Two Journeys on The Road to Wembley

27th January 2015. Two teams reach a Wembley final. I am a fan of the one of them and at a train station with fans of the other shortly after the final whistle's have blown.

I would like to start the next sentence with the words 'For the Chelsea fans, celebrating a place in the final of the league cup' but there is a problem. It's the word 'celebrates'. The Chelsea fans do not appear to be celebrating anything. It seems like just another evening. No hint of excitement at reaching Wembley as they make their way home. As they wait on a platform at Wimbledon, the usual train delays - police called to an incident on an earlier train nowhere near Chelsea - don't dampen their spirits, because they seem to have no spirits to dampen.

In contrast, about a hundred and fifty miles north, Walsall supporters are, no doubt, celebrating what will be their first ever appearance at the venue that has English football's finest stadium inside, and one of London's least desirable places to visit outside. Banks' bitter is probably being drunk in copious amounts, and a lot of employers are already expecting phone calls from people saying they won't be at work in the morning.

What does this say about the satisfaction and excitement that the millions spent by the likes of Chelsea and Manchester City have brought to their supporters? Walsall are going to Wembley to appear in the final of the Johnstone's Paint Trophy, a tournament that does not carry with it a place in Europe, promotion to a higher division, or even a by in the first round of next year's tournament. But, from the level of rejoicing I imagine there will be, you could almost believe it promised all of those things and more. Particularly if you compare it with the reaction of a group of fans who have just reached the final of a tournament that guarantees the first of those things, even if they are likely to get a place in a different, more prestigious competition thanks to where they finish in the league. To paraphrase the words beloved by TV commentators every time 'minnows' put on a good performance against a higher league side in the FA Cup 'if you didn't know, you would never guess which team was in the top flight'.

Never mind the examples of premiership teams fielding weakened sides for FA Cup games, here is your proof that the magic of domestic competitions has disappeared not just for the chairmen and managers, but also for the fans of the biggest clubs. But it actually says more than this. The Johnstone's Paint Trophy also draws pitifully low crowds in its early rounds. It only actually reaches decent levels when you get to the regional semi-finals, and the regional final is the first time interest really kicks in for all but the most die-hard fans and season ticket holders. But when a team reaches the final, the excitement is clear to see. It's a major achievement, irrespective of the prize, and everyone is surprised and delighted. No one goes into the tournament believing they have a god-given right to win it, or even be one of the last two.

In contrast, the impression I gained from the Chelsea supporters end of evening silence, was that reaching the final would never be seen as a success and something to be excited about, only the failure to make it would have elicited a response, which would have been annoyance that someone somewhere hadn't read the script, and the place that should be theirs by right had gone to someone else. For me, this says all you need to know about how the money and riches that have flooded the top flight game have failed to really enrich the life of the supporters who watch it. Big spending teams generate a culture of expectation and 'right' rather than hope amongst their fans. As a result, and this time paraphrasing an 80s pop song, the only way is down. There is nowhere to go, no pleasure to be taken in success, only disappointment or humiliation, as Chelsea found in the FA cup, in failure. The delight Man City fans took from pipping Man United to the league title in 2012 will be nothing compared with the devastation they'll feel if they lose out to them this time around.

Neither Chelsea nor most Man City fans seem to be able to remember the time when any success was an achievement, something unexpected that they could cheer about. Maybe they never had that feeling at all? Maybe their lack-of-glory days were spent constantly looking over their shoulders in envy of their more successful rivals, bitter at their comparative lack of success, rather than happy when they outperformed their own expectations.

This why I'm delighted to see Southampton in third place in the Premiership. It was why I was delighted when the likes of Bolton, Birmingham, Stoke and Wigan reached Europe. Not because I'm a fan of any of them, but because you could see what it meant to their supporters. It was something they would enjoy whatever happened. They were there for the ride. It was the taking part that counted. When that goes, and when it's replaced with the culture of expectation, fulfilled and further fed by wealthy foreign owners, then the only people that ever really have anything to cheer about are the fans of smaller clubs when they see a giant crash and fail. Where would the bigger smiles have been on Saturday? On the smiles of Chelsea fans if they'd beaten Bradford, or the faces of the rest of the country when they lost to them?

Likewise, in the two Wembley finals teams are qualifying for this week, which game is more likely to live in the minds of the fans who go to it, irrespective of whether they win or lose? It's not a hard question. Bring on Wembley for Walsall. Whatever the outcome it's a landmark in the club's history, and it will be remembered for a long time.

Starring Michelle Collins and Keith Duffy

Hampstead Theatre is a theatre founded on artistic credibility and sustained by a reputation that means it attracts some of the best writers in the UK today and that actors want to perform there. It is a theatre where all actors are equal, like yellow cards before the world cup quarter finals, whatever success they have had and whatever fame they do have, count for nothing. It is all about the production and the play. Nothing else matters. Or so the theory goes.

A short distance away, Trafalgar Studios are also producing a high quality bill of plays for discerning audiences who are looking for high quality productions of new or critically acclaimed works. The TV credits of actors mean nothing to the people that attend, they are not swayed by such shallow considerations. Or so we are led to believe.

And yet, in the last week, productions have opened at both of these venues where the main device for generating publicity has been to plaster the words 'Starring Michelle Collins' and 'Starring Keith Duffy' on any poster, programme or press release they can find.

It is a sad and damning indictment of the theatre crowd today if they really need these inducements to get them into the shows. This is not to say that either Collins or Duffy are bad in their respective productions. Both of them, in fact, give strong performances, with Duffy in particular defying critics who may have relished the prospect of trashing the West End debut of someone who is cursed with the twin evils of boyband super stardom and a role in a long running soap opera.

