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| Martine McCutcheon: 'This business is hard and really mean' Martine McCutcheon on trying to survive as an actress – and why the main character in her debut novel is undisguisedly her'You will be nice to her, won't you?" Martine McCutcheon's somewhat overprotective publicist says to me when our interview ends. They are feeling a bit bruised because actress-turned-singer-turned-first-time-novelist McCutcheon has just been bashed up at an awards ceremony by screenwriter Lynda La Plante for having the temerity to write a book, The Mistress. "Martine's a very sweet lady, but have you read the book?" La Plante told the Daily Mail. "It's a load of c***. She'll have a lot of publicity, but it's the biggest load of rubbish." I guess we can read behind the Mail's ridiculous asterisks.La Plante's intervention produced a wave of articles attacking celebrity authors – Katie Price (aka Jordan), Kerry Katona, Ulrika Jonsson, and now McCutcheon – who, it was argued, were taking the bread from the mouths of real writers, as if one might pick up The Mistress instead of, say, some finely wrought verse by a manic-depressive northern poet in a slim volume published by Carcanet. It was all gibberish, a storm in a champagne glass, but has left its mark – on the publicist, at least. Less so on the author, who arrives at the decadently styled upstairs room of the Chelsea restaurant in which she has suggested we meet in a short black dress, black leather jacket, black tights and boots. I will not allow my professional judgment to be swayed, but she looks great. It certainly beats interviewing Martin Amis.She arrives with her stylist, Michael, who applies a final few tweaks to her hair before she is photographed. She has a reputation for being difficult, a bit of a drama queen. Alison Boshoff, again in the Mail of course, wrote a foul piece a couple of years ago attacking, inter alia, her "grandness", "controlling behaviour", "airs and graces", and "flawed ambition". Various anonymous sources quoted by Boshoff attested to her all-round awfulness: "'She is barking, barking mad,' sighed one supporter." Would one ever sigh such a sentence? Isn't the whole piece just a bitchy exercise in character assassination?On the strength of a chat lasting a couple of hours, it's hard to be definitive. But something happens while we're drinking our pre-interview coffee that makes me doubt Boshoff's poisonous certainties. A middle-aged bloke comes into the restaurant to size up the room as a possible venue for a formal dinner. He has made an appointment to see the manager, but confuses her with McCutcheon. There's a bit of tension among stylist, publicist, photographer and me, perhaps expecting a "Don't you know who I am?" moment. But she laughs it off, with a gnomic, "It's been a funny old morning."We eventually settle down to talk in a tiny room with mirrors on every side. The contrast between her stylish petiteness and my grotesque bulk, magnified in the mirrors, makes me self-conscious. Worse, she is picking at a fruit salad, while I have ordered a slimy croque monsieur and am getting grease everywhere. But her friendliness and lack of hauteur gradually put me at ease, and she seems willing to go on talking all afternoon.She tells me The Mistress began a couple of years ago (she is hazy on dates) as an idea for a television series. Some have said she has drawn on a much-publicised frisson with the chef Marco Pierre White, which is said to have caused some difficulty in his marriage, but she denies this. While she may never have been a mistress in real life, the main character, Mandy Sanderson – dynamic, just turned 30, obsessed by designer clothes, looking for love – is undisguisedly her, invented because she wanted to play the role. A producer asked her to develop it, and when she did she realised what she had was the makings of a book. "It felt like a dream thing to do," she says, "because I could be whoever I wanted to be as I was writing. I could be gay, straight, man, woman. It was liberating, because I've always been aware that there are certain characters that the public love me to play and that I'm always cast as." Fragile, vulnerable, lovable, a bit dumb – see Tiffany Mitchell in EastEnders, Eliza Doolittle in the 2001 stage revival of My Fair Lady, and Natalie in the 2003 film Love Actually. You can take the girl out of Hackney, but directors have been keen not to take Hackney out of the girl.McCutcheon took what was now a book proposal to literary agent Jonny Geller, got advice from her mother Jenny Tomlin, who also writes novels, and The Mistress was born. Anna Karenina it is not, but I found the first 60 or so pages quite diverting when I read them on a plane, though after that the book does become repetitious: work, shopping, sex with hunky married man Jake, heartache, more sex, crying on the shoulder of gay friend George, more sex, more shopping. Once you get the idea, you just read it for the tics: the sex is routine ("'I want you inside me,' Mandy whispered. 