on world cinema is impressive and that remains good news. The benefit our domestic industry gains from exporting its talent is not something to be classed as failure.

Yet so often we make out as if they leave because of our failure, as they are forced out by our sheer lack of comparative talent. No one ever says that they might be leaving of their free will, to pursue a type of filmmaking that is best done within Hollywood’s purview. One of our finest screen actresses, the immaculate Kristen Scott Thomas makes more films in French than English these days yet I don’t hear many people sighting this as a damning failure of our ability to create compelling lead roles for women over 30. I think it’s great that the French love her and I think it’s great that the Americans adore Simon Pegg. How does their success make the rest of us look bad?

Most importantly it is not a one-way street. They go, they come back, the essential truth we need to recognise is that talent moves freely between Hollywood and the UK because we are not actually at war. We are not actually in competition with Hollywood.

Don’t throw things. Of course I agree that in the battle for bums on seats UK films are in direct multiplex competition with Hollywood’s. Worse this is a battle in which Hollywood doesn’t play fair and in which those who have power over the situation here refuse to act. However outside of the domestic box office we are just another branch of English language cinema, one that believe it or not, is surprisingly popular when you consider our relative size.

I don’t see any need to create a UK industry that mirrors Hollywood, that beats the yanks at their own game. Making films is not the same as international football. There isn’t a world cinema cup handed out once every four years and we don’t have to be constantly dismayed when the Germans win it. I love world cinema, a term I don’t use euphemistically to mean worthy art-house films in black and white but simply to mean cinema made somewhere in this world.

By imagining we are locked in an entirely fictional battle with Hollywood we turn ourselves into the drunk outside the tube, still trading blows with an opponent who was never there. This mindset infuses much of the popular discourse on film planning and policy. This leads us toward short term strategies aimed at creating precisely the kind of industry we can’t hope to sustain.

It’s hard not to get angry but in this instance it’s best to try.

A quiet sarcastic snort is uncontrollable. The Prime Minister’s call for us to make more “commercially successful pictures” is a fatuous remark from a fatuous man. It reminds me of the Crystal Maze when those players not taking part in a challenge would shout redundant advice like “TRY REALLY HARD!” or “JUST GET THE CRYSTAL!!” But then a lot of my life working in this industry reminds me of the Crystal Maze.

His choice of movies is a hostage to fortune and telling of how badly briefed he is on the subject. Viewed with hindsight it is easy to demand more films like the multi-oscar winning international box office smash hits “The Kings Speech” and “Slumdog Millionaire”. However you don’t have to be much of an industry insider to know that both are relatively low budget films that struggled to get made and depended largely on the grim determination of a few just-influential-enough people to make it to the screen. Indeed even after it was made Slumdog was heading for a straight-to-DVD release in the States until Warner’s feet got so cold they sold the rights to Fox Searchlight. If we are to base all future movie production on this example then what exactly is the model? Rush into cinemas everything that was about to go straight to disc?

Some Happy Lottery Winners.

So I understand why today’s posturing has created a ringing of hands and a gnashing of teeth. Our Prime Minister sounds like a well meaning Aunt or idiot Grandfather. I’m sure if you see the full text of his speech he’ll have added “And I hear a good way into films is to make a hit TV show like that Fab Abs programme they have now, have you thought of writing to the BBC about directing that?” or “What we really need is another Carey Grant he was nice wasn’t he. Came from Bristol didn’t he. But you wouldn’t know from his voice would you? That’s acting, he didn’t make movies with mucky language like they have these days.”

It is annoying to be given advice on success by the man who failed to win the last election even though his opponent toured the country insulting old women. However the appropriate response is not to turn ourselves into the militant idiots many of his supporters would wish us to be.

The term “mainstream” seems only to have been used by that child’s drawing of buttocks, Julian Fellowes, a man who takes a lot of credit for winning a screenwriting Oscar whilst working with a director famous for preferring his cast to improvise. All Cameron has said today is that he wants us to make more “commercially successful pictures”. To oppose the glib stupidity of making this statement in public it is not necessary to start pretending that there is something inherently great about commercially unsuccessful pictures.

I completely agree with Ken Loach that we want a diverse industry producing a wide range of films. Loach is one of our foremost directing talents and according to Box Office Mojo “Looking For Eric” grossed $11m world wide whilst “The Wind That Shakes The Barely” brought in just under $23m. I can’t easily find reliable figures for production budgets but I would be very surprised if these films haven’t reached something like profitability. In short, though I’d hate to taint a master with such a tawdry concept, Ken Loach makes commercially successful films.

