Crime writers

John Creasey wrote hundreds of books though he had great difficulty in getting his first published. He said he received 743 rejection slips before getting one accepted.
Almost as many as I've had!
I knew a crime writer who had many rejections before succeeding: Roger Ormerod who wrote about fifty novels. He told me he was being constantly rejected until he read somewhere that the best way to get accepted was to write a novel in the first person. He did so; it was published and he never looked back. From then on all his crime novels were written, like Raymond Chandler's, in the voice of the private detective he created - Richard Patton, ex copper.
Later he did a few novels, again in the first person, as if written by a woman detective - Phillippa Marlowe. Get it? Do I have to spell it out? Chandler's hero was Phillip Marlow. OK a bit obvious, but it worked.
One difference between Creasey and Ormerod was that, so I read, Creasey listened to other people's ideas and took some of them on board. Roger never did.
He'd read us a passage from a new novel he was writing and tell us he was having problems with a certain part of the plot. We'd tell him what we thought he should do - but he never did it.
As a successful playwright friend of mine says: "Listen to other people's advice and use if you think it will help, otherwise don't." A bit obvious, but wise just the same.
Incidentally, John Ford made a film out of John Creasey's most famous novel, "Gideon's Way"; set in London with Jack Hawkins as Gideon it was not a great success.
So much for Ford's comment when he was asked about his film making: "I just make Westerns."

Life and Death

Theodore Dalrymple, writing in The Times about prisoners on life sentences, tells of how some of them cope with the knowledge that they are never going to leave prison and will die there. Some cannot bare the thought but others "accommodate themselves to it and even find happiness in it."
He mentions Arthur Koestler "who wrote that he had never felt more serene than while waiting execution in one of Franco's jails in the Spanish Civil War."
I doubt if it would be serenity that I would experience in similar circumstances - more like fear I think.
Yet there are people, maybe like Koestler, who can face up to the imminence of death with more courage than I could muster.
One man I knew, "Jimmy" James, a pilot, who died this year in his nineties, was a famous escaper from German concentration camps in the Second World War. He told me once, in the almost off-hand, casual way, that was not too far away from, say, his telling me about a Sunday afternoon's tea party with the vicar and his wife, about how he and twenty or so other prisoners were one day taken outside and ordered to stand up against a wall.
"I had the impression," he said, "that they were going to shoot us."
They didn't, but after some time "told us we could return to our huts." Then he gave a little chuckle, a sort of "Hah well!" chuckle.
This was just about the time when Hitler ordered the death of about twenty (or more?) escapers who had been recaptured.
I shall always remember Jimmy's chuckle.

Sportsday

Someone was commenting on the recent allegations that cheating is going on in tennis - bribes to lose games! What would happen, he wondered, if both players in a singles match had been bribed to lose? Interesting.
Makes me think of my army days, National Service in the 1950's, and sportsday.
The finals of the competitions took place on Saturdays; the heats took place on the days before. If you won a heat you would be able (or have to) enter the final on the Saturday. Which would make it impossible for you to have a 48 hour pass to go home (away from the madness that was army life). So, in order that you did not qualify to enter the final you deliberately set out to lose your heat. This was not dificult because there were always young officers eager to succeed, eager to run in the finals.
But if all the entrants to a heat were ordinary private soldiers then things could prove difficult.
Imagine a race in which everyone is intent not on winning but on losing so that they could get the 48 hour pass.
However, I never actually saw that happen. As I say, there were always young, eager officers ready to stay over and win the finals on Saturday.
Not that we privates ever saw them win; we were, as they say, "home and dried".

