Astrophe unforgotten.
Thanks, Uggi.
ASTROPHE was the name. Three syllables.
Sounding a bit posh. We thought it a good idea at the time, because he
was our cat Astrophe.
He was A Good Thing; an Action Cat who progressed to
being A Memorable Animal. He was Astrophe the All Right.
He was our first pet, 56 years ago, in 1956; the
first of several felines to rule the marital roost down the years. His
successors all had their qualities, but none of them was a footballer.
Astrophe became a footballer – but more specifically
a goalkeeper, because his footwork did not qualify him to be an outfield
player.
He also became a goalkeeper because he coincided with
our custody of a wicker wastepaper basket of the kind that used to
feature prominently in school classrooms.
The idea was that the basket would be put on its side and we would say, “Go into goal!” – and when he crouched to guard the big round circle with which he had been entrusted we would make a ball of paper, tightly bound by an elastic band, and hurl it in the general direction of the wickerwork.
Sadly, there is no picture of Astrophe in charge of his recumbent basket – just a couple of memories of him practising in the very early days, disporting on the earthen heap that was to become a suitably slabbed patio.
Astrophe came to mind with The Artist, the mostly-silent movie featuring Uggi, the Jack Russell terrier with a penchant for walking on his hind legs, playing dead, or putting his chin on the floor and his backside in the air.
I can’t tell you the essence of the plot
because I became an Uggi groupie on the instant. Everything else was an
unneeded extra.
I am a sucker for acting animals; the first to
breathe a silent “Aaaah!” when a tiny pooch is pushed out from
the wings and whizzes across the stage to be scooped into the waiting
arms of the young actress who awaits him in The Wizard of Oz or
some other production involving a four-footed chum.
Astrophe never made the big-time. He never bestrode a
stage. He was simply a very special small-time cat. And Uggi has
suddenly brought him back into my brain cell.
John Slim
Sorry – but I’m apostrophising
HERE we go again.
Another barmy brickbat is hurled at our lovely
language. Another opportunity is afforded for linguistic know-nothings
to claim that their ignorance doesn’t matter after all, because an
organisation that is up to its neck in English literature is pretending
that it doesn’t know any better and it wants to claim some street cred.
But perhaps Waterstone’s thinks it can hang on to
shelves full of Eng lit while abandoning Eng lang. Can it really be a
pulveriser as well as a purveyor?
If it can, it’s another nail in the coffin of
anybody’s hopes to give slight pause to the daily mayhem meted out to
the most beautiful language in the world by the gonna-gorra-wonna
wonderkids who bash my ears on the BBC and whom I would be ashamed to
support if I were not so deep into the sere and yellow that by now I can
catch them at it without having to buy a licence.
The dismal reality is that Waterstone’s is now
officially apostrophe-free. Mr Waterstone, who was presumably
responsible for launching his outsize bookstore and has until now been
apostrophically proud to indicate that he owned it, has gone plural,
though he gives no indication of how many of him there now are.
His apostrophe is officially banished. Mr Waterstone
wants to be Waterstones and more “web-friendly.” Do I detect an imminent
bid for the presidency of the (apostrophe-free) Greengrocers Shops
Federation?
But why is it more important to be on chummy terms
with the increasingly all-pervasive web than with English? Is the
internet to be the ultimate arbiter of communication, as well as the
purveyor of porn and countless other goodies?
I think we should be told.
John Slim
The drawbacks of spilling the
beans
WHEN is asparagus a green bean?
It’s possibly an unlikely
question, but it seems that the saga of television’s
Downton Abbey was
faced with an anguish of etiquette. Nobody knew how to eat asparagus in
the context of the early 20th Century.
Naturally, the series has an historical adviser, but he was not
available when he was needed to resolve the particular problem. Sod’s
Law had struck again.
Apparently, so it has been reported, opinion was
divided into three camps – using fingers, using forks, or using
“something else.”
It is perhaps not the sort of issue that is likely to
prompt empires to totter. Even so, understandably confident that there
was bound to be an unimpressed taxpayer out there somewhere, waiting to
pounce if they got it wrong, there was behind-the-scenes anxiety –
compounded when it became clear that not even Julian Fellowes knew the
answer, though I am not certain why it was assumed that he might know,
just because he wrote the series and was misguided enough to put
asparagus into the mix.
Anyway, he didn’t know – and this, so I read, “caused
a hiccup during filming.” So, with the urgent resourcefulness that makes
us proud to be British, it was decided that all those actors pretending
to be toffs would have to be joined by sliced asparagus that was
pretending to be green beans.
This makes me realise that we are faced with a
question that is begging to be begged. I can’t begin to work out why, in
that case, the silver tureen could not have contained, er, green beans.
Then any reference to asparagus could have been deftly removed from the
script, with Baron Fellowes of
But this was not done and the only reason that
springs to mind is that such a substitution would inevitably have
separated the company from asparagus and its aftermath, which is that –
compared with spilling the beans – it does add a pong to the eater’s
outpourings. I can only guess that Lord Fellowes and his fellows did not
want to forgo the pleasure of swapping their urinary findings.
Just briefly, and just as if they had been eating
asparagus, they all turned up their noses.
John Slim
Let’s acclaim the man of the
caff
YEARS ago, in the magazine of the National
Operatic & Dramatic Association (NODA), I drew attention to a citizen
who should have been the centrepiece of a stage comedy.
Alas, my words fell, if not on deaf ears then on
blind eyes. Nothing has happened in the interim to indicate that
playwrights have been rushing in what would be the theatrical equivalent
of the January sales. All that puzzles me is how blind eyes can have
looked a gift horse in the mouth.
I was, and I am, talking about Pete. Pete, the
raucous restaurateur; Pete, the compact character who presided,
throatily and nasal, high priest of the tea urn, over the Worcestershire
transport caff to which a colleague and I used to repair every day to
enjoy the best cuppa in town – and the one-man entertainment that
unfailingly accompanied it.
Restaurateur is pitching it a bit high.
Caff is indeed more correct. The scrubbed pine tables were parallel
with the spotless stainless steel ramparts that were Pete’s vantage
point, from behind which he maintained a conversational barrage that
skewered his customers where they sat. Regulars, who popped in every day
for the badinage as much as the brew, had the additional pleasure of
seeing strangers adopt a mien of wide-eyed uncertainty when they faced
his decibel-charged onslaught for the first time.
Not that there was anything frightening about Pete.
Indeed, he was a comfortable, comforting character – stocky,
bow-fronted, 15 stones by 5ft 6in, with forearms like hams. But his
public persona did tend to hit the patrons full-on. They had no room for
manoeuvre, nowhere to run.
Behind the barrage, however, this was the most
joyously gentle of citizens, just as liable to enquire solicitously
about a regular’s newborn baby as he was to unleash a rip-snorting
riposte or his highly-personalised verdict on the weather.
He offered a virtually continuous running commentary
to the world at large while his customers speared their steaming
platefuls of fried egg, bacon, sausage, mushrooms and tomatoes, topped
by a tsunami of brown sauce.
The patrons were wont to pause in their confrontation
with a bacon butty, the better to assimilate the tidings that washed
over them from behind the gleaming tea urn.
First-time visitors paled appreciatively in the face
of the unstoppable tide that was Pete at full throttle; Pete, presenting
an avalanche of amiability that included confidential asides barely
audible on the other side of the street if last man in had omitted to
shut the door.
I would have loved to see the Pope step aside just
once, switch off a suddenly unnecessary microphone, and entrust Pete
with an Orbis et urbe.
Pete was the unchallenged master of ceremonies; the
full-on front man; the man of many insults, all offered – and accepted –
in the spirit of gargantuan goodwill that pervaded Pete’s Café. He
snarled his sneers – always harmless, good-humoured sneers – in a
high-decibel groan that defied you to ignore it as he reached for an
aluminium teapot of bucket proportions.
His po-faced whispers hurtled into every corner,
interrupted only when he paused to shout “Sausage sengwich” over
his shoulder, in order that the elderly, white-coated women forming his
back-up battalion in the kitchen should have no doubt about the latest
requirements for a further supply of the wonderful, fat-running fodder
that came clamped between two white-bread doorstops while high-pressure
epithets hurtled past their ears like bucketed gravel.
Not that Pete’s adjectival arsenal was in danger of
being compared to the abysmal flurries of four-letter filth that
television aims at our sitting-rooms on a nightly basis, courtesy of
speakers unable to master their native tongue or control their own.
No, Pete’s epithetical parade, though impressive, was
sanguinary, rather than copulative. He was a bloody and a
bleedin’ man, totally free of malice; a sanguinary Horatio at his
bridge of egg-and-bacon abundance.
Alas, he and his characterful domain were joys of the
1960s, now long-gone and surely lamented by others who, like me, were
beneficiaries of a gentle but no-nonsense citizen who ruled his little
empire with a tongue of iron.
All of which, I trust, may have gone some way to
indicate that I think that if a playwright were to reincarnate Pete he
would instantly enliven yet another play that would otherwise be full of
cardboard characters – characters of no depth or interest or, er,
character, whose only justification for existence is in some way to
flesh out the plot. A latterday Pete would work wonders.
Into Pete’s unassuming empire one day came one of his
regular customers. Having had his cup of tea and quietly enjoyed the
current entertainment, he got up to leave. As he opened the door,
he called over his shoulder: “Cheerio, Pete!”
The high priest paused in his tea-towel ministrations
to newly-washed crockery and watched the small retreating figure. Then
he growled his benediction.
“Ta-rar!” he roared. “Mind yer arse on the step.”
John Slim
We’ve drawn the short
straw, chaps
ONCE upon a time, when
men were men and women were glad of it, there was no question about who
wore the trousers. Men did.
That was when women were women
and wore floaty frocks and men were prone to be delighted.
By prone, incidentally I mean liable –
not the opposite of supine; not, as I see I may have been interpreted,
lying on their front, in the expectation of delight that might be coming
their way. Alas, televised footballers are for ever falling over and
lying on their back and nevertheless being described as prone by
under-instructed commentators.
Alas again, and à propos the floaty
frocks I was pondering before being summarily distracted, sexual
equality means that women now wear the trousers, too. Legs have been
sacrificed on the altar, oddly enough, of feminism – that is, of
females’ right to look like men if they want to.
Women make up their own minds. Women know what they
want. And if women want to lose their legs, we mere males have to let
them get on with it. It is women who are the smarty-pants. There are no
flies on women. Nor on their smarty-pants, either, for that matter.
Equality of the sexes means there need now be no
reason why a man shouldn’t be able to ask whether his bum looks big in
this. In fact, I’m certain that, somewhere in this once green and
pleasant land, there must be a genial joker who has already done so –
and probably been berated for his pains by ladies who don’t like to see
one of their favourite lines being stolen by the lads.
In the female form-book, equality does not confer the
right to steal a quote, any more than it paves the way for pinching a
bottom. Slice us where you like, it is we men who have drawn the short
straw.
It’s all right with me if the girls feel the need to
take to trousers. I just wish they knew that there are trousers which
are neither black nor denim, and that far too many of them are large
economy size and filled to the brim – but who among us is brave enough
to break any of this to them?
I first became aware of trousered women in the early
years of the war. Women went fighting on the home front in munitions
factories. They had trousers at one end, knotted headscarves at the
other and a cigarette somewhere between. Those were the years when
ladies lost their legs to the practicalities and their hearts to the
GIs.
By now, female leg-wear can have a special elegance,
especially when it comes with bell-bottoms at one end and a belle bottom
that’s shaped to distraction-point at the other.
So why, suddenly, am I distracted?
I honestly don’t know – unless it’s because I have
just begun remembering the ra-ra skirt.
John Slim
A new era for Action Man
A SURPRISING story of
Christmas Past came my way in the course of the recent festivities.
One of the celebratory citizens present related the
tale of a child who was a reluctant recipient of Tiny Tears, a doll whom
I remember as being all the rage at one time but who as far as I know
may well have dropped out of fashion by now, overwhelmed by competition
from the electronic marvels that are wont to fill today’s toy-boxes.
For some reason, the aforesaid infant was in no mood
to adopt the inoffensive TT – who was promptly subjected to a severe
haircut and deposited in a military uniform for immediate resurrection
as Action Man.
Alas, this was an Action Man who needed
bottle-feeding and repeatedly had to have his nappy changed. Hardly
manoeuvres of a military kind, but I understand that there were no
complaints from the victim of what was surely something new in the
matter of transgender torment.
John Slim
Dead men don’t make us
happy
WHAT a
wonderful woman he is! To the point of being Queenly, indeed.
It is the impish and
irrepressible Gyles Brandreth, doppelganger for Queen Mary – Mary of
Teck, Victoria Mary Augusta Louise Olga Pauline Claudine Agnes, to give
King George V’s Queen, grandmother of Queen Elizabeth, her full dues –
in her middle years.
In the poster, there are pearls
dropping from his ears, strings of them in all their glory on his
new-bosomed chest as he supports a china cup and saucer in his
white-gloved hands, little pinky up and to the fore. All the
accoutrements.
Not that this is a Brandreth with
regina-like pretensions – but he certainly brings to mind such adored
divinities as Dames Edith Evans and Maggie Smith, who are among those to
have preceded him as Lady Bracknell, fearsome and inspirational creation
of Oscar Wilde.
The irrepressible Brandreth became
Bracknell, lock, stock and barrel, in the cause of the new musical
version of The Importance of Being Earnest at Riverside Studios,
Hammersmith. He learned to master high heels and become accustomed to a
corset and stockings, though confessedly less happy with his new bosom
and failing to understand why any woman can ever opt for an inconvenient
enlargement.
He learned to walk like a woman (head
held high), sit like a woman (knees together), eat like a woman (smaller
mouthfuls and less noise) and make sure he had no conversational boom.
There was even the inconvenience of moisturising morning and night, and
it was All for Art.
In the bar afterwards, he was visibly
tired. Not the happy, zippy citizen who has found his way from fancy
sweaters to National Treasure. I told him it was time to slow down
somewhat and that I didn’t want the low-point of my ninth decade to be
the need for writing his obituary.
He promised to rest, be it never so
briefly. So at least that’s something. Dead men don’t spread happiness.
John Slim
We all put our foot in it
sometimes
MY friend Anne, with whom I tend to occupy
the nave end of the back pew when I go to church for my weekly
kneel, said she hoped I didn’t mind mentioning this, but had I had a
look at my shoes?
Well, no, I hadn’t, but I did –and realised fairly
quickly what had prompted her question. On one foot I was wearing a
polished brown leather shoe. On the other was a shoe that was suede –
apart from which, it was dark grey.
This is something I have never achieved before, and
as I freely confessed to Anne while we went on waiting for the kick-off,
I am not at all sure how I managed it this time.
My main concern at this point was to hide my feet
beneath the 12 ft-long retractable kneeler and eventually to escape
without presenting the unsuspecting faithful with a sighting of the
unco-ordinated footwear – so I skipped Communion, waited until all was
ended and we had the OK to go in peace, and shot out to the car park,
staying not upon the order of my going. I decided to forgo calling for
my Sunday paper.
I have had other memorable shoe moments, even
discounting the time I went to the theatre in my slippers. One was many
years ago, during a long-gone English seaside holiday. Elsa and I were
taking the mixed infants for a walk, and the strap of one of my sandals
broke. The only way of keeping it on was by clenching my toes and
defying it to slip off. This inevitably resulted in my walking as best I
could with an outsize limp.
As Elsa was at that time facing the world with an
upper lip that was sporting a large-economy-size herpes, we began to
look like an outing of cripples who had escaped from the local leper
colony.
Another happened back in the 1960s. It was actually
nothing to do with me, but it impressed me sufficiently to ensure that I
have remembered it for nearly half a century. This, for a citizen who
habitually struggles to remember yesterday, is going some.
I was walking gently along an otherwise-deserted
street in Redditch and was intrigued to see a woman’s shoe – small,
perfectly formed and in good condition, standing on the pavement just in
front of me. Almost at once, from behind me, a car drew up, a door
opened and a woman’s voice shouted, “Here it is!” – at which point, I
realised that, with no effort on my part, I had found the shoe’s owner.
Here, suddenly, was a young woman who hopped,
one-shoed, out of the car, picked up the solitary piece of mystery
footwear, jumped back in and disappeared from my life for ever. Fifty
years later, I am no nearer to understanding how she had come to leave
it there in the first place.
I do not claim a monopoly of shoe moments, of course.
Most recently, I have heard of two gentlemen called
Earlier this year when the snow was still around,
they decided to have a session at Col's house, so John took the
precaution of using his cycle. At the end of the evening they were
both somewhat well-lubricated. Eventually,
John left the house but had difficulty putting on his
safety helmet before setting off for home. He was probably not unduly
surprised when he fell off his bike. He later said it was like poetry in
(slow) motion.
When he hit the ground, his helmet came off – which
allowed him to see that his gloves were nestling inside it, offering
mute explanation of his recent problems in ensconcing his head. When he
came round at home later that morning, he realised he was wearing one of
his own shoes and one of his friend’s.
If the shoe fits – wear it. That’s what I say. After
all, perhaps you will be the only one who will ever know.
John Slim
The bygone joy of Gerard
THE oafs who sully the fair name of stand-up
comedy have even more to answer for than I realised.
An early arrival into my
Christmas stocking was Gerard Hoffnung with
The Bricklayer’s Story,
attractively primed in CD format and plastic casing, as a replacement
for the version which for years has been giving me so many chuckles in
its cassette form.
Naturally anxious to introduce a bygone joyful genius
to a generation that has never heard of him – they’re called
grandchildren, since you ask – I used the opportunity occasioned by
having eight of my nine in one room at the same time, and switched on.
What I got was blank looks from the uninhibitedly
uninterested. Uninterested, of course, is what the Daily
Mail’s army of the employed but uninformed habitually refers to as
disinterested. Not the same thing at all, but don’t tell
ۥem: I’ve a mind to see how many
times they do it in 2012 and I might even run a small sweepstake on it.
But back to oafs and grandchildren.
My pre-seasonal failure to engender joy among the
junior set brought into sharp focus the culpable clowns who masquerade
as comedians and are largely responsible for my suspicion that F has
replaced E as the most used letter in the language.
