Terence Blacker
Terence Blacker: Trust teenagers to make their choices
Published: 28 March 2007
We live in a careless age. Only this week, a survey - yet another survey - has revealed that childhood has been lost. David Cameron has made a speech arguing that adults have lost authority over the young. In his new book Tokens of Trust, the Archbishop of Canterbury had identified a loss of trust in public institutions and the political system. We have also apparently mislaid the ability to be decent parents, according to a report from an Education Select Committee.
Terence Blacker: This sanctimonious whiff of disapproval
Published: 23 March 2007
Terence Blacker: Truly daring remarks from a voice of sanity
Published: 21 March 2007
In the relatively unlikely event of Britain becoming a republic and there being a vacancy for a wise, sensitive, public-spirited person to become head of state, there can surely be only one candidate. He is the man with whom Tony Blair shared a thoughtful podcast last month and to whom, a few days later, Robbie Williams turned for advice on the question of addiction. Prince Charles is said to consult him. He has been in prison, has shared his personal experience of depression in a television documentary and has written a book about how to write poetry. Not only a successful novelist, actor and comedian, he is thought by a startling number of people to have an unusually brilliant brain.
Terence Blacker: What is so thrilling about killing a deer?
Published: 14 March 2007
An exciting new sport is becoming popular in America. Enterprising safari owners have realised that there is good money to be made from the internet and are bringing the joys of hunting animals into the home. A variety of mammals - antelope, wild pig, deer and others - roam in an enclosed safari park where there are a number of rigs with webcams and remote-control .22 rifles. Online hunters can, at a click of the mouse, shoot an animal and, for a fee, be sent its mounted head. It is now possible to be a successful sportsman, with a wall covered in trophies, without actually leaving the house.
Terence Blacker: If academics can't think freely, who can?
Published: 09 March 2007
There is more than a hint of Lucky Jim to Professor David Coleman, as he poses for a photograph, tweed-jacketed, in his book-lined room at Oxford. He looks like a man who would rather enjoy stirring things up and goosing the pieties of the moment.
Terence Blacker: The sorry state of these latter-day icons
Published: 07 March 2007
An alarming insight into the minds of the people of Warwick has been provided by the psychology department of the town's university. A study into British attitudes to character, published in the magazine Personality and Individual Differences, interviewed 17,056 adults, 40 per cent of whom were graduates, and a third of whom were managers or professionals.
Terence Blacker: Enough of this defeatism about the Olympics
Published: 02 March 2007
Terence Blacker: Pimp your ride the green celebrity way
Published: 28 February 2007
There is some good news at last this week for Planet Earth. The writer Iain Banks has announced to the press that he has undergone a major change of conviction about the environment, and is changing his lifestyle accordingly. He will vote for the Green Party. He has bought a wind turbine to put on his roof. All the light-bulbs in his home have been replaced by high-energy ones.
Terence Blacker: The dangers of email dependency
Published: 23 February 2007
Terence Blacker: For Lent, could we all just calm down a bit?
Published: 21 February 2007
It is the season for self-mortification with the start today of Lent, one of Christianity's better inventions. There is much to be said for a short, bracing spell in our personal wilderness, without booze or chocolate or fags or TV, and pre-spring, these few glorious weeks of chilly anticipation, is the perfect moment for it.
Terence Blacker: Why do we want marital perfection in our leaders?
Published: 16 February 2007
Terence Blacker: Why sex surveys are going to the dogs
Published: 14 February 2007
This month, some startling new statistics have come to light. A higher proportion of Britons find Sir Cliff Richard a powerfully erotic fantasy figure than they do George Clooney. Between Carol Vorderman and Nicole Kidman, it is the Countdown presenter who is found to be the more arousing. Eight million British adults, crushingly described as "neo-virgins", have become sexually inactive, while a plucky 1.8 million (you know who you are) have had sex with more than 100 partners. In Scotland, people have significantly more orgasms than in London.
Terence Blacker: It is easy to shout from the sidelines
Published: 09 February 2007
Terence Blacker: An oasis of calm in a poultry crisis
Published: 07 February 2007
The signs are now in place on the borders of the restricted zone. Local newspapers have moved on to emergency footing and bear headlines which read "The crisis - what YOU can do". Meanwhile, within the zone, we are doing our best to keep calm. We try to keep our chickens from fraternising with wild birds. We scan the horizon for any shovelers, swans or geese who might, addled by disease, perhaps, have overshot the east coast and flown inland.