Interviewing

Brian Moore writing on sport in The Daily Telegraph today comments on the poor quality of sports' interviewers. They make statements and wait for the interviewee to say he agrees. He mentions how Parky, "the doyen of TV interviewers" was so good at his job; he says how Parky would often wait in silence for the guest to elaborate on what he had said in answer to a question - "he often received the most interesting revelations" with this technique.
I was once asked by a features editor to interview a famous comedian whose show I had reviewed flatteringly.
I said: "I'm sorry but I've never interviewed anyone before."
He said: "Just ask him a question and he'll start talking and won't stop."
Which I did. Then the comic got out the drinks and so we drank rather than talked.
The piece I wrote was not published.
One of my favourite interviews I saw on TV was Parky again with Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice after the opening of their show "Evita".
Michael Parkinson said: "Bernard Levin saw your show and wrote, I quote: ' I have never spent a more miserable evening in or out of a theatre.' "
"Well, that's just his opinion.... everybody else has liked it... Etc" from Rice.
"No," said Parky, persisting: "In or out of a theatre!"
I can't remember how it all ended, probably because I was laughing too much.
One of the best interviewees was Clement Atlee. He'd be asked a question, then he'd puff on his pipe a while, then say "Yes", or "No". Nothing else. You could feel the tension in the interviewer as he struggled to dig up more questions.
One that amused me was an interview of Gavin Henson by a young woman commentator after the England/Wales game when Henson kicked a marvellous seventy foot penalty to win the game. The woman asked him: "How did you feel when you kicked that goal?" "Huh?" said Henson. With more emphasis on the word "feel" she repeated the question. "How did you FEEL?"
"I din feel anything," he said. "I been kicking um all week."

Rare Books

A sale has just taken place of a rare Jane Austen first edition of "Emma". £180 000 was paid for it.
No one will read it. It is just collected, and looked at I suppose - "look at what I've got!".
Reminds me of a friend of mine who was offered a few bottles of a very superior wine for a knock-down sale; he turned down the offer only to find that a few years later the price of the bottles had rocketed.
No one drank it of course. Not even worth looking at really.
These things are "collectors' items", of no use, with no apparent aesthetic value, only money value.
But, when you come to think of it, this is how picture sales operate: when a Monet is sold for millions, this doesn't reflect the artistic value of the work but its money value as a "collector's item".
My wife is going to buy a Beryl Cooke painting (reproduction, that is - even her paintings have gone up recently, probably because she died a couple of weeks ago) because she likes it, which I think is a pretty laudable reason. The fact that I can't stand the paintings means nothing much (except that I'll have to look at it now and then).
But there! - I don't like Monet's very much either.

Talent spotters

Someone writing in The Telegraph about Cezanne said that he would not have been known in Britain if it had not been for Samuel Courtauld who recognised his talent and bought a lot of his paintings.
It made me wonder how many artists and writers have not been successful because they have never been "talent spotted" by somone with money to back them.
It's often said that "So-and-So" of the "Something Publishers" discovered some writer who went on to be great, as if that without "So-and-So" he would never have succeeded.
Unfortunately I think there's a lot of truth in this.
You can send stuff to publishers and nothing happens. You can paint and try to sell and nothing happens. You have to get known somehow.
I wish I knew how.

Cyd Charisse

Who can forget the impact of Cyd Charisse's appearance in the Broadway Sequence in the film "Singing in the Rain"? It was simply sensational. Pauline Kael talked about her "unleashing her legs". Then, the success of this dance performance deep in people's minds, the film industry came up with a similar sequence in "The Band Wagon" when again she unleashed her famous 10 million dollar (insured) legs. As Fred Astaire said in the words of the Mickey Spillane detective he was playing as he met her in the down-and-out bar: "she came at me in sections; she had more curves than a scenic railway."
The dance sequence I recall that was more sensational than either of those, though not quite so sexy, was the boxing training session in "It's Always Fair Weather". It is a work of art. It has humour, excitement, classical ballet sections together with broad Hollywood musicals work; it has dance effects that are simply beyond belief. I don't think there is anything to compare with it for sheer entertainment, skill and unforced athelticism in the form of easy-going dance.
They say she wasn't much of an actress. So? So what? She didn't need to act, just to dance.
As Fred Astaire said: "When you danced with Cyd, you stayed danced with."
I think she helped change the style of classical ballet and made it sexy, and at the same time transformed Hollywood films dance routines to make them more balletic.

