Thomas Sutcliffe
Thomas Sutcliffe: Ethics aside, citizen reporters get scoops
Published: 02 January 2007
When ITV scheduled I Was There, a review of the year which sidestepped the traditional suppliers of news coverage in favour of "citizen journalists", they can't have known that the year's end would bring the most macabre example yet of this growing trend - the mobile phone footage of Saddam Hussein's final drop.
Thomas Sutcliffe: The weird world of the news searches
Published: 26 December 2006
As the year draws to its close,it's clear that the competition for most morale-lowering news report of the previous 12 months has been a hot one. Global warming, the war in Iraq and the crisis in Darfur have all done their bit - with Korean nuclear tests and Lebanon adding to the sense that long-range optimism may be a symptom of certifiable mental illness, rather than a viable way of looking at the world. But, although I know it doesn't really compete with any of these genuine crises, I couldn't help but feel sandbagged by the revelation, just before the contest closed, that Paris Hilton had topped the list of Google news searches for 2006.
Thomas Sutcliffe: The first casualty of war - and art
Published: 22 December 2006
"I think it's a crappy picture myself," says an army publicist, as he welcomes three of the soldiers who raised the flag over Iwo Jima back to the States. "You can't even see your faces." The line is fictional - a sour counterpoint to the mood of patriotic boosterism which the picture has stirred back home, and which is the subject of Clint Eastwood's film Flags of Our Fathers.
Thomas Sutcliffe: Tongue-tied medic has a lot to learn
Published: 19 December 2006
The phrase "political correctness" isn't invariably an indicator of bone-headed prejudice - though it's often best to work on that assumption until evidence to the contrary arrives. But it's hard to imagine what form the contradictory evidence could take in the case of Dr Michael Dixon's apparently impatient reaction to a request from Brighton and Sussex University Hospitals Trust that doctors should give up wearing ties - because of the possibility that they might spread MRSA.
Thomas Sutcliffe: Here's hoping sparks will fly
Published: 15 December 2006
It was easily the double take of the year - a momentary hesitation by Judi Dench as she made her entrance at the back of Stephen Brimson Lewis's set for the Royal Shakespeare Company's new musical version of The Merry Wives of Windsor. His design includes an optical trick - the downstage houses looming life-size while those at the rear are just bigger than dolls' houses, a perspectival device which is fine just so long as no one actually stands next to them. Obliged to enter between two of these Lilliputian buildings Dench caught herself momentarily and gave the roof tiles a puzzled stare - as if astounded to find the world dwindled around her. It brought the house down on the night I saw the production - and if you'd been looking somewhere else for that moment, down at the programme for instance, no double take would have recovered it for you, it was so fleeting.
Thomas Sutcliffe: When victims are treated like criminals
Published: 12 December 2006
The woman whose body was discovered on Sunday just outside the Suffolk town of Nacton didn't remain a woman for very long. By Monday morning that neutral description, the only one available before a proper identification of the body, had been displaced by the term "prostitute" and a subtle demotion in her victimhood had taken place.
Thomas Sutcliffe: Nice one, Pablo; can I copy it?
Published: 08 December 2006
Why is it that artists and painters are so rarely accused of plagiarism? There are exceptions to this rule, of course - though almost all the ones I can think of are recent, and parasitic on a particular type of art practice; the visual-arts equivalent of sampling, in which a pre-existing image is co-opted for a new purpose. It happened to Jeff Koons, for example, who copied a sentimental photograph of puppies by Art Rogers for a sculpture he called String of Puppies and eventually lost his case - the court having decided that what was being parodied was not the original work but the social sentiment that had given rise to it. The fact that Koons's physical interaction with the work didn't go much further than tearing the copyright symbol off the postcard he sent to the Italian artisans who actually made his sculpture didn't exactly help his case.
Thomas Sutcliffe: When television was the glue of the nation
Published: 28 November 2006
It was intriguing that the return of Jackanory yesterday afternoon should have coincided with reports of an ICM poll that found online and mobile consumption of television were beginning to bite into more traditional forms of viewing. On the one hand, you had the epitome of gas-fired, golden age television - with John Sessions setting out to seduce the video-game generation into 15 minutes of unbroken and collective attention - and on the other, proof of the continuing growth of snack-attack forms of broadcasting - which essentially depend on a solitary viewer watching in isolation.
