'Tis the year of heroes and hobbits

Last Tuesday's announcement of the 2012 Oscar nominations presented a formidable, if predictable, list of the worthy and the wise, with The Artist and George Clooney's The Descendants front runners, and Steven Spielberg's Warhorse, Woody Allen's return-to-form, Midnight In Paris, and another Parisian tale, Martin Scorcese's Hugo also in the hat for Best Picture. 

Smart money is on The Artist, a silent movie. Smart money is also on Meryl Streep for her performance as Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady, which some of us might wish was a silent movie.

Anyway, enough of the anachronistic satire. Amongst the Best Actor nominees is Gary Oldman for his brilliantly understated performance as the brilliantly understated spycatcher George Smiley in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. Unfortunately with a real George - Clooney - hotly tipped for the Oscar, Oldman will probably leave the Kodak Theater on February 26 empty-handed. A shame as Oscar recognition for Oldman is long overdue.

Like his South-East London contemporary Tim Roth, Oldman has built a successful commercial career in Hollywood that has rarely veered from the edge of darkness. And without too much hoopla, either.  His breakthrough as Sid Vicious in Sid And Nancy and Joe Orton in Prick Up Your Ears established a canon of edgy characters, from the wonderfully deranged DEA agent Stansfield in Luc Besson's Léon and the equally capricious Zorg in Besson's The Fifth Element, to Count Dracula, Sirius Black in the Harry Potter series, Lee Harvey Oswald in JFK, and the Russian baddie in Air Force One - a camped-up panto villain performance to rival Alan Rickman's Sherriff of Nottingham.

Sadly, when it comes to gongs like the Oscars, superhero franchises are rarely in the running. It becomes bread for an extinct cause to think that Oldman might be in with an Academy Award shout again next year for his third outing as trusty Gotham City cop Jim Gordon in The Dark Knight Rises, the final part of Christopher Nolan's rebooted Batman trilogy.

The Dark Knight Rises will be one of an army of superhero blockbusters due this year: assuming 2012 isn't cut short by the Four Horsemen wielding Mayan calendars we will be entertained by the return of Batman, Bond (James), Bourne (Jason - sort of) and Baggins (Bilbo). This might sound like four old prog rockers reforming for one last hurrah, but in fact they represent the sort of box office business that will have numerous residents of the 90210 zip code sizing up their next mansion.

Together with the return of Spider-Man, The Avengers, Judge Dredd and several more comic book characters brought to life, plus Ridley Scott's reacquaintance with sci-fi in Prometheus, we will not be short on fun with a capital F in 2012, even if the economic doom and gloom continues as it is.

There is a little doubt that any of these franchise additions will prove to be anything other than lucrative,  but from a creative point of view, the weight of expectation on the shoulders of those making them will be huge. None more so than Nolan.

While sniffier critics - and awards ceremonies - have been indifferent towards such popcorn fodder as comic book characters, Nolan's channelling of Bob Kane's Caped Crusader through Christian Bale in Batman Begins uncompromisingly jettisoned the frivolous levity of previous screen incarnations to create a superhero of searing darkness, lurking in ambiguous shadows between vigilante and vengeful creature of the night. The Dark Knight raised that bar even higher - the late Heath Ledger transforming The Joker from the whoopee cushion-toting popinjays of Caesar Romano and Jack Nicholson's interpretations into the greatest screen psychopath since Hannibal Lecter. It was - and still is - a film which, even after repeated screenings, takes your breath away with its portrayal of anger, madness and murderous intent unleashed.

In stopping at three Batman movies, Nolan has set an enigmatic tone for his final instalment. Little is known of the closely-guarded plot, beyond the fact that we know Batman will meet his "ultimate match" in the shape of the bludgeoning supervillain Bane, and there is a cheeky suggestion in the pre-publicity that Batman might not survive. How refreshing an act of storytelling that would be if it turns out to be the case.

Given the sheer laziness of Hollywood's current propensity to remake anything that isn't screwed down, the 'reboot' has become a clever means to continue a maturing franchise with some degree of creative merit. Christopher Nolan has been rightfully hailed for adding detail to the shadows of Batman, and the likes of Superman Returns and the forthcoming The Amazing Spider-Man do much the same to their respective characters. But for all the added weight reboots have given such franchises, they are at the end of the day no more an exercise in rebranding that Ford relaunching its Mondeo as an upscale midsize car to compete with BMW and Audi. It may be a good car, it may look nice, but it's still a Ford.

Casino Royale - which, ironically enough (and thanks to the questionable wonders of product placement) featured Daniel Craig's new James Bond briefly driving a Ford Mondeo - did something delicate but definite to the 007 franchise. The girls and gadgets were there, along with the exotic locations, but there was something else; more than just the casting a blond Bond, there was the application of an actor capable of portraying Ian Fleming's Bond, a Bond with depth and a vulnerability painfully lacking in Pierce Brosnan's cocky execution and Roger Moore's ageing frivolity.

Sean Connery has cast a long shadow over the character, not helped by Fleming revising Bond's back-story in the later novels that followed Dr. No's cinematic success and describing Bond as a half-Scottish, half-Swiss orphan. Craig hardly fits that description, being a Scouser of average height, but he has evolved Bond into a believably cold, blue-eyed assassin.

After the preposterous CGI effects that blighted the later Brosnan movies, plot returned with Casino Royale and while its sequel Quantum of Solace was not universally popular, it at least continued a story-driven arc about the Quantum organization (itself a post-modern reboot of SPECTRE) and the loss and betrayal of Vesper Lynd. QoS baffled in equal measure as it delighted which, frankly, is the sign of good film-making. If you can continue a franchise by giving the punters what they want while bending things ever so slightly in a different direction, you're doing the right thing.

