Noel Coward

A friend of mine recently went to see "The Vortex" by Noel Coward in London. "Good play," he said.
I have only read it and that was a long time ago. I remember one line from it (probably not accurately) : "we are being drawn down into a vortex of beastliness". Or something like that.
I thought, at the time that it was typical Coward and typically superficial and, indeed, rather silly.
It was, I believe, Coward's first major success. I saw his last one. With him in it.
London. The day when England won the world cup in football. The same afternoon. There I was in one of the London theatres watching Noel Coward in his final appearance of his last performed play (whose title I have forgotten) while England were wallopping Germany in the same city.
Coward was too old to be anything but adequate in his play. He shuffled about the stage like someone in an old people's home. He spoke the lines well enough but with hardly any feeling. Until the end of the play.
The play revolved around the purchase of some incriminating letters from a man with whom the old man in the play had once had an affair (very risky material for the time). He eventually acquires the letters and sits facing the audience with the letters on the arm of the chair while his wife is getting a tray of tea in the background. One of the letters falls to the floor and Coward picks it up, is about to put it with the others but instead starts to read it. Tears slowly well to his eyes and run down his cheeks as he reads. His wife walks towards him with the tray of tea but, sensing something wrong, pauses and stands there looking at his back.
Curtain.
You have to give it to Noel Coward: when it comes to dramatic theatrical effects there is hardly anyone to beat him.

Margaret Martin

Who is Margaret Martin? Well, she wrote the book, lyrics and music for the new musical version of "Gone With The Wind". DOCTOR Martgaret Martin actually. Doctor of Music? No. She has a Doctorate in Public Health, a Masters Degree in Behaviourial Science/Health Education.... and heaven knows what else, but nothing in any way connected to drama, lyric writing or music.
So how did she secure the job of writing "Gone With The Wind - the musical"?
Well, it was easy. She said to herself: "That Scarlet O'Hara is very much like me. I'd like to write a musical about the book/film." And she somehow (wish I knew how) obtained permission from the Margaret Mitchell estate to do so and went ahead and wrote it; then she sent a DVD sample of songs and script to Trevor Nunn and he said:"Good idea. We'll do it."
Something like that anyway.
So, a couple of months afterwards, with a couple of million pounds no doubt invested, the show is on - not in some back street theatre with wooden seats but in The West End.
I don't believe it.
Well, LLoyd Evans of the Spectator believes it, so it must be true.
This is the kind of story they used to write musicals about with Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland who would have the material to put on a musical but no backing from anyone.... so they'd say "Why don't we put it on ourselves in the barn attached to the farm - we've got the singers, the cast, the book, the lyrics, the band...." And this they did.
In the barn.
But this show is in The West End!
Sorry to repreat that but it is absolutely amazing.
Maybe the musical I wrote fifteen years ago, for which I found a composer four years ago, will now find a home. Maybe if I send it to Trevor Nunn....
However, somehow I don't think he'll be eager to do another musical for a while, not if he's read the reviews of this one. Especially those that mention the music. "Not a hummable tune in the show."
Well what can you expect from a Doctor of Public Health with a Masters Degree in Behaviourial Science/Health Education?

Blind Spots

There are three famous artists whose works I do not appreciate. One is Harold Pinter. I have seen many of his plays over the years but, apart from "The Caretaker" which is a good play with striking characters, I do not see anything worthwhile my spending my time trying to fathom. I read today that "The Birthday Party" was panned so badly by the London critics when it was performed in the fifties that Pinter almost gave up writing for the stage. He would not have been missed by me but, of course, there are thousands of people who do appreciate his plays and so who am I to deny that their judgement is good? I think "The Birthday Party" is a thoroughly unattractive, deeply morbid, basely frightening play, and "The Homecoming" a dreadful piece of near pornography.
Harrison Birtwhistle leaves me cold. Yet here he is with another opera in London being given great reviews by music critics. I have yet to hear a tune, let alone a hummable one, in his music. Maybe it works dramatically, on stage, the music being one of the many effects used in the dramatic piece.
Mahler, I have to say, is not quite a closed book but I have never understood the adulation his symphonies induce. His fifth of course has a beautiful second movement but the rest of it is so heavy with dissonance. And there is so little joy in any of his works. To me they're hard going.
I have to compare my responses with those of the art critic Ivor Newton who disliked Rembrandt.
Even the greatest of critics have their blind spots.