Criticism

Professor Evans, who used to run the extra mural class in philosophy I attended, when he was at Oxford some time ago got friendly with the famous philosopher, Gilbert Ryle. His most famous book is called "The Concept of Mind". Both he and Evans at that time were dons at Oxford and Ryle was in the process of writing the book.
One day he asked Evans if he would like to read the first chapter of his new book; naturally Evans was delighted to do so.
When they next met Ryle asked him what he thought of it and Evans said that he thought it marvellous and that it was so good he found he had no criticism to make of it.
Professor Evans told us: "He never gave me Chapter 2 to read."
Ryle was not interested in receiving flattery, only in receiving criticism. You learn nothing from flattery; you learn a good deal from criticism.
People love to be flattered; makes them feel good. Criticism is, for many people, especially those like famous actors, celebrities and such like, not welcome. Makes them feel inadequate.
For a philosopher like Gilbert Ryle it was, I think, something he required, something he appreciated; it did not hurt him because he had nothing to gain from ignoring others' opinions.
Great man.
A very difficult book to read though.

Teaching

I attended an extra mural course in philosophy for a couple of years. The lecturer was Professor Evans of Cardiff University. There were about fifteen people on the course, most of them getting on in years.
The lectures took this form: for the first part (just under an hour) Prof. Evans would dictate slowly to us and we would copy down every word he said. No one asked a question, we just wrote down his words. Then there would be a break for tea or coffee after which followed another session of about three quarters of an hour when questions were asked and a discussion took place.
The format was simple. And it worked.
I tried it on a class of GCSE pupils later on; it worked then too - they all passed.
It seems the sort of thing that an inspector, say, would frown on: "this is not teaching, this is simply dictating and discussing; where's the visual aids? where're the hand-outs?"
I think the secret was that in slowly copying down in one's own handwriting the prof's words, one absorbed them much better than the words of a hand-out. They became one's own words, not others'.
Towards the end of the few years of the course, just before Professor Evans retired, he gave us a few sessions in which he read out to us some chapters of his published book on ethics (?). It was most boring. I could not believe that he could be so boring. He had never been before - why now?
It probably says something about a good teacher: there was a spontaneity about his lectures which did not come across from the well planned material of his book.
As Shaw said: "those who can, do; those who can't, teach." Or maybe "those who can teach, can't do."

Norman Lewis

In my younger days I lived in a block of flats in the middle of Cardiff. Close by an old woman moved in, a lovely lady, a widow, gentle, friendly, educated, cultured. Her name was Mrs Lewis. One day we were talking and she mentioned that a close relative of hers was a writer. Who's that? I wanted to know, being a bit of a struggling writer myself (still struggling, by the way). "Norman Lewis," she said. I'd never heard of him. "He writes travel books," she said.
That was that. I moved out of the flat and bought a house and never saw Mrs Lewis again.
Then I came across a review of a book by Norman Lewis, a review that praised him to the skies.
"Who is this guy?" I wanted to know.
Not many people had heard of him.
Now someone, Julian Evans, has written a biography of him and a review in The Telegraph has a heading "The life of a great unknown writer."
i.e. He's still unknown.
Yet Auberon Waugh described him as "the greatest travel writer alive, if not the greatest since Marco Polo." And Graham Greene wrote: "I have no hesitation in calling Norman Lewis one of the best writers, not of any particular decade, but of our century."
Amazing. And there I was talking to his sister (or cousin, a close relative anyway) and thinking "he's probably some hack nobody's ever heard of or going to hear of."
Maybe now people will sit up and take a bit of notice of him. I know I will. I shall order one of his travel books in the local library or buy one on Amazon - pronto.

