I COULDN’T care less how much BBC presenters are paid, but I was miffed to discover that Graham Norton is publishing a crime novel.

Plenty of writers either struggle to make a living or struggle to even get a publishing deal. And here’s Graham with his new novel, Holding, described as story of “love, secrets and loss” centred around a small village in Ireland.

According to the Observer, his novel is part of a return in publishing to cosy crime – a term often used to embrace novels written in the spirt of Agatha Christie (not that Agatha was really all that cosy when you think of it). The paper reported that this new-old trend was a reaction against all those psychological thrillers with ‘Girl’ in the title.

Many writers will feel envious of the apparent ease with which Graham Norton has won a book deal. But publishing is a business, and Norton has a name that will sell, and if he’s half as good at writing as he is at presenting his chat show, then his novel will probably be worth a read.

Theresa May is quickly emerging as a prime minister who likes to play populist games by introducing policies in a distracting flourish. Pulling a grammar school policy out of an old Tory hat as a distraction from Brexit. Or making a foot-stomping show of standing firm against Chinese domination of British infrastructure by questioning their part in the Hinkley Point nuclear power station – and then saying, ‘Oh, go on then’ a few weeks later.

Forcing the BBC to publicly identify the pay of any employee paid more than £150,000 is another bit of pointless populism. This will force the BBC to reveal the pay of its on-air talent, including the likes of Graham Norton.

The BBC described these new rules as disappointing and a “massive headache”. They are also unfair in the sense that other broadcasters do not have to comply: in an open market such as broadcasting, why should only the BBC have to do this? Well, because it plays well in certain quarters, and Mrs May You Never is all too happy to bang a populist drum.

The prime minister didn’t make the announcement herself, but left that to her new culture secretary, Karen Bradley. Having never heard of the woman with the culture and media brief, I looked her up.

The MP for Staffordshire Moorlands is a former chartered accountant who has said she was inspired to go into politics by Michael Howard. The thought of anyone being inspired to do anything by Michael Howard is a surprise, so I suppose that counts as an interesting fact about Karen Bradley.

Other than that she is described as a May loyalist. Her interest in cultural matters seems a little thin, although she is a great fan of crime novels, once saying that she’d “read every Morse, Dalziel and Pascoe, Frost and Rebus that’s been printed”.

So that’s a point in her favour. Perhaps she will read the new Graham Norton too, if she can stop Mrs May tutting in her ear about how much he is paid.

BBC director general Tony Hall points out that as the BBC operates in a competitive market, this rule will “not make it easier for the BBC to retain the talent the public love”.  Well I am not sure I love Graham Norton, but I do rather like him, and that reaction to a well-paid BBC presenter is probably fairly normal.

The BBC is surely more transparent than many organisations, as it should be thanks to the licence fee, but forcing the corporation to operate under different rules to other broadcasters is petty-minded and unfair. It could also see cornered politicians picking on presenters about how much they are paid.

Perhaps if all businesses everywhere were forced to be open about everything, then this move on BBC pay would be fair. Until then it isn’t.

NOT for the first time, satire has been wrestled to the ground by reality. Never mind sitting there sharpening that quill, satire, you need to get out in the real world.

Admittedly it would take the gloomier sort of satirist to keep up with the way life rolls nowadays.

Yesterday there were reports that a 19-year-old single mother had her child tax credits cut after she was wrongly accused of being married to a dead 74-year-old man.

If there is anything positive about this grim absurdity, and really there isn’t, it must be that at least she wasn’t rightly accused of being married to a dead septuagenarian; the smell alone would have been punishment enough.

Nicola McKenzie is said to be one of hundreds of people complaining they have been unfairly punished by the US firm Concentrix, which was, according to the BBC website, “used by the government to cut tax fraud and over-payment”.

Nicola, who lives in West Yorkshire, told the BBC: “Basically they were accusing me of being married to a 74-year-old bloke that used to live here way before I did, saying that it’s a normal thing for my kind of age.”

This was the beginning of a bad day for Concentrix – accused of incorrectly withdrawing tax credits from hundreds of claimants – as by close of play HRMC said the US firm would not have its contract renewed. The firm will keep the deal it has, which runs until May next year.

Understandably, Concentrix is being portrayed as the villain of this cruel pantomime, but in a sense this is unfair. The firm was hired by the government – by our government – to cut tax credit fraud and over-payment. And that’s what it did.