Thomas Sutcliffe: Face it... obesity is a form of child abuse
Published: 21 November 2006
Should you be minded to harm your children, you're probably best advised to feed them rubbish. As a way of inflicting damage on a minor this has its drawbacks, of course. It isn't a quick-fix solution, as with many other forms of cruelty and neglect. Indeed you may have to wait for years to see any kind of payoff. Sure, they call it early onset diabetes, but remember, these things are always relative. Against those downsides though, you can set one large advantage, which is that you're extremely unlikely to be prevented from destroying your child's health in this way.
Thomas Sutcliffe: The anti-slavery classic and the nag
Published: 17 November 2006
I've been forcefully reminded of the pleasures of footnotes this week, largely by a set of footnotes that offer very little pleasure at all - those attached to Henry Louis Gates Jr's annotated Uncle Tom's Cabin - a lavish new edition of Harriet Beecher Stowe's sentimental polemic against slavery. Strictly speaking, I suppose these don't really count as footnotes at all, being printed in the margins of the text - and, abandoning strictness altogether, they often blur the distinction between a footnote's urge to clarify and the baser instinct of marginalia - which is to demonstrate that the reader is better than the book - or at least not intimidated into silence by it. But footnotes is what they are in principal - a scholarly rubric which is intended to seal the gaps between the understanding of the novel's original readers and our disabled, limping comprehension.
Thomas Sutcliffe: Imagine a world of art without religion
Published: 14 November 2006
I found myself wondering the other day whether the history of art wouldn't have been immeasurably improved by the absence of religion. The immediate provocation for this thought was the Royal Academy's new exhibition of Chola bronzes, a collection of about 40 sacred processional images of Hindu gods and avatars dating from the 9th to the 12th century - but in truth the Royal Academy show was just soil and water for a seed that had been planted a few days earlier by the Today programme.
Thomas Sutcliffe: Horrors that never grow stale
Published: 10 November 2006
I had a terrible time trying to decide what my dissertation should be about when I was in my final year at university, dithering about with various subjects until the deadline for submitting a title was finally on top of me. In the end I came up with something tactically vague about Jane Austen - reasoning that I could tighten up the small print later and that it would, at least, be a positive pleasure to do the basic reading. And ever since then, in a kind of academic esprit d'escalier, I occasionally find myself struck by dissertation subjects that seem immeasurably superior in every respect but for timing. Just a couple of decades earlier and they would have done very nicely indeed.
Thomas Sutcliffe: A fall from grace to delight connoisseurs
Published: 07 November 2006
It looks as if the Thou Shalt Laugh Comedy Night has been cancelled. On Sunday it was still being offered as one of the forthcoming highlights on the New Life Church's website. But when I checked yesterday it had gone.
Thomas Sutcliffe: Naked prejudice in the piazza
Published: 03 November 2006
Venice was awash with architects last weekend - in town for the architecture section of the Venice Biennale. I found myself dogging the footsteps of Maxwell Hutchinson in the Calle delle Veste and, having lunch in Campo Sant' Angelo on Sunday we happened to be seated next to two female architects engaged in a reverent discussion of the Villa Savoie - Le Corbusier's modernist masterpiece. And if that seemed a mildly perverse topic given that we were surrounded by masterpieces of Baroque and Palladian architecture it also seemed to sum up the doctrinal piety of some architects - for whom a building is less a physical object in a landscape than an expression of sacred theological principles.
Thomas Sutcliffe: The strange case of the cop and the cult
Published: 24 October 2006
I don't know a great deal about Chief Superintendent Kevin Hurley. He wears a cheerful smile in the picture on the About Us section of the City of London Police website and, reading his brief biography, he would seem to be one of those characters whose impulse towards public service has found most congenial expression in uniform. He's seen service in Iraq with the Territorial Army and has completed a six-month attachment to the Foreign Office as the senior UK Police adviser to the Iraqi police force.
Thomas Sutcliffe: Rules of repetition, broken repeatedly
Published: 20 October 2006
In the preface to one of his collections of essays, Julian Barnes tells an instructive story about the literary dread of repetition. It's a kind of writer's war story, told in honour of his New Yorker copy editor Charles McGrath. Going over the galleys for a piece - already subjected to three or four exhaustive fact-checkings and style policings - McGrath noted the word "crepuscular" and objected that Barnes had used it before. Barnes said that he hadn't. McGrath insisted he had. So Barnes asked which page it was on. Not in this piece, replied McGrath, but one you wrote earlier. When he checked, he saw it had been nine months previously - which I would have thought fell well outside the statute of limitations on vocabulary overuse. Barnes, though, capitulated instantly. For him, McGrath's vigilance was exemplary, not eccentric, and I imagine the fact that he'd forgotten his earlier usage only confirmed his sense of having been caught out. Conscious repetition, after all, is no problem. It's the accidental or unconscious repeat that leaves you blushing. The urgencies of journalism mean that it happens to me far too often - and I can tell you that I would far rather be caught misspelling a word than re-using one inadvertently or prematurely.