Sibelius

Is Sibelius out of fashion? Whenever I mention his symphonies to someone who is a music lover, a look comes over their face that says they don't much like him. How about his violin concerto? Well (a grudging) yes, of course.
I have just been listening to a recording by Ginette Neveu of the violin concerto and what a performance it was. I think Barbirolli conducted it. The recording is a bit scratchy now but still very exciting.
She got killed in an air crash; she was not very old; Barbirolli was devastated.
Sibelius arrived at a stage late in life when he found he could no longer compose. Beecham went to visit him at his home and was approached by Sibelius's wife. "Don't mention his 8th Symphony," she urged Beecham. It was a sensitive subject. He never did write it.
After listening to his 7th. Symphony I am not surprised; I think he had done all he could have done with the symphonic form. The 7th. is a bit of a mess; it is as if he took all the best bits of his six symphonies and joined them together in a sort of pot pourri of his music.
Another occasion when a composer's wife asked a visitor not to mention a certain work was when Larry Adler visited Georges Enesco. Adler had made a mouth organ recording of his Romanian Rhapsody. "Don't mention his Romanian Rhapsody," the wife said.
The reason for this was that it was virtually the only piece of music he was known for and he was fed up with hearing people mention that rather than any of his other works.
(I have written a play like that - "Dreamjobs". It's the only work of mine people know about.
Yet, I have to say, that I would be disappointed if people didn't mention it sometimes. Better that than silence.)
When Larry Adler was seated, the first thing the composer said to him was :"That recording you did of my Romanian Rhapsody is superb."

Saatchi Art

What is going on when the greatest authority on modern art is not a critic or an expert but a man who has specialised in advertising? Charles Saatchi. If he says something is good then the price rises immediately. Recently he has "bought almost the entire degree shows of three postgraduate students at The Royal Academy Schools."
Good for them you may say. It certainly is good for them if making money is the only criterion by which art may be assessed.
A few years ago he bought a portrait of Princess Diana by Stella Vine called "Hi Paul can you come over." It is a daub, seemingly done by a child's hand, the face of the princess is a coloured atrocity and the title is splashed onto the background.
Stella Vine is made. Her paintings are now selling well, God help us. Beryl Cooke had more talent in her little finger than this woman has in her whole body. With a Beryl Cooke you have to admire her consistency of approach if not her (little) painting talent, there is humour in her work, there is love in her choice of people she paints..... This Stella Vine daub shows us nothing about the subject, in fact the face could be anyone's, or rather no one's - because it is not a carefully executed drawing and painting.
As David Lee wrote in The Times last week :"Her work is jaw-droppingly inept."
Charles Saatchi is a fraud. Yet the art world listens to him and goes out and buys the stuff he recommends.
Has the art world gone barking mad?

Rhyming poetry

Freida Hughes writing in The Times says ""There are some basic do's and dont's when writing poetry. Rhyme is nice but it is entirely up to the poet - in which case lines must scan."
Not so, writes Wendy Cope in a letter to The Times a day later: "There are some rhyming forms, such as the clerihew, which rhyme but do not scan. And rhyme without metre can be found in the work of a number of reputable poets - Ogden Nash and Paul Muldoon, to name but two."

One of my favourite Ogden Nash poems is:

"The turtle lives 'twixt plated decks,
Which practically conceal its sex,
It is amazing how the turtle
In a such a fix can be so fert'le."

And one of my favourite Wendy Cope poems begins:

"Bloody men are like bloody buses -
You wait for about a year
And as soon as one approaches your stop
Two or three others appear......"

Here's the opening of one of mine:

"I've a dirty old suitcase all covered in grime,
I'm putting it in for 'The Turner',
And an old garden gnome that is dripping with slime -
I'm putting that in for 'The Turner';
My mother-in-law's cat which is dead and is stuffed
It sits on her lap and she's terribly chuffed
But I don't like the in-law or cat half enough
So I'm putting them both in for 'The Turner' ."

Well it rhymes and it scans - what more do you want - Art?

