Gags and Bans

In last week's Spectator, Quentin Letts wrote a list of "What I Really, Really Want" for Christmas. Some of these were: "A referendum on Britain's future in Europe"; "A new shadow chancellor - the old one doesn't really work any more"; "Freedom for the Edinburgh pandas"; "A reduction in the number of pop songs on Desert Island Discs" - and so on.
Well, I have a list of my 10 wishes under the heading "What I'd like to gag or ban":
1. Fundamentalists of all faiths.
2. David Cameron's "We're all in this together" when simply we are not: some are in it deeper than others and some are not in it at all.
3. Modern poets/artists/composers.
4. Lists of best ever films, especially those that don't include "Shane", "City Lights", "Double Indemnity" and "To Be or Not To Be" (Jack Benny version).
5. The Archbishop of Canterbury's beard and eyebrows. They give him too much gravitas for what he usually has to say.
6. Politicians who keep telling us that we are drinking/eating too much.
7. MEP's. Can someone tell me what they do over there - apart from dine out at the best restaurants?
8. Cliff Richard.
9. Muslims who say "Islam is a peaceful religion". You could have fooled me, mate.
10. Muslims who say "I will not fight in a war against my brother Muslims". They're fighting each other all the time, mate.
10. Tracey Emin, Damien Hirst, Emma Thomson. I have good reasons for the first two, none for the last - I just can't stand her.

Billy Conn

I had heard of the boxer Billy Conn from the film "On the Waterfront" when Marlon Brandoe, in the famous taxi scene, tells his brother "it was you, Charlie, it was you.... I could have been another Billy Conn...." I realise now that what he meant was "I could have been another white contender for champion heavyweight of the world" as Billy Conn was.
Sitting in the doctor's surgery this morning I picked up a Reader's Digest booklet and came to an article written by Billy Conn on the death of his good friend and opponent in the ring, Joe Louis. Then I looked at the front of the booklet; it was dated 1983 - which brought to mind Tommy Cooper's joke about just having come from his dentist, having read something there, and saying: "Isn't it terrible news about the Titanic?"
Billy Conn writes (well) about his fight with Joe Louis, how he was winning on points, how his trainer was shouting at him, urging him to avoid Joe's fists, that all he had to do was get through the next two rounds and he would win. Not Billy Conn. Billy wanted to knock Louis out so he went at him swining blows. It was then that Louis came up with two left hooks and a right hand that sent Conn to the canvas and instant, temporary oblivian. They did fight again, and again Conn was floored and lost.
Yet he loved Joe Louis: the most sensitive guy, the most humble, the nicest person anyone could meet. They became firm friends and here was Billy Conn at his friend's funeral.
Wonderful stuff though he didn't mention Tommy Farr's bout with Joe Louis, remembered in South Wales to this day: "Tommy should have won." I recall Tommy Farr telling a TV commentator about his fight with Louis; he said "he hit me here on the forehead with a blow that was like a sledge hammer". You could see in Farr's face the sort of admiration for the man that was in Billy Conn's encomium.

Giants

According to a writer in The Daily Telegraph today there is a queer sort of dispute going on in Ireland over the bones of a man named Charles Byrne who was a giant: more than eight feet tall. His skeleton is on display at the Hunterian Museum of the Royal College of Surgery. The question is, should it be displayed at all since his wish was that his body should be buried at sea in a lead box? Thomas Muinzer, a legal academic from Belfast says "it is now time to honour Byrne's last wish and make retrospective amends for the continued unseemly display which satisfies morbid curiosity without any intellectual or scientific purpose".
I have no views on this except to say that I don't believe Byrne himself feels anything or cares about what happens to his skeleton. But there are others who like to sanctify bones of certain famous people, particularly if they were themselves exceedingly religious.
The man-giant recalled to mind a giant mentioned in a Dickens novel.
Mr Vuffin runs a circus with a giant, a lady with no arms or legs and a man, named Sweet William, who could put small lozenges into his eyes and bring them out of his mouth.
Vuffin is having a chat with a man named Short in a pub.
"How's the giant?" said Short when they all sat smoking round the fire.
"Rather weak upon the legs," returned Vuffin. "I begin to be afraid he's going at the knees
"That's a bad oulook," said Short. "What becomes of old giants?" he asked.
"They're usually kept in caravans to wait upon the dwarfs," said Mr Vuffin.
Isn't it amazing how Dickens can imbue a thoroughly sad state of affairs with a lightness of empathetic touch that lifts the spirits and makes the baleful characters human beings?

Vaclav Havel

Roger Scruton, writing on Vaclav Havel in The Times today, noted this: "In his penetrating essay on 'The Power of the Powerless' Havel shows how totalitarianism so enters the soul of its victims that it no longer needs force to maintain itself. People forge their own chains and display them obediently to their masters. They live within the lie, as things are comfortable there and nobody intrudes save liars, whose motives you share. It is not violence or oppression that holds the facade in place, but ideology, which confiscates the very language with which people might describe things as they are."
I cannot think of a better description of North Korea than that. One just had to witness the scenes at the death of the leader, Kim Jong-il, today on TV to realise what sort of a country that is; it is the sort of totalitarian country that is depicted by Havel in his essay. You could see that the people have been so brainwashed that they believe they are living in good times not in cloud cukoo land.
When a picture of North and South Korea is taken from space, the South is all lights giving the impression that, even in the night, people are free to enjoy themselves while in the North there are no lights at all, all is in darkness. They cannot afford to turn on the lights - except at the place where the leader lives.
I am not so sure that Havel is right when he says that "it is not violence or oppression that holds the facade in place" because the North Korean army looks to me a formidable force which frightens me let alone someone close to them, marching in perfect step very like those in the Nazi party and army, goose-stepping along with the crowd cheering.
But he is right in his overall view: there is no chance of a sort of Arab Spring there because the people there think that that is how human life is lived, they don't know that there is another kind.

Emlyn Williams

A long time ago I had a quite long article about Gwyn Thomas published in The Anglo-Welsh Review. I was paid £5 for it but I didn't very much care that the pay was little because getting published there was its own reward - it was considered an honour. I tried to think of another author I could write about; wasn't interested in many who wrote in Wales, didn't read much Anglo-Welsh literature.... Then I thought "Emlyn Williams", I'd write about him. I liked some of his plays; I enjoyed both volumes of his autobiography, "George" about his young life and "Emlyn" about his life particularly on the stage in The West End. I approached the editor who liked the idea and so got working on the article. But I found I couldn't write anything sensible, anything that carried any weight; I couldn't find anything in his works that told me anything about the literary quality of his work, only the autobiographical content of it. I think that when he wrote his plays he wrote about some aspect of his own life. If I were to attempt such an article now I think that autobiographical line might work well but it wasn't the sort of thing the Anglo-Welsh Review wanted I believed. So I didn't write an article; I told the editor why and we left it at that. I never wrote another article for the journal and soon after the editor retired.
I have just bought a copy of Emlyn Williams's "George" and started to read it again. I wish I had read it then more closely because it is a fine book, amusing and detailed about his close family and there is evidently a great affectionate tone to it. He was known as George when he was young but took his second name as his writing name Emlyn.
The second autobiograhy, Emlyn is as good if not better than the first; it is one of those books that you feel takes you behind the scenes of theatrical life in London in the thirtees and forties more truly that any other book.
I reviewed it for the TLS.

Ken Russell

When I heard that Ken Russell had died the first question that came to mind was "Who killed him?" While once he had been the darling of the arts department of the BBC under Huw Weldon, who seems to have given him a free hand to do what he liked, he later gravitated to feature films like "The Devils", "Women in Love", "the Boy Friend" etc. Are any of them any good? "Women in Love", an adaptation of the novel by D.H.Lawrence, was passably good and contained, sensationally, a wrestling match between Oliver Reed and Alan Bates, both naked; otherwise it was a slow, rather boring film - much like the book (Hemingway said it was one of those books that you tell yourself you won't read any more of at the end of a page but for some reason you have to come back to - I had a similar experience with it).
Everything with Russell was "in-yer-face"; there was no depth, just sensational images that were force-fed you.
I have just read David Thomson on Ken Russell and he doesn't have much good to say about him. Nor do I. Though I do have something in common with him: we both tackled the subject of the rector of Stiffkey, he in a short film (not mentioned in Thomson's "Biography of Films") me in a short play (online at Lazy Bees).
The once famous rector of Stiffkey was a prize subject of the "Gutter Press" of the 1930's. While he was supposed to be tending to his flock of parishioners in the small town of Stiffkey, he spent most of his week in London "saving prostitutes" from sin.
I picture him, in my play, in limbo where he has to try to persuade two spirits that he deserves to go to heaven rather than the other place. Ken Russell didn't have him in his film at all but used a sort of Citizen Kane device, using flashbacks of a woman reporter trying to discover what it was that drove the rector to his actions and, eventually, drove the church of England to unfrock him.
I don't know if the film has survived; haven't heard of it being shown anywhere and no, I don't want to see it. The next film he said he was going to make was to be "The Fall of the Louse of Usher". Yes, that's right, "Louse".
After being kicked out of the church the rector got a job preaching, like Daniel, in a lion's den at a circus. A lion named Freddy attacked him and killed him.

Gentlemen

When I was a schoolboy of age about 10, the headmaster appeared in the classroom one day to speak to the teacher; he turned to the class and asked us did we know what a gentleman was. I think a few wiseacres put their hands up and said things like "good, sir" and "kind, sir" and "gentle, sir". Good said the headmaster: you can, he said, break the word into two parts, "Gentle and man", a gentle man or a gentleman.
Why has this memory come to mind recently? Well, there have been a series of letters in The Times commenting on what the writers believe to be qualities found in gentlemen. One said "a gentleman is someone who is treated as such" which is, I suppose, rather witty but not definitive. Another wrote: "A gentkleman never gives offence unintentionally" which is rather good.
I remember thinking about the headmaster's question and believing I didn't know any gentlemen. I didn't think my father was then though now I realise he was; that is, he never thought badly about most people - except the Australian test team - he was generally kind and thoughful towards people and so on. I think I had the idea that a gentleman would have to be rich and a toff (like David Cameron who, I read, can be rude so that cuts him out). But a lot of toffs are not gentlemen; indeed, it may actually be the case that being a toff instantly diminishes your gentlemanly status because isn't a toff someone who shows a certain measure of disdain for those who are not toffs? Yes is the answer to that. Yet, though Cameron is evidently a toff and not a gentleman, I think that Boris Johnson is a toff and possibly is a gentleman.
Being polite to ladies and old people was once, I think, considered to be gentlemanly behaviour. But feminism made some "ladies" into dragons and there's not much politeness these days to old people (I should know from experience); they rather get in the wayand they make too many demands on younger people.
So how does the Collins dictionary define "gentleman""? Quote: "A man of good birth; one who, without a title, bears a coat of arms; one above the trading classes" ..... When was this dictionary written? In the 18th Century or earlier? .... Hah this is more like it: "A man of refined manners; a man of good feeling and instincts, courteous and honourable." That's better.
Not at all like the definition Freddy Trueman gave: "A gentleman is someone who gets out of the bath to use the lavatory."