Of course not all of Loach’s films have made money, Danny Boyle has had flops aplenty and Tom Hooper’s are sadly sure to come. Only an idiot in a tie would imagine it could work any other way. However as we gather ourselves in advance of Monday’s report by Lord Smith we would do well not to sound too unworldly, as it is a pose that does us no favours. By hearing calls for commercial good sense as those for dumbed down lowest common denominator dross we not only make ourselves a sitting target but we also insult the intelligence of our audience.

There is a market in this country for independent film, for the intelligent, the unexpected, the delightful and the original. What we need is a better system that enables filmmakers to reach that audience. What we need is less interference from bumbling toffs who clearly don’t know what the hell they’re talking about.

The triumphant return of Phil Ilson and his cohorts has also reminded me a of thought I started to have just before the New Year when Kindle King Andy Conway kicked off a Screenwriter’s bulletin with this link to Mish’s Global list of cultural artefacts marked for extinction. Among the items set to follow both Dodo and Dinosaur are the book, the newspaper and all television. Surprisingly for once no mention of the short film so I guess that leaves the score at Phil Ilson 1, Rupert Murdoch 0. Of course it’s not often that these two titans are mentioned in the same breath but they share a common role and if there’s any truth in Mish’s doomy predictions then it’s one that is going to become increasingly prominent.

The curator is a figure who passed through the 20th Century virtually unnoticed. Even now the title conjures up an Ilsonish figure, a passionate intellectual on a mission to make the world better. However a curator is simply someone who brings together other people’s work and presents it to an audience in a way that draws significance as much from the relationship between the works as from the work itself. Murdoch, through his twin roles as mogul and master of the night, has done his best to curate people’s sense of the world for the past twenty years. Every TV programmer and commissioner is a curator, as is every publisher. Often passing largely unremarked through their careers they nevertheless have played a vital and active role in curating mass media and popular culture through the decades in which it first truly exploded.

We haven’t tended to call these people curators, preferring to class TV stations, newspaper owners and publishing houses as “producers” rather than mere bringers-together. We have measured their importance by what they have created, often taking for granted the way they bring to prominence the work of others. It has been what broadcasters chose to make rather than how urgently and cleverly they push the programme upon that has been seen as their key role. It has been what the newspapers print, not the nature of the space devoted to the story.

However if the next twenty years are indeed to see the demise of newspapers and television as we know them today then it is because the role of curator has been pushed to the forefront of cultural jobs. Already it is possible for anyone who cares to access nearly most of everything that our species have said, sung, drawn and generally done. Already this is too much information.

Faced with the onrush of instant reporting the newspapers, creaking along a full day after events have been tweeted and forgotten, have attempted to turn this overabundance to their advantage. As the news sections decrease so the pages of comment and speculation increase. A newspaper is a bad tool for telling us what’s happening but it hopes to prove to be a good tool for exploring why. The more tv channels proliferate the more they focus in on a specific genre, the more clearly curated they become. What for decades was merely part and parcel of the job of creating and broadcasting is increasingly becoming the raison d’etre of the channel. The rise of Dave means for the first time we have a channel so good at curating the scraps it could pick up that it has been able to secure a loyal audience and so transform into a producer of new work (albeit not especially original work…) No longer able to be the first or freshest voice they instead focus on being the most authoritative, most dedicated, most complete – best curated.

The interesting question is not so much whether 20th Century media will survive long into the 21st, it’s what form their competition will take. It used to be that our views and viewing were formed by what was recommended in the papers and what happened to be on when we slumped down in front of the box. Everything else was loftily bracketed together as “word of mouth”, the largely irrelevant chatter of your friends. Now though your “friends” are probably legion and their chatter is almost constantly updated in the palm of your hand. Increasingly tools like Twitter and Youtube have enabled clever, passionate people to talk directly to an ever growing audience.

However I don’t want to get too hung up or starry eyed about the technology. After all, both those examples run at a loss and exist purely on the sufferance of wealthy backers – in one case Saudi billionaire Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal, in the other “How-Long-Before-They-Give-In-And-Become-Evil” internet giant Google. Whilst it is fun to foretell the collapse of all newspapers and the implosion of TV as we know it, it is less deliciously modern but still probably more likely that either one or both of these democratising technologies will, if not disappear, at least be twisted out of shape by market forces long before the ink dries on the world’s last printed headline.

"Hallo I own all your tweets!"

Whatever happens the fundamental point remains that what we crave most of all is someone we trust who can point us in the direction of stuff that’s good and the more stuff proliferates and the faster and easier our access to it becomes the more important and powerful will be the best curators.

And remember you heard it here first…

So get along to the Curzon Soho this Saturday. Not to mention the opening night tonight at the ICA where mine and my brother’s own brief silliness “The Maestro” will be part of the fun.