Artists

I was surprised to hear what the composer Harrison Birtwistle's choice of music was on Desert Island Discs a couple of years ago: he did not choose any composers from the past, not even from the past of twenty or so years ago. He chose music from the present, like, of course, his own.
But listening and watching a programme tonight on BBC 4, Andrew Dixon told of Vasari and the artists of The Renaissance who chose to ignore their predecessors and go back for their inspiration to Greek and Roman artists; so this may be what all creative artists tend to do - rubbish those from whom they have learnt most.
The composers of the 20th Century in England like Vaughan Williams went back for inspiration to folk song; the American composers of the 20th Century took their inspiration from Jazz. So did the French composers like Poulenc and Russians like Stravinski - though Jazz seemed to be an inspiration in their case for only a short period of time, about five years.
For an artist to progress, it seems, means he must reject those artists who have come before him; not only reject their influence on him but actually demonstrate their revulsion of them.
I am thinking of the Impressionists, of Picasso, of John Osborne and his Angry Young Men who denounced such playwrights as Terence Rattigan.
The trouble is that in this dismissal of that which was once fashionable the public go along with the trend and they too dismiss it. But eventually that which was dismissed sometimes becomes suddenly acceptable: you get a sort of renaissance of the plays of Rattigan and the works that came before the Impressionists and of the music that came before Schoenberg.
Schoenberg, incidentally, believed that anything that was popular could not be art and anything that was art could not be popular. He will turn in his grave if his music becomes popular but I can't forsee much chance of that happening - so rest in peace Arnold Schoenberg.

Sybil Thorndike

A review of a new book on the life of Sybil Thorndike says that "she was a pioneer, even when an established star, never happier during the second world war than when touring Welsh mining villages in 'Medea' and 'Macbeth'."
I can testify to the fact that she toured Welsh mining villages, having been present at a performance in Blackwood, Monmouthshire, of "Macbeth". I can't remember much about it being very young but I do remember the excitement it
caused. It seemed that everyone was speaking of the event before the performance and, of course, the Institute of Mineworkers Hall (called colloquially "the Stute") was packed to the roof.
I believe that she and her husband, Lewis Casson, brought a limited number of performers with them so Blackwood theatre company provided most of the extras required.
The Blackwood Theatre group was a well known amateur group in South Wales. When I was young I saw them do Shaw's "Saint Joan" and some of the famous Greek tragedies; and when, later, I went to Blackwood in my capacity of theatre critic for the much despised South Wales Spectator (one of those journals that focussed most pages on society weddings), I reviewed a good performance of "The Father" by Strinberg. So you can see that this theatre company was no ordinary amateur group only producing standard farces and popular West End plays - they often did the big stuff.
Sybil Thorndike had a tremendous reputation as an actress early in her career doing the first "Saint Joan" for example but, as with all actors of that time, they tended to be left behind when "Look Back in Anger" and so on came along.
The review in The Spectator mentions her in "that legendary Uncle Vanya" as "an unforgettable nurse rooted in the earth like a Courbet-figure". I saw it and remember Olivia's great performance and Redgrave's wonderful Vanya himself but, alas, I do not recall her in it. Olivia always made everyone seem small beside him - even the rhiniceros in a play by Ionesco.

Drunks

Some writers can't write unless they are drunk. Dylan Thomas for example, though he maintained that he didn't drink much while writing, only after finishing a poem.
Dickens liked a lot to drink according to Paul Johnson in an article in The Spectator, and there certainly is a lot of drinking going on in his novels. Johnson quotes Dickens in a letter to his daughter:
"At seven in the morning in bed, a tumbler of new cream and two tablespoons of rum. At 12 a sherry cobbler and a biscuit. At three a pint of champagne. At five minutes to eight, an egg beaten with a glass of sherry..... At quarter past ten, soup, anything to drink I fancy."
I read his novel "Pickwick Papers" a few years ago and was struck by the amount of drinking that went on by Pickwick himself and his Pickwickians. There are whole passages where Pickwick is either dining and drinking immense amounts of liquor or falling down in a heap, drunk.
We were in Muswell Hill a year or so ago and went to have lunch in a pub called "The Spaniards". Much to my surprise there were notes on the menus to the effect that this pub was mentioned in "The Pickwick Papers"; this I already knew - what I didn't know was that the pub was a real one, not an invention of Dickens's.
In one of the scenes in "The Pickwick Papers" attention is drawn to the behaviour of boys from Westminster School, to the effect that the waiters were almost as badly behaved as those boys. I wondered if the present headmaster was aware of this reference in the novel so wrote a short note to apprise him of it. He sent me a postcard with the words: "Thank you for your letter. Yes, no doubt nothing changes."

