The doors open and the pro-Vice Chancellor sweeps in, flanked by a swishy mass of black-robed proctors. With impressive co-ordination for a bunch of academics, the procession crosses the floor of the Divinity School and sets up court at the far end. The procession is silent. The audience is silent. This is Convocation.

Only two elections merit holding Convocation: that of the Chancellor and the Professor of Poetry. Every detail has to be just right. Half-way through his first syllable, one of the proctors stops; he’s forgotten to tip his hat. Once the giggles fade he reads out the vote count, and in all of thirty seconds weeks of campaigning come to an end.

Ruth Padel is swarmed by a smiling, congratulatory buzz. When I finally catch up with her at the after-party in Holywell Manor, she looks more relieved than jubilant. ‘The last week has been a barrage of stuff, it’s been difficult to hold myself together,’ she admits, sipping a glass of red.

The controversy of the past week aside, I ask her if she already has plans for her lectures. ‘I will be thinking about science a lot. Coleridge described words in a poem as hooked atoms, and I would like to do something about words and atoms in a poem and how poems work,’ she says, a little uncertainly. ‘Those are the lectures. I don’t know yet.’

If it sounds a bit vague, that’s only to be expected: it was only after Derek Walcott dropped out of the race that Padel could be reasonably confident of winning. She has much clearer ideas of what she wants to do ‘on the ground’ though, and gets increasingly animated as she talks about them.  

‘I’ve got plans to work, for instance, with Wild CRU. It’s part of the zoology department here. Professor David McDonald is a really wonderful conservationist—he’s got a lot of ideas about involving science and arts, literature and conservation, and I’d really like to go down that path too.’

It’s partly this interdisciplinary enthusiasm which earned her such strong support during the nominations, but isn’t she worried that it’ll alienate people who prefer a more traditional approach to poetry? ‘What does traditional mean?’ she retorts. ‘Tradition is a big subject. We’re all using tradition. We’re all in tradition. And you actually take the tradition forward by going away from it.’

‘The good poems that are written now are the poems about our lives and what matters to us now. You don’t want poetry that’s in a museum—it’s got to be done in the language of now, with the ideas of now, but using all the things that’ve come before.’

Unlike the professors who’ve come before, however, Padel will be the first woman on the job. In this she has something in common with Carol Ann Duffy, the nation’s new and first female Poet Laureate. Unlike Duffy though, Padel had ruled herself out from ever being nominated for the laureateship, calling it a ‘terrible job’ under constant national security.

‘Carol Ann will be fine,’ she says with a firm smile, though she admits that she personally would be afraid of not writing poems. But the professorship, she feels, is different. ‘I hope I would keep private enough. And you’re not asked to write any poems for this job.’

Still, her ambitions for the role sound taxing – rather than limiting herself to lectures, Padel is determined to ‘bring poetry’ to all the colleges in whatever way she can. ‘Part of what I do, whether it’s in university or outside, is making people realise that poetry as it is written now—and poetry in the past —is for them, whether they study English or study, I don’t know, astrophysics.’

‘Every college is different. Would they like to talk about their own poems? Would they like me to give examples of the variety of modern poetry now and how to read it? How it matters to their lives , how you can find poetry in the subject you’re reading. I would probably work through some people in each college. Maybe it would be a poetry society, maybe it would be a drinking club,’ she laughs.

‘Poetry is something that brings together, like Orpheus. Orpheus with his lyre brought stones and animals and mountains and things to him. And it should be fun.’

There’s something infectious about her enthusiasm. Padel has a warm, crackling charm, a sort of  Pratchett-esque witchiness. Of course, not everyone’s thrilled by her appointment; some are still sore about the Walcott affair. But Oxford’s new Professor of Poetry is clearly determined to reach out. It only remains to be seen how the students respond.

Children and childhood have long been a source of artistic inspiration: their straightforward attitudes and way of seeing the world, uncluttered by the complicated thoughts and ideas that adulthood brings. It is this gentle simplicity that pervades the current exhibits at the Sarah Wiseman Gallery, a small art gallery in Summertown, geared more towards selling than exhibition, although it certainly doesn’t fail to showcase the works to their best.

      On display here until the end of May can be found the sculpted wooden toys of Ian McKay and the silkscreen paintings of Catherine Rayner’s Creatures series. Both maintain a childlike frankness that charms and intrigues.