'But I want to please you too'"), everyone's skin is described as "alabaster", and no piece of clothing can be mentioned without name-checking the brand ("They purchased a slinky, tight-fitting black Alaïa that would match beautifully with her new diamanté Jimmy Choos"). On the plus side, McCutcheon definitely wrote it: you can hear her voice in every sentence. Her publicist was especially annoyed that she had been lumped in with celebs who used ghosts. For better or worse, The Mistress is all McCutcheon's work, written in longhand and typed up by her mother.But why bother? Won't it confuse people who think of her as an actress and/or singer? "Maybe it will confuse them," she says, "but I've got to do what I want to do next. People in this country always want you to be one thing. I've been told if you're an actress you can't sing, if you're a dancer you can't act, you can't do theatre and be respected if you've done a TV soap, you can't have a No1 record. All these different things they've told me I can't do, but I wanted to do them so I've done them."Well, maybe. But what's undeniable is that the book comes at a quiet time in McCutcheon's career, and the suspicion lingers that the glory days of her 20s may be hard to recapture. Her death as Tiffany in EastEnders – she was tragically hit by a car in 1998, on New Year's Eve – was watched by 22 million viewers and two years later voted the most popular ever episode of the soap. She embarked on a pop career, and had a No1 single in 1999 with her debut song Perfect Moment. It all seemed too good to be true, and it was. Sales of her discs declined thereafter and her record company dropped her. Though she won an Olivier award in 2002 for My Fair Lady, she was plagued by illness and had to leave the show early; embarrassingly, her understudy appeared more often than she did. The show's producer, Cameron Mackintosh, while praising her performance, said she "was not up to performing regularly". Love Actually was a success, but her subsequent attempts – in two stints in 2004 and 2005 – to break into Hollywood came to nothing. Echo Beach, which she hoped would mark a new beginning last year, bombed.Missing the boatShe is resolutely upbeat about it all, but occasionally you get a hint of how difficult it is to sustain a career. "I'm learning to not rely so much on other people's offers and to create things for myself instead," she says. "It's tough out there. Any actress will tell you – it's really hard. If you're not an A-list Hollywood movie star, if you're in the middle, there are people who assume you wouldn't do certain things without even asking you, when actually you probably would. And there are people who always think you are busy doing something else."McCutcheon says she enjoyed the "solitude" of doing the book – she took most of last year off to write it. "I've grown up in the public eye and every decision I've made has always been so public and often inaccurately reported," she says. "It was nice to have the guts to stop, to not have to put the face on every day and not have to worry about anybody looking or watching." That sounds like a conscious decision to pull back, but she also says: "I thought at the moment, with the current climate with work, I could go out to LA, but I find LA really lonely. The work I'm being offered here – some of it is OK and some of it is just not good at all." I ask her what she'd have done if Steven Spielberg had got in touch. "If Steven Spielberg had called," she says, "I'd have no doubt spoken to Jonny [Geller], and said: 'What's the publishing date? Is there any way we can shift it?'"The real problem was missing the boat after Love Actually. The knockers blame her for this and point to her falling out with her Hollywood agents. The way she tells it, she was unlucky, signing up for an NBC show that never happened. It's hard to know where the blame really lies, but her description of her lonely life in LA rings true. "I went one year for seven months and the next year for six – for pilot season," she says. "You're sat with rows and rows of girls and sometimes they [the producers] would come in and go, 'Yep, yep, nope, yep, yep, nope, yep.' I'd just sit in the car, in my mac, in my mini, listening to the Rolling Stones or a bit of Whitesnake – I love corny 80s rock music – and I'd sing to myself driving down the freeway, getting lost, trying to go to eight different auditions in one day. That's why the picture that's been painted of what happened in Los Angeles is not accurate at all. There's no room for ego, there's no room for you thinking you're owed anything. You start from scratch out there."She dismisses her reputation for being difficult. "If you're a man and you ask questions, you're a genius; if you're a woman, you're difficult. If you're saying something that people don't want to hear, they just don't like it and will come to their own conclusions, and say you're difficult because you're not doing exactly what they want you to do, and you're not being a puppet. I always work really hard, and most people I've worked with would say I'm a professional. People who are secure in themselves welcome you asking questions." Do the attacks in the media matter, I ask her? Surely all publicity is good publicity. Her reply is a neat one: "I think that's something people who don't have lots of negative press say."Misfortune has certainly played its part in her career. Her early reviews in My Fair Lady were terrific, but she