Dennis Noble

The second record I bought, a 78, many years ago featured the English baritone Dennis Noble. His name came to mind this week when an article in The Times mentioned Belshazzar's Feast. It was mentioned because the biblical story seemed to higlight features of the credit crunch - rather a way-out reference I thought.
The Belshazzar's Feast I know better is William Walton's oratorio. I once went to a concert in London in which the oratorio was performed with, if my memory serves me right, William Walton himself conducting the work with the soloist Dennis Noble.
He was a wonderful baritone with a rather hard timbre to his voice.
The record I had purchased all those years ago had on the one side the Prologue to Pagliacci and, on the other, the famous Barber song from "The Barber of Sevile" by Rossini.
What I remember most about the record was that Dennis Noble sang both songs in English. I don't think I have heard either in English since.
When I wrote a monthly article for a journal called "The South Wales Spectator" for which I received the princely sum of £5 per article, I used to rant on about operas being always performed in foreign languages. How was anyone to know what they were singing about for Heaven's sake? I remember, in one article, suggesting sub-titles. Now they have sur-titles. I often wonder if I was the first to come up with the idea; probably not because the readership of "The South Wales Spectator" was very small indeed.
"Belshazzar's Feast" is a wonderful work, one of Walton's best, but it was thought that it would not be popular when it was first performed (at Leeds). Thomas Beecham suggested to Walton that since he was "up North" he should throw in a brass band to make it more thrilling. Might as well make the best of it, he said, because "it wouldn't be performed again."
It's still going strong.

Films from Novels

I once met a novelist named Frederick E. West. Not well known now though at one time he was a bit famous for writing the novel "633 Squadron". It was made into a film which he thought rather good - buit he never got a cent for it. I can't recall how that was - maybe it had to do with his selling it outright for ready cash or to do with American royalties not covered in an agreement.... Doesn't matter why: he was still bitter about it years later.
So was Jack Trevor Story, novelist, who often wrote in a column in a newspaper about how he had never made a penny from the film version of his most well-known novel "The Trouble with Harry".
Today there's an obituary in The Times of John Michael Hayes, a script writer for films in the 50's and 60's then later a writer for TV series. Two of his most famous film scripts were for "The Trouble with Harry" and "Rear Window". Both were directed by Alfred Hitchcock. In the obit. there was no mention of the novel from which the script was taken; you get the idea that Hitchcock had proposed the idea and Hayes had gone about writing the script. Jack Trevor Story never forgave Hitchcock.
Strangely enough no mention was made either of the original novel from which the film "Rear Window" had been taken. It was a novel in fact written by an American writer of rather horrific fiction named Cornell Woolrich.
I have a copy of "633 Squadron" signed by the author. Worth anything I wonder?

Dubai

Was I dreaming or did I read somewhere that a wedding that took place in Dubai recently cost as much as 13 million dollars? OK, so people are rich out there but squandering that amount of money on a wedding strikes me as.... well, demented.
I have a slim association with Dubai in that a play of mine was performed there last year. Not, I hasten to add, anywhere near The Atlantis hotel where the wedding took place (with, by the way, a firework display that out-brillianced the one in China at the Olympic Games) but at a school.
My play "Dreamjobs" which over the years has been put on many times, is now not all that popular; so I was surprised to see from the info. on my royalty payment that it had been staged at The American School of Dubai.
Look that school up on the internet and you'll see it's one of the most fabulous schools - they do everything a school should do there, and more.
I wrote an e mail to the Drama Teacher at the school asking how my play went down but did not receive a reply. I was hoping for the sort of reply that said something like "It went down wonderfully well and we'd like to extend an invitation for you to come to our school as Resident Playwright for a year or two, where we'll put you up in The Atlantis, all expenses paid....."
What I did get was a cheque for £16.