Waiters

Often, waiters make me feel more than just uncomfortable - they make me feel inferior. I feel they have knowledge of certain things that give them a superior edge over me. For example, I once ordered a wine (house wine of course) with a meal and said "Red please. O yes, and could I have a dry one please?"
The waiter in an evening suit looked at me with something close to contempt and said: "There is no such thing as a sweet red sir."
I felt he was mentally spelling "sir" with a "c" followed by a "u" and an "r".
I wish I had had the same agressive-like attitude that Christopher Hitchens possesses; he object to waiters pouring a small quantity of wine in your glass to "taste" it. They are interrupting your conversation; it's an act of rudeness; it's saying to you "hurry up won't you and order another bottle".
I don't think it signifies any of these things. What the waiter is doing is being a waiter, that's all. There are certain acts he carries out that distinguish him from other people and this pouring of the "taster" into one's glass is one of those acts.
"You see that waiter," Jean Paul Sartre is supposed to have said to a friend (probably a girl friend - and a young one at that!). "Well that waiter is playing the part of a waiter."
I never thought this remark carried much weight until I heard about Christopher Hitchens and his bitchiness, but now I do: many people do play parts they are given in life and they, sort of, follow a set of rules that give them a certain dignity.
So I feel sorry for Hitchens's waiters. And I feel a bit sorry too for the waiter who corrected me too, for he wasn't playing his part as well as he should have done. What he should have said when I asked him for a dry red wine was "Certainly sir," and gone his way. That would have been what a proper waiter would have done, the sort you get as a butler in Wilde plays or in Henry James stories. Perfect actors of parts they assume to give their lives some meaning.

The Apprentice

Sir Alan: Now, everybody's looking at us tonight in the final of what has been an absolute bloody fiasco, and I have to pick one of you four losers to be my apprentice and pay you.... (colours and swallows).... what I consider to be a vast amount of moolah. Which one do I pick? You, Mouthy, tell me why I should pick you.
Claire: Well, Sir Alan, I think I am the most....
Sir Alan: Shurrup. (pointing a finger) I think I've heard more than enough from you. You've come here with the idea that you can talk your way to glory and.....
Claire: But Sir Alan, I have learned to shut up.
Sir Alan: You're off again. One more word out of you and you're fired.
Claire: B....
Sir Alan: What?
Claire: I didn't say a word, I just said "B", the begining of "But" and I do think that....
Sir Alan: Think in your own time not mine. Now you, Lee, why should I pick you?
Lee: Because I'm a fighter, I am. I can do fings, I can. Ask me to do somethin' and I'll go out there and do it.
Sir Alan: Spell "Sir Alan".
Lee: Uh.... Er.... S...R...E...R....A...L...U...N...N...N... Sreralunnn. (Smiles)
Sir Alan: You come here saying you've been to college and you were there five minutes....
Lee: I can do a brontosaurus. Look.
Sir Alan: Sit down and belt up. You are an absolute shambles. Helene, what do you think you could contribute to my company?
Helene: I've run a corporate company, I've been in charge of 500 gobshites and I've proved that I can recover from my parents' alcoholism...
Sir Alan: But you done shit, that's all you done. You can't sell....
Helene: I know I can't sell, I've never been taught to sell; when you're in charge of 500 gobshites you've no time to sell.
Sir Alan: What about you, Alex?
Alex: I'm 24.
Sir Alan: I know you're 24. I'm sick of hearing you're 24. What other qualifications do you have?
Alex: I'm good at stabbing people in the back.
Sir Alan: Well that's something in your favour I must say.
Alex: And my hair...
Sir Alan: Never mind about your bloody hair. Hair don't make a good company man. Margaret, what do you think about them all?
Margaret: They are not what candidates once were. (Rolls her eyes)
Sir Alan: And Nick?
Nick: (Eyes closed tight) I do think there's some good material here but where exactly it is I'm afraid it's difficult to say.
Sir Alan: I agree. Well, this has been a bloody fiasco from day one and I can only pick one of you so.......

WHO WILL IT BE? See here tomorrow for the final result.

Morris Dancing

Someone suggested that Morris Dancing should become an Olympic event; then, it was said, Britain might actually win a gold.
A letter in today's Times begs to differ: "Please spare us," it says. "After some initial success we will find our team lagging to those of former colonies with year-long summer weather and superior orchards..... Surely the only way to preserve our primacy at this activity is never ever to compete with anyone else at it."
Yesterday's Times had a letter from someone who had "invited my new French neighbours to come and see morris dancing at the nearby pub. While driving there they asked 'Who is Maurice?' "
I am reminded of what Sir Thomas Beecham once said: "One should try everything once - except incest and morris dancing."