Cricket

I was a young teacher; someone on the staff said to me: "We're short for the cricket team on Saturday; fancy a game?" "Sure," I said. He told me where and I turned up thinking it would be an ordinary affair, throw the ball about sort of thing, have a laugh sort of thing. Not on your nelly. They were all in white, I was in dark trousers, shirt and pullover; I was wearing daps. There was a hole in one of the toes.
I fielded on the boundary, touched the ball twice maybe; went in for tea; came out to bat number 11. The first ball hit me on the toe - the one poking out from the hole. The second ball clean bowled me ("it was an unplayable ball").
What a game! No, I don't mean just that one, I mean all cricket games. It must be the only game in which you can be out first ball and have no opportunity to have a second go. You walk the long walk out to the crease, bang goes your wicket and then you have the long walk back.
I read an article in The Spectator last week about cricket and suicide; it seems there are more suicides of cricketers than in any other sport. I thnk he mentioned 80. Last week another ex-cricketer took his own life. The article also mentioned Gimlett of Somerset. He killed himself after he'd retired from the game. I'm not surprised that there are many suicides in cricket: it's a crazy game; I'm sure it can drive you nuts; you stand around the place for five days or you bat a bit with someone bowling who is trying to decapitate you; you bowl a bit doing your best to maim the batsman. It's a mad, mad game I tell you.
The first professional game of cricket I saw was one between Glamorgan and Somerset at Weston-Super-Mare. Gimlett was playing. Big hitter. Strapping fellow. He tried to knock a hole through Wilf Wooler who was standing, intimidatingly, a few yards from him. Wooler caught the ball and Gimlett was out.
What a game!

Rugby

A long time ago I wrote a play called "Horseplay"; it won the Drama association of Wales play competition in 1980 but it was never performed. One of reasons given was that it had too many in the cast: "we'd have to pay everyone the basic pay even if they had a line or two...." etc. "Too Welshy" said a Bristol producer. So it laid in my drawer for many years until recently, when I re-wrote it with a cast not of 20 or so (mostly rugby players and camp followers) but with a cast of 4. And it was "published" on-line. And it was performed for the first time this month in Canada - I didn't pop across to see it.
The action of the play takes place in a rugby club where, on a night of celebration after winning a local derby game, a young woman from the rival club is assaulted and, so she says, gang-raped. Instantly the club's officials take action to protect the players, accuse the girl (who was a well known "skirt") of making up the story; in the coarse of the play the club secretary gets to believe the girl and urges her to take the rapists to court.
I couldn't help thinking of Tyndall and his problems down under (NZ that is not where you thought!). He has come in for a lot of stick over the incident when he appeared to be propositioning a young lady while seeming to be quite pissed. Fined £25000. Dropped from the team. I would have thought he would have suffered enough at the hands of the royal family but this on top seems to me bit extreme.
I thought the same when Andy Powell drove a golf cart up a motorway to get himself a packet of crisps or something. He was dropped from the Welsh team.
The thing is probably I lived my young life in a different age when there was a good deal more wry humour gained from the cavorting of rugby players. Of course there were no mobile phones then to capture for Youtube the goings-on of well known people caught, so to speak, with their pants down. But there wasn't the same interest in it all. It went on, as it were, behind closed doors. I found Andy Powell's antics highly amusing and, to a lesser extent, Tyndall's too. Some of the things that went on in my day.....
So my play is being done in Canada. This play has a gang rape in it, incidental music from Tom Jones singing "Delilah" with Welsh hymns too and it's being performed by schoolchildren in Quebec which is part of French-speaking Canada! I don't believe it. Or, as The Daily Mail often puts it: "you couldn't make it up."

War Songs

There were more good war songs written in WW1 than in WW2; not so much war songs as songs wriiten during the war, maybe about bravery and courage but usually light-hearted songs about keeping spirits up. The second world war produced more sentimental songs than the first with Vera Lynn crooning her ballads about the white cliffs of Dover and about seeing you again. The First World War had "Pack up your Troubles" and "There's a Long, Long Trail A-winding" and "Over There" (I like the Caruso version) and "It's a Long Way to Tipperary" and "Keep the Home Fires Burning" which Ivor Novello wrote before his mother could get her own song, "Keep the Flags A-Flying", onto the market place - he didn't fear the competition so much as the shame he might have felt if she had put out for general consumption her god-awful piece of work.
But the best song of all, according to some experts (who are they I wonder?) is "Roses of Picardy". Melody by Haydn Woods who was a great light classical composer and words by Fred Weatherly. Fred who? Well, he was not a professional lyricist but wrote them in his spare time. Famous in his day but largely forgotten now except for two songs: the lyrics for "Roses of Picardy" and the more famous lyrics for The Londonderry Air the music of which was a traditional folk song. Other lyricists had written words for both songs but none were as acceptable to music publishers as those by Weatherley. "Roses of Picardy" was written I think for the sort of parlour tenor like Webster Booth whose diction was perfect and who pronounced R's clearly with rolling effect; but many other different types of singer sang the song from John McCormack to Buddy Greco.
Again, The Londoderry Air, or as it came to be known after Weatherley's lyrics were added, "Danny Boy", was also much recorded - I recall its being a song sung on the street in John Ford's Irish film "The Informer" no doubt Ford believing it to be a pure Irish air. Certainly sounds it; but actually Fred Weatherly didn't have an Irish drop of blood in him: he was a QC who lived and worked in the west of England.
But what a song "Roses of Picardy" is; so simple, so sweet, nothing sentimental about it, romantic yes, as romantic as anything the Second War came up with.
"Roses are shining in Picardy,
In the hush of the silvery dew,
Roses are flow'rin in Picardy
But there's never a rose like you,
And the roses will die with the summertime
And our paths may be far apart,
But there's one rose that dies not in Picardy,
'Tis the rose that I keep in my heart."

Contagion

It had quite good reviews, many four stars, some three stars but none, so far as I know, with two or less stars. Then Carol whats-her-name in The Times said the film "Contagion" weas terrifying and dull. She's usually spot on with her views but does she know anything about films I wondered?
It seems that she does because it was pretty dull. Not that it was badly made - it was made with considerable skill; you couldn't help admiring the construction of the film and the acting too was superb with some of the leading film stars of our day doing their stuff on screen (maybe they thought they were making a film that had a vital massage for us all in this day and age of terrors of all sorts, especially perhaps ones that have to with the environment and fatal bacteria scourges). What was wrong with the film then?
It told the story of a worldwide spread of a contagious disease due to a bacteria that was not known and for which there was no known remedy. It seemed to have everything right: the spread from person to person, the concerns by governments to find some means of stopping it spreading, the president and his staff taking to bunkers, people dying on the street and others rioting. But though it had everything right according to what might happen if it in fact happened in reality, it had nothing right in the way the story was told. Or, rather, stories. For there were a few stories in it of certain people who were affected in some ways by the disease but the stories didn't link and so they seemed not apt except that they were linked to the disease. I had the feeling that the makers had a plan: let's make it more human by introducing characters who suffer as a result of the contagion. These stories seemed tagged on rather than being intricate parts of the big story.
The director, Stephen Soderbergh, has a big reputation for making serious films; while he does make popular films like Oceans 11 and 12 (is there a 13?) I always had the idea that, like Orson Welles, hje made these in order to subsidise his more "sderious " films like "Contagion". Maybe I was wrong. But I can't say I like any of his "serious" films. They seem to me to lack an ingredient that should be part of all mature, satisfying work, and that is heart.
The film, however, was spot on with its theme; only today I read about the evolvement of dangerous bacteria, especially in hospitals, that have become resistant to known antibiotics. The report was quite terrifying as Carol Whats-her-name said in reference to the film.

Le Carre

I tried once to read a John le Carre novel and failed to go further than 20 or so pages. I don't know why. The same reason, probably, I don't get on with Graham Greene's novels - except "The Comedians" which I liked enormously. I found his novel "Stamboul Train" enjoyable for about fifty pages until, inevitably I suppose, he introduced a character that was the devil incarnate. My favourite Greene story, a long one that may be called a novella, is "May we Borrow your husband". Maybe Greene and le Carre are similar writers in style as well as, sometimes, in content and maybe my aversion to le Carre stayed with me when I went to see the film "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy". I did not like it at all. The chief reason was that I simply didn't know what was going in, I just couldn't follow it. It kept going back to previous happenings without a break, so to speak, so that the drive forward of the narrative, if there was one, was all the time prevented. Flashbacks in my youth were frowned upon in films, actually booed sometimes; the screen would show wavey pictures and everyone would groan or shout insults or boo. Hitchcock used a flashback once in a not very good film called "Stage Fright"; it worked there because the murderer was telling what had happened and it was all a lie.
I looked up "Rotten Tomatoes", a website good for heaps of reviews of films: every reviewer bar one thought "Tinker, Tailor etc" was the best thing since sliced bread. One I agreed with; he too thought the film confusing and confused. Everyone said how good Gary Oldman was whereas I thought he walked, at a liesurely pace, through the film as if he were dreaming about something other than catching the Mole who turned out to be..... no, I won't tell you since you probably, like 90% of the world's population, will enjoy the film.
I believe you need to have read the book to make sense of the film and, as I said, I can't read Le Carre.