Critics

I see that Clive Barnes the influential critic has died. He and Frank Rich were both New York critics and they were influential in the way that they could, with a bad review, close a Broadway show practically overnight. One show that one of them was influential in closing was "Under Milk Wood", a production that here in Britain had had a good run but there in New York ran for about a month. It had Glyn Houston as the narrator and I believe he was most distressed by its reception in the States.
Clive Barnes, shortly after he became New York Times drama and dance critic had a telegram from David Merrick, a top Broadway producer saying "The honeymoon's over." Barnes replied "Didn't know we were married. Didn't know you were that kind of boy."
I was never actually threatened as Clive Barnes once was by Joe Papp but I was banned once from reviewing at a well known Cardiff theatre, and I received some quite angry phone calls from some disappointed performers. Then there was the letter I received from someone who didn't like the things I was writing: the letter was a picture of a plate of sausage and mash and across it were written the words "get stuffed."
You don't realise when you are writing reviews how hurtful they can be; artists love praise but some of them can't take criticism. There's a film with Vincent Price in which he plays a crazy ex-actor who takes his brutal revenge on all those theatre critics who reviewed him badly by getting rid of them one by one. I sat through it with mixed feelings wondering if, sometimes, I had gone too far.

Discipline

A friend of mine from college days did his National Service in the Royal Air Force. He had a degree in Chemistry and Mathematics and there in the air force he became a sergeant in the Education Section.
His first task was to lecture to a class of young men all of whom were Officer Cadets. They being of the officer group (or soon to be) were considered a notch (i.e. class) above what he was - Non-Commissioned Officer.
He started to deliver his lecture when some tittering broke out, then some whispered remarks, then some laughter. He didn't know exactly what it had to do with but guessed it might have had something to do with his Welsh accent.
Somehow he got through the lecture but he immediately went to see the head of the unit (brigade or whatever they call it in the RAF), a Wing Commander possibly - someone fairly high up the officer ranks.
He told the officer what had happened and said he would not be able to carry on with his lecturing under these circumstances.
The officer said; "Go to the next lecture and carry on as if nothing had happened."
"But sir...."
"Leave it to me," said the senior officer.
"Yes sir."
The next lecture time arrived and my friend went into the room and stood there about to start. There was the usual tittering, whispering etc.
Then the door opened and in came the senior officer he had spoken to.
He stood there at the back of the room and told my friend to continue please.
Silence.
The man remained standing there until the end of the lecture. He said not a word to the officer cadets who were silent throughout, listening attentively and taking notes.
At the end he walked out.
My friend told me he never had any trouble with that class again.

Shirley Bassey

Mark Stein, who writes a piece about a popular song every week on his website, chose this week to write about what he thought was the best Bond song. He chose "Goldfinger" sung by Shirley Bassey. I knew the music was by John Barry but didn't know that the lyrics were by Anthony Newley and Leonard Bricusse. Bricusse and Newley had, of course, collaborated on "Stop the World I want to get Off" which ran in London for a long time.
It's a great number, a good film, probably the best of the Bond films, and it is magnificently belted out by Bassey.
I once tried to get an interview with Shirley Bassey for a newspaper but wasn't successful. The nearest I got to her in the respect of knowing someone who knew someone who knew her was that I was aquainted with a man who came to the same local as I used to go to: Eric - don't know his other name. Eric used to be a singer with Shirley Bassey in a club in Cardiff. She wasn't there long; she soon found fame in London and went on from there to hit it big. Eric stayed put.
I did write a review of a show she did in Cardiff when she was....O, in her forties or early dfifties and I remember mentioning that it was difficult for what were then called "coloured" people from Cardiff Docks area to make it in any art or sport. But there were two others, I remember writing, who did: Billie Boston and Joe Erskine.
I don't thing Boston would at that time have been able to play rugby for Cardiff - there was no colour bar as such but there was just the same. Billie Boston went North to play rugby league and was a tremendous success on the wing. Joe Erskine of course had some famous fights with the top boxers of the day.
Mark Stein says you can't pick a top Bond song that is not composed by John Barry and seemed on another occasion to suggest that you can't have a Bond title song without Shirley Bassey. I know what he means, good as some of the others are.

