The Guardian Audio Edition: 19 February 2013

1. Obesity fightback begins in Tamworth, fat capital of Britain .....................................................................2 2. Chinese struggle through 'airpocalypse' smog .............................................................................................6 3. Churches stepping in to fill gap left by welfare cuts ...................................................................................9 4. Film school graduates take on might of Disney in the race for Oscar glory .............................................12 5. Tracey Thorn: the accidental pop star........................................................................................................14 In this week's edition: The Midlands town of Tamworth has the highest proportion of overweight people in the UK. Now it is trying to save a generation. Read the article here. By Sarah Boseley Pollution has hit record levels in Beijing, prompting citizens to ask if they're paying for economic growth with their health. Read the article here. By Jonathan Kaiman In Tyne and Wear faith is about the only thing left for those in poverty, say the church organisations trying to help. Read the article here. By Andrew Brown Head Over Heels, an 11-minute film made on a shoestring budget in Britain is up against Disney for an animation Oscar. Wallace and Gromit creator Nick Park loves it - but can it beat the favourite? Read the article here. By Vanessa Thorpe She quit the music business to start a family at the height of Everything But The Girl's success - but then Tracey Thorn says she's never felt like 'a proper star'. Read the article here. By Decca Aitkenhead In this week's book review we consider Frankenstein by Mary Shelley and Wendy Moore's How To Create The Perfect Wife.

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Obesity fightback begins in Tamworth, fat capital of Britain

The Midlands town has the highest proportion of overweight people in the UK. It is trying to save the health of a generation Sarah Boseley, Health Editor The Guardian, Monday 18 February 2013

Instructor Alan Hodson, in black, gives advice at Castle Grounds activity centre in Tamworth, Staffordshire, where more than 30% of people are recorded as obese. Photograph: David Sillitoe for the Guardian Tamworth in Staffordshire, a pleasant former market town 14 miles from Birmingham, has had its moments in the national limelight. It boasts a statue of Sir Robert Peel, whose constituency it was and who bred the Tamworth pig, and it is the home of the Reliant Robin, the three-wheel car invented in a back garden in 1935. But, as of 2011, it has been trying to shake off the less welcome title (shared with Gateshead) of fattest town in Britain. Just over 30% of people in Tamworth are obese, according to the National Obesity Observatory, Britain's official collector of such data. Gateshead and Tamworth have 30.7% adult obesity, while two other districts, Swale and Medway in Kent, have also for the first time nudged over the 30% line. By 2050, warned the seminal Foresight report of 2007, the UK could hit 60% adult obesity if nothing is done. Tamworth is halfway there. To the visitor, the girth of Tamworth's inhabitants is noticeably large. The nearly one in three who are technically obese are not hard to spot. While some council members protest loudly at the tarring of their town as fattest in the land, contesting the accuracy of the data and pointing to all that they are doing to encourage the local population to get more active, Jeremy Oates, who sits in the council cabinet and has health as part of his remit, acknowledges there is a problem. "We can run around saying the figures are out of date, but the bottom line is there is still an obesity issue," he says. Local GP John James, chair of the clinical commissioning group that will decide what NHS services the area needs, says people do not notice that others are overweight any more, because almost everybody is. "I have been a GP for 30 years," says James. "We don't need the statistics. We have all seen it happen. But we normalise visually. We look around the room at other people and say, I'm fairly tall or I'm not very tall. So in a room full of overweight people, nobody thinks they are fat." Oates, who is not overweight, is surprised at how far it has gone. "It's not just elderly but overweight people using mobility scooters," he says. He recently saw four men in early middle age with walking sticks. "I Page 2 of 17

thought, when did walking sticks become fashionable?" And then he realised these were overweight people who needed sticks to be able to get around. "We're almost on the verge of a lost generation obese parents who aren't recognising that their children are obese. Getting parents to recognise that is quite tricky," he says. Tamworth is not out of step with the rest of the West Midlands, which has an average adult obesity rate of 26.4%, just as Gateshead is within the general range of the north-east, where adult obesity averages 27.8%. The figures are a bit out of date, because they are based on 2006-08 data from the Health Survey for England, but that is the most up-to-date information there is. The names at the top of the league table will no doubt have changed by the time new National Obesity Observatory data is published, but it is a safe bet that there will be even more towns with more than 30% adult obesity not fewer. This is not just Tamworth's problem it is everybody's problem.