Filming on Skyfall, the 23rd Bond movie, finally began last November and while its plot has also been kept largely under wraps (the Fleming books now long exhausted of theatrical potential) the fact that 007 is returning at all is an escape from calamity that Bond himself would have been proud of. When the closing credits of Quantum of Solace issued the traditional prediction that "JAMES BOND WILL RETURN", no-one quite knew when, as MGM's finances were not enjoying the rudest of health.

Thus, the project known only as 'Bond 23' (until Internet chatter started turned the title Skyfall into the worst kept secret in the film world) looked like it was never going to get off the ground, potentially ending  Bond's run at 22 'official' films. However, 2012 is a significant year in the Bond timeline, and indeed in the history of cinema. In October, the film world will celebrate the 50th anniversary of a film containing two of the greatest onscreen moments ever. The movie is Dr. No and the first of these moments involves just five words - Connery uttering "My name's Bond, James Bond", and the second is the emergence of Ursula Andress from the Caribbean singing. The song, in case you'd forgotten and was only concentrating on her legendary white bikini, was Underneath The Mango Tree.

With Dr. No's 50th anniversary coming up, it was almost inconceivable there wouldn't be a new Bond movie to acknowledge it. And so, on November 3, the media was assembled at London's lavish Corinthia Hotel to hear step-brother and sister producers Michael G. Wilson and Barbara Broccoli, declare Skyfall the 23rd Bond movie - and that money would not be an issue.

"[The budget] in the same range as the last film," explained Wilson. "We really haven’t had to change anything in the script to get what we want. In fact we keep on adding." Broccoli was even more direct on the budget issue: "Does it look like we're cutting back?" she joked, as she pointed to the principles of the movie sat alongside her - Craig returning as Bond, Judi Dench again as M and Javier Bardem as the as-yet undefined villain. Albert Finney will also appear in a role rumoured to that of a Whitehall mandarin. As for the story, that is being kept strictly under wraps, although the blogosphere has been noisy with rumours of M's past catching up with her as the core of Skyfall's plot.

Perhaps the biggest surprise of Skyfall so far has been the choice of Sam Mendes as its director. An Oscar-winner, no doubt, his reputation is steeped in being a very theatre-minded, 'actor's director', rather than an automatic choice for the film world's longest-running action franchise.

Certainly we can expect a more 'actorly’ Bond movie in Skyfall, but with forebears like Terence Young, Guy Hamilton, Lewis Gilbert and John Glen, Mendes will be expected to maintain the franchise's sharp style and wry humour without descending into a downbeat melancholy yawn. With Skyfall's so-far unexplained title just a little too close to "awful", Mendes will not want to tempt critics and headline writers taking up such a God-given gift.

That the Daniel Craig-era James Bond has been deeper and a little more pragmatic may owe something to Robert Ludlum's Jason Bourne. Craig's Casino Royale was preceded by the first two Jason Bourne movies, in which Matt Damon presented a spy for the post-9/11 world: darker, brooding and well versed in the realities of a troubled world, with his own government the source of much of the trouble.

This summer sees the release of a fourth film adaptation of Ludlum's novels, The Bourne Legacy, but one crucially lacking its title character. Another movie shrouded in plot secrecy, we know that Matt Damon won't be appearing (he allegedly declined to do another Bourne unless director Paul Greengrass was on board). Instead, Tony Gilroy - who wrote the first three Bourne screenplays - is directing Jeremy Renner as key character Aaron Cross. Renner's star has risen considerably following his outstanding performance in The Hurt Locker, and his turn in Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol demonstrated how adept at the action genre he is.

What's not known is where Jason Bourne will fit into the story at all (sci-fi fans will recall that the BBC's wobbly-sets-and-orange-squash-bottles-for-guns series Blake's 7 managed to survive quite happily without the titular protagonist, Blake, so I suppose it's not a prerequisite). What is known is that Renner will be joined by the always bankable Edward Norton plus the new Mrs. Daniel Craig - Rachel Weisz, together with Joan Allen as the sympathetic Pam Landy, and Scott Glenn and David Straithairn as the stressed out CIA bosses who will no doubt spend much of the film saying "People - we have a situation...", which they spent most of the previous three Bournes doing a lot.

And finally, prepare your gluteus maximus for a return journey to Peter Jackson's imagination of Middle Earth. For the first three Christmases of the new millennium, the backsides of filmgoers the world over were put to the ultimate test by Jackson's epic eleven-hour, three-part interpretation of J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord Of The Rings. This Christmas, competing multiplexes will be no doubt playing up the enhanced comfort of their seating for The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, the first half of Jackson's two-part adaptation of Tolkien's prequel to Lord Of The Rings. It finds members of that trilogy's cast (including Sir Ian Mackellen, Andy Serkis and Sir Christopher Lee) joining up again, along with TV's latest Dr. Watson, Martin Freeman as Bilbo Baggins, along with his Sherlock Holmes, Benedict Cumberbatch, whose sounds like a hobbit to begin with.

With the first part due on December 14, and the second, The Hobbit: There and Back Again, to open on December 13 next year, it's clear that Jackson has no intention of giving us an abbreviated version of Tolkien's entertaining novel, which was written in 1937 as a children's story. In fact I doubt there's a child known to mankind able to sit through six new hours of Tolkien mythology, but for us adults it will make a pleasant revival of a challenging but entertaining Christmas outing.

As with all custodians of major film franchises, Jackson knows the ticket-buying public will have high expectations for The Hobbit. After all, the Lord Of The Rings trilogy turned over almost $3 billion worldwide. Furthermore, the third chapter - Return of the King - demonstrated that populist, fantasy adventure franchises can be critically acclaimed, winning all eleven Academy Award categories in which it was nominated, including Best Picture – and that was the first time such a film had ever won the prize.

