The executive producer behind Spooks, Life on Mars and Hustle talks to Matt Parvin about the future of broadcasting, British TV and how it feels to be back in Oxford.

Marc Kidson shows you how to cook a roast dinner that will save you slaving over a hot stove.

Recipe Re-cap:

Student-friendly Sunday Roast, for two.

– Two chicken legs
– Two lemons
– Two red onions
– 8 garlic cloves
– Fresh rosemary
– Olive oil, salt, black pepper

For the Potato Wedges:
– Two large baking potatoes
– Olive oil, salt, black pepper
– Other seasoning: e.g. paprika, dried rosemary, dried thyme

1. Cut the lemons and red onions into quarters, add to a large roasting tin.
2. Peel 8 cloves of garlic (or to taste) and add to tin.
3. Season both sides of the chicken with black pepper and salt, place in tin.
4. Scatter over fresh rosemary, then drizzle generously with olive oil, more salt and pepper, and mix to coat all ingredients.
5. Place in oven, preheated to 180C/Gas Mark 4 on top shelf.
6. Cut the potatoes into wedges (see video tip), and place into oven-proof dish.
7. Drizzle with olive oil, season well with salt and black pepper, then add pinches of paprika, rosemary, and thyme (if using).
8. Mix to coat all the wedges with seasoning, place below chicken in the oven.
9. Cook for 40 minutes once wedges are in, tossing ingredients of both pans halfway and switching positions if the wedges are cooking too slowly.
10. Remove from oven once chicken is nicely brown and the wedges are cooked through.
11. Finally, serve with vegetable of choice, spooning over pan juices for extra flavour.

The strangest thing about Japan is not the food. And believe me, to the average Brit, accustomed to well cooked, battered Cod as their staple fish, the food in Japan is strange. Even our Yo Sushi interpretation seems tame once you have experienced full-on Japanese cuisine. The sheer variety of colours, flavours, ingredients, styles of cooking (and lack there of) left me embarrassed about my average diet back home. It took a trip to Tokyo’s famous fish market to make me realise why food is such an integral part of Japanese culture. Here, workers tolerate, and largely ignore, the tourists who come to witness huge tuna and a plethora of other fish I couldn’t even attempt to name, being auctioned.

In other Asian countries that I have visited, notably India and China, where I was always conscious of being freakishly tall, white and foreign, in Japan I felt entirely at home. It’s the only country I’ve ever visited and thought ‘Yeah, I could actually live here’. Despite the obvious cultural divides between our two nations, I got the impression that the British and Japanese nuances and psyche have a lot in common. They share our island mentality. Japan certainly feels detached from Asia – the lack of anyone except ethnic Japanese walking around central Tokyo suggests their immigration policy reflects that too – much as we are isolated from Europe. Their respect for personal space and unwanted conversation might mean the Japanese come across stoic and perhaps cold but that seems very natural to a Brit who took four years before he spoke to his next door neighbour. They also share our disregard for other languages and persistence in speaking our own mother tongue progressively louder to anyone who can’t understand it, using decibels to compensate for vowels. The taxi drivers in Kyoto gave us entirely blank looks when we asked to be taken to the golden pavilion – probably the most notable tourist site in the city.

For all the similarities between our nations, Japan is of course very different and this is what made the country so strange to me. The place felt familiar yet eerily different, like seeing an old friend for the first time again after a term at university. Whether it was their unfathomable love for strange cartoon creatures that were either cute or creepy, such as the phallic mascot of Tokyo Tower called ‘Noppon’, I’m still undecided.

Even the ruthless efficiency of the trains or their refusal to break even minor rules felt odd; every man on the streets immaculately dressed in suits and crowds waiting patiently for the ‘green man’ whilst the road was obviously devoid of cars. As did the infusion of superstition into their daily life – we visited one temple in Kyoto with miles of orange arches each dedicated to the rice and sake God, rented by every major company in Japan. On the back of this visit and other similar ones I found it impossible to leave the country before I had become the proud owner of a fox shaped bell. This supposedly has the power to call good luck to whoever rings it. Even the countryside I saw from the window of the infamous bullet train looked different due to a farming culture in maintaining small, very regular fields, in contrast to loose and expansive ones back home.

Japan is a fantastic country. Going there is not going to be a life changing experience and you won’t ‘find yourself’ like people seem to do in Thailand. Just walking around Tokyo and soaking in the atmosphere is an experience in its own right, as is going into an average sized bar to find it has just four chairs and an £8 entry fee. But going there will, oddly enough, make you consider and hopefully appreciate what being British means.

