Peter Hain comment times 29.03.15

Document:/The Sunday Times/Editorial/Production/Pages/Print/The Sunday Times/News/2015-03-29/1WN-News-027.pgl
Author:kmullin Date:28/03/2015 18:49:28
SUNDAY TIMES Print/Wales-01 ... 29/03/2015
29.03.15 / 27
P R O F I L E JA M E S C O R D E N
The blob from Bucks
turns into the talk of LA
W
A
s part of his introduction to America, James
Corden stripped off for GQ magazine: a
cheeky photo shoot shows him washing up
wearing just a Union Jack apron and
matching socks. The magazine’s US
readers were probably baffled. Even the
week before Corden took over as host of The Late Late
Show, people walking past a vast billboard of his face
outside CBS Television City in Los Angeles claimed not
to know who he was. When the comedian went to buy
lunch and forgot his pass, a CBS security guard didn’t
recognise him and refused to let him back into the
building.
Critics wondered whether Corden could pull off such
a prestigious new job running a talk show in a land that
hasn’t heard of Gavin, never mind Stacey. The answer,
against the odds, seems to be yes. Corden’s starstudded debut show — a mixture of on-the-sofa chitchat and sketches featuring Tom Hanks, Mila Kunis,
Arnold Schwarzenegger, Meryl Streep, Simon Cowell
and Eddie Redmayne — was an instant hit. A clip of
Corden and Hanks performing all of Hanks’s films in
less than seven minutes went viral on You Tube and has
now been viewed more than 9m times.
Corden, 36 — the youngest late-night host on a US
television network — played on his inexperience, telling
the audience: “I’m from a place called High Wycombe,
which you almost certainly will never have heard of.”
The night’s entertainment opened with a very funny
sketch supposedly relating how Corden got the job by
winning a Charlie and the Chocolate Factory-style
golden ticket in a confectionery bar: the ticket leads him
to a warehouse where he is put through a talk-show
host boot camp, coached by chat-show titan Jay Leno,
encouraged by Streep when it seems he’ll never get it
right and subjected to a fitness regime by Schwarzenegger, who prods Corden’s chubby middle and says:
“You don’t look like a talk-show host.You look like
two!” (This despite Corden having previously lost six
stone by cutting out bread and sugar, as well as recently
hiring a personal trainer in the run-up to the show.)
CNN said it was “one of the smoothest first episodes
of any new talk-show host’s in recent memory”.
Variety magazine’s Brian Lowry described Corden as
“natural and likeable” and said his Late Late Show contained moments of “inspired lunacy”. Tim Goodman of
The Hollywood Reporter wrote of Corden: “He’s different. The glaring difference is that he comes without
any snark.” Leno agreed: “He’s a very funny guy and
he’s an especially likeable guy . . . I think the era of ironic
snarkiness is over in America.” Within hours the bookmaker Coral was giving 7-1 odds on Corden hosting the
next Oscars ceremony.
“Well, so many truly lovely messages about the show
tonight,” Corden tweeted, declaring he was the luckiest
man alive: “I’m blown away, thank you.” His strategy —
being nice — had paid off. “The biggest struggle is trying
to convince people that this is a place where no one is
ever going to be the butt of the joke,” he said as he was
rehearsing. “All we want is our guests to shine because
if the guests shine, the show shines . . . then I shine.”
That’s how he likes it: his earliest memory is standing
on a chair, aged four, at the christening of his younger
sister Ruth, pulling faces while people laughed. “This
felt good. Really good,” he recalled in his autobiography, May I Have Your Attention, Please? “In my head
it became simple: if people are looking at me, and only
me, it feels amazing. And that was that. From that day
forward, every day became a quest to be noticed. To
have the attention of people. Of you.”
That innate tendency to show off has served him well
at some points and ill at others. When he is new to a
project and learning the ropes, Corden seems eager to
please, but after his huge success with Gavin & Stacey —
co-written with Ruth Jones — fame seemed to go to his
head. He spent a couple of years arrogantly berating
critics, demanding to know at a Bafta ceremony in 2008
why his show had not been nominated in one category
when he had just won in another. It was as if a posher
version of Smithy, the needy, beer-soused plumber he
created in Gavin & Stacey, had come to life.