Bristol Old Vic

I once got close, I believe, to having a play staged at The Bristol Theatre Royal. Close but not close enough.
It would have been a wonderful thing for me because I have always had a great love of that theatre and its many great actors. Many, of course, were not great when they were there, just starting out on successful careers.
Two I particularly recall not just because they turned in great performances but because I saw them play the same parts in two different plays - "Hamlet" and "Man and Superman". They were (and are) Peter O'Toole and Richard Pascoe.
I saw both of them at different times playing the lead in Hamlet at The Bristol Old Vic and remember well how good they both were but how different their interpretations were. Then I saw Pascoe as the lead in "Man and Superman" on stage at Bristol but O'Toole in a TV version of his stage performance as John Tanner. Both were immensely funny.
Now the theatre is closed but great efforts are being made to drum up enough money to re-open it.
Let's hope.

Jeff Koons

There's an article in yesterday's Telegraph about a 78 year old woman living in Hay-on-Wye who paints pictures and is now selling them. Small scale things, colourful, bright, cheery, she now has a following. Indeed Arnold Wesker, the playwright, has a collection of her works. She has no gallery, she paints in her house, and exhibits her work in a bookshop. When people visit the bookshop, the owner has said, they usually buy a Jean Miller. Shown in the article is a picture of a bowl of flowers, another of a sheep in a pink field with green trees and a pink mountain.
I couldn't help thinking of Jeff Koons who creates monstrosities that are, so to speak, at the other extreme end of art, the end of installations, of sharks in tanks, of unmade beds, and so on. Koons is in my view the King of such modern art.
But let me allow the fine critic Robert Hughes to have his say on him: "We decided to put Jeff Koons in the new programme (TV's "Shock of the New") not because his work is beautiful or means anything much, but because it is an extreme and self-satisfied manifestation of the sanctimony that attaches to big bucks..... He has the slimy assurance, the gross patter about transcendence through art of a blow-dried Baptist selling swamp acres in Florida. And the result is you can't imagine America's singularly depraved culture without him."
I'm off to Hay-on-Wye next month for the Festival of Literature - but my main reason is to see, and maybe buy, a Jean Miller lanscape.

Desert Island Discs

Paul Johnson in the Spectator this week was ruminating on what records he would pick if he were to be asked (again) to Desert Island Discs. Because of the nature of the programme - short excerpts rather than complete works - he thought it best "not to put in any classical stuff, for the excerpts are too short", so he chose Hutch singing "These Foolish Things", Marlene Dietrich doing "See What the Boys in the Back Room Will Have" and Sam in Casablanca singing "As Time Goes By"; Gracie Fields with "Sally" and finally Richard Tauber singing "In a Shady Nook" and John McCormack singing "I Hear You Calling me".
A good choice of records, though I think I prefer Tauber singing "You are my Heart's Delight" which my mother used to sing (not very well) and McCormack singing "Keep the Home Fires Burning" which made him a fortune - as well as it's composer, Ivor Novello.
I recall Alfred Hitchcock on Desert Island Discs choosing Dohnanyi's "Variations on a Nursery Rhyme" - he liked jokes in music - and saying he had just made a film called "Psycho" which he described as "a gentle horror film". Gentle, my foot!
One of the best on the programme was Professor Joad ("it depends on what you mean by....") who chose all classical records up to about 1850. At the end he said "children should be forced to listen to this sort of music until they liked it."
I can think of only one record I am certain I'd take if I were given the opportunity to choose eight records for Desert Island Discs: Sousa's march "Liberty Bell". Nothing like it to lift the spirits - except, of course, a large Bells.