Witches

Have been to see "Hansel and Gretel" by Englebert Humperdinck (no, not that one, this is the German composer) at The Millenium Centre, Cardiff, performed by The Welsh National Opera Company. And a very impressive production it was.
It has some wonderful music in it, so immediately attractive that you wonder why more of Humperdinck's music is not heard. There is a superb passage at the end of Act 1 when the two children are taken care of by guardian angels.
Then came Act 2 and it proved to be rather a mess. I think the faults lay largely with the opera itself though I wonder if the producer exacerbated the faults by having the witch played as a rather comic character.
He (the witch is a tenor, played by a man) was simply not terrifying enough. Though the opera is new to me I have the feeling that the witch should scare the living daylights out of the audience. There was a good sprinkling of children in the audience so it might have been thought wise not to frighten them too much.
They uderestimate how frights in stories appeal greatly to children: while being frightened they know that they are watching a fictional work and that what is frightening is going on there, not here with them.
Whatever, this witch brought to mind a few of Walt Disney's horrid women (they may not have been witches, all of them, but they were all certainly frightening creatures). Take the queen in "Snow White and the 7 Dwarfs". What a superbly horrific, terrifying creation! And the witch in "Sleeping Beauty" is equally terrifying.
Disney is much maligned these days; people talk of the Disnification of our times. Well, after Disney's death, things went rather down the drain. The creative spirit that had conjured up such grotesques as the queen and the wicked witch and, of course, the cat in Cinderella - he should have been given an oscar! - died with him. He was a creative genius without parallel - no, Dickens with his marvellous characters and, you have to admit, his loads of sentimentalty, stands alongside him I think.
I feel that Humperdinck was made of sterner stuff than what was presented as his creation in the production I saw: the witch should not be played as a panto dame but as a Disney queen.

Ian Fleming

In a review of the new James Bond book written by Sebastian Faulks, Charles Cumming writes: "The snobbery which has hampered Fleming's literary reputation was exemplified by Faulks when he said 'It was like asking someone who writes complex symphonic music if they would like to write a three minute pop song'." He tells of "London's literati" performing readings of the Bond novels and "collapsing in fits of giggles."
Cheek.
Most of these London literati are long forgotten, Ian Fleming lives on.
Cumming goes on to say that Faulks's rendition of Fleming's Bond,"Devil May Care" "marks an improvement on the original Bonds..."
I don't believe it.
There are people out there who believe Fleming was just another hack writer of crime thrillers. Actually he was a great stylist.
Listen to what another "hack writer of crime thrillers" had to say about Fleming:
"... he escaped from Mandarin English, the forced pretentiousness, the pre-occupation with the precise and beautiful phrase, which to me is seldom precise or beautiful, since our language contains an interior magic which belongs only to those who, in a sense, care nothing about themselves."
Raymond Chandler wrote that, and you can't get more stylish than Chandler.

Two Questions

Here are two seemingly unanswerable questions:
First, how on earth did they make Tracey Emin an RA? I was always under the impression that an RA had to be able to paint or, at the very least, be able to produce something approaching a work of art. However, not only have they gone and made her an RA, they have given her the opportunity to "curate" a room of exhibits at this year's Royal Academy's Summer Exhibition. Needless to say she has gone all out to shock. Defending herself she said: "I didn't want to be shocking (you are shocking my dear); but I did want to be provocative." Well, that's one way of avoiding being shocking I suppose.
"There is a fair smattering of male and female genitalia...." (Par for the course so far).... "an explicit structure involving a girl and a zebra.... (a "birdie" maybe with this one).... "and a virtually unwatchable video which shows a naked woman mutilating herself by swinging a barbed wire hoop around her waist.... (an "eagle" surely, an "eagle")."
So says the art critic of The Telegraph.
My father used to visit the Royal Academy's Summer Exhibition every year; if somehow he can see it now he'll be rolling in his grave. I'm rolling in mine and I'm not dead yet.
It is of course not so much "shocking" or so much "provacative" but downright disgusting.
Which was, no doubt, he real intent.
The other unanswerable question is this: What do MEP's actually do? Apart, that is, from trousering a lorry load of expenses and dining out regularly at some of Brussells' finest restaurants? They don't report back to anyone as far as I know. I don't even know who my MEP is.
So what have MEP's and Tracey Emin got in common?
They are all frauds.