Blind Date is kindly sponsored by the Oxford Retreat, open for lunch, supper and drinks at 1 Hythe Bridge Street.

Him: Winston Featherly-Bean, Harris Manchester, PPE

Itinerant Alaskan turned OxStu news editor, looking to mix business with pleasure and sleaze with clichés.

Our newspapers are rivals, apparently, and not always friendly ones. So when this paper suggested a blind date between editors, I gamely took up the chance to promote collegial relations. But my bosses warned of savage Cherwell trickery and I arrived at the Oxford Retreat just a little wary. No need. I was pleased to see that the alluring blonde loitering outside was, in fact, my date. Happily, she was rather better looking than my own newspaper’s beloved if stubbly chiefs – and lovely company too. Speed-talking engagingly through Into the Wild’s symbolism and the merits of Italian hospitals, Marta came across as driven but sweet. There were some unavoidable bits of typical first-meeting chat – she seemed determined not to allow a silent moment – but luckily the Cherwell’s beautiful editress was well worth getting to know.

Banter: Rapid & thoughtful

Looks: She could edit my copy…

Personality: We yanks would say “spunky”

2nd date? Crew date, dead ahead!

Her: Marta Szczerba St John’s, PPE

A fierce Cherwell Editor finishing her term, looking for someone who will fill in the void left by the newspaper, entertaining her intellectually (and probably physically too).

Wow, an OxStu person who doesn’t send me to sleep after 5 minutes! But admittedly, it took me a while to learn that Winston travelled all the way from vast and cold Alaska to Harris Manchester, shooting a commercial for McDonald’s in Indonesia along the way. I can’t deny that the two hours we spent in Oxford Retreat were intense. I was relieved when I learnt that yes, Winston has good skills of riposte and that I wasn’t alone throwing misunderstood remarks at the other party, which happens more often than not. After probing him on why he joined OxStu (‘Cause I thought Cherwell is better so I can contribute to OxStu more’ ) we only had two or three moments of genuine awkward silence. Overall, Winston proved to be a lovely dinner companion, but let’s face it: romance between the two papers would never work.

Banter: Sharp

Looks: Lives up to the name

Personality: Refreshing

2nd date? OxStu/Cherwell crew date

Going Up:

Lent apologies

It’s the beginning of Lent so forty days without chocolate/alcohol/kebabs still seems fairly manageable and we’re optimistic. Let’s hope it continues!

Apologies

78 days after Tiger Woods’ affairs came to seedy light, he has finally managed to eke out an epic 13-minute apology. Are John Terry and Ashley Cole to follow?

Good Views

The ‘Endeavour’ shuttle left the International Space Station with a new ‘Tranquillity’ mode which features seven huge windows through which to watch space. The station commander Jeffrey Williams was delighted, “We are really going to enjoy the view.”

British Sport Morale

27-year old Amy Williams was the first Briton to win a solo Gold medal in thirty years, in the women’s skeleton competition as part of the Winter Olympics. Anything that gives us a little faith for 2012…

Going Down:

Banksy

One of Britain’s biggest Banksy works, a mural of a rat holding a machine gun, is to be painted over by a developer who admits to not liking ‘modern art’.

Security

A website called ‘pleaserobme.com’ claims to be able to reveal the location of empty houses based on what people post online. That’s why we’re always on facebook – we just don’t want to be robbed.

Fair Play

Shakter Donetsk footballers were banned from Harrods by Muhammed Al Fayed in the build up to their match with the Egyptian businessman’s club, Fulham, who went on to win the match 2-1. Victory for the ‘win-at-all-costs mentality’ once again…

Swimming Goggles

Due to health and safety laws, officials have been claiming that children should be prevented from swimming in goggles because the rubber straps can be dangerous if a child has them “snapped back in their face”. Stop giving us ideas…

I am, I think, the first person in the history of Cherwell to be rejected by my Blind Date partner before we had even opened the menus and ordered the first drinks. I spent a happy evening constructing witty remarks and erudite opinions on the great topics of the day, so that I was sure to impress my new paramour. Unfortunately we already knew each other, from a drunken late night conversation in an overpriced London club a year ago. On the very reasonable grounds that Sohna is young, charming and beautiful, whereas I am old, fat and grumpy, a new date for her will be arranged, but not me. I haven’t been so distraught since the Cherwell Boathouse last took venison off the menu.

