Then we came to George Clooney

Working life: It really is painfully funny and absurdly true

 

“We were fractious and overpaid. Our mornings lacked promise. At least those of us who smoked had something to look forward to at ten-fifteen.” So begins the opening lines of the novel Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris, the comic hit of 2007. It’s almost entirely set in a hermetically sealed workplace where one by one, the ad agency colleagues that form the collective “we” are picked off by redundancy. Some go quietly with a perceived air of dignified self-sacrifice - “they left, so that we might stay” - some, like Tom Mota, try to throw their computers out the unsmashable windows. Amber Ludwig spends the duration fearing the undone Tom will “return like you hear on the news and open fire”.  

So layoffs, obviously distressing for the people alleviated of their duties, can be, um, a little uncomfortable for their surviving colleagues, too. The one person you shouldn’t waste time feeling sorry for, should your sympathy be of the finite variety, is the person doing the firing. George Clooney says as much in his new film Up in the Air (Jason Reitman, 2009) – his character, downsizer-for-hire Ryan Bingham, instructs his young apprentice (Anna Kendrick) to avoid feeling sorry for herself and never ever give off that “this is hard for me too” air when she’s mid-sacking. Perhaps it’s the media’s need to be contrary, the management sympathies of commissioning editors and/or the perceived employer-heavy readership demographic, but there’s been a few “it’s really horrible laying people off, you know” articles in the press lately. But the possibility of having to dole out P45s is part and parcel of management: it seems self-evident that having to go ahead and do so is a rather tough day at the office, but nothing like the devastation felt by the person left wondering how they’re going to pay their rent/mortgage the following month. 

Although I preferred the wry asides on redundancy in In Good Company (Paul Weitz, 2004) or the restructuring comedy of Office Space (Mike Judge, 1999), Up in the Air is a decent film about how work shapes our identity. It would be unsettling if its legacy is to give cold, cowardly employers on this side of the Atlantic the idea to outsource their layoff programmes to the kind of consultancy firm that sends you on your not-so-merry way with a platitude-laden information pack rather than a fat compensation package. 

Unlike Then We Came to the End’s smart use of the third-person plural,  Up in the Air has individualism at its core. Redundancy being a deeply unsexy topic, it helps that he’s an unfeasibly gorgeous and charismatic individual. But both the novel and the film expose the limits of empathy in what is an underexplored “life change” (which is a euphemistic way of putting it, I know). With one predictable exception, none of the fired workers, by turn tearful and stoic, become central to the plot, while in the novel, the redundant employees cease to be part of the narrative voice. 

Although there’s a risk that with Up in the Air’s success, audiences might have had their fill of layoff-themed movies, I’m still looking forward to the inevitable adaptation of Then We Came to the End, especially one filmed with a giant Altmanesque cast and careful handling of the repetitive nature of work culture – seemingly endless until it suddenly ends. In the meantime, I’ll have to settle for the new novel by Ferris, The Unnamed. Maybe it’ll make diverting lunch break reading: these days having work to break from in the first place seems like something to treasure.

Whatever you do, don’t blink

Sally Sparrow (Carey Mulligan) after a visit from the Doctor

Carey Mulligan is being hailed as a future heroine of British cinema, or saddled with the Next Big Thing tag, depending on your point of view. An Education, Nick Hornby’s adaptation of a Lynn Barber memoir, suggests that the future is now.

As Jenny, Mulligan is in pretty much every scene, whether it’s preening about her new playboy older man to her schoolfriends, cringing as much as any teenager can possibly cringe – at, variously, her parents, her lover’s penchant for babyspeak, herself - or delighting in the apparent sophistication of the world she now waltzes in.

I remember reading an interview with Winona Ryder some time in the 1990s, before she got a little too enthusiastic with the Marc Jacobs, where she said that when she saw the finished product of Heathers she thought she’d never be in a movie that good again. “I thought I’d peaked at 16,” was pretty much the quote. Some might say that’s exactly what she did. But if the future doesn’t quite turn out the way all the kindly critics say it will for Mulligan – and personally I think if the adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go is anywhere near as hamfisted as the book, it’s got flop written all over it – then there’s always the past to fall back on. And the past, unlike Ishiguro’s anticlimactic effort, contains some proper science fiction.