Cats in Sitges

Last week I took a photo of a Persian cat sitting on our bird table ..... waiting. But I took the photo through the glass window since I had to be quick, so the photo's not very good. But anyway, I sent it today to the magazine Cat World wondering if they might be able to improve on the picture for use there.
Years ago I wrote an article for Cat World about a group, or maybe gang would be better, of cats that lived under cars on the sea front in Sitges, Spain. In the day they lay around in the shade from the sun's intense rays, occasionally wandering over to cafes nearby hoping to get odd scraps of food from people dining there.
There was one particularly large tomcat who seemed to be the big boss: an enormous head, an intelligent look around the eyes, a "top dog" - or, rather, top cat. We called him John Wayne.
One morning a friend on holiday with me came back from a swim early in the morning to report that he had just seen a rather remarkable sight - a line of cats, one behind the other, a crocodile line of cats if you like, making their way down to the harbour where the fishing boats were coming in. And who was at their head leading the way? None other than John Wayne.
Years passed. Then at a writers' weekend I related this tale of the Sitges cats to the group only to be reliably informed, by a detective novelist no less, that "They're still there".
I wonder if they are there today. And I wonder if that big faced cat, their leader, John Wayne is..... No, can't be alive now surely.
Except in my memory. And maybe in others' too.

Dollars and Pounds

I have a play published by an American company and occasionally I received cheques for the royalties the play made. As time went on the cheques got smaller and smaller.
One of these came to about ten dollars. I took it to my bank and said I wished to cash it in pounds please. The girl behind the counter worked things out a while then told me, though the value in pounds was not much, the fee for the transaction was more.
I said: "In other words, I have to pay you instead of you paying me."
She smiled and said "That's right," as if she had discovered something new.
I took it away, wrote to the publisher and said "please don't send me cheques with small amounts of dollars; wait until the amounts accrue to, say, about a hundred dollars and then send me a cheque; in that way I won't have to pay the bank much relatively for the transaction."
I have not had a cheque since.

Cartoons

I have often thought of some good ideas for cartoons but cannot draw them, so there they remain in my head - for ever! And I am not going to send my ideas to magazines because I know what will happen. Nothing. And some time later the cartoons will appear drawn by a resident artist.
This happened to a professional cartoonist I knew of. He sold a good deal of his own work but often his work was turned down only for him to find that it had been done by someone else. He never complained. Why? Because they would not want his work again, he felt.
A man turned up at the Adult Education College I used to frequent who was there to teach people how to be cartoonists. Having a couple of hours to spare he gave the Writers Group a talk because at one time he had written a couple of sit-com episodes.
The first words he said were: "I have to tell you I can't write."
Writing to him must have meant being literary and he wasn't literary; he just put bubbles in mouths of sit-com characters or of cartoon characters.
Another thing he told us was: "You don't have to be able to draw well to be a cartoonist."
I have never believed that. If I believed that I'd turn my ideas into cartoons, but I can't, I don't know where to start.
And I'm not not teling you what these brilliant ideas are in case you use them - I'll die with them.

Edgar Wallace

A brand new libarary has opened nearby; I went there today and facing me as I entered were "Books You Might Like". They were all brand new.
Newly printed, that is. Not newly written.
Well, some of them may have been but not the one I chose: "The Four Just Men" by Edgar Wallace.
I have for many years wanted to read it but could not find a copy anywhere..... Or maybe I didn't really want to find a copy. Why? Because I didn't want to discover that a love of my father's, Edgar Wallace, proved to be poor stuff.
So I'm reading it and, so far, enjoying it.
Here's a few things I know about Edgar Wallace. He once dictated a whole novel to his editor from a telephone kiosk. He wrote some real thrillers that were turned into quite frightening films. He wrote the script, or maybe just supplied the idea, for the film "King Kong". He had a play running in London that had Charles Laughton and Emlyn Williams in it and, according to Emlyn Williams (in his autobiography "Emlyn") he was responsible for firing a cast member because it was discovered he was gay - though, as Emlyn said, most of the cast were too.
My father rarely went to the cinema but he did take my brother and I once or twice; once I recall well: the film was called "Educated Evans"; it starred Max Miller and was based on a novel, about racing, by Edgar Wallace.

James M. Cain

The whole of the Books section of The Sunday Telegraph today was devoted to "Top 50 Crime Writers". Stuart McGurk, writing about film adaptations of famous books wrote: "Chandler will be equally remembered for his screenplays both original (Billy Wilder's "Double Indemnity") and adapted ("Strangers on a Train" for Hitchcock).
Well, "Double Indemnity" was not an original work of Raymond Chandler's; it was a novel written by James M. Cain.
The interesting thing to me is 1. a good deal of the film's dialogue which seems pure Chandler is actually taken directly from the novel and 2. the end is different, and here I have to say that Chandler's and Wilder's ending is better - something like "Keynes, we worked across the desk from each other, we were that close." Keynes: "We were closer than that." Walter: "I love you too."
Famous death scene.
You cannot believe that so perfect a film was made by two guys who hated each other. Chandler, for one thing, did not a man like Wilder who wore his hat in the office. Wilder had no good word to say about Chandler.