How much has this cost today’s youngsters – the
particular bunch under review are aged 12 to 19 – in their ability to
appreciate humour that is clever and measured, rather than foul and
inyerface? (Inyerface is three words that I’ve turned into one, and for
which my computer screen is quietly shouting at me, but I think it’s a
good word and one that deserves to survive because it says what it
means. When will The Oxford Dictionary discover it?).
The Bricklayer’s Story is related by Hoffnung
in the beautifully controlled and rounded tones that vested him with
years of undisputable authority despite the fact that he was only 33
when he unveiled it at the Oxford Union in 1958 – the year before he
died.
It is, in brief, the story of how the bricklayer
“fixed the building.” It involves a barrel of bricks, a rope and a
pulley. It tells how the bricklayer, standing on the ground, “cast off
the line”, causing the barrel to plummet to the ground while the
bricklayer, who had “decided to hang on” hurtled upwards.
Halfway up, he met the barrel coming down. . . and
when the barrel hit the ground, it burst at its bottom, causing all the
bricks to spill out. The bricklayer, who by this time had banged his
head on the beam and got his fingers jammed in the pulley, was now
heavier than the barrel. . .
And so calamity continues. This is a masterclass in
making people laugh. It is absurdity encased in an oratorical delivery
and punctuated with pauses that are so beautifully timed that they let
the audience get ahead of the story and thus have two laughs for the
price of one.
But I suspect that you have to be over 35 to picture
the scenario, let alone appreciate it.
Which brings me back to our stand-up slobs. They have
the impression that the F word is bound to guarantee uninhibited
hilarity among the faithful – and, incredibly but sadly, they are right.
Alongside computer games, they are responsible for a generation without
imagination and which wouldn’t see subtlety if it was served with toast
and treacle.
It’s such a shame. Every day, we are seeing and
hearing the destruction of a beautiful language.
John Slim
The day the Arras dodged me
LIFE is for ever leading me down side streets
and into side issues. It decides it is time to tell me something, and it
tells me without so much as a by-your-leave.
This means, lucky you, that I
can now tell you about beh.
I now know all about beh because I was
misguided enough to think that if I simply typed beh it would
save me all those extra letters in Behind the Arras. After all, I
visit
So yes, I simply typed beh.
What an idle clown! Yes, I saved having to type
another 11 letters – and two spaces – but I still have not reached
Behind the Arras, because I have been distracted. I’m not complaining,
because the result is that I can now tell you that beh occurs
when an Australian tries to say bear.
?
Moreover, I can also tell you that whoever is telling
me this has got into something of a mess with his next sentence: “They
tend to refuse it make you feel bad for telling them they can’t speak
proper English.”
Er. . ?
Whoever this is (who worries about people who can’t
speak proper English and who unfortunately can’t speak proper English
and may even be Australian) is saying refuse it make when he
presumably means use it to make – lending support to my belief
that words are always in charge and that we are as clay in their hands.
But the really interesting bit is the bit that
follows:
“Since Australians are weird, they can't pronounce
their R's, so they fail at life. Try to get them to say other words that
end with er, like pear. If you get them to yell at you,
try to record it and play it to humiliate them.”
Whoever this is (again) mentions words that end with
er, then quotes pear as an example. And anyway, how often
am I going to get an Australian to say pear by goading him into
shouting at me? Pear does not strike me as a word that is liable
to invite vituperation. Pear is something to tempt the taste
buds; a gentle word that speaks of succulence while rhyming with other
kindly words like care and fair.
But this is yet another side issue. Life is at it
again.
John Slim
How’s your time bomb?
IT IS just possible that every amateur
theatre group in Britain is sitting on a time bomb.
John Slim
All a pose for chopped-up
prose
I SUPPOSE you could
call anal, banal
and canal
the ABC of a poet’s despair. They look so similar – indeed, they’re
virtually identical – but you can’t make them rhyme with each other or
come anywhere to doing so.
But there’s always the silver lining. Fortunately for
poets these days, rhyme is of no more concern than rhythm is. The day it
occurred to one of them that it’s far less work to chop up a chunk of
prose and call it poetry was the day that creativity was subsumed by
sloth. Now everybody’s at it.
That’s why a modern poet, if so moved, could churn
out something in which successive lines ended in flange, filthy,
fondle, sixty, seventy, ninety, else and eschscholzia.
It wouldn’t matter a damn that these are among the
legions of words which make nonsense of the myth that orange, cushion
and month are the only words in English that don’t rhyme with
any other word, while overlooking the slightly inconvenient circumstance
that orange manages to rhyme with lozenge.
These days, rhyme is of no concern for a man in
search of his muse. Give him his keyboard and watch the stanzas tumble
forth, rhyme-free and uncontaminated by cadence. Easy!
I suppose it’s a symbol of modern society. Avoid work
at all costs. Not, as far as I know, that you can go on benefits for
failing to write a poem. You’d have to find some other dodge, which is a
bit of a shame. Some slight travail involved there, mate. Not fair.
But it’s interesting that among the words that won’t
rhyme with anything are poem, poet and poetry. At least,
it strikes me as interesting. In opting for isolationism, these are
words that offer undeserved support to the improbable poets who recoil
from rhyme like a schoolboy from soap.
Cut the cadence, chaps, we’re going freestyle! And
now we have lost Wordsworth and the boys, three little words have
pinched the labels that match the idle mission.
Alas, it is a ploy that has backfired pretty
profoundly. Hurray, came the unabashed cry, if poet won’t rhyme
with anything, why should a poet try to force the issue?
I am sure that the possibility of such an outcome did
not remotely occur to the words which then found that they had been
hijacked – and this is surprising.
After all, words usually know precisely what they’re
up to. They realised an age ago that today’s poetry did not deserve to
be dignified by labels that rhymed with any other word, because this is
poetry that has turned its back on rhyme and from which metre has gone
missing.
Nevertheless, poem, poet and poetry
cannot have foreseen that in abstaining from rhyme they would come to
symbolise the sloth of modern verse.
Me? I just wish somebody would find a poet brave
enough to vest his verse in honesty and make its lines form a natural
unbroken succession. And call it prose.
John Slim
Dumbing
down, the Amdram way
THE
nightmare of forgetting the words must surely weigh on those who bravely
go forth nightly and expose themselves to the pitfalls of performance.
This is something of which I have no first-hand
knowledge. Obviously, like any other habitual supporter of the amateur
stage, I have heard the sibilant whisper from the wings that follows
momentary amnesia. But my own appearances on stage have been strictly
limited.
There were two of them. They found me as an
uncommunicative shepherd hanging on to his crook on behalf of a mixed
infants Nativity production; and about a year later, aged six, as The
Wind, whose responsibility was to slip into a crotch-length pale blue
shantung frock with a serrated hemline and make the flowers grow.
This involved whizzing on and wailing “Whooooo!” –
apart from which, my one-boy breeze could not be accused of being a
conversationalist. I remained silent, at one with the late Stout Cortez
upon his peak in Darien.
It is therefore perhaps not surprising that I have
not sought to unleash any slight semblance of amateur acting talent upon
a startled world in all the years in which I have been required to try
somehow or other to make myself useful.
Even so, I feel constrained to voice my despair at
the appalling shorthand that is used to describe amateur theatre.
QUICK AND EASY
It is the dramatics bit that I find particularly
appalling – despite my discovery that it appears in my dictionary as
meaning dramatic productions, alongside histrionic behaviour. It’s a
word in which I detect no appeal whatever, and the same goes for
operatics.
For me, dramatics sounds like the shorthand of
contempt, a disparaging, get-it-over-quickly reference to a subject that
respectable folk really ought not to talk about at all – which of course
is not remotely true of one of Britain’s most popular hobbies or
occupations.
Operatics is open to the same criticism. Moreover,
unlike dramatics, it is not recognised by my dictionary.
I would like to see both terms banished to the outer
darkness, or at least into the wings – and certainly by those who have
made amateur theatre their hobby. Instead, it is the very practitioners
who use them habitually. There is no hint of a tide of change that would
see such aberrations washed up on the rocks of repentance and regret.
Amdram, meanwhile, is the journalistic short form for
amateur drama and is habitually recognised as embracing thespians who
enter stage-left singing their heads off, as well as those who are not
required to make their vocal cords hit the heights or the depths.
As far as I know, however, it has not broached the
glossary of terms habitually employed by its practitioners – either the
straight-play folk or the people who are wont to warble. As far as they
are concerned, whatever they do, it isn’t amdram. And this is good,
because amdram is the shorthand of shoddiness.
This is why amdram does not pain me to anything like
the extent that amateur dramatics does. I hear amateur dramatics spoken,
and I see it written, by the very people who take enjoyment from their
involvement, but who seem to me to be taking a contemptuous swipe at
their hobby, even though it is an unconscious one – and by doing so, to
be joining forces with its detractors.
And, sadly, there are many detractors – and amateur
dramatics is such a handy tool for the outsiders, the know-nothings, who
affect to despise all stage work that is not professional and who would
not dream of darkening the doorstep of any of the hundreds of excellent
amateur productions that could show them the error of their ways six
nights of the week.
All right, I must be a super-sensitive soul. Even so,
amateur thespians ought to avoid this unthinking belittling of their
chosen hobby. The more they throw amateur dramatics into the
conversational melting-pot, the harder the opprobrium will stick – and
in the end it will be no more than its practitioners deserve.
John Slim
Time to cuss
the custodes
I UNDERSTAND that it
was an ancient Roman poet, or possibly Plato the bygone Greek, who was
moved to ask “Quis
custodiet ipsos custodes?
Was it Rome’s Juvenal – or was it Plato parading his
mastery of Latin and leaving the rest of us to work out that he wanted
to know who watches out for the guards and keeps an eye on the
baby-sitters?
Pardon my classical outburst. It’s just that I have
finally confirmed for my own satisfaction that some of the people who
set examination papers for schools are indisputably barmy.
For years, the rest of us have watched the steady
dumbing down of GSCE and its preparatory questions, ensuring that our
universities are in danger of being overwhelmed by an ever-increasing
tide of grossly unsuitable applicants, including even those for whom a
course in remedial English has to be made available when they arrive
there.
And now, heaven help us, there are exam-setters who
have reached what will surely remain for some time a landmark in their
inexorable progress towards certifiable insanity.
I see that Year 10 students at a North London school
have been required to handle a mock spoken English language examination
involving the crackpot crudities vouchsafed in 2008 by Jonathan Ross
and Russell Brand, well-known alleged funnymen, on the answerphone of
Andrew Sachs, the actor who charmed a nation as the hapless waiter
Miguel in Fawlty Towers.
Their wit and wisdom has become essential reading for
fourteen-year-olds who have been required to study and absorb it as the
current stage in what the cognoscenti are pleased to call their
education.
The head teacher of the school concerned made a
spirited but specious defence by claiming that it was no more coarse or
vulgar than Shakespeare – clearly overlooking the fact that Shakespeare
dealt either with the dead or with fictional subjects – and suggested in
any case that the test paper was all about language and was totally
appropriate to the real world in which children live.
Lest you forget, and who shall blame you, the
ever-twinkling twosome under review left their sick messages during a
BBC Radio 2 show, to the effect that Brand had slept with Georgina
Baillie, the burlesque dancer granddaughter of Andrew Sachs, the gentle
veteran whose duties required him to be intermittently hit on the head
with a tin tray by Basil Fawlty.
They did not put it in quite the genteel terms that I
have deployed, naturally, and they provoked more than 50,000 complaints,
which led to Ross’s suspension and Brand’s resignation.
My doubts about the sanity of examiners are prompted
by the realisation that more than one school chose this same snide
snippet as appropriate for assessing pupils’ mastery of English in their
mock GSCE exam, and that this particular school moved into the top six
per cent of schools in 2001 – when Ofsted awarded it a gold star.
Moreover, it was this year applauded as being among the most improved
schools in
So who does guard us from the guards? Does anybody?
Week by week, we seem to advance further into the
swamps of foul-tongued television. There is clearly no caution
administered to anyone who is about to go “live” – yet we blithely go on
trusting everyone to be civilized in our sitting room.
This, alas, is too much to ask of the average oaf –
as the rest of us could have testified, if consulted.
Consultation, alas, is a rare privilege. We are
simply required to cough up our licence fees and derive what consolation
is possible from cussing the custodes – whose ranks, remember,
include the clever-clogs who have decreed that sex education is a must
for four-year-olds
John Slim
Sorry, but I can’t face Facebook
I HAVE just discovered
that I have numerous friends waiting for me. Unfortunately, they are all
on Facebook.
They’re very kind, but if I
were to be consulted, and at the risk of being deemed to be uncaring, I
would have to admit that most of them qualify as acquaintances, rather
than friends – and some of them I have never heard of. It’s a bit
disconcerting.
It is Facebook itself, having failed to push in my
direction any kind of mild enquiry about whether I would like to be
offered as a potential recipient for ubiquitous friendship, that has
told me of my untimely and clearly undeserved popularity – so perhaps I
ought to point out that I have never remotely considered becoming a
Facebooker.
My friends know who they are and I know who they are,
but I see little point, if any, in giving away such an embarrassing
secret to the world at large – especially when the world at large cannot
possibly be interested. Must we, to bend the Bard a bit, hold a candle
to our shame?
I am so remote from Facebook that my computer screen
is taken by surprise and underlines it in red on the rare occasions that
I type it. It is clear that even my very own know-it-all built-in Big
Brother finds no reason whatever to associate me with it.
Just for the hell of it, I clicked on Facebook and
was told that Facebook is a great way to catch up with friends,
especially if I’ve been away for a while.
It may be, but it’s not for me. I don’t want a wall –
for I gather that this is what it is called – on which to scatter my
secrets to captivate the curious-but-not-remotely-interested.
In any case, I am not a mine of undiscovered
mysteries, let alone enough of a delusional fathead to assume that
everyone beyond my front door will be fascinated to find that I am about
to have a toasted teacake.
My computer has already unforgivably educated me into
abandoning letter-writing in favour of emails – though I am fairly
confident that I shall never take the next, seemingly unavoidable, step
of writing u when I mean you and ur instead of your. I
decline to push our beautiful language any more rapidly down the hill
that it is already coursing at breakneck speed. Emails do me fine.
Stephen Fry’s is the name that always seems to crop
up in relation to Facebook. He, I gather, is a man of many Friends; the
Pied Piper of the Lonely Hearts Club. He is well blessed.
Well, good for him. He is clearly the latter-day
example of Homer nodding and he has not yet tired of his fatheaded fad.
I know I’m down to my ultimate brain cell, but – undoubtedly to the
dismay of millions – I prefer a wall to protect me from the world
outside, not to act as a scribble-sheet for everyone who passes by.
John Slim
Tickle my tear ducts.
Smash a piano
LET there be no secrets
between us. When I sit in a theatre or a cinema, I am a sucker for a sob
story.
Not that I am to be caught
flourishing a tear-stained handkerchief with as much frantic furtiveness
as I can muster. No, a careless flourish of the forefinger across the
eyeball serves its purpose and any residue of dampness can usually be
relied upon to sort itself out before the lights go up.
When I am being entertained, I am one of the world’s
secret weepers. I may, indeed, sniff under pressure, but it will
be a small, silent sniff, broken down into even smaller sniffs to
guarantee that my immediate neighbour will not suspect a thing.
But I am not so good at controlling the old eye-juice
in the broad light of day – a failing that was memorably brought home to
me several decades ago, when a piano tuner turned up and I was his
audience of one.
I stood alongside him as he sat on the piano stool,
and I immediately suspected that I was going to have problems, because
he was blind – and because he was such a likeable, happy soul. Life had
dealt him a cruel hand, but it was if he didn’t give the proverbial damn
– and this immediately threatened to do something to my extraordinarily
susceptible set of tear-ducts.
I hardly had to wait a moment before I received
confirmation that I was done for. When a happy blind man chooses to
regale me with What a Wonderful World, singing to his own
accompaniment, I haven’t a hope in Hades.
It is a song that has been with us since Louis
Armstrong recorded his gravelly-sweet account of it in 1968. Under any
conditions, it is guaranteed to get among my sensibilities on the
instant. When it is offered by a blind man who has no idea of the
delights that are there for the seeing, because he has never seen them,
it is time to surrender while my response mechanism goes into overdrive.
Piano tuners are special people. As far as I know,
they do not complain. They take life as they find it, they sit down and
deploy their skills, and they don’t expect me to marvel when I am the
beneficiary.
I suspect that piano tuners are rare birds these days
– presumably because pianos as a breed were subjected to banal brutality
in the cause of piano-smashing competitions back in the 1970s. Ritual
wrecking was the order of the day. Without pianos, blind piano tuners
are not very necessary.
Four members of the Robin Hood Karate
club in Nottingham must have been so proud of themselves when they
smashed a standard upright piano with bare hands and feet in 2 minutes
53 seconds, with every bit of its remains passed through a nine-inch
hoop.
But even their proud feat pales into
insignificance compared with the achievement of a 20-year-old apprentice
during the Kilsyth Civic Week in Scotland in 1974. He armed himself with
a mallet and destroyed a full-sized grand piano before pushing it
through a letterbox in two minutes and seven seconds.
Whatever turns you on, as they say. I
prefer a piano to be used as a piano, rather than being pressed into
playing – er, second fiddle to a Philistine with an excess of energy.
John Slim
Those operatic parasites
MEMBERS of amateur
operatic societies may be roughly divided into two groups – those who do
the menial but vital work of clearing up after a show and those who rise
with prima donna-like persistence above any contact with such
responsibilities; those who strut their not always particularly special
stuff on stage and then disport themselves to await the compliments of
the sycophantic.
Oh, yes, there’s work to be done in the wake of their
latest village hall triumph. They do realise that there’s the scenery to
shift, the lights, sound equipment and chairs to be removed and the
dressing rooms to be cleared. But they also know that somebody else will
do that while they go to the bar for a bask.