Perhaps by way of compensation, my editor agreed to have dinner with me instead. As a food critic, you’re employed to know about eating, so if you pick a bad restaurant or worse, suggest a dish that turns out to be disgusting… So I was on my best behaviour. And I booked Pierre Victoire. As the Oxford Union might say: where else? It’s the obvious choice, which is perhaps why I haven’t got around to reviewing it yet – I just assumed you were all fully cognisant of its greatness. But they deserve their 650 words anyway, for Pierre Victoire is one of the not-so-hidden gems of Oxford dining; reliably excellent, good value food in a small, cosy, friendly environment.

We went on a Tuesday evening, which is generally a bad time to eat out, because most places are half empty and all the decent cooks are on their day off. But PV was hosting a big group on a birthday dinner, which livened things up until the post theatre crowd began drifting in.

I started with a chicory, pear, and Roquefort salad. I don’t normally do salads – a soggy pile of wilting green stuff is not really my idea of sustenance – but there were three empty packets of McCoy’s on my desk, I hadn’t done any exercise for a month, and I convinced myself that if I chose some rabbit food, as my brother calls it, as a starter I might just about fit into my dinner jacket again. (It didn’t work). I was immediately punished for my virtue, the lonely lumps of (really quite good) Roquefort being vastly outnumbered by a great heap of pear and chicory, which was nice enough but really quite dull.

For those of you who are sad food buffs, the chicory had also been exposed to slightly too much light before ending up my plate, for it was a touch greener and more bitter than the ideal. But it was better than any other salad you can get in central Oxford on a cold Tuesday evening. My date’s goat’s cheese soufflé was much better: light, fluffy parcels of cheese and egg white alive with the rich smell of the farmyard (in a good way, in a good way). My smoked haddock was exemplary and came with a beautiful, quivering poached egg which, when I gently touched it with the edge of my fork, exploded into a rich, unctuous river of yolk flowing lava-like across the serried backs of the unsuspecting fish. Beautiful, just beautiful. Tasted pretty good too. Alternatively, the cassoulet was strong and filling in the best French housewives’ tradition. We had puddings too, but I was too scared of my date’s reaction if I tore myself away from her scintillating conversation to take notes on the food, so I can’t for the life of me remember what they were. I’m sure they were good though.

All of this came to twenty pounds per person for three courses -superb value. At lunchtime they do three courses for ten pounds, which, coming from London, I find utterly unbelievable. I’ve paid more for a cocktail. Rating: 4/5 In short: Reliable

Heading off to watch Laura do a poetry reading, at the Beatknik Bookstore in Jericho, I wasn’t sure what to expect – my image of poetry readings was all duffel coats, long pauses and lots of staring moodily into the distance. I can safely say I have never been so surprised in my life.

Despite the fact that her second book is published under the title ‘Ugly Shy Girl’, Laura Dockrill is neither of these things. It may seem like a slightly sycophantic cliché, but she comes across like a whirlwind of bright colours, pink lipstick, clever wording and spot on impressions. Described by the Independent as a ‘Poet for the iPod generation’, there was certainly no reading involved – Laura stands, brimming with (nervous?) energy and acts her poems; it comes as no surprise that the word ‘performance’ is frequently prefixed on to the word ‘poet’ when describing her job. ‘I have enough respect for the poets who read the poetry quietly, of course, but I just couldn’t do that. It makes me less nervous to be energetic – if stood still my hands would be shaking, I’d be a wreck, and I’d be sweating the life out of me!’

Laura is probably the first of her kind to have graduated from the infamous Brit School. ‘I did Performing Arts – no I didn’t, that’s a complete lie! I did theatre there. It was probably the best experience of my life. Teenagers are difficult aren’t they? I was sixteen and I went to a private school before that, and my parents really had to scrimp for me to go there… we couldn’t help but feel like it was a bit of a waste of time. I felt creatively they were burning me out – I remember one of them saying that if I wanted to be a writer then they’d see me stacking shelves with Mickey Mouse in Sainsbury’s and I just thought ‘Fuck this’.’

It was the creative encouragement that it seems Laura has always craved, and this has helped her flourish into the performer she is today. ‘It’s so creative, they just encourage you – you could just go up to the front desk and say ‘You wanted to put a play on’ and they’d just say ‘Go on then’. Don’t get me wrong, there were prima donnas whimpering ‘I’m like so… fractured’ and you meet all the characters but they’re just inspiration- and you know, at one point I was a dick too. It’s growing up isn’t it?’