Blink, the award-winning 2007 episode of Doctor Who written by its new showrunner and former Press Gang and Coupling writer Steven Moffat, was that season’s “Doctor-light” episode, which is Whovian code for let’s give David Tennant or whoever a break for one 45-minute show out of the 13-long run. And so, as Sally Sparrow, Mulligan got to take centre stage in a simple, scary story – the scariest story of the Noughties revival – where gargoylesque statues called Weeping Angels “disappear” people who dare to keep their eyes off them. Blink, and you’re hurtled back in time – stranded in an age that isn’t yours, “time being a wibbly wobbly thing” and all that. Whatever you do, don’t blink.

It’s a long way from a scream-and-wait-to-be-rescued gig. A typically funny, inventive Moffat script, you don’t recognise wise and sad Sally Sparrow from the giddy, giggly, girly Kitty that Mulligan played in Joe Wright’s Pride & Prejudice. And ironically given it’s a time travel yarn, it’s one of her few contemporary roles. Now, every time the question of who the next Doctor Who companion should be comes up, the comment-feeders make a collective “bring back Sally” plea… silenced only when someone points out why the burgeoning theatre and film career might rule that out. But if it all goes wrong, and the hype doesn’t last beyond her imminent batch of Bafta attempts, Carey Mulligan will find the loyal sci-fi fanbase waiting for her to be their heroine on Saturday night TV.

One night, one note

John Simm and Lucy Cohu as a mistrusting married couple in Speaking in Tongues

Which is a more interesting – that is to say, least overdone - theme? That trust between people  has been eroded to the extent that you cannot count on your wife/husband not sleeping with another man/woman? Or that human beings have such amazing emotional resilience and generosity of spirit that despite extreme testing, they can ultimately get over it? The first is the nub of Speaking in Tongues, the revival of a 1990s play by the Australian Andrew Bovell just opened at the Duke of York’s in Theatreland, or the good old West End as everyone except the ticket brochure writers call it. For the second, I give you every soap opera in the land.

Speaking in Tongues is one of those self-consciously tricksy pieces of theatre, the title superficially relating to the manner in which several separate scenes take place on stage simultaneously, with the dialogue niftily intercutting between each scene. The cast of four take on nine characters. Small screen regular Lucy Cohu switches from confident flirt in act one to terrified, mistrusting therapist in act two; the wonderful Kerry Fox metamorphosises from nervy housewife to Cohu’s brash, diffident patient. John Simm, who I’ve loved since The Lakes, gives a flash of how good he is playing angsty underdogs; for the most part, he plays a suave, guarded, adulterous cop. And Ian Hart takes on three characters: would-be adulterer, broken-hearted loser and cold, closed-off husband.

The cast is almost too good to be true, in other words. They pretty much could be coming out with any old rubbish and I would have been fully entranced by the fact that here was Simm in the flesh, his low voice emanating from a stage just a few metres away. This was lucky, as the play is far from perfect. As any two characters mostly get just one scene together, and some couples only appear separately, there is little development in their relationships; the play just riffs along its trajectory of broken trust, broken people; societal breakdown exemplified by these edgy, hurt, scared people. It ends with that definite “hmmm” feeling.

It’s a question of form. Almost every night in people’s homes for as long as people have had televisions, viewers can catch couples like Coronation Street’s Ken and Deirdre (the saga that never ends), or my personal all-time favourites, Susan and Dr Karl from Neighbours, suffer the fallout from (multiple) affairs; it’s nothing new, though it’s always painful. But then, comes the richer, more delicate part: the slow recovery of trust and affection, as played out over the months, years and decades. The rebuilding of their connections is rooted in the properly realised mundanity of urban/suburban life, not the unrelatable, anonymous world of Speaking in Tongues  or its film version, Lantana. Soaps may be the conveyor belt of drama, but these long-running soap performances are a real artistic achievement of much greater pathos than Bovell’s two-act exercise in wordplay.

