Plebgate

Andrew Mitchell strikes me as someone stuffed up with a sense of his own importance. I don't suppose people who are chosen as Chief Whips are ever your pleasant guy with good manners and a beguiling attitude to life. They have to impose discipline on the party and they must get to feel proud with having such power. I can't say I took to the man. Nor did I feel sorry for him over the Plebgate affair since he sort of brought it on himself.
What would I have done if a policeman had curteously asked me to use another, smaller gate to take my bike through. I might have mumbled some disapproval but I think I'd have said "OK officer, and mind how you go..... Sir." Not turn angrilly around and make for the smaller gate saying "fucking plebs" as I went.
OK, he maintains he didn't use the word plebs but admits that he used the expletive. For which he appologised. Let me tell you that if little me had used the word he used to that copper, or for that matter, any copper, I'd have been arrested on the spot and quite rightly so.
But, of course, he was an important guy in the government and coppers can't go about arresting right honourable gentlemen.
So he wasn't arrested for swearing at the policeman as he should have been.
We'll let that go. Let's concentrate on not what was said but what was not said, or rather on what might have been said. Mitchell did use the word fucking as an adjective rather than a noun; so he must have followed it with a noun. Whether it was pleb or not we'll never know but it was something. Maybe "pigs". Maybe "arseholes". Maybe "angels". We don't know but he certainly called them something and I can't believe it was anything pleasant or complimentary.
I'm not surprised that the police invented evidence or told lies or, maybe, planted dope at his residence because that's what they've always done.
There are no good eggs in this story and of the whole cast of bad ones Andrew Mtichell, in my opinion, doesn't come near the top for best behaviour.
I also think the matter shouldn't be called Plebgate because it isn't known that he said it; it should be about the exit he was to take - the gate. It should be called Gategate.

The bad and the beautiful.

Last week I saw one of the worst films I have ever seen and.... well, probably not one of the best but certainly a great film. "Only God forgives" is a dreadful film. I was expecting something good from the director and his star of "Drive", Ryan Hoskins, but it wasn't to be. It had nothing going for it unless you like heaps of violence of the nastiest kind - eye-gouging, sword eviscerating, guns galore etc. Left halfway through and don't know why I waited so long. On the way out I said to the usherette "Can I have my money back please?" She said that many people had left the film early in the past week; some had come to see Christin Scott Thomas believing a film with her in it must be good. Not so. She played the part of a criminal mother of two sons one of whom is killed.... But it doesn't matter because the story was just plain uninteresting, slow and boring.
The other film was one of Carl Dreyer's early films, a silent one in fact: "The Passion of Joan of Arc". Piano accompaniment with it. A slow-burning film culminating in a death scene that made one shiver with dread. The film concentrated on facial expressions at the trial of Joan of Arc. Most of the action took place in a single room. There was little dialogue but it wasn't needed, the expressions said it all.
I don't think it's as good as "Day of Wrath" which I saw on Film 4 a few months ago but compared to "Only God Forgives" it was masterly.

Robert Preston

Sitting here musing, the other night, over why many people think Berg's violin concerto is wonderful and yet I find it pretty awful, I suddenly wanted to hear Robert Preston singing "I won't send your roses". So I found it on You tube and lay back in exstasy to listen to it.
What a wonderful interpreter of some popular songs he was; not having a great singing voice like Sinatra he gave them the colour of sentiment, maybe some sentimentality.
What a fine actor too! Never a star because, I suppose, he didn't have the looks they wanted for heart-throbs. But while he was no Cary Grant or Gregory Peck he could play the sort of roles in which a guy from a small town almost makes it to the top. The mention of Gregory Peck brings to mind a quintessential role of Preston's: "The Macomber Affair", taken from Hemingway's great short story "The Short and Happy Life of Francis Macomber, he played the part of Macomber whose marriage was falling apart and whose courage was not what he felt it should have been. There was Greg, The White Hunter, for his wife to compare him with. So Robert Preston has to be the guy you put down, the failure who will never attain the heights where he can feel proud. And, of course, he finds the courage to take on a charging bull, standing and shooting but not running, not stepping aside but meeting the creature head on. He could do that sort of part better than anyone in Hollywood.
But he could also do comedy. "The Music Man" he had played on Broadway but when it came to the film the producer wanted Cary Grant. Grant said: "If you don't let Robert play the part I won't even go and see it."
Looking up Hemingway on the web I came across a story by him of only six words: "For Sale: Baby Shoes; never worn."