Welcome to the five-ring circus

I'm in shock. Really. According to my Letts 2012 Diary - in which I have dutifully filled in all the Personal Details, updated the birthdays and anniversaries, and made careful note of religious holidays around the world - we are already more than two-thirds of the way through January.

This bombshell means we're closer to February, and with February a short month, we're almost into March and therefore getting ready for Easter. Which is in April. Based on this logic, then, it has taken me almost a third of the way through the year to commit fingertips to keyboard for the first What Would David Bowie Do? outing of 2012.

Here in France, however, it is still technically "the New Year": my indigenous colleagues continue to plant kisses on each other as if the clock got stuck at a minute past midnight on New Year's Day, and this will, apparently, continue until the very end of the month. Actually, there is a strong likelihood that it will continue long into February as the kissing becomes part of the national coping mechanism for France getting downgraded to AA+. I'm still not entirely sure what that means, but I suspect it means everyone here now can claim to be part of an exotic blood group.

As if France wasn't suffering enough, passengers on the Eurostar rail service between Paris and London are currently being invited to visit the buffet carriage where they can purchase badges commemorating the fact Eurostar is an "official partner" of the 2012 Olympic. The games, if you're not aware, will be taking place in London. Paris had offered its services but were turned down on the grounds that, with the streets paved with dog poo, the marathon might prove too risky for the athletes' welfare.

To compound the insensitivity, at the entrance to the Channel Tunnel on the French side, Eurostar trains pass under a large sign reminding, mainly, the driver and a few illegal immigrants wandering along the track that, in the famous declaration of Jacques Rogge, "The IOC has the honour of announcing the Games of the 30th Olympiad in 2012 will be in...[pauses for dramatic effect] - London."

I am, of course, proud for my home city, but you have to feel a little sorry for the French having it rubbed in like this. It reminds me of the late, great Bill Hicks, who observed in a typically acerbic routine: "If The Second Coming ever does happen will Jesus want to be confronted by people wearing crucifixes? It would be a bit like going up to Jackie Onassis with a rifle pendant". Perhaps the only way to worsen the insensitivity is by screening Henry V with French subtitles on giant screens in Paris shortly before the opening ceremony, while offering out 'How was Agincourt for you?' T-shirts.

France may, however, have the last laugh after all: not wishing to put a complete downer on the Games already, my advice to anyone hoping to watch the event is, I'm afraid, do so from the comfort of your own home.

It will be an unmitigated disaster. Should you be mad enough to consider flying to London, and have been booked on a flight by a sadistic travel agent who thinks Heathrow Airport would make the ideal gateway to your Olympic experience, you will face a nightmare.

Your plane - one of only 36 takeoffs and landings to be allowed each hour in order to reduce Heathrow air traffic by 20% in order to handle the 500,000 visitors expected in London for the games (yep, I couldn't work out that logic either) - will have spent the final hour of its journey (and fuel supply) circling over the Kent or Hertfordshire countryside, waiting for air traffic control to let your pilot land on the airport's single active landing runway.

Once you have landed you will probably wait until the first medals are being presented before your luggage arrives. This is because the second thing Heathrow fails miserably at - after allowing passenger airplanes to take off and land - is repatriating passengers and their luggage with anything approaching recognition that the regular passenger, once landed, might wish to subsequently go somewhere.

Heathrow is at pains to point out that it is backing Britain, or something like that. In a glossy 28-page brochure, Normand Boivin, the airport's Chief Operating Officer, says that "80 per cent of all Games visitors are expected to pass through Heathrow – including athletes, officials, Marketing Partners [note the capital letters...] and media, as well as spectators – the airport will be their first experience of London and the UK before the Games."

Oh dear. This is the very same airport which, in December 2010, had to cancel 4000 flights because it was underprepared for snow and couldn't cope with the backlogs or the volume of grounded passengers. Now, I know that even with the climate being as mad as it is, snow is highly unlikely in July, but the fact that the self-styled Gateway To Britain was unprepared for weather which shouldn't exactly be a shock in December doesn't bode well for the influx of half a million people in the space of a few weeks.

But let's imagine that all goes well, and the sixth and temporary terminal they are planning to build (I'm assuming this will be nothing more than a group of Portakabins), does manage to process all the athletes, managers, sponsors, corporate types, regular punters and their luggage (which will also include a total of 800 firearms belonging to 530 atheltes of both the Olympics and Paralympics), the next challenge will be traveling across London.

Heathrow Airport, for the uninitiated, was built to the west side of London. Britain, it should be pointed out, experiences a prevailing south-westerly wind, which means that Heathrow-bound aircraft usually land into the wind, requiring them to fly across a city of eight million people before touching down. Always something to think about when you're wondering about the rules of physics and the laws of average.

Getting from Heathrow in the west to Stratford, where the main Olympic events will take place, in the east is normally a voyage of endurance that would have made Captain Scott turn back.

This is because you have a limited number of transport choices: a taxi, which will cost you more than the Greek national debt; the Piccadilly Line of the London Underground, which will cost you more than the Greek national debt as well as your blood pressure; or the Heathrow Express, which which will cost you more than the Greek national debt, will only take you to Paddington, and then you will need to choose either a taxi or the London Underground to complete your journey

And then there's the hotels. I rarely have reason to stay in London hotels but when I have done so, I've found them to be appallingly bad - overpriced, poorly serviced and staffed by people who give the distinct impression that you are interrupting their day by asking for things.