Sunset

When I was a very little boy I attended a school which was divided into two sections - one for boys, the other for girls. We hardly ever mixed. We hardly ever saw any of the girls or their teachers. Occasionally their headmistress would pay a visit and even now I recall how, as soon as she had left, the eye rolling of male teachers would start and the slightly scornful grins of disrespect.
She was not so much fierce but overwhelming. She was large of stature and loud of voice. She was, I thought, what was called "a dragon" of a woman.
We were all afraid of her; I think possibly the men on the teaching staff were too.
But I recall something she'd do that makes me warm to her in retrospect - though at the time I thought it daft.
If there was a beautiful sunset just before the end of a school day, she would march all the girls in her section of the school, out to see the sunset. They would stand there and look at it for quite a long time. I don't know what she told them, couldn't hear, if she said anything at all. Maybe she thought that they'd get some religious-like feeling from watching the sun go slowly down.
So recently when I have been reading article after article, review upon review, about the Rothko exhibition at The Tate in London, reading how, being in a room full of his paintings, people seem to get a religious kind of experience from it - then I think of the headmistress and the sunsets.
Rothko painted those seemingly meaningless abstracts of long lengths of colour on top of each other..... like the sunset when there are those great stretches of red and grey and white filling the sky. Which, of course, are as seemingly meaningless as Rothko's.
Thank you Miss.... Sorry I've forgotten your name.

Prizes

George Osborne's having to give Peter Mandelson a Spectator prize a couple of days ago reminded me of when a man I knew, Dai G., was obliged to present a prize to a certain Gwyn C. who I also knew. Osborne and Mandelson had, of course, been good friends until the incident arising from their fraternisation on a Russian oligarch's yacht; after the incident they must have felt themselves to be enemies for life, yet here they were, in a newspaper picture, seeming to enjoy each others' company as Mandelson accepted his prize (for politician of the year or some such thing).
Dai G. and Gwyn C. had been very close friends for some years. Both were playwrights, successful in their own ways, Dai G. on radio, Gwyn C. in publishing plays for the amateur market.
Then something happened between them (I never discovered what) and they became bitter enemies. They never spoke to each other although they were often in the same company, for example at fairly regular meetings of The Welsh Guild of Playwrights.
Every year the Drama Association of Wales ran a play competition for one act plays. One year Dai G. was the adjudicator and Gwyn C. knew that if he entered the competition and Dai got to know it was he, then there was no way he would win. So he entered a play written in a style Dai G. would not recognise as Gwyn's. "Then," he told me, "I borrowed a typewriter so that Dai G. wouldn't recognise the type as mine."
The competition was done using pseudonyms so there was no way Dai G. could know who had entered.
Well, Gwyn won.
Dai G. told me: "I told the secretary of the Drama Association the winner, she wrote the pseudonym down and looked up the winner's name." She told him it was Gwyn C. "Can I change my mind about the winner?" he asked. She shook her head and said "Certainly not."
So there was Dai G. (like George Osborne)having to make a short speech congratulating Gwyn C. on being the year's winner and there was Gwyn C. (like Peter Mandelson) accepting the £50 prize money with very great joy.
They never spoke to each other again.

Fish

"The sting-ray was about six feet from wing-tip to wing-tip, and perhaps ten feet long from the blunt wedge of its nose to the end of its deadly tail. It was dark grey with that violet tinge that is so often a danger signal in the underwater world. When it rose from the pale golden sand and swam a little distance it was as if a black towel was being waved through the water."
Hemingway perhaps?
The next line defines it:
"James Bond, his hands along his flanks, and swimming with only a soft trudge of his fins followed the black shadow....."
I had never been fond of Bond novels (except "Goldfinger" which I thought exciting); then I read this short story, "The Hildebrand Rarity" and I was impressed. It's about diving with a harpoon gun.... (can't remember much about it except how stylish it was).
A friend of mine hired such a gun when he was abroad on holiday but he got to be quite unhappy about using it. He told me "you get close to a fish, it doesn't move but looks at you sort of politely, enquiringly; then you shoot it and you feel sorry you did."
He gave it up. But not before he'd killed a rather large squid (one of those squids that get larger every time the story is told). He dragged it onto the beach but didn't know what to do with it until he was approached by a couple of blokes, fishermen types, who offered him a good payment for it if he didn't want it. Well, he didn't know how to cook squid so he sold it. Then he took the gun back to the place he'd hired it from and never shot another fish - or a squid - again.
I know what he meant by the inquisitive, innocent, trusting look of fish in South of France waters. I never used a gun or anything else of a lethal nature but just swam about with them. Until, one day, something stung me: a jelly fish.
Not a pleasant thing to happen. If I'd had a harpoon gun then I'd have...... Well, maybe.