Cliff Morgan

There was no one like Cliff Morgan playing at outside half. I first saw him when he played for the Welsh schoolboys team. I had heard something about him, how fast he was off the mark, how he could jink his way through gaps "that weren't there" but none of this talk prepared me for the real thing. At first he just passed the ball to his centres, not showing any style or brilliance, a mere pivot. Then suddenly he was off, breaking away from his team, cutting his way through the opposition. This he did many times. In short he was virtually unstoppable.
But the big games were ahead of him: playing for Cardiff after Billy Cleaver who was very popular (in East Wales that is, not so in the West where they always complained about there being too many players from Cardiff in the Welsh team) and one wondered if he would cope - he wasn't very big, stocky yes but meat for wing forwards maybe? Not at all. He was brilliant. Only once can I recall him having as poor match; that was against a strong South African team with wing forwards the size of trucks and fast with it. One was a man called Van Wyck who gave Morgan a torrid time, hitting him hard every time he received the ball. While he survived the crunching tackles -he was a stocky ball of muscle who could have survived a house falling on him - he changed his game to a kicking game and, in his own words, lost the match. He had his revenge in South Africa playing for the Lions when he left Van Wyck standing a few times, one to score himself.
He worked on the next bench to me when we did Intermediate Chemistry. He was always surrounded by lecturers and other fans and I don't recall exchanging any conversation with him. Outside lectures one day I had to pleasure of meeting him, introduced by a mutual friend, and he was a joy to know, talking without ceasing, his languagfe not without the odd - ok, the many - expletives.
The BBC smoothed his rough edges later on and he became a great broadcaster.
When he played his first game for Wales against Ireland, Jackie Kyle, his opposite number, came up to him before the start, put an arm roung his shoulders and said: "Have a wonderful, wonderful game, Cliffie, my boy." Cliff said he never forgot that.
A close friend of his was another Irishman, Tony O'Reilly who, when paying a tribute to him on his death recently, said; "I have often been asked if he would have been any good in the modern game and the answer is yes, certainly, absolutely."

Institutions

Charles Moore, writing in The Daily Telegraph: "From its inception the NHS has been a nationalised industry. All nationalised industries put those who run them first, their trade unions second and their customers nowhere. They are by nature indifferent to human need and so their effect, whatever the intention, is cruel. Until this is acknowledged, nothing much will change."
He has a point but I think his focus on nationalised industries is too narrow: I think what he says applies to pretty well all institutions. After some time, when good intentions start to be eroded by the necessity of maintaining effective efficiency, something happens to the system: it seems that it becomes necessary in the minds of those who run the institutions that efficiency of operation is more important than whatever were the good intentions at the start of the process.
Charles Moore is a Catholic: isn't he aware that the institution of the Roman Catholic Church is too concsious of the mechanism of its own set-up to notice the sinful behaviour of some of its priests as regards their paedophilia, or, if aware, then too anxious to cover up their wrong-doings by moving them to other parishes?
It isn't only nationalised industries which are guilty of these malpractices. The trouble is, I believe, that someone comes along with an idea which seems brilliant - e.g. comprehensive education. It is untried and an experiment but believed to be the right thing to implement. After a while the brilliant idea is found not to work to the degree of satisfaction previously desired but instead of the idea being abandoned, it is made to work. Or an attempt to make it work is operated. Then it seems to work because those operating it think it is working: they operate it for their own benefit because they cannot believe their "brilliant idea|" lacks credibility. Once it appears to be working then everyone is satisfied - except those, the children, who are being so-called educated.

Wine

Rory Sutherland writing in The Spectator a week or so ago maintained that "most wine is actually rubbish". He thought people liked to talk about wine but didn't really know much about it or even like it. What about some wines having astronomical high prices while others are quite cheap: isn't there are difference in the quality? He says: "One winemaker sent the same wine to a competition under three different labels. One was rejected by the judges as 'undrinkable', another won a double gold award".
I have to say I'm in some agreement with Sutherland. In the past twenty years or so of drinking wine, mainly red wine, I have to say I have had only two bottles where I have said: "Mmm, yes, this is very good." One was a Chateau neuf de Pape given to me by a friend, the other I bought for a special occasion in a wine shop in Cardiff - don't remember what it was. Mostly the wine I drink seems much the same. I take no notice of what it says on the bottle - matured in brandy barrels etc - I just drink it. Sometimes it's quite palatable, sometimes just bearable but mostly it's very ordinary with no great 'lift to it except, of course, the lift that comes from the alcohol in it.

