13/04/2012 The Review Show

This programme includes some strong On the review show tonight, the

secrets of Bob Marley, his white father and much more in a feature-

length documentary. Why did those leet lads get hooked

on heroin, Irvine Welsh returns to Trainspotting land with Skagboys. A

Streetcar Named Desire in dance? And Damien Hirst reassessed at Tate

Modern. On our parpbl, the journalist and documentary maker,

Sarfraz Manzoor, the author, Louise Welsh, whose novels include The

Cutting Room and Naming The Bones. And the writer and writer, Natalie

Haynes, author of The Ancient Guide To Modern Live.

We are also going to have live music from Don Broco, specially

selected by BBC introducing. You are welcome to join in the

Conservatives if you are on Twitter. Somewhere there must be a queue of

cinema directors waiting to pay homage to their favourite musicians.

We have had Neil Young, and both Bob Dylan and George Harrison from

Martin Scorsese, now comes Marley, a lengthy film profile of the

Jamaican reggae superstar, from the Myint Aye ward winning director of

The Last King of Scotland, Kevin MacDonald. Three or four places

here. They were verseing every day. It was Bob, Peter. We used to call

ourselves The Juveniles, people who we went to rehearse, said you came

from a land where people always balling and wailing, you should be

called The Wailers. He's definitely an icon, but there is the negative

side, he's a symbol of rebelliousness, and marijuana

smoking. What this film is trying to do is reclaim him. He noticed

his use of words in the song, Judge Not was a song about his rights as

an individual. It occurred to me that this guy was a good poet.

didn't know what the film was going to be until I got to the end of it.

I was on the search for who is this character, how do I understand it.

I started interviewing, family, friends, musicians, and more and

more people, I interview 80 or 90 people. You were right in the mix,

the most important thing culturally happening in Jamaica at that time,

was happening right there. That was the headquarters, the centre of it

all. Bob never left 56 Hope Road, people came from all over the world

to see him. Did you live at Hope Road with your dad? We lived a

couple of miles from Hope Road. Hope Road was really a "spot".

is a long film, it is two hours 25 minutes. One of the reasons it is

so long is the stuff that is really revealing and new is the detail. It

felt like you have a responsibility to history to make a film that

isn't just a piece of entertainment, in a way, that can stand the test

of time and you can say this is something if you really want to

know that Bob Marley watched that film. He was strict, we were like

an army, we called him Skipper. We had certain strict rules at that

time, woman supposed to wear dress, not pants. You had those kind

coming in with the war paint, lipstick, and eye shadow, this is

the roots, if you come on Rasta, you have to throw away those

Babylonian things. We heard there about the attention

to detail, 80-90 interviews that Kevin MacDonald took part. To me

one of the most fascinating aspects was Bob Marley's early life, and

this elderly white father? One of the things that makes, I think

Kevin MacDonald has done a brilliant job. He contextualised

the music against a racial and political background. Some people

don't realise that Marley was mixed race. What I didn't realise until I

watched this, of the sense that he was bullied growing up in Jamaica,

and bullied for not being fully black or fully white. That identity

crisis eventually led to the music he made. The interesting thing I

noticed, a parallel with Muhammad Ali and Barack Obama in this, these

are people who find some kind of identity, it is not what they are

born with, but creates some of their work. For Marley it was

Rastafarian. There was those details, and that made it more than

entertainment. It was that which drew him to

Rastafarianism. It always comes up when you find a vaguely hippyish

philosophy and religion, you think I wonder will they be extended to

the women? No just the men, the women get told what to wear and do

and the men have a nice time, one of those. No Babylonian war paint?

Much of which I'm wearing now, no room for anyone else to have some.

