I’m not going to add to all the partially-informed verbiage prompted by the story apparently involving the BBC, The Sun, £35,000 and some unedifying pictures, except to stroke my chin over one legal oddity the case has highlighted. Someone 16 years old or more has the capacity, the law says, to choose to display his or her or their naked body to someone older, provided said viewer isn’t in a position of responsibility. However, said 16+-year-old is not allowed to distribute an image of said body. The image, one might infer, is more powerful than the original. Baudrillard vindicated again. 

I remember the extraordinary final of the 1985 World Snooker Championship, and the screams of delight echoing around the neighbourhood when Dennis Taylor finally potted that last black ball. It wasn’t that people disliked Steve Davis per se, simply that anyone who challenged his hegemony at the time acquired automatic plucky underdog status.

Plenty of other folk remember it as well, it seems, to the extent that the whole final frame is being restaged as a live event, a simulacrum of a match, a bit like one of those re-enactments of Civil War battles, but with cues replacing pikestaffs. It’ll be a lot of nostalgic fun, but what made the original event really exciting – as with any sporting event – was the tension, the jeopardy, the fact that nobody, including those pacing round the table, knew what was going to happen next, how the whole thing was going to end, who was going to lift the silverware and who was going to look rueful on the periphery. Short of tweaking reality so that Davis wins, I’m not quite sure how they can bring that back.

(After all these years, I’ve only just noticed that the boa ate the elephant trunk-first.)

A day off, it being the 80th birthday of the world's hippest monarch. Small Boo and I decided to take a trip to Pattaya: I've skirted the edges of the resort a few times, but never actually been there. It's actually a fairly grim, tacky place, somewhere in the psychic space between Blackpool and Benidorm, but with rather more tattooed, chain-smoking Eastern Europeans in evidence. Still, one more to tick off the list.

The fun came on the way home. First, we stopped at Mini-Siam, a model village in the grand tradition, with representations not just of Thailand's finest architecture, but many of the world's finest tourist attractions. It's actually pretty good, although the right-most head on Mount Rushmore is more Leonard Nimoy than Abraham Lincoln.

It's a fun detour if you're passing, and there were plenty of local family groups enjoying the holiday. What surprised me was the presence of three vast coaches full of Korean tourists, who were lapping the place up with as much relish as the Thai kids. It did make me wonder whether we've got this tourism business right: maybe its enough to stick models of the Parthenon, Sydney Opera House, Angkor Wat and so on in one venue, and let the punters run free with their cameras. I mean, when they photographed each other in front of an impressive copy of Abu Simbel, they could have been imagining themselves in Egypt, or the Las Vegas version of Egypt? And which would more impress the folks back in Seoul? (Which reminds me, I really want to go to Macao, to see their version of the Vegas version of Venice.)

Obligatory obeisance to Baudrillard duly performed, we proceeded to The Bottle Art Museum, the life's work of the late Pieter Bij De Leij.

The oeuvre of Dutch-born De Leij falls squarely into what art critics with interesting haircuts now call "outsider art". He made rather rough and ready representations of buildings and vehicles, then dismantled them, and put them back together inside bottles. It's what people have been doing with model ships for centuries, but rather more fiddly. The slightly melancholy atmosphere in the little museum tipped over into David Lynch territory when we reached the back wall, only to see pictorial representations of De Leij's six weddings, revealing that he was a dwarf.

The final stop was an orchid farm, but we were stopped in our tracks by a gesticulating man who warned that a randy, rather violent elephant was blocking the road, and if we carried on we'd probably be making a very interesting claim on the car insurance. We took an alternative route, and from the farm we had a good view of the beast being tranquilised, which made me feel a bit Orwellian, albeit in a terribly safe, sterile way.

"It's nearly four," said the orchid man. "The Russians will be here soon." On cue, seven or eight all-terrain vehicles, most of them ridden by burly men in shorts, crash helmets, vicious sunburns and nothing else, rolled up, had a quick drink, and departed. "Tour party," explained our host.

Small Boo selected an orchid cluster, and stowed it in the boot. On the freeway back to Bangkok she glanced at the car ceiling and gasped. It was swarming with large, black ants, which had presumably hitched a ride along with the flowers, and spent the rest of the journey wandering harmlessly over our heads and arms.

"How shall I end this?" I asked her, as she lounged on the bed, tapping into her laptop. She shrugged.

Jean Baudrillard, philosopher, sociologist and cultural theorist, pioneer of the simulacrum and hyperreality, died yesterday at the age of 77. And yes, as Joel pointed out a few months ago, he does indeed look quite like Stanley Baxter.

PS: CiF piece here.

It needs to be said from the outset that Colour Me Kubrick (Dir: Brian Cook, 2005) is not a very good film. The story of Alan Conway, a London conman who impersonated Stanley Kubrick, has the potential for an interesting meditation on ideas of fame, reputation and personal success. Instead, we get clunk-heavy references to Kubrick's films (bits of Strauss; two droogs threatening an elderly couple); and Jim Davidson, of all people, playing one of Conway's victims, a character that seems to be based on Joe Longthorne, channelled through Dale Winton (something that's even worse in reality than it sounds).

I only mention the film, because: a) while I was watching it last night, I remembered that when I began this blog, I had the idea that I'd use it to review every film, book, record, etc that passed under my nose, and I've been pretty slack in that respect; and b) I think it adds a brief footnote to a post I wrote a few months ago about the ambiguities that ensue when actors play 'themselves', which has parallels with the soul-searching about blog personas that everyone seems to be experiencing these days (see here, here, here and here).

Conway is played by John Malkovich, an actor I like, but one who is always identifiably Malkovich in everything he does. Of course, since Being John Malkovich, this John Malkovich is interchangeable in the public mind with the pompous, self-obsessed 'John Malkovich', so casting him as someone who loses track of his own self in the assumed identity of someone else is a brave move, to say the least. The obvious comparison is with Geoffrey Rush's performance in The Life and Death of Peter Sellers, and not just because the real 'Kubrick' appears in that film as a character. Rush, an actor who can disappear into his parts, plays a man who did the same, to the extent that his whole personality seems to have been extinguished.

No such risk with Malkovich. Even his accents are self-consciously acTORRish: as Conway he verges between Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins and Keanu Reeves in Dracula; as 'Kubrick', he seems closer to a Catskills comic being Bernie Schwartz being Tony Curtis being Joe being Josephine being Junior being Archie Leach being Cary Grant, a near-infinite Russian doll of reinventions.

This can be defended: Conway was unstable and shambolic, and a key theme of the film is how easily people allowed themselves to be fooled by such an unconvincing performance. Less excusable is the sheer labour with which the metafiction is ladled on soon becomes tiresome, especially when compared with the elegance with which similar nods to the audience were handled in the Sellers film. Conway announces that he's considering John Malkovich for a role in his new film: a throwaway gag that would have been fresh and startling had Jonze and Kaufman slipped it into Being JM, but now feels trite and obvious. As Conway languishes in a psychiatric ward, and hears all this fellow patients proclaiming that they're Kubrick as well, we're supposed to pick up a hint of a great Kubrick moment, the "I'm Spartacus!" scene. But that, of course, has already been parodied out of existence by Monty Python's Life of Brian; when we see that one of the others (played by Ken Russell) has "K. RUSSELL" scrawled on the sticker affixed to his bed, we're supposed to applaud the in-joke, but that too has been told before. Ethel Merman in Airplane!, anyone? Even the nudge-and-a-wink of the film's subtitle, "A True...ish Story" has been done to death, as far back as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

This is moviemaking for film students from the Rosebud School of Spotting the Reference. "So, you've never directed a Carry On film?" asks one of the less credulous characters that Conway meets. In comparison, the Carry Ons were masterpieces of subtlety. And that's the problem with making art that says "Look at me, look at me!" The worst thing is not for your potential audience to hate it. It's for the audience to say: "Yeah, I'm looking. And?"

PS: More film-related opinionating at CiF, as I suggest how to destroy the Oscars.

In an interview in The Observer, the art critic Robert Hughes defines and justifies his elitism thus: "I prefer the good to the bad, the articulate to the mumbling, the aesthetically developed to the merely primitive, and full to partial consciousness."

Which sounds pretty convincing, until you realise that he's probably never enjoyed that sinus-clearing rush you get from dancing badly to some gloriously stupid punk record. There is a place for creative stupidity in the aesthetic universe. But how do we define it? Are some stupidities (the Ramones?) better than others (Crazy Frog?) and, if so, why?

And while we're on the subject of pop music that Australian art critics in their late 60s probably wouldn't like: shortly before Christmas, at a party thrown by my dear friends Bui and Simon, I met a very smart and articulate young man who'd just that day graduated from USC. We got talking about music (duh) and he confirmed something that I'd suspected for some time.

"I've never heard any Joy Division," he said, "but I hear all these bands that apparently sound like them, so I think I know what they sound like."

If anybody, despite my incessant, tedious harangues, still hasn't got the hang of Baudrillard's notion of the simulacrum, that's a pretty cogent example of it.

Coming Soon: The Chasms of the Earth

The sensuous yet cerebral Molly Bloom offers a thought- and argument-provoking list of her favourite London films. Of course, the question of what 'a London film' might be is as open to discussion as the content of the list. Which London are we talking? And whose?

In the 30s, Hollywood could create anything it wanted on its backlot, and that included Ver Smoke. Witness, as an example, Fred taking Ginger on a carriage ride round Hyde Park, CA, in the delightful, utterly nonsensical Top Hat. This is travelogue London, with chirpy cabbies, bewhiskered bobbies and shots of the obvious landmarks every five minutes to remind you where you are (especially necessary in this case to distinguish it from the scenes in an equally fanciful Venice). The whole concept was brilliantly sent up in the opening sequence of the first Austin Powers movie, although I suspect there's a hardcore of Midwestern multiplex-goers that really does believe the streets of Chelsea are patrolled by Beefeaters.

The ultimate city-as-cinematic-simulacrum, however, was Casablanca. Much was made of the fact that the cast was drawn from dozens of different countries (of the main actors only Bogart and Dooley Wilson were born in the States) but nobody seemed too worried about the absence of any actual Moroccans. In fact, the producers' attention to veracity was so half-arsed, they even put Casablanca in the wrong place on the map in the opening sequence.

From the late 1940s onwards, easier and cheaper transport made location shoots more feasible. Audiences, it was claimed, also wanted more realistic movies, although what they actually got (wanted?) was a different, less fluffy flavour of unreality. The 1950 noir Night and the City is a classic example. Jules Dassin's delightfully sleazy yarn of dodgy dealers and desperate losers offers us all the right establishment shots of St Paul's and Tower Bridge. The twilight world of Soho clipjoints and fixed wrestling bouts is inhabited by reliable pillars of the Brit moviemaking community: bloated Dickens specialist Francis L Sullivan; professional slattern Googie Withers; all-purpose immigrant Herbert Lom. But American cinemagoers wanted to have their individual fruit pie from a Lyon's Corner Cafe and eat it; the leads are Richard Widmark and Gene Tierney; even the boring bloke downstairs who carries a torch for Tierney is played by the American Hugh Marlowe. The question of why so many people would want to swap the post-war Truman/Eisenhower boom economy for damp, rationed Blighty is seldom addressed. They're there because American audiences want them there, just as they'd later want Hugh Grant to cop off with Andie or Julia. The Hudson flows into the Thames, and Nelson wields a torch.

The last scenes Night and the City offer a frenzied cat-and-mouse game between Widmark and the various thugs, snitches and low-lifes of London ('London'?). The first time I saw it, I became disoriented when the action moved to the river, hopping between dockside huts and building sites. Where the hell were they? I was guessing the Isle of Dogs, and wondering how he'd managed to get so quickly from W1, before someone asked a policeman (of course) for directions to York Road; and I realised this mess of mud and cranes was the South Bank, presumably in the throes of development for 1951's Festival of Britain. And this, of course, was also where Grant quoted David Cassidy to McDowell in Four Weddings and a Funeral. Everything is connected, even when you're being chased by sinister Cockneys.

Of course, for many years, the preferred destination for footloose Yanks was Paris: think Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Gene Kelly, Jean Seberg in A Bout de Souffle, selling the Herald Tribune on the Champs Elysées. The disadvantage, as Seberg's endearingly crap French demonstrated, is that Parisians insist on not understanding the international language of English shouted slowly. This created something of a problem for Roman Polanski in the mid-70s, when criminal charges of unlawful sex with a minor forced him to flee the States just after the success of Chinatown.

His first film in exile effectively wrote the whole Hollywood sojourn out of his history, by referring back to his London classic Repulsion (which is in Molly's Top Ten, something you can't say for Four Weddings). The Tenant (1976) is, like so many of Polanski's movies, about a small, insignificant individual cast adrift in a world gone insane. (Note to self... Polanski does Kafka... music by Radiohead...) In the familiar story of an apartment building that's not quite what it seems, he shakes up the model of Repulsion by making the lead character male (himself, rather than Catherine Deneuve) and transferring the action to Paris.

But because Polanski was now a Hollywood player, albeit a disgraced one, there was American money around; which meant American stars. Melvyn Douglas is the landlord; Shelley Winters the concierge. And if they're not going to speak French, why should anyone else? The polyglot Polanski is fine; but Isabelle Adjani, her loveliness only slightly marred by green eyeshadow and Deidre Langton specs, seems to be dubbed; the other French performers (including Josiane Belasko, Michel Simon and Claude Dauphin) are definitely given the Singing Ringing Tree treatment.

It's Paris made safe for Anglophones, although the image of a deranged Polanski dressing up as a woman and pulling out his own tooth may take the romantic sheen off the city for some. It's properly abroad, but you don't even need subtitles, let alone a phrasebook. In a world where Americans feel the need to sew Canadian flags on their backpacks before boarding international flights, such a concept must be tempting.

However, it's not just a case of moving into a city and installing enough aircon, valet parking and Hershey bars to make it comfortable. Location filming in New York and LA has become so expensive that Toronto and Budapest, Pinewood and Cinecitta are now called to stand in for the definitive American cities, CGI smoothing over the joins. Instead of bringing the world to the Hollywood backlot, the world becomes the backlot. As Le Monde declared on the morning of September 12, 2001: "Nous sommes tous des Américains".

Late to the game, as ever, I've been catching up on Rob Brydon's Annually Retentive. (Dig that ambiguous apostrophe!) If you're even further out of the loop than I am, it's Have I Got News For You meets The Larry Sanders Show. Brydon plays himself (or a Welsh comedian of the same name), hosting a fictional, derivative panel game. We see behind the scenes: the banal, demographic-obsessed production meetings; the preparation of 'spontaneous' quips; and, above all, 'Brydon''s pompous, thin-skinned, two-faced megalomania. And we see the 'show', which has all the trappings of HIGNFY, They Think It's All Over, Buzzcocks and all those other repositories for moderately competent circuit comedians. The attention to detail makes it convincing (the obvious question being, does the studio audience know it's not 'real'?), but because we see it in context, we know it's fake, and by extension, so are all the panel shows it mocks. Although, as Small Boo points out with a sigh, its fakeness does not stop me from shouting out the answers.

What Brydon is doing is, of course, not new. Before Larry Sanders, Garry Shandling played 'himself' in It's Garry Shandling's Show ("This is the music that you hear as you watch the credits/We're almost to the part of where I start to whistle..."), which was, in turn, suspiciously like the almost forgotten Kelly Monteith Show. Then, of course, Seinfeld had a character called 'Jerry Seinfeld' (played by Jerry Seinfeld) surrounded by characters who seemed less 'real', more 'extreme', partly because the actors didn't share their names. Although one of them (George) was clearly based on the show's co-creator, Larry David - who then came up with his own show, in which he played a character called...

Annually Retentive seems to owe even more to Bob Mills' notorious flop The Show; the key difference being that the backstage bits in the Mills offering were real. Or were they? Well, certain stars complained because they felt they'd had their privacy invaded. Or did they? The fact that Mills ('Mills'?) appears as a panellist on 'Brydon''s fake show adds to the fun.

There seem to be two forces at work here. One is that producers now accept that audiences are relaxed about post-modernism, self-reference, metafiction and all that fancy French stuff, even if they can't put a name to it. The other is that performers now need to show that they don't take themselves too seriously. This is a fairly recent development: look at the difference between Peter Falk, playing Peter Falk straight in Wings of Desire (1987) and the character-self-assassination implicit in Being John Malkovich, just 12 years later. The extraordinary sight, in Extras, of 'Les Dennis' being informed of his cuckold status with his saggy arse ('arse'?) on display, is just a logical progression.

But there's a subtle difference. Malkovich and Dennis have taken the public perception of themselves, their lives, their personalities, and used them to make a particular character. "Fair enough, there are bits of us here," they say. "But this is clearly a self-caricature. We know we're not perfect, but by doing this, we're proving ourselves to be a bit less imperfect than you might have thought." Brydon, however, never seems to be out of character, even in the 'reality' of an interview situation. In the past, there was always a bit of Keith Barratt-style loserdom about him; now, I suspect, the 'Rob Brydon' style arrogance will resurface, even when it's Rob Brydon (no quotes) on the guest list.

We know more about the life of his colleague Steve Coogan (Ferraris, coke and shagging on a bed of money, apparently), but his own personality is still a mystery; any difficult question and he'll pull in Alan Partridge or Gareth Cheeseman to fend it off. He too has gone the Malkovich route, portraying 'himself' in Jim Jarmusch's underrated Coffee and Cigarettes as a complete shit, snubbing 'Alfred Molina''s overtures of friendship until he finds out that 'Molina' has Spike Jonze's phone number. (Jonze, of course, directed Being John Malkovich.)

Brydon and Coogan, of course, play themselves, playing roles (if, in fact, 'themselves' are not roles) in Michael Winterbottom's A Cock and Bull Story, which, being based on the pioneer postmodern fiction Tristram Shandy, is also about Tristram Shandy, and about itself, as well as up itself. Or so I'm told. I haven't seen the film. But Coogan hasn't read the book. Or so he said.

(Winterbottom, of course, plays the po-mo thing as if it's second nature - the appearances in the Tony Wilson biopic 24-Hour Party People of the 'real' Howard Devoto, Clint Boon, Wilson himself being the most obvious examples - that when something 'real' happens, the audience is temporarily thrown. The sex in 9 Songs is 'real', because we can see the ins and outs and bodily fluids. But, because it's Winterbottom, and the non-boudoir action takes place at 'real gigs', we're constantly aware that they're actors, following a script, only 'really' sucking and fucking in the way that actors in a Woody Allen film are 'really' talking.)

Coogan and Brydon, then, are the next step in celebrity culture, keeping their 'real' selves hidden, or at least ambiguous, even when apparently taking the piss out of those very 'real' selves. And in the Baudrillard sense - that's him on the right, by the way - say "bonjour", Jean - doesn't he look like Ronnie Corbett? - "le producteur dit à moi, il dit, Rrrronnie" - and who does the better Corbett impression, Coogan or Brydon? - and isn't the whole thing impressionism in a way? - post-modern post-impressionism? - in playing these versions of themselves, they have become true simulacra. Because, since the real Brydon and Coogan are kept away from the public domain, 'Brydon' and 'Coogan' are representatives of things that (in a cultural sense) do not exist.

So why do I still feel the urge to shout out the answers?

I know how difficult it is to get media coverage these days, especially for worthy but unsexy causes such as hearing impairment. So when the RNID staged the photo opportunity above, I was at first prepared to be tolerant. I mean, at least it wasn't one of those bodged-together, statistically nonsensical 'surveys' to publicise a new brand of lager or car or no-fee legal assistance. (You know, the type that asks a sample of ordinary Brits: "If you'd just crashed your car after drinking 10 pints of lager, which sexy celebrity would you like to represent you in court?" The answer is always Angelina Jolie.)

But back to the picture. The fact that the subjects are in the vicinity of red phone boxes might suggest some tangential reference to hearing loss, but is probably more likely to trigger thoughts of English Heritage. I mean, when was the last time you used one of these things, unless you're a Japanese tourist? And look at the people themselves. We have a man who doesn't look very much like Albert Einstein, another man who doesn't look in the slightest bit like Del Boy, and people whose resemblance to Madonna, Winston Churchill and Elvis Presley is, to put it gently, fleeting. If there's any implied message or meaning here, it's probably more related to blindness, since only someone with severely restricted sight would associate these people with the figures they are puported to represent. Baudrillard appropriated the word simulacrum to describe a representation that continues to have currency, even when its link to the thing it represented is severed. So, to stick with the public telephone idea, Dr Who's Tardis is now better known than the police box it hijacked. I've got a horrible feeling that these gurning parasites will continue to appear even after we've forgotten what Elvis sounded like.

There's a tired old line trotted out by desperate PR hacks when something's gone utterly tits-up: "There is no such thing as bad publicity." It's utter bollocks, I'm afraid; look at John Prescott, or DFS commercials. It's not polite to say it, but desperate, naff, lame, cheap, bland, banal, amateurish stunts like the one above make me want to follow Basil Fawlty's lead. The next time I meet a deaf person, I'll move my lips as if I'm speaking, and when she adjusts her hearing aid, I'll just scream "POSTMODERNISM" into it.

And, while we're in the goods yard of prevailing mediocrity: Miss Prism, in her Capacious Handbag blog, elegantly sums up the whole, fraught issue of 'dumbing down':

"It's simply not feasible to explain complex issues to the public one soundbite at a time - the general level of background knowledge is far too low. I'm no defeatist, but I think the problem should not be 'How do we explain this in 100 words or less?' but 'How do we make people want to read 10,000 words?'"

Couldn't have said it better myself (which is why I nicked it).