Animal Gratitude

There was a bee in the kitchen buzzing against the window. So, it not being a wasp which I would have swotted (because I still remember those stings I'd had as a child), I took a glass tumbler, placed it over the bee, carefully slid a card over the opening of the tumbler thus trapping the bee inside, then I took bee and card and tumbler to the back door and removed the card to let the bee go free.
But I made sure that as soon as the bee was flying out of the tumbler I shot inside the house and slammed the back door after me - because there was every possibilty that the bee would turn and attack me.
Gratitude in animals? Forget it.
The best example I've seen of this lack of gratitude was in a TV programme about wild life in Africa.
A rhino had fallen into a swamp and was slowly sinking in it so that all that was visible was a front leg and a horned head.
The intrepid team of TV film makers got out, tied ropes around the beast's neck and leg and, using their jeep, slowly pulled the rhino from the swamp.
That part of the operation had been filmed successfully. The next scene wasn't filmed at all, only hurried camera still shots had been managed, most of them at angles other than horizontal.
The reason? Well, of course, the rhino, as soon as it was free, charged with its horned head the jeep and its occupants. Naturally. What else would you expect? Gratitude?
Remember that when you next see a rhino in a swamp. Or see Androcles with his lion.

Write about what you know!

Ben Macintyre, in The Times, was writing about a woman named Favell Lee Mortimer who published three volumes of travel writing covering Europe, Asia, Africa and the Americas yet she had never been to any of these places. Either she had made it all up or copied from other travel writings. He then mentions novelists "depicting places they have not seen."
I recall a meeting in Cardiff in which two well known crime writers spoke about their works. One said how he meticulously researched all details so that he would not be caught out by readers; the other who said he didn't do much research and didn't care if there were errors. Indeed, he had created an Indian detective who lived in Calcutta, a place the author had never visited, but no one had ever pointed out any problems with setting or plot; in fact, he said, he had once received a letter from a man who lived in Calcutta complimenting him on how wonderfully he had described the city and its inhabitants.
You are always advised, when you start out as a writer, to write about what you know. Codswallop. Write about what you want to write about, that which pleases you, not about your dull, ordinary life which will not be of much interest to others. In other words, use your imagination.
That's the advice of someone who has had one children's novel published - in Welsh!
Incidentally, Favell Lee Mortimer, in her imaginary travels, described the Welsh as "not very clean". Thank you Favell Lee Mortimer. She had probably seen pictures of miners coming up out the pits after a hard day's work, covered in coal dust.

Jack Kirby

Jack Kirby? Who's he? Rather, who was he?
He was the creator of some great comic heroes: Spider-Man, The Incredible Hulk, X-Men, among others. He worked for Marvel Comics for a salary, not much, no royalties from films, books etc. When he died he left no fortune for his wife and kids. She had to ask Marvel Comics for some sort of pension to see her by.
Comic book artists did not live like song writers who received generous royalties from their words and music.
I don't know if that is the case now but a few years ago I met a writer of stories for comic books and magazines and he looked rather well off.
He attended a "writers' weekend" we held at Abergavenny Adult Education College. Why? Because he had some spare time on his hands while his wife was attending some other function elsewhere; so he thought he might find out what"real writers" did.
In other words he thought he was going to mix with succesful writers who were published everywhere and made loads of money.
You can imagine his surprise to find that only two people, out of 20 or so on the course, had had anything published. Commercially, that is. Most had had poems published in local journals or short stories in unknown magazines. No one there made money out of writing.
"I can't understand it," he told me. "There's all this marvellous talent here going to waste."
He did not understand the writing game and I could not get through to him that most writers like those present were not successful, never had been and never would be.
I think he was paid a lot for what he did - writing captions for comic strips; he was wearing a leather jacket that must have cost a small fortune.
But this man who, he told me - and I believed him - had created Judge Dread could not write a short story to save his life. He tried and failed. His stories had heaps of action but no form. They were constructed like those pictures you see in magazines which tell a story in a series of bubbles.