Sure, there are staggeringly luxurious hotels in London, but the hotels you and I would stay in (i.e. those which aren't predominantly populated by semi-resident Russian mobsters and Middle Eastern arms dealers) mostly fail to understand the concept of service, 21st Century communications technology, or that a minibar should comprise of more than just a kettle, powdered milk and a solitary shortbread biscuit. Compared with the consistently high standards of comfort and service you get in Germany or even basic chain hotels in America, the British hotel experience is lousy.

Don't expect any improvement just for the Olympics. What you can expect is the loss of your children's inheritance: apparently, hotel prices in London will rocket by 400% during the games. This phenomena is commonplace in Las Vegas during major events like CES, the annual consumer electronics show. Several years ago, for the duration of CES I stayed at the sumptuous Bellagio Hotel (you know, the one with the amazing fountains which George Clooney knocked off in Ocean's 11). For the first two nights of CES, I was charged $318 a night, by the third night it had fallen to $240 and by the fourth and fifth nights I was paying just $130. Same hotel, same room, same me. And they said the Mafia was no longer operating in Las Vegas...

Once you're in London, you're going to have to get about. Taxi drivers I've spoken to all seem to be of the opinion that it would be better for them to go on holiday en masse during the Olympics than trying to get through traffic - even with fare-paying passengers on board. The consensus is that it simply won't be worth the hassle. So don't expect to find any taxis.

The Underground won't be any better: London's Tube trains are year-round sweat-boxes of a severity beaten only by the punishment received by Alec Guinness in The Bridge On The River Kwai. Coupled with chronic overcrowding, the inevitable strike by Bob Crow and his cronies, and your journey from inn keeper's hearth to trackside at the Olympic Stadium will be nothing short of torturous ardor.

Basically you'd be best off at home with your feet up watching several hundred honed athletes doing all the hard work. They've spent the last four years training so you won't have to lift anything more than another cold one. Yes, I'm sure it would be nice to be in the fabulous new stadium, juggling your eyes to watch the 4x400mm relay simultaneously with the high jump, the javelin and a mustachioed North Korean woman heaving a lead weight across the infield.

With everyone, surely, now owning a sharp-as-a-button High Definition TV, there really will only be one way to watch the 30th Olympiad and close-ups of sinews being stretched to their limits, Usain Bolt completing another unfeasible world record, or the somewhat preposterous notion that beach volleyball played in the middle of east London is authentic. It won't be, but it'll be a lot more entertaining than getting to the stadium.

Annus mirabilis or annus terribilis?

It was no less a sage than Carrie Bradshaw who once mused in Sex And The City: "Maybe the past is like an anchor holding us back. Maybe, you have to let go of who you were to become who you will be." It is perfectly true that looking back, rather than the other direction, only relives troubling memories or revisits those we'd rather resign to the dark coffers of history. That said, the adage that knowing where you've come from helps where you're going also rings true.

The point of all this cod philosophy is that, this being New Year's Eve and all, I feel compelled to cast one final glance over the shoulder of a year which, on a personal level, could at the very least be described as 'odd', and on a global level, be described as relentless. I won't dwell here on the personal stuff, save to say that if 2011's emotional dips, peaks, twists and turns were to be turned into a theme park ride, Health & Safety would close it down in an instant.

The list of world events, however, warrants some reflection. Keeping pace with 'big' news this year has been the current affairs equivalent of running a long, punishing marathon with only a few stops for water and the odd embarrassing Paula Radcliffe roadside evacuation along the way.

In the year in which the world welcomed its seven billionth inhabitant, major news stories seemed to be bigger and more impactful: perhaps it was the way they were reported by the media that engorged them, but from the Arab Awakening and the Fukushima earthquake to Europe's economic disaster, the deaths of Steve Jobs and Osama Bin Laden to the deranged rampage of Anders Brevik, Charlie Sheen's very public meltdown and Amy Winehouse's somewhat inevitable demise to the bizarre case of Dominic Strauss-Kahn, England's summer riots and the Anglo-Saxon media's self-ingestion over phone hacking, there was a never-ending parade of news which just seemed that much bigger than usual.

Of all of them, it is the events that will continue into 2012 that deserve the most attention. Biggest of these is the revolution that swept the Middle East and North Africa. It actually began last December with the self-emoliation of a 26-year-old Tunisian fruit and vegetable seller, Mohammed Bouazizi. His act of fatal desperation lit the fuse of a conflagration that is burning still in Syria and smoldering elsewhere.

If the Vietnam War had been the first television war, the revolution that took hold in Tunisia, Egypt, Algeria, Libya and other countries in the region was the first to be initiated by and spread via social networking. The smartphone, YouTube, Twitter and Facebook became more powerful than any pitchfork or Molatov cocktail in the history of popular uprising, channels for disobedience, for liberty and retribution, conveying both brutal injustice as well as the brutal dispatch of an insane monster like Muammar Gaddafi.

Social networking tools evolved from frivolous platforms for sharing pictures of drunken nights out, commencing and ending relationships and posting inconsequential videos of cats playing musical instruments to outlets for freedom and ingenuity. People found a voice they either didn't have before, or were denied their right to exercise it in the first place.

At the arrival of 2012 nothing is more certain than it was one year ago. Europe continues to heave and groan amid the seismic contractions of its politically complex economy, and the Middle East continues to be a source of social unrest and even the resurgence of the sort of nuclear tension that kept an entire generation awake at night not so long ago.

To add to the uncertainty we have Iran rattling its sabre over oil and its own atomic ambitions and a North Korea run by, it would appear, a pudgy video gamer who has swapped his Xbox controls for a large red button labelled Use only if you wish to hold south-east Asia to ransom. Given that the Mayan calendar doesn't have a lot planned for 2013, there is much to be nervous about as we send fireworks into the night sky tonight.

Happy New Year.