It is an incredibly revealing film. Verging a little bit too much on

the hag iog raphy, the executive producers are his ex-tour producers

and his son. There was a limit of people saying what was wrong with

him, that was limited. I kind of want the one that people make as a

backlash to this and can I find out the rest of the story. Did it feel

as much of a hag iog raphy to you, we heard about his relationships

with women and children? I can see what Natalie is saying, there is

that element there, the great thing about this documentary is the

people we get to hear the voices of. Not only band mates, but family

members, Bob Marley's mother, the guy he shared a room with behind

the recording studio, when he was young. Also the way that Kevin

MacDonald's managed to piece together the early life, without

any footage. When you think about Martin Scorsese's documentary about

George Harrison, there was so much there. They were preparing to be

famous since they were boys, it is not the same with Marley. Do you

think the fact that there were family members in it, with editoral

control, did mean that Kevin MacDonald did have to cede some

kind of editoral grounds? When you are dealing with icons like Bob

Dylan, or Bob Marley, the only way to get access to those people, and

the only way you get a chance to play the music is if you have to do

a dance with the devil. Chris Blackwell, who popularised Marley

as one of the executive producers, journalistically, Kevin MacDonald

walked the line well. There is a bit where the late Peter Tosh

described Chris Blackwell as Chris White-well, there was a sense where

they thought he was ripping them off. As we mentioned before his

relationships with women and infidelity, and the relaxed

attitude. We did have one of the executive producers being slag off?

His relationships with women weren't criticised, he had 11

children by seven different women. Everyone loves him, he's a very

beautiful and charismatic man. You get why everyone loves him. I think

my favourite thing about it is that Kevin MacDonald, I think, must have

got a little tired of everyone going he was perfect and wonderful.

The last word of the film goes to his daughter, who, you know, even

at his death bed they can't get close, his children can't get close,

because there are so many hangers on and friends and political

acquaintances and all kinds of other things, she's allowed to say,

we thought this moment might be for us, but not so much. It is a very

touching moment, I wanted more of that, in truth. I I did find the

final months very intriguing to hear about. Rita his wife saying

about his cancer, that it was the white man in him that killed him.

He ends up in this white place, he ends up with snow trying to find a

cure for his cancer. Putting together a life is a very

complicated thing. What story do you choose to tell, you are

imposing a narrative on something that didn't have a narrative, you

could feel the end of his life could be one itself. There is a

driving seen and Redemption Song is playing, it is one of the best

endings of a documentary, they end by hinting at the global nature of

Bob Marley.Ing going back to the beginning, it was the conflict in

him that led to him making music, he was conflicted but the music he

made united. Beautifully made, I thought, some of the editing, the

archive was so sparse, we had black and white stills cut together

beautifully, and some of the other archive they managed to get, Haile

Selassie's visit to Jamaica. There is incredible footage, and footage

of the peace concert, where he gets the warring politicians to hold

hands in front of a baying crowd, all desperate for it to happen. You

realise how crucial it is. The credits at the end are cut over

from people all over the world who are Bob Marley fans. As I was

watching it, I was wondering if they had to ask people, or they had

to find people. Today I swear this is true, I walked down the street

and there was indeed a man playing No Woman, No Cry, and you think

they just walked around. I thought starting off the record of

splashing rum all over the studio to bless it.

The only Marley note for me was subtitles, so patronising, I wonder

if they were a late addition. was hugely annoying, luckily I had

a man with a big head in front of me, I couldn't read them any way.

didn't have a man with the big head, I was annoyed by the subtitles, but

not the rest of it. Marley is released next Friday. Irvine Welsh

has published ten books since his sensational debut with

Trainspotting, but, a bit like the addicts in the book, he has never

been able to forget the pleasure of the first hit. His new book,

Skagboys, he's drawn back to the area of Leith, to tell the back

story of the characters, with strong language.

Trainspotting quickly acquired cult status and commercial success, with

harrowing descriptions of drug use and Edinburgh squalor, laceed with,

literally, filthy humour. The subsequent film was an

international hit, and helped make stars of Ewan McGregor, Robert

Carlisle and Danny boil. There is already a sequel, Osborne, from

2002, which picked up where Trainspotting left off. Now in

Skagboys, Welsh brings us the earlyies of Renton, Sick Boy and co,

from opportunities to disinfection and devotion to heroin.

So I get out the gear in a foil pipe, I have practised making

tonnes of them, and we have a blast. You can feel the all lum anyone yum

particles with the heat sticking to your lungs, it starts to feel

elated and euphoria spills through my soul like a burst of sunlight.