Tommy Farr

Born in The Rhondda Valleys in South Wales, Tommy Farr started life working as a miner but gave that up when quite young in order to box. Young men then boxed in "boxing booths" where they were paid small amounts of money to fight all comers. It was a tough start to what was a very tough career. He lost a lot of fights early on, but then he began to win some and eventually, became British and Empire Heavyweight Champion.
But he wanted to be world champion, so after fighting Max Bear and beating him he took on Joe Louis, The Brown Bomber, heavyweight champion of the world.
It is said the whole of Wales stayed up listening to the radio to hear the fight. Most of my friends did. I am not sure if I did or not - I heard and talked about about the fight so much that I may only have imagined I had stayed up in the early hours to hear it.
Tommy Farr was expected to be defeated in a few rounds by Louis but instead he came out aggressive and attacking and took Louis to 15 rounds, losing on points. Most people in Wales thought he should have won but, as was always said at the time, "you only win in America if you knock your opponent out."
When he retired Tommy Farr became the proprietor of a pub but also used to be called on by BBC commentators to talk about fights; and he was a superb analyst of fights and fighters.
They made a documentary film of the life of Joe Louis showing his rise from rags to riches and showing all his great fights along the way. All, that is, except one - the one which he nearly lost against Tommy Farr, and which everyone in Wales said he had lost.

Second Act.

I have just had a short play, "Romantic Novelist", accepted for publication by a company called Lazy Bees which publishes plays and musicals on the internet. The reviewer, I was told, "was sorry when it came to an end". Better than "couldn't wait for it to finish".
It reminds me of the performance of another play of mine some time ago, "Aspects of War", a one act play about the First World War.
When the play ended I went to the bar and, standing there having a drink, was a young man. Most people had left.
I heard him say to the barmaid: "How long is the interval?"
He thought the play hadn't ended. He thought there was a Second Act.
I thought: "God! I've failed. It's an unsatisfactory ending."
Then, later, I thought: "He must have enjoyed it and wanted more."
Or maybe he was sorry when it came to an end.

Nature Boy

Everybody knows the song:
"There was a boy,
A very strange, enchanted boy....."
But who wrote it?
Well it was someone named eden ahbez. Yes, no capital letters.
Anyway, you won't be surprised to know it wasn't his real name. He had a few others. And, you may have guessed by now, he was a very, very odd guy. He had a beard down to his knees, long hair, wore a sort of dressing gown and he was a vegetarian (that's important later).
He wrote this song, "Nature Boy", took it to Nat King Cole's agent who told him to get loss, but persisted pushing the song so that eventually Nat King Cole recorded it, reluctantly, on the B side of a record.
It took off. The A side song took a dive but "Nature Boy" became such a hit that all and sundry have, since, recorded it.
I get all this from Mark Stein's website.
When, after its success, eden ahbez was given 30 000 dollars he said "What do I want all that money for? I'm a vegetarian and I live off 3 dollars a week."
One of the most interesting aspects of this tale is this: here is a guy with a hit in his possession and nobody wants to know. Not even Nat King Cole knew he would have a multi-million dollar hit on his hands. How come?
It reminds me of what a scriptwriter, Goldman, who wrote among other things "Butch Cassidy and the Sun Dance Kid" and "Marathon Man", said about Hollywood - words to the effect that there in Hollywood "nobody knows anything."

Benn

Michael Henderson, writing in The Daily Telegraph, had a go at Tony Benn: "interviewed in the newspaper, it wasn't hard to hear the tone of that smug, self-satisfied voice. What an unctuous man he is.... ever eager to conceal an overwhelming vanity within the cloak of modesty."
I can't say I agree with him though I do find Benn hard to take these days. Once, whenever he was interviewed on TV, I use to listen to him and think "yes, I agree" with everything he said..... For a couple of minutes only. Then I'd analyse in retrospect what he had said and did not agree at all.
I first saw him in the flesh in Cardiff many years ago at a Miners' Rally. They were held every year in Sophia Gardens, a large park near the city centre. Miners turned up in thousands having first marched through the streets of Cardiff, cheered all the way.
A year or so before Benn spoke there, Aneurin Bevan gave an address. Now there was a speaker. Strong, sing-song, rather high-pitched Welsh accent, heaps of humour followed by vicious attacks on the Tory party; he could make you laugh one minute and make you angry the next.
Tony Benn did not have Bevan's powers. He spoke in a sensible, slow way, making strong arguments against the opposition; logical it seemed, reasonable in its quiet tone it seemed. Yet it seemed to me there was, beneath the cultivated, well brought up personage a steely wrath, an almost vengeful fire burning there. There was a look of passionate hate in his eyes which I have never forgotten. You don't see it now. Now you see this reasonable old man with a manner of a logician, taking opponent's arguments apart and shredding them.
Inside that civil servant's-like body there's a radical firebrand still struggling to get out.