Gin

A letter from a 79 year old man in The Times today describes how he took the advice of his dentist many years ago to "increase substantially the ratio of gin to tonic" in his favourite drink because the tonic with its sugar content was ruining his teeth; he said he still has a good set of teeth.
The medicinal use of gin was always recommended by a certain doctor I vaguely knew: he would tell young mothers with crying babies to pour a glass of gin, rub some of the gin on the baby's gums and then "drink the rest".
One day this same doctor drove to Cambridge from Cardiff to visit his son, his daughter-in-law and their young baby boy of about two years of age. When he got there he was worn out and asked his son for a drink. The son dutifully poured his father his usual tipple - a large (very large) gin with a little drop of water. The doctor took a sip and put it on a side table nearby.
His son said they'd been having terrible trouble with the baby because he wouldn't sleep well, crying at night - it was wearing them both down.
When the doctor came to pick up his gin, the glass was empty and there, standing nearby was the baby boy.
The doctor said nothing and after a while they all went to bed.
The following morning the doctor's son came downstairs beaming with joy: "That's the best night's sleep we've had for ages," he said.
The boy had slept soundly all night.
The doctor never told them why.

Ian Fleming

I have never been a fan of James bond novels or films, though the first film to have Daniel Craig as Bond was rather good. He is believeable as a human being; the others were not. Yet, while I'm reading the latest Bond book, a collection of short stories with the title "Quondam of Solace" (same title as the new film), I keep imagining Bond not as Daniel Craig but as Roger Moore, someone I didn't like at all in his Bond films.
I don't know how they were able to produce a whole film from the story with the title "Quondam of Solace" because it hardly has Bond in it - he spends the whole short story listening to someone tell him about a certain man who married an air hostess and how the marriage broke up.... and so on. Bond in not involved in any physical action, he just sits and listens.
I shall see what they have done with the story when I see the film soon.
Raymond Chandler was a fan of Ian Fleming. I was, at first, surprised to hear this since Chandler is such a fine writer and Ian Fleming, I always thought, was an inferior writer of pulp fiction.
I was wrong. Fleming is a very good writer indeed. He has a way with phrases that make them almost poetic in the sense that you feel he has hit the spot with ease and style. There is, of course, a nasty brutal aspect to Bond that is not in the character of Raymond Chandler's Marlowe and this comes out occasionaly so strongly that you wonder why you find the man so fascinating. But Fleming tells a very good short story, a thing he may be better at than novel writing, like Maupassant.

Upside down?

Some years back we went to see the Jackson Pollock exhibition at The Tate in London. The most impressive aspect of it to me was the way it was set up and the way it was described (commentary through ear-pieces). It was presented with his early work first, then you moved around the rooms listening to the explanations and history until you came, gradually, to the final works, the ones he is most famous for - the drip and throw stuff.
The commentary pointed out the devopment of the style at the same time as the personality of the painter seemed to change - from quite normal to, really, a psychiatric case at the end. The paintings sort of illustrated his decline towards madness.
We bought a reproduction for a few pounds and took it home to hang it on the wall where we have some other reproductions of famous paintings. But we didn't know which way up it was to go. I can't remember how we decided but eventually we put it long way up.
One of these days I shall find out if this was right.
In the meantime I discover, from an article in The Telegraph today, that there is some dispute going on in "artistic circles" as to whether some of the Rothko's at The Tate now on show have been hung correctly.
No one seems to know.
Both these painters, it seems to me, are more interesting in the study of their personalities than in the depth of their presentation of their ideas. Ideas they certainly do have but I wonder if these ideas, which are so deep, if not perhaps the products of psychotic minds, that their pictorial representation cannot be achieved satisfactorilly.
I hope to go to the Rothko some time. I am told it is like having a religious experience. Well, good - I haven't had one of those for years.