Tamworth's civic leaders have been doing what they can to cut obesity, including the installation of free gym equipment in the grounds of the town's castle. Photograph: David Sillitoe/The Guardian Tamworth's civic leaders have been doing what they can which is mostly to encourage and enable people to take up sport and become more active. The zumba dance-fitness classes the council organised took off. In the grounds of the town's Norman castle, it installed free outdoor gym equipment. There are now about 15 council-run exercise and fitness classes a week, including Nordic walking. It invested 17,000 in free swimming lessons at a local pool and subsidised the SnowDome, the first indoor ski slope with real snow. The council has got results. In 2009 just over 9,000 adults in Tamworth were taking part in sport, but by 2011 this had risen to 11,000. With a population of 76,000, however, there is still a way to go. It is, says Rob Barnes, director of housing and health, "a really good community leisure offer" but people's thinking needs to change if more are to use it. "They have a perception that it is normal to be overweight, it is normal not to exercise and normal to smoke." It would take something else to get the local people really moving, mused Oates. "What we're lacking in Tamworth is high-achieving sporting heroes. We haven't got a Jessica Ennis. It is a shame we haven't got a local connection with a role model." Local people do not believe Tamworth is fatter than anywhere else. Anne Devenney, a consultant for Slimming World in Tamworth, says: "I do see people struggle with their weight, but I wouldn't say it was massively noticeable or that every person you see is obese or overweight. I can't understand that we have been labelled as the worst. There's nothing different in Tamworth. The zumba craze has gone mad in Tamworth and we have got cycle paths galore." She says there are many reasons why people put on weight. "A lot of factors cause people to overeat. It could be depression, it could be not enough money to do exercise slimming groups cost money and healthy food costs money. There are lots of other factors beyond overeating on fast food. There is lack of employment it all has a knock-on effect for people nowadays. You get in the car much more easily. Page 3 of 17

Everything is much more convenient. You don't necessarily walk to the shops any more. There is a big picture." In her case, it was emotional distress. Her fourth child, Cameron, was diagnosed with a very rare blood disorder when he was 15 months old, after four months of tests. He needed a bone marrow transplant and luckily all three of his siblings were a match, but he suffered complications after the operation and eventually died. "He was in Birmingham children's hospital for virtually six months," she says. "It became ready meals and hospital meals and never leaving the room because he was in isolation. [We parents] called it the mum's shuffle wandering down the corridor in your slippers." Devenney's weight went up to 103 kg (16st 4lb) and she had to wear size 20 clothes. She used to order two big breakfasts at the McDonald's drive-through and eat both. "I can't face even one now. You get a little bit embarrassed because you feel disgusted that you did that. "People don't necessarily understand how difficult it can be. Even now I can still have bad days. I'm still in danger of reaching for the chocolate. I don't think that will ever leave me." There came a point when she knew she had to do something. She was ashamed of having to struggle up the six flights of stairs to the hospital car park. And she had her other children to think of. "It was a good few weeks after we'd lost him. I was eating a lot and down with everything. Then it was a sudden realisation that I didn't want a tragedy for the others. I looked at myself and felt awful." With the support she got from her Slimming World group, she ate better food, took up running and is now size 10 and weighs 67kg (10st 8lb). Michelle Wright went to see her GP last year with pains in her feet and joints. She was 1.67 metres (5ft 6 in) tall and weighed more than 108kg (17st). "My doctor didn't even say to me I was overweight," she says. "He just started me on steroid injections. He didn't advise me to lose weight or anything." She knew herself that she was too heavy. "At Christmas last year I was in size 22s. My Christmas present under the tree was the biggest parcel there and when I opened it, it was a coat," she says. It was huge. She did not feel good about herself. Wright started trying to cut the calories in the food she ate on her own, but then saw adverts for Weight Watchers in the new year and joined up. "When I lost about three stones, the pain stopped in my feet," she says. She thinks the epidemic of overweight is down to the pressures on consumers. "You only have to sit down and watch TV. There are the special offers, buy one get one free, boxes of Maltesers in the supermarket for 1. But also people are making the wrong choices. It is down to willpower as well. You choose what you put in your mouth." Obesity rates rise with deprivation, most research shows, but there are studies that suggest the area in which you live may be more important than the amount of money you earn. So those less likely to be obese include people who do not use cars, because they cannot afford them or live in a town with a cycling culture, those who have fresh fruit and vegetable shops nearby and not just an abundance of takeaways and corner stores selling processed food, and those in places where the norm is not to be fat. It is very complex, says Jonathan Topham, district public health lead, but searching for reasons for obesity in Tamworth, he points to lower levels of activity than average for England three in five men and women say they are completely inactive and low consumption of fruit and vegetables (22% eating five a day compared with 29% on average in England), which is a marker for a healthy diet. "We do have issues around lifestyle and behaviours," he says. "We have lower levels of physical activity than you would expect. It looks like the levels of healthy eating are not as good as they should be. There is probably a correlation with obesity." The town also has low educational attainment at GCSE fewer than half its students get A*-C GCSE grades (including English and maths) and there are high levels of teenage pregnancy compared with the rest of Staffordshire. Page 4 of 17

In some areas people can buy fish and chips, a meal heavy in saturated fat, for 1. Photograph: David Sillitoe for the Guardian It is just as complex in Gateshead, where director of public health Carole Wood talks of activities and school initiatives, including encouragement to the older generation to pass on recipes and cooking skills to the younger ones. But they are stumped for answers to one of the biggest local problems how to stop more fish and chip shops opening. There is such a density that in some areas people can buy fish and chips for 1. It's a meal heavy in saturated fat. "I don't think we have one fish and chip shop or hot takeaway shop that would cook in vegetable oil rather than beef dripping," she says. But it's a planning nightmare, pitching health against jobs in the local economy. It is, as the Foresight report said in 2007, the "obesogenic environment" that is to blame, and that has to be tackled on many fronts at the same time food, transport, activity levels, planning and, importantly, education. Both Tamworth and Gateshead say they are doing what they can, but they can't do it alone. Tackling social and cultural issues, as well as practical matters like food labelling and advertising, requires a lead from central government.

