One for Sorry, Two for Job

I don't believe in an either/or view of the world, as you know, but a lot of people do, so, oddly, sometimes you find yourself surrounded by people with fixed ideas about things. Beatles vs. Rolling Stones; Raquel Welch vs. Brigitte Bardot; Blue Peter vs. Magpie.

We never had Magpie on in our house, because it was on ITV, and we tended not to have ITV on. I think my mother subscribed to the theory that ITV meant the End of Civilisation as We Know It. I still fucking hate advert breaks, but they're easier to avoid now, what with time-shifting and all that.

Anyway, we were a Blue Peter family. Those that preferred Magpie tended to say that Blue Peter was patronising, dull, and stuffed full of middle-class worthiness; from the other point of view, Magpie was tacky, commercial, and surrounded by advertising. On Blue Peter, they always took the time to put black tape on all the brand names. Though it could be confusing; I still don't know where you were supposed to buy "sticky-back plastic."

So, that was then. The world grew up, and the intellectual Magpigmies won. That means that everything has to be commercial and tacky, and nobody is allowed to be middle-class, patronising, or, god forbid, worthy.

Documentaries now follow the style of not telling you what the hell is going on, lest the producers be accused of "telling you what to think." The recent, beautifully filmed BBC compilation of bits from The Blue Planet, Deep Blue was fatally flawed by the almost total absence of patronising/worthy/middle-class commentary. So you saw all these beautiful fish and other creatures of the deep, all fantastically filmed, but you had no idea what any of them were, or where they were.

Jesus and Lord preserve us from people who want to tell us things, eh? God forbid we should learn something while we watch the eye candy with our iPods stuck in our ears and our mobile phones on vibrate up our arses.

My daughter came home with maths homework that was completely unfathomable yesterday. She's seven years old, she's doing addition, but she has to use some crazy methodology involving drawing some weird box thing and linking up lines and making numbers jump over each other. Fucking hell, I thought, it never ends, does it? When I was her age, and younger, I was forced to go through the entire ita reading scheme with its crazy gobshite spellings and fucked phonetics - even though I could already read.

Our kid can already do addition the traditional way, believe it or not, but now she's hopelessly confused by some crazy maths method created by morons on meths. See what I'm doing there?

Anyway, so this is my opinion on the first part of No Direction Home: deeply flawed by the lack of a script, informative commentary, narrative. Instead we get Scorsese's flashy jump cuts and match cuts and vulgar montage moments (which is all he had available to him, given that he didn't film any of the actual footage). Bob Dylan, we should all know by now, is the very definition of an unreliable narrator, and most of the other talking heads had their own agendas, too, so what we really needed was someone to pull it all together, to give it a coherent chronology, to tell us what was going on.

I knew what was going on, don't misunderstand me. I know the story inside out already. But I kept thinking about those who might have been roped into watching by their friends and lovers, who probably sat through the whole thing thinking, that bloke on that blog said he had a beautiful voice, but it really does sound nasal and whiny.

Scorsese jumped back and forth, interrupting the black and white stuff with the colour stuff (to keep it interesting for the Magpites, no doubt), but he gave us no real sense of the chronological trajectory of Dylan, the constant, restless, assimilation and growth. It was all too impressionistic for me. So he's an auteur, big fucking deal. He also has absolutely no taste or subtlety.

I enjoyed watching and listening to Bob, as I was bound to, but I felt the presence of "the direc-tor" too keenly, and wished for a more sedate, patronising, worthy, educational tone. So sue me. Teach me crazy maths and ita, but you can't make me enjoy Magpie, because it's rubbish.