‘Poetry comes easy to me. Everything else just makes me feel like an imbecile’

The Brit school is famous for its alumni and has been nicknamed the ‘Fame Academy’ by the media, with ex-students often quite embarrassed about their roots, preferring instead to appear ‘self-made’. Laura doesn’t seem to share these qualms, perhaps because what she does seems so unusual compared to the usual Brit-pack singers and actresses. Why though, did she not take the path more travelled? ‘I did want to be an actress, but I just couldn’t stand the auditions. It’s the most gruelling, stressful, terrifying experience ever. And so I wanted to be a playwright, but that is just boring – watching people perform your work that you know you could have done better. So in the end, it just seemed right to marry my too loves together. It comes easy to me. Everything else just makes me feel like an imbecile.’

‘Saying you want to be a poet is like saying you want to be a tyrannosaurus rex’

And it seems that Laura is trying to ignite the creative passion in people that she felt slipping away in that first secondary school. ‘I want them to go away and think ‘Maybe I could write…’ It’s such a craft, and it’s been forgotten. It frustrates me how it’s being taught in schools. If people don’t engage with poetry and poets – how is anyone ever going to aspire to be something they don’t think is tangible to them? They’ll just think, Oh, I could never be a poet, poets are all dead. Saying you want to be a poet is like saying you want to be a tyrannosaurus rex. So it’s important that people who are twenty-three and could be a singer, or an actress or a receptionist, can still be excited by words.’

For Dockrill, it’s all about making poetry exciting again and reaching a new audience. ‘Why is music and theatre so important? Why do people say ‘Oh, I can’t live without that song’ but they don’t really do that with poetry. I want to make people fall back in love with words. No one listens to stories anymore.’

‘Poetry’s not made for everywhere though, we know that’

And reaching a new audience is just what she is doing- her second ever gig was at Latitude, and since she has played at Glastonbury and Reading. ‘On paper it sounds really exciting but it’s mostly drunk people going ‘What the fuck is this?’ and throwing cider at my head. Tough crowd! Poetry’s not made for everywhere though, we know that. Although, Latitude is always amazing, because it’s about all the arts; you want to go to the comedy tent, or the theatre tent more than you want to go to the music stage.’

If that was her second gig, then her first must have been pretty impressive. It was, in fact, because of her friend Kate Nash – in the year below her at the Brit School – that Laura first performed. ‘She did like a mini launch and she wanted all her friends to read something, but I didn’t have anything that I wanted to do. I’d just come out of university though, and we had had to write a letter to someone telling them something, and I changed it into a letter of obsession – and wrote to Rolf Harris- of course!- and made this whole character up… and I just knocked it together and made it rhyme. I read it all scared and shaking, so nervous. Acting is so different because you’re doing someone else’s work, but once it’s your own work and you’re being judged by everyone, and the clothes your wearing because you haven’t got a costume to wear- it’s scary! But once you get paid for doing something you love- even if it’s just a drink you get bought – it’s like ‘this is it!’

And what’s the dream, where does Laura go from here? As it is, she’s concentrating on her third book and is taking it easy on the gigging side of things – but next year? ‘In 2011 I’m going to make a poem number one in charts- I’m going to do a bit of a Lou Reed’s Perfect Day and get aspirational, inspirational figures in the arts to say a line of the poem a capella and then see where it takes us. And all the money that we raise will go into a massive pot to fund new talent.’ ‘People think poets don’t need to be paid, people think poets are just banjo players or that they’re all like Pete Doherty – they don’t need pens they write in blood…. The amounts of times I’ve sat next to someone and they say ‘So what do you do?’ I feel kind of embarrassed, because people don’t expect it. It’s like saying you’re an astronaut. And then people just say, ‘Are you actually living off that?’ and I say ‘Yes’. I mean of course, it’s a struggle but this is what I want to do. If it doesn’t work I’ll just have a baby…’

It’s said with a wry smile, but there is a sense that Laura battles against such poetry prejudices on a regular basis. ‘I face those kinds of battles all the time. People ask me who my favourite poet is all the time: sometimes I say Eminem, sometimes I say Roald Dahl or whoever. If you say someone like Sylvia Plath, they just think you’ve looked on Wikipedia. That’s so frustrating because people only know a handful of poets, so they think you’re not a real poet. People just love to capture you and I find it really tough because I am so inspired by everything – music, art, people, things- that it’s so hard to say what my favourite anything is.’

There is no bitterness in these words, but a very potent understanding of how people work- something that reads powerfully in her poetry, and a key factor in her quick success. ‘It’s been a whirlwind – well, as far as a poetry whirlwind could whisk you.’ The thing is, I imagine in Laura’s case, the whirlwind might go pretty far.

By the end of this you might think, ‘this guy needs a sense of humour.’ Well, I’m in the market for a new one. And so you should be too. There’s something rotten about British humour, and it’s time to hold our noses and face up to it.

