Wisecrowd game prototype - play now.

To play the Wisecrowd game prototype, please click on this link:

https://cream-snore-92963422.figma.site/

This gamified polling mechanism has been many years in development (understatement), originally coming out of work on “expectation polling” when doing my PhD. This varaint of opinion polling asks respondents (or players) what they think other people will think or how they will behave, rather than for their own attitudes. It has been used successfully to predict election results, outperforming conventional polling models.

It can be used to rank the popularity of pretty much any category - cheaply, quickly and accurately. Because the results of the polls are known instantly, it create a quick-fire game that is engaging to play. Simply make the most popular choice to win.

Please contact me via email if you are interested in developing this game: albert_tapper@hotmail.com.

The wonderful story of Barrie de Suys and the revival of a local bowls club.

Winner of Bowls England's "Story of the Year" Award, 2022.

Watch Barrie pick up his award here:

Listen to Albert and Barrie on BBC Radio Surrey:

Many locals consider him the original Captain Tom.  Yet Barrie de Suys, 87, is little known beyond his hometown of Addlestone on the outskirts of London.  Now the winner of Bowls England's "Story of the Year 2022" his unsung achievements during Covid may become a morale booster to a wider audience.  Further, his revival of a flagging council-owned bowls club – from five members at the start of 2021 to forty by Season's end – could become a template for other struggling council clubs to follow. 

 

Addlestone Victory Park Bowls Club has endured a long and protracted demise since 2002 when it had a hundred members and Barrie last served on its Committee as a successful Captain.  By 2020 local Councillors began moves to end the subsidy of the Club (effectively closing it down).  They felt it was making little effort to recruit new members.  Increasingly, reports began to surface of unfriendliness at the club and members leaving as a result.  On one sad occasion a newcomer to bowls was turned away at the gates for wearing shorts.

 

Barrie himself had retired from outdoor bowling in 2016.  He had arthritis in both shoulders and lacked sufficient power to deliver the bowl more than half the required distance.  His medical record also included heart attacks and heart surgery.  In 2018 he had a replacement hip operation which left him with a pronounced limp.  

But his legs were generally sound and strong, as was his willingness to serve the local community.  At the start of lockdown in 2020, for everyone's mental and physical health, Barrie decided to draw people into the Park by walking around its 965 metres perimeter for charity.  

By October he had completed a staggering 2,400 circuits - stunning the local community who took to cheering him on.

Absent on only three days (due to heatstroke) he raised over £10,000 for the RNIB.  He took several falls on his way but waived away those who told him to stop.  In total, he covered 1,440 miles, far further than from Land’s End to John O’Groats.  The oldest person to complete that trip previously was aged 74 – yet Barrie received only minimal local press coverage for his accomplishment. 

Barrie en route, with police guard.

Barrie was deeply concerned about the state of his old club in the Park, of which he was still an honorary life member. The immediate problem in 2021 were the boards around the green which had become rotten and deemed a health and safety hazard by the Council.  They would fit new boards if he painted them with creosote.  This he did, single-handedly, twice over.  This involved two months pre-season work in March and April, working from 9am to dusk.

 

Meanwhile, the Club decided to invest all its remaining funds in recruiting new players via an Open Day, with free cream teas and subsidised annual memberships.  For advertising, it followed what proved wise advice from Bowls England: to market the occasion in local Facebook groups and use the stock Bowls’ Big Weekend digital images (both of which were free).

 

For the 25 new members who signed up at the Open Day, Barrie quickly became a totemic figure: the ‘Duracell Bunny’ was by now gardening around the green every day, also umpiring when called upon, and coaching a new Adults with Learning Difficulties bowling group he helped set up.  He was a figure of inspiration and awe.  He drew the new group of players together as the Club’s figurehead like a kind of glue.  All the new players were united by his tangible goodness and leadership.  He became the yardstick by which to measure decent behaviour, in short, he set the standards and they were high: ask not what you can take from the Club but what you can give.  Park-goers were drawn into the Club to see him and give him food and drink.  People joined up because of his local reputation.

 

Pressure mounted on him to play again, and his frustration grew at not being able to get his woods even the minimum length, right-handed or left-handed.  In recognition of his service to the Club, it gifted him a mechanical bowling arm. 

 

At first it seemed to be wasted precious money.  The bowls were fired off in a wide arc from mid-wicket to extra cover, and still nearly always too short.  But he never gave up and within a month, through hard practice and grit, he learned how to use his new tool with his wonky shoulders, even delivering running shots and the occasional drive.   For new bowlers and weaker bowlers in the Club, giving up had suddenly become more difficult.  If Barrie could play, so should they.  His spirit and encouragement kept them playing.  In July 2021, out of 34 playing members, 28 played, with the remaining six off games, injured.  Amazing numbers, considering over half the Club’s members were new to bowls that year.

 

Barrie’s most important contribution of all was to change the direction the Club was heading.  He was the spur to much needed change.  He embodied some new values that seemed to be emerging at the Club.  Inevitably there was some internal tension between old forces and the emergent new forces.  He led the later, looking to revive the still inward-looking club by opening up as a public service for all.  Measured by his high example, old behaviour began to look wrong and out of place, and change inevitable.

 

Barrie precipitated the creation of a new Committee with ten positions quickly filled by new members.  Perhaps uniquely, he helped push for the Club to adopt three new values, to guide it into the future, which were approved by 87 per cent of the membership in a vote: 

• “Accessibility - previously known as sport for all”.

• “Inclusivity - every player and spectator is made to feel at home inside the Club”.

• “Self-sufficiency – helping the Club become asset for the local community as a Council maintained club, not a burden on local tax-payers”. 

 

This was the makings of a successful strategy to survive and recover.  But tactically, the Club was still struggling to recruit local players.  It became apparent that endless videos of match highlights were not making the required impact in local Facebook groups.  People were not interested in bowls per se it seemed, perhaps due to its national image, perhaps due to the product the Club was offering, less likely because people were ‘hunkered down’ at home, an idea which smacked of defeatism.  If this was really true, why were the golf courses suddenly full post lockdown? 

 

Communications with the local community started to change.  Firstly, a suspected lost pet parrot filmed on the Clubhouse balcony hit the mark with locals.  A video of the Adults with Learning Difficulties was also well received.  Then it was decided that Barrie must be the best content, himself.  A tribute video to him went viral locally, seen by 15,000 locals and liked by nearly 200 in the town.  It was also kindly shared by Bowls Surrey, and Barrie finally got some recognition from a wider area and more members joined up.

 

Barrie de Suys working at the green, December 2021.

In conclusion, the Club has nominated Barrie for three reasons.  Firstly and most importantly - he deserves it.  Secondly, it’s felt his story and how he brought new players into the game is instructive for others.  And lastly, the Club is critically short of funds for marketing, and public relations like this is always free.  Winning this award would help generate more interest in the Club locally, both in online and offline media.  It would help relations with the Council, and the story will help the Club raise the funds we need to subsidise our memberships and develop in other areas.  In 2022, for every ‘over 60’ member the Club must pay £62.50 to the Council, and for every ‘Under 60’, £125.  These are precisely the same amounts the Club charges in membership fees, so the Club currently runs at a loss.  In future, Addlestone Victory Park must either charge more, difficult in a relatively deprived and predominately working-class area, permanently fund-raise or develop reliable new income streams such as providing food and beverages to local park-goers.

  

Donations to the club would be hugely appreciated by anyone who wants to support it, directly.  Please call Albert (Club Secretary) on 07427 664 600 or via email: albert@addlestonebowls.com.   Every pound given will subsidise the memberships of new bowlers to the game who cannot afford the fees.  

 

Barrie was elected as the new President of the Addlestone Bowls Club in August 2021, unopposed.

Barrie recieves his British Citizens Award, House of Lords, September 2021.

See also www.addlestonebowls.com

The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election and Political Prediction.

Pt.1. Failing to predict.

$3.7 billion was a lot to offer.  This was the amount Caesars Entertainment agreed to pay for William Hill this month.  The stated target of the Vegas-based gaming giant was the British bookmaker’s ‘trading expertise’, to expand their sports betting business during a post-prohibition, covid era, boom-time in American online sports gambling. 

Every month seems to deliver a new record level of sports betting in America. $3 billion was staked in September 2020, with new-blood Yankee sports bettors providing healthy trading margins of 5-10 per cent.  But just after the purchase of William Hill, Caesars should have got the message that British bookmaking practices may not be ones to trust, long term; and the bookmakers themselves, not worth the money. 

