Carry On Carcharodon

I was checking the listings for Birmingham's Electric Cinema today when I saw the following:

Electric Beach Party - Jaws & Roy Scheider Tribute

Friday 18^th

Summer comes early to the Electric with this special tribute to the late, great Roy Scheider and one of the scariest films ever made. The Electric Cinema Film Orchestra will return with a full 22 piece orchestra! £9 standard and £15 sofa with free Pina Coladas!

Sounds like fun and I'll probably go. Jaws, after all, is one of my favourite films and Scheider's death in February has got me thinking a lot about it lately. Jaws wasn't the only great film that Scheider appeared in, of course, and his filmography included numerous supporting roles in undisputed heavyweights of 70s cinema like The French Connection, Marathon Man and Klute. He also turned up in films that, while not quite so critically acclaimed, have endeared themselves to me regardless. John Badham's copter-based conspiracy thriller Blue Thunder [1983] springs to mind; don't ask me why, but I've always had an inordinate weakness for copter-based conspiracy thrillers. One day I'd like to write the definitive book on this hitherto overlooked sub-genre, but that'll have to wait until I can think of more than one example.

Scheider also starred in Peter Hyams' criminally underrated sequel to 2001: A Space Odyssey [1968], 2010 [1984], but had nothing to do with Steven Spielberg's 1941 [1979], Ridley Scott's 1492 [1992] or the 1984 adaptation of George Orwell's 1984, Nineteen Eighty-Four [1984].

Having said all that, there's no getting away from the fact that Scheider shall always be remembered for playing the role of Amity Island's Police Chief Martin Brody . And so it should be. I've lost count of the number of times I've watched Jaws over the years and - like all my favourite films - it is part of who I am. Its images, scenes and characters have seeped into my subconscious mind, inform my imagination and have a tendency to manifest themselves in strange and unusual ways.

To put it another way, I like to quote it a lot.

For instance, when faced with the limited and often insufficient storage capacity of the average supermarket shopping basket, I'll often blurt out a Brodyism and snarl: "We're gonna need a bigger boat." This invariably attracts strange looks from shoppers, shelf stackers and instore security staff, particularly when you say it in the Duty Free compartment of a cross-channel ferry.

While taking photographs of people, I've often substituted the traditional pose-prompt of "Watch the Birdie! or "Say Cheese!" with Chief Brody's more ballsy shark-slaying aphorism: "Smile, you son of a BITCH!" That also tends to get a mixed response, particularly at Weddings.

Finally, I've also been known to blurt out "This was no boating accident" to describe anything that doesn't strictly fit the traditional maritime definition of "boating accident".

In land-locked Birmingham, that tends to include most things.

Latitude

It's early days yet, but the line-up for this year's Latitude Festival is already shaping up rather nicely.

As I've probably mentioned before, Latitude 2007 was one of my favourite festivals ever (and that includes Glastonbury '97). A great location, a brilliant atmosphere, a nice mix of people, a relatively intimate scale, a welcome lack of corporate presence and a veritable smorgasbord of odd, mad and interesting stuff all contributed to the mix, but I think it was the shonky handmade signs that really made the difference. It gave the weekend a nice, old-school homemade feel and I've always had a weakness for shonky handmade signs.

On the music front the main headliners this year will Franz Ferdinand, Sigur Rós and Interpol. I've got mixed feelings about this. Franz Ferdinand will be fun to see live, I like Sigur Rós a lot but I'm not sure of their big(ish)-ass festival headliner potential, and I haven't heard enough by Interpol to care one way or the other. None of them have the same must-go appeal as, say, Arcade Fire, who stole the show last year. Having said that, I enjoyed Latitude 2007 so much that I'd have probably still turned up this year if the headliners were Adamski, Bucks Fizz and The James Last Orchestra.

In any case, like any good festival it's not really about the headliners: there's lots of other good music lined up, too. Grinderman, The Breeders, Buzzcocks, Elbow and Seasick Steve are currently residing in the archive file-box marked Stuff I Like Lots, while Death Cab For Cutie, The Mars Volta, M.I.A. and Amadou et Mariam are in a neighbouring folder marked Stuff I'm Planning To Listen To Soon. There's a time-honoured migration path in my head in which the contents of the second folder often end up being shuffled into the Stuff I Like boxes. Sadly, I've had to put the process on hold as I'm currently experiencing an administrative backlog.

There's lots of other stuff going on at Latitude besides the music. Last year my brother and I accidentally disrupted a woodland performance of Shakespeare's The Tempest (as opposed to, say, Jacqueline Susann's The Tempest) when my brother loudly barked "Arsenal!" in the style of Eric Morcambe. You don't get stuff like that at a V festival.

The comedy at Latitude is top notch, too. Stand-up standouts last year include Bill Bailey, Dylan Moran and Jeremy Hardy (I missed Stewart Lee, Dammit!). Already, this year's comedy line-up is looking pret-ty, pret-ty good: Bill Bailey and Stewart Lee are back, along with Rich Hall (and Otis Lee Crenshaw...), Lucy Porter, Ross Noble, Omid Djalili, Dave Gorman and the mighty Mark Thomas. More significantly, though, Nicholas Parsons and his cohorts will be recording an edition of Just a Minute from the festival. As a lifelong Radio 4 junky I can think of no better hangover remedy.