Rome

Jonathan Ray wrote an article recently on a visit with his wife to Rome; he saw all the well known tourist attractions and also enjoyed a few (if not many) glasses of wine and ate in some good restaurants.
When my wife and I visited Rome for three or four days we too saw the usual tourist attractions.
But what I remember most was one day walking from one side of Rome to the other seeing all the famous fountains as we went.
Then I got hungry and said "Looks like a cafe up that side street - let's try it."
Well, it was off the beaten track, and the cafe was a small affair, a few tables, men drinking wine at the bar, the usual set up for small bars/cafes. I was given a menu, didn't read Italian so couldn't understand it and then found that no one there spoke any English. It was, in fact, so off the beaten track as to be somewhere only Italians visited.
I pointed to what I recognised, Spaghetti Bolognese, ordered two portions by raising two fingers (hoping the gesture was not misinterpreted), and ordered half a carafe of wine.
However, the waitres obviously did not understand "half a carafe" and brought two full carafes.
When we fell out of the cafe, paying a small amount for a delightful meal, we strolled or staggered back to the hotel.
Better than seeing all those tourist sights!

The Pitch

If you have seen the opening seven or eight minute uncut tracking shot opening to Robert Altman's "The Player" you'll know what I mean by "the pitch". The camera tracks past a window where a man is pitching a film story to a producer: " 'Graduate 2' ," he says. "Mrs Robinson has grown old and her daughter now has an affair....." or words to that effect.
In this week's Spectator Toby Young tells how he has tried pitching ideas over the years to BBC and ITV programme makers, none of which proved successful.
I have tried too, a few times, also unsuccessfully.
You contact someone at the BBC and arrange an appointment (not an easy thing to do of course to start with). Then you meet the producer or script editor in his/her room and sit down. The chair you are in is always lower than theirs. And there's usually a secretary in the room pretending not to listen to what you are saying.
You take along in your mind about seven ideas so that if the first isn't acceptable you try the second, then the third and so on. You can see by the expression on the face of your interviewer if what you are pitching is making any impact: eyes glaze over in boredom, the mouth either curves downward at the edges or is set in a permanent rictous grin.
You leave feeling like a piece of washing out of which all liquid has been squeezed.
I went along once to such a meeting with someone who was starting out as a script editor; he was looking for ideas he could submit to higher levels. Nothing interested him until I said "Four young women, beautiful young women, in a flat together, they are models...."
I could see his eyes shining and his mouth smiling.
"A sit com with a story each week about these girls," I said.
I had him hooked. He'd call me. I waited. Weeks passed. Months passed. Phone calls yielded no sensible replies. Nothing.
That's how it usually is. Then, later, you see some show and it has young women in a flat and.... and you wonder.

Rap

I have just read a short report on someone with the unlikely name of Jay-Z. He is a rapper (?). His personal fortune is estimated at more than £250 million. He is reported to be earning about £5000 an hour. For rapping?
I find this difficult to believe because from what little I have heard of rap (or rapping, or whatever) it strikes me that it is nothing more than simple rhyming couplets in verses, spoken (or shouted) rather than sung, carrying messages which it is hoped will inspire young people to follow some kind of anarchic path.
I may be wrong because I find it difficult to actually follow the gist of the themes of the "songs".
What is interesting to me is that the verses have rhymes in them.
I recall, some time ago, a young pop artist saying something to the effect that now he and his ilk were the new poets of the age. I scoffed at the idea at the time but now I'm not so sure he's wrong. After all, verses of pop songs do have rhymes - which a great deal of poems published in books and magazines don't have these days.
Indeed, there is one publisher who, while requesting that poets are welcome to submit works to her magazine, specifies that she does not want poems with verses that have rhymes.
Why not? What's wrong with rhyme?
Is this one of the reasons that modern poetry has lost touch with the general public? After all, most people love rhyming poems.
Maybe that's why rap is so popular - the verses have lines that rhyme.
And on the subject of modern poets, Cyril Connolly wrote: "Poets arguing about modern poetry: jackals snarling over a dried-up well."
So rap on Jay-Z. Maybe you are saying something important after all; and if not, at least you are keeping a vast public entertained - something that certainly cannot be said about modern poets.