The War

I knew Bill for about twenty years but only twice did he mention the Second World War. He was a young lieutenant then, in Europe after the invasion.
He said his troup was marching through a town which had been liberated by the Americans when a crowd came out to greet them. "They kept cheering and shouting 'It's the British, the British are coming'." Apparently they had had enough of the Yanks and were so pleased to see the British that, Bill said, it was embarrassing.
When they arrived at their headquarters, still occupied by some Americans, he and a Major opened a door of a room to discover a young American soldier in bed with two women, one each side of him. "Hi, Guys," he said cheerily.
His other story had to do with a Major or Colonel who was giving Bill and another young lietenant their orders. "See that hill over there? Well, you have to take your platoons onto the that hill and stay there until...."
"Hold it there Sir," said Bill's companion. "No need to say any more, Sir - I've read the book."
And they all laughed.
Don't say there's no such thing as dry, British humour which can reveal itself in the most desperate of circumstances.
The phrase "The British are coming," reminds me of an American composer of popular songs who one day was boasting to fellow practitioners of the art that he could write a love song if he were given any phrase you liked. So one of the group said: "OK, how about 'The Russians are coming?' " The composer thought for a while, then his eyes lit up and he said "The Russians are Coming, The Russians are Coming, so let's make love tonight."

She Wore a Yellow Ribbon

Years ago when there were many cinemas in South Wales, a lot owned by people not by organisations like Odeon, they used to have showings of new films for these owners, called Trade Shows. Sometimes I'd be lucky enough to get tickets for these films. I can't recall how I did this but it usually had to do with knowing someone who knew someone who knew the owner or manager of one of the valley cinemas - or, as we often did, by standing outside the cinema when a Trade Show was about to start and asking if we could go in with a person who was about himself to go in - a ticket could be used for two people. That is begging, in a way. Usually these trade people would say yes so you could see one of the latest releases before it was distributed to the general public - for free!
There are only two films I recall seeing at a Trade Show: a film with Jerry Lewis which was dreadful, and "She Wore a Yellow Ribbon" which was marvellous.
I went with my brother, older than me by four years. How we got tickets I don't know though I do know it wouldn't have been by begging (he wouldn't have done that sort of thing).
This afternoon I caught on TV the ending of "Fort Bravo" which was the prequel to "Yellow Ribbon", the first in the series John Ford made concerning the career of a certain officer in the American army played by John Wayne. What a wonderful film it is: great performances by Henry Fonda and Wayne, with Victor McClaglen bursting the seams of his uniform with cheery Oirish vitality.
This film is in black and white, "Yellow Ribbon" is in glorious technicolour.
As we came out of the dark cinema into the bright morning sun my brother stopped, turned to me and said: "What a marvellous film that was."
So it was. Is.
Apart from when we were boys I think that is the only film I ever saw with him in a cinema. We didn't always like the same things (though I do recall that we both loved the violin concertos of Sibelius and Elgar and the black and white versions of the Shakespeare history plays on TV) but on this occasion we found something we both liked enormously.

In Court

When I was a student a friend of mine was arrested and his case came up a few weeks later. "Rusty" (he had red hair!), with some friends of his, had broken into the Students' Union building - I can't recall why - but probably looking for a few more drinks. Someone heard them and phoned the police. When the police approached the group Rusty pulled out from his pocket a water pistol and shot water into the policeman's face.
We (Rusty's other friends, the unnarrested ones) all turned up to his trial and, lo and behold, he got off with a caution.
The case didn't last long so we stayed on to see the next case which was a bloke who had been caught breaking into a shop. The policeman who had arrested him stood facing the crook's lawyer who said: "Officer, you say that, in arresting my client, you used your truncheon." "Yes, I did." "Tell me, constable, have you used a truncheon before?" "Never," said the copper proudly.
"I see," said the defence council, "untrained in the use of a truncheon."
I wondered: do they give such training? If so, on dummies? Or volunteers? They should have used Rusty - that head of red hair would have taken all the blows like a sponge.