Drive

Now here's a film worth seeing: "Drive". It seems slow at times yet it drags you along excitedly, you are drawn into the spell of the chases and the violence. Is it excessively violent? In a review by Anthony Lane for The New Yorker he doesn't so much think it is excessive but that it takes your mind off the point of the action. He argues that the maiming of James Stewart in a western in which a villain shoots Stewart's hand so that he won't be able to do what he does well again i.e working the loand or shooting a gun with a fast draw. If the director had shown us the blood and gore when the bullet goes into the hand we would have that vicious act in mind whereas if, as he does, show only the painful response of Stewart's features we dwell not so much on the violence of the act but to what affect it has and will have to the character, that is, to the story as it unfolds. The violence in "Drive" is very much to the fore, presented in gory detail, blood everywhere, razors slicing arms etc. Horrible. Yet the film is terrific.
Basically it's a familiar tale about a man with no name meeting a family with a young son and becoming so attached to them that he wants to protect them from people who want to harm them. Can't help thinking of "Shane". He was man with almost no name, just one name. He came along from nowhere and with the ability to be as violent or, in this case, more violent, than those who wish to harm the family. In both cases you have a man with an attachment to no one who finds a family to love.
Anthony Lane is of course right: the violence is too blatant and takes away from the scenes any moralistic point. The only time in the film that a violent act is done but is not seen in close-up is when the hero, Driver, kicks a man to death in a lift. We hear it but we see only his back as he puts the boot in. This is an important scene because we not only see his back but, over his shoulder, we see the woman he is protecting drawing slowly away realising at last the nature of this man who has come to them as protecting agent. Or maybe angel.

John Ford

Many moons ago I wrote to Clive James disagreeing with a review he had written of a TV version, with Stanley Baker if memory serves me well, of "How Green was my Valley". I told him I thought it wasn't a patch on the film version directed by John Ford. Wonder upon wonders, he wrote back saying he was not as great a fan of Ford as evidently I was. Today he has written in his TV column for the weekend Telegraph a piece about "Donovan's Reef": "How does a movie get quite as bad as Donovan's Reef? Directed by John Ford, this horrible mess was made in 1963, at just about the time that all the bright young film critics were trying to get Ford hailed as infallible. No doubt he was an efficient technician but his view of the world was like some endless recruiting commercial for the US cavalry." He doesn't like John Wayne either: "I always loathed John Wayne."
Well, I am not going to write a spirited defence of John Ford because there are only a few of his hundreds of films that I like - and, I have to agree with Clive James here, "Donovan's Reef" ain't one of them. But there's "The Searchers" and there's "The Man who shot Liberty Valence" and there's "The Grapes of Wrath" just for starters. Do you need to admire Ford for all he did when these marvellous ones are worth lauding his talents for. And there are great scenes in most of his films from the pit disaster in "How Green was my Valley" to "The Horse Soldiers" to "Sergeant Rutledge".
As for John Wayne - how can you loathe him with his smile and his drawl and the way he walks: he's not so much an actor as a physical presence on the big screen that you can't help admiring - unless you are Clive James.
In the same article he wrote appreciatively of "Billy Connolly's Route 66".... now there's a man worth loathing.

Waitors

This morning in Sainsbury's I queued for a coffee; there was only one person in front of me but the waiter/coffee server, who was dark skinned, probably an Ethiopian, was so slow in everthing he did that when the woman in front of me said " pot of tea please and four lattes" I thought better of waiting and just sat down and re4ad the newspaper. Probably he was in training; there was no one there to help him and I did feel a little sorry for him but feeling sorry for him was not going to hasten the arrival of my beverage.
He remindedf me of those "darkies", as they were then called, who appeared in films in the late 30's and early 40's and who always appeared slow and rather daft. I recall one whose name I never knew, a servant to Bob Hope in two films one of which was "The Cat and the Canary" an excellent thriller/comedy; he spoke in a "Down-South" accent and did everything wrong so that Bob Hope could make fun of him. We in the audience laughed along with it all. You don't laugh now. It's not surprising that blacks in America (and here) are so sensitive to criticism or suggestions that they are somehow inferior when films like that made them appear stupid.
Times have changed and, in general, for the better.
I was reading David Thomson on the D.W.Griffith film "Birth of a Nation" in which blacks are treated contemtuously and cruelly; Griffith makes the Ku Klux Klan to be the heroes of his film. The film when it was made was very popular and, indeed, was graetly responsible for the uprising of the Klan so that they were rejuvenated into carrying out further lynches. Thomson believes it to be a horribly one-sided and prejudiced film but that it has qualities that make it fascinating. He concludes: "Yes, you should see this appalling film."
I doubt if even an art house or film society would dare show it these days.
I have just seen D.W.Griffiths's silent film "Orphans of the Storm" and that is terrific. I once showed a BFI copy of this film (abridged to half an hour) to a group of Technical College students in a Film Study class. When I asked, at the end of the year, which film or part of film they enjoyed most out of the many I showed them, they all said "Orphans of the Storm".

The NHS

Many moons ago, pre-NHS, if I wanted to have a ear syringed I'd pop to the doctor's and he'd do it there and then; might have to wait an hour or so but it would be done. Now?
Sunday morning I woke to find that my right ear was clogged with wax. I phoned my doctor's surgery on Monday.
"I have a blocked ear; can I get it syringed?"
"You'll have to put earex in it for five days before it can be syringed."
"I put some in yesterday; it's now Monday so can I have it done on Thursday?
"There are no nurses here on Thursdays."
"What about Friday then?"
"Let me see. No, none available I'm afraid."
"Listen, I've booked for a concert on Friday evening, French music, Ravel and Debussey. I'll only be able to hear it with one ear. Couldn't you slip me in somehow?"
"No."
"what can I do then?"
" Next Monday all right?"
"I suppose so."
"Monday at our other surgery at 10.50."
Later that day I went to the surgery to pick up a prescription. I thought might as well ask the girl behind the desk:
"Any chance of seeing a nurse on Friday this week?"
"Yes. 12.30."
"Great."
She wrote the day and time on a piece of paper for me.
Tuesday afternoon I happened to look at the paper. It said "Tuesday at 1.30pm."
I phoned the surgery.
"I came there yesterday and asked for an appointment with a nurse on Friday; she's given me one today at 1.30."
"That's gone."
"I know it's gone but it's not my fault - she booked it when I asked for Friday."
"There's nothing available on Friday."
"I know, I was told that Monday morning. But it's ok, I have an appointment at your other surgery on Monday to get a ear syringed."
"They don't do syringing there."
"What? But I booked an appointment."
"You booked with a new woman on the desk. The next you can have is next Wednesday."
"That's 10 days from the time I had the problem"
"Sorry."
"Ok, book it please."
Then I had a brainwave. I shall phone Spiral (used to be Bupa I believe) and pay for it.
"Spiral here."
"Can I have my ear syringed on Friday."
"Yes."
"Good. How much will it be?"
"Well you'll have to see a consultant first; it will be under £50."
Yeah, £49.50 I thought.
"No thanks."
Another brainwave. The University of Wales Hospital's ear department.
"I wonder if I could come there and have my ear syringed."
"Not unless your doctor has referred you."
Which would mean a wait of a couple of months, no doubt.
So, to the concert on Friday with one ear good and one bad. A few drinks are called for before the concert I think. Maybe a few afterwards too.
Some NHS this is!

Downton Abbey

I don't like it. That's a bit unfair since I have seen only twenty minutes or so of it; but "Downton Abbey" I decided, after only 20 minutes, wasn't for me. I sort of disapproved of it but I couldn't find words to express why. It had to do with the snobbery, the Upstairs/Downstairs feel of it, the Them and Us thing, the complacency and superiority of the ones who were well off and the regard for them by their underlings. I just felt it was a world that had gone and good riddance to it.
Of course it hasn't gone. There's the monarchy and the aristocracy and the hangers-on and the Oxbridge set and their rag balls and the boat race and the blues rugger match....
I wrote a short play some time ago about the rector of Stiffkey who became famous, or more famously, infamous as a result of spending the greater part of his week in London, instead of Stiffkey, helping prostitutes find a way to reform their lives. He became known as The Rector of Stiffkey (also as The Prostitutes Rector) and his fame was kept alive for some time by the sensational press coverage. I thought a trip to Stiffkey would be interesting. And it was because I met the present occupier of the Rectory, now a Vicarage. He was a pleasant guy; he wanted to chat about the infamous rector and the people of his parish who would not wish to have to live again the pain of his defrocking. In the course of the conversation the vicar told me how he was in a local shop one day buying something or other and when he turned to leave who should he come face to face with but Julian Fellowes. He mentioned this in a way that I knew he found exciting, as if he had met someone in the royal family or, maybe, a high-up in the church. I felt there was something about his telling me a certain boastfulness: he had met and spoken to Julian Fellowes.
In The Daily Mail recently A. N. Wilson wrote a scathing piece on Julian Fellowes and in the course of his article summed up what I could not myself put my finger on as regards Downton Abbey. He wrote: "Downton Abbey glorifies an ordering of society that was hateful in reality. While the real-life aristocracy of Edwardian England lived in grandeur and expected other people to wait on them and attend to all their needs, the great majority of British people lived without sanitation, education or comfort."

Two actors

Bill Nighy seems to be the darling of the critics. In a play by David Hare last week Bill Nighy played the part of a government official who is targeted for making a statement about the prime minister that could prove damning. Talk about playing the part smoothly! He wandered though the play like a man half asleep. Yet one TV critic wrote about how wonderful Nighy is and that when he, the critic, grows old he hoped he would grow old like Bill Nighy - old but young in character, old but still attractive to the ladies, old but with a good head of hair, old but able to wear a suit well. And so on. Nobody says how limited Nighy is; how he makes every part he plays into a Bill Nighy; how he languidly strolls around tiredly mouthing his lines as if he's afraid they might do some damage if he shouts them.
Compare him with Dominic West who was also recently in a play (serial, rather), The Hour, and who then appeared in a play (2 parter) about Fred West, the infamous murderer. In the first play Dominic West was your handsome, smooth, upper crust middle aged gentleman who had a beautiful wife but loved a female colleague. In the second he had transformed himself into a louse, a man with no morals but with a banter that made him almost likeable (something the Daily Mail complained about and they do have a point I suppose). Here was the Dominic West face but in two different guises: one, your cool ex-public school guy as handsome as Cary Grant; the other, a guy you might listen to but whose presence you'd get away from as fast as you could.
This was a masterly performance which Bill Nighy, likeable as he is, would not, could not play. I'm afraid that what he has become is a "character actor" capable of cameo roles while Dominic West is becoming something of a great actor.