became seriously ill with a virus and then a blood clot, and had to pull out. "I was very much of the attitude that the show must go on no matter what," she says, "but it's not no matter what. On one occasion I was so ill that my family didn't know if I was going to make it through the night, and that makes you have a big reality check."Getting killed on EastEndersShe also claims she's been the victim of showbiz politics. She says she only wanted a two-month break from EastEnders, but producer Mal Young, who thought she was trying to keep the door open in case her pop career didn't work out, insisted her character be killed off. She says she first heard that Tiffany was to die on her car radio. "I swerved on the A1," she recalls. "I couldn't believe it. I couldn't reach the powers-that-be for a couple of days, and none of the cast believed I didn't know." A change at the top of Virgin then undermined her pop career: "I'd been moved to a different division, but I was still ringing the old division. Nobody'd told me." And then came the NBC debacle. No wonder she just wanted to be alone in a room with a notepad.The setbacks may have mellowed her. "The illness [during My Fair Lady] and how serious it was made me take stock, made me realise things. I grew up a lot and realised what mattered. My work was always such a passion, and I was always striving, striving, striving to do so many things, sometimes for the wrong reasons, and it's just nice to be in a more mature, settled place about it all really. I don't think it's coincidence that I'm in my happiest relationship since I've been quieter workwise." She lives with the singer-songwriter Jack McManus, who, at 25, is eight years younger than McCutcheon. "You'd never know it," she says of the age difference. "I'm the life and soul, and he's the quiet one."She used to be a fixture of the gossip columns, thanks to a series of bust-ups with boyfriends. But most of it, she says, was tabloid nonsense. "I've had three big relationships, and when a relationship comes to an end people say it was a mistake, but for those three years that you're happy it's not a mistake. I learned a lot in those relationships, and I'd say one of the biggest misconceptions is that I've been a victim in love. That doesn't really tally up with the controlling image, does it?"You have to admire her spirit, especially when you realise how tough her upbringing was. Her father had drink and drug problems, and was allegedly abusive towards both mother and daughter, an experience the former described in the book Behind Closed Doors. McCutcheon says her first memory is of her father dangling her over a balcony by her ankles. Her parents separated when she was three. Yet despite all this, she says it was the attempt to win her father's approval that provided her initial drive. "My biggest motivation was getting my dad to acknowledge me. He didn't want to know. He was obsessed with my mother and wasn't interested in me at all. I always felt, even when I was really young, that I was destined for better things, and that I would make everybody love me if that meant that he had to acknowledge me. That was what kept driving me. But eventually I realised that he was never going to be this person that I wanted him to be."She was, in effect, an only child – she was 15 when her stepbrother was born – and says that she and her mother, who was only 19 when she had McCutcheon, were like two best friends, trotting round the country attending dance events at which the precocious Martine competed. I had assumed her mother would be the pushy one, but McCutcheon says she did all the pushing. "She said to me, 'Do you want to do something different – go horse riding or ice skating?' I said, 'No way, I want to be a star.'" She went to stage school at the age of nine, had her first acting role at the age of 12, was in a girl group called Milan at 15 ("We were the Spice Girls without the budget, we weren't great," she says with a hyena-like laugh), and landed the life-changing role of Tiffany in EastEnders at 18. "I'm only 33," she says, "but I feel like I've lived an 80-year-old's life."McCutcheon will need every ounce of that spirit to regain the limelight, as she recognises. "In this business, you're lucky if you have five minutes really, let alone 10 years. You don't stay in it unless you love it, because it's really hard and it's really mean. My favourite bit you get to do 5% of the time, which is actually being in front of the camera and performing. The rest of it – all the politics and all the power struggles – you just think, 'Fight among yourselves, I want to work.'"She admits that 33 is a difficult time for an actress – "You're not really old enough to play a mother and you're not really young enough to be playing the romantic leads" – but is convinced she will be offered more good parts. Will she ever get another chance at Hollywood? "Oh God, I don't know," she says. "It's a cut-throat business in Hollywood. If you find the right people it's great, but there are lots of sharks out there. It would be the cherry on top of the cake, but the most important thing for me is to have the cake."The Mistress is published by PanMacmillan, price £7.99.CelebrityEastEndersTheatreStephen Mossguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Literate people 'should boycott books', says Murdoch biographer Michael Wolff asks readers to stop buying ghostwritten 'brand enhancers' until publishers reform their outputRupert Murdoch's biographer Michael Wolff has called on "literate people" to boycott books until publishers stop bringing out ghostwritten memoirs by the likes of Sarah Palin.Wolff, a columnist for Vanity Fair and author of the recent Murdoch biography The Man Who Owns the News, said that books were "evil". "They're pernicious. They represent themselves as being one thing, when they're insidiously the opposite," he wrote in a column for the news aggregator website newser.com, which he founded. "If there are still good books, they are largely irrelevant to a form and business that is largely about the creation of the artefact – identifier, symbol, leave-behind, brand enhancer. Books are a sales tool. They're propaganda. And they're fake. A lie. So many are just simply not written by the people the publisher tells you they are written by. Somebody should sue."He pointed to Palin, whose bestselling memoir Going Rogue – published last week – was ghostwritten by Lynn Vincent. "Sarah Palin, for instance, did not write her book and, what's more, it is not meant to be read like you read a book. It's a preposterous image, someone actually sitting down and furrowing their brow over the Palin work. But this is hardly a point just about Palin," he said. "It's a model followed by almost every politician with ambitions or entertainer without something better to do."Ghostwritten celebrity books – both non-fiction and fiction – are big business for publishing these days. Novels "written" by Katie Price and Kerry Katona, and memoirs "by" David Beckham, John Prescott, Wayne Rooney and Robbie Williams, have flooded into UK bookshops in recent years, although the celebrity market has slipped slightly this Christmas. Book trade magazine the Bookseller reported yesterday that sales of the top 50 celebrity hardback titles were down 28% last week to £3.3m, compared to the same week the previous year."It's a sleight of hand. A bait and switch," said Wolff. "It's not that there is anything wrong, or at least out of the ordinary, with salesmanship or promotional copy, or with even saying you wrote what your ghostwriter wrote. This is the stuff of speeches, advertising, and testimonials. What's insidious here is that these forms, which are understood to be insincere and a confection, are now in the guise of a book, which is understood to be genuine and substantial."Some readers, he believes, are fooled into believing the book is actually by the celebrity or politician; for those who are not fooled, "the form of the book itself is undermined". "Books lose value and meaning. Real readers come to understand there are fewer and fewer real books," he said. "We have created a giant system of national agitprop, in which books and the book business have become one of the most effective tools." The answer, he said, is for literate people to boycott books.PublishingCelebrityAlison Floodguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
The Bedside Book of Beasts: A Wildlife Miscellany by Graeme Gibson Philip Hoare explores a modern bestiary that implores us to reconnect with our biological realityWhat do we want from wild animals? Nowadays, they're mere decoration, a cultural add-on in Attenborough HD; nature porn, exquisitely filmed and teasingly revealed. The reality is something else. In the flesh, animals have a magnetic strangeness that transcends their physical reality. At Smithfield, in central London the other evening, I watched a fox calmly strolling along the pavement, across the street, and up a spiral fire escape – a presentiment of what will happen when our species cedes its temporary hold and the world is abandoned once more to the wild. We bear witness to animals as emblems of a lost Eden – that's why our spirits lift with birdsong. We invest our emotions in animals, often at the expense of expending those emotions on each other.As Graeme Gibson writes in his wonderful new book, we have "infantilised" animals – and no more so than our own pets. It is hard to reconcile the sight which I saw this summer in Cape Cod, of a pair of bichon frises, shampooed and primped under a plastic awning in a dog buggy, with their remote ancestors, the patrolling wolves which once roamed that same sandy spit.From the brutes of the conquered past – the Tasmanian thylacine and Steller's sea cow, which we drove to extinction – to those species that still roam free, animals have become barometers of global change, even as we ignore our own culpability in that end game. Gibson, a Canadian novelist and partner of Margaret Atwood (both are vocal supporters of animal charities), enshrines an awareness of this in the follow-up to his Bedside Book of Birds. A collection of literary extracts from Charles Darwin to Angela Carter, accompanied by illustrations stretching from the ancient world to Audubon, it concentrates on "alpha predators and their prey".In his introduction he explains that these "are central to us, and to our understanding of our place in nature, because the primal fact of hunting and/or being hunted and the inescapable demands