Most of the really great pubs in Oxford are something of a hike from the centre of town, but The Grapes is a gem right on your front door. Situated next to the Wig and Pen, it provides a nice alternative to those of us who don’t want to spend an evening wishing we were dead. You would be hard pushed to find two pubs so close together that are so different. The Grapes is tiny, so if you arrive during the lunchtime luvvie rush or after the score of regulars, then you’ll be hard pushed to get a seat, though with its pleasant 60s soundtrack and a moderately priced booze, you’ll want to spend some time here. To appreciate its unique charm try to get there at three and stumble out at half-past six. The walls are decorated with posters from events at the nearby theatres, and Daniel O’Donnell and the Chippendales seem to have a stake. The barmaid is beautiful, but we fear she is betrothed to the genuinely funny barman (sample comment directed to the Boy Texas: “would you like a haircut with your pint?”). We can still dream. The wonderful thing about this pub is looking outside to see the centre of Oxford in full swing, while you are sat in a sliver of George Street where time seems to stand still. The only interruption is the front door swinging open to catch a split second of passing conversation. We paused to consider the bewildering late afternoon light as we slumped out into what we had thought was the middle of the night. “That barmaid’s well fit,” mused Pat. “I know,” agreed Texas. “I really, really know.”
ARCHIVE: 2nd Week TT 2003

Entertaining one’s grandparents is always tricky. So much must be borne in mind: will the place serve sherry at Granny’s preferred lukewarm temperature? Can a Zimmer frame fit through the front door? Will someone drone off into a story about the war while ordering? What will we do about Grandad pissing himself every five minutes? It was thus with trepidation that I booked a table with two of my oldest surviving relatives. Eventually I settled for the hack-ridden, OUCA-favoured, ChCh and Oriel staple Ma Belle. I had only been once before: a delightfully long, boozy lunch with the lady of the hour in Michaelmas one Tuesday afternoon, and fancied a return. I was not disappointed. It’s a wonderfully clattery French bistro, with fine house plonk but rather dodgy baguettes. Everyone began with salad: a chicken liver pâté for me; a goat’s cheese and a smoked chicken for the fogies, all served with delicate vinaigrette and the predictable paprika garnish. Delicious but for the flavourless tomatoes in the salads. It being the Sabbath and all I chose pork, while the geriatrics both chose to dribble into Coquilles St. Jacques. They assured me this was delicious but I must say it looked rather dodgy: you simply can’t serve the delicate flesh of scallops in a cloying, textureless mashed potato. My pork was really excellent: slowly fried in butter and moistened by a herby béchamel, again served with a mash fluffed with cream, chives and an onion gravy. A superb marriage of flavours, if a little cluttered. Both courses went well with a crisp Muscadet. Best of all, Grandad didn’t piss himself till after coffee, and even then nobody seemed to mind.
ARCHIVE: 2nd Week TT 2003

Peter Harness isn’t brooding. He doesn’t have furious, intense eyes and he smiles a lot. I mention this because the Harness I have in my mind is silent, solid and scary. This Peter Harness is wearing a stone-blue Oriel T-shirt. He swings his arms as he walks like an affable goon. His eyes, I notice, are green-hazel not, as I’d thought, impenetrable brown. His squirrel-eyebrows have a tendency to fibrillate. Nevertheless, he scares me shitless.
I tell him. He chuckles. “Really? I know that I terrify people a bit but I don’t know why. I don’t want to scare people at all because I’m actually quite nice. I’m sorry I terrify you.”
The day before, the curtains had just closed on the first run of Mongoose, Harness’s first professional play. It’s “tough, delicate and cunningingly structured” (Guardian). An Oriel DPhil student, he’s managed to develop something of an iconic status among Oxford thesps and comedians from the second-year up. President of the Oxford Revue in 2000, most recently he adapted Dorian Gray. Yet an internet trawl only reveals the following: he was brought up in an old people’s home, he died on 21 February 1825, and at one stage in his life was bequeathed one Negro.
Apparently only the first one is true.
Although he doesn’t like scaring people, Mongoose has its fair share of unsettling bits. “Which bits?” Well, the bit with a ruler. “Oh that’s fantastic! Ted goes, ‘Mongoose stuck a ruler in his mouth,’ and the audience titters. Then he says, ‘Sideways,’ and they laugh. Then he says, ‘I had to cut his mouth to get it out,’ and they all gasp. They did it every night. I found it lovely.” Suspiciously, he chuckles again.