TV Plays

There were two plays on TV this week: one was superb, the other was OK. You'd have thought maybe that the superb one would have been "Page 8" by Sir David Hare but no, this was the OK one; the superb one was "Field of Blood" (first episode only so far). Why was this? After all David Hare is one of our great living playwrights - so people keep telling us. His plays have become school text books. He has written some famous plays like... er... can't recall a single title. Then he is a "sir" - surely they don't throw those honours around like smarties at a kids party. Well on the strength of "Page 8" maybe they do because whie it was watchable, though tiresome, it was a play that depended on one's point of view about politics. In short, it was a play which pointed a finger of guilt at Tony Blair. The Left, playwrights like Pinter and Hare, journalists like Polly Toynbee and the rest cannot forgive Blair for two things: winning a few elections with a policy that had abandoned Clause 4; joining Bush in the warmongers saloon and invading Iraq. While Blair isn't mentioned in "Page 8" he's there in spirit and in body in the shape of the Prime Minister in the play played by Ralph Fiennes (a nasty piece of work if ever there was one). You should, I believe, try to be fair minded to both sides of an argument when you are a playwright; Hare is one-sided and so he's preaching to the already convinced.
The strange thing about the comparisions of "Page 8" with "Field of Blood" was that though one would have expected the Hare play to have the best dialogue, it turned out that the Scottish play set in Glasgow really sparkled with wit and humour and vibrancy. Hare's dialogue was almost sermon-like: people kept repeating what had just been said, there was no life in the words, can't recall a single memorable line. In the other play there were great lines like (about a fattish girl junior journalist) "she's no stranger to a macaroon".
Can't wait for the second episode.

Modern music

When I say "modern music" I don't mean music of today but music starting about 1900 - Strauss, Richard that is, not one of the waltz kings, Stravinski, Prokofiev, Shostakovich, Webern, Berg, Schonberg, Ruggles (never heard of him; well, he was an American composer who was deeply insulted when he discovered that a lot of people had turned up to hear one of his works!); and now, among this group of variably talented composers, I've discovered Oliver Messiaen. Of course I had heard of him and I actually went to a concert where a piece of music by him was played - can't say I liked it but it was tolerable enough to let me give him a second chance (as if cares, or would if he was still alive). So there's a concert in a few weeks time where a piece by Messiaen is to be played.
Now, I have to say I am getting a little tired of spending good money on concerts of "modern music" which send me away in a state of near anger. It wasn't the fault of The Welsh National Youth Orchestra that I came away from their concert a few weeks ago feeling peeved rather than uplifted. They played two big works: a tone poem by Liszt which was utterly boring and Prokofiev's Fifth Symphony which I used to like but now think is, at times, ugly.
I am surprised to discover that there are a couple of music critics who have the same aversion to certain pieces of music that I have. Michael Tanner of The Spectator says "Mahler 8 has long been a work I detest." So do I. Then there's Norman Lebrecht who dislikes Messiaen: "Messiaen lodges in my critical faculty like a bone in the throat: a composer of great consequence whom I could neither ingest nor ignore."
So off to the concert to hear a piece by Messiaen - give him a second chance! But there are pieces by Ravel (I like Ravel), Saint-Seans (I like him too) and Debussy (some of whose music I like). A cello concert by Saint-seans and La Mer by Debussy - which I love. Apparently he composed it when he was at Eastbourne. No, I don't believe it. Eastbourne isn't the sort of place that inspires creative processes I would have thought. But there you have it - there's no accounting for tastes.

Book to Film

John Sutherland, writing in The Times this week, had a headline "Can the film version ever outclass the book?" He seemed to think not. Of course his article linked to the film made and distributed this week called "One Day" based on the popular novel of the same title. The film didn't live up to the book (both sound pretty awful to me, a bit like "Love Story" maybe to which handkerchiefs galore were taken - I took one to stifle my laughter). He suggested that they hardly ever do though he did draw a comparision of this film with the quite recent film "An Eduaction" which was a more successful adaptation, though that was taken from a memoire rather than a novel.
Hitchcock felt that it worked best if the book was not a good one; he made the great horror film "Psycho" which was based on a quite ordinary novel. On Desert Island Discs some time back he said he was about to make "a gentle little horror film". Gentle, my foot. The book is gentle but the film is anything but.
There have been some good films made from some good books: "Shane" for one. The character of Shane in the film, played by Alan Ladd, is much different from the one in the book who is a harder guy altogether. But both versions pass the test of watchability/readability.
I think the film of "Gone with the Wind" is rather better than the book though, I have to say, I don't want to see it again. Nor do I wish to trudge through that long book again neither. "Double Indemnity" is a superb film and an excellent read. I was surprised that a lot of the dialogue in the film is not Chandler's but comes straight out of the novel by James M. Cain.
A few of his books became films and most were good: "The Postman always rings Twice" and "Mildred Pierce" in which Joan Crawford won an oscar were the most famous.
Sutherland mentions the two versions of "Brideshead Revisited": the ghastly one made in 2006 and the TV version of 1981. He says: "The main reason it didn't work was because 113 minutes wasn't enough time to wrap itself around the novel." I think the John Mortimor adaptation was the chief factor in that it used a great deal of the original novel's narrative by that great writer and ghastly human being, Evelyn Waugh. Maybe he'd have enjoyed the ghastly version!

Re-makes

There was a film on the TV in the bar of the hotel we were staying in. I didn't recognise it so I asked the barman; he said it was a remake of "Assault on Pricinct 13". He added: "Remakes aren't usually as good as the originals." Well, that very afternoon I had seen a sort of remake: that of "Singing in the Rain". No, not a film remake but a theatrical remake, a transcription I suppose it might be called. Not as good as the original? Actually it was as good. Though being a different medium one can't really compare them. What was so good about it was that it was pure theatre and it was fresh - a fresh take on a well-known and well-loved picture. It had all the songs, all the dance sequences, though of course, they changed certain routines to accomodate the strict space of the stage. But it also had differences: in the number "Moses supposes his toeses are roses..." instead of the voice teacher being amazed and a little horrified at the two dancers' antics as in the film, he got wound up in the joy of their response and joined in the dance. These small changes - though rather large ones when you think of the choreography that went into their creation - gave the musical a freshness that the film now, after many viewings, does not have. (It still has something this version couldn't rise to: Cyd Charisse).
We saw this at the Chichester Theatre Festival which runs for about half the year. It will surely transfer to London in due course. If it toured to Cardiff or somewhere near I'd see it again.
We also saw Terance Rattigan's "The Deep Blue Sea" the night before. Excellent. Rattigan has the knack of moving you emotionally with a gesture: the middle-aged woman's lover picks up a piece of paper at the end of Act 1 and slowly reads it to himself. You know what it is: she failed to commit suicide and he is reading the note she left for him. Until then he's been full of beans, happy, and he may be in love; now he is, by his face, a wreck of a man. Curtain.

Kill yourself

I was reading the back of a wine bottle today and wondered at how they are so politically correct that they don't advertise their product but play down its health defects. They tell you that if you are a woman you should drink only two to three glasses a day of this wine in the bottle and that if you are a man you should drink only three to four glasses a day. Otherwise, you get the impression, that it's going to kill you. The same sort of warning is written on the fronts of cigarette packets: "Smoking can seriously damage your health."
So, even the stuff they sell us is, according to the people who sell it, bad for you. Where's their morals? How can they be allowed to sell such dangerous stuff in a modern society which prides itself on its ethical values? Well, like the people who said about the Iraq war, "it's all about oil" (though they were wrong) this is all about making money and raising tax. An effort is made by governments to "make people healthy" so they promote these ludicrous methods of telling us that "wine is bad for you" and "smoking can kill you" so that they can feel good about things but at the same time they can sweep up a sackful lot of taxes in the process.
Of course there's always people who smoke a lot and will always do so who say something like "my father smoked all his life and never had an illness and lived to ninety two" and there are always people who say that drink is good for you and the more the better. At least they're direct and honest, But the government and, more surprisingly, the manufacturers will say one thing on the packet or bottle and take your money when you don't take their advice. I call that hypocricy which, according to Christ, was one the greatest of sins.
I was amused to read that Gerard Depardius was caught urinating on a plane since he had consumed a large quantity of wine (possibly from his own vineyard) and pleased to hear that he usually drinks about five bottles a day. Henry Whats-his-name, the cricket commentator, says he drinks at least two bottles per day and has always done so. Good for them I say because I too believe that three or four glasses oper day is far too little. Dr James Le Fanu in his book "How to live to Ninety" writes about the government limits : "there is no serious scientific basis for these recommendations which over the years have always been revised downwards. There seems little doubt that people can double this intake with no obvious untoward effect."
About smoking I'm not with the man whose father died at ninety two. Though I once smoked myself, I believe it's very bad for you. End of sermon.

Peter Hall

I'm getting to like Peter Hall. Never thought I would. Always thought him a bit smug. I have a memory of him standing outside the New Theatre in Cardiff, outside the stage door in fact: he is there looking smugly, I thought, at passers by on their way into the theatre to see the nastiest play I've ever seen: Pinter's "The Homecoming".
I picked up Hall's autobiography in the local library this morning; it was on a shelf of books for sale and since it was only 20 p I bought it thinking "well I won't be losing much if I just read the Intro". But it's quite fascinating. His childhood is interesting and entertaining. His father, the only one of his family then to date to have gone to a secondary school; his mother, with a furious temper but loving nature, given to speaking in cliches: "Better to be born lucky than rich"; "It'll all work out in the end; "a change is as good as a rest". Reminds me of my own mother! His father was a "miserably paid clerk in the goods depot at Bury St Edmunds railway station". His mother did not work - in those days most mothers didn't, their work was housework.
I have never seen a production of a play by Peter Hall that I liked much. I saw his Shakespeare History plays on TV a long time ago and felt that an earlier production of them was better. I saw a production of his of "The Wild Goose" by Ibsen and didn't like it at all: he introduiced a comic element into it that was not at all suitable, I thought. It has one of my favourite characters in all of literature in this play: Gregers Werle, an idealist who brings a family to its knees with his honesty.
But I may now get to like Peter Hall the more I delve into his life through this well-weritten autobiography. You never know, I may like one of his productions one day. But not another "The Homecoming" please.