So do we blame a company that made some very bad mistakes while fulfilling its brief; or do we blame the government that hired them in; do we, as it were, blame the hitman with his finger on the trigger or the government minister who gave him (or her) the job?

I reckon we should blame the government. Further than that, we should blame the shitty way matters are arranged nowadays, with governments hiring in US companies to clobber people being paid tax credits. Maybe some recipients of this benefit did not fully deserve what they were getting. But the vast majority are poor and struggling, and they’ve been targeted by an American firm out to take away what little they have.

This all ties in with the free-market consensus that all you have to do to solve a problem is bring in an outside force – to privatise the problem.

Concentrix claims that it has “operated within the guidance set by HMRC” – a phrase which, like much else here, sounds more than a little sinister. The firm’s contract is reported to be based on payment by results, with the government setting one of the key requirements as “maximisation of revenue flows” – in other words, the more payments it cuts, the more it earns.

The company accused HMRC of attacking its “professional credibility” but really there are some sorts of credibility you don’t want to brag about.

Labour MP Frank Field, who chairs the Commons Work and Pensions Committee, said the firm’s “reign of terror” was coming to a close. But does that mean that another firm will be hired in to unleash its own form of bureaucratic terror; or will the government think of a kinder way? Not being much of a betting man, I wouldn’t risk a fiver on the kinder way.

SO David Cameron is buggering off – sorry, stepping down as an MP to avoid being a ‘distraction’ to Theresa May – and the Great British Bake Off is jumping ship to Channel 4. Perhaps a parallel or two can be found here.

To rub the fat of Bake Off with the flour of politics, all political careers end in a soggy bottom.

Enoch Powell said that, by the way, and not Mary Berry, although what he actually said was “end in failure”. And for David Cameron that was exactly the trajectory he followed, propelled upwards by his own personality, and the yeast of privilege, only to collapse in soggy ignominy. Cameron is the perfect example of this unkind rule as he engineered his own failure, toppling himself by gambling everything on the EU referendum. He was certain that he would win, as he was the sort of ‘contestant’ who always won.

But not this time and his career sank like a suicidal sponge cake. And then his successor threw all of his recipes in the bin marked ‘history’. So now Cameron is going to spend more time with his family – “if he can remember which pub he left them”, as the cartoonist Matt puts it in the Telegraph.

So here we have two topics of weight, but we should recognise that one is far more important than the other. So that’s enough about David Cameron. What’s happening with Bake Off?

Television used to be simple: there were a few channels and they showed programmes they’d made earlier themselves; and if they hadn’t made the programmes, they had invested the capital of hope by buying them in and screening them.

It was all easy to understand; and easy to spot the dividing lines between channels. But that old world crumbled for at least two reasons: one, the Thatcher government introduced rules to free-up the production of programmes on the BBC, allowing independent producers to grow; and two, the rise of Sky and then other satellite services disrupted what were once the traditional broadcasters.

Nowadays almost anything goes, as shown by the Great British Bake Off Bunk Off. The series is produced by Love Productions who are reported to have made financial demands the BBC felt it could not afford. So now Channel 4 has got its floury fingers on a three-series deal.

Now I like some Channel 4 programmes, and Channel 4 News is the best current-affairs watch around. But the Bake Off seems such a BBC programme to me, the spirit of what the Beeb should be about (along with many other things, naturally). The BBC might not have made the programme itself, but it nurtured the show, let it rise in the BBC2 warming cupboard, before putting it on BBC1. Yet all that effort, creativity and attention counts for nothing in the grab-all bun fight of modern television, which is a great shame.

Bake Off isn’t a Channel 4 show, but at least ITV didn’t manage to steal this pie from the BBC shelf. Will I still watch? Not at all sure, because I think the adverts will spoil everything. And Channel 4 will put the show on a desert island or something; or tell the contestants they have to be naked beneath their pinnies; or some such ratings-grabbing nonsense.

Okay, that won’t happen, but this great big warm fruitcake of a show just won’t be the same on Channel 4.

THE Archers is a soap for people who say they don’t like soaps, the snob’s soap if you like. And I can say that because that’s me.