Spud with his cricket eyes looks like a reflection of me, we share a

solitary thought, "everything else can go and Fukushima itself".

backdrop is Edinburgh in the mid- 1980s, a time when everything was

saying its reputation as AIDS capital of Europe. Welsh was

exploring characters choosing death not life. Everybody needs a

compelling drama in their life, mostly we get that through being in

a relationship, work, it gives us a place and status. That is not been

there for people for two or three generations now. Of course drugs

will fill that void, what else is there. Everybody is getting into

skaing nowadays. Boys on Tenants lager and laughing at us months ago,

are now hunting it down. Basically because they have nothing else to

do. In Skagboys there is plenty of what made Trainspotting such a huge

success, biting comedy, eye- watering sex, wild drug taking,

even pathos, all served up in Welsh's characteristic Leith slang.

Can this prequell, weighing up at 500 pages, match the original for

style and impact. What did you think of the idea having a prequel

going back to the characters? interested in the idea of every ten

years revisiting characters, other authors have done that. Do you do

something new with them, do you see development within the writer? I

think you do with this. I think Skagboys is a development on

trainspotting and on Porno -- Trainspotting and on Porno,

structurally it is more mature. This is the product of a mature

writer. It is a historical novel, and like the best it reflects on

the current period as well. Prequels can be tricky? They really

can, I completely agree that in the microstructure of it, it is

brilliant. Over and over again he sets up a da-da moment, and the

narrative switches to a different person and you get the in the next

character. Overall it has a structural failure, it is always

hard with a prequel, because we know who survives. The jeopardy is

seriously limited. When Spud collapses with wound botulism, we

know he survives. There is a sense in the beginning that the people

not in Trainspotting are the people in Star Trek wearing a red jumper,

you are like, oh dear, I'm not liking your chances of seeing the

end of the book, and they don't. It is a pity, given that you don't

have the momentum of needing to know what happens to the characters

as we did in the other book, I would have brought it in less pages.

Do we learn more about them, the cause and effect that Irvine Welsh

was talking about in the film? starts with the Battle of Orgreave,

the miners' conflict with the police, there is a famous quote

from Margaret Thatcher with "there's no such thing as society".

It is about the definition of the times and understanding some of the

motivations. I was struck by the Thatcher quote ending saying "there

is no such thing as society, it is just men and women and families",

the book is more about men and women and familiar leets, rather

than no such thing as society -- families, rather than no such thing

as society. The reasons they get into the drugs are not to do with

society, it is more about relationships and the death of

somebody in a family. I felt it was a personal book pretending and

setting itself up to be more political than it was. I sometimes

wondered if the politics was shoe horned? The politics was essential,

Irvine Welsh was showing people don't turn to drugs only because of

societal reasons. There are other emotional things. There is the

perverse, as Poe would call it, the moment you do something against

your own interests and you know it. All of that is present. There is a

moment when Renton's father looks at these boys and he says the

problem is not that I don't understand them, the problem is

that I do understand them, and I cannot see what is going to save

them. He was saved by a family, by all of these structures that

existed before, being a docker, the mines have gone, all of these jobs

that people would have gone into before have left. There is not

going to be that moment that there is at the end of clockwork orange,

when you see the reformed hooligan on the street with a wife and pram,

that option is not on the cards for these boys. What did you make of

the political parallels drawn, going back to the 1980s, a time of

unemployment and the Conservative Government? I wanted to find it

more important than I did. The trouble is, the central character,

which we have to assume Renton is, he gets most narrative time. He

doesn't turn to heroin because he as unemployed, he turns to heroin,

like our parents warned us, soft drugs lead to hard drugs, he has

tried everything else and he wants to know what it's like. He's a

student at the golden time of the grant, you didn't pay fees and no

loans, he has everything and chooses to squander it. I think

that could be counter point to the nihilism of Spud's life, it

undermines it for me. As he says towards the end t doesn't matter

which Government was in power, I would be shooting up any way.

the narrator we have multiple voices, we see the failure of

society to cope with this. We need when all of the needle exchanges

are closed, as did happen. It is a very good scene in the shooting

gallery, people are handing around this giant syringe that they have

stolen from a hospital. These things don't always need to be

stated, I think they are there, I think they are in the book.