T
CHARLES
CLOVER
Nye Bevan’s
legacy will
continue to
secure seats
A CLIP OF CORDEN
AND TOM HANKS
PERFORMING ALL OF
HANKS’S FILMS IN
LESS THAN SEVEN
MINUTES WENT
VIRAL ON YOUTUBE
he grass hadn’t yet begun to
grow on the verges as I drove
along several A-roads recently,
so the volume of litter was
noticeable. I wasn’t alone: a
reader wrote to say he was
appalled by the amount of litter on the
banks and in the hedgerows along the
M6, particularly around junction 13, near
Stafford. He said, rather memorably, that
it was symptomatic of a selfish nation
with no civic pride.
I recalled similar sentiments in the
obituaries of Singapore’s first prime
minister, Lee Kuan Yew, who died last
week aged 91. Lee, a brilliant Cambridge
lawyer, expected the highest standards of
his people in the years after
independence in 1965 and imposed fines
for littering, spitting, begging, driving
dirty cars and chewing gum.
Lee expressed admiration for Margaret
Thatcher alone among western leaders,
and in later interviews indicated that he
had lost respect for the West because of a
general decline in personal responsibility.
Eventually Rob Brydon, a co-star on the show, took
him aside and told him he was in danger of looking like
an idiot. Corden took his advice to heart. “He’s changed
remarkably,” said Steve Bennett, founder of comedy
website Chortle. “He’s grown up and mellowed.”
Much of the credit for this goes to the steadying influence of his wife, Julia Carey, a charity worker whom
Corden met through his friend and fellow actor Dominic
Cooper (both appeared in Alan Bennett’s drama The
History Boys). He and Carey have two children.
Corden’s parents were in the first-night audience last
week; he thanked them for all the support they had
given him, then added that they were enjoying life in
Los Angeles: “They are eating kale every day and my
mum is getting a boob job.”
He was born in Hillingdon, west London, and
brought up in Buckinghamshire. His father was a musician with the RAF band and his mother a social worker.
He was the adored brother with two sisters and his
childhood was happy and unremarkable, though for
some reason, “I was always the kid at school who
thought it was a good idea to set off the fire alarm.”
The cause of his chronic attention-seeking is a mystery. “When I look back, I think, God, that’s all it was
ever about,” he said when his autobiography was published in 2011. “I wish I did have some sort of story where
I was, you know, beaten as a child, but there was none
of that.”
His first part was a one-liner in the musical Martin
Guerre in 1996 when he was 18. He appeared in the
drama series Teachers and had a small part in the soap
Hollyoaks. His breakthrough was playing the part of
Timms in The History Boys at the National Theatre and
later in New York, Sydney, Wellington and Hong Kong.
“He came into the room to audition for Alan Bennett
and me,” recalled Nicholas Hytner, the outgoing artistic
director of the National Theatre, “and he took the room
over. He appeared to be extraordinarily confident and
charming and funny. He said afterwards that he was
covering up for extreme nerves.”
Gavin & Stacey ate up the next three years of his life,
then came the bad patch. A sketch show, Horne &
The West evidently feels there is a lot to
learn from Singapore, though its critics
have always pointed to the corporal and
capital punishment, the mild
authoritarianism and the intolerance of
journalistic criticism. The American
vice-president, Joe Biden, a Democrat,
didn’t seem to mind that Lee banned long
hair. He flew in to sign the book of
condolences while Lee’s people queued
for up to nine hours to pay their respects.
The lessons of Singapore’s success are
not just economic — though its growth
has been vertiginous. We should
remember that Lee guided Singapore
from being a slum to an eco-city. He
promised “the cleanest and greenest city
in southeast Asia” in 1968 and duly
delivered it. In parts of Britain, notably
the north, that’s a lesson we would do
well to absorb.
What Lee knew instinctively was that a
good living environment was at the heart
of respect for each other and the law. He
worried about litter, a symptom of wider
social decay that encouraged crime and
Corden (a partnership with Mathew Horne, who played
Gavin, the pair aiming to be a latter-day Morecambe
and Wise) is described by one critic as a “train wreck”.
The boy who couldn’t do anything wrong suddenly
couldn’t do anything right. “The absolute truth is I
wasn’t good enough,” Corden said later.
He was rescued by Hytner, who cast him in One Man,
Two Guvnors, a comedy that was a huge hit on both
sides of the Atlantic and won Corden a Tony award.