For years I listened to the omnibus edition every Sunday, almost as a form of worship. I have been losing that religion lately and more often listen to Cerys Matthews on BBC 6 Music instead, although I still drift in and out of the nightly instalments of the BBC Radio Four tale of farming folk.

Last night the longest episode ever was transmitted. And now I must insert a plot spoiler alert here – and how odd that seems for the Archers, that humdrum village of horticultural dullness punctuated by moments of high drama. This plot reveal doesn’t concern crop rotation or what to feed pigs or whatever. No, it’s the trial of Helen Titchener.

The usual short burst was turned into a gripping hour of radio as Helen stood trial for the attempted murder of her abusive husband, Rob – a relatively new character who, over the space of a couple of years or so, turned into the biggest villain in the history of the Archers.

This storyline hasn’t pleased everyone, as the misery has been piled on Helen Archer (as was) for years. Wasn’t there a partner who shot himself or something? And all that cheese making, too. Anyway, Helen found herself in an abusive relationship with a controlling, nasty and yet plausible man.

For month after miserable month, only the listener and Helen knew what Rob was like, as to everyone else in Ambridge he seemed like a perfect partner.

This was clever writing and this story of cruel intimacy took so long to play out. It was also quite a gamble, as the rising ride of Helen misery put some people off the Archers, for good in some cases. All that intense emotional claustrophobia made for a difficult listen.

Helen became a figurehead for the victims of domestic abuse in a story that seemed horribly real, for the simple reason that it was horribly real. There was a hinted-at rape along the way, and also the endless diminishment of Helen’s character and confidence, as she succumbed to the controlling strictures of a man clever in his cruelness.

She stabbed Rob in the end – or he gave her a knife in a row, told her to kill herself, then ran at the blade in her hand. I never was quite sure, which is what happens when you betray your faith and wander over to listen to music instead.

Last night’s hour-long episode, the first in 65 years, mostly took the form of a discussion in the jury room. Nigel Havers had a guest role as the nasty chairman of the jury, a man who, it transpired, was another version of Rob Titchener, at least in his bitterness towards women.

Anyway, after much deliberation, and the possibility of more Helen-shaped misery, she was acquitted of attempted murder and wounding with intent. And hooray for that: any other verdict would have been a travesty. Although don’t expect everything to run smoothly for Helen from now on. In a mean little coda, last night’s mega-episode saw Rob confront her after the trial, suggesting more bumps in the farm track ahead.

We listened while we ate a stir-fry with our home-from-uni daughter, who is more of an EastEnders and Corrie girl. She wasn’t impressed with the idea of a whole hour of the Archers, but listened in the end.

Other jurors were played by well-known actors, including Dame Eileen Atkins and Catherine Tate (who sounded annoyingly just like Catherine Tate). In a sort of in-joke, one juror was played by Graham Seed, who was cast as Nigel Pargetter in the Archers for 27 years, until he fell off a roof in a storm.

It was a cruel end for a good character, a bumbling toff and decent sort. But Nigel did at least leave the airwaves with the longest scream in radio history. Altogether now: “Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!”

I SPOTTED the word quinquagenarian yesterday and decided to use it while I still can.

Sadly, it took a while to type. This wasn’t only because it’s an alphabetical mouthful. A Mexican woman who used to be a ballerina should take some of the blame. She came down for breakfast just as the word had been typed and after that I became distracted. Among the oddities of my life nowadays, sharing the Airbnb breakfast table with charming a Mexican woman can count as a bonus.

It was less of a bonus last night when she went out at 5pm and didn’t return until 2.30am. This is not a problem to any degree but it is the sort of thing that triggers my insomnia.

After falling asleep easily, I woke up a couple of hours later, and that was that. In the restless hours I began to wonder if she’d returned, and if not what might have happened. The reading light went on and off; I went downstairs to see if the sofa would be more conducive to sleep. It wasn’t so I went upstairs again. At around four, long after I’d heard our guest return, and after our daughter had returned too, I eventually fell asleep, back on the sofa  after failing to find the trick of it upstairs.

So this morning I went out for a sleepy-headed run. Which is where quinquagenarian comes into the equation. You see I spotted the word yesterday in the Guardian Weekend supplement, as used by a letter writer who was reacting to the previous week’s What I’m Really Thinking item, in which a pensioner had said he was mocked for jogging. “I’m a quinquagenarian and hope I never have to hang up my running shoes,” the letter writer said.

