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.