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Chinese struggle through 'airpocalypse' smog

Pollution has hit record levels recently, prompting citizens to ask if they're paying for economic growth with their health

Jonathan Kaiman The Observer, Saturday 16 February 2013 19.47 GMT

Photograph: Alamy Children wear masks as a thick haze of air pollution envelopes Tiananmen Square in January. Hu Li's heart sank when she realised that she could gauge how close she was to home by the colour of the air. Driving 140 kilometres from Tianjin City to Beijing last week, she held her breath as the chalky-white horizon became a charcoal grey haze. The 39-year-old businesswoman has lived in Beijing for a decade, and this past month, she said, brought the worst air pollution she has ever seen. It gave her husband a hacking cough and left her seven-year-old daughter housebound. "I'm working here and my husband's working here, so we have no choice," she said. "But if we had a choice, we'd like to escape from Beijing." A prolonged bout of heavy pollution over the last month, which returned with a vengeance for a day last week called the "airpocalypse" or "airmageddon" by internet users has fundamentally changed the way that Chinese people think about their country's toxic air. The event was worthy of its namesake. On one day, pollution levels were 30 times higher than levels deemed safe by the World Health Organisation (WHO). Flights were cancelled. Roads were closed. One hospital in east Beijing reported treating more than 900 children for respiratory issues. Bloomberg found that for most of January, Beijing's air was worse than that of an airport smoking lounge. The smog's most threatening aspect is its high concentration of PM 2.5 particulate matter that is small enough to lodge deep into the lungs and enter the bloodstream, causing respiratory infections, asthma, lung cancer, cerebrovascular disease, and possibly damaging children's development. The WHO has estimated that outdoor air pollution accounts for two million deaths per year, 65% of them in Asia. Yet the smog has become more than a health hazard in China it has become a symbol of widespread dissatisfaction with the government's growth-first development strategy. Feelings of resigned helplessness have given way to fear, anger, and society-wide pressure to change the status quo. The Lunar New Year, which came last Sunday, usually coincides with clear blue skies an estimated 9m cars depart from the capital, and its emissions-spewing factories shut down as workers go on holiday. Yet the smog came back with a vengeance on Wednesday. Environmental authorities sent text messages to Beijing residents urging them to mitigate the pollution by refraining from the long-held holiday tradition of lighting fireworks. According to state media, they took heed. Fireworks sales fell 37% compared with last year.

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"PM 2.5 and data measurement issues with regard to air quality have entered into mainstream Chinese life," said Angel Hsu, a doctoral candidate at Yale University. Hsu has tracked usage of the term "PM 2.5" on Sina Weibo, China's most popular microblog, over the last two years. In January 2011, it was mentioned about 200 times. Last month, the number soared above three million. In China, PM 2.5 has acquired a symbolic weight to parallel its medical gravitas. Young internet users post photos of themselves wearing air filtration face masks. One popular mask is hot pink; another looks like a panda bear. Last spring, Shanghai hosted a PM 2.5-themed rock music festival. A music video called "Beijing, Beijing (Big Fog Version)" went viral on video sharing websites. "Who is searching in the fog? Who is weeping in the fog? Who is living in the fog? Who is dying in the fog," A man croons over images of cars crawling along smog-choked highways. Experts say that the last month's pollution was probably caused initially by a cold snap, forcing huge use of coal, followed by a rare temperature inversion, which trapped emissions under a blanket of warm air. Others say that it could be related to a prolonged period of high humidity, trapping particulate matter in the air. Pollution levels depend heavily on the force and direction of the wind. A strong north-eastern gust can blow the smog out to sea; a few stagnant hours are enough to make noon look like early evening. The standard international measurement for air quality the US Air Quality Index, or AQI rates air quality on a scale of zero to 500. With experience, it becomes possible to guess the AQI in Beijing without looking at official readings. One hundred correlates to a thin grey gauze hovering above the horizon. When the index hits 200, the sky is visible only in a small patch directly overhead. An AQI reading of 300 blots out the sun, smothering the city in drab uniformity. When the AQI reached 755 on 12 January, the worst day on record, the air felt like industrial smoke chemical-tasting, eye-watering. On particularly smoggy days, the toxic cloud is visible in satellite photos. The worst of the last month's pollution stretched 1,100 miles south, closing highways near the south-western city Guiyang. When the smog clears, it doesn't simply vanish, but instead drifts to surrounding countries. January's smog spurred Japanese authorities to release health warnings to people living in the country's western cities. Traces of China's smog have been detected as far afield as California. The Beijing municipal government has taken steps to curb the pollution, temporarily shutting down factories and ordering government cars off the roads. While propaganda authorities used to quash reports of air pollution for fear that they could spark social unrest, Chinese newspapers were allowed to report freely on the crisis. Shanghai's Environmental Protection Bureau has designed a cartoon accompaniment to its AQI readings a pigtailed girl with big anime-style eyes, green-haired and smiling when the index reads "excellent" but maroon-haired and weepy when smog rolls in. "I'm pretty optimistic that this happened at the right time to prompt the most action possible," said Deborah Seligsohn, an expert on China's environment at University of California, San Diego. President Xi Jinping took the reins of the Communist party in November; incoming prime minister Li Keqiang has promised to make environmental protection a focus of his tenure. Beijing authorities hope to wean the city off coal and implement stricter vehicle emissions standards by 2016. Seligsohn added that changes would take a while. "If Beijing were surrounded by cities that were doing the same thing that Beijing was doing, it would be fine, but it isn't," she said. A short drive from central Beijing, the landscape fans out into sprawling, dusty plains, where farmers burn coal to heat their concrete homes. Small factories there often escape the notice of environmental watchdogs. PM 2.5, she explained, is produced by four airborne pollutants sulphur dioxide, nitrous oxides, volatile organic compounds, and black carbon each of which would require its own slew of regulations to curb. People have begun to take protection into their own hands. "People are starting to treat air purifiers as a necessary appliance like a washing machine or computer," said Bi Xiuyan, a 56-year-old product salesperson for Amway. Bi has sold about 50 air purifiers in the last month, each of which costs 960, about twice the average monthly income for Beijing residents. "Everybody needs to breathe," she said. Louie Cheng, the president of Shanghai-based Pure Living China, a small company that tests indoor air pollution, said that the current situation boosted the company's web traffic 30-fold. "Literally you can see it this isn't compared with a year ago, this is compared with a month ago," he said. Cheng said that he Page 7 of 17