Mud

Jeff Nichols, writer and director of the film "Mud", when asked by a reporter on the New York Times what the film was about, replied "It's Sam Peckinpah meets Mark Twain". It isn't. In many reviews Mark Twain is mentioned with particular reference to "Huckleberry Finn" (no other mention of Sam Peckinpah) but the film has only a passing similarity to the novel: it's set in Mississippi, on a river, yes, and is about a boy who makes friends with an outlaw,yes, but it's theme is not of the world of Twain. Again, a critic wrote in today's newspaper, summing up the film with four stars: "Down on the MIssissippi, two boys discover Mud (Matthew McConaughey) in an adventure of the Hucklberry Finn kind".
It's all a bit troubling since this film is of a superior kind to most movies and its story has very little resemblance to Twain's book.
While on the surface it is an adventure - a boy of 14, Ellis, and his friend, Neckbone, meet an odd guy living rough on an island; he has shot a man over a woman and he is being chased by a gang recruited by the dead man's father and brother, two rather frightening people; he's also being chased by the police, in league with the father; the boys decide to help Mud because Ellis feels that Mud's devotion to the woman he loved, Juniper (Reese Witherspoon) is so genuine, greater for example than that of his own mother and father who are breaking up etc. - but while it is an adventure, it is also a study of a boy's beginning of an understanding of what adult love is, how chancy and unstable it is: Ellis finds he is surrounded by deceit and game-playing - even Mud's and Juniper's affection is not the deeply held love Ellis felt it was.
Great performance by the boys and by McConaughey.
But the film's too long by at least half an hour. 

Arnold Bax

I bought a book from Amazon recently called "The Symphony"; a set of chapters on great composers of the form: Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Berlioz, Mendelsshon, Schumann, Liszt, Franck, Bruckner, Brahms, Borodin, Tchaikovsky, Dvorak, Mahler, Elgar, Sibelius, Vaughan-Williams, Rachmaninov and one other whom I did not expect to see there - Arnold Bax.
The book was first published by Penguin in 1949 which is about the time I first bought it. It was on my shelves for a long time but when I looked a few years ago it had gone, I don't know where. So I decided I needed it again when I recently heard Vaughan-Williams' second symphony, known as "The London". No doubt there are many other books from which I could have obtained the information I needed but I suddenly had a nostalgic desire to look again at this book.
It's very good. It's not written by one person but has different authors for each chapter.
As I say, I did not expect to see Sir Arnold Bax's name there; I can't recall that his name was there but, obviously, since it's the same book, not a revised edition, it must have been.
I didn't even know that he wrote symphonies. Elgar, yes. V-Williams, yes. But not Bax. I knew only one piece by Bax and that I think is his most popular work: Tintagel, a tone poem about a castle on the coast of Cornwall. Can't say I like it much. But I must try out a symphony or two of his - from seven - on Youtube.
His name came to mind last week when I watched David Lean's "Oliver Twist": Bax wrote the incidental music for the film. Jolly good too.

Wagner

Sitting here last evening looking at the blank screen of my computer and wondering what I was going to do with the rest of my life - as one does when one gets to my age - I felt rather down in the mouth. I needed something to lift my spirits - I had already read On Line Daily Mail but that hadn't helped much, in fact it had done the opposite - when I suddenly had the bright idea to seek on Youtube a certain Wagnerian "number" with the title "Siegfried's Burial March". Now you wouldn't think that that piece of music from "The Ring" would do anything but make my depression even greater than it was. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong again. Try it for yourself - the Klaus Tennstedt's version with The London Philharmonic Orchestra. It is absolutely thrilling, moving and it lifts the spirits as no other work can do. For me at least.
But what can I say about the work better than Thomas Mann in his essay "The Sufferings and Greatness of Richard Wagner".
"The overpowering accents of the music that accompanies Siegfried's funeral cortege no longer tell of the woodland boy who set out to learn the meaning of fear; they speak to our emotions of what is really passing behind the lowering veils of mist: it is the sun-hero himself who lies on the bier, slain by the pallid forces of darkness - and there are hints in the text to support what we feel in the music: "A wild boar's fury", it says, and : "Behold the cursed boar," says Gunther, pointing to Hagen, "who slew this noble flesh." The words take us back at a stroke to the very earliest picture-dreams of mankind. Tammuz and Adonis, slain by the boar, Osiris and Dionysus, torn asunder to come again as the Crucified One, whose flank must be ripped open by a Roman spear in order that that the world might know Him - all things that ever were and ever shall be, the whole world of beauty sacrificed and murdered by the wintry wrath, all is contained within this single glimpse of myth."