And the people who clear up are probably the same
people who freely gave their time to install the stuff in the first
place – the same people who put all the chairs in place, altered the
costumes, adjusted the drapes, ordered and sold the ice cream,
distributed the posters and sorted out the programme; the people who do
front-of-house and all its ancillaries. After all that, why on
earth should such willing workers fret about that extra couple of hours
clearing up after the final curtain? It’s a puzzle for any parasite, in
the unlikely event that any thought of what all those menials are up to
actually crosses the parasite mind.
In any case, these are the loyal labourers who do the
jobs whose importance pales in comparison with the contribution of a
self-styled star who gets up on stage and warbles the words that
somebody else has written; the preening parasite who is not intelligent
enough to understand that a production is a team effort and that anyone
who does not pitch in to help with the unglamorous bits is a pain in the
proverbial.
Any amateur operatic group that does not have its
quota of parasites is very fortunate. But isn’t it odd that your average
parasite seems not to understand that a production is rather like an
iceberg, with more of its vital bits hidden than on display? But perhaps
parasites do understand. Perhaps they actually are aware of all the
effort that other people have put in to make any starry performance
possible – and perhaps they don’t care.
And if they don’t care, they are clearly either thick
or unspeakably selfish – perhaps both: self-centred dumboes who
have warbled the words with which the writer – to whom they never give a
thought, naturally – has provided them, and then that’s it until
tomorrow night or next year.
Where do these people come from? How do they manage
to spread themselves around so that every amateur operatic society has
its uncalled-for quota? Any group, immediately post-production, is a
hive of activity. If 20 per cent of its members contribute to the work
that is at that time involved, it is very fortunate. For every busy bee,
there are probably half-a-dozen drones.
And if any particular parasite is not prepared to get on with it, suggest a payment of, say, three times the normal subscription – and hope that there will be an immediate disappearance in high dudgeon, trailing clouds of imaginary star-dust on the way.
John Slim
Where’s the buzz in
bee-eating?
A RESPECTABLE Sunday newspaper, which should
surely have known better, was recently to be found unashamedly offering
its readers the recipes for Love-bug Salad and Chocolate-covered
Scorpion.
There it was, not a blush in sight, bringing us up to
date on the latest entomological offerings from a restaurant in central
London which is apparently fixated on presenting its patrons with
platters that would have me bolting for the exit, staying not upon the
order of my going and looking neither right nor left.
Heaven knows what would have been the reaction of an
abashed actor I saw in Cabaret. He could not even stomach the
prospect of swallowing a Prairie Oyster, which is a raw egg in Worcester
Sauce, let alone of swallowing the reality that was to follow. So he put
his brimming glass on a convenient shelf – from where it was promptly
knocked onto the floor by the next dancer we saw.
She then compounded her misfortune by skidding onto
her backside in the instant mix of egg yolk and spiky shards. For a few
brief, exciting moments, we had the feeling that all the world’s
theatrical action was happening onstage at the Palace Theatre in
But, to revert to the excitement of the Sunday I have
in mind, the unappealing article was under the byline of a gentleman
called Adam Lusher. Had his words been a little lusher, and if he had
remained faithful to his name-sharing predecessor’s BC faith in a
God-fearing apple, I would have been distinctly more tempted.
But no, he started off by enquiring whether we
fancied some scorpion soup or a mixed locust salad with bee crême
brulée, followed by a belated warning that our masters in the
European Union could be putting these delights on our mesmerising menus
before we can shake a stick at them.
Naturally, his words were accompanied by four
close-up pictures of the crunchy corpses of assorted wee beasties, lined
up for chewing, to ensure that we got his drift.
And it got worse. It seems that our bosses in
Not to put too fine a point on it, they plan to turn
us into entomophagists. (I may just have invented a word, but I
understand that entomophagy means insect-eating, so insect-eaters
themselves must somewhere have a long word of some kind as a short
form).
The thinking behind this vile endeavour is that
little grasshoppers – for example – can, if pressed, give us 20 per cent
protein and only six per cent fat, compared with lean ground beef’s 24
per cent protein and 18 per cent fat. And you can’t whack crickets for
calcium, termites for iron and giant silkworm moth larvae for all your
daily copper and riboflavin needs. Oh, yes, and it’s thought that if you
chobble on a bee it boosts your libido.
Me? I’d rather put my libido out to grass than
try to get a buzz out of bee-eating.
Not that there would be much point in any such
gratuitous grazing. It seems that scientists have found that so many
insect bits find their way into food that every one of us eats the
equivalent of 500g of bugs every year.
John Slim
All God’s
chillun got ۥem
II
IS a fact unspoken, though universally recognised: all God’s chillum got
nipples.
And that’s another fact: I have just typed
chillum, when I meant to type chillun, and my computer screen
has not mocked me with a horizontal red line.
Finding it hard to accept that chillum was not
my very own accidentally-created word, I have been moved to consult
The Shorter Oxford Dictionary Volume 1 (1280 pages, third edition,
1983) in search of it – and there it is!
“Chillum. 1781. [Hindi chilam.]
The part of the hookah containing the tobacco, etc; loosely,
the hookah, the act of smoking, the ‘fill’ of tobacco.”
Of chillun, alas, there is no mention. So let
us speak instead of nipples, which I was trying to do in the first
place.
“Nipple The small prominence in which the
ducts of the mammary gland terminate externally in nearly all mammals of
both sexes; esp. that of a woman’s breast; a teat.”
That’s in Volume 2, which finally calls it a day on
page 2672 – and who shall blame it? – with “Zwitterion
Physical chem. A molecule or ion that has separate positively and
negatively charged groups; a dipolar ion. Hence Zwitterionic.”
All of which has come remarkably close to
distracting me from nipples. Particularly those of Carol Vordeman.
I was not at all distracted from nipples when I
settled down to watching her presenting Pride of
But then, lo and don’t behold, immediately
thereafter, they had vanished, not to say teetered away; distractions of
the merest moment. What had happened?
The wonders of television being what they are, there
was no untoward disruption to end my distraction. One moment, she was
nippled to the hilt; the next, hers was a bosom bereft of monuments. It
was if somebody had nipped up the local hill and pinched the
I have never been part of what is for some reason
called a live television audience, though I have always thought it
sounds better than a dead one. So I can only imagine that the producer
of Pride of Britain Awards, keeping an avuncular but alert eye on
the opening moments, must have seen more Vordeman than he expected and
leapt from his seat like a rocketing pheasant, thereupon to decree a
more effective cover-up.
But what happened next? Obviously, the cameras ceased
to roll while something surreptitious was done with the Vordeman
underpinnings. But did she retreat discreetly from the sight-line of her
live audience, or were amendments effected in situ?
And how long did they take? And did television’s
warm-up man come back to try to make the live patrons forget what they
were concentrating on?
In last year’s show, so I gather, Ms Vordeman, who is
the regular hostess of the event, wore a low-cut, cleavage-enhancing
dress that was considered to be too risqué and prompted complaints from
among the watching millions..
As a result, she chose a grey dress with a high neckline for this year’s
ceremony. We can imagine her saying, “That should do it!”
Er. . .
With all these shenanigans, I can’t help wondering
how long it will be before we underestimated males start challenging the
distaff side for nipple notoriety.
We are undoubtedly putting on the poundage these
days. Many of us are now disconcertingly equipped with what have been
unkindly christened moobs – and as that’s not in my dictionary, either,
it prompts my long-suffering computer to uncork another red line – so
there will surely come the day when only the citizens of Cannes and
suchlike forward-thinking places will be able to contemplate an immodest
moob without recoiling like a schoolboy from soap.
Who knows what conundrums the fashion industry will
face in future? Who will be the first hero to wear a bra?
John Slim
Brit abroad (2): Italian bank job
IT was my failure at a
bank in
Shock horror!!! What am I
saying? Wodehouse is the master and I have been his groupie for nearly
70 years – ever since, in the wake of my School Certificate
examinations, my English master read me and my form-mates
Honeysuckle Cottage
from the Wodehouse short story collection
Mulliner Nights.
I was entranced. Who was this Wodehouse fellow? He
should go far!
This was the immediate post-war period, when Herbert
Jenkins was re-issuing hardback Wodehouse books in its Green Label
series at 5s a go. By the time I had bought all of them, about three
dozen, I was ready to begin stockpiling the new ones as they emerged.
I now have what I believe to have been his entire
output of books – 92 of them. He was the master of felicitous
phraseology and plot-twisting. I was devoted. Still am.
But now, shock horror again, I have been into a bank
in
Elsa and I had had a coffee in the piazza and it was
time to pay our dues. I walked through the door of the adjacent
building, clutching my flimsy billet doux – which was presumably
something else now that it was involved in this Italian job – and I
halted uncertainly in my tracks on realising that I was in a bank.
Kindly smiles all round. Hasty retreat.
But it was this piffling incident that led me into
what can only be described as a bookman’s blasphemy. It reminded me of a
tattered, cover-free paperback volume of humorous short stories,
Literary Lapses, by American humorist Stephen Leacock. I know not
where I came upon it so many years ago. I just plead not guilty to
destroying its cover.
More specifically, it made me realise that when I got
home I simply had to re-read the first story in the book, My
Financial Career. It started, “When I go into a bank I get rattled.
The clerks rattle me; the wickets rattle me; the sight of the money
rattles me; everything rattles me.”
This is Leacock recounting his failed attempt
to open a bank account by depositing 56 dollars. Apprehension
becomes rampant anxiety. Anxiety turns to panic and panic prompts him to
babble that he now wanted to draw a cheque. The sum he had in mind was
six dollars, but when someone gave him a cheque book and someone else
began telling him how to write it, everyone else had the impression that
he was an invalid millionaire.
He filled in the cheque and thrust it through the
wicket at the clerk – only for the clerk to express astonishment that he
was apparently intent on withdrawing 56 dollars instead of six..
Thus was confusion worse confounded. Worse was to
come when he was mistaken for someone from a detective agency. Then a big iron door loomed alongside him. “Good morning”, he said, and
stepped into the safe.
Since then, he reports, he banks no more. No more.
The words have a sonorous ring – unlike, for instance, cellar door,
which is the most musical pairing in the English language.
He banks no more. He now keeps his money in cash in
his trouser pocket and his savings in silver dollars in a sock.
The telling is compact and economical. Short and to
the point. It is brilliant. Despite all the laughter I have had with
Wodehouse, nothing has matched Leacock in this one exhilarating burst of
fun. Wodehouse is the undisputed champion of comic novels and short
stories – but Leacock simply leaves him standing in this one-off sprint.
The pith or essence of these witterings is that My
Financial Career really should be adapted as a playlet – a playlet
without words, just a narrator who would step in, intermittently and
briefly, like the captions in a silent movie.
It would be the narrator who would tell us that the
man who banks no more now relies on an old sock for his savings.
Leacock wrote Literary Lapses long before my
brief and minor encounter at that Italian bank. But it is a classic, the
funniest bit of reading I have found, of any length, in 67 years since
the long-gone T R Sutherland led me into the arms of Wodehouse.
But I had to fly to
This was my failed Italian job. Naturally, the first
thing I did when I got back home was to re-read My Financial Career –
because my Italian job turned out to be such a rejuvenating joy.
John Slim
Brit abroad (1): Stepping
out
THIS is Sunday. Tomorrow, I shall pay
something exorbitant for today’s paper, to read yesterday’s football
results. It’s tough, being a Brit abroad.
We are an interesting mix, here
on the Amalfi coast. In Ravello, actually, on the left-hand side of
There are the Italians, of course – the men with
booming voices that speak from the diaphragm and are apt to begin
exchanging views once they are a mere 30 feet from the target they are
approaching: the conversational shout is their norm; and the women, the
chatter-chatter women, seemingly united in subservience to their males,
and, like their males, tending to foregather in the piazza only in
same-sex groupings.
There are twang-toned Americans, too, with their
neck-slung, belly-propped cameras and low-drone voices. There are the
occasional Japanese. And no Germans. And, of course, there are we, the
British.
This is
And, in particular, this is Ravello, where stone
steps are in unlimited supply and there are 52 of them up to our
apartment’s front door. A visitation to one particular spot involves
1,000 of them, and just as many when making your escape. I had no
intention of going, so I made no note of its name.
I have, however, done my bit by the ruins, by going
to
And in our Apartment for Tourists our fellow-pilgrims
include a bald, bespectacled, pasty-blubbered lard tub – amiability
itself in his futile quest for the body of burnished bronze that he
surely will not have the effrontery to inflict upon his friends back
home.
Despite such visual distractions, we do like it here.
From the comparative safety of our service bus, we see motorcyclists
dicing with death on hairpin mountain roads. We see pedestrians
taking not one whit of notice as traffic thunders by within inches of
their elbows, although their only options seem to be death by autobus or
diving headlong into an unlimited ravine.
At our restaurant table we are learning to say
grazie in an unconvincing accent and recognise when the waiter is
implying that the tip is surely only really meant for a laugh.
We have been by horse-and-trap round Sorrento, old
and new, with a kindly driver who had history coming out of his
fingertips and whose only concern seemed to be for our enjoyment.
In Ravello, we have pottered like true pilgrims,
threading the needle-eye streets, lusting for the huge, gaudy plates
that flanked our every step, and pondering the chances of ever getting
one home, even if we managed to find 700 euros a time.
We liked the piazza, where a dozen high-decibel boys
seemed to be playing football at any given time. And we gave praise for
all the shopkeepers who responded to our pregos and our pointings
with such resigned patience.
Day after day, the sun blazes down. Every afternoon, it drives the locals inside for a few hours. But it fails to make my wife abandon her insistence that she doesn’t get sunburnt and that any alteration in her customary appearance is because her freckles just join up.
John Slim
I WONDER whether anyone has ever played a
character with his own name.
The odds against doing so must be millions to one,
but the thought is prompted by the fact that I have – for the first time
since I did my first review in 1968 – now seen an actor who at least got
halfway there.
The fact that the actor and the character shared the
same initials as well as the same surname, and that they did so in what
was supposed to be the last production I ever reviewed – Pam Valentine’s
Spirit Level – simply added piquancy to the unlikely, now that
the unlikely had happened for the first time in my 43 years of playing
the critic.
But there he was – Steve Willis, playing Simon Willis
in the Swan Theatre Amateur Company’s production of an
as-yet-unpublished play which its creator had never seen performed.
So this was an unexpected bonus on what was already a
joyous evening of Worcester theatre. The play features ghostly goings-on
in Cobblers Cottage, former home of crime-writer Jack Cameron and his
wife – who are now both dead and making free with their surroundings as
befits their latterday ghostly status.
The chuckles abound in what is a sort of spectral
special – a Blithe Spirit with twice the ghosties, but, as far as
I could see, without any hint of a naughty innuendo like that which Noel
Coward was able to hide so successfully from when he wrote it in 1941
until I spotted it a couple of years ago.
Just to recap: I realised that the only reason why he
had given his central characters the unlikely surname of Condomine must
surely have been because it breaks down into condom in E – the
E being the initial of Elvira, Charles Condomine’s first wife, whose
ghost is persistently among those present.
John Slim
Puke and the Duke are
Bardic
props
DAME HELEN MIRREN was voicing the views of
many theatre-lovers when she said that Shakespeare is for acting, not
reading.
True, I would have missed out on Montague (that was his surname: his first name has long since vanished into the mists of time) in my third-form years, if we had not been reading Twelfth Night – out loud – and if he hadn’t come up with a trifling amendment to the name of the noble Duke Orsino.
But as it was, Monty had his moment and Orsino became
O’Rinso, the unsung, clean-as-a-whistle, soapsuddy Irishman who
had clearly been lurking in the wings for long enough. The rest of us
were delighted. How we chortled!
Monty is memorable, too, in that he was the only
13-year-old I have ever met with every finger on both hands wearing a
gold ring so that in effect he sported a pair of permanent
knuckle-dusters. I never did find out why – but what really mattered was
that he was the amiable, slightly pudgy youngster who produced O’Rinso,
and O’Rinso was special. He became another Shakespearian commercial
creation. O’Rinso, the Irish laundryman, joined Valentine (the greetings
card man), Old Gobbo (the Venetian blind man), and Curio (the antique
dealer) – not to mention Peter of Pomfret, a Prophet, who sounds as if
there’s a limerick coming on when you catch him among his particular
bunch of dramatis personae.
O’Rinso was an unexpected livener for us disenchanted
13-year-olds as we infiltrated the iambic pentameters. But O’Rinso,
alas, cannot be guaranteed to be on hand every time young people are
introduced to the Bard.
Neither can Puke, who emerged as a Puck substitute
throughout a schoolgirl’s essay account of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
Between them, Puke and the Duke offer a substantial indication that
it is far better for children to see Shakespeare than to read it.
That’s why Dame Helen is so right – as, indeed, was
the Royal Shakespeare Company in 2006, when it expressed the fear that
boring lessons were doing nothing to alert youngsters to the froth and
the depths that are waiting to be explored. Shakespeare has love and
lust and derring-do, but these are qualities that don’t exactly leap off
the page when the textbook is in the hands of those – schoolchildren and
adults alike – who have been given no cause to suspect the fun and the
excitement between his covers.
A 13-year-old takes no pleasure from reading
Shakespeare. And if he reads it out loud, he will assuredly
stumble among the stanzas and fail to understand the jokes – and if he
does understand them, he will probably make a mess of delivering them to
his disenchanted classmates, so there’s little delight for them, either.
Nevertheless, I trust that they will not be subjected
to the inanities of Shaking Up Shakespeare, as manifested by the
dumbed-down texts which have been bursting upon the scene, degrading
lines that are beautiful in the hope of finding the common touch. One
example is enough to show the way things are going. For centuries, Romeo
has been saying something wonderful to Juliet. Not any more, he doesn’t.
Fresh from clownland, he is now invited to chirrup: “Fancy a snog,
then?”
No, even putting this kind of idiocy aside untouched,
what youngsters require is Shakespeare on the stage; Shakespeare who
becomes a living, lively thing, full of movement and merriment; who has
come alive in a way that had been unimaginable to them as they ploughed
reluctantly through the text. Liz (“Guiding”) Light, director of
Birmingham’s splendid Stage 2 youth theatre for two decades, makes a
point of presenting the group’s highly-populated sallies into the
Shakespeare canon in a way that demonstrates how easy it is to
understand when it’s performed clearly.