A high-definition Christmas

By this time next week it will be all over. I’m not talking about the world, however, as that is not due to expire until next year.

No, by next Thursday Christmas will already be a fading memory and life will be returning to some semblance of normality after the annual orgy of food and wrapping paper.

I know it's all meant to be about the Nativity, but let’s face it, thanks to the consumer insurgency we all buy into, it has become a desperately anti-climactic festival of spending. Right now many of us are in a state of belligerent defiance mixed with blind panic, but in a few days from now, all that preparation and the weeks spent agonizing over the perfect gift which you then wrap with the precision of a master bomb maker, will have dissolved into a flurry of ripped paper amid fleeting hope passing rapidly into barely disguised disappointment.

In case any members of my family or diminishing circle of friends are reading this hokum (and apologies to regular WWDBD viewers for the apparent break in service – November appeared to have exhausted my writing mojo), all I want for Christmas this year is shiny, circular, measures about 12cm across, and can rightfully be described as the last physical media format I will ever own: Blu-ray Disc.

Despite having played a part in the launch of Blu-ray Disc in a former life - and the format itself being on the market since 2006 - I have hitherto resisted its charms. DVD, for the most part, has been a perfectly adequate format to enjoy movies and TV series in fantastic quality at home. The arrival of high-definition digital TV services and even the availability of HD movies via iTunes has also dented any urge to start building up more shelf-swamping content in a new physical form.

I know I’m not alone in this view – Blu-ray clearly has yet to become the true high-definition successor to DVD it was touted to be. I have happily embraced renting movies online as a means of ensuring my film collection doesn't end up occupuing another post code. In fact this time last year I was completing a significant rationalisation of both my CD and DVD collections, and I’ve maintained a notable abstinence this year in building the pile back up. Dangerously, perhaps, iTunes has made it easier to buy film and music on-spec that I probably wouldn't have bought had I gone to a shop. That said, in the process I’ve come across some gems.

So what tipped me over the edge and dragged me into my local FNAC to buy a Blu-ray Disc player? There were two factors: firstly, my ageing DVD/SACD player was suffering from wear-and-tear, and it was time to buy a replacement. The good people of a particular Japanese consumer electronics brand were helpfully put on the market a Blu-ray player that also played SACDs, so my investment in that format wouldn’t be forfeited. Secondly, the price of even a decent Blu-ray player has commoditised so sharply in the last five years that it was a steal.

There was a third factor: Mad Men. Walking through one of the few remaining HMV stores in London recently I saw a box set of the first four Mad Men seasons going for an absolute song. Knowing that amongst the many things Mad Men had been hailed for was its vivid, Technicolor art direction, it seemed a perfect match for the high-definition richness of Blu-ray Disc. I plunged in.

I wasn’t disappointed. It did, however, dawn on me, as I gorged on the glorious depiction of amorality in a 1960s Madison Avenue ad agency, that it created a paradox: here I was watching a TV show in pristine high-definition picture quality which is set in an era when television was a largely grey, fuzzy and intermittent affair. Then it didn’t have so much as an ‘interactive red button’, programmes didn’t communicate via Twitter, and changing channels involved getting off your arse and turning a dial.

The other irony about Mad Men is that I doubt if any of the characters would actually be alive today. For a start, no scene seems to be possible without everyone lighting up a cigarette, pouring a large measure of scotch or both, which means that most of the employees of Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce would have dropped dead long ago from some variety of cancer – lung or oesophagal, take your pick. Mad Men’s Olympian levels of smoking was established early on. Indeed Page 1 of the script of the very first episode starts thus:

Alone in a red corner booth is DON DRAPER, early 30's, handsome, conservative, and despite his third old fashioned, he is apparently sober. He is doodling on a cocktail napkin.

He crosses something out, puts down his fountain pen, and taps a cigarette out of a pack of 'Lucky Strike'.


The BUSBOY, a middle-aged black man, too old for his tight uniform, approaches.


BUSBOY: Finished, sir?


DON: Yeah. Got a light?


The busboy pulls out a pack of matches from the back of his 'Old Gold’s' and lights Don's cigarette.


DON: Ah, an 'Old Gold' man.

(inhaling)


'Lucky Strike', here.

Man Men’s high consumption of tobacco and Johnny Walker’s is matched only by the number of notches on the bedposts of the principle characters. There is more shagging going on at SCDP than even the members of Fleetwood Mac entertained with each other during the 70s and 80s. Most – if not all – of the agency’s male staff would have succumbed to some unpleasant disease of the genital district long before AIDS came along.

But I digress. Blu-ray Disc is having to co-exist with television and the Internet unlike any other format before it. In principle, it wins hands-down on the quality front, something film director Ridley Scott recently put forward in a blog article he wrote for the Huffington Post.

"Technology will need to make many more huge leaps before one can ever view films with the level of picture and sound quality many film lovers demand without having to slide a disc into a player," Scott wrote. "The technically sophisticated Blu-ray Disc, of which I've been a supporter since its inception, is the closest we've come to replicating the best theatrical viewing experience.”

The director of Alien and Blade Runner maintains that, while iPads and smartphones have become as much a part of personal theater as the big screen TV, we must continue to maintain shelf space for Blu-ray Disc and DVD box sets.

“Physical media has years of life left," says Scott, "and must be preserved because there is no better alternative."

I’m not so sure: as Internet bandwidth improves all the time, and video technology continues to be refined further and further, it’s only a matter of time when the quality of Blu-ray Disc will be completely superceded by something which doesn’t require packaging and shelf space. And actually having to get off your fat arse to change discs when gorging on a whole season of Mad Men in one go, as that’s what WiFi is for.