Although theatre and soap opera are very different cultural forms, they do both mine a seam of melodrama, and for me, the particular joy of soap is the open-endedness of its stories. Their structure better reflects reality, as our relationships are never over, even when they are. As soon as I hear an actor is leaving a show, I immediately lose interest in their character. Grand exit storylines are all very well, but they’ve got nothing on a story arc that lasts a lifetime.

Everything changes, all the cities and faces

I was in London, appropriately enough, when I saw the news that the revolving door that is the Sugababes has made its latest rotation. Out: Keisha Buchanan, the last of the founding members. In: Jade Ewen, best known for almost knocking out her backing violinist as she warbled her way to fifth place in the Moscow Eurovision. Sugababes have always been part of the London popverse, with their most successful songs and videos anchored in the part-grit-part-glamour of the city.

Sugababes’ origins story goes that Buchanan and Mutya Buena, schoolfriends in Kingsbury, north west London, were introduced to Siobhan Donaghy when they were 13 and she (Donaghy) was 14. Even after Donaghy’s and later Buena’s departure and the recruitment of Liverpudlian Heidi Range and Amelle Berrabah (born in Aldershot, Hampshire), Sugababes used London as their landscape. When it wasn’t the sweaty, subterranean clubs of the promos for lead singles Freak Like Me, Hole in the Head and Girls, it was the grey-hued, gherkin-punctuated skyline that formed the backdrop for the harsh regret of About You Now, posted above. While Girls Aloud were all Northern girls, Sugababes had a London edge. Sadly, Ewen’s Londoner status is the only thing about her that fits with the franchise.

It’s too late to get precious about the purity of Sugababes as a band; much as I love Range’s elegance, vocal and otherwise, Donaghy-era Sugababes was something unexpectedly special: unaffected, sulky, teenage, soulful, controlled. Donaghy went onto infuse her two woefully underrated solo albums, Revolution in Me (2003) and Ghosts (2007), with a tuneful, truthful, offbeat air. Born of her clinical depression, they are overwhelmingly sad, lonely songs, not without wit (see Man Without Friends, 12 Bar Acid Blues). Sugababes, meanwhile, metamorphasised into a hit machine. They were at their best when they were party girls (Round Round, Push the Button), but live performances of slowies like Stronger showcased both Range’s steely blankness and the newfound depth to Buena’s maturing voice. Xenomania producer Brian Higgins once called it Dustyesque.

Even when Buena gave way to Berrabah, a husky but tonally poorer soundalike, it was probably Buchanan who was the weakest singer of the trio: dextrous but not distinctive. That’s not the same as disposable. The tragedy of this latest reshuffle is not so much that they’ve sacrificed Buchanan to the cold winds of a solo career, but that they’ve replaced her with the wrong person. Ewen is just too tall and too naff for Sugababes.

Too naff for Sugababes! Yes. Ewen’s big exposure up to now has been the weekly patronage inflicted upon her by Andrew Lloyd-Webber on Saturday night telly. Her Eurovision song, It’s My Time, co-written by sludgy, yucky lyricist-for-hire Diane Warren (also responsible for Sugababes’ ballad-bore Too Lost in You), was awful. This is brand contamination. If Sugababes’ next record, Sweet 7, is any good, Ewen might overcome this cheddary past, but she can’t solve the problem of her height. She towers over Range and Berrabah, disrupting the unity of their image, but more critically, her legginess helps transform Sugababes into what they never were and never should be: Pussycat Doll clones, all sex, no song.