“The point about James,” Hytner said at the time, “is
that, for a couple of years, he allowed people to get the
wrong impression of him. He appeared to be just some
fat celebrity with a sharp tongue. The real James comes
in eight times a week and gives everything to this physically exhausting show.”
Success brought out the best in him again. “Corden’s
strength is that he can charm the pants off anyone.
That’s what’s allowed him to go around the England
football team for Comic Relief and insult them — he can
get away with almost anything because people like
him,” said Stephen Armstrong, The Sunday Times’s
comedy critic.
“The launch The Late Late Show has had says that CBS
has decided to back him all the way. These shows are
totemic in America; the fact that he attracted so many
stars isn’t just down to his force of personality: the
channel wants him to succeed. It will have taken
months to get that show together.
“He’s riding a wave — Brits are doing extremely well
in America at the moment. Gavin & Stacey might have
only played on a minor TV station in New York and Los
Angeles but the right people will have seen it.”
The fuss over The Late Late Show might seem a bit
odd to us. It goes out week nights at 12.35am, which on
British television would be the graveyard slot. Corden’s
debut pulled in 1.7m viewers. An interview given while
he was still in London was published last week in which
he was asked, on a scale of one to 10, how famous he is.
“Where — walking down Oxford Street right now?”
Corden replied. “There’s no way of answering this
without sounding like a dick, is there? I’m going to go
for . . . six. I can’t allow myself to go more.”
instability, which he feared. He also paid
attention to green causes such as selfsufficiency in water and air pollution.
In Britain, it has been clearly shown
that littering and deprivation go hand in
hand: the scruffiest parts of England are
the poorest, according to a survey by
Keep Britain Tidy last year. The overall
presence of crime is far greater on streets
where litter, graffiti and fly-posting are
present. That doesn’t mean the poor and
uneducated like living with litter; they
don’t. It is often about how they are
governed. What doesn’t seem to have
occurred to anybody here, but did to Lee
and to New York in the 1990s, is that it is
possible to reverse the trend in crime and
build desirable neighbourhoods by being
incredibly tough on litter.
Britain is a litter-ridden country
compared with most of Europe, North
America and Japan, as a committee of
MPs said this month. Levels of litter have
hardly improved in 12 years and best
estimates are that cleaning it up in
England costs up to £850m a year. Fly-
hy are Welsh nationalists so dormant
and Scottish nationalists so rampant?
On the rugby pitch England is the old
enemy, but separation for Wales is
unthinkable except to a minority. Even
Plaid Cymru has pushed its favoured
independence into the far-flung future.
Where Wales is also fervently patriotic, its language
spoken by one in five citizens and proudly transmitted
through rail station announcements and road signs, in
Scotland Gaelic is hardly spoken. To outsiders it is a
baffling conundrum. In Scotland the SNP is riding high,
­
whereas in Wales Plaid Cymru is trailing far behind.
And yet back in 1999, when Labour stormed to victory
in the first Scottish elections, the same party in the first
Welsh assembly elections lost iconic former coal mining
heartlands such as Rhondda, Neil Kinnock’s Islwyn and
“safe” Caerphilly, after Tony Blair had blocked the popular
Rhodri Morgan from being Labour first minister.
Painful though that was, in retrospect it was a blessing.
The party reinvented itself as Welsh Labour and Morgan
soon succeeded Alun Michael, who was just as Welsh as
Morgan but cursed with being “London’s parachute”.
New, campaigning candidates were chosen in the heartlands lost to Plaid, and won back in 2003. By then Morgan
had become a “father of the nation” leader with a quixotic
blend of rugby populism and intellectually grounded
“clear red water” policy distance from Blairism.
Where most of Scottish Labour’s “big figures” either
remained in or headed for Westminster, less so in Wales,
where today some of Labour’s brightest young politicians,
such as Vaughan Gething and Ken Skates, chose the
assembly and are new Welsh ministers.
Meanwhile, after what proved a minor heart scare, the
popular Welsh nationalist leader Dafydd Wigley had been
unceremoniously dumped for a decent but anonymous
Ieuan Wyn Jones. Jones was succeeded by an able but
equally downbeat Leanne Wood. With Wigley out of the
picture, Plaid had no Alex Salmond or Nicola Sturgeon.