Do not worry: rabbits, chickens and princes will save the planet

As the European economy continues its irrevocable slide back to the Middle Ages, a seemingly lesser event crept in under radar last week and set up camp in South Africa: the 17th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.

Mercifully abbreviated to ‘COP17’ (which fits better on a T-shirt) the conference is the latest attempt by Planet Earth to save itself by limiting greenhouse gas emissions. If you've hitherto been unaware of this event, do not be embarassed. Global attention has been elsewhere.

However, as COP17 enters its second week, there is a chance that the start of what is traditionally known as the 'higher level talks' might draw a bit more attention to the conference, which draws together over 10,000 delegates from 194 countries, and includes the world's leading climate change experts, scientists and campaigners, as well as governments.

Despite the scant coverage in the media, this year's conference represents a critical moment in the effort to agree binding global targets for greenhouse gas emissions. It has been an exhaustive process, ever since COP3 in 1994 produced the treaty named after the conference's host city - the Kyoto Protocol On Climate Change. Then, 37 nations committed themselves to reducing their emissions of the four main greenhouse gases (which include the two we're all guilty of - carbon dioxide and methane...) by 5.2%, the benchmarked "potential" for future climate warming, by 2012. However, the United States (which contributes the world's second-largest output of CO2) - along with Australia - refused to ratify the treaty on the grounds that it didn't encourage the world's poorest polluters to step up as well (the Aussies have, however, since signed their ratification. The United States still hasn't). With the Kyoto Protocol due to expire next year, all subsequent UNFCCC events have concerned themselves with continued negotiations, arguments, posturing and brave attempts to come up with a successor.

In 2004 the climate change circus pitched up on the extremely agreeable island of Bali to map out the steps to a new agreement. The following year it was the somewhat less temperate environment of Poznan in Poland. With these two events meant to, respectively, prepare the roadmap and then fill in the blanks, COP15 in Copenhagen two years ago was supposed to have presented the new global agreement. Some felt it was a slam-dunk, requiring no more than the signatures of world leaders to make it happen.

Disastrously, it didn't. Despite the high-profile presence of presidents and prime ministers, it failed to produce any kind of binding agreement, merely producing a flimsy 'look-we've-come-all-this-way-so-we-need-to-sign-something' document which paid little more than lip service to getting anything done.

Not being a particular expert on climate change, the politics surrounding it, or the diplomacy required to get governments to do something about it, I have my own theory as to why COP15 in Copenhagen failed to deliver: crap logistics. I can offer this viewpoint from personal experience.

I arrived in Copenhagen in a blizzard. The first thing I noticed was that, unlike other some places I've lived in, where the merest hint of a snowflake sends people mad and preparing for a 1000-year nuclear winter, Danes have got it down to a fine art. An airport runway that had been covered in thick snow barely half an hour before my plane landed had been cleared and was operating with all the normality of a summer's day.

That was, however, the last time that day that I encountered anything resembling efficiency. Arriving at Copenhagen's Bella Center I encountered an already lengthy queue for accreditation. Being British, I was, initially, as happy as a clam to queue stoically and politely, while scanning the peripherery for any potential bad-mannered interlopers.

Unfortunately I hadn't banked on the UN's own imported police force who were administrating the accreditation process. For five-and-a-half hours I queued ankle-deep in freezing snow, weathering wind chill of -20. Climate change and global warming were two distant concepts as I stood there, shuffling from one foot to the other, cursing (the first sign of hypothermia) for being shod in officewear and not the pelts of two wolves.

Artist impression of the rabbit

Advancing at a pace only time-lapse photography could faithfully record, and with the only comfort coming from cups of coffee handed out by the Danish Army, I watched two grown human beings dressed, respectively, as a chicken and a rabbit embroiled in a punch-up.

Artist impression of the chicken

From what I could gather - and do bear in mind that I may have been hallucinating at this point - the contretemps between the bunny and the bird appeared to be a territorial dispute over the optimum spot from which to stage their protests against global warming. The morning had taken on a profoundly surreal element at this point.

By the third hour of queuing I was entertaining irrational fears of succumbing to frostbite and, like Ranulph Fiennes, having to saw off my own toes with a tool fashioned from of a reindeer's antler. By the fifth hour I'd had enough, having been up since 4.30am for my flight to Copenhagen (yes, I know, I should have chartered a more carbon-friendly pack of sled dogs). Just as I was planning to make a break for it I noticed that ahead of me in the queue was a representation from a Native American tribe. Oh, the irony that my eyes had been watering for most of the morning.

Their skills of endurance, hewn no doubt on the high plains, we're clearly more developed than mine. Annoyed, cold and resentful from having spent a long morning standing still in the actual land of ice and snow, I hobbled off on my frost-bitten, close-to-amputation feet in search of a hotel, several cold (but not too cold) beers and an open fire-heated bar.

Reanimated by the loving toastiness of the hotel, and by the fact a colleague had provided me with the pass I should have had in the first place, I returned to the Bella Center where, several hours after I’d left it, I discovered the Indian tribe to be still just in front of me. Twin Peaks had now been uprooted and moved to a Scandinavian exhibition centre.

As it transpired, the process to get into COP15 was almost as arduous as it was for the conference to get any agreement out of it. The Prince of Wales was addressing the opening session of what is called the "high-level talks". My presence was due to the fact that my then-employer was a significant member of the Corporate Leaders Group, an organisation set up by the Prince to bring enterprises together to apply more pressure on governments to do something about climate change.

Charles was there to apply his passion for the environment by imploring the great-and-the-good assembled to, effectively, pull their fingers out and reach an agreement. "The inescapable conclusion," he told delegates, "is that a partial solution to climate change is no solution at all. Crucially, it must be embraced by the public, private and NGO sectors, as well as by local communities and indigenous people, while also encouraging individual responsibility."