Bookmakers manage political prediction markets badly

Hill’s much vaunted market-making and public relations abilities were put to test this month, on the hardest of all betting markets to manage, but the blue ribbon market: the U.S. Presidential Election.  Over £200m has been staked by bettors on British Betfair alone, on the contest decided next Tuesday night. And this is the market which the rest of us are actually interested in, especially now, and I imagine Caesars were too, although as yet, political betting is curiously illegal in America.  

But over in England, where the practice is legal but where the spectre of safeguarding regulation looms like the Sword of Damocles, at times during October, not a single British bookie was brave enough to stand above the parapet and offer his services, including William Hill.  Betting on the Presidential Election had been suspended.[i]

The bookies’ reason for existence is managing predictions, or rather adding up and averaging the predictions of its customers, the general betting public.  That is where their wisdom comes from.  The crest on their Coat of Arms could read: ”The Voice of the People is the voice of God."  If the bookie takes on the public, thinking he knows more than they do, in the long run he will lose.  That is a short history of British political betting over the last thirty years.

As Sporting Index’s political trader in the 1990s, I used to get regular rollickings from Alistair Hunter, the venerable head trader, for conducting too much academic research, running insightful novelty markets and losing money. When the limey bookies get cock-sure, they always get skewered by the punters who know more.  

Less insightfully, we took bets on how many sips of whisky the Chancellor would take, in the House of Commons, during his budget speech, as well as how long he would talk.  When the dour Scottish Presbyterian Gordon Brown gave his first speech, he had us reaching for the Johnnie Walker's.  We had based our 'expert' prediction on the form of Brown’s predecessor, the clubby, genial, wide-smiling, Kenneth Clarke.  We knew Clarke drank heavily, as many as 6 or 7 sips during his speeches at the Dispatch Box.  But Gordon Brown was a teetotaller and we didn’t know it.  In the end he didn’t even touch his glass of water.  Needless to say, the crowd of punters knew. They sold the market heavily, i.e. went low on his sips.  For ever sip he didn’t take, it cost Sporting Index £20,000, and we had originally estimated four.      

The best political bookies hoover up information from their customers.  They know who the long term winners are, so they give disproportionate attention to their behaviour.  They listen to their customers.  If they listen to the wrong people, such as academics and journalists, they lose.  And the good bookmaker talks up his losses and never issues tips on his own markets.

Ladbrokes lost an estimated £2m on the 2015 election, and William Hill reported a £1m loss in their official results, eye-swivelling amounts when you consider how much is staked on politics today,[ii] and the fat margin built into bookmakers’ prices.  It’s not so much what they lost, but what they should have won. 

The bookmakers own stewards’ inquiry in 2015 was brief: “We trusted the polls and the expert analysis. The customers got lucky.”  But yet more was lost on Brexit and Trump in 2016, doing the same thing, i.e. swallowing the media and the academic account of the referendum or election, rather than understanding what their customers were saying with their bets.

As documented in this blog ad nauseam, when managed correctly, the betting market is a more reliable guide to what will happen in politics than: a) fast-whirring academic models of many breakable parts, b) voter intention opinion polls – a snapshot of opinion, not a prediction in any case - and c) the views of political pundits, i.e. tipsters, the most unreliable source of all.  

A market price prediction, particularly on a matter of public interest, often draws up more relevant information from a wider range of varied sources than expert opinion can, essentially because it has more tentacles. The market, as Hayek put it, is a vast information storage system.  Its tentacles are the bettors, now motivated by winning a game, to think harder about what will happen, largely ignoring emotion and their own prejudices - if they are good and going to win.  

In this regard, Dominic Cummings was right when he said: “political news makes you dumber.”  Right now, we need political betting like never before, as an alternative to polling and the pundits, to answer questions like: What was the impact of the first televised debate on the race?  What is the effect of Donald Trump catching covid on the outcome of the Presidential Election?  Indeed what will be the effect of covid on the result?  At the time of writing, all I have heard is conjecture on that last question, and a resounding silence from political scientists who prefer to start their work, after the event.  

But multivariate analysis of opinion poll data would reveal rigorous conclusions, especially in ‘time-series’, modelling the shock of covid on the American electorate over time, rather than at a snapshot of time.  British political science doesn't have the will or the skill to do it - with a few notable exceptions - to understand what will happen in politics using Bayesian methods, although it would have predicted the result of the Brexit referendum.  Understanding how support for E.U. membership moved over time was what my PhD was about. 

I found the dedicated study of political prediction is largely confined to a small 'prediction unit' hidden away in a dirty peeble-dash bungalow cum Nissen hut, at some obscure university in South Wales.  

Meanwhile, in the gleaming towers of the City, these difficult skills of Bayesian analysis are the norm.  They are used to predict economic outcomes, such as the movement of interest rates over-time, currency price fluctuations, as well as the effect of shocks like covid on everything economic, and how these effects will dissipate into the future.

Political correctness infects accurate insight 

I listened to the Today programme the morning after Trump's covid diagnosis, hoping to find out about its impact on the election.  Even the sports news is about politics on the Today programme, even the insulting racing tips at the end are somehow selected for the topicality of the horse’s names, so the ghastly little toad who does the sports news can share a political joke with Nick Robinson, the main presenter, thus reducing them to a segue to another item.  

Unsurprisingly, I was none the wiser about the election after a miserable three-hour long ordeal.  Now I will revert to checking the odds instead, for a numerical ready-reckoner of the impact of news on the predicted result, as I have always done, particularly at a time of crisis and seismic fast-moving events, should the prices be made available.

I shouldn’t be the one saying bookmaking works, that it should be a rival to mainstream media in educating us about politics. The bookmakers should be saying it. Their job is to represent the magical mechanic of the market - the soothsayer of probabilities, i.e. their product - and their customers - the two things that make the wisdom of crowds work.  They have to believe in their product and defend it to the hilt.  I don't think they have that fight in them.  They don't understand of what their sometimes socially useful trade can deliver, instead they descend to where only frivolity lies: cheap product sold with cheap TV adverts.  

It should also be the public’s choice whether they bet on political affairs, even on an election when the pale cast of death hangs overhead.  It shouldn't be taken away from them by their bookmaker.  The element of death must be calculated in too, we can't be squeamish about this.  Incapacitation from fighting the election is about a 10 per cent chance I would think, but this is the component of the betting decision which the bookmakers say is distasteful.  

Then there are the regulators at home to consider for the bookmaker, and a perverse desire to play up a sort of virtue in not doing their job – a new and unlovely feature of British bookmaking. Bookies now flock to the scent of progress, smelly little orthodoxies really, like blue-bottles to a dead cat.  

Political progress used to be about the steady empowerment of the people, such as giving everyone the vote, including women and the working class. But modern political progress - cultural correctness - is a swindle.  The end is never reached, conflict will go on and on, there will always be something more to vanquish, until the scythe of progress comes down on the bookmaker himself, in the form of an outright ban, on safeguarding grounds. 

Or the British bookmaker succumbs to the heat of Vegas.  An old colleague and friend of mine called Humid, who sweat a lot, found even the more temperate climes of Gibraltar too much.  He was a gigantic man, as so many bookmakers are, and we were all heavy drinkers on the Rock, where a litre of Smirnoff was a fiver and more expensive than the Red Bull we mixed it with.  One steaming morning, seperated from the air-conditioning, on a cigarette break outside, Humid keeled over in the sun. He was successfully medevacked back to the U.K. - but was never to return to Gib.  

I simply offer this as a warning to any bookmaker who may be Vegas-bound.  The problem with the place is the problem for the bookmaker.  The best bookmakers in my experience, like the best players, are addicts, it takes one to know one, but, increasingly, they must practice their trade in some of the most dangerous places in the world for them.  With Vegas, top of the list.

***

The old code of the bookmaker, once his only code, was “not to bet on human suffering”.  It used to only apply on bets about someone actually dying.[iii]  A betting market on Trump dying, would, I suppose, be unacceptable, rightly.  But now the rule seems to apply to any factor involving suffering, within the betting calculation of a wider, more important, and different outcome: i.e. he may die – and that will affect the result - so the whole innocent election market gets written off.  

Of course the market’s importance goes way beyond the health of one individual, even if it’s the President.  I’m sure he didn't mind too much, he knew the stockbrokers were doing the same thing, just not downing tools. It’s major ground to concede by the bookmakers, not assessing Trump’s survival rate, but I am a hard liner who thinks we should be firing all our guns at a time of crisis. The biggest guns are the crowd.  The covid tracing app is another good example of employing the crowd, to police covid, using new technology.  The government, either sabotaged it or didn't give it the support it needed, not trusting the behaviour of the crowd and fearing the reaction of the civil libertarians at The Telegraph.  