helped start the company three years ago when an expat friend with an asthmatic daughter couldn't find a local company to competently test his house for pollutants. His client-base has tripled since January, and now includes more than half of Shanghai and Beijing's international schools. "It's just hard to keep up with the demand," he said. Awareness of the problem has spread beyond major urban centres. Ma Shiying, who sells moist towelettes in the small coastal city of Weifang, Shandong province, heeded the government's warning and lit fewer fireworks this year. "Over the past few months, the whole world has begun to pay close attention to this problem," he said. "It's become impossible for anyone to ignore." Yet interpretations of the issue vary. Eva Zhong, the head of exports for a fireworks manufacturer in Hunan province, said that the government's fireworks warnings were misplaced. "Fireworks are very innocent," she said. "Car exhaust is a far greater problem." Despite the government figures, she added, her company's sales this year have been unscathed.

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Churches stepping in to fill gap left by welfare cuts

In Tyne and Wear faith is about the only thing left for those in poverty, say the church organisations trying to help

Andrew Brown The Guardian, Thursday 14 February 2013 20.15 GMT

Graham Wharton of the Salvation Army works on the Sunderland food bank project. He has noticed a big increase in people knocking at church doors for help. Photograph: Christopher Thomond for the Guardian Carole Davison was surprised when she got a text offering her 500. "I've got a bad credit record," she says. "I was put into debt by the [Inland] Revenue: It's 'approval for a 500 loan' and I never applied for anything". The irony of Davison receiving such an offer is compounded by the fact that she works for a church project counselling people with debt problems on Tyneside. Thousands of stories of the greed and cruelty of loan sharks pass through her small office in South Shields each year. There is the pensioner who borrowed 500 15 years ago, and still owes 2,000 on the debt. There is the man with learning difficulties who could not understand the forms he signed. One disabled man came into a little money when his mother died. The money brought friends, but when the money ran out, the "friends" walked away and he ran up a 28,000 debt phoning chatlines to have someone to talk to. Davison has been helping people find their way through problems such as these for 30 years now. Her office, with two filing cabinets of debt cases, has three bookshelves covered in thank-you notes from clients. The government is keen to promote churches and mosques as delivery mechanisms for social services. Yesterday Lady Warsi, the faith minister, announced another initiative to make small funds available to multi-faith projects, and welcomed a survey showing that the hours donated by schurch volunteers have risen by 36% in the recession, that each church in the country delivers an average of eight social initiatives, and that three quarters of these projects were self-funding. Thinktanks have popularised these ideas: most recently, the secular Demos, in a report on Faithful Providers, while church-based bodies such as Phillip Blond's ResPublica are exploring developments of this idea. Iain Duncan Smith's Centre for Social Justice has been pushing the role of voluntary organisations since at least 2007. The Church Urban Fund reported that one in 10 Anglican parishes offer organised help with debt and homelessness, and about a third of them offer informal help; only 3% offered organised help with benefit dependency. Some church leaders are suspicious of being recruited to prop up the welfare state. The bishop of Leicester, the Rt Rev Tim Stevens, told the House of Lords: "I fear that we are heading in the direction of a US-style welfare system, where healthcare provision and pensions are large and protected but working-age provision Page 9 of 17