Morgan was followed as Labour first minister by the less
ideological but equally charismatic Carwyn Jones who,
when the Conservatives took over in Westminster, moved
to command anti-Tory Welsh political ground, storming
to victory in a 2011 referendum to deliver full law-making
powers similar to those in Scotland. Welsh Labour, not Welsh
nationalists, spoke for Wales, with Labour’s government
in Cardiff refusing to treble student tuition fees or to adopt
the privatising, market-driven NHS reforms in England.
Although David Cameron has mounted a sustained
attack on Welsh Labour’s stewardship of the NHS, his Offa’s
Dyke pronunciation on the difference between life and
death was widely viewed as offensively propagandist across
public opinion in Wales. Nobody suggested the Welsh NHS
was perfect — its problems are similar to England’s, both
suffering from real-terms cuts. However, everyone
resented Cameron’s highly selective facts and figures
focusing on hospital waiting times not whole-person care.
The latest Public Expenditure Statistical Analyses
figures­for 2013-14 show that combined spending on
health and social care per head of population in Wales was
5% higher than in England, corresponding to £120 a head.
Over the past five years Wales has seen a real-terms
increase in social care spending, when the budgets in
England have been cut by 26% according to Local Government Association of Directors of Adult Social Services.
Thus delayed transfers of care in Wales are falling to
record lows but in England are rising to record highs, with
waiting times for diagnostic procedures and treatment
also increasing. Yet Welsh Labour complacency could be
fatal. In the 2014 European elections, Labour pipped Ukip
by a miserly 0.5%, or fewer than 5,000 votes. The party’s
overwhelmingly white, working-class base — like in
Scotland and England — feels left behind in modern Britain.
Labour strongholds in former coalmining valleys such as
my Neath constituency have experienced huge change in
the 25 years since I first stood. Too many former miners, car
workers or steel workers now survive in an insecure, zerohours culture. Instead of the solidarity of trade unionorganised workplaces, they are on their own. Where they
had modest opportunities — council houses, foreign holidays, a car — their kids compete on lengthening housing
lists, their grandchildren saddled with student debts.
The culture of mutual support and aid which has sustained
Labour in its heartlands has been melting away. Membership of my local party has halved, yet it is four times the size
of the Glasgow constituencies. And yet, where Scots Labour
fights for its life against the SNP on May 7, Welsh Labour will
almost certainly take seats from the Tories and Lib Dems,
and maybe even from Plaid. Nye Bevan’s legacy clings on.
Former Wales secretary Peter Hain
is standing down as MP for Neath
tipping is up and so is litter from fast
food.
So would we tolerate a bit more
interventionism, if we won the prize of
making the scruffy places richer, safer
and pleasanter to live in? I believe we
would. Some people will say that there is
a kind of lowlife that dumps McDonald’s
bags out of car windows. It’s cultural and
you can’t catch them anyway.
But culture is about choice. You can
make drivers liable for litter and give the
public a hotline to shop them on.
Penalties need rethinking, too. The
maximum fine for littering is £2,500 but
litterbugs, when caught, are usually given
a fixed-penalty notice of £80. That’s like
a parking fine, but littering is a criminal
offence. Why not put traffic wardens onto
it? Councils might even make money
from it.
We should address other habits that
make people less likely to take their litter
home or put it in a bin. On trains, if
somebody does not come by with a bag
for our rubbish, we leave it where it lies.
Our culture has decided to suppress
litter, not to tackle it on principle. The
coalition government has decided to stop
funding Keep Britain Tidy, the only
charity that deals with litter. The
government now gathers worryingly
little data on litter. This is a mistake.
Doing something about litter strikes a
chord: some 470 local groups took part in
a community clear-up day last weekend.
For as we are discovering, litter is a
bigger problem than we thought. Plastic
bottles and bags drift down to the sea and
are ground down over decades into tiny
fragments that pick up pollutants and are
ingested by fish and plankton. Our
irresponsibility comes back to haunt us.
There isn’t even a government strategy
for litter in England, although there is
in Scotland. This need not mean
spending money. It is about creating
shared values through enlightened
leadership, as Lee did.
Don’t be beastly to aliens — they’re
nature’s go-getters, News Review, page 9
charles.clover@sunday-times.co.uk