I have been mocked for jogging, too. Years ago now, when my legs were stronger and my head not quite so bald, two tracky-bottomed yobs took the piss out of me as I ran towards them. “You’re too old for that,” one of them said. I seem to recall that he was overweight and eating a sausage role. And if he wasn’t, he is now and it serves him right. I ran on and left him to his baggy stomach and his bakery product.

Like that letter writer, I hope not to have to hang up my running shoes for a while yet. Or my squash racket: one of my opponents is a couple of years younger than me, the other five years older.

I looked up quinquagenarian to discover that it means someone in their fifties. So I thought I’d better use the word before I stumble over my laces and end up as a sexagenarian. And I know that the Latin language is to blame, but is it some sort of a joke to label people in their sixties with a word that begins with “sex”?

The Mexican woman has just come down again having failed to find our downstairs shower – “Did you say there was a shower somewhere else in the house?”

I direct her to the shower and then return to the laptop. It turns out that she met some people in a bar, then met more people in a different bar, and had lovely night out in York, catching a taxi back in the early hours. And she is 32 and only here for the night and my responsibility doesn’t extend beyond a pleasant breakfast chat. Still the funniest things can disrupt the sleep of a quinquagenarian.

THE Labour leadership contest grinds on with the two contenders grating against each other like rocks put in a spin drier in the spirit of dull mischief. Meanwhile the winner of the Tories’ no-contest leadership race confirms that she wants to bring back grammar schools – and allow more faith schools.

I have only seen a few highlights from last night’s Question Time debate between Jeremy Corbyn and Owen Smith. Well, I say highlights but they looked more like low-lights.

Corbyn continues to tread his quietly stubborn furrow, displaying the sort of oddly understated arrogance that seems to be his style; Smith continues to go red-faced with discomfort as he staggers under the weight of his own personal cross: the knowledge that he cannot win.

All in all, I am with the audience member who asked why they didn’t both step aside and let someone else take over. Although Labour seems to be in such a mess at the moment you wouldn’t give the ghost of Nye Bevan much of a chance of turning matters around.

Maybe political parties occasionally have to endure these dark nights of their tired souls; maybe something positive will come from this contest, a sort of non-contact wrestling match between two men who are trying not to lay into each other; or maybe we are stuck with the Tories for the next ten years.

You see the Conservative Party is good at survival; good at pulling itself round; good at getting on with things while their opponents indulge in an internecine scrap. Sometimes it seems that the best hope for those who dislike the Tories is that, emboldened by Labour’s deep troubles, they will end up splitting into their own bloody factions.

No love was ever lost between the inhabitant of this ledge and the last prime minister. The mocked-up front page I was given on leaving the Press featured a strap at the bottom of the page saying: “Julian’s David Cameron tribute column: Page…”

The joke being that in my long-running column I would never have written such a thing. A good joke and a true one. That view is not about to be softened now either, but at least Cameron represented a modern style of Tory. Theresa May seems dipped in darker ink.

Her rapid announcement that she plans to end the ban on new grammar schools and make the country “a new meritocracy” shows two traits: one is a leaning to the right-wing side of her party; and two – a more personal one, this – a steely determination to push ahead with something, with or without the evidence to hand.

Mrs May is about to overturn decades of cross-party consensus on education policy almost at a whim – and certainly without anything new to back up this change. Where is the evidence or the evaluation? It’s not there, as she has none. All she has is that big stick she is using to scratch an old party itch.

She is also boldly stating something that is surely a contradiction: she talks about a “country that works for everyone” and in the same breath wants to reintroduce selection by ability at the age of 11. No amount of social tinkering will avoid the fact that her “new meritocracy” is based on old-fashioned slicing away of the few.

In 2007, David Cameron dismissed talk of bringing back grammars, saying that the debate was “pointless” because “parents fundamentally don’t want their children divided into sheep and goats at the age of 11”. Now Theresa May is in charge and she is counting out those sheep and goats.

As for creating more faith schools, in particular more Catholic schools, that will seem like a retrograde step to the sensibly agnostic among us. Far better to separate religion and schools altogether, but sadly that argument seems to have been lost.

And all of these proposed changes are being introduced by a prime minister none of us has yet voted for.

DONALD Trump has been much mocked for wanting to build a wall between the US and Mexico, and rightly so. Yet what about another wall much closer to home?