is less generous and more stigmatised, barely providing enough for people to live on without relying on charitable handouts, where visits to the food bank are not an emergency response to an economic crisis but an integral part of the welfare state." The delivery of faith-based welfare comes down to little rooms such as Davison's, housed in an abandoned bank building in a small row of shops on a street that once had three thriving churches. The community centre where she works was opened by a bishop, and about half the board of management are Christians. But very little is funded by the churches. Although Durham is one of the dioceses most heavily funded by the rest of the Church of England it gets 2m a year from the church commissioners little of the money trickles down to these projects. Most goes on making up the shortfall in clergy salaries. Money is tight all round. Davison says: "It's 50 times worse than 10 years ago. It's not just people who are unemployed. We're starting to get middle-class people in. People who through no fault of their own have lost their job and their partnership's broken up. But in the main it's people who are unemployed or on the minimum wage." But she predicts a multitude of further problems from government plans to cut housing benefit for families in social housing who are judged to have too many bedrooms, and separate moves to make the lowest-paid pay council tax for the first time. "People never paid council tax in their lives and are living in a two bedroom, apartment," says Davison. "All of a sudden they are going to be paying council tax, and then on top of that they are going to be hit with the bedroom tax. All of a sudden they are going to have to find, out of about 70 a week, an extra 10. Where are they going to get that from? I'm frightened, to be quite honest." The only thing that the new archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, has denounced as "evil" during his time as the local bishop is loan sharking. "The bishop of Durham had his head in his hands when he come here. He had his head in his hands on that table and he just said, 'Oh God''. He was quite disgusted with what was going on," says Davison. Last year, she was diagnosed with cancer, and her work was taken over by her assistant, Mandy Allcock, who does 16 hours a week on minimum wage. When Davison's treatment was over, she got a handwritten card from the bishop: "'Wonderful news!' it said. Alleluia and all that sort of thing." Down the coast, in Sunderland Minster, the first thing to greet a visitor is a notice board asking for contributions to a food bank and a night shelter. The canon here, Sheila Bamber, was once a rent collector, working door to door in social housing in Hartlepool. But now she believes she can be far more use in the church than in the welfare system. "I can say more things in more places. The reach of this church is enormous, much greater than the congregation. We have 5,000 worshippers and maybe five times as many people passing through in a year," says Bamber. Graham Wharton, from the Salvation Army, works closely with her on the food bank and night shelter projects. "We don't have a political agenda. But there has been a massive increase in people knocking at church doors," he says. "We get a lot of referrals from professionals whose statutory methods have failed. Often we can say, 'We can't fix this, but we know this person who can help.'" For Wharton, one of the great services the church can provide is simply a sense of worth. People come to them convinced they are hopeless: "They say, 'I cannot provide for my family what they're used to. I am a failure as a human being.'" It is impossible to get away from questions of morality when talking about faith-based welfare. There are certainly stories of greed and stupidity as well as desperate need among the people who get themselves into trouble with debt. Bamber remembers from her time as a housing officer one of the three evictions she carried out. "This was in the 80s and they had bought themselves a video player. They were eating McVitie's chocolate digestive biscuits. In my house, we only had chocolate digestives at Christmas." Page 10 of 17

So she is sympathetic to the argument that some people are led astray by consumerism. Time she spent as a theological student in India showed her how little some people can be content with. "We need to get back to what we need to be really alive, and not blind ourselves with consumerism. But people dropping out of the system now are doing so to a level of basic need," says Bamber. The Sunderland Minster hands out food, but not money and arranges shelter rather than vouchers, to avoid producing tradable commodities. But the idea that the church workers are morally superior to their clients is one Bamber emphatically rejects. "All of us need to be changed morally from the inside and I don't have a monopoly on any of that stuff and neither does the church," she says. What Christians can do, she believes, is neither to preach nor to feel smug, but to try to live in a more hopeful and less selfish way than the world around them. "We might hope that we might model a community of people who hold principles that will show you different ways. There's a lot of truth in 'there but for the grace of God'." Wharton worked as a retail banker until he was 40, helping to create the problems he now tries to clear up. He's much more willing to testify about his faith, if asked, but he is not in the least bit triumphalist. "The loan shark is more entrenched and rooted in the community than the church is. He's a friend. If I need 10 to put food on the table, I have a friend. What do we have to offer them instead?"

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Film school graduates take on might of Disney in the race for Oscar glory
Head Over Heels, an 11-minute film made on a shoestring budget in Britain is up against Disney for an animation Oscar. Wallace and Gromit creator Nick Park loves it but can it beat the favourite?