Cell 211

At last a film comes along which I like. "Cell 211" is a Spanish film about a prison, probably the toughest in Spain, full of the dregs of Spanish society. In the beginning along comes a nice guy who is about to become the new warden; the trouble is he arrives at the same time a riot breaks out. He is knocked out by a piece of falling masonry and the two guards with him put him in a cell, cell 211, for sakekeeping while they make a judicious and quick escape, knowing that if they stay they will be either taken as hostages or torn limb from limb by the mob of evil-eyed killers most of whom have nothing to lose, being lifers.
When he comes to his senses he realises he has to improvise and pretend to be a new prisoner. It works, after much humiliation and fear.
The film is gripping, tense and very violent; a man's ear is cut off, another is beaten to death, another has his throat cut.
On my way out a man said, speaking to an audience that wasn't there: "I've never seen anything like that, never, never."
He's right: you don't see many films like that these days that sort of grip you by the throat and take you on a journey of fear, fright, violence and some human warmth.
It took me back to "Brute Force" with Burt Lancaster, made in the early fifties. That too was an exceedingly violent film. But neither were films in which violence was there for its own sake, it was an essential part of the film's plot and theme. In both cases it was saying "here are men incarcerated in a sub-human institution with no hope except escape (in the Holywood film) or (a better deal on human rights) in this film.
Which made me think that Spanish prisons do not have the same schemes of rehabitulation that other European prisons have. Or conditions for those who have no hope of improvement in their well-being.
I have read recently that Norway is far ahead of most other European countries in their rehabitulation schemes - I don't think we need refer to any of the prisons in the Arab countries in comparision - they are hell holes it seems.
In Norway only 20% of released criminals go on to carry out further cries. In this country the percentage is 75%. Having seen "Cell 211" I guess the number must be nearer 90%.
Good film, strong message.

Beginnings

How many times have I recently read favourable reviews of films only to find that they are not very good. How is it that the film "Beginners" has been advertised as having had good reviews from many critics, mostly with four stars, when on seeing it it turns out to be pretty awful? OK, that's just my point of view. But it's happened so often in the past year. I have seen at least four films that have bored me almost to death.
"Beginners" had, I imagined, the basic idea for a splendid film: a man of seventy-five tells his thirty odd year old son that he is gay. Hah, I thought, we'll see him going through the agonies of his confession and the son's reaction will, of course, be shock and awe. Not a bit of it. Christopher Plummer as the father tells his son, Ewan Mcgregor, of his secret as though he's telling him he's given up going to the corner shop for bread and is now going to the supermarket instead. And, instead of the son reacting like a man who's just experienced a life-altering moment, all he does is smile, look a trifle put out and carries on living his usual heterosexual way.
This part of the story is not a slow development: it's told us in the first two minutes, so the rest of the film is, really, padding because the strong story line has gone and we are left with a sort of long summing up.
It is an utterly boring film. Before I went I thought "here's a film with a strong story line with two of the finest actors in films - can't fail".
I cannot understand how it came to be distributed at the popular cinema outlets; it's film for art houses; its a gay film, it's art. Well, I think that's what the director (and writer) imagined it would be - art. It brought back to mind some of those French films I used to see: faces looking into space; philosophy of the cracker-barrel variety; lots of useless talk; crises in the lives of middle-class adults etc.
I am always wary now of a film which has been advertised as "Critically acclaimed". Art, in other words. There are very few films which are works of art; I can count them on the fingers of one hand; they are mostly Swedish or French or Japanese, raraly American. And they are all, in my experience boring, utterly boring.

Dictionaries

Kingslay Amis , in his book "The King's English" (the King here being Kingsley not the one Fowler meant), he writes about the word "Dictionary": "It used to be said, probably with much truth, that every literate household possessed a Bible and a copy of "The Pilgrim's Progress. During the 19th century, the works of William Shakespeare and of Dickens would have added themselves to these and, towards the end, an English dictionary, one of the smaller ones. Nowadays, the shelf where these volumes would once have stood has been replaced by a longer one bearing video recordings. In particular, the habit of owning and often consulting a dictionary has largely died out among the general public."
I have a dictionary in most rooms of my house (and an encyclopaedia in two - though they are being used less and less as more an more use is made of the internet). I look up words in the dictionaries every day; one trouble is that I find myself looking up words which I have already looked up days - or even hours - before. This is partly due to my getting old with a memory that is slowly failing but more to do with the fact that there are certain words that, even after looking them up many times, I still cannot remember their meaning. This probably has to do with the fact that they do not fit in my vocabulary, they are never used, don't need them, don't like them, don't want them. "Solicitude" is one. "Solipsism" is another. "Trenchant" another. There are many others.
When I was doing my year of teacher training I was first put in a junior school with a middle-aged woman who was a good teacher but did not take a liking to me; I had the feeling I was an intruder. Luckily, the headmistress did like me so I knew I'd get a good report at the end of my two week session.
One day the teacher asked the children to look up a word in their dictionaries; they vigorously started turning pages, haphazardly I could see, looking for the word. This took some time because, to my amazement, they didn't know the alphabet.
This was, evidently, a perfect demonstration of that ridiculous idea that took flight then in theoretical educational circles that "discovering things for themselves" was the best method of learning. Kingsley would have been red-faced with the disgust if he had witnessed it.

Chess

I was never much of a chess player; I prefered trying to solve chess problems in newspapers and magazines. I was reasonably good at that. I was never good enough at playing chess to enter competitions with teams of players. But I have known a few people who have played competitively, my father for one when he was a young man. He had studied the game and told me he used some of the methods great chess players use. The name Kappa Blanca (not sure of the spelling) comes to mind. "I did a Kappa Blanca opening on him," he'd say. He used to play with my brother, a couple of years older than me. I can't remember who won those games. My father told me of a game he played against a man who ate nuts throughout, crunching them between his front teeth; probably done to annnoy his opponents.
A man I knew for a while some years ago was a schizophrenic - he had been hospitalised some years before I knew him. He was sort of recovered but I was wary of him; I knew him to be awkward if riled. I was told that when he was learning to drive one day, the driving instructor shouted at him and received in return a punch to the jaw. End of driving lesson.
He played chess in tournaments. He told me of a game in which he played when, he averred, his opponent cheated. He complained to the official and the incident was investigated. I'm afraid I never heard the result.
Went to see the film "Bobby Fischer against the World", a documentary which told the life of Bobby Fischer in some film and most still photos; there were filling scenes of people who knew him, played against him, helped him etc. It's been a highly rated film but I didn't like it much. It didn't tell me anything new about him - correction:I didn't know that he had won the American title of best player at the age of 14. It didn't have any chess in it - not surprising I suppose because the makers wouldn't have wanted to put people off who don't play the game. But it suffered from being not so much about a genius and more about an eccentric. It was hard to watch towards the end when Fischer went into decline. Strangely he was an anti-semite and an anti-American yet he was Jewish and American.
Here's my pschological analysis of Bobby Fischer: he got to hate himself because he could never satisfy his longings (maybe sexual) so he hated what he was - a Jew and an American.
I rest my case.

The Apprentice

Some of my friends don't watch The Apprentice. Most of them wouldn't watch it unless they were strapped to a chair and had their eyes prised open. To them Lord Alan Sugar is a capitalist of the worst kind: one who makes money for the sake of making money. Capitalists of a certain kind enjoy making money: it's their 'raison detr', their purpose of living.
I'm growing to like him. He is possibly the ugliest man on TV, maybe the ugliest in the country, but I can't hold that against him since I once read, and enjoyed, an essay by Chesterton titled "In Praise of Ugliness" and so have always had a soft spot for uglyiness: without ugliness there would be nothing to compare beauty with after all.
Who is going to win this year's game? That's what it is, a game. Though there is a serious element this time in that the winner will have £250 000 to play with - or rather, to start a business with. But who cares if a business is started or not; all we fans care about is who wins.
My money is on Tom because he is the only one with an inventive streak. While he doesn't know much history - "Columbus was English wasn't he?" (To which Hazel replied "Yes"). Then, didn't Tom say he was going to be greater than Dyson? I think he believed it. And I think Sugar.... sorry, Lord Sugar..... may believe it too.
Jim shot himself in the foot last week and the week before with his "Caracas" restaurant - Crackers might have been better. And he talks too much. He'd annoy Sugar so much - yeah Sugar - he'd be dropped at the first hurdle.
Hazel is too good to be true. She's perfect. But she's never run a company like the other one, the Chinese-looking girl whose name escapes me. The panel of "The Apprentice - You're Fired" picked her last week. Never. She'd drive me up the wall in two days - no, two minutes.
We shall see.

Guessing games

A young man on "Deal or no Deal" turned down an offer of £24000 and decided to guess instead. He had two boxes, one with £5 in it, the other with about £50000 in it. Guess what: he picked the wrong-un and went home with £5. Did he cry or try to throttle Noel Edmunds? No he did not. He said those immortal words that are said every week, if not every day, on "Deal or no Deal", "Well, I'm only here once".
I'm only here once to demonstrate that I am a complete idiot by guessing which box had £50000 in it and failing to find it.
So why did he guess instead of pocketing the £24000? Because he thought he was "on a role". He had just got rid of three blue numbers (all low in £'s) and thought he must be on a role and therefore the next box he picked would bound to be the big one.
You can't be on a role in a guessing game. You can be on a role in a game where you're using your brain to calculate how things will be.
Another TV game show that is often entertaining is "4 Rooms" where four dealers (in antiques, art.... everything that is saleable) make people, who come there with something to sell, an offer. Sometimes you wonder if the things brought in are of any value at all and then they turn out to be worth a lot: a stuffed tortoise brought a bit of cash for someone, a picture of Marilyn Monroe, drawn by Marilyn Monroe brought a bit of dough from one of the dealers. A stuffed polar bear came too and the four dealers stood beneath it and wondered at the size of the thing.
You wonder sometimes how some of these articles are brought to the studio. In a lorry? Part of a wall with Banksy's graffitee on it.
A guy turned up with 7000 photos of famous stars of old: film stars mostly I think. It's not as if they were by a particularly well-known photographer which might have given them some value - but just a pile of old photos?? So I was amazed when one of the dealers bought them for about £45000. I wasn't the only one who was surprised: the other three dealers would have offered, they said, £500, £600, £700 for them.
Perhaps he thought "well I'm only here once". But I think he saw something special amoung them because there was glint in his eyes, that dealer's glint you've always got to look out for when you're buying or selling something. The glint that says: "I know something that you don't know". As Raymond Chandler put it about a crook: "he had the innocent eyes of a used car salesman".