The barking, brash mess that is Get Sexy, the last song to feature Buchanan, is just the beginning. Gone is the fully clothed innocence of the early days, the effortless trashpop fun of the second incarnation and the classy Motown pastiches of the third era. In comes anonymous, Americanised robo-singing and videos stuffed with cages, collars and leather halternecks: arresting, but for all the wrong reasons. Sugababes have swiftly moved from being an accessible girl group for girls to lad mag also-rans with by-the-numbers product to shift. The moody girls next door have become soft porn sycophants. Given her earlier propensity for reticence when it came to bumping-and-grinding for the cameras, it really can’t be long before Range becomes the first “new babe” to become the latest “old babe”.

Catwalks, cupcakes and cut-throat commercialism

Vogue editor Anna Wintour surveys the catwalk

Is “fat” the new “thin” in the fashion world (as opposed to the real world)? Let me rephrase: are hips, thighs and breasts the new skin and bones? Are “curves” the new “14-year-old boy” on the catwalk and glossy spreads of Vogue, Glamour et al? Like hell they are. So US Glamour magazine has scored a massive (no pun intended) publicity coup courtesy of its September issue’s 3X3 inch photo of ”plus size” model Lizzi Miller, posing with a roll of stomach fat, shocking readers who had never seen rolls of naked stomach fat except when they sat up in bed and looked down. But Glamour is using Lizzi’s tummy the same way it might use any old prop in a shoot.

This, according to editor Cindi Leive, was the magazine’s “confidence” spread. And what says confidence more than admitting that, “hey, not only is this the way female bodies work sometimes (Lizzi is completely toned everywhere else on her body apart from the saggy stomach), but I’m going to sit here laughing about it”. In short, it’s that old cliche: fat = happy. It’s not a coincidence that Lizzi has emerged the same season that Glamour is hawking itself around New York delivering cupcakes to advertising agencies, trying to convince them that Glamour is home to sunny, cheery, all-American girls who are more than willing to comfort themselves through the economic downturn with some fondant icing and sugar sprinkles… and the odd spree.

Marie Claire, the UK version, is at it too in its October issue, athough in its case its “real women” spread is less of a novelty or a fightback strategy and more of a welcome “how to” – in this case, dress to suit your shape. That’s the crux of the dilemma for fashion magazines: finding the balance between representative and aspirational. The former is more a concern in the mid-market, whose editors don’t want to alienate their readers or, at least, want to pay lipservice to their readers’ real identities every now and again. After all, those circulation numbers aren’t going to be kept afloat by posh orthorexics alone.

At the high fashion end of the spectrum (essentially Vogue) alienation is pretty much the whole point; laughing your way out of recession is anathma. The September Issue, the new feature documentary by R.J. Cutler about the magazine’s biggest ever issue (September 2007), shows how the aspiration of many of the people who work for the magazine is for it to be treated seriously as a portfolio of art and design. The commercial bible bit can be something of an afterthought. Witness editor Anna Wintour’s scathing remarks when Mario Testino flies to Rome to take pictures of Sienna Miller but fails to give proper focus to one key feature: the clothes.

The documentary makes abundantly clear that Meryl Streep’s portrayal of a Wintour-esque editor in The Devil Wears Prada was no exaggeration: Anna “nuclear” Wintour is notorious for her icy dismissals of colleagues whose standards just don’t meet her impossibly high, randomly fluctutating expectations. There’s a revealing moment when she talks about feeling angry a lot of the time; if it starts to overcome her, she will quit, she says. The hurt spills out when she says her sister and two brothers finds what she does for a living “ridiculous”, her efforts to mould her daughter in her own image don’t seem to be working and she is never shown in conversation with anyone who you might describe as a real friend. It’s lonely at the top, I guess.

Maybe “thin = miserable” just like the last 15 years’ of catwalk models (and Amy Winehouse) have done their best to imply, or maybe that’s just the flipside of the same old cliche. Curiously, the October issue of UK Glamour indirectly suggests another reason for Wintour’s glumness: her trademark structured bob. Dividing hairstyles into “happy” and “unhappy”, Glamour notes that “hair that is contrived, overdone or over-laden with product” is unhappy hair. “Hairstyles with a sense of humour” is the new hair.