      McKay’s wooden toys, well-crafted and mechanical (usually with handles that turn to animate the figures), are most definitely toys that are art, rather than the other way around. They often feature old-fashioned dolls or figurines at play, subverting their topics, such as The Three Graces Eating Candy Floss. It is in his work with driftwood, however, that Ian McKay’s skills as a sculptor and an artist really shine. The set is made up of small wooden ships, moved by handle, set in and around pieces of driftwood of varying size, the largest measuring some metre and a half in length and containing over twenty ships that move in sequence. The driftwood backdrops that form the structure lend them an element of desolate poignancy that contrasts nicely with the brightly coloured, childish boats.

      Sarah Rayner’s silkscreen paintings, collectively titled Creatures, deal mainly with those that may be found in a rural garden, focusing on hares, rabbits and hedgehogs. At times her artistic style tends a little bit towards the static, becoming reminiscent of Beatrix Potter illustrations, but in her best works there is an energy and vitality to her creations that lend them real power. In Eva, for instance, the hare is slightly abstracted in form, but the impressionistic nature of it captures an animalistic sense of the creature.

      The only letdown of the exhibition is how similar a lot of the works are. Driftwood toys are certainly interesting and strangely affecting, but the variations are mainly in size and minor details, rather than in overall appearance; two pieces may be identical save that one has a small model yacht and the other a small model liner. The same is largely true of Rayner, who sticks to much the same subjects throughout the series. Overall, it is interesting and strangely beautiful, but it’s hard to avoid the feeling that one gains as much from the window display as one does the entire exhibition.

As the name suggests, Awaydays centres on football hooliganism. Those looking for unadulterated violent entertainment in a similar vein to Football Factory should look elsewhere. In fact, those looking for any entertainment at all should probably avoid this completely. This film is not fun; it is miserable. More miserable than marriage, miscarriage and Morrissey ground together in a pot of genocide.

The setting for this film is Merseyside, naturally. In the grim early years of Thatcher, The Pack travel from town to town to engage in mindless fisticuffs with fellow football fans.

Carty (Nicky Bell) longs for acceptance into the group. He finds a means of entry through Elvis (Stephen Graham) – a bohemian amongst apes – who befriends him on the basis of their mutual appreciation of good music, and the opportunity to make an emotional connection with someone of intelligence. Despite mutual artistic leanings, both have divergent interests: Carty wants nothing more than primal release through sex and violence, whilst Elvis yearns to escape that very same vacuum.

To understand these characters, the director wants you to relate to the boredom and drudgery of their environment. In this respect he succeeds, only perhaps a bit too well. The scenery is awash with dull browns and greys and the plot moves at a snail’s pace, never managing to muster up much momentum. The film stretches your patience to its maximum, to the point where the prospect of mindless violence is screamed for. But the payoff never delivers.

The fight scenes are clumsily shot, never yielding the visceral impact that is demanded. The film itself is schizophrenic in its endeavours. On the one hand it wants to drag the audience through grit and grime, but at the same time it strives desperately for stylish cult-chic.

Slow-motion moments, pensive, wide-angled river shots and trippy drug montages are used liberally and superfluously. All of which detract from what is genuinely interesting­-the characters. The young leads play their roles superbly, creating wonderful chemistry and managing to portray the contradictions within themselves with complete plausibility.

The supporting cast fare just as well; Stephen Graham as the leader of The Pack dominates the screen in every scene he’s in, and Holliday Grainger as Carty’s sister plays her vulnerable character perfectly.

Despite strong performances all round, perhaps the most disappointing area of the film is the lack of understanding of the characters’ situations and their consequent behavioural patterns.

Carty for example leads a humdrum life working in administration, his intelligence and artistic talents in danger of rotting away; but he never shows any contempt for his lifestyle. He seems perfectly happy with his underachievement: he taps plentiful ass; has a sister who idolises him; and holds no financial worries. As such, his dogmatic passion to beat the shit out of strangers never sits comfortably with the audience.

By the end of the film this irritates heavily, clouding whatever message is meant to be delivered. Some scenes are deeply poignant and yet others boring and drawn out. Interesting setups fail to be mined fully for their potential.

The film gets top marks for effort, but below average for execution. It is noble in its attempts to require patience from the viewer and avoid simple gratifying conclusions. In this respect it might warrant a viewing; any semi-decent British output should be commended.

Though if you do choose to watch it, expect to want to punch it in the face afterwards.

Two Stars out of Five

I apologise. ‘Comedy’ is far too broad for me to put my favourites down here and not to have whimpering twats droning in my ear about how Caddyshack is ‘seminal’. (It’s not. You are just a twat.)