Vaughan-Williams

Sir Thomas Beecham made many a sarcastic remark during his time as conductor of orchestras but none, I think, quite so nasty as the one he made about Ralph Vaughan-Williams's music: words to the effect that while a young man he composed a rather pleasant piece of music when he wrote his Variations on a theme of Thomas Tallis but that "he's been writing the same work ever since".
While this is shear ill will towards a worthy musical craftsman I have to say that there is in it an inkling of truth, not so much that he wrote the same work ever afterwards but that his style is very much that of the early piece. There is something unsatisfying about Vaughan-Williams's compositions, particularly his symphonies.
This week I attended a concert in whch Andrew Davies and the Philharmonia orchestra played his 2nd symphony which I don't think I have ever heard before and was surprised to read that it was one of his most popular works. Now it couldn't have received a betrter performance that that given here since Davies is a great champion of British music ([perhaps it would be more accurate to say "English music" since there is very little Welsh, Scottish or Irish music of a classical/symphonic kind) and the Philhramionia orchestra is one of the best in the world but.... well I was left with a feeling of being somewhat let down. I could see what the composer was doing in introducing snatches of themes but, unlike Sibelius, they did not come together in what I call "the big tune". There were a lot of little intros to tunes but never a culmination into something big, whistle-able, thrilling as in say, Sibelius's 1st and 2nd symphonies.
Maybe Vaughan-Williams worked better with other people tunes as with his variations on a theme of Thomas Tallis or with his Greesleeves with its tune from an original folk tune (though some say Henry 8th wrote it).
One of the problems of coming away from a concert with the snatches of his tunes in your mind is that they stay there for some time. I am still toodle-whodling and humming certain phrases but, like those in the symphony they rarely get anywhere.

Mrs Thatcher

I am Thatchurated: the Telegraph is full of her, the Times too; every where I look I see her face, young, middle-aged, old. Thatcherated, up to here (a point above my head) fed up with it all, the tributes, the what-a-wonderful-woman encomiums.
Mrs Thatcher was not a likeable woman. She was a sort of  female machine, a robotic creature with certain missions in her head and nothing was going to stop her seeing them through. Nothing: not miners and their families, not her colleagues who probably despised her as much as she despised them; not anyone daft enough to disagree with her - because she was right and everyone else who didn't agree with her was wrong. She could not compromise on anything because she was always right and they were wrong. She had no feeling for people, no empathy. At times she seemed to sympathise with ordinary people but this was always over trivial matters.
But she got certain things done for which we have to be grateful: she took on the unions which were just about getting completely out of control and won so that they became a spent force politically. She fought a war with a dictator who'd have over-run The Falklands and probably kicked the British out of there. And she helped Reagan bring down Communist Russia which I once believed would last for ever.
But she did all these things with a coldness that was as unfeeling as a boa constrictor.
Many feel she wrecked industry in this country, leaving parts of the North of England destitude.
She ordered the sinking of the Belgrano with all those young men on board. Maybe that was a turning point in the war but, I believe, she felt no remorse.
The odd thing is that while I dislike the woman I feel that she may have saved the country from open revolution - I believe it had got to that point when she became Prime Minister and I don't believe there was anyone else capable of facing up to it.

Rebecca West

There is a new biography published about Rebecca West. I can't imagine many people wanting to read it since Rebecca West is not well known these days. I know a few small things about her: she wrote a famous report of The Nuremberg Trials of the Nazi war criminals; she had a long affair with H.G.Wells in her twenties (when she was a "new" woman in the style and manners of a Shaw heroine - though her name Rebecca West is a pseudonym and is taken from Rosmersolm by Ibsen) from which resulted a son whom she neglected and who, in turn, got to hate her; she wrote many novels none of which are read now (I guess); I once read one of her novels, "There is no Conversation", and thought it pretty dreadful.
I do recall this very intelligent oldish woman on TV a long time ago, in The Brains Trust I believe, a formidable lady, tweedy in costume, informing us that she knew how Bernard Shaw had come to write his play "Saint Joan"; she maintained that Shaw's wife left books about Joan littered around the house, Shaw kept picking them up and glancing at them etc etc. Eureka! Shaw writes "St Joan". I only half believed it.