Anyhow, if - like me - you're Uncut Magazine-reading Radio 4 listener who's into eclectic music, good comedy and inadvertent acts of theatre disruption, then I encourage - nay, urge you to get your arse to Henham Park in Suffolk between the 17th - 20th July.

I mentioned the shonky handmade signs, didn't I?

Nick Cave

Looks as though I'll be seeing Nick Cave twice this year.

Over the weekend it was announced that Nick Cave would be appearing at this year's bloody marvellous Latitude Festival. As I'm going to Latitude, have already bought a pair of tickets to see him play at the Birmingham Academy next month and am currently so skint I can't pay attention you might think I'd be a bit annoyed by this turn of events. Not so: I'm bloody well delighted.

As a big fan of Nicholas Edward Cave for many, many years I already know how good he is live. Despite of his reputation - unwarranted, in my opinion - for creating dark, brooding, Book of Revelation-tinged songs about love and murder, as a live performer he's a true swaggering God of Rock who kicks arse so hard it farts out of its nose.

If that wasn't enough, the two gigs are under two very different incarnations. The Academy gig is with The Bad Seeds, promoting their latest offering Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!! (haven't heard it yet, but I've yet to hear a NC album I didn't like) while at Latitude he'll be performing with Grinderman, his Birthday Party-esque, raw noise, gee-tar band. They've got a song called "No Pussy Blues", and another track (Love Bomb) that namechecks Radio 4's Gardener's Question Time. That's how cool he is.

Maybe I should go and see him three times, instead...

Kiss Kiss, Blah Blah

So there we were, Clare and I, watching - nay, re-watching - a DVD of Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang, Shane Black's tremendously fun directorial debut starring Robert Downey Jr and Val Kilmer.

Midway through the second act I turned to my significant other and said tenderly, yet emphatically: "I think Harry Connick Jr is a great actor."

Clare let several moments of blissful ignorance pass before she turned to me and said: "That's really nice, Tom... but what do you think of Robert Downey Jr?"

Needless to say, this has now become something of a running joke at my expense.

The Dork Knight Returns

So here I am again.

March was my month off from here. I say that as though it was planned or premeditated, but I should come clean and admit that - like most things in my life - there was precious little planned or premeditated about it. Nothing new there, then. I moved house (I think I mentioned that before) and, as a result, didn't have a domestic Internet connection for the best part of last month. To put it another way, I was broken down on the hard shoulder of the information superhighway. As metaphorical dilemmas go, I suppose it's better than being online roadkill.

(Just been interrupted by Lily, Clare's 4 year-old daughter who really should be fast asleep by now. She wants me to help her find her toy unicorn, and who am I to refuse? This is a new thing for me, but I suspect that random toy unicorn searches will become a regular part of my life. So it goes.)

Anyway, I'll keep this brief as (a) I'm tired and my head is fuzzy, and, (b) I haven't quite mastered the knack of picking up from where I left off after a random toy unicorn hunt.

But I'm working on it.

Pete does a Jarvis

My pal Pete Ashton at the MediaGuardian Awards last week.

Priceless.

The sound of a pin dropping...

Okay, for the last couple of weeks I've been as quiet as Marcel Marceau and prolific as Peter Gabriel. I have reasons for this. I always have reasons.

The main one is that Clare, her wonderful 4 year-old daughter Lily, Kiki the family Kat and your's truly are moving to a stylish newbuild apartment this weekend. Or maybe it's a flat. I'm not affiliated with the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors so can't tell the difference between the two. I've got a hunch that 'flat' and 'apartment' are pretty much interchangeable. The latter is probably a rebranding of the former designed to appease those aspirational types we all know and love. In any case, it certainly sounds a lot more wanky.

This move is a Big Deal for me. It's also a Big Deal for Clare, Lily and quite possibly Kiki too, of course, but this is a blog and - by definition - I'm permitted to exercise a certain level of self-absorption. I'm not normally like this, you understand.

The apartment (or flat) is in Kings Norton. Or Kings Heath. I'm not quite sure about that, either. The postcode is B30 - which reliable sources inform me is a Kings Norton postcode - but it's only a five minute walk away from my one-time, Kings Heath-based bachelor-pad flateau. If I'm moving into a new, unchartered part of Brum it certainly doesn't feel that way, but that may have something to do with the fact I'll be using the same fish and chip shop.

Part of me rather likes the idea of living in Kings Norton, but it's not due to any postcode snobbery or aspirational bullshit. For one thing, living in an area I technically haven't lived in before adds another notch to my Birmingham postal-district bedpost (I've been 'round the block a few times - just check the voter's register...). More importantly, though, the word itself - 'Kings Norton' - resonates with me because it reminds me of Norton I, the first and only Emperor of the United States of America.

Joshua Norton, in case you don't know, was a failed English businessman who ended up homeless and destitute in mid-19th Century San Francisco. In 1859 he proclaimed himself 'Emperor of the United States' (later adding 'Protector of Mexico' to his illustrious title), and for the rest of his life the people of San Francisco treated him as such. He issued proclamations, arbitrated disputes and even issued his own currency. When he died in 1880 as many as 30,000 people lined San Francisco's streets to pay tribute. Needless to say, he's one of my favourite historical figures.

By contrast, the word 'Kings Heath' now makes me think of dead movie stars.