But, onward. Anyone under the misconception that comedy is only funny when it is somehow relevant to them only has to look at Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator for renewed faith in early comedies’ power to tickle.

This wonderful pastiche of Nazism includes the subtly (and wonderfully) named dictator Adenoid Hynkel performing a lovely bit of ballet with a big inflatable globe. Absolute genius.

This and the films of Chaplin contemporary Buster Keaton form the basis for almost all physical comedy produced today.

Despite the seeming dearth of genuine comedy talent in mainstream cinema in recent years, some gems have nevertheless emerged, foremost among them Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy.

Without a doubt, it contains some of the greatest hammed-up lines in modern cinema, whilst the romantic sub plot even (kind of) works.

And just last year, Martin McDonagh’s move from stage to screen produced the hysterically funny In Bruges, thereby proving that there is room for sharp and biting dialogue in amongst the temptation of star power to carry a film.

Doing comedy a little bit differently often helps too, and Rob Reiner’s This Is Spinal Tap exploits the director’s incredible (albeit anal) attention to detail, to ensure that the film gets every bit of the documentary style spot on.

The result? The viewer is immediately and intensely transported into the sordid world of Nigel Tufnel and co.

Choosing my absolute personal favourite, though, required a painstaking effort to decide which comedy classic to pick from the bastion of bloody funny that is the complete Monty Python oeuvre. In the end, The Meaning of Life won out with just the right combination of witty dialogue and absurdity.

I know everyone will disagree with me, so I say this to the whimpering twats-bring it on.

Every year for four days in May The Great Escape Festival sees the city of Brighton taken over by an army of music fans who swarm to the 34 bars and clubs chosen to host the performances in the hope of catching the year’s ‘next big things’ before they hit the big time.

One of these bands is Bombay Bicycle Club, who seem destined to be perpetually ‘hotly-tipped’ for success. Having offered two excellent performances across the three days, and with an album on the way later this year, they seem finally ready to fulfil their much vaunted potential.

2006 was a big year for Bombay Bicycle Club. Having formed just a year before that, the four boys in their mid-teens suddenly faced the full attention of the English music-press. Some feared that, like so many other skinny-jeaned indie-hopefuls, the band would be too young to withstand the harsh winds of the hype machine. Happily, they emerged virtually unscathed from the clutches of the NME’s claws and, talking to singer Jack Steadman, guitarist Jamie MacColl, and bassist Ed Nash, it is clear that they couldn’t be more optimistic about the band’s future.

‘We want to be the biggest band in the world,’ jokes MacColl, ‘but seriously, we just want to do this for as long as we can. It’s been frustrating not being able to put an album together, but now that it’s ready it’s pretty exciting’.

But how did being on the pages of NME at only fifteen years old affect them? Surely it must have been hard to keep their feet on the ground when their rockstar dreams were coming true before their eyes?

‘We were really well managed: we weren’t aware of the hype at all. It was weird being recognised-and it was definitely exciting-but we didn’t take it too seriously. We’ve all got places at university waiting for us if this doesn’t work out; we’ve tried to be sensible about it’.

Asked if they’re happy with their debut album, the response comes promptly in the affirmative. ‘Definitely,’ asserts Steadman, ‘some of the songs are a few years old now, so it’s hard to keep perspective when you’re so familiar with them, but we’re pleased with the finished product. It’s been a long time coming; now we just want to get it out there’.

Having worked so hard on the album, MacColl says the possibility of it leaking online is a definite concern for the band. ‘It would make you sick if you’d been working on an album for ages and people got their hands on it before you were ready. It happened to Grizzly Bear, one of our favourite bands: they recorded an incredible album and it leaked months before the release date’.

The issues of releasing albums in the modern world aside, Nash asserts that playing live is the only real reason to be in a band: ‘we love it’, he says, ‘we’ll never get tired of it.’ When they start to play, their raw talent makes it instantly clear that they belong on the stage. Their live set is nicely varied, offering shout-a-long choruses while maintaining enough individuality to keep things credible. Their new single ‘Always Like This’ is a definite standout, and sees the crowd descend into an ugly, dancing mess of sweaty youths.
If they continue to perform like this, it seems that there is nothing to stop them from triumphantly entering into the mainstream

Next Tuesday go to the Playhouse and break out of the Oxford bubble. It’ll be the best thing you’ve done all term, and Chickenshed’s As a Mother of a Brown Boy will be by far the best piece of professional theatre you have seen in a long time.

Chickenshed are all about a perspective shift. When the company was founded 25 years ago in north London, the message was simple: that life is good if you’re in it. This remains true today: theatre is at heart a social medium and it must be inclusive.