We should be betting on covid rates of infection in my opinion, because that will give us the best idea of what is going to happen to covid numbers – better than any single epidemiologist’s view, based on another expert algorithm of many breakable parts.  Never mind the new middle-class morality of not causing offence. Let’s save lives, we are in a crisis like a war with five-hundred people being killed a day.  Imagine them, in a field, like the fifty at the end of The Great Escape: and then they are all mowed down. Sometimes, I needs the horrific mental image, of something we can manage, to knock myself out of denial and easy sweet talk about civil liberties. 

And where exactly does all this new found sensitivity about politicians end up?  There is animal suffering involved in horse-racing.  Horses are killed regularly.  Does that apply any less than human suffering?  And if hunting is wrong because human pleasure is derived from killing a fox, why not ban horse-racing, which is also for our entertainment?  

I fear the bookmakers have opened a door here that will not be easy to close.  But the real problem is this. They have never properly made a case for political betting as a tool of insight.  Having social value is the best bulwark against regulation, as well as hooking the government into a share of your profits.

Even Betfair, not really a bookie but the facilitator of exchange betting between players, suspended its market on the result this week, announcing: “We do not feel it is right to provide a market, given the circumstances,” continuing either piously or deceitfully, probably deceitfully: “our thoughts are with the President and First Lady at this time.”  

This after matching £100m in bets, with the company Political Analyst and PR man, Paul Krishnamurty, telling all its customers Biden was a great bet throughout the campaign.  Report the market, it is more interesting.  Tell the world what you are finding out about politics from your customers. If not, public expectations on the election cease to find expression.  We are left with the experts view only.  

One thing we do not want more of is the expert view.  In any case, lines from political pundits jump into place like iron fillings obeying the magnet.  If the expert view on the election turns out to be the correct one, we already know what that view is.  

If you aren’t already aware of the British mainstream media view on the 2020 U.S. Election, I think at least my American readers will find it interesting.  What the limey British media thinks of you, my friends. It's one ginormous sneer after another I’m afraid.  I promise you, many of the British public like you a great deal, certainly more than the French or the Germans. They would like Trump too, because he’s an entertainer and best appreciated as such, particularly when he is making an otherwise dry political point, - I liked his joke about the North Korean leader, “Rocketman” - perfect - but I’m afraid the British public has been ‘got at’ by the British broadcasters. No one says anything too positive about Trump on social media, out of fear. The elite view is largely synonymous with the B.B.C. view.

Here it is, I heard it on the Today Programme:

It’s just too downright uncertain to get involved with political predictions, at all.  American politics right now is too turbulent nay chaotic.  It’s ill-tempered divisive and now ‘polarised’ (i.e. extreme).  Accurate information is in short supply and the Russians and the Chinese are trying swing the election with misinformation.  The public are for one conspiracy theory or another, and generally not very well informed on the details of the debate. But this is a unique election where the usually strong incumbency advantages do not apply. Covid has created a new and dominant issue of competency tackling the virus. Given what is going on over there, this can only be bad for Trump.  

Over 200,000 Americans have died from Covid in six wearisome months, over seven million have been infected, and now the President has gone down with it, four weeks before the poll on 3^rd November and is in and out of hospital. Jon Sopel, the BBC’s North America Correspondent,[iv] says "the White House are scrambling like crazy to work out what to do” – a bit like the Telegraph newspaper: “the power cord has been yanked out of his campaign” (02/10/20) – i.e. you lot are rudderless and without a plan. 

Meanwhile, U.S. GDP has tanked 30 per cent; a third of California has been incinerated, and the country is on the verge of a constitutional crisis, if not a well-armed civil war.  

Unsurprisingly, whilst a prediction is never made explicit by the BBC, against such a backdrop any listener would call it as a Biden win by default, backed up to some degree by his lead in the voting intention polls.  

The British punters, following it’s pundits, under a sustained barrage of undisguised English sneers about Trump, the President you voted for, forget the average American - the voters - cares less about politics than is made out, they are not either for Antifa or the Pretty Boys, and not all America is rioting.  

An alternative academic view of American public opinion

American public opinion is generally moderate, conservative and authoritarian, as my favourite political scientist put it, an American himself, called Morris P. Fiorina.  He is no fan of Trump.

The American public have been like that for some time, political change is over-egged at the public level, only the political elites have become significantly more radical, and this is merely a reflection of how political choice is working in America.  

It is how policies are packaged together and sold to the public in the American two-party system. Given the circumstances, it’s quite rational for the two rival candidates to move apart - usually it is rational for them to move together, like two ice cream vendors on a long beach will both position themselves together in the middle, assuming sun-bathers are evenly distributed along the length of the beach.

However, American politics is changing currently in this respect, with a realignment of policies around ‘identity politics’, and away from economics.  The Democrats are now more pro-free markets in their economics than the Republicans on questions of global trade.  

In short, what is happening in American politics is natural change, it is not so mad, bad and sad, if you want to analyse it honestly and dispassionately.  The American political system is more likely to produce more leaders like Trump these days, leaders that play on the new political divide, because it is a more convenient way to package themselves - successfully.  If he loses, it will be because of the coronavirus, not his populism.

I follow Morris P. Fiorina who says the culture war thesis is over-egged at the public-level. It’s the politicians and the media who have moved apart to the point of conflict.  Culture wars aren’t emanating from the public as the writers in the Telegraph tell us, or as Douglas Murray argues in his infuriatingly entitled book, "The Madness of Crowds".  The mass of the American public is not that interested.  It’s in the middle and could go left or right.  Will they buy the liberal package to the left, or the populist package to the right?  We will know after this election whether the challenger liberal package of Biden will take the crown. 

I do not however, underestimate how important questions of competency are as drivers of vote choice.  But there must be some uncertainty of how much covid will provoke change in the ballot box, beyond a referendum on populism and liberal packages.  Covid is surely a big ‘shock to the system’ and the more Trump moves the debate onto the territory of culture wars, the better for him.  He has a built-in majority on that front in the U.S.A.  

State of the prediction market

As of Monday 5^th October at 21:30, Trump had just 33 chances in 100 of winning in November, according to Betdaq, Betfair’s smaller rival.  Currently, on the 29^th October, the prediction is similar.  The expert models predict that Trump has smaller chances, the most celebrated expert being Nate Silver, who gives Trump just 13 chances in a 100. Either the experts or the markets have got it wrong.  

For William Hill, Biden’s chances leapt from 56 / 100 before the first T.V. debate, to 63 / 100 after it.[v]  When the news about Trump’s covid diagnosis came in, and then he was hospitalised, they suspended the market, but Biden’s win probability rose to a high of 67 / 100 on Betdaq who bravely didn’t suspend their market.  It fell back slightly to 64 / 100 when Trump announced he was leaving hospital and has fluctuated around that mark since.  In betting terms he is a 2-1 on shot.  Stake £200 to be returned £300, or lose it all if Trump wins, as of 29^th October 2020, less than a week from the Election on 3^rd November.

Betfair suspends it market on the Presidential Election, 02/10/2020.

Part 2. A silver lining...  alternatives and an opportunity.

Since leaving Betfair in 2009, I have been engaged mainly in political science and attending rehabs, doing an MSc and then the unfinished PhD.  

However, academia did stoke my interest in prediction games.  I became increasingly disenchanted in academic approaches to prediction, ones that didn't acknowledge the crowd’s wisdom and relied too heavily on expert assumptions, and also the internet polling industry, upon which the academics relied, who refuse to gamify their product because they felt it was below them.   

Pollsters are already fully occupied bodging their online polling data to correct for chronic biases in their self-selecting internet panels of respondents.  There is only one vote intention opinion poll that is ‘gold standard’ and that is a random-probability survey, where every single voter has an equal chance of being selected for an interview – like the British Election Study.  

But these more representative surveys of opinion are extremely rare and expensive.  They involve canvassers visiting most postcodes, leaping over garden fences, and avoiding dangerous dogs to access the randomly selected interviewees.  So we only get the gold standard very rarely, and the opinion polls currently showing wide-margin leads for Biden over Trump, are nearly all internet polls.  Not only is the polling and market research industry not moving forwards with new products, it is moving backwards with its existing offering. 

The problem, specifically relating to the U.S. Election, is that it takes a particular type of person to even contemplate filling in a twenty minute survey for fifty cents, by signing up for one of the panels.  This type of person tends to be either conscientious (middle-class) or a penny-pincher – they tend to be of a type that likes voting Remain or supporting Joe Biden.  On the other hand, Brexiteers and Trump supporters are generally 'risk-takers' in profile -and if anything, more likely to have a bet - which can also create biases in political betting, but not such serious ones. 