Little Dorrit

Am I the only person in the land to think that the BBC production of "Little Dorrit" is pretty awful?
The praise it's receiving from TV pundits is lavish to the extent that I'm beginning to think I'm missing something. OK, the acting is excellent, the settings well presented, the story unfolds in an almost acceptably dramatic way but it's all so slow and tedious and un-literary. It is Dickens in the sense that it has his eccentric characters on display but the trouble is here that practically everyone is eccentric. And the names they have!
In the book one tends to accept these characters because they are basically funny; but here they are no fun, they are simply eccentrically daft.
And the story is so contrived and dull. And the two main characters, Little Dorrit and the male lead, Clenham, so plainly formulations of what Dickens believes are "good people".
I think it a disaster and I must put the blame mostly on the shoulders of the adapter, Andrew Davies.
Some of the TV critics have drawn attention to the contemporary significance of the theme: people in dept in the credit crunch. But that doesn't make the story credible - it's simply an excuse for the play's basic lack of credibilty.
"Mad Men", repeated now on BBC4 is a masterpiece in comparision and that has no contemporary significance at all, except that it deals with people under various stresses as they try to make meaning of their lives. Something that's always with us.

Bingo

Someone writing in The Spectator recently mentioned a new kind of bingo game - "wine bingo". A crowd get together at someone's house and do a wine tasting..... I'm afraid I didn't understand the game so it's pointless my trying to explain it; also, it seemed utterly dull and boring and not the sort of game I'd like to take part in (see who could drink the fastest tumbler of wine might be more in my line).
But the word "bingo" brought to mind a wedding reception I went to years ago. An aquaintance of mine, big drinker, had married a nurse, big drinker, and the reception was in a pub. I don't recall there being much food available but there were plenty of drinks and the sort of people invited were all people who could"put it away", as they say.
There were no speeches, just hard drinking.... Then someone got on a loud speaker and announced that the bingo session was about to commence.
"Bingo!" exclaimed my drunken friend, the groom. "We don't want this."
So he started making a fuss, complaining that he had come here to celebrate his wedding not to play ******* bingo.
"What are you going to do?" my wife asked me.
"Play bingo, of course," I said. "Haven't had a game of bingo for years."
So we were all presented with cards and play commenced. Except that the groom wasn't going to let this happpen. He bellowed things at the caller, fell over chairs, squared up to a harmless looking bloke who tried to come to his assistance and was so unpleasant that.... Well, the fact is he was thrown out.
It is the only time in my life that I have seen someone thrown out of their own wedding party.
But no one cared much. We were all heads down looking for the full house. I'm not sure but I do have the singular feeling that his newly aquired wife was there in the crowd, head down.... No, it's just wishful thinking.

It's All in the Game

You don't see many novels on the shelves of bookshops these days by Sinclair Lewis, though, if there is one, it will probably be "Main Street". It was his most famous novel but I found it difficult to read; it was one of those books (like "Women in Love" by D.H.Lawrence) that you put down and think "I won't pick it up again" but you do. It's about a "modern" woman (20's or 30's America) who marries a small town doctor and lives in a place with small town values. She revolts against her dreadfully dull life..... It's not a novel I'll read again - though now I've said something about it I must say I do have a desire to re-try it. His other novels like "Babbitt" or "Kingsblood Royal" or "Cass Timberlaine" or the wonderful "Elmer Gantry" I'm sure I could read again and enjoy them again.
But one of his novels I once tried to read I gave up on. It bored me. It was "The Man who Knew Coolidge". Coolidge was president of the US in the 20's and a duller man there never was - or, at least, that was the impression I got from Sinclair Lewis's novel. Now I have come across his name associated indirectly with a very sweet love song called "It's All in the Game".
The words of this song were written by Carl Sigman in the 50's but he used a tune that had been written in the 20's or earlier by a man named Charles Gates Dawes. This was the only tune Dawes wrote that was published. He didn't try to get it published but a friend did it for him. It was popular then, called simply "Melody in A Sharp" and was a favourite of the famous virtuoso violinist Frtiz Kreisler.
The connection with Coolidge is that Charles Gates Dawes became his Vice President.
They disliked each other intensely; perhaps a bit more than Dawes disliked hearing his own tune played over and over - like Elgar perhaps who didn't much like his Pomp and Circumstance March No.1, especially with those words!
Dawes never lived to hear the tune with words, so he never could enjoy its success - No.1 in the charts in a version by Tommy Edwards (he does it on Youtube), a favourite of Nat King Cole and Dinah Shore; later sung by Cliff Richard.
If Coolidge was a dullard, Dawes certainly wasn't. Not only was he a successful banker and writer of learned tomes on financial matters and Vice P:resident of the United States, he also won the Nobel Prize for Peace.
Must get the book again by Sinclair Lewis and see if Charles Gates Dawes is a character in it.