But neither Collins or Duffy are the stars of their shows. Duffy is closer to a cameo than a central performance, while Collins is part of an ensemble piece where there are at least two other actors with a higher billing than her in terms of their roles and stage time. So why push their names to their forefront? Because they are household names? Because they may attract a voyeuristic crowd hoping to see them fall flat on their faces? Because they are the only redeeming feature in plays that are so poor that they would otherwise never get an audience?

The answers to the above are probably yes, maybe and no, in that order. But by pushing the names of the soap stars to the top of the list, the press officers are only managing to detract from the quality of the rest of the production, reducing the quality of the writing and performances of their fellow actors to minor, almost irrelevant, details. It's insulting to audiences to imply that this is the only reason they would want to come and see a production, or is something that they put so much weight on that it will become a decisive factor in their decision, and it's insulting to the other people involved in the production who have collectively created finished products that are greater than the sum of any of their individual parts.

I don't blame Duffy or Collins for this, as I doubt that either of them insisted that they be given top billing, or that either of them believe they are going to be the difference between the plays succeeding or failing, but I do think that the press officers who believed that the presence of an ex-soap star was the thing they needed to major on, should take a close look at themselves. If the soap star is the only reason they'd go to see a play, they are in the wrong job. If they think it's the only reason other people would go and see a play, then they are dismissing the audience and treating them with a patronising contempt that most of them don't deserve.

Of course, if I'm wrong and they're right, and this is what you have to do to get an audience, then maybe writers everywhere should just give up, and resign ourselves to a world where content is unimportant as long as the words 'starring that bloke or woman from the telly' can be included in the promotional material.

Everything Counts

It's a competitive world, as the Depeche Mode boys said, and that was in the 80s. It's got more competitive since. You have to be on your game all the time if you're to stay in the lead. The world of blogging is probably no exception to this, so with that in mind, welcome to my first blog post since December, when I got off the game (that's blogging rather than prostitution, just in case you're wondering). In truth I was never really on it, at an average of one post a month, normally when it got to the end of the month and I realised I hadn't posted anything, but it was always in my to do list.  

So what competitive advantage have I lost in my absence? Has anyone missed me, apart, maybe, from the person who tried to post comments in relation to my last two posts, telling me how much he agreed with them, had found they had a lot to say, and echoed what he had been saying on his blog that he helpfully posted a link to, and that turned out, on not so close inspection, to be nothing to do with The X Factor or the Gibraltar National Football Team.

Traffic has of course gone down in the last few months, no doubt as people clicked on their favourites and found, yet again, that there was no new content here, and yet there were no internet debates asking what had happened to the man who posted 'Jumping the Shark of Revenge' 'Naked Royals Here' and 'There's no Nashville in Nashville'.  It appears that unlike David Bowie, there was no speculation about unpublished material, and the blog posts I might be planning to unleash on the world when the time was right.

That's not to say I've had no readers. There have been visitors, and in fact there has been a shift in my audience. The majority of visitors in 2013 were from the United States and yet in the last month, two thirds of the traffic has come from Russia. Who'd have guessed it? Maybe it was all the winter Olympians sitting on their shared toilets showing each other the post about the World Cup in Qatar and saying 'and you think that's bad.' Or maybe it was Vladimir Putin looking at the blog, because it's one of the few that has never said anything bad about him and the putative laws he's passing in Russia. If it is, here's a message 'Vlad - come out of the closet, you are fooling no-one'. And that's another reader gone.

Except that I doubt it was him, or indeed anyone applying their translation skills to discover why National Record Store Day was a rip off or why it's a good thing Jackie Mason is no longer doing stand up in the UK. At best, it will have been people searching for nude pictures of Royal family members, and stumbling on my greatest piece of Search Engine Optimisation - the post about nude pics of Kate Middleton. They will have scrolled to the bottom, just in case the pictures were at the end of the English that they couldn't read, and then clicked off and looked at another site. At worst, they won't even have been people. They will have been some automated internet trawling device looking to find something they could clone, hack, or do something else with, to demonstrate just what an unlovely place most of the world is today. And that sort of gets us back to the start of this post, although it's taken a massive detour to get there, and the routing still won't be that clear. 

We live in a world where everything is an opportunity to be exploited, and where misery has become a profit making business. From the pre-recorded phone messages of ‘had an accident (sue the bastard and give us some of the money)’ and ‘Government legislation means you can write off your debt (and pay us some of it)’ to all the other dubious cold calls and internet scams, people around the country and around the world are doing unto others what they would be pissed off with if anyone did to them. They justify this on the basis that it’s a business, it’s making them money and so what if people fall for it, they shouldn’t be so feckless. It's a competitive world and you have to do what you can to get on. Competitiveness has been accepted as the default position of the human condition,  All men (and women) are equal, but we should all work to disrupt that equation and get ourselves in the lead. 'Get ahead in business ' 'get yourself higher in search engine rankings' ‘get one over on the opposition’ - success is everything and we should all live by that motto. 

But, here’s the thing, it's not true.  Competition is not always healthy, and first place isn't what we should all be striving for. By it's very name, first place is something only one person, or group, can occupy, and that means a lot of people either making themselves miserable in their relentless quest for it, or making other people miserable by pursuing it at their expense with calls they don't want, emails they won't read, and other far worse things that show just how much profit is valued above people. It didn't used to be that way, it doesn't have to be that way now. Even if it is a competitive world, it doesn't have to be one where the success you have equates to the number of people you piss off or exploit. Depeche Mode were not singing a mantra for business in the 80s, let's just remember that.