And also, in a way, what we are looking at here is the strength of

Irvine Welsh's language, for people who like Trainspotting, the same he

can sub regins, the same filth -- he can sub regins, the same --

exuburance, the same way he captures the Scottish language.

guess you said it in the vt, people say f-ar- king. Apologise for

anyone here, because of the way you pronounced it, it might be fine.

Apologies. The The dialects of Edinburgh are incredibly good, you

can tell the difference of who is talking without a moment of context.

They are brilliantly done. With the London scenes it sounded like Dick

van Dyke with Tourettes. If that was that inauthentic with London, I

didn't know how much I could believe the Edinburgh.

It is terrific with the Edinburgh, the joy of the language, the humour

unlike the Marley film we don't have an explanation or glossry, you

get it, you don't get it, sometimes you get it after the book it put

down, you realise what "manto" is, for the working girls, I can't tell

you what it is. When they have the Agatha Christie you realise they

have an infestation with mice, Mousetrap, you get it. Irvine Welsh

is a very good story-teller. There is a black sense of humour, with

the scene with he and his son. are not allowed to describe that on

television, it is dark and funny. You have to read the book, it does

vofl a Scottish news reader, very famous, called Mary Marquis,

Skagboys is published on the 19th of April. She famously relied on

the kindness of strangers. Blanche DuBois has long since left the

stage. Now there is a dance version of the Tennessee Williams classic.

We went along to film the dress rehearsal.

A Streetcar Named Desire put a brutal and sexually-charged story

of jealousy and possession in front of post-war Broadway audiences. It

won Tennessee Williams the pults Sir prize for drama. It was peedly

made into a film, starling Marlon Brando as Stanley, and Vivienne

Leig h as the faded southern belle. You are surviving on my liquor, you

know what I say, ha ha. You hear me, had a, had a, had a.

-- ha ha ha. The film won four Oscars and is still regarded as the

definitive take on the play, setting a challenge for all

subsequent versions. It is really important if you are making a

ballet that you are not just trying to put a play or film on stage.

That is really very unsatisfying, if you are trying to repeat

something from one medium to another. As a play, it's so rich,

and has so much resonance, and so many images and ideas in it. It

really lends itself to being thought about as a ballet. That is

what we really set out to do initially.

This new version fleshs out the back story, a brief marriage to a

bisexual man, the loss of her planation mansion and family, as

she falls into the isolation and promiscuity, which leads to her

being run out of time. The challenge of adapting a classic

play, led to a collaboration that is still rare in the dance world.

It is an experiment, it is unusual to put a director and choreographer

together and ask them to make a piece, a story ballet. I think

really there has just been a huge amount of crossover, I don't do any

choreographing, but Annabel is also used to directing the dancers in

terms of acting. I think this on this particular

project it was clear from the beginning on, whatever idea I would

put in, Nancy has the last word. She doesn't like it, we change, we

change, until you know, she's the captain, so she has the overall

view on everything. Has Scottish Ballet managed to

translate the theme of domestic violence, sexual addiction on the

stage. Our's is different, but just We know the film so well, I was

trying to work out whether it is a disadvantage, because you are

constantly making comparisons, or an advantage, when you are watching

a work of dance, because you do know the plot? I think it is an

advantage. If you turn up to this going, I xerbgted it to be exactly

like the play -- expected it to be exactly like the play, you are an

idiot, it is a ballet and exactly like a ballet would be. You know

the story. With most ballets you know the story before you go, you

know the story of Swan Lake or something, it really does help. I

think they do an amazing job of story telling. Tennessee Williams

is the big southern melodrama that he has designed to be turned into

ballet or opera, he's absolutely somebody you can understand without

words. I'm glad to see they don't resist the urge to put in someone

yelling "Stella" at one point. did? They failed to resist. I

apologise, you were right to pick me up on that. They go into a great

deal more detail, themes that we don't really get in the play,

although only hinted at in the play? The early life. They start

with the relationship between Alan, blanche's husband, and another man,

and this is something that we know in the play, but we have to read a

bit deeper, perhaps. It is interesting Tennessee Williams is

writing at a time when these things have to be hidden, that is no

longer the case. How do we cope with these things within narrative

now. Perhaps the strangeness of ballet is a nice way to approach it.