Thrush

I have not seen a thrush in our garden for about eight years; today I saw one, a rather large, stout one that stood on the top of a hedge for some twenty seconds. He (or she) looked as if it was studying something, it had an almost serious expression on its face. Heaps of speckles on its chest.
There used to be heaps of them in our garden eight or so years ago. They ate all the red currants which I couldn't bother to cover - anyway they probably enjoyed them more than I would have because I never knew what to with red currants except make jam out of them and that's a tedious job which, in my case, always resulted in disaster - too soft, too hard, too something.
Then, suddenly, the next season there were none. But there were, and are, plenty of magpies. If they don't eat chicks they certainly eat eggs; so they probably ate all the young thrushes and none came back. Until now.
Welcome wise thrush which sings his song twice over..... Hah yes:

"Hark! where my blossomed pear-tree in the hedge
Leans to the field and scatters on the clover
Blossoms and dewdrops - at the bent spray's edge -
That's the wise thrush; he sings each song twice over,
Lest you should think he never would recapture
The first, fine careless rapture!"

Amateurs

Matt6hew Parris wrote a nice piece in The Spectator last week: he attended a concert given by the Chesterfield Symphony Orchestra and was surprised that he enjoyed it so much. He had the impression, before he went, that it would be sort of OK but not much more than that; after all "the demise of local performance looks so strong" - before broadcasting, the internet, before easy transport to the nation's great venues, local amateur groups performing music or theatre was something to look forward to. But now? Who'd want to hear second rate performances rather than first rate ones - on Radio 3 or You Tube or on CD? Well it seems that a lot of people still do.
You just have to put up on Google a list of amateur dramatic companies near where you live to realise that things are going well. OK, they don't do some of the great works - probably not much Shakespeare being done but what they do is likeable and often well attended.
When I was a young man many moons ago, the local drama group in Blackwood, South Wales did perform some quite heavy stuff. I remember them doing Shaw's "St Joan", Macbeth", a Greek tragedy, Strinberg's "The Father". And they were not exceptional.
I happen to write plays for amateur groups; I get some published on line where, of course, they are advertised world wide. I have had plays perrformed in America, Australia, Canada as well as in this country. I have only ever seen one production - of my short play "The Return of Lady Bracknell" at a place near Evesham. I thought it quite well done.
But performances are never quite as good as the one that you have in mind when you've wrttten it and I'm afraid it will always be something of a disappointment. I won't be going again though it was pleasant staying in a very good hotel in Evesham. But the weekend was spoilt to a certain extent when a police letter came a few weeks later telling me that I had exceeded the speed limit (I was doing a mere 36 mph for God's sake!) and was fined £60 with 3 points off my licence. O yes, I also left my M&S umbrella in a pub.

Bach

"Many people feel that he floats outside history altogether. That's why listening to Bach confers a mysterious sense of coming home, as if he's both the origin and the centre of classical music. All the great composers who come after him acknowledge that." Thus writes Ivan Hewitt, the Daily Telgraph's brilliant music critic (but I wish they wouldn't show his face above the feature - turns me off my gruel).
I have a slight problem with Bach. It's not quite the same problem Bernard Levin had when he wrote that all his music was in the minor key; this assertion was soundly confuted by a prominent music critic of the day (?) who called Levin's statement bunk. Well, replied Levin, it always sounded like minor key music. I know what he means about some of the music, especially the religious music, the Passions, the Masses and so on - Hewitt mentions his own music professor grumbling that "Bach is always on his knees". But surely not the concertos, the suites, the Brandenburg concertos for example. What's more lively than the last movement of the double concerto for violins and orchestra?
Hewitt mentions "all the great composers who came after him" held him in high esteem - not Stravinsky early  in his career, though he later praised him. I'm not so sure about that; many of them seemed to despise anything that smacked of classical form, rather like modern poets dislike rhyme. I can't imagine Schoenberg liking or even approving of Bach since Schoenberg developed a form that defied the classical form.
I have done my best with Schoenberg - and Berg and Webern - and I'm not going to waste any more of my time on him. I feel in sympathy with the music critic who listened to Schoenberg for a while before getting to his feet and leaving the room with the words: "Enough, enough, enough".
Quite!