Music

No more Shostakovic for me thanks. His 5th Symphony was probably, for some, the highlight of the concert I went to a few weeks ago but the highlight for me was the Grieg Piano Concerto. I can hear some of my college friends of many years ago saying "O no!" Yes, Grieg. I recall someone in the interval of a concert saying to his partner "Liked the Mozart but hated the Grieg." The Grieg happened to be his Holberg Suite which is a wonderful work, Grieg at his best.
I recall reading something about Walter Legg the great impresario: he had discovered a young pianist, Dinu Lipatti, and wanted the famous and then ageing Arthur Schnabel to hear a record of the young man. "I'll play you the Grieg Piano Concerto," he told Schnabel. "O no, not that, anything but that," said Schnabel. "Just the cadenza then?" Schnabel agreed and was swept away by the man's playing (Lipatti didn't have long to live after that and hurried to record a great deal of piano music before dying). But that was all, he didn't want to hear the rest.
Michael White, writing in The Telegraph, says that music critics like him can't "unquestionly adhore every piece of serious music". Even they have their favourites and composers they positively dislike.
I dislike Shostakovic (apart from his 2nd Piano Concerto), Mahler, Bruckner, Schonberg, Berg and most modern composers. I love Beethoven, Mozart, Chopin, Brahms (some of it), Stravinski (some), Bach, Haydn - which is enough to go with. O yes, and Grieg.

Westerns music

If I were asked for my favourite music on a Desert Island Discs programme I think one of my choices would be the music from one of my favourite Westerns. This would take me back to long ago when they made good Westerns in Hollywood. I suppose when we think of Hollywood we think usually of three kinds of film: Westerns, Musicals and Thrillers. I do anyway.
The three in contention would be Elmer Bernstein's score for"The Mgnificent Seven", Jerome Moross's "The Big Country" and Victor Young's "Shane". It would be a diffuicult choice because I like them all.
OK, here goes: it would have to be "The Magnificent Seven". It is one of the most excciting pieces of film music I've heard though Star Wars and Psycho run it close seconds.
I put the three pieces of Westerns music on Youtube and they're all good but 7 is the best.
At the end of 7 there are a few comments sent in by members of the general public. One of them was "This song makes me wanna find six of my best friends and take on an army."
Yeah, I know how he feels.

Theatre

"The costumes are a fusion of antiquity and modernity which succeed in locating the play precisely nowhere." Thus wrote Lloyd Evans, theatre critic of The Spectator on a certain play - i doesn't matter which one because they do it all the time. This band of new directors seem to want to be as creative as the playwrights or composers of operas; they want their work to be as outstanding as that which they are interpreting. So they set an opera in no-man's-land.
I have seen three operas in the past few years and each one was set nowhere, as Lloyd Evans said the play he saw was set. First there was Salome by Richard Strauss. It was a mess. You wouldn't have been able to follow the plot unless you had read up about it beforehand. There were no famous arias and the music was at times quite dull. Yes, you did have the dance of the seven vails which does have some exciting music. But that was all. Then there was Wozzek by Berg. I have tried hard to appreciate Alban Berg but find his music quite tuneless; not as tuneless as Schonberg but tuneless just the same. It was set in a sort of baked beans factory. It had a murder and everyone was dressed in bright costumes. But it was quite a sordid plot (if you could follow it) and there were no arias that were at all memorable. Recently I saw the Welsh National Opera's take on Turandot, "Puccini's greatest work" I'm informed. It was, as I should have expected, set in another no-man's-land. It had two arias that were worth hearing - "None shall sleep" being one of them - and the rest was quite dismal (the plot, of course, was ridiculous as many operas and ballets are but you expect the music to lift you to that plane of excellence where you "willingly suspend your disbelief"). People wore modern outfits - and this was supposed to be ancient Japan. Or was it China? It didn't matter where it was because the directors and designers decided to set it nowhere.
This is the last opera I shall attend.I used to like some operas but with the advent of the modernising directors and the modernising designers I'd prefer to stay at home and watch "The Killing".
By the way, Wozzek died when he fekl into a heap of tinned beans.

Oldies

Here we go again. Health n' Safety. When you are getting on in years you not only have to put up with care-home inattention and care-hospital ill treatment and not being able to touch your toes, you also have to put up with people telling you how you should be living. The latest comes from some Pshychiatric Committee (?) who have declared that all people over 65 should be MOT'd - well, sort of. They should be "screened" to see how much alcohol they drink. Where are we? Mecca? These Pschyatric loonies believe that old people should enjoy only about a half a glass of wine per day or half a pint of beer (I don't think they used "enjoy"; they probably meant "force-fed"). It's enough to drive you to drink.
You live to 65 and then retire to enjoy life without the discipline of the boss looking over your shoulder and telling you off. You're free at last. Why not celebrate by having a couple of pints or, in my case, a couple of (large) glasses of red wine? But looking over your shoulder now is that haggard witch "Elf n' Safety".
I recall, many moons ago, Cliff Mitchelmore interviewing an "expert" on health matters; it was a programme called Tonight if my memory is correct (it often isn't these days what with all the health and safety junk I read about food, drink, excercise, eyes, cancer, heart etc). They were talking about potatoes and the expert said "O, potatoes, shouldn't eat them, very bad for you with all that starch". Then Mitchelmore said "What about the well-known 'chip buttie'?" To which the expert replied: "Certain death".
A couple of years passed and the humble potatoe became something that was good for you. Didn't some wiseacre in government advise us all to eat five potatoes a day?
Health advice comes at you like a sine curve: one day its up and the next day it's down. Potatoes kill you then potatoes save your life.
So two fingers to Health and Safety and pass the bottle please. I've always thought pschiatrists were crazy - now I'm sure of it.

Drabble

I am looking at a photo of Margaret Drabble in this week's Spectator. It was taken some time ago because she looks quite young. She is sitting very upright on a chair, fingers of her right hand in the air poised above a typewriter, left hand resting on the side of the typewriter. She seems about ready to type but she is thoughtful; her face is young but already has a look of womanhood about it; there's a bandana round her head and her hair, what little can be seen of it, is centre-parted like a headmistress's. She does have that headmistressy look about her. Perhaps that's the reason I have taken a disliking to her. Not just now but for years. Why?
Francis King reviews her new book of short stories (old stories, new collection) on the page opposite her photo. He met her when she was about to be published. They had lunch with his publisher at Wiedenfield and Nicolson. "I found myself facing," he writes, "a woman, attractive but not beautiful." Later the woman publisher says to King: "There's someone who already knows what she's going to do - and, by golly, she'll do it."
Which, of course, she did. Novels, essays, editing the Oxford companion to English Literature.... and so on.
I think I must be jealous of her success. Yet she doesn't carry her success too well. I feel she is proud of her achievements to such a degree that she seems superior. And not in a nice way. In an "Oxford way". Because she is "so Oxford", isn't she? She has that air of superiority that a good many Oxford students have. I don't suppose they know they are developing it while students but something happens to them and they come away with a chip on their shoulders.
I looked for a poem by D.H.Lawrence about Oxford and superiority but all I could find was this:
"How nice it is to be superior!
Because really, it's no use pretending, one is superior, isn't one?
I mean people like you and me -

Quite! I quite agree.
The trouble is, everybody thinks they're just as superior
As we are, just as superior -"

Etc.
There's a smugness about her I feel, an intellectual smugness. She is "so Oxfordly" smug.
Can't say I like her sister much either. I've heard they hate each other which goes some way to making me feel better about the rather nasty way I feel about her.

Sports

I was looking forward to seeing the film "Only Angels Have Wings" which I saw a few years ago and remember it for its wit and for Cary Grant who, incidentally, David Thomson rates the best film actor of them all. He is always a bit goofy in Howard Hawks films, especially so in "Monkey Business" and "Bringing up Baby", and here he is quite goofy at times but more of the office bully type as he is in "His Girl Friday". So I set "The Box" to record it since it was playing at 1.00 p.m.. But what did I find? Instead of the film the BBC decided to show tennis. So I, no doubt, have recorded Murray versus some French bloke instead of the film. I don't like Andy Murray. He is just too dull a creature. And what is so important about the contest at Queens club that it takes up half the afternoon on TV? But, of course, a British tennis player is taking part and surely, in BBC-think, surely all of Britain will have their eyes glued to their TV sets. It's pathetic. Anyway, Murray is Scottish and proud of it so why should we of the other three parts of Britain be cheering him on? He'll probably vote Scottish Nationalist when the time comes for a referendum.
But, God help us, we've got the Wimbledon affair soon. Let's hope Murray doesn't make it past the first or second round; it's bad enough watching the primas donas prance about the place - and I mean the men, don't watch women at all (unless they're worth looking at like that unpronounceable Russian beauty) - without a dullard like Murray taking up prime time on TV.
I'm afraid that most sportsmen are pretty dull people; they usually just talk about sport and nothing but sport. Strangely enough, though I don't like watching boxing much except when heavyweights are trying to kill their opponents, but I always find what they have to say interesting. They too usually only talk about boxing but it's the fact that they've been there bashing away for an hour or so and being bashed too that makes what they say interesting. The new one, the British fighter who's just won something or other - he's a really good talker. Tommy Farr was a wonderful talker on boxing and boxers. I think boxing films are the only sport films I like. Always have. "Gentleman Jim" and "Rocky" come to mind.
Imagine a film about tennis players. I know it's been done but d'you think I'd go to see that?
George Bernard Shaw liked to put the gloves on occasionaly; in fact he wrote a novel about a boxer. I have it hear on the shelf: "Cashel Byron's Profession". Rather good too.