But I thought the use of the narrative was fantastic. I thought

it was absolutely brilliant, one of the things I liked about it, there

was a problem of how you don't use words, and the creative ways they

solved them. There is the bit where Blanches relatives are dying, they

organise a family-like photograph in front of Bell Vue, each, one by

one they crumble, they are dying. Trfs an interesting way -- It was

interesting. In more ways in terms of sexuality it is more interesting

than the film, there was a rape scene further on, that was more

sinister and disturbing than the one in the film. We really saw the

inventiveness of dance in a way that the past was able to be

referred to, in literal form. So dead characters could be danced

with. She sees herself, as another person in the past. Absolutely. I

almost invariably hate a dream sequence, but whack it in a ballet

and I cheer right up. The music goes back to the music when she was

happy, we know it is a memory or a dream. Another girl will come on

and dance her in the past. She's wearing the same costume and the

same hair. The coding of ballet is extremely easy to follow, even if

you don't know the story. You would follow it with relative ease. They

did an amazing job of taking her madness and fragility and putting

them right at the front where we could see them. It worked

incredibly well. It starts with a very classical music, and goes off

to jazz for New Orleans and becomes later metalic, it was a beautiful

soundtrack. I wondered if it was almost too beautiful, when Blanche

is at the height of her pros mus cute, in a twauddree bedroom

sleeping with strangers, it was too beautiful? I don't think so. It was

a moment like in Skagboys, there is an escape for her. The contrast

between that and the sexual violence, the rape we see later is

clear and defined, Blanche is not a willing partner later on. We saw

the theme of addiction going on, through the metaphor of a moth to a

flame, she dances towards the light, there is her addiction to alcohol

and promiscuity, and Stella's addiction to Stanley. That is much

more to the forein this, than the play. In the play we are given some

idea that he might stop being quite so aggressive, and so on, in this,

there is never even the suggestion of that. What is so beautiful about

the way they decide to cor glaf it, Blanche is -- choreograph it,

Blanche is the only of the women and men to dance on pointe, she

locks like a ballerina in a pink dress, everyone else is dancing to

the ground in a New Orleans way, everyone looks more grounded than

she does, it is incredibly smart. agree with you, the tragedy of

Blanche doesn't come through, in the film there is a sense of a

woman terrified of ageing and trying to appeal to younger men. As

you said, when she's flouncing around with lots of men, she looks

like she's having a good time, that is not what you are meant to be

thinking. This is a 21st production. Chronologically you are right.

idea of they are being worried about ageing is not so relevant. I

guess the other thing we lose is the idea that Stanley is more

complex, that he might actually be attractive, and that we might also

be attracted towards him. That is also a product of the 21st century

dealing with the worries of a different age. Many more shades of

ambivalence. You can see A Streetcar Named Desire tomorrow

night, and then it travels to Edinburgh Inverness and other

places. Given that Damien Hirst is probably Britain's most famous

living artist, counting tabloid inches and the wealthiest too. It

is amazing he has never had a retrospective at home. That is

remedied with a 14-room career- spanning show at Tate Modern in

London. Spanning three decades of

creativity, encombassing pots and pans and pharmaceuticals, from

beach ball, butterflies to blue bottles, it is a wide range of his

work. As I have got older I have got better and better, I have

learned the language of visual art. In any piece of art, since the

beginning, what I tried to do is go beyond my expectation. In the first

room it is a little less than what I was attempting. I actually

thought when I painted the pans, I would create this iconic

contemporary object that would make people fall down dead. When I made

it, it looks car-boot sale. I hate art that you have to think about it,

but art that grabs you. Like it does in the Natural History Museum.