While many think of Charles as either a well-meaning eccentric or a do-gooder who should stay out of politics, his ability to command the attention of a large conference chamber was impressive, and his commitment to the cause can never be faulted. Alas, the failure of COP15 to reach any kind of conclusive agreement was more the result of everyone else in Copenhagen to make a commitment.

The following year the conference took to the blisteringly warm Mexican beach resort of Cançun, better known for American college students indulging in the drunken debauchery of Spring Break. COP16 was meant to be a more low-key affair, attended by a more functional profile of delegates who, according to the roadmap, would have been tasked with outlining the implementation of whatever Copenhagen the year before had agreed. The presidents and prime ministers stayed away, leaving their experts to pick up the baton. Apart from a few token pieces of legislation, and a lot of huffing and puffing about the critical need to do something, the outcome was limp.

So, what of this year? Despite the lack of media attention, COP17 is the last-chance saloon to replace Kyoto. Whatever your view on climate change, the planet's ice caps are thinning at an alarming rate, and the seas are heating up to the extent that America's hurricane season is growing longer and more intense. These can't be random developments.

Critics of the climate change discussions say that they are hampered by too much self interest. Surely, though, self-interest should be the reason for getting an agreement. After all, London, Paris and New York won't be much fun to live in when they're under water.

It's still here

One Saturday, 24 years ago, a magazine editor, in his wisdom, dispatched me to the English market town of Hereford to ask locals about their sexual habits.

It was an assignment fraught with danger. Firstly, Hereford is the world-famous home of the SAS, Britain's elite special forces. They are not know for their openness to strangers asking questions. About anything.

Secondly, the objective of my mission was to test national attitudes towards HIV/AIDS which, in 1987, was seen almost exclusively as a "gay plague", helped no end by unenlightened newspaper headlines along those lines.

Dodging threatening looks and accusations ("You some sort of pervert?") and the inevitable and progressively unfunny 'jokes' ("Practice safe sex? Absolutely - last time we 'ad it off in the car we almost crashed." Ho and, can I add, ho), I waded through the crowded provincial town centre. This particular 'vox pop' required nerves of steel and, I discovered relatively early on, a decent pair of trainers.

At the beginning of 1987 the government had delivered a leaflet to every home in Britain inscribed "AIDS: Don't die of ignorance". It was a slogan born of the age of Katherine Hamnett's famous white FRANKIE SAYS... T-shirts, and formed part of a £20 million advertising campaign which also included two iconic TV commercials, in which a large iceberg in one, and a tombstone in the other, loomed into view to John Hurt's voiceover cheerily warning of "a deadly disease and there is no known cure".

Amid the inevitable hostility towards my questions, my afternoon in Hereford produced some interesting results. Firstly, it was clear that a large number of people under the age of 20 hadn't seen the government's leaflet at all. Of those that had, less than half had found it useful, only a similar number said that the advertising campaign had made them change their sexual habits, and even a sixth said they hadn't even thought about it.

There was plenty of indifference and, indeed, ignorance in Hereford that afternoon, reactions that replicated themselves across the country as the same investigation was carried out by my colleagues in London, Manchester, Newcastle, Leeds and other cities and towns. Things weren't helped by the positively Victorian thundering of James Anderton, who was then-Chief Constable of Greater Manchester Police, who talked about AIDS victims "...swirling in a human cesspit of their own making".

Today is World Aids Day. It is also 30 years since scientists at the United States' Centers for Disease Control first flagged up a new virus with an alarmingly high mortality rate. Although human infection by the HIV virus has since been traced back to the early 20th Century, and the origins of its development into a pandemic even now unclear, 'full blown' AIDS became the sort of bogeyman that communism and 'Reds under the bed' had been in the 1950s and 60s. Much of this had to do with the gay stigma attached to the disease. As I found in Hereford, few people understood, or were prepared to understand that HIV contamination could affect both heterosexuals as well as needle-sharing drug users.

As deaths soared - and the deaths of figures from the arts and entertainment world like Rock Hudson, previously regarded as the all-American hearthrob whose homosexuality had been kept an unusual secret in pre-Internet Hollywood - public opinion continued to focus on issues of morality surrounding the disease.

In 1985 the story of Indiana schoolboy Ryan White caught media and celebrity attention. White was a hemophiliac who, in 1984, was diagnosed with pneumonia and was subsequently discovered to have AIDS. When it was learned that he'd contracted the HIV virus from a contaminated batch of transfused blood, White and his family entered a protracted dispute with the local education authority who wanted to keep him away from school. White's case drew celebrity attention, with everyone from Elton John and Michael Jackson to Ronald and Nancy Reagan supporting his cause and, in the process, doing much to destigmatise AIDS and the real ignorance that existed around it.

When AIDS first reached the public consciousness there was much talk of it becoming a pandemic that could even impact world population numbers. Today its global death toll stands at 22 million with HIV infections at 60 million. Effective treatments have turned it into a manageable, chronic condition which has kept it off the front pages. While people still die from the disease, the fact that those dying aren't actors and rock stars has stopped it becoming news. There is also the complacent belief that HIV/AIDS is on the decline. Certainly in places like south-east Asia there has been a marked decline in new infections and deaths thanks to preventative education and treatment programmes in countries like India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.

In truth, however, HIV/AIDS is anything but disappeared. It is estimated that 33.4 million people live today with the HIV virus, and two-thirds of those are in sub-Saharan Africa. In Zimbabwe, Botswana and Swaziland around a third of the population lives with the virus. There have been significant signs of progress in Africa, but it is still a basket case by world standards.