Terence Blacker: Now weed out all those idle and clueless GPs
Published: 02 February 2007
Terence Blacker: Donate your moobs to the less well-endowed
Published: 31 January 2007
The vogue for moob-reduction has yet to reach the part of England where I live. Relatively unevolved when it comes to the question of cosmetic surgery, East Anglians tend to believe that a man's breasts - "moobs", as they are now called - are an essential part of who he is. Perhaps we lag behind the rest of the country but when, on the High Street, a vast economy-pack mother, father and children trundle by, scoffing chips, with their various boobs, moobs and choobs wobbling away in unison, they are simply regarded as part of the local scenery.
Terence Blacker: Back to the old Tory basics of cutting art
Published: 24 January 2007
It is as if south London has slipped into some grim time-warp and suddenly finds itself back in the mid-1980s. That proud Conservative council Wandsworth has just announced a cost-cutting offensive and, to show how seriously it takes the business of keeping down taxation, it has started by hammering a local fringe theatre.
Terence Blacker: Be creative: think up an alibi to tell the wife
Published: 19 January 2007
There was one small but significant omission from The Independent's excellent new pull-out feature 40 Ways to Improve Your Creativity, published this week and already pinned to the wall above my desk. Nowhere among the 40 tips ("Connect", "Be childlike", "Spitball", "Use distraction loops" and so on) was there a mention of the creative tool that has always been particularly popular and useful among the most actively creative: having an affair.
Terence Blacker: The Queen's role of a lifetime is a class act
Published: 17 January 2007
It seems unlikely that the royal households at Balmoral, Sandringham and Windsor Castle will have stayed up on Monday night to find out how The Queen - the film, that is - fared at the Golden Globe awards in LA. There may have been one or two discreet whoops and high-fives in the ranks of Her Majesty's distinctly camp retinue, but royal life will doubtless have continued at its regular, sedate pace. The Queen does not do showbiz.
Terence Blacker: All politicians are B'Stards, obviously
Published: 12 January 2007
Nobody unzips his fly with quite the dramatic élan of Rik Mayall. It was part of The Young Ones 25 years ago, and the routine has improved with age. There are several brilliant unzippings during Mayall's bravura performance as Alan B'Stard in the West End Production of Marks' and Gran's The New Statesman, the last of which is followed by a high-energy sex scene, complete with flailing limbs, gurning facial expressions and comical gasps of climax.
Terence Blacker: Soon nothing will remain unpublished
Published: 10 January 2007
When you go out today, it might be prudent to have your camera handy, your mobile cocked for photographic action. If you happen to see a soap star out shopping, and take a quick snap, you might earn yourself a few hundred quid. Catch something really worthwhile - a royal girlfriend getting a parking ticket, a film star revealing some of her underwear while getting out of a car - and you could be looking at £1,500. If you happen to be on hand at a major news event - Pete Doherty in the gutter, a celebrity kissing someone they should not be, or perhaps just a particularly interesting everyday stabbing - you will soon be able to pay for a holiday in the sun.
Terence Blacker: Something wholesome to feel patriotic about
Published: 05 January 2007
Terence Blacker: Politicians, prostitutes and scruffy morality
Published: 03 January 2007
That old stand-by of British life, class prejudice, has made a terrific start to the new year, with a couple of obituaries that have positively crackled with snobbery. Marmaduke Hussey - "Duke" as he liked to be known (in his famous letters, Henry Root addressed him as "Your Grace") - received a pasting from one obituarist for being less of a toff than he claimed. The young Duke's school fees at Rugby, it was reported with some shock, had been paid by the public purse.
Terence Blacker: Why can't I smoke and be merry?
Published: 29 December 2006
It was a scene that has probably been enacted in varying forms this week in houses across the country. At a moment of post-prandial contentment, the householder lit up a Christmas cigar. A couple of puffs in, he was asked with all the ice-cold moral authority a 12-year-old girl can muster - that is, a lot - to put it out.
Terence Blacker: How geeks became the new sex gods
Published: 27 December 2006
A relatively uncomplicated matter in a changing world, one would think, is the question of what makes one human being physically attractive to another. Beyond that unconvincing chat-show cliché about the most important erogenous zone being the brain, we know that, in the real world, looks matter, and we tend to assume that the basic ingredients of allure remain more or less consistent.
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