A wall just over the water, a wall some are dubbing it the Great Wall of Calais, or so I just read. Does everything have to be given a flippant label these days? It does seem that way.

This wall will be funded by the UK taxpayer and will run close to the so-called Jungle migrant camp in Calais. It will be 13ft high and will run for 0.6 miles along both sides of the main road to Calais port. And it will cost you and me £1.9 million. But you know what it’s like when you get the builders into erect forbidding walls to repel migrants, or even just build a small extension. The cost is bound to rise.

Home Office minister Robert Goodwill is, in this instance, a man not well named. For only ill will can motivate such a wall.

On the BBC website, Mr Scant-Goodwill said security was being “stepped up” as migrants continue to try to board vehicles heading for Britain.

A number of fences already exist, and now there will be a wall, too. As the minister said to the Home Affairs Committee of MPs on Tuesday: “We are going to start building this big new wall very soon. We’ve done the fence; now we are doing a wall.”

Put like that it sounds like a garden project, something Monty might do. But in fact it is more of in the way of a geopolitical crowd-shoving project to control would-be migrants massed in unhealthy conditions in France. Not our problem, we seem to be saying. But here is a nice big wall – thanks for the idea, Donald.

Now it is easy to pontificate at the laptop; harder to be a lorry driver who fears migrants might jump on board at any minute, possibly killing themselves in the process.

Some lorry drivers believe the new wall is a poor use of money, as all it will do is push the problem further down the road. They feel that better security would be a wiser investment.

As I say, I drive a laptop and not a lorry. I cannot comment on what it’s like to manoeuvre a lorry in such stressful circumstances. But the shadow thrown by that wall does worry me. You build a wall when you don’t want to see something or perhaps someone.

On one level this wall in Calais could be seen as a functional solution to a problem – a costly bit of crowd-control, if you like. Yet seen from another angle it seems inhumane and morally grubby, while also being a distraction done for the sake of being able to say that something is being done. But not really solving the problem.

Perhaps this problem cannot be solved. Yet something strikes me as grimly ironic about our governments, particularly but not exclusively Tory ones. We sing the praises of market forces, tell ourselves the global market knows best – but when those same forces push thousands of impoverished migrants in our direction, we look the other way and mutter about keeping our country for ourselves.

So for those reasons I cannot welcome that wall. Apart from anything else, it represents a jerk of a pin-striped knee. Or possibly a jerk with a pin-striped knee.

One thing is for certain: building that wall won’t solve the problem, even if it lets Mr Goodwill play the hard man for a day or two. We will only get anywhere by taking a more humanitarian approach to dealing with migrants.

I HAVE cars on my mind. One car in particular and the exhaust-burping tin masses in general.

Pete the mechanic reckons our old Volvo is getting towards the end of its life. Although still in mechanical working order, and still capable of bombing over the M62, the valiant estate is suffering from various problems of old age, and is becoming more difficult to mend.

So a decision will have to be made soon. I like having a car and need one in my freelance life, but I am not earning enough yet to take out a loan. Ho-hum.

Cars, who needs them? Most of us do in the end. It’s good to have a car, and I don’t want to be without one, but cars are a nuisance and a hazard too.

In this vein, I spotted something on Facebook the other day, like you do in the digital flit of life nowadays. A report on Business Insider UK – no, me neither – listed ten cities that are going car free. York was nowhere to be seen.

This was a shame in a sense, but hardly surprising. York couldn’t even manage the temporary closure of one bridge, never mind the whole city centre. When use of Lendal Bridge was restricted by the then Labour council, the recriminations were long and bitter. Many drivers hated being denied this key route through the city and complained at length to me – not in a personal sense but in my role as letters editor. Dear me what a lot of letters there were, nearly all saying the same thing.

The closure wasn’t handled well, especially in the way that visiting drivers were fined after not realising they shouldn’t cross the bridge. That’s all bad-tempered history now, but a sorry side-effect is that only a brave council would ever again suggest limiting cars in York.

That is a shame because unfettered use of cars is never good or healthy for cities. Until the late 1980s, cars still drove by York Minster, an area now blissfully free of cars. No one complains about this as a rule, although you could probably find a grumbling taxi driver somewhere; you usually can.