The pollsters admit the problem now, after it was the primary conclusion of the highly credible Sturgis Report on why the opinion polls have been failing in the last five years.  So they have to correct for this, by giving greater weight to working class respondents they are under-sampling, but the amount of correction is pure guesswork and assumption on the part of the expert psephologists.  

The problem is exacerbated by the new cleavage in British and U.S. politics which causes disturbance to their assumptions about which groups of voters support which candidates on which criteria.  More working class people up North are supporting Boris Johnson and Brexit, and more middle-class voters, who voted Remain, are supporting Labour.  Brexit sped up this realignment in Britain, as has Trump in America.  

Believing internet polls requires trust in the abilities of these experts to be omniscient about the scales of these changes, and also to know the likelihood of each new competing group to turnout and vote – ‘differential turnout’ is another reason why polls aren’t predictions and shouldn’t be treated as such.  

Maybe low-risk taking Democrats will be less likely to vote than red-neck Trump supporters, at a time of covid, we just don't know.  We really don't know why turnout in this election is so high, already, before polling day, and whether this favours Biden or Trump, it either suggests the wind of change is blowing, or it's because of a positive effect from Trump's livelier campaign, on his more passionate supporters.  

But the dilemma of political prediction today is really this: the bookies know or care little about insight, and the polling people know little about customer engagement and fun.  The future is the Yin and the Yang – gamified polling. I am confident that neither industry has the capacity to deliver that; a missing mechanism needs inventing, probably by someone with a missing mechanism himself, that both gamifies polling yet still delivers accurate and reliable insight.  

Consider how pollsters and bookmakers get on together.  Pollsters are particularly snooty about bookmakers, who in return revere pollsters in a fawning way.  I remember on some high floor at the L.S.E, at the big academic prediction conference on the 2015 English General Election, a nervous bookmaker from Ladbrokes pitched up and was told by the academics, in a form or a question, that the betting public were biased on politics weren’t they, and the bookmaker, with a weak embarrassed smile, meekly agreed: "political markets are not a good guide to what may happen", he said.  I noted his words down at the time.  There is nothing easier for bookmakers to desert their trade and make peace with the British Establishment, and nothing more sickening. 

They are running from the fair representation of their customers, who they think are stupid.  They even publically pronounce during this campaign that too many of their customers have backed Trump and the price is wrong, and jobs are on the line if he wins.  And that is their PR man!

It was at that L.S.E. conference that the scales fell from my eyes about expert prediction, and I saw how the assumption-laden models were in reality as toothless as carp.  But worse was the distain in the room at the alternative: asking the public what they think will happen. 

I sat next to an esteemed American professor called Michael Lewis-Beck, and he looked slightly stunned too.  Of the twelve academic models on display that day, all attempting to predict the 2015 election – the only non-expert ‘crowd wisdom’ prediction came from a German called Andreas Murr.  Andreas' model turned out to be the second most accurate of the twelve when the results came in.  

I left my PhD to look at social gaming product, in the belief that I had a way to improve on what Andreas Murr was doing, aiming to rectify the maladies of social scientists, market-researchers, pollsters, bookmakers and of course the media, with an alternative.  A compelling game is required, which aggregates crowd wisdom but does not involve players losing money and ruining lives, and delivers the insight to make it truly social. It’s not an easy nut to crack.  

Gambling companies’ disingenuous social gaming developments

This - changing the product - if you have the time and the effort to think about it, would be the honest and socially responsible thing for bookmakers to do themselves.  

Consider how Philip Morris has got surprisingly honest about the dangers of smoking, and is investing heavily in vape technology. Or the oil majors, Shell and Co, they really are investing in renewable energy.  But social games to the bookmakers are nothing to do with social responsibility.  Rather their games are designed as a wolf in sheep's clothing to the unsuspecting players. Witness the iTV Seven and Sky’s Saturday Super Six – both built by Sky Bet, a British bookmaker now owned by the Canadian The Stars Group, owned in turn by Flutter, who also own Paddy Power and Betfair.  

Somewhat astonishingly, jaw-droppingly really, they are a funnel for customers in the other direction to the one Philip Morris is taking, i.e. from vaping to smoking.  In this form of social gaming, the player starts off in a harmless world, a bit like being safe in a clean white walled vape room, rather than down the pub, with free entrance, free liquid, and all legally promoted on the TV by Jeff Stelling.  

Then he finds himself, all of a sudden, in the betting green forest of the wolf, via the back door, lured in with a free bet.  I know revenues of £800+ per player are an average for an effective online sports betting and gaming site - once you have rinsed the same players through the casino (the really hard stuff) and then fed them to the Swedes in the online poker room.  That's like chucking chunks of red meat to lions. 

Apart from the bogus commitment to social responsibility, the big problem with the bookmakers version of social gaming is the same problem with fixed odds betting, the industry ignore the potential of their games to provide insight as well as entertainment.  As ever, the games are frivolous.  

I'm not so interested in synchronous video game play counting as social gaming, nor eSports, 'skill gaming' or Fortnite - because these games generate no socially useful insight. Puerile social casinos are the same, along with fantasy sports. 

The Dream11 fantasy game has its merits, currently operating on the IPL – to you Americans that is the Indian Premier League cricket tournament. Players pick a team before an individual match starts, from which players on both sides will perform best, with points for wickets, catches and runs and double for your Captain, a sort of tie-breaker.  Dream11 are clever because the IPL is principally about player performance, not team performance, among the public.  The territory of fixed odds - “who will win?” - still of course has a value, but the gap between when the bet is struck and the result being known is yawning, which makes it less compelling.  

There are more exciting games to play, too.  What we need now in sport is a new creation to re-engage the crowd who have been locked out of the live sporting venues, that is healthy and represents the public in sport in a new way.  Something better is needed than the insult of artificial crowd noise, controlled by a single sound mixer technician; who has a habit of sending the viewer the wrong way by pushing the ‘loud cheer’ button when the batsman has drilled it straight to the fielder.  Every time it happens, we are reminded that the expert is no substitute for the real crowd who know more, collectively.

The Indians are getting their kicks out of sport in a new way.  They love the Dream11 game, it has well over 100 million users (that's 7 per cent of all Indians), and had enough cash to buy the IPL's lead sponsorship in 2020.  

However, Dream11 play the same trick on the regulators as Sky Bet, having been classified as 'games of skill' rather than gambling by the Indian courts. The free play tournaments get promoted in the broadcast, including directly by IPL commentators as part of their deal. But the prizes are tiny with the free play games.  Players soon want to move onto the cash tourneys where you can lose real money but the bigger returns make the whole exercise worthwhile.  Of course, that all happens away from the eyes of the broadcasting regulator.

Where it ends for the punter

When the player is under the cosh of the bookmaker, in some dark place, then finally accepts that the online casino has beaten him, he is rendered powerless as the bookmaker puts £1,000 cash into his casino account, a few days later, on non-withdrawable terms.  

Mechanically, he returns to the laptop to play, and then cannot stop.  I know this used to happen, I used to issue the money myself. We simply had to keep the best players playing.  In an online casino 90 per cent of the profits come from just 10 per cent of the customers, and they only last two months on average until they know they are beaten, stop playing and maybe try online poker because it’s a game a skill – and all gamblers think they are skilful.  Shower these lapsing players in cash and they will give you more cash back. If you give an alcoholic a bottle of scotch, after he has stopped drinking for a month, he is sure to buy a crate from you in less than a week.  

This is the duplicitous theory that lies behind the player reactivation strategies of online casinos.  It sits uneasily next to the fine words of the Betting and Gaming Company spokesman announcing political betting market shutdowns out of ‘respect’.  Respect your customers first.  Bookmakers are best off staying out of the morality game altogether, unless it is to change their product.  

A fixed odds bet on the U.S. election?

If the market is infected with the mainstream view, their view-taking is there to be punished by you - if you agree with me - although of course it’s still a dangerous course of action, something I no longer advocate - having a bet. There are safer ways to draw socially useful information from a prediction market, which will be more entertaining.  The something missing is coming my friends, but in the meantime, if I were to bet, my rationale on the 2020 Presidential Election is similar to my tip to back Brexit at 11/4: the odds reflect the established view of the media and academics, it's not one hundred per cent punter sourced.  The result will probably be closer to the betting market forecast than what the pundits are saying, and the academics and the pollsters.

This does not mean I support Trump, I have my sneaking, and weak sympathies for anglo-philia which may help Britain. I like the way he never looks down on the public. He is flawed like I am flawed, like miserable little egotisms together.  There is a certain realism and honesty about that, in a back-handed way.  But a populist government is a contradiction in terms.  