But if a text is just read and not acted,
hard-pressed teachers will have to rely on the likes of Puke and the
Duke to claim the attention of their youthful charges far more
frequently than they otherwise have a right to expect.
John Slim
Singalong-a-Siam
HAVING just seen my
first production of The King and I
for a very long time, I am aware of a thought that has just occurred to
me: is it compulsory for the King to do his best to look like Yul
Brunner?
Admittedly, my recent King was not keen enough – and
who shall blame him? – to shave his head in obeisance to the shiny-pated
look – but he did have the seemingly obligatory fancy waistcoat,
unbuttoned, to go with his bare chest. If I, or any other male taxpayer,
did it, there would be whispers behind hands and much mirth at the
checkout.
Not fair, is it? But the kings of The King and I
get away with it every time. Unfailingly. But do they have to?
I only ask, because I have no idea of the dress sense
of the kings of
All I know, as I say, is that if I started dressing
in King and I Siamese-style, questions would be asked in the
house.
Is this the workaday gear that was affected by kings
of
FASHIONISTAS
After all, as far as I have been able to judge, it’s
not the look that kings as a class tend to favour nowadays, and I can’t
help wondering whether they ever did. And if the citizenry at large had
ever seen their monarch in a constant state of partial undress, would
they not perhaps have been moved to copy him and thus improve their own
rankings among the fashionistas of the day?
Obviously, we chaps would make sure we tried to cut a
fine figure, only partially clothed, if, say, the Duke of Cornwall –
William to his pals – were to inspire us similarly? Or would we?
The trouble is, fashion’s decrees do tend to leave us
standing. By and large, we can take them or leave them – or, indeed,
turn our backs altogether on the new look of the moment. Fashion is not
for us. Some of us – far too many of us – are apt to greet the summer
sunshine by donning those strange long shorts in unbecoming khaki, with
outsize outside pockets and hemlines halfway down the shins. We don’t
care that all that these do is ensure that we look demented.
And what about jackets? It occurs to me that women
newsreaders on television are a bit strange in the matter of jackets.
They often treat them, that is to say, exactly as the kings of
Not that they are apt to tell us about the latest
crisis in a flurry of rampant mammaries. Nothing like that. No,
they’re always suitably sedate – but when it comes to having anything
visible beneath the jacket, they do tend to dress
Siamese-waistcoat-style, with nothing there except a triangle of bare
chest.
TELEVISION QUEENS
Again, it’s not something that your average man will
opt for. Just as the King of Siam has more flair than we have in the
matter of waistcoats, so do our women television queens leave us
standing when it comes to the jackets they wear with nothing visible
beneath them, while bringing us the nightly bad tidings.
Nothing risqué, of course. No, what we get is two
lapels forming a sharply tailored triangle, its internal area consisting
entirely of what an affronted friend of mine calls Chest.
Norman makes no bones about it. Consult him, and you
will be told that the world is more and more a matter of Chest.
Sometimes, he wonders how he continues to cope.
What I don’t understand is why Chest somehow does not
go with jackets and lapels if Chest is male. As far as I know, no man
has ever been caught in public while trying to discover whether it does.
We chaps have to be led gently towards a Fashion Statement – and when we
get there, we usually discover that we are not ready for one.
No, I fear that the gold-trimmed weskit will have to
remain under wraps in the wardrobe just a little longer, and although I
shall try meanwhile to get the upper arms up to monarchical standard, I
have to admit that I am simply not sure about the vista it would mean
that I was inflicting upon my fellow men.
I hesitate. I equivocate.
It was not with a view to wasting my time, as a
ten-year-old, that I learned the Siamese National Anthem. All together
now: “O What an ah
John Slim
How to capture my initial
interest
FOR some little time now, I have been whiling
away the hiatus between taking my seat at the latest production and the
opening of the curtains by leafing through the programme.
Agreed, this is not an entirely unusual pursuit at
such a time. Your average patron does like to know who’s playing what,
and assuming that the venue has reasonable lighting and the programme
has not been printed with black text on a dark red background – which
can happen, possibly because it can help to hide the misprints – it is
quite likely that there will be much leafing back and forth before the
action starts.
For nearly a couple of years now, I have spent part
of the time before act one on seeing whether I can add to my current
score in my home-made game of Match the Initials.
The idea is to see whether a cast member’s initials
are the same as those of the character whom he or she is playing. Sounds
simple, possibly because checking initials is simple. The problem
arises in finding a player whose character shares his initials.
And this is understandable, given that there are 26
letters in the alphabet, which means that it’s 25-1 against the two
first names’ initials’ qualifying, with the same odds attending a
matching of second-name initials. This in turn means that my prospects
of sitting in on a show containing a character with two initials
identical to those of the actor involved are pretty minimal. 25 x 25 to
one against, to be precise, which shows what a total waste of time it
is.
So I can’t help thinking that I’ve done rather well
by at least finding one example in something under two years of
searching.
My grateful thanks go to Emma Dyke, of Dudley Little
Theatre. She played Eliza Doolittle in DLT’s Pygmalion.
Incidentally, former DLT member, actress Josie
Lawrence, was an earlier Eliza – at Nottingham Playhouse.in 1994. But
she wasn’t in the same class as Emma, initially speaking.
John Slim
A quick word in your ear, please
WORDS are pretty busy. They christen us, they
marry us, they bury us. They make us laugh, they make us cry. They calm
us, they infuriate us. They make us think that a cow is in calf when a
calf is in cow.
They disport themselves on signs that say
Authorised Access Only, which means you can't come in if you can't
come in.
They have preoccupied me inordinately for most of my
life. That's why my most prized bit of knowledge is that rotavator
is our longest word that is the same backwards as forwards. When I
was 14, I was for ever composing crossword puzzles on grids from the
Birmingham Mail and getting them published at a guinea a time
(tax-free). I embellished one of them with 100 per cent rhyming clues,
which I had never seen done before and have never seen done since.
Words that issue from a playwright's pen and then
from the stage can be both a charm and a distraction. They move me to
silent rejoicing when they demonstrate their creator's dexterity, but
they make me grind my teeth every time yet another actor demonstrates an
inability to say either communal or inventory. Who is the
director who also knows no better? What are the drama schools doing?
It's the same when television and radio people, for
whom words are essential tools, precede a phrase by saying more
importantly, when they mean it's more important. If adverbalising
were a word, that's what they would be doing - adding an L-Y
to an adjective that's supposed to describe something they are
about to say.
Words are why 1 was delighted to recognise that
Charles Condomine, the character in Coward's Blithe Spirit, on
whom I have elaborated elsewhere, had all these years been a hidden joke
perpetrated with undoubted glee by naughty Noel.
But one or two words have always been a bit of a
personal trial. I have never known the difference between ingenuous
and disingenuous — let alone had any certainty about what
they mean - and it's probably too late to bother finding out now. Having
said that, I did look them up recently. Being me, I had forgotten the
answer by the time I closed the dictionary.
We have fads about words. For quite a long time,
several years ago, empirical went through a phase of appearing in
every newspaper every day. It's another one whose meaning totally
defeats me, but fortunately it has now been abandoned by the chattering
classes, so I am not going to lose sleep over it, let alone consult
Collins' Concise.
Then somebody talked about pre-conditions, as
if a condition has the option of emerging after something on which it
seeks to impose its will. With its users undeterred by such a quibble,
preconditions caught on throughout the media and they are still going
like smoke.
Not enough smoke, unfortunately, to hide the number
of times a newspaper that means led says lead, confirming
my suspicion that I may have discovered the shortest word that people
can't spell. I regard that as my consolation prize.
John Slim
A word from a failed retiree
AS my colleague Roger Clarke has remarked, I
seem to have made a hobby out of retiring. The trouble is, I’m not very
good at it, so I have to do it again. And again. And again.
I said my first goodbye to The Birmingham Post & Mail
– after a mere 37 years – in January 1991. But my willingness to join
the pipe-and-slippers brigade was thwarted by my continuing thereafter
to review amateur theatre several times a week and to write two amateur
stage columns a week, one for the Post and one for the Mail.
So I rapidly realised I was no good at retiring – and
compounded my inability to do so by additionally taking on the
editorship of the National Operatic & Dramatic Association’s magazine
and writing the umpteen-page quarterly newsletter of Birmingham Civic
Society.
Towards the end of 2009, however, I had moved towards
retirement again by effecting disentanglements from both organisations –
and in September of that year an upheaval at the Post & Mail brought
another laying down of what by then had become a part-time keyboard.
All that this demonstrated, however, was that I had
failed again – because that was when Behind the Arras emerged to claim
its now-prominent position in coverage of amateur stage in the
All of which means that I am not at all surprised,
having decided to retire from the reviewing scene at the end of the
2010-2011 season, to have caught myself volunteering to continue after
all, just a little bit, as well as passing on news items as and when I
receive them.
By this I mean that I am liable to be caught
continuing to darken the doorsteps of the Swan Theatre Amateur Company
(in
Well, I’ve been loitering in the wings there, as with
many other groups, since 1984, and it seems a shame to break the habit
when they are both within easy striking distance of Bromsgrove, which is
where I am apt to lay the ancient head.
Moreover, Dudley Little Theatre, in no-messing-about
mode, has – all unprompted – sent me a cheque to continue its
affiliation for the new season.
So we shall continue, in the words of somebody or
other, to boldly go but not quite as often, for just one more season.
And retirement is a no-no. Again.
John Slim
Roger Clarke writes (a claim disputed by some incidentally): "We may have given the impression in earlier articles on Behind The Arras that Mr Slim was in fact retiring and we apologise to anyone who took this to mean retirement in a strict, fundamentalist and inflexible way.
Retirement in its post-modernist, organic sense within the socio-economic matrix can be interpreted as incremental development, as management might say - in other words he has just retired a bit."
The amateur stage would just not be the same without the sight of Slim slipping into his seat in the stalls. Welcome back - even though you never did quite manage to leave . . . now perhaps we can make his retirement an annual event . . . .
Stealthy does it for BBC
sock chiller
I DON’T know how long man has been making a
nuisance of himself to the planet – but it surely ought to be long
enough to ensure that there are no real surprises left.
Wrong!
Somewhere behind a door in BBC’s Radio Four there
lurks the Phantom Sock Fiend.
Not that I am suggesting that this hell-raiser among
the hosiery means any harm or that he is spreading alarm and
despondency. On the contrary, it sounds as if he is offering disbelief
and delight in fairly equal proportions among his bemused
fellow-broadcasters.
And he does it with minimum effort – by putting socks
in the office fridge. Gents’ natty ankle-wear keeps claiming shelf space
alongside the cheese, the bacon and the plastic-wrapped beetroot - but
its owner remains unrecognised.
It could be argued that perhaps he is trying to kick
the habit by giving himself cold feet and thus banish the bravery that
he requires every time he puts himself at risk of being caught at it.
On the other hand, it has been suggested that he is
taking a do-it-yourself approach to tackling an obscure medical
condition.
John Humphrys, Evan Davis, Sarah Montague and Martha
Kearney declare themselves intrigued – and perhaps just a little uneasy.
Well, it can’t be good for a broadcaster’s peace of mind to receive a
round-robin that says, “Sorry to be the one to have to send this email
but I found another pair of socks in the fridge this evening.”
Presenters and production teams alike are baffled.
Thanks to incomplete reporting of the phenomenon, it
is not clear whether the furbisher of woollies for the fridge proffers
old socks or new ones, smelly or untouched by human foot – but this
doesn’t matter in relation to the principle of the thing, because this
is something that is guaranteed to prompt habitués of The World at
One, PM and Today to suspect that they are rubbing shoulders
with a phenomenon far stranger than anything in the great big world
outside that makes up the routine content of their programmes.
In a commendable effort to end the saga of the socks,
that apologetic email not only told their owner where the socks had been
put for reclaiming, it also sought to ease the pressure on the fridge by
naming a website where coolbags are supplied.
Intriguingly, the same fridge was once caught housing
a biography of Benjamin Disraeli.
Meanwhile, with Radio 4’s news programmes due to move from White City to Broadcasting House, near Oxford Street, the question of the hour is: Will the phantom cooler of the editorial socks be moving, too?
John Slim
Pre-production pants time
I PASS on a rare and
happy sidelight in these unlovely times, while the unintelligentsia
destroy our streets and our Government keeps hinting that it might just
possibly do something about them one of these days.
A woman was walking along Hurst Street, on her way to
Birmingham’s Hippodrome, when her attention was drawn to a bunch of
hooded yobs who were busy being yobs on the opposite pavement.
Intrigued, she stopped to watch – because she thought she had stumbled
across street theatre.
All is never lost. Someone managed to draw brief
entertainment from Britain’s ongoing national disaster. Excellent!
Meanwhile, my attention has been drawn to the
nation’s nether garments, so this is the point at which I suggest that
it would not be a bad idea if theatre’s directors included them in their
pre-production instructions.
From time to time, while enraptured in my first-night
visitation to a group’s latest offering, I have become aware that I am
watching an actor who has had the bad luck to omit to zip up. And before
we go any further I should make it clear that I still cling pitiably to
the notion that an actor is a man and that an actress is neither a man
nor an actor, despite the liberal lobby which increasingly seeks to make
me think I’ve got it all wrong. (What’s the matter with these people?)
Incidentally, the only moment more unfortunate than
omitting to zip up, in the scale of bad luck on the social scene, is
that experienced by the man who has forgotten to zip down.
But it’s the failed zipper-uppers who concern me at
the moment – the citizens who have either a malfunctioning brain cell or
a misguided pride and who are guaranteed to divert the audience’s
attention from a production on which so many people have been working so
hard for so many weeks.
I was most recently aware of an actor who left us in
no doubt whatsoever that his nether garments were bright red. When he
was motionless, they glared at us with a malevolent eye. When he moved,
they became what the late J Keats, poet, would have recognised on the
instant as a hammock for bearded baubles winking at the brim. I cannot
have been the only one who was reluctantly riveted. They glowered
through their vertical window and they skewered us where we sat.
The problem is always the flamboyant underpinnings
that contrast so sharply with the trousers that are supposed to conceal
them – and this is where I think the director should make himself
useful. He should decree that, to limit their capacity to distract, only
those budgie-smugglers of subdued hue, preferably in complete accord
with the colour of their outer coverings, should have any place onstage.
Then there might just be the chance, if their owner happened to afford
them the opportunity to peep out of their vertical window, that not more
than half the audience would notice them.
In regard to all this, it is just as well that actors
as a class have not followed what I understand is an occasional female
foible in these enlightened days – not necessarily onstage – and turned
up knickerless or whatever is the male equivalent.
That would really give the director cause for
talk at the – er, debriefing.
John Slim
Au revoir, Amy
SO farewell, Amy.
You’ve fallen off your one-girl bandwagon and devastated a legion of
Winehouse wailers.
I’m writing this to say that,
much to my surprise, I have joined the mourners. Obviously, I was sorry
to learn that you had left us, but I now realise that the legacy with
which we have been entrusted is much more impressive than I expected it
to be. Not that I actually expected anything at all. I didn’t even think
about it.
But now – just like, I assume, hundreds of thousands
of others – I have been prompted by your departure to listen to what
you have left us, because I really had no idea what all the fuss was
about, either while you were still with us or when we suddenly
discovered that you weren’t. I never seemed to be watching my television
when you appeared, and it never occurred to me to make a pilgrimage to a
Winehouse wow-fest.
Do forgive me, but in our house you were an unknown
quantity – but now, in your absence, I have become a Winehouse CD
seeker. More important, you can rejoice with me for I have found that
which I had never suspected. I am now a Back to Black aficionado,
listening to Winehouse going well while I pour a well-judged libation.
People call you a singer, but, with all due respect,
you somehow don’t compare to Joan Sutherland or Kathryn Jenkins. Theirs
are names that conjure images of pure, silver notes and a soaring
exploration of octaves. You, on the other hand, I now discover at
first-hand because I have found a CD, have been not so much a singer,
more a growler; more an explorer in the exciting firmament of jazz. And
yes, a pseudo-Yank and a latterday delight.
You also earn full marks in my book for writing your
own material. Writers, especially writers for the stage, are so little
thought of that theatre programmes are apt to provide every production
detail, from lighting design and sound operators to painters of the set
and purveyors of ice cream, but too often manage to overlook completely
the person who made it all possible by having an idea and getting it
down in script form.
What I am saying, belatedly, is that you appear to
have been a one-woman wonder and that I am trying to catch up with what
I have missed.
Clearly, I have missed a lot. I was never even aware
of Frank, the album that set you on your way in 2003 – but I do
know now that Back to Black, which emerged in 2006, brought you
five Grammy awards and that you were Best Female Artist in the Brit
Awards in 2007, the year in which your so-prescient Rehab won the
Ivor Novello Award for Best Contemporary Song.
In the matter of Winehouse wisdom, I am a late developer. You didn’t miss me, but, all of a sudden, I think I may discover that I am missing you.
John Slim
It’s more fun if the
surprises keep coming
THE passing years are full of tricks. A friend lost
his mobile phone – so he used his landline to ring his next-door
neighbour and ask him to ring his mobile for him.
Er. . ?
The neighbour, thinking on his feet, asked why he
didn’t use his own landline. Unable to offer an explanation, my friend
did just that – and realised that his mobile was now ringing somewhere
at the far end of his extensive garden.
Hanging up on his landline, he went in search, and
found the missing mobile lurking just where he had forgotten that he had
left it. He picked it up and found that it was registering one missed
call.
Intrigued, he rang the number as he made his way back
to the house – and immediately heard his landline phone holding forth.
These are the sort of things that mobile telephones
can get up to, aided and abetted by faltering faculties that may perhaps
not be quite as fully-charged as they used to be, once their owners are
no longer in any danger of being confused with the sharpest knife in the
drawer. And I have personal evidence of the way in which, just like
mobile phones, other inanimate objects are apt to take fleeting charge
of our day-to-day passage through life. Socks, for instance.
