DOESN'T it seem like whenever enterprising amateurs pioneer a new artistic medium, pros have to come in and ruin it by making it better? Last week, Will Ferrell became the latest "real" celebrity to star in a homemade-looking internet video. The Landlord is a genuinely funny two-minute movie in which Ferrell plays a layabout who is accosted by his angry landlady.
The catch: Pearl, the landlady, is played by an actor who couldn't be more than two. This wunder-infant does an amazing job of parroting the lines that an adult clearly has taught her moments earlier.
"I want my money!
" she shrieks at Ferrell's character, then taunts him with a string of unprintable invectives. Pearl's lines, including her explanation of why she needs the money so urgently - "I need to get my drink on" - are helpfully subtitled for the viewer.
After being posted recently on a new video site called FunnyOrDie.
com, The Landlord quickly went viral. At time of writing, it was piling on tens of thousands of views every hour. In an age when making your professionally produced video look DIY is a great way to grab attention, did Ferrell make the video on his own, or did he have industry backing?
Is this just a new way for celebrities to mess around between gigs? Then again, that seemingly unprocessed appeal might be just what Hollywood's PR machine is trying to engineer.
Neither Ferrell's publicist nor FunnyOrDie.
com - a website for "aspiring comics to try out new ideas, experiment and generally have fun" - would comment on the origin of The Landlord. Independently made or not, Jeff Stern, chief executive of industry-friendly video website The Daily Reel, says there are going to be a lot more, chiefly because internet video is a low-risk, high-reward venture.
"It's easy to do, it's fast, you don't have to go through a two-year development process in order to put something funny out," Stern says.
"You put something up that's three minutes long. If it works, great, if it doesn't work, it'll be overwhelmed by other things that do."
Earlier this month, Alanis Morissette's career got a boost after she posted on her website a low-budget parody of the Black Eyed Peas' song My Humps.
The spoof has become YouTube's biggest hit this month, with more than five million hits. As more celebrities and their handlers are lured by the exposure possibilities of a viral internet hit, Hollywood's need for control of its content surely will bump up against the near-impossibility of controlling anything online. According to Stern, Hollywood is alarmed by the unpredictability of viral video, but until a better system comes along, there's only one way forward.
"You put it up and see what happens," he says.
DAVID SARNO
"THE work of an imagination which is both revolutionary and scholarly, avant garde and traditional, local and universal..
." So one Gaelic writer, Iain Crichton Smith, described the magisterial poetry of another, Sorley MacLean (inset). Perhaps it's appropriate, then - although we can't imagine what Sorley might have thought - that 11 years after his death, this universal Gael is to be celebrated by a website dedicated to his life and work.
Due to be launched on Tuesday, with both English (www.sorley maclean.org) and Gaelic (www.
somhairlemacgillean.org) url addresses, Sorley MacLean Online packs a wealth of biography, commentary and, of course, the man's poetry (mainly in Gaelic but currently with six English translations) into an accessible and attractive format. Site visitors will be able to read about the poet and his work, but video and audio clips will let them see and - perhaps most importantly - hear recordings of MacLean intoning masterpieces such as Hallaig and The Cry of Europe with his characteristic sonority.
"We felt it was one of the best possible ways to honour Sorley's memory," says Professor Norman Gillies, director of Sabhal Mor and a founder-trustee of the new online resource. "We wanted the site to be comprehensive, definitive and reliable, and with an emphasis on Gaelic, because that was where Sorley was coming from."
The website will expand over time to take in, among other things, more international studies of MacLean's work.
As it stands, it features video clips, including some of Tim Neat's documentary on the poet, Hallaig, and fellow Celtic bard Seamus Heaney (who won the Nobel literature prize many felt should also have gone to MacLean) recalling his first experience of hearing him, at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, and the impact of a "mesmeric and weathered" voice, "sometimes coming in close from far away, like the drone of a pipe".
GORDON Brown says Britain has fallen out of love with celebrity and that there is a new thirst for serious discussion exemplified by the flourishing of literary festivals and the growth of book clubs.
Of course, Brown has a book out to promote - Courage: Eight Portraits - as well as a leadership to win.
So it's perhaps no surprise he's cosying up to the publishing industry and attempting to show some intellectual breadth.
In reality, the Government has done precious little to encourage serious discussion when it comes to literature. When Sir VS Naipaul won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2001 - the first British winner for 18 years - the PM pointedly never congratulated him.
Last year culture minister David Lammy had to apologise for misleading the Commons into believing that England's libraries contain more books than ever when, in fact, stock has plummeted by 20 million books since Labour came to power. This Government takes casinos more seriously than literature. When did you last see any politician at a literary festival unless they're on official business?
Yet only last October, who should turn up to the Cheltenham Literary Festival but Gordon Brown. Naturally, he had a book on the go (his collected speeches on that occasion). He cited literary influences that ranged from the Bible to Tolstoy's War and Peace via Milton and Shaw.
Not exactly contemporary.
In my experience, book festivals are not about Big Conversations, but cosy small talk, gossip and bookish celeb-spotting.
As for book clubs, they may be flourishing but this conceals a larger cultural malaise - the decline in independent booksellers.
They have fallen from 1,700 in 2000 to 1,400 today.
Meanwhile, Peter Kay's memoir, The Sound of Laughter, is still riding high in the bestseller list (830,000 copies), and Dawn French has just sold her memoirs for £2 million. The death of celebrity culture?
I don't think so.
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