All of which could prove very awkward if you’ve chanced upon Glamour’s hair manifesto while you’re staring at yourself in the mirror with a towel on your shoulders, the blunt side of the scissors blade pressing against the back of your neck as a man dressed all in black snips away your damp split ends. “Um, change of plan…” A good thing no one can see your stomach bulge under those protective capes: the very fact that the existence of normal body fat has the capacity to shock the glossies tells you everything you need to know about how far away they are from accepting it. Even if on the pages of hairdresser fodder, “happy” is the new “sad”.

Brighton babes

Andrea Riseborough (as a young Margaret Thatcher)

The actress Andrea Riseborough has such a lovely tea shop face; a classic English rose with big round eyes and the perfect black curls for smothering under a hat… an early 20th-century, etiquette-requiring hat. Which is why it is a joy to hear that Riseborough is to play Rose, the naive tea-room waitress in a new film version of Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock, but a shame that the adaptation is to shift from the 1938 of Greene’s “entertainment”, to 1964, the year of the mods vs rockers clash on Brighton beach. Leave that to Quadrophenia.

Read Brighton Rock today and the most amazing thing about it is how modern it is. Proto-feminist Ida Arnold knocks back Guinness and is deeply suspicious of the uncouth, stairway-lurking gangstas that manage to turn the red-and-white candy sticks referenced in the novel’s title into a murder weapon. Pinkie, the teenage killer, knows how to manipulate Rose, the “good girl”, for his own ends: his amorality is as desolate and his sociopathy as stark as the black silhouette of Brighton’s West Pier is today. He is a burnt-out hulk of a boy.

The last film of Brighton Rock, made in 1947, transported the denouement from leafy Peacehaven to the then functioning West Pier. But this new adaptation by Rowan Joffe, in which Control’s Sam Riley will play Pinkie, is making a bigger change by fast-forwarding a quarter of a century to the 1960s. The empty, hopeless violence of the novel – the messy status anxiety behind the tourist facade – means that the plot of Brighton Rock could pretty much be transported to any time, or at least any time when the death penalty was still in place. Which is exactly why it should stay when it is.

I thought that pre-war England was a fairly genteel place until I read Brighton Rock. When I did, the book’s copyright date of 1938 naturally loomed large. It’s just one of those years, like 1913 or Mad Men’s take on 1962, where you can look at the characters’ lived worlds, shake your head in hindsight at their innocence and add a new layer of context: the ignorance of what lay ahead. But I also liked the way that the contemporaneously drawn experiences and emotions of Rose and Ida seemed far, far fresher than the anaemic images of tea-dress wearing war sweethearts or ambulance-driving heroines that I’d amassed from nostalgic screen treatments of the Blitz.

The Brighton of today still has a shady subculture, if recent celluloid treatments of the city are anything to go by. On my own visit there last year, it was all kitsch amusements, cupcake shops and fresh sea air. The only screams of terror I heard came from the ghost train. (Those cobwebby fronds will get you every time.) But the 2006 crime thriller London to Brighton wasn’t quite as pleasant. Indeed, it was a tale of pimps and prostitutes so grim and lacking in compassion that if insecure Pinkie had rocked up he would have seemed like a priest in comparison.

Regency bliss at the BBC

A publicity still from the BBC's Cranford... not to be confused with The Wire

Despite Dominic “you’re an asshole McNulty” West’s best attempt to denigrate the costume-laden output of the BBC drama department, the BBC One autumn schedule shows that drama commissioners continue to milk the fine talents of writers, producers and corset-wearing actresses – unfettered by anything as superficial as street cred. Emma, Jane Austen’s most cutting novel, is the subject of an immiment four-parter. Sure, it’s just 13 years since Gwyneth Paltrow smirked her way through a movie version and Kate Beckinsale did the simpering honours for an ITV one-off, but Emma is back.