Vanessa Thorpe The Observer, Sunday 17 February 2013

Head Over Heels was financed and made by students of the National Film and Television School. Photograph: NFTS Call it the Wallace & Gromit effect. A quirky British film called Head Over Heels could be about to upset the natural order in Hollywood and beat Disney to the coveted animation Oscar. Just like A Grand Day Out, Nick Park's first, much-loved 1989 animation, Head Over Heels was made at the National Film and Television School (NFTS) and is now set to make a similar impact overseas. It is the only student film in contention for an Oscar next week. Describing the animation, directed by Timothy Reckart and produced by Fodhla Cronin O'Reilly, as "one of those stand-out little gems that doesn't come around that often", Park said: "It's a cleverly conceived but simple idea. A clear and inventively told story, very poignant and full of heart. I'm not surprised they're winning awards with Head Over Heels. Much deserved." The stakes are suddenly sky-high for the young film school graduates who put together the 11-minute animation on a tiny budget. So far, it is holding its own in the short animation category against the favourite Disney's black-and-white offering, Paperman. While Disney has allegedly contravened strict Oscar rules by releasing Paperman in full online, the makers of Head Over Heels hit back by editing scenes from their film into the form of a viral Valentine email. O'Reilly, who is already in California for next Sunday's ceremony, said: "People seem to really like it because the story itself is quite universal. That is why the film has had such a strong reaction." The plot revolves, quite literally, around a house where an emotionally distant married couple live together but apart. Their tentative attempts to communicate are repeatedly thwarted as they continue to live according to different rules one on the floor; one on the ceiling. "I have had to pitch the story so often now, I find it hard to remember the effect it has," she said. "The meaning is very subjective, as it should be, but for me it is about realising what you already have. A couple can certainly start to take each other for granted and this is a romance about that." O'Reilly made the film Page 12 of 17

with animator and director Reckart as their final project at film school. The two invited a group of fellow students to pitch in and bring Reckart's vision to life. "The concept for the film came from Tim and we worked on it together," said the 26-year-old from Co Kerry. "We were in the same year and decided to make it the old-fashioned way, as a stop-motion animation with clay models." Reckart has described the idea behind the story as "simple a husband and wife separated by different fields of gravity". However, this does not stop the story from having a "really rich and emotional" depth. "Many married people have told me that the film rings true with their own experiences of marriage, and I think everyone, married or not, can identify with this story of love built upon sacrifice,'' he said. Reckart, who is also 26, grew up in Arizona and travelled to Britain to study at the NFTS in Buckinghamshire. "He came over here because he saw it as the home of animation. And it has been nice to think that the first Wallace & Gromit film was Nick Park's graduation film here too," said O'Reilly. Park, who joined Bristol-based Aardman Animations, also earned an academy award nomination with A Grand Day Out, his graduate film, but actually won the Oscar that year, 1990, for Creature Comforts. Earlier this month in Los Angeles Head over Heels won an international Annie Award for animation. "We are funding the film ourselves, of course, and so we don't have the money to spend huge amounts on PR and publicity, but we are trying our hardest to spread the word," said O'Reilly. Since leaving film school she has worked with Parallel Films in London and is involved in several new projects, including more animations with Reckart. Among those who pitched in to help make Head Over Heels was 32-year-old film editor James Taylor from Plymouth, who will also attend the ceremony on Sunday. "Tim came up with such a simple but beautifully conceived metaphor that lies at the heart of Head Over Heels," Taylor has said. His family and friends have raised money to fund his plane ticket and hotel room for Oscars night. "I'm so excited to be going to Hollywood to mix with people who have made the films I have been watching all my life," he said. Head Over Heels is also up against Adam and Dog, a solo project from Disney animator Minkyu Lee, Fresh Guacamole, a film about making a dip out of inedible objects, and The Simpsons spin-off, The Longest Daycare, in which Maggie Simpson attends an Ayn Rand-inspired nursery. Head Over Heels remains an underdog, but since its powerful ending has been described as "one of the most romantic in cinema", perhaps Oscars night will end in the same uplifting way.

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Tracey Thorn: the accidental pop star

She quit the music business to start a family at the height of Everything But the Girl's success but then Tracey Thorn says she's never felt like 'a proper star'

Decca Aitkenhead The Guardian, Sunday 10 February 2013 19.00 GMT

Tracey Thorn: 'A bit of a square peg in a round hole.' Photograph: David Levene for the Guardian If there has been one constant throughout a music career lasting almost 30 years, Tracey Thorn would almost certainly say it has been other people's misapprehensions about what she's really like. She can't even tweet about how much she loves The X Factor without incurring the wrathful incredulity of fans who continue to mistake her for some sort of po-faced music purist. "I sit and tweet about X Factor and every week, without fail, I get people who will come back at me it's usually men 'How can you watch this rubbish! This has killed music, you with your talent ought to know better.' Lecture, lecture, lecture, every week. It drives me mad, it drives me mad." She laughs. "So yeah, I'm astonished that people get so uptight about it." Ever since Thorn emerged as a singer in the indie scene of the early 80s, as one half of the band Everything But the Girl, she has been identified with the ascetic, high-minded and somewhat dour subculture of postpunk pop. But the label was only ever partially accurate, and over the course of a dozen albums she proved herself to be infinitely more musically eclectic. Now, aged 50, she has written a memoir. Always a reluctant, almost accidental pop star an "anti performer", as she puts it she has written one of the best books about ambivalence I've ever read. "I've slightly parted the curtains and done this thing of showing behind the scenes of everything," she agrees. "Whether it's to do with the idiotic things that happened to you, or what I have felt like at certain times whether that's to do with stage fright, or not feeling like I was living up to being a pop star, or even the moments we were being ambitious with something and it failed. I've sort of admitted all those things, and I'm now at the point where I've started thinking: 'Oh, did I mean to admit all that?' But I've done it now." She hadn't intended to when she first started writing. "But then it became about this thing of ambivalence of being a bit of a square peg in a round hole." For the first 13 years of her life Thorn was a conventional suburban girl, growing up in a commuter town north of London. Then she discovered punk, got herself a guitar and a newly nihilistic persona, and became the only female member of a local indie band. Even so, she was still so shy that when the band asked if by any chance she could sing, she was too embarrassed to have a go in front of them, and could only pluck up the courage to sing Rebel Rebel by hiding inside a wardrobe. Page 14 of 17