What I mean by this, is that real populism, if we are heading in that direction, is about people governing themselves, a vision of the future if you like, not a boot stamping on a human face.  New technology and good science can empower the people to govern themselves, without recourse to coercive government, even lockdowns.  Any government needed in such a State would be truly old-fashioned liberal, crediting the public with good sense.  This is an English tradition laid down by John Locke, and before that Aristotle the Greek at the dawn of Western civilisation. It is what made our civilisation, and how we survive in hard times.   

Notes to reader:

• I will give you more thoughts about social gaming and my version of it - i.e. engagement + fun + insight + safety, in 2021.
   
• If you are interested in my approach to social gaming, or have any thoughts or would like to get involved, please contact me at albert_tapper@hotmail.com. 
  
  
• For more discussion on the U.S. Election story and political prediction, please listen to my interview on the excellent "Gamble on" U.S. podcast, on political prediction and the U.S. General election - here: https://soundcloud.com/gambleonpodcast/episode-114-betting-handle-records-alexander-westgate-dispute-election-betting-with-albert-tapper - 25 minutes and 30 seconds into it.

Ends / 6,100 words / edited, 30/10/20. 

---

[i] With the exception of Betdaq, which has continued trading.
[ii] Over £100m was matched on the Betfair exchange before it was suspended.  Eventually, over £550m would be matched.
[iii] It still goes on, but underground.  I know a private group who run a ten-to-follow game, if one of your selections dies in the calendar year, you win 100 points minus their age. 
[iv] BBC Radio 4.  Friday 2^nd October 2020.
[v] See Las Vegas Review Journal: https://www.reviewjournal.com/sports/betting/election-odds-taken-down-after-trumps-positive-coronavirus-test-2135622/.  Accessed 05/10/2020.

Bohemian Rhapsody and its critics

Note: Since the piece below was written, the film Bohemian Rhapsody won four Oscars (2018-19), although not Best Picture.

***

As I went through the doors into Screen Six, the first sound was a triumphal wall of graphite-strengthened guitar.  I was in time for the 20th Century Fox opening fanfare at the beginning of the film, Bohemian Rhapsody (Oct. 2018).  The original fanfare had been dubbed over by Queen at a higher voltage.  Right from the start, this drummer-boy dub seemed to define the whole exercise, a prelude for what would be stirred emotion, but a pointless one for the critics.  I wasn't sure why.  From then on, in the following two hours or so, every melody that came along was an pleasing acoustic memory.  Now with pictures, it was important and interesting history.  The loud sound and sonic effects, the ones you only get watching films in cinemas, amplified my euphoria.  A week after its opening, I had viewed it three times, and each time the images grew stronger and the whole point of all the emotion, clearer.  And with things going wrong in Britain right now, don't we just need a soothing spoonful of the Freddie Mercury syrup?  Britain’s favourite syrup.  It's rather comforting to be reminded, that we, the British, are still the world's finest exporter of culture, especially when we team up with Hollywood.  Us Anglo-Americans again!  A-A…  A set…  American-Airlines…  Pocket-rockets…  Two-Aces in the hole! 

I am writing about the unashamedly popular art of Queen.  It’s the genuinely heroic tale of Freddie Mercury, delivered by the best professionals in the film-making business, costing fortunes but hated by the mainstream critics.  In its first month, not one professional critic awarded more than the seemingly obligatory three stars (out of five).  I saw about 20 three stars.  And now today, in early January 2019, it has, 'surprisingly' according to the B.B.C., won two Golden Globes: one for best film drama, and the other best drama actor (Rami Malek).  The earlier tocsin-ringing by the critics was ignored by the Golden Globe voters, who sided instead with the public.  The public had rated it an '83 per cent' on the useful IMDb app, compared to the miserable ‘49 per cent’ Metacritic average of the reviewers.  I suppose those producers in Britain and Hollywood are just that much closer to the public than the reviewers, who have all sorts of personal motivations for what they write.

And show those producers in Britain and Hollywood a hero, and they will write you a tragedy, full of emotion and tug.  Deliveries of emotional art are much sort-after, but elusive.  What really helps is a good subject.  They are equally rare.  Find a good subject and show those producers, Britain and Stateside.  All that glitters is gold is the rule.  Someone like Alex Higgins with his potting will do.  Take a peep at Dave "The Devilfish" Ulliott on the poker tables.  Show them Bobby Fischer with his moves.  "I only believe in good moves", Bobby will tell them, not "psychology" - in 'Pawn Sacrifice' on Netflix.  Show them T.E. Lawrence and his Arabs, or Freddie Mercury with his musical anthems and strutting about.  Genius and illness must be conjoined.  Then perhaps, perm a light tale, from the array of those terminally unique, and your chances of delivering artistic success improve measurably.  In sales or votes. 

But don't get slaughtered in the process, like they all did.  The critics will accuse you of making frothy and shallow emotional appeals to the public. They will call your work 'populist art' rather than 'popular art', preferring the former.  'Populism' is the elite's own term, loaded with danger, delivered with a distaste for an emotional public, or those pied-piper populists, like Farage and Trump, who serve the public.  One is never sure whether the pied-pipers are to blame, or the public, or both.  Generally, critics of populist culture target the producers, not the audience, more so than critics of populist politics who readily and brazenly dismiss the public’s views.

  

The realism of the film: Freddie Mercury at Live Aid.  Or is it Rami Malek?  

No copyright infringement intended.  Source: here.

With this film, the totemic lines come regularly and in-time - evocative now in the light of Mercury’s death - lines which, frankly, defy rational explanation.  But we still know what they mean when Freddie Mercury the man rears up to deliver them, and knowing enough of his story:  Who wants to live forever?  Everyone wants to put me down.  Ay-oh!... Ay-oh!...  Ay-oh.  The Show must go on!  Keep yourself alive!  I want to break free.  Don’t stop me now!  Does anybody know what we are looking for?  Gordon's Alive!  What are these lines about?  What does it even mean, “Bohemian Rhapsody?” asks Mike Myers, who plays the music boss.  “Nothing really matters to me, just keep the sentences short, and don’t use a long word when a short one will do… and add a new para ___

And add a track called: “I’m in love with my car.”  The film reveals the band management's pressure to publish that song, and it did indeed appear in A Night At the Opera (1975) - ‘the machine of a dream’ - the most expensive album ever made at the time.  The vast money down was a warning sign for the critics then – the cost – just like “10 years to make, multiple directors” regularly comes into the critics sight-line with Bohemian Rhapsody the film.  They say good art is often spontaneous and cheap to produce.  Critics take themselves off to obscure film festivals in places like Reykjavik to produce their kindest reviews.  With populist art however, being lavish helps greatly.

The totemic anthems of Queen – the band’s speciality and essential vigour – are lost on the new film’s mainstream critics.  Are they even mainstream anymore?  They have always seen Queen and its straightforwardness as rather vulgar, like Status Quo, when measured against their own expert yardsticks: just a bit simple and obvious.  And the direct crowd engagement and sing-alongs to ‘We will rock you’ are: proper ugh and yuk.  The material isn’t obscure enough to dig their critic tentacles into, and tell us what it is all about.  We know already.  It's an emotional procession or something, it's enjoyable and meaningful to us in our own way.  We don’t really need the critics parading their talent for revealing hidden meanings, and picking up on odd controversial remarks, when this show is so gloriously simple, but, somehow, requiring a hatchet job.  The more you blithely ram into us the same regurgitated brain-dead clichés (ah, both clichés themselves), – the more we don’t listen, or read, or watch.  The less we care.  In the digital world, increasingly, people want to choose their own stuff, on demand, and make their own minds up.  And look at the star ratings on Amazon or somewhere to determine what our fellow man thinks, because that’s the most reliable guide for now, aggregated and averaged up, rather than a few opinions of experts.  But something new will come along that's an even more reliable guide, mark my words!

Clearly the censors deliberated long and hard about whether Bohemian Rhapsody was a 12 or PG, eventually coming down on the side of a 12 / PG13 certificate.  What a discussion that must have been!  I’m glad I was out of the oak-panelled room, as the great and the good of the British Board of Classification (another B.B.C.), no pipe-smoking to be seen, but deep-sunken in their weathered leather armchairs around the board table - ironically made of an (E.U.) banned material - mahogany - itself of nuanced and much-analysed grain – opined on the nuanced textures to the film.  Or lack of them, probably.  Whatever "nuanced textures" are?  

Maybe they are only visible to a few when the fog of reviews descends on art and glorious simplicity is lost.  I think the textures may have been about homosexuality and drugs, at the highest level.  And whilst we are now sanctioned to take teenagers to see the film, and are grateful we may do so, the reviewers were desperately upset!  They (and Sacha Baron Cohen who left the part of Mercury thankfully) seemed to want the film to have enough drug-fuelled descent and lurid homosexual action to warrant an 18 classification. 