of hunger have largely defined animal life on earth, and are undoubtedly among the key engines driving evolution".The compendium is divided into sections, each prefaced by the writer with essays containing personal observations, from boyhood camps to adult encounters. His subtitles betray that this is no cosy compilation: "Echoes of a Working Eden"; "Death's Golden Eye"; "Mighty and Terrible". The portrait Gibson presents is red in tooth and claw, but rich in philosophy and art, too.What makes a beast? The author quotes the medieval Peterborough Bestiary on the subject. "The term 'beasts' belongs properly to lions, leopards and tigers, wolves and foxes, dogs and monkeys, and all other (except snakes) which rage by mouth or with claws. They are called 'beasts' from the force with which they rage; and they are termed 'wild' because they are by nature used to freedom and they are motivated by their own will. They do indeed have freedom of will and they wander here and there, going as their spirit leads them."Beasts define a wilderness; humanity, its opposite. Gibson sees civilisation as nothing more than our own domestication. Compared with animals, we are "alien beings", possessed of remarkable brains with which we have conquered our bestial nature, removing ourselves from it at the same time. Gibson pinpoints this fatal disconnection to the time when man became able to kill remotely, with bow and arrow. The delicate equilibrium whereby a predator targeted only weakened prey – for fear of damaging itself – was thrown.Natural predation had the effect of weeding out "the stolid and the slow", and producing "alert and fleet prey". Instead, humans focused on the strongest, biggest individuals and, by taking the most genetically valuable animals, compromised the whole population and thus the ecosystem as a result. Ever since, it has been a slow, inevitable war of attrition, rather than a natural cycle of renewal.Thus we witness every manner of human-animal interaction, usually deadly for the animal. Occasionally, however, the animal gets the upper hand. Gibson quotes from Dr David Livingstone's journals on his travels in Africa, during which he was mauled by a lion. "Growling horribly close to my ear, he shook me as a terrier dog does a rat," wrote the explorer. Yet the shock of the attack seemed to produce a stupor, "a sort of dreaminess, in which there was no sense of pain nor feeling of terror". "This peculiar state," Livingstone reasoned, "is probably produced in all animals killed by the carnivora; and if so, is a merciful provision by our benevolent Creator for lessening the pain of death." (Livingstone was left badly injured, yet announced brusquely that he required "only the inconvenience of a false joint in my limb".)A continent away, Leo Tolstoy had his own beastly encounter. Bear-hunting in Russia, the writer was seized upon by one of his would-be prey. As the animal closed its jaws around its victim's face, Tolstoy's servant cried, "He's eating the master! He's eating the master!" Tolstoy's reaction was rather more phlegmatic. "I felt that he had seized my forehead just under the hair with the teeth of his lower jaw, and the flesh below my eyes with his upper jaw, and was closing his teeth."In Tolstoy's description, this attack, too, attains a kind of hallucinogenic quality. He feels the animal's fur on his face, smells its blood, hangs in its violent embrace. Yet even with his flesh "in rags above my eyes", Tolstoy felt no pain. Rescued and stitched up, he returned to have the bear shot and stuffed: "He now lies in my room."Sometimes we kill out of revenge; sometimes from politeness. When George Orwell shoots an elephant "solely to avoid looking a fool", the animal's lingering, painful death becomes an emblem of imperial hubris. And sometimes death is a mechanism for something else. "Kill every buffalo you can!" Colonel Richard Dodge urged a sport hunter in 1867. "Every buffalo dead is an Indian gone."Many of the stories and images Gibson chooses are from his native Canada, where until quite recently people were outnumbered by predators. As a result, the northwestern Indians saw no border between the natural and the supernatural. Visiting the Museum of Anthropology in Vancouver last month, I saw strange, carved chimera, such as a Haida "sea-wolf" made up of three killer whales and a bear's fore legs. These were animist totems of the real creatures that lived in the forests and the seas, and which held sway over the Indians' environment, rather than the other way around. In this mysterious contract, seals would agree among themselves which hunter they would allow to capture them. Death was dignified, by leave of the animal's consent: "Let's wrestle,/ my little man, my little son, nay little death, my brother", in John Newlove's poem, "God Bless the Bear".Once we humans were no longer prey, that subtle balance was gone. We lost respect for them and, perhaps, for ourselves. "Strange to say, he himself was beginning to realise that his growing sensitivity to the process of nature also made him more sensitive to the wickedness of men," wrote Joseph Roth. When abuse and torture is discovered to be rife in our modern world, we are said to be "inhuman", little better than beasts. The fact is, we