The group’s emphasis on a kind of modern social humanism infliltrates all of its work. And in the case of Brown Boy, the production’s commitment to human issues goes far deeper than its aesthetic. Director Christine Niering has a hugely personal relationship with the production, as the narrative centres around the traumatic ordeal that her sister underwent when her son was killed. He died in a police chase after being caught up in jewellery thefts in London. The boy had been a member of Chickenshed, where he sought refuge from the harsh realities of growing up as a fatherless black male on the council estates of north London.

Niering is emphatic about the play’s human message. In a piece which deals so provocatively with the ‘black issue’, alongside difficult questions of single parenthood, the danger of dwelling in the solely political dimension is avoided.
This is largely due to the way in which the production is staged artistically. Connectivity is central to Chickenshed’s message; making connections across social and physical boundaries has always been important. Chickenshed productions incorporate not only able-bodied cast members, but also physically or mentally disabled people. It is all about returning to the issue itself: political or social issues are, at heart, human ones. So long as we are able to see through this politicised veil, we are able to see the truth. And for Chickenshed, in art there is truth.

Niering believes Chickenshed’s role is both social and artistic, but that the former must not be at the latter’s expense – ‘our ultimate responsibility is to produce excellent theatre. The only way we can do this is by drawing in individuals who do come from all over the place.’ If Chickenshed were to target one section of society, they would not be able to express the experiences of such a diverse group of people so effectively. It is the company’s social spectrum which makes it unique.

My sister is a member of Chickenshed. She comes from a nice, middle class family and is lucky enough to have been privately educated. Yet, she works and leads young people with severe learning disabilities, kids from the nearby council estates our parents warned us not to walk through. This is the amazing thing about Chickenshed. It unites people regardless of background. Once you are on stage, it’s not about where you’re from: it’s about where you are going.

Ultimately, the production is socio-politically relevant. But in projecting through theatre, the piece breaks down the political and gives a simple message: this is human. In labeling someone as criminal, black, IC1, we immediately alienate that person from him or herself. It’s about treating people with decency, giving them the respect they deserve. As a Mother of a Brown Boy is unique, and deserves your undivided attention.

I must confess, my sexual awakening was not found in day-dreamed dalliances with strapping farm-hands from the well-worn pages of Penguin classics. My childhood taught me to understand books as tools of mind-expansion, soul-enrichment and exam-passing, not, alas, groin-engorgement (a-hem). I guess things can change.

Who is my favourite fictional fittie then? Well, the classical heroes are not for me: Achilles’ prowess is hampered by a pushy mother and crippling arrogance; Odysseus’ cunning and strength are dampened by eyes (and other more troubling portions of his anatomy) that wander as far from home as he and his Greek chums.

The warrior-heroes of this fair isle hold little more allure. No doubt Beowulf’s biceps would bulge breathtakingly (and I am sure I could find some use for his legendary grip), but hour upon hour of monosyllabic self-aggrandising tales would wear the libido a little thin methinks.

Perhaps not a hero from the days of yore then, but surely those sexually repressed lascivious ladies of Georgian and Victorian literary circles bequeathed men to tantalise and titillate me? Alas, no. You can keep Darcy with his sexless reserve, his moral fibre and soggy breeches, and though I’d happily make room for Heathcliff’s brooding, dangerous passion, he is too wild a stallion. Gaskell’s men are all eclipsed by their more striking and impressive female counterparts, and Eliot’s are all well-intentioned, intellectual also-rans.

The only rich hunting ground populated with men you can really sink your teeth into is – no, not Bram Stoker’s Dracula – but Shakespeare’s drama. There are so many men in Shakespeare’s work with whom I could tussle the sheets all midsummer night long making the ‘beast with two backs’ (forgive me), because the way to this man’s heart is one of words. Who can deny the sexiness of Iago’s mastery of both language and man? Certainly not me; that menacing, wordy malignancy, balanced at once dangerously and deliciously with such poise and confidence, is beyond my power to resist. And ‘what a piece of work’ is Hamlet! I could forgive a man almost anything if he could talk to me as Hamlet does when declaring his indifference to humanity. I don’t care if ‘man delights not’ him, give me his ‘quintessence of dust’ any day. Then of course, there is Benedict with his suave, acerbic wit, and Oberon with his jealous passion and mystical power, and Othello with his noble presence and physical grandeur…the list goes on. Shakespeare’s men are the men for me; they are, most definitely, fit fiction.