West is currently lending his talents to a presumably well-remunerated coffee commercial, where he is kindly reading extracts from Pride & Prejudice with a straight face. So he must have been just shooting his mouth off when he recently lamented that British drama producers were too ready to churn out Cranford-esque serials and weren’t hot enough at “contemporary stuff” along the lines of his HBO platform The Wire. (Although if it’s above-averagely gritty police shows you’re after, the Tony Garnett produced drama The Cops, which ran on the BBC in the late 1990s, makes The Wire’s drug-addled housing projects look like a cosy tea-party.)

West’s complaint, if it really was a complaint and not just a tout for work on his home soil, is stuff and nonsense.  The on-set dressers may be empire line experts and the vernacular 200 years old, but Austen’s output has only a veneer of politeness: her angry assessments of the perils of being trapped in an intergenerational economic bind are just The Wire’s street corners transposed to the drawing room. Amy Heckerling’s superb Clueless (1995), a high-school adaptation of Emma, proved how Austenite themes infiltrate, and sometimes define, modern life. (Sample Clueless quote about a crush target from spoiled heroine Cher: “He does dress better than I do. What would I bring to the relationship?”) But you don’t actually have to go as far as ditching the costumes for costume dramas to be relevant.

Promisingly, Emma has been adapted this time around by Sandy Welch, who was responsible for the moody, succinct 2006 BBC version of Jane Eyre, and it stars Romola Garai, the best thing about Atonement. Meanwhile, the BBC’s last addition to the Austen industry, the biopic Miss Austen Regrets, should have won scriptwriter Gwyneth Hughes all manner of Baftas. (Instead, she had to be content with a Writers’ Guild of Great Britain award, according to IMDB.) Despite the manners of its title, Miss Austen Regrets was a harrowingly grim portrait of loneliness, ageing, mismatched affections and career frustration, with one memorably excruciating scene in which Jane (the lovely Olivia Williams) realises the object of her affection isn’t smiling at her, but at the younger woman delighting them all from the pianoforte instead. Who hasn’t been there?

There are those who will argue that in failing to formally contemporise the source material (i.e. ditch the corsets), the satirical realism gets subsumed by all the nicely sexually charged escapism, as if that scene in Pride & Prejudice was the only reason legions of lady-viewers tuned in. But I say keep the craft, keep the thrills; with scripts as great as these, you’d have to be either an idiot or a man with preconceptions to be totally distracted by the frocks, bonnets and billowing wet man-blouses. Bring it on.

The newspapers of the future are…em…magazines

Della and Cal look grim as they see their paper's latest circulation figures

The film State of Play (out next month on DVD) wrecked one of the greatest television shows of the Noughties, not just by casting Russell Crowe instead of the lovely John Simm, but by inserting a portentous rumination on the nature of journalism.

Setting up a seemingly logical dichotomy between old and new media, it dramatised the tense (at first) relationship between the patient but macho, crime-scene hanger-on newspaper hack Cal (he doesn’t just check facts, he cares about them) and perky froth-and-gossip merchant Della (Rachel McAdams in place of Kelly Macdonald), who blogs her views without recourse to anything as traditional as pyramid-style story structure or dirty old newsprint.

But isn’t this the wrong way around? In the days of 24-hour online, television and radio news coverage, the power behind “single point in time” headlines in datelined hard copy has dissipated. The impact of a newspaper scoop dissipates pretty quickly: the story is dissected on late-night television newspaper review slots, followed by breakfast radio, long before anyone can get down to their local newsagent. And then there’s the fact, however little journalistic egos may like it, that the average listener either doesn’t actually know or doesn’t care where the original story came from. (The recent MP expenses campaign by The Daily Telegraph, which saved a lot of its exclusive detail for its print edition, is the exception that proves the rule… it may even turn out to be one of the last hurrahs for must-buy broadsheets.) Not only can the 24-hour news operations devour a newspaper’s content, but they can develop (or dismiss) the story within minutes, leaving the printed source of the story stale by comparison.