Scorcese

I have been an admirer of Martin Scorcese. I liked his "Goodfellas" a lot. His "Taxi" was interesting, though too long. There was short film in a trilogy of films with Nick Nolte that was terrific. But now he has just made "Shine the Light"; it will not be a film I will be going to see because I cannot take The Rolling Stones.
He uses an army of cinematographers to film a few concerts and then there's an editor, David Tedeschi (where's his usual editor - she was superb?) to bring it all together into one continuous film.
I can't see where the creative powers of Scorcese are utilised: employing all those cinematographers and then having an editor to do the splicing together of all the bits and pieces they have filmed, it seems to me that Scorcese must have been a sort of Producer of the affair, looking over shoulders at the work of others.
But what I know about the technical aspects of making a film you can write on the back of a postage stamp.
It's easy, said Orson Welles; you get people to act and you point the camera at them.

Death beds

Yesterday I bought a book from the local library - they were selling off unwanted books. It was a collection of stories by William Trevor called "A Bit on the Side". How is it that a wonderful book of stories like this sells for 20 pence? (Because nobody wants to read it of course - pass the latest Mills and Boon please).
The first story was called"Sitting with the Dead". Two sisters, the Geraghtys, of a certain age, "sat with the dying". In this case they arrived at the home of Emily too late to sit with the dying, for Emily's husband had already died. But they sat anyway. Emily made them tea and something to eat and they, well, sat. And chatted.
Maybe this is typical of Ireland. I can't say that I've heard of this practice in England or Wales.
Though I did hear a story of a man, let's call him Mr. George, who liked to "sit with the dying". He made a habit of turning up at people's homes when he knew they were on their last legs.
One day he arrived at the home of Lord Somebody-or-Other who was on his death bed. The butler duly informed his Lordship that Mr. George was at the door and should he let him in.
His Lordship replied: "Certainly. If I am alive when he gets here I'll be pleased to see him; if I'm dead he'll be pleased to see me."
Which brings to mind what a certain Dominic Bonheurs, a French grammarian, is supposed to have said just before he died: "I am about to.... or I am going to.... die. Either expression is used."

Work

Paul Johnson in The Spectator quotes John Ruskin and Bertrand Russell on "Work".
Ruskin asked: "Which of us is to do the hard and dirty work for the rest - and for what pay? Who is to do the pleasant and clean work, and for what pay?"
And Russell had a sort of answer: "Work is of two kinds. First, altering the position of matter at or near the earth's surface relatively to other such matter. Second, telling other people to do so. The first kind is unpleasant and ill paid. The second is pleasant and highly paid."
This made me wonder which section, first or second, I had come in when I was a teacher.
And this made me recall what Bernard Shaw had said: "Those who can, do; those who can't teach."

End-of Pier actors.

Michael Henderson, writing in yesterday's Telegraph, mentioned the TV show "Croosroads" which he called "that execrable 70's soap stuffed with end-of-pier actors".
When, years ago, I challenged my father on a criticsm he had made of the working class area he was living in, asking him why the criticism now since he had always lived in working class areas, he replied: "Well, there's working class and there's working class".
Well, I say, "there's end-of-pier actors and there's end-of-pier actors".
I know what Mr Henderson is talking about: I've had my fill of the second raters who put on second rate plays and sing popular songs with voices you would find more appropriate to town criers (if there are any now) and so on. But I recall a play I saw on the pier at Bournemouth many moons ago. The star of the show was Norman Vaughan, popular at the time on TV but not much to my liking. But the star to me was Bernard Bresslaw who came on about half way through the play and stole the show.
I was never a Bernard Bresslaw fan; in fact I don't think I ever laughed at anything he said or did in the Carry On films. But on stage he was transformed into a being so funny it was impossible not to shreak with laughter. He brought the house down, as they used to say.
That was end-of-pier acting like I had never seen before and surely won't again.