“Most people come out wanting to hug Ted and love him. What you’ve in fact seen is a man who writes poison pen letters, pushes his father down the stairs, sticks a ruler in his mouth, and eventually murders him.” Nope, there’s definitely a talking mongoose. “Everybody kind of ends up believing in it, which they should. Otherwise you’re stuck in a room with a psychopath.” He looks pensive. I decide there is something impenetrable about his eyes. “I think there’s a talking mongoose, too.”
Mongoose is about Ted, a lonely farmer coming to terms with the death of his lifelong friend. A talking mongoose. Did he have to suppress any urge to play Ted? “No I would’ve done it very differently. I saw him as this hapless, fat, Northern farmer. Richard had a nice kind of lilting voice, which I hadn’t heard [when I was writing].”
It must be strange having one foot here in Oxford and another in a professional world. “I’ve kind of gone on. I feel I properly left three years ago. I graduated in ’97, did three years of my doctorate and then got commissioned to do Chocolate Billionaire. I’ve just come back to finish off. I know nobody in my college anymore and skulk about. Nobody’s got the slightest f**king idea who I am.”
Harness stared in the student film Onion Club about a stand-up tragedian. Maybe there’s something of onions and tragedy about Harness. Maybe also loneliness. Mongoose is, after all, a pitiful study of a desperately lonely man. The shy, “solitary geek” from Yorkshire remains grateful for what Oxford gave him and attributes his writing ambitions to wanting to be someone everybody knew off TV. Is television still his goal? “I used to believe in television. I always wanted to write for it, I hope I will, but I used to want to be a proper TV playwright. That’s completely evaporated now.”
So he doesn’t want to be iconic? “It’s like pursuing fame for its own sake. You’ve just got to do it and not give a f**k about your audience. Well… I think you’ve got to entertain people. But most people are morons; you can’t just write for them. So you’ve just got to write to please yourself.”
Maybe his FilmFour experience left him somewhat jaded? “It wasn’t nice writing Chocolate Billionaire. It was my first proper commission. But it was hard work. There were so many f**king layers of commissioners and programme heads justifying themselves coming up with crap off the top of their heads. They perpetually said, could I make it more like something else. Apparently what they wanted was a cross between Citizen’s Kane, The Secret of My Success, Willy Wonka, The Good Life, and League of Gentlemen. It’s been rewritten fairly comprehensively now. It’s nice to have the money and it’s nice that it’s getting made. And if it’s ‘Based on an Original Story by…’ that’s fine.”
Does he feel that writing is like work at all? “I work hard on things if I’m doing them. I tell myself I’m writing and then I settle down, like a dog making its blanket into a nest, for about two weeks. I think about it, read Murder Casebook, have baths, get depressed. Eventually, I start writing.”
Sounds a bit miserable. “I can see why Virginia Woolf had to go and drown herself every time she finished her latest novel. Your brain’s been working in a certain way and when it runs out of stuff to process it starts sucking in all this other stuff. When I’d finished writing something last year, I ended up watching every episode of Inspector Morse. I couldn’t sleep because of the dreams. It’s a very silly way to work.” But, um, he’s happy now, isn’t he? “I am. But I still panic about it. Everybody does. Everybody’s beset with panic all of the time. But if I was doing anything else I don’t think I’d be…”
There’s a pause. He’s looking far away, his chin on his knuckles, forefinger pressed into his right eyebrow. “But… I’ve done nothing except this since I was twenty-one. I’ve been very poor and battled with the terror that I’ve just pissed away the best years of my life on something that’s going to go completely down the toilet. If I did anything else I’d be wholeheartedly miserable.”
Is there a tingle that he’s hit something that he can talk of as a writing career? “I’ve been doing it for such a long time. There was a long period before I got anything done professionally. I’ve been starting for a long time. But having Mongoose on, having nice reviews, people hearing of me as a writer… Starting to earn enough to live on. Touch wood. I feel I’ve stepped up a gear for all sorts of reasons.”
He swings his hand around and nimbly plucks a buzzing blob out of the air. He grins. I think he’s happy. Before we call it a day I ask after the Negro. “He’s fine.” Does he keep him in a box? “No, I make him work. No point having one, otherwise."
ARCHIVE: 2nd Week TT 2003

Eva, 26, sells the Big Issue on Broad Street and lives in a tent just outside Oxford.