‘Apart from Harry Potter, humour is our last remaining cultural export’

In English-speaking foreign countries, British humour is a sign of cultural superiority. It’s part of our mystique, that vague notion of an island peopled entirely by James Bonds. British humour, dry as gin and black as taxis. We work hard to keep its cachet high, and understandably: apart from Harry Potter, it’s our last remaining cultural export. And it’s one of the few forms of nationalism we have left. Americans? Too dumb to get it. The French? Too stuck up. There’s a paternalistic thrill about it when some foreign product (usually American, The Simpsons or the Coen brothers maybe, but remember that Australian show Kath and Kim?) takes up British-style humour. Perhaps that’s what it felt like when a colony first formed a cricket team.

We like to feel as if we’re inside something other people want to get inside too. In that sense British humour is like Oxford: exclusivity is key. Here’s where the essential element of British humour, irony, comes in. The main thing about irony is that it only works if you already know what’s going on and where you stand. Take an example: ‘lovely weather!’ That’s (debatably) funny in a hailstorm; in sun, just banal. It gets more complicated when the context of a joke depends on your milieu: ‘that Dave Cameron’s a splendid chap,’ say. Irony relies on cultural codes that close groups off from one another and from hapless outsiders: it’s basically a form of in-joke, which is why we love to tell Americans, ‘you won’t get it, it’s ironic.’ ‘Oh,’ they say, embarrassed, slightly awe-struck, ‘that’ll be the famous British humour.’

It also fosters ambiguity in social situations. Banter, for example. You walk into the bar, your collar popped, hair spiked, ready – or, as you would put it, pumped. Your companion greets you: ‘Good look, mate. Good look!’ Not only do you suspect he is joking, but in any case your only option is a counter-quip. The spiral has already begun. Lest you dismiss it as a modern form, remember Churchill was a master of banter (‘and you, madam, are ugly, but I will be sober in the morning!’) But then, he was quite posh. The atmosphere created by the insult-as-joke obviously favours the ostensibly more socially secure, which in Britain correlates to what kind of school you went to: another form of exclusivity.

So to a second and related area of British humour: self-deprecation. You might think this makes up for the elitist spirit I have sketched so far, but you’d be wrong. Sincere self-deprecation makes us insecure, and insecurity provokes us to seek solace in superiority to others (c.f. Andy Millman in Extras). If insincere, it simply reinforces positive self-image: you are not only wonderful, but modest too. Self-deprecation also breeds neurosis in those who come into contact with it. How do you react when someone says, ‘I’m such an idiot, I totally forgot that Sartre changed his mind about the concept of praxis,’ or just, ‘God, I look so ugly today’?

‘The comedy of social awkwardness has largely taken over from the comedy of class’

The comedy of social awkwardness has largely taken over from the comedy of class. Perhaps this dates to Tony Blair. Contemporary British humour specialises in identifying and examining in painful detail all the sources of humiliation lurking on the edges of our daily lives. Whether we’re all too mindful of each new embarrassment (Mark, Peep Show), self-consciously oblivious (David Brent, The Office), or faintly, tragically aware that someone, somewhere, seems to be laughing at us (Alan Partridge), each state is as undesirable as the next. Perhaps it’s just the dying sigh of an ex-empire, but British humour at its core says, ‘Life is full of failure. Best just stay in your pyjamas.’

Compare Friends, which extracts its humour from adorable and ultimately harmless human foibles. In some ways its about as funny as a kitten with a ball of wool; still, it’s life-affirming. That’s why it’ll be on, somewhere, any time you care to turn on the TV. Frasier, on the other hand, pays so much homage (Frasier would rhyme that with fromage as in frais) to British humour that it’s sort of like a cargo cult, but even that features an old man and a dog. By the way, for those who think I’m being too Atlantic here, I’d bring in German comedies but I’m not sure they have any. The point is that British TV comedy depicts a world of unredeemed, unhappy people. That can’t just reflect our national psyche, it must influence it too.

‘It cherishes the cutting remark, discourages sincerity, and prides itself on being meaningless to ever-larger groups of the uninitiated’

But it’s in real life that British humour, as a form of interaction, that we do our best to make attractive to unfortunates who didn’t grow up with it, has its most harmful effects. As a cultural mode it puts us constantly on guard for social ambiguity and awkwardness; it cherishes the cutting remark, discourages sincerity, and prides itself on being meaningless to ever-larger groups of the uninitiated. We are a shy, stiff, anxious, and increasingly parochial people. There’s plenty of blame to go round. I’m just saying, lay a smidgen of it at the door of British humour.