Eyes screwed shut behind her glasses. Her face, neck and shoulders are wet with pepper spray. Woman in a summer dress. Woman in the city on a warm night. Woman of a certain age. Old enough – sorry if this sounds rude – old enough to have grown a little fat; but no, our friend, the new friend we’ve never seen before, is growing thin and stringy instead. And this moment – with the pepper spray moist and prickly, condensing on her reddening skin – may be the moment that dries her out, thins and brittles her till the end of her days.

With so much frailty exposed, we can hardly fail to befriend her. She is to us like the tendons and muscles in anatomical drawings: raw and tenderised. Best not shake hands: hers might come away in ours.

Zap! Pow! A cartoon of vexatious particles aimed and fired at the woman of a certain age, the woman in a summer dress, in the city; streaming so neatly they could have been drawn on. Behind the thin straight line of pepper spray, a gloved hand holding the canister; and inside the glove, metal fingers? Or maybe no fingers at all: just the glove, and the padded sleeves, protective vest, over-trousers and over-sized helmet. Programmed from the outset but nothing inside except Robocop Till It Drops.

But look again at the narrow shoulders underneath the hard hat: you wouldn’t design Robocop to be so small. This is a case of Petite Police. A younger woman, perhaps; or a slim-hipped youth all booted up and set to go – who knows what human frailty that helmet is hiding?

We are at the cinema. On screen, the restaurant scene in which a villainous Mr Saatchi is seen holding the curvaceous Ms Lawson by the throat. There are shades of noir; echoes of Ace In The Hole (1951, with Kirk Douglas in the Saatchi position and Jan Sterling feeling his fingers around her neck); Beware, My Lovely (1952, Robert Ryan and Ida Lupino); Angel Face (1953, Robert Mitchum and Jean Simmons) andThe Big Knife (1955, Jack Palance and, again, Ida Lupino).

Luckless Lupino – seemingly the girl most likely to find herself in a throat-hold – was really A Player in 1950s Hollywood, adding writer, director and producer credits to her acting roles. Ida’s position of strength is echoed today in Nigella’s show-making, deal-clinching status in foodie TV both for the BBC and now ABC (as seen in the new, piping hot show, The Taste).

Meanwhile her husband, Charles Saatchi – the ex-adman-turned-art-collector who’s never alone because he always has a cigarette to hold hands with, is such a dyed-in the-wool smoker he too might be described as taking a leaf out of the noir pack.

Yet for all the smoke signals of the past, the mise en scene has moved on from the 1950s. No morechiaroscuro; instead of a monochrome contrast between light and dark, the current scene offers a full spectrum of colour and texture.

Partly decorative, partly a screen to make the protagonists’ faces more elusive, more alluring, the restaurant is woven with pistachio green plants set against the incandescent copper-and-glass tubing which serves to warm this Mayfair terrace on an unseasonably cold day in June.

The tubing is smooth; so too is the suede of the villain’s shoes, but in a different way – one hairless, the other furry. And, somewhere in between, his immaculate, clinically white shirt made of the softest cotton: material that says ‘touch me’ even though you know you’re only ever going to see it on someone you don’t. read more

Closedown  The presenter wraps up the item, closes the show. Dyed blonde hair, she has that day-glow, daytime TV look. The next programme team – Sobriety’s the name, two men in suits, a woman with minimal make-up – comes into the studio and there’s a whole palaver of microphone unclipping and clipping; technicians assisting as usual, but also an abnormal amount of handshaking and embracing. Somebody’s last handover? Got a new job, or going on pater/maternity leave, maybe.

Studio’s off air; on air there must be titles/theme music playing out the old show, playing in the new. By now the new team is seated…..and Action: short intro from minimal make-up woman; cut to a split screen of talking heads.

Heads are cut off, never get to talk. It all goes dark; not even fade to black. At the flick of a switch, what was On has now been taken Off.

Was it ever that simple? The Greek government’s decision to pull the plug on its own state broadcaster prompted scenes reminiscent of Britain in the 1970s: mass mobilisations and long, lazy sit-ins; banners, beards and hours of waiting for something to happen.