Because she fancied boys in bands, she naturally assumed boys would fancy her if she was in one. The discovery that this was not the case was to be her introduction to life as a misfit, even in a scene that purported to be all about defying convention. "Yes, that was a bit eye-opening," she laughs. "I began to understand about boys finding certain kinds of girls challenging and intimidating and I just genuinely didn't know that. Why would I have known that? I didn't think I was being intimidating; I thought I was being quite friendly." Her parents weren't particularly political in fact they were dumbfounded by her transformation into an angry young rebel and it was years before she read any of the classic feminist tracts. She seemed to find her way to feminism by instinct, and agrees: "Yes, I suppose that's true. I suppose I was instinctively," and she begins to chuckle, "just a bit stroppy, I reckon." By the time she left home for Hull University she had formed an all-girl band, which played some London gigs and was interviewed by Melody Maker. But at Hull she met Ben Watt, who soon became both her boyfriend and the other half of their new band, Everything But the Girl(EBTG). Before long the music press was dispatching journalists to Hull to interview the couple in their student bedsit, declaring them the hot new indie sensation. Part of their appeal was their apparent nonchalance, which tended to be mistaken for cool but was really, she says, just gauche bemusement. They'd never dreamed that what they thought of as a hobby could become a full-time job, but success seemed to be so ludicrously easy that after graduating they moved to London to begin a career as official pop stars. "What we didn't have was the experience of struggling for years and doing lots of tours as the support band. I think we were a bit spoiled at the beginning and that's why, when things went a bit wrong later, it felt like a bit of a slap in the face, because we hadn't had the experience of having to work very hard for people's love." Thorn writes beautifully about their embarrassment and shock when the very critics who'd raved about their early work began to complain that EBTG were becoming blandly inoffensive. Having never set out to be star, Thorn found herself turning into the sort of diva who would storm out of an interview in indignation just because the journalist had uttered the words "easy listening". The irony of an anti-performer taking herself more seriously than even Madonna was presumably not lost on Thorn? She grins, and sighs. "I did go through a phase where I felt intimidated by any negative opinion, and I think in order not to look intimidated, I adopted the opposite reaction of being very stroppy and probably what came across as diva-ish. Anyone who came across us during that first year or so probably doesn't have fond memories of us and I wouldn't blame them I'd probably go back and apologise to a few people now. I think we were just scratchy and hackles up and defensive. And the terrible thing is, insecurity comes across as arrogance." Part of the problem was that she and Watt stood for a political sensibility that had made sense in the early post-punk 80s, but was rapidly becoming anachronistic as the decade evolved away from the Jam towards Wham! and a Thatcherite ethos of shiny consumerist ambition. The music industry was becoming more interested in self promotion than musical expression yet when EBTG released a single, they went off on holiday, and their label couldn't even get hold of them. The idea of trying to publicise or promote the record hadn't even crossed their minds. In many ways her memoir is as much about the cultural shifts of the 80s as it is about music, and she looks relieved when I say so. "Well that's good, because I do feel the 80s gets described in a funny way sometimes and I do feel a lot of the atmosphere of the period gets forgotten; it's as though the clocks turned at midnight 79 turned into 80 and everyone just turned into different people wearing shoulder pads and drinking champagne. It's just bizarre. I didn't know anyone who was like that, or was into that, or liked those kinds of bands, or did that kind of thing. And that's not because I lived the most radical, alternative life because there were thousands and millions of people who were just like us. So the trouble is, one side of it has been a bit written out of history." Because history is written by the winners? "Yeah, probably, I suppose, because Thatcher's lot won." Thorn spent much of the 80s supporting leftwing causes as a loyal member of Red Wedge, and her memoir evokes an earnestness that is comically unimaginable today and could never, she reflects, be replicated.