The ten cities listed for their car-reduction plans began with Oslo in Norway, which intends to ban all cars from its centre by 2019, instead boosting the number of cycle lanes and improving public transport.

Madrid in Spain plans to ban cars from the city centre by 2020, with 24 streets given over to walking rather than driving. In Chengdu, China, a new part of the city is being designed to make it easier to walk than to drive, while Hamburg in Germany aims to make walking and cycling the main form of transport in the city centre.

The Danish have been ahead in this greening game for a long time. In Copenhagen half of the population cycles to work every day, thanks to pedestrian-only zones introduced in the 1960s. Now there are plans for a cycle super-highway linking to the suburbs. And I am guessing this will entail more than painting a narrow strip of the road green.

Paris wants to have more car-free days, to ban older cars during the week and to ban diesel cars – and London wants a diesel ban by 2020 as well.

Brussels aims to introduce more car-free boulevards, while Mexico City introduced car-reduction plans last April, restricting cars for two working days every week and at the weekends, too.

New York isn’t planning a car ban, but has introduced more pedestrian-only zones in Times Square, Herald Square and Madison Square Park. And on three Saturdays last month, the road linking Central Park to Brooklyn Bridge was closed and opened up to pedestrians for a Summer Streets event.

Business Insider UK quotes Paul Steely White, of Transportation Alternatives, a group that supports cyclists in New York City and campaigns for car-free cities. He says of the summer event: “This is what everyday life could look like if people mattered. The worst thing as an urban dweller is to be stuck with the auto as your only option.”

Well, the ‘auto’ is not my only option in York, where I cycle everywhere where possible. I do like my bicycle, which is probably just as well right now.

I BELIEVE there may be something wrong with my radio. For some reason I keep hearing Nigel Farage. I really should complain to the makers or perhaps the BBC, as that man is supposed to have stepped down from running Ukip.

He was in there this morning, spouting rubbish. I gave the radio a shake but he still burbled away on the Today programme about whether or not Britain should adopt an Australian points-based immigration system.

Farage had been invited on, presumably by a producer with a limited contacts book, to respond to the statement by the prime minister that there was “no single silver bullet” on reducing immigration.

Now I am far from being a fan of Mrs May You Never, but she does have a point here. Sadly, those silver bullets were flying all over the place in the lead-up to the EU referendum.

The Gunfight at the Not O.K. Corrall saw so many such bullets being fired, it’s a wonder the sky didn’t turn silver.

All sorts of promises were made, many of them ludicrous; and assorted colourful threats were delivered by both sides, many of them sculpted out of thin air.

Last week, the Electoral Reform Society reported on “glaring democratic deficiencies” in the run-up to the vote. Their polling showed that “voters viewed both sides as increasingly negative as the campaign wore on”. And the “top-down, personality-based nature of the debate failed to address major policies and subjects, leaving the public in the dark”.

How true. And worth remembering when you discover Nigel Farage in your radio. And this morning he said something that struck a discordant note in my ears (not that such an aural complaint is unusual when Nigel is spouting forth).

What he said was that people in their millions had voted for an Australian points-style immigration system. Sadly, the presenter did not pick him up on this. People did not vote for that: they were given an either/or choice on remaining in Europe. All sorts of issues attached themselves to the vote, ideological limpets and distractions. But in the end it was down to yes/no, in/out. Nothing more to it than that.

Some of those who voted Leave might well believe in a points-based system: but that wasn’t part of the deal.

Neither, sadly, were all sorts of mendacious promises made by the Leave lot, but we know that now.

There is an argument that those of us who lost the vote should pipe down and accept it. Well, that is nonsense. We should accept the vote because it happened; but we shouldn’t pipe down because the vote was only the beginning in a very long and complicated process. Rather, we should make as much noise as possible.

I keep hearing that millions of people wanted to leave. This is true but only part of the story, as millions also didn’t want to leave. And both sides have to play a part in what happens next. Unless, as I suggested the other day, you want to fall in with the front page of the Daily Express and its daily Brexit mantra of: “Are we there yet?”

Perhaps we never will be ‘there’, as while flying to the G20 summit in China Mrs May declined to commit to various promises made by Vote Leave of an extra £100m a week to the NHS, ending contributions to the EU budget or scrapping VAT on fuel bills.

There remains a mountain of work to do. Sweeping up all those silver bullets was just the start of it.