Wearying of the frequency with which one sock or
another would disappear in the domestic laundry, I long ago launched the
habit of pinning a pair of socks together with a safety pin when it was
ready for washing. Inevitably, I am now able to lose two socks where
previously I would lose only one. I also find that I now take very small
strides.
On the other hand, the safety pin did enable me the
other day to sling a pair over one shoulder, one sock hanging in front
of me and the other down my back, while I strode from the bathroom in
search of the morning’s sweater. This left my hands free for the job of
actually donning the woolly job.
It also enabled me to forget that the ankle-coverings
were there – forgetting is an art with which I am increasingly at home
these days – until I was ready to put them on. This was the point at
which I realised that my right shoulder had grown an unaccustomed small
lump which defied me to remove it until I had partially undressed again.
Life, I am increasingly aware, does begin to pass me
by – though it always seems to have time to pause and set me up for a
laugh. It’s one of Life’s universal little habits and it has frequently
been a source of inspiration for playwrights. It is manifested in
comedy, farce and gut-wrenching tragedy – but when it deploys its
favourite trick across any of us for the first time, it always takes us
by surprise.
I suppose the surprise is unavoidable. If it told us
it was coming, we would be on our guard and avoid it. And look how many
silly stories we would not be able to tell against ourselves if that
happened. Life is funnier the way it is.
John Slim
Hot air, cold air, the
Crescent and Stage 2
IT is not entirely
unknown for a theatre to produce advance publicity for a show that turns
out to be not quite what we’ve been led to expect. You could call it so
much hot air.
That’s what I’m going to call
it, anyway, because it leads me on to my latest experience with
Birmingham’s Crescent Theatre. And this was entirely unexpected also.
My wife and I were sitting in our favourite seats – K
27 and K 28, in the back row and handy for the bar, since you ask – but
before we had lowered our aged bottoms we were unavoidably aware of a
Siberian windstorm gusting around our legs. My wife was the principal
sufferer, because I had fortunately remembered to put my trousers on,
whereas she was trustingly ensconced in a skirt.
Our problem – and it was one that I never encountered
in all the years I sat there on a pretty frequent basis from 1998 until
autumn 2009 – was an air conditioning vent, set in the riser of the high
step immediately behind us and going like a good
ۥun.
Fortunately, the production was one which generated
an abundance of good feeling and warmth, so there was no danger of our
being distracted by the Arctic undertones. And the warmth went on after
the final curtain, when Liz Light, multi-talented founder of Stage 2,
who could have made her name in the world of professional theatre if she
had wanted to, caught us in the bar.
This was not to bribe us with drinks but to utter
some quiet and kindly words to mark the approach of my final goodbye to
amateur thespians after 27 years of pursuing them across the boards and
to give me a framed montage of a recent Stage 2 show, plus a card with
messages from herself and two of the group’s leading lights.
I have been tracking Stage 2 only since 1988, because
that was when Liz was inspired to launch a group that has since then
generally turned its back on the sort of shows that are customarily
considered by youth group leaders when they ponder their next season.
Stage 2’s website is able to report matter-of-factly that when members
did Ionesco’s Rhinoceros they learned the history and theories of
Theatre of the Absurd. Similarly, Les Liaisons Dangereuses gave
them the chance to research period costume, movement, manners and
etiquette, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream had the entire company,
aged from nine upwards, exploring iambic pentameter.
The youngsters found satire in Once a Catholic,
peer pressure in The Crucible and they explored the relationships
in Much Ado About Nothing; mental health in Equus and
bullying in Lord of the Flies.
And so they have continued – young people from a wide
mix of backgrounds into whom has been instilled a discipline that may
well make the uninitiated shake heads in disbelief when they first see
the discipline that underpins a performance.
As it happens, their latest venture, Our Day Out, strikes a lighter note, and Stage 2 plays it equally unerringly. It almost took my wife’s mind off the cock-up that appears to be the Crescent’s air conditioning system.
John Slim
Leave the Bard alone – and be
grateful
RIGHT, as Bamber
Gascoigne, shiny-faced quizmaster of television’s
University Challenge
for a quarter of a century from 1962 used to say, here’s your starter
for 10.
Is Shakespeare more important than his works?
I think the answer is that he used to be – but that
was in the 16th and 17th Centuries, when he was in
full flow and there were still gems to be strewn from his treasure
chest. Undoubtedly, at that time, it was no contest.
But is he now, 400 years after his passing? Well, no
– obviously, he isn’t. His job is done. He bequeathed us 37 plays and
154 sonnets – an oeuvre that overtook him in importance as soon
as it was completed. At that point, Shakespeare became just a man who
had given his all, while his works embarked on what seems deservedly
destined to be life for ever.
Today, as the ever-perky Ernie Wise would have been
the first to admit, the plays what he wrote have lost none of their
lustre – but the Bard himself is a heap of bones. Of himself, he is of
no importance whatever. The man had to do what the man had to do, and
what we have to do is give thanks and reap the benefit.
Shakespeare said, “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s
day?” Looking at me, I rather doubt it, but perhaps he didn’t have me in
mind at the time. Equally, there is no one who can be compared to
Shakespeare – and here, incidentally, is a little lesson for all the
alleged writers who invariably write compare to, unmindful that
compare with is often what they really mean. Compare to
means liken to. Compare with means contrast with.
But, syntax aside, I despair that I now read that
there is talk of digging up what’s left of Shakespeare in
This time, it appears, the idea is to try to discover
what caused his death in 1616. The would-be disturbers of his peace seem
to think we ought to find out. Professor Stanley Wells, honorary
president of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, is reported as saying he
would be happy if the proposal went ahead, because finding the answer
would end the years of fruitless speculation.
Perhaps it would – but why bother? Would the world
become a better place for knowing why Shakespeare rose to higher things?
I don’t think so. Far better if we treasure his legacy and offer thanks
for the miracle that created a one-off human being.
John Slim
Funny – but proceed with
caution
DISABILITIES are not for laughing at. If I am
suddenly aware that the playwright of the moment has forgotten this
elementary courtesy, I am uncomfortable. There are enough ways of
chasing a chuckle without resorting to unkind inanities – though, having
said that, stage deafness is apt to raise a laugh with virtually no work
involved on the part of the playwright, and – more important – the
laughter can come without malice.
Especially if the victim comes with a Northern accent
that gives him a head start in the funny stakes because it is intended to indicate perhaps that he is not only hard of hearing but
tenpence in the shilling as well. At this point, it’s practically job
done.
Yorkshire comedian Sandy Powell’s heyday was the
1930s-1950s – though he re-emerged in 1970 for a surprise guest
appearance on the show of television’s glove puppet Sooty. His
catchphrase was built around maternal deafness and his catchphrase was,
“Can you hear me mother?” In his case, the butt of the joke was always
safely out of sight, on the other end of a telephone line.
My maternal grandmother, bless her, was both stone
deaf and blind – a mild, sweet, lovely, snow-haired lady with a smile to
charm the birds from the boughs. I was perhaps about ten when she, my
grandfather and her outsize hearing aid arrived to visit us from Leeds –
without, I hasten to add, bringing with them a hint of the raucous tones
that are often apt to identify habitués of the comedy circuit as they
seek an easy laugh, and certainly without any deficiency of grey matter.
I was in the kitchen with my mother when Granny
Fearnside made her first appearance of the day. Mother, busy with
something at the sink, did not turn round – not that Granny F could have
known that, or indeed, could have had any idea who else might have been
in the company she was just joining.
“Good morning”, she said, prompting my mother to
return her greeting as a sort of cheerful echo.
Then Granny spoke again. “Is it raining?”
“Yes, pouring.”
It was a reply that clearly did not quite satisfy her
need for meteorological enlightenment. Moreover, she misheard it to the
degree that she thought Mum was restarting the conversation – which is
why, when Mum said “Yes, pouring”, Granny F replied on the instant,
“Good morning.”
The whole thing was clearly in danger of beginning
all over again.
These things happen, and when this one happened it
was a whole sight funnier than it appears in the cold light of print. It
happened only because she was both blind and deaf, and if I saw it
re-enacted on the stage, I would laugh with delighted gratitude – as
Granny F did when the instant replay on which she had unwittingly
embarked was pointed out to her.
A theatrical re-enactment would not be mocking an
elderly, doubly-disabled lady: it would show her at grips with the sort
of things that can lurk in any situation that she faces every day and
there would be no question of the other half of her conversation
intentionally finding mirth in her misfortune.
Even so, disability of any sort should be treated
with care. The afflicted character must not be the butt of cruel
remarks. There, but for the grace of God, go the rest of us.
John Slim
Come and
feast!
(Bring your own bangers)
I DO my best to keep up with trends. Things like the latest fashions – not to wear them, naturally, but just
to be able to claim that I’ve heard of them – and the current bit of a
beautiful language that has been chosen for airheaded destruction, for
example.
But I wouldn’t expect to be
invited as someone’s guest on a theatre visit and then told to buy my
own ticket. Somehow, it would take the edge off my vote of thanks.
Teeth-grinding could well replace gratitude.
But if this is going to be the next manifestation of
Britain’s selfish society, just remember you heard it here first. The
way things are going, it could well follow closely on the heels of what
I gather is the latest back-garden fad, whereby you receive an
invitation to the barbecue – but you are expected to provide your own
food and drink. If you are really unlucky, you will find that you also
have to bring your own eating-irons, or the deal is off.
It seems that Pimms, the drink that hollers for a
fruity filling, has done a survey of the Great British Barbecue and
discovered that fings ain’t what they used to be, not by any means.
They’re going precipitately down the pan.
Admittedly, I can’t understand why a survey of our
backyard yomping can possibly have been deemed necessary – but now that
it has happened, it reveals that there is plenty more I don’t
understand, either.
I gather that anyone who hosts a barbecue spends an
average of £12.56 on each guest – but the average guest is parting with
£22.68. The bunch of flowers, the box of chocolates or the courteous
bottle of wine, each a civilized acknowledgment of the effort that has
gone into preparing and presenting the event, is no longer considered
adequate recompense by the friend who has despatched the invitation, so
his guests have to cough up a tenner more than he does.
Yes, where we were once the mannered society, we now
demand that our friends turn up with their own grub and their own drink.
It’s all part of the me-me-me world we now inhabit. Human rights may be
the often-nonsensical stuff of everyday considerations, but it seems
there is no such thing as a human responsibility to try to keep our
visitors happy. Perhaps somebody ought to re-invent it.
Meanwhile, stand by to hear of the first big barbecue
bash at which guests have had to pay for parking on the drive before
they got anywhere near the rip-off awaiting them in the back garden.
We are a wonderful people.
John Slim
Putting our backs(ide) into things
IT IS reported,
possibly unreliably, that the delightful soprano Lesley Garrett has
confessed to what seems a highly individual way of hiding her problems
if she forgets her lines while singing an aria in a foreign language.
The diva is said to have
divulged that all she has to do is to sing
arse instead of the errant libretto. I
gather that it can be spun out as long as necessary, and presumably
repeated at will, to fit any set of lyrics.
And if she is moved to really artistic heights, she
knows that Kiss my arse, I come from Leeds will fit obligingly
into anything. Presumably, it needs to emerge suitably disguised by
sundry trills and protracted notes, so that everybody thinks she is
still singing foreign and nobody suspects a thing. All she has to do is
put her back into the problem – as, indeed, she apparently did during a
production of Die Fledermaus in 1988, when she mooned at a
surprised but suitably gratified audience.
Bottoms are an interesting phenomenon. Essentially,
they are designed to make it possible for us to sit down, so there’s
nothing remarkable in discovering that any particular specimen is doing
just that. On the other hand, given that they are meant to consist of a
couple of fleshy curves separated by what may best be described as a
crevice, or in extremis a crevasse, they do vary enormously, one
from another.
The Tennis Girl, an iconic image of the 70s was reputedly the biggest selling poster of all time with more than 2 million sales. It was taken in September 1976 by Martin Elliot, who died earlier this year, and features his then girlfriend 18-year-old Fiona Butler (now Walker) at Birmingham University, Edgbaston, using a borrowed dress, racquet and balls
They come extra large and are apt to rise and fall
alarmingly as they grind along the high street in the wake of their
owner. Or they come nicely disciplined and a joy for ever. Or they are
sometimes spotted as the meeting-place of legs so thin that they
themselves are clearly certain to be almost 100 per cent bone.
One young lady gave her posterior to posterity in the
famous picture showing her holding a tennis racket in one hand and using
the other to raise the hemline of her mini-dress sufficiently to ensure
that the viewer is left in no doubt at all that she has forgotten to put
on her knickers. Many others have responded to the call of Art by going
on stage and cavorting in the altogether.
More alarmingly, so have many men, who customarily
thus offer the distaff side of their audience a gratuitous gasp at their
gentleman’s sausage.
I admire their cheek – indeed, their cheeks – as well
as their willy, but I have to confess to being no more enthralled than I
was when Highest Up The Wall was the game of the day during junior
school playtime. And I have learned that if the revelation arrives at a
suitably serious moment in a play, members of the fair sex are not apt
to go into paroxysms of excitement, either – which does say something
about their unwillingness to be easily distracted from the pith or
essence of the plot.
Perhaps what they had read about Equus had
raised great expectations, but they soon realised, having possibly
turned up with a girls’ night out in mind, that this was rather more
serious, not to say a horse of a different colour, and were prepared to
give it a run for their money.
Good on ۥem!
John Slim
Time to wave the wave goodbye
THERE’S nothing like seeing a cheery wave. It
means you’ve been spotted from a distance and the waver is pleased to
see you. It means that the loyal crowd is delighted that the Queen is
going by. It means that the new football club manager is saying hello to
his new supporters and hoping he may not be saying goodbye in six
months’ time.
But there really is no place for the mass wave,
undisciplined and unrehearsed, that all too often erupts disconcertingly
from the stage at a curtain-call, mainly at the end of a musical,
accompanied by huge grins. On the instant, it does away with any
pretence of professionalism that may have been engendered during the
preceding couple of hours. It means that any thespian competence is
being replaced by daft delight.
If the show is a happy one, the audience has a right
to expect a parade of smiles. What it should not have to face is the
frantic farewell tremble of hands that always puts me in mind of the
pierrots who inevitably featured in pre-war family holidays at Filey
before Billy Butlin turned up to provide the laughs.
It is a daft and seemingly unstoppable nonsense that
some companies have thoughtlessly adopted to indicate that the show’s
over. But why? We know there’s nothing more to come, because we’ve been
paying attention and we’ve kept up with the plot. And yet, every so
often, we discover that what we intended as a civilized incursion into
showtime has, in its final moments, become a parade of the happy-daft.
Listen to them: “No, we’re not professionals, we’re
just an ordinary bunch who are absolutely delighted to have somehow
attracted an audience. Is that you in the stalls, Fred? So pleased you
could come!”
It’s a nonsense. Waves have to be approached with
caution, not indulged in willy-nilly.
In this respect, I am disconcerted to discover that
the Duke of Cambridge, senior scion of our future King, Air-Miles Andy,
is an ill-disciplined waver. True, I have caught him at it only in royal
processions and on the Palace balcony, but I have to say it’s not a wave
to be proud of. It’s not a manly wave.
A manly wave is one in which the hand is to all
intents motionless at the end of a forearm that isn’t moving overmuch,
either. It’s not a fatheaded effeminate flutter. A manly wave goes well
with a calm smile, whereas a flutter demands a daft grin. And the ducal
flutter is further misplaced if it happens to be teamed with a scarlet
uniform and a chestful of medals. Not manly. Not military.
But as far as theatre productions are concerned, it
would be reassuring if directors made a point of telling their casts how
to accomplish a curtain-call. Don’t allow the plague to continue to
erupt so long that even the directors of the future don’t know any
better.
John Slim
Time to screech to a halt
I HAVE become rather
preoccupied with
And yes, I think the roof is a Good Thing and I hope
there will be similar Good Things joining it in future. Alas, the Bad
Thing is still with us, with no sign that we shall be spared it soon.
It is called Sharapova, she of the shrill shriek, who
thus remarkably conjures alliteration out of Ssh! – the very
antithesis of all she represents. I want to keep on watching, in the
hope that she will have the good manners to lose and go away, but by the
end of the first week my prayers were in vain.
For some reason, some newspapers refer to her
“grunt.” It’s nothing like a grunt. It’s a screech; an ear-blasting
banshee howl, emitted every time she hits the ball and guaranteed to
keep me awake, however boring her current match. It is also physically
draining – for me, that is, not her: she clearly thrives on the
appalling behaviour that can’t do much for an opponent’s concentration.
No, my problem is that my index finger is surely not
going to cope much longer. The only time it feels possibly safe to keep
it off the mute button is when she is between games. Whenever there is
action on Sharapova’s court, I have to reduce it to silence and thus
destroy any hope of capturing the atmosphere.
Blonde bombshell she may be, but in our house she is
a pain in the proverbial, a scion of
Sharapova apart, we like Wimbledon Fortnight at our
house. We like moaning
But we still have not found out why the ball-boys can
if necessary stay on duty, perhaps lasciviously looked upon by
paedophiles all over Britain, long after theatres are required to ensure
that youngsters are safely removed from the premises and the company of
adults whom they may well have known ever since joining the drama group
and starting to frequent the village hall..
When I enquired about this last year, I was told that
But this is no time to start looking for logic. Got
to get back to the shriek.
John Slim
Fooling none of the people
IT’S quite some
time since I last reviewed a Fiddler
on the Roof. In fact, as I shall be jumping
off this particular bandwagon at the end of the season, I don’t suppose
I shall ever review one again.
This means that I shall never again see a bunch
of black-garbed, black-bearded bottle-dancers crouching down and
shooting alternate legs out sideways while purporting to be persuading
the bottles to remain upright on their black hats.
Unfortunately, it does not mean that the charade
will not still be played out, somewhere in the world, every night of the
week – even including Sunday, which is not, after all, the Jewish
Sabbath.
Good heavens, no. You don’t banish
bottle-dancers as easily as that, not even pretend ones. I fear they are
here for keeps, maintaining the most stupidly-conceived bit of
codswallop in the world of theatre – and, indeed, for good measure,
looking extraordinarily stupid while they’re doing it.