I sympathise with drummer Roger Taylor’s relief when they were rid of Baron Cohen.  “We didn’t want it to be a joke… we want people to be moved”, said Taylor recently, “as ever… as ever”, he could have continued ad infinitum.  But the reviewers wanted their truth out, how Mercury challenged the prejudices of the day: the film ‘could have been a little franker on Mercury’s gay relationships’, lamented Tim Robey in The Telegraph.  (Reasoned conclusion: he didn’t sufficiently represent his homosexuality and gay rights).  What about how difficult it was to be an immigrant at the time, from an obscure Parsi background via Zanzibar? (Conclusion: ‘he was a victim too’ – B.B.C. Radio 4 Front Row.)  

And here was the ‘missed opportunity’ ‘bedevilling the whole thing’ (Telegraph): what might have been rather than what was.  Jasper Rees, writing in The Spectator (groan, has PC reached this far?) wanted more of the feast of life, but the film was a famine: “Demoralising, the weird tale of a Parsi immigrant, an astrophysicist, a dentist and an electrical engineer is packaged as a succession of pre-digested clichés…”  

I think this reviewer wanted a study of the whole band Queen, not Freddie Mercury!  

Is he mad?  Keep the band away from the film altogether should have been the maxim.  That this largely happened, is a tribute to the humility of the band in their direction of the film.  No one says this, yet we know Mercury wrote all the hits as well as singing them.  The relationship between the “Mercury” in “The Band” is like “Britain” in “The E.U.."  Freddie is sort of in the band, but it’s Freddie that really counts.  He is the interest and the spark.  The appeal is always the person or the country.  Not the band or the E.U..  Both are only required sparingly.

That of course – ‘the what’s missing’ - is the favourite tack of any reviewer; his pretext to talk about his own creative ideas and mock idealism, giving up on the film itself, boring us all senseless.  ‘Den of Geek’ displayed in his review, another tiresome habit of the critic: a penchant for comparison with all the other films he knows about, to reveal his own very precise knowledge, and ability to pigeon-hole within a continuum of all the other rock biopics he has watched and rated.  Den says “in essence, Bohemian Rhapsody is a greatest hits album wrapped in the same package that moviegoers received for Ray, Walk The Line, Beyond the Sea, and Jersey Boys (it’s lesser than the first two but far superior to the later)”.  Where will “Rocketman" (2019) about Elton John, to be released next year, slot in, do we all wonder?   I hope it somehow weaves in Trump's use of the word "Rocketman" as a description of Kim Jong-un, because it was perfect.  But I fear it's going to be a long time.  A long, long, time.  

When Rocketman is launched, expect its gayness to be analysed in minuscule detail.  And discussed, more worryingly, by the critics clutching a glass of wine in the foyer, at the pre-screening in Shepperton Studios.  That was where, I presume, they had agreed to give Bohemian Rhapsody three stars - "But no more!"…  They had exclaimed in unison a couple of times, "BUT NO MORE!", and were now rolling around with laughter, wine splashing about, their spectacles gone quiffy so spastically did they roll around.  But, taking control of themselves again, they took in a deep, long intake of breath whilst arching their backs to upright, specs nudged back into place over their long noses.  Some hands were thrust into mainly skinny hips, jolting them sideways as a result.  They looked down solemnly.  Some placed a hand their chin.  They were chastening themselves from all their jeering, and feeling their rancour.  A guilty feeling probably, for being such a venal lot.  But once the ice was broken with the three stars business, the critics seized their opportunity once more, to fire their best lines into the huddle, on how the film fell short, and laughter erupted again.    

The Metro man bemoaned Brian May and Roger Taylor’s insistence on the film remaining ‘family friendly’.  There was too much about the heterosexual relationship with Mary (to whom he left most of his estate, b.t.w. Metro).  However, a friend with me at the cinema enjoyed that bit the most – “every good film should have some love story” she declared.  

And do people really want gay advocacy and raw cock shoved down their throats... as I have just done to you?  Doesn’t it make you squirm and feel uncomfortable?  I only say those words to illustrate the point – I don’t like writing that sentence.  And shamefully I will not easily put politics before my popularity with you.  But I challenge any reviewer to say it, too, or if they really mean it, to say this film is “beautifully gay” (and it is).  I want to see it on paper.  From a progressive paper.  The Guardian would be nice, but not essential.  I’ve never seen that even in The Pink Times – I think I’ve seen “beautifully African” somewhere and agreed, but never “beautifully homosexual”, although both are ugly and generalising labels.  They will do however for now, just to feel the reviewer’s tolerance.  For as long as he utters specious stuff such as "gayness could have been explored further", I will remain unconvinced.  Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them.  Worse, I will think the male writer is pulling a fast one, bathing in a warm virtuous feeling of being ‘right on’, without paying the fare that is risking his readership to get there – a sham signaling of virtue, not virtue itself.  

***

George Orwell and the "Nancy-Boy" (Mandarin style) critics

This is the true enemy of promise that the 'Nancy-boy Poets' suffered from, as described by George Orwell in Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936) and Politics and the English Language (1945).  Lots of words about very little, Mandarin style done badly.  Staleness of imagery, lack of precision, dying metaphors, pretentious diction, always in the passive, meaningless words untethered from real objects.  The kind of thing that 'those moneyed young beasts... write almost in their sleep', as they glided gracefully from Eton to Cambridge and then on to the critic columns of the old press, with no intervening time whatsoever. 'Money and Culture!  In a country like England you can be no more cultured without money than you can join the Cavalry Club.'  I think Orwell would have taken heart right now, at least with the lowering of Old Media’s colours.  There are good things about our world today.  Let's say it!

Warming to my task, I plead to the reviewer, just say “raw c*!k” to show honesty, but “C*!k and balls”, a dying metaphor, will not do.  If you want raw c*!k on celluloid, then just mention those words in ink why not, on your own canvas, as a starter?  Don’t be disingenuous.  Prove to us your true worth, not your double standards.  Don’t criticise a film’s taboos, whilst shying away from them yourself, without even showing a picture, but as graphically as is possible - just spell it out on paper!    

The woman from the B.B.C. piped up that it was against the Trust’s constitution or something, and the man from The Independent said it was firmly against the editorial guidelines, even OFCOM.  “I would be sacked” he said.  “Well come and write online then!” - thinking of turning rebellion into money: 

“You can make good cash if you write what we don’t get in the established papers, and people like it” I thought, “although you may have to pay 63 per cent of it back as Universal Credit tax."

I suddenly feel a twinge of sympathy for the mainstream reviewer; he’s perfectly well, just caught in the whole wretched declining system of old media.  I say: “being a fit and healthy writer, in old media, not on benefits… you are missing out on so much that is new and interesting."  This conversation did actually take place, with a pro-reviewer friend, in a London Club of all places, on Carlton Terrace between Whitehall and Buckingham Palace.  'Enemy territory' I suppose, but the grand-old-enemy in the form of the Nancy-Poets, who have some sneering charm, and nearly all are genuine public school and Oxbridge.  I like the old Nancy-Poets.  Generally they elevate the aesthetic above the political, and therefore are more interesting.  Not this burgeoning new cultural PC enemy who are more likely to be found in the Groucho Club, when not in Millbank presenting B.B.C. Breakfast or 'Today'.  

Worst of all is that ghastly little toad who somehow manages to swap the sports news for sport politics news, every time, at around 07:25, and then rounds of his bulletin with farcical racing tips, disgracefully dismissive ones actually, usually drawn by funny name or topicality, to round off the miserable little report about women's cricket, the thin gruel of what's left of the B.B.C.’s 'crown jewels of sport', and link back as quickly as possible to John Humphries.

Originally, this new cadre of the elite harked from Northern housing estates, so the story goes.  They had one attribute in common: intelligence.   Therefore, arguments about meritocracy could be employed to justify their promotion.  They were made good (or less authentic, depending on your view) via grammar schools, even comprehensives, and then the red-brick universities.  This process was very much like a new car being put through the paint-shop.  Prior to this make-over of the best of the working class into MP material, Labour MPs were ex-public servants or union men, their politics hewn from practical experience.  Likewise, Tory MPs got practical experience of life via pre-political careers in business or in the professions.  Now, if the new cadre haven't already slipped quietly into the B.B.C. in their early 20s, or slotted-in high up the civil service via the administrative grade exam ('administrative' is civil service code for the top reaches), they will be destined to be political researchers for a single-issue lobby or a Lord or an MP; then policy advisers, always with the aim of becoming an MP themselves.  Only three per cent of current MPs have a blue collar background.