“I come from the south of Spain and first came to England about three years ago as an Erasmus student. Last year my boyfriend and I had jobs but this year we’ve found that we couldn’t find proper work or pay the rent. All the jobs we’ve found pay a week in hand so how are we supposed to eat and live for that week? So that’s why I sell the Big Issue. I think it’s a really good thing to do because you’re supporting other people like us.
We came here to try and find jobs but we couldn’t so we’re just stuck. We’re trying to raise money to get back to Spain. But I like England. The countryside’s beautiful, but at the moment it’s a bit cold. It’s not for the weather it’s more for the people really! I like the English people but I find in Oxford that their really cold. I don’t know why. In Portsmouth it’s just different. The people are poorer down there, but they treat you really well. When people see me here they cross the road. Girls walk past and hold their bags tightly ‘cos they think I’m going to jump out and take them. It’s really stupid. There’s people that don’t even look at me… I don’t understand why.
I’m trained as a primary school teacher, but in Spain it’s really hard to find a job as a teacher. I’d heard England really needed a lot of teachers, but there’s no equivalent to my Spanish diploma. I’ve had interviews in a few cities last year but they never called me back. So I gave up – I need to eat really. Going to interviews all of the time when people don’t call you back and you have no food or drink…”
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The ‘X-Men’ comic books and cartoon series have attracted a fierce loyalty from fans since its genesis in the 60s. The first X-Men was fervently anticipated by fans, anxious to see how Usual Suspects Director Bryan Singer would adapt their beloved story to screen. Singer did a sterling job, directing a dark, millennial tale that faithfully captured the civil rights sympathies that inspired the original comic series. In the recent DVD, Singer described the first movie as merely a trailer for X2
Beginning with an assassination attempt on the US President by a mutant, X2 has both factions of mutants, those led by Professor X (Patrick Stewart) and Magneto (Ian McKellan), joining forces to defend themselves against the hostile human government. The vanguard of this campaign is led by a maniacal apotheosis of the military-industrial complex, Stryker (the superb Brian Cox), a figure from Wolverine’s mysterious past who is hell-bent on wiping out what he sees as the mutant threat. Stryker kidnaps Professor X and attempts mutant genocide by abusing X’s telekinetic powers.
X-Men’s strength and versatility lies in its limitless number of characters and issues, which has enabled the stories to evolve over the decades and through different mediums. The problem that Singer faces in translating X-Men to screen is juggling the number of X-Men and the rest of the mutants, and the audience’s ability to keep track of what’s going on. Both are compromised. There is still no Gambit or Beast; two of the best X-Men; and towards the end of the film the strands of the film tangle. Despite so many characters clamouring for attention, Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine stands out, stealing scenes with the raw energy of a young Clint Eastwood. The kids are very good, with Anna Paquin returning as Rogue and Aaron Stanford playing an intense, rebellious Pyro to whom Magneto counsels, “You are a god among insects. Never let anyone tell you any different.”
X2 taps into American fears about terrorist attacks, and the strike on Professor X’s school is particularly well-staged. Singer notes well the various analogies between mutation and more prosaic political and cultural concerns. When Iceman ‘comes out’ as a mutant to his parents, his mother asks him, “have you ever tried not being a mutant?” There’s much made of military experimentation and Wolverine’s history, of the really sinister interface between mutants and human technology.
People who haven’t read the comics or watched the cartoons will be nonplussed by X2, but fans should enjoy it. Expect lots more.
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Welcome to Collinwood is to Ocean’s Eleven what Danni Minogue is to Kylie: a less fashionable little sister. Sharing producers (George Clooney and Steve Sodenburgh) with its sibling, Collinwood features the same basic premises: a group of crooks attempting to pull off a heist. Clooney only makes a cameo appearance dressed as a Rabbi, which doesn’t really have the same sex appeal as a doctor’s coat. But, I digress.
Welcome to Collinwood is the story of the pursuit of the perfect crime. When a fellow in-mate informs Cosimo (Luis Guzman’s petty criminal) of a ‘Bellini’ – a sure-fire, get-rich-quick job, he enlists his girlfriend to find him a ‘Mullinsky’ – a clown to serve his sentence while he executes the plan. But all the potential Mullinskies want in on the Bellini, even though their bungling may turn the whole caper into a ‘Kaputschnik’. Once it has been established we’re not talking abouta pasta sauce and some kind of Russian weapon, the film follows the fortunes of boxer Pero (Sam Rockwell) and his downtrodden gang (William H. Macy, Isaiah Washington, Michael Jeter) as an apparently simple operation goes terribly awry.