During the day employees gathered inside ERT headquarters in Athens – a modernist, corporatist structure which looks like it belongs in Brussels. That afternoon – Athens in the middle of June – it rained. Clusters of TV people stood at the windows looking through raindrops at anti-government protesters getting soaked outside (among those inside and out, the relative absence of mobile phones adds to the impression of an earlier era). Some worked all-out to re-start and maintain programming on the Internet. Others paced the corridors or sat on the floor looking up at all those suspended ceiling tiles, all that strip lighting.

Were they waiting for Carl/Dustin Bernstein/Hoffman and Bob/Robert Woodward/Redford to walk in and get the real story? Nail it. Get to the bottom of it. Sort it out. Had they meant to keep the offices of the Greek state broadcaster looking like the Hollywood film set for All The President’s Men? Was it all a cunning plan to make the 1970s live forever? read more

Here is the news: you may listen to it; or scroll down to read it.

The Queen, 1953 and 2013   Hardly young at 27, yet a maid of honour charged with carrying the train of her heavily embroidered gown, remembers the Anointing of a ‘child queen’; recalls how she was disrobed, then the 70-year-old Marquess of Cholmondeley, Lord Great Chamberlain, pressing the studs – ‘his heavy fingers going down her spine’ – of the plain linen shift she was dressed in to receive the holy oil.

Partly hidden by a portable canopy held over her by four Knights of the Garter, spiritually even more significant than placing the crown on her head, this was to be a moment of private austerity between God and the monarch and the slim-waisted yummy mummy with beautiful skin, now slipping into her regal role. Out of sight, in a ceremony steeped in a thousand years of Christian tradition, the Archbishop laid an oily finger on her hands, her head, her breast. Another 60 years – long to reign over us – before anyone would even think: child queen, behind a screen, shades of Jimmy Savile.

And so to the BBC. After a commemorative service at Westminster Abbey on Tuesday of this week (‘O Lord, make thy servant Elizabeth our Queen to rejoice in thy strength; give her her heart’s desire, and deny not the request of her lips; but present her with thine everlasting blessing, and give her a long life, even for ever and ever. Amen.’), on Friday the Queen went to Oxford Circus to re-open Broadcasting House, the BBC’s home of Radio, newly refurbished and extended to accommodate TV, too.

It was the TV broadcast of her coronation 60 years ago which first established television in the eyes of the British nation. More than 20 million viewers in the UK; a million televisions purchased in the run-up to the big day. In the Abbey unsightly cameras were boxed in, with slits for the camera-eye to look through, like machine guns poking out of Second World War pillar boxes. ‘We will crown you on the beaches,’ Sir Winston never said. read more

She is a handsome woman. Her strong chin is a boon to cartoonists. She’s not as chic as IMF chief exec Christine Lagarde. But on the face of it – also on account of the cut of her clothes (the black dress, the black trouser suit), also because of the way she moves in them, also on the basis of the raspiness not waspishness of her nicotine-stained voice, this is the French woman that wives of English retirees – all those Mrs Peter Mayleses – would really quite like to be.

This is Marine Le Pen (44), second president of the ‘far right’ Front National (the party’s first president and founding father was Marine’s own father, Jean-Marie), who previously made headlines in the British press when she came third in the 2012 French presidential elections, polling 18 per cent of the popular vote.

Now Le Pen Jnr is featured again, this time because the legal affairs committee of the European parliament has voted to waive her immunity from prosecution. If MEPs follow their committee’s recommendation at a full parliamentary sitting in mid-June, Le Pen will soon face prosecution in France for the following statement about Muslims spilling out from mosques and blocking the city streets with their Friday prayers, made in Lyon in December 2010 when campaigning to become president of her party:

‘For those who want to talk a lot about World War II, if it’s about occupation, then we could also talk about it because that is occupation of territory. It is an occupation of sections of the territory, of districts in which religious laws apply. It’s an occupation. There are of course no tanks, there are no soldiers, but it is nevertheless an occupation and it weighs heavily on local residents.’