They go into their uncomfortable crouch with
their arms folded and their bottles aloft, doing their best to keep
their shoot-out legs in time with the music, and we’re supposed to
applaud when it’s all over, although they haven’t deceived us for a
moment.
Unfortunately, we always do, which simply
encourages them – which, as I say, means we are stuck with The Great
Bottle Baloney for ever. The fact that they have, in the best traditions
instilled by the late Baden Powell, Been Prepared, simply makes them
look dafter.
I don’t know whether their bottles are anchored
by Blue Tack, superglue, spit-and-polish or drawing pins: they are
simply ones that they prepared earlier. What I do know is that it takes
no time at all for the glassware to start moving out of its vertical
stance until every bottle is leaning at an angle that is quite
ridiculous. The result is that beneath them, the leg-shooters look quite
ridiculous, too.
Once, only once, in heaven knows how many
productions I have seen, have I been moved to sing the praises of the
bottle men – all of whom failed to maintain the bottles’ upright status.
They deserved the hallelujahs – because they had at least made an honest
attempt to complete the dance without resort to subterfuge. The Bottle
Dance had for once been enhanced by believability.
One by one, the bottles dropped – but it was one
of the most reassuring sights I have ever seen on stage. Here were half
a dozen genuine triers, far more deserving of applause than all those
clever micks who, as I have been lamenting for many years, simply go
through the motions then claim the acclaim because the glue has worked.
Of course it’s worked! That’s what glue’s for!
And when it’s worked, we all clap like mad. We know they’ve treated us
like fools, so we might as well show how right they were in doing so.
Hooray! Hooray! How unspeakably clever they’ve
been, in failing to fool any of the people any of the time. It’s the
world’s least convincing con trick. But yes, I clap with the rest of
them. Noblesse oblige, or something.
But what I really want to do is throw something.
Probably a bottle.
John Slim
Can that be Kate behind the
bar?
I RECKON it’s a good job that we chaps are
not expected to kneel at the approach of royalty. Our wives, mothers,
sisters and daughters have to practise their curtseys beforehand, but
all that is expected of us is a bow of the bonce – a slow inclination of
the neck that may or may not display our dandruff.
For this, I thank tradition and custom for their
consideration. These days, although I have had a couple of
hip-exchanges, I have yet to pop to hospital for a knee-swapping fest.
All that the passage of time has brought me is a brace of hips and an
arthritic back. Meanwhile I seethe with silent envy every time the
latest production regales me with rubber-bodied dancers or citizens who
rise from armchairs as if jet-propelled.
I have, of course, had my share of moving without
having to think about it first; without the need to consider what I may
have to hang on to when halfway through what is becoming something of a
major operation. But, as I foresee a future as a sort of seated human
statue, changing position only when propelled by kindly carers, I am
aware that there will come a time when those who at present simulate the
speed of light with every move and gesture will themselves discover that
fings ain’t what they used to be.
Time does have a habit of catching up. Even the
delightful Duchess of Cambridge will not prove to be immune.
Meanwhile, however, it is good to see our latest
Royal evincing such a pleasing pleasure in the world about her. Shapely
legs carry the country’s most popular smile from point to point.
Happiness appears to be her calling card. She’s a grin on pins.
I don’t know whether any member of the Royal Family
has ever graced an amateur theatre production – but wouldn’t it be fun
if it fell to Kate, to either set the trend or to follow an existing but
forgotten one?
I’m sure she would not be remotely fazed if she were
invited to help out on the bar in the interval. It might even afford her
the opportunity to put a Guinness where it belongs, unlike her royal
in-laws, who graciously missed the chance when it was offered in the
course of the Duke of Edinburgh’s 90th birthday celebrations – and who’s
to say she wouldn’t have a go?
Pubs seem to be closing every day of the week, but it
is surely a cast-iron certainty that there’s a hostelry somewhere that
will sooner or later become The Duchess of Cambridge – though I suspect
that heads would roll if a brewery had the temerity to support its loyal
royal cheek with a signboard bearing the Middleton likeness.
In any case, it’s more fun to see her about the place
than swinging over the main entrance as a graven image.
She is much older than was the luckless Princess of
Wales when she achieved greatness and had royalty thrust upon her –
which is why we have so far seen no hint that Diana’s trademark early
shyness may be repeated. Here is a duchess who, like the sister I have
previously commended, is undoubtedly A Good Thing – meeting the people,
offering the royal glove without a qualm, seemingly destined to be a
dream of a Queen.
Royal gloves and I are not immediately discernible as
odds-on favourites to be close acquaintances in the immediate future, of
course – but should I find myself in line for the highly unlikely, it
will be no end of a pleasure to bow the old bean.
John Slim
Theatregoer? Don’t
tell a soul!
TURN up at a theatre’s first night and you
may possibly not know what is in store for you. Take the audience at
Sadler’s Wells Theatre for the launch of Un Peu de Tendresse Bordel
de Merde.
No, I wasn’t there, either, but, relying on the
report of someone who was there on behalf of a publication that
intermittently calls itself a family newspaper, I gather that “naked
male dancers ran into the stalls, rubbed their crotches in people’s
faces, parted their buttocks within inches of women’s noses and
generally behaved like apes.”
The article virtually filled a tabloid page and was
accompanied by a four-column photograph of three of the dancers wearing
blond wigs, scrambling across the seats while members of the audience
wore expressions of amusement, disgust and shock.
If it had happened in the street, somebody would have
been arrested. Why was nobody arrested in any case? Since when has a
theatre been a sanctuary? I know they say you can’t find a copper when
you need one, but even so. . .
The production was the latest in a tawdry line of
offerings in theatre land, featuring male nudity, homosexual rape and
masturbation. Who thought it a good idea this time around to present a
knicker-free woman straddling a chocolate cake? Who pays to see this
sort of muck? Who pays to put it on?
I don’t know the answer to the first and second
questions, but the answer to the third is a bit alarming: you do. So do
I.
We spread our largesse, all unconsulted, our consent
taken for granted, because Sadler’s Wells is a state-subsidised emporium
that separates us from £2.5 million a year. We have to pay our taxes, so
we have to be pimps by proxy, because the avant garde among
theatre management insist on showing how brave and daring they are –
clearly unaware that daring eventually defeats its own object by
becoming boring.
So we now get to read of “a gimmicky barrage of
genitals” and “bearded bimbos gleefully rubbing their bottoms against
anything that doesn’t resist.”
Makes you proud to be a supporter of the world of
theatre, doesn’t it? Still, I suppose we can try to keep our quirk well
hidden under our hats. I won’t tell a soul if you don’t.
John Slim
The bottom line or two
WELL, hip, hip, hooray and Bottoms up!
Just a small salute to the two joints that enable us
to bend in the middle, and more especially to applaud good old gluteus
maximus, which lets us sit down immediately afterwards.
Like the hips, the backside – also tagged as the
posterior and the derrière – is usually taken for granted, but it
is habitually more in the public eye than the twin joints that don’t
last anywhere near as long and are prone to replacement in what has
become a matter of routine surgery.
It’s not surprising. Hips work pretty hard. And what
does the average bottom do? It sits down. It’s not overtaxed.
Interestingly, a football ground is the place where
bottoms are particularly on parade in all their perversity. Football
clubs spend thousands of pounds to provide seats for them, but as far as
I can see these oases of comfort are used only at half-time, or when
they are being thrown onto the pitch.
Even in theatres, where the seats are habitually even
more comfortable, patrons are apt to fail to get their money’s worth out
of them, especially if the occasion is a pop-filled musical one. At such
times, as the show comes towards its ear-splitting conclusion, the
audience rises as one to clap and scream and stamp.
I should have said the audience rises, except
one.
Naturally, when everybody else is standing up and
going delirious and I stay put, I can’t see what’s happening on stage. I
do show my enthusiasm – but moderation in all things. I’m not a standing
stamper, but I don’t mind clapping along – so it’s not at all unusual to
discover that I am applauding the writhing behind of the young lady in
front of me and sort of sensing that something exciting is going on
beyond her.
It does tend to be the female bottom, rather than the
hips, that catches the eye and makes the news. Marilyn Monroe’s hips may
well have been working overtime when she purred Happy Birrrthday, Mr
President to John F Kennedy, but nobody to whom the television
camera gave the rear view was giving them a thought. It was a day, yet
again, when bottoms were tops.
It’s the same with Jennifer Lopez, J-Lo to her
friends. J-Lo became J-Hi the moment somebody observed the anatomical
exception that is her backside and pointed a Nikon at it. This is a
bottom with attitude, a stern with expression, a pert little bump of a
rump, a rear to hold dear. Our Jennifer joined
Pippa Middleton has also been hailed as A Good Thing
in the matter of bottoms. In her case, it’s because it has class, rather
than idiosyncrasy. It’s a bottom newly brought to the fringe of fame
because its owner is the sister-in-law of the Duke of Cambridge.
On the other hand, your God-fearing workaday bottom
can be the, er, butt of a joke, if one of those particularly colossal
ones is wobbling along, just ahead of a group of loud-mouthed oafs. Or
it can be incorporated into the tale of the man who poisoned his wife
with a razor blade. (He gave her arsenic).
My sister and brother-in-law once had two goats
called Ifs and Butts. It is only their names that prompt me to mention
them in this spasm of posterior-pondering – but now I’ve done it I might
as well also mention the name of our first cat before I bring these
bletherings to an overdue conclusion.
He was Astrophe. Because he was our cat Astrophe. Life can be so logical.
Danes’ brown study means
Marmite is out
AS far as I know, Marmite has never been
mentioned or seen in a play. I’m probably wrong, of course – but if by
chance I am right, it seems a shame.
Not a shame that I’m right, just a shame that I don’t
remember having yet seen the dark brown sticky stuff in its highly
individual jar claiming its share, either onstage or on TV, of the
product placement routine that is now being allowed to creep into
productions on television.
Eventually, I’m sure, we shall see a pot perched on
one of Ricky Tomlinson’s kneecaps if he and the rest of the Royle family
return to the overworked settee that they occupied in three TV series
from 1998-2000. It seems certain that an emotion-stirrer like Marmite –
you either love it or hate it – will eventually be slipped into our
daily round, whether it be as an in-yer-face Product or something
slightly more subtle, on a now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t basis.
Certainly, Marmite would possibly be less obtrusive
than the first product to be “placed” on British television, a Nescafé
coffee machine, which was allowed to elbow its way onto This Morning.
The Church of England and the medical fraternity
failed to acclaim the oversized coffee box with a flurry of hallelujahs,
on the grounds that it could promote unhealthy lifestyles and even
damage the trust they clearly think we have in broadcasters. Would they
be similarly offhand with, and offended by, Marmite, that simple,
unassuming by-product of the brewing industry?
Quite apart from its obvious benefits in adding a
tang to the toasted crust – I speak as a Marmite-lover, naturally – I
understand that it gets good marks for its contribution to the
all-pervading health and safety because it frightens off mosquitoes. It
seems that without necessarily having overdosed on the brown stuff, we
are likely to emit Marmite vapours through our pores – and the small
flying community does not like it one bit.
Clearly, a Marmite sandwich stakes its claim as the
ideal precursor for a spot of sunbathing – even if the goo between the
bread has come from one of those upstart squeezy jars and has become a
bit more liquefied than we are accustomed to, in order to overcome its
possible reluctance to emerge.
But not in Denmark. May 2011 goes down as the month
in which Marmite was threatened with biting the Danish dust. Its
cardinal sin was that it contains vitamins – and vitamins in food are
not allowed in this slice of
I don’t imagine that mosquitoes are much less
deleterious. Nevertheless, when in
It’s such a pity when the beat
goes on
MANY, many years ago, far longer ago than I
can remember, in the course of a production whose name entirely escapes
me, though seem to recall that it was an offering by Sutton Coldfield’s
Trinity Players, I watched one of my former schoolmates drop dead.
Not really. Only pretending. It’s just that I was
most impressed with the way that Tony did it.
With his arms straight down at his sides, and with
not a bend of his back or his knees, he simply dropped to the ground.
Again, I can’t for the life of me think whether he was falling backwards
or forwards – though I do seem to recall that he was subsequently carted
off in a wheelbarrow.
But I do know, whichever way he went, that I have
never forgotten the astonishment that attended his artistic departure to
Higher Things. I suppose on reflection that there must have been
something to break his fall, but if there was it did not impinge on my
awareness at the time – which it why, in its essence, it was one of the
bravest things I have seen on stage. So brave that I don’t suppose the
minions of ’Elf and Safety would dream of allowing it nowadays, were
word to reach them of the plan during rehearsal period.
Dying on stage customarily has another
connotation, of course. As far back as I can remember, it was associated
with comedians at the Glasgow Empire, where Killing the Comic on a
Saturday night was the sport that enabled football fans to work off any
energy they still possessed after watching a Rangers-Celtic match.
But I must say that I am always a tad anxious for
actors who are required to do the Big Farewell for the sake of a
production. Not for their safety, as I was in Tony’s case. It’s just
that I have never understood why directors don’t make more of an effort
to ensure that the corpse of the moment is sufficiently hidden behind a
chair or a settee, so that nit-picking patrons like me don’t become
irritated by the unavoidable realisation that it is still breathing.
There’s life in the old ham yet, sort of thing.
On television, the Dear Departed can be instructed to
hold its breath for a second or two, to avoid the rise and fall of the
abdomen that would otherwise rivet my attention, before the camera
switches to its face. So with television it’s the face – or rather, the
neck – that finds me unfailingly bemused.
I just can’t understand why I have never yet seen a
TV corpse with its pulse beating in close-up – and believe me, being a
fully paid-up member of the Let’s Be Awkward Squad, I find I am unable
to avoid looking for it. But never, since I saw my first television
drama – a live production of Rope, on a tiny black-and-white
screen in an otherwise darkened room in 1949, in the
requisitioned block of flats in which I was ensconced with a few hundred
other National Servicemen in St John’s Wood – have I seen evidence that
somebody’s neck is more alive than the rest of his body is supposed to
be.
In defying the laws of nature, the corpse has
apparently paused its pulse. It can’t have done really, I know, but how
is it that it does seem to switch it off so unfailingly for the sake of
the camera?
But even if it didn’t, the wonders of television
could surely appear to make it happen. All that is needed is a still
photograph – a close-up of the late lamented where he has fallen, so
that this can be slotted into the film. I know nothing of the world of
TV trickery, and I suppose it is quite possible that this is an artifice
that is already widely carried out. I have no idea and I have never
heard it mentioned – but having never spotted the indefatigable pulse of
the allegedly dead, I feel fairly sure that something must be habitually
practised in the matter of pulse-pausing in pursuit of artistic reality.
After all these years, I surely could not otherwise have failed to spot
a single one.
At the other extreme of dying on stage, there is the
Comedy Corpse – the one that is most disastrously dead but then opens an
eye. It’s the sort of thing in which the Farndale comedies –
which have not crossed my path for many years since they were all the
rage – are happy to indulge, along with scenery that has been placed
upside-down and suitcases that are belatedly but not very furtively
pushed onto the stage from the wings so that they can assume their vital
part in the action.
Laughter is guaranteed. But for head-scratching, eyebrow-raising, would-you-believe-it moments, my money is on the pulse that stands still whenever a director wants it to.
Make way for the audience
IT was with Old Timer’s
Dismay that I read of Cilla Black’s encounter with a seven-year-old boy
when she was the Prince in a Liverpool pantomime.
She did the time-honoured panto
thing of kissing her Princess on the cheek – only for a monstrous infant
in the front row to shout, “Cilla Black is a lesbian!”
She did her best. She walked to the front of the
stage and addressed the obnoxious half-pint. “I’m a man”, she said.
“Can’t you see what I am!”
Well, no, the regrettable little toad made it clear
that he couldn’t. He declared, “I’m more of a man than you, and I’m only
seven.”
I can’t help thinking that if there were any justice
whatever in these liberal days, he would be lucky to see eight. And I
shiver, in my ninth decade, while Whitehall’s whiz-kids unveil their
intention of ensuring sex lessons for four-year-olds, at the way in
which standards have plummeted since “my” day – a day, that is to say,
when I am pretty sure that I had still never heard of lesbians by the
time I ended my two years of National Service in the RAF on behalf of
the late King George VI, on May 10, 1951.
In my day, men were men and women were grateful, and
I could have been the role model for the man in the joke. He was told
that a girl who had just walked into the bar was a lesbian and he went
up to her and asked where it was in Lesbia that she lived.
Our Cilla – whom I interviewed when she was a
17-year-old newcomer – has now joined the ranks of performers who have
been challenged by the patrons. I think it was the late Sir Donald
Wolfit who brought his misfortune on himself, having been halted in his
tracks, halfway through a Shakespearian soliloquy, on becoming aware
that he had failed to enthral a man who was sound asleep in the front
row.
Like our Cilla, many years later, he strode towards
the stalls. And as with our Cilla, things didn’t quite work out as he
had hoped.
“That man there!” he shouted. “Wake him up!”
On the instant, from elsewhere in the auditorium,
came the reply: “You put him to sleep! You wake him up!”
Alas, I have never heard the end of the story.
Unscripted audience involvement is not uncommon.
Theatregoing is always prone to be plagued by the untethered idiot who
thinks he is funnier than the script. Indeed, the script doesn’t even
have to try to be funny: drop in on a drama school production in a
studio theatre, and be prepared for lunatic braying from the front row
because a so-called student finds it hilarious that his mate Tracey is
talking in a different accent from the one to which he is accustomed.
Somehow, nobody has ever told him that this is called acting.
There is room, nevertheless, for suspicion,
particularly in pantomimes, that things are not as spontaneous as they
seem. Anyone who has seen Widow Twankey in Old Peking, or followed a
thigh-slapping Whittington on the road to London, knows that, come what
may, there is a time when somebody on stage reads out greetings to
audience members and soon receives the expected response from the
circle: “She’s gone to the toilet!”
The merry widow is also prone to register delight and
disbelief that Mrs Jones is 111. Oh, no, she isn’t. She’s ill. Not for
the first time, I realise that I am jaded and jaundiced.