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The Marine Girls Tracey Thorn, Jane Fox and Gina Hartman in Regent's Park, London, in 1982. Photograph: David Corio/Redferns "It would be fascinating to do a study of when irony took over completely, because I can't quite put my finger on it, but I'm sure someone clever could analyse culture and politics and music and define the moment when irony stopped being an option and became the default option. I think it's really problematic that everything is now seen through an ironic tinge; it just makes it very difficult for people within the arts to be entirely sincere about things without looking like they just haven't thought it through properly. The problem with irony is it assumes the position of being the end result, from having looked at it from both sides and having a very sophisticated take on everything, so the danger of eschewing irony is you look as though you just haven't thought hard enough about it, and are just being a bit simplistic." In another life Thorn would have been a brilliant columnist, for she has a sharp and candid eye for the perennial conflict between idealism and realism. Her memoir doesn't mock her former Red Wedge self, but nor does she come across in person as remotely humourless. "I'm a person of my times, and so I would never claim that I'm still flying a flag single-handedly for not being ironic. And I wouldn't want to be, because I don't like the idea of flying in the face of the times you live in. So, no, I don't know what the answer is. It's just that I can see that that is what's happened. In some respects there's more humour about everything, which isn't always a bad thing. All of that getting very defensive which went on with us in interviews a lot of that came from humourlessness. When I see younger bands, they do seem to be a bit more self-aware of the sort of ridiculous elements of being in a band and that's to do with the ironic perspective. But sometimes I think something's lost, because you sort of protect yourself by being ironic and humorous, and never risk anything." EBTG took a lot of musical risks, experimenting with everything from electronica to folk to loungecore, and so each new album inevitably incurred accusations of betrayal from fans of the previous one. The interminable debate about "selling out" wasn't the only one Thorn and Watt had to wrestle with, though. They also had to negotiate the balance between publicity and privacy that being a famous couple required. "I think we erred on the side of privacy being the dominant thing, really. Yeah, I mean no one used the word 'celebrity', but if it was just to do with enhancing your celebrity then we turned things down. We were very self protective; I think being a couple made us feel that, for our own sanity, it was really important to hang on to a really proper private life, in the sense that you could go home and be private individuals. We weren't massive celebrity party-goer type people. We could have done; we could have joined in a lot more with the sort of going to award ceremonies. But we chose not to." The book includes a lovely anecdote about an occasion when the couple arrived at a restaurant and spotted the words "Semi VIP" added to their names in the reservation book. "'Semi VIP' was classic," she giggles, "I loved that. I think it's so funny. It's superb. On the one hand it kind of puffs you up because the word VIP is there, and then it just deflates you at the same moment. And that's what keeps happening. It's why I think people who become famous go bonkers, because it's like being slightly psychologically tormented. That's being dramatic about it," she quickly clarifies, "because nothing that happened to us was on that level. But on a big level, that's why people go bonkers." Page 16 of 17

By the early 90s EBTG had released seven albums, some of which had been idolised, others torn to pieces, and at least one, worst of all, ignored. More devastatingly, in 1992 Watt had contracted a rare lifethreatening auto-immune disease, Churg-Strauss syndrome, which hospitalised him for many weeks and left him without most of his small intestine. When their label dropped the band Thorn had reached her lowest ebb, disillusioned and depressed, confronting obscurity and defeat. Then Todd Terry remixed an EBTG single called Missing. It sounded OKish to them, but nothing special. To their total disbelief, Missing became one of the great dance anthems of the decade, topping the charts all over the world and transforming the band into a global pop sensation. And that was the moment when Thorn decided it was time to quit. Watt continued a music career as a DJ, but in 2000 Thorn retired to raise a family: her twin girls were born in 1998, followed by a son born in 2001. If proof that she was never really "a proper star" were still needed, the timing of her retirement seemed to settle the matter. "Of course I'm not a proper star!" she laughs. "To say goodbye to that and walk away from things at that very moment? That's being an absolute lame-o, in terms of star culture." For seven years she was happy to be an anonymous north London mum, never mentioning her former life to the other mums. "God no, I was trying to fit in. This was my new gang. It was brilliant, I was so enjoying it, I didn't want to suddenly go: 'Oh, by the way, I'm famous!' Yeah, that's going to make me popular, isn't it?" she laughs. She did draw some startled looks at the school gate on one occasion, though, when George Michael drove by and bellowed an excited greeting from his Range Rover window. In 2006 she returned to the studio, and has released three solo albums to quiet but respectful acclaim. Success and failure, she has concluded, ultimately come down less to any objective talent than to the endless caprice of musical fashions, which dictate a band's fate on little more than random whim. Today it is her 15year-old daughter who has ambitions for a career in pop music. Is that a future her mother would recommend? Thorn hesitates for a moment, ambivalent to the last. "The thing is, what's gone is the middle class of the arts. Where you could just be a worker, respectably, and do respectable work and earn a respectable living and have respectable ambitions that's just vanished, I think, as an option. You either sell millions, or nothing. Which is why, again back to X Factor why there is that slightly manic quality about those kids, and again why I'm sympathetic when people are so snobby about them. Because you just think, they have to be hungry and desperate and bursting into tears all the time saying: 'My life depends on it.' Because, effectively, it does now."

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