Hitchens

Whenever I read anything by Christopher Hitchens I feel that I haven't been educated well. He mentions authors whose works I think I know quite well but writes about them in such an elegant and stylish way that I feel inadequate to talk or write about them any more. Take his piece (a review of a book by Fred Kaplan who, if he made the mistake of reading the review, might have decided to give up writing now) on Mark Twain. He brings up stuff that I never knew yet I have read a bit of Twain at various times in my life: "Tom Sawyer" and "Hucklebury Finn" for example; "Quaker City" and "Innocents abroad" - never heard of them. Then there's Twain's atheism. Never imagined he was so hostile to organised religion. Hitchens writes; "What is it about Twain that made him not just an agnostic or an atheist but a probable sympathiser with the Devil's party?"
The review of Kaplan's book is followed by a review of Upton Sinclair's most famous novel, "The Jungle". Now, I read this book a long time ago and it had the desired effect on me of making me believe that being "on the left" was the right (excuse the pun) place to be. Hitchens described Sinclair as a "socialist realist" which, he admits, is a bit unkind since the two words put together "evoke the tractor opera, the granite-jawed proletarian sculptor, the cultural and literary standards of Commissar Zhdanov...". He compares the work with Dickens and Zola expressing a notion that it is a greater work of damning the powers that be, or were anyway, than either of those two writers were capable of. Mmmm! "Hard Times" ? well, yes, I agree. But "Germinal"? Contentious surely.
Upton Sinclair has gone out of fashion - though there was a film made a few years ago based on one of his novels, "Oil": "There will be blood". Good film but too long, I thought. He's been out of fashion for some time; maybe this has to do with the advances societies have made in making working places less hell-holeish than they once were.
I wrote to Cardiff library a couple of decades ago urging them to put a few of his books on their shelves. They may have heeded what I suggested for some time later there was the complete set of his Lanny Budd books available to borrow. I borrowed one and didn't finish it.

Drones

Paddy Ashdown, writing in The Times last week, was in favour of the use of drone missiles by the Americans for what I thought were very good reasons. This is war that is being fought after all and these drones are used sparingly to target terrorists though, unfortunately, civilians are also killed. But, he argued, they are not killed in great numbers and we must understand that in all wars people who are non-combatants do get killed. They have, he went on, been very effective in getting rid of some of the most "important" leaders of the various groups that come under the name of Al Queda.
You get the feeling from the article that this is the only effective way of dealing with such abominable people who kill indiscrinately in great numbers - indeed, the greater the number of civilians that they can eliminate, the better they like it.
But there are dangers. One is specified in a letter to Time magazine this week. Faroud Rahman, writing from Karachi puts the case that " a good number of innocent and unarmed civilians have lost their precious lives, yet the relentless attacks continue. The US is indirectly creating more militants after each bombing that does not wipe out its intended target. Please stop the heinous act; halt the carnage."
Another danger, closer to home perhaps is expressed in another letter to Time."Drone technology is spreading fast worldwide and one never knows when or how it will land in the wrong hands." (The inference is that it is temporarily in the right hands.) "The consequence could be dreadful..... Imagine what extremists could do if they managed to possess or control a fleet of armed drones.... Is there any pre-empting measure to contain proliferation?"

The News

I have to agree with a writer in yesterday's Times that she experienced great pleasure a few days ago when there was a strike of journalists at the BBC; it meant that many news programmes were cancelled or shortened. She nostalgically looked back to the times (of her youth no doubt) when there only a few news broadcasts compared to today when there are many. Not only many on regular terrestial channels but on others, not to mention the 24 hour news channels. I can look back further to a time when there was no TV at all: we had radio only and my memory informs me that there were even fewer news broadcasts. I recall one fifteen minute item at mid-day and one in the early evening and one at nine o'clock at night. I too am nostalgic about those times for I feel there's just too much news on TV; and not only is it on all, or most, channels but it is virtually the same news. One might, rarely, have a scoop but it's soon picked up by the rest.
The nine o'clock news to me was a time of a great treat: I think it lasted five minutes or so and it was followed by a serial version of "Les Miserables". We, my brother and I, would wait for the beginning after the news had finished with baited breath. It was always the same beginning: a voice - "My name is Jean Valjean...." It was the wonderfully sonorous voice of Henry Ainley. That's all I recall of the serial, Ainley's voice and the first few words, every Sunday evening for weeks on end. I have just read Wickipedia about Henry Ainlee: married three times (or more), five children (or more) two of them by a woman who was not a wife. Also, he seemed to have had a passion for the young Laurence Olivier which was not, according to Olivier's son, reciprocated.
I believe he liked his drink quite a lot and, if memory serves me right, his acting career's end was the subject of a play by Emlyn Williams.