However, Welcome to Collinwood suffers from belonging to the tired, done-to-death genre of heist films. In theory, it should escape this pigeonholing due to its quirkiness and cheek, yet it lacks mojo to pull it through. There’s a terrible ‘been there, done that, laughed at the gags’ feeling, as it is impossible not draw comparisons to Woody Allen’s Small Time Crooks, or Home Alone. Perhaps more skilled direction from the Russo brothers would have saved Collinwood, but still just the imitation copy which does not pull it off. Would you splash your cash on a Danni Minogue thong? No, I thought not.
ARCHIVE: 2nd Week TT 2003

The Dandy Warhols are a band emblematic of student cynic chic: their we-take-drugs lyrics on Thirteen Tales of Urban Bohemia evoked a supremely stylish laziness. The Dandy Warhols, like everyone else, ooze don’t-give-af**k style, their ludicrously named front man Courtney Taylor-Taylor permanently sporting a sneer that could sour milk (and stunning cheek bones, if you will allow me to digress).However, it seems the band have woken up from their lethargy, rather like Placebo’s embrace of electronica after Without You I’m Nothing, winning back the fans lulled into melancholia by their self-indulgent misery. Likewise there is an enjoyable range of energetic 80s beats on Welcome to the Monkey House, as well as a number of intriguing motifs, from the orgasmic panting on synth-pop singalong ‘The Dope’ to the funky ‘I Am Sound’, which is hugely reminiscent of David Bowie’s ‘Ashes to Ashes’. The Warholsbeing well-known for their sense of faux-irony and the kitsch. One can’t help but feel that times Taylor-Taylor (who co-produced the album with Duran Duran’s Nick Rhodes) is over-sexing his performance; his husky drawl is perhaps too provocative for comfort.
The Warhols keep up a steady stream of toe-tappers, although the album occasionally loses its energy: it sometimes diminishes into characteristic apathy. However, there are enough lush layers of sound for the album serve as ambient background music for any student gathering involving tie-dyed blankets and incense sticks (‘The Dandy Warhols Love Almost Everyone’ being a prime example), as well there being adequately danceable tracks, such as the bass-driven ‘You Were the Last High’. They even come close to rocking out on ‘Heavenly’, although that kind unbridled enthusiasm is curtailed soon enough. Unabashed indulgence would be the death of the Warhols’ endearingly chilled-out sound, but Welcome to the Monkey House shows them pulling their socks up just enough to save them from camp-pop obscurity. Out Monday.
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The New Noakes International, fronted by Pete Oxley, played the Wheatsheaf to promote their latest album Blue In Black and White. New Noakes comprise bass, drums, keyboards and Oxley on electric jazz guitar and electro-acoustic. Playing a style rich and varied, the band seem to be well-acquainted with the Wheatsheaf crowd, which helped in creating a laid-back yet engaging atmosphere. It was a crowd that was a little older than one generally finds in Oxford bars, but they were not all jazz aficionados. Perhaps this is where the real skill of New Noakes becomes apparent. Alternating between the recognisable structures of jazz, and more mellow blues-infused songs, the band give the audience a real sense of the diverse sounds and moods that a four piece instrumental band can conjure up. Luckily they never completely abandon their jazz roots. A whole spectrum of genres are touched upon – from acoustic pop to straight jazz and avant-garde – but there’s no self indulgence or clever ‘intellectual’ aspirations. The solos, while clearly demonstrating proficiency and accomplishment on the various instruments, were not outlandishly virtuoustic (as one often finds with emerging jazz groups trying to consolidate their place on the scene). They nonetheless quickened the heart-beat. Worth checking out.
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The successor to the Another Late Night series, Late Night Tales continues the tradition of getting artists to choose and mix the music that has shaped their own sound. This time round, the team has collared the legendary N.O.W. a.k.a. George Evelyn. What follows are a series of funky, tasteful selections with hip-hop leanings, all adequately displaying N.O.W.’s eclectic tastes and influences. Included with each song is a narrative based on the original song lyrics. These narratives are written by Whitbread Award winner Patrick Neate and read by Brian Blessed. Of course it’s absolute garbage, but at least N.O.W. is on top form. Out Monday.
ARCHIVE: 2nd Week TT 2003