Novello

There has been talk here in Cardiff for some time about a statue to honour Ivor Novello who was born in Cardiff and whose only commemorative artifact is a small plaque, hardly visible, on the house where he was born - and there's some doubt about that being the right house.
Now Peter Nichols has been commissioned to make a statue of Novello to stand outside the Millenium Centre, but £25000 more is needed to ensure the 12 foot high statue will be completed.
I have the feeling that Ivor Novello has never been all that popular in these parts: he was born here in Cardiff but shot off to London to live when quite young. As far as I know he never returned and seemed to have no allegiance to Cardiff or Wales (many people are surprised to know that he was, in fact, Welsh - he dropped his real name of Ivor Davies for Ivor Novello, Novello being his mother's maiden name).
If you ask young people, as I did when I wrote a short booklet on him, if they have ever heard of Ivor Novello, they'll say "Is he something to do with the Ivor Novello awards?" They don't know how famous he was - film star, composer, playwright, creator of many musicals.
An actor played the part of Novello in one of Robert Altman's later films: he arrives at a country house, goes to the piano and plays and sings some of his most famous numbers.
Ivor Novello never sang. He couldn't sing. He could play alright but if he did have to deliver some lyrics he talked them through the song.
His first big success was the First World War song "Keep the Home Fires Burning" which made him a fortune (it also made the tenor John McCormack a millionaire when he recorded it); he always said that when he died he would like to do so just as the curtain came down on one of his shows. This he nearly achieved, dying soon after the end of one of his biggest successes, "King's Rhapsody".

Lies

One of the contestants in The Apprentice on TV the other night was accused of making his CV look better than it should: he had written that he had spent 2 years in university but it turned out that it had been only 2 months. This matter was brought before Sir Alan Sugar who thought it not very honest but another of the interviewers on his panel said that it was often done - why! - he had done it himself! Lied, that is, when he'd been going for a job. He said that everybody did it.
A long time ago I had an idea for a story of a man occupying a lectureship at a college when he didn't have the qualifications he had claimed he had. I asked a friend who was at that time a Head of Department at a similar college. "Are qualifications checked?" I asked him. He thought a while then said "Do you know, in all my experience I have never known a person's qualifications checked."
Another friend of mine who applied for a post wrote down a certain qualification he had - or said he had; when I said to him: "You never got that grade." "Hah!" he said. "That's the grade I should have got."
But I don't think the contestant on The Apprentice will survive his lie. We shall see next week in the final.

Actors and Politics

Many American actors and directors these days use the cinema to put across political messages. George Clooney, Sean Penn, Tommy Lee Jones and, of course, Susan Sarandon. Maybe it's always been the case that actors wish to be more than just repositaries of others' ideas but desire to make known their own.
I find some modern American films rather one sided in the positions they take on matters like "welfare" and "war" - particularly the Iraq war. They expect their audience to be on the side of "peace". Which reminds me of a historian of wars visiting the editor of The New Yorker and being told, on leaving, that "we here at The New Yorker, you know, are in favour of peace."
As someone said: Isn't everybody?
Not according to Clooney, Sarandon and company.
When Marlon Brando was asked what he thought of some political point of view he replied to the effect that all he was, was an actor.
They don't want to be just actors anymore as if acting is not all that splendid a profession.
John Gielgud summed up his feelings on being an actor when he was 89 years old. He said: "O, I don't go to the theatre any more. I used to go twice a week, but I stopped all that. I do think that, over my long life - and I've lived through two world wars - that theatre has been completely unimportant. Yet I've been obsessed by it all my life, and I'm a bit ashamed that it interests me much more than politics, say. It's been an escape for me, which I'm not particularly proud of. It seems a bit childlike."
Well it's not childlike to the likes of George Clooney and Susan Sarandon - and maybe it's the better for it.