are far worse. "A wild animal is cruel," said Freud. "But to be merciless is the privilege of civilised humans."You might want to give this book as a Christmas present, but buyer beware: like its subject, these beautiful pages deceive. They are a snarling, still-living reminder of our own lost nature. Gibson implores us to "reconnect with the animal inside us, with our biological reality". Perhaps that means we must reclaim an animal morality, too.Philip Hoare's Leviathan or, The Whale (Fourth Estate) won the 2009 BBC Samuel Johnson prize for non-fiction.guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Tolstoy Recalled Fondly in Chechen Museum A museum devoted to Leo Tolstoy reopened recently in the village in Chechnya where he spent his formative years as a writer in the 1850s. feeds.nytimes.com |
Open door: The reader's editor on… getting mixed up in the business of film and music reviews The reader's editor on… getting mixed up in the business of film and music reviewsThe screen adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's post-apocalyptic novel, The Road, has been well received in some quarters and, as is the way of things, star ratings and quotes from reviews have found their way into an advertising campaign aimed at cinemagoers. A handful of readers asked why a full page advertisement for the film, on the back page of Film&Music this month, which attributed four stars and the word "superb" to "the Guardian", didn't match Peter Bradshaw's three-star review inside. "What's the true picture on the picture?" one of them asked.A search of the archive brings up an earlier, four-star, Guardian review containing the accolade "superb", which was written for the website in September, when the film was screened at the Venice Film Festival. Michael Hann, Film&Music's editor, said this kind of confusion sometimes happens when an early review by someone other than Bradshaw appears in the news pages or on the website.In the course of this mini-inquiry I discovered that the Guardian is sometimes paid a fee for the use of quotes and ratings in advertising campaigns. More surprising, freelance writers are entitled to a royalty of 50% of that income. Neither the Guardian, nor its reviewers are making much money from this. The revenue, I'm told, amounts to around £1,390 in the past nine months. Ratings and quotes are frequently used without permission, as happened in the case of the ad campaign for The Road, and the syndication department is hardly active in this area. Why then does the Guardian bother licensing this "content"? Partly, it seems, to ensure that adverts match reviews: permission is not always given. "We are here to protect the reputation of the journalism; not just to monetise content," said the general manager of syndication.I'm told that since April last year seven licences have been issued for the use of Guardian film and music reviews in ad campaigns. Four were granted for no fee and in three cases music writers received between £350 and £200 apiece. Contributors are contractually entitled to the money under the Guardian's freelance charter, which provides that freelance writers get 50% of any income from one-off or "spot" sales of their work.Peter Bradshaw has asked not to receive any payment when his film reviews are used in ad campaigns. The payments are made electronically and other writers may not be aware of them. Alexis Petridis, one of three music reviewers to have received a small amount in recent months, said he'd assumed that his article had been reproduced elsewhere (the usual reason for additional income) and pointed out that it wasn't obvious from his electronic notice what the payment was for. He had no idea that the Guardian granted licences for the use of quotes and ratings in this way. "I just assumed they were free," he said.Paul Lester, who also received a payment, said: "I've been music writing for ages and this is the first time I've been paid for a quote… I can't imagine any reviewer going 'soft' on a music or film 'target' on the off-chance that they may get a bit of extra cash down the line, but if there were a ruling stating that no money would be forthcoming, I'd be fine with that."Dave Simpson, another recipient, said that payments are so few and far between it is unlikely that anyone would tailor a review. He is concerned about the misuse of his work. "I am sure there will be much debate on this but I would argue that the (meagre, very rare) payment system is a small price to pay for control over Guardian content." He added: "If a consensus concurs that the payments should stop, then so be it. But I would hope that requirement for permission does not."While it's possible to justify payments to the business when Guardian content is used in ad campaigns, payments to writers are more problematic. Contributors are contractually entitled to the revenue under the freelance charter, but the payments, though infrequent and small, risk impugning the journalism. The simplest solution may be for the Guardian to stop charging for this kind of licensing altogether, but that is not my call.The GuardianNational newspapersNewspapers & magazinesNewspapersFilm adaptationsFilm industrySiobhain Butterworthguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |