dreverativy

This is a light, vaguely entertaining tale made for Anglia and set on a bleak Suffolk farmhouse, about an art forger. Messrs Maynard, Troughton and Sallis provide capable support, and Roald Dahl makes a brief introduction. It also happens to be just about the last appearance of one of the great stars of her era.

It was shown as the final part of the Jessie Matthews season at the NFT in London. The audience was also treated to a feature produced by Edward Mirzoeff (best known for his work with Jessie's near contemporary, John Betjeman), plus a series of clips from "The Good Old Days", "This Is Your Life", etc. in which Leonard Sachs and Eamon Andrews provide support.

The whole collection of clips and off-cuts was depressing to a degree. In the Mirzoeff programme (dating from 1986) we see that Matthews' ashes had been deposited in an unmarked grave in Ruislip churchyard (the oversight has now been corrected). She seems to have wafted through life stirring up a great deal of enmity in the process. Hardly anyone had a good word to say for her - or if they did, the praise was (tellingly) equivocal. The contributions of her adopted daughter (in particular), her agent and her rival Chili Bourchier ooze contempt. This is perhaps understandable: her daughter has been cut out of her (no doubt modest) will, and seemed to be living in cramped conditions - she seemed to find her 'mother' almost physically repulsive (it was virtually a 'Mommie Dearest' performance); her agent was prepared to attribute to her all the deficiencies of a star, including the warped and deluded mindset; the remarkable Ms Bourchier was still raw with the affair between Matthews and her husband, and decried her attempts at bettering her accent.

Nor was Matthews much helped by her 'friends' (her agent remarked that there were precious few of these). Her brother remarked that she had thought her life pointless; Lord and Lady Elwyn-Jones (a very entertaining couple) emphasised her ill-health (Elwyn-Jones had been a not overly distinguished lord chancellor in 1974-9); her neighbours spoke of how tiring (and therefore by implication how tiresome) her late night calls and egotistical behaviour had been; her nurse, had largely forgotten about her, but obviously found her quite an effort.

In the final analysis her reputation rests upon a tiny repertoire of quite good songs (mainly by Rogers and Hart) and two or three British films that almost reached Hollywood standards in terms of quality and spectacle. The clips from TV shows revolved around "Over My Shoulder", "Dancing on the Ceiling", "When You've Got a Little Springtime in Your Heart", "Look for the Silver Lining", and not much more. Her heyday on stage and screen was 1927/28 to 1936/37, which is quite brief, and her days of film stardom (1933-37) were shorter still, even by the standards of female leads of that era. The period following 1938 is a virtual blank, save "Mrs Dale's Diary", which was almost an afterthought and not thought strong enough for Radio 2 to preserve. Her health issues aside, she was not much helped by the parlous state of Gainsborough and Gaumont and by the virtual disappearance of homegrown musicals from the West End. Matthews' career compares invidiously to Ginger Rogers (although considered by some to be a better dancer - a persuasive argument, but by no means definitive), much as Jack Buchanan does when put alongside Fred Astaire.

Fans of Matthews (of whom I am one) have noted her attractive mixture of star presence and innocence. Actually, the appearance of innocence - and her tendency to wear a wide-eyed, startled look - also indicates a chronic insecurity - hence the lifetime of 'starry' behaviour, and the recurrent breakdowns. Her weight was, somewhat predictably, the barometer of her vulnerability. She started to gain pounds after her miscarriage and once Sonnie Hale began to direct her. Once the roles dried up with the war (when her ethereal, lissome, gamine-like qualities became passé) she became quite plump. The shots taken of her recording 'Mrs Dale' show greater self-discipline, but during her appearances in the 1970s see seems to stagger across the stage (her voice weakened) like the ghost of Florrie Forde. It is only around 1980 (when the cancer was starting to tighten its grip) that she shrank greatly. The appearance alongside her, of a very well-preserved, though virtually bankrupt, Anna Neagle (her former understudy) in "This Is Your Life" made this physical 'fall from grace' all the more painful. Matthews could so easily have played the roles that Neagle enjoyed in the 1940s - only she had no Herbert Wilcox to rescue her.

Matthews is the acme of the tragic star. What a waste!

I saw this impressive documentary during its short run at London's Barbican Centre in mid-2006. It was roughly the same time that the trial of Kenneth Lay and Jeff Skilling was coming to a climax. The production values are high and the interviewees were very articulate and credible. Unlike other reviewers, I can't say I've yet read the book.