The Star System

The star system of judging films in The Radio Times can be a bit of a hit or miss affair. I think they got it wrong with John Ford's "Sergeant Rutledge" when they gave it 3 stars and again with his "The Horse Soldiers" which only got 3 stars, yet a couple of days ago a Randolph Scott western was given 4 stars. This was one of those old fashioned OK westerns in which the characters were stock types, there was a weakish husband with an admirably likeable wife who is fancied by a rakish crook in the shape of Lee Marvin (who, I have to say, raised the film above a standard type of western which usually Scott acted in).
But these discrepancies don't worry me much. Last week, however, a film with Frank Sinatra and Doris Day was given a modest three stars and I felt that it deserved better.
OK, the film itself, without the songs, was not much to write home about - Doris Day falls for Gig Young only to find she is attracted soon after by the taciturn and rather unfriendly, if not deeply depressed, Sinatra whose performance was one of the saving graces of the blandness of the film.
What lifted the film to 4 star status, in my opinion, was the songs. How could you downgrade a film, whatever the plot, when Sinatra sings four songs (never mind Miss Day's contribution of two or three trite numbers) all of which were top hits by him: "Young at Heart"; "Someone to Watch Over me"; "Just one of those things" and "One for my baby and one more for the road".
I've changed my mind - 5 stars.

Cesar Franck

Some composers are remembered popularly by one work only. Bruch's Violin Concerto comes to mind; Dukas' "Sorcerer's Apprentice" also; and Litolff's one movement from one of his Concerto Symphoniques, Barber's "Adagio for Strings", Lyadov's "Enchanted Lake", Albinoni's Adagio.
It's as if they didn't write anything else. Most of them wrote vast quantities of works but none now remembered (except by students of music maybe).
Cesar Franck almost falls within this "one work only" group, though forty odd years ago you often heard three pieces by him quite regularly: his Symphony, his Symphonic Variations for piano and orchestra, and his violin sonata.
Robin Holloway, in The Spectator this week, writes that "Cesar Franck appears nowadays to be almost universally reviled."
I used to love his Symphony. I was in good company then: it was one of John Barbirolli's favourites which he performed with his Halle orchestra regularly. I haven't heard it - or heard of a performance of it - for many, many years. Also, the Symphonic Variations, a highly entertaining piece, is never played now; nor the violin sonata.
Why is this? We'll let's allow Robin Holloway to explain the reason: "The present consensus is that Franck is merely thick, cloying, glutinous, too sequential, too chromatic, stiff in rhythm and phrasing, mechanised in form and process - especially in the 'motto' idea, laboriously applied, whereby all of a work's themes transfer and transform across all its movements."
Well, I suppose you could say that about his music!
What I would like to say is that there's a great slow movement in The Symphony, a wonderfully exciting finale to the Symphonic Variations and a beautifully executed last movement in the violin sonata.

Poems for Orchestras

I had the brilliant idea of writing a set of poems about the instruments of the orchestra, a bit like Britten's "Young Person's Guide to Music" in the sense that each section of the classical orchestra would be highlighted and given a sort of character by the poems.
I went ahead and wrote the poems and contacted, by e mail, the conductor of a Cardiff orchestra asking him if he'd be interested in the project leading to a performance. He said I should get in touch with a certain young man who was something like "The person in charge of education of young people associated with music...." Something like that. I did so and arranged a meeting.
As soon as we met I knew (from years of experience of such meetings) that this would be on his part a personal relations exercise. You know, they don't want to meet you, they don't want anything to do with your brilliant idea (which they probably think is stupid) but they are going through the motions because someone has told them to or because I may report a complaint to someone in the arts world that nobody's interested in new ideas and that these people aren't doing what they're paid to do.
I was offered a coffee which I accepted and the meeting began. I told him my idea and the expression on his face froze into a mask of indifference which probably covered an expression of intense annoyance.
Nothing came of it of course. I had to be satisfied with the free coffee - which was Nescafe Jar kind.
It brought to mind a time when I was supposed to be a bit of an expert on calculating machines. I wasn't but my boss liked to say I was so that he didn't have to bother with salesmen. Well, one phoned one day and the boss put me onto him. I spoke some stuff for a while, looked at my boss and he mouthed "Fob him off". So I fobbed him off.
Over that coffee I had been fobbed off.