We are talking only about the current non-creative side of the new elite, the most dangerous side.  Of course the creative Nancy-Poets would never have dreamed of going into politics.  Even their direct descendants, the modern day critic, although more politically motivated and very political in his or her writing, wouldn't fancy politics as a profession, at all, either.  That is for the new cadre of the politically motivated, whose spirit intends to govern, rather than understand, who put a grimy revolver to our noses and growl “Be like Me or Die!”  To regulate rather than to create is their only mode of operation - regulare nec creare! That could be on their Coat of Arms.    

I felt grateful that I could write in my home territory of Addlestone, not in this stuffy club, or in the dried-out atmosphere of a Millbank tea-room.  I like to get deep-down and dirty with my subject, by living, working and playing where it exists.  Poverty is what I am writing about and I find it here in Addlestone.  It is my gift that I was forced to report the matters of the poorer towns, from the poorer towns, where writers are few on the ground yet excitement abounds. 

Orwell knew the external treasures lay about, going down and out, but he didn't have the helping hand of alcoholism to take him there.  He was though, always a physically weak man, riddled with tuberculosis by the end, with a bullet injured throat yet still a smoker.  Coughing and spluttering through the dust, he became a professional ethnographer – learning about it, by being part of it - rare and good.  But his descent into poverty from the stellar trajectory promised as a trained little-winner, then precocious Eton scholar - was made out of political choice, not really circumstance - however much he often pretended otherwise.  

For all his integrity, he played his literary tricks, but hardly committed any offences.  Where others may have been found guilty of minor fraud, Orwell was of 'good moral standing' - so his integrity gave him ample scope to play games.  Highly entertaining ones they were, for our benefit.  He never spent very long down mines, or as a plongeur in a Parisian hotel in the 1920s, or homeless in London, or getting shot at (and hit in the neck) during the Spanish Civil War in 1937.  But reading him you would have thought he had spent most of his life ducking in and out of trenches or small-doored hovels, or bumping his head as he struggled along the two-mile stretches of tunnel to the coal-face, a mile down.  

Coming up for his air, as soon as his notes were taken, the pencil was thrust behind the ear, his lips were pursed below his pencil moustache, and he tried to work out where the train station was.  His tufted hair was a crest of dignity combined with that long, earnest, but caring face, in his working uniform of the ethnographer: a tall tramp's suit, slightly moth-eaten hairy twill, patched-up; woollen tie, old Clydella shirt, looking around again, before heading off to another industrial town.

He hoped he would return after only a few weeks more away, although the Spanish trip occupied him for months, as did Paris.  He usually resurfaced in the pleasing surrounds of a Hertfordshire village, or in the care of a champagne socialist like Sir Richard Rees on the coast.  Orwell would have made a promising subject of a heroic biographical film.  But it would have to be a courageous one that didn't include his work after 1946, ruling out Animal Farm and '1984', when he was largely spent, close to death and could hardly crawl from bed to desk at times.  

At this low-ebb, Evelyn Waugh unexpectedly pitched up at Orwell’s bedside.[1]  They had never met, but now were the two English titans of their literary age, standing tall above the post-war rubble, like skyscrapers.  And despite all their similarities, and shared interest in responding to the malaise of their times, Orwell was told by Waugh he had got it all horribly wrong in his contempt for the spiritual.  And I think Orwell knew that the truth he had told was an overly-material one, as the pale-cast of death loomed - as Waugh loomed - along with the ghost of Lord Marchmain by his side, especially for Orwell.  The once arch-atheist patriarch of Brideshead, Lord Marchmain, was now making a feeble sign of the cross, once more.  For Waugh, the truth about the malaise could be found inside a Catholic church, not down a coal-mine.  Anywhere really, bar in external objects.

***

Back in the London Club with my friend, I was just a guest in a very big house where the Nancy-Poets formulate their words around their aesthetics – where you stand a good chance of talking about Waugh and Orwell, knowing the steak and kidney pudding will be paid for.  It's an established rule that the member always pays for his guest in his own club.  "A splendid rule!"

I offer further inducements to my host and friend, this professional reviewer, to come over to my side, and I think he is politely losing patience with my cheekiness, as I teed off again:  “It will cure you instantly of all those bad and lazy habits you have picked up writing for the papers, and not for your readers.”

“And you can write much more, 5,000 words even, if you can carry the reader with you via the compulsion of your words.”  

I’m back in the unsympathetic groove, hostile and slightly angry, the state any writer should be in at least at the outset, before the bravado is kicked out of him by the subs, the industry and the critics - just like what could have happened to poor Freddie.  In the film, one could feel his torture in his press conferences, from the endless questions about drugs and his sexuality.  

I suppose it’s the writers ideal of authenticity that can feel threatened, as he comes blinking into the world of being sampled, recorded, reviewed and minced.  I noticed that Rami Malek used that word, 'authenticity', an avowed attribute of the populist, at the Golden Globes award ceremony.  The actor talked about how Queen resisted losing it, when they would have been feeling the pressure to actually alter their output, to conform to a numbing code of acceptability.  Pretty much the same code the actor was now hearing in all the other acceptance speeches at the Golden Globes ceremony.  They were nauseating.  

I suppose the pommelling effects of the critics is why the first material of any popular artist will often stand as his best, after which his steam has been spent and no longer propels the whole venture forward.  How much energy does political correctness kill in the creative?  In Mercury's case, admirably little.  That was the core of his heroism.  Never giving in to the critics or the bosses.  Staying unique to the end. Terminally unique.

What the pro-reviewers seem to forget, or not pick up, is just how brazen Freddie was about “getting f#£ked all the time” (his words in the film and also in real life).  I gathered from the film alone that he liked Burt Reynolds types, but from Northern Ireland.  Thick-set, square jaw, short hair to the side, classic butch good looks and moustachio’d.  And he probably liked them recibiendo.  How much more detail about this, or indeed the drugs do we need to know about before laws of diminishing returns kick in, and we are all sufficiently aware?  

We resist the siren calls from the critics for More! More!  We are helpfully reminded by Lucy Boynton, who played Mary (and is rumoured to have had a relationship with Remi Malek since), that “Freddie Mercury proved your sexuality doesn’t have to define you”; but for the reviewers, the film, somehow, remains a ‘homophobic biopic’ (Forbes), before the feeble qualification: ‘whether it’s homophobic or slut-shaming, it’s icky’.  For Little White Lies’ Hannah Woodhead: ‘the attention paid to his sexuality feels cheap, with one scene contrasting the recording of ‘Another One Bites the Dust’ with Mercury visiting a gay club’.  Apropos, I thought, through the gathering gloom of memorising these unmemorable reviews. 

For The Guardian’s Steve Rose, ‘the film might have explored the relationship between Mercury’s hedonism, his mostly closeted sexuality and his on/off-stage personas in a more nuanced way’ (that word again), no doubt like all those Steve has watched with his reviewer pals, at some art-house cinema near The Barbican.  Or through that side door, round the back of Waitrose in Barnsbury.

And of course Mercury wanted and got more drugs than we see or ever have seen.  We all want more palliative drugs.  That is the modern condition.  It’s just that we’ve had enough of the anti-heroic drug-demise film genre, and for some of us even the drugs themselves.  Wisely.  We have turned the corner, off misery porn street.  I feel spared in this film from the squalid details which I know too much about.  But I enjoyed the line from Freddie: ‘Being human is a condition that requires anaesthetics’.  That, really, is all you need to know about the problem of drugs. 

I turned to the review in The Sun, thinking that if anyone would step out of line and award more than the seemingly obligatory three-stars, it would be the populist paper of Britain.  But no, three-stars had been awarded again.  Remarkably, and I don’t know whether the reviewer still has his job, The Sun’s beef was the commercialism of the whole project:  ‘to make you walk out of the cinema and immediately start streaming or downloading the band’s incredible music… if however, you were expecting something more than a rose-tinted version of what could have been… beware.'

***

Out of the Club and back in Addlestone’s cinema, I feel that warm inner glow of contentment again, thrusting backwards into the over-sized chair, and resting my legs on a poof provided.  (A furniture poof that is, Steve).  I know it’s not going to last long in this exciting brand new cinema that is packed out.  We will be caught up, oblivious to life irritants: tobacco-craving - the filling bladder - the coughing-person behind - “you’ve already had your six cans of Red Bull today”; in the company of a truly great but tragic rock hero.  Facing it with a grin, never giving in!  Carry on Maestro, please!  Until your fast-approaching death, that is.  There really isn’t time to hypothesise about drugs and homosexuality, on with the show.  