Beethoven

I used to know a man who had a friend who "collected performances of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony". That is, he attended every performance of the work he could. I used to feel this way about Beethoven's Third Symphony and once thought: "that's what I'll do, collect performances of The Third." I never did. For one thing there weren't all that many performances in my neck of the woods; especially then, some twenty or thirty years ago when the nearest concert hall was in Bristol - in Cardiff there'd sometimes be a concert in The New Theatre (wholly inadequate) and occasionally they'd use The Sophia Gardens Pavilion (more inadequate); it wasn't until they built St David's Hall that good quality concerts came to Cardiff.
Anyway, Beethoven's Third was my favourite then. It isn't now: I prefer The Seventh. But I like them all. I think you could call me a Beethoven freak.
So it came as quite a shock to hear Howard Goodall's comment about Beethoven on Desert Island Discs a couple of months ago.
Now Howard Goodall is presently giving a series of  TV programmes on music: "Howard Goodall's Story of Music" and James Delingpole in The Spectator last week wrote this about it: "Let's not beat about the bush: Howard Goodall's Story of Music is landmark television, a documentary series that deserves to rank with such unimpeachable classics as Kenneth Clark's "Civilisation"......
As you may have gathered, I enjoy classical music.... some classical music.... not all. Not Berg or Webern or Stockhausen but Bach, Mozart and, most of all Beethoven.
So, as I said, it came as something of a shock to hear Howard Goodall on Desert Island Discs say what he did. When asked if there was any composer he didn't like, he said: "Well I'm not too keen on Beethoven." Or it might have been stronger than that: "I don't much like Beethoven." Why didn't he come out with what he really meant and say "I hate Beethoven" because that's how I interpreted his remark.
He doesn't like Beethoven! I can't listen to someone talking about music who doesn't like Beethoven.
Which is why I didn't even start to watch his series.

Valley of Song

Yesterday I went to see a film that was made in 1953 but which I felt gave the impression that it was set much earlier - about 1927. It was about a small town in the South Wales valleys which had a choir that was about to embark, as they did every year, on a performance of "The Messiah". But the choirmaster had recently died,. However, conveniently, a former inhabitant of the town was retiring from London to become the insurance agent and who had had experience with conducting London choirs. Why not conduct ours? asked the local Minister of the chapel. He seemed reluctant until the Minister mentioned the words "The Messiah" when his eyes lit up: of course he would be thrilled to come to their aid. However, one of his first duties was to distribute solo parts to four members of the choir and he made a fatal error of not choosing Mrs Lloyd for the contralto soloist, choosing instead a Mrs Davies. Feelings were hurt, quarrels began, and eventually turmoil: the whole village separated into two tribes: either you were for the Lloyd's or the Davies's.
I remember not this film but the radio play on which it was based: "Choir Practice". I also recall it being described as "a storm in a Welsh teacup".
I enjoyed the film a lot: heaps of homely fun and some fine singing from the London Welsh choir (incidentally my wife's uncle was a member at that time). It was no masterpiece but as we all know, some masterpieces can be difficult to take, especially film masterpieces - I am thinking particularly of those from Sweden some fifty or so years ago. No, it was not a masterpiece; it had no depth, it was rather silly at times and it depicted the Welsh as comic people which, I suppose, could be regarded as "condescending". But I ignored all that deep thought and sat back and enjoyed it like one does a cream cake.
It brought to mind a matter which we had to solve when putting on a panto at the college I worked in. I always wrote the script and a chap called Dave produced it. We did "Cinderella" one year and "Jack and the beanstalk" and "Sleeping Beauty" and so on. And every year the boss's secretary played the female lead because she could act a bit, sing a bit and, most required quality of all, she was pretty. But prettiness fades with age. And now we were going to do "Snow White and the 7 Dwarfs". "Who'll play Snow White?" I asked Dave. He thought deeply about for it about two seconds and said "there's a girl in the new intake who'll be ideal." I said "What about the boss's sec.? She'll have to be told." "I'll tell her," he said. But I knew he wouldn't. He couldn't. No one could, it would be too unkind. So no one told her. But it must have been "in the air"; she must have realised herself that she was too old for the part. She came to us one day and said she'd like to play The Queen. "No, you can't do that, Snow White surely" we said. "I insist," she said.
Problem solved. No Lloyds versus Davies's. Peace. Panto on with six male members of staff on their knees singing "Hi, ho, hi, ho ....." Big success. OK, little success.