Trevor Jones

When I was young I went to a concert in Blackwood's Miners' Institute; the star of the show was Trevor Jones, tenor. I can find only one reference to his name and that is that he appeared in the film "The Great Mr, Handel" as "tenor". So, I assume he sang in the film but did no acting.
I saw that film, made in 1942, and enjoyed it: it had a lot of Handel's music in it of course and it had a striking performance from Wilfred Lawson as the great composer - a rather argumentative man who spoke with a strong German accent (much different from the part Lawson played in the film "Pygmalion" in which he played the dustman, the heroine's father).
I would very much like to see that film again, see if is any good or see if it merits the one star given it in the film reference website I found it on.
I had seen Trevor Jones's name some ago as one of the singers on an old record of Ivor Novello's songs, I actually had the record but.... where it has gone I don't know.
At the concert in Blackwood I remember Trevor Jones singing only one song, though he must have sung many; it was from an operetta I believe and was the song of a dwarf or deformed man with a "knap-sack"(?) on his back. I doubt if that song will ever be heard again or maybe it will be delivered in a new politically correct, acceptable form - man of smallish build with an attractive protruberance attached naturally to his rear, high up.
He was a fine tenor but now, it seems, forgotten.

Comedians

A few people have recently shown an interest in a one-man play of mine called "I'm on a Train", a play about a man using a mobile phone and how he.... but it'll take too long to tell - send to see the play instead - FREE by e mail.
When I wrote it, a couple of years ago, I thought it would be an ideal piece for Seinfeld. Then, pondering on it a bit more, I thought "No, not Seinfeld but George!" Though the man who plays George is an actor, he is also a comic. Sometimes you can be one and not the other: a comedian can act of course but usually he plays the comic character he has developed over the years; and an actor, good as he may be at entering into the personality of a character, may not be able to be a comedian - he may not get a laugh.
And this might apply to my play "I'm on a Train" more than to many others. I think the play needs a comedian to have success with it because if he doesn't get a laugh pretty well straight off he could, as they say in theatre-land "die a death".
An actor with a Welsh theatre comapny a long time ago said to me one day (or, rather, one evening in the bar) "You know? You've never given me a good review." I can't remember how I flannelled my way out of that accusation but it was true. Not that I'd ever given him a bad one. Probably he felt that he was, sort of, invisible to me.
This same actor in a sort of college show, did a stand-up comedian act and failed dismally though he did elicit from the studentish audience the sort of hollow laughter that might have been polite but was probably a result of them wanting to have a good time and, damn it all, "we're going to laugh even if it isn't very funny."
In a review afterwards I think I wrote something about comedians having to grow over the years, having to bear the "slings and arrows of outrageous fortune" in such places as Glasgow where, as one comedian put it "they didn't leave a turn un-stoned." You can, of course, stand up and imitate a comedian but I think you'll be lucky if anyone laughs.
Now, today, I've had an e mail from someone who'd like to read the play "I'm on a Train" and I wonder if I should tell him that if he's not a comedian or if he has never known what it is to die on stage then probably he'd be better off not doing it.
But I think I'll let him make his own mind up about it.
Incidentally, the actor I mentioned who'd never received a good review from me went on to greater things; the next time I met him he said he'd just landed a part in a TV production of Emlyn Williams's "The Corn is Green" - the part of the young man who is on his way to Oxford, the one who is tutored by the local teacher. "Well done," I said. "And who's playing the part of the teacher?"
"Katherine Hepburn," he said.