A lot of people say I deal with death. I don't know. The diamond

skull seems very much alive to me. That skull called For The Love of

God was a one-off created in 2007. Cast from platinum, adorned about

8,601 flawless diamonds, at a cost of �40 million. Hirst's output is

controversial for quantity as well as quality. All the things I have

done because they feel right. I have taken a leaf out of war hole's

book. He said a great thing, if people slag off what you are

working on, do more. That is kind of the right way to go. When I

first started making the spot paintings, people didn't like them,

I got slagged off. I just think you have to paint. The only thing you

can believe in really is your feelings. I had no money when I was

a kid. I became aware of the importance of money, and the

importance of money in two ways. We need money to survive, you have to

respect money, because there is so many people without money. After I

had my auction at Sotheby's, I started getting noticed on the

street by businessmen, that can't be a bad thing, when you are an

artist. I always thought you have to get people's attention before

you can change their minds. longer a WBA, Hirst still courts

controversy, and shares passion with fans. Where does this

retrospective place him among his contemporaries, and will his work

outlast its notoriety. A lot of these works were genuinely

shocking at the time, do they still have this kind of power? It is

interesting, I think in a way, it is a bit like the Bob Marley

documentary, you kind of have to go there and drop your expectations

and try to see if you can look at the material fresh again. In a way,

the fact that they have lost some of their power to shock is good, it

means you can look at them for more works of art rather than shock

pieces. I found it really impressive. It was game of two

halves. In a sense, I can't just find, any piece of art that looks

like my daughter's nighty, I can't be Imrie pressed by. The spot

paintings, the fact there is 1400 of them, and they are clinical and

other assistants make them, I'm not impressed. The stuff about animals,

mortality and life, I found that powerful, I think there is a

nervous laughter about mortalty. Particularly the mind of someone

living, do we look at the concepts more than the immediate shock value

of them. In the case of the shark, I feel the shock may have gone with

some of the shark's youth and vigour, he looks not as well as he

once did. I saw him in the Met in New York, I don't know if it is a

new old shark, or if that shark has had a very ageing paper round over

the last couple of years. But he really doesn't look very

frightening any more. In truth, those are the pieces that have

probably survived best, in a slightly different way from

actually physically surviving. I have to admit I found it all rather

trite this time around. Without the shock factor, his s tisk is about

life and death and mortality, there is something about saying I would

like to talk about death, and I will put maggots into a toilet and

see them turn into flies. I missed the press view, and it was packed

with families with small children, I think he might make art for small

children. They love him, they like the bright colours and the dead

animals, they like him such a lot. I found myself thinking, he just

doesn't have very much to say to anybody who has kind of thought

about death for more than ten minutes. Did it seem as trite to

you? It did, for me there is an element of control within all of

the works that makes it rather clean. Even the dark sun, I think,

the Black Sun, which is composed entirely of flies, and that should

be really horrible, shouldn't it, a great big black circle, completely

made out of dead flies, no, it was fine, it was all very clean-looking,

I think the ...I can't help thinking about Renfield and Dracula,

he starts off by killing the flies and then something bigger and

bigger, I surely can't be the only person that thinks we should watch

our grand mothers around Damien Hirst. Surely he wants to graduate

on to something else. I think it is very decorative. Talking about

decorative, it isn't all uglyness and death and decays, there is the

blur flies and the life cycle? spin paintings, in where he's

exploiting his brand I'm not happy about, he does that with the spots

and the spin paintings. There is a butterfly room where they are all

going around in the room, in the next room you see them deceased and

put into a flame, I found that -- into a frame, I found that

uncomfortable, I don't know if they were selected where they were

selected to die and or collected afterwards. With a live thing and

then they are dead in the next room, found that an uncomfortable room.