Vertigo

Most film critics, when discussing the film Vertigo, seem to want to talk as much about Hitchcock's obsessions as those possessed by the central characters of his films. Which is, of course, interesting. But it's a critical study of Hitchcock rather than a look at the film on its own, without meanings that come from outside the story of the film. So Vertigo is used to expose Hitchcock's psychological defects as much as the central character's.
Without Hitchcock imposing his own personality on Vertigo is it possible to view the film as a story of a man obsessed with a woman so that he is tricked into believing she is dead when, actually, another woman is murdered? Of course it is. And I think the film is better for it. There is an innocence about Scotty, played brilliantly by James Stewart, that is lost when he becomes the replacement for the director. Gradually the innocence is replaced by anger until the man is deranged almost to the point of wanting to commit murder himself. The portrait is extremely subtle: first he tries to help an old college mate, reluctantly, to follow the man's wife who, the man tells him, believes she has been "taken over" by the soul of a dead woman, a dead woman who took her own life; he tells Scotty that he is afraid his wife is near suicidal herself. Scotty follows the woman, played in her own lusciously cool way by Kim Novak, and gradually falls in love with her. When he believes she has committed suicide and cannot help her because of his vertigo, he has a nervous breakdown. Can he recover from  this? He discovers a woman who looks exactly like the woman he loved and attempts to shape her to look like the woman he believes to be dead. But she is not dead. This woman he is shaping to his deranged will is the very same one he had previously followed and loved. When he finds out he has been all along deceived his derangement takes the form of madness: he wants the woman to pay for tricking him. Which leads to a fascinating and thrilling finale in which Scotty is a lost, mad soul who has now found the way to resolve the problem he had previously found left him unable to prevent a suicide - which, of course, never took place.
Brilliant. Slow moving but worth watching its every scene, every twitch of Stewart's face, every twist in the very intricate plot.
Recently it's been voted best film ever made by Sight and Sound magazine. I think I prefer Rear Window but it is better than most others not directed by The Master.

Cornell Woolrich

Who is (or, rather, was) Cornell Woolrich? Well, he was a popular crime writer in the 1900's,up there with Chandler so they said. He wrote heaps of novels (27) and short stories (hundreds) and some of his stories were made into films; indeed, 31 of them were adapted for the screen. I was surprised to discover that Hitchcock's "Rear Window" was adapted from one of his short stories - saw the film in Chapter Arts Centre this week and believe it to be Hitchcocks's best, superior to "Vertigo" which was recently judged to be the greatest film ever made by Sight and Sound magazine which, every ten years, draws up a list of the 10 - or is it 100? - best films made.
Another of one of my favourite films was an adaptation of a Woolrich short story: "The Window" which starred the ten year old Bobby Driscoll as a lad who went around telling porkies, tales that made people anxious only to find that the boy had made them up. It was a "cry wolf" kind of story because when the boy witnesses a real murder, no one believes him. It's a remarkable B picture,  a real thriller with an outstanding cast: Arthur Kennedy and Barbara Hale as the boy's parents and Paul Stewart and Ruth Roman as the killer and his wife.
Another of Woolrich's stories - a novel in fact - was made into a film, a 'film noire': "Night has a thousand eyes" with Edward G. Robinson. I must have seen this film. Surely I wouldn't have missed a film like this with an actor whom I admired more than Bogart - and that's saying a lot.
I have a collection of 12 of Cornell Woolrich's short stories and have just started one: "The Corpse next Door" about a man with a temper who is so enraged by the disappearance of his milk bottles every morning or so that he 's determined to catch the culprit; he does, and in a fit of rage, kills him. What does he do with the body? Well, there's an open door nearby - must be where the felon lives - so he drags the body there and dumps him in one of those beds that spring up against a wall..... I don't know what happens next but will soon find out. Great stuff. He wrote great stories but I'm afraid he is largely forgotten now. Pity.

Restless

Lavish praise from pretty well every TV reviewer for William Boyd's play called "Restless". And I have to admit I found it quite exciting: the pace was fast, heaps of action, the characters were well drawn and the acting was top-notch. And yet, and yet. In retrospect I find myself confused: there were so many parts of the story I simply didn't follow. Why did the heroine go to Holland? It seemed for no purpose since when she got there she was ordered to go immediately to Belguim. Why? To spy on an activity involving a German general's defection. Did she see it? Did it occur? No idea. Why did she crawl through a toilet window to escape - from what? And who was the bloke she spoke to and why was he chased and shot? Then suddenly, towards the end of the play, the heroine's daughter (in a later period) is interrogated by the police about the suspicious activities of her husband who soon turns up and then leaves. What was he supposed to be doing there in that play since he wasn't remotely involved in any of the action.
Phew!
I could go on since the play seemed to me to be full of holes and red herrings.
One of the reviewers referred to William Boyd as "the great William Boyd". On the strength of this play I would call him "the confused and confusing William Boyd".
I have the feeling that it was one of those adaptations of a novel which required the reading of the novel before seeing the play; maybe then one would be able to follow all the trails.
When I mentioned the author to an old friend of mine he said "wasn't he a cowboy?" When you're as old as us you'd remember William Boyd from short black and white films as the character Hoppalong Cassidy. Now there is "the great William Boyd".