Collectibles

A distant relative of mine was a man who possessed "collectibles". I assumed that they were old comics, magazines, bits and pieces of things that were collectible because, in time, they would prove valuable - though that's rather an unkind thought since he may have collected them simply because he liked them. I don't know what happened to them when he died a few years ago but, having just seen the TV programme on Channel 4 called "Four Rooms", I have the feeling that they might have been worth a heap of money. I know that old comics can sell often at high prices and I know that he had some of these. The amazing thing to me about "Four Rooms" is that the stuff that people come to the studio to sell to four dealers is that they are worth anything at all. For example, last night a man brought along a tin can with paint brushes in it and sold it for £17000. The fact that the brushes had been the property of Francis Bacon (used when he painted a portrait of Lucien Freud) didn't mean anything to me but to the dealers it meant a lot. "I just have to have those Francis Bacon brushes," one dealer said as if he were talking about a Francis Bacon painting itself. The four dealers were all interested in acquiring them and all offered quite large sums. But the owner held out and eventually, dropping his expected price a little because he liked the dealer, sold them for £17000.
Phew! It doesn't seem to matter, with "collectibles", that they possess any aesthetic quality, only that they are collectible, that they have attained a value on the basis of their collectibilty. Book dealers aren't interested in what is written in the books they deal in, only in how old they are, what condition they are in, if they are signed by the author, if they are first editions etc. So it is with the dealers on "Four Rooms". A fascinating programme because it takes you into a world where only money counts for anything and, for most people like myself, it's into a world devoid of all that education tells us should be important. It's a bit like watching sharks hunting.

Class

Melvyn Bragg's first programme on Class brought together two writers of entirely different backgrounds, style and themes: Evelyn Waugh, the upper class twit who could write brilliantly and Arthur Greenwood, working class who wrote a famous book in the thirtees called "Love on the Dole". Bragg compared, or rather contrasted, this book with Waugh's "Vile Bodies" which I tried to read a few years ago but failed to reach page 20 (I have always, previously, found Waugh's novels entertaining and stylish but this one left me cold, even angry I think). It was a good comparision in that here was a Waugh, full of himself, looking like a gentleman (which he certainly wasn't), trying to look like a toff, which he tried hard to be but becoming only a person on the fringes of the upper class where he wanted to be and probably bitter about not being fully accepted; and here was an ordinary looking fellow in the shape of Greenwaood wanting to change the lives of working people from the gutter they were living in to a more pleasant path to some properity. Waugh wrote about the beastly upper set and Greenwood about the lower set who were forced to work hard and had liitle time to do much else. Waugh's lot didn't work at all but lounged their way through life.
I saw the film of "Love on the Dole" a few years ago on TV and while I found it rather hard going as entertainment, it got its points across well. Deborah Kerr played a young working class woman who turns to prostitution to make her life bearable - much frowned on of course by her family. The arguments were strong and the action presented them dramatically. "Vile Bodies" was just vile. I believe that Stephen Fry made a film of it a few years ago (is there anything he can't do?) but you wouldn't have got me to see it with a team of wild horses dragging me there.
"Love on the Dole" I'd like to see again.
I wonder why Melvin Bragg didn't mention Bernard Shaw's play "Pygmalion" in his treaty on "class": here was a young woman "from the gutter" introduced to high society and taught to speak properly; she has no problem with getting into the upper class. Why? Because it's not to do with "blood" or breeding as with racing horses but with how you speak and how you conduct yourself in high society. It's that simple. Devastating exposure I thought.