Occupation, occupation, occupation, occupation, occupation – at the count of five, there’s no doubt that the Muslim presence in France was occupying Marine’s mind at the time; hence the thinly veiled reference to the occupation of France by Nazi Germany between 1940 and 1944. read more

Another in the ‘last post of the month’ series which is analytical and philosophical instead of leading with description. In other words, thinking about Take 2 and what it’s trying to achieve, rather than doing a double take on  the news of the day.

A few days ago, at a seminar on ‘the new materialism’, I had been explaining the duality which, as it seems to me, is necessarily entailed in literary composition; hence it’s also true of the way I am trying to ‘compose the news’. By ‘duality’, I mean the way in which the words that refer to a real world thing also refer to another, textual world of similar things and relevant descriptions of them. Also, that the more a composition is indeed literary rather than being for information only, the more it resonates with these further meanings.

Listening to this, a friend of mine hrrrumphed and said he’d heard all this Lukacsian stuff before; didn’t want to hear it again. My riposte: regardless of whether anyone wants it or chooses to respond to it, the duality I described, simply is. As any commodity is both use and value, at one and the same time, the singular thing which it can be used for, and also its relatedness – its commensurability – with everything else that is part of the social product (produced for other people to use), so it is in the use of language. As in the world of things, there is no escaping the duality of the word which exists at once in respect of a particular thing, while at the same time that same word exists in respect of everything else related to it, including other things and other usages.

Moreover, whereas in previous societies this duality only really existed in special institutions such as the Church or the Roman Empire – institutions requiring constant maintenance in order to maintain their social character, in the commodity producing society of the past 200 years – a society predicated on production for exchange, such duality occurs spontaneously. It is a constant, instead of an exception requiring repeated re-introduction. read more

They think it’s all over    So farewell then,  Sir Alex Ferguson (71), who topped the English Premier League 13 times as manager of Manchester United; and David Beckham, OBE (38), the only UK footballer to hold a top flight league winner’s medal from four different countries (England, Spain, USA and France).

In the 1998-9 season Beckham was part of the Manchester United ‘triple’ team which claimed Premiership, FA Cup and European Champions League titles – a unique achievement in English football; but Beckham left the club in 2003 after a dressing room incident in which a football boot thrown or kicked by Sir Alex, landed in his face.

Now these two faces of football are re-united in retiring from the game simultaneously, at the end of the 2012-13 season.

Beckham has been the David Bowie of British football. Filtered through him – more precisely, mediated in the way he looked so good when playing so well – football fans have been able to access a repertoire of roles, expectations and attitudes which would have remained out of reach otherwise. As Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust enabled young dudes of the 1970s to touch base with androgynous glamour – even if they remained bloke-ish hod carriers underneath a thin covering of Glamrock bacofoil, for subsequent generations Beckham’s successive hairstyles opened up a new range of implied cultural references.

Moving swiftly on from the Curtains he first appeared in (two swirls of hair draped across the forehead beneath a centre parting), Beckham’s 1990s Moptop (short back and sides with a floppy fringe) echoed Brideshead Revisited – the late 1970s tv series which echoed Evelyn Waugh’s post-Second World War novel, which was itself an elegy to pre-war England. His turn-of-the-century Buzzcut re-made Modernism for the lads. The transition from Mohawk to Fauxhawk acknowledged Travis Bickle’s alienation before babyfying it (fluffy on top like a new born chick). Growing-it-long and dyeing-it-blond gave entrée to Kurt Cobain – and with Alice band attached, Kurt could go Continental instead of joining the ‘stupid club’ of 27-year-old suicides. read more

Narcissism more than terrorism    Meat cleaver in one hand, blood on both, the butcher explains himself for the benefit of a bystander’s smartphone – and the millions standing behind it. The grain of his voice is the giveaway. Truth will out of the mouth of the (alleged) Woolwich murderer. He may have customised Islam into a rhetorical skin – the surface account of his own horrendous actions; but the way he speaks – neither Cockney nor Nigerian but ‘multicultural London English’ – suggests that the substance of who he is and what he is doing, lies in London itself.

And what does London do nowadays? The ‘world city’ of London is a global spectacle, largely paid for by the outside world: funded by the millions of international tourists who experience the London scene in person; grant-aided by billions more who stay home to watch The London Show (Reality TV wherever and whenever you want it); zillions the world over who subscribe to pay-per-view London by entering their domestic wealth into the financial circuits routed through here.

