Among The Touts

The only football ticket I’ve ever bought from a tout was for the FA Cup semi-final between Manchester City and United at Wembley last year. It cost me more than a third of my monthly rent. After the tout had satisfied himself that I wasn’t a cop he told me that the ticket was ‘one and a half’ and that I could collect it from his pal. ‘My mate’s in the bookies, ’cause it’s bent round here with the Old Bill.’ In the bookmakers there were horses on the telly, beer in the air, and football on everyone’s lips. A thin man with an unlit cigarette in his mouth gave me a ticket in a Club Wembley branded envelope, and I handed over £150.

Buying multiple gig tickets on several credit cards and selling them for a profit is not only legal but smiled on: the Conservative MP Sajid Javid called such touts ‘entrepreneurs’. But touting football tickets is a criminal offence, punishable with a fine up to £5000 and a ban from all matches for up to ten years. Similar laws are in place for the Olympics, with a maximum fine of £20,000. The Met have been stepping up their arrests of football touts since the beginning of last year, on the reasonable assumption that they are likely to be involved in selling Olympic tickets too. ‘What we have uncovered shows that organised crime networks of the highest level which are known to us are involved in ticketing offences,’ according to the head of Operation Podium.

[Continued here: http://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2012/07/05/harry-stopes/among-the-touts/ ]

Here Comes Dickens!

Recently I've been reading David Lodge's novel Therapy, in which the main character Tubby Passmore pursues various therapies for his painful knee and, later in the story, his broken heart. Tubby is a television writer, most famously for the Heartland Productions smash hit The People Next Door, a sitcom about two incompatible families that share the same party wall between their semi-detached houses. The show is a massive success, and Tubby has a large house in Rummidge, Lodgelandia, and a flat in non-fictionalised London.

The US version of the show is also succesful (which explains the house and flat), though as usual the Americans feel the need to change the name. The People Next Door becomesWho's Next Door? This suggests a more dynamic, exciting television concept. Not just a known, understood, fixed situation of some people next door, but a constant revisiting of the question – who are they, these people next door? Probably the writers would aim to hamfistedly restate the concept within the first couple of minutes of dialogue in every episode, for the benefit of American viewers chancing on the show for the first time, flicking through hundreds of American cable stations. There's also a hint of Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?there, with class in Tubby's original being replaced by race, though Lodge has the conversation about whether the Davises should be replaced by a Latino family go unresolved.

Being clear is good when translating titles. Elizabeth Laird's novel Red Sky in the Morning, which my mother read to my sister and I when we were children, is about a girl called Anna whose younger brother Ben is born with hydrocephalus. At first Anna is ashamed of Ben and tries to hide his condition from her friends, but later she comes to accept him and his disability. When it was first published in America this book was called Loving Ben. A Ronseal title, as David Cameron would probably say. John McGahern's That They May Face the Rising Sun (which was set by a lake)? By The Lake, published by Knopf. Whimsy is out too. Angela Carter's The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman reappeared as the more prosaic The War of Dreams.

(As an aside, Tubby Passmore's oeuvre excepted, TV shows tend the cross the water unchanged. Well, the names stay the same – Life on Mars, Queer as Folk, Shameless, Cold Feet – they just replace the actors with sexier American versions and swap Manchester for New York.)

Americans seem to like names that suggest action, preferably in the present tense – continuous if possible. Helen Simpson's collection of stories Hey Yeah Right Get a Lifeappeared across the Atlantic with the self-helpy title Getting A Life. The Violent Effigy, John Carey's book on Dickens, went out in America as Here Comes Dickens, a name so bizzare that when I first heard it spoken aloud I assumed it was followed by an exclamation mark. Which really would be dynamic.