And yet, inevitably, every time I suffer another pang
of familiarity and regret, I am aware that I am in the presence of
dozens of children for whom such dross comes shiny-new – and children
deserve the delight that it gives them.
Unless, of course, one of them is a seven-year-old toad who is perhaps over-optimistic about attaining his eighth birthday.
Let’s have a quick
run-through
IT has taken me a long time to catch up with
the Ullenhall Players, out there in deepest Warwickshire, but with their
latest pilgrimage into Redditch and the lovely Palace Theatre it was
time to do so – not only to make amends for having somehow stayed away
from them for the last 27 years while making other amateur theatre
groups sick of the sight of me, but because I was lured by learning of
the way they have been turning the end of every production into a sort
of signature scamper.
It’s a simple enough idea: present a play as the
playwright has planned – but then present it again at high speed in two
minutes flat. That’s where a simple idea becomes an exercise in
mind-boggling rapidity. It’s a tradition that the Players started in
2003, with Ken Ludwig’s Lend Me a Tenor, and it’s one that makes
them just a bit different from most other groups.
It is, after all, a tradition that means that when
you go to see a Players show, you end up seeing it twice – with the
second time lasting only a couple of minutes.
Naturally, there is no time for dialogue – just lots of dashing about
and gestures. It’s like Charlie Chaplin on fast-forward.
By now, the Players’ regular patrons have come to expect this extraordinarily rapid re-run. If they don’t get it, they withdraw, feeling thwarted. But give them their due, the Players have been doing their best to maintain the habit. Since Lend Me A Tenor, they have demonstrated it with It Runs in the Family (2005), No Room for Love (2006). Cash on Delivery (2007), Who Goes Bare? (2008), Business Affairs (2009), It Runs in the Family (a second time, in 2010) – and in their 2011 production, How the Other Half Loves, the Alan Ayckbourn romp.
SPLIT-SECOND TIMING
Players spokesman David Humphries
says: “Production-wise, the finale is quite demanding. It requires
split-second timing and enough space offstage for the cast to turn about
and re-enter through the correct door. We normally use The Can-Can –
The Galop Infernal from Jacques Offenbach’s Orpheus in the
Underworld – to drive the reprise and we use the natural pauses in the
music to emphasise particular parts of the action.
“The first reprise, for Lend
Me a Tenor, was received with such acclaim that in 2005 we decided
to adopt this style of finale for all future spring productions at the
Palace Theatre. Because of the space constraints at village hall
productions, we tend then not to run the finale there – but of course
then we get good-humoured complaints from our regular followers.”
The Players left their own village
hall, their home since the 1950s, in September 2009, after the village
hall committee decided, for reasons unpredictable and seemingly
unspecified, to remove the stage and facilities for scenery storage.
They are now based in nearby Aston Cantlow, but the success of their
Redditch reprise – coupled with the fine quality of their latest
production – should be healing any scars left by the unexpected parting
of the ways.
It also prompts the thought that,
with a few other groups already making a habit of culminating in a
canter, perhaps somebody should organise a
canter festival – a round-up of reprises, presented at five-minute
intervals. Yes, the intervals would be longer than the action, but
scenery and props don’t clear themselves when the action finishes.
And if the programme didn’t give the titles away, there could be a game of Name the Play, with a prize for the member of the audience who got most right. Why not? There’s always room for something new in Theatreland.
A quick flit from Fliss to Flick
I DID not see Fliss
Walton in TV’s Doctors
or
Holby City – but I don’t care. I have now
started seeing her repeatedly, saying “ISA ISA, Baby” in a television
commercial for a product-pusher whose name has never registered with my
brain cell. She is a daffy distraction. Who cares what she’s
advertising?
It’s the same with the efforts of other organisations
to prise open my piggy-bank via the box in the corner. Time after time,
I see an expensively-produced bit of telly excitement and I have no idea
what it is advertising until it’s finishing and it turns out to be a
car. And when the hoo-ha has subsided, it’s no use hoping that I shall
be able to say what car. Telly-wise, I live for the moment.
As far as Miss Walton is concerned, the moment lasts
about 30 seconds. She wears headphones and a wide-eyed sparkly-barmy
expression, nodding her head repeatedly while moving it gradually from
one side to the other.
I am presumably not the only one who cannot keep up
with the plot on these occasions. But I hope my confession that I am a
waste of advertising budgets does not result in the banishment of the
delightful Miss W from my screen. (As if it would! Oh, the presumption
of the man!).
There are, after all, those who have gone out of their way to be unkind to her. One somewhat disenchanted Internet contributor I found on entering “ISA ISA, Baby” declared: “This is beginning to feel as though Halifax are deliberately making annoying adverts to piss everyone off” – and that is one of the more quotable ones.
WINSOME CHARMER
But at least this has now given me
a suspicion about which is the bank behind the winsome Walton charmer –
who, I gather in further pursuing my investigations, is 5ft 8in with
brown hair and hazel eyes and weighs in at 10 stone.
Moreover, I find that she shares
with me the likelihood of an unintentional name change. From time to
time, I have occasion to tell people who I am, and they write down my
name. Unfortunately, they sometimes write it in capital letters: SLIM.
Even more unfortunately, they put the I too close to the L
and they eventually read it as SUM and write it on the envelope or
parcel that I’m waiting for.
And just as I can be Mr Sum, Fliss
is intermittently likely to be Fuss. What’s more, although she is by far
the most pleasing of distractions, she is not the only habituée of TV to
suffer the importunities of L and I. Somewhere in the
archives of ’Allo, ۥAllo,
there lurks Herr Flick, but I’m not going
to talk about him.
Fliss/Fuss is one of three newly
digitised distractions I have found recently. Another is the little
black-and-white dog that made an appearance in the first episode of the
new Midssomer Murders series. It was caught in the middle of a
chat between two people – I remember not who – and as the
conversationalists spoke in turn, it twisted its head back and forth to
watch the speaker. It looked as if it had been trained at Wimbledon and
it was a winner with me on the instant.
That is more than I can say for
the jokey new detective inspector who has joined the well-established
detective sergeant – who has also, unfortunately, become one half of
what seems to be intended to be a new comedy double act. But I thought
the dog was a delight.
Equally, I find I have a soft spot
for a man I can’t see. He is the voice-over in the cause of
do-it-yourself, and I am fascinated by the way he says Wickes so
cosily on a descending scale and comes as near as dammit to turning it
into three syllables. That takes some doing.
So it's goodbye from me . . .
THE time has come, the Walrus said, to talk
of many things. Or, in my case, to talk about calling a halt.
It is 27 years since I began writing about amateur theatre, entirely by accident. The year was 1984 and the man who had been specifically taken on by the Birmingham Evening Mail to cover the amateur stage had upped sticks and gone elsewhere.
So when the features editor asked me if I would “look
after it this week”, I signified that this was all right by me, though
without noticeable enthusiasm and with no knowledge whatever of the
subject.
I went on, er, looking after it this week, both for
the Mail and The Birmingham Post – this was long before
the Post decided to drop its definite article as it pursued an
indefinite future – until I took early retirement in 1991. This was part
of a very gentle, very civilised winding-down of a career that had
largely seen me specialising in scores of major interviews with public
figures from all kinds of backgrounds.
I was at the House of Commons as the first journalist to interview Enoch Powell after his River of Blood speech in 1968; at the Dorchester as the first to interview Muhammed Ali after he was struck by what we now know is Parkinson’s Disease.
ESSENTIALLY ASLEEP
He spent the entire session with his eyes closed,
essentially asleep, slurring answers to my questions through closed
teeth and lips that barely opened, and only doing that because I was
shouting into his right ear while one of his acolytes repeatedly stabbed
his left thigh to try to keep him conscious. This, sadly, had become the
real Ali, who bore no resemblance to the man who was somehow to present
his customary larger-than-life, showbizzy persona for that
evening’s recording of the Michael Parkinson Christmas show.
The amateur stage came as quite a contrast to my
great big wide world beyond the village hall. But trying to call it a
day on retirement in 1991, just seven years after it had been thrust
upon me, made me realise that the amateur stage is something you don’t
shake off that easily once it has got its hooks into you.
Having thought I had retired, I not only began editing the national magazine of the National Operatic & Dramatic Association (NODA), Britain’s umbrella organisation for amateur theatre, but went on reviewing amateur theatre for the Evening Mail and writing two weekly columns, one for the Mail and one for the Post – which I continued to do until I thought I had retired again, in September 2009, when my 13-year stint with NODA came to an end.
It was then that I discovered that my former Post &
Mail colleague Roger Clarke and I were then somehow going to go
cyberspatial. Without more ado, we launched Behind the Arras.
I feel pretty confident in saying that since the Post
& Mail virtually turned its back on amateur theatre in 2009, and in the
absence of any other significant regional press interest, BTA has turned
out to be a pretty good stopgap. It’s informative, it’s fun and it
offers reviews that are observant and authoritative. Long may it
continue.
But, reverting to the Walrus, I realise that my own
contribution to the reviews section is reaching the end of its shelf
life. I love amateur theatre and the friends I have made within it –
some of them right from the start of my own involvement more than a
quarter of a century ago – but with the best will in the world I can’t
pretend that my eightieth birthday at the end of January
was just a figment of my imagination.
It’s time to go – or, more specifically, if there is
a review on the horizon, not to go. I don’t want another winter of
night-time driving, up to four times a week. I don’t want any more
getting home late and then confronting the keyboard until after
midnight.
And to be still more specific, I don’t want to find,
after 57 years of enjoyable motoring, that I am becoming an irritant to
other road users. It’s time to go.
So, with just a suspicion of a tear in the eye, I’m going. No more reviews from me after August. It’s a shame, because this has become the job that’s become a hobby.
I’ve had much fun and pleasure and found many friends
in my efforts to be appreciative without recourse to soft soap; honest
while doing my best not to overdo the anguish for some particular
individual; and always being aware that I do have a duty to tell
potential audiences what they are letting themselves in for before they
spend their hard-earned cash.
HIGH SUMMER
It is all due to end pretty soon. High summer will be
high noon.
But to ease the parting of the ways – for me, I mean,
not for anybody else – I shall continue to scatter Small Thoughts
as frequently as my brain cell is able to find any, and I shall continue
to be the receptacle for the news and views of theatre groups and
individuals. Tell me, and I shall tell that portion of the world that is
alert enough to tune in to Behind the Arras.
Amateur productions will continue to be reviewed in
Behind the Arras, but not by me. I shall be contemplating the
telly and ruminating. They can’t touch you for it.
In 43 years of reviewing – professional theatre came
my way in 1968, as an adjunct to my “proper” journalistic job of that
period and 16 years before I began to be a nuisance around the amateur
stage as well – I have so far turned up at a theatre in my slippers only
once.
Time to quit while I’m ahead.
Proverbial punchbags
IT’S quite fun, using
proverbs as punchbags. You know: think of an ancient adage or cliché and
turn it into a bit of a surprise.
I have a friend who insists on
saying that he who laughs last gathers no moss. He inspired me to point
out that it is only an extremely short lane that has no turning, and
that you should not count your chicken before it’s crossed the road.
You get the idea. Encourage words to do what they’re
best at – packing surprises.
It’s a rare child who knows his own father. A
bird in the hand may poo on your palm. A friend in need is a friend who
comes scrounging. Absinthe makes the heart grow fonder, so let bygones
by big ones.
You can place a plaque on both your houses or
go racist by suggesting that a miss is as good as a mlle. You can
graduate with first-class honours in chauvinism by insisting that a
woman’s place is in the wrong and talking about the back of Beyoncé
while pointing out that beauty is only skin.
I soon realised that proverb distortion comes by the
yard – but it isn’t just what proverbs and clichés say, it’s the
way that we say them. How we say anything, in fact, that is an
established ritual. I am fascinated every Sunday, for instance, by the
kindly but sonorously ponderous priest who intones about the yoonerty
of the Holy Spirit and I have wondered for years at my eldest
daughter’s insistence on saying becausssse with an unhurried
emphasis and unmissable sibilance that always grab my attention so
unfailingly that I am by now devoted to it. She unwinds it slowly, to
hypnotic effect that defies me not to listen. I am hooked.
And there’s the friend – the wife of the friend who
gathers no moss, as it happens – who commands the attention every time
she disagrees with something. She swaps an R with an L and points out
that it is not necesselery so. Meanwhile, aforesaid first friend, on
hearing something that surprises him in the course of a conversation, is
apt to say, Steps back in amazement! Delete the exclamation mark
and it’s the sort of instructional thing you may well find in a play
script.
My father was prone to exclaim, Bless your little
cotton socks! And Go and chop chips! And Well, I’ll be
blest!
Another friend – the wife, already mentioned, of the
moss-spurning first friend – heaps gentle abuse on her amiable helpmeet
by addressing him as You dolly! And I, many years ago, was
greeted by a photographer colleague on The Birmingham Post when
he strolled alongside my desk with the words, How are you, you
mouldering old heap of parrot droppings?
This sort of thing is possibly known as Words They Live By, and they’re special.
Whodunit? The Sergeant
did!
THE opening episode of the new television whodunit
series Lewis didn’t do a fat lot to get the old corpuscles
racing.
But before going to sleep after about half an hour
there was time to observe that Inspector Lewis’s detective
sergeant sidekick had the misfortune to be required to say inventory
twice – and he made a mess of it both times.
It’s nothing whatever to do with invent and
its accent comes on its first syllable.
Clearly, this has escaped the notice of the actor, the director, the producer and everyone else associated with what is usually a pleasing interlude. So much for Education, education, education.
Roll
over? It’s 9.30 am!
“GET further down the bed”, she said. “Get your head under the clothes. Roll over.”
Well, yes, but I’m reading the paper and it’s only
9.30 in the morning. I could have protested that it was a bit early for
this sort of thing – and anyway, I’m 80 now. But Pat has an
authoritative air about her and it comes through clearly, even on the
telephone.
Even on the telephone, moreover, I am discovering
that Pat knows precisely where I am, even before I have freely confessed
that she has found me opting for my habitually delayed departure from
between the duvet and the memory-foam mattress. The moment I responded
to her call, she had realised that there was something muffled in my
manly tones; something not quite as clear and bell-like as citizens who
don’t catch me in bed are accustomed to hearing.
I have known her for the best part of 60 years, but
this is a talent of which I had not until now suspected her. It seems
that when Patricia, by the marvels of telephonic communication, begins
talking to somebody malingering between the sheets, she knows on the
instant. Apparently, the likes of me come out a bit muffled. She reckons
it’s all down to having the spine enshrouded in pillow.
I was impressed – so I conducted a small-scale
experiment. I had been lying almost supine, but pillow-propped, while I
prised yesterday’s happenings out of today’s newspaper. But now, in the
cause of aural science, I undertook the biggest effort of the day thus
far and somehow separated my back from the foam-filled comfort on which
it had been reclining.
Nearly 30 miles away, she detected the difference on
the instant. I was even more impressed – and it struck me that here
could be the germ of an idea for a playwright in search of inspiration.
Could I have stumbled upon a talent that could be intriguingly
incorporated into The No 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency and astound
television audiences worldwide?
And there’s Alan Bennett, of course: he’s reported at
the moment as battering abortively at writer’s block and could possibly
be disproportionately grateful for a bit of a leg-up in his hour of
need.
Perhaps he could turn out something about a citizen
who specialises in long-distance diagnosis of the positions that people
are in when they receive telephone calls. Once he’d started, aforesaid
specialist could find himself at the forefront of a science that nobody
had suspected we needed. And from there, where could it lead?
I’ve no idea – but then, I’m not Alan Bennett.
Initial
indications of a celebration
HALL
GREEN LITTLE THEATRE – now increasingly intent on greeting the world
from behind its new banner as hglt – attracts my attention by announcing
that it will be celebrating its 60th
birthday on April 2 and 3.
I am alerted
because my 55th
wedding anniversary is on April 3 – but Saturday, April 2, is the bigger
of Hall Green’s two dates. No hard feelings: I’m sure they’ll try harder
in 2021.
Meanwhile, at 2.30 pm on April 2,
there will be a showing of Greasepaint and Girders, the film of
early members at work, building their new home, ready for its opening
production in April 1951, plus BBC Television’s contemporary story of
their achievement, Mind Your Own Business.
After a buffet supper at 5.30 pm –
which sounds rather more like teatime – there will be a performance of
The Unexpected Guest. Understandably, hglt is at pains to point
out that, unlike the supper and the two films, Christie does not come
complementary and that the box office is on high alert to sell tickets
for Dame Agatha’s thriller, which follows at 7.30 pm.
The excitement abates overnight
but the intentions to continue with a reet good do are evinced in the
plan for a gathering for tea, coffee and reminiscences at 11 am on April
3 – which is the reason for my evincing a rare interest in the timetable
for the shindig that is following the sacrificing very recently of a
name in the interest of initials.
That first production was The
Circle of Chalk and it has been followed by more than 500 others.
hglt – capital letters have been abandoned in the face of the insurgence
of initials – hopes that former members from down the years will join
their current successors to celebrate the anniversary of a little
theatre which was built over many months by those who toiled willingly
and freely to create it with their own hands.
Meanwhile, didn’t I do well? I
sense a groundswell of disbelief. Here is a man who can remember his
wedding anniversary at the drop of a hat. I claim no credit. I forsook
freedom on 3.4.56, which does have a certain helpful resonance. In fact,
however, it always comes with a tinge of regret that knot-tying time was
11 am instead of an hour later.
'Can
it really be sixty years?’
This is a question that many of
the founding members of Hall Green Little Theatre are asking themselves.
In April 1951, the building that they - and many friends who are no
longer with us - had toiled many months to build with their own hands,
was finally ready for the opening production of ‘The Circle of Chalk.’
The following sixty years have
seen many hundred stars of the Midlands put on over 500 shows, from
comedy to drama, classics to pantos and more, all supported by teams of
backstage and front of house theatre enthusiasts.
It is no surprise then that there
will be a celebratory mood this April at Pemberley Rd, Acocks Green, and
Hglt are organizing two special days to remember. Current active members
have been contacted, but the help of the local press is sought to help
spread the message to ex-members that are no longer in touch.