Money that makes the world go round, itself revolves around the spectacle of London.

Young Londoners have never known anything else. They are keen – desperate, even – to be entered into this spectacle. To be featured in it if only, famously, for 15 minutes. For the most part they have nothing to circulate but themselves; and in the attempt to get a showing/gain a hearing, they are under constant pressure to raise the spectacular value of the self – their one and only commodity in the attention economy.

In Woolwich yesterday two isolated individuals responded in a manner that plumbed new depths of desperation and depravity. Not even ‘lone wolf terrorists’, they are best comprehended as pop-up narcissists. A perversely extreme manifestation, here today and gone tomorrow, of what has become London’s guiding principle and principal dependency: manifesto ergo sum; I show myself therefore I am; my existence depends on spectacle. read more

James Wharton (29), the MP for Stockton South charged with proposing the Tories’ in/out EU referendum Bill, once tried to lubricate the progress of a £30,000 enterprise grant to the ex-Mayor of the Teeside town of Yarm, Jason Hadlow (Conservative), best known in the ‘Tees Corridor’ for trading in giant, sandstone penises.

On the same day (17^th May) that Wharton came top in the private member’s Bill ballot, thus landing the job of fronting the party’s mildly Eurosceptic, anti-UKIP spoiler, a metropolitan Tory insider, said to be part of prime minister David Cameron’s social circle, was overheard describing local association activists as ‘mad, swivel-eyed loons.’  The latest fracas at Tory HQ sounds like a mash-up of a couple of scenes from Stanley Kubrick’s Clockwork Orange (1971) in which (1) a giant, model penis is used for sexual violation; and (2) Alex and his droogs start fighting among themselves.

There was me and my three droogs, that is Dave, Georgie and Dim, and we sat in the Metrovia Milkbar trying to make up our rassodocks what to do about Europe. Dim, also known as Jim Whart, announces he’s up for a bit of the old in-out, in-out referendum on EU membership. Better to resolve the situation, he says. Release the pent-up frustration among grassroots activists so that afterwards we can focus on that which ordinary malchick- and devotchka-voters are worrying about all the time, namely ‘the cost of living’.

When he used that antiquated phrase – viddy well, oh my brothers, ‘the cost of living’ was last spoken of before there were even videos – the bile in me started to rise. I thought I could hear the blissful music of dear old Ludwig Van urging me to visit some actual ultra-violet upon Dim and his ilk; upon all the mad, swivel-eyed loons who populate the party with their outdated, provincial customs and embarrassing clothes. read more

Only the little people pay bedroom taxes  On trial for tax evasion in 1989, New York billionaire Leona Helmsley aka ‘the Queen of Mean’, was famously said to have told her housekeeper: ‘we don’t pay taxes, only the little people….’ More than 20 years later, Stephanie Bottrill (53) was one of the ‘little people’ in line to pay the new Coalition ‘tax’ on unoccupied bedrooms.

The small terraced house in Meriden Road, Solihull, where Bottrill had brought up her two children on ‘state handouts’, was judged too big for her solitary needs; and she was required either to accept alternative accommodation or pay back £80 a month from her benefit. Instead, in the early hours of Saturday 4^th May, she walked on to the carriageway of the nearby M6 and was killed outright by an oncoming lorry.

Bottrill and Helmsley, who died of heart failure in 2007, had similar hair – cut short, then growing out thick and bushy (Sheena Easton meets Bonnie Tyler), but there the resemblance ends. Helmsley’s wealth has been estimated at $8 billion – that’s how much she counted for. Whereas Bottrill spent most of her life being discounted: diagnosed from childhood with myasthenia gravis (immune system deficiency), but this did not count as ‘disability’; living in the less well-off part of an otherwise prosperous Birmingham suburb – the bit that does not count as well-heeled Solihull. Not considered important enough for the education system to ensure she could spell (in her suicide note, she invites her son, HGV driver Stephen, to blame ‘the Grovement’).

Stephanie Bottrill died a small, sad death having lived a marginal life. But society (yes, Mrs T, there is…) only cheapens itself by discounting the little people like her.