Rumours that the Guardian Media Group wants to turn The Observer into a magazine make perfect sense in this context (and not just because the best thing The Observer has done in recent years is launch its monthly roster of well-resourced sport, food, music and woman magazines). The joy of the printed product lies in exploring what newspapers’ online editions cannot effectively deliver: lengthy and/or illustrated articles for the leisurely reader, large-format graphics, creative use of photography, and all of it subordinate to the overall page design. It doesn’t have to be a front-to-back viewspaper: solid, fair reportage (let’s not pretend to believe in complete objectivity) can be framed in many ways. Great features have as much timeliness, relevance and ”got there first” competition among their writers as an above-the-fold page lead.

Many newspapers still save their “best” stories for the print edition, where they lie in the shadow of mastheads hailing from a different age. But traditional “hot off the press” stories are often packaged in macho headlines that can inflate the importance of a story or take a single news “line” woefully out of context: leave that for the HTML boxes, where stories can be instanteously updated, mistakes corrected, reader responses published and archives full of context conveniently listed in the sidebar.

This isn’t the current state of play in Ireland, which has never had a vibrant magazine tradition and where many journalists fear going “soft” even more than a Russell Crowe romcom on repeat play. But evidence from other parts of the world suggests that the industry is moving this way. Newspapers may be losing circulation for all kinds of reasons: free online substitutes, consumer resistance to top-down information, a saturated market, general indifference. But they also have a conceptual chasm at their heart that most people who depend on newspapers for employment like to ignore; a few more glossy, kaleidoscopic, A4-sized, advertiser-friendly magazines could, at the very least, paper over the cracks.

Breaking the sad news

Sienna Miller poses at the G.I. Joe premiere... before the difficult questions begin

“Really sad,” says Sienna Miller, looking uncomfortable, and clamming her mouth shut. But the Sky News red carpet reporter is looking for a bit more of a reaction than that to the death of film director John Hughes: something about his iconic teen angst-fest The Breakfast Club, perhaps, or his legacy to the high school genre. Sienna duly trots out the following: “I just think obviously he was an incredible director and an incredible filmmaker, and it’s sad… but I always feel bad talking about it like it’s news.”

As a news consumer, this was frustrating. The (indeed very sad) death of John Hughes was news. I wanted her to be able to enthuse off-the-cuff about Matthew Broderick’s performance in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off  and how she grew up longing to be part of the Eighties brat pack, whether that was true or not. But even if this was Sienna just being her spiky self again, her comment reflects what appears to be a growing trend in tellynewsland: news editors’ demands for celebrity insta-eulogies.

I’m still recovering from the day BBC News raced down to a London showbiz event to break the news of director Anthony Minghella’s death to Kevin Spacey and a number of people who had actually known and worked with him – their pale faces backing up their claims that they were “shocked” – then followed this tactless pursuit of soundbite grief later the same evening by waking up elderly astonomer Patrick Moore for a little phone chat about the passing of his close friend, the sci-fi writer Arthur C. Clarke.

A reporter friend of mine covering the fresh death of a semi-public figure was once asked to ring round other public figures who had known him for reactions. After the first person he rang went very silent on hearing the reason for his call, he stopped dialling, and decided if it was him, he wouldn’t want some stranger telling him their friend or colleague had died, especially not a reporter who has been asked to do so by his editors for reasons that are as much commercially motivated as they are professional habit.

As a journalist, I’ve only come close to this kind of awkwardness once. Part of a modest-sized media scrum waiting to doorstep the then Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Employment Micheál Martin outside a science shindig in Trinity, some of the radio reporters discovered via their breaking news text subscriptions that businessman Tony Ryan, of Ryanair fame, had passed away. The microphones encircling his chin, Martin was asked for his thoughts. He was wary at first. Had that been confirmed? No one wants to give an obituary, however glowing, to someone who’s still very much alive.

So here, from the Sky News website, you can watch the cast of G.I. Joe give their “oh my god, really?” red carpet reactions to Hughes’s death. It’s the new media training session they’re all clamouring to attend: how to pay your immediate, but still perfectly sensitive, respects to the (very) recently deceased.