We learned that part of his earlier work the themes began early on. We

had the medicine cabinets, the spot paintings, which Damien Hirst

himself talks about as playing with colour? The youthful exuburance you

get in the first room, the spot painting he has done are rubbish

compared with the later ones, there are drips elsewhere. Then you have

the room of medicines, the Four Seasons, different colours, the

bluish ones to make a huge wall of winter, pinkish ones for spring and

brown for autumn. They are so exciting, you get another room of

slightly less exciting versions and another room and another room. I

found myself thinking, when you were 25 you were the most exciting

person, I guess it is all right not to be as exciting as 25, I wouldn't

want 14 rooms to be celebrating my inability to be as exciting as I

once was. The skull was attracting a lot of attention the queues were

there when I was there. It became a symbol of morality at our time, the

peak of the boom before the burst? I have no problem with artists

getting rich. The skull didn't move me, it is an old idea. I found it

very difficult to respond to. I was very surprised, actually, to see

that it was 14 rooms. I felt it was a much smaller exhibition, and I

think perhaps it is the reputation. The 15th room is the gift shop,

exit through the Egypt gift shop. almost bought the �36,000 replica

skull. �310 for a deck chair. There was almost a gift shop inside with

the auction room, $111 million done in one day. I bought postcards, I

felt you couldn't have a Damien Hirst experience unless you gave

him a quid. It feels artistically compromised not to turn up and go

here you are. I got the postcard, not the skull. Damien Hirst

continues at Tate Modern until the 9th of September. If you noticed

the date, Friday 13th, you might have spent the day crossing your

legs or carrying a four-leaf clover. Ed Smith's new book is all about

luck, what it means, why it matters, we asked him to explain.

Winners don't like talking about luck. It detracts from their

achievements. Losers don't want to get caught talking about luck

either. It sounds too much like an excuse. 15 years ago I would have

agreed. When I was starting out as a professional cricketer, I took

the view if you had enough ability and worked hard enough, you would

inevitably get what you deserve. What changed my mind? On the pitch

I learned the hard way. A bad LBW decision had irreversible

consequences, a broken ankle ended my career. If I was honest, I had

to acknowledge that luck determined decisive forks in the road.

But mine is anything but a hard luck story. My cricket career, in

the first place, owed a great deal to the non-random luck of my

cricketing education. I realised I had been 20-times more likely than

average to play for England, because I had gone to such a good

cricketing school. The deck was stacked, if you like, long before

words like "practice", "determination" and "hard work",

even came into the equation. Sceptics argue that though luck

might sway an individual life, the fates of nations always have

grander causes. Think again, Norway's good will fare state and

high standard of living depends on North Sea oil. How did they find it,

when the search was on it, Philip's petroleum office sent the order,

don't dig any more wells, they couldn't stop leasing the rigs,

Thesee played out time and struck oil. Our own nation too should

thank lady luck, in 1922 in New York, a politician with a mixed

reputation and a turn coat, looked the wrong way crossing Fifth Avenue,

he was hit head-on by a car and flung to the side of the street, he

lived, just, to tell the tale, it was Winston Churchill. But what

practical use is believing in luck? I once played for a cricket team

that banned the word, it was thought to be too much of an excuse

that had no place in our sporting utopia. But life without luck made

for an awkward dressing room and underperforming team. Believing in

luck does not imply fatalism, as many people mistakingly think. Fate

is predetermined, fixed, closed, the skpwroi of luck, in contrast, -

- the joy of luck, in contrast, is its openness.

The book, called Luck, is out now. That's almost all from us. Next

week Kirsty and her guests will be watching Glenn Close in the Albert

Nobss, and Gross Und Klein is on at the Barbican.

There is no more on all the items on the website. We end with a slow

low musician, but tonight we have a quartet, Don Broco come from

Bedford, it is an acoustic version of their forth coming single

# When your round with the boys # Would you ever contemplate

# On telling her # Exactly where we'll be

# When you are out with the boys # Would you ever contemplate

# On ditching us # As soon as she turns up

# You you got priority # Mate you know how much you

changed # Where's my buddy

# I was hanging out yesterday # My friend my friend

# It's best you mend your ways # Or you'll end up

# Having no friends left # And you can bail

# I Miss You pumpkin # I miss you babe

# I wish you could hear # What you're saying

# Miss you Princess # Miss you babe

# Makes me sick hearing you say it # Miss you pumpkin

# Miss you Princess # Miss you babe

# Miss you honey # My little angel

# Come every hour # Of every day

# Pretty rain # Sunsets

# That is the price you pay # Mate you know how much you

changed # Where's my buddy

# I was hanging out with yesterday # My friend my friend

# It's best you mend your ways # Or you'll end up

# Having no friend left # To hear complain

# Mate # You know how much you've changed

# Where's my buddy # I was hanging out with yesterday

# My friend my friend # It's best you mend your ways

# Or you'll end up having no friends left