Naipaul

What a beastly, cantankerous old so-and-so V.S.Naipaul is. Has he got anything good to say about anyone? Maybe he appreciates his housekeeper for little things like making him a cup of tea - and maybe some other "little things", knowing his proclivities. But he doesn't seem to have anything good to say about writers. And now he's off again on one of his diatribes against other writers. This time it's women writers. He dismisses Jane Austen and accuses women of having a "narrow view of the world" and suggests that there is no writer of the fairer sex who is his equal.
I can think of quite a few because I'm not a fan of Naipaul (liked one of the books written by his brother Shiva better). I tried "The House of Mr Biswas" twice and found it rather tedious.
Yet I do have a sneaky sort of liking for the old sod. He is so arrogant and antagonistic towards writers that he has become a kind of "performance artist". Whenever he is mentioned by other writers, journalists usually, he is regarded as someone who is beyond the pale, someone people shouldn't take any notice of, someone who is so filled with his own vanity that he is disgusting. Why do they write so much about him then? Like moths to the light which can kill them, these writers are drawn to Nailpaul maybe hoping that he will try to kill them (metaphorically) so that they can join that long list of great wriers he doesn't like - Dickens for example who he finds unbearable; Hardy who he also finds unbearable; Henry James who he thinks is "the worst writer in the world" and Joseph Conrad about whom he says "I have trouble with some of Conrad's books".
I like him for his honesty. He tells us what he believes. I agree with him about Conrad, I too have trouble with his books; and I find Henry James difficult to take these days; and Thomas Hardy I have always had difficulty with. Then there's his view of women writers. I have to say I'm in sympathy with him to a certain extent: there's always, to my mind, a touch of Mills and Boon about most women writers (of fiction, that is). "Sentimental" Naipaul avers. Mmmm! may be something in that!
But Dickens unbearable! I draw the line there in my small admiration for V.S.Naipaul.

4 Rooms

I could not believe my eyes. In the TV programme "4 Rooms", people take along to a studio some item they think valuable and a game is played: they meet four professional "dealers" in artifacts, usiually works of art (or things that their owners believe are works of art). It's then a game show. The dealers tell the visitors what they'll pay for the item..... it's more complicated than that but it's not worth going into here because I wasn't so much interested in the game but in the things people brought along to be offered for sale. And in one in particular: a wall with a Banksy work on it. Graffitti in short. Two young bloked wanted £300 000 for it. £300 000 for a wall with graffitti on it? That was not the most amazing thing about it. Surrealistic depths (or heights, depending on your feeling towards graffitti on walls, art, Banksy etc) were reached. The most amazing thing was that one of the dealers offered them £240 000 for it. And there was more amazement to follow. They turned the offer down.
Now, they had spent only £20 000 on it, removing it from its original place i.e. part of a larger wall, and transporting it to the studio. Surely if they had been in their right minds they should have accepted the offer. But no. They thought they were going to get more for it elsewhere. And in retrospect, I think they may have been right. Because the dealer who offered them this massive amount of money told them that he already had someone who was interested in it.
Which brings us to the meat of the matter. There must be market in such things. It turns out that Banksy is not only regarded as a serious artist but his stuff sells as well. I'm flabberghasted. I thought scribbling graffitti on walls was against the law. Which, no doubt, is why Banksy never signs his work. How then can he sell them? And those who do try to sell them: how can they if they're not signed? I mean, anyone could have done them.
But it seems I'm on a different planet from the art world. Tracey Emin is bad enough with her unmade bed, then there was the pile of bricks in a gallery in London; then there's Ligetti in the music world; and now, the wall. £300 000 for a wall with graffitti on it. Give me strength. Where did I go wrong?

Hates

Terry Engleton, writing in Prospect magazine tells us who he hates..... Hold on. Terry Eagleton, that leftie professor whose latest book is called "Why Marx was Right" - perhaps he means Groucho - he's writing an article in that rightie magazine!!!! Those four exclamation marks no doubt would bring out the worst in Eagleton: "one is too many".
Anyway, he gives a list of people he'd like to see done away with or locked up with the key thrown away. These are Tom Cruise,Mel Gibson, Dick Cheney, Henry Kissinger, Tony Blair, Prince Andrew, Piers Morgan, Ben Brown (who's he?) and Robert Kilroy-Silk.
I have to agree with him on Mel Gibson but probably for different reasons. He doesn't give reasons but you can see where he's going can't you? Tom Cruise is Master (or some such thing) of Scientology, a religion based on the teachings of a science fiction writer named L. Ron Hubbard - I wonder what the L stands for if anything; maybe it's like the G in Edward G. Robinson which gives some distinction to an ordinary name but isn't actually a name at all. So Eagleton must be against stupid religions. That means most. Mel Gibson is a Jew-hating religious film maker and hopeless actor who makes religious films etc. Dick Cheney. Well nobody likes Dick Cheney except Dick Cheney and George Bush (maybe). Kissinger. Mmm. Yes I suppose so. A bit sinister and remember Vietnam.Tony Blair? Now I like Tony Blair but he is disliked by the right and the left for, wait for it, Iraq and the dodgy dossier. Blair made the Labour Party votable for; without Blair there wouldn't have been all those years of left-wing..... er..... liberal.... er.... OK, I hate him too. Prince Andrew. Agreed. What a shocker he is!!! (three exclamation marks to make sure he's noticed). Piers Morgan. I can't say I like or dislike him. He's a bit of a nonentity really. Ben Brown. Who's he? And Robert Kilroy-Silk. Not who's he but where's he?
The trouble with Eagleton is, like a lot of lefties (and rightees), he doesn't believe in freedom of the individual; he'll shut people up who don't agree with his ideas; he hates people he doesn't think worthy of his time; he writes books like "Why Marx was Right" when we all know now that Marx was wrong.
Wasn't he?

Chips

So Wallace McCain is dead. Who was Wallace McCain? Well, he's the man responsible for selling milliions of bags of oven-ready chips. He started the company that made them, turned it into a million dollar enterprise, became a billionaire before he was forced out of office by his brother - never mind why. The point is that he and afterwards his brother is responsible for flooding the markets with inferior goods. They are not chips at all. I think they must be made of reconstituted potatoes mashed up and fried. O yes, they're easy to cook; all you do is heat up the over and stick them in. You don't have to peel potatoes then chop them into chips then fry them, you just open the bag that's been in the freezer, tip out a quantity onto a tray and bung them in the oven. Easy for the harrassed housewife over the hot stove all day.... Rather the harrassed wife over a desk all day, coming home to get some ready-made food for dinner and simply opening the bag etc.
I don't like them. I think they are just dreadful. They don't taste like chips at all. They don't even taste like potatoe. They taste like cardboard. OK like I imagine cardboard tastes.
Chips are fine foods. They may not be what Jamie Oliver and his ilk think are fine foods but that's because they dabble in trivialities, make what's simple difficult. i.e show off.
I have come across two methods of cooking chips well. Fist from one of the Hairy Bikers. You fry the potatoe chips at about 140 degrees until they are cooked through but not brown; you then take them out of the pan and let them stand and dry. You then turn the heat up to 190 degrees and cook until they are brown. Another way, from the internet: boil the chips for about ten minutes, remove and dry, then fry at a high temperatuure until they are brown.
I've tried the second mothod and it works well.
But tonight I did my usual thing: just fried them once. Maybe not quite so good but certainly far better than McCain's hash.
There's a certain chef who fries them 3 times. He says they taste as good as lobster.
Good chef there; not one of your prima donnas.

Eric

You won't know Eric but there was a time when he was, well, "known" for a while. Saw him today on the bus going into Cardiff. Looked a lot older than when he used to go to the local pub quite a few years ago. Older but not frail; a bit bandy now and a bit wobbly perhaps. Knew who he was straight away but I don't think he remembers me.
Claim to fame? He used to be a singing partner to Shirley Bassey in one of the clubs she sang at in Tiger Bay, Cardiff - where policemen went in two's at least. Pretty rough area then. Not now: it's been transformed into The Cardiff Bay with a great body of water like a large lake held back from the sea by a sort of lock so that ships can enter and leave at various times of day. Boats on the lake and, surrounding it, cafes and restaraunts, all good ones, some classy, some quite cheap but not "cheapy" or "greasy spoon". A few clubs there still but none, I believe, like the one/s Miss Bassey used to sing in.
She was good then and I suppose she got better. According to Mark Steyn, who writes a daily blog which covers politics and show business, she was the best singer of the James Bond films' opening songs. She did more than one I believe.
I nearly got to interview her once a long time ago but her agent (or somebody in charge) said no.
I should have tried earlier in her career when she was singing in that club in Cardiff. With Eric
Saw him later in the day in Cardiff; he was with a very attractive woman not as old as him, who is eighhtyish; she was about fifty eight I guess. No wonder he was wearing his best jacket. Maybe, later on, he'd serenade her with some of the old Perry Como numbers he was so fond of.

Fair Game

The film stars Sean Penn and Naomi Watts, both fine actors (though sometimes I find it hard to understand Penn - he mumbles), and is about how Bush and Cheney tried to deceive the American public about the Iraq war. Maybe they did and maybe they didn't but this film believes they did and in a way that was totally immoral. They heard, from British intelligence, that Sadam Hussein was going to obtain nuclear material from Niger in Africa; to substantiate this piece of news they sent a man, who had previously been an American ambassador to that country, to find out if the news was true. He found no evidence to prove it; in fact, he was positive that Niger was not in a position to do so. His report was ignored and the war went ahead. The man, played by Sean Penn, wrote an article in The New York Times saying what he knew and this resulted in a leak from the CIA naming the man's wife as a CIA agaent, which she was. This resulted in her world contacts being exposed and in some cases killed.
If I had know all this before I saw the film I might have been more entertained than I was. The film is made in such a "hand-held-camera" style - even when the camera is not being hand-held - that the story is a confusing and confused mess. Only at the end did it seem to work - in retrospect.
Sometimes I wonder if some of the modern American film makers don't know the first thing about story telling: they throw action scenes in to demonstrate how clever they are and they lose the story line. A good dose of Ozu would do them good I feel - he hardly moves the camera at all.
Anyway, I don't believe that America went to war in Iraq on the one detail of the build-up to it that this film highlighted; there were heaps of things that pointed to Hussein's wish to make WOMD. Maybe they were all matters of intelligence failure. But everyone believed tham at the time.
Another film maker some of these whiz-kids of American cinema ought to study is Woody Allen. Now there's a guy who knows how to make films; he puts a story together brilliantly. I have recently seen "You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger" and it is brilliant. And no one in it or making it is trying to push a political point down your throat as "Fair Game" does - and not very successfully either.