Thomas Sutcliffe: Fudge makes life sweeter for us all
Published: 17 October 2006
We have a fudge crisis, it seems. Ruth Kelly and her cabinet colleagues can't fudge a deal which will allow faith schools to get away with discrimination against homosexuals, British Airways can't fudge their uniform requirements to accommodate the wounded piety of one of their check-in staff and Kirklees Council has decided that it can't fudge over Aishah Azmi's insistence that she wear a full veil, just in case one of her male colleagues passes by and catches sight of her immodestly exposed nose and lips.
Thomas Sutcliffe: Invasion of the film snatchers
Published: 13 October 2006
I went to see Martin Scorsese's The Departed last week, checking in for the earliest public screening at the Odeon Holloway along with a handful of zealous Scorsese completists and - I'm guessing here - Jobseeker's-funded cineastes. The film itself is a Christmas stocking for the Scorsese fan - predictable in its contents and thematic bulges but no less exciting for that, and generously stuffed with cinematic treats.
Thomas Sutcliffe: Has North Korea made the world a safer place?
Published: 10 October 2006
We're told that North Korea's nuclear test registered 4.2 on the Richter scale as measured by the US Geological Survey. Small earthquake, nobody - so far as we know - dead. But according to the international media's informal seismographic, the tremor was far greater, setting off all kinds of global diplomatic aftershocks. Teacups rattled in Beijing, plaster came off the ceiling in Washington and in Tokyo tiles slipped off the roof and shattered.
Thomas Sutcliffe: Don't cast Asperger's on Holbein
Published: 06 October 2006
I felt a little for Boris Johnson the other day, fending off the wasp-like attacks that followed his foolish decision to say what was actually on his mind, rather than process his statements through the usual Passport Control of political acceptability.
Thomas Sutcliffe: Poor journalism saves a guilty church
Published: 03 October 2006
If you measure the success of an investigative report by the fuss it causes then Sunday night's Panorama was surely a triumph. Archbishop Vincent Nichols, the Chairman of the Catholic Office for the Protection of Children and Vulnerable Adults, immediately denounced the BBC for sensationalism, misleading editing and prejudice. Colm O'Gorman's report, which accused the Pope of presiding over a deliberate policy of cover-up, had obviously done nothing to dispel his belief, expressed three years ago, that the BBC as an institution is hostile to the Catholic Church.
Thomas Sutcliffe: A thrill that is barely concealed
Published: 29 September 2006
Thirty-eight years ago this week, Hair opened in London - one day after the Lord Chamberlain's power to licence plays had been done away with. And the hair that most obviously exercised the many journalists who covered the event was pubic. Hair, notoriously at the time, included a scene of mass nudity - the cast's own minor contribution to the banishment of shame.
Thomas Sutcliffe: Only men could be such jackasses
Published: 26 September 2006
It being something of a bull market for anti-Americanism these days I don't suppose it will be very long before some social commentator attempts to treat the success of Jackass Number Two at the American box office as a symptom rather than a mere commercial statistic. Who could blame them, frankly? In the same week that Sean Penn's film of Robert Penn Warren's great political novel All The King's Men opened in cinemas, the citizens of the most powerful nation on earth overwhelmingly preferred to watch a celebration of reckless self-endangerment - the highlights of which include the administration of a beer enema, the drinking of horse semen and one of the team having a penis seared on to his buttocks with a branding iron. In truth, the commentators are going to be jostling with the Freudians to be first in the interpretative queue - dire warnings of terminal societal decadence battling with diagnoses of derailed transitional development and suppressed homoerotic tendencies.
Thomas Sutcliffe: Television will survive YouTube
Published: 22 September 2006
So far YouTube doesn't seem to have been verbed yet - that transitional moment at which a brand name metastasises to take possession of an action, as has already occurred with Google. It really can't be far away though, given that YouTube is one of the most popular websites on the internet and is growing at an astonishing rate. It reportedly increased its users 500 per cent in the first half of this year - and the news that it has just signed a deal with Warner Music to make pop videos available free aren't exactly likely to to slow its growth. And if you're one of the dwindling number of people not aware of it, then I should explain that the verb "youtube" would mean something like the following: to upload short video clips to a website so that anyone with an internet connection can view them. If you're one of the one in eight internet users who already visit the YouTube site you will probably know that the verb has a secondary meaning: to sit in a state of powerless stupefaction in front of a cornucopia of the nugatory and the negligible.
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