Calling all ex-active members!
A warm invitation is extended to
past active members to come along and share memories of times spent and
productions made at the Pemberley Road theatre. The main celebrations
take place on Saturday 2nd:
Saturday 2
April
2.30 p.m. Showing of “Greasepaint and Girders” and the
BBC television
programme
“Mind your own Business” which featured the Theatre;
5.30 p.m (Approx) Buffet supper
7.30 p.m. Performance of Agatha Christie’s “The
Unexpected Guest”
(There will
be a charge for tickets for the play performance.)
Sunday 3
April
11.00
a.m. Coffee/Tea
Shaun makes the scientists
look sheepish
I DON’T know how long it is that Shaun the
Sheep has been enlivening my afternoons for five minutes, Monday to
Friday, on BBC 1 – but it is clear that the boffins have only just
started taking notice of him.
The folks with the brains are suddenly excited
because they have discovered that your average unassuming sheep has more
intelligence than they suspected – as much as humans, according to some
tests.
Researchers have been rocked by the realisation that
sheep can recognise people, respond to their names, work out which of a
choice of coloured buckets is the one containing food, and then find
food when guided only by coloured shapes – even when the colour does not
matter. And they can cross cattle-grids by lying down and then rolling
over them.
All this has resulted in sheep being classed as
quicker than rats, mice and marmosets but not as bright as Rhesus
monkeys.
It’s a shame about the monkey comparison, but I’m
hanging onto the positives – and I’m back to Shaun the Sheep. I didn’t
find him until a couple of years ago, but this splendid little chap has
been on television with pleasing regularity since his début on Christmas
Eve, 1996, in Nick Park’s short animated feature film, A Close Shave
– and the brainboxes among us have not kept up with him.
Thanks to Shaun, we already knew that sheep can open
gates, build dry stone walls, climb ladders, trees and telephone poles,
and drive lorries, cars and tractors. They can outwit a farmer,
especially if he is able to speak only in monosyllable grunts while he
surveys his world through blacked-out glasses. All this, despite having
no noses. Shaun, moreover, is a synchronised swimmer.
We were already fully primed. We cannot share the
scientists’ surprise. Can they really be so – er, woolly-minded?
John Slim
Can we have a word with
computers?
I SEE that somebody has upset his computer by
having the temerity to try to write about faggots.
You know: they’re what one of my dictionaries
describes as “a baked or fried ball of seasoned chopped liver etc”,
while another one ignores them altogether.
But, bless me, he got into trouble the moment he
spelled out faggots. It’s not allowed. He was breaching the
bounds of good taste. He had to be put a stop to. Muzzled. And he was.
A faggot, alas, is more certainly identified in
impolite quarters nowadays as a homosexual. It’s a word that has been
hijacked. The person responsible in the first place, instead of
inventing a new word, simply pinched it – and now, says this particular
computer, there’s no way of applying it to the Black Country delicacy
that has to all intents and purposes been proudly bearing its name for
ever.
I might have said, in another age, that that’s a
little queer, but again the world of etymology has beaten me to it. So
let’s just say I reckon it’s a bit hard – but on the other hand, it’s
almost exactly the same as has happened to gay.
It was in the early 1950s that I saw Cicely
Courtneidge in the Ivor Novello-Alan Melville musical Gay’s the Word.
She was in her late fifties but accompanying her rendering of
Vitality with a succession of cartwheels. Those were the days
when gay meant happy and joyful.
Not any more, it doesn’t – because gay is
indeed the word, the word that has been taken over and re-insinuated
into the language with completely different connotations, initially by
somebody who presumably couldn’t be bothered to find himself a new one.
And and now we’re all stuck with having been deprived
of what was always such a cheerful little trio of letters. Try to use it
now in its original meaning, and you will find you are on the instant
into a world of misunderstandings, like the man with the faggots.
As far as I know, the problems that gay
encountered were nothing to do with a computer. It was simply stolen –
but I am reminded that this whole business of upsetting our computers
also cropped up on the West Midlands amateur theatre scene in the early
summer of 2009. That was when Birmingham’s Billesley Players were
preparing to present Noel Coward’s Nude with Violin.
Oh, no you don’t, said their computer. Nude is
rude.
And that meant that their plans to present the play
for two nights in June that year, preceded by necessary publicity, were
stymied by the affronted box in the corner.
Where are we going? It’s no use asking me: I’m just the one who stutters disbelief and wonders why people who are intelligent enough to make computers are so stupid that they allow tin boxes to don dictators’ hats and decree that we cannot ignore them.
John Slim
A Rush too soon to the loo
I HAVE finally seen it,
and it’s a cracker! I mean The King’s
Speech, the Oscars-grabbing movie starring
the memorably-hesitant Colin Firth as King George VI, the monarch who
fought such a brave battle with his stammer.
Original film clips showing his struggles accentuate
the accuracy of the Firth performance. It’s jumping-on-the-spot,
shoulder-loosening time for the admirable actor; hanky-to-the-eye time
for the rest of us.
Geoffrey Rush plays Lionel Logue, the speech
therapist with whom the King built a trusting relationship after the
shakiest of starts – and it is Rush who is ambushed by an anachronism,
virtually at the start of the film. Has any moment of movie mistiming
been quicker off the mark?
Such things are by no means rare, of course. The most
recent sighting, I gather (and I know that you can’t actually see a
sound), concerns Ironclad, something apparently nonsensical about
King John and the Magna Carta and succinctly described in one newspaper
as historical garbage. It is replete with 13th-Century
badinage that includes “Get off my back”, which would drop into context
only if spoken by His Majesty’s horse.
It is a far remove from the Oscar-grabbing excellence
of The King’s Speech – which nevertheless has been tripped up by
unnecessary sloppiness. It finds King Colin and his Queen (Helen
Bonham-Carter) arriving for their first appointment with Logue, who is
nowhere to be found. The Queen gives a hopeful, enquiring cry – and from
somewhere out of sight comes the voice of Geoffrey Rush, in full
explanatory mode: “I’m in the loo!”
And that was an extraordinarily far-sighted piece of
script-writing, because the year is alleged to be 1934. True, James
Joyce’s Ulysses is said by the Oxford English Dictionary to have
given a hint of things to come 12 years earlier, in 1922, with
"O yes, mon loup. How much cost? Waterloo. Water
closet." (I can’t see it myself, but who am I to argue?)
In any case, 1934 was long
before the loo became the single-syllable substitute for the lavatory,
and it had certainly not established any sort of a foothold by the date
of Lionel Logue’s interestingly posthumous-yet-precipitate saddling with
it, to provide a head-scratching moment for surprised cinemagoers
everywhere.
A Rush to the loo, indeed.
John Slim
The great white wine fiasco
I HAVE just finished
reading The Summer of a Dormouse,
by John Mortimer, QC – wit, raconteur,
novelist, creator of
Rumpole of the Bailey and user of drugs and
a wheelchair.
Well, all right, they know how to drink it. What they
don’t know is how to hold the glass.
The book’s dust cover is illustrated with a drawing
of about a dozen people, standing and drinking at some kind of
gathering, while Mortimer is on his own, being ignored, in his
wheelchair. This not only shows the rudeness of the drinking classes,
but also makes it clear that they have never been instructed in the
finer arts of getting the stuff down their neck.
We can see seven of the glasses from which they are
drawing their sustenance – and in every case, one of them being
Mortimer, they are clasping not the stem but the flute. In other words,
having been provided with an expensive drink, presumably suitably
chilled, they are now warming it up with their hands – five of them
using their right hand; and two, one of them Mortimer himself, their
left.
This is something that happens, not necessarily in
these proportions, every time I see a drawing room comedy in the Noel
Coward tradition. Clearly, director and actors know no better. They
should hold the stem. That’s what it’s for.
But the book is a delight. Mortimer, whom I met in
his prime and who died in 2009, aged 85, describes its subject as a year
of growing old disgracefully. He was a charming, shameless old
reprobate, but thank heaven he happened to be a barrister who had the
skill to put his trials – and tribulations – on paper.
He also, surely, knew how to hold a glass of white
wine – but from time to tiime, I have bewailed the inability of actors,
amateur and professional, to drink white wine.
In any production that involves the pleasing process of doing so, I can guarantee that the stuff in the glass is impaired by the time it reaches the lips. Speaking in the most general of terms, white wine is supposed to be served pleasantly chilled – not slightly warmed.
But slightly warmed is what it habitually is in any
stage or television production in which it is offered as a civilized
libation – because it is clear that neither the person drinking it nor
the director who is supposed to have given precise instructions on how
to do it has the remotest idea of how to go about it.
ABYSMALLY ADRIFT
Even so, it was something of a shock to the system,
in the final appearance of John Nettles as television’s Detective
Inspector Barnaby, to see that this likeable outpost of the law in
Midsomer Murders had no more idea than the rest of them. All the
more so, since he got it absolutely right when he was drinking
celebratory champagne at the start of the episode, only to go just as
abysmally adrift as his friends in the acting profession when he was
required to repeat his success at the end.
White wine is not served chilled for no reason, and
certainly not in order to cool the hands of its imbibers. Nevertheless,
when actors are required to drink either the genuine article or a health
ۥn’ safety imitation, they do so while enveloping the bowl in their
drinking hand. This can be relied on not only to give them cold fingers
but to warm the wine that is supposed to have been served chilled. It is
an aberration that is clearly destined to go on for ever, because it is
obvious that the drama schools that are supposed to have taught the
actors and their directors alike have no more idea of the niceties
involved than have their students.
Perhaps, just to get the ball rolling, the annual
summer school of the National Operatic & Dramatic Association could
spare five minutes to start spreading the word by asking students if
they can think of a reason why a wine glass has a stem – then pass their
supplemented new teaching system on to RADA.
Though I say it myself, that’s not a bad idea. Let us
drink to proper drinking – carefully, of course.
David’s not digitally doodah
You rang , Sir?
Gerry Hinks as the
butler delivers his line to Inspector Drake played, as always, by Alan
Birch
WHEN it comes to
evoking chortles in the stalls, Georges Feydeau (1862-1921) offers
hell-for-leather lunacy at every revival. Alan Ayckbourn, though prone
to black comedy and underlying darkness, even in his rib-ticklers, has
about 100 plays to his name and is apt to enrich the humour of theatre
with the bonus of an innovative and decidedly different approach.
For years, Ray Cooney has been
the current name that springs immediately to mind for lunatic fun and
the frequency with which it emerges. He is the master of farce who first
produced a belly laugh with One for the Pot
in 1961.
David Tristram was four at the
time.
By now, however, the Tristram outpouring of plays –
21 – sounds to have come of age on the wings of his steadily-growing
reputation. This is why it is theatrically apt that he is now hitting
cinema screens for the first time with the po-faced Inspector Drake,
who, with Sergeant Plod, has become a quiet cult for thousands of
afficionados since they arrived on stage.
With typical Tristram insouciance, their first
appearance, in the 1980s, was Inspector Drake’s Last Case.
Fortunately, it was a final foray that has turned out to have
been followed by several more. And now, belatedly but heaven be praised,
we can find the wrong arm of the law at the touch of a button. Not in
cinemas, actually, though if there is still a remnant of sense in
the real world which Drake and Plod spice with such painstaking lunacy,
this surely cannot be long in coming.
No, at present, Inspector Drake, born to the world of
theatre, is still to be found in little-theatre surroundings – though
these have, of necessity, to be temporarily embellished with a cinema
screen to mark his coming.
Rightly, the audience arrived black-tied and
posh-frocked at The Theatre-on-the-Steps, Bridgnorth, for the gala world
première at the Tristram equivalent of Ayckbourn’s Joseph Theatre, in
Scarborough. And there can be no equivocation over the Down-Under
launches in Australia and New Zealand, where Tristram and Drake are a
duo of recognised distinction, splendidly supplemented by Sergeant Plod.
Nevertheless, it was understandable that Inspector
Drake – The Movie also arrived without delay at Sutton Coldfield’s
Highbury Theatre. This is an outpost where productions of Tristram plays
have prompted an amiable partnership between playwright and performers,
three of whom are in the large company of actors it involved.
Not, as David Tristram was at pains to point out at
the Highbury showing, that there is any danger of confusing his
cinematographic start (cost, £10,000) with a Hollywood movie (average
cost, more than $150m). The Flying Ducks had £400 in the bank when
ambitions stirred and the wheels began to whirr. Fortunately, ambitions
were not to be derailed by an outbreak of commonsense.
The result is a joy – over-long at 2½ hours, as
Tristram acknowledges, but a joy. He says it was fashioned on the
strength of unpaid actors, a crew of one, borrowed and stolen locations
and a damn’ good camcorder, and it took six months to make.
While independent little theatres continue to come up
with enquiries about hosting it, the whole lunatic unlikelihood has been
committed to DVD – and its improbable length is a testimony to the fact
that behind its success is a very talented but very human citizen. After
coming up with the script, he directed his host of unpaid actors and
actresses – and he says the result was very difficult to cut. You don’t,
he explains, want them giving their artistic all without reward and then
turning up and finding that they’re no longer in the cast.
Inevitably, there were out-takes – but some
have been preserved on the DVD, where they take their place after the
intended laughter has come to a close.
It is a civilized approach to multi-layered lunacy –
and I am honoured to find that I am associated with it, even at a remove
or two.
When Inspector Drake – The Movie was still on
its way, I was waving palms and shouting Hosannas! Well, perhaps
not. But I did write, and it’s now inscribed on the DVD cover: “There is
no cinematic experience I would prefer. He is Inspector Clouseau-cum-Goon.
He is a joy that is largely indescribable. And on film he will be with
us for keeps. With all the confidence I can muster, I now declare
that he will be an instant high-powered hit.”
While I don’t detract a syllable, David Tristram
characteristically betrays no excitement. Ask him whether this is the
forerunner of films-to-come, and he says it’s still early days.
Reassuringly, he gives no impression of going digitally doodah.
Beautiful?
Who’s kidding?
THE recent glossy magazine that came with a Sunday newspaper carried the rear view of a footballer’s head. It was bony and bristly at the side and could well have been bald on the top, but it was hard to tell.
What was unmistakable, however,
was that, in referring to an article somewhere inside, it spoke of “The
beautiful game”, which seemed a bit ironic in that the head in
question, being very much like any other head, could not be accused of
having beautiful aspirations.
The Beautiful Game is a label that has been used in relation to association football for more than 30 years – but association football, at its topmost level, is not remotely beautiful. It is a game that frequently sees players fighting in the tunnel or on the pitch – up to 22 of them.
It is a game that occasionally sees a deliberate foul tackle, sometimes with bone-breaking results, which the television camera conveys to our living rooms. It also finds these same thugs surrounding the referee, presumably with the sort of language that viewers are so frequently privileged to lip-read.
Beautiful? Who’s kidding?
It is tempting to suggest that theatre would be a
suitable replacement as the standard recipient of the adjective
that soccer abysmally fails to deserve. Certainly, it’s possible that it
used to be. It’s not so certain nowadays, not when the patrons are apt
to find that theatre is giving its stage to young men who, to coin a
phrase, get their kit off.
Well, there’s a surprise! He’s got a gentleman’s
sausage! But we felt fairly safe in assuming that already. Did we really
need to see it? At least when a young actress strips to the buff, she is
a thing of beauty, if unlikely to be a joy for ever. I do apologise to
the PC brigade, by the way, for calling her an actress when it seems,
for reasons uncertain, that they all like to be actors these days, but
if I had made this one an actor the point would have been rather lost.
We also get the revered Alan Bennett writing a 1986
play and calling it Kafka’s Dick. We get Shopping and F***ing,
the Mark Ravenhill 1996 naughtyfest that Birmingham’s Crescent
Theatre presented in 2007 and which still decorates its website with 49
photographs including a record of its heroes engaged in some
enthusiastic gum-sucking and purported anal sex.
In this respect, as with football’s unlovely moments,
theatre shows itself to be not remotely beautiful. It’s not theatre’s
fault: it’s down to some of the people who write, design, direct or act
the sort of stuff that could equally uncomfortably be left to the
imagination.
It’s a shame, but yes, it’s down to the people.
Without the people, we could well side with the poet in finding that
every prospect pleases. It was this same poet who decided that man is
vile – and do you know, he could be right.
Bemusement on the
bridal path
SOMEHOW, deeply rooted in the nation’s
subconscious, is the realisation that if you’re a bride you’re likely to
be found walking up the aisle – but it’s clear that we’re by no means
certain about it: witness a London newspaper.
The headline was, Don’t rush up that aisle, girls
– but in the first paragraph underneath it talked about TV presenter
Lisa Butcher not wanting her children to go “hurrying down the
aisle.”
Clearly, there is doubt about which way a bride
should be going – or, indeed, coming. Moreover, the bemused
bystander is not guided with any sense of authority by Bless the
Bride (the A P Herbert-Vivian Ellis 1947 musical), The Bride Wore
Boots, the Barbrara Stanwyck-Robert Cummings film of the previous
year, or the third of the three stories in Neil Simon’s Plaza Suite,
which concerns a bride who locks herself in her hotel suite bathroom
before the ceremony and refuses to emerge.
But apart from her not knowing whether she’s coming
or going, when is a bride not a bride? Assuming she is agreed to be
going up the aisle to the altar, and this is clearly a matter for doubt,
is she still The Bride on the return journey – or should she then be
more correctly described as The Wife?
Only at your peril! Enlightened young ladies these
days will come down pretty heavily on the misguided man who talks about
The Wife in the same carefree tones that he saves for The Cat, The Car
and The Telly.
And quite apart from this, when was it that a bride
last walked up – or down – an aisle?
Though nobody seems to know this, her customary route
to what we hope will be connubial bliss has never involved the aisle.
Never ever. It is the nave that she traverses, customarily hanging onto
her father and a bunch of flowers, because it is the nave that is the
central pathway in the church.
So where did this aisle business come from? Any bride
who uses the aisle must expect to be correctly described as being a bit
on the side – and that’s another fine mess you’ve landed yourself in.
Make sure you say it quietly.