Royal Music

Someone once, long ago. asked me why I had, when in London for a week, on holiday, attended the ceremony at the cenotaph on Remembrance Sunday. I said because of the music chiefly though I did find the marching etc. rather moving. I love Walford's "Solemn Melody" (I suppose he must have written other pieces of music but this is the only work of his I have ever heard). It was played by massed brass bands which is always thrilling.
This came to mind when I found myself, against my will, watching the Royal Wedding: the music would perhaps balance the sentimentality of the occasion. Actually, there was little sentimentallity to experience: the English do these occasions so well, with military precision and effectiveness such that there's no room for tears or shows of public sentiment. I enjoyed it. All of it. I liked the bride - she is a real beauty with a smile that could melt the heart of a knave. The prince is quite likeable too, much more so than some of The Firm. But it was the music that thrilled.
I read somewhere that the music was chosen by Prince Charles and the bride, Kate Middleton herself. Another mark up for the young woman and a great leap up in my estimation for the prince, her father-in-law to be. Obviously the guy has taste. Of course he has taste: doesn't he always get seven eggs boiled for him for breakfast for different periods of time so that he can choose the one done just right for him (the other six probably go in the bin).
So there was no pop music played in spite of Elton John being present (no "Candle in the Wind" thank God!); no light music at all; nothing to make you think "here we have a real, great, modern marriage". No. We heard Hubert Parry, a choral work, Cwm Rhondda and Jerusalem sung with spirit (as if it's a patriotic song, which it isn't), then a short choral work by John Rutter (safe hands there) and at the end when the married couple were leaving, walking the length of Westminster Abbey - which is some walk, especially in the clobber they both had on - William Walton's magnificent march "Crown Imperial". I almost stood up and saluted.
Why was William Walton not made Master of the Queen's Music? He could turn that stuff out like nobody's business: Crown Imperial, Spitfire Prelude and Fugue, Orb and Sceptre etc. All great stuff. Good as Elgar.... why wasn't he too made Master of the King's Music? One of his Pomp and Circumstance marches has practically become the National Anthem.
Ah! I see. Now I know. Elgar was a Catholic.
Just a guess.
Poor Max Whats-his-name, who is Master of the Queen's Music wasn't even invited to write something. He was hurt. He said "I'm not even going to watch it."

The Wedding

If I were a young woman - I'm not a woman or young, by the way - I wouldn't like to be in Kate Middleton's shoes, metaphorically speaking. No wonder she's supposedly not eating these days. God! She'll be joining The Firm is a few days' time and there's no bigger firm - or soap opera - than that. Those palaces where people live! Those large dining rooms where the knives, forks and spoons are laid out military style. The corridors you have to walk to get from one room to another. All those flunkies about the place bowing and scraping to you with, possibly, pervy little smiles on their mouths that tells you that you really are not fine enough to be in this hallowed place with these hallowed people.... and so on.
She seems a nice girl but will she stay a nice girl living the sort of life she will have to live soon. If she decides to continue "being herself" she'll suffer - "we don't want royalty to be anything other than royal, old boy". She's a commoner but she can't stay a commoner because a commoner to some of those soon to be around her is to be common.
Will she survive in the airless atnmosphere of the royal households?
One of two things will occur I believe: she will either start the beginning of a new kind of royalty, the sort that survives in some of the European countries, or she will unconciously wreck it. There are forces in and around The Firm that will not like "the likes of her" to break into the extended family of the whole artificial set-up: flunkies who like to flunk to the aristocrats; the remains of "the debutants" who still linger on the outskirts of royal events like those girls in "Dracula" who wish to suck your blood - sexily; the Duke - enough said; his daughter, Princess Anne, who seems to be more of a robot rather than a human being. They'll probably all play the game for a while but they'll bide their time before they strike with upper-class venom. In the immortal words of Gerry Adams: "We haven't gone away".
Maybe.
Or maybe not. Maybe they won't be allowed to by the British public. Maybe it will be as Matthew D'Ancona puts it in the Sunday Telegraph: "So relaxed, loving and straightforward are Prince William and his bride-to-be that it is easy to forget that the monarchy is about to embark on the greatest experiment in social mobility in its modern history. But it is the Palace that is on trial, not the new princess: the public will not take kindly to the slightest whiff of snobbery."
I'm with them there even if I'm not with them on much else besides regarding royalty.

Fantasy

I have seen a couple of strange films recently: "Unmissable" and "Source Code". Both are fantasies. In "Unmissable" a down-and-out writer who can't get on with the novel he's been commissioned to do, is given a tablet by a man he once knew who is working for a chemical company on a secret formula. Which should have told the hero not to take the pill; but he was desperate so he does. Almost instantly he becomes a sort of high-powered, over-intelligent monster: we are told that the average person uses only about 20% of his brain (didn't know that before) but that the pill he has taken will make available to him 100% of his b rain. So he writes his novel which is great - so his agent believes - and it gets published. Then he finds he can wiz-kid things like helping firms to make money. But people are after him, they want the pill of course. It's all rather unbelieveable. But it's fun. "Source Code" is fantasy made so assuredly and seriously that you almost believe it could take place. A man wakes up on a train and, gradually, in eight minutes, finds he not the man he thinks he is. He is dead but certain brain parts of his have been saved and it is these that inhabit the other man. Get it? No, I didn't either. But again, it was fun though even more violent than "Unmissable". While waiting for the film to start I had to put up with reviews of films to come. They were all fantasies. A man becomes a "green man" who can perform great feats of strength and possesses extraordinary powers etc. Another couple of films were also fantasies. They were all spectacularly full of "special effects" which I find rather boring in that, well, you know they are "special effects" don't you?. I prefer a film to be grounded in reality like "Sideways" which had no special effects. Neither did "The King's Speech" which was an excellent film with three, at least, superb performances. Is this fantasy-film-making anything to do with the general public's dispensing with "old forms" of fantasy like religion? Are people now non-believers but still have a secret desire to want to believe something? As G.K.Chesterton put it: "When people stop believing in God, they don't believe in nothing - they believe in anything."

Wendy Cope

Charles Moore wrote a good piece on the poet Wendy Cope this week in The Daily Telegraph. He pointed out how her use of easy-to-understand words was deceptive because her poems were greater than the sum of their parts - sort of thing. As the Archbishop of Canterbury said (or wrote): "Wendy Cope is without doubt the wittiest of contemporary English poets and says a lot of extremely serious things. I read something a few weeks ago that she is not very popular with other poets. Moore seems to think this is because (a) people like it and buy it without necessarilly being experts on poetry and that upsets "proper poets". (b) Her name makes her sound like "a suburban spinster poet and that brings out the snob in other writers" - a bit loose that! (c) "She writes lines - indeed whole poems - with no unusual words or syntax" which makes other poets think she's no good. She is good. She's subtle and clever and, though you wouldn't think it on first reading one of her poems, quite erudite. But it's love she writes best about. My favourite is, of course: "Bloody men are like bloody buses - /You wait about a year/ And as soon as one approaches your stop/ Two or three others appear." (First verse). Another is rather clever, again about men - they often are about men! "There are so many kinds of awful men -/ One can't avoid them all. She often said/ She'd never make the same mistake again:/ She always made a new mistake instead." (First verse) Here's a fairly new one called "The Widow": I like this piece. I think youd like it too./ We didn't very often disagree/ Back in the days when I sat here with you/ And knew that you were coming home with me./ This is the future. It arrived so fast,/ When we were young it seemed so far away./ Our years together vanished like a day/ At nightfall, sealed for ever in the past./ I can't give up on music, just discard/ The interest we shared because you died./ And so I come to concerts. But it's hard./ Tonight I'm doing well. I haven't cried./ My head aches. There's a tightness in my throat./ And you will never hear another note."

The Killing

Why is "The Killing", the Danish thriller on TV, better than any of our British TV products? It's a work that analyses in depth the murder itself and also the effect it has on a whole community - well, those in the community who are affected in various ways by the murder, from the girl's immediate family to a councillor who is trying to oust the mayor and take over the job himself. The police investigating the case also become humanely affected by the murder, especially the young woman detective (who wears cardigans that have, due to the series, soared in price) who becomes almost insanely obsessed with the case. Yet don't British TV crime plays do something of the same kind? "Waking the Dead" has investigations of murdered people whose cases are history. Each murder affects certain people within the community and outside it; the innvestigating team use pathology to find this and that out about the victim.... and so on. But there's something special about "The Killing". Its tone is not frivolous or superficial or slightly humorous (Poirot) but deadly serious. You feel, with British crime plays and series that the victim is there to make a good story; he or she is dead so now we'll concentrate on the whys, hows amd wherefores. The victiim is a sort of cypher on which the story hangs (if it does!). In British TV crime works, often, depth of character attempts use idiosyncrasies to make them interesting; there is little depth of character in fact. In "The Killing" the characters were portrayed with depth and understanding: you have the dead girl's immediate family suffering with an agony you could almost feel yourself; then as the investigation spread out to others - a teacher, a boy-friend, a councillor etc - and, not least, the investigating team and slowly the pressure grows on everyone concerned. There was nothing of the "let's make this as exciting as possible" but something of the long, serious , well written novel which delves deep into its characters as well as tell a good story. It was not of the English school well described by Orwell in his essay "Decline of the English Murder": respectable middle class chap who decides to bump off his wife (less disgracefull than leaving her for his secretary apparently - then!) and start out in life anew. It was, it seems, a characteristically Nordic murder mystery for, it seems, the Danish and Swedish writers of crime fiction have become far superior to our home-grown breed.