Michael Clayton

Am I the only person in the world who thought the film "Michael Clayton" was boring?
All the big reviewers have written encomiums about it, praising Clooney particularly for his performance, but I found it tedious to the point of having to stop watching it (I turned the DVD off). I can't believe it was a popular film since it was so difficult to follow - I feel that if Clooney had not been in it to give the main character, well, character, the film would have failed on all accounts: plot construction, character development, excitement of dramatic action.....
But I am no film critic. And as I get older I am finding modern American films quite hard to take, especially those which have an agenda - they are going to deal with important issues and tell us what we should think about them. Most of George Clooney's films recently (apart from Oceans 10, 11, or whatever) have had agendas and I am fed up with being preached to by them.
I have not seen a good new film since "The Lives of Others".

Writing Sit-Coms.

Before I tried to write a sit-com I should have read Brian Cooke's book. In it he wrote:
"After Johnny Mortimer and I finished a script we went through a process we called 'ticking the laughs'.... ticking off the lines which would get a laugh. We liked to see three or four ticks on each page i.e. every 3rd or 4th line. If there weren't enough ticks on the page we'd do something about it.... not stick in an obvious gag but strengthen the lines in situation or maybe trim or tighten up some of the plot lines."
Well I wrote an episode of a sit-com about a man who had retired and decided to go to college because he felt he had missed out. OK, there'd already been a film with Bing Crosby on the same subject but Shakespeare had pinched his plots so why couldn't I?
I sent it off somewhere and, of course, it came back. Yes, the idea was useful (which meant they might use it themselves some time) and the characters were neatly drawn (which meant they didn't like them) and so on. And, O yes, there was a joke on page three.
Sod them!

Alun Lewis

I was reading plays for BBC Wales Drama Department some years ago and a sort of play arrived written by a Mrs Lewis from North Wales. It was not good enough to recommend for broadcasting but what was interesting was that the woman was the mother of Alun Lewis. I can't recall if that information was in the play itself or in an accompanying letter but I wrote to her and enjoyed a short correspondence for a few weeks.
Alun Lewis died in the 2nd World War at the age of 29 (it has been claimed "by his own hand"); at the time he was on duty in Burma having been in the army for four years.
I believe his mother wished to write something that would serve as a sort of memorial to her son.
He is not a well-known poet though he did achieve some fame with a volume of his poems published after his death (Robert Graves wrote an introduction to the book).
His most famous poem begins:

"All day it has rained, and we on the edge of the moors
Have sprawled in our bell-tents, moody and dull as boors,
Groundsheets and blankets spread on the muddy ground
And from the first grey wakening we have found
No refuge from the skirmishing fine rain
And the wind that made the canvas heave and flap
And the taut wet guy-ropes ravel out and snap....."

Some quotes.

John Ford, when asked about his films, said seemingly disparagingly "I just make Westerns". But that is what he did best.
Auden wrote:
"A poet's hope: to be
like some valley cheese,
local, but prized everywhere."
And Peter Ackroyd:
"When Susan Sontag invokes something known as 'world literature, it is difficult to understand exactly what is meant. If it existed at all it would be the literary equivalent of air-line food, palatable to all but interesting to none. I suspect that, for Sontag, it represents some yearning for significance when what is significant can be found much closer to home."

Marlene Deitrich

There's a show in London at the present time which celebrates the friendship of Noel Coward and Marlene Deitrich; good show I hear, especially the second half when the the artists playing them perform some of their famous numbers.
Sometimes I meet someone who thinks Marlene Deitrich is the best thing since sliced bread. They moon over her memory and some start singing like her (men I mean): "see what the boys in the back room will have, and tell 'em that I'll have the same."
So I am always pleased to inform these fans that I have been this close (thumb and forefinger a few centimetres apart) to her.
London. Strolling along just outside the Cafe De Paris. A crowd gathering and the police moving us along. I didn't have clue why. The crowd knew why though. They knew that M.D. was about to appear.
And she did. In a big limo.
Suddenly I was caught up in the rush and found myself pushed right up against a chain of policemen, arms linked, while along the corridor they had made she walked to the door of The Cafe.
I was there, arms thrust down my sides with the pressure of the crowd on me. And she passed within centimetres of me and smiled.
"Marlene!" called yearning males over my shoulder. "Marlene, I love you." called others.
But - she smiled at me.