What descends on me in the cinema, watching this film, is a rare moment of internal peace during which the washing-machine head asks no questions, especially political ones.  I’m going to enjoy the ghastly tub-thumping bits.  And all the bizarre and wonderful moments that are rarely mentioned in the reviews: his glorious debut for Queen, singing the wrong lyrics to a different old Queen song - and the astonished band's reaction as they played the backing, it was either Seven Seas of Rhye, Who Wants to Live Forever, or Keep Yourself Alive! - it could have been any two from three in either order - a reverse combination forecast if you had to bet - but it was clever and risky unless down brilliantly - which it was of course.  There was the understandable kinship with gay DJ Kenny Everett; the stage action combining imperious vocals with perfectly synced strutting, with the long, delayed swinging arms (he must have seen bullfighters do that so gracefully with the cape and the sword).  I've practised the move many times in my part-time job with the tray as microphone.  The slow and steady, parabolic movement of hand and tray, withdrawing from the dining table, tray perched on four fingers and thumb, all splayed to the very maximum, the waiter then bowing, piroeting and finishing on tip toes before walking away quite normally, thereby signally it was all for the crowd.  

Those shots from behind, showing Mercury alone bar the prop of the microphone, which has now become sexualised in a bewildering number of ways, in front of another ginormous Wembley full crowd, sometimes giving a knowing smile of stadium unity, a sincere thank you, signed off at Mercury’s zenith, at Live Aid, with the most elaborate and beautiful bow you have ever seen.  Good night Freddie: it doesn’t get better from now on - and I feel tears coming.  Before that, ‘Miami’ Beach always looking like a teddy bear was oddly memorable, but Tom Hollander always plays a teddy bear!  Mike Myers as the gnarled music boss, his pores still oozing toxicants taken back in 1967, yes definitely.  The sound mixing and huge effort of recording Bohemian Rhapsody – the most expensive record ever produced at the time – everything Queen did was the most expensive.  And I thought about the title, 'Bohemian Rhapsody': dictionary accurate for both the song and the film. 

Do you know how the song was first received by the critics back in 1975?  It was a similar reception to the one they gave the film over 40 years later: “It will be interesting to see whether it’ll be played in its entirety on the radio” observed Pete Erskine of The NME.  “It’s performed extremely well, but more in terms of a production than anything else… Someone somewhere has decided that the boys’ next release must sound ‘epic’.  And it does. They sound extremely self-important.”   Here is another early catastrophic judgement of anything Queen, with Ray Fox-Cumming of Record Mirror the most unmoved of all:  “It has no immediate selling point whatsoever: among its parts there’s scarcely a shred of tune and certainly not one line to latch onto.”  It would become the UK’s third best-selling single of all time, a nine-week UK No.1, including Christmas 1975. 

Throughout Bohemian Rhapsody, we see a muscular, still swaggering Freddie Mercury from the rear, a good Rami Malek rear (although you must know it’s an American rear!)  Or is it an Egyptian one with a bit of Greek?  Is it erotic?  Yes.  But the gay rights critics want politics here, not aesthetics.  He’s about to climb the Live Aid stage in 1985, bouncing like a bull-fighter again.  The bouncing is all about the bum, and Rami Malek bounces brilliantly.  For a moment I consider that homosexual aesthetic and its beauty.  I remember it was the bum of the bullfighter, clad tightly by his suit of lights, that offered considerable pleasure to my gay friends at the bull-ring in Beziers or Seville, and to me a bit, if I am honest.  I realise that the whole Bohemian Rhapsody is shot through with homosexuality or gay erotic to enjoy and write about, and my mind unfortunately flicks back onto the reviews again.  Like Variety’s Owen Gleiberman, groaning out loud, ‘it treats Freddie’s personal life – his sexual-romantic identity, his loneliness, his reckless adventures in gay-clubs – with kid gloves reticence’.  I suppose this is one step short of the prim incomprehension of Kate Mossman on Radio 4, who, with a baffled shrilling, says: ‘it’s a [pause, up an octive] very odd [down an octave] film.’  She’s talking about the least odd film of the year!  Or the final descent into the bizarre with the New York Post’s review: ‘it looks like it was shot in a sauna’.

I scribbled a note when I watched the film, "Bohemian Rhapsody will receive no Oscars", but now my feelings are less certain, with these Golden Globes awards.  But the reviewers are unrepentant.  Scott Mendelson came back with a rejoinder after the first reviews and the hoards had flooded the cinemas.  Look! you are the problem here, not me!  “Although it's rather out my province to affect viewership figures” - plenty of disingenuous humility there – and unconvincing modesty here: “Bohemian Rhapsody is just the latest big movie with bad reviews to score big specifically because even the pans didn’t necessarily scare off those who wanted certain (populist) elements from a given movie” – god, what a terrible sentence to re-type.  And they said exactly the same thing after Brexit.  And Scott Mendelson boasts he has “studied the film industry, both academically and informally, and with an emphasis in box office analysis, for 28 years.”  What an indictment of both cinema viewers and his long weary life.  And he still doesn’t know what causes a box office smash.  A good film makes you feel better not think harder, lean-back not lean-forward.

   

Bohemian Rhapsody is a biographical account which is best not carved up.  If the myth turns into reality, sometimes you still need to print the myth, to echo director John Ford.  What the reviewers aren’t doing - and what Mercury did so well, and this film does too - is connect with the public and give them what they want - in order to feel better.  That, by itself, is good enough for a populist artist, his only trusted measure of success is moved feelings.  So it was for Mercury who said his best songs were the ones that sold best.  If you want ‘meaning songs’ look elsewhere, or if you really want to analyse what Bohemian Rhapsody could mean – try the internet here.  But the genius of Bohemian Rhapsody – dictionary defined ‘an emotional or ecstatic construction by a socially unconventional person’ - is actually that ‘it can mean whatever you want it to mean'.  That, incidentally, is the band’s retort to Mike Myers, the despairing music boss who wanted more convention, ironically, given how he looked himself.  

This is the wrong film to batter with sociological commentary from the old divides, questioning the motivations of those involved, and how it all could be so much better.  Mainstream media has lost its way here on the biggest film of the year, not you the viewing public.  Their dead hand of political correctness sees the challenges to Mercury’s success as the interest or the problem, being homosexual, drug-use, his immigrant status, his public school, the capitalist industry and his relationships with the band.  If those were really the challenges, the real interest is how he overcame those challenges, rather than the challenges themselves.  Mercury is the living thing, and should be written in the active.  He is like the hammer that hits the anvil.  He isn’t the anvil being hit by the hammer.  That said, I think getting HIV was the main challenge – a genuine challenge to Mercury.  One could credibly say that AIDS destroyed him.  AIDS got Freddie, he didn’t just get AIDS.  He was acted upon, he didn’t act in this instance.  Although Mercury the hero kept battling on, finally with the album Innuendo (1991) which is largely an elergy to himself, coming down with a fever and going slightly mad.  "Rule with your heart" and "live with your conscience" - not bad at all - "these are the days of our lives".

Overcoming challenges is tantamount to being heroic and this film is a visceral study of heroism.  It’s with some understatement and maximum strength he sings at Live Aid - 'We Are The Champions' and that it’s been no bed of roses”.  Central to film, truthful or not (we don’t know), is the suggestion that he appeared at Live Aid knowing he had AIDS when none of the audience did. What a secret.  What a challenge that is.  The critics' suggestion that Mercury didn’t know for certain he had AIDS as early as 1985, is designed to defuse the populism of the movie, despite evidence he may well have known then he was doomed.  The purpose as ever is party-spoiling by the reviewers.  

When I recognised what mean tricks the reviewers were up to, (see here and here for a full cross-section), that once again the established media had, en masse, got Queen wrong and misjudged their popularity; then I knew I was impelled to spit out my own review, to help correct the balance in a very small way.  But the main reason for what I have written is to say it again: trust the wisecrowd, not the experts!  The many are smarter than the few!  In our digital age! 

  

***

Editing notes.  Originally written 7/11/2018. Revised 05/12/18 (9,500 words), Proofed, Amends made, Revised again after the film’s Golden Globes win 08/01/19 and 14/01/19.  The purpose of the essay is to affirm the wisdom of crowds – the many are smarter than the few.  This latest version: Thursday 17^th January 2019.  6,547 words.

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[1] Lebedoff, David (2008).  The Same Man: George Orwell and Evelyn Waugh in Love and War.  Random House (New York).  Chapter 8: ‘The Meeting’. 

  

 Freddie Mercury, performing at Live Aid, 1985

Remi Malek Performing as Freddie Mercury, 2018