In retrospect it seems that it was Skilling and not Lay who was most culpable for the debacle that occurred. As the film progresses it is clear that Lay became an increasingly marginal figure in the Frankenstein's monster of a corporation that he had created. He seems to have been reduced to the role of a cheer-leader and front man. Lay may have suffered from moral infirmity, but then how many great business leaders are whiter than white? The problem with Lay is that I believe his concept for Enron's business was based upon a serious misconception: that energy (i.e., the supply of electricity, which in this instance must be differentiated from the raw commodities - coal, natural gas, etc. - that create power) can be traded like most other, tangible goods. Lay assumed that an efficient market could be created for electricity and he advocated the abdication of the state from the regulation and supply of electricity. However, the electricity 'market' was infested with jurisdictional issues, never mind the fact that supply is unevenly distributed and subject to inherent engineering problems (which is itself both a cause and a consequence of state intervention). Moreover, Lay's ambition (worthy in itself) was to create a global market, but on the international level the jurisdictional and technical problems were even more severe than in the domestic U.S. market. The uneven and problematic nature of the supply of electricity, and the fact that Lay had to get his business up and running meant that from the start Enron was preoccupied with the exploitation of arbitrage opportunities - i.e., technical and price differentials across exclusive and overlapping boundaries. Of course almost every trading company does just that, but in the case of Enron this meant dealing almost exlusively in the exploitation of bottlenecks, blockages and other inefficiencies in supply, which had the effect of seriously exacerbating these inefficiencies. This was the root cause of the moral hazard and corruption that was to follow. As the ideological climate of the 1980s and 1990s supported deregulation (and Enron encouraged that trend), and as the electricity market had been comparatively neglected by economists and policy-makers, a lot of bad policy decisions were made as governments ceded control of supply to the markets. Enron, having chosen (by default) the side of darkness - of inefficient deregulation (as in California) as the best way of making money in the absence of a perfect market - soon found itself morally compromised. The other reason why Lay's idea wasn't squashed from the outset was that this was the era of the 'new paradigm', the doctrinaire belief in the perfectibility of markets and the neoliberal assumption that state intervention is always bad for consumers. Lay's failure to serve any time in prison (due to Providential intervention) was therefore - I think - fair, although his sanctimonious denial of responsibility was a further, self-inflicted blow to his reputation. Enron might just have worked if no government anywhere played a role in the supply of electricity, but that is probably never going to happen. Lay was therefore: (a) a cynical opportunist, or (b) a deluded prophet and fantasist who was far too far ahead of the curve, or (c) both.

No, the people at fault in Enron were Skilling (a particularly odious individual with no genuine sense of self-knowledge, and who continues to evade real responsibility for his actions), and his minion Andy Fastow. These two individuals hijacked the company and made the disaster irretrievably inevitable, rather than merely probable. It was Skilling's pseudo-Darwinian complex that handed the company over to the traders. I don't doubt that traders are useful, up to a point, but they ought always to be kept under close control, whereas in Enron's case, Skilling goaded them on. The bug-eyed Enron traders who were interviewed here were a particularly disagreeable lot. Skilling grafted onto Lay's silly idea the notion that as the company was not really dealing with tangibles (redundant Indian power plants aside) its losses could be placed off-balance sheet in shell companies with funny names without too many issues arising, together with the infamous 'mark to market' stratagem. How could we blame him for doing this? Isn't it what banks do by 'securitising' mortgages so that they have little or no credit risk and can therefore lend with abandon to sub-prime borrowers for the sake of capturing market share? Wasn't Skilling simply using the same assumptions that are inherent in fractional reserve banking? The only detail that he forgot - fatally - was that Enron wasn't a bank and could therefore be allowed to fail. Skilling should have got a much longer prison term - not because of the fraud he perpetrated - but because that sort of appalling, hubristic arrogance needs to be punished severely as a deterrent to other moral derelicts who find themselves in positions of power they don't deserve.

It's a pity that the creators of this excellent film didn't interview the other authors of the debacle: the bankers, fund managers, politicians, economists, journalists, philosophers and regulators who made this perversion of capitalism possible by promoting a flawed concept of a liberal economy, and then telling us that there are no real alternatives when it goes painfully awry.