Not that things are necessarily rosy in the developed world. New HIV infections in the UK, for example, have continued to grow over the last ten years as complacency towards practicing safe sex has crept in. In the United States HIV infection rates amongst African-Americans overtook those within the gay community in 2000, and today the disease continues to ravage parts of the country's southern states, where mortality rates are markedly the highest and the majority of people who have HIV or AIDS are black. Significantly, six of the ten American states with the highest number of women with AIDS are in the South.

Sexual health is still a topic of extreme sensitivity, and the stigma attached to AIDS in every part of the world - and every community where it resides - is still the biggest barrier to achieving a World Health Organisation target of zero new HIV infections and deaths from AIDS by 2015.

The second biggest barrier is, inevitably, money. Scientists claim they are achingly close to developing an HIV/AIDS vaccine, but cuts in funding are threatening to arrest that development. Still, World Aids Day today - and on December 1 for the next four years - will focus on the zero infections target.

The blight of AIDS has, in recent years at least, been blighted itself by a combination of indifference, ignorance and cynicsm. Being straight, I've been part of a community that regarded it as someone else's risk; being European, it was someone else's problem; not being a drug user, someone else's stupidity. Other causes have come along to claim attention for our charity and our lifestyles. But 24 or 25 years ago, while we were still more worried about the Russians turning our capital cities into irradiated wasteland, a new disease came along to wipe the post-Free Love Generation smiles off our faces. And it's still with us today.

When even having it all doesn't seem to help

With frightening prescience, 24 hours before Gary Speed was found dead yesterday morning by his wife Louise, fellow footballer Stan Collymore wrote the following blog post:

"Suicidal thoughts. 

Thankfully i've not got to that part yet,and in my last 10 years only once or twice has this practical reality entered my head,and practicality its is,unpalatable the thought may be to many.

Why a practicality? Well,if your mind is empty,your brain ceases to function,your body is pinned to the bed,the future is a dark room,with no light,and this is your reality,it takes a massive leap of faith to know that this time next week,life could be running again,smiling,my world big and my brain back as it should be.So what do some do? They don't take the leap of faith,they address a practical problem with a practical solution to them,and that is taking their own life.And sadly,too many take that route out of this hell."

Collymore - much pilloried for his sexual demons - had to endure even more mockery from his own manager when he announced, 12 years ago, that he suffered from depression: "How can you be depressed when you're on £20,000 a week?", was the apparent voice of support.

The trouble is depression is far too often dismissed in much the same way, especially for men. "Get a grip", they are told. It is a tragic fact in its own right that, while women are statistically more likely to seek treatment for depression, men are more than three times as likely to take their own lives, often for a condition only they know they are dealing with.

We may never know, nor should we want to know what it was that took Gary Speed to take his own life. What we can know was that, at 42 and with an exemplary playing career behind him, a promising managerial career unfolding before him, a beautiful wife, two healthy teenage sons, and the requisite footballer's comfortable lifestyle, he was - on the outside at least - an unlikely candidate to commit suicide.

Even on Saturday - shortly before he died - Speed had appeared on the BBC's Football Focus as a studio pundit, demonstrating his solid knowledgeability of the game alongside former Leeds United teammate Gary McAllister. 

Dan Walker, the show's host, spent a few hours with Speed throughout the day and, amongst all the many comments posted online about the Welshman's suicide some hours later, had as much reason as any to be shocked by what happened.

"After Focus we recorded a 10-minute piece with Gary talking about Wales' qualifying campaign for the next World Cup," Walker wrote on his BBC blog. "He spoke with passion about the fixtures and desire to see success. His hope was that the upturn in form would see his team playing in front of full stadia again. He joked about Team GB and how Scotland would be an easy game, McAllister giggled. Those words and hopes for the future seem so poignant now. There was certainly no hint of any troubles or any indication of what was going to happen a few hours later."

As is the modern way when tragedy strikes, Twitter becomes, perhaps, an over-inflated barometer of grief. The avalanche of tributes tweeted yesterday came from across the worlds of sport, showbusiness stars and even politics. 

Few of the posts reflected any deep personal relationship with Gary Speed, but the volume of largely unqualified sentiment reflected the utter  shock of news that a young football manager, who seemingly had everything going for him, could choose to exit this world so suddenly. 

The sight of Aston Villa goalkeeper Shay Given, a close friend and former teammate of Speed's, unable to compose himself before his match yesterday against Swansea City, summed up the genuine, wrenching disbelief that was felt across football.

In fact, not just football. The vast majority of tributes commented on Speed's professionalism and the bewilderment over what had happened, highlighting the apparent contentment of his life, his lifestyle and his career.

Stan Collymore's earlier post underlined the fact that depression is a prison cell with few visitors. In so many people, but especially men, it goes unspoken for the very fear of mockery, of loss of respect at work, even the risk of it undermining personal relationships.

Without wishing to trivialize the condition, many mental health professionals praised the depiction of fictional Mob boss Tony Soprano's depression in The Sopranos as a pivotal story arc in the show. Dr. Glen Gabbard of Baylor College of Medicine in Texas wrote in his book The Psychology of the Sopranos: "I can't tell you how many of my colleagues have told me, that a man has come to their office seeking therapy because if a big, tough guy like Tony Soprano can get something out of it, maybe he can." The fact is, yes you can. 

The tragedy, however, of Gary Speed's death reminded me of the often misquoted comment by legendary Liverpool manager Bill Shankly - "Football's not a matter of life and death, it's more important than that". In reality, Shankly used the line in a TV interview when asked about his dedication to the game: "I regret [its impact on my family] very much. Somebody said: 'Football's a matter of life and death to you'. I said, 'Listen it's more important than that.' And my family's suffered. They've been